Why Me?

33

"He annoyed me," Mologna said to Leon. "I was gettin all this shit about telephones—he is there, he isn't there, it's goin through, it isn't goin through—and I just forgot myself."

"This too will pass," Leon said, his face a woodcut entitled Sympathy. He was feeling so bad on Mologna's account that he wasn't even dancing in place.

Mologna sat slumped at his desk, forearms sprawled among his papers. "The static I'm goin to take," he said, shaking his heavy head. "The static I am goin to take."

It had already started. The Commissioner—Mologna could never remember the man's name, and didn't see any real reason to make the effort—had called to chew him out in that discreet, distant, with-gloves-on manner of upper-echelon bureaucrats everywhere. The point, as Mologna well knew, was not what the Commissioner said, or what he himself said in response; the point was that in the Commissioner's phone log and in his day book and in Mologna's personal file there would now be a notation to the effect that the Commissioner had demonstrated leadership. The son of a bitch.

Well, maybe not entirely a son of a bitch at that, since the Commissioner had in the same phone call made it very clear where Mologna's true enemies were: "FBI Agents Zachary and Freedly are in my office at this very moment, discussing the situation with me," the Commissioner had said, and the background gasp of outraged betrayal behind the Commissioner's voice had been the only bright spot in that entire fumigated conversation.

Was there anything to be done about Zachary and Freedly? Was there anything to be done to protect his own ass, now that he'd exposed it for all the world to see?

The only real solution, obviously, was to find that goddam ruby. And to find it with perpetrator; this wasn't the kind of little trouble that could be smoothed over with a nice piece of jewelry. What the public would need this time, what the Police Department and the FBI and the State Department and the United Nations and the Turkish Government would need, what Mologna himself would need, was a human sacrifice. Nothing less. "We've got to get him," Mologna said aloud.

"Oh, I couldn't agree more," Leon said. He and Mologna were alone in Mologna's big office in Police Plaza, partly because Mologna wanted it that way and partly because right at the moment nobody else in the great city of New York wanted to be linked with Francis Mologna in any way.

"And we've got to get him," Mologna went on. "Not the fuckin FBI, or any a them foreign bozos."

"Oh, absolutely."

"And not the goddam criminal element either. Though the bleedin Christ knows, they've got the best shot at it."

"Unfortunate," Leon said. "If only our man were gay, I might be able to do some undercover work myself."

Mologna squinted at him. "Leon," he said, "I'm never entirely sure when you're bein obscene."

Leon pressed graceful fingertips to his narrow chest. "Me?"

"In any case," Mologna said, "you heard the tape. Did that sound like a goddam faggot to you?"

"If he is," Leon said, "he's so far back in the closet he must poop mothballs."

"You're disgustin, Leon." Briefly, Mologna brooded. "The criminal element," he said. "What happens if they find him first?"

"They turn him over to us. With the Byzantine Fire, of course."

"Maybe. Maybe." Mologna squinted at the far wall, trying to see into the future. "Maybe the press gets onto it first? Maybe the word gets out the crooks helped us do our own job? Not good, Leon."

"Ungood all the way."

"That's right." With sudden decision, Mologna said, "Leon, call Tony Cappelletti, have him reel in that stoolie of his, Whatsisname."

"Benjamin Arthur Klopzik."

"Like I said. I want Tony to wire him, full radio pickup. I want to know every word said in that thieves' den of theirs before they know it themselves. And I want every available TPF man in the city at the ready, no more than three blocks from that saloon. If and when those boyos find our man, I want to take him away from them that second."

"Oh, very good," Leon said. "Incisive, decisive, and oh so correct."

"Give me the bullshit later," Mologna told him. "First make the phone call."