“Yes?”
“So let’s talk a little bit.”
They had reached an intersection of corridors. The elevators were straight ahead, but the man was pulling Levine to the right. “Talk about what?” Levine asked, trying to shake loose.
“Cops and robbers,” the man said. “I got a proposition.”
Levine planted his feet, refusing to move. Peeling the man’s fingers from his elbow, he said, “What sort of proposition?”
With darting movements of his head, the man shot wary glances along the corridors. “I don’t like it here,” he said. “Exposed here.”
“Exposed to what?”
“Listen,” the man said, moving closer, his breath warm on Levine’s chin, his hatbrim nearly touching Levine’s face. “You know Giacomo Polito,” he said.
“I know who he is. Mafia chieftan. He controls one of the five families.”
“I’m a soldier for him,” the man said, his voice low but harsh, pushing with intensity. “I know Giacomo’s whole life story.”
Levine frowned, trying to see this too-close face, read meaning into the tone of the husky tense voice. Was this an offer of information? The setting was unusual, the manner odd, but what else could it be? Levine said, “You want to sell that life story?”
“Don’t rush me.” Another darting glance. “Giacomo disappeared my son,” the man said, still in the same breathy way. “He knows I know.”
“Ah.”
“You take your bus, like you do,” the man said. “Look out the back window. When you see a green Buick following, you get off the bus. There’s a — kind of a flower on the aerial.”
“And who are you?” Levine asked him. “What’s your name?”
“What’s the dif? Call me Bobby.”
“Bobby?” The incongruity of that name with this man made Levine smile despite himself.
The man looked up, facing Levine more directly than before. He too smiled, but with an edge to it. “That was my son’s name,” he said.
The green Buick with the red plastic chrysanthemum taped to its antenna followed the bus for a dozen blocks before Levine decided to follow through. Then he got off at the next stop, stood at the curb while the bus drove off, and waited for the Buick to stop in front of him.
The delay had been because Levine wasn’t entirely sure what he thought of “Bobby” and his story. A Mafia soldier who decided to defect usually did so when under indictment himself for some major crime, when he could trade his knowledge for softer treatment from the courts. Simple revenge between criminals rarely included squealing to the police. If Bobby’s son had been killed by Giacomo Polito, in the normal course of events Bobby would simply kill Polito, or be himself killed in the attempt. The Mafia tended to run very much along the lines of a Shakespearian tragedy, with few roles for outsiders.
In addition, if Bobby had decided that his vengeance required selling Polito to the police, why not do it the simple normal way? Why not simply drive to Manhattan and go to the Organized Crime Unit in Police Headquarters and make his deal there? Why talk to some obscure precinct detective in the depths of Brooklyn, and in particular why do it in a hospital corridor? And why all this counterspy hugger-mugger?
What finally decided Levine to take the next step was that he couldn’t think of any rational alternative explanation for Bobby’s actions. If someone had decided to murder Levine, of course, this would be an excellent ploy to put him in a position where it could be done; but Levine could think of no one at the moment who would have a motive. He wasn’t due to be a witness in any upcoming trials, he hadn’t made any potentially dangerous arrests recently, nor had he received notification within the last year or so of any felons, arrested by himself, who had been released from prison. Also, if Bobby’s story were merely a charade for some sort of con game, how could it hurt Levine? He wouldn’t pay anything or sign anything or even necessarily believe anything. And finally, there had been the real brimstone aura of truth in that last direct stare from Bobby, when he’d said, “That was my son’s name.”
So for all those reasons Levine had ultimately stepped off the bus and stood waiting until the Buick pulled to a stop in front of him. But, before getting into the car, he did nevertheless check the floor behind the front seat, just to be absolutely certain there was no one crouched back there, with a pistol or a knife or a length of wire.
There was nothing; just some empty beer cans. So Levine opened the front passenger door and bent to enter the car, but Bobby was leaning over toward him from the steering wheel, saying, “Uh, would you take down the — get rid of the flower?”
“Of course.”
Masking tape had been wrapped around both antenna and flower stalk; Levine tugged on the plastic stalk and the tape ripped, releasing it. He then got into the car and shut the door, feeling vaguely foolish to be sitting here with a red flower in his lap. He tossed it stop the dashboard as Bobby accelerated away from the curb, checking both the inside and outside mirrors, saying, “I did shake ‘em, but you never know.”
“You’re being followed?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, shrugging as though it were an everyday event. “They wanna know I’m not going anywhere before the big day.”
“What big day?”
“Wipe out,” Bobby said, and ran a finger along his neck. “Giacomo’s got a contract out on me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Bobby gave him a quick glance, almost of contempt, then went back to his fitful concentration on the road ahead and both mirrors. “I’m sure of everything,” he said. “When I’m not sure, I shut up.”
“So you want police protection, is that it?”
“Why don’t I tell you what I want, okay?”
Levine smiled at the rebuff. “Okay,” he said.
Bobby turned a corner. He seemed to be driving at random, though trending northwest, away from the hospital and in the general direction of Manhattan, several miles away. “Giacomo’s got a young wife,” he said. “The old Mama died, all over cancer, right? So Giacomo went to Vegas to work out his grief, he come back with a bride. A dancer at the Aladdin, calls herself Terri. With an I.”
“Uh huh.”
“My son—”
“Bobby.”
“My son. Got hooked on this Terri. He was like a dog, there’s a bitch in the neighborhood in heat, you cannot keep that dog in the house.”
“Dangerous.”
“She says he raped her,” Bobby said. “He didn’t rape her, she was asking for it.”
Levine kept silent. He watched Bobby’s fingers twitch and fidget on the steering wheel.
“A bodyguard found them at it,” Bobby said. “Naturally she had to cry rape. My son told his story, the bodyguard said forget it, my son went home. Terri with the I, she went to Giacomo. She talked to Giacomo, but Giacomo didn’t talk to nobody, not to me, not to my son, not to nobody. The bodyguard got disappeared. My son got disappeared. I said, ‘Giacomo, we know one another a long time, why don’t you talk to me first, ask me a question?’ He still don’t talk. I go away, and he puts a contract on me, he puts shadows on me to be sure I’m still here for the hit.”
“There’s a special time for the... hit?”
“Saturday night. Day after tomorrow. I still got friends to whisper me things. At Barolli’s Seafood House in Far Rockaway, upstairs in the private dining room, there’s gonna be a banquet. It’s Giacomo’s first wedding anniversary.” Bobby spoke the words with no apparent irony. “That’s where they’re gonna take me out. By the time they’re at the coffee and cigars, I’m at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.”