Knockdown Read online

  Samenza shook his head.

  "Phil? Hitting Grieco did you some good."

  "No," Corone said firmly. "I had my own guy for that job. She got to Grieco first. Until she hit the OCTF woman, I supposed she had her own reasons — I mean, something Grieco did to her. But…"

  "She's a hitter," Segesta said. "A pro. And whoever sent her to do that woman lawyer is a fool. I say it in front of all of you, knowing I'm probably saying it in front of the man who did it. Whoever sent her to hit that woman is an idiot."

  "She is our first priority," Philip Corone said.

  Barbosa turned in his chair and faced Whitey Albanese. "You take care of her. Hmm? Until you get her, nothing else. No other responsibilities. I want that woman dead."

  "I agree with that," Segesta said.

  Corone nodded.

  Rossi nodded calmly. "Agreed. Now… the Bolan problem."

  "You assumed responsibility for that," Barbosa said. "A million dollars you wanted. So? Was it Bolan who hit Don Lentini?"

  "I believe so," Rossi replied. He fixed his eyes on Whitey Albanese. "I'm pleased that so skilled and determined a man is assigned to get the black woman. I had rather his skills were dedicated to the Bolan problem. With all respect to the rest of you, I suggest that Bolan is our first priority. I suggest that Bolan would laugh if he knew we are dividing our forces and sending some of our most effective people after this woman." He struck the table with a fist. "It is Bolan who threatens us most." He paused, glanced around and let out his breath, so that he seemed to diminish. "Forgive me if I dissent. But on the list of priorities, I suggest the woman isn't number one."

  "You want our help with the Bolan problem?" Corone asked.

  Rossi understood what that meant. Corone was suggesting that Rossi couldn't handle the Bolan problem, had in fact failed to handle it and should be relieved of responsibility for it. Rossi was threatened by a significant loss of status.

  "Bolan has been a threat for many years, Phil," Rossi stated coldly. "I hate to think of the names of men of honor who lost their lives to this man, or because of him. Contadina comes to mind. Toppacardi. Battaglia. Others. Whole families have been eliminated. I suggest the extermination of Bolan is worth a cooperative effort, with honor to the Family that accomplishes it."

  "This is true," Segesta rumbled.

  "We agreed to pay the hitter who gets him one million dollars," Rossi went on. "I suggest we make the sum two million dollars — payable to whichever hitter gets him, mine or someone else's — and I offer half the amount myself." He turned to Whitey Albanese. "Does that seem an attractive proposition to you?"

  Whitey glowered. "If it is to Don Barbosa."

  Barbosa nodded at him. "Try to earn this fee, my friend. But get me the black woman, too. That should be an easy job. She shouldn't be too hard to find."

  * * *

  Salina Beaudreau kept a room in Brooklyn for one purpose — to house her telephone recorder. She never went there. She could query the recorder from anywhere, just by beeping the right codes on a touch-tone phone. She and Rossi had a set of cryptic messages. He could leave one word for her, and she would be waiting for him on a specified corner at a specified hour.

  His chauffeured car stopped at the corner of Forty-ninth and Amsterdam. Picking up the tall black woman in the skimpy shorts looked like a transaction that was repeated ten thousand times a day on the streets of New York.

  "You ever hear the name Whitey Albanese?" he asked her.

  Salina had accepted a French-fried potato from a bag he held. She shook her head.

  He handed her a photograph — taken with a hidden camera during the meeting that had broken up only two hours ago. "That's Whitey Albanese. Luca Barbosa gave him a contract this morning on the black woman who hit Joan Warnicke. He hangs out around a bar called Luciano's, on Second Avenue between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth. Really, I oughtn't to be asked to pay you for this one. In a sense, you ought to pay me. But, if you want to get rid of the guy who's got a contract on you, I'll pay, say, ten thousand for the effort."

  Salina studied the photograph and nodded. "How'd you get the photo so quickly?"

  "I have my contacts. Get a good look at that picture. You can't keep it. And don't blast away a nun or a schoolteacher this time, Salina. Let's see a hit, the kind I know you're capable of."

