Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (8 page)

 
          
The
frisker came back and said to the other two, “We take him to Mr. Vigano.”

 
          
“Fine,”
I said. I said it partly because I wanted to be sure my voice was still
working.

 
          
The
frisker led the way. The other two took my arms again, and we left the kitchen
in a group.

 
          
It
was a weird sort of stop-and-go method we had, the four of us, traveling
through the house. First the frisker would go on ahead through a doorway or
around a comer, and then he’d come back and nod to us, and the rest of us would
move forward and catch up with him. At which point we’d stop again, and he’d go
on to the next phase of the trip. It was like being a piece on a board game, something
like Monopoly or Sorry, moving one square at a time. I don’t know if the idea
was that they didn’t want me to be seen by members of Vigano’s family who
weren’t a part of the mob operation, or if he had Mafia people staying with him
that I wasn’t supposed to see and maybe identify. But whatever their intention
the result was that I got a slow-paced guided tour of the first floor of
Vigano’s house.

 
          
It
was a strange house. Either Vigano had bought it furnished from the previous
owner, who had been somebody with a lot of good taste, or he’d had the thing
done for him by an expensive decorator. We went through rooms filled with
obviously valuable antiques, graceful furniture, flocked wallpaper, crystal
chandeliers, heavy draperies, all sorts of tasteful and quietly expensive
things; just the kind of surroundings Fm happiest among. But then on the wall
there’d be hanging some lousy painting of a crying clown, with real rhinestones
sprinkled on his hat. Or a lovely marble-topped table would have one of those
ashtrays on it made of a flattened gin bottle. Or a modern black parson’s table
would have a lamp on it composed of a fake brass statue of two lions trying to
climb up the trank of a tree and the shade would be cream-colored with purple
fringe. Or a room with
a beautiful
wallpaper would
have one of those porcelain light-switch plates in a free-form star shape.
Absolutely the most amateurishly done bust of President Kennedy I’ve ever seen
was sitting on a huge gleaming grand piano, next to a green glass vase with
pussy willows in it.

 
          
And
finally, at the end of the guided tour, they took me through another door and
down a flight of stairs and into a bowling alley.

 
          
It
was amazing. A one-lane bowling alley in the basement,
a long
narrow brightly lighted room like a pistol- practice range
. There was
the normal kind of curved leatherette settee behind the lane, and Vigano
himself was sitting there alone. He was wearing a gray sweatsuit and black
sneakers and a white towel around his neck, and he was drinking beer from a
Pilsner glass. A bottle of Michelob was on the score table.

 
          
Down
at the far end of the lane, a heavy thirtyish guy in a black suit was setting
up the pins. He was another hood, like the two who’d brought me in and who now
stood back by the door, waiting to be called on.

 
          
I
moved forward to the settee. Vigano turned his head around and gave me a heavy
smile. He had heavy-lidded eyes; it was as though he only allowed the dead part
of his eyes to show, the living parts were hidden away behind the lids. He
looked at me for a few seconds, and then put the smile away and nodded at the
settee. “Sit down,” he said. It was a command, not hospitality.

 
          
I
stepped through the central opening in the settee and sat on the side opposite
Vigano. Down at the other end of the lane, the hood in the black suit finished
setting up the pins and hoisted
himself
up onto a seat
hidden away out of sight. Only his highly polished shoes showed, hanging down
over the black valley where the ball would stop.

 
          
Vigano
was studying me. “You’re wearing a wig,” he said.

           
I said, “The story is, the FBI takes
movies of your visitors. I don’t want to be identified.”

 
          
He
nodded.
“The moustache phony too?”

 
          
“Sure.”

 
          
“It
looks better than the wig.” He drank some beer. “You’re a cop, huh?”

 
          
“Detective
Third Grade,” I said.
“Assigned in
Manhattan
.”

 
          
He
emptied the rest of the beer from the bottle into the glass. Not looking
directly at me, he said, “I’m told you don’t have any papers on you.
Wallet, driver’s license, nothing like that.”

 
          
I
said, “I don’t want you to know who I am.”

 
          
He
nodded again. Now he did look at me. He said, “But you want to do something for
me.”

 
          
“I
want to sell something to you.”

 
          
He
squinted slightly. “Sell?”

 
          
I
said, “I want to sell you something for two million dollars cash.”

 
          
He
didn’t know whether he was supposed to laugh or take me seriously. He said,
“Sell me what?”

 
          
“Whatever
you want to buy,” I told him.

 
          
I
could see him deriding to get annoyed. “What bullshit is this?”

 
          
I
talked as fast as I knew how. “You buy things,” I said. “I’ve got a friend,
he’s also a cop. In our position, with what we know about how things work, we
can go anywhere in
New York
you want and get you anything you want. You just tell us what it is
you’ll pay two million dollars for, and we’ll go get it.”

 
          
Shaking
his head, seeming to be talking more to himself than to me, Vigano said, “I
can’t believe any DA in the world would be this dumb. This is a stunt you
worked out for yourself.”

