Conversation in the room dwindled a lot faster than when DeSantis shouted for quiet.
“What do you mean by ‘hijacked?’” DeSantis asked, some irritation showing through his hospitality. “The only people who know about the shipment are in this room. Who here would try to hijack the stuff?”
“You,” I said. “You would.”
DeSantis pointed at his chest.
“Me? It’s my stuff? Why would I hijack it?”
“Because it’s not your stuff. You’re not my partner.”
DeSantis took a quick glance at every face in the room, but his eyes ended on me.
“This is a double cross? We made a deal, Turk, and you’re going to stick by it. You can’t just get here and start making a new deal with someone else. We respect a contract. All you’re going to get from acting so smart is a big zero.”
“You broke our deal, Mr. DeSantis. You sent at least four contracts out on me after we became partners. So there is no deal, and you forfeit your $100,000.”
DeSantis flushed. Angrily, he bullied everyone out of the way until he confronted Vera, who still sat as calmly as a purring cat on the sofa.
“He’s lying,” DeSantis told her. “Tell the people he’s lying.”
Vera set her drink of the sofa arm and looked at DeSantis with her wide eyes.
“But he’s telling the truth, Charlie. When I went, you told me just to find out where the opium stash was and then kill Raki. Then you also sent three Corsicans to do the job. But Raki took care of them instead.”
“And what about you?” DeSantis’s face turned a deeper red.
“I decided that he was telling the truth, that he could bring the heroin in. So, for the sake of the organization, I did not follow your stupid advice.”
“You little punk,” DeSantis wheeled towards me. I wanted him to get within arm’s reach, but a wall of broad shoulders suddenly came between us.
“Sounds to me,” the man from Boston said to DeSantis, “like you’re out a partner, Happy. He’s free to make another deal as far as I’m concerned.”
The other chiefs expressed unanimous agreement. DeSantis, who had been host, was now on the outside looking in.
“How do we make this new deal, though?” a pug-faced captain from Miami asked. “A 100-kilo shipment the first time. Another 100 kilos a month after that. That’s a lot of financial pooling Just to pay you off, Senevres. Hell, at $2 million cash on delivery, you’re asking for $24 million a year.”
“But it’s a lot of profit for the partner too,” the Boston consigliere interrupted. “$240 million on the market. The main distributor controls the biggest business in the country. At any rate, the family in charge has to operate from an East Coast port.”
“Any port will do,” the man from Los Angeles spoke up.
“The first shipment is coming to New York, so the main distributor should be here,” one of DeSantis’s local competitors pointed out.
“With your permission,” I said loudly. “With your permission, I want to remind you that it will be a week before the first shipment of candy arrives. That’s not a lot of time but it gives everyone a chance to put together their bids.”
“Bids?”
“Right. Since I no longer have a partner here, I’ve decided to auction off all the rights for distribution at one time. The auction will be five days from now, and it will be open to anyone.”
“It’ll be a damn convention,” the L.A. chief objected. “It’s tough enough as it is for this many of us to get together without the FBI on our backs. An auction is fine for you, it drives the price up. For us, it’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” Vera twirled the ice in her drink. “There’s one place everyone will be safe — Snowman.”
The only sound in the room was Vera’s ice cubes.
The Mafia chiefs were tom between greed and concern for their safety. In a sense, they had no choice. By allowing another family to wrap up the narcotics windfall I represented, they would allow their competitors unlimited money, and money bought “soldiers.”
My thoughts were different. I’d brought my shipment from Turkey to Germany. I’d killed men in Portugal and France. Now I was close to the jackpot, and the jackpot’s name was Snowman. Vera had first mentioned the name the day before when we were plotting DeSantis’s downfall.
Snowman was the neutral ground, the inviolate headquarters of the American Mafia somewhere in the Cascade Mountains, a fortress Washington had never even heard of except in the scribbled notebook of Jaime Montenegro. How did he hear of it? I didn’t know, but I remembered that he was heading for the Jet Set spa of Puerto Vallarta when he was killed. Who was luring Jaime? Perhaps Vera had the answer to that, too.
“Maybe,” the chief from the West Coast said, “that might be a very good idea. Not that anyone in this room would try to make a deal with Mr. Senevres behind everyone else’s back.” Not much, the Mafioso’s eyes said. “But a good, fair auction with everyone’s interests protected is what’s called for.”
“Right,” the Boston chief joined in. “Everybody gets a chance to bid, with the understanding that everybody respects the results. We’ll have what, shares in this German company, right?”
“That’s the way it will be done.”
“Watch out,” DeSantis’s angry voice cut through the room. “How do you know the whole thing isn’t a trap? He may be trying to set you all up for a raid by the Feds.”
The gathered Mafiosos broke into laughs.
“A little sour grapes, Happy? That’s tough.”
“Besides,” another added, “there’s no way they can reach us at Snowman, not with an army of Feds.”
Thirteen
The airline only took us as far as Spokane. Vera and I got on a chartered plane equipped with skis for another fifty-mile hop onto a glacial lake. There the plane left us, and we waited.
The air was frigid; the lake itself had been frozen for thousands of years. Directly up from the lake perimeter, jagged mountains rose in a ring of teeth up to the brilliant blue sky. Vera, wrapped in a wolfskin coat, looked warm and comfortable. I’d made a right guess about her sometime ago, that she was a skier. Hawk and I had made some wrong guesses, though. The Mafia was something we’d associated with the dirty business of drug running and the grimy streets of big cities. Here was Raki Senevres 10,000 feet up in the crisp, clean wilderness of the United States’s last untamed mountain range.
“You always wanted to know more about me,” she said, each word made visible by a puff of condensed air. “Now you will. To begin with, you will now call me Vera King.”
There was a shudder in the air before I could call her anything. Skimming low over the lake’s ice surface was a helicopter. As it approached, I could see it was no ordinary bush chopper. The slim, dartlike nose had a machine gun stinger. Slung under the nose was a grenade launcher, and on the sides of the copter’s lean fuselage were rocket pods. The copter was an AH-1 Huey Cobra and the last bird like it that I’d seen was outside Saigon. The Cobra was no civilian craft, but its markings — a light blue that made it nearly invisible against snow and high sky — were definitely not Army.
As the Cobra swung around us, its machine gun trained at our chests, Vera waved. The Cobra dipped and veered off.
Another copter appeared, apparently after some radio signal that the coast was clear. This bird was plumper, a sky-blue Huey Iroquois, a passenger carrier, a very special passenger carrier with modified Gatling guns jutting out the bays. It hovered over us and came down on the whirlwind of its rotors.
“Welcome aboard, Miss King,” the gunner gave Vera a hand as she climbed on. He and the other gunner, as well as the pilot and copilot, wore uniforms the same color as the copter. I got on board with no help.