Ransom (15 page)

“Mr Padua - ” said Malone.

Giuffre held up a hand. “No names, please. Is better that way.”

“All right, no names.” Malone had decided he would do the talking; it was too long since he had been a junior cop, keeping his mouth shut, and, besides, he could take the questioning further than Jefferson could. If he could think of the right questions … He would begin with a lie, not always the best approach but one that had, accidentally, had its effect on Padua: “The kidnappers have threatened your friend. They said they would plant a bomb outside his house if you interfered.”

“Did they say that?”

“They implied it.”

“Implied - what’s implied? I do not have the education my grandson has.”

“They hinted - suggested - “

“You mean that’s what you think they meant?”

This old bugger may not have gone to college, but he is educated all right. “No, that’s what I’m sure they meant.”

“I think you are bluffing, Mr Malone.” The old man took off his hat, put it on the seat beside him. He was bald, with white wings of hair that stood out above ears that seemed almost at right angles to his head; the effect was to broaden his whole head, like primitive masks Malone had seen in museums. Now that Malone’s eyes had become accustomed to the dim light he could see that the old man’s face was mottled, as if his skin had been tie-dyed. At certain moments and in certain moods, Malone decided, Don Auguste Giuffre could be downright ugly. But so far his temper and

his voice were even. “The kidnappers do not know who our friend represents.”

I can be cunning too. “If they don’t know who he represents, how do you know who they are? I think you are bluffing too, Mr Giuffre.”

Giuffre sat very still in his seat for a long moment, then he shifted his bulk, took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “Every year, this time, I get a cold. I never get used to the New York climate.”

“You should go home to Sicily,” said Jefferson, shifting his own bulk on the back of the seat.

The old man shook his head. “Nothing there, Mr Jefferson. Everybody I know is dead. Stupid vendettas - ” He looked back at Malone. “You think I am bluffing, Mr Malone? That is insulting.”

“My wife is in danger,” said Malone. “I didn’t come here to watch my manners. I’m sure if Mrs Giuffre was in the same situation, you wouldn’t be too bloody polite.”

“My wife is dead, Mr Malone. But you are right - ” He looked down to the front of the theatre, to the big blank screen, defaced by a large rip in it, that still hung there. He was not an imaginative man and the screen remained blank for him: he did not see there the scenes that had mirrored this clandestine meeting with his enemies, the police. Edward G. Robinson, Joseph Calleia, Eduardo Cianelli: he had never come to see movies that had featured Italian gangsters: to him they had been as dirty as the sex movies of today. He had never condoned even the amount of flesh that was shown in Italian-made movies; but Mama, God rest her lately departed soul, had liked Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. If anyone had ever attempted to kidnap Mama, he, personally, would have cut the heart out of the son-of-a-bitch. “I am trying to help you, Mr Malone. And the Mayor.”

“How?”

“Everybody has the wrong picture of us Italians. The Negroes also, eh, Mr Jefferson ?”

“At least you’re the right colour.”

“You think so? An olive skin, dark hair, a name like Giuffre or Rapelli or Gasperi, you get into trouble with the police, and what they say? Who you know in the Mafia?” He looked around as if searching for a place to spit. “When I come to America sixty year ago, nobody talk about the Mafia. My father and me, we had an oyster lease in those days. There were coloured folk there too, nice peaceful people from the South, and we got along fine. The oyster leases, they nearly all gone now, everything muddied up. What they call it - polluted ? Anyway, when I first come here nobody heard of the Mafia. Men with Italian names get into trouble with the police, lots of them, but nobody say anything about the Mafia.”

Jefferson said nothing, his dark face an asset in the gloom: Giuffre could read nothing in it. Over this past year or two he had heard this plea so often he could recite it by heart, The honest, decent Italians were entitled to resent being classed as all related to the Mafia, but that did not say there was no Mafia.

“Why do they call you Don Auguste?”

Giuffre shrugged, shifted again in his seat. He should have had the meeting up in the circle, where he and Mama used to sit in the old days: the seats were wider and more comfortable up there. “Just respect, Mr Jefferson. And a little pride for me, too, I suppose - it’s a title. Like yours. Why do they call you Captain?”

“Maybe because I earned it.”

“Me, too. I have done much good in this parish - ask the priests and the sisters, ask anybody. Now I want to do some good for the Mayor.”

