The arrangement Joe and I had was that he would come by every fifteen minutes until I gave him the signal. Then our second timing sequence would begin, with me making the first move. We hadn’t made a contingency plan for what we’d do if the mob never showed up, but I figured if Joe was still circling the neighborhood an hour from now we might as well throw in the towel and go away and see what we could do next.
Get drunk, most likely.
Five minutes before he was due to come by for the third time, the mob arrived. A black limousine came up Central Park West and pulled to a stop in the entrance to the roadway. Gray police sawhorses blocked the road to automobiles this afternoon, and the limousine stopped broadside to the sawhorses, out of the way of northbound Central Park West traffic. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then the rear door opened and four people got out; two men and two women. None of them looked like the kind of people who normally travel around in limousines. Also, the general practice with limousines is that the chauffeur gets out and opens the door for the passengers, but this time the chauffeur stayed behind the wheel.
A man came out first. He was stocky and tough-looking, and despite the heat of the day he was wearing a light zippered jacket closed about halfway up. He looked around warily and cautiously, and then motioned for the other people to come out.
The two women appeared. They were both in their twenties, both a little too full in hip and breast, both wearing plaid slacks and ordinary blouses, both in full night-style make-up, and both with big bouffant hairdos. One of them was chewing gum. They stood around like collies waiting their turn to appear at a dog show, and the other man came out of the car after them.
He was the one. He looked like the first guy, and he too wore a half-zippered jacket, but the important part was that he was carrying the picnic basket. From the way he held it, the thing was heavier than hell.
Let it be full of the real thing, I thought. Let them not try that kind of fast one, I don’t want to have to go through this twice.
The four of them made very unlikely picnickers. There didn’t seem to be any coherent connection among them; the men didn’t hold the women’s hands or elbows, and there wasn’t any conversation back and forth. Nor could you figure out which woman was supposed to be with which man. The four of them seemed as arbitrarily joined together as four strangers in an elevator.
They walked off in a group into the park, the second man struggling with the heavy picnic basket. They disappeared from sight, but the limousine stayed where it was. Thin exhaust showed from the tailpipe.
I took the newspaper off my lap and tossed it down to the other end of the bench. In less than a minute a thin old fellow came along and picked it up and walked off with it, reading the stock reports.
Joe came by right on schedule. I didn’t look directly at him, but I knew he would see that I didn’t have the paper in my lap anymore. That was the signal. He would dope out for himself what the limousine meant, parked sideways in the entrance.
After Joe passed, I got to my feet and walked on into the park. Strolling down the asphalt path, I saw the four picnickers sitting in a bunch down near the traffic light on the interior road, where I’d said they should be. They had the picnic basket on the ground and they were sitting in a tight circle around it. They weren’t talking among themselves, they were all facing and concentrating outward, not even pretending to have a picnic together. They looked like Conestoga wagons waiting for Indians.
Vigano would have other people in the area, to guard the basket and try to keep us from going away with it. Walking around, I spotted four of them, guys sitting or standing at strategic locations where they could watch the picnickers. There’d be more of them, I was sure of that, but four was all I’d seen so far.
I’d probably see more later, whether I wanted to or not.
I kept an eye on my watch. It would take Joe a while to get into position. At the right time, I walked forward across the grass and down a gentle slope toward the picnickers.
They watched me coming. The one who’d first gotten out of the car put his hand inside his half-open jacket.
I walked up to them. I had a smile tacked to my face, as phony as the moustache. I hunkered down in front of the first man and said, quietly, “I’m Mr. Kopp.”
He had the eyes of a dead fish. He studied me with them and said, “Where’s your stuff?”
“Coming,” I said. “But first I’m going to reach into the basket and take some bills out.”
His expression didn’t change. He said, “Who says?” Both women and the other man kept looking away from us, outward; watching for Indians.
I said, “I have to check them out. Just a few.”
He was thinking it over. I glanced away to my left and saw one of the guys I’d spotted earlier, and he was closer now. He wasn’t moving at the moment, but he was closer.
“Why?”
I looked back at him. The question had been asked in a flat tone, as though he were a computer instead of a man, and his face was still expressionless. I said, “You know I’m not going to make the deal until I know for sure what you’ve got in that basket.”
“We have what you want.”
“I’ll have to check it out for myself.”
The other man turned his head and looked at me. Then he faced outward again and said, “Let him.”
The first man nodded. His fish eyes kept watching me. He said, “Go ahead. A few.”
“Fine,” I said. As I leaned forward to reach into the basket, I looked down the road. Joe was due about now.
Joe
I let Tom off at Columbus Avenue and 85th Street, went on up to 90th, made a right turn, and headed over to Central Park West. Then I turned south, and drove slowly down alongside the park to consider the situation.
Everything looked normal, as far as I could see. I didn’t believe it, but that was the way it looked. There’s a long oval road called the Drive that goes all the way around inside the park, and every entrance to it that I saw was blocked with gray Police Department sawhorses; the usual thing for a Tuesday afternoon. People with bicycles were going in past the sawhorses, and wherever I could catch a glimpse of the Drive inside the park it was full of bicycles sailing by. Nobody I saw had a sign on his back that read Mafia.
It took twenty minutes to go down to 61st Street and then come back up again, and when I went past 85th Street it was fine by me that Tom was still sitting there with the newspaper in his lap. I wasn’t ready to leap into action just yet. To tell the truth, I was getting a late case of cold feet.
Maybe it was because everything looked so peaceful. When we’d gone up against the brokerage, there had been people around with uniforms and guns, there’d been closed-circuit television and locked doors to go through and all kinds of things to pit ourselves against. But here there was nothing, just a peaceful afternoon in the park, summer sunshine everywhere, people riding bicycles or pushing baby carriages or just lying on the grass with a paperback book. And yet this was a much tougher situation; the people we were up against were meaner, and we were pretty sure they were out to kill us, and they knew we were coming.
So where were they?
Around; that much I could be sure of. Since I’m on the uniformed force I haven’t had much to do with stakeouts, but I know from Tom that it’s possible to flood an area with plainsclothesmen and not have anything look out of the ordinary at all. And if the Police Department could do it, the mob could do it.
I was supposed to check with Tom every fifteen minutes, so after I saw him I headed over to Broadway and farted around there for a little while. Ran my beat, in fact. I was on duty at the moment, which was the simple straight-forward way I’d gotten hold of a car this time. It had turned out Lou had a girl friend that went to Columbia and lived up near the campus and didn’t have any classes on Tuesday afternoons. So for the last three weeks I’d been giving him a couple hours to shack up with her; drop him off at her place, pick him up later. It was an established pattern now, nothing out of the ordinary, and it gave me a couple of hours alone with the car; with the numbers changed again.