Authors: Thomas Perry
“The Langustos. They kind of took charge, didn’t they?”
“They wish,” said Catania contemptuously. “Joe has connections in brokerage houses and banks, so he was in a position to find things out. The Langustos were supposed to be responsible for Bernie all these years, so they should take on more of the headache. And Phil’s the head of their family, that’s all.”
Mosso nodded, and sat in silence. Catania looked away and walked back to the table, picked up his empty juice glass, then glanced at Mosso, still sitting in mute immobility. His silence was beginning to feel loud. Catania put down his glass. “What?”
“The Langustos call a meeting,” said Mosso. “They tell everybody what they ought to be looking for, but they also tell everybody what they shouldn’t be looking for. And it sounds like an odd choice: who’s doing it. Then this woman nobody knows supposedly shows up in Seattle and hammers a full-grown made guy. But who saw it besides him, and whose guy is this?”
“Langusto’s,” conceded Catania. “But that could just be odds. They’ve got more guys out looking than anybody else. They flew them all over the place. I figured it’s better Phil Langusto pays those travel bills than me.”
Mosso sat in silence. His silence was expanding again, and Catania began to feel it taking up space. Catania said, “Are
you thinking that the Langusto family don’t want us to find the money?”
“I don’t want to say the Langustos are trying to get all that money for themselves. Maybe they wouldn’t do that.”
“Of course they would,” said Catania. “I would, you would, anybody would.”
Mosso shook his head and feigned bewilderment. “I’m not as smart as a lot of people: you, them.… But wouldn’t a good way be to send everybody else to look in all directions except the one that will pay off?”
Catania’s eyes began to burn. He nodded.
Mosso said, “This is like being in a card game where the dealer is a little too good. You don’t know he’s dealing from the bottom, because you didn’t see it, but you can tell he could if he wanted to. So if he’s not, why isn’t he?”
“It’s true. The Langustos might be trying to keep us all out of the way while they concentrate on finding the people who have the money and then shaking them down.”
Mosso shrugged. “I’m too slow to figure out what they’re doing. It could be that. It seems to me that if the Langustos have all these connections and they’re so good at figuring it all out, why call a meeting? Why cut everybody else in? Are they doing it because they want to be fair and make sure each family gets what it laid off with Bernie? Why? How?”
Catania stared down at the soaked cards on the table. He seemed to be unable to find an answer.
Mosso held up both hands. “I’m not saying it’s one thing or another. We came to you because you’re our capo, and you’re smarter than we are. We came to ask.” Cotrano and Pescati stared at Mosso in undisguised admiration.
Catania said, “You came to tell me I’ve been walking around with my eyes closed.”
Pescati was braver now. “No, Victor. It’s just that to us, the whole thing smells a little ripe, you know? We’re all supposed to spot any of this money moving, and report to Langusto’s guy, Pompi—who, incidentally, would steal the dirt from your fingernails. I’ve known him for years. We’re looking for
a bodyguard and a maid. What happens if we find them? Do we bring them to the Langustos?”
Cotrano said quietly, “It’s a little bit like Phil Langusto was the boss, and we all worked for him.”
Catania’s head snapped to face Cotrano.
Pescati said, “He means—”
“I know what he means,” Catania interrupted. “He means what he says.” Catania walked faster, turning when he came to the wall, walking to the end of the room, and spinning again. “The truth is, I don’t know any more than you do about this. Maybe Bernie really did do what we all thought, and started writing down where he put the money. Maybe he even did it because I asked him to think about it. This could all be my fault. Maybe I got him to write it down, and now there really is somebody moving it around to wash it. But you’re right. Phil Langusto is trying to control this. It might just be that he wants to sucker us all into helping look for these people, then get to the money first and say he never found it—or pay everybody a tenth of what we put in, and hide the rest. But it could be a hell of a lot worse than that.”
“What are you thinking of?” asked Mosso.
Catania’s eyes began to glow again. “Think back a few months. Suppose that, while the rest of us were worrying about what would happen if Bernie died, the Langustos were thinking about it another way.”
