The Sweeney 02 Page 15

  “Go on.” Cassidy sounded impatient.

  “When the shipments of equipment arrive in the docks at Dubaya they are unloaded, taken across the dock, loaded onto Libyan ships, and sent away. The two guys involved are the Prime Minister, Okani, and the Minister of Finance, Dr. Barundi. They reckon the regime won’t last another six months, which is how long they reckon it’ll take the Americans to find out their arms are in the hands of their enemies, the crazy oil-rich Libyans.” The guy went quiet for a moment and closed his eyes. Cassidy shook him. Brown’s eyes opened and he resumed. “The Libyans gave Barundi and Okani a hundred million in Libyan currency. Barundi sent four guys to Switzerland to try to bank the cash. A mob hit them, killed three of them—murdered in broad daylight in Geneva.”

  “What mob?”

  “We don’t know. The fourth guy escaped back to Dibouti. Nobody knows who these guys were who hit in Geneva, believe me...”

  Cassidy didn’t understand, but he also didn’t want to stop the man’s flow.

  “So Okani decides some heavy mob is out to stop him banking this money, maybe tin-pot Commie revolutionaries in his own country, but fuck who. He needs this money banked. That’s where we came in.”

  “How?” Cassidy probed.

  “I’m telling you how. Okani had lived in the U.S., knew his way around, had contacts. He contacted us.”

  “By ‘us,’ you mean the Syndicate, the East Coast Mafia. Right?” Cassidy demanded.

  Brown didn’t answer, probably because he felt an answer was obsolete.

  “So Okani contacts the East Coast family, and asks them to get the money into Switzerland?”

  Brown corrected. “He decided to bank it in the U.S.”

  “And you’ve done that?” Regan asked. “When and how?”

  “The money’s here. I can’t get it for you. But I can tell you it’s here. I can tell you how it came in. You never understood the fucking documents you took from Galliano in London...” Brown looked disgusted at Regan.

  “What didn’t I understand?” Regan asked.

  “The papers were documentation of the processing of a hundred million dollars through a bank in Germany, ultimately through London, then to the U.S. When you grabbed those documents, the money was in the pipeline from Germany to the U.S. If you or your colleagues at Scotland Yard Detectives Bureau had read those documents properly, you could have gotten the money in transit.”

  Regan shrugged. It was irrelevant and it was too late.

  “So we take our papers back from you.” Brown was still addressing Regan. “So we think maybe we will kidnap you or something. So we put some guy onto following you in London, and the next thing we hear is you’re at the airport going through the gate for the New York plane. We put two and two together—”

  “Why can’t you put your hands on the money?” Cassidy cut in.

  “We brought it direct from Germany to New York, then we reinvested it in about a hundred and fifty sources immediately.”

  “Why did you rob the Lexington Bank?”

  “Jesus, what are you talking about? I didn’t rob it!” Brown was becoming more apoplectic. “I was sitting in the manager’s office when the bastards ran in.”

  Cassidy shot a quick look at Regan.

  Regan nodded. “I didn’t see the group entering the bank. Brown could have walked in earlier. He didn’t have a gun on him.”

  Cassidy turned back to Brown. “Why were you at the bank?”

  “I was there to pick up a letter. It hadn’t arrived.”

  “Letter from whom?” Cassidy asked. “Containing what?”

  “From a guy you don’t know. Name of Ricky Rossi.”

  “I’ve met him,” Regan said. “What was in the letter?”

  “Details about where he’d finally deposited all the money, and my share of it.” “You’re going to tell us all you know about Rossi,” Cassidy decided.

  “Adds to nothing. I’ve never even met the guy,” Brown returned.

  “You’re going to give us all the details about everything you’ve said so far,” Cassidy went on.

  “You can have whatever you fucking want!”

  “Why? Why d’you say that?” Regan demanded.

  Brown’s temper was about to explode again. He swung on Regan. “Don’t you understand, you asshole, you can have everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because we’re dying! We’re all getting killed. Cohen, Galliano, and Cimini. And they’ve tried to get me. They’ve tried to kill me...”

  “Who?” Cassidy shouted the word.

  “I don’t know!” Brown said, his voice now edging over into total hysteria. “It’s goddamn black revolutionaries, or maybe gangland, or maybe the goddamn police department. I don’t know who.”

  “Who robbed the Lexington Bank?”

  “Jesus, you shit!” Brown screamed in pain and fear. “That’s what I’m telling you! That’s the point. Who robbed the bank? Because the outfit that robbed the Lexington Bank is the same mob that murdered Cohen and Angelo Galliano and Cimini, and who are now after me...”

  Snow. A thin lace of particles that dissolved and smeared into the arc of the cab windshield wipers. It was 10:00 p.m. He couldn’t see the sky or how much gloom was up there. He sat wrapped in the warmth and unique smell of the New York cab going to Christa’s. He had called her on the phone. She’d announced that she didn’t feel well—maybe a cold coming on—which, offered as an excuse at any other time would have been entirely acceptable, but because tonight he desperately wanted her companionship for a few hours, an excuse of not feeling well became almost a pointed rejection. He said he would like to see her for a couple of hours at least, and he said it stiffly. She gave in but made him promise he would be gone by midnight so she could get some sleep. He promised.

