“Still, what’s done is done. Fast forward to her eighteenth year, high school graduation. She’s a beautiful young woman. A beautiful young lesbian actually. But cunning. She’s gotten herself a lot of street wisdom growing up where she did, and she sure as hell ain’t going to join the NYPD. She can see the world is more or less still run by men, and being a lesbian isn’t going to get her a whole lot of mileage in most conventional jobs. She goes to her father, who by now is deeply in with the mob.
“I mean deeply. He’s a millionaire captain of the NYPD. It’s only a matter of time before they catch him, but he doesn’t care anymore. He’ll do some time, not too much, and retire. What help can he give a girl just about to enter the real world? He assumes she wants money, but it isn’t that. She wants entry. To the mob.”
Moira paused again. Chan was aware of a diminishing of the intimacy between them as she retreated more deeply into her memories, and his cop’s instinct made him wonder what was coming next. He didn’t want to lose her, though. He wanted that touch of love for one more night, that mature caress. God knew there had not been many in his life. He drew her closer, and she smiled gratefully.
“Of course a lot of this stuff I didn’t know at the time. I’m giving you the benefit of some years of research and a whole decade of soul-searching. Mario explains that the mob doesn’t employ women, at least not on the executive level. It’s a very old-fashioned organization. Now, I don’t know how she got from there to being the mistress of one of the senior members in the Corleone branch, but Mario must have introduced her. For that I’m unable to forgive him. Nor do I know how she managed to fake it in bed all those years because this daughter of mine is very, very gay. I guess it was one of those dirty weekend affairs and she was only too glad when he went home to his wife.”
Moira sighed. “I guess she gets plenty of money to live on and time to decide what to do with her life. One thing about her, she likes to learn. She’s good at it. She reads a lot, and the mob is always on her reading list. She finds out that the way the American Mafia makes most of its dollars these days is by laundering money for less sophisticated operations, especially the Colombians. The Colombians have so much cash from the cocaine boom in the States and in Europe, they actually contract out the laundering to the Mafia, which charges twenty cents on the dollar. So Clare comes up with a proposition: Send me to college; let me learn about high finance; give me something to do, I’m bored. The consigliere shrugs, why not? The mob hires Harvard M.B.A.’s to count their cash; maybe she could be useful.
“So, she spends three years at the university and actually enjoys it. Her thesis was money laundering and the effect it had on the national economy. I think the mob really fascinated her.
“So she goes back to the consigliere, massages his ego, pours his favorite whiskey down his throat and talks about her future. We’re in late 1989, early 1990 now, when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR ceased to exist. There’s a new boy on the block; he’s called the Russian Mafia. In the NYPD we expected war between the mobs when the Russians started coming in with a whole new spectrum of drugs, scams, weapons of all kinds, multimillion-dollar frauds, swindles like Al Capone only dreamed of. But the streets are strangely quiet. There’s no war. Why? Because even the Russian mob needs to launder money, and the local Mafia actually likes staying away from the heat. They’ve taken a few hits from FBI investigations, and anyway, they’ve got all the money they need. They’ve sent their own kids to college and told them crime doesn’t pay. Why not sit back and rake in twenty or more percent on the narco dollar while the other guy takes the risk?
“This news excited Clare no end. After a hell of a lot of cajoling she persuades the don to take her to East Berlin in the summer of 1990, which is a high-level meeting between Russian gangsters and the heads of the five New York families and a few others as well. You don’t have to take my word for it; this meeting was monitored by the FBI. Journalists have written articles, books about it. It sounds like a bad novel, but what happened at that meeting was organized crime from different countries carved up the Western world. The main play was between the Russians on the one hand and the Americans and Sicilians on the other. The Americans had the expertise in laundering, the Sicilians had access to every member state of the European Community and the Russians-well, they had everything that was left in Russia. There was no government there anymore. You could buy tanks by the dozen, rocket launchers, AK-forty-sevens by the truckload, gold, oil, silver, aluminum, copper-just about everything people want and need. Of course I didn’t know at the time that Clare had gone to that meeting. I just remember how proud of herself she was around that time. She looked like she’d conquered the world. Can I have another cigarette?”
