“What is this stuff?”
“Let it be a surprise,” Banadando said.
Levine took a breath. “Mr. Banadando,” he said, “I have to tell you something you should already know. If any evidence of crime is put in my possession, I am going to turn it over to my superiors.”
“Sure you are,” Banadando said. “You’ll take the package, you’ll sniff all over it like a bird-dog, you’ll get nothing out of it. The next thing that happens, you’ll bring it to me.”
“But you realize we’ll study it first.”
“I am not here to be stupid,” Banadando said. His finger moved down to the next item, below THIRSTY. There was the word KOPYKAT, and under it an address: 1411 BROADWAY. “This is a copying service,” he said. “It’s a chain, there’s Kopykats all over the city. This is the Broadway one, you got it?”
“Yes.”
“They’re open on Sunday. This afternoon, any time this afternoon, you go there and pick up the package for Mr. Robert. If there’s no package, don’t worry about it.”
“All right.”
The stubby finger moved down to the last item on the sheet of paper: BELLPORT on one line, and under it HOWELL’S POINT. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “It’s farther out from the city, so let’s say ten o’clock. You bring me the Kopykat package and the other package, and I tell you what next.”
“And the scraps from your table?”
With a thin smile, Banadando shook his head. “We pay at the end,” he said.
“No,” Levine said. “We have to have something now, to prove it’s worthwhile.”
Banadando sat back, brooding. The small movements of the boats were comforting at first, but then insistent. A large white ferry went by, on its way to Fire Island, and its wake made the Bobby’s Dream heave on the water, like something alive and in pain.
“Upstate in Attica,” Banadando said at last, “in the state pen there, you got a guy named Johnson, serving five consecutive life terms. He’s never coming out. He’ll be the only Johnson there with that sentence.”
Levine smiled faintly. “I guess you’re right.”
“In Vermont,” Banadando said, speaking slowly, picking his words with obvious care, “there used to be a ski lodge called TransAlpine, had a big Olympic indoor skating rink. Burned down. No link between that and Johnson at all, right?”
“You tell me,” Levine said.
“Johnson did things for Giacomo sometimes,” Banadando said. “Giacomo had a piece of TransAlpine. Not right out in front, but you could find it.”
“And?”
“Johnson hired the torch.”
“It was arson?”
“Nobody ever said it was,” Banadando said. “Not up there in Vermont. All I say to you is, Johnson hired the torch. Johnson and TransAlpine, there’s no link there, so nobody ever talked to Johnson about that. Now all of a sudden I’m giving you a link. And what has Johnson got to lose?”
“The same as the rest of us,” Levine said.
The man who answered the Thirsty phone number had a thin raspy voice. He said, “I got everything but the gun. You want?”
“Yes,” Levine said.
“In Manhattan,” the raspy voice said, “79th Street and Broadway, there’s benches at the median, middle of the street, where people sit in the sun. Around two o’clock there’ll be an old guy there with the package, gift-wrapped. Tell him you’re Abe.”
Levine followed directions and found half a dozen elderly men on the stone bench there, faces turned to the thin clear autumn sun. The faces were absorbing the gold, hoarding it, stocking it up for the long cold time in the dark to come.
One of the old men held in his lap a parcel that looked like a box of candy gaily wrapped in Happy Birthday paper. Levine went to him, identified himself as Abe, and took delivery. When Levine asked him how he’d come by the package, the old man said, “Fella gave it to me half an hour ago with a five dollar bill. Said you’d be along, said he couldn’t wait, said I had an honest face.”
The next old man over laughed, showing a mouth without teeth. “I said to the fella,” he announced, “what kinda face you think I got? Paid me no never mind.”
Carrying the Happy Birthday parcel, Levine went down Broadway to Kopykat, where he picked up the package for Mr. Robert. Then he continued on downtown to hand the material over to Inspector Santangelo at the Organized Crime Unit. “People upstate are talking to Johnson,” Santangelo said.
“But is he talking to them?”
Santangelo grinned. “He will.”
The next morning, Santangelo brought the two packages to the Forty-Third Precinct and handed them back to Levine in Lieutenant Barker’s office. The Kopykat package had turned out to be copies of about forty ledger pages, but only numbers and abbreviations were filled in, making it useless by itself; you’d have to know what business those pages were connected to, and presumably Banadando’s intended customer would know.
As for the birthday present, that box had contained a jumble of sales slips, for items ranging from automobiles and furs to coffee tables and refrigerators, plus a bunch of photos and negatives. There were a dozen pictures of what appeared to be the same orgy, there were pictures of a man getting into a car on a city street, pictures of a man at a construction site, of a truck being loaded or unloaded at the same site, of two men exchanging an envelope in the doorway of an appliance store.
Everything had been fingerprinted and photographed and brooded over, but there wasn’t so far much value in this material. “It’s puzzle parts,” Santangelo said. “Just a couple stray puzzle parts. Banadando has the rest.”
Monday was a less pretty day than Sunday had been, the broad sky piling up with tumbled dirty clouds and a damp breeze blowing from the northeast. With Banadando’s packages on the front seat beside him, Levine drove out the Long Island Expressway and took the turnoff south for Bellport. He found Howell’s Point, left the car, and saw Banadando approaching on a bicycle, dressed in his yachting outfit, with a supermarket bag in the basket. Banadando looked unexpectedly human and vulnerable, not at all like the tough guy he really was. Levine was pleased with the man, almost proud of him, for how matter-of-factly he carried it off.
Dismounting, Banadando said, “Take the groceries, okay? The boat’s just over here.”
Banadando walked the bike, and Levine followed with the bag and the two packages. The bag contained milk, tomatoes, lettuce, English muffins, a steak. Levine found himself wondering: Does Banadando have a wife? Is she part of his escape plan, or is he abandoning her, or does she not exist? Maybe she’s already gone on ahead to prepare their next home. Banadando’s style was that of the complete loner, but on the other hand he was only involved in this problem because of his emotional attachment to his son.
That was why Levine had never been able to go along with the idea that a murdered mobster was something to be happy about. Even the worst of human beings was still in some way a human being, was more than and other than a simple cartoon criminal. No death should be gloated over.
Aboard the boat, Banadando lashed the bike to the foredeck, then cast them off and headed out onto the bay, while Levine went below and put away the groceries. Coming up again on deck, where Banadando sat in a tall canvas chair at the wheel, steering them on a long gradual curve eastward into Bellport Bay, Levine said, “I’m not wired today. Thought you’d like to know.”
Banadando grinned at him. “Waste of good tape, huh?”
“You won’t say anything useful while I’m recording you.”