Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (25 page)

 
          
Vigano
slept for most of the trip. He was lucky that way, he could sleep on planes,
and for that reason he tried to do as much of his traveling as possible late at
night. Otherwise, too much time was wasted going from place to place.

 
          
He
was riding in a Lear
jet,
a private company plane
owned and operated by a corporation called K-L Inc. K-L’s function was to own
and care for and run the fleet of six planes that were available around the
country to Vigano and some of his associates. The company also leased hanger
space in Miami and Las Vegas and two other places, and in addition owned some
real estate in the Caribbean. It had been financed by a private stock offering
a few years ago, most of which had been bought by various union pension funds.
Its assets were the planes and the island real estate, but its expenses were
very high and it had never shown a profit, and so had never paid taxes or
dividends.

           
The interior of the plane was
comfortable, but not lush, in a kind of motel-lobby style. There was seating
for eight, large soft chairs similar to first-class accommodations on a
scheduled airliner, except that the front pairs of seats faced backwards and
there was an unusual amount of leg room. Aft of the seats was a partition,
followed by a dining area; a long oval table that would also seat eight, around
three sides, leaving one of the long sides open for passage. A lavatory and
galley came next, and farthest back was a bedroom containing two single beds.
That was where Vigano traveled, sleeping on one of the beds while his two
bodyguards sat up front, joking with the hostess, a girl who used to be a
dancer until she’d had to have an operation on her hip. She was a beautiful
girl, and her former bosses had done right by her.

 
          
The
hostess came back finally and knocked on the bedroom door, calling, “Mr.
Vigano?”

 
          
He
woke up right away. His eyes opened, but he didn’t move. He was lying on his
right side, and he looked around, shifting only his eyes, until he’d oriented
himself. He’d left one small light on, over the door, and it showed
him
the other bed, the curving plastic wall of the plane, the two oval windows
looking out on nothing but blackness.

 
          
On the plane.
Going to see Bandell about
the stock market robbery.
Right.

 
          
Vigano
sat up. “All right,” he called.

 
          
“We’ll
be landing in five minutes.” She said that through the door, not opening it.

 
          
Of
course they’d be landing in five
minutes,
otherwise
she wouldn’t be waking him. “Thank you,” he said, and reached for his trousers
on the other bed.

 
          
He’d
stripped to his underwear for the flight, and now he quickly dressed, then
opened his attach^ case and out of the small separate compartment in it took
his toothbrush and toothpaste. Carrying them in one hand and his tie in the
other, he left the bedroom for the lavatory.

 
          
The
hostess was in the galley, doing this and that. She smiled at him and said,
“Coffee, Mr. Vigano?”

 
          
“Definitely.”

 
          
He
didn’t take long in the lavatory, and then he carried his attache case up front
to the regular seats to have his coffee and watch the landing. His bodyguards
were sitting facing one another on the right, so he took the forwardfacing
window seat on the left. The bodyguards were named Andy and Mike, and Vigano never
called them bodyguards. He didn’t even think the word; they were just the young
guys he traveled with. They both carried their own attach^ cases, and they were
presentable in a tough kind of way, and he simply traveled with them because
that’s what he did.

 
          
Vigano
sipped at his coffee and looked out the window at the lights of the city. You
could always tell a resort town, it ran much heavier to neon. A place like
Cleveland, now, you could hardly see any neon from the air at all.

 
          
Andy,
grinning, said, “Mr. Vigano, it’s a waste of time to come here in the summer.
We ought to come for the winter.”

 
          
Vigano
smiled back. “Maybe I’ll work something out,” he said. He liked these two boys.

 
          
It
was a smooth landing. They taxied away from the normal passenger terminals and
over to the private area. When they rolled to a stop a black limousine drove
out to meet them. Vigano and the two young men he traveled with picked up their
attache cases, thanked the hostess, congratulated the pilot on his landing, and
stepped out into incredible heat. “Christ,” Andy said “What’s it like in the
daytime?”

 
          
“Worse,”
Vigano said
The
heat lay on his skin like a wool
blanket It made New Jersey seem cool.

 
          
They
crossed quickly to the limousine, and slid inside, where the air was a cool,
dry seventy degrees. The chauffeur shut the door after them, slid behind the
wheel, and drove them smoothly to the hotel. It was nearly four in the morning,
and the streets were deserted; even a resort city goes to sleep sooner or
later.

 
          
They
had another blast of heat between the car and side entrance of the hotel. They
were also put on film, though it didn’t matter, by a team of federal agents
concealed in a bakery truck parked on a side road just off the hotel property.
It was infra-red film and the faces were blurred, but they already knew who it
was they were filming, so there wasn’t any problem about identification. This
strip of film would eventually join the strip that had been taken earlier
tonight outside Vigano’s home in New Jersey, and the two strips would establish
the fact that on this date Anthony Vigano had gone to a meeting with Joseph
Bandell. The fact would never mean anything to anybody, but it would have been
established and placed on film and filed away, at a cost to the government of
forty-two thousand dollars.

