Devers was so pleased he was almost drunk with it. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not once a month?”
Dalesia and Hurley and Mackey arrived next, with the smallest take of the night: seven thousand, six hundred twenty-five, from the loan-shark operation. That was less than Faran had suggested would be there, but by then nobody much cared. Besides, Mackey was full of funny stories about Nick, the guy who ran the place, and about his wife, who slept through the whole robbery. “He’ll wake her up tomorrow morning,” Mackey said, “and he’ll say, ‘Sweetheart, we got knocked over last night,’ and she’ll say, ‘Schmuck, leave the drinking to the customers.’”
Parker didn’t do any of the talking. He watched and listened, letting them work out their pleasure and their nervous excitement; it wasn’t even three o’clock yet, plenty of time left to get his own work done.
Webb came back with Handy and Ducasse, and then everybody was here. The money was brought back out and recounted, and all the totals added up to two hundred seventy-six thousand, two hundred eighty-seven dollars. The money was stacked up on the dining table, and Mackey said, “Son of a blue bitch, boys, that’s a quarter million dollars.”
“Pencil and paper,” Hurley said. “I want to know what my piece is.”
It turned out to be an even twenty-five thousand, one hundred seventeen dollars apiece. Nobody could believe a big number like that would come out even when divided by eleven, so three of them did the division, but it kept working out. Twenty-five thousand, one hundred seventeen dollars a man.
Elkins nodded, smiling. “That’s a nice night’s work,” he said.
Parker said, “Now we do another night’s work.”
They all looked at him, and he could see that in the pleasure with their success, they’d forgotten about him and what was supposed to happen next. It brought them down off their highs, one at a time. He waited it out, waited till the smiles left the faces, waited till the eyes got the flat look back again, waited till they were ready to go back to work.
“Right,” he said.
Forty-eight
Calesian could feel it slipping away. He’d had it in his hands, he’d held it just long enough to know what it really was, and now it was slipping away.
That bastard Parker. They’d get him, of course, they’d finish him off, either tonight or tomorrow or sometime later this week, but it was going to be too late for Calesian. The power that had skidded through Buenadella’s hands and into Calesian’s was gone again, running out like sand through the bottom of a sack. And not a damn thing he could do about it.
Buenadella’s house was a goddam fortress by now. There had to be at least forty armed men in here, plus Dutch himself and Ernie Dulare. Also a guy named Quittner that had been sent over by Frank Schroder. Quittner was a cold bastard, tall and skinny and pallid and silent as death. He wasn’t a part of anybody’s action, wasn’t a regular at all. He belonged to Frank Schroder, the way a horse belongs to a mounted policeman. Most of the time Quittner didn’t even seem to exist; just every once in a while Frank Schroder wanted a representative somewhere, on something he considered very important, and here came Quittner, empowered to act on his own, to make Schroder’s decisions for him, and then to fade out of the picture again.
So now the power lay between Quittner and Ernie Dulare And when the crisis was over and Quittner disappeared once more, that would leave Dulare the man in control.
It was strange about power. Al Lozini had held it in his hands a long, long time, unquestioned and unchallenged, but Dutch Buenadella could bleed it out of him slowly over three years without Lozini ever even feeling it: getting the money, getting the right men, inching the reins into his own hands.
If the guns hadn’t come out, the shift in control would have been seamless and simple and straight, as automatic as the movement of a teeter-totter. But once Parker and Green had come to town and the balance had gone, once violence had become the only way to make things right, Buenadella had lost the rhythm, had ceased to function, and it became inevitable that the reins would fall from his grasp again.
But not back to Lozini. Once a man was drained of his power, he seemed to lose the assurance that had won it for him in the first place. Lozini with his mastery intact would never have gone after Calesian himself with a gun, just as Calesian would never have dared to shoot a Lozini who was still in charge; so in a way it was the knowledge of his powerlessness that had killed Lozini more than anything else.
Something like that was also happening to Buenadella. For a while Calesian had seen himself as the silent partner, the power behind the throne, with Dutch Buenadella nominally in charge. But then Parker had brought in an army from some goddam place, he’d attacked in a way that hurt too many people and that neither Buenadella nor Calesian could deal with on their own, and Buenadella’s loss of control became apparent to the wrong men: to Frank Schroder and Ernie Dulare.
So that’s where the power was now, in the hands of Ernie Dulare and of Frank Schroder’s man Quittner, sitting together at the desk in Buenadella’s den, making their phone calls, making their decisions without consulting Buenadella, picking up the reins in every way. Tomorrow, when Quittner stepped out once more, Ernie Dulare would be the man holding Al Lozini’s power in his hands, with Schroder as his ally and Buenadella as his satellite.
And Calesian? Dulare had made it plain when he got here tonight, in a few harsh cutting remarks, that he felt this mess was more Calesian’s fault than anybody else’s. He’d made his peace with Buenadella, and he’d apparently chosen to turn Calesian into the goat, the one whose bad judgment had brought this trouble down on everybody’s head.
Which just wasn’t fair. It was Buenadella who had started the power play in the first place, and it was Buenadella who had taken Parker and Green’s money, and it was Buenadella who had ordered Mike Abadandi to go kill them. But all of that was being forgotten now. The only things being remembered were that Calesian had killed Al Lozini and that Calesian had fired on Parker and Green after Buenadella had worked out an agreement with them. Nobody was making a big point of blaming Calesian, nobody was arguing with him and giving him a chance to defend himself, but the feeling was obvious in the air. Calesian was out. Not yet, but soon; Farrell would be elected mayor, and would appoint his own police commissioner, and it was only natural to expect the new commissioner to do some reshuffling of assignments. Calesian would lose his slot with the Organized Crime Squad, would be shifted to Public Relations or the Red Squad or some other meaningless backwater, and that would be the end of him. His last state would be worse than his first; less power than before, after having for just one day tasted more power than he’d ever dreamed of.
Was there a way back? Not yet, not that he could see, but still he couldn’t just give up. He had to hang around, watching and waiting, hoping for some break somewhere; sitting in Buenadella’s den, obscure and ignored in a corner, he watched Dulare and Quittner over at the desk, like two military commanders in a field headquarters setting up for a major battle. Watched and listened and hoped for some new hole to open, some other route back to the trough of power.
Dulare was on the phone now, talking to Farrell. Until a day or so ago direct communication between Farrell and anybody at all on this side of the fence would have been unthinkable; but now they were in a crisis situation, and security was going by the boards. Besides, with the election tomorrow it was too late for anybody to get political mileage out of Farrell’s connections; and after the man was elected, what was anybody going to do about it?