Fast Lenny had them laughing good. “I swear to God, I used to knock him crazy with them fucking phone calls. That Vinny, he’s a scary guy, you know what I mean. But he don’t scare me, ever. I used to find out from his brother Sal, Sal shit-for-brains they shoulda named him, ‘Where’s your brother gonna meet tonight?’
“And this guy would tell me, ‘He’s going to the Casa D.’ So then I would call up there and say, ‘Gimme Vinny DiSanto,’ and then I would hang up. Vinny would go to the phone, no answer. Then I would do it again. I was driving him nuts. So then he tells Funzi, Funzi told me this later, ‘Funzi,’ he’s saying, ‘the fucking agents are on us.’ So Funzi, who don’t know nothing, asks, ‘Why you say that?’ And he tells him, ‘I just got two calls, no answer. They’re checking to see if we’re here.’”
Naturally everybody thought this story was hysterical. “You gotta understand, I do this all the time to him. ‘Sal, where’s your brother going tonight?’ Another time it was the Cockeyed Crow up on 85th Street. I called him there three times. I swear to God the third time he was swearing at the phone. Louie told me he turned white. I’ll knock him fucking crazy.”
As funny as Fast Lenny was, that’s how funny Georgie One-Time wasn’t. Whatever anybody else was talking about, he brought it back to money. That’s where the “One-Time” came from: There was only one time that anybody saw Georgie reach for a check. Georgie had a good piece of a profitable concrete business. His connections inside the union enabled him to bid low and still turn a pretty good profit. His connections inside the construction industry often got him inside information about competitors’ bids—and on occasion they were able to change his bid after the submission deadline. So when the laughter over Lenny’s story died down, he said to Little Eddie, “I got a call yesterday from Mike Delves, the boss up at Colonial, and he says to me, ‘I’d like to do business with you, but you gotta help me with the number. So I tell him I can drop my number without any embarrassment, but if I do, the job’s gotta be mine.’”
Bobby raised the volume on the radio and tossed his hat neatly onto the middle of the table, as if gently landing a flying saucer. “Hey, Georgie, maybe you wanna get me a job on one of those sites,” he said. “I can be, like, Superforeman. You know, like Superman? I can get concrete laid without even being there.”
Tony Cupcakes shouted above the laughter, “Then that must make me Superforeplayman. I can get laid without my wife even being there!”
“Hey, Lenny,” Bobby asked, sitting down, “you talk to your commie friend for me?” Duke put a steaming cup of cappuccino in front of him.
As Lenny replied, the one phone in the club started ringing. “First of all, he’s not my friend. He’s my business associate. I don’t got commie friends. I got commie business associates. You understand the difference?”
“Hey,” Bobby said, raising his hands defensively, “no offense.”
“Okay. But the guy’s getting a little goosey on me. There’s something going on that I don’t know. He’s putting me off on things like he never did before. Give me a little more time . . .”
Vito V had answered the phone. “Hey, Lenny,” he shouted, holding up the receiver.
“Excuse me.”
Bobby sipped his cappuccino, listening to Eddie complain how he wasn’t getting his right piece of the weekly payments from a loan-sharking deal. “We figured out how much everybody got coming, you know what I mean? Who gets $150, who gets $175. It’s supposed to be according to how much money each person put on the street. It was broke down so that everybody gets even at the same time. But the guy wasn’t paying regular, and Tommy, who brought the guy around, says all of a sudden that he ain’t responsible for the money. Well, fuck that prick, I says to him, then what do we need him for? And this fucking guy, he—”
Lenny sat down and said casually, “They got that fucking driver.”
“No shit,” Little Eddie said, laughing.
“Where is he?” Bobby asked.
“He’s s’posed to be picking up a payment from Jerry the Jeweler.” Half his face was a smile. “Fucking guy.”
In the world of organized crime, people communicate just like they’ve done it since the first creature stood up on two legs and said, “Give me two rocks on the green dinosaur to win.” They talked to each other. The so-called underworld might be the most tangled, extensive grapevine in history. But somehow it works. The word spreads. Somehow people find out what they need to find out. In this case the word was that Henry Franzone’s crew, especially Fast Lenny, was looking for “a little wimpy-acting colored guy, probably wearing glasses, with a banged-up nose,” probably trying to fence some merchandise. Pretty much every fence who worked with the mob on a regular basis got the word.
