Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (18 page)

“That’s the way I’ve always felt about baseball.”

The old man shook his head. “Baseball I no like. Is
morto,
boring. Wrestling I like.” He raised his small hands and made a gripping, choking gesture. “This Rocca, is
Italiano
—he kill people!” He laughed happily. “Watch the television, is
miracolo.
Every night, wrestling,
pugliato….
” He assumed a boxer’s stance.

“Boxing.”

“Sì.
Marciano, eh?” Toscanini raised his right fist, his eyes suddenly ablaze, a wild, crooked grin on his face.

“He’s a brute,” I said.

“Sì! Bruto! Un toro
—a bull! Then …” The Maestro sighed, his expression turned dour. “Then we go San Francisco, FBI come on train, say to me, ‘Maestro, is danger from
fascisti.’”

“Danger of kidnapping.”

The Maestro shook his head. “No kidnap.” He raised his right hand, cocked his thumb and index finger.
“Assassinio!
”

“The FBI came to you and said there was a plot to shoot you.”

“Sì.”

“During a concert?”

“Shoot during concert?”

“Yes.”

The Maestro shrugged. “During, before, after
… no conosco
… this they don’t tell me.”

“And you saw their badges, you were sure these guys were really FBI?”

“My son Walter brings them in, says, ‘Papa, these are FBI, have to talk to you.’” Toscanini looked down at those fabulous slippers, then threw me a sideways glance. “Why you ask that, Detective? Who you think they are?”

“I have no idea. I’m just asking.”

“Because you are good detective.”

“That’s right. So then what happened, they arranged for you to disappear?”

“They tell me when we get to this place, Sun Valley, yes? You hear of this?”

“Sure. Sun Valley, Idaho. Big skiing town.”

“Sì.
There, they say, they take me off this …
macchina.
”

“The chairlift.”

“Sì.
They will take me off
macchina,
then they will say Maestro is sick and since tour is almost over, they get someone else to finish last few concerts. I say get Cantelli or maybe Leinsdorf.” I didn’t know who the hell he was talking about, so I just nodded. Obviously, they hadn’t informed the old man that they had cooked up a double. And the FBI? I was highly dubious that the Bureau could have been involved in what seemed, at least thus far, to be a remarkably heady and sophisticated operation. Most G-men I had met couldn’t find their asses with a five-minute head start.

“So they told you that after Sun Valley, NBC would just move in a new conductor and announce that you had taken ill.”

“Sì.
” The old man turned and looked over my shoulder.
“Ecco!
My friend.”

I turned around.

Walking toward us was none other than that man of multiple nomenclature, Giuseppe LaMarca.

“Who’s this guy?” I innocently asked the Maestro.

“This,” said Toscanini, “is my friend, Signore LaMarca.”

“Using your real name,” I called out to LaMarca. “That’s a sign of respect, I take it.”

LaMarca was wearing a lightweight tan suit and a Panama hat and looked to be passing himself off as a plantation owner. He grasped Toscanini’s hand and kissed his ring finger.

“You know this man?” Toscanini asked LaMarca. “Signore Detective.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.” LaMarca’s voice was thin and raspy. “Giuseppe LaMarca, but everybody calls me Joey.”

“They call you a lot of things.” I said to him. “I’m Jack LeVine.”

“Yes.” LaMarca nodded, leaned closer to Toscanini. “Maestro, I need to talk to Mr. LeVine here for a couple of minutes. Are you all right, or should I send someone up?”

“No,
grazie.
I take a little walk,”

“You want me to send Walter up?”

“No Walter. Am fine.” Toscanini smiled at me. “You feel better, Signore Detective?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Thanks for asking. I have to say that it was a very great honor to meet you, sir.”

Toscanini just nodded. There was no false modesty; he knew it was an honor to meet or even to be in the same room with him. The old man didn’t bask in his glory, he just lived in it. Like the Mona Lisa, or Michelangelo’s David, he was a work of art. He perspired, he breathed in and breathed out, but that was where his resemblance to mortal humankind ended.

