John thing. It has brought a lot of federal heat into that town. Our financial involvement in his firm is extremely well hidden, but we need this resolved as soon as possible. Be casual but thorough.”
“It will be like old times!” enthused Gid.
The two Mafia soldiers looked like ravens in their black pants and their black shirts hanging out to hide the handguns on their belts. They patrolled the palm grove in a sort of figure eight, so nobody could point a shotgun mike at the windows of the suite.
Pale green fronds clacked overhead, laid lacy patterns of light and shadow over the faces and somber clothes. They stopped to chat between the almost red trunks of the date palms. One man was short, wide, sloppy, with black hair sprouting at his wrists and on the backs of his fingers and growing low and curly over his forehead. More hair sprouted into the open V-neck of his black polo shirt. His Beretta 92 was considered a classic, but he couldn’t hit anything with it from over three feet away.
“Hey, Red, I’m gettin’ fuckin’ sick of walkin’ around in circles in the fuckin’ desert,” he said.
His partner was a very large redhead with an open face and twinkling blue eyes and a boozer’s complexion. His drink actually was carrot juice and he could bench-press six hundred pounds. On his hip he wore a Colt-clone. 45 auto loaded with subsonic rounds that made it effective yet remarkably quiet when fired. He was an excellent shot.
“Tell it to Mr. Prince,” he said. “Hell, Tony, you’re in here under the trees, in an oasis-soft duty.”
“This an oasis? So where’s the fuckin’ belly dancers?”
A bluejay-sized bird with a long beak soared into the palm tree directly over their heads with a loud whistle. When he flew, red patches showed on his wings. Tony went into a shooter’s crouch at the cry, straightened up sheep-faced.
“I didn’t know there was any fuckin’ birds in the desert except them ravens and those big buzzards always soarin’ around.”
“How long you lived in Vegas, Tony?”
“Three, four years.”
“And you never see any birds?”
“Just ones with tits an’ hair between their legs. Anyway, what’s eighteen inches long and makes a woman scream when she wakes up in the morning?”
Before Red could answer, a man appeared, walking quietly through the trees, dark-haired and lean and moving like an athlete. A pair of binoculars was around his neck, a canteen was on one hip, and a skinny paperback book was in one hand.
Red slid over to confront him without seeming to, beaming at the binoculars. “Those Zeiss-Ikon glasses?”
“Good Lord no, I got ’em at Eddie Bauer’s!” The man held up the slim glossy paperback. “I use ’em for bird- watching.” At that instant the bird above them whistled again, then arrowed away. “Did you see that? A red- shafted flicker!” He opened the book to the back page and began writing in it with a ballpoint pen. “I can add it to my Death Valley life list.”
“I heard they were pretty common here,” remarked Red.
“Not indigenous at all-a late-autumn visitor from the Panamint Range. There’s almost three hundred species of resident and migrant birds in the Valley-”
“Fuck the goddam birds,” said Tony in an aggrieved voice. “I’m tryna tell a fuckin’ joke here!”
Red grinned and winked at the bird-watcher. “Okay, Tony,” he said, “what is eighteen inches long that makes a woman scream when she wakes up in the morning?”
“Crib death!” crowed Tony.
“Crib death?” exclaimed the redhead in a disgusted voice. Neither man had laughed. “That’s revolting.”
“Hey, just fuck off, okay?” said Tony.
Red’s beeper went off. The two buttons started away through the trees. When they had disappeared from view, the bird-watcher sought a point of vantage facing the inn.
Dante kept out of sight behind a palm tree while he glassed the windows of the suite the inn’s front desk had told him was rented by Kosta Gounaris. Yes, people in there, but he couldn’t see who. So he refocused on the inn’s sweeping stone steps. Most of the front turnaround was taken up by a black stretch limo with a black-uniformed chauffeur lounging against the fender.
Tony was just a stupid button man, but with a couple of short and seemingly casual questions, Red had elicited why Dante had binoculars, that he actually could identify the bird flying out of the tree, and that he knew it was not a year-round resident at the Furnace Creek oasis. The redhead was canny and quick-witted, dangerous, which meant the man who paid him was also dangerous.
The chauffeur opened the back door, came to attention. Dante ground the glasses against his eyes; heat shimmers slightly distorted his view through the lenses, but he knew the four men coming down the wide stone front steps of the inn. Shaking hands with the two who obviously were depart ing was Gounaris. No surprise, since the fact he was flying himself down here was why Dante had been here before him.
Dante had studied the second man’s face ranging from his 1960 passport photo to an FBI surveillance picture taken a week ago poolside at the Tallpalms Country Club in Palm Springs. It was Gideon Abramson.
The other two were astounding. First, the legendary Don Enzo himself, out from Jersey. Probably flown openly into Vegas by private jet, then whisked out of some underground garage in this anonymous limo and would go back in the same way so the surveilling feds would think he’d never left the hotel.
The fourth was The Man himself, Martin Prince. Marcantonio Princetti. Dante could recite the man’s biography in his sleep.
The limo disappeared around behind the hotel toward Highway 190 which eventually would take it back to Vegas. A cream Lexus followed, stuffed with Red and Tony riding shotgun. Dante considered alerting the feds, rejected it; the meeting was over. Nobody knew he was here, he wanted to keep it that way.
Gounaris and Abramson were sitting down at one of the tables on the inn’s broad patio for a drink under a sun umbrella. He’d have given a year’s pay to hear what they were saying, but he couldn’t get close: Gounaris would see him, and he wanted to be the one doing the viewing.
What was important enough to drag frail old Garofano out here from Jersey? The doubleheader on Kreiger and St. John? Was somebody within the Family trying to take down its leaders one by one, grab control? Did Prince call this meeting because these were the only men he could trust within the Organization? Or because he thought one of them was behind the murders?
Or was he playing some dangerous game of his own?
“I tell you he’s playing a fucking game, Uncle Gid!” exclaimed Kosta Gounaris. He was drinking beer in the thin dry desert air. Gideon was having iced tea.
“To what point, Kosta? He already has all the power.”
“To set me up for unsanctioned killings he ordered himself!” Gounaris mimicked, “‘I’m suggesting that the same man ordered both hits.’ He’s just putting on a show for the old man so there won’t be any heat when I get hit.”
Gideon chuckled. “Who’s the unhappiest man in New York?”
“New York? What the hell does New York-”
“A man with an Irish psychiatrist and a Jewish bartender.” Gideon stirred his tea, sipped it. “Mr. Prince setting you up makes no sense. What does make sense is Kreiger having St. John hit, using Popgun. Ucelli is an old-timer, he would do it and deny it afterwards. And get away with it, because he’s tight with Don Enzo and St. John was not a made man.”
“Then who had Kreiger hit?”
“I fear Mr. Prince is starting to feel that perhaps you did. Out of ambition, a desire to move up… Let me tell you how he thinks. The killing was clever. You are clever. The killing was on your turf, San Francisco, where the Organization has very little influence. You fly your own plane, so he might even suspect you of Spic’s murder.”
“That’s crazy! It’s all crazy! He had Spic hit!”
“You know it’s crazy. I know it’s crazy. But Mr. Prince…” He shrugged. “In the morning-”
“I’ve got to fly back up in the morning, Uncle Gid.”
“Then let’s play a round of golf this afternoon.”
With obvious relief, Kosta said, “I’ll get my clubs.”