So it wasn’t exactly luck that they found him. A guy fitting his description had been trying to sell some loose diamonds to a friend of the family’s on the Bowery that everybody knew as Jerry the Jeweler. Jerry the Jeweler would buy precious stones without asking questions or requiring documentation. And considering the potential legal consequences of that policy, he paid out a fair price. The truck driver had approached Jerry with a sack of diamonds two weeks earlier. That was no problem. They had done business twice before, and the seller had been a stand-up guy. In this case the man, who said his name was Franklin Jefferson, claimed to be representing the owner of the stones. Provenance was not an issue with the Jeweler. If anybody asked him where they came from, he had a standard answer: “From the earth. You want them or don’t you?” The only thing the Jeweler cared about was whether the stones were real or fugazis. He had taken Mr. Jefferson’s diamonds on consignment. The sale would have been completed several days earlier and Jefferson would have been history, but Jerry’s associate had gone to Israel for business and stayed longer than expected. He had just come back with cash, and Jerry had arranged for the suddenly very nervous Mr. Jefferson to be paid his money that afternoon.
When the Jeweler got the word, he didn’t hesitate to contact a friend of the family’s. The Jeweler was a smart guy, he knew it was in his future interest to cooperate. And if maybe he got to keep some of the cash as a reward, just a taste, who would notice?
Franklin Jefferson was late for the meet. An hour, two hours, no phone call, no nothing. That didn’t surprise Bobby. If he were that guy, he’d be late too. At least five years late easy. And even then only if he felt completely secure. There was no doubt in Bobby’s mind that Franklin fucking Jefferson had gotten to the Bowery early and was hiding there, watching, waiting.
The jewelry market on the Bowery, which consists of dozens of individually owned stalls crammed side by side in a large ground-floor space, is actually in Chinatown. Mostly Jews and Chinese work there. In this situation a person like Franklin Jefferson would prefer to do business down on the Bowery rather than on 47th Street because it was such a public space. To do business on 47th Street, in the Diamond District, sometimes you had to go upstairs, into offices, into back rooms, inside walk-in safes, and there was nobody to hear you shout if you needed help. Downtown there were always civilians around. You yelled, somebody would hear you. You did business in the light.
By five-thirty, just as the after-work lookers were drifting in, Little Eddie spotted the truck driver. The guy’s decision to wait until the place got crowded seemed sensible but actually worked against him. Crowds provided the cover of a forest rather than the visibility of a few thin trees. It made it real difficult for Jefferson to spot Little Eddie, who was sitting behind the counter of an antique watch dealer halfway down the row from the Jeweler’s stall just watching; or Lenny, who had been standing at the pay phone, mostly hidden by its privacy walls, for more than three hours and was totally pissed off. It also made it harder for the truck driver to move quickly if he had to get out of there. Jefferson was approaching from the back of the place. Apparently he’d come in through a side door and been working his way around, trying to determine if the Jeweler had been straight with him. Evidently he was satisfied, because he cautiously approached Jerry’s booth. Even from a distance Little Eddie could see the guy’s face was banged up pretty good from the shot Lenny had given him.
“Hey, what’s happening?” Franklin Jefferson asked Jerry.
“You,” Jerry replied, looking happy to see him. Jerry had the salesman’s gift, a natural smile that was wide and shallow. He reached across the counter and shook hands. The man is cool, Bobby thought. Bobby was watching from the back of Jerry’s booth, hidden behind a curtain. Jerry was blocking part of his view, but he could see the guy well enough to remove any doubts about his identity. Bobby had a tremendous desire to walk out from behind the curtain and just level the guy. He really couldn’t wait to see the look on the guy’s face when he realized he was a dead man.
“You got my money?” the little guy asked, continuing to scan the room like a breathing lighthouse. Bobby noted he was wearing a down jacket, which was much too warm for the mild fall weather. So Bobby guessed he had a piece on him, hidden beneath the coat.
“Sure do,” Jerry said, opening a small counter safe. “You get any more like that, you let me know, okay? I can handle whatever you get.” He took a manila envelope out of the safe and handed it to Jefferson. “You want to come in the back and count it?”
Jefferson opened the envelope and peered inside. Satisfied that the cash was there, he closed the clasp, folded it in half lengthwise, and jammed it into his pants pocket. Whoa, Bobby thought, the guy must be completely freaked out. He had never seen a man accept a large payment for a deal without counting the money slowly and carefully. Twice.
As Jefferson turned to leave, he ran smack into an old man wearing a navy peacoat, sunglasses, and a woolen cap pulled all the way down to his eyebrows. Mickey Fists had his right hand in his coat pocket. If Bobby hadn’t known who it was, even he would have had a tough time recognizing him. Jefferson had never met Mickey, so he had no idea he was bumping into his fate. “Excuse me,” he said.