Toscanini jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and took off for his stroll down the deck. I was left standing alone with LaMarca, or whatever the hell he was calling himself at this particular instant.

“Beautiful morning,” he began. “Little cloudy, but I like the clouds sometimes. If the sun was out, we’d be boiling to death out here.”

“You always dress like this, Joey? Or you just impressing the Maestro?”

“I gotta say, he’s like a god to me, the old man. I don’t give a rat’s ass about music, but he’s the real goods. Two minutes you talk to him, you’ll follow him anywhere. Reminds me a little of Lucky in that regard, you know? That same type of dynamic personality.”

“And you’re out here protecting him from the forces of fascism, that’s the story?”

LaMarca placed a short stout cigar in his mouth and lit it up, turning the stogie slowly and with great ceremony, the smoke billowing out to sea like a genie escaping from a bottle.

“Something like that,” he finally said.

“The old man thinks the FBI is protecting him. He just told me that.”

“He did?”

“He can’t think
you’re
with the FBI.”

LaMarca chuckled, the laugh turning into a wheeze. “He don’t ask who I am. I’m Italian—that’s good enough. He knows I’m looking out for him.”

“And his son Walter? He really thought that it was FBI agents who showed up at the hotel?”

“They did come, FBI agents. That was the truth.”

“To tell the old man he was in danger from some fascist lunatics still holding a grudge from the war?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t.”

“No. And I don’t think the FBI whacked me on the head and doped me up and brought me out here, and I don’t think they killed Fritz Stern, either, although I’m not saying it’s impossible. God knows the FBI’s done a lot worse.”

LaMarca took the cigar from his mouth and studied it as if appraising an uncut diamond. “These go for two bucks a pop, can you believe it? But they’re worth every fucking penny. Best thing about Cuba, far as I’m concerned, the cigars and the hookers, who are out of this world.”

“I didn’t have a chance to find out.”

“Next time,” LaMarca said amiably, as if discussing a favorite restaurant. “It’s not just that they’re gorgeous and hot and know every trick in the book, but they’re
friendly.
They don’t make you feel like they’re doing you a favor. There’s some heart to it.”

“You want heart from a whore.”

“I do. Absolutely. I always had a romantic streak, which makes me different from most other mugs. Although the Yid has one, too. A romantic side.”

“Lansky?”

“Yeah.” LaMarca looked at me with no expression at all. “He was really nuts about that fiddlers daughter. Talked about her all the time.”

“She’s quite the young woman.”

“Certainly is. In every respect.” He placed the priceless cigar back in his yap, looked back over that restless, roiling ocean. “Can’t imagine the Yid would be all that happy about you boffing her.”

“I didn’t boff her, Joey. The festivities got broken up pretty early.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“It was quite the coincidence, I must say—those apes breaking the door down at that particular moment in time. Educate me, Joey, because so much of this seems out of kilter—was this whole thing a setup? Did Lansky ask Barbara Stern to lead me along until he could smash my skull in? It doesn’t really add up. He could have had me jumped the minute I walked into the Nacional. Why bring her into it?”

“Doesn’t seem logical, does it, Jack?”

“Couldn’t have been Barbara’s idea, could it?” That hardly seemed possible, even to a garden-variety paranoid like me.

“That’s hard to buy, Jack, but, tell you the truth, I can’t say for sure.” LaMarca shook his head, demonstrating heartfelt confusion. “I been out on this boat since Thursday night. Flew down right after Stern’s funeral.”

“How come you were there?”

“At the funeral? Meyer asked me to. He didn’t feel he could make the trip.”

“Because of the girl’s family.”

“Maybe. I didn’t ask. He’s not the type of individual who invites a lot of questions.”

“I can imagine. How long have you worked for him?”

“I work for me, Jack.”

“No you don’t. You worked for Lucky, then you worked for Anastasia, and now it looks like you’re with Meyer, unless you’re just on loan from Anastasia. Or are you still with Lucky?”