 
          
“Sure
it is,” I said. “And how can it hurt you? Your boys frisked me on the way in, I
don’t have a recorder on me, and if I did
it’s
entrapment. I’m not crazy enough to just hand stuff over to you and expect two million
dollars in cash right back, so we’ll have to work out intermediaries, safe
methods, and that means you can’t possibly get picked up for fencing stolen
goods.”

 
          
He
was studying me hard now, trying to work me out. He said, “You mean you’re
actually offering to go steal something, anything I want.”

           
“That you’ll pay two million for,” I
said. “And that we can handle; I’m not going to get you an airplane.”

 
          
“I’ve
got an airplane,” he said, and turned away from me to look toward the pins set
up at the far end of the lane.

 
          
I
could see him thinking it over. I felt I hadn’t said enough, hadn’t explained
it right, but at the same time I knew the best thing to do right now was keep
my mouth shut and let him work it out for himself.

 
          
The
fact was, he had nothing to lose, and he should be smart enough to see it. If I
was crazy or stupid or just a horse’s ass kidding around, it still wouldn’t
cost Vigano anything to tell me what he’d be willing to buy from me. So long as
I didn’t ask for an advance payment, it was strictly to Vigano’s advantage to
play along with me.

 
          
I
saw that understanding come into his face before he said anything. I watched him
work it out, slowly and cautiously, looking for traps and mines the way
somebody in his position would have to do, and I saw him come around finally to
the understanding that there was nothing hidden underneath at all. I had come
here asking a question, which it wouldn’t hurt him to answer. And if I was
telling him a straight story, it might eventually profit him to answer.
So why not?

 
          
He
gave a sudden decisive nod, and looked at me with his heavy-lidded eyes, and
said, “Securities.”

 
          
Tbe
word didn’t immediately make sense to me. All I could think of was security
guards in stores and banks. I said, “Securities?”

 
          
‘Treasury
bonds,” he said.
“Bearer bonds.
No common stocks. Can
you do it with an inside man?”

 
          
I
said, “You mean Wall Street?”

 
          
“Sure
Wall Street. You know anybody in a brokerage?”

 
          
I
had been thinking all along it would be something in our own precinct, where we
knew the territory. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Do I have to?”

 
          
Vigano
shrugged and waved it away. His hands were surprisingly big and flat. “We’ll
change the numbers,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t get me anything with a
name on it.”

 
          
I
said, “I don’t follow you.”

 
          
He
breathed heavily, to show me how patient he was being. “If a certificate has
the owner’s name on it,” he said, “I don’t want it. Only papers that
say,
‘Pay to the bearer.’ ”

           
“Did you say Treasury bonds?”

 
          
“Right,”
he said “Them, or any other kind of bearer bond.”

 
          
I
found myself interested in this in a separate way from the question of stealing
things. I’d never heard of bearer bonds. I said, “You mean they’re like a
different kind of money.”

 
          
Vigano
grunted, with a little smile. “They
are
money,” he said.

 
          
I
felt happy at the thought, the way I’d been happy in that rich woman’s
apartment on Central Park West “Rich people’s money,” I said

 
          
Vigano
grinned at me. I think we were both surprised at how well we were getting along
with one another. “That’s right,” he said.
“Rich people’s
money.”

 
          
I
said, “And you’ll buy them from us.”

 
          
‘Twenty
cents on the dollar,” he said

 
          
That
startled me.
“A fifth?”

 
          
He
shrugged. “I’m giving you a good price because you’re gonna deal in volume.
Usually it’s ten cents on the dollar.”

 
          
I’d
meant the percentage was low, not high. I said, “If it’s pay to bearer, why
don’t I sell it myself?”

 
          
“You
don’t know how to change the numbers,” he said. “And you don’t have the
contacts to get the paper back into legitimate trade.”

 
          
He
was right, on both counts, “All right,” I said. “So we’ll have to take
ten-million-dollars’ worth to get two million from you.”

 
          
“Nothing
too big,” he said. “No certificate over a hundred thousand.”

 
          
“How
big do they get?” I asked him. This whole thing was heady stuff.

 
          
“U.S.
Treasury bonds go up to a million,” he said. “But they’re impossible to
peddle.”

 
          
I
couldn’t help it; I was awed and I had to show it “A million dollars,” I said.

 
          
“Stick
to the small stuff,” Vigano told me.
“Hundred grand and
down.”

 
          
A
hundred thousand dollars was small stuff. I felt my mind shifting around to
that point of view, and doing it with the greatest pleasure. Years ago there
was a show on Broadway called
Beyond the
Fringe
and they did a bit from it on television one time that I saw. (I’ve
never seen a Broadway show.) The bit was a monologue by an English miner, and
at one point he said something like, “In my childhood I wasn’t surrounded by
the trappings of luxury, I was surrounded by the trappings of poverty. My
problem is I had the wrong trappings.” That line stayed with me over the years
because it was exactly the way I felt; I was surrounded by the wrong trappings.
And any time I found myself in the midst of the right trappings, it made me
very happy.