Night Work (42 page)

Fuentes nodded. “And the stairs you told me about? The exit?”

Orso led him ten feet into the right-hand tunnel. An iron gate blocked metal stairs that rose toward the distant thump and rush of traffic on the street. He pulled on the gate, and it opened. Fuentes stepped in and looked up the stairs. “Where does it end?”

“In the lobby of a building on Thirty-first Street.”

“Very good.” He stepped aside and let Orso lead them back to the intersection of the tunnels. “How far are we now from the hotel kitchen?”

“About twenty-five yards. I paced it off like you asked.”

“So, in the end now, who will it be? How many?”

“Detective Cassidy. Mr. Ribera. Castro.”

“Only three? You're sure?”

“Yes.”

“Why not more? Why not ten men around him? If it was my operation, I would have many men.” He watched Orso closely.

“Cassidy knows you're working for Lansky and Trafficante, and they've got lines into every precinct in town. He's pretty sure there's a leak in the security detail. He's afraid that if he involves a lot of men, it'll get out.”

“Yet he told you.”

“I'm his partner.”

“Yes. Lucky for us.” Contempt in his voice.

“Fuck you.”

Fuentes ignored him. He looked back down the tunnel toward Penn Station and whistled shrilly. Moments later there were footfalls in the dimness, and then a man dressed in a Con Edison jumpsuit appeared. He carried the twin of Fuentes's machine pistol. He was a big man with wiry black hair hacked short and a broad, flat, high-cheekboned face. “Detective Orso, this is Sergeant Lopato.” The big man stopped, nodded to Fuentes, and then turned to inspect Orso carefully as if weighing how much trouble he would offer if it came to that. The machine pistol looked small in his hand.

“I thought you said it was just the two of us,” Orso said.

“Yes, well, when a man offers you a plan, it is always better to change it a bit so it becomes your plan, not his. What kind of gun do you carry, Detective?”

“A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.”

“May I see it?”

Orso pulled the gun from the holster on his hip and held it with the barrel slanted toward the floor at Fuentes's feet. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lopato shift the muzzle of the machine pistol toward him.

“May I look at it?” Fuentes held out his hand.

“Sure.” He turned the pistol around and handed it to Fuentes butt first. Fuentes dropped it in his jacket pocket. “If you don't mind. Until this is over.”

Orso shrugged. “Colonel Fuentes, we have a deal, remember. Castro, okay, but not my partner.”

“It is up to him, not to me. If he is sensible, we will have no problem, but he must be sensible, otherwise…” He shrugged away his responsibility in the matter. Now, we will change the plan a little more. The basement is this way, no?” He inclined his head up the tunnel.

“This is a better place. We take them from both sides. There'll be people in the kitchen down there.”

“Yes. I know. Still, I think we will go to the basement.” Lopato led. Fuentes went last. Orso was sandwiched between them.

*   *   *

Cassidy used his left hand on the control lever to start the service elevator down from Castro's floor. After a minute, he took his pistol out of its shoulder holster and held it down by his side. The two men behind him felt the tension too, and both of them breathed heavily. One of them had had garlic for lunch.

“This is what happens when an artist becomes involved in politics,” Ribera said. “Instead of studying the beauty of a nude model in his studio, he is riding down in an elevator that smells of garbage to meet a man with a gun.”

“Twenty-two yards from the elevator to the tunnel intersection. Orso'll be in the left-hand tunnel, Fuentes in the right,” Cassidy reminded him.

“Tell me again why we are doing this.”

“You said that Colonel Fuentes was dangerous. If he missed here, he'll try again in Boston. If he missed there, he'll try again in Canada. This way we know where and when he's coming.”

“I get no comfort in knowing this.”

“Orso will have him covered, but we need him to make the attempt, otherwise he walks away.”

“Yes, you told me all this. So why is it that I want to throw up?”

“Olotka, are you okay?”

“Yeah, Mike, I'm good.” The big bearded detective laughed. “First time I ever volunteered to get shot at.”

“Almost there.”