 
          
Vigano
and his bodyguards rode up in the elevator to the twelfth floor, and walked
down the corridor to Bandell’s suite, at the end. They went in and Bandell was
there with his advisers. “Hello, Tony,” he said.

 
          
“Hello,
Joe.”

 
          
They
spent a few minutes in civilities, taking drink orders and asking after one
another’s wives and making the couple of introductions necessary; one of
Bandell’s assistants was a new man freshly in from Los Angeles, named Stello.
There were handshakes and general chitchat.

 
          
Bandell
was stocky and short and gray-haired, a man in his sixties, wearing a dark suit
and a conservative tie. The three men with him were in their thirties or
forties, tanned, all dressed casually in the style of a resort town. Everybody
deferred to Bandell, who sat alone on a sofa with his back to a picture window.
Vigano was the only one present who called him Joe instead of Mr. Bandell, but
he too deferred to the older man, in smaller ways.

 
          
After
three or four minutes, Bandell said, “Well, it’s nice to see you again. I’m gl
?d
you phoned. I’m glad you could take the time to come
visit.”

 
          
He
meant the chitchat was done, and he wanted to know the purpose of the trip.
Vigano hadn’t attempted to explain anything on the phone, had only suggested he
make the trip. (The phone conversation was also in a government file now, at a
cost of twenty-three hundred dollars.) Now, in guaranteed privacy, Vigano set
aside the drink he’d been given and explained the story of the two possible
cops and the twelve-million-dollar stock-market heist.

 
          
Bandell
interrupted once, saying, “It’s usable paper?”

 
          
“They
took exactly what I said, Joe.
Bearer bonds, in amounts
between twenty and a hundred grand.”

 
          
Bandell
nodded.
“All right.”

 
          
Vigano
went on, explaining the payoff terms he’d agreed to. When he was finished,
Bandell pursed his lips and looked across the room and said, “I don’t know. Two
million dollars is heavy cash.”

 
          
Vigano
said, “It’ll be back in the bank within two hours.” Because that was the point
of this meeting; he couldn’t draw two million cash on his own say-so, he needed
Bandell’s approval.

           
Bandell said, “Why take it out at
all? Use a bag full of newspapers.”

 
          
“They
aren’t that dumb,” Vigano told him. “The caper they pulled shows how cute they
are.”

 
          
“Then
use a dressed roll,” Bandell said. “Take out a hundred thousand or so.”

 
          
Vigano
shook his head. “It won’t work, Joe. They’re very cute and very cautions.
They’ll have to see the two million before they relax. They’ll reach in and see
what’s in the bottom of the basket.”

 
          
Bandell
said, “How about wallpaper?”

 
          
“They
already talked about that,” Vigano said. “They’re ready for it”

 
          
Stello,
the new man, said, “If they’re that good, how
do you
know they won’t figure out a way to keep the money?”

 
          
“We’ve
got the manpower,” Vigano said. “We can smother them.”

 
          
Another
of Bandell’s assistants said, “Why not leave them alive? If they did this first
job so good they can do more.”

 
          
“We
don’t have anything on them,” Vigano pointed out. “We don’t know who they are,
we don’t have any handle on them, and they don’t want to do any more. They were
only interested in the one job. They’re amateurs, they said so from the
beginning and they acted like it”

 
          
“Smart
amateurs,” suggested Stello.

 
          
“Granted,”
Vigano said.
“But still amateurs.
Which
means they could still make a mistake and get picked up by the law, and that
leads right directly from them to me.
”

 
          
Bandell
said, “Are they cops or aren’t they?”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Vigano said. “We tried to find them in the
force,
we asked around with our tame cops, nobody knows anything. I myself personally
looked at mug shots on twenty-six thousand New York City cops, and I didn’t
come up with them, but that doesn’t mean anything because the guy came to me in
a wig and moustache and eyeglasses, and who knows what he looks like with his
normal face?”

 
          
Bandell’s
other assistant said, “Why didn’t you take the disguise off him when you had
him?”

 
          
“That
was before he pulled the job,” Vigano pointed out. “If I broke his security
ahead of time, he never would have gone through with it.”

           
Bandell said, “What do you think,
Tony?
You yourself, personally.
Are they cops or not
cops?”

 
          
“I
just don’t know,” Vigano told him. “The guy who came to me said he was on the
force. They pulled the job in uniform and used a police car for their getaway.
But I’ll tell you, I don’t know for sure what the hell they are.”

 
          
Stello
said, “If they’re cops, maybe it’s not such a good idea to have them hit.”

 
          
“If
they’re cops especially I want them hit,” Vigano said. “One of them visited me
in my own home, remember.”

 
          
Bandell
said, “If you do it, you do it quietly.”