LaMarca pulled a stray bit of tobacco from his tongue.

“You’re making this very complicated, Jack.”

“I’m
making this complicated? As far as I can see,
none
of it makes a goddamn bit of sense. NBC flies me down here to find the old man. Fine, I come down. No sooner do I check in than Lansky invites me to share a couple of gallons of water with him. I do so, and after maybe ten minutes of chitchat, Barbara Stern waltzes in, and the next thing I know, Lansky is on his feet excusing himself and I’m off to dinner with possibly the most beautiful girl in the Western Hemisphere. We have a quiet, friendly, sober dinner and then I proceed, against all dictates of common sense, to crawl into bed with her. The party has barely begun when a grand piano falls on my head, followed by what I presume was enough morphine to keep Man O’War quiet for the weekend. When I come out of my stupor, I find myself I don’t know how many miles at sea, headed I know not where, strolling the decks with Arturo Toscanini. Given that everyone was clearly lying in wait for me, why in the name of God was I brought down’ here in the first place? Why not let me just chase my tail in New York?”

“We have too much respect for you, Jack.”

“That’s a total crock of shit. You’re trying to distract me, that’s all this cockamamy trip is about. You want me out of New York and out of circulation. You snatched the old man and now you snatched me. I feel like a grade-A nitwit.”

LaMarca puffed on his cigar. “Jack, think about it a little—we didn’t fly you down here, did we?”

“NBC did, ostensibly.”

“So there you are. There’s your answer”

“You’re saying that NBC brought me down here to get me out of the way?”

“I’m not saying anything, Jack. I’m just talking.”

“You were sitting next to Sidney Aaron at the funeral. I gotta presume you two cooked this up.”

“Too much presuming, Jack. I know Sidney from way back. Whenever he has a labor problem, he knows to give us a call.”

“He told me he never met you before.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” LaMarca smiled. “I’m a nefarious character, right? Why should a guy like that admit he has knowledge of me? Those guys use us because they have to, Jack, not because they want to. I’m sure he’s embarrassed he ever met me.”

I was getting more befuddled by the second, and I didn’t think it was the drugs.

“Listen,” I told LaMarca. “If you, or you and NBC, or you and NBC and Lucky Luciano or the fascists and the FBI, or whoever is behind this fucking insanity—if one of you thought I was getting in the way in New York, why not just plug me like you plugged Fritz?”

“We didn’t plug Fritz.”

“Give me a break.”

“Why should we? Nice gentleman like that, the father of Meyer’s ex-girlfriend? Does that make any sense, that we would hit him? Think about it.”

“I did think about it. So if not you, who? NBC?”

“That I wouldn’t know. I doubt it.”

“You do.”

“Yeah.”

“But they’re involved in this snatch.”

LaMarca’s eyes narrowed. It didn’t make him any better-looking.

“There’s no snatch. I thought you understood that, Jack. We pulled the Maestro off the tour for his own protection. There’s plenty of these Mussolini-lovers still running around and they hate the old man’s guts. He’s on this boat for his own best interests. I don’t know why you can’t see that, Jack. Instead of ranting and raving about NBC and saying me and Sidney Aaron bumped off this fiddler, why not consider the possibility that it was these fucking fascists who went after Stern and things got out of hand?”

“Joe, why the hell would the fascists kill Stern? He’s looking for Toscanini, they’re looking for Toscanini. There’s no reason for them to bump him off.”

“I agree, not unless things got out of hand. That’s what I think happened.”

“You do.”

“Absolutely. These fascist bastards get wind—I don’t know how but they do, probably they still got spies everywhere—they get wind that Stern suspects the old man is missing. They call him that night and set up a meet; they’re looking to pick his brain. He goes down there to the West Side, suddenly finds out who he’s dealing with, Nazi lovers, and of course, a Jewish fella like that, he panics. Maybe he tries to run, they plug him. They’re animals, you know that, Jack. They’ll plug anybody.”