Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Catania sighed in weary resignation.

Di Titulo kept him in the corner of his eye, but didn’t let it be known that he was watching him.

Phil Langusto said, “Some people think that Danny Spoleto was involved. So let’s look harder for him, too.” Di Titulo watched him hold up a photograph that had been blown up from a snapshot. Di Titulo could see a clean-cut, athletic-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties. He was positive that he would not have recognized him again in five minutes.

Langusto continued, “There’s the maid.” He held up another photograph. “This is the shot we had taken of her when she came to work for Bernie.” Di Titulo could see an enlarged shot of a girl with shoulder-length, stringy blond hair. She looked younger than his own daughter. She was just a child. He waited for somebody to say something—someone strong and powerful—but nobody interrupted Phil Langusto’s monologue.

“We’ve got five thousand copies of each of these pictures. What we want to do is cover the country. We’ve already got guys in airports and a few hotels. What we’d like to do is have everybody out looking—every made guy, every stringer, every wanna-be.”

Al Castananza frowned. “Are you thinking we’re going to find the two of them together?”

Langusto shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but some are more likely than others. I think that if somebody’s mailing letters with checks in them, it ain’t Vincent Ogliaro, and it sure as hell ain’t the ghost of Bernie.”

Di Titulo sat still as the bosses around him accepted stacks of pictures and their bodyguards and lieutenants and coat holders stowed them in flight bags and briefcases. Di Titulo had not felt motion sickness since he was a child, but he felt it now. He looked at the window across from his seat. He could see the dim shapes of trees slipping past and, far away, fixed lights that were no bigger than stars. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

19

Frank Delfina wondered whether he should have done something about Augustino’s bus after all. He had listened to a plan that his lieutenants liked, but had rejected it. He had spent an hour in his Jersey City cannery listening to the route, hearing his guys tell him the details, and had even examined some of the equipment. The presentation had been impressive. They had shown him how the stop-stick worked. He could easily accept the idea that the device probably didn’t look like anything when headlights shone on it at sixty miles an hour. When the guys waiting out of sight beyond the reach of the headlights pressed a button, a row of spikes popped up from the flat base and punctured all the tires. Then a picked team of men would swarm over the bus like ants on a dead carcass, blow the doors at both ends with explosives, toss in a couple of grenades, and spray the interior with MAC-10s until the blood in the aisles was up to their ankles.

He had listened politely and thoughtfully. It was probably the only time in a generation when that many heads of families had been in one small, enclosed space all at once. But something in the back of his mind had remained hungry and unsatisfied. The men in front of him were credible. He knew they were not likely to be hesitant in the execution, or likely to panic afterward and fail to slip back into the darkness and escape. All of them had dropped the hammer on people before. They exuded fitness and strength and competence. He just didn’t trust military-style operations that required perfect timing and mechanical efficiency. Once in a while they worked for armies, but not always. If any detail of the plan went wrong, Delfina was dead. And creating devastation around him was not even what he wanted.

“No, I don’t think so,” he had said. “It’s not for me.”

They had all looked at him like dogs that had smelled rabbit and then heard the click of the clasp as the chain was snapped onto their collars.

It had reminded him that he was alone. He could get people like this to take risks for him, but he couldn’t get them to grapple with the complexity, the subtlety of events. Each act set off a series of reactions, and each of the reactions caused some divergence in other sequences of events. Yes, he wanted to get his hands on the money Bernie the Elephant had hidden. Yes, if most of the other people who had a realistic chance of getting to it were dead, it would increase his chances. But no, he didn’t want to do it.

A massacre would have brought on a period of anarchy across the whole country, and that was not good for anyone. A few thousand soldiers in a dozen cities would suddenly be cut adrift without leaders. Undoubtedly they would regroup and reconfigure, but not instantly, and not in predictable ways. Everywhere there would be internal fighting to determine who would take the places of the dead men, and Delfina could not exert influence to determine the winners. When the struggle was over, there would be a dozen new faces, or even three dozen—who could say that the big families wouldn’t split?—for Delfina to try to deal with.

While the fighting was going on, the rivals who were always waiting on the fringe for the Mafia to weaken would be eagerly streaming into pieces of territory, making inroads into businesses everywhere. The value and security of the mob’s holdings would be drastically eroded.

Delfina’s family would be more vulnerable than anyone’s. The others had fixed, solid ground that they could defend. His empire was a network of filaments extending vast distances, like a spider web. He didn’t have collectors and bagmen, he moved money on the Internet. He depended on the slow, lumbering dinosaurs to keep his enterprises safe. When he sent five of his people to visit a business competitor in Cleveland, what he was doing was invoking in the competitor’s imagination the hundred soldiers that Al Castananza had within a mile of that office, and who would never go away. The fact that Castananza had no knowledge of what Delfina was doing or interest in it was not something the competitor could know.

Delfina had held his hand. But now he squinted under the glare of the New Orleans sun and wondered. He drove along Iberville Street looking for the corner, then realized that he must have missed it at least a block back. He spotted a big old Buick pulling out of a parking space and decided to take it. He eased his rental car into the space, then sat still for a moment in the air-conditioned atmosphere while he checked his street map. Yes, it had to be about a block behind him. He glanced in the rearview mirror, and he could see the four-story building just as he remembered it. He had come from his hotel south of here this time. Last time he had approached it from the north, so he had been looking on the wrong side of the street.

He folded the map, turned off the engine, and got out of the car. The weight of the hot, humid air came down on him as he glanced at his watch and began to walk. He still had fifteen minutes, and that was good. Being late would have negated the effect he had constructed in coming alone and driving himself.

He walked into the yellowed marble lobby of the building and looked around for the elevator. There was only one, and it fit with the ornate, old-fashioned decoration of the place. There was a pair of shiny gold doors with a folding gate behind them and an elderly operator sitting on a high stool who pushed a lever to get you to the right, unmarked floor. The building had been a bank when Chi-chi Tasso was a child, and it still had that substantial, heavy look. Tasso had told him that he had owned it for a year before he noticed that the designs on the pillars and pressed into the plaster along the edge of the ceiling were copied from the filigrees and swirls on a one-dollar bill.

Delfina stepped into the elevator, and the white-haired operator said, “Top floor, sir?”