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  That was how things had started off between them. She quickly understood that his generosity more than made up for his puniness.

  At the time, Zaza was living in a sordid hotel room, one step from being evicted for failure to pay rent Her Worldly goods consisted of a cheap suitcase, a sublime eve ning gown, a street outfit, and her makeup kit So Morti mer's gifts overwhelmed her quite as much as his brand of sex failed to—rabbit-like sex that left the exhausted legal eagle in trancelike ecstasy and did nothing for her.

  To get her own kicks, Zaza indulged in as many rough secret affairs as she could squeeze in between Mortimer's, visits. He set her up in a sumptuous suite in one of New York's best residence hotels, where she was allowed to or der anything she pleased from room service. She hadn't been slow to make demands, and within a week she had a wardrobe that would have put a star to shame. Then, to test her lover, she started asking for jewels. He had com plied with bashful alacrity, plying her with more loot than she had ever-dreamed of. Nothing she asked for seemed to surprise him, and he appeared to dote on fulfill ing her wishes even before she expressed them. All he asked for was her company during long, utterly boring, evenings. Sometimes he would take her hand’—to her ex treme embarrassment if she thought anyone was watching —hold it in his, and look at her with an expression of un speakably stupid subjection.

  He didn’t tell her much about his business, being satis fied to shower her with money and gems, until the day, a month earlier, when he had spoken the mysterious words: "How about you and me living together, alone? Are you x ready for that?"

  Zaza, who knew he was married, felt a shiver of dis gust at the prospect of a permanent shack-up. She prompt ly went looking for advice from Jimmy, the photographer, whom she had taken to seeing again. Jimmy had not put up much resistance when she had offered him "loans" after her affair with Morty began, but he did wonder why a man like O’Brien would want to take up with this kind of narcissistic hunk of flesh, the likes of which paraded through his studio by the dozen. So he impressed on her what a soft berth she had fallen into.

  Only one thing that Jimmy told her really made an impression: "That guy you call a twerp is the top trouble-shooter for the whole damned Syndicate!"

  She burst out laughing. Morty, a gangster? Yet she could almost see it And yesterday it had all come to a head. O’Brien had repeated, in more pressing form, his question of a month ago: "Are you ready?'1

  Remembering what Jimmy told her, she said yes. - Now she opened the drapes and looked out at the street, where a flood of tourists moved along sluggishly in the hot sun. She had always wanted to see Nassau and walk on Bay Street, but now that she was here, it was a fucking bore. Morty wouldn't be back for an hour. Their tickets were all ready, but she didn't know where they were going.

  "Where I’m taking you," he had said, "you'll live like a queen. There won't be anything you ask for that you won't be able to have lickety-split"

  "An elephant?" she said.

  And Morty had come- back in his little boy's voice, "I suppose you mean a solid gold one."

  She felt ill at ease, and she went back into the bath room, trying to keep her spirits up by figuring out how many days she'd have to stay with O'Brion before she found a way to latch onto a good hunk of his loot so she could hotfoot it back to Jimmy.

  [ What was most repulsive about Morty was not that she had to spread her legs for him, but that he had the nerve to take her hand and expect her to show him affec tion.

  The military trucks left Geneva, Nyon, Morges, Lau sanne, Fribourg, Bern, Lucerne, Zug, and Zurich to drop off their troop contingents. Each man was ordered to ex plore a three-hundred-meter section of tracks, finecombing the underbrush for a width of ten meters on either side of the right-of-way. For once agreeing on something, the Swiss police and the army had felt that a human corpse, even lacking a right leg, might constitute a jarring note in the happy Swiss countryside. The police were in charge, but the army was supplying the men. The order was to keep searching until the body had been found. As night fell, the engineers' noncoms gave instructions to turn on the searchlights.

  As for the leg that had been found on the cowcatcher of the Geneva-Zurich Express locomotive, it had already provided the investigators with a few good leads. The shoe was from Biasca, a well-known New York bootmaker. The Zurich police had immediately gotten on the phone to their American counterparts, who were investigating too, and with a little luck they would quickly know whose shoe it was. In the pants pocket, apart from a roll of American bills amounting to over five thousand dollars, the Swiss officials had found a ticket to Geneva stamped in Zurich. What really threw them was that the leg had ap peared in Zurich when it should have been arriving in Geneva at the same time as the other leg, the head, and the rest of the body of its rightful owner.

  Seated snugly between Vittorio Pizzu and Moshe Yudelman, Italo ("Babe") Volpone looked sharply at the twelve men around the conference table. That he was sit ting in his brother's chair gave him a feeling of quiet authority betrayed only by the constant darting of his eye balls, two shards of black coal hiding behind half-closed lids. He was concerned about his voice, which had to re main calm and collected, for he knew it was most effective when it was aggressive or threatening.

  He tried once again to get into the skin of the charac ter he was supposed to be playing, ordering his hands not to play with his pen, his eyes to keep still.

