At End of Day Read Free

the only one.”
    “Well, even so,” Rascob said, “he should be enough to do it, if what he’s got is big enough.… Which wouldn’t be unusual, in that kind of thing. And even if he couldn’t use the whole of it, you know, two-forty or three hundred, well, we could live with that. The other sixty, someplace else—it wouldn’t be that hard.”
    “He asked me for a million six,” Frolio said. “He asked me, could we do that.”
    Rascob whistled. “Quite a lot,” he said, “but still, it would be doable, I think—he still reliable?”
    “Has been before,” Frolio said. “Not that he has that much himself that he can get it from, but if a deal went bad for him, he could make it good. The thing is that the first time it was a littlething, a small matter of forty large for a little union problem. And the other time we did some business with him, the much larger matter. He was doing something else. That time for the fishing boat, taking guns someplace—Ireland, I believe.
    “Gut said No. Too many people; sentiment involved. Bad combination, sentiment and money. Coast Guard … we were lucky. Buyers paid—advance. Two anna quarter. Young Charlie’s father would’ve covered him, the nature of that deal, if the money hadn’t been there.
    “This time, the father wouldn’t. Not a business of this kind. Cocaine. Father would turn away.”
    “Would the father have to know?” Rascob said. Two helicopters skittered in before the tallest buildings on the skyline, heading for the airport.
    “He would,” Frolio said. “The risk is big. His plan is not to use the planes again.” He made a small gesture with his right thumb toward the sky above the water. “Too risky. To have the transporters swallow the condoms the day of the night that they come here from Puerto Rico, Mexico, whatever.
    “I say to him that I agree. ‘Won’t work. Ever since the time the rubbers burst inside the people, they got sick. At least one died. Now they watch the airplanes, getting on and off. Profiling—kind of people who they know would do such a thing for pay. You try a thing like that again and you lose all the money—drugs and people too.
    “ ‘Besides, we do not do that. Family rule—we do not conduct such business.” ’
    “Well,” Rascob said, drawing the word out.
    Dominic looked grim. “ ‘The man is dead,’ young Charlie says to me. ‘The son is dead. The boss in jail.’
    “ ‘
Viva la Famiglia
,’ I say to him. ‘And the Family’s not in jail. The rule is of the Family, not the boss, who is in jail, or the son and father, dead.” ’
    Rascob gazed straight ahead and said nothing. The wind gnawed at the back of his neck and he reached back with both hands, awkwardly, to pull his hat down on his head and tug up the collar of his trenchcoat.
    “You don’t agree,” Frolio said.
    Rascob said, “Oh, I agree. The Family rule is as you say—of course we honor it. But as you know there’s been an exception made in recent years. Many times, in fact. For money to be made. The business has become so great—if we don’t participate we will lose control. So—conducting it is not allowed, but financing is permitted.
    “As I’ve understood it now to be arranged.”
    “I have not,” Dominic said. “If you go to McKeach and report what I have said, and he tells you I am wrong and the money should be given, then you tell him I said that someone else must take it—put it on the street for this forbidden business. This one—if he decides to do this one, he does it himself. That is all I have to say.”

2
    A S CASUALLY AS A REGULAR VISITOR with an interest in the three-story leasehold, Nick Cistaro just before noon the same day opened for the first time the low gate in the black iron fence on the sidewalk and walked onto the brick patio of Imaginings at 73 Newbury Street in Boston. He wore a black calfskin single-breasted safari jacket, a white merino turtleneck, custom-fitted stonewashed blue jeans,