Operation Bamboozle (26 page)

“Crude,” Vito said.

“We don't use cops,” Uncle said. “Not reliable.”

“We
buy
cops,” Vito said. “Not the same thing.”

“The KGB has its own code of honor,” Luis said. “You steal from the state, they shoot you. We gave the general a choice: either we expose him or he joins us in a much bigger racket.” Luis took some wine. This was harder on the voice than the Swiss clinic con. “Why do nations run lotteries? Because they're cheap and profitable. So here's how Operation Bamboozle works. We copy the genuine Ukrainian lottery tickets.” He held up the piece of paper. “This is a perfect fake. Indistinguishable from the real thing. General Bolshevik adds them to his normal supply. Now he's selling
double
the number of tickets. The profit margin is obscenely big. The People's Republic of Ukraine keeps 95% of the ticket price on genuine tickets. We keep 100% of the price on our fake. Bingo.”

“Russians ain't stoopid,” Uncle said. “Ask Hitler. You sayin' nobody notices some two-bit backstreet printer crankin' out half a million bum lottery tickets?”

“We don't print in Ukraine We print in Milan, Italy, and ship to Ukraine. Ways and means. It's simple. Operation Bamboozle gets rich while the Soviets are robbed blind. Patriotism pays.”

Nobody spoke. Luis folded the fake ticket and put it away. Vito looked at Uncle. Uncle was examining his fingernails. “Now we eat,” Vito said.

Uncle rang a small handbell. Waiters arrived. Lunch began.

Immediately, Vito changed character. He became the suave and attentive host. He gave advice on funghi and prosciutto. He touched on the varieties of gnocchi, the roles of Parmesan versus Mozzarella. He had strong feelings about oregano. It was too soon to talk of Zabaglione, but clearly it had a place in his heart. They ordered. Luis glanced at Julie and she hoisted an eyebrow in return. Vito's game. Vito's rules.

And then the food was excellent and everyone relaxed, until the coffee came and the conversation stalled. It happens. No reason. Luis filled in with an innocent, foolish remark. “Awfully sad for the family, losing three young men at once.” Uncle heaved a deep breath, with a hint of a groan in it. Luis searched for a safe exit line. “Act of God, I suppose. End of story, life goes on.”

“Stupid fuckers,” Uncle muttered.

“I was very disappointed,” Vito said. That tone of voice might have meant too much oregano in the pasta. “Disloyalty …” He shook his head. “Theft,” he whispered.

“Bruno brothers thought they were bigger than the Organization,” Uncle said. “Dumb idiots.” Still as flat as slate.

“No room for them inside,” Vito said. “No room outside. Simple decision.” Vito looked at Julie with his clear, bright, fifteen-year-old eyes.

“Mr. DiLazzari was very disappointed, see,” Uncle said. “They knew it, he told them, I was there, I heard.”

“People forget the Social Contract,” Vito said. “Rights and obligations. I explained to them. I think they understood.”

“They got the message,” Uncle said. “Then Mr. DiLazzari terminated their appointments. Personally.”

“They disappointed me,” Vito said, “so I dis-appointed them.” He cracked a smile.

Silence.

“Well, that's the name of the game,” Julie said. Somebody had to say something.

On their way back to Konigsberg, Luis asked: “Were those real churches?”

“Who cares?” Julie said. “Vito doesn't want them.”

It had been one hell of a lunch, and neither of them needed much of Princess's pot roast that evening.

“Lucky Othello,” she said.

“Off your grub?” Stevie asked Luis. “Could mean a loss of virility. I read in Newsweek, they eat a special kinda spinach in Africa, it got extra iron in it.
Lottsa
iron. Two pounds of this African spinach got as much iron as a six-inch nail. Six inches. Zulu warriors eat it all the time, Newsweek said. Six inches. You don't get that from parsley.”

“We must find a good church,” Julie told Luis. “Soon.”

“Maybe not Zulus. Maybe Arabs. But definitely Africa.” Stevie forked some more pot roast.

“Jeez, girl,” Princess said. “The way you eat, virility ain't gonna be
your
problem.”

“Wrong gender,” Luis said. “Shall I draw you a picture?”

“Forget it.” Julie raised her hand. “They're happy. Let it lay.”

“You got a problem, honey?” Stevie said to her. “Look on the sunny side. You could be Tony Feet.”

“Wrong gender again,” Luis said loudly.

“There's peach pie an' ice cream,” Princess said. “Vito's uncle phoned. They want twenty more nudes, all indoor stuff. Vito ain't happy about Stevie sittin' on the grass where the mailman might see her.”

“Don't disappoint him,” Julie said. “He's very sensitive about disappointments.”

Michael J. Stagg, only son of the late Willard Stagg, aviation pioneer, opened his new copy of
USA Tennis
and found that he was looking at a hole that exactly matched the size and shape of a picture on the page. What shocked him was that the hole did not reveal the next page. It revealed nothing. So he was looking at a small rectangle of emptiness that did not exist. A non-existent hole.

He shut his eyes, counted five, opened them and the hole had gone. He turned the page and it was back. Different picture, same hole. He tried to poke his finger through it and it vanished and he was touching a picture of a new doubles champion. He read a paragraph of text and blinked and the empty square was there again. Neat and tidy and full of nothingness.

