26
September 1971
The record of Enid’s account of Bart Simms’s overall arrangement with J.D. Palladino was coded in Peking and sent out to Agatha Teel by courier. The courier, chosen for her intelligence and because her parents were still in the tiny Albanian village of Yn, was Miss Norma Engelson. She had been called in from Zambia to make the drop. On arrival in New York, Miss Engelson checked into her apartment on West 24th Street, washed her hair, drank two slow glasses of cold Wente white wine and then, at a quarter to seven, called Teel at her apartment in Murray Hill.
“Teel?”
“This is she.”
“Remember Engelson from the porch in Locarno?”
“Yeah!”
“When can I see you? Business.”
“Name it.”
“Tonight?”
“Well, late. I got people coming for dinner. Hell, come for dinner.”
“No. I already got a lot on my plate. I’m due in Belfast tomorrow.”
“Then come on by at eleven thirty.”
“Now is the best time.”
“Okay. Sure. Fine.”
Engelson handed over the envelope, gave Teel the Women’s Liberation handshake grip, backed into the elevator and was off toward the Irish Riviera.
The first dinner guest, a Pentagon assistant secretary, arrived within four minutes after that, so Teel didn’t get around to decoding and reading the Peking message until after midnight. She read it twice, very slowly, memorizing everything, then she burned it and flushed the ashes away. At one twenty she called William Buffalo. They made a meeting for two fifteen at an all-night cafeteria on Fordham Road in the Bronx.
“You surprise me every time,” Buffalo said. “I never seen you in a rush before.”
“It’s just a trick, William,” Teel said easily. “I’m always in a hurry. Now, I got bad news and I got good news. Which you want first?”
“I take the bad for the hurt and the good to make it better,” he grinned. He looked more frightening when he smiled; a trick of light.
“I am going to give you two head bookkeepers, William. My own fellows.”
“Hey! Anything you say is okay, but I got my own bookkeeper, y’know, Dawes, Binchy Dawes. I trust him. Y’ don’t trust me?”
“You’re a good man.”
“But—how come? You think you not gettin’ a count?”
“Oh, I know the count is for true. You been solid. Nothing like that.”
“Then–what?”
“The what is that the good news is so good that the takings are going to get so much bigger and fatter and sweeter that, just as insurance, because we all only human after all, I want my own two head bookkeepers counting it as it come in and go out. Why, the good news is so good, my bookkeepers may want to put their own bookkeepers to check on them.”
Buffalo chuckled as if he were doing an imitation of a man he had just strangled. “I never thought things could get better’n they is right now. Hey, how are my boys and girls doin’ out there somewheres?”
“Who?”
“You know—them ones who done time for armed robbery.”
“They’re fine. Okay?”
“Sure. What else is good news?”
“The competition—Palladino, the Sicilian big one—is selling for thirty-one thousand a keye shoreside what he got for six thousand.”
“Six thousand? No way.”
“Oh, yes. Palladino has a clean connection out of Formosa backed by high brass out of the old MACV and the CIA is muling it for them.”
“You lost me. I mean—that’s good news?”
“It could work out. Find me the best shit chemist there is, like a Corsican. I don’t care what you pay him. Send him to the Sicilian. I want an inside man when we take over. Taking over, William B., is the good news.”
Teel’s Rolls was parked around the corner from the cafeteria. Her chauffeur, Marty, who packed heat, held the door open.
“Take it easy, Marty,” Teel said. “No rush. I got to think.”
“You want to loop the island once, Miss Teel?” Teel liked to make the drive around the edges of Manhattan.
“That’s it. Let’s loop it.” She got in and Marty closed the door. She didn’t talk to the driver. As the car started she settled back in the darkness to think about how she wanted to handle Hobart Willmott Simms.