Big Al shook his jowls in bewilderment. "How could the President do it? Every piss-poor tobacco farmer in Dixie will be planting pot or coca trees. Little old ladies'll grow opium poppies in window boxes! We'll have a country fulla junkies. " He gulped his wine.
Kieran got up and refilled the don's glass. "No we won't, Poppa. The other provisions of the Piccolomini Law will see to that. The educational campaigns against all forms of chemical abuse... the compulsory treatment or confinement of hard-narc addicts... the capital penalties for outlaw dealing. What the government has done is to say: 'Okay, you low uneducated trash, you unemployables, you losers, you cheap thrill-seekers. Go ahead and smoke yourself into a stupor if you want to — and pay Uncle Sam tax on each joint. Or snort till your nose falls off — but don't bother nice people while you're doing it, or we lock you up and throw away the key. And don't commit a crime under the influence, or recruit underage users, or peddle shit illegally — or you die.' It's a very simple, sensible solution to a nasty problem, Al. The Treasury will recover revenue lost from the declining sales of tobacco and hard liquor, the streets will be cleared of criminals supporting their habit, and the big bad Mafia will have the financial floor cut out from under it once and for all. "
"It's indecent, " Big Al said. "Sell cheap pot and crack and kids are gonna get it. I don't give a damn about the adult addicts. Let 'em turn their brains to stronzolo! But the little kids..."
Kieran resumed his seat with a shrug. "The bleeding-heart liberals and the church people and the social workers tried to tell the President and Congress that. And so did we, of course. "
Al stared morosely into his wine. "Thirty percent. We lose thirty percent of our income just like that with the legalization — and we're the most diversified of the Families! New York, Boston, Florida, New Orleans — they're gonna drop fifty percent at least. And California — !"
"The Outfit will have a lean year or two. But those Families who go into my venture-capital pool will eventually end up richer than ever. Chicago is leading the wave of the future, Poppa, and my consortium will provide the impetus for a whole new profit structure. We'll survive, and so will the Families who follow us. "
"Follow you. " Blood-webbed eyes burned for an instant with the old antagonism and fear; but then came a fatalistic little laugh. "What else could they do but follow you, stregone? Sorcerer!"
Kieran's expression was earnest, his coercive faculty working at max. "Al, we can't keep running a two-hundred-billion-dollar business like a gang of nineteenth-century banditti — squabbling over a shrinking pie, eliminating rivals by shooting them and stuffing their bodies in car trunks. Times have changed. In two years, human beings will be walking on Mars. All financial transactions will be fully computerized. Most of the old rackets will be as dead as the peddling of narcotics. Sure, the Mob is rich. But you know what they say about money: if you just sit on it, it might as well be toilet paper. "
"Yeah, yeah, " the don said wearily. "We gotta invest. I know. "
"Invest properly, Al, so that the money makes more money. That's what I've been doing as your consigliere — and what I'll continue to do when I'm Boss. "
"Boss of Bosses, " Camastra muttered.
Kieran did not seem to hear. "In addition to our legitimate investment corporation for the Organization funds, we now have our own small tank of sharks to work with — three of them, all under my thumb and without the slightest off-color taint to attract Justice Department bloodhounds. We own Clayburgh Acquisitions, Giddings & Metz, and Fredonia International. They're takeover artists, Al, the kind of outfits that specialize in the leveraged buy-outs of troubled or vulnerable companies. So far, our little pets have confined themselves to modest raids of the loot-'em-and-dump-'em type. But now I'm ready to give them the go-ahead for some real action. Once the capital pool is ready, we're going after the biggest money there is. "
"What, for God's sake?"
"We'll begin with small defense contractors — the ones whose stock took a dive during the late-lamented détente. With the space-station disaster and hawkish noises starting up again in Congress, those defense companies will come back like gangbusters. When we're ready to tackle a biggie, there's a McGuigan-Duncan Aerospace, the firm that almost crashed when their Zap-Star orbiting mirror weapon was axed by the Pentagon economizers. I have a strong hunch that by 1993 — when we have a new President and the Mars Project is recognized for the useless PR stunt that it is — this country will wake up and realize how far ahead of us the Russians are in the space arms race. Then those Zap-Stars may get a new lease on life. "
Big Al had gone the color of chalk. "You think there's gonna be a war?"