“Why him?” Malone asked.

“The Mayor, he is not gonna stay in City Hall. If we have an Italian in the White House, nobody is gonna say all Italians belong to the Mafia. Mr Forte, everybody respect him. I would like to see him in the White House, the first Italian President. The Greeks got a Vice-President, didn’t

they ? What the Greeks ever do for the world ? They invent something called democracy and they sit on their asses ever since.”

So much for Greek history, Malone thought; but his own education could not add much to it. “All right, then, help us. But don’t let’s waste time.” He held up his watch, looked at it in the dim light. Though he always wore a watch, in the past he had rarely looked at it; but now time had become a growing sore, like a skin cancer on his wrist. “If these people stick to their deadline, every minute counts.”

“I got information on all those men in The Tombs. Maybe more than you got, Mr Jefferson - ” For a moment there was a twinkle in the dark eyes; they had seemed as dull as black olives to Malone. “You try Fred Parker, ask him about San Francisco and Pasquale Parioli. Maybe he tell you something?”

“Do you know something?” Jefferson asked.

The old man smiled, put his hat carefully on his head. “If I tell you, Mr Jefferson, maybe you think you owe me something. Is that what you want?” He stood up and Malone was surprised at how short he was; he had looked a much taller, bigger man in the seat. He stepped out into the aisle, looked down with distaste at the litter. “Was a very clean place when we ran pictures here. Everywhere. Up there - ” he gestured at the screen ” - here, everywhere. It’s a dirty world now.”

“He should know,” said Jefferson as they got into their car. “It’s his kind has made it dirty. I just never understand the split in their characters. They lead blameless family lives -they go to church, bring their kids up strict, protect and respect their women. Yet that old bastard has ordered more contracts - ” “Contracts?”

“Orders to kill. He’s handed out more of those than I can count - but we’ve never been able to lay a finger on him. He runs the drug racket in South Brooklyn and there isn’t a bar or restaurant for miles around that he isn’t leaning on in some way or other. He’s got the prostitution game sewed up and he runs two union locals in the construction business. He sure knows it’s a dirty world.”

“I’ll worry about my conscience later - when I get my wife back.”

Malone watched Giuffre, his elbow held solicitously by his grandson, cross the sidewalk and get into the big black Cadillac drawn up in front of Jefferson’s car. The Cadillac drove off into the night, its tail-lights lost almost at once in the driving rain. A moment later it was followed by another car containing the don’s four bodyguards. Malone looked across at the flapping, shredded posters beneath the theatre marquee. A sticker had been pasted across the posters: Last Week Ever: behind the obituary notice The Love Bug rode into oblivion.

“Were the good old days really that good and innocent?”

“Maybe not innocent, but a goddam sight better than today.” But Jefferson wondered if he spoke the truth. Nostalgia was only an escape and everyone had his own exit; but it could never be proved that the past had been better, memory could never be trusted to be objectively selective. He started up the car. “Do we go and see Fred Parker at The Tombs?”

They drove back to Manhattan through the almost deserted streets; the storm seemed to have worsened. It was almost a relief to get inside the detention building; at least the storm gathering in here had not yet broken. But in the hard light reflected from the yellow walls none of the guards looked relaxed. Malone noticed, as he had this afternoon, the tension under the casual, gum-chewing attitude of the officers; this hurricane they policed might not blow itself out for years, not till the whole prison system was changed. Jefferson signed himself and Malone in, checked his gun

with the guard in the duty cubicle, then led Malone into the Warden’s office.

The Assistant Warden, a black about Jefferson’s age, was on duty. “I can’t let you see them this time of night, John. What authority have you got?”

“I’ll sign a DD24, if you want it.”

Davidson, the Assistant Warden, pondered a moment, then nodded. “Okay, just to keep my own nose clean. Parker ? I dunno he’ll come down to see you.”

“Just tell him Don Auguste Giuffre sent us.”

Davidson’s eyebrows went up. He had prematurely grey hair and eyebrows; Malone thought he looked like a negative of a white man, but he knew he would never voice the description. He had noticed that Davidson had barely glanced at him since he had entered the room.

“The Mafia? Are they in this?”