Bobby watched the old man work. Supposedly, when Crazy Joey Gallo was just getting started in the rackets, he was in the passenger seat of a car, on his way to see a man about a late payment on a debt. He was looking into the rearview mirror scrunching up his face. When the driver asked him what he was doing, Gallo told him, “Practicing to look mean.”
Mickey Fists looked very much in control. He had a faint smile on his face. Bobby figured his pacemaker had to be racing. For an instant, as Franklin Washington Jefferson, whatever the hell his name was, took his first step away from the counter, the two men were chest-to-chest. Mickey didn’t hesitate. He put his left hand on the guy’s shoulder to hold him in place and sort of thrust his right hand, hidden in his jacket pocket, into his stomach. The old man was smooth, Bobby thought, fully aware he was watching a real pro in action. Jefferson’s whole body drooped, as if the soul that had held it rigid had evaporated. His eyes darted rapidly around the place, searching desperately for an escape route. The Jeweler had turned around and gone into the back. He didn’t want to witness nothing. Mickey was so cool that when Jefferson started looking around, Mickey responded by pushing harder into his chest.
Any hopes that Jefferson might have optimistically harbored that this was a simple stickup disappeared within seconds. Bobby stepped out from behind the curtain, Little Eddie walked down the aisle in front of him, and Fast Lenny came from behind. Before Jefferson could take a breath, he was surrounded. It was done so casually that no one in the place paid any attention to them. Mickey pushed harder into Jefferson’s stomach and said something Bobby couldn’t hear, but he was pretty sure it was a warning not to make any noise. They walked out of the place together.
Tony Cupcakes’ new Cadillac was waiting right in front. He’d had the car only three months and definitely did not want to use it on this kind of job. But they needed a car right away and the water pump in Lenny’s car was leaking, Eddie’s Chrysler was a piece of crapola, and Bobby’s car wasn’t big enough for all of them. So Tony reluctantly threw an old sheet and some blankets over the seats and pleaded with everybody not to get blood all over the car. “It’s a bitch getting it out,” he explained, “particularly those cloth seats I got.”
Bobby half pushed the guy into the backseat and climbed in after him. Lenny got in on the other side. Eddie sat in the front with Tony. Mickey stood on the sidewalk, the proud father watching his brood. This was not the kind of work he did too much anymore, being semiretired, but he was clearly pleased the job had gone as well as it had. He gave a little wave, turned, and walked proudly down the block as Tony drove away.
The truck driver—nobody cared enough to ask him his real name—was not a moron. When he saw the backseat covered up, he knew that this was a bad ride to be taking. Tony headed north on the FDR. Nobody said a word for several minutes, but then the truck driver broke the silence. “Am I allowed to ask where I’m going?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Lenny warned him. His voice was bristling with anger.
“Hey, c’mon, Lenny, huh?” Tony Cupcakes reminded him. “I’m asking you nice, watch the seats.”
“Fucking guy,” Lenny sighed. Once again everyone was quiet—this was serious business they were doing—but the silence made Lenny too uncomfortable. “Answer me this, you asshole. What the fuck were you thinking? I mean, did you really fucking think you were gonna get over on us?”
The truck driver was trying hard to control himself, but he was having a tough time of it. “I swear to God, I didn’t know nothing about you guys coming,” he said. There was a quiver in his voice. “Nobody was s’posed to get hurt. Honest, I swear, I figured the store’s insurance would cover the missing load. And then when you guys were all over me, what was I gonna say?” He paused. “I’m begging you guys, gimme a break.” He waited, looking first at Lenny, then turning to Bobby. But the only answer was the loudest silence he had ever heard. “C’mon, please, listen to me. I know shit that’s going down. I can tell you a lot of things.”
There really is no way of predicting how people will act when they believe they’re negotiating for their lives. They cry, they beg, they threaten reprisals, often they try a bribe: “Whatever you’re getting paid I’ll double it.” They’re brave, they’re cowardly, they pray, they curse their killers, they just can’t believe that this is actually happening to them. And a few people are unbelievably stoic: They understand the rules of the society and accept their fate without a murmur of protest.
Each of the four of them had been on rides like this one before. It was part of the job. So they pretty much knew what to expect. The truck driver was a negotiator. He wanted to trade information for his life. He spoke rapidly, knowing he didn’t have much time left to save himself. “I know stuff,” he kept telling them. “I can give you a truckload that’s worth $15,000 easy.” He turned to Bobby again. “I’m supposed to drive it. Just me, no security. I’ll just hand it to you, swear to God.”
