Bay City Blast

Chapter five

"The climate is very good here," Mayor Rocco Nobile said into the telephone.

"It's good here too," came back the gruff voice. "It was in the eighties yesterday and we ain't getting no rain at all."

Nobile looked away and sighed. "I mean the business climate," he said.

"Oh yeah. That. Okay. Well, we was talking about it yesterday and everybody kinda thinks it's a good idea, moving and all."

"Sure," Nobile said. "Centralize your operation. It's just good business."

"That's the word they used yesterday too. Centralize. They said it was like General Motors, they don't go building cars everyplace, except they stay in that grubby frigging Detroit."

"Right. And what's good for General Motors is good for you," Nobile said.

"Exactly. Count on us, Rocco."

"Okay. Take care." Nobile hung up the telephone in his apartment and sighed again. He had been on the telephone all morning to the West Coast suggesting to certain independent businessmen that their business operations might be more soundly run in Bay City. He described the beautiful location, just minutes away from the New York metropolitan area, the world's prime market for everything legal and illegal. He pointed out the city's natural harbor, which he was now having cleaned up to reopen the channels and allow ships to move in and out from foreign countries, more or less freely. There would be, he emphasized, no federal money involved in the harbor cleanup and therefore no federal personnel hovering around, watching things that didn't concern them.

He had held this discussion before with many other independent businessmen and all had told him they might be interested once he had proven he could get control of Bay City. Now he had it and he could deliver it to them.

On his way to his office, Rocco Nobile felt satisfied that within the next few weeks more of the vacant lofts along River Street would soon have new tenants, new and thriving businesses.

Nobile arrived at his office at 9:15 A.M. in the old dilapidated City Hall, where he had specifically rejected a suggestion that the building be repainted. The last thing he wanted was to give some kind of signal that might drift to the outside world that things were changing in Bay City. The city had, for years, been ignored by the world and the press and he would be happy to keep it that way. He only wished the harbor cleanup work could be done at night so no one would notice that it was underway.

At 11:30 a.m., he met with his five-member City Commission, three of whose members had voted to install him as mayor and whose other two members had abstained. They talked about the impending city budget, about which Mayor Nobile knew nothing and cared less and they talked about the prospect of payroll cuts and Nobile told them to do whatever they wanted. When the meeting was over, he asked the three councilmen who had voted him into office to stay for a few minutes and when the two abstentions had left the room, Nobile handed the councilmen fat envelopes filled with cash.

"More where that came from, fellas," he said.

"Good," said Walter Fingal O'Flaherty Wills Wilde. "Keep it coming."

Outside the mayor's office, the three councilmen found reasons to burrow themselves into corners so they could look into the envelopes and make sure they hadn't been handed coupons from the newspaper instead of cash.

At noon, Rocco Nobile began to look through the day's mail, a boring task which annoyed him because all the good mail was never sent by mail. It was hand-delivered to his apartment at the Bay City Arms.

He looked quickly through the stack of letters. Employee unions, state environmental agencies, federal bureaus, fan mail. One letter was unopened. There was a lump in the middle of the brown envelope and on the outside his name had been printed in ink along with a warning: personal, confidential.

The letter was handwritten on lined yellow paper. It was printed in block letters. It read:

MAYOR NOBILE. YOU ARE A BLOT UPON THE FACE OF AMERICA. THE ERASER RUBS OUT BLOTS. YOUR TIME IS COMING SOON.

It was signed: THE ERASER.

And Scotchtaped to the bottom of the letter was half of a broken pencil, the eraser end.

Nobile scratched his head under the blue-black hair and, as was customary, looked at his fingertips as he withdrew his hand. Then he read the letter again.

On his private telephone line, he dialed a number he had never called before but had committed to memory. He did not know who was on the other end of the line.

When the dry voice answered, he said simply, "I'm in trouble."

There was this little store off Canal Street in New York City that sold pure silk blouses from Hong Kong at half the price you could buy them anywhere else, so Ruby Gonzalez was going to go there and spend some time. But first she had to get out of Bay City, which was ugly.