“What’s the Mafia?” Jefferson made an Italian gesture with his hands; both blacks smiled at each other. “Just do me the favour, Phil. We’re trying every angle we can to get Inspector Malone’s wife back. And the Mayor’s.”

Davidson looked at Malone seemingly for the first time. Then he nodded. “Okay. But if Parker won’t see you, I’m not gonna press him. We got enough to worry about here without worrying about what’s going on outside.”

That’s it, Malone thought. He doesn’t care one way or the other about me, whether I’m white, brindle or striped. I’m just an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong to his world, The Tombs. He and all the other guards are the long-term prisoners here.

Malone and Jefferson went out to one of the interview rooms, sat there for ten minutes before the door finally opened and a grey-haired man, his face still cobwebbed with sleep, came in with a young black guard.

“Curiosity got the better of me, Captain.” Fred Parker sat down at the table, lit a cigarette and blew out the smoke. Malone tried to guess his age, but it was impossible: too many years had been crossed out on the lined calendar of

his face. Once he might have been heavily built, but passion and God knew what else had worn all the flesh off him; the fingers that held the cigarette were the thinnest Malone had ever seen on a man, no more than claws of bone. Yet there was an air of tired tranquillity about Parker, as if the tightly wound spring of the years had finally rusted and fallen apart. “Who the hell is Don Auguste Giuffre? Is that the name you sent up?”

Jefferson considered the other man for a moment, then said, “I do believe you honestly don’t know. You live in a world all your own, you anarchists, don’t you?”

“Everyone needs his escape, Captain. But don’t quote me.” He looked over his shoulder at the young guard behind him. “Especially to my young friends upstairs.”

“Giuffre is a Mafia don, one of the top three in the New York area.”

“Ah, then that’s why I wouldn’t have heard of him.” He glanced at Malone and smiled; several of his teeth were missing, yet it was still a not unattractive smile. “We anarchists, Mr Malone, are the only political party in America who have no connection with the Mafia.”

“You should try campaigning on it,” said Malone. He had had no experience of anarchists. Somehow Australians, among the world’s most conservative rebels, had bred very few; Australians had always had very little tolerance for eccentrics, especially for political rat-bags. “But Giuffre said he knew a lot about you. More than Captain Jefferson and his mates know.”

“Captain Jefferson and his - mates have a file on me they tell me is that thick-” He held his hands apart. “I think Don Auguste Giuffre has been putting you on, Inspector.”

“He said to mention San Francisco and a Pasquale Parioli.”

Parker drew on his cigarette, but Malone did not miss the slight tremor in the bone-like fingers. “What else did he say?”

“Let’s just take that for starters. Who is Pasquale Parioli?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” admitted Malone. All the years of questioning had developed a sixth sense in him: he knew this man was on the verge of talking. “But we can go back to Giuffre, if that’s what you’d prefer.”

Parker said nothing, staring down at the smoke curling up from between his fingers. Somewhere outside a steel door clanged and he lifted his head, not quickly but like an old dog recognizing a familiar sound, a door that had been opened and shut many times. He was dressed in a cheap blue suit that could have been twenty years old and a tie-less white shirt that was in need of laundering; Malone didn’t know how the other anarchists, except McBean, dressed, but he guessed Parker must be the square amongst them. He looked like the crumpled newspaper picture of some clerk in the Fifties who had been arrested on a charge of petty embezzlement. Except for his face: there was too much agony, too much exhausted idealism there for a man caught only with his hand in the cash-box.

“Jesus, they never let you go!” His hand quivered and he took another drag on the cigarette, coughing on the smoke this time. When he had recovered he looked at Jefferson. “There’s a prologue to that file on me, Captain. You want to hear it?”

“If you want to tell it.” Both Jefferson and Malone were quietly casual: they were dealing here with a man who was not going to spend the night waving polemics at them. Fred Parker, they were beginning to realize, had grown tired of carrying banners and shouting slogans.

“None of this gets to the kids upstairs, okay? I’m not gonna split on them, but I’d just sooner keep a piece of myself to myself, you know what I mean?” Jefferson and Malone nodded, waiting patiently; this was not the time to be counting minutes, because what they might learn might save them hours. Parker lit another cigarette, sat back in his chair. “Pasquale Parioli was my old man. He was the top lieutenant for the capo of one of the Families in ‘Frisco. That was back in the Twenties and Thirties - I was seven-