“We were prepared to give him forty-five as his end here in America,” Andrew said. “He held out for fifty.”
“Even so,” Bobby said, and shrugged.
He was dressed more casually than any of the others, still sporting a tan he’d acquired in Miami, and wearing Ralph Lauren slacks and a purple Tommy Hilfiger sweater.
“Which, by the way, you agreed to,” Petey said.
“Fuck what he agreed,” Rudy said.
“Correct,” Sal said. “Fuck ’em.”
“Still,” Ralphie said cautiously, “our word should mean something, no?”
“Not in this case,” Orafo said.
Like Carbonaio, with whom he worked most closely in the organization, he was wearing a sports jacket and slacks, no sweater, dark tie on a white shirt. He was some sixty-odd years old, and went back a long way with Rudy and also with Anthony, who was now in prison. Carmine still believed in honor. They were all supposed to believe in honor. You gave a man your word, your word was your word. But the man Andrew now wanted killed was a man totally without honor. As he saw it, the rules did not apply here, even though Andrew had given Moreno his handshake.
“This would be a stickup in a dark alley,” he said, “fifty percent of the take. The spic’s out of his fuckin’ mind. Andrew’s right. We dust him as a lesson to whoever’s next in line. Then we go to them with the same deal, and they’ll grab it in a minute.”
“Still,” Carbonaio said, and shrugged.
“I want to do it where he lives,” Andrew said:
They all looked at him.
“Let them know they’re not safe from us wherever they are. If we want to take them out, we can do it in a minute. They agree to our deal or we bury them one by one. That’s what I want them to realize.”
“Are you talking Colombia?” Bobby squeaked. His throat got dry whenever he went too long without a smoke. He felt like killing Andrew, not letting him smoke, never mind the fuckin spic.
“Colombia, yes,” Andrew said. “That’s where he lives, that’s where I want it done.”
“I think he’s still here in New York,” Petey said.
“We could do it easier here, Lino,” Rudy said reasonably.
“I know, Uncle Rudy, but we make a stronger point if we do it there.”
“Do we have people there?” Carmine asked Ralphie.
“Everywhere,” Ralphie assured him. “But I’ll tell you, Andrew, this, could backfire. We’ve got a lot of legitimate businesses in Miami, which is a stone’s throw from where this man operates. It wouldn’t be difficult for his people to find out what they are and where they are. We could be setting ourselves up for terrible trouble in the future.”
“What kind of trouble?” Carmine asked. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about, Ralph?”
“Murders, bombings, you name it. Moreno’s people’ve killed judges, you think they’re gonna draw the line at us?”
“The judges didn’t go into Moreno’s house and kill him in his own bed,” Andrew said.
The men sitting at the conference table said.nothing for several moments, each — with the exception of Rudy — wondering who would be the. first to tell Andrew that this was an impossible thing he was proposing. Rudy didn’t want to undermine his own nephew. He preferred the criticism to come from elsewhere. Besides, he wasn’t sure this couldn’t be done.
“Ahhh... how do we get in his house, Andrew?”
Petey Bardo. Wearing a brown suit, naturally. Brown tie, brown shoes. Mr. Brown.
“By offering someone a million in cash to get in there,” Andrew said.
Which only made sense, Rudy thought, smiling.
At six o’clock that Wednesday night, while Johnny Regan and Alex Lowndes were reporting to Michael that a heavy meeting had taken place at the tailor shop and they had nothing of consequence to show for it, Sarah Welles was buzzed through the door on Mott Street and hurried up the steps to where Andrew was waiting for her. All of this past week she’d thought of him in this place, sitting in one of the big leather chairs in the living room, wearing his silk monogrammed robe sashed at the waist, naked beneath it, waiting for her.
She could not understand why the mere thought of him aroused erotic thoughts she’d earlier entertained rarely if ever. She knew that what she felt for him was not love — how could it be, she hardly knew anything about him? — but was instead what the Bible had called lust and what her teenage students called a plain and simple lech. She didn’t know this man, yet she longed for him virtually twenty-four hours a day. She longed for him now as she climbed the stairs to the familiar door at the top, and saw the door opening, and saw him standing in it wearing not a robe but jeans and a sweater instead, and went into his arms, and lifted her face to his, and drank from his lips and drowned in his embrace.
“Meeting broke up at about twelve thirty,” Regan said.
“I went down for sandwiches,” Lowndes said.
Jackass, Regan thought.
“All of them saying goodbye to Benny the presser,” he said. “Our guys watching the shop reported them filing out one at a time, heading off in all directions. Except our main man. He was in there all day long. Still there when we packed it in at five.”
“That’s when the shop closes,” Lowndes said. “Five o’clock. Warrant gives us a nine-to-five. Which is when it opens. Nine.”
“Team’s still outside watching the front door, though,” Regan said. “They’ll take Faviola home, put him to bed.”
“What’d you mean by nothing of consequence?” Michael asked.
“They ain’t talkin’ in that back room, Mike,” Regan said. “Oh, sure, hello, goodbye, nice day, and so on. But where they’re meeting is upstairs, wherever the fuck that may be.”
“Freddie mentioned a door,” Michael said. “Deadbolt lock on it, speaker off to the side.”
“Yeah,” Regan said, nodding. “Faviola buzzes them in, they go upstairs.”
“Must be some kind of meeting room up there,” Lowndes said. “There’s windows across the front of the building, it could be a room up there.”
“Freddie’ll have to go in again,” Michael said.
“When?”
“As soon as possible,” he said, and stabbed a button on his phone. “We’ll need another court order.”
Apartment was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, never felt right in here. Luretta hated it here all the time. Summertime, with the windows open, you heard all the third-world noises out there, didn’t even sound like you were living in America anymore. Wintertime, you closed everything up tight, keep out the cold, you got all these exotic cooking smells coming under the door, other kinds of foreign smells, too, she sometimes thought these people never took baths. The apartment was freezing cold already. They turned off the heat at eleven every night, and it was already eleven fifteen.
Dusty had moved in with them three days ago.
Told Luretta’s mother he wanted to be near her while his baby formed inside her. His exact words. “I wanns a’be near you, Haze, while mah baby forms in’sahd you.” Fucking lying drug addict, all he wanted to be near was the welfare money her mother got for herself and the two children. Luretta and her younger brother had two different fathers, neither of which either of them had ever had the pleasure of meeting. Hamilton Barnes was twelve years old, the baby of the family till now. Barnes was her mother’s maiden name, which she chose to give her children ’stead of her boyfriends’ names, thank you. Now Hazel Barnes was pregnant again, and her new junkie boyfriend had moved in, hooray. Seemed to always take up with junkies, Luretta couldn’t figure why that was. Did she need needy people? Did she need men who couldn’t take care of themselves?