A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(38)
“I guess you’re right. I’ll do it today. I’ll pay her rent, and give her some spending money.”
“A good start,” said Salamone. He stared at Crane for a few seconds, and then sighed. “I’m afraid there’s one more thing we have to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“I heard that guys were checking themselves into the Erie County jail to wait for this Indian. You know anything about that?”
“Well, I did ask my guys if they knew a couple of friends we could pay to make sure the Indian didn’t get off. They got four of them to get arrested for small things—probation violation, domestic abuse, that kind of thing.”
Salamone stared at him, and he could feel the eyes were seeing through his skin and into his innards. “You know that I like you, Danny,” he said. “Not personally, of course. That’s a different thing, and I have a very big family for that. But you’re a good earner. Every month, I get a shipment from you that’s full of good things to resell, and I get an honest percentage of the storage business. You’ve made me a lot of money, and I haven’t had to spend much time worrying that you’ll do something stupid and put me in danger.”
Crane said, “I try to be smart.”
“I’ve appreciated that. You run your business right. No outsiders who aren’t in on things and might ask questions, and not much chance of strangers noticing what you do. You do your own books and pay taxes and all that. We could go on forever and die rich old men. You want that, right?”
“Yes,” Crane said. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“That’s the way to be,” said Salamone. “When this business gets big enough and you’ve diversified your investments and set aside money for trouble, you could stop doing burglaries and just collect your rent. So here we are. And this is what gets me. You’re like forty years old, and I’ve got to explain the way the world works, and our place in it.”
“You don’t really,” said Crane. “I don’t need—”
“Yes you do,” Salamone snapped. “So here it is. You know that the little bit of power I have on this earth isn’t from me, or from the handful of guys like Pistore and Cantorese who work for me. It comes from people up above me, the people I work for. Most of the power that matters belongs to Mr. Malconi.”
“I know who he is,” said Crane.
“See, that’s exactly my point. You do, and you don’t. He’s the guy you’ve seen in the papers. The don, the capo, the boss of the Arm. They keep showing that one picture of him from his last indictment twenty years ago, outside the courthouse, with the two FBI guys holding his arms. The wind blew his hair straight up, so he looks like an old man with a porcupine sitting on his head. That’s who you know, but that’s not him.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Mr. Malconi is the man who is at the top of the pyramid. Below him are a couple of underbosses, and then there are about a hundred guys just like me, who have a few businesses that he allows to operate, and that he protects. We can each pay ten or twenty guys like Pistore and Cantorese, and we send a percentage of our profits up the line to Mr. Malconi. I send him a part of what you give me, for instance. Once in a great while, Mr. Malconi will pass down an order to those hundred guys like me, and we each pass down the order to our ten best guys, so in an hour or two, there are a thousand guys following that order. If the order was about trouble, he would also call the bosses of nearby places—Rochester, Cleveland, Toronto, or Pittsburgh, or even Boston or New York.”
“I guess what I meant before was that I don’t know why you’re telling me this,” said Crane.
“To help you,” said Salamone. “I don’t ever want to drive up to this place and find a hundred-gallon drum with two hundred pounds of unidentifiable goo in it that used to be you. Am I getting through to you?”
Crane was wide-eyed. “Have I done something that would make him want me dead?”
“I sincerely hope not. What I’m trying to do is explain to you some things that I had assumed you had learned. You’re a good businessman and a competent burglar. Those are really good things to be, both at once. What you’re not is un uomo duro, a hard guy. It’s not what you’ve done, and you weren’t brought up to it. You should be glad, and stay away from that stuff. Know your place in the universe, and accept it.”
Crane was sweating, and his mouth was dry. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have killed Nick Bauermeister?”
“You wanted the girl, and so you thought with your dick instead of your brain. You’re human. All I’m saying is that you should have gone about it the right way. If I were in that situation, I wouldn’t just go out at night with a rifle, shoot him, and expect to forget it. I wouldn’t do it and then tell Mr. Malconi, ‘By the way, I killed a guy on my crew.’ I would go to Mr. Malconi first, explain my problem, and ask his permission to kill the guy. That way, I keep Mr. Malconi convinced I’m not suddenly becoming a crazy, unreliable man. I give Mr. Malconi a chance to make sure that he, and anybody he’s worried about, has an alibi, and can’t be connected to it through me. It also gives him a chance to make sure I don’t get in the way of anything else his people are doing. Or, if I’m really lucky, he might say, ‘This Salamone is a good man, but he’s no killer. I’ll tell him to sit tight, and I’ll have somebody else do it—somebody who’s used to doing that kind of thing and isn’t going to screw up and get us all in trouble.’”