Winter Kills (26 page)

“If Chantal Lamers was a fraud, who was she?”

“If you would rather talk about a plain and obvious red herring like Lamers, that is all right with me, Mr. Thirkield, but we have come to a fact that is—as I implied—incontrovertibly sinister.”

“Which fact?”

“Frank Mayo lied to you and your father with his story about Diamond being recruited by the Tubesters Union. Diamond was never near the union movement. Diamond never met Vonnie Blanik in his life. Nothing Frank Mayo told you and your father ever happened.”

Nick felt like a sliding mote within a kaleidoscope aboard a spinning spacecraft above a turning constellation within a limitless universe. “If Mayo was lying,” he articulated slowly, “then who did find Joe Diamond for the man who bought the murder?”

“Frank Mayo,” Cerutti answered.

Confusion hit Nick like a stomach cramp. Then he stood outside himself: he saw a Nicholas Thirkield sinking into a bog, too hopeless ever to be able to put the whole thing together.

“Nineteen years ago Frank Mayo was the usual run of successful American big crime executive. He probably would have gone on to lead one of their corporate units called a “family,” but nineteen years ago, in 1955, there was a dramatic change in Mayo’s position, his power and his fortune. Essentially, you could say he owes everything to one person. In 1955 he met and went into business with glamour-beyond-glamour, the ineffable force known merely as “the world’s greatest entertainer”—the woman who was once your brother’s keystone mistress and procurer, Miss Lola Camonte. Let me tell you about her.”

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1955—HAVANA

In 1955, at least on the outside, Lola Camonte was still gloriously beautiful, still twelve years away from announcing her last farewell appearance for the first time. The paunch, the wattles, the aqueous ankles, wrists and mouth, the rotting fruits from the cornucopia of her prodigious dissipation were still a decade in the future. In 1955 she was a star at Metro—not yet, however, the great, central Red Giant she was about to become because of her gimmick: a breathtakingly contemporary switch on the Faust legend, in which Faust becomes his own Mephistopheles, his own mirrored, formidable fiend, which then most certainly delivered the goods to Faust as Faust wanted them. In Goethe’s version Faust’s soul escaped Mephistopheles, but the Faust of Miss Camonte wanted power above all else—and power is known to be very sticky stuff (Professor Cerutti explained).

In 1955 Lola Camonte was perhaps the Number Six star on the Metro list. Six isn’t a big number anywhere. Lola’s instant identification in the Metro publicity department was “the Mexican sex machine,” mostly because of her gleaming blue-black hair and olive-on-pink coloring that she had inherited from her Sicilian parents, who had emigrated to New Orleans. It could also have had to do with her being discovered (for movies) in Acapulco, Mexico, by Harry Small, who was very big on the Metro lot and who had a lock on most of the big-budget musicals. He had discovered Lola on a night when he had a bad cold and had sent
out for a hot fifty-dollar hooker to put on his chest (Professor Cerutti chuckled). Lola was so intelligent in those days that though she was only a fifty-dollar hooker in Mexico, it was just to get together enough money to get out of town. At home, in the United States, she was a hundred-dollar hooker. Harry Small liked her style. He put her under personal contract.

In New Orleans, Lola’s family had ever leaned upon Mafia benevolence. When the second movie Lola made went into release she flew to New Orleans and asked for an audience with the head of the “family” in her parents’ area. She asked him humbly if he would help her to organize a letter-writing campaign telling the studio that the public thought it had a great new star. She explained that the campaign had to be conducted on a national basis, that the letters had to seem to come from all over the United States—obviously from wherever the Mafia was organized (everywhere). Lola averaged two thousand letters a week for eight weeks. Luckily there was a wire-haired terrier in the same movie that had caught the public’s fancy, so the picture was doing (mysteriously) big business. The studio connected all the letters about Lola with the unexpected box office. By that time she had the best agent in town.

Lola’s intelligence helped her to become a convincing film actress, and she had been born with a skinful of that other stuff that stars squirt off the screen so blindingly. She worked very hard for what she got. She worked hard for it all her life. But beyond energy, intelligence, ambition, talent and beauty she had belief. She believed in the power of the Fratellanza the way a young nun in western Ireland could believe in the power of Rome. It was all and everything. It was the only (American) way to (insured) glory and power.

Aside from her daily prayers to the little brothers, Lola lived by her head. She did this to the square of the degree by which Tim Kegan lived by his head, but precisely to the degree Thomas Kegan lived by his. She was blood over ice. Lola saw the entertainment industry
only as a cosmetic that would make her all the more desirable in the seduction of power. Everything it stood for was convenient to her holy goal. Her emergence as the household synonym for sex was just so much rope to pull her up to where she could grab what she had to have, what she told herself she could not live without: power.

Lola wanted that kind of respect from her dead father (who had thrown her down a flight of stairs when she was seventeen because she had come home one night twelve minutes later than he had told her to come home). His soul would grovel in front of her if he could see her as an equal of the Dons. Her mother had had to take shit from him all her life, but if a punk kid who ran coffee for the crap game in the garage across the street came into the store, Pop would practically drop to his knees to kiss that punk’s ass. In fact, this was why she believed in the Church. She was a strict Catholic because she wanted to be told over and over again that there was life after death, so that wherever her father was, when he saw her as the equal of any
capo
of the Mafia, he could fall down on his knees and kiss her ass and Mom’s ass for fifty thousand years of eternity.

Lola gradually figured out her gimmick when the son of her neighbor at Palm Springs, a square named Kegan, was elected to the U.S. Senate five years before his father said he was going to make it to the White House. First she made good friends with the father. Then she screwed the son. Then he screwed her. Then she screwed him, and so on, and on, and on. It was—like—an idyll. Then she heard both father and son tell her again that he was going to be the next President of the United States. The gimmick began to materialize. She hung around them real close and listened real good. She was able to throw in a few fast angles of her own, so they were more than glad to have her around. After a while, so Tim wouldn’t get bored screwing only her, she began to get broads for him. Later on that
grew into a major effort. She had a full-time guy on it in Europe because it was worth it. Her cousin lined up broads in New York, and Lola handled Hollywood, Rome and London. She got him the top broads.

Lola wanted a very simple thing for herself. How to get it was just as simple. She wanted to be the national crime industry’s lobbyist in Washington. She would be the sole fixer with the federal government, working with the Attorney General’s office and the White House. She would be set with every single “family” in the Fratellanza, accepted as the one who could solve their problems with Uncle Sam, from the Congress to offshore deals through the State Department to a lock on the big contracts at the Department of Defense. That was all. To get there would take a little more muscle than she presently had, but she knew she had to be all set at about the same week or, at most, two weeks before Senator Kegan got there as President. When she was ready to make her move she bought the private-line, home telephone number of Salvatore Verdigerri, a/k/a Frank Mayo, a/k/a Frank Brown, at his modest home in Pound Ridge, New York, from where he commuted to the city every day just like any other working stiff, in a Mercedes 600SL.

Mayo was in his workshop in the cellar of his house building a hi-fi set, which was his hobby, with which, by installing it on the roof of an office building, they could bug as many telephones as were necessary to be bugged throughout the structure. Lola spoke to him in a west Sicilian dialect. She said she had important business to talk about and asked permission to fly to New York to see him right away. He knew her in a minute. In fact, he was a fan.

“It wouldn’t be good for your business to come to see me, Miss Camonte,” he said. “Your reputation and mine, they just wouldn’t mix.”

“Nobody has to know.”

“Look, you my favorite movie stah. I knew the first minute I seen you you wasn’t no Mexican. With me,
you couldn’t do no wrong. You need advice, I wanna help you. Can you get to Havana?”

“Anyplace, Don Francisco.”

“Okay. Good. I gotta do some business in Havana. I’ll be at the Nacional Thursday night for four, five days. If you want, I’ll see you in Havana.”

***

When she called him from her room at the Nacional he told her to come up to room 917-18-19-20-21-22. This was easy for Lola to do because her suite happened to be 923-24-25. She used floral-based perfume because Dons were real straights. When she went into the big parlor, Don Francisco was with a certain man from Naples who had once been from New York for a long time just a little while ago. They were smoking two-dollar cigars, retail cost in Havana. The louvered wooden windows that led to a balcony overlooking the gardens were open. The scents of ginger and frangipani had come into the room. She could see the intensely blue flowers of a tall jacaranda tree in the background behind Don Francisco. Behind and around the tree was a blue, blue sky without a cloud. Overhead in the tall ceiling a four-bladed fan turned lazily, stirring contentment. The sun filled two-thirds of the room in a way that made it seem as if Pissarro had painted them sitting there so motionlessly. The room was tropically warm, but each man remained correctly dressed in a dark suit jacket and wore a dark necktie. Lola was humble and respectful, as they were with her. She addressed them as Don Francisco and Zu Carlo. Zu Carlo was senior. They talked about movies and movie people they all knew for a few minutes. Then her sponsor, Don Francisco, asked her how he could help her. She went directly to the point.

