“What did you say?” Clark asked.
“Maybe she’s not your type, Mr. Clark, but Gina was, and is, a real good-looking woman. Besides, not once in my life have I ever said no to a woman who asked me to dinner in her house. That’s always a bingo.”
One of the agents at the far end of the table suddenly said, “Tony, you must need a bottle of water by now, right?”
“Sure, thanks.”
The agent walked to Tony and put a bottle of water in front of him. “Thanks, guy,” Tony said.
Clark, who didn’t appear to approve that one of his agents had offered water to Tony, asked, “And next?”
“I went over. We ate. And I fucked her. Or she fucked me. Or we fucked each other. I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
Yvette Yang asked, “And how long did this relationship, as I would call it, go on?”
“For two years. Until last night. I don’t think she has plans to see me again.”
“Did she,” Horace Clark asked, “tell you anything about her work?”
Tony, with a twist of his heavy, powerful hands, snapped open the sealed cap of the water bottle.
“Listen to me real careful now. We spent at least three nights a week together for two years. She had this thing about the city being vulnerable. What pissed her off even more was that the Feds, the Homeland Insecurity shitheads she called them, didn’t understand New York. She said the mayor was a great guy but a garbagehead, a pill user; Xanax, Vicodin, that shit, and that he thought the Feds were idiots, too, but he was too busy with other stuff, particularly the Masterpiece Theatre girlfriend he had, to ask too many questions about the Feds’ plans for protecting the city.
“So Gina put together her own plans. She had this huge budget. She told me the number once but it was so big it was like what we used to call a telephone book number and it didn’t really mean nothing to me. She started telling me she was using chunks of the budget to hire guys, tough guys, who’d been in Afghanistan and Iraq to organize special groups that would know what to do if any part of the city got attacked.”
“Why,” Horace Clark asked, “did she tell you these things?”
“Ask her. Pillow talk, I guess. She had always loved for me to screw her. When I finished her off each time, she got tired. And she talked. I heard about the hit list. I heard about state-of-the-art secret prisons on piers that looked like they were crumbling into the East River. I heard about something she called Code Apache. When I asked her whether she had hired Tonto and the Lone Ranger for Code Apache, she thought that was funny and said no, it was her plan to lock down Manhattan if an attack happened here. She told me about a guy named Davidson, a real killer, someone we really could have used in the Gambino family.”
“Why,” Yvette Yang asked, “are you telling us all this? You have no immunity from prosecution, you have no lawyer, and you are saying extraordinary things about the commissioner of the New York City Police Department and even the mayor of the city.”
Refreshed by the water, Tony said, “Did you ever hear of revenge? Payback? I was at her baptism. I took care of getting her what she wanted-bat girl-when she was a kid. I was her lover when she got to be old enough to have lovers. We lived on the same street. Our uncles were in the same business. I drove Gina Carbone to the airport when she left for basic training. I screwed her the night before she left.”
Tony stared only at Yvette Yang, who was obviously afraid of him or had nothing but contempt for him. “We were friends. For life. And then eight years ago she decided to work with a group of you people. They knew she knew me. They knew we were-what’s the right word-dating? She taped everything I told her.
“And then she sat in this same room. She could have warned me off, given me a heads up. Like a friend would do. And then she testified at my trial.” Tony sipped more water. “Anything else you want to know, Ms. Yang. Or don’t you have friends?”
Suddenly Clark said, “We could use a bathroom break. If you want to use the bathroom, Mr. Garafalo, we’ll have to handcuff you as we walk through the hallways.”
Tony Garafalo waved a hand and stayed seated. “Go enjoy yourselves. I’m good.”
“Who is, or was, Raj Gandhi?”
“I read lots of newspapers. It got to be a habit in prison, where I read the fucking New York Times in that dirty newsprint that got all over my hands. Now I’ve even got a Kindle. I had no idea in prison that there was such a thing. I read the Times there.”
“And?”
“I started seeing the names of reporters I hadn’t seen before. When I was on trial I hated the two reporters from the Times who were there all the time. They were supposed to be experts on the Mafia. They didn’t know shit from Shinola about the families. Everything they knew was from the movies. Both Jews. They studied the Godfather movies. That, they thought, made them experts. When it came to my trial they were hanging reporters, just like in the old Western movies there were hanging judges.
“But when I came out of Supermax, where, believe it or not, I got to know the Unabomber, a pretty sweet guy actually, those two reporters were gone. Retired, fired, dropped in the East River. Who the hell knows? Over the last two years on my gorgeous little Kindle I saw mainly new names of reporters.”
“And one of those was Raj Gandhi?” Yvette Yang asked.
“Very perceptive, Ms. Yang. I liked the name, I liked his articles. I looked him up on Google, another thing I never saw or heard of at Supermax. He was new to the city. I read his articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“So I started calling him. I wanted him to know about the hit list, the prison on the piers, Gina’s secret army, what she thought about Homeland Security.”
“Did you tell him who you were?” Clark asked.
“Tony Bennett.” From somewhere in the room one of the agents laughed, briefly. “Come on, Horace, grow up. I gave him information. I wanted him to work. I’m a salesman, an actor. When you’ve got a guy from Queens in a Mercedes show room, you talk Queens. When you’ve got a twenty-five year-old kid from Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs who wants a Mercedes convertible you talk his talk. I’ve got this God-given skill of imitating accents and voices. I know how to do these things. Remember, I’m a criminal.”
“So,” Yvette Yang asked, “why should we believe anything you say to us now?”
“That’s your choice.”
Clark asked quietly, “Did you kill Raj Gandhi?”
“Of course not. Never saw him. I only talked to him. I used a wiseass Queens accent. Once he let the world know what I wanted him to know, I was happy I had picked out such a smart dothead. I had no use for him any longer. He did what I wanted. No need to hurt him.”
Yvette Yang said, “We have videotape of you entering and leaving his building.”
“I knew where he lived. It was right in the phone book. There’s a gorgeous thirty-year-old in that building. She’s one of my other girlfriends. Her name is Gloria Kopechne. She’s something like the grandniece of that girl Teddy Kennedy killed on Martha’s Vineyard in, what the hell was it? 1969? Take a look through all your videotapes. Go talk to her. There are probably thirty videotapes of me going into and out of that lobby. I was fucking her. She is kind of a rich kid. No job. I had an open invite to go there to screw her anytime I wanted. I was even in the elevator with her and Mr. Gandhi the day he did his blog-heard-round-the-world. He had no idea who I was. But I’ll tell you this. He was a very polite little dothead.”