Deacon King Kong(61)

“I smelled a rat then. I almost backed out. I didn’t trust him. So I said, ‘If you’re the guy my brother said you are, wire me ten grand and tell me the name of one thing my brother sold you.’ He did. I ain’t daft. I didn’t tell the guy where I lived. He thinks I live in Staten Island. That’s the return address I put on the envelope with the picture I sent him. He wired the dough to the bank in Staten Island I told him to. I sent him the ten grand back and said okay.

“But I got no muscle to move this thing. I can’t get it to Europe now. Even if I could, I wouldn’t go all the way over there and have the guy lay boots on me or worse, then bag the thing and run off. So I says to him, ‘You come here and get it and I’ll let it go for three million dollars. You can keep the extra million for your troubles.’

“I was just talking,” the Governor said. “I thought he’d say ‘Get lost.’ I didn’t think he had the balls to do it. He said, ‘Let me think about it.’ After a week, he called back and said, ‘Okay. I’ll come get it.’ That’s when I come to you.”

“You’re throwing a pretty long pass here, mister. What makes you think I’d give it to you—or to him—if I found it?” Elefante said.

“Because you’re your father’s son. I ain’t just flying it, son. I asked around about you. See, your poppa and me, we knew who we were. We were always little guys. Moving guys. We never wanted muscle or trouble. We moved stuff. This guy from Europe I’m talking to, he’s a head guy. He talks smart. With an accent. Smooth. Head guys like that are always one step ahead of you. No matter how smart you think you are, they got a leg up on you. That’s why they’re head guys. You fool with a head guy, you better be the full shilling. Your poppa always said you were the full shilling.”

Elefante thought that one over and said softly, almost to himself, “I’m not really a head guy.”

“For three million chips you are.”

The Governor was silent a moment, then continued. “I took it as far as I could. I called the guy and said, ‘Let’s arrange a meet.’ He said, ‘Put it in a locker and let me come get it and I’ll leave your dough.’ That was the idea. We meet at Kennedy. Make the switch in a locker there, and go on. We didn’t talk about the exact switch, how we’d do it, but I agreed on the locker bit.”

“Then work out the last bit and go make your money, for Chrissakes.”

“How can I do that if I don’t know where the statue is?”

“You did know,” Elefante said. “You had it before my poppa did.”

“He stashed it!” The Governor paused. “Look, I had it before I went to prison. I couldn’t tell my wife about it. She’d already spent my dough on fuckin’ bagels. The statue wasn’t in a safe place. I told your poppa where it was when we were in Sing Sing. He got out two years ahead of me. He agreed to get it and hold it. I told him, ‘After I get out, when things cool off, I’ll come for it. And I’ll give you a piece of it.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ But he had that stroke in prison just before he got out, and I didn’t see him no more. I tried passing word to him when he was in the prison hospital, but he was gone before I could reach him. They released him after his stroke. He passed word to me after he got out. He sent a letter. It said, ‘Don’t worry. I got that little box of yours. It’s clean and safe and in the palm of God’s hand like that little song you used to sing.’ So I know he got it somehow. And I know he kept it someplace.”

“In God’s hand? What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know. He just said the palm of God’s hand.”

“You got the wrong guy then. My pop didn’t write that letter. He never went to church.”

“Weren’t you Catholic?”

“My mother dragged me to Saint Augustine till I was big enough to quit. But my father never went. Until he was dead, he never went into a church. We had his funeral. That’s when he went to church.”

“Maybe he left it in a church. Or in his coffin.”

Elefante thought for a moment. His mother did say she wanted his father’s coffin exhumed so she could get in the same grave. And Joe Peck had promised to do the job himself. The thought of that pea-brained idiot Joe Peck digging through his father’s remains, flipping his poppa’s corpse around, working through the pockets of his dad’s best suit, drilling through his poppa’s brains with a screwdriver, trying to find whatever the hell the fat girl’s name was that was worth three million dollars threw him, and for a moment Elefante felt out of breath. After a moment, he regained his composure and said: “He wouldn’t leave it in a church. He had no contact with churches. There’s no one in any church he’d trust. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to bury it with himself either. He wouldn’t do that to my mother.”

“I agree,” the Governor said. “But you have a storage place. You move stuff.”

“I looked through every single storage rental we have. The ones I have access to.”

“What about the ones you don’t have access to?”

“I guess I could get in them,” Elefante admitted. “But that’ll take time.”

“Time I ain’t got,” the Governor said. “The guy who wants to buy, he won’t deal with nobody else. You don’t call this type of guy. He calls you. I’m stalling him. I told him I had to think about the deal. He’s skittish. He won’t like it if there’s a second person involved. As it is, I’m thinking he might make a move on me regardless. Which is the other reason I’m hoping you’ll dig it up.”