She wanted to get to the store early so she had no time to waste.

She walked around the back of the Bay City Arms apartment building. It was a warm day and Ruby wore a white halter top and black slacks. Her coffee-with-milk skin seemed a perfect middle ground between the light and dark of her clothing.

There was a ramp behind the building leading to an underground garage, and whistling lightly and swinging her purse, Ruby walked down the ramp. It was cool and airless under the building. Forty cars were parked in numbered slots and she had no trouble picking out the black Cadillac with the New Jersey MG — meaning municipal government — license plates which belonged to Mayor Rocco Nobile.

She stood behind the Cadillac for a moment, looking around. There was no one else in the garage. She rooted into her purse and found a large Idaho baking potato. She bent over and jammed it into the end of the exhaust pipe.

It could just as easily have been a bomb.

As she was walking from the garage, a man came out the door at the far end of the building.

Ruby made a sharp turn and walked rapidly toward him.

"Hold the door," she called. She smiled at him.

He held the door open for her as she brushed by him.

"Thanks," she said.

"Have a nice day," he said.

She waited until the heavy metal door swung shut behind her, then got her bearings and went to the elevator.

Inside she pressed the top-floor button. When the door opened, she was in a carpeted hall, facing four doors. One of the central doors had potted plants on each side of it. That would be the main entrance to Rocco Nobile's apartment.

Ruby fished in her purse and found a thin strip of steel, the size of a credit card.

She listened at the door at the far left end of the hall. There was no sound from inside. She slipped the thin strip of metal under the wood molding of the door frame near the lock. She pressed hard, and felt the lock slip open. She pulled the door out a half-inch to satisfy herself there was no other lock. She pushed the door closed and removed the metal strip, quietly relocking the door.

She did the same thing at the door at the far right side of the hall.

Then she rode back down on the elevator.

In the lobby, she waved at the doorman who waved back. She smiled at him as he opened the door for her. Breezily, she walked across the street and got behind the wheel of her white Lincoln Continental.

So far, she thought, it was a joke.

She kept her eyes on the front door of the apartment building, occasionally checking behind her in the rearview mirror.

Fifteen minutes later, she saw the mayor's black limousine turning the corner. Ruby picked up a grocery bag off the back seat of the car. In her mind, it could very easily have contained a submachine gun.

She got out of her car and walked across the street just as the mayor's car, bucking and puffing, pulled up to the front door of the Bay City Arms.

As she drew close to the front entrance, the door opened and a man she assumed was the mayor stepped outside. Another man followed behind him. The mayor smiled at Ruby. The bodyguard scowled, then held the door to the rear seat open for Rocco Nobile.

The car sputtered. Ruby walked toward it. If she had carried a machine gun, she would simply have taken it out now and used it.

Instead, she said to the bodyguard still standing next to the car, "There's something stuck in your exhaust pipe."

He looked at her suspiciously.

She smiled and pointed to the rear of the car. "The exhaust pipe," she said. "Something's stuck in it."

The man growled. Ruby shrugged. She turned away from the building. Rocco Nobile saw her and smiled and gave her a small wave. She waved back.

The potato was removed from the exhaust and the mayor's car had driven away, before Ruby drove her own car out of Bay City toward the Holland Tunnel to New York.

She stopped to use a telephone in a booth alongside the roadway.

"Doctor Smith?" she said.

"Yes," answered Harold W. Smith.

"Ruby. That mayor got no security at all."

"As bad as that?" Smith asked.

"Yeah," Ruby said. "I coulda put a bomb under his car and no one would have noticed. I got into his building with no trouble at all. I slipped two of the locks into his apartment. And when he came out to go to work, I walked right up to him and I coulda blown him away. His bodyguards are hopeless."

Smith sighed on the other end of the phone.

"Thank you, Ruby."

"I think if you got some reason to want to keep that man alive, you better send in somebody. Send in the dodo. He can do it."

"All right, Ruby," Smith said. "When will you be back?"

Ruby pictured those half-price silk blouses in her mind. "Take a few hours," she lied. "I'm having me some car trouble."