"Of course not. Only a fresh defense initiative. Once we've wrapped up McGuigan, we can go after G-Dyn Cumberland, the submarine builders. And Con Electric is shaky with the Japanese and Chinese undercutting their domestic products — but they were the fourth largest defense contractor in the country during the 1980s, and the Pentagon certainly won't buy missile parts from Asia. "
"Madonna puttana! You really mean it!" Big Al's glass fell without a sound to the thick beige carpet. Inside his thoracic cavity, the pacemaker adjusted his heartbeat in response to the elevated level of adrenalinemia.
Kieran was patient. "History has shown that there is no greater potential for profit than in a suitably stimulated military-industrial complex — and the stimulation is imminent. The Soviets don't really want war and neither do we. But both countries are bound to slide back into the Cold War groove in response to internal tensions. We have our high unemployment and monumental national debt. They have their eternal food and consumer-goods shortages, and Slavic angst. "
"What if you guess wrong about a defense build-up? What if this U. S. -Russian Mars Project makes us all buddy-buddy with the damn Reds and the disarmament thing gets into high gear?"
"Then it would be Goodbye, Daddy Warbucks. " Kieran waved one hand dismissively. "But we won't let that happen. We'll protect our investment. "
Big Al stared at his son-in-law with the unaccepting disbelief of a man confronting an impending natural disaster — an avalanche descending, a looming tornado funnel — and then his face cleared and he began to laugh uproariously. "Jesus!" he wheezed. "Jesus H. Christ! Wait till that cazzomatto Falcone gets a loada this action!"
Kieran touched a golden square. Immediately the door to the outer office opened and his executive assistant appeared.
"Yes, sir?" Arnold Pakkala inquired. His mind added: The two hoods are sitting quietly biting their fingernails, and you have a conference call coming up at ten-thirty with Mr. Giddings and Mr. Metz in Houston, and then an early luncheon with General Baumgartner.
"Mr. Camastra is ready to leave now, Arnold. Would you ask Carlo and Frankie to step in?" Kieran stood in front of Big Al with an outstretched hand and a cordial smile. "Thanks a lot for stopping by, Poppa. Betty Carolyn invited me to bring Shannon to your place tomorrow for dinner, so I'll see you then. If you feel up to it, we can talk over this new financial business in more detail. "
Supported by his bodyguards, Big Al surged to his feet. "Sure. We'll talk tomorrow. " He was still chuckling but his eyes refused to meet those of the new Acting Boss of Chicago. "You can bring the two cases of Marsala. It's real good stuff. See you, Kier. "
Kieran O'Connor turned to the window to look out again over the luminous lake. The sailboat with the lovers was gone. He focused his farsense on a big cabin cruiser moving up the river toward the Michigan Avenue Bridge.
Arnold said: Ten-thirty. Shall I set up the call to Houston?
One person in the cruiser was telling another person a scandalous anecdote about the Illinois Attorney General and a certain labor official.
Kieran said: Give me five minutes to meditate and clear my mind. Then bring on the sharks.
12
MILAN, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH
16 AUGUST 1990
IT WAS THE worst psychic stakeout in his experience
, from beginning to end, bar none.
The damn tippy little rented johnboat! Essential to his night bass fisherman cover, it was dismayingly low in the water, its aluminum hull clanked at his slightest movement, and it stunk from decaying salt-pork bait trapped down under the duckboards.
The damn hot, muggy night! Not a breath of fresh air stirred over the small lake ringed with summer cottages, and after four hours of surveillance, he was sopping wet with sweat and cramped all to hell.
The damn fucking bugs! They really were — mating, that is — and doing it all over him. Perhaps it was the seductive stench, or the little boat might just have provided a convenient rendezvous out there in the middle of the lake. Whatever... aquatic insects by the hundreds, gossamer-winged and mostly connubially linked, fluttered, crept, and copulated in and about the anchored johnboat. Any shift in posture by the boat's occupant produced a cellophanish crunch.