“What way?”
“Everybody knew Bernie wouldn’t live forever. The Langustos added up what they would lose if Bernie kicked off right away. It came to—I don’t know—say, a billion dollars. It occurred to them that they might make bigger money if they killed him themselves.”
“I’m lost,” said Pescati.
Catania spoke quickly but patiently. “They kill Bernie. They get every family together who stood to lose money, and say, ‘We’ve all got to look for the money together, because none of us can find it alone. Just for efficiency, report what you find to us and we’ll tell everybody else.’ People get used to talking to the Langustos instead of each other. Pretty soon
the Langustos are telling everybody’s people where to look for the money and who to call if they see anything. And they’re deciding who gets to be cut in and who’s cut out. I told you they didn’t invite Frank Delfina to that meeting, right?” His mind seemed to take another turn that surprised him. He asked, “Who have we got out on this right now?”
Mosso pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling. “I guess it’s about three hundred made guys out of town, and the ones who work on their crews. Figure a thousand, fifteen hundred.”
“Suppose something happened right now—today, right here in New York? Say I need guys to line up along Thirty-ninth Street and protect this building from the Langustos? How many will show up?”
Cotrano frowned. “Jesus, Victor … ”
“How many?”
“In twenty-four hours, everybody, with all their crews. In half an hour, I don’t know. Maybe fifty, probably less. We kept the good earners at home, not the guns. We’ve even got some of them out running down bank accounts and addresses and stuff.”
“Mixed right in with people from the other families, right? Molinari’s guys, Langusto’s guys … ”
Pescati and Cotrano began to look increasingly uneasy. Even Mosso seemed uncomfortable.
“See what I mean?” said Catania. “It’s like this was designed to sucker people like me. I figure, if I keep my guys at home and the rest of them find our money, are we going to get it? No. So I send my soldiers away, so I don’t lose out. But what if that was the whole point? The families that go along with the program like they already work for the Langustos … well, pretty soon, they’re going to find out that they do. But the ones the Langustos know will be trouble can be handled. Like me. Instead of having to face my four hundred guys with his four hundred and fifty, they just have to face the fifty guys we kept home because they were good at arithmetic, but not so good in an alley on a dark night.”
“You think Phil Langusto is making his move like Castiglione did?” asked Mosso.
Catania shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought from the beginning that if somebody killed Bernie the Elephant and got his hands on the money, the place we’d find it wasn’t going to be the March of Dimes. The only thing I’m sure of now is that this is a hell of an easy way to take over another family.” His eyes were sad and wistful as he stared down at the street outside the window of the Rivoli Social Club. “I wish I had thought of it myself.”
A
s Jane drove west out of Chicago on Interstate 90, her constant glances into the rearview mirror and her careful appraisals of each car that appeared beside her gave her a chance to study the women that she was trying to impersonate. That one ahead and to the right had probably dropped somebody off in the city—a husband at work, a child at school—and she was driving her Land Rover back to the suburbs. Jane read the frame around the license plate: Valley Imports, Elk Grove Village. Jane pushed a bit harder on the accelerator to pull closer to the woman. The hair looked almost exactly like Jane’s. A lot of women with babies cut their hair to keep little fingers from tangling in it. As Jane drew abreast of the woman, she could see a child strapped in a car seat behind her.
Jane pulled ahead. She had to keep looking for danger, not finding new ways of telling herself it was gone. She had verified that the changes she had made had lowered her profile—made her look like a million other women—and proving it to herself over and over was pointless. She was doing what she had decided to do, and she had known exactly what the risks
would be before she had made the choice. There were lots of people who had been dazzled by the sums of money the Mafia took in, and had concocted some clever scheme to divert some of it. There were skimmers and embezzlers and hijackers and con men, young members of gangs who got into grown-up rackets without considering who had been making all that money before they were born. The graveyards of big cities were full of them.
