Omerta (12 page)

But like many fortunate men, Rubio believed in pushing fate. He enjoyed pitting his wits against dangerous men. He needed risk to flavor the exotic dish that was his life. He was involved in the illegal shipping of technology to China; he established a line of communication on the highest levels for the drug barons; and he was the bagman who paid off American scientists to emigrate to South America. He even had dealings with Timmona Portella, who was as eccentrically dangerous as Inzio Tulippa.

Like all high-risk gamblers, Rubio prided himself on an ace in the hole. He was safe from all legal peril because of his diplomatic immunity, but he knew there were other dangers, and in those areas he was careful.

His income was enormous, and he spent lavishly. There was such power in being able to buy anything he wanted in the world, including the love of women. He enjoyed supporting his ex-mistresses, who remained valued friends. He was a generous employer and intelligently treasured the goodwill of people dependent on him.

Now, in his New York apartment, which was very fortunately part of the Peruvian consulate, Rubio dressed for his dinner date with Nicole Aprile. The engagement was as usual with him, part business and part pleasure. He had met Nicole at a Washington dinner given by one of her prestigious corporate clients. At first sight he had been intrigued by her not-quite-regular beauty, the sharp, determined face with intelligent eyes and mouth, her small, voluptuous body, but also by her being the daughter of the great Mafia chief Don Raymonde Aprile.

Rubio had charmed her, but not out of her senses, and he was proud of her for that. He admired romantic intelligence in a woman. He would have to win her respect with deeds, not words. Which he had immediately set about doing by asking her to represent one of his clients in a particularly rich deal. He had learned that she did a great deal of pro bono work to abolish the death penalty and had even defended some notorious convicted murderers to put off their executions. To him she was the ideal modern woman—beautiful, with a highly professional career, and compassionate in the bargain. Barring some sort of sexual dysfunction, she would make a most agreeable companion for a year or so.

All this was before the death of Don Aprile.

Now the main purpose of his courtship was to learn if Nicole and her two brothers would put their banks at the disposal of Portella and Tulippa. Otherwise there would be no point in killing Astorre Viola.

I
nzio Tulippa had waited long enough. More than nine months after the killing of Raymonde Aprile, he still had no arrangement with the inheritors of the Don’s banks. A great deal of money had been spent; he had given millions to Timmona Portella to bribe the FBI and the police in New York, and to procure the services of the Sturzo brothers, and yet he was no further in his plans.

Tulippa was not the vulgar impersonation of a high-powered drug dealer. He came from a reputable and wealthy family and had even played polo for his native land of Argentina. He now lived in Costa Rica, and he had a diplomatic Costa Rican passport, which gave him immunity from prosecution in any foreign land. He handled the relations with the drug cartels in Colombia, with the growers in Turkey, refineries in Italy. He made arrangements for transport, the necessary bribing of officials from the highest rank to the lowest. He planned the smuggling of huge loads into the United States. He was also the man who lured American nuclear scientists to South American countries and supplied the money for their research. In all ways he was a prudent, capable executive, and he had amassed an enormous fortune.

But he was a revolutionary. He furiously defended the selling of drugs. Drugs were the salvation of the human spirit, the refuge of those damned to despair by poverty and mental illness. They were the salve for the lovesick, for the lost souls in our spiritually deprived world. After all, if you no longer believed in God, society, your own worth, what were you supposed to do? Kill yourself? Drugs kept people alive in a realm of dreams and hope. All that was needed was a little moderation. After all, did drugs kill as many people as alcohol and cigarettes, as poverty and despair? No. On moral grounds, Tulippa was secure.

Inzio Tulippa had a nickname all over the world. He was known as “the Vaccinator.” Foreign industrialists and investors with enormous holdings in South America—whether oil fields, car manufacturing plants, or crops, necessarily had to send top executives there. There were many from the United States. Their biggest problem was the kidnapping of their executives on foreign soil, for which they had to pay ransoms in the millions of dollars.

