Beirut Incident (8 page)

For the second time since my arrival in Beirut, I went through the processing records routine with Charlie. He was good, but abysmally slow, and this time it took almost three hours.

I spent a good deal of time wondering how I was going to get rid of him. It was a problem. With Charlie alive, I'd never make it to the airport, let alone back to the States. Even if I left him bound and gagged, he would eventually get free and my goose would be cooked, no matter where I was.

The answer, obviously, was to kill him. But I couldn't do that. I've killed many times in my career, and Charlie was certainly no jewel of humanity. But I had killed as a final act of the hunt — men I'd been in combat with, or had stalked, or been stalked by. That's one thing. But Charlie was something else again.

There didn't seem to be any other way. Charlie had to go. On the other hand, if Harkins came up dead or missing just after fixing up my papers, the Dragon Lady was going to think it very strange indeed. It was a pretty little dilemma.

Charlie, however, solved it for me.

I was examining my new set of documents — for Nick Canzoneri this time. Charlie always liked to stay as close as possible to the real name. "Saves you from not responding sometimes when you should," he explained.

The papers all seemed in good order. There was a passport stating that Nick Canzoneri had been born in the little Calabresian village of Fuzzio, a workman's permit and a driver's license from Milano, a picture of an indistinguishable young man and a girl holding hands in front of a Roman ruin and four whining letters from Nick Canzoneri's mother back in Fuzzio.

Charlie had done a good job.

Then, as I was bending over the coffee table, looking at my new papers, he picked up the small lamp from the end table and smashed it across my head.

The force of the blow knocked me off the couch and onto the coffee table. I could feel it splinter beneath me as I crashed to the floor, the world a red haze of shrieking pain. I wasn't unconscious, thanks to the fact that the lamp had smashed. Schmitz's Law: The disintegration of a moving object dispels its force of impact in direct proportion to the speed of disintegration.

But I was hurting.

As I crashed to the floor, I instinctively sprung off the palms of my hands, throwing myself to one side in a roll. As I did, something else — probably the other lamp — smashed down next to my head, barely missing me.

I was on my hands and knees now, shaking my head like a wounded dog, trying to clear my brain. It felt as if a small bomb had exploded inside it.

I still couldn't see clearly. But I couldn't remain in one place. Charlie would be on the attack. From my hands and knees, I ducked my head into the crook of my arms and did a forward roll. My feet hit flat on the floor and I flipped upright.

I crashed against a wall. The jolt seemed to help. As I instinctively ducked just to keep moving, my vision began to clear. I could feel warm blood gushing down my face. I leapt sideways. I didn't dare remain motionless until I found my enemy. Any move I might make might take me directly into him, but I couldn't stay still.

Then I found him.

He was coming around the corner of the couch after me, one hand on the back of the couch, the other held out from his side. It held a wicked looking curved knife. It must have come from the decorative Arabic scabbard I had seen hanging on the wall.

Charlie held the knife at waist height, pointed at my belly. His feet were widespread for balance. He advanced slowly.

My floundering gyrations may have saved my life, but they had also left me crowded into a corner with the couch along one wail and a heavy oaken table along the other.

Charlie blocked my only route of escape.

I pressed against the wall as he took another step forward, only about four feet away now. His thin lips compressed tightly. The final lunge was coming.

I had no recourse. I snapped Wilhelmina into my hand with an instinctive draw from the shoulder holster and fired.

The bullet caught Charlie full in the throat and he stood there a moment, brought up short by the shock of the Luger. A look of puzzled surprise spread over his face and he seemed to be looking at me as if I were a stranger. Then his eyes glazed over blankly and the blood spurted from the base of his throat. He fell over backward, the knife still clutched in his hand.

I stepped gingerly over his body and went into the bathroom to see if I could repair my face. If nothing else, cold water would clear my head.

It took me a half-hour over the washbasin and another twenty minutes over two steaming cups of black coffee that I made on Charlie's stove before I was ready to go. Then I picked up my Nick Canzoneri papers and headed back to the St. Georges. There were still the "special instructions" from Su Lao Lin before I could take off for the States.

