'Anyway, the way it usually works, we take the money out of the bank, offshore, and give it to one of our guys, and he goes to Puerto Rico, and gets on the plane to Philly, and somebody meets him and takes the bag.'
'Yeah,' Vito said.
'The problem we have is that we think that IRS is watching the only guy we have available,' Mr. Rosselli said.
'Oh,' Vito said.
'So the way those IRS bastards work it is they make an anonymous telephone call, anonymous my ass, to either Customs or the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and tell them somebody, they give a description of our guy, is smuggling drugs. So when he's picking up his bag at the carousel, they search his bag. The Narcotics guys don't have to have the same, what do you call it, probable cause, that other cops do. You know what I mean.'
'Probable cause,' Vito said. 'You need it to get a search warrant.'
'Well, they don't need that. They can just search your bags, ' looking for drugs.' They don't find no drugs, of course, but they do find all that money.'
'And then what happens? You lose the money?'
'No. Nothing like that. It's just a big pain in the ass, is all. They take it, of course. And then you have to go to court and swear you won it gambling in Barbados or someplace. And you have to pay a fine for not declaring you have more than ten thousand in cash on you, and then you have to pay income tax on the money. Gambling income is income, as I guess you know.'
'Yeah, right. The bastards.'
'But there's no big deal, like if they caught somebody smuggling drugs or something illegal. The worst that can happen is that they keep the money as long as they can, and you have to pay the fine.'
Mr. Rosselli took a sip of his drink.
'Vito, you got anything against making a quick ten big ones?' Mr. Rosselli asked.
Vito looked at him, but did not reply.
'The four you owe us on the markers, and six in cash. It'd pay for your plumbing problem.'
'I don't understand,' Vito said softly, after a moment.
'Now, we don't know for a fact that this is going to happen,' Mr. Rosselli said. 'But let's just say that the IRS does know our guy who will have the million two in his suitcase. And let's just say they do make their anonymous fucking telephone call to Customs or the Narcotics cops, giving them his description and flight number. Now, we don'tknow that's going to happen, but we're businessmen, and we have to plan for things like that.'
'Yeah,' Vito said softly.
'So what would happen? They would wait for him at the baggage carousel and search his bags, right?'
'Right. I've seen them do that. Sometimes they call it a random search.'
'Right.'
'So they search his bags and find the money, and we have to go through the bullshit of paying the fine and the income tax on a million two. And also have to get another million two out of the bank to pay the guy in the Poconos. Right?'
'Yeah, I understand.'
'So, I figured we could help each other. We don't want to take the chance of having to go through the bullshit thatmight happen. Including paying the IRS tax on a million two of gambling earnings. And you need money for your fucking plumbing, and to make good the four big ones you owe us.'
'What do you want me to do?'
'Just make sure when our guy's airplane lands at Philadelphia, one of his bags don't make it to the carousel. There will be nothing in his other bag but underwear,if and I keep saying,if they search it.'
Mr. Rosselli paused.
'Look, Vito, we know you're a cop and an honest cop. We wouldn't ask you to do nothingreally against the law, something that would get you in trouble with the Department. But you got a problem, we got a problem, and I thought maybe we could help each other out. If you think this is something you wouldn't want to do, just say so, and that'll be it. No hard feelings.'
Vito Lanza looked first at Mr. Rosselli and then at his hands, and then back at Mr. Rosselli.
'How would I know which bag?' he asked, finally.
'Jesus, Carlo,' Mr. Cassandro said to Mr. Rosselli as they left the apartment building. 'I got to hand it to you. You played him like a fucking violin!'
'That did go pretty well, didn't it?' Mr. Rosselli replied. 'And he wants in. That's a lot better than having to show him the photographs and the Xeroxes and all that shit.'
'Yeah,' Mr. Cassandro agreed.
'It's always better,' Mr. Rosselli observed philosophically, 'to talk people into doing something. If it's their idea, they don't change their minds.'
Neither Mr. Rosselli nor Mr. Cassandro noticed that the four-yearold Pontiac was still parked halfway down the block on the other side of the street.
TWENTY-FOUR
Special Agent C.V. Glynes woke at seven a.m., which, considering how far they had lowered the level in the bottle of Seagram's 7-Crown before they went to bed, was surprising.
He went down the corridor to the bathroom and made as much noise as possible voiding his bladder, flushing twice, and dropping the toilet seat back into the horizontal position as loudly as he could manage.
He heard the creak of bed springs and other sounds of activity in the Springs's bedroom, and went back to his room to finish dressing and to wait for the Springs's announcement that breakfast was ready.
Logic told him that he was not likely to find anything at all, much less anything of interest to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when he got Deputy Dan Springs out into the Pine Barrens. And that meant that this whole business would have been a waste of time, and moreover would cause some minor difficulty with H. Howard Samm, Jr., the special agent in charge of the Atlantic City office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
'Sam Junior,' as he was known by his not-too-admiring staff, liked to have what he called 'his team' present each morning for an eightthirty conference, aka 'the pep talk,' and Glynes knew he wasn't going to make that.
On the other hand, finding a chunk of three-eighth-inch steel with a link of chain imbedded in it by the force of high explosives was not an everyday occurrence, and Glynes had a hunch he was onto something. Sometimes his hunches worked, and sometimes they didn't-more often than not they didn't-but they had over the years worked often enough so that he knew that he shouldn't ignore them.
Sam Junior's pontifical pronouncements vis-a-vis scientific crime detection to the contrary, Glynes believed what really did the bad guys in was almost always sweat, experience, luck, and following hunches, in just about that order.
In other words, Glynes felt, he just might find something of professional interest to ATF out in the Pine Barrens. He was either right or wrong, but in either case, the sooner he got out in the Pine Barrens the better.
Overnight, Marion Claude Wheatley had given a good deal of thought to the Lord having directed him to the Divine Lorraine Hotel.
There had to be a reason, of course. The Lord was not whimsical. One possibility was that the Lord knew that once the Vice President had been disintegrated the Secret Service and the FBI would learn that Marion had
