“There’s other things go in and outa that compound,” Mac said. “The oil truck makes deliveries.”
Ace said, “If you think I’m gonna hold my breath in an oil truck for forty minutes, you’re crazy.”
Mac shook his head and opened the back door. “That’s not what I’m saying. Be sure it’s locked, Buddy.”
“Right.”
“So what are you saying?” Ace demanded, as he followed Mac out to the small neat back porch while Buddy made sure the kitchen door was locked. From here it was a simple walk across a lawn flanked by privacy fencing in rough wood verticals—if Morriscone did nude sunbathing out here, he didn’t take pictures of the fact—and through the hedge at the back to the unoccupied house on the next block with the FOR SALE sign out front. The way it was set up, they could get in and out of Alphonse Morriscone’s home unseen any time they wanted. The only problem was, there was no reason to want to.
As they walked from Morriscone’s house around the for-sale house and down the street to where they’d parked the Taurus, Mac said, “It isn’t just oil deliveries. They get food to that house, they send their dry cleaning out.”
Buddy said, “You’ve watched their procedures, Mac. All those delivery trucks get completely searched by those rent-a-cops at the gate. Boy Scout Morriscone is the only one who just drives in.”
Ace said, “Well, there’s some employees. Staffers.”
“No use to us,” Mac said.
“And the wife does, too,” Ace said.
They looked at him. Buddy said, “Now you wanna kidnap the wife? The three of us go into the estate hidden in one of those little dinky cars she drives?”
“I could hide under her skirt,” Ace offered with a big grin around at everybody, which fell away when he saw they didn’t think that was funny.
Morosely, Mac said, “Maybe we oughta try to find the Harvards.”
•
“Look at those capering apes,” Os said, binoculars to his eyes.
“You probably mean Ace,” Mark said, since he didn’t have binoculars to his eyes. “He’s the worst of them.”
“God,” Os said. “Not only proles, but useless.”
“I think it’s our friend Morriscone who’s useless.” Mark suggested. “We could find nothing in his background that we could use against the man, and by now, after three B and Es, it’s becoming quite clear our friends in the labor movement haven’t found anything in his foreground, either.”
“Time is going by,” Os said.
Across the way, the trio were getting into their Taurus. Watching them through the naked eye, Mark said, “We have to use those people. Somehow use them. Use them somehow.”
“Good,” Os said.
25
GIVEN HER UPBRINGING in Kansas and D.C., Anne Marie’s automatic response to any gathering of individuals was to turn it into a social occasion—why miss an opportunity to work a room? But Andy absolutely refused to go along with the idea in re the upcoming three P.M. meeting in their apartment in which Jim Green would give Andy and the others their new identities. “It isn’t a party, Anne Marie,” he explained, not unkindly. “It’s more of a huddle-type thing, you know, informational.”
“I’m not saying a party,” she insisted, although she knew she was. “Just a few hors d’oeuvres, maybe a glass of white wine. You can’t drink beer and bourbon forever.”
Looking startled, he said, “I can’t?”
“I should think Jim would feel insulted,” Anne Marie said, “when he’s doing us this big favor, and he comes all the way down from Connecticut, and we don’t even offer him a pâté.”
“We’re not going to an opening, Anne Marie,” Andy said, “and none of us is gonna want pâté on his new identity papers. Green is gonna bring the stuff down, hand it out, explain what he’s gotta explain, and that’s it. Everybody goes away.”
She shook her head. “You want people to come into our home,” she said, “and sit around and talk, and then just go away again, and nobody eats anything, and nobody chats about anything, and nobody drinks anything but beer.”
“Now you got it,” Andy said.
•
But she stuck around anyway, just in case a social aspect should happen to arise, in which case her hostessing abilities would be needed after all. And Stan Murch was the first to arrive. She greeted him at the door: “Hi, Stan.”
“So now it’s Brooklyn,” Stan said, coming in. “I always figured, Canarsie’s a convenient place to live, you got a lotta ways to get to Manhattan, you got Flatlands to Flatbush to the Manhattan Bridge, only Flatbush can get a little slow, so sometimes I do Rockaway Parkway to Eastern Parkway, and not Rockaway Avenue, that takes you to Bushwick, you don’t wanna go to Bushwick.”
“No, I don’t,” Anne Marie agreed. “Would you like something to drink?”
But Stan wasn’t done. “So that’s what I did today,” he said, “only you got a mess at Grand Army Plaza, they’re tearing everything up in front of the library there, you can’t get through, so I eased around to Washington Avenue, up past the BQE to hang the left on Flushing, and again you can’t get through. Why? A demonstration against the Naval Reserve Center, that’s two blocks down to the right, the cops won’t let the demonstrators any closer than Washington. I’m backing outa there, some guy pulls up on me and honks. I gotta get outa the car, explain to this bozo that all those yelling people and cops and picket signs he could see if he had working eyes and not just a working horn means you can’t go that way. So he finally moves over to let me back up, then he jumps in where I was, cackling like an idiot, he put one over on me, he’s probably still there.”
“A glass of wine?”
“So I come under the BQE on Park,” Stan told her, “and Tillary, and did the Brooklyn Bridge instead, and after that Manhattan was a snap.”
“Stan,” Anne Marie said, “you got here first.”
“So it could of been worse.”
“A beer?” she asked him.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I still got some driving to do today,” and the doorbell rang.
This time, it was Tiny, and he had with him a small but lovely bouquet of pink roses. “Here,” he said, and handed them over.
“Why, thank you, Tiny,” she said. “That’s very thoughtful.”
“Some girl on the street,” he told her, “threw them at her boyfriend just before the cops showed up. I figured they shouldn’t go to waste.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“Any time.”
Tiny finished coming in, but before Anne Marie could shut the door Jim Green was there, smiling, saying, “Hello, Anne Marie, how are you today?”
“Just fine,” she said, and would have closed the door but John was suddenly there. “Oh,” she said. “Did you two come together?”
John looked confused. Frowning toward Jim, he said, “I don’t think so.”
“No, we didn’t,” Jim said, and at last Anne Marie could complete the closing of the door.
And here came Andy from deeper in the apartment, saying, “Hey, we’re all here. Anybody want a beer?”
“Not me,” Stan said.
“Maybe later,” John said.
“What we want,” Tiny said, looking at Jim, “is to see who we are.”
“Coming up,” Jim said. He was carrying a hardsided black attaché case, which he now put on the coffee table. He snapped open the catches, lifted the top, and inside Anne Marie saw several thick small manila envelopes, each with a name written on it in black ink. Taking these out of the case, Jim distributed them, saying, “This is yours,” four times.