361 - Donald E. Westlake [52]
“You mean a redistribution, Eddie?” asked Nick.
“Not at our level, Nick. We work the same as always. You’ve got Long Island and Brooklyn and Queens, Irving has Jersey and Staten Island, and Little Irving has the Bronx and Westchester. And the four of us operate Manhattan together. Same as we discussed, right?”
“Then what’s this talk about gravy?”
“Down in the neighborhoods, Nick. There’s gonna have to be a redistribution in the neighborhoods. There’s a lot of disloyal types we’ve got to replace, you know what I mean?”
Nick nodded. “All right,” he said. “That sounds like an incentive for the rest of you guys, huh?”
There was scattered agreement, and Kapp said, “Okay, so let’s talk about arms. How many and where. And how much capital do we need to get rolling.”
Two or three of them started talking at once, telling about athletic clubs and veteran’s organizations and other things, and Kapp smoked while the three top men argued with their assistants.
I didn’t care how they sliced their pie. I walked through them to the kitchen and got a bottle of House of Lords and went downstairs and got my folding chair out of my bedroom and brought it down to the dock.
There was a cold wind ruffling the sea and blowing away the words of the peasant kings upstairs. But the wall of the boathouse protected me from most of it. The sky was dark and the lake darker. I sat and smoked and held the bottle till it was warm and wet in my fingers. Then I drank from it and set it down on the warped white wood beside the chair.
After a while, the door opened behind me and Kapp came out. I could still hear the voices upstairs. Kapp came over, grinning, trailing gray cigar smoke, and said, “It’s coming along, huh, Ray?”
“I guess it is,” I said.
“And all on account of you. Now, we all got together, we got a firm base here, you know what I mean?”
“Is Ganolese the one?”
“You figured that, huh? I thought you did. Yeah, if he’s the one making the propositions, then he’s the one ordered the guns.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He walked out to the end of the dock, looked out into the darkness a minute, and then turned and winked at me, grinning. He glanced up at the lighted windows on the top floor, where his staff was readying his army, and then he walked back to me and said, “You bring me luck, Ray. I didn’t figure it to run this smooth. Only a little trouble between Nick and Irving, everybody else coming along nice. We can’t miss, boy.”
“Nick and Irving don’t like each other, huh?”
“They hate each other’s guts. Always have. But they work together. It’s the way of the world, you know what I mean?”
“I know.”
He walked around the dock some more, and then said, “You figure to go after Ganolese, huh?”
“Uh huh.”
“But there’s no hurry, right? You’re better off, you wait a while. You see what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Pretty soon, Ganolese is gonna have full hands. We’re gonna hit his bunch of bastards so hard and so often he won’t know which way is Aqueduct. That’s the time for you to slip in at him, right? When he’s too busy to see you coming.”
“I guess so.”
“Take it from me. I know the way these things work.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Sure. One more thing. What did you think of the spade?”
“Cheever? Nothing at all. What should I think?”
“I wondered if you picked that up,” he said. “But maybe you wouldn’t. You don’t have the background for it.”
“Pick what up?”
He stood there and unwrapped a cigar. “It’s this way,” he said. “A mob, an organization like this, it’s in some ways like a business, you know what I mean? Lots of details, lots of executives and vice-presidents, people in charge of this and that