Beirut Incident

Chapter 7

Louie met me at the Trans World Airlines gate at the airport an hour later. He had been talking to two swarthy men in inexpensive English-cut suits. They might have been olive oil merchants, but somehow I doubted it. As soon as Louie spotted me, he hurried over, hand outstretched.

"Good to see you, Nick! Good to see you!"

We shook hands heartily. Louie did everything heartily. Then he introduced me to the men he had been talking to, Gino Manitti and Franco Locallo. Manitti had a low, overhanging brow, a modern-day Neanderthal Man. Locallo was tall and spindly, and I caught a glimpse of a yellowish set of bad teeth through his tensely parted lips. Neither one spoke enough English to order a hot dog at Coney Island, but there was an animal hardness about their eyes, a tightness around the corners of the mouths that I'd seen before.

Musclemen. More grist for the Mafia mill.

Once on board the big airliner, I sat next to the window, with Louie in the adjoining seat. The two newest recruits to the Franzini family sat directly behind us. During the entire flight from Beirut to New York, I never heard either one say a word.

It was more than I could say for Louie. He was bubbling from the moment we buckled our seat belts.

"Hey, Nick," he said with a leer. "What did you do last night after I left Su Lao Lin's? Man! That's some chick, huh?" He laughed like a little boy telling a dirty joke. "Did you have a good time with her, Nick?"

I looked at him coldly. "I had to go see a guy about my papers."

"Oh, yeah. I forgot. That would have been Charlie Harkins, I guess. He's a real good man. Best in the business, I guess."

Was, I thought to myself. "He did a good job for me," I said noncommittally.

Louie babbled on for a few more minutes about Charlie in particular and good penmen in general. He didn't tell me much I didn't already know, but he liked to talk. Then he changed the subject.

"Hey, Nick, you know you sure messed up that guy Harold in Su Lao Lin's apartment. Jeez! I never saw anyone move so fast!"

I smiled at my friend. I can be flattered, too. "I don't like getting rousted," I said toughly. "He shouldn't have done that."

"Yeah, yeah. I sure agree. But, damn, man, you almost killed the guy!"

"If you can't hit the ball, you shouldn't go to bat."

"Yeah, sure… man… The doctor at the hospital said that his kneecap was practically destroyed. Said he'll never walk again. He's got a spinal injury too. Might be paralyzed for life."

I nodded. Probably from that karate chop I'd given him across the back of the neck. It will do that sometimes, when it doesn't kill outright.

I looked out the window at the disappearing Lebanese coastline, the sun glinting on the azure Mediterranean beneath us. I'd been on the job a little more than twenty-four hours and already two people were dead and one crippled for life.

At least, there should be two dead. I looked at my watch: ten-fifteen. The plastique bomb under Su Lao Lin's bed should have gone off a half-hour ago…

So far, I'd done my job. The mouth of the pipeline in Beirut was destroyed. But it was just a beginning. Next, I had to take on the Mafia on its home ground. I would be dealing with a solidly entrenched organization, a vast industry that spread across the country like an insidious disease.

I remembered a conversation I'd had with Jack Gourlay a few months before, just before I'd been given the assignment to run down the Dutchman and Hamid Raschid. We were drinking beer in The Sixish on Eighty-eighth Street and First Avenue in New York, and Jack had been talking about his favorite subject, the Syndicate. As a reporter for the News, he'd been covering Mafia stories for twenty years.

"It's hard to believe, Nick," he said. "I know one of those loan-sharking operations — the one run by the Ruggiero family — that's got more than eighty million dollars in outstanding loans on the street, and the interest on those loans is three percent a week. That's a hundred fifty-six percent interest a year on eighty million. Figure it out!

"But that's only seed money," he went on. 'They're into everything."

"Like what?" I knew a lot about the Mafia, but you can always learn from the experts. In this case, Gourlay was the expert.

"Probably the biggest is trucking. Then there's the garment center. At least two-thirds of it is Mafia-controlled. They're in the meat packing business, they control most of the vending machines in town, private garbage collections, pizza parlors, bars, funeral homes, construction companies, real estate firms, caterers, jewelry businesses, beverage bottling concerns — you name it."

"Doesn't sound like they have much time for real crime."

"Don't kid yourself. They're big on hijacking, and everything they hijack can be funneled into their so-called legitimate outlets. The guy who expands his Seventh Avenue garment business is probably doing it on money that came from narcotics, the guy who opens a chain of delicatessens in Queens is probably doing it on money that came from pornography in Manhattan."

Gourlay had told me a bit about Popeye Franzini, too. He was sixty-seven years old, but far from retirement. According to Gourlay, he headed up a family of more than five hundred initiated members and some fourteen hundred «associate» members. "Of all the old 'Mustachio Petes, " Gourlay said, "that old son of a bitch is by far the toughest. He's probably the best organized, too."

