potentate of that era. Angelo’s natural temper was gloomy and dyspeptic, and at first he found that the prostitution business was tough going. Potential customers were instinctively frightened when they saw him, and often left before they saw the merchandise he was offering because they suspected that the young two-hundred-thirty-pound entrepreneur might have conducted them to his lair in the Albemarle Hotel to garrote them for their wallets and watches. This in fact, was one of the business practices he was reduced to considering, when one day a prospective client, a gypsum buyer from Ohio, enlightened him. “You think I’m crazy enough to go out in the dark in a strange town with you?”
Thereafter Angelo had concentrated his considerable will on changing his image. He had spent some money on decorating the upper floor of the Albemarle, more money on some respectable suits for himself and still more money on presents and clothes for his sullen and underworked talent. He made it a policy never to enter a room without smiling at everyone he saw and, if possible, calling them by name. He developed a comical way of talking to his girls, patterned after the way he and his male colleagues in The Arm talked to each other, a tone that was simultaneously conspiratorial and derisive. He even gave them nicknames like mobsters. One, a girl who had been born with a blond, bovine beauty in a part of Alabama that hadn’t seen fit to reward it suitably, he called “Slowly- butt Shirley.” Another, a tall, bony woman who might have been a fashion model if she had had a pretty face, he called “Olive Oyl,” and a younger girl of similar charms and handicaps, “Extra-Virgin Olive Oyl.” His star, an intense young woman named Gloria Monday, was so inventive in what she did to, on, under and with her clients that she achieved a clientele that wasn’t either blind drunk or lost, but actually knew the way to the Albemarle. Angelo had never heard Latin outside of church, but he could read an inscription, and when he saw “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” on a tombstone, he started calling her “Sick Transit Gloria.”
That had been a long time ago. Now the girls were old or dead, and Angelo’s hearty, expansive manner had become so habitual that he had often displayed it at the most inappropriate times, such as the night when he had executed a young Canadian named Boromier for being found in close proximity to a truck-load of cigarettes that unofficially belonged to Angelo, and again when he had attended the funeral of a close friend. Because it bore no relation to his feelings, this bogus jocularity could surface at any time when he wasn’t concentrating. It added to his stature and reputation in his later years, because when it appeared it was chilling.
Angelo was alone in his booth tonight; it was a brief vacation for him. Usually he was encumbered by Capella and Salvatore, two young retainers sworn to die to protect him. The problem with young men sworn to die to protect their patrons was that they didn’t actually want to die, so large portions of their mental capacities were devoted to vigilance and suspicion. This left so little for ordinary human commerce that it made them dull and preoccupied companions. But tonight Angelo was to meet with a man who wasn’t willing to speak in the presence of third parties and hadn’t the experience to appreciate the fact that at any given time Capella and Salvatore were only half conscious of anything that was said, and in any case had no interest in it.
Angelo sipped the terrible white wine and rolled it around his mouth so that he could detest it. Then he set the glass down, filled it again, stood up and went to the men’s room. As he walked across the dining room, he felt the eyes of a dozen people on him, all establishing his presence to the satisfaction of a hundred grand juries. He had seldom done what he was about to do. The Vesuvio was his sanctuary, and to use it as an alibi in any illegal activity would have been a violation of trust. But the man he was going to meet was a banker, a solid citizen who had, to Angelo’s knowledge, never done anything that wouldn’t put a grand jury to sleep.
Angelo passed the men’s room door, went out the fire exit in the hallway near the storeroom and emerged beside the dumpster in the lot behind the restaurant. He was so overwhelmed by the sweet, nauseating smell of fermenting vegetables that he stopped to peer over the edge to see what they were. He was dispirited when he saw that the smell was from a collection of empty quart cans of tomato paste, all opened and dumped hastily without being scraped. These days everybody was in a hurry; in the old days they had made the sauce from fresh plum tomatoes.
He looked for the car Salvatore had left for him, and saw it immediately. It was a small gray Toyota registered to someone named O’Reilly who ran a gas station and used it as a loaner for regular customers. O’Reilly had no idea who would be driving the car, or that it had anything to do with the way Salvatore made his living. It was a favor of no consequence to O’Reilly, but the fact that he had done it had, without his knowledge, made him eligible for dividends in the future. He would probably find that over time he would gain a few customers who would mention that Salvatore had recommended him. But he might also find that when he was worried about his property taxes they had already been paid, or that his daughter had miraculously moved up the waiting list for admission to the most desirable girls’ school. In the most extreme case, he might find that when his enemies were about to triumph over him, forces that had nothing to do with him would destroy them, suddenly and utterly. The world worked on goodwill, favors and reciprocities, but the system was too crude to keep the exchanges in proportion.
Angelo drove out of the lot without even glancing in the direction of the space where his own Cadillac was parked. In ten or twenty minutes he would be back at his table. He drove carefully. The car was probably like a fingerprint collection by now, having been loaned to half the city without being cleaned, but if he hit something there wouldn’t be much question as to who had been driving it.
* * *
Wolf heard the sound of the Toyota leaving the lot. As soon as its lights had passed, he knew the driver’s eyes would be turned to look up the street, and he sat up in the back seat of Fratelli’s Cadillac. What he saw seemed impossible. The driver of the little car that was going past Angelo Fratelli’s new Caddy was Angelo Fratelli. He ducked back down, opened the door a little and kept the light switch in the door frame depressed with his keys while he opened it wide enough to slip out into the darkness. He reached inside to the floor to haul the shotgun out after him, then hurried to his own car.
Angelo wasn’t sure why he was going to the trouble of meeting McCarron in secret and alone, but he was intrigued by the request. McCarron was the president of a small bank that operated only in Erie County. Banks had always titillated Angelo, and they had titillated him even more since he had begun to read the stories about savings and loans being closed by the government. It amazed him that so much crude bad-boy thievery had gone on behind the substantial institutional columns of those places. There had been clowns who had imagined they could practically stuff their briefcases with their depositors’ money and walk out the door free and clear the day they had declared bankruptcy. But oddly enough, it seemed that the clowns were right. The government was picking up the tab, and those former savings-and-loan officers were sitting on their yachts drinking champagne. Obviously Mr. McCarron had been reading the same newspapers Angelo had. He would be thinking that right now, as the army of sweaty little federal bookkeepers were busy breaking their pencils and gnashing their teeth while they worked their second year of double shifts to figure out what had happened to all the money in the savings and loans, they would be letting the banks alone.
McCarron obviously had a scheme. Those guys must all know each other too, just the way Angelo and his colleagues did. They weren’t exactly competitors, because there was plenty to go around, but they kept an eye on each other because nobody ever knew the future, and if one of them got too big he would be dangerous. McCarron would be sitting in his big old Victorian mansion on Delaware Park Lake, and he would read about how the dumbest bastard he had known at Harvard Business School had just gone under. He would say to himself, “It makes sense.” Then he would read on to learn that two hundred million dollars had somehow disappeared on bad loans, and he would know. For an hour or a day he might pretend he didn’t but he would know. The dumb bastard had somehow ended up with the money. The federal regulators wouldn’t be able to figure out how, but McCarron would because he was in the same business.
So now McCarron had done something that not even the most cynical and suspicious of investigators could have anticipated: he had set up a meeting with Angelo Fratelli. This bank president, whose social life was reported in the
Fratelli drove to the park, and along the curving drive around the lake. Across the water he could see the
