Ed McBain - Another Part of the City

“I haven’t heard any complaints,” Jessica said.

“You’re hearing them now. Stay out of the papers. Keep a low profile while you’re in New York.”

“Why can’t I go to Switzerland?” Jessica asked.

“Because the Captain needs you here.”

“Okay, let’s call him, okay? Let’s find out if he really ...”

“If you want to risk his anger, go ahead.” She nodded toward a desk across the room. “There’s the phone.”

Jessica hesitated, weighing this. She went to the bar and poured two fingers of cognac into a snifter. She came back to the fire, stood staring into the flames for a moment, her left hand on her hip, the cognac snifter in her right hand, a model’s pose. Olivia could almost see the wheels spinning inside her gorgeous head. When she turned from the fire, her face was in repose. The anger was gone. Her voice was mildly beseeching, almost childlike.

“It’s just that all my friends are there at Christmastime,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” Olivia said.

“I’ll be missing all the parties.”

“Give a party here.”

“The parties are better in Switzerland.”

“Enough, Jessie. If I have to tie you to that playpen...”

“Playpen?”

“Yes, that eternally reverberating four-poster bed upstairs, your playpen, darling sister. If I have to tie you to it to keep you here, I will, believe me.”

She rose, walked to where her mink was draped over one arm of the sofa, and picked it up. Casually, she said, “And I’ll also put someone outside your door to break both your legs if you try to walk out of here with a suitcase.”

She smiled.

“Got it, Jessica? ” she said.

Jessica scowled.

“Good,” Olivia said, and shrugged into her mink.

A sign on the door of the Luna Mare restaurant read:

A small black wreath hung on the doorknob under the sign. Inside the restaurant, Mark D’Annunzio sat at one of the tables, an open bottle of Chianti before him, a glass of wine in his hand. Reardon’s wine glass was on the bartop. He was crouched behind the bar, looking at the safe. A clock on the wall read five-thirty. Outside, it was snowing fiercely. D’Annunzio had turned on very few lights, but the place seemed cozy and warm in contrast to the tundra beyond the plate glass windows.

“Before they shot your father,” Reardon said, “did they take any money from the cash register?”

“No,” D’Annunzio said. “Well, wait. I’m trying to remember. This was still early, there wasn’t much cash in the register, anyway. But they didn’t even go anywhere near it. They told us to keep quiet, and to put our hands up, and then they asked me what my name was, and they asked my father what his name was, and they shot him. That was it. And ran out.”

“You were standing about where I am now?” Reardon asked. “When they shot him?”

“Right about there.”

“Did they know there was a safe behind the bar? Did they seem to know it?”

“I don’t think so. How could they?”

He seemed on the verge of tears again. Reardon came around the bar, the wine glass in his hand, and sat at the table opposite him.

“You don’t know what this restaurant meant to him,” D’Annunzio said. “My grandfather came to this country in 1901, after the grape crop failed in Italy. He was a common laborer, didn’t even speak the language, but he worked his fingers to the bone to raise a family and to make sure they never wanted for anything. Even during the Depression, my grandfather made sure his kids had clothes on their backs and food in their bellies.”

Reardon nodded. D’Annunzio poured more wine for him.

“There are people, you know,” he said, “they come to this country, they only want to dump on it. Not my grandfather. He wanted to be a Yankee Doodle Dandy, applied for his citizenship papers practically the minute he got off the boat. Raised his kids to be Americans, never mind the other side.”

He sipped at his wine. His eyes had a faraway look in them now. He seemed to be recalling a distant time, a less complicated time, a safer time.

“My father was the youngest,” he said. “There are three older sisters and a brother in Washington.”

He nodded. He said nothing for what seemed a very long time.

“This restaurant was his dream,” he said at last. “He’d been saving for it all his life.”

Another silence, longer this time.

“When he found this place, it was a dump, you shoulda seen the stove in back, you couldn’t cut the grease on it with a machete.”

He shook his head, a small smile on his lips.

“His dream. Put all his savings into fixing it up, got himself a mortgage, borrowed the rest he still needed. So now this happens. A man finally realizes his dream, and this happens.”

He shook his head again. The smile was gone now.

“Mr. D’Annunzio,” Reardon said, “you told me earlier that your father didn’t owe anybody money.”

“That’s right.”

“But you just said — unless I misunderstood you — that he borrowed the rest he needed.”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean privately?”

“I guess so. Because he got all he could from the bank, you know, and it just wouldn’t stretch.”

“How much did he borrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it a sizable sum?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who’d he borrow it from?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, what difference does it make? Did the money do him any good? He got his restaurant, he got his dream, but he...”

And suddenly he was crying again. Reardon put his hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” D’Annunzio said, sobbing.

“That’s okay,” Reardon said. “That’s okay.”

“He was such a good father to me,” D’Annunzio said, fumbling for his handkerchief, “such a good man. Why’d they have to do this, those bastards!”

He blew his nose, and then looked directly across the table at Reardon.

“We’ll never find them, will we?” he asked. “We don’t know what they look like, we don’t even...”

“I’ll find them,” Reardon said. “I promise you.”

But he wasn’t at all sure.

In a wine bar in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Rothstein and Phelps sat drinking a more expensive vintage than the one Reardon and D’Annunzio were sharing. Rothstein had ordered the wine, a 1969 Lafite-Rothschild Pouliac; Phelps would never have dared. Phelps seemed nervous sipping something so costly. He kept looking into the glass after each sip, as though mourning the loss of the dollars the vanishing liquid represented.

“Relax,” Rothstein told him.

“I’m just afraid of taking such a big plunge,” Phelps said. “I mean, personally. I mean, this would be our money, Lowell. This isn’t the same as investing someone else’s money.”

“I think we can consider it a relatively safe investment,” Rothstein said.

“Because the Kidds are taking such a heavy position?”

“Yes. And undoubtedly others as well.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Things she said.”

“Like what?”

“When we were discussing disclosure, she mentioned that the family was here in New York. I’m assuming she meant they’d be available to sign any documents required by the CFTC.”

“Well. yes. but...”

“At the same time, she said there’d be purchases abroad. So I’m assuming those purchases are being made by others, with the Kidds in for varying percentages.”

“You think the Captain is masterminding this?”

“Anything the Kidds do is masterminded by the Captain.”