I took a deep breath and steeled myself. I needed to focus on the kids—the Strattonites! They were the ticket! I had a plan and I would stick to it: the slow phaseout; keeping myself behind the scenes; keeping the troops calm; keeping peace among the brokerage firms; and keeping the Depraved Chinaman at bay.
As I approached Janet’s desk, I noticed she had the grim expression on her face that spelled trouble. Her eyes were open a bit wider than usual and her lips were slightly parted. She was sitting on the edge of her seat, and the moment we locked eyes she rose from her chair and headed directly for me. I wondered whether she had somehow caught wind of what was going on with the SEC. The only people who knew were Danny, Ike, and myself, but Wall Street was a funny place like that, and news had a way of traveling remarkably fast. In fact, there was an old Wall Street saying that went: “Good news travels fast, but bad news travels instantly.”
She compressed her lips. “I got a call from Visual Image, and they said they need to speak to you right away. They said it was absolutely urgent they talk to you this afternoon.”
“Who the fuck is Visual Image? I’ve never even heard of them!”
“Yes you have; they’re the ones who did your wedding video, remember? You flew them down to Anguilla; there were two of them, a man and a woman. She had blond hair and he had brown. She was dressed—”
I cut Janet off. “Yeah, yeah, I remember now. I don’t need a full-blown description.” I shook my head in amazement at Janet’s memory for detail. If I hadn’t cut her off she would have told me what color panty hose the girl wore. “Who was it that called: the guy or the girl?”
“The guy. And he sounded nervous. He said that if he didn’t speak to you in the next few hours, it would be a problem.”
A problem? What the fuck? That made no sense! What could my wedding videographer possibly need to speak to me about that was so urgent? Could it be something that happened at my wedding? I took a moment to search my memory…Well, it would be highly unlikely, in spite of the fact that I had received a warning from the tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla. I had flown down three hundred of my closest friends (friends?) for an all-expenses-paid vacation at one of the finest hotels in the world: the Malliouhana. It cost me over a million dollars, and at the end of the week the island’s president informed me that the only reason everyone wasn’t under arrest for drug possession was because I’d given the island so much business that they felt turning a blind eye was the least they could do. But he further assured me that everyone who’d attended would be on a watch list and that if they ever decided to come back to Anguilla they had best leave their drugs behind. That was three years ago though, so this couldn’t have anything to do with that—or could it?
I said to Janet, “Get the guy on the phone. I’ll take it in my office.” I turned and started to walk away, then over my shoulder I said, “By the way, what’s his name?”
“Steve. Steve Burstein.”
A few seconds later the phone on my desk beeped. I exchanged quick hellos with Steve Burstein, the president of Visual Image, a small mom-and-pop operation somewhere on the South Shore of Long Island.
Steve said in a concerned tone: “Um…well…I don’t know quite how to say this to you…I mean…you were really good to my wife and me. You…you treated us like guests at your own wedding. You and Nadine couldn’t have been any nicer to us. And it was really the nicest wedding I’ve ever been to and—”
I interrupted him. “Listen, Steve, I appreciate the fact that you enjoyed my wedding, but I’m kind of busy right now. Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on.”
“Well,” he replied, “there were two FBI agents in here today and they asked me for a copy of your wedding video.”
And just like that, I knew my life would never be the same again.
CHAPTER 23
WALKING A FINE LINE
Nine days after I’d received that poisonous phone call from Visual Image, I was sitting in world-famous Rao’s restaurant in East Harlem, engaged in a heated debate with legendary private investigator Richard Bo Dietl, known simply to his friends as Bo.
Although we were at a table for eight, there would be only one other person joining us this evening, namely, Special Agent Jim Barsini *6of the FBI, who was a casual friend of Bo’s and, hopefully, would soon be a casual friend of mine too. Bo had arranged this meeting, and Barsini was due to arrive in fifteen minutes.
At this particular moment, Bo was doing the talking and I was doing the listening, or, more accurately, Bo was lecturing and I was listening and grimacing. The topic was an inspired notion I’d had to try to bug the FBI, which, according to Bo, was one of the most outlandish things he’d ever heard.
Bo was saying, “…and that’s simply not the way you go about things, Bo.” Bo had this odd habit of calling his friends Bo, which I found confusing sometimes, particularly when I was Luded out. Thankfully, I was able to follow him just fine tonight, because I was sober as a judge, which seemed like the appropriate state to be in when meeting an FBI agent for the first time, especially one who I was hoping to befriend—and then subsequently gather intelligence from.
Nevertheless, I did have four Ludes in my pocket, which at this very moment were burning a hole in my gray slacks, and in the inside pocket of my navy-blue sport jacket I had an eight ball of coke, which was calling my name in a most seductive tone. But, no, I was determined to stay strong—at least until after Agent Barsini went back to wherever it was FBI agents went back to after they ate dinner, which was probably home. Originally I had planned to eat light, so as not to interfere with my upcoming high, but right now the smell of roasted garlic and home-cooked tomato sauce was bathing my olfactory nerve in a most delicious way.
“Listen, Bo,” continued Bo, “getting information out of the FBI isn’t difficult in a case like this. In fact, I already got some for you. But listen to me—before I tell you anything—there are certain protocols you gotta follow here or else you’re gonna get your ass caught in a sling. The first is that you don’tgo around planting bugs in their fucking offices.” He started shaking his head in amazement. It was something he’d been doing a lot of since we sat down fifteen minutes ago. “The second is that you don’t try bribing their secretaries—or anyone else, for that matter.” With that, he shook his head some more. “And you don’t follow their agents around, trying to find shit out about their personal lives.” This time he shook his head quickly and began rolling his eyes up in his head, the way a person does after they’ve just heard something that defies logic in such a dramatic way that they have to shake off the effect.
I stared out the restaurant’s window to avoid Bo’s blazing gaze, at which point I found myself staring right smack into the gloomy groin of East Harlem and wondering why on earth the best Italian restaurant in New York City had to pick this fucking cesspool of a neighborhood for its location. But then I reminded myself that Rao’s had been in business for over a hundred years, since the late 1800s, and Harlem was a different sort of neighborhood back then.
And the fact that Bo and I were sitting alone at a table for eight was a much bigger deal than it seemed—given the fact that a dinner reservation at Rao’s needed to be booked five years in advance. In truth, though, getting a reservation at this quaint little anachronism was all but impossible. All twelve of the restaurant’s tables were owned,“condo-style,” by a select handful of New Yorkers, who more than being rich were very well connected.
Physically, Rao’s was no great shakes. On this particular evening, the restaurant was decorated for Christmas, which had nothing to do with that fact that it was January 14. In August, it would stillbe decorated for Christmas. That was the way of things at Rao’s, where everything was reminiscent of a much simpler time, where food was served family-style, and Italian music played from a fifties-style jukebox in the corner. As the night progressed, Frankie Pellegrino, the restaurant’s owner, would sing for his guests, as men of respect congregated at the bar and smoked cigars and greeted one another Mafia-style, while the women stared at them adoringly, the way they did back in the good-old days, whenever those were. And the men would rise from their chairs and bow to the women each time they went to the bathroom, the way they did back in the good-old days, whenever those were.