The damn fish! Smallmouth bass, gourmandizing on the besotted bugs, leapt explosively out of the water at unnerving intervals. If he had been a genuine angler, the sight of the noble lunkers would have warmed his heart. But Fabian Finster was a city-bred, sports-hating sophisticate who preferred his fish filleted, gently grilled, and served with lemon-butter sauce. Periodically, when the feeding frenzy in the waters around him disturbed his concentration to an unbearable degree, he would break off the surveillance, muster his coercive faculty, and blast both predators and prey. The fish would hightail it into the depths and the bugs would faint, fall into the lake, and drown. All would be serene for ten minutes or so, until a new swarm of insects arrived and the fish pulled themselves together again.
The real corker, however, the brain-bender supremo of that enchanted evening, was a technical surveillance problem: the subjects were speaking — and thinking telepathically — in French. He had encountered this in his nightclub days, too, and learned to fake translations by cracking the linguistic formulation of the thought and extracting its purely imaginal content. (Ha ha, ugly gringo! Read my mind! Tell me I have six thousand-dollar bills in my money-clip! ) But translating more than a phrase or two of a foreign language was a bitch of a job for a mentalist — analogous to eyestrain. The intense concentration required would leave him physically and mentally pooped, by no means a healthy state for a guy in the espionage and extortion racket. Add to the French translation grief an uncanny premonition of disaster that no psychic could afford to ignore, and Finster decided he had been very unwise to accept the Remillard assignment, no matter how much loot Kieran O'Connor dangled as bait.
Bait!
SCRAM! FUCK OFF! FUCK ELSEWHERE!
Momentarily alone again in the starlight, Finster sighed.
His troubles had started at the beginning of the assignment, when he'd tackled the kid professor, Denis Remillard. Denis was a truly boffo screener of his private thoughts, nobody to mess with. Any probe attempt by Finster would not only have been detected — but its source would have been pinpointed. So he'd settled for crumbs, bits of "public" telepathy Remillard addressed to his friends and associates. Denis spoke only English and his subvocal thoughts were also couched in that language. But what thoughts! The prof ratiocinated on such a rarefied level that poor Finster was totally out of his league, lost in a labyrinth of symbolic logic, gestalts, alatory subintellections, and other horrors. If Denis was working on anything potentially threatening (or useful) to the O'Connor enterprises, it would take a better brain than Finster's to prove it at this stage. He had suggested, and his Boss had concurred upon, a more indirect course of investigation. Finster would leave Denis and his Coterie alone until there were hints of more than theoretical activity, and concentrate his efforts on the young genius's many relatives. One or more of them might provide useful leverage material for future action against the Dartmouth group.
It was when Finster began surveillance of Denis's uncle, who acted in loco parentis to the professor and worked at a big resort in the White Mountains, that culture shock struck. Like most persons who considered themselves one-hundred-percent Americans at that time, Fabian Finster was completely ignorant of the French-speaking minority population of New England. Uncle Roger was a harmless fellow who spoke fluent Yankee — but his thoughts were an untidy melange of French and English. Sorting them out had consumed a tedious month, during which Finster stayed as a guest at the resort during the high season, eating too many gourmet meals. But there had been a payoff: Uncle
Roger was preparing to leave his job because he was afraid! Afraid of Denis's younger brother, Victor, the black sheep of the family.
Bingo.
Finster had zeroed in on Victor immediately, and discovered that the twenty-year-old man was not only a telepath but a powerful coercer as well — certainly stronger than his older brother and perhaps even more compelling than Kieran O'Connor himself. Furthermore, he was a crook, using a legitimate business as a front in much the same way that Kieran did, only on a vastly smaller scale.
O'Connor was very interested.
Finster was instructed to study Victor and his operation, using the utmost caution. He was always to stay out of coercive range, which they pegged at a hundred yards to be on the safe side, more than twice Kieran's sphere of psychic influence. He was to eavesdrop both electronically and telepathically, being especially alert for useful dirt. Each night Finster would fast-transmit the tape of the day's data to Chicago via scrambled land-line, and there would follow consultation and fresh orders from the Boss.
