Operation Bamboozle Read online

  Vito tore up the sheet of paper.

  “He never forgave them for losing that sock,” Uncle said. “Even when he owned the laundry, he wouldn’t pay that bill. To the day he died he owed nine dollars and thirty-three cents to a company that he owned. They’d lost his sock, see. Unforgivable.”

  7

  At breakfast next day, Princess told Stevie to lay off the blueberry pancakes. “I don’t want you fat an’ frumpy,” she said. “I want you skinny, so your titties poke holes in the air. Shove the coffee this way, Luis.”

  “It’s time we sold some paintings,” Julie said.

  “My figure’s perfect,” Stevie said. “Whatcha think, Luis?” She pulled up her t-shirt until it covered her face. “Any complaints?”

  Luis shook his head. “When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them both … Don’t buy another gallery, Julie. We still own that place in El Paso.”

  “Cover yourself up, girl,” Princess said. “You’re scaring the dog.” Stevie pulled down her t-shirt, and looked at Othello. He sprawled against a wall, drooling hard.

  “I’m planning on visiting some galleries,” Julie said. “Show them a few things, maybe do a deal.”

  “Fat chance,” Princess said. “This is LA. Disney scores big here. Get me some more canvas while you’re in town.”

  Later, Julie searched the Yellow Pages. Not many art galleries for a city this big, and most were Downtown. She drove to where Wilshire Boulevard met South Grand Avenue. She parked the Packard and carried four paintings under one arm and three under the other to Pierre’s Contemporary Art. Pierre saw her coming and did not open the door. Inside, the furniture was chromium plated, the walls were leather, the lights were neon, the art was Day-Glo kindergarten. Pierre was about 30, bald as an egg, with a tiny tuft of beard below his lip, as worn by all the best jazz musicians.

  “You don’t know the artist,” Julie told him. “American, been living in Mexico. Terrific on atmosphere.”

  He looked them over. “Somewhat strident for my taste.”

  “Strident?” She looked at the works on the walls. “Yeah, see what you mean. Your stuff is kinda soporific. Might almost say narcoleptic.” After that, relations grew worse. She gathered up her pieces and left.

  A gallery calling itself Mike’s looked more promising. It was all stripped pine and no foolishness, and the stuff on show was fairly honest: large abstracts spray-painted in pastels. Mike turned out to be Mrs. Mike, an ash blond old enough to be your mother. Within sixty seconds she had identified Julie as a New Yorker. “One thing you got to realize, honey, this is a conservative city,” she said. “The people who buy my art are likely to be Baptists, Methodists or Mormons. They’ll never hang your nudes on their walls. Never.”

  “I thought Mormons were hot for sex.”

  “In the dark, under the sheets, with the door locked,” Mrs. Mike said. “Me, personally, I think your nudes are damn good. But I just work here.”

  Next stop was Art For Art’s Sake. It was run by Art. “Bad joke,” he said. “I’m sick of it. What you got there? Oh, my. Who is she? I don’t keep up with the new movies like I should.”

  “She’s nobody,” Julie said. “She’s a model.”

  “Pity.” He looked more closely. “Good skin tone. The wet look is a nice gimmick. Now if this was Marilyn Monroe, say, or better yet Jane Russell. Maybe Piper Laurie. The new French girl, Bardot. Then you got a product.”

  “Rembrandt didn’t paint movie stars.”

  “That was before Hollywood. Bring back Rembrandt today and you know what he’d do? He’d follow the money. Where we are, it’s spelled Tinseltown.”

  Julie visited five more galleries. One owner said he thought he recognized Stevie and asked for her phone number. Two were amused by the idea of a Comanche squaw artist and wanted to meet Princess. Apart from that, all she got out of the morning was smarting eyes from petrochemical smog, sweat, a parking ticket, hunger and suppressed rage. She wasted fifteen minutes driving around, looking for an outdoor restaurant, until a cop put her straight. “Only place I know of is a burger stand in Griffith Park, up beyond the Hollywood sign. Down here, folks like to eat indoors. The smog, see.”

  She drove on, thinking If I didn’t feel so damn tired I’d have worked that out for myself Suppressed rage was exhausting.