And she had to be disposed of, too, before I left Beirut. I couldn't very well leave her there, pushing Siciliano hoods through the pipeline to the Mafia in New York. And since I was the last one she had sent to Charlie, his death wouldn't look so good for me.

I sighed as I rang for the elevator in the ornate St. Georges. I didn't want to kill the Dragon Lady any more than I had wanted to kill Charlie, but I had made one stop between his apartment in the Quarter and the hotel, and that stop would help me carry this part of the job out.

There was a softness in her eyes when Su Lao Lin opened the door for me, but it quickly turned to alarm as she looked at my damaged features. I had a strip of adhesive tape running across my temple over one eye were Harkins' lamp had cut a painful but actually superficial gouge, and that eye was swollen, probably discolored by now.

"Nick!" she cried. "What happened."

"It's okay," I reassured her, taking her in my arms. But she pulled back so that she could look up into my face. I remembered the fat Arab and the very young girl I had seen on my first trip up to Charlie's apartment. "I just got in between some Arab and his whore," I explained. "She hit me with a lamp instead of him."

She looked concerned. "You must take care of yourself, Nick… for me."

I shrugged. "I'm leaving for the States in the morning."

"I know, but I'll see you over there."

"Oh?" That was a jolt. I hadn't known she was planning to come to America.

Her smile was close to being demure. She put her head on my chest. "I just decided tonight, while you were gone. I'll be over there in a couple of weeks. Just to visit. I want to see Franzini anyway, and…" There was that mid-sentence pause again.

"And…" I prompted.

"…and we can spend some more time together." Her arms tightened around my neck. "Would you like that? Would you like to make love to me in the United States?"

"I'd like to make love to you anywhere."

She snuggled closer. "Then what are you waiting for?" Somehow, that emerald green chiffon thing she had been wearing when she answered the door had disappeared. She wriggled her bare body against me.

I picked her up and headed for the bedroom. We had the better part of the night ahead of us and I wasn't going to spend it in an office.

I didn't tell her she would never get to the States, and the next morning I constantly had to remind myself of the American G.I.'s Su Lao Lin had destroyed with her drug network before I could bring myself to do what I had to do.

I kissed her softly on the lips when I left the next morning.

The plastique bomb I had attached to the underside of the bed wouldn't go off for another hour and a half, and I was sure she would sleep that long, probably longer if for some reason the acid took longer to eat through to the detonator.

I had picked up the bomb on my way to the St. Georges after I had left Harkins' place. If you ever need a plastique bomb in a foreign city, the place to get it is from the local C.I.A. agent-in-residence — and you can almost always find the C.I.A. agent-in-residence posing as the local Associated Press man. In Beirut it was Irving Fein, a little round man with horn rimmed glasses and a passion for drawing inside straights.

We had run into each other more than a few times around the Middle East, but he'd been reluctant to provide me with the explosive without knowing who I intended to blow up, and without checking with his boss first. He finally acceded when I convinced him it was a direct order from the White House.

It really wasn't, of course, and I might find myself in trouble over that later, but the way I figured, Su Lao Lin was an enemy agent and she had to be destroyed.

She was also very good in bed. Which was why I'd kissed her goodbye before I left.

Louie met me at the Trans World Airlines gate at the airport an hour later. He had been talking to two swarthy men in inexpensive English-cut suits. They might have been olive oil merchants, but somehow I doubted it. As soon as Louie spotted me, he hurried over, hand outstretched.

"Good to see you, Nick! Good to see you!"

We shook hands heartily. Louie did everything heartily. Then he introduced me to the men he had been talking to, Gino Manitti and Franco Locallo. Manitti had a low, overhanging brow, a modern-day Neanderthal Man. Locallo was tall and spindly, and I caught a glimpse of a yellowish set of bad teeth through his tensely parted lips. Neither one spoke enough English to order a hot dog at Coney Island, but there was an animal hardness about their eyes, a tightness around the corners of the mouths that I'd seen before.

