“I won’t say anything useful at all. Not the way you mean.”
They ran southeast for fifteen minutes, then Banadando dropped anchor near Ridge Island and they went below together to talk. Levine explained that the Thirsty man had said he had everything but the gun, and Banadando waved that away: “I don’t need the gun. I got enough without the gun.”
“Well, here it all is,” Levine said, gesturing to the two packages on the table.
Banadando nodded at the packages and grinned. “Made no sense to you, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“It’ll make sense to some people,” Banadando said. “And that’s all it has to do. What about Johnson?”
“He’s being talked to.”
“He’ll be very interesting, Johnson. Okay, time to memorize.”
It was another sheet of paper, instructions on another two pick-ups. Levine listened and nodded, and when Banadando was done he said, “How long am I your messenger?”
“Two more days,” Banadando said. “Tomorrow morning, you bring me this stuff, I give you the last shopping list. Wednesday morning, you bring me the last of it, I give you a nice package for yourself. The Johnson stuff is just a teaser; Wednesday morning I give you a banquet.”
“And you leave.”
“That’s right,” Banadando said. “And if you keep your ear to the ground the next few months, Detective Levine, you will hear some far-away explosions.”
Their business done, they both went up on deck, and Levine sat in the second canvas chair while Banadando steered back toward Bellport. Even though the sky was lowering with clouds and there was a chill dampness in the air, there was something extraordinarily pleasant about being out here in this boat, skimming the choppy little wavelets, far from the cares of the world.
Not far enough. They were almost to Howell’s Point, Levine could actually see his own car and a few other cars and some people walking along the pier when Banadando suddenly swore and spun the wheel and the Bobby’s Dream veered around in a tight half-circle, lying way over on its side into the turn, spewing foam in a great white welt on the gray water.
It wasn’t till they were far from shore, out in the empty middle of the bay, that Banadando slowed the boat again and Levine could talk to him, saying, “Friends of yours back there?”
“Friends of his,” Banadando said, his voice vibrating like a guitar string. Tension had bunched the muscles in his cheeks and around his mouth, and his lips were thin and bloodless.
Levine said, “I wasn’t followed, I can tell you that. My back-up would have known.”
“The supermarket,” Banadando said. “I can’t even go to the supermarket. This is rotten luck, rotten luck.”
“Now he knows about the boat.”
“He can put people all around this bay, Giacomo can,” Banadando said. “If he knows there’s a reason. And now he knows there’s a reason.”
“I’ll just mention police protection once,” Levine said.
Banadando nodded. “Good,” he said. “That was the mention. Look here.”
From an enclosed cabinet under the wheel, Banadando pulled out a Defense Mapping Agency book of Sailing Directions, found the pages he wanted, and showed Levine what he intended to do. “Long Island’s a hundred twenty miles long,” he said. “From where we are here, there’s like another seventy miles out to the end. But I can’t stay on the South Shore any more, so here’s what I’m gonna do. I don’t have to go all the way out to Montauk Point at the end of the island. Here by Hampton Bays I can take the Shinnecock Canal through to Peconic Bay, then I only have to go out around Orient Point and there I am on the North Shore. Then I head west again, across Long Island Sound. Look here on this map, west of Mattituck Inlet, you see this little dip in the coastline?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a dirt road there, comes down from Bergen Avenue. I know that place from years ago. There’s a little wooden dock there, that’s all. Nobody around. That’s where we meet tomorrow, let Giacomo and his boys search the South Shore all they want.”
Looking at the maps, Levine said, “That’s a long way to go, in a small boat like that.”
“A hundred miles,” Banadando said, dismissing it. “Maybe less. Don’t worry, Levine, I’ll be there. Between now and Wednesday, let’s face it, the only way I stay alive is to do things Giacomo thinks I won’t do or can’t do.”
“You’re right,” Levine said.
“I’m always right,” Banadando said. “I can’t take you back to your car. I’ll drop you at Center Moriches, you can take a cab back.”
Levine made that day’s pick-ups with no trouble, and that evening, as rain tapped hesitantly at the windows, the four policemen who knew about Banadando — being Levine and Jack Crawley and Lieutenant Barker and Inspector Santangelo — met in the lieutenant’s office at the precinct to decide what to do next.
Jack Crawley, a big beefy man with heavy shoulders and hands and a generally dissatisfied look, had no doubt what he wanted to do next: “Bring in everybody,” he said. “Inspector, you bring in your whole Organized Crime Unit, we bring in plainclothes and uniformed people from the precinct, and we surround that mother. I don’t want Abe to spend any more time in the middle of some other clown’s argument.”
“I’m already in, Jack,” Levine said. “We’re on the verge of getting some very useful information. I think Banadando actually is as smart as he thinks he is, and that he’ll manage to elude Polito for the next two days. It’s only until Wednesday, after all. The minute I step off that boat on Wednesday you can phone Inspector Santangelo at Organized Crime, tell him I’m out of the way, and send in the entire police department if you want.”
“He’ll be long gone by then,” Crawley said, and Lieutenant Barker said, “I tend to agree with Jack.”
“I’m sorry,” said Levine, “but I don’t. In the first place, he won’t be long gone. I believe he actually will make it around the island tonight, but it won’t be an easy trip. Those little boats always feel like they’re going fast, but they’re not. What’s the top speed of a boat like that, on choppy open water? Twenty miles an hour, maybe a little more? And they gobble up gasoline, he’ll have to stop once or twice at marinas. This rain will slow him down. Traveling as fast as he can, on a small boat pounding up and down over every wave, he’ll be lucky if it only takes him seven or eight hours to get around to where he’s supposed to meet me tomorrow.”
Lieutenant Barker said, “Meaning what, Abe? How does that connect?”
“Meaning,” Levine said, “he can’t disappear from us all that easily.”
Santangelo said, “That’s not such good news, Abe. If we could find Banadando just like that, why can’t Polito?”
Levine shrugged. “Maybe he can, I hope not. But we have the entire law enforcement apparatus behind us, to help, and Polito doesn’t. We can bring in the Coast Guard, Army helicopters, anything we need.”
Smiling, Santangelo said, “Not necessarily at the snap of our fingers.”
“No, but it can be done. Polito can’t begin to match our manpower or our authority.”
Crawley said, “Never mind all of that after-the-event stuff, Abe. What it comes down to is, Polito’s people got to that pier today within an hour of you getting there. What if they’d been an hour earlier?”
“A lot of different things could have happened,” Levine said.
“Some of them nasty,” Crawley told him.
Santangelo said, “The decision has been Abe’s from the beginning, and it still is. Abe, I’ll go along with whatever you decide. But I have to say, there’s a lot in what your partner says.”