After the bridge over the Big Moose River, there was a bend at the top of the hill and an old logging road right after it. He was almost there and he would briefly be out of sight of the police cars. He thought about the duffel bag full of cash. He could carry that and Seth Cole’s suitcase full of drugs and be gone without a trace in this rain. Dani would have to stay behind, and he indulged himself in a small hit of pity.
Andre saw the bridge and he felt a fresh surge of adrenaline firing up the nerves behind his eyeballs. The road ran down and he was just to the bridge when a cop car pulled up off the side road on the other side with its lights flashing.
“Fuck!” he screamed, slamming the wheel, but not letting up on the gas.
The cop car came straight at him, driving right down the middle of the bridge.
“Die, motherfucker!” Andre screamed, heading dead at him, picking up speed.
At the last second, the cop car tried to swerve, but fishtailed instead. Andre smashed into the rear quarter and the big truck spun, rocked, and plunged through the guardrail. The truck seemed to hang in the air, suspended in space. Silent. Peaceful.
Then it dropped. Andre braced himself, outscreaming Dani as the heavy truck plummeted a hundred feet to the rocky riverbed.
58
BERT IS DRESSED in a new gray pinstriped Zegna suit with four buttons on the jacket. His burgundy tie is in a Windsor knot. Miraculously, we found a pair of Ferragamo fifteen double E wingtips. On his wrist is a big silver-and-gold Rolex Submariner.
Chuck Lawrence is fidgeting with the pin in the tie that is really a camera. He lets go and gets on his tiptoes to peer up into Bert’s ear.
“Comfortable?” he asks.
“You can’t see it, can you?” Bert asks, fingering his ear.
“Don’t touch it,” Chuck says, and disappears out the front door.
“I don’t know about these stripes,” Bert says, looking down.
“They make you look less like a refrigerator,” I say. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’re everything you’re saying you are, and I’ll be right there in your ear.”
“Yeah,” he says, putting a breath strip into his mouth and replacing the package in his coat pocket, “I’m an Indian from upstate. But I don’t own any casinos or know anything about big business. How’s it going to come off when I’m just repeating the stuff you say in my ear? My grandmother used to say that a skunk in a possum’s coat still smells like a skunk.”
“When they see your bank records,” I say, handing him the portfolio, “all they’ll smell is money.”
“Did you have to call it the Iroquois Group and be so fucking obvious?” he asks.
“It’s a sentimental thing with me,” I say. We are standing in the foyer of the mansion on Fifth Avenue. I open the front door and follow Chuck down the steps toward the white utility van with a boomerang antenna. In front of it is my limousine. “Let’s get going, will you? If you’re late, that’ll piss them off.”
Bert looks down at his watch and shuffles after me. He gets into the limo. In the back of the van are two captain’s chairs and a metal desk beneath a bank of electronics with four different TV monitors. I get in the back, sit down next to Chuck, and put on my headset.
I push a red button in front of me on the desk and say, “Bert, do you hear me?”
“Jesus, not so fucking loud,” Bert says.
The camera gives me a fish-eye view of the inside of the limo, and now Bert’s scowling face dips down into the top of the picture. Chuck Lawrence adjusts some knobs and says, “How’s that.”
“Better,” Bert says, but his tone is surly.
“You’ll be fine,” I say.
Chuck climbs hunchbacked into the front of the van and gets behind the wheel. We follow the limo across the 59th Street Bridge and down into Long Island City.
I watch and listen. When Bert picks up the Post off the seat and begins to go through it, I realize that I’m holding my breath. After I read the papers this morning, they went right in the trash so he wouldn’t see. I try to make some small talk, but he keeps on turning the pages, even when I start blabbing about the Jets’ upcoming game.
I already know the item on Dani Rangle is on page eleven. Two inches. No picture. The small headline reads, FINANCIER’S DAUGHTER DIES. I think maybe Bert will miss it, but he doesn’t. The paper rattles and he pulls the lower corner of the page closer to his face.
After a few seconds he puts the small story right up to the camera lens in his tie, rattles the paper loudly, and says, “Did you know this?”
I sigh and press the red button. “Let’s not worry about that now, okay?”
“You knew,” he says. “Jesus.”
I stab the red button and ask, “What’s Jesus got to do with it?”
“She was just nineteen, that’s what,” he says, looking down into the camera, his nostrils like two dark caves. “First Villay’s wife and now this.”
“She was no fucking Girl Scout,” I say, stabbing the button and blurting out the words before I realize I’m talking about someone who’s dead.
Bert is quiet for a minute, long enough for me to wonder what has happened to my soul.
He folds up the paper and sets it down on the seat. I see him angle his chin out the window. Finally, in a low rumble, he nods his head and says, “Yeah. You’re right. She was going down anyway. No problem.”
His tone isn’t convincing.
When we get to the East River Yacht Club, the limo goes in but we drive past and park on the road where we can see the big modern building, a rectangle of concrete with smoky horizontal windows. Across the East River are the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan surrounding the silver jewel of the Chrysler Building. There are other limousines out in front of the Yacht Club and men in dark suits patrolling the perimeter whose jackets are bulging with automatic weapons.
“Bert,” I say into my headset, “you’re with me, right?”
“Right here,” Bert says. “Ice in my veins. Skunk in a possum suit.”
“Good,” I say.
Bert is frisked by the men at the door and led inside. He goes up the stairs and through a lobby. In the back, overlooking the river, is a long room with a conference table. Nearly a dozen men are sitting around with small espresso cups in front of them on saucers with small lemon peel shavings. Frank sits in the middle of the group facing the water. Ramo Capozza is at one end of the table and there is a chair for Bert at the other, where he sits down.
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Washington,” Capozza says.
“Thanks,” Bert says.
Someone sets down a cup of espresso in front of Bert along with a sugar bowl and some cream. Bert lays down the portfolio on the table in front of him, but doesn’t touch the coffee.
“Thank you for meeting with me, gentlemen,” I whisper.
Bert glances down at his tie and stiffly repeats my words.
“Holy crap,” Chuck Lawrence says under his breath.
“Don’t look at your tie,” I say in an even lower whisper.
“Don’t look at-” Bert begins to say, then after an uncomfortable pause he recovers. “I mean, would you like to look at these bank papers?”
All the men are looking down the length of the table at him. It is Frank who smiles and says, “Damn right I would. Hand that stuff down here, would you, Jim?”
The portfolio is passed down by the man on Bert’s left, and Frank tears it open and begins to pull out the papers. His eyes are narrowed and his massive jowls shake under the effort it takes him to breathe. The diamond ring on his finger flashes on his fluttering hands.
“In a real hurry, aren’t you, Frank?” says a man on the other side of the table with a pocked face, a bulbous nose, and a dark widow’s peak of slicked-back hair. “I guess our business isn’t clean enough for you and all your Park Avenue friends, huh?”