  TAP-DANCING THROUGH THE CALENDAR

  1

  The church of St. Nicholas of Tolentino had a wonderful priest, Father Reilly, warm, encouraging, generous with his time, always ready to share your problem, never averse to a taste of Irish whiskey if it helped smooth the rocky road of life. But he was in Rome for a conference, so Jerome Fantoni got Father Fletcher instead.

  “I have this serious problem, Father. I’m afraid of flying.”

  “No, you’re afraid of crashing.” Fletcher was a large young man, under 30, and he had a voice like a box of broken glass. “Flying never hurt anyone, did it? The takeoff and the landing, those’re your hotspots.”

  “It’s not as easy as that. Just getting on the plane is torture. Even thinking about flying, the days beforehand, it …” He had no words.

  “Of course! You’re only human.” Fletcher grinned. He always grinned. “I know about airy-planes. I flew off carriers in the Pacific, flew Hellcats against the Japs, and brother I saw more crashes that you could count, and that’s using all your fingers, toes and what-you-will.”

  “I’ve taken up too much of your time,” Fantoni said.

  “Relax, we’ve got all eternity. You’ll agree with that? I’m here to tell you, as God is my witness—God and a couple hundred US fliers now at the bottom of the Pacific—crashing is nothing to be scared of.”

  Fantoni stared. He had a stare that made bungling hitmen wet their pants. It bounced off Father Fletcher. “You must have crashed and burned and gone to your Maker many times,” Fantoni said, “or you wouldn’t speak so flippantly.”

  Father Fletcher laughed. “Flippantly. That’s good. I must remember that.” He reached out a meaty hand and touched Fantoni’s arm. Fantoni flinched. “My, we are tense today,” Fletcher said. “Here’s the good news. When you make a hole in the Pacific, or in New Jersey for that matter, you don’t feel a thing. You’re like that light switch over there. One moment you’re on … a flick of the fingers … you’re off. Lucky you.” Big grin. He rocked his eyebrows as if they were coming in to land.

  “Lucky to be dead? Lucky to be nothing?” Fantoni took a little walk and came back. “I must have missed that press release from Rome.”

  “Okay. This is the easy bit.” Fletcher clapped his hands. He was happy in his work. “From the day we’re born, each of us is preparing for his death. That’s what really matters. The rest is just tap-dancing through the calendar. Now the great thing about flying is, it’s a win-win situation. Either you arrive, or …” His forefinger flicked an imaginary switch. “Job done.”

  “Uh-huh.” Fantoni rubbed his arm where Fletcher had touched him. “Preparing for death. Includes you?”

  “I’d be a sorry salesman if I didn’t buy my own product.”

  Father Fletcher’s hearty laughter followed Fantoni out of the church. Maybe I can help you reach your goal, Fantoni thought. Don’t thank me, fellah. It’s what I’m here for.

  He canceled his reservation on American Airlines and took the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago.

  This was the way to travel: speedy, safe, luxurious. He sat in an armchair in a private compartment with his shoes off and a Bloody Mary at his side and watched the farmland stream past. People stood and waved. So they should. This train was one of the triumphs of America. He saw a contrail scratching a thin white line across the baby-blue sky and said aloud: “Suckers.” They rushed from the city to the airport so they could rush from another airport to another city.

  It was good to get away from the job occasionally and take a wider view. America was changing—well, America was always changing, but now it was getting younger, fast. There was this young girl, Mau
reen Connolly, only 16 and already the best woman tennis player in the world. At 16! Ridiculous. Adolescents were invading everything. Their new music, rock’n’roll, was corrosive, nobody over thirty could dance to it without damaging his joints. Movies were going the same way, there was a new picture out that used the word virgin, for Christ’s sake. And how could anyone write a bestseller about a kid who gets kicked out of school? But teenagers had money and influence, and that was something organized crime couldn’t ignore, so Jerome Fantoni had reluctantly bought a copy of Catcher in the Rye and now was a good time to read it.

  When the train pulled into Chicago, Sam Giancana was waiting. They shook hands, they embraced, they made counterbalancing noises of appreciation, they made their way to the bulletproof limousine. Doors closed with the reassuring thud of battleship steel. “Good trip?” Sam asked. “Dumb question. The TCL is always tops.”

  “Caught up on my reading.” He showed Sam the book. “Rave reviews. You read it? It’s pathetic. If this is the way America is going, we might as well send the Kremlin a postcard: come and take us, we quit, it’s all yours.”