For three weeks, Finster had shadowed the young pulpwood entrepreneur in and around his home base of Berlin, New Hampshire. It soon became apparent that the shady aspects of Victor's operation were expertly papered over; there was no immediate prospect of blackmailing him. He had no wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or significant other susceptible to outside menaces. (He shared support of his widowed mother and younger siblings with Denis, but seemed to have no real love for any of them. ) His financing was tightly secured in two local banks and a third in Manchester. He had logging contracts in both New Hampshire and Maine, and seemed ready to expand into Vermont as well — as soon as he could pin down the appropriate persons to coerce. Given Victor's apparently invulnerable setup, Kieran O'Connor decided he had two options at the present time: He could let Victor be, as he had Denis, filing him for future reference; or he could invite the young man into his own criminal coalition.
Finster was now completing the feasibility study for the latter alternative... and it was looking dimmer and dimmer. In Finster's judgment, Victor Remillard was not only a mental badass, he was probably a nutter to boot. His French-English thoughts were often chaotic, indecipherable. There were dark hints of no less than three murders perpetrated within the last year, together with an indeterminate number of psychic and/or physical assaults. He dreamed of monsters, and most of them had his own face. He hated Denis, and only some deep-lying inhibition constrained him from doing violence to the older brother he both envied and despised.
Fabian Finster had long cherished a salutary fear of Kieran O'Connor; but he had decided that he was even more afraid of Victor Remillard. When he finished up for the night, Finster intended to pass on to the Boss his own urgently negative vote regarding any alliance with Victor. On the contrary, the Mob might give serious consideration to putting out a contract on this kid before he spread his web any wider...
Sweaty, pest-ridden, and disquieted, Fabian (The Fabulous) Finster resolutely stayed on the job, whispering a simultaneous translation and running commentary into a bug-smeared Toshiba microcorder hung on a lanyard around his neck. Meanwhile, on the screened porch of his lakeside summer cabin, Victor Remillard drank cold beer and went about the business of recruiting fresh heads for his growing coven of psychic henchmen. He was concluding an interview with a middle-aged Canadian telepath of dubious moral fiber who had driven down that day from Montreal in a brand-new Alfa Spider.
"Now the two of 'em just sit there chewing things over... Now Vic offers the g
uy another bottle of Hibernia Dunkel Weizen from the refrigerator on the porch (Jesus!)... Now Vic says out loud in Frog, 'I agree that a merger of our two groups might be advantageous, Roe-bear, but it must be on my terms. I will make the machine march — be the boss. ' And Fortyay says, 'For sure, Vic. No — uh — hassle. I have seen for myself who you are and what you are. ' And he takes a fast slug of suds, trying to be brave. And Vic leans toward him and smiles just a little and thinks: 'Is it that you are certain your four playmates will accept my direction? Without making any doubts? I am not playing kids' games, Roe-bear. I am going to shock the gallery' — dammit! he means score big — 'with this mental thing. My Remco pulpwood operation is just — uh — for starters. I'm going to be a big vegetable' — shit! — 'big shot and make more millions' — wait, that means billions — 'than you can count. So will the people who work with me. But you will have to do things my way. Do you understand, Roe-bear? No one makes the cunt with me — uh — fucks around with me and manages cheap — uh — gets away with it. ' And the other guy says out loud: 'Good blood, Vic! I told you, anything you say!' And his brain is dripping blue funk like a colander, and he thinks: 'You know why we're anxious to join up with you. Who else knows the music — the angles — of this mind business like you? Up in Kaybeck, me and Armang and Donyel and the rest have been just — uh — spinning our wheels, fooling around with small-beer scams. We know we gotta come South to get where the real — uh — action is. And that means joining your outfit. Why do you think I made my proposition regular?' He means above-board. 'Drill in my head all you want. Drill in the boys' heads. You'll see we aren't — uh — bullshitting. ' And Vic is all charm now. He says, like: