“Who’ve you been talking to?” Andrew asked.
“Alonso Moreno.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“He knows you’re here.”
“Does he know we want an answer?”
“He knows that, too. Andrew, I told you, they don’t care.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“He’s got houses all over these islands. He stays where he wants to stay.”
“Where’s his house on this island?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you’ve been talking to him.”
“I have.”
“And you don’t know where he’s staying?”
“If you’re Alonso Moreno, you don’t send out cards with your address on them.”
“How do you get in touch with him?”
“Through a waiter at the hotel. I tell him I want a meet, he phones Moreno, sets it up.”
“Where have you been meeting?”
“On a boat. They pick me up on the dock in Gustavia.”
“Tell your waiter friend I want to see Moreno personally.”
“He’ll tell you to go fuck yourself, Andrew.”
“Tell him, anyway,” Andrew said, and smiled.
There was something chilling about that smile. It reminded Willie of Andrew’s father when he was young.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “When do you want this?”
Because Frankie Palumbo of the Faviola family in Manhattan was out of the goodness of his heart willing to listen to still further bullshit about this deadbeat thief who was somehow related to Jimmy Angelli of the Colotti family in Queens, he was the one who chose the location for the sitdown.
Lucy Angelli got the information from her cousin and immediately called Dom Di Nobili to tell him when and where the meeting would take place. She also told him that his presence was not called for; his fate would be determined privately by the two capos. Dom immediately reported the time and place to Michael.
It was bad news that they didn’t want Dom there when they talked; this meant they couldn’t send him in wired. But the DA’s Office, the FBI, and the NYPD conducted routine, long-standing surveillance on a day-by-day basis, and there were bugs already in place at many wiseguy hangouts where business was conducted. Michael made some calls to see if the Ristorante Romano on MacDougal Street was one of them. It was not. This meant they had to start from scratch.
Costumed as a quartet of New York’s Bravest, wearing firemen’s gear and carrying hoses and axes and all the other paraphernalia, four detectives from the DA’s Office Squad honored the place with a visit on Christmas Eve, ostensibly to extinguish a small electrical fire that had mysteriously started in the restaurant’s basement. During all their chopping and hacking and spritzing and shouting and swearing down there, they incidentally managed to tap into the restaurant’s telephone lines to provide a power source for the Brady bug they buried in the basement’s ceiling — and consequently the floor of the room above. This self-contained transmitter was the size of a half-dollar, and it was now positioned directly under the prestigious corner table Frankie Palumbo favored on his visits to the place. The owner of the Ristorante Romano tipped the “firemen” four hundred dollars when they left, this because he knew firemen were bigger thieves than anybody who came to the place, and he considered himself lucky they hadn’t helped themselves to the stolen twenty-year-old Scotch stacked in cases along the wall opposite the fuse boxes and telephone panels.
At three thirty on the afternoon of December twenty-eighth, while Sarah and Heather and Mollie splashed in the warm lucid waters off the house on St. Bart’s, Michael sat in a parked car with an ADA named Georgie Giardino, the Rackets Bureau’s most ardent mob-watcher.
Georgie’s grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply Americans. The two men meeting in the restaurant today had also been born in America, and despite their Italian-sounding names, they too were American. In fact, neither Frankie Palumbo nor Jimmy Angelli felt the slightest allegiance to a country that was as foreign to them as Saudi Arabia. Even their parents, similarly born in the good old U.S. of A., had little concern for what went on in Italy. Most of them would never visit Italy in their lifetime. Italy was a foreign country where, they’d been told, the food wasn’t as good as you could get in any Italian restaurant in New York. This was not like the Irish or the Jews, whose ferocious ties to Northern Ireland and Israel would have been considered seditious in a less tolerant land. The irony was that although these hoods called themselves “Italians,” they were no more Italian than Michael himself was. Or, for that matter, Georgie Giardino.
Frankie Palumbo and Jimmy Angelli were Americans, take it or leave it, like it or not. And like any other good Americans, they believed in a free society wherein someone who worked hard and played by the rules could prosper and be happy. The rules they played by were not necessarily the same rules most other Americans played by, but they did obey them. And they did prosper. Georgie despised them and their fucking rules. It was, in fact, his firm belief that until every last Mafioso son of a bitch was in jail, any American of Italian descent would suffer through association. That was why he was sitting alongside Michael today, freezing his ass off in a parked car two blocks from the Ristorante Romano, waiting to hear and record the conversation that would take place between two or more American gangsters in an Italian restaurant.
The first of them to arrive was Jimmy Angelli, one of the caporegimi of the Colotti family in Queens.
“Hey, Mr. Angelli, long time no see, what’s the matter you don’t come to the city no more.”
The restaurant owner, they surmised.
The city was Manhattan.
Anyone who lived in New York knew that there was the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island — and the City.
There was another man with Angelli.
They didn’t get his name till Angelli said, “Danny, sit over there.”
This was while the two men were still alone. Angelli was probably indicating that his goon sit with his back to the wall, where he could see anyone coming in the front door. It did not take too many restaurant rubouts before you learned where to sit.
Frank Palumbo and his goon arrived some ten minutes later, fashionably tardy as befitted the offended capo of Manhattan’s Faviola family. After all, some stupid cocksucker thief guaranteed by the Colotti family had shortchanged him five grand after he’d done them a favor. He could afford to play this one like the boss himself instead of one of a hundred lieutenants in the Faviola family.
At the recent trial of Anthony Faviola, convicted and sentenced boss of the notorious Manhattan family, the U.S. Attorney had introduced in evidence the taped conversations that were the result of a yearlong wiretap surveillance. On those tapes, a man identified as Anthony Faviola had, among other things, ordered two hit men to do several murders in New Jersey. The defense called his younger brother, Rudy, as a witness and he was the first to testify that on the night his brother had allegedly made the call from his mother’s house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, he was instead at his own palatial home in Stonington, Connecticut, playing poker with six legitimate businessmen. The six men were each called in turn, and each corroborated the fact that at eight twenty-seven that night — the time at which the incriminating interstate call was allegedly made — Anthony was laying a full house on the table, aces up. The jury didn’t believe any of them.