CHAPTER ONE
Damian theorized that within Fifty years man would move onto and into the sea.
San Dominica was only a very small beginning. An exploratory expedition. Kid stuff. The people who engineered it didn't understand their own inner motivation...
three-fifths of the world is water, and that was about to be fought over on a staggering scale....
The Rose Diary
February 24, i 979; Lathrop We@, Nevada
As the stupid, piggy Chevrolet Impala floated through buzzard-infested desert, Isadore 'the Mensch' Goldman was thinking that he was slightly surprised there really was a state of Nevada.
Every so often, though, the Chevrolet passed a tin road sign with PROPERTY OF THE STATE OF NEVADA stamped into it by some convict at Washoe County Jail.
Once, Goldman even saw some Nevadans: a woman and small children with frayed ankle boots, turquoise jewelry, faces the color of pretzel sticks.
Somewhere out here they tested H-bombs, the old man was thinking. At Mercury, Nevada. Then the seventy-four-year-old's mind went walking. He remembered something itchy about the still not-to-be-believed Bay of Pigs invasion. Then a very brief, fuzzy association he'd had with Rafael Trujillo that same year: 1961.
Goldman's history. All leading up to February 24, 1979. The biggest day of the old man's life.
Maybe.
A man named Vincent 'Zio' Tuch was patting Isadore's gray-striped banker's trousers at one baggy knee. Death spots were all over Tuch's unsteady hand.
'Bizee Izzee, what are you thinkin'?' Tuch rasped. 'You thinkin' this is a big-fashion setup, Izzie? That's what I'm thinkin'.'
'Aahh... I'm getting too damn old to think all the time. ' The consigliere casually dismissed the powerful old capo. It was a typically stupid, if well meant, Mustache Pete question.
Old Tuch told him to go make shit in his own pants-which was also typical.
Also typical was the fact that the caporegime smelled of cheap hair tonic spilled over twenty-year-old dandruff.
Goldman had flatly predicted that the final meeting at Lathrop Wells would be ridiculous beyond human belief. Even he was surprised. It had the consistency of Silly Putty. It looked like the opening scene of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
to begin with, both sides arrived at the farm in the most absurd 'anonymous-looking' automobiles.
Goldman watched and counted bodies through the green-tinted windows of his own Impala.
There were nine chauffeurs driving such cars as Mustangs, Wildcats, Hornets, Cougars-even a Volkswagen Beetle.
There were seven bodyguards, out-and-out Buster Crabbe types.
Eleven actual participants besides himself and the shriveling zombie Tuch.
Somebody had remarked at the last meeting that they didn't want to have another Appalachia at Lathrop Wells: twenty Cadillac Fleetwoods suddenly arriving at some deserted farmhouse. Drawing attention from locals or the state police.
So there were none of the usual big black cars at the meeting in the Nevada desert.
All of the twenty-seven men wore dark business suits, with the exception of one Gucci-Pucci fag
Frankie 'the Cat' Rao of Brooklyn, New York. Rao wore a black-and-white-checked sports jacket, a sleazy open-necked electric blue shirt, white Bing Crosby shoes.
'Dirty asshole,' old Tuch said. 'asshole with all of his pinky rings.' 'All very predictable,' Isadore Goldman muttered. The old man lit up his first cigarette in more than eight months. Then he headed inside, through hot, heavy air that smelled like horses.
Inside the farmhouse it was air-conditioned, thank God.
A Fedders was blowing dust and what looked like cereal flakes all around the rustic, low-ceilinged rooms.
Goldman noticed the other side's head man whisper something to a younger man-his aide-decamp. The younger man looked a little like the Hollywood actor Montgomery Clift. His name was Brooks Campbell, and he would be going to the Caribbean for them.
The older man, their side's main spokesman, was Harold Hill. Harry the Hack to the trade.
Harold Hill had spent nearly ten years in Southeast Asia, and he had a certain inscrutable look about him. Something intangible. Isadore Goldman suspected that Hill was a pretty good killer for such an obvious loser type.
Within ten minutes the thirteen important negotiators had settled down comfortably around a wide beam table in the living room. Characteristically, they had taken opposite sides at the big wooden table. Dark, slightly European-looking men on one side. All-American football-player types on the other.
'By way of a brief introduction'-Goldman began the meeting after allowing just a snitch of small talk-'it was agreed at the last meeting-January seventeenth-that if Damian and Carrie Rose were available, they would be satisfactory contract operators for everybody concerned.... '
Goldman peeked over his silver-rimmed eyeglasses. So far, no objections.
