Omerta - Mario Puzo [38]
But like many fortunate men, Rubio believed in pushing fate. He enjoyed pitting his wits against dangerous men. He needed risk to flavor the exotic dish that was his life. He was involved in the illegal shipping of technology to China; he established a line of communication on the highest levels for the drug barons; and he was the bagman who paid off American scientists to emigrate to South America. He even had dealings with Timmona Portella, who was as eccentrically dangerous as Inzio Tulippa.
Like all high-risk gamblers, Rubio prided himself on an ace in the hole. He was safe from all legal peril because of his diplomatic immunity, but he knew there were other dangers, and in those areas he was careful.
His income was enormous, and he spent lavishly. There was such power in being able to buy anything he wanted in the world, including the love of women. He enjoyed supporting his ex-mistresses, who remained valued friends. He was a generous employer and intelligently treasured the goodwill of people dependent on him.
Now, in his New York apartment, which was very fortunately part of the Peruvian consulate, Rubio dressed for his dinner date with Nicole Aprile. The engagement was as usual with him, part business and part pleasure. He had met Nicole at a Washington dinner given by one of her prestigious corporate clients. At first sight he had been intrigued by her not-quite-regular beauty, the sharp, determined face with intelligent eyes and mouth, her small, voluptuous body, but also by her being the daughter of the great Mafia chief Don Raymonde Aprile.
Rubio had charmed her, but not out of her senses, and he was proud of her for that. He admired romantic intelligence in a woman. He would have to win her respect with deeds, not words. Which he had immediately set about doing by asking her to represent one of his clients in a particularly rich deal. He had learned that she did a great deal of pro bono work to abolish the death penalty and had even defended some notorious convicted murderers to put off their executions. To him she was the ideal modern woman—beautiful, with a highly professional career, and compassionate in the bargain. Barring some sort of sexual dysfunction, she would make a most agreeable companion for a year or so.
All this was before the death of Don Aprile.
Now the main purpose of his courtship was to learn if Nicole and her two brothers would put their banks at the disposal of Portella and Tulippa. Otherwise there would be no point in killing Astorre Viola.
Inzio Tulippa had waited long enough. More than nine months after the killing of Raymonde Aprile, he still had no arrangement with the inheritors of the Don’s banks. A great deal of money had been spent; he had given millions to Timmona Portella to bribe the FBI and the police in New York, and to procure the services of the Sturzo brothers, and yet he was no further in his plans.
Tulippa was not the vulgar impersonation of a high-powered drug dealer. He came from a reputable and wealthy family and had even played polo for his native land of Argentina. He now lived in Costa Rica, and he had a diplomatic Costa Rican passport, which gave him immunity from prosecution in any foreign land. He handled the relations with the drug cartels in Colombia, with the growers in Turkey, refineries in Italy. He made arrangements for transport, the necessary bribing of officials from the highest rank to the lowest. He planned the smuggling of huge loads into the United States. He was also the man who lured American nuclear scientists to South American countries and supplied the money for their research. In all ways he was a prudent, capable executive, and he had amassed an enormous fortune.
But he was a revolutionary. He furiously defended the selling of drugs. Drugs were the salvation of the human spirit, the refuge of those damned to despair by poverty and mental illness. They were the salve for the lovesick, for the lost souls in our spiritually