Bobby listened to the guy’s tales all the way up the FDR into the Bronx. Tony had decided on upstate. Finally Bobby said to the driver, “All right, lemme hear what you got to say.”
The truck driver took his first good breath since being shoved into the car. He had a shot. “Look, I drive trucks, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m supposed to drive one of those big gasoline tankers tomorrow night. There’s like ten thousand gallons of gas in one of those tanks, and just about any gas station in New York will buy it all.”
Hijack a gasoline truck? Why not? Bobby thought. Actually he liked the concept. The gas stations had been ripping him off ever since the fuel shortage during Carter; this was his chance to get even with Mobil or Shell, Amoco, Cities Service, Gulf, get even with them all. “Who you driving this truck for?” he asked.
The driver shrugged. “I don’t know their names. Some Russian guys. Igor, Boris, I don’t know. They pay me off when I park the truck. Five hundred cash for the night.”
“Jesus Christ, Bobby,” Eddie said, glancing back at him, “what the fuck’s going on with all these Russkies?”
Bobby turned and looked right at the truck driver. It was something that he tried to avoid. Looking at men caught in this situation always made him uncomfortable. “Now, just what are the commies doing with a gas truck?”
The truck driver’s mouth was racing now. He’d hooked someone, now he needed to pull them in. Carefully. “I don’t know, really, I don’t know. Selling it, I guess. All I know is I’m supposed to pick up a full load at the Staten Island Terminal and deliver the gas to two stations on Queens Boulevard. Then I drive it up to the Bronx and park it there, in that big parking lot they got near the stadium.”
Bobby was curious. “You ever drive for these guys before?”
Few people have ever been more enthusiastically cooperative than this driver in this car at this time. “Oh yeah, a few times. It’s always the same thing. Deliver the gas to the gas stations, then go park the truck. Honest, all you gotta do is tell me where to meet you. I’ll hand you that truck on a platter.” As they crossed over onto the Hutch and then onto the Taconic Parkway, Bobby asked the same question several different ways. But no matter how he phrased it, the answer was always the same: The driver did not know why the Russians were selling gas to gas stations.
“Let me ask you this, then,” Bobby said. “What about these Russians? Just what do you think they’re gonna do to you when they find out you gave up their truck? Think they’re gonna give you a nice present maybe?”
The driver was pretty blunt about it. “They gotta catch me first. I’m gonna go so far so fast they’re gonna start calling me Hurricane.”
Bobby had to laugh. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad guy. Too bad you fucked up so badly, he thought to himself.
Lenny wasn’t happy with all this conversation. It was too much talk, as far as he was concerned. “Selling gas to gas stations?” he said. “That’s bullshit. Lemme tell you this. You want gas for free, just come to my house when my wife is making her spaghetti sauce.”
Bobby had almost no doubt the driver was telling the truth. People taking this ride rarely held back information or told lies. Their only hope was that something they said might keep them alive until they could figure out a next move. The driver didn’t have much else to offer. The truck and the cash in his pocket, that was it. He gave Bobby all the details: when and where he was supposed to pick up the truck, make his deliveries, drop the truck. This was a sweet deal, the driver swore; all they had to do was let him show up.
He offered all the information he had, beginning with complete descriptions of the Russians. They were young guys, both of them real muscular. One of them, the taller one, had a deep ugly scar stretching from the corner of his eye right down his cheek. The shorter guy had a modified Mohawk; he’d shaved the sides of his head but left his blond hair on top. The driver had seen their car and was pretty sure it was a Chevy Camaro, a silver Z28. And then he began talking about other jobs he’d done, mentioning as many names as possible, trying desperately to catch a miracle. At one point he even offered to help Lenny with directions, explaining that he’d been driving trucks for fifteen years and knew every shortcut and back road in the region.
Lenny paid absolutely no attention to him. But every once in a while he would suddenly drive off the parkway, just to make certain they weren’t being followed. The FBI and the NYPD just couldn’t be trusted. Fast Lenny was an experienced driver. He knew how to spot a tail and how to shake it. No one was tailing them, though, he was sure of it.
Bobby was starting to feel sorry for the truck driver. Personally he didn’t have anything against the guy. He seemed like a decent small-time crook. His real crime was stupidity. He hadn’t set out to beat the mob; things just happened that way. The mistake he made was that when he had the opportunity to make things right simply by explaining what happened, in which case he wouldn’t have had a problem, he walked away with the load. Cheating the family out of a score was a capital offense. Maybe if he had a rabbi, a made man to speak up for him, his situation might have been mitigated. But nobody knew him, nobody would miss him, nobody cared. And if he was allowed to walk away from his situation without punishment, other people would get the wrong message.
