Setup on Front Street (12 page)

OVER
the next week, I kept a low profile, or at least as low as it gets in this
town. Which means I walked back and forth from my rooming house to Mambo's
every day, using side streets.

Ortega managed to spot me on the street a
couple of times and patted me down for no good reason, just like he'd seen real
cops do on TV. He always made sure to tell me that they were working around the
clock to build a case against me. Then he added how much he was going to enjoy
leading me away in handcuffs.

As big of an asshole as he was, I didn't
think he was in Whitney's pocket. He really took all that cop shit seriously
and didn't strike me as the kind who could be easily bought.

It was
Wednesday, April tenth — all this cop talk, I sound like Joe Friday
myself. Actually, I mentioned the date because a week had gone by with nothing
from Ryder.

He was
looking more and more like a dead end.

Anyway, I was in Mambo's early that evening
enjoying a little
ropa vieja
with yellow rice and black beans. Mambo
insisted on feeding me, saying I hadn't been eating right since I got back home.
And he was right.

He had the best yellow rice in town, I mean
the very best. In Key West, with authentic Cuban restaurants all over the
place, that's saying a lot. The kernels were always, always separate, bursting
with flavor.

I drank the last of my beer right at the
end of the meal.

The place was dead, according to the empty
pool table and only one other occupied booth. A couple of guys sat at the bar
with their backs to me, watching the baseball game. Mambo finished with some
bolita business, then came out of the back room. On his way to my booth, he
caught the waiter's eye.

"
¡Eduardo!
¡Dos cervezas!"

Eduardo brought the beers and we sank into
heavy conversation. I told him everything that happened since my return, all
about Whitney, BK, Norma, and the Russians. The only part I left out was the
FBI shakedown.

Not that Mambo would worry about the FBI,
since he was strictly local, but I just didn't think he needed to know about
it.

Besides, how would it look? Me, a career
street guy, cozying up to the goddamn federals. I could hardly believe it
myself.

Mambo absorbed the whole story. He leaned
back in the booth and took another hit from his beer. Then he pulled a Cohiba
from his pocket, examining it for a moment.

The cigar apparently consumed his thoughts
for a few seconds. He toyed with it, rolling it around between his palms and
twirling it between his fingers like a magician. He decided against lighting it
for the time being, so he left it on the table, still in its wrapper.

"My brother," he said in Spanish,
"I have to tell you that I have heard through my family that Wilson
Whitney is very upset with you. You must be careful.
El tiene mucho poder
."

Whenever Mambo heard something
"through his family", you knew it was serious.

I replied, "I know he's powerful. And
I've heard he's not too thrilled with me. But he's after Norma,
me entendés?"

"The word is you interfered with BK's
arrangement with her. And you also insulted Whitney in his home. That really
pissed him off, from what I hear."

"Well, why, then, does he bring the
top Russky hitman in the entire fucking country down here to dust Norma? His
own goons can't do it? I mean, we're small potatoes, right?
Fue solo un insulto pequeño
. So what's
the big deal? Why all the high-priced firepower?"

Mambo finally surrendered to the temptation
of the Cohiba. He unwrapped it, then clipped the tip.

After going through his sniffing and
lighting routine, he finally said through a cloud of smoke, "
Para mandarte un mensaje
."

"Send me a message? What
message?"

"To make you think that killing both
Sullivan and Norma was in response to your meeting with Whitney."

He puffed on his cigar, but I could tell he
had more to say. I let him go on.

"I think Sullivan was killed for
another reason altogether. And you came back to town at the right time,
conveniently, to take the blame."

He took another big puff on the cigar,
watching the smoke trail off to his right, toward the deserted pool table.

"¿
Por
qué, Mambo?
Why was Sully killed?"

He contemplated that one for a minute. I
could tell he was thinking of the right way to put it as he swigged from his
beer bottle.

He carefully placed his Cohiba in a big
ceramic tray.

"The Russian mafia is making
preparations to bring their enterprise to Cuba once Castro goes. I mean
everything. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, government corruption, everything.
They've made a deal with Whitney to establish their base here in Key West using
his influence, his real estate connections. Owning him, in other words. I think
Sullivan got in the way somehow."

"Sully? He had no interest in the
Russians. How was he in the way?"