  For reassurance he slipped two fingers into his jacket pocket, next to his heart to get a welcome feel of the deck of playing cards he always kept there. At times they were his instruments for gambling-—he had always lived off gambling, lived only for gambling—and at other times they were the masters of his destiny, tellers of good and bad fortune. When he traveled, he also carried a miniature roulette wheel. When he rolled its ball time after time to work out endless fascinating systems of probabilities and chances, neither day nor night nor time itself existed, and he entered a kingdom in which figures alone were kings. His record had been three days and four nights in a private gaming room at Las Vegas. At regular intervals waiters had set food and drink before him, which he consumed without realizing it, and when he got up from the table and tried to stretch his weary muscles, he collapsed into the deep sleep of the blessed and had to be carried to his room. He hadn't come to until fourteen hours later.

  Now, without moving his fingers from-the lucky deck, Italo said, "Your representative, O’Brien, has just reached Zurich. Everything is okay. Here's the cable I just got from Don Genco."

  He took from his pocket the crumpled piece of paper that he had reread a hundred times before carrying out his brother's instructions to send out invitations and announce the news.

  Ettore Gabelotti glanced at it and silently passed it along to Simeone Ferro, who handed it to Joseph Dotto. While Carmine Crimello, Vittorio Pizzu, Angelo Barba, Vmcente Bruttore, Thomas Merta, Aldo Amain, Carlo Badaletto, and Frankie Sabatini each read it in turn, Italo Volpone was thinking that this was a historic occasion: the peaceful meeting of the two most powerful Syndicate

  "familes"—the Gabelottis and the Volpones—after twenty years of cold wars and murderous feuds. Volpone's eyes slipped from-one man to the next, noting the uncon trollable shock of satisfaction that, ever so briefly, cracked the artificial deadpans they sported in public. Having gone all around the table, the cable finally came back to Italo.

  ‘So what else is new?" asked Carlo Badaletto.

  Badaletto hated Italo Volpone and never missed a chance to defy him. Five years before, when Italb had come back from London, Badaletto had been a member of the Volpone clan. By way of welcome, he had said, "Come va, speranzaritu?’ and it had gotten him a double fracture of the jaw as well as the loss of his incisors, one of which, after Italo butted him violently, remained stuck in Volpone's forehead.

  Speranzaritu was the scornful Sicilian word for lo cal boys who had had to skip abroad. But if Italo had been forced to spend two years' exile in London, the capo of every
family on the East and West coasts knew it was on the express orders of his brother, the don, Zu Genco Volpone, from whom a mere wink was a decree that his younger brother was in no position to challenge.

  ‘Nothing else," Italo snarled at Badaletto.

  Babe Volpone would have liked to.evoke in Carlo Badaletto the same feeling of inferiority that everyone ex perienced in his brother's presence, without Genco doing anything to make it so. To be sure, people were afraid of Italo, but Genco had something more: people respected him.' His seeming gentleness, his open smile, and his natural gift as a mediator were the perfect front for his grasping, pitiless nature. On the contrary, Italo could not for long contain the rage constantly boiling within him. His mur derous impulses drove him to satisfy his desires immediate ly in every area: private, emotional, or economic. Had it not been for- his brother's position, Italo's tendency to re sort to brute force would have condemned him to the vege tative life of a punk or a hit man. The capi of the Syndi cate didn't trust Italo's lack of self-control or his delight in primitive solutions. Times had changed since the days of Al Capone. Although rough hits might be no less numerous, they were carried out more subtly by nameless characters who were paid off by intermediaries so that the hit men never knew why or for whom they were performing their contracts.

  Nowadays each capo had to have the facade of an eminently respectable businessman, so that he could carry on his work without being bothered by the IRS, the po lice, or the competition. Family investments had the look and the seamless structure of multinational corporations with endless ramifications, and they were directed by an army of lawyers who knew how to put the illegal pro ceeds of the various rackets into businesses that were be yond reproach. For example, it was not unusual for some of vie profits from the narcotics trade to end up, after a mysterious series of twists and turns, financing a hospital for handicapped children, christened by the highest au thorities with great pomp and circumstance in the presence of all the local officials, and receiving the deep gratitude of the people.

  Zu Genco Volpone's brain trust was made up of the cream of graduates of the best schools of international law, as if buying the top men somehow made up for the fact that, until the age of eighteen, he himself had hardly been able to read.

  Moshe Yudelman was the first to speak up. "The first phase of the operation is over," he said. "Within three months all our funds will have been laundered."

  Straight out of the Lower East Side, with a brief de tour through the Bronx, Yudelman, who had supported himself through school by swiping vegetables from push carts and beating the bums on his block at pinball games, could outthink the most cunning head of any international central bank. Born with a God-given gift for figures as some are with eyes of blue, he knew without having to learn, he understood without having to think. He always found the way. This nose for finance was further strength ened by his talent for sharp practice. No contract, however adroitly drawn, could hold him at bay more than five minutes. He could immediately find a chink, the tiny de tail, the missing comma that might be used with absolute legality to break off an agreement without anyone even suspecting that bad faith or dishonesty was involved. Bet ter than any computer, his head contained the exact list of holdings, privileges, and profits of all the rival families of the Commissione, that top-level organization consisting of the eleven capi who ran the worldwide business, in which Zu GencoVoIpone was not the least important