The guy just wouldn’t shut up. Lenny was about to bust a lung, but there wasn’t too much he could do about it. He didn’t want to slug the guy in Tony’s car. He respected Tony too much to get blood all over his new cloth seats. And given the circumstances, it would have been pretty ridiculous to threaten to kill him.
The truck driver was also beginning to get under Bobby’s skin by the time they turned onto the road up to Swan Lake. The road weaved several miles through a heavily wooded area. There were several summer resort communities around the lake, but except for a caretaker or two, they would be deserted this time of year. Bobby had been up there two years earlier. Georgie One-Time’s brother-in-law had rented a place on the lake for a month and Georgie had thrown a party there for the entire crew.
When Lenny made the left turn into the darkness, the truck driver knew he was a dead man. He started screaming. For the first time he started fighting to get out of the car. He clawed at Bobby, screeching like the cornered animal he was. Tony started screaming at everybody, “Watch my car! Watch my car!” Lenny had taken off his coat when it got too warm for him in the back. He picked it up and threw it over the truck driver’s head, then started bashing him in the head with his elbow.
Finally the truck driver quieted down and started crying.
“I knew it,” Lenny said. “Fucking wimp.” And slugged him again in the side of his head, just for the pleasure of it. The truth is that there are people who enjoy the violence, who love pulling the trigger. Bobby wasn’t like that. For him a hit was never pleasurable; it wasn’t like he really enjoyed it—although admittedly it was always thrilling. He couldn’t help feeling that way. The adrenaline just raced through his body, making him acutely aware of everything going on around him, stretching every second into forever.
Two miles off the highway Tony stopped the car and turned out all the lights. Lenny snapped the plastic cover off the dome light and unscrewed the bulb so the light wouldn’t go on when the door was opened. Then they sat silently in the darkness and waited. They waited for their eyes to adjust to the darkness, for a car to come down the road, for a flashlight in the forest, for an unusual sound. They waited for anything unexpected. The truck driver was sobbing, mumbling something Bobby couldn’t understand, gulping air. As they sat there, Bobby looked into the woods. It was like looking into death.
The woods were a good place for this type of work. Isolated and dark. Ironically, whacking the driver wasn’t necessarily the difficult part—there were a lot of men who loved the rush that came with that—the troublesome part was getting rid of the body. The body was the strongest evidence that could be used to connect the killer to the victim. Without a body detectives had nothing to detect. But sometimes getting rid of a body turned out to be a hassle. There were a lot of different options: Saw it into pieces and drop the pieces in various sewers or other bodies of water or bury them. A lot of bodies have been buried under tons of concrete in construction sites of basements. A body can be weighed down and dropped out in the ocean as a fish gift. On occasion some people used a double coffin, a coffin with a false bottom that allowed two bodies to be buried together. And then sometimes people buried a body in a field and relied on wild animals.
Lenny got out of the car, then leaned back in and grabbed the truck driver by the neck of his shirt and literally pulled him out of the car. The guy was much too terrified to put up any real resistance. Bobby got out the other side and quietly closed his door. It was freezing. Bobby had forgotten to bring an overcoat, so he turned up the collar of his sports jacket and pulled the lapels together. Then he reached around his back and pulled his gun out of his waistband. It was a Remington .38 Special. Bobby didn’t have a silencer with him, but with any luck it wouldn’t matter. He was working backup. Lenny was the shooter. Unless there was some kind of screwup, he would not have to fire his gun.
A layer of decaying leaves covered the ground. Bobby felt like he was walking on a damp sponge. Lenny was carrying a throwaway, but he did have a silencer for it. Lenny, Bobby, and the driver walked into the woods, Lenny never letting go of the driver. The little guy was shivering, and whimpering, pleading, promising. And then he let loose in his pants. “Oh Christ,” Lenny said softly, “that’s fucking disgusting.”
If the driver responded, Bobby didn’t hear him. They were moving down the side of a sloping hill. Bobby walked a few steps behind them, constantly turning and looking around. Nobody was going to make a big deal over the fact that some two-bit hustler disappeared—unless they could pin his disappearance on a made man. Doing that successfully would make some cop’s Christmas very merry. It was a trade law enforcement would make every day of the week and twice on Super Bowl Sunday.
