And I just have this vague feeling that it isn’t necessary, that this isn’t who I have to be. Joe and me both, my partner Ed, all of us, we’ve narrowed ourselves down, we’ve made ourselves blunt and tough because that’s the only way to survive. But what if we were in a different kind of setting? Even that hippie was a ten-year-old kid once. But we all of us get together in that city like hungry animals jammed in together in a pit, and we beat on each other because that’s all we know how to do, and after a while all of us have turned ourselves into people you don’t want to bring your kids up among.
So you sit in the car on the way to work, and you fantasize a million-dollar robbery, life in a Caribbean island, out and away from all this lousy stuff. They make movies about robberies, and people go to them and love them. Or watch them when they show up on television. And every once in a while somebody tries it in real life.
A flashlight was coming down the drive from the house. I tensed up, seeing it come. I could still turn around and walk away from this, let it stay in the land of fantasy. I think it was only the idea of facing Joe that kept me from doing it.
There were several people behind the flashlight, I couldn’t be sure how many. The flashlight didn’t point at me at all now; first it pointed at the ground, and then it pointed at the gate as it was being unlocked. A voice said, “Come in.” It wasn’t the gravel voice from before, but a different one, smoother, oilier.
I stepped in, and they shut the gate behind me. I was frisked, fast and expert, and then hands held my arms just above the elbows and I was walked up to the house.
I didn’t get to use the front entrance. They took me around the side and into an entrance with snow shovels and overcoats and overshoes in the small room inside. We went through that into an empty kitchen, and they frisked me again, more thoroughly, going through all my pockets. There were three of them, and two searched me while the other stood off a ways behind me. They were dressed in suits and ties, but they were unmistakably hoods.
When they finished with the second search, one of the friskers went out of the room. The other two and I waited. I looked around the kitchen, which was like the kind you see in a fairly small restaurant. Big chopping-block table in the middle, with copper pans hanging from racks over it. Stainless-steel ovens and grill and sinks. Apparently Mr. Vigano did a lot of entertaining.
It had occurred to me there was a possibility Mr. Vigano might decide to kill me. I couldn’t think of any reason for him to do it, but I couldn’t discount the possibility. I admired the kitchen rather than think about that.
The frisker came back and said to the other two, “We take him to Mr. Vigano.”
“Fine,” I said. I said it partly because I wanted to be sure my voice was still working.
The frisker led the way. The other two took my arms again, and we left the kitchen in a group.
It was a weird sort of stop-and-go method we had, the four of us, traveling through the house. First the frisker would go on ahead through a doorway or around a corner, and then he’d come back and nod to us, and the rest of us would move forward and catch up with him. At which point we’d stop again, and he’d go on to the next phase of the trip. It was like being a piece on a board game, something like Monopoly or Sorry, moving one square at a time. I don’t know if the idea was that they didn’t want me to be seen by members of Vigano’s family who weren’t a part of the mob operation, or if he had Mafia people staying with him that I wasn’t supposed to see and maybe identify. But whatever their intention the result was that I got a slow-paced guided tour of the first floor of Vigano’s house.
It was a strange house. Either Vigano had bought it furnished from the previous owner, who had been somebody with a lot of good taste, or he’d had the thing done for him by an expensive decorator. We went through rooms filled with obviously valuable antiques, graceful furniture, flocked wallpaper, crystal chandeliers, heavy draperies, all sorts of tasteful and quietly expensive things; just the kind of surroundings I’m happiest among. But then on the wall there’d be hanging some lousy painting of a crying clown, with real rhinestones sprinkled on his hat. Or a lovely marble-topped table would have one of those ashtrays on it made of a flattened gin bottle. Or a modern black parson’s table would have a lamp on it composed of a fake brass statue of two lions trying to climb up the trunk of a tree and the shade would be cream-colored with purple fringe. Or a room with a beautiful wallpaper would have one of those porcelain light-switch plates in a free-form star shape. Absolutely the most amateurishly done bust of President Kennedy I’ve ever seen was sitting on a huge gleaming grand piano, next to a green glass vase with pussy willows in it.
And finally, at the end of the guided tour, they took me through another door and down a flight of stairs and into a bowling alley.
It was amazing. A one-lane bowling alley in the basement, a long narrow brightly lighted room like a pistol-practice range. There was the normal kind of curved leatherette settee behind the lane, and Vigano himself was sitting there alone. He was wearing a gray sweatsuit and black sneakers and a white towel around his neck, and he was drinking beer from a Pilsner glass. A bottle of Michelob was on the score table.
Down at the far end of the lane, a heavy thirtyish guy in a black suit was setting up the pins. He was another hood, like the two who’d brought me in and who now stood back by the door, waiting to be called on.
I moved forward to the settee. Vigano turned his head around and gave me a heavy smile. He had heavy-lidded eyes; it was as though he only allowed the dead part of his eyes to show, the living parts were hidden away behind the lids. He looked at me for a few seconds, and then put the smile away and nodded at the settee. “Sit down,” he said. It was a command, not hospitality.
I stepped through the central opening in the settee and sat on the side opposite Vigano. Down at the other end of the lane, the hood in the black suit finished setting up the pins and hoisted himself up onto a seat hidden away out of sight. Only his highly polished shoes showed, hanging down over the black valley where the ball would stop.
Vigano was studying me. “You’re wearing a wig,” he said.
I said, “The story is, the FBI takes movies of your visitors. I don’t want to be identified.”
He nodded. “The moustache phony too?”
“Sure.”
“It looks better than the wig.” He drank some beer. “You’re a cop, huh?”
“Detective Third Grade,” I said. “Assigned in Manhattan.”
He emptied the rest of the beer from the bottle into the glass. Not looking directly at me, he said, “I’m told you don’t have any papers on you. Wallet, driver’s license, nothing like that.”
I said, “I don’t want you to know who I am.”
He nodded again. Now he did look at me. He said, “But you want to do something for me.”
“I want to sell something to you.”
He squinted slightly. “Sell?”
I said, “I want to sell you something for two million dollars cash.”
He didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh or take me seriously. He said, “Sell me what?”
“Whatever you want to buy,” I told him.
I could see him deciding to get annoyed. “What bullshit is this?”
I talked as fast as I knew how. “You buy things,” I said. “I’ve got a friend, he’s also a cop. In our position, with what we know about how things work, we can go anywhere in New York you want and get you anything you want. You just tell us what it is you’ll pay two million dollars for, and we’ll go get it.”