  * * *

  Whitey Albanese had a couple of beers at Luciano's at about seven. He had work to do. These Americans had no idea where to find this man Bolan. They didn't know where to look for the black woman — though obviously one of them did — and the only one he trusted was Don Barbosa.

  Interesting. The don had spoken with him after the sitdown. He'd said it might be necessary, sooner or later, to reduce the council by one. Think about it, he'd said. I don't have to tell you which one I have in mind.

  Sure. Whitey trusted Don Barbosa, but he could see that the don, like all the rest of them, was falling straight into the trap being set for them by this man Bolan. Oh, he was smart, Bolan. He'd succeeded already in turning the Families against one another. Too damned smart…

  Whitey would go to work on it. He could handle two contracts at once — the woman and Bolan. And when they faced him, they would be facing a Sicilian.

  He wiped the beer foam off his upper lip and pushed back his stool. He looked around. No one in Luciano's approached him unless he signaled that he wanted to be approached — and tonight he hadn't given that signal. He walked toward the door.

  Whitey was a man who worked the night. It was a good time. Tonight he would eat first. And then… Well, there was a fat little dark-haired girl… Tonight he'd do her a favor; he'd take her to dinner, then to her apartment.

  Albanese stood for a moment on the street in front of the bar. The summer night was a soporific. For a moment he thought of spending the night with the girl, relaxing. But the time wasn't right. Everything was threatened. He set his shoulders and walked north.

  "Help a poor ol' soul, would ya?"

  He looked down. It was disgusting the way the city allowed vagrants — which it dignified with the word «homeless» — to foul the streets. She sat there, dirty, ugly, stoned or drunk. He sneered and drew back his foot.

  Two 7.65 mm slugs punched into his chest.

  Whitey Albanese staggered toward the nearest wall, grasping for support, irrationally obsessed with staying on his feet, knowing that falling was death. His right hand went instinctively to the.38 Smith & Wesson under his jacket, but he realized with horror that his hand was too weak. His chest was a barrel of pain, and he choked and spit blood.

  He turned toward the woman sitting on the sidewalk, but she wasn't there. In the briefest of moments she had gathered herself up from her huddled position and walked away.

  It was all too clear. Her rags lay on the pavement. Striding north on Second Avenue was a tall black woman, triumph in her posture and gait.

  Whitey stared at her for a moment as his vision failed. Then he vomited blood and slipped down the wall.

  * * *

  Joe Rossi's home telephone rang. Okay. He'd told her she could call, just this once. He left his dinner table and his guests to take the call his butler said came from Detroit.

  "Rossi."

  "Done."

  "Problems?"

  "Clean."

  "Okay. Original assignment. Plus one more, for half a mill."

  "That big?"

  "Phil Corone."

  "You got it, Daddy."

  * * *

  Joe Coppolo reported to Bolan that Whitey Albanese was dead. "You've got them at one another's throats."

  "I'd think so for sure if I knew who killed Albanese."

  "There's no word around on that. Nobody knows at NYPD. Or so they say. The truth is, they don't care. I checked a couple of sources of my own — you know, old informers from my police days. I've kept in touch with them. There's no word on the street. It was professionally done."

  "What kind of slugs did they dig out of Alb
anese?" Bolan asked.

  "Uh, 7.65 mm. And yeah, I see your point."

  "Grieco was killed with a 7.65 mm pistol. Gina was hit at the Summit Hotel by slugs from a 7.65 mm pistol. That one was a Walther PPK, I think."

  "Our friend the tall black woman," Coppolo said.

  Bolan nodded. "She's damned good," he said. "Bold. Shrewd. I want to know who she works for. We ought to be able to figure that out. Process of elimination."

  "I see what you mean. If she killed Albanese, then she probably doesn't work for Barbosa. Unless he had some reason to be rid of Whitey Albanese."

  "Let's figure she doesn't work for Barbosa," Bolan said. "When she hit Grieco, that smoothed the way for Phil Corone. But I doubt she works for Corone. She killed Cesare Frenchi a while back. Phil Corone was in Danbury then, serving his time. Besides, his old man was still firmly in control then."

  "If you eliminate Barbosa and Corone, that leaves Segesta, Lentini and Rossi. Lentini is dead, but one of his capos may think Albanese killed him and so sent the woman hitter to take out Albanese."