It was nearly pitch-black in the woods and Bobby could barely see the two men walking only a few feet in front of him. Mostly he was looking down at the ground, watching his steps. He heard Lenny order the guy, “Walk over there.” And an instant later he heard the unmistakable pop! pop! of a silenced weapon being fired twice. It sounded more like a kid stomping on an overturned paper cup than bullets being fired into a man’s head, although the gunshot probably wasn’t as loud as the pop of air. The truck driver grunted involuntarily as his life burst free of his body, and that was the last sound he made. The leaves pretty much absorbed the sound of his body hitting the ground. Then, a couple of seconds later, pop! pop! That was Lenny again, Bobby knew, putting two more slugs into the truck driver’s brain, just to make sure he was forever dead.
“That’s it,” Lenny said without emotion. Lenny was holding on to the manila envelope filled with cash and the guy’s wallet when Bobby came up to him. “Watch yourself,” Lenny warned. The truck driver’s body was lying on its side, his blood pooling on the leaves, and Lenny didn’t want Bobby stepping in it.
Lenny took the cash out of the envelope and put it in his pants pocket. He’d split it up later. He put the driver’s wallet in his jacket pocket. Without that wallet no one would be able to identify the truck driver, even if all it contained was phony IDs.
“What do you want to do with him?” Bobby asked. It didn’t make sense to bury him. Unless they were willing to dig a really deep hole, within a few days hungry animals would dig him up. This was a feast for them. They’d carry parts of his body throughout the woods. Chances were that no matter what Lenny and Bobby did with the body, no one would find it for a long, long time. If ever. The only people wandering this deep into the woods this time of year were hunters, and most of the land around the lake was posted.
Lenny thought about it. The land rolled downhill into a narrow ravine. “Gimme a hand,” he said, grabbing one of the driver’s arms. Bobby grabbed the other arm and they began dragging the corpse. It slid along the slick surface a lot more easily than Bobby expected, like shit on silk, he thought, and it took only a few minutes to roll it into the ravine. Then they covered the body with leaves. In the dark it looked like it was completely covered, but it was impossible to be certain. “Fuck it,” Lenny decided, “that’s good enough. Let’s get out of here.” Bobby turned around to return to the car, but suddenly Lenny spit at the corpse. “Fuck me again, you fucking bastard,” he said, and that would be the truck driver’s epitaph.
Bobby reached down and grabbed a handful of leaves, then began wiping the touch of death off his hands. As best as he could, he checked his pants, shoes, and socks for bloodstains. Lenny did the same thing. They were both clean, but they would get rid of the clothes they were wearing as soon as they got back to the city. That probably wasn’t really necessary, but this was a business in which the price of simple mistakes is measured in years. For Lenny that was nothing, a pair of slacks, a T-shirt, and old sneakers. For Bobby it meant throwing out a $700 suit, $175 shoes, and a $3 pair of socks. It didn’t thrill him, but he accepted it as the cost of doing business.
By the time they climbed back up the hill and got to the car, Lenny was breathing hard. He had to pause a couple of times to catch his breath. Nobody said a word as they got into the car. Tony turned around and drove about a mile up the road. “This is good,” Lenny said. Tony stopped the car and Lenny got out. He walked a few steps into the woods and then heaved the silencer as far as he could in one direction, then he turned and threw the wallet in the opposite direction. Neither the silencer nor the wallet would ever be found.
Nobody said a word for several minutes as they headed back to the city. Finally Little Eddie decided, “I guess that’s one way to christen this car.” Tony was the only one who didn’t laugh.
This was an unremarkable murder, a simple hit. It was without complications or high risk. Each of the four men in the car had been involved in hits before. The complete absence of remorse was a tribute to their professionalism. This had all been done according to the rules. Anyone who felt bad about it was simply in the wrong business.
That didn’t mean it had no impact on them. It was a solemn undertaking. Literally and figuratively. Bobby had participated in five other hits, although he’d pulled the trigger himself only twice. None of these men were afraid of death, but each of them greatly respected it. So while this job remained a monster in their minds, they didn’t say a single word about it on the drive home.
Halfway down the Taconic, at a place where trees closely bordered the parkway, Tony slowed down. When he was certain there were no cars behind him, he pulled over to the side. “Okay,” he told Lenny, “this is good.” Lenny had unloaded the gun and wiped his fingerprints off it with a handkerchief. He got out of the car and walked several feet to the tree line. Anybody driving past would assume he was relieving himself. A car sped by, he waited. Another car. He waited. And then he heaved the gun into the woods. A minute later Tony eased back onto the parkway and kept going. The job was done.
They were just about back in the city when Eddie asked, “Any you guys interested in that gasoline truck?”