*   *   *

Orso could hear the elevator grinding down. They were in a wide, short hallway outside the kitchens. Three serving carts loaded with dirty room service dishes were against one wall. He could see into the kitchen through the glass panels in the big double doors. Men in white moved past the windows carrying pots or roasting pans or dishes. A man walked by bent under the half side of beef on his shoulder, another followed with a metal tray of raw chickens. They moved quickly, concentrating on their tasks, and no one looked back at him through the windows.

The elevator whined down the shaft.

Fuentes and Lopato stood on either side of the elevator doors, Fuentes on the left, Lopato on the right. Their machine pistols were centered on the doors. Orso knew they would shoot as the doors opened and the passengers were still trapped in the car. Fuentes ignored Orso, but Lopato watched him.

*   *   *

“Two more floors,” Cassidy said. “When the doors open, we go out fast. Turn right, and there's a door, then steps down to the steam tunnels. I go first, Olotka next, Ribera last. The steam tunnel is badly lighted, and I think he'll let us close before he makes a move, but if he sees it's not Castro, he'll go for Orso and try for the stairs, so keep your head down, Olotka, and stay close behind me. He's expecting Castro. He'll see Castro.”

*   *   *

Fuentes hissed at Lopato and jerked his head toward the elevator. The elevator indicator showed the car a floor above them. Lopato set himself in a shooter's stance, feet at shoulder width, knees bent, left hand to guard against the gun barrel's need to rise as it fired.

Orso wondered that they did not hear his heart pound, that they weren't warned by the noise. Tension squeezed him breathless. The elevator was seconds away from arriving. When the doors opened, the men in the elevator would be slaughtered. And it was on him, all on him.

Orso shook a cigarette loose and put the pack back in his pocket. He pulled out a book of matches and dropped it. “Shit.” Lopato threw a look his way as he bent to pick it up, saw what he was doing and turned back to the danger of the elevator.

The elevator arrived. Whoever was running it missed the landing, and they could hear it maneuver up and then down again.

Fuentes and Lopato snicked off their safeties.

Orso pulled his hideout gun from its ankle holster.

The elevator came to rest.

Orso stepped forward and shot Lopato in the head. The hideout gun was a little Browning .25 automatic, and it made a high, flat crack like someone snapping a shingle. He turned and fired two shots at Fuentes as fast as he could pull the trigger. The first hit him in the cheek and blew a spray of blood against the wall. The second hit him in the chest. A .25 has little stopping power. It rocked Fuentes, but did not put him down. Orso fired again and missed. Fuentes turned and triggered his machine pistol. Three bullets hit Orso. They smashed him back against one of the service carts and he went down in a wreckage of dirty dishes and silverware.

The elevator doors started to open. Fuentes swung the machine pistol toward them. Cassidy, warned by the gunfire, filled the gap between the doors, and as the gun tracked toward him, he shot Fuentes twice in the chest. In reflex Fuentes's finger tightened on the trigger, and bullets stitched up the wall next to the elevator and across the ceiling. Cassidy shot him again.

The bullet Orso had fired into Lopato's head had not penetrated his thick skull. It had hit the bone and then torn a groove under the skin around to his forehead where it exited over his right eye. He pawed at his face, trying to clear the blood that poured into his eyes so he could see to shoot. Cassidy stepped out of the elevator and shot him, and Ribera and Olotka cleared on either side of him and shot Lopato again and again until he slammed against the wall and slid to the floor.

The room stank of cordite, and the blast of shots made Cassidy's ears ring. As he went toward Orso, he was vaguely aware of the faces that crowded the glass panels of the kitchen doors. “Tony, Jesus, Tony.” Orso made a gesture with one hand to show that he was all right. Then he slipped away into darkness.

 

29

“Is he going to be all right?” Alice asked.

“They don't know. He's still unconscious. They got the bullets out, which they say is a good thing, but they don't know.”

Raindrops pecked at the bedroom windows and slithered down the glass. The lights across the river in New Jersey were muted to a glow. A foghorn moaned somewhere as a ship slid down the tide toward the open sea. Cassidy could feel Alice's warmth down the length of his body. He took the cigarette back from her, took the last drag, and stubbed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table. He offered her a sip of his bourbon.

“No, thanks. Not now. Maybe later.”