"Maybe they wanted the building his
bar was in. I don't know. But it was enough to get him killed. The Russians
consider Key West a very important point of departure into Cuba. When Castro
goes, they're positive they can move right across the straits and set up shop
there without any problem. You know, because they're Russians, and because the
Soviet Union was in Cuba for so long."

A wry smile slid across his face.

"But they'd be wrong?" I asked.

 
"Dead wrong."

His smile now a shade wider, he said,
"What they don't realize is that, after more than forty years under the
communist bootheel, and with Russian domination of Castro that whole time, the
Cuban people have had it with them. I'm not saying the Russians will be thrown
out on their asses, but it's going to be very, very difficult for them."

"How do you know this, man?"

His voice lowered a little through the
thick cigar smoke. "The Key West-Cuba connection is much stronger, much
deeper than anything they could come up with. Much older, too. Older than the
Soviet Union itself.
Tú sabes eso, mi
hermano
. Key Westers and Cubans share a special bond."

I gave him a nod.

He went on: "Our peoples have
intermingled back and forth across the straits for over a hundred and fifty
years. What I mean is, the Russians aren't the only ones waiting for Castro to
leave power."

Up at the bar, the two guys watching the
baseball game became aroused over a big play at the plate. They started
shouting at the TV.

Mambo continued, his voice hushed. "My
family has been preparing for that day for years now. We go to Cuba at least
once a month to meet with our family members over there."

"I remember they were doing that when
I was growing up. In fact, I remember seeing you and your brother leave on your
family's boat from over in Key West Bight."

He nodded. "We've spent years making
the necessary arrangements with the right people, the younger people, who will
be in positions of power in the post-Fidel era. We've arranged to get the first
gaming licenses awarded, and we've got our choice of hotels. Not only that,
we've already got the rights lined up to import many necessary products like
meat, liquor, and a lot of the things the big hotels and casinos are going to
need. By the time the Russians get there, we'll already be in place, and
they'll have to face a population that is fed up with Russians
altogether."

This guy never failed to amaze me. Him and
his whole family.

We talked a little more, then he ended with
the caution, "But I tell you again, the Russians are not to be taken
lightly.
Ten mucho cuidado, mi hermano."

Mambo never tossed warnings around loosely.
If he gave you the glare and told you to be careful, you better do it.

I left his place that night by the back
door and returned to my rooming house, mostly by way of the little off-street
lanes, staying in the shadows.

THE
ringing phone jarred me out of a sound sleep.

I picked up right before the second ring,
mumbling something like a hello.

"Doyle," Ryder said, "meet
me at the Casa Marina for breakfast in thirty minutes."

My eyes could barely open as I shook myself
awake.

"What time is it?"

"Six-thirty."

"Jesus! What — what the hell are
you doing calling —"

"Your government never sleeps, pal.
Just get your ass up and get over to the Casa Marina."

"And what's with The Casa Marina?
That's one of the swankiest hotels in town. What are you, pulling some kind of
expense account scam?"

"This is no scam. I've got something
for you."

"Oh, you've got something?" I
rasped as I finally snapped into second gear. "Then you can give it to me
someplace where we won't be seen by any of Whitney's friends who might well be
having breakfast in the Casa Marina themselves. Hmph! Where the fuck do they
find you guys, anyway?"

"Well … where do you suggest,
then?"

"Try the Waffle House on North
Roosevelt. Think you can handle that, hotshot?"

"Okay, okay. Just be there in thirty
minutes."

≈≈≈

There were the usual assortment of early morning types at the
Waffle House, most of them slurping down coffee in order to catapult themselves
into their day's work. No chance of encountering any of Whitney's crowd in here
under the harsh fluorescent lighting.

Ryder was waiting for me. At least he had
sense enough to take a booth in the back. I sat down and poured coffee from the
pot on the table. Also on the table was his new cellular telephone, sitting
upright between us like a plastic statue.

"Where've you been?" I asked.
"It's been over a week."

"I told you it would take time."

"Yeah, and in the meanwhile, Vasiliev
is running around on the loose."

Ryder poured cream into his coffee, then
stirred it slowly.

"How do you know that?"

"Never mind how I know. Before you get
started, let me tell you what I've come up with."

He sat back. "Okay. Let's have
it."

I drew a warm pull from my coffee.

