You play?' Giancana nodded. Columbus Park. We passed it on the way here. Is that your club?'
Nah. Too easy. Wide open fairways, big greens. Ray Charles could make a par on that fucking course. Riverwoods. That's where I play. Not as much as I'd like. The weather's against it up here on the Lakes. Plus, when I'm here I'm doing business, or I'm collecting porcelain. That's a passion with me. Meissen, stuff like that. Kind of an antidote to a tough business, you know?' Nimmo nodded and sipped some of his Scotch and water. Jimmy, I'll come straight to the point. And no offence intended. But how would you like to do some real police work again?'
Real police work?' Nimmo grinned. With all due respect, Sam, if that's what I wanted to do, then I'd hardly be sitting here, drinking your Scotch, now would I?'
You've got a point. Then let me put it another way. How would you like to do some detective work? Investigative work?'
Private investigative work?'
Why not? In New York, you were the soft-clothes ace, I hear.'
Is that what Meyer told you?' Nimmo frowned and inspected his pipe. He was having a hard job keeping it alight.
Giancana was nodding. How did you come to leave the feds anyway?'
On the day I was leaving the Bureau, I found myself under this big black cloud that just happened to come floating up Manhattan Island.' Nimmo grinned sheepishly and, putting aside the pipe, sipped some more of his Scotch. I resigned because I had to. I hit someone. Another agent. Hard. Too hard. The guy had it coming, everyone agreed, but it didn't help that I was drunk. He made a full recovery, but I was finished. Hoover doesn't care for that kind of behaviour. Actually, there's not much in the way of behaviour he does care for. Anyway, I resigned and Meyer fixed it with the Mayor of Miami for me to get the job I have now. It's not a bad job. But I'm just treading water. Waiting to collect my pension. There's a lot of that in Miami. Miami's a pensioner's kind of place. I golf, play canasta with the few friends I have down there, push some fucking papers around my desk, sign expenses, fuck this whore in Fort Lauderdale once a month, and generally plan my retirement. No one pays much attention to a guy like me. I'm part of the furniture. Some hotter days in summer I don't think they'd notice if I wasn't even there. Which means that some days I'm not.'
Nimmo put down his drink and made a couple of fists, as if he was driving a team of horses. But I still have it, you know?' He tapped his head and then slapped his belly. Up here, and in here. I'm still a good cop. Not like some of these kids they're bringing into the Bureau nowadays. Harvard graduates, some of them. They've got soft feet and nice hands. Sure they've got brains. But they don't have it here, in the belly. You ask me, it's the same as Jack Kennedy. Yeah, he's bright. He can read fast. He can comprehend a brief. But is he going to have the balls to push the button if the Russians come marching into Berlin? I doubt it. Now Ike. You never doubted the man's stomach. He was a soldier. A fucking general. But this Kennedy is just a damn college boy. A politician. A fucking bureaucrat. Same as these new kids in the Bureau.
You ask me if I'd like to do some investigative work, Mister Giancana? I'd give my right arm to be working on a real case. That's God's honest truth. I can't figure out how else my life can have any meaning again. Just one last investigation and then I won't mind what happens, but at least I'll have my self-respect. Because when there is no dignity there is no strength. So, whatever kind of investigation it is you have in mind, Mister Giancana, I'm your man.'
Giancana nodded.
Okay, here's how it is. A while ago, Meyer Lansky recommended a man to do a job for me and for the CIA, a job for which we would have paid him a fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But before we could give him the go-ahead, the man and a hundred Gs of that money upped and disappeared. With the help of my organisation, I want you to find that man. Jimmy? The money he took is not important. What is important is that I find him again before my new friends in the government find out that the guy has gone AWOL.
Now after that speech you made I could probably ask you to work for nothing. But I'm a fair man, and I believe in paying a man what the job is worth to me. All I ask is a fair shake in return. I'll pay you twenty-five thousand dollars, Jimmy. Which means I want this guy found, and found quick. Ten thousand now and another fifteen when you find him.'