He was desperately tired, but he could not sleep, and the bourbon did nothing to blunt the jaggedness inside him that kept him awake. The liquor and the darkness let him talk, and the story came out slowly, and to him it sounded like something that had happened to someone else.

The sudden flood of cops into the basement of the hotel, and then the cops pushed aside as irrelevant by the emergency medical crews who had been on standby to care for Castro in case someone managed to get a bullet into him. They were quick and efficient with Orso, but their faces were grave as they carried him to the elevator on a stretcher. The dead, broken bodies of Fuentes and Lopato were photographed, mapped, sketched, and then carried away. The bullet holes in the walls and ceiling, and the brass shell casings that littered the floor were marked with red circles and photographed.

Deputy Chief Clarkson and Assistant Deputy Chief Holloway arrived together followed by two assistants, Headquarters detectives, as lean and nervy as whippets. One of them loped off to find a private room while the two chiefs surveyed the wreckage. The assistant came back and said something to Clarkson, who nodded in approval and then barked, “Cassidy, Olotka, Ribera, you're with us.”

“Ribera went to talk to Castro before his train leaves,” Cassidy said.

“Parker, go find him. Bring him back.” The detective nodded and left in a hurry. The other detective led them through the kitchen where the chef was ringing his hands and trying to explain to cops questioning his staff about the disaster that was imminent if he could not have his people back to prepping for the evening meals. Dinner would be ruined. The hotel guests would be disappointed. There would be hell to pay.

The detective led them into the kitchen manager's office and then stood with his back to the door as if barring escape.

Deputy Chief Clarkson started with, “Who the hell came up with this fucked-up plan? Who the hell let you think you were in charge of this security detail?” And it went downhill from there. The very professional reaming included threats of dismissal from the Department, loss of pension, and possible prosecution.

Then Ribera arrived to hear the tail end of it. He read the anger in the room. “Ah, Chief Clarkson, I am so glad to find you. I have a message from Fidel.” He wrapped the startled officer in a hug. Clarkson held himself stiff with his hands at his sides. Ribera kissed him on both cheeks and then stepped back. “He insisted. He is awed by the courage and sacrifice of the officers of the New York City Police Department, and intends to publicly thank the Department and to award medals for bravery to all the officers who took part in the operation that saved him from assassination. I am to tell you that he is impressed that the police department leadership has trained its men to abandon set plans and take the initiative when necessary.” Cassidy could see that he was riffing, but both Clarkson and Holloway were absorbing Ribera's bullshit.

One of the detective assistants was sent to find a stenographer, who took down Ribera's description of the events. Clarkson warned Cassidy of punishments available and imminent, but Cassidy suspected he had weighed Castro's public praise against his private need to punish, and his heart was not in the threats.

There was rain in the evening sky when they left the hotel, but it had not yet begun to fall. “Let me buy you a drink,” Ribera said.

“I'm going up to the hospital.”

“Of course.” Ribera nodded in understanding. “Michael, when I was seventeen, my brother, Ricardo, and I, and our cousin Manuel attacked a small police outpost in a little town east of Havana with hunting rifles we had stolen from our fathers. Who knows what we were thinking? Revolution. Anarchy. Romance. Something. The confused brains of teenage boys said this was what we should do. So, bang, bang, bang. One policeman shot in the leg, and then the others replied with a machine gun. We ran. One bullet, one bullet out of the hundreds they fired, clipped my brother's hand and took off three fingers. Blood, fear, screaming. I have never been so scared until we rode down in the elevator today, and we heard the shots, so we knew someone was waiting. You could have taken the car back up, but I watched you. You did not even change expression. The doors opened, and you went out. You are a brave man and a good man. Cuba is in your debt, and I am proud to be your friend.”

“I'm proud to be yours.” They hugged, and people passing on the sidewalk looked at them curiously. Cassidy raised his hand for a taxi, and one pulled to the curb. “Are you going to Boston to rejoin Castro?”

“No. I'll take care of some things here, tell my version of the glorious heroism of the New York City Police Department to the newspapers, and then, in a day or two, I will go back to Cuba, and back into my studio, and to hell with politics.”