  When Moshe Yudelman joined Genco's family, Genco had had to put up a fight with his associates to bring Moshe in as consigliere. The proud Sicilians who made up the top group found it hard to accept a Jew among them. With their ferocious attachment to Old World traditions, they had a gut distrust of anything foreign, lumping togeth er the Irish, Negroes, Jews, Chinese, and Protestants. At the beginning, Yudelman had tried to keep a low profile, giving advice only when it was asked for, never taking sides, never saying anything against anyone. He was there, period; like a piece of furniture that gradually became familiar, that you knew would always be on hand when you needed it He was too smart not to see that some of the clan's unwritten laws were outmoded, but too shrewd to voice the least criticism. The underground world in which he lived was the only one that could ever assuage his lust for power, his yearning to be the strength behind the throne. His amazing accounting and managerial talents had done the rest

  Although the families frequently killed off each other's members oyer meaningless questions of prestige, Yudelman had succeeded not only in staying alive, but in occupying a place from which none, not even the members of the Commissione, dared try to unseat him. He owed every thing to Genco, who had picked him up when he was poor and defenseless, but it was through Yudelman that Don Zu Volpone had been able to reinforce his own prestige and authority. Thereafter, his role as consigliere to one family had been extended to all parts of the activities of the Syndicate, for it had made Moshe a kind of elder statesman, an arbitrator in matters of the greatest deli cacy. These responsibilities hadn't kept him from building up his own fortune, day by day increased through careful investments, split-second decisions, the unbeatable flair of the great predator for any weakening prey on the stock ex change, in gambling, slot machines, bars, taverns, real es tate, vending machines, bootleg booze, numbers, champion ship prizefights, blackmail, loan-sharking,. or pimping.

  It was on his say-so that Genco had agreed to make an alliance—who knew for how long?—with the man he considered his number one rival: Ettore Gabelotti, Moshe sneaked a sidewise glance at him now. An old Roman face, heavy pouches under his eyes, Ettore weighed over 275 pounds. He kept up a kindly paternal front that was periodically contradicted by terrible rages that often ended in unquestionable condemnations to death.

  It had taken inordinate diplomacy for Moshe to get Gabelotti to admit that, over and above whatever sepa rated them, his interests were the same as Genco's when it came to laundering liquid money. To convince him that their money ought to be pooled had been no easy matter, for the two men held against each other the many corpses that each had sown in the other's camp over now-forgot ten disagreements. But the accord had been reached, and today it was about to give birth to the greatest financial operation ever undertaken by the Syndicate.

  Gabelotti, who had not said a word, must have felt Yudelman watching him. He looked toward him sharply, then covered up with a smile. Moshe smiled back and looked away.

  "Lemme see the cable again!" Ettore asked.

  From fingers to fingers, it flew from one end of the table to the other. Gabelotti grabbed it and laughed up roariously as he called to the younger Volpone, "Say, Babe, your brother sure didn't waste any dough on Wes tern Union!"

  Everybody joined in the raucous laughter. Italo, on the defensive, began to laugh along with the others once he realized that Ettore's words contained no hidden sarcas tic criticism.

  The cable, beyond the indication of its point of origi nation—Zurich, Schaffhauserstrasse Post Office—and the address, had just one single word, three letters: OUT. But those three letters represented the code name for the joint operation under which those present at the meeting were bringing home clean and free the net returns from all their criminal activities for the calendar year 1978.

  And these net returns came to the sum of exactly two billion dollars.

  Inez claimed that as a child she had been raised ex clusively on blood and milk. The men in her tribe grew to be seven feet four inches tall, and the women grew to be six foot four. "Normal" warriors, by comparison, seemed like dwarfs. She casually dropped the fact that she was the daughter of a king, and that she had eight brothers, one more handsome than the next When they went through their rites of passage, signifying their acceptance into the adult world, they had to prove their valor by covering themselves with serious wounds in the genital regions, thus unwittingly duplicating the actions of those young Athen ians who slit their phalluses until the puffy scars made them look like sculptured totem poles.

  Lando listened to these sto
ries open mouthed, unable to tell where truth gave way to fabrication in the filmy texture of her tale.

  "You mean to say your brothers made slits in their pricks with a razor?"

  Inez stretched her arm and picked up a tangerine. "Absolutely."

  ''They gotta be crazy." Lando sighed. "Honest-to-God savages!"

  Out of the corner of his eye, he looked at his mis tress's immense body, now in repose on the carpet Bare foot she was exactly the same height as he, a fact that kept him from getting cramps in his calves when he made love to her standing up. Yet even during his two sea sons of professional soccer he had rarely come across guys who were taller than he, either on his own team or the other side.

  He turned toward her. "So you really are six foot two?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, it’s funny—you don't look the least bit like a giraffe."

  She glanced at him, half amused, half sneering. "Everything is relative, Lando my boy. In my country, even you would be considered a shrimp."

  She came from Burundi, from a village called Bujum bura. Several times, pointing with her long, slim chocolate-colored fingers with bright red fingernails, she had shown