The half disguise she had assumed was not bad, but it was best in situations like this: if all anyone could see were brief glances from a distance, she was difficult to distinguish from the people around her. At close quarters, she was still Jane. She spent a few seconds thinking her way through the rest of her original itinerary, and decided it was not good enough. They had her picture, they knew that she was mailing letters. The only way to fight them was to try to do it quickly.
Jane stopped at mailboxes in Hoffman Estates, Elgin, Rockford. From there she took 39 south until she came to a tollway rest stop just west of De Kalb. After she had mailed her letters she filled the gas tank, spent a few minutes rearranging her boxes of letters in the Explorer to bring the next ones up to the front, and went into the little store to buy a pile of road maps.
Then Jane began to drive. She kept moving across the long, straight highways, always just fast enough to cheat the speed limit a little but not enough to be pulled over by the highway patrol. She drove to Moline, crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa, and stopped in Davenport, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids. She turned west again on Route 30 and reached Ames at six, then went south to Des Moines. She didn’t stop for dinner until she had approached the southern edge of the city.
She ate quickly, spent five minutes moving the next boxes of letters to the front of the Explorer, collapsed the empties and stuffed them into a Dumpster, then drove onto Interstate 35. She reached Kansas City after dark, and found a big central post office just west of the junction with Interstate 70. She was fairly confident that even the most thorough search
for her wouldn’t include any surveillance of closed post offices, so she drove up, dropped her mail in the box outside, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 70.
She stopped in Columbia, reached St. Louis just before dawn, and slipped into the city just ahead of the wave of commuters. She made five stops on her way through St. Louis, and as the traffic around her began to crowd and slow, she got back on 70 and crossed the Mississippi again into East St. Louis.
Jane’s nervous energy was beginning to leave her after the night of headlights on nearly empty highways. She considered her options. She didn’t feel ready to settle into a hotel, because it would take too much time, so she pulled off the big highway, made her way back to the park with a little patch of green grass and shady trees she had seen from the road, parked the Explorer, climbed into the back seat, and slept.
When she awoke, it was to the sound of voices. She lay still and listened for a second, then verified that they were the voices of children. She raised her head and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was noon, and there were other cars in the lot. As she got back into the driver’s seat, she could see that there were three families at the picnic tables, the parents laying out food and drinks, the children running around in that aimless way they did after they had been confined in a car—first chasing one another, then rushing back, then just running. Jane backed out of her parking space and headed for the interstate.
The noon sun was bright, the day was clear, and the stops were far apart. She stopped at Vandalia and Effingham to mail letters, then followed Interstate 70 into Indiana at four o’clock.
She stopped just over the border at Terre Haute, then at Indianapolis, then Fort Wayne. She ate in a truck stop, where she knew there would be little competition for the ladies’ room. She locked the door, washed herself as well as she could, and worked on changing her appearance again.
It was great to be a young suburban matron driving her
SUV around during the daytime, but it wasn’t daytime anymore. Tonight she wasn’t going to be driving across long, sparsely populated stretches. She knew that in some of the areas where she was going tonight, suburban matrons were going to be scarce. She tucked her short hair up under her baseball cap, put her thin windbreaker on over a loose sweatshirt, and laced up her running shoes. She evaluated herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like a man, precisely, but she was as tall as many men, and on a dark city street, her silhouette wouldn’t scream out, “What am I doing here alone?” She slipped her wallet into her back pocket like a man, and wondered how they could stand the way that felt. But when she stepped back from the mirror far enough to see herself at full length, she was pleased. It disguised the female shape of her backside pretty well, if she kept the windbreaker down to her hips.
She walked out to the Explorer and drove off to pick up Interstate 69. She reached the Michigan border at nine, then stopped in Battle Creek, Lansing, and Flint, so it was after midnight when Jane abandoned Interstate 69 and turned onto Interstate 75 toward Detroit.
Jane was premeditated and methodical, because time mattered. At each stop she walked quickly with her head up and her eyes scanning, dropped off her mail, and hurried back to the vehicle. Each time she left a freeway, she memorized the exit she had used to leave it and drove back the same way to the entrance ramp. She spent the night making the circuit of the cities around Detroit.