Chan took the box out of the pocket of his white jacket. While Moira had been talking, the night had thickened. Lovers strolled past arm in arm, Japanese photographers screwed thousand-dollar cameras into tripods, trying to find an original perspective on one of the most photographed night scenes in the world. Sitting on the bench, he had heard about twenty different languages spoken by the people passing behind their backs. If Moira was telling him that there was a truly international dimension to the murders he was investigating, where would he start? People moved around these days almost as easily as money. Dual, triple nationality was common, and most successful gangsters had upwards of fifty bank accounts.
He lit their cigarettes. Moira took a long pull. “Then the world came to an end for her. It happened all at once. The consigliere finally found her in bed with another woman. There’s a fight, Clare threatens to inform on him- something you just don’t do, right? A few days later she’s busted for marijuana. Ironic, considering what she had been doing for most of her life. She maintained it was the mob planted it on her as a warning. Anyway, she was cut off, out in the cold. Not total excommunication but a punishment. They knew she couldn’t survive without them; they wanted to make sure she knew it too. The message was pretty clear: Shape up, dahlin’, or next time the frame-up will send you to jail for the rest of your life. I don’t think Clare had ever shot up on reality before; she’d assumed she’d survive on street cunning and teenage luck forever. She wasn’t free at all. They owned her, all of her.”
Chan grunted. Enslavement by organized crime was as old as China.
“Worst of all, the smack she’d been using for over ten years was pure, the stuff that arrives in bulk before it’s cut with all kinds of junk. She’d been getting it through her mob connections and was able to pay for it with mob money. When she couldn’t get it anymore, she got real sick. That’s when she came back to live with me. She would lie on her bed most of the day shivering, groaning. Sometimes she would double up with cramps that lasted hours. Sometimes she would lash out at me with her fists. Elegance was only ever skin-deep with her. The best I could do was get her small hits off the street and some methadone to ease the sickness. I took time off work to sit with her. It went on for over a month, and during that month I think I aged inside about a hundred years because it was then that she talked, mostly in a semicoma.
“Little by little I pieced together everything I’ve just told you-and suffered my first clinical depression. I had to accept that even in the depths of her sickness all she could think of was getting back into the mob, shooting up on the best-quality smack, setting up a money-laundering operation bigger than anyone else’s, finding some homeless young girl to seduce.
“Flesh, drugs, power-they were what she lived for. Well, for her the clouds dispersed one day. She’d been right about one thing: The mob wanted to use her services. They figured she’d been punished enough and knew a little more about the lines of power. If she belonged to a made member, she belonged to a made member, no more girls. She got hold of her favorite drugs, started to smile again, forgot about me. She moved out as soon as she could. Last I heard from her was about two and a half years ago. She came around, tried to give me a bunch of money, which I refused. I remember she was talking about China a lot, had been to a bookstore and bought a whole load of books. It seemed to spin off from the book I gave you,
“So, Clare was back on her feet, but I wasn’t. I started drinking heavy. And stealing. The first time I did it I was so drunk I couldn’t believe it the next day. On the third occasion I took early retirement from the NYPD so as not to embarrass the force. Crazy the way some of us cling to morality, isn’t it? Why did I start stealing? My probation officer says it’s common, a psychological reflex he calls flip-flop. People who’ve followed one rigid path all their lives when hit by a serious trauma do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree flip. They act out the very behavior they’ve always deplored. Being a Catholic, I can’t help seeing it as a kind of punishment for pride. I sure don’t despise anyone anymore the way I used to despise Mario. I started lying a lot too, to cover up. I always wanted her to study sociology, to be interested in people. So often as a cop you get to thinking there must be a better way of helping pathetic people than locking them up-you ever think that?”
Chan inhaled. “And you haven’t heard from her at all since she stopped by with the money?”
Moira shook her head. “No. Not a word. I can’t give you any more help, Chief Inspector, because I don’t know nothin’. I guess you’re glad now I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow, huh?”
