«Okay, okay. Tell me what happened. Did you get anything I can use?»
«If you can’t, I can. This jigsaw’s got more crazy pieces than a pasta salad, definitely worth more than those markers in Vegas.»
«Hey, Joey, those markers were over twelve thousand!»
«What I got’s worth double, Bam-Bam.»
«Don’t use that name, huh?» said Mangecavallo defensively. «It don’t fit with this high-class office.»
«Hoo-hay, Vinnie. Maybe the dons shouldn’t have sent you to school. You lose your humility, you don’t get no respect.»
«Knock it off, Joey. I’ll take care of you, on my father’s grave.»
«Your poppa’s alive, Vinnie, I saw him the other week at Caesar’s. He’s rolling high in Vegas, only not with your momma.»
«Basta… He’s not in Lauderdale?»
«You want a room number? If a bimbo answers, don’t hang up.»
«That’s enough, Joey. Stick to business or those markers will reach fifty big ones with the vigorish and I cut you loose, capisce? Now, what happened?»
«Awright, awright, just testing the water, okay, Vinnie?… What happened—jeez, what didn’t happen?» Little Joey the Shroud took a deep breath and began. «Like you figured, Goldfarb sent a crew out to that Indian reservation—I knew right away when I recognized the Shovel walking through the big fake stockade gate past the nut Welcome Wigwam and heading straight to the food counter. Boy, can that huge fazool eat! Right behind him is this scrawny gibrone who blows his nose a lot, but the bulge in his hip pocket ain’t Kleenex. Then I mingled and heard two other friends of the Shovel who talked funny English asking about this Thunder Head you’re interested in, and let me tell you they were hot for his warm body… So I wait from a big distance and the four cannolis—one of which is a broad—run out of the souvenir joint and race like hell up a dirt road where each of them goes into a different path—»
«A path?» Mangecavallo interrupted. «Like more dirt?»
«S’help me, Bam-Bam—excuse me, Vincenzo—dirt and bushes and trees, a regular forest, you know what I mean?»
«What the hell, it’s a reservation, I guess—»
«So I waited and I waited and I waited,» continued Little Joey rapidly.
«So am I, Joey!» broke in the director.
«Okay, okay. Finally, this big-shot Indian comes running out of the woods—I mean, he’s got to be your big shot, Thunder Head, ’cause he’s got a clothesline full of feathers from his head to his ass—and barrels down the dirt road, then hangs a right till he reaches a big, funny-looking tent and goes inside. Then I saw what I tell ya, Vinnie, I couldn’t believe with my own eyes! This big-shot Indian comes out a few minutes later, only he’s not the same guy.»
«What are you smokin’, Little Joey?»
«No, I mean it, Vin. He’s the same gumbar, but he don’t look like the same gumbar! Instead, he looks like a four-eyed accountant in a regular suit, wearing glasses and some dumb fuckin’ wig that don’t fit, and carrying a big cloth suitcase… Well, naturally, the suitcase tells me he’s breaking out of the reservation, and the way he looks tells me he don’t wanna be an Indian no more.»
«Is this gonna be a long story, Little Joey?» asked Mangecavallo plaintively. «Get to the goddamned point.»
«You want your markers’ worth and I wanna prove what I got’s worth more, okay?… But I’ll cut to the airport in Omaha where I followed him and where he got a ticket on the next plane to Boston, which I also did the same. However—and this is important, Bam-Bam—while I’m at the counter I show the little girlie one of my phony federal badges and tell her the government’s interested in the big fella with the stupid-lookin’ wig. I think the wig did it, ’cause the broad was so helpful I had to explain to her that everything was on the quiet and she shouldn’t call nobody. Anyway, I got the name from the big gumbar’s credit card—»
«Give it to me, Joey!» exclaimed the DCI, picking up a pencil.
«Sure, Vin. It’s M-small a-small c, capital K period, Hawkins, G-e-n with a period, then USA followed by a big R, then e and a t. I wrote it down but I don’t know what it all means.»
«It means his name is somebody Hawkins and he’s a retired army general… Holy shit, a general!»
«There’s more, Vinnie, and you better hear it—»
«I’ve got to hear it! Go on.»
«So I resume the tail in Boston and everything goes crazy, I mean pazzo. At the airport he runs into a men’s room where he meets a couple of Spies wearing uniforms I never seen before, and they go out to the parking area and get into an Oldsmobile with an Ohio or Indiana license plate and drive away. Quick, I lay a fast fifty on an off-duty taxi and tell him to stay with the Olds when things go even more crazy!… This now-accountant-type Indian chief takes his two refried beans to a fuckin’ barber shop, then s’help me God, Bam-Bam, they drive to some park by the river where the big lasagna makes his two enchiladas march around the grass like a couple of marionetti while he keeps yellin’ at ’em. I tell ya, it was weird!»
«Maybe this retired general is a Section Eight; it could happen, you know.»
«Like he got bounced for mixing up tanks for dirigibles and saluted the trucks?»
«You read about it all the time. Like some of our dons, sometimes the bigger the guns, the flakier they get. Remember Fat Salerno in Brooklyn?»
«Hoo-hay, do I remember! He wanted to make Oregano the flower of New York State. He walked right into the Albany legislature yellin’ his head off about discrimination.»
«That’s just what I was thinking about, Little Joey. Because if this M-small a-small c Hawkins, retired General Fruit-of-the-Loom, is Chief Thunder Head like I agree with you, we got ourselves another Fat Salerno yelling his head off in Washington also about discrimination.»
«He’s Italian, Vinnie?»
«No Joey, he’s not even an Indian. So then what happened?»
«So then the big lasagna and his two enchiladas got back in the Olds—that’s when I had to slip my off-duty creep another fifty—they drove to a busy downtown street and just stayed there. Not the two refrieds; they get out, and after they stop at a men’s store, they go into a big building, but the nut-Indian-chief-now-four-eyed-accountant just keeps sitting in the car. That’s when I had to hand over two fifties to the lousy off-duty thief ’cause he says his wife’s gonna hit him with a hot frying pan if he don’t come home, and he had a point… It was over an hour before a big stretch limo pulls up in front of the big building and three gumbars get in, followed by the two enchiladas who go right to the Olds, which follows the limo. Then I lost both of them.»
«You lost …? What are you telling me, Joey?»
«Not to worry, Bam-Bam—»
«Please!»
«Sorry. Vincent Francis Assisi—»
«Forget that, too!»
«Awright, awright, I apologize with all my heart—»
«Your heart’s gonna stop unless you tell me why I shouldn’t worry!»
«I lost the zuccones in the traffic, but not before I got the license of the big dark-blue stretch, and at the same time, would you believe, I remembered the name of the Boston police-prick who collared me twenty years ago and who, I figured, had to be in his late sixties, and who, Christ willing, might still be alive like I was, since we were both pretty much the same age.»