Aside from her daily prayers to the little brothers, Lola lived by her head. She did this to the square of the degree by which Tim Kegan lived by his head, but precisely to the degree Thomas Kegan lived by his. She was blood over ice. Lola saw the entertainment industry only as a cosmetic that would make her all the more desirable in the seduction of power. Everything it stood for was convenient to her holy goal. Her emergence as the household synonym for sex was just so much rope to pull her up to where she could grab what she had to have, what she told herself she could not live without: power.
Lola wanted that kind of respect from her dead father (who had thrown her down a flight of stairs when she was seventeen because she had come home one night twelve minutes later than he had told her to come home). His soul would grovel in front of her if he could see her as an equal of the Dons. Her mother had had to take shit from him all her life, but if a punk kid who ran coffee for the crap game in the garage across the street came into the store, Pop would practically drop to his knees to kiss that punk’s ass. In fact, this was why she believed in the Church. She was a strict Catholic because she wanted to be told over and over again that there was life after death, so that wherever her father was, when he saw her as the equal of any capo of the Mafia, he could fall down on his knees and kiss her ass and Mom’s ass for fifty thousand years of eternity.
Lola gradually figured out her gimmick when the son of her neighbor at Palm Springs, a square named Kegan, was elected to the U.S. Senate five years before his father said he was going to make it to the White House. First she made good friends with the father. Then she screwed the son. Then he screwed her. Then she screwed him, and so on, and on, and on. It was—like—an idyll. Then she heard both father and son tell her again that he was going to be the next President of the United States. The gimmick began to materialize. She hung around them real close and listened real good. She was able to throw in a few fast angles of her own, so they were more than glad to have her around. After a while, so Tim wouldn’t get bored screwing only her, she began to get broads for him. Later on that grew into a major effort. She had a full-time guy on it in Europe because it was worth it. Her cousin lined up broads in New York, and Lola handled Hollywood, Rome and London. She got him the top broads.
Lola wanted a very simple thing for herself. How to get it was just as simple. She wanted to be the national crime industry’s lobbyist in Washington. She would be the sole fixer with the federal government, working with the Attorney General’s office and the White House. She would be set with every single “family” in the Fratellanza, accepted as the one who could solve their problems with Uncle Sam, from the Congress to offshore deals through the State Department to a lock on the big contracts at the Department of Defense. That was all. To get there would take a little more muscle than she presently had, but she knew she had to be all set at about the same week or, at most, two weeks before Senator Kegan got there as President. When she was ready to make her move she bought the private-line, home telephone number of Salvatore Verdigerri, a/k/a Frank Mayo, a/k/a Frank Brown, at his modest home in Pound Ridge, New York, from where he commuted to the city every day just like any other working stiff, in a Mercedes 600SL.
Mayo was in his workshop in the cellar of his house building a hi-fi set, which was his hobby, with which, by installing it on the roof of an office building, they could bug as many telephones as were necessary to be bugged throughout the structure. Lola spoke to him in a west Sicilian dialect. She said she had important business to talk about and asked permission to fly to New York to see him right away. He knew her in a minute. In fact, he was a fan.
“It wouldn’t be good for your business to come to see me, Miss Camonte,” he said. “Your reputation and mine, they just wouldn’t mix.”
“Nobody has to know.”
“Look, you my favorite movie stah. I knew the first minute I seen you you wasn’t no Mexican. With me, you couldn’t do no wrong. You need advice, I wanna help you. Can you get to Havana?”
“Anyplace, Don Francisco.”
“Okay. Good. I gotta do some business in Havana. I’ll be at the Nacional Thursday night for four, five days. If you want, I’ll see you in Havana.”
***
When she called him from her room at the Nacional he told her to come up to room 917-18-19-20-21-22. This was easy for Lola to do because her suite happened to be 923-24-25. She used floral-based perfume because Dons were real straights. When she went into the big parlor, Don Francisco was with a certain man from Naples who had once been from New York for a long time just a little while ago. They were smoking two-dollar cigars, retail cost in Havana. The louvered wooden windows that led to a balcony overlooking the gardens were open. The scents of ginger and frangipani had come into the room. She could see the intensely blue flowers of a tall jacaranda tree in the background behind Don Francisco. Behind and around the tree was a blue, blue sky without a cloud. Overhead in the tall ceiling a four-bladed fan turned lazily, stirring contentment. The sun filled two-thirds of the room in a way that made it seem as if Pissarro had painted them sitting there so motionlessly. The room was tropically warm, but each man remained correctly dressed in a dark suit jacket and wore a dark necktie. Lola was humble and respectful, as they were with her. She addressed them as Don Francisco and Zu Carlo. Zu Carlo was senior. They talked about movies and movie people they all knew for a few minutes. Then her sponsor, Don Francisco, asked her how he could help her. She went directly to the point.
“They are going to make Martin Hanaberry resign,” she said. Both men blinked involuntarily. Martin Hanaberry was the big reform mayor of New York in the fifties. He had too strong a grip on the police. Anything that could break the grip would be good for business.
“Who says?” Zu Carlo asked.