  “I sorta skimmed it,” Giancana said.

  “Sixteen-year-old kid. He’s the hero, can you believe. Flunked out of three prep schools. Knows nothing. No girlfriend, no friends at all. Big ambition is to be a deaf-mute.”

  Giancana laughed. “I remember that bit.”

  “Yeah, I thought it might be a joke. If only. This kid lies, cheats, and swindles. What does he know about adult behavior? All adults are phonies, he says.”

  “That’s how it is with teenagers, they have a small vocabulary.”

  “Most of it obscene.”

  “The kid’s a pain in the ass, I agree. Forget the goddam book, Jerome, it’s a freak, up like a rocket and down like the stick. You got bigger problems, I’m told. Family problems.”

  Fantoni described his worries about Stevie: the Cabrillo-Conroy connection, the counterfeiting activity, the risk of a long stretch. “She won’t listen to me. Her mother was the same.”

  “Know what you mean. Women’s brains aren’t put together like ours. Scientists proved it. God was holding the blueprint upside-down that day. Leave it to me, Jerome. I’ll send Tony Feet. He knows Stevie, they’re old friends, problem solved. Look, I bought this for you.” He pulled out a magazine. “First edition. Makes The Catcher in the Rye look like the Ladies Home Journal.”

  Fantoni opened Playboy. “Jesus … Nothing phony about that”

  “Try the centerfold,” Giancana said. “Look hard, you can almost see where you came from.”

  2

  Size matters. Of course size matters. When Stalin took the salute at those May Day Parades in Moscow, he made very sure that everyone else stood well behind him. At a squat five feet four inches, Stalin never let himself be overshadowed. Napoleon—five feet six-and-a-half—was taller than most men of his day, even the fighting men. Mozart at five-four could at least look the orchestra in the eye. But Holly Hanna, at five-two, was born in the wrong century and the wrong state where, to make it worse, all that orange juice was working like fertilizer on the rest of the population. Now, wherever he went, he was always looking up at people. You think size doesn’t matter? Try being five-two for a while.

  Try being called Holly, also. America has these hermaphroditic first names: Hazel, Marion, Carol, Sue, even Shirley. Parents mean well, but a boy called Holly is always going to struggle. As soon as he could, he changed his name, legally, to Alexander Carey MacFarlane. He’d noticed that tall men have long names. Too late. He still got called Holly Hanna. He gave up. “I’m a joke,” he told his shrink. “You guys don’t know how lucky you are. Take sex. Suppose I score with a tall girl. When we’re face-to-face my feet are in it. When we’re toe-to-toe my face is in it. When I’m on the job there’s no-one to talk to.”

  “If you could talk,” his shrink asked, “what would you say?”

  Hanna Fine Art was on Alameda Street near Wilshire Boulevard. The chairs were low, the desk was like a coffee table, but the pictures had to hang up high, so he hired a sleek young Latino called Raul. It was Raul who greeted Julie and Princess and took their stack of canvases, but it was Holly who bustled forward.

  “You wanted to meet the artist,” Julie said. “Here she is. Princess Chuckling Stream, the Picasso of the Comanches.”

  “Enchanté,” Holly said. He’d expected a sawed-off squaw, not this Amazon, six feet in heels and a redhead for God’s sake. “Enchanté in spades.” He bowed. Princess said nothing. She was working on a wad of gum. It was a long time since breakfast.

  “Nobody paints like Princess,” Julie said. “Get a load of those skin tones. See the dynamics in her palette. And that wet look? Pure trompe l’oeil. She’s unique.”

  “Yeah. These nudes are good. They’re very—”

  “Don’t say nice,” Julie warned.

  “They’re more than nice. They’re real cute.”

  Princess hit him. It was a jab to the head that knocked him flat on his ass, a short journey. Raul jumped forward to protect the boss and Princess decked him with a straight left. Julie grabbed her and marched her to the door. “Go wait in the car,” she ordered.

  Holly Hanna was sitting on the coffee table desk, working his jaw from side to side. “My apologies,” Julie said. “You shouldn’t have said cute. One thing Princess ain’t, she ain’t cute.”

  “She married?” he asked. Julie shook her head. “Some lucky guy,” he said.