Bobby had been thinking about that for most of the drive, but not for the $15,000 reason. As a teenager Bobby had practically rebuilt his first car, a 1960 Plymouth Fury with a 425 Hemi. One time the car had two very distinct problems, a banging coming from the rear right side and a bad oil leak. It didn’t seem possible the two problems were related, but they were. The banging in the back was caused by a loose exhaust pipe hitting the underside of the car. Occasionally the pipe brushed against the oil line, which eventually started leaking. That experience had taught Bobby to at least consider the possibility that two seemingly unconnected events happening at the same time might have a common root.
In his whole life the only Russian he’d ever known was a really stacked young brunette named Irena who worked for a furrier on 37th Street and loved having sex in cars with stick shifts. A lot of wonderful memories were made in that ’60 Fury. Actually she’d played an important role in his life. This was just after he’d graduated from college, before he was tied up to Ronnie, when there was still a chance he might try the straight world. He was a smart kid; he could have been successful at many different things. But Irena helped him make the decision: Not only did he get laid regularly—although somewhat uncomfortably—Irena also told him exactly where the security cameras were hidden and when the most valuable furs were left out of the vault for the night. The result had been the first substantial score of his life. The choice was made.
But until the last couple of weeks that had been his only real contact with a Russian. He knew all about the Russian mobs, he admired their success at organizing so quickly, but he didn’t know any of them. Now it seemed like they were coming out of the Kremlin in waves: The professor wasn’t technically Russian, but he taught the language. Two Russians had trailed him to Skinny Al’s funeral and had business with Cosentino. According to Grace Gradinsky, the professor had worked with Skinny Al—which made sense because Cosentino was the boss searching for the professor. And now this truck driver had been working for the Russians. Somehow the pieces fit together like a banging exhaust pipe and an oil leak. “Yeah, I’m in,” Bobby replied to Eddie’s question. He intended to learn a little more about these Russians.
No one ever again mentioned the truck driver. From that night on, he had never existed.
The next morning Bobby and Little Eddie planned the heist. Tony Cupcakes wanted in; so did the kid, Vito V. Joey Scars, a tough little guy who had been down in Florida meeting some people who claimed to be able to deliver as much as 140 pounds of marijuana a week, was in the club and heard about it and asked in. Legally this job belonged to Fast Lenny because the information came from his source, but he was okay with sharing equally. There really was no logical reason for Bobby to believe that this job might lead to the professor—there are thousands of Russians doing business in New York—but Bobby had a feeling he wasn’t about to ignore. Besides, the worst thing that would happen is that he would end up with a share of an oil tanker heist.
He spent the rest of the afternoon with Little Eddie chasing the professor. To Eddie’s absolute delight, they went back up to Columbia. Bobby had no plan, but there wasn’t much else for him to do. The clock was running down and he was pretty much out of options. He needed a break, so why not just take a shot? You never know who’s waiting around the next corner, he figured, you just never know.
Identifying themselves as private detectives hired by the professor’s relatives, they spoke with two of his colleagues and his graduate assistant. Neither of the teachers had the slightest idea what might have happened to him, but both of them acknowledged that this sort of behavior was completely out of character for Professor Gradinsky and they were quite worried about him. “He’s a good man,” one of them said. “He’s got a fine accent.”
The graduate student had just wandered into the administration office as Bobby and Eddie were getting ready to leave. When she overheard them asking Geri Simon more questions about Gradinsky, she introduced herself. She was a tall, attractive coed named Natalie something, who to Eddie’s disappointment was wearing very loose pants and a bulky knit sweater. She looked like she had a figure underneath all that cover.
She was extremely concerned about the professor, she explained. She’d been coming to the office every day since he’d disappeared, desperate for any news. She’d even gone out searching for him herself, going to all the local places where previously she’d been able to find him. She was so frustrated at the fact that no one seemed to be doing very much about this—no one had even hung up a notice on the departmental bulletin board, she pointed out—that she had called the police department.
Great, Bobby thought to himself, that’s definitely what we need. More people looking for this guy. Next thing the Coast Guard’s going to be searching for him.
Natalie something sighed. “They weren’t any help at all. They told me they couldn’t do anything until he was reported missing by a member of his immediate family. And I don’t think she’s going to do that.” She hesitated, obviously making a decision, then decided to confide in Bobby and Eddie. “I’m assuming that Gra—his wife, she didn’t hire you, but you should know that his marriage isn’t so great. Sometimes he complained to me about her. Personally? I think she’s glad he’s gone.”