“They are going to make Martin Hanaberry resign,” she said. Both men blinked involuntarily. Martin Hanaberry was the big reform mayor of New York in the fifties. He had too strong a grip on the police. Anything that could break the grip would be good for business.

“Who says?” Zu Carlo asked.

“Senator Kegan. He’s the junior senator from California.”

“That’s a long way from City Hall.”

“So is Naples.”

“The senator or the senator’s father?” Don Francisco asked.

“Both.”

“Why is Hanaberry out?”

“He’s going to have a nervous breakdown. He came out of the war with a very bad condition. He was in a hospital for two years and he picked up a very expensive habit with the treatment. He can hardly support it. When he comes to Palm Springs, I help him.”

“How did Kegan find that out?”

“I told him.”

“Maybe you shoulda told us,” Zu Carlo said sharply.

“New York is big and it can throw off a lot of money,” Lola said diffidently. “But when junk comes in like it’s gonna come in, and when it takes in the whole country—that’s much more money, and it’s gonna take much more junk.”

“Say what is on your mind.”

“If we can bring in, say, ten thousand kilos of the purest and stockpile it, we will have a lock on an industry, not just a business.”

“We?”

“An ambassador can go back and forth as much as he wants and nobody bothers him,” Lola said. “We could line the whole inside of an ambassador’s plane once a week. He could bring in a thousand kilos a week. And nobody would bother him.”

“What ambassador?”

“I mentioned to the junior senator from California that it would be a good thing for him and his father to move his father’s old friend Martin Hanaberry out of New York and into Mexico now, before he can foul up the next elections. The senator’s father has the muscle with the White House to swing it.”

“You have good ideas, Miss Camonte,” Don Francisco said.

“I like to think I have an investment in my ideas,” Lola said.

“First we’ll see if you can do it,” Zu Carlo told her. “Then we’ll talk about your investment.”

Lola’s long, beautiful hand moved out. Her exquisitely tapered forefinger tapped Zu Carlo on the knee. “Giving you New York—which I have just done—is nothing,” she said. “Bringing you an ambassador who will deliver two thousand kilos a week is nothing also. I mean that. Everything is comparative. What I want to talk to you about now is giving you a President of the United States and his entire Cabinet.”

***

“The record of that meeting,” Professor Cerutti said to Nick on Schrader Island, “is on a tape Charley Fortunato gave us in Naples the year before he dropped dead. He was the Zu Carlo at the Nacional in Havana. He agreed to give us the tape because your father had been influential in getting him pardoned by the governor before he was deported and because as a patriot he was deeply shocked by your brother’s assassination. He also agreed to talk because he had reason to believe that Frank Mayo and Camonte had been giving him a fast count.”

“Then they did make a deal with Lola?”

“All the way. Camonte got sixteen and two-thirds percent of their net. In return, to make her what you could say would be an international hostess, when the time came for Lola to move to Washington and establish the new lobby, Zu Carlo and Don Francisco persuaded the national council of the Fratellanza to put out everything to turn Lola into “the world’s greatest entertainer”—or certainly the most successful. Tremendous pressure was put on the entire entertainment business and the overcommunications industry. It took them about five years to make Lola the phenomenon she became in world show business—and still is
in spite of the paunch and wattles. She suddenly developed as a singer, and her records were pushed day and night, night and day, on every jukebox and by every disc jockey in North America. She was showcased twice a year as the biggest act ever to play Las Vegas. She had a series of her own television shows, the only place she flopped, because even the trained press can’t comment on television until after the audience has seen the show, which is bad news in a regimented country, because the viewers just didn’t know they were supposed to be watching Lola. But she ran her own movie company. She collected two Oscars. And while she was wowing them from the local Bijou screens to in-person appearances in Tokyo and Paris, she established herself in an enormously effective pleasure complex in Palm Springs which attracted—more and more and more—the highest political figures. She got women for most of the men. She got them whatever they thought they needed. In return they blubbered over her wonderful generosity and fiercely independent spirit, such as when she beat up the mother of a senator in the lobby of the Statler in Washington. Lola’s nerves got very taut, and it was up to the press and her powerful friends to make her a law unto herself. As time went on and your brother got closer and closer to the White House, Lola became a very tense, exhausted woman. When Tim got elected, long before his inauguration Lola moved into Washington and her real work began.