Just in case Frank didn’t, Cattano used a little gold guillotine to clip a Cuban.
“Frank,” Cattano said, soothingly. “You see how I live. You’ve seen my wife, you know the kind of family I have. I fancy I’m a kind of Renaissance man.”
“I got that.”
Cattano shook his head regretfully. “Unfortunately, not all my associates are as... enlightened. You ask them, what is civil rights? They don’t know. To them, black power is a couple of boxers hammering each other bloody. They’re not open to change from the way things’ve been done in the past, and who’s done it, and who is doing it now.”
“Do you anticipate a problem, Dominic?”
Cattano held up a palm. “No, not if I talk to them, so there won’t be any misunderstanding. That, Frank, is what I mean by peace of mind.”
Frank realized that he was not really being given a choice here. Funny — he’d dismissed the old protection racket as antiquated, and yet this Italian don, Renaissance man or not, was squeezing Frank’s balls in a time-tested fashion.
Still, maybe this really was an opportunity. Frank operated internationally, procuring his product; but for merchandizing, he was limited to Jersey and New York, turf he knew and was familiar with. Cattano and his Cosa Nostra pals could open the world up...
All business, Frank said, “You pay what, now? Seventy-five, eighty a kilo? I’d consider taking fifty. And I can get you as much as you want. And better than anything your other sources have ever come up with.”
Now it was Cattano’s turn to put on his best poker face; but Frank saw right through it: the capo’s eyes had dollar signs in them. Fifty thousand a kilo, for the highest-quality shit on the planet, would be a hell of a coup for the Mafioso on the marble horse.
“You see,” Cattano said, and put a hand on Frank’s shoulder, “I was right. This is one of those historic moments we were talkin’ about. Frank, you’re going to be bigger than Bumpy Johnson himself.”
And Cattano handed Frank a Cuban cigar, expertly prepared for his guest.
“Can’t smoke it here, unfortunately,” Cattano said, with a funny little grin and shrug. “Grace doesn’t like it. Take it with you.”
Half an hour later, Frank and Eva walked across a driveway smaller than Rhode Island to the Lincoln, where the massive driver Doc waited. Frank slipped the cigar into his top shirt pocket and they climbed in back. From the front step of the reconstructed castle, their host and hostess smiled and waved.
In back of the Lincoln, Eva gave Frank a raised-eyebrow glance. “Why would you trust these people, the way they look at you?”
“What do you mean?” he said, and grinned and laughed. “Why, baby, they look at me like it’s Christmas and I’m Santa Claus.”
“Please,” she said and shivered. “They look at us like we’re the hired help.”
Frank leaned over and kissed her cheek. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“They work for me now.”
In the bedroom of the penthouse, the dusk outside giving way to evening, Frank — in shirt-and-tie and trousers — stood gazing into his closet where his extensive color-coordinated racks of Phil Cromfeld suits and sports jackets awaited his whim.
On the TV on the dresser opposite the bed, Howard Cosell — already ringside at the Garden — was (in his trademark nasal bleat) expounding on tonight’s fight... or anyway, talking about Muhammad Ali’s antiwar stand. The battle ahead with Joe Frazier seemed almost an afterthought.
Eva, in her lacy underthings, was sitting at her makeup table, getting herself even prettier than God had managed, and God had done a hell of a job. Frank selected a linen jacket, laid it carefully out on the bed, then strolled over to the lovely young woman, catching her eyes in her mirror.
“What?” she asked. She had just a tiny bit of attitude left from this afternoon’s tea party at the Cattano castle.
He set a little jewelry box down on the vanity.
She gazed at the small square object and reached for it, but her hands couldn’t quite manage to touch it. So Frank opened it for her, showed her the four-karat diamond engagement ring, which he then slipped on her finger.
Her lips trembled. A tear formed and trickled down a perfect cheek and messed up her makeup, just a bit.
Then she was on her feet, hugging him.
Kissing him, long and lovingly.
“Yes, I’ll marry you,” she said. “Yes.”
After that, still in his arms, she held her hand out in the way all newly engaged women do, appraising their own worth via the size of the diamond their men had provided.
“Funny thing,” she said with an impish grin, “I bought you a surprise, too.”
She eased from his arms and moved past the TV and opened her own closet; she made her selection — a man’s garment bag — and rested it on the bed next to the linen jacket. She touched her fingers to the zipper, but then stalled, giving him a girlish, teasing look.
“What?” he asked. “What is it?”
She giggled.
As if unveiling a great work of art — one that would at least rival the Cattanos on horseback — she unzipped the bag and revealed the full-length chinchilla coat.
Frank, his anticipation turning to embarrassment, said, “I don’t know, baby... I don’t think that’s exactly my style.”
“You don’t have a style, Frank,” she said firmly. Probably in the same kind of voice Grace Cattano used to tell Dominic not to smoke his Cuban cigars in the house. “And it’s time you got one...”
16. Capone
Saturday afternoon, at the narcotics squad’s church HQ, the guys had given up paperwork and sorting through surveillance photos to gather around the portable TV, watching a press conference where Muhammad Ali was telling the world that he was the black man’s black man, whereas Joe Frazier was the white man’s black man.
“Frazier is gonna kill that conceited clown,” Spearman said.
“What odds you give me?” Jones asked.
Richie Roberts wasn’t paying any attention to the TV. He was studying the bulletin boards, specifically the work-in-progress that was the table of organization of drug suppliers and their higher ups. Only the lowest level included black faces — one of them Charlie Williams — but Frank Lucas (whose name Richie had never heard) was not among them.
The other faces were white, mostly Italian, and stopped midway up — the top slots remaining empty. The squad had hit a wall, and Richie didn’t know where the hell he was going to find a ladder.
He was still preoccupied with the problem that evening, attending the Ali/Frazier match via a press pass as he and his camera blended in with the media crowding the rear entrance of Madison Square Garden.
Celebrities were arriving in their limousines, including showbiz figures like Sammy Davis, Jr., and his wife, Altovise, and sports figures like Joe Louis and his wife, Marva. Some celebrity gangsters attended, too, like Nicky Barnes and Joey Gallo, all with flashy jewelry and flashier girls hanging off of them.
But one VIP couple — also likely belonging to the gangster category — Richie did not recognize. The beautiful Hispanic gal in a showy white dress — according to buzz among the press photographers around him — was a recent former Miss Puerto Rico. She stepped out first and basked in the flashbulbs, but then seemed to have to coax her escort from the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car.
“You want to miss the fight?” she was saying. “Come on, baby. You look great...”
A black patent leather shoe poked out of the vehicle, followed by a tall, handsome black guy in a floppy wide-brimmed pimp fedora and full-length chinchilla coat so ostentatious, Nicky Barnes would’ve thought twice about being seen in public like that. Miss Puerto Rico, casting a dazzling smile on the media boys, hooked onto an arm of the chinchilla-coat character like she thought her squire might make a break for it.