On the plane winging its way toward the States from Beirut, I looked at my seat companion, Franzini's nephew Louie. Out of the nineteen hundred gangsters who made up the Franzini family, he was the only one I could call a friend. And for anything besides a nonstop conversation, I doubted he'd be very useful if things got rough.

I looked out the window again and sighed. It wasn't the type of assignment I relished. I picked up a Richard Gallagher novel and began reading it, to get my mind off my immediate future.

After three hours I had finished it, we were still airborne, the immediate future still looked bleak, and Louie had started talking again. It was not a happy flight.

We were met at the airport by Larry Spelman, Franzini's personal bodyguard. Louie, I gathered, was held in fairly high regard by his uncle.

Spelman was at least an inch taller than my six-feet-four, but narrow and bony. He had a long, high-bridged nose and piercing, wide-set blue eyes. Gray speckled black in overlong sideburns, but he figured to be only about thirty-five years old. I knew him by reputation: hard as nails and fanatically loyal to Popeye Franzini.

He had a surprisingly booming laugh as he grabbed Louis by both shoulders in an affectionate grasp. "Good to see you, Louie! The Old Man sent me out here to meet you myself."

Louie introduced Manitti, Locallo and myself and we shook hands all round. Spelman stared at me curiously, the blue eyes unwavering. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

He damned well might have. I could think of any of a dozen assignments on which I might have been pointed out to him. One of the factors in the success enjoyed by organized crime in this country has been its remarkable intelligence system. The underworld keeps as close tabs on government agents as the government does on underworld figures. I had never met Spelman personally, but it was quite possible he might recognize me.

Damn! I thought. I'm in the country five minutes and already I'm in trouble. But I played it nonchalant and hoped the deep tan I'd picked up in Saudi Arabia would throw him off a little. The adhesive tape across my forehead had to help, too.

I shrugged. "Ever been in New Orleans?"

"No. Not New Orleans." He shook his head fretfully. "You any relation to Tony?"

Tony?"

"Tony Canzoneri, the fighter."

Goddamnit again! I'd forgotten my name was Canzoneri now, even after having heard Louie introduce me that way just a moment before. A few more lapses like that and I'd really be in trouble.

"He's my cousin," I said. "On my father's side."

"Great fighter!"

"Yeah" I had the feeling Larry Spelman was keeping the conversation going so he could study me longer. It was a funny game we were playing. He knew that I had just come from Madame Su Lao Lin in Beirut and that Canzoneri would not be my real name.

It wasn't a game I enjoyed. Sooner or later he was going to recall who I was and the whole charade would blow up. But there wasn't much I could do about it at the moment "See you in a minute," I said. "I have to go to the john."

I took my bag with me, and in the privacy of a men's room stall, quickly transferred Wilhelmina and Hugo from the suitcase to their accustomed places: the shoulder holster for Wilhelmina, the spring-loaded chamois scabbard for Hugo. Security precautions being what they are these days in Lebanon, you don't board any airplanes carrying arms. On the other hand, a toilet kit lined with lead foil travels very nicely in a suitcase, looks perfectly innocuous and is impervious to baggage X-ray machines. Any customs inspector might decide to pick it up and look at it, of course, but life is full of chances, and for some reason I've never seen a customs inspector examine a toilet kit. They'll look in the toes of your slippers and smell your tobacco pouch to make sure it's not marijuana, but I've never seen one look in a toilet kit.

I left the men's room feeling a lot more secure.

The big Chrysler which Spelman drove back Into the city was filled with Louie's chatter. For once, I appreciated his endless, laughing monologue. I hoped it would keep Spelman's mind off me.

It was just a little past 6:00 p.m. when the big blue car pulled up in front of a large, nondescript loft building on Prince Street, off lower Broadway. I was the last passenger to get out, and I looked up at the well-worn sign across the front of the building: Franzini Olive Oil.

Larry Spelman led us through the small-paned door and then down an open hall, passing a small office area where four women worked attentively over their typing desks wedged between a bank of gray filing cabinets and the wall. None of them looked up as we went past; in some businesses, it's best not to know who's coming and going around the office.

We came to a frosted glass door, neatly lettered with Joseph Franzini. As though we were all army draftees, newly arrived at boot camp, we filed in and lined our suitcases against one wall, then stood around looking self-conscious. Only Louie was immune to the regimental nuance the group had assumed; he vaulted over a small wooden railing and seemed to swarm all over a prim-looking secretary who had half-risen from her desk when she saw him enter.

"Louie!" she squealed. "When did you get back?"

He smothered her with kisses. "Just now, Philomina, just now. Hey! You're beautiful, honey, just beautiful!"