Nimmo whistled. For that kind of money, I'd find you the lost Hebe tribes of Israel and throw in Glenn Miller by way of a bonus. What's the guy's name, and when did he take off?'
His name is Tom Jefferson. And nobody's seen him since late last Friday.'
Friday?' Nimmo looked pained for a moment as he saw the prospect of instant enrichment begin to recede again. He thought of all the things he could have done with the money. Buy a house, a nice car maybe - he'd just started to like the idea of himself in an MGA. And a tailor-made suit.
Mister Giancana. Eager as I am to take your twenty-five thou, that's only five days. Right now, all over this great land of America that we live in, there are red-eyed women walking into police precincts to report their no- good husbands missing. And the dumb Irish desk sergeant always tells them the same thing. Maybe the guy went on a Ray Milland and had himself a lost weekend. Maybe the lucky bastard found himself a new gal and the Dear Janet postcard from Vegas is still in the mail. But whatever the reason, a week is usually considered to be the minimum period that the average American male can go missing in this country before the police become involved. It's different for wives. For wives it's forty-eight hours. Wives get raped and murdered in less time than it takes to cook an omelette.'
Spare me the Naked City, Jimmy,' said Giancana. I made enough guys disappear in my life to know the real thing when I see it. Coupla times I even woke up with the cats starin' at me, myself. I know dead, and I know dead drunk, and I know disappeared.
You'd better tell me everything.'
I can't tell you everything,' said Sam Giancana. But I can tell you all I know, and then you can go and figure the rest for your twenty-five Gs. Sooner the better. This year I'd like Thanksgiving to have a red ribbon and a nigger's shine on it.'
Chapter 10
Ybor City
From Miami, Tom drove to Palm Beach where he sat outside the Kennedy family estate and smoked a couple of cigarettes. There were a couple of cops, some well-wishers, and lots of news reporters standing on the road. For a while Tom joined them on the sidewalk and found that most of the talk was not about Kennedy, but about Clark Gable who had died that morning. Then he drove to the airport at West Palm Beach, for no other reason than this was where Kennedy's private plane flew in and out of, sometimes as often as once or twice a week. As soon as he saw the place Tom knew he was wasting his time.
There was a gun dealer in West PB, who was an old army buddy, and in any other circumstances Tom might have visited him, not least because the dealer supplied Tom with specialist rifles and ammunition. But since he knew that Giancana's people were likely to come looking for him, if only to get their money back, Tom decided that it would be more prudent to telephone.
From Palm Beach, by way of Fort Pierce and Lake Wales, Tom drove north-west along the Sunshine State Parkway to Tampa which, depending on whether population figures are estimated there, or in Jacksonville, is the second or third largest city in Florida. The parkway was new and wide and he could breeze along with the top down at sixty miles an hour, which helped to clear his head of Mary and Sam Giancana. He made the two-hundred-and- sixty-mile journey in just over five hours.
Ybor City was Tampa's Latin Quarter, a Spanish version of Greenwich Village, with lots of good restaurants and several cigar factories. It was from here that JosE Marti had plotted the overthrow of the Spanish in Cuba and where he had written the revolutionary manifesto, in 1895. Sixty-five years later it continued to be a centre for exiled Batistianos and, as a consequence, for G2, the Cuban Intelligence Service.
Tom met his own debriefing officer, Colonel LA3pez Ameijeiras, at one of the many excellent restaurants on the quayside. Ameijeiras was a sallow-faced man of about fifty whose bushy eyebrows, high forehead, and slightly slanted eyes lent him a vaguely Far Eastern appearance. If he had owned a Mao suit he might even have passed for the Chinese Premier, Chou En-lai. With or without the jacket Tom thought Ameijeiras was probably as inscrutable as any oriental politician.
Tom ordered a daiquiri and handed Ameijeiras a large manila envelope containing all the information he had gathered on the MIRR and its anti-Castro activities in Miami and Havana.