Musclemen. More grist for the Mafia mill.

Once on board the big airliner, I sat next to the window, with Louie in the adjoining seat. The two newest recruits to the Franzini family sat directly behind us. During the entire flight from Beirut to New York, I never heard either one say a word.

It was more than I could say for Louie. He was bubbling from the moment we buckled our seat belts.

"Hey, Nick," he said with a leer. "What did you do last night after I left Su Lao Lin's? Man! That's some chick, huh?" He laughed like a little boy telling a dirty joke. "Did you have a good time with her, Nick?"

I looked at him coldly. "I had to go see a guy about my papers."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot. That would have been Charlie Harkins, I guess. He's a real good man. Best in the business, I guess."

Was, I thought to myself. "He did a good job for me," I said noncommittally.

Louie babbled on for a few more minutes about Charlie in particular and good penmen in general. He didn't tell me much I didn't already know, but he liked to talk. Then he changed the subject.

"Hey, Nick, you know you sure messed up that guy Harold in Su Lao Lin's apartment. Jeez! I never saw anyone move so fast!"

I smiled at my friend. I can be flattered, too. "I don't like getting rousted," I said toughly. "He shouldn't have done that."

"Yeah, yeah. I sure agree. But, damn, man, you almost killed the guy!"

"If you can't hit the ball, you shouldn't go to bat."

"Yeah, sure… man… The doctor at the hospital said that his kneecap was practically destroyed. Said he'll never walk again. He's got a spinal injury too. Might be paralyzed for life."

I nodded. Probably from that karate chop I'd given him across the back of the neck. It will do that sometimes, when it doesn't kill outright.

I looked out the window at the disappearing Lebanese coastline, the sun glinting on the azure Mediterranean beneath us. I'd been on the job a little more than twenty-four hours and already two people were dead and one crippled for life.

At least, there should be two dead. I looked at my watch: ten-fifteen. The plastique bomb under Su Lao Lin's bed should have gone off a half-hour ago…

So far, I'd done my job. The mouth of the pipeline in Beirut was destroyed. But it was just a beginning. Next, I had to take on the Mafia on its home ground. I would be dealing with a solidly entrenched organization, a vast industry that spread across the country like an insidious disease.

I remembered a conversation I'd had with Jack Gourlay a few months before, just before I'd been given the assignment to run down the Dutchman and Hamid Raschid. We were drinking beer in The Sixish on Eighty-eighth Street and First Avenue in New York, and Jack had been talking about his favorite subject, the Syndicate. As a reporter for the
News,
he'd been covering Mafia stories for twenty years.

"It's hard to believe, Nick," he said. "I know one of those loan-sharking operations — the one run by the Ruggiero family — that's got more than eighty million dollars in outstanding loans on the street, and the interest on those loans is three percent a week. That's a hundred fifty-six percent interest a year on eighty million. Figure it out!

"But that's only seed money," he went on. 'They're into everything."

"Like what?" I knew a lot about the Mafia, but you can always learn from the experts. In this case, Gourlay was the expert.

"Probably the biggest is trucking. Then there's the garment center. At least two-thirds of it is Mafia-controlled. They're in the meat packing business, they control most of the vending machines in town, private garbage collections, pizza parlors, bars, funeral homes, construction companies, real estate firms, caterers, jewelry businesses, beverage bottling concerns — you name it."

"Doesn't sound like they have much time for real crime."

"Don't kid yourself. They're big on hijacking, and everything they hijack can be funneled into their so-called legitimate outlets. The guy who expands his Seventh Avenue garment business is probably doing it on money that came from narcotics, the guy who opens a chain of delicatessens in Queens is probably doing it on money that came from pornography in Manhattan."

Gourlay had told me a bit about Popeye Franzini, too. He was sixty-seven years old, but far from retirement. According to Gourlay, he headed up a family of more than five hundred initiated members and some fourteen hundred «associate» members. "Of all the old 'Mustachio Petes, " Gourlay said, "that old son of a bitch is by far the toughest. He's probably the best organized, too."