“Senator Kegan. He’s the junior senator from California.”
“That’s a long way from City Hall.”
“So is Naples.”
“The senator or the senator’s father?” Don Francisco asked.
“Both.”
“Why is Hanaberry out?”
“He’s going to have a nervous breakdown. He came out of the war with a very bad condition. He was in a hospital for two years and he picked up a very expensive habit with the treatment. He can hardly support it. When he comes to Palm Springs, I help him.”
“How did Kegan find that out?”
“I told him.”
“Maybe you shoulda told us,” Zu Carlo said sharply.
“New York is big and it can throw off a lot of money,” Lola said diffidently. “But when junk comes in like it’s gonna come in, and when it takes in the whole country—that’s much more money, and it’s gonna take much more junk.”
“Say what is on your mind.”
“If we can bring in, say, ten thousand kilos of the purest and stockpile it, we will have a lock on an industry, not just a business.”
“We?”
“An ambassador can go back and forth as much as he wants and nobody bothers him,” Lola said. “We could line the whole inside of an ambassador’s plane once a week. He could bring in a thousand kilos a week. And nobody would bother him.”
“What ambassador?”
“I mentioned to the junior senator from California that it would be a good thing for him and his father to move his father’s old friend Martin Hanaberry out of New York and into Mexico now, before he can foul up the next elections. The senator’s father has the muscle with the White House to swing it.”
“You have good ideas, Miss Camonte,” Don Francisco said.
“I like to think I have an investment in my ideas,” Lola said.
“First we’ll see if you can do it,” Zu Carlo told her. “Then we’ll talk about your investment.”
Lola’s long, beautiful hand moved out. Her exquisitely tapered forefinger tapped Zu Carlo on the knee. “Giving you New York—which I have just done—is nothing,” she said. “Bringing you an ambassador who will deliver two thousand kilos a week is
nothing also. I mean that. Everything is comparative. What I want to talk to you about now is giving you a President of the United States and his entire Cabinet.”
***
“The record of that meeting,” Professor Cerutti said to Nick on Schrader Island, “is on a tape Charley Fortunato gave us in Naples the year before he dropped dead. He was the Zu Carlo at the Nacional in Havana. He agreed to give us the tape because your father had been influential in getting him pardoned by the governor before he was deported and because as a patriot he was deeply shocked by your brother’s assassination. He also agreed to talk because he had reason to believe that Frank Mayo and Camonte had been giving him a fast count.”
“Then they did make a deal with Lola?”
“All the way. Camonte got sixteen and two-thirds percent of their net. In return, to make her what you could say would be an international hostess, when the time came for Lola to move to Washington and establish the new lobby, Zu Carlo and Don Francisco persuaded the national council of the Fratellanza to put out everything to turn Lola into “the world’s greatest entertainer”—or certainly the most successful. Tremendous pressure was put on the entire entertainment business and the overcommunications industry. It took them about five years to make Lola the phenomenon she became in world show business—and still is in spite of the paunch and wattles. She suddenly developed as a singer, and her records were pushed day and night, night and day, on every jukebox and by every disc jockey in North America. She was showcased twice a year as the biggest act ever to play Las Vegas. She had a series of her own television shows, the only place she flopped, because even the trained press can’t comment on television until after the audience has seen the show, which is bad news in a regimented country, because the viewers just didn’t know they were supposed to be watching Lola. But she ran her own movie company. She collected two Oscars. And while she was wowing them from the local Bijou screens to in-person appearances in Tokyo and Paris, she established herself in an enormously effective pleasure complex in Palm Springs which attracted—more and more and more—the highest political figures. She got women for most of the men. She got them whatever they thought they needed. In return they blubbered over her wonderful generosity and fiercely independent spirit, such as when she beat up the mother of a senator in the lobby of the Statler in Washington. Lola’s nerves got very taut, and it was up to the press and her powerful friends to make her a law unto herself. As time went on and your brother got closer and closer to the White House, Lola became a very tense, exhausted woman. When Tim got elected, long before his inauguration Lola moved into Washington and her real work began.
“She established herself overnight at the social center of the American government—the lobbyist and fixer for the American crime industry among all top criminal executives of the country. They came to Washington; she entertained them and explained the nature of the services she would offer among all the agencies and branches of the federal government. She was accepted by the greatest of these as a capo dei capi, and her father began his fifty-thousand-year term in Purgatory kissing her ass. If Tim had been allowed to serve out his two terms, the lobby would have been established forever and would have been just as blandly self-righteous in its work as the farm or medical lobby. We might have seen federal price supports for heroin and evaluations of the lives of John Torrio, Alphonse Capone and Benjamin Siegel in history books printed under federal grants.
“It was Lola who handled the Mob’s campaign contribution of two million dollars toward Tim’s election. She knew what she was doing. She didn’t make the donation directly to Tim. She did it through your father, whose reaction seems to have been merely that Lola’s friends appreciated as much as he did that Tim was the man for the job.
