Ness got up. He sighed heavily. Then he took the hardwood chair next to Johnson and said, 'I've already put you in for that promotion.'
'What?'
'You're going to be a sergeant, Toussaint, if you can pass the test,'
'Hell, I'll pass the damn thing.'
'But I'm pulling you out of the Roaring Third.'
Johnson backed off, his eyes open very wide. 'Well, that's my turf. Shouldn't I oughta be workin' that side of town?'
'From time to time, you will. But if you think I went through these hard months to let a good cop like you give in to temptation, you're crazy.'
'Temptation?'
'To go back on the pad. To be the cop who fixes things on the east side for the colored independent policy operators.'
Johnson looked like he'd been struck with a plank.
'Toussaint,' Ness said, smiling, not hiding the irony in his voice, 'you're part of my team now. No one can accuse me of race prejudice when I have a Negro detective on my personal staff.'
Johnson's eyes were filled with incredulity. 'You assigning me permanent to the safety director's office?'
'That's right, Sergeant Johnson.'
Ness held out his hand.
'Welcome aboard,' Ness said.
Numbly, Johnson shook Ness's hand.
Then Johnson threw back his head and began to laugh, until every pebbled-glass window in the office was rattling.
'And one of these days,' Ness said, as he walked the still-chuckling Johnson out, 'we're going to nail that bastard Lombardi. He can run…'
'But he can't hide,' Toussaint Johnson said.
And he wasn't laughing or smiling when he said it.
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 19
Black Sal Lombardi sat under the thatched sun shelter on a wooden beach chair, sipping coco-loco from a carved-out coconut. He was watching pretty American girls play soccer with their slightly older American boy friends; they all (Sal, too) wore bathing suits and were soaking up the afternoon sun. He was between Mexican whores right now, having gotten bored with the last girl the hotel man had provided. Sal had been enjoying his privacy these last several days; but watching these golden-tanned American girls bounce and jiggle got him thinking about requesting a new puta for this evening.
Playa Caleta was the 'morning' beach and most of the tourists headed for Playa Hornos, the 'afternoon' beach, after one o'clock. Nobody Sal asked seemed to know why this was-though a few had mentioned tide and shade patterns-but the tradition was long-standing. Sal liked to watch the girls, but he didn't like a crowded beach; so he waited till the afternoon had thinned of tourists before making use of palm-fringed Caleta beach, which his hotel fronted. When he wanted to swim or sun some morning, he used the private pool of his casita.
Sal had taken to the sun, though he seldom swam. His olive complexion had gradually baked to a near black, making him truly worthy of the nickname 'Black Sal' at last. He had been here, after all, over two years. Two years of vacation or retirement or however you cared to view it.
He knew only that he was happy. His pre-ulcerous condition had gone away; he hadn't had a glass of milk in eighteen months. He weighed ten pounds less and was as physically fit as a teenage boy. At least three times a week, he played the golf course at Playa Encantada-usually with vacationing American businessmen, some of them with ties to his own business-and went fishing several times a month, hiring out a boat and tackle and captain through the hotel. He had sent home several photos of himself with prized catches: sailfish and marlin longer than an elephant's dick. He'd been fresh-water fishing in the coastal lagoons, by torch light; he'd gone duck-hunting and once even took a guided expedition into the mountainous interior, where he bagged a mountain lion.
The spectator sports weren't bad, either: Jai alai every night in the fronton building near Playa Caleta; bullfights every Sunday afternoon; boxing and wrestling. The nighttime entertainment was wild; from one nightclub you could view a spic kid climb down La Quebrada cliff to a platform and, torch in hand, dive forty feet into a breaker, then climb the opposite cliff to a flat rock one hundred thirty feet up and dive the fuck again, between a narrow sea ravine with jagged rocks on either side. Down below newspapers were set on fire so the kid could see what he was doing. This took balls or no brains or both, but whatever, it was a hell of thing to see.
Sal was glad he had a piece of this action. Acapulco had been just another scenic bay city in the boondocks until the highway was built between here and central Mexico back in '27. Horvitz and some of the other big boys from back home, when Repeal was around the corner, got in on the ground floor when resort hotels started going up along these beaches.
The resort town would only continue to grow. Sal knew, but there would come a time when it would be too crowded with tourists for his taste. By that time, though, he'd be back in the States, back in Cleveland, back in business. That fucking Ness was already out from under the protective wing of his patron. Mayor Burton; now that Burton was in the U.S. Senate, an acting mayor-Edward Blythin-was filling the slot till the next election. If the democrats won, and they probably would, that meant the end of Ness as safety director-and the beginning of Sal Lombardi finding his way home and back to the top.
Not that he was anxious. If his late cousin Angelo, God rest his soul, had thought that the life down here would make you any less a man, Sal had only to look at his wall of mounted fish and his scrapbook of hunting and fishing photos and for that matter slap his flat firm belly to know how very much a man he was. And people here, whether tourists or locals, knew Sal Lombardi was somebody important from the States. So he had respect, too. Which was important to him.
He would go back home, eventually. He even looked forward to it-but he didn't dwell on it. He was having too good a time drinking tropical drinks out of hollowed-out pineapples and watching sailboats against blue skies and divers cutting into clear water and pretty girls in skimpy bathing suits frolicking and beautiful sunsets painting the horizon.
He had learned something important here: Saludy pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlas — health and money, and the time to enjoy them. No accident that 'tiempo' came third. Back in the U.S.A., Sal was like everybody else: a slave to watches, to clocks, marking his life in minutes and hours. These Mexicans knew enough to measure their lives in days or even years.
Time was something you let pass; you enjoyed. Something you disposed of, not let rule you. Sal was a better, happier man, now that he had absorbed this view of life. Look how Little Angelo ended up, because he was impatient; because he couldn't accept things like they were. Sal had no intention ending up that way. He was a new man. A man with a future. A man without an ulcer.
The soccer game between the good-looking young people had broken up. Sal padded out onto the white beach, his feet in sandals, a big towel rolled up under his arm. He threw the towel out and spread himself on it, belly-down; let the warmth of the sun blanket him. Bake him. Turn him blacker.
He thought about Ness, smiling into the towel as he contemplated that smug bastard being out of work soon. That fucker wasn't so much. Big-shot Ness never figured out who the Mayfield Road gang's inside man with the cops was…
Vice cop Moeller-who had tipped Lombardi and Scalise and certain key others, who had lied about getting a