Inzio Tulippa headed a company that insured these executives against kidnapping, and every year he visited the United States to negotiate contracts with these corporations. He did this not only for money but because he needed some of the industrial and scientific resources of these companies. In short, he performed a vaccinating service. This was important to him.

But he had a more dangerous eccentricity. He viewed the international persecution of the illegal drug industry as a holy war against himself, and he was determined to protect his empire. So he had ridiculous ambitions. He wanted to possess nuclear capabilities as a lever in case disaster ever struck. Not that he would use it except as a last resort, but it would be an effective bargaining weapon. It was a desire that would seem ridiculous to everyone except the New York FBI agent in charge, Kurt Cilke.

.  .  .

A
t one point in his career, Kurt Cilke had been sent to an FBI antiterrorist school. His selection for the six-month course had been a mark of his high standing with the director. During that time he had access (complete or not, he didn’t know) to the most highly classified memoranda and case scenarios on the possible use of nuclear weapons by terrorists from small countries. The files detailed which countries had weapons. To public knowledge there was Russia, France, and England, possibly India and Pakistan. It was assumed that Israel had nuclear capability. Kurt read with fascination scenarios detailing how Israel would use nuclear weapons if an Arab bloc were at the point of overwhelming it.

For the United States there were two solutions to the problem. The first was that if Israel were so attacked, the United States would side with Israel before it had to use nuclear weapons. Or, at the crucial point, if Israel could not be saved, the United States would have to wipe out Israel’s nuclear capability.

England and France were not seen as problems; they could never risk nuclear war. India had no ambitions, and Pakistan could be wiped out immediately. China would not dare; it did not have the industrial capacity short-term.

The most immediate danger was from small countries like Iraq, Iran, and Libya, where leaders were reckless, or so the scenarios claimed. The solution here was almost unanimous. Those countries would be bombed to extinction with nuclear weapons.

The greatest short-term danger was that terrorist organizations secretly financed and supported by a foreign power would smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States and explode it in a large city. Probably Washington, D.C., or New York. This was inevitable. The proposed solution was the formation of task forces to use counterintelligence and then the utmost punitive measures against these terrorists and whoever backed them. It would require special laws that would abridge the rights of American citizens. The scenarios acknowledged the impossibility of these laws until somebody finally succeeded at blowing up a good portion of an American metropolis. Then the laws would pass easily. But until then, as one scenario airily remarked, “It was the luck of the draw.”

There were only a few scenarios depicting criminal use of nuclear devices. This was almost absolutely discounted on the grounds that the technical capacity, the procurement of material, and the broad scope of people involved would inevitably lead to informers. One solution to this was that the Supreme Court would condone a death warrant without any judicial process on any such criminal mastermind. But this was fantasy, Kurt Cilke thought. Mere speculation. The country would have to wait until something happened.

But now, years later, Cilke realized it was happening. Inzio Tulippa wanted his own little nuclear bomb. He lured American scientists to South America and built them labs and supplied money for their research. And it was Tulippa who wanted access to Don Aprile’s banks to establish a billion-dollar war chest for the purchase of equipment and material—so Cilke had determined in his own investigation. What was he to do now?

He would discuss it soon with the director on his next trip to FBI headquarters in Washington. But he doubted they would be able to solve the problem. And a man like Inzio Tulippa would never give up.

.  .  .

I
nzio Tulippa arrived in the United States to meet with Timmona Portella and to pursue the acquisition of Don Aprile’s banks. At the same time, the head of the Corleonesi
cosca
of Sicily, Michael Grazziella, arrived in New York to work out with Tulippa and Portella the details on the distribution of illegal drugs all over the world. Their arrivals were very different.

Tulippa arrived in New York on his private jet, which also carried fifty of his followers and bodyguards. These men wore a certain uniform: white suits, blue shirts, and pink ties, with floppy yellow Panama hats on their heads. They could have been members of some South American rhumba band. Tulippa and his entourage all carried Costa Rican passports; Tulippa, of course, had Costa Rican diplomatic immunity.