“You know him pretty good, huh?” Eddie said in his best detective voice. Bobby couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Who would’ve guessed? That randy old professor.
“I’ve been working with him more than a year. He is truly an enchanting man,” she said brightly. This was the first time Bobby had heard Gradinsky described as anything but plodding and ordinary. “You should hear him when he reads the great Russian poets. He’s . . .” Bobby watched as her eyes searched the air for a meaningful description. “. . . a man given to grand feats of verbal ecstasy.” She leaned back, satisfied with that tribute.
“Wow,” Eddie said aloud, impressed if not certain he understood her meaning, and wondering if they were talking about the same guy.
Verbal ecstasy? Bobby thought. Nice try. “Lemme ask you this, Natalie,” he said. “Did you see a lot of the professor?”
She nodded and, completely missing the intended humor in his question, replied seriously, “Oh yes, at least three or four days a week. Peter was my mentor so we worked together very closely. He was helping me write my thesis.”
Peter? That’s pretty good, Bobby thought to himself, practically feeling the pain on his knuckles that would have resulted if he had dared refer to Sister Mary Margaret, his fifth-grade teacher, as just plain Mary. This Natalie certainly knew a lot about the professor’s life; she knew the people on the faculty he respected, she knew the places he liked to eat and what he ordered, that he was reading Gorky Park when he disappeared, even his secret strategy for finding a parking spot on campus. But she knew nothing at all about his relationship with Skinny Al or, most important, just where he might be at that very moment. “I need to talk to him,” she said. “If you find him, tell him it’s very important.” She would not confide in them, even when pushed, but emphasized, “It really is important.”
Later, as Bobby and Eddie walked back to their car, Eddie asked, “You think he’s boffing her?”
Bobby laughed at him. “Do I think he’s boffing her? Do I think he’s boffing her? Is the pope Catholic? Fuck yes, I think he’s boffing her. You heard her, four times a week.”
“Man, that’s really something,” Eddie said, astonished by the thought. “What the fuck is a piece of ass like that doing with that schmuck?”
“You heard her. He’s got verbal ecstasy.”
“Sure he does. And I got a fifteen-inch schlong. What does that mean, verbal ecstasy?” Eddie asked.
“It means he can talk her into giving him blow jobs,” Bobby explained.
On the way back they stopped at Charlie DaSilva’s place on MacDougal Street in the Village for a cannoli. They sat at a table in the window. It was a gloomy day, dark and blustery, the perfect harmony for Bobby’s mood. He had read that after Mickey Mantle retired, he used to dream that he was locked outside Yankee Stadium and kept running around the place desperately trying to find an open door. That’s sort of the way he felt about this search, like he was running around in a big circle unable to find the key to get inside. He had gathered some decent information, but it didn’t lead anywhere. It was like trying to find the words in a bowl of alphabet soup: The letters were all there but they were floating around aimlessly.
He wondered if those two FBI agents working the case were doing any better. Franzone had given him their names and home addresses, but there wasn’t too much he could do with that information. What was he going to do, bug the feds? The FBI had a lot of advantages, no question about it, but they also had one big problem: They were restricted by the law. They needed the bullshit search warrants, they weren’t allowed to use the family methods to encourage people to give up information, and they didn’t have access to the same range of people.
His own involvement with the bureau had been sporadic. Two different times he’d been picked up by members of the joint FBI-NYPD Organized Crime Task Force and questioned about specific killings, but in both cases they had nothing more than a hunch. Those were obviously fishing expeditions and they didn’t catch anything. He’d been tailed many times, too many times to count up. Sometimes the tail was obvious, sometimes it was supposed to be covert, and he figured there were times when he had been followed without knowing it, but the only crimes he’d ever been charged with were a conspiracy rap that never even got to court and a wire fraud charge for working for a bookie during the ’78 World Series. He’d been convicted in the bookmaking case and received a six-month suspended sentence. A couple of times bureau agents had approached him on the street to feel him out about cooperating with them, just answering a few questions from time to time. “Building up some credit for when you’re gonna need it,” one of them had called it. He’d laughed them away.
He respected the bureau. They had some smart guys working there. And they played by the rules. He was reminded of that every day by the precautions their shadows caused him to take. And those agents he’d met . . .
“I just can’t fucking believe it,” Eddie whined, interrupting his thoughts.
“What’s that?”
“That fucking professor. Where’s he get off banging a cute little cunt like that? I swear to God, sometimes this world just isn’t fair.”
Bobby chuckled at that thought. Eddie was right about that one. “C’mon,” he said finally, “let’s go get some gas.”