"Whitney and the Russians are working
together, just like you thought. The Russians want to move into Cuba when the Beard
kicks off. They're cutting deals with Whitney to use Key West as a preliminary
kind of base camp. And when they move into Cuba, they're bringing their whole
operation with them.
 
Not just girls and
gambling, but drugs, the heavy weapons trade, corruption, and all the rest of
it."

Ryder picked up on it, showing surprise in
his eyes.

"Which means they're essentially
looking to retake Cuba for themselves."

I didn't tell him about the DeLimas' plans
to inconvenience the Russians. Instead, I stayed on topic.

"And I'm told that Sullivan was killed
because he was in the way, although I don't know how."

"I might have some information on
that."

He shoved his coffee cup out of the way to
make room for his briefcase on the table. He opened it and out came a plain
manila folder. "But first, let me show you this."

He opened the folder to reveal an
eight-by-ten photo. "This is Vasiliev."

He handed the photo to me. I looked at the
black-and-white surveillance picture of a youngish guy, maybe in his late
twenties. He wore an expensive leather coat that came down to the middle of his
thighs while he stood by a vehicle as if he were about to get into it. It was
dark-colored.

A Land Rover.

Ryder moved that photo aside.

"And here's a closeup."

This was a tighter shot of his face. Not a
mug shot, but one of him in a candid moment, like he posed for it with some
other people at a party or somewhere. I could see blurry figures of other
people in the background.

This close, I saw the beginnings of lines
around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. His one-sided struggle with
time had begun. I revised my estimate of his age to be around thirty-five.

But there was no mistaking one thing.

He was a killer, all right.

Even though he was smiling in the picture,
he had that same cold, vacant look in his eyes that I'd seen in so many other
eyes before.

Ryder went on. "He's thirty-five years
old. He came to this country a few years ago with the first real wave of
Russian mobsters. They were the ones who'd bought their way out of the USSR
during the last years of communism."

I'd heard about the fall of communism while
I was inside, and the subsequent mass arrivals of the Russian gangsters on our
shores.

He said, "Anyway, we don't quite have
all the names and numbers yet, but we do know that this Vasiliev is one of the
top shooters for the entire US branch of the mob. The big boys up in Brighton
Beach sent him down to Fort Lauderdale a couple of years ago when they were
getting their Broward County operation set up. He runs a little group of thugs
who provide all the muscle, and he's constantly seen in the company of the mob
bosses. They turn to him whenever they have contracts on important people. Like
the guy who was running for Broward commission last time out."

Ryder looked at me like I should know the
rest of the story. My blank face told him I didn't, so he rolled his eyes,
vibing lots of impatience.

"You may remember this. The guy was a
real reformer type. Law and order all the way. He saw the threat the Russians
posed, and he promised to send 'em back to Mother Russia."

"It doesn't ring a bell."

"Well, one night he and his wife were
snatched in a brightly-lit restaurant parking lot. Local cops found their body
parts a few days later stuffed into two 55-gallon oil drums in a dump in Oakland
Park."

You know, it's one thing to do somebody who
needs doing, or who really deserves it. But this politician, all he apparently
did was mouth off to get some attention. They all do that, for Chrissakes. I
mean, that's what politicians were born to do.

A little slapping around would've shut him
up.

But then, to chop up his
wife
?

"Okay," I said. "What about
Whitney and his Russian trip?"

"That took me a little time. I had to
call Washington. Like I told you, I have a friend over at State. He went to
—"

"State?"

"The State Department, Doyle. You
know? Like, where the Secretary of State works?"

"Oh-h-h," I said, pretending this
was all a great revelation to me.

If he was going to wake me up with the damn
chickens, I was at least going to get a laugh or two out of the deal.

"Anyway," he continued, "my
friend at State, he works for the Assistant Secretary for European and Canadian
Affairs, and he had to call a friend of his at the Special Issuance Agency for
the —"

"Shit, Ryder! Enough of the government
mumbo-jumbo. Just tell me what you've got."

I had to take a big coffee hit. His
bureaucratic doubletalk was making the room spin right before my eyes.

He got indignant on me.

"Look, I went to a lot of trouble to
get this. And I violated FBI regulations by going interdepartmental. So don't
give me —"

"FBI regulations? You mean like our
little chat the other night in that abandoned bakery? That was in line with FBI
regulations? Did J Edgar include that in his training manual? Or that part
about how you were gonna frame me for a stickup if I didn't help you get
Whitney? Is that in the new FBI playbook?"

