Эд Макбейн - Criminal Conversation

“I mean, this was a violent need for revenge. This wasn’t your garden-variety urge to stray — which I never did, by the way, fool that I was, and more’s the pity. Have you ever?”

“Ever what?” Sarah asked.

“Strayed.”

“Cheat on Michael , do you mean?”

“Well, who else would you cheat on? He’s your husband, isn’t he?”

“I’ve never cheated on him, no.”

“I’ve gone to bed with sixteen men since I found out about Doug. That was on the day after Halloween, less than two months ago. Sixteen men in less than two months, that comes to a different man every four days, give or take a few percentage points. If my lawyer knew, he’d kill me.”

“I think you ought to be careful,” Sarah said.

“Not with that tape in our hands.”

“I’m not talking about a divorce settlement. I’m talking about...”

“ Fuck safe sex, I don’t care anymore,” Heather said. “Was Michael your first one?”

“No,” Sarah said.

“Who was?”

“A boy at Duke.”

“You never told me.”

“I feel funny telling you now.”

“I was a virgin when I married Doug,” Heather said, and suddenly her voice broke. “Shit!” she said, and reached for her handbag, and yanked a lace-edged handkerchief from it just as the tears welled in her eyes. “I hate that bastard,” she said, “I really hate him. I can forgive her , she’s just a dumb impressionable... no, goddamn it, I hate them both !” she said, and covered her face with the handkerchief and began sobbing uncontrollably into it.

“Did you see that?” Andrew asked.

“Very healthy girl,” Willie said.

They were walking up the beach together, back toward where Andrew had parked the VW. Half an hour earlier, there hadn’t been anyone on the beach here in front of the big house, just the blanket and the striped umbrella and a paperback novel lying open on a towel. Andrew noticed details like that. The paperback novel. A romance novel. He’d wondered at the time who was reading it. Now he wondered which of the two blondes the book belonged to. The topless one who was crying, or the one trying to comfort her. He wondered if they were sisters. He wondered if they lived together in the house there.

“I meant did you notice she was crying ?” he said.

“No. Who?”

“The one without the top.”

“No, I didn’t notice. If you want my opinion, they’re asking for it when they parade around naked like that. Even if that’s the custom with the French here.”

“Those two weren’t French,” Andrew said.

“How do you know?”

“The book was in English. I saw the title.”

“What book?”

“The one on the towel.”

When Andrew was a child, he’d been as blond as either of the two women they’d just passed. His hair had turned first a muddy blond and then the sort of chestnut brown it now was. His eyes, too, were a darker blue than they’d been when he was a boy, and whereas his ears were still a bit large for his face, they were not quite as prominent as they’d been then. He’d eventually grown into them, all kids with big ears do, but he still wore his hair somewhat long, perhaps as a reminder that he’d once worn it that way deliberately, to hide the big ears.

The beach ahead of them was empty now. The striped umbrella was some hundred yards behind them. It was a good half-mile to the car, perhaps a bit more than that. Their conversation turned to business again.

“How much are they asking?” Andrew said.

“You have to understand these people are amateurs,” Willie said.

“Worst kind of people to deal with. Did you explain the exchange to them?”

“They understand all that. Andrew, let me tell you something,” Willie said, and looked around to make sure they weren’t being overheard, even though the beach ahead and behind was empty.

Andrew admired the way Willie looked. He had to be at least sixty, some thirty years older than Andrew, but he had the well-toned, tanned appearance of a man who spent a lot of time swimming and sunning in the Caribbean. Andrew figured they were about the same height and weight — six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds, give or take — but Willie seemed in much better shape. Both men were wearing swimming briefs. Andrew was still relatively white; he’d flown down only yesterday.

“They don’t care,” Willie said. “They just don’t have the vision. They think what they’ve got going’ll last forever, the demand’ll never dry up. What they’re saying is they don’t need what we can provide, they’re doing fine, they’ll keep on doing fine. If nothing’s broken, why fix it, you follow? So they just aren’t interested. I told them we’d be doing all the work, we’d do the spadework with the Chinese, we’d provide the ships, load and unload on both ends, this doesn’t matter to them. Since they don’t think they need us, the swap doesn’t interest them. They’re dumb amateurs, they can’t see the beauty of this thing.”

“Who’ve you been talking to?” Andrew asked.

“Alonso Moreno.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“He knows you’re here.”

“Does he know we want an answer?”

“He knows that, too. Andrew, I told you, they don’t care .”

“Where’s he staying?”

“He’s got houses all over these islands. He stays where he wants to stay.”

“Where’s his house on this island?”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you’ve been talking to him.”

“I have.”

“And you don’t know where he’s staying?”

“If you’re Alonso Moreno, you don’t send out cards with your address on them.”

“How do you get in touch with him?”

“Through a waiter at the hotel. I tell him I want a meet, he phones Moreno, sets it up.”

“Where have you been meeting?”

“On a boat. They pick me up on the dock in Gustavia.”

“Tell your waiter friend I want to see Moreno personally.”

“He’ll tell you to go fuck yourself, Andrew.”

“Tell him, anyway,” Andrew said, and smiled.

There was something chilling about that smile. It reminded Willie of Andrew’s father when he was young.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “When do you want this?”

Because Frankie Palumbo of the Faviola family in Manhattan was out of the goodness of his heart willing to listen to still further bullshit about this deadbeat thief who was somehow related to Jimmy Angelli of the Colotti family in Queens, he was the one who chose the location for the sitdown.

Lucy Angelli got the information from her cousin and immediately called Dom Di Nobili to tell him when and where the meeting would take place. She also told him that his presence was not called for; his fate would be determined privately by the two capos. Dom immediately reported the time and place to Michael.

It was bad news that they didn’t want Dom there when they talked; this meant they couldn’t send him in wired. But the DA’s Office, the FBI, and the NYPD conducted routine, long-standing surveillance on a day-by-day basis, and there were bugs already in place at many wiseguy hangouts where business was conducted. Michael made some calls to see if the Ristorante Romano on MacDougal Street was one of them. It was not. This meant they had to start from scratch.

Costumed as a quartet of New York’s Bravest, wearing firemen’s gear and carrying hoses and axes and all the other paraphernalia, four detectives from the DA’s Office Squad honored the place with a visit on Christmas Eve, ostensibly to extinguish a small electrical fire that had mysteriously started in the restaurant’s basement. During all their chopping and hacking and spritzing and shouting and swearing down there, they incidentally managed to tap into the restaurant’s telephone lines to provide a power source for the Brady bug they buried in the basement’s ceiling — and consequently the floor of the room above. This self-contained transmitter was the size of a half-dollar, and it was now positioned directly under the prestigious corner table Frankie Palumbo favored on his visits to the place. The owner of the Ristorante Romano tipped the “firemen” four hundred dollars when they left, this because he knew firemen were bigger thieves than anybody who came to the place, and he considered himself lucky they hadn’t helped themselves to the stolen twenty-year-old Scotch stacked in cases along the wall opposite the fuse boxes and telephone panels.