  "It makes more sense," Bolan said, "to think the Lentini Family is in a state of shock for the moment. Your guess could be right, but…"

  "Segesta and Rossi."

  "Segesta and Rossi," Bolan agreed. "It's speculative, but it makes a good working hypothesis. And I'll go one step more. It's Rossi. He's the only one likely to have sent a hitter to Boston. He's the only one of the five dons who has a seat on the Commission. The other four limit their operations to the New York area. I'll guess the woman works for Rossi."

  Coppolo shook his head skeptically. "Why would Rossi want to kill Joan? Why Gina?"

  "When she hit Gina, she was shooting at me," Bolan said. "That's her contract — to get me."

  "Joan?"

  "I don't know," Bolan said grimly. "Maybe they figured out that Joan was working with me. And they certainly know you're working with me."

  "Yeah. Maybe I better make myself a little more difficult to find."

  "I recommend it."

  * * *

  Nick Caravella edged his way out on a steel girder, more stories above the street than he wanted to think about. He was three levels above the place where John Claw had fallen — some say was knocked — off the high steel.

  He had heard the story of John Claw. His union local and the company that had hired him for this job said Claw had been stupid with cocaine the morning he'd fallen. They had withheld that information, they said, to avoid embarrassment to his family. Why, after all, hurt a family that has suffered tragedy enough in the death of a loved and respected father?

  Nick was a building inspector, and for the past ten years he'd worked almost exclusively in Brooklyn. Over the years, he'd been promoted from the simpler jobs, with help from the City of New York, which had paid for courses in welding, riveting, foundation building and even architecture.

  He carried tools — a magnifying glass to inspect welds and rivet heads, an ohmmeter to check the electrical resistance of welded or riveted joints, a Polaroid camera to photograph suspicious structural elements and a heavy ball-peen hammer.

  Today he was crawling along one girder after another, hitting welded joints hard. Then he examined the weld under the magnifying glass.

  A welding bead isn't like glue. The melted remnant of the welding rod doesn't stick two pieces of steel together; it melts and fuses with both of them, like the cement used to join two pieces of plastic. The heat of the arc melts the steel as well as the rod until two pieces of steel and the bead are one piece, one fused joint.

  When Nick hit the joints with his heavy hammer, they cracked between bead and steel. The welder had moved too fast, melting the rod only, not the steel.

  Time after time he whacked at joints, and they broke under the minimal shock he could give them by hitting them with a hand-held hammer.

  Caravella returned to the elevator.

  "How's she go, buddy?" a foreman asked.

  Caravella raised his hand and joined his thumb and middle fingers in the gesture for okay. He smiled and entered the elevator. They would hear from him in writing, from his office. He'd heard too much about this job to risk telling a man up here that he'd found serious defects. Too many men fell.

  He was still on the site when the accident happened. He didn't see the first of it, but he saw the result. The driver of a concrete mixer misjudged his distance and bumped a vertical column at about five miles an hour and with the massive force of a heavily loaded truck. A shudder went up the beam. Forty stories above, a joint broke, releasing one end of a girder. The girder swung down, breaking the joint at the other end, and suddenly the girder was falling freely. It punched through a concrete floor at the thirty-fifth level, which slowed it, and at the thirty-fourth level it broke the floor but stopped. Then it fell outward and began to turn end over end, plummeting toward the ground. It crashed into the concrete mixer, bursting the rotating barrel and spilling tons of wet concrete. Finally it smashed down the fence and crushed a car parked on the street.

  No one was killed. No one was injured.

  Five minutes later Nick Caravella identified himself to a police lieutenant. "Close it down," he said curtly. "Everybody out. Building's unsafe."

  "Hey!" yelled a superintendent wearing a hard hat stenciled ASMAN. "An accident! Could happen anywhere. The driver could have been stoned, backed a truck…"

  "Closed," Lieutenant," Caravella repeated. "Evacuate it."

  * * *

  Charles Asman sat in a booth in a small Brooklyn restaurant, smoking a thin cigar and staring with apprehension and skepticism into the face of Natale Plumeri.