"Bullshit, Doyle. That was —"

I shut him up. "Don't be pulling that
righteous shit on me, G-Man. We're not kidding anybody here. We both want the
same thing, and we're both willing to step over the line to get it."

The waitress brought his breakfast, some
kind of omelet with toast. She asked me if I wanted a menu. I was hungry, but I
didn't want to break bread with this asshole.

I waved her off, then poured more coffee
into the thick white cup in front of me.

Ryder didn't say anything for a minute or
two. He started fiddling with the eggs on his plate, buttering his toast, that
kind of thing. Eventually, he looked up from his food.

"Two years ago this month, Whitney Senior
flew to Miami, then to New York to begin his international mission of good
will. Records show he spent the night in New York, although he could've made an
easy connection that afternoon on a Lufthansa flight to Moscow via Frankfurt.
He stays at a medium-priced hotel out by Kennedy Airport, then takes the very
same Lufthansa flight the next afternoon."

"Any proof he saw the Russians in New
York?"

"No. But whatever his reason for
staying, it may well have been because he wanted to be near Kennedy Airport … which
is very close to Brooklyn."

"Which is the American home … of the
Russian mob."

"Bingo." He seemed quite
surprised that I knew that. "So, the next day, Whitney flies to Moscow. He
spends the night there, then on to Odessa the following morning. Now, Odessa
isn't really in Russia. It's in Ukraine, but they all speak Russian there,
because it used to be part of the old USSR, and Odessa just happens to be the
headquarters for worldwide Russian organized crime."

He stopped talking for a second. It looked
like he was going to dig into his breakfast, but he put his fork down instead
and continued. "He's there in Odessa another day and a half, after which
he makes the short flight down to the town of Sevastopol, on the Black Sea
coast. That's the so-called sister city of Key West. He spends the afternoon
shaking hands and cutting ribbons, then it's back to Odessa for two more days.
Then, Moscow for another day, New York for a full day and night, then back
home."

"In other words, a ten-day trip, all
for a few hours in the sister city."

"Right."

He paused and finally took a bite of his
food, which must've been getting cold by this time.

"Now, we don't have any record of who
he saw or who he spoke with during his time in New York, Moscow, or Odessa,
because we weren't tailing him. In fact, I'm damn lucky to have gotten this
information at all. You know, Doyle, this stuff is really hard to come by, even
within the government. All this happened during the Cold War, and there were
strict regulations against —"

I put my hands to my ears.

"Spare me any more government
bullshit. Please!"

"All right, all right."

He swirled some of his eggs around on the
plate. They looked terrible. He apparently had the same idea because he didn't
eat any more of them.

Instead, he pulled his cigarette pack out
of his shirt pocket and shook one loose. He torched it with his Bic, set at
flamethrower level.

"And that brings us to your friend
Sullivan."

I felt myself bend forward in anticipation.
I was sure, though, that he didn't catch it.

"What'd you find?"

"Well,
I have to tell you that it took me several hours on the phone. I had to lean on
this guy I know at the Treasury Department. I say I know him. Actually, I
barely know him. I really had to persuade him into helping me out. But he eventually
steered me to the right person at the commissioners' office of the SEC, and let
me tell you, that was no day at the beach. They shuttled me off to the Division
of Investment Management. There, I got some twenty-one-year-old girl on the
phone who put me through to the Bureau of —"

"Ryder!"

He flinched. "Hey! You were pretty
impatient, mister, with all your talk about me taking so long to get this
information. You have no idea what it takes."

"Alright already. So I have no idea. Cut
to the chase."

He calmed down a little. So did I. He
paused for the all-important dramatic effect while he puffed on his cigarette.

Do they teach these guys this shit at the
FBI Academy?

"It may interest you to know that on
May 3, 1989, more than a year after you went inside, Sullivan opened a rather
large account with a Miami investment management firm. According to the
Securities and Exchange Commission records, a little over four hundred thousand
dollars, to be exact."

I'll
be damned. So Sully was telling the truth after all.

"Go on," I said.

"It wouldn't surprise me if that
figure coincided exactly with what you guys took down in that swindle out in
Las Vegas."

"Go on," I said again, waving
smoke away from my face.

"Okay, you ready for this? The
investment company that took your money is called Adams Securities. They appear
to be only a semi-legitimate firm."