He was right. As she disengaged herself with some difficulty from his gorilla-like grasp, I could see that. Despite her appearance — rimless glasses, black hair pulled back in a tight bun, high-necked blouse — she was a true Italian beauty, tall, slim, but with exciting breasts, a remarkably small waist, and full, rounded hips. Her oval face, highlighted by huge brown eyes and a perky, defiant chin, was straight out of Sicily with its olive skin, sculptured features, and heavy, sensuous lips.

She smiled self-consciously in our direction as she stepped back of her desk, tugging her skirt straight. Momentarily, our eyes met across the room. Met and held, then she was busy sitting down again and the moment was gone.

Spelman had gone on by the desk and disappeared into an open office door behind and to the right of Philomina's desk. Louie perched on the corner of the secretary's desk, chatting with her in low tones. The rest of us found seats on the brightly colored plastic chairs just inside the door.

Larry Spelman reappeared, pushing a chrome wheelchair in which sat a huge old man. He was gross, filling the oversized wheelchair and spilling over the sides. He had to weigh three hundred pounds, perhaps more. Out of the mound of fat that formed his face glared baleful black eyes ringed strangely by dark circles, a classic example of the moon-face syndrome usually associated with cortisone treatment.

Just then I remembered something I had read a long time ago: Joseph Franzini was a multiple sclerosis victim. He'd been in that wheelchair for thirty-seven years — shrewd, defiant, ruthless, brilliant, powerful, and crippled by a strange neurological disease that strikes the central nervous system. It distorts or disrupts the motor impulses so that the victim can suffer loss of vision, lack of coordination, paralysis of the limbs, dysfunction of the bowels and bladder, and other problems. Multiple sclerosis doesn't kill, it just tortures.

There's no cure for MS, I knew, no preventive, not even any really effective treatment. Like most multiple sclerosis patients, Franzini had been struck down by the disease when he was young, at the age of thirty.

Looking at him, I wondered how he had done it. Except for a few short periods of spontaneous remission, Franzini had been confined to that wheelchair ever since, growing fat and bulbous from lack of exercise and his fondness for gorging himself on Italian pasta. Yet, he headed one of the most powerful Mafia families in the world with a business acumen and a reputation in underworld circles second only to Gaetano Ruggiero.

This was the man I had come to New York to work for, and to destroy if J could.

"Louie!" He barked, his voice raspy but surprisingly loud. "It's good to have you back." He glared malevolently around at the rest of us. "Who are these people?"

Louie hastened to make introductions. He gestured. "This is Gino Manitti."

"Bon giorno, Don Joseph." The Neanderthal man half bowed toward the crippled giant.

" 'Giorno." Franzini looked at Franco Locallo.

There was a quaver of fear in Locallo's voice. "Franco Locallo," he said. Then his face brightened. "From Castellemare," he added.

Franzini grunted and turned to me. I met his gaze steadily, but it wasn't easy. Hatred burned in those black eyes, but I'd seen hatred before. This was different Popeye Franzini hated with a fervor I had never encountered before.

Suddenly, I understood. Franzini's hatred was so malevolent because it wasn't directed at one man, or group of men, or at a country or an idea. Franzini hated himself. He hated his diseased body and because he hated himself he hated the God he had created in his own image.

Louie's voice cut across my thoughts. "This is Nick Canzoneri, Uncle Joe. He's my friend. I met him in Beirut."

I nodded toward the old man, not quite a bow.

He cocked one white eyebrow, or tried to. The result was more of a maniacal grimace as one side of his mouth gaped open and his head tilted to one side with the effort. "A friend?" he rasped. "You weren't sent over to make friends. Ha!"

Louie hastened to reassure him. "He's one of us, too, Uncle Joe. Wait till I tell you what he did one day."

It seemed strange to hear a grown man calling another one "Uncle Joe" but I guess it was all part of Louie's somewhat juvenile approach to life. And as for what he could tell about what I had done one day, he didn't know the half of it.

I smiled at Franzini as sincerely as I could, but I really couldn't think of anything to say so I just shrugged. It's a marvelous Italian way out of any situation.

The old man stared back steadily for a moment and then with a quick flick of his hands, half-turned the wheelchair so that he faced Louie. It was a remarkable move for a man who a moment before had had a difficult time cocking one eyebrow.

"Book these guys into Manny's," he ordered. "Give them tomorrow off, then tell them to report to Ricco." He looked over his shoulder at us. "Goddamn!" he said. "They don't even speak English, I bet."

He glared up at Louie. "We got a party at Tony's Gardens tomorrow night. It's your cousin Philomina's birthday. You be there."

Louie grinned happily. "Sure, Uncle Joe."

His cousin Philomina blushed prettily.

The old man spun his wheelchair deftly and headed back into his office under his own power. Spelman looked me over coolly one more time, then followed his boss. If he'd ever known who I was, one of these days he was going to remember.

As Manitti, Locallo, and I followed Louie out of the office and down the hall, I had a very uneasy feeling about Larry Spelman.