  "Order something to eat," Plumeri said. "It's a modest place, but you can't find better food. Try the polpi — octopus. That's what I'm having. I swear it's heaven."

  Plumeri frightened Asman, just by the look of evil in his lined face. He was an old man, maybe seventy, and his long, pointed jaw seemed to stretch the deeply pitted skin of his cheeks. His nose was long and sharp, yet ruddy and veined. His gray eyes were bloodshot and watery. His voice was thin and whispery.

  Asman, by contrast, sought to give the impression of a conservative, deeply committed businessman. He wore big eyeglasses with silver wire frames. His sandy hair was combed severely from side to side across his head. His mouth was wide and thin, the lips white. When he withdrew the cigar from his mouth, invariably his tongue darted out as if to be sure to capture any stray crumb of tobacco that might remain there.

  "Octopus…" Asman murmured dubiously.

  "I recommend it as it is prepared here. A man must keep in mind always that life is fragile, that time may not be left to us to enjoy all that we might hope to enjoy. That's why I always take my small pleasures whenever the opportunity offers itself. What you put off until tomorrow, you may not live to experience. So I will order a wine, too, unless you see one you particularly favor."

  Asman shook his head.

  Plumed looked up at the waiter, who was standing near, a respectful two paces away, where he might not accidentally overhear anything these two men might not want overheard. He stepped forward when the old man's eyes met his. After receiving their order, he hurried away.

  "Now, my friend," Plumed said to Asman. "Let us dispose of business quickly, before these fine things are brought."

  Asman nodded, remembering how uneasy he was about this meeting.

  "The building inspector didn't solicit a bribe," Plumed stated firmly, "as yesterday's papers stated. You will see to it that the accusation is not repeated. Your employee who made that statement will be fired tomorrow, and you will explain to the newspapers that it was an error."

  Asman flushed. "I need to talk to the don."

  Plumed put his wrinkled old hand firmly on Asman's. "My friend, do not ever again call Mr. Rossi 'the don. Mr. Giuseppe Rossi is not a Mafia don. He is an honest businessman of Italian descent, as I am. Do you understand?"

  Asman essayed a measure of indignation. "He took control of my
company…" He stopped. Plumed was shaking his head. "I…"

  "You would have been out of business long ago if Mr. Rossi hadn't bolstered your company with a large infusion of capital."

  "Therefore, I am his… underling."

  Plumed shrugged. "As you would be to the officers of a bank who let you have that much money. As you would be to the officers of a corporation who bailed you out and merged you in." He tightened his grip on Asman's hand. "The only difference is, if you say the wrong things, you may have an accident." He shrugged. "A small price to pay for what you got out of Mr. Rossi's bailout of your faltering company. All you have to do is keep your mouth firmly shut."

  "Why did I falter?" Asman asked. He remembered why, vividly: the labour troubles he'd had, the accidents on job sites, the skyrocketing insurance premiums, the exorbitant increases in the cost of paying off building inspectors… "I… Well… What difference?"

  Plumeri smiled. "What difference, indeed? Today you earn more income from your business than you ever earned before. We know where you are putting it, incidentally. And that's all right. Someday soon you can retire. A very comfortable retirement."

  "Mr. Plumeri, the unions are killing me. Caravella was right. The building on Seventh is a mess. Welds… Hell, that's just a part of it. Barbosa…"

  "Luca Barbosa killed the Mohawk."

  "Murder…? My God…"

  "Do not try to cope with this matter by yourself," Plumeri told him. "Forget that you are president of Asman Construction. Report your troubles to me. I will take the necessary steps."

  "What happens on Seventh Avenue?" Asman asked miserably.

  "Wait for your orders. Above all, keep everything quiet. Dismiss your lawsuit. Stop work. We will make you whole, one way or another."

  "Who's going to pay?" asked Asman.

  "That isn't your problem. It may be Don Barbosa. But not a word from you. Nothing, unless it's cleared by me. This thing is getting far too much public attention. Others will do what must be done to quiet it. And, uh, that eight million you have put away. Treasure it. Cherish it. If we have to make you the scapegoat, it will take care of you. We promise you one thing. You will not see the inside of a jail cell."