“Until the basic deal could be set, the deal by which Tim would personally acknowledge the contribution of the two million from Lola’s establishment by favoring them whenever and wherever possible, which is the only reason for any private campaign contributions—after all, money’s use is to buy not to bless—Lola waited. This pulled her almost to the breaking point. She turned to the little doctor on Ninety-seventh Street for vitamin injections to keep her calm and happy. It was a miracle cure, but it eventually ruined her looks.
“Tim was elected President. What a wonderful day for so many different kinds of people, but particularly for your father. And his friends. In Washington, Lola began to cultivate, organize and re-establish her place among the powers. Then—at last—the time came to affirm the basic deal. The Fratellanza had decided it would be more dignified to wait until the President summoned Lola to him to acknowledge the precedent-smashing contribution they had made to his election. Eleven months went by and nothing happened for them. At the end of that time, her own nerves shot, pressed by her perplexed colleagues, Lola arranged to see Tim at his father’s house in Palm Springs, “the winter White House”—not knowing that your father records even the visits of house flies to any of his establishments. She presented her detailed bill for services rendered, including her services as a fund raiser, emphasizing that the crime industry’s offering had been the largest single campaign contribution ever made.
“Lola really thought she had your brother. She was convinced he needed her as though he were some kind of a junkie about sex. She was ready for her great niche in the history of the Mafia. She handed your brother a sheaf of papers that she laughingly identified as the Treaty of Palm Springs. Here is the tape of their conversation.” Professor Cerutti touched a button on the console and Tim’s distinct, nasal, California voice came into the room:
TIM: No papers, honey. Let’s talk about new broads. I’m sick of looking at papers.
LOLA: Read it. It’s a big surprise.
TIM: What is it?
LOLA: I call it the Treaty of Palm Springs.
TIM: Okay, but what is it?
LOLA: Did you know I was a Sicilian?
TIM: I knew you weren’t a Mexican.
LOLA: Tim, do you remember the Sicilians contributed two million dollars to your campaign?
TIM: Two million dollars? You’ve lost your mind.
LOLA: We gave it through your father. He handled it. I gave him a check for two million dollars so he would know it was sincere, then he told me to have it made into hundred-dollar bills and put into suitcases. Gucci made the suitcases.
TIM: Is that right? Who are the Sicilians? That’s a pretty rich ethnic group.
LOLA: Maybe you better ask your father. [There is a telephone sound.]
TIM: Pa? Lola is here. She says some Sicilian organization contributed two million dollars to the campaign and that you took it in hundred-dollar bills. [There is a long silence on the tape.] All right. We’ll talk about it later. [There is a sound of a telephone console button being pressed.] Henry? Get John Donnelly out here from Washington. Tell him to bring me the record of every campaign contribution, legitimate or otherwise. Thanks. [Sound of telephone being hung up.] It’s getting clearer anyway. At least I know who the Sicilians are. Now—what is this treaty?
LOLA: Look—you sound upset. I mean, I thought you knew all about the contribution. Let’s sleep on it. There is absolutely no hurry.
TIM: That’s good.
LOLA: Tim—don’t read it now. Give it back and I’ll go home and we can start all over again.
TIM: I’ll be damned. Why—it is a treaty!
LOLA: Tim, please. Give it back.
TIM: You will address me as Mr. President, please. Well! What stately language…. Listen to this. I’ll just skim it now, but I will read it through later. Let’s see—the treaty seeks the recall of one hundred and four federal indictments—you’d like seventeen presidential pardons—you respectfully request the elimination of the use of the word “Mafia” by all federal agencies—you petition for greater freedom for Sicilian importers dealing out of Mexico and Canada, and you suggest that the Treasury Department cease pressuring the Swiss government to allow them to examine anonymous bank accounts held in Swit
zerland.
Lola, are you sure you don’t want Joe Bananas made ambassador to the Court of St. James’s?
LOLA: I am very happy that you are taking it this way, Tim. I was beginning to get a little worried.
TIM: For the last time—I am Mr. President to you, Lola.
LOLA: Yes, Mr. President.
TIM: You came here for an answer. This is the answer. You may never set foot in Washington again—unless, of course, you are under investigation. If you get my drift. Is that clear? And if I hear that you are entertaining any member of my government from the Vice-President down to the U.S. Marshal in this county, I will see that you are investigated, and I think it will be quite possible that you will be arrested, tried and convicted. This conversation is being recorded, and copies of the tape will be delivered—courtesy of my father—to every one of any consequence in your Sicilian group so that they know where you stand and where they stand. NOW GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!
[The tape stopped.]
“That was why Lola Camonte—and Frank Mayo, for that matter—were happy to cooperate with your brother’s assassins by finding Joe Diamond for whoever it was who paid for your brother’s murder,” Professor Cerutti said.
“But you don’t know who that is?”
“Not yet.”
“Can Miss Camonte be made to tell who it is?”
Cerutti shrugged. “Maybe. Your father could do it. He is friendly with everyone on the Council. The Council could certainly persuade her to tell who asked her to find Joe Diamond.”
“Why hasn’t he done that?”
“I would say he hasn’t—and I hesitate to conjecture about these things—because he knows they might decide to implicate him and Tim’s memory by leaking their version of the two million dollars.”