He stretched out on a couch. No hole appeared in the ceiling. His mouth was dry. How would a dry mouth help? What was his foolish body playing at? Then he remembered the B Strain, and he began to sweat. Perhaps he had whatever it was those lawyers had said his illegitimate brother got. And now his useless goddamn brain couldn't even remember the name of the disease.

He searched all day and failed to find the lawyers' business card. The thing was in none of the obvious places and in none of the ridiculous places. He hated to think he might have thrown it away.

A week later the Empty Hole stared at him from the cover of
Esquire.
The chances of inheriting the B Strain were fifty-fifty. His bastard brother got it either from his mother or from his father. If he got it from his father, then Michael J. Stagg probably had it too.

Part of the rental deal at Konigsberg was the tenants paid all the bills. Julie spread the monthly hits on the kitchen table. They drew blood. On a quick reckoning, she and Luis would be broke by Halloween.

The Swiss clinic con was split 50-50 with Hancock, and anyway they hadn't worked it for a month. Luis was always out
of town and Hancock said he couldn't do it alone. “We're a double act or we're nothing,” he said. Princess Chuckling Stream was at last selling her stuff, and keeping 66 percent of the take. That's what they'd agreed in Mexico. Julie got the rest.

Stevie was Stevie and Julie had begun to feel sorry for her father. Mrs. DiLazzari was against engaged couples living together, so Stevie stayed at Konigsberg and bored the backside off everyone with her wedding plans, until they bought her a Pontiac convertible so she could visit Vito any time. It wasn't often enough. And the car had made a serious hole in funds.

It was not a new situation. Living with Luis was always riches or poverty, sometimes both on the same day. No point in discussing it. She'd tried once, and he'd said: “Life is a roller-coaster. Plunging down creates the momentum for soaring up again.” His hands demonstrated.

“So losing money makes money? Grow up.”

“It makes money for somebody
else.
Money is like a tennis ball. Hit it hard enough and it bounces high.”

“No, you're wrong there. Making money is like riding a bicycle.”

“Now you're being absurd.” That had been the end of that.

Someone knocked on the front door. It was Agent Moody. “Hello,” she said. “Come to look for cadavers? The house is yours. Nobody else is home. I'm sick of the place.”

“My day off. Want to go somewhere? Anywhere.”

“Oh … why the hell not? It's your city, you choose.” She looked at his green station wagon. “Quaint. Can't see you hanging out the window, firing your Tommy gun at Dillinger.”

“That's why I like it. Fools people.”

He drove to the head of the canyon and turned east on Mulholland Drive. “Twenty miles of twists and turns,” he said. “Worst accident record in the county. I love it. Freeways are for robots.” After that they said nothing. He enjoyed driving; she liked the forests. But in the end he had to use a Freeway to get through Glendale and onto the Angeles Crest Highway, which was one long climb into the San Gabriel Mountains. He reached into the back of the car and dropped a sweater in her lap. She needed it. He took a turn-off and kept climbing and soon they were driving past mountain peaks. Finally they stopped on one.

“Mount Wilson,” he said. “Five thousand plus feet. Los Angeles is just over the edge. Take a running jump and you land on Foothill Boulevard.”

“You come here often?”

“Well, you know us G-men. Got to feed our delusions of power now and then.”

They walked past the observatory to a viewing platform.

“Down there, there's no natural water supply, some days the air is the color of Scotch, and sooner or later the geology is guaranteed to shake like a wet dog.” He spoke mildly. They were just facts. “Great place to build the biggest city west of Chicago.”

“Why d'you live here?”

“I often ask myself. Maybe it's the crime. LA loves crime. I blame Hollywood. Some guy, he never read a book in his life, he sticks up a bank, he talks just like Bogart, maybe better. Life imitates art.”

“I don't know who shot Tony Feet. I told you once, now I'm telling you again.”

“Sure.”

“I can do Veronica Lake, if that helps.”

He laughed. “You're not the homicidal type, Mrs. Conroy.”

“You married?”

“Twenty years.”

“Ever thought of killing your wife? Did it ever flicker through your mind? Just for a second?”

“Jeez, it's cold up here,” he said. They went down the mountain, he bought her lunch and drove her home.

Vito took his fiancée out to supper, to a place on Sunset Strip called The Body Shop. “Figure of speech,” he said. “We own a few stripper joints. Might buy this one.”

“Good investment,” Stevie said. “Skin never goes out of fashion.”

They watched the show. When the lights went up he said: “You like it?”

“Askin' the wrong person, Vito. If I was a guy, would I kick those lovelies out of bed? Beats me.”

“Forget the flesh. Can we make a big dollar? All the profit's in the bar. A sharp barman can skim ten percent and we're screwed.” A waiter brought menus. “Steaks,” Vito decided.

“So the strippers didn't light your fire,” she said.

“I didn't fall asleep. Want another drink?”

They had finished their steaks, and he was picking his teeth, politely, one hand hiding the action, when she said, “You think about stuff, don't you? I mean, UCLA an' all that, you got brains.”

“I beat the odds, yeah.”

“Reason I ask, the Bible says we all began with Adam and Eve. Maybe that's just flim-flam, but slice it where you like, there had to be a beginning, right? Human race couldn't start unless somewhere, sometime, a man and a woman forgot their manners and got their rocks off.”

“Want some dessert?”

“They weren't married. Nobody around to marry them.” She leaned forward and gave him a big smile. “But God never kicked their ass. In fact the Bible
approves.
Bible says they did good. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“It's a precedent, for Chrissake. Adam didn't feel bad, so why should you?”