  He was not quite sure why he should be so depressed. Brown had produced the kind of information that would spark off more leads. There was a basis now. A big deal that had originated in an African country being processed through the East Coast Syndicate, where it had run into some murderous snags. From that bedrock he, Cassidy, Ciales, Seebohm, anyone in the NYPD could plan a campaign that might last days, weeks, or months, but which had a reasonable chance of arriving at a successful conclusion. That was all that any cop could ask.

  Maybe at the back of his mind there had been a wish that Brown would solve everything—he would talk and it would be names and dates and explanations and suddenly the whole case would be wound up. Well, he had been a detective long enough to know that that very rarely happens. A case is a progression, never a burning bush and a heavenly voice pat with evidence. Brown had given them new facts, like Cohen’s body was buried next to the rosebush in back of his house in New Jersey, minus the side of his head that had been shot off. That Brown and Galliano had buried him there after finding him locked in his garage shot dead in his Cadillac convertible. These were all items that Cassidy and Ciales were working on now, but as these new leads required a lot of precinct-hopping and phone work, the two had dumped Regan back at the surveillance office.

  Brown had gone off in an ambulance from the Croton bungalow with Dr. Kitson. That was about ten minutes before Cassidy talked on the phone to Seebohm and informed him that he had stolen Brown from the hospital. Cassidy’s appalled chief had gone into various operatic screams of outrage which Cassidy had ended by shouting that he was on the way in to see him and then hanging up on him.

  Regan in the cab turning into Eleventh Street was worried for Cassidy and the reception he’d get from Seebohm. In London if Regan had done what amounted to kidnapping a prisoner from a prison hospital, he’d be arrested on sight and put in jail.

  She looked pale, not ill or surrendering to a cold, just pale and nervous. She managed a smile. “Come in, Jack.”

  He went in, took off his coat as the heat hit him, and without her invitation sat down in a brown suede armchair. “Why didn’t you want to see me?”

  “Scotch?”

 
He nodded.

  She went over to the black leather bar and pulled out a bottle of Teacher’s. “I didn’t sleep last night. I feel rough. I’d like to be alone. Don’t you get days like that?”

  He shrugged.

  “Besides which, my roommate definitely is back tonight from Florida. She phoned. She’ll be here midnight. She’ll want to tell me the news. And I’ll have to listen to it. That’s why I didn’t want you to come. I’d like you to have this drink,” she handed him the Scotch, “and go.”

  “Why?”

  “I can get a couple of hours’ sleep before Geraldine arrives.”

  He sipped the Scotch. “I want you.”

  She looked at him almost sadly. “Tomorrow.”

  “No,” he said firmly. He put the drink down, got up, and crossed to her. He put his arms around her. He could feel her body tense. Then suddenly her resistance went. “I’m also down,” he told her. “I don’t know why. The case is in good shape. We got some new leads. But I don’t feel so bright.”

  She made an attempt at an encouraging smile. “Two human wrecks.”

  “Come to bed. I’ll tell you the rest.”

  She looked at her watch. “A quarter of midnight, you’re out on the streets. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They didn’t make love immediately. Looking back at it later, reexamining her behavior, he concluded that there were various alternatives. That she had asked him about the case to get him talking, in the naive assumption that she’d get his mind away from sex and then get him to leave at the appointed time. Alternatively, maybe she was deliberately playing with fire, based on some private courageous resolve, now that he was physically in her presence, to try and make the profound change in her life. And maybe her talk about loving him was true. At all events it was about eleven o’clock when he told her, almost ordered her, to take her clothes off. And they made love.

  At half-past eleven he was lying naked on top of the bed, and she said he must go. He started to protest. Christa became insistent. And then suddenly below they heard the front door of the apartment open. Christa grabbed her dressing gown and put it on fast. Regan pulled up the eiderdown from the bottom of the bed to cover his body. “Roommate?”

  “Get up,” Christa whispered, her voice desperate.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Get up!” She said it urgently again. But already it was too late.

  “Christa. You upstairs?” It was the sound of a girl’s voice from below.

  “Well, shit this,” Regan said sourly. “I’m not bloody pounding out of bed just because your roommate’s here...” But his protest trailed away. Christa was standing there, large silent tears coursing down her face.

  Regan turned. He heard the soft footsteps on the thick carpet of the stairs.

  Geraldine entered the room. Her clothes were quiet, restrained, echoing the kind of care and expense that she had practiced in furnishing her apartment. The face was attractive—that is, for the second while she walked in the door, and before she realized Regan was in the bed. Then she looked from Christa to Regan. Then back to Christa. Then to Regan, her face suffused with more fury and hatred than Regan had ever seen in any girl. “What in Christ’s name is happening here?” she said in words low and full of cold violence.