Tulippa and his men moved into a small private hotel owned by the consul general in the name of the Peruvian consulate. And Tulippa did not slink around like some shady drug dealer. He was, after all, the Vaccinator, and the representatives of the large American corporations vied to make his stay a pleasant one. He attended the openings of Broadway shows, the ballet at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, and concerts given by famous South American artists. He even appeared on talk shows in his role as president of the South American Confederation of Farm Workers and used the forums to defend the use of illegal drugs. One of these interviews—with Charlie Rose on PBS—became notorious.

Tulippa claimed it was a disgraceful form of colonialism that the United States fought against the use of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana all over the world. The South American workers depended on the drug crops to keep themselves alive. Who could blame a man whose poverty entered his dreams to purchase a few hours of relief by using drugs? It was an inhumane judgment. And what about tobacco and alcohol? They did much more damage.

At this, fifty followers in the studio, Panama hats in laps, applauded vigorously. When Charlie Rose asked about the damage drugs wreaked, Tulippa was especially sincere. His organization was pouring huge sums of money into research to modify drugs so that they would not be harmful; in short, they would be prescription drugs. The programs would be run by reputable doctors rather than pawns of the American Medical Association, who were so unreasonably antinarcotics and lived in dread of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. No, narcotics could be the next great blessing for humanity. The fifty yellow Panama hats went flying into the air.

Meanwhile, the Corleonesi
cosca
chief, Michael Grazziella, made an altogether different entry into the United States. He slipped in unobtrusively, with only two bodyguards. He was a thin and scrawny man with a faunlike head and a knife scar across his mouth. He walked with a cane, for a bullet had shattered his leg when he was a young Palermo
picciotto.
He had a reputation for diabolical cunning—and it was said that he had planned the murder of the two greatest anti-Mafia magistrates in Sicily.

Grazziella stayed at Portella’s estate as his guest. He had no qualms about his own safety, for Portella’s entire drug-dealing business depended on him.

The conference had been arranged to plan a strategy to control the Aprile banks. This was of the utmost importance in order to launder the billions of dollars of black-market money from drugs and also to acquire power in the financial world of New York. And for Inzio Tulippa, it was crucial not only to launder his drug money but to finance his nuclear arsenal. It would also make his role as the Vaccinator safer.

They all met at the Peruvian consulate, which was security-proof in addition to supplying the cloak of diplomatic immunity. The consul general, Marriano Rubio, was a generous host. Since he received a cut of all their revenues and he would head their legitimate interests in the States, he was full of goodwill.

Gathered around the small oval table, they made an interesting scene.

Grazziella looked like an undertaker in his black shiny suit, white shirt, and thin black tie, for he was still in mourning for his mother, who had died six months before. He spoke in a low, doleful voice with a thick accent, but he was clearly understood. He seemed such a shy, polite man to have been responsible for the death of a hundred Sicilian law-enforcement officials.

Timmona Portella, the only one of the four whose native tongue was English, spoke in a loud bellow, as if all the others were deaf. His attire too seemed to shout: He wore a gray suit and lime green shirt with a shiny blue silk tie. The perfectly tailored jacket would have hidden his huge belly if it was not unbuttoned to show blue suspenders.

Inzio Tulippa looked classically South American, with a white, loose-draped silk shirt and scarlet handkerchief around his neck. He carried his yellow Panama hat in his hand reverently. He spoke a lilting accented English, and his voice had the charm of a nightingale. But today he had a forbidding frown on his sharp Indian face; he was a man not pleased with the world.

Marriano Rubio was the only man who seemed pleased. His affability charmed them all. His voice was well bred in the English style, and he was dressed in a style he called
en pantoufle:
pajamas of green silk and a bathrobe of a darker forest green. He wore soft brown slippers lined with white wool fur. After all, it was his building and he could relax.