"Hello, Mary Pat." She knew this was it. It didn't matter what he said to her. She could see the insanity and death in his hooded eyes.
"If you do as I say I will let you live. Otherwise, I will let her slake her thirst on you here —" He penetrated and she fought back a scream. "And here." Angelina cried out in pain.
"Now do as I ask or Mary Pat will SLICE AND CARVE AND TEAR UNTIL YOU ARE ANYTHING BUT RECOGNIZABLE, YOU GUINEA SLUT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?"
"Yes."
"Good." He moved out of her vision for a moment and she heard a clicking noise and he held a piece of paper on it with a typed message. "Read exactly what it says. If you fuck with me Mary Pat will rend the side of your face into pumping, dripping shreds of bloody meat." His icy calm was more frightening than the screaming. She read as he held the small microphone to her mouth: " 'I am alive and well. You must do as I say. Dagatina m-mus' die. Here is what you mus' do if you want me to live.' " She had read almost all of the message before it occurred to her what she was reading. She figured the lunatic would play this for Joey, her older brother, to convince him to whack out the old man. Even then, she kept reading. Angelina did not want to die. Not here. Not now. Not like this.
It actually began with the most unlikely of sources, the one and only BeBop Rutledge, and a conversation between Bud Leech and his snitch along the lines of, "You gotta help me, man, this ain't FAIR."
"Life's a trade, BeBop. You gotta give to get."
"I gave till it hurt, man. I come right to ya with it."
"You ain't give us shit."
"Murder fucking one."
"You're goin' down behind that righteous coke bust and we both know it. I can't go to MY boss and get somethin' for you with no better'n this. I mean, I can talk to Her Honor for ya, but you want some heavy-duty clout you got to gimme. You got to bring some to get some."
"I didn't SEE the fucker. Just that second or two in that funky light from the goddamn EXIT sign. I don't think I'd know the dude if I bumped into him."
"That's a shame, BeBop. Dig it, my man: the lieutenant's got him a SLIDE into Wilma Smith. I mean, if you could really think, put your shit down tight for it and give us a better sketch. Shit, The Man would start talkin' and you'd start walkin'."
"Aw, man. I guess I could sit down with the dude again. Whatsisname with the drawings."
"Weyland. Yeah. That's it, my man, you need to sit down with the dude again. Concentrate. Think real hard. Maybe he'll come back to ya." So it was that, fuliginous visibility notwithstanding, a refined Identikit got put together. Sort of. More or less. The more BeBop thought about Judge Smith stomping his grapes the better his retroactive vision became. He saw the light so to speak. And there is no vision with greater clarity than 20-20 hindsight.
With the exception of Eichord, perhaps held in check by the powerful fabric of SEE NO EVIL intuition, only the wise guys still worked to nail a lone assassin. The cops themselves appeared to no longer be interested or concerned with the mad enforcer — only that the thing, whatever it was, be contained from escalating into wide-open gang warfare throughout the inner families and ethnic fringe factions.
"The Two Tonys gang is a fuckin' memory," Eichord heard one cop tell another, "and that means you know what."
"Turf up for grabs."
"Fuckin' A." It was times like these when a couple of defecting gunmen could start all-out war by themselves — never mind the "lunatic chief enforcer" theory. But Jack did not share their preoccupation. He listened quietly as they talked.
"Russo torched the old man, right? So what have you got here? You got a power thing from the inside." Sally Dago! The madman had managed to reach inside the prison walls. Soak the old man with oiled gasoline and torch him in his cell. Joey Russo righteous for it.
To Eichord it was so clearcut now. The enforcer had kidnapped Angelina. Somehow got through to the brother in the slams: either hit the old man or your sister dies. Some scenario along those lines. She'd told him how close they were. The watcher had been watching. Had he also been listening? Anybody with this level of skills would find audio surveillance little more than child's play.
Jack pulled Leech aside. "How can I get to Tony Cypriot?"
"You tell me and we'll both know." Leech laughed. Jack just looked at him. "You're serious. Okay. I doubt if you can. Why?"
"I just want to get a message to him. On the telephone. How would I call him?"
"He'd never talk to you. You'd have to go through a million underlings. Shit. It'd take a week."
"I don't got a week. How can I reach the man? Think."
"If you had something he wanted. You could get one of his top people to get the word to him, I suppose. Maybe somebody in New York." Leech sounded very unsure about it. Like it was a total timewaster.
"Humor me," Jack said to the big man. "Who would be somebody could reach Cypriot right now? Rikla?"
"Fuck, no." Leech laughed. He thought for a moment. The wheels turned. "Okay. There's a guy who's inside. Serving a twenty-to-life. If he thought it was in The Man's interest. You know."
"Can you get a message to him quietly?"
"Does Oscar Peterson sweat."
"Oscar Peterson? Oh, yeah, the guy plays basketball for Cincinnati?"
"He could play it if you'd hum a few bars."
"Okay. Hum a few bars of this: tell him to get word to Tony Cypriot. Jack Eichord has something to sell the godfather. He can give 'em the man they want. Tell him that I want the scum dead and I'm afraid if we bust him he'll end up walking. Some high-priced legal talent will plead him fruitcake and he'll be back on the street. If Cypriot wants him handle it through me personally. Him to me. Tell him to call me. I'll do all the talking. He can listen and make up his mind. That — or the man he wants to nail so bad keeps waging war."
Now it was Leech's turn to just stare. "He'll never buy it," he said finally. "No fuckin' way."
And of course he didn't. Not for a second. But within twenty-four hours he was on a telephone in Eichord's ear.
"Don't waste my time. Whatd'ya REALLY want?"
"It's not what I want. It's what you're going to do. You're going to go pack a few things — don't take much because you don't have a whole lot of time. Get on a plane or your private jet or whatever, and fly back here. I'm going to put you in custody. For your protection."
Cypriot began laughing uproariously. Roaring, hysterical guffaws. Eichord waited him out.
"Oh, shit," he said, catching his breath. "I haven't had a laugh like that in weeks. Christ. Oh. You're all right. That's funny. Hey, listen. I got to go now and —"
"HOLD IT! You put this monster on the street for the Council or Committee or whatever you assholes call it. Do you have any idea what the other families will do if I get the word to them that YOU were responsible for all these kills within the organization?" He didn't hear any more giggling. "Your ass will be grass." When Jack Eichord wanted to seriously threaten somebody his soft-spoken tone hardened into a razor-blade edge, and when he opened the floodgates and let all his poison pour out in a hot, acid gush, you'd better not be downhill.
"Forget about it," Cypriot said disdainfully.
"Forget about it, huh? If you don't cooperate with me and come under our protection ... I go right to the dons. I'll tell 'em what I know about your chief enforcer and how you fucked this up." Eichord was winging it now. "And by next week there won't be enough of you left to fill a fucking shoe box. Now you gonna cooperate or what?"
Any other time and Gaetano Ciprioni would probably have told this no-dick cop to go fuck his mother. But he'd just had the sad and awful chore of canceling out one of his great friends and one of the company's most trusted vice presidents. The Russo kid had got word to him about the hit. What should he do? he wanted to know. Ciprioni knew that Spain knew — he WAS the godfather, the REAL godfather, to Angelina Russo. No way he'd let her be killed for the old man. So he passed the word back for Russo to do it. He hated to do it. Helluva thing. But sometimes you had to cut your losses. "Go ahead," he said. "Tell him to burn him."