  Regan felt humiliated and, alternately dulled by the shock and wild with fury, wanted to go back to that apartment and kick both fucking dykes around their phony deep-pile cathedral to perversion. The iced air shock of the night street as the cab dropped him off at the surveillance office suddenly cooled the danger out of his rage. He found his key, opened the door of the premises, and headed up the stairs.

  The central heating was off, or too low, or maybe nonexistent. The three chairs and camp bed were still there. He had worried about that in the cab on the way over—the City Works Department might have removed the furniture. The furniture was still there—the camera equipment gone, which would be a normal precaution.

  No booze, no coffee, a frozen room, a camp bed, and two blankets. Well, tonight, he was going to have quite a few drinks, the anesthetic delivered after the incision. Yeah, he would go out, appropriately alone, and find some firewater dens on these freezing streets and spread his wounds over an empty table and concentrate on nothing except the tick of his watch and the level of his glass. He got up and moved toward the door.

  The phone rang.

  He paused, debated ignoring it, imagined her face, wet tears, excuses, and contrition at the end of it. But somehow that didn’t seem likely. The two girls would be on top of each other now—Christa hard grinding a penance for her aberration. Jesus, what a dirty bitch, he thought, and picked up the phone. “Yes?” he said into it sharply.

  “Me,” Cassidy said, voice liquored and low with fatigue. “I’m in Fifty-ninth Precinct. Stay put. I’m coming over.”

  “I’m going out,” Regan said, but he spoke to a mile of dead wire.

  He put the phone down and walked up and down, silently cursing. Then he started to pace about, slapping his arms around to warm himself and keep the circulation going. After ten minutes or so he opened a window, stuck his head out into the frost, and looked down just in time to see Cassidy turn the corner and walk up toward the surveillance building.

  “I’ll come down,” Regan called.

  “Stay there,” Cassidy instructed.

  A moment later Cassidy walked into the room and wavered about on his feet. Regan realized the guy was really drunk. “How are you doing, Jack my boy?” His words sounded pleasant enough but his face and eyes were angry.

  Regan studied him, equally tired and furious. “Did you know that Christa was a lesbian? Did you know?”

  Cassidy sat down heavily, threw the evening paper he was carrying on the floor, and looked up at Regan with a puzzled look. “What the hell is a lesbian? What gives you the right to throw words of definition like that around? Everybody is everything in this fucking town. Christa could be at one time a United Airlines hostess raper, another time a Mojave Indian fucker. That is the style and speed of these times...”

  Regan’s anger was mounting. “You steered me onto a girl you knew was a dyke. People have done lousy things to me in my life, but nothing as shitty as that.”

  Cassidy was smiling, a wry drunken line along his mouth. “What you’re saying is you weren’t man enough. Some moneybags whore with winning ways in manipulation beat you hands down, Jacko—”

  Regan hit him a sweeping right fist that connected square with Cassidy’s jaw and felled him backward out of his chair.

  The man lay there, stunned in pain and shock, the cobwebs of alcohol clearing, a trickle of blood tracing out sideways across his cheek. Then he laughed.

  Regan was heading for the door.

  “Hey, you bugger, the rest of the news. Hear it!” He shouted the last two words so loud that Regan stopped short, turned, and looked at the collapsed American, still seated in the upturned chair, grin on his face, legs held at the knees. “Here’s my news, fucker. Ready for it? The blackamoor’s dead. Never came out of his coma. I’ve been requested by Seebohm to check in nine a.m. tomorrow and get myself arrested. And more—I just put Ciales on a plane to Mexico. He’s not prepared to go on trial—he’ll see what happens to old buddy-buddy here...”

  Regan started to go out of the door.

  “Hey, pumpkin penis!” Cassidy screamed out merrily once more. “You get it? I am one hundred percent off this case. There’s nothing more I can do. You’re on your own. Good luck, fucker!”

  Regan took a cab to Times Square and wandered into dark streets tunneled away from the main oases of light. He was too depressed to get really drunk, and spotted the warning signs. If he drank in the kind of quantity that he felt like drinking, he would end up the night not pissed but unconscious. It had happened a few times. He could not face the knowledge of the pain of the two or three days of recovery from one of those obliterating sessions. So he did it by the clock. One bar every three-quarters of an hou
r, two Scotches per bar. He tried to relax his mental and physical self into the paradoxical atmosphere of the easy familiarity and mild undefined paranoia of late-night New York bars. He relaxed his bodily nervousness but honed his mind to a high pitch of concentration as he started to go over every single item, word, phrase, event, dot, comma from a long time ago in another country when Detective Chief Inspector Haskins had told him to check out a hot FBI tip on some guys coming into London Heathrow from the U.S. People—Cassidy, Galliano, Broughton, Christa; places—bungalow, marina, the East Eleventh Street duplex, the Fifty-ninth Precinct; smells—Galliano’s rotting gray flesh, sex, sweat, formaldehyde, New York City, alcohol; events—the shooting in the Plaza, the phony FBI offices, snow patching the hill grass out at Croton, the shooting of Brown, Brown’s confession.