  They called on one more gallery. Julie told Princess to stay near the door, say nothing, keep out of fights. But as she began showing the canvases, she knew Princess was wandering, was on the prowl. “I can leave these with you, if you like,” she said.

  “That’s won’t be necessary.” He was middleaged and should have worn spectacles but he was too vain. As a result, he frowned a lot. “These paintings bear a close resemblance to my daughter.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “This is some form of trickery. What’s more, I don’t believe your artist is a pureblooded Comanche.”

  “We’re on our way,” Julie said quickly.

  “You admit it, then.”

  “Watch your chops, gringo,” Princess said. “Us heathen savages was here first.” She punched him lightly on the nose and his legs folded.

  “Let’s go eat,” Julie said.

  They found a diner that served veal and peppers. “You gotta stop smackin’ people, kid,” Julie said. “It ain’t ladylike.”

  “Well, neither was Sheboygan ladylike. If a guy pinched my ass, I bust his face. Dad taught us how to hit. Tell the truth, that’s why I left town. I decked a cop. He groped my boobs in a bar so I got mad and stopped his clock. Folk in the bar passed the hat, gave me sixty-seven dollars, that’s a lot in Sheboygan, I took the bus to Texas.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Nah. He was fat, slow, sorta drunk too. I could of taken him one-handed.”

  Agent Moody in LA got a teletype from Agent Fisk in NYC. The female Fantoni would probably be returned to her father. No action necessary. Background information only. Moody thought briefly about meeting Milt Gibson. No. Any more steam rooms and he’d be a dill pickle. He phoned him instead. “Daddy Fantoni wants his little girl to come home,” he said. “Could be daddy’s scared she’ll get burned by a hot dollar.”

  “Could be he wants someone to play gin rummy with.”

  “Put your ear to the ground, Milt. The dirty one.”

  “I’m sick of this lousy deal,” Gibson said. “You get the gravy and I get the washing-up.”

  “Your choice. Remember?”

  “Yeah. Choice between getting’ screwed or reamed.”

  That same day, Tony Feet flew into LA. Beyond meeting Stevie, he had no plan. They knew each other, he would explain things, she would act sensibly, problem solved. Or she wouldn’t, he’d knock her cold, stuff her in the car, drive three thousand miles to Jersey, problem solved. Tony Feet’s life had been changed by a book by
Dr. Skip Golightly MD called Take It As It Comes: Let Stress Kill The Other Guy. Since then he had seen many other guys die, a few from stress, most from short-range gunshots, but all in a state of considerable anxiety. Tony avoided that. He took it as it came.

  He rented a Buick and made sure it had air conditioning: LA was a lot warmer than Chicago. He checked in at the Hotel Lafayette in Bel Air, expensive but what the hell: Fantoni was paying. Fantoni also paid for a haircut, a manicure, a couple of silk shirts from the shop in the lobby, a tennis lesson from the hotel pro, and lobster thermidor with a bottle of Blanc de Blanc, lightly chilled. Tony Feet was in no hurry. Stevie Fantoni was going nowhere until he suggested it.

  The house detective at the Lafayette knew Tony Feet as soon as he saw him; knew him from the twinkletoes way he walked. He called Agent Moody. It paid to have a friend in the Bureau. Even at the best hotels there were guests who left in disgrace, and it helped if the body wasn’t wheeled out through the lobby with a battery of flashbulbs advertising it.

  Counterfeiting meant printing. Milt Gibson drove past Konigsberg and wondered if that was really where it happened. George Parr was an actor, he wouldn’t have printing machinery in his house. This Cabrillo-Conroy couple were on a short lease. Would they set up printing stuff, and have paper and ink delivered? No, too public, too risky. The place to do counterfeiting was in a printing business. There must be a thousand in LA. Gibson went back to his office and thought of the guys who might know a thing about hot dollars. Then he went out again and called on them. No soap. They were noncommittal. They said Ain’t buyin’, ain’t sellin’, now beat it. They said Forget it, you ain’t smart enough to make change, never mind funny money. They said, What you want, you bum? You’re always snoopin’ about. Take a hike.

  Nobody knew anything. Moody wouldn’t buy that. Gibson looked at his life and saw that it wasn’t getting any better. He was a free man but he didn’t feel free. He felt trapped in the city that invented smog.