The Vulture's Game Read Free Page B

will then be shifted to a second car and driven to an auto dealership where the money will be recycled as payment for a preowned luxury car. It was all nice, clean, and painless—unless you happened to be the intended target.
    I’m not going to lie to you. I was impressed by the efficiency of the operation. The real estate agents were routed out every six months, sent on missions in Europe or across the country. If it was even hinted that any one of them might be inclined to do a flip or brag about his business to a friend or a lover, he was eliminated without hesitation, his body dissolved in an acid barrel that same day. Wagner, a tall, thin man with a rakish sense of humor and a passion for the theater, ran the operation out of a safe house on the East Side of Manhattan. He kept to his Mossad training—he seldom if ever spoke on the phone; held all pertinent conversations outside, usually by a construction site so the noise could drown out any possible wire pickup—and hand-picked both the assassins and those who fronted the real estate offices. He was paid $5 million a year for his services, the money deposited on a monthly basis in a nephew’s bank account in a Berlin bank.
    Now you would think that between a twenty-five percent share of all the real estate action in New York City plus his rather hefty cut from the assassination bureau’s operations, my uncle would be pleased with business. But a mob boss is never satisfied with a piece of the pie. They want the whole damn thing, and if you happen to be standing between him and it—well, as they say, it might bring you some bad weather.
    “Tell me what you know about Frank Scanlon,” my uncle asked me one night during dinner at one of his downtown restaurants. I was twenty-two years old, still in college, about to be engaged to a woman I was madly in love with, and unsure of my place in Uncle Carlo’s universe. Even more, as attractive as I found that world to be, I was uncertain whether I wanted to plant my flag on its soil. You don’t get to test-drive that decision, check it out for a year or two, see how it suits you. The thumb goes up or down well before that. And know one other thing about mob bosses—they all hate the sound of the word no.
    I rested my knife and fork against the side of a thick plate and looked at my uncle. “Most of it is from what I’ve read in the papers,” I said. “He was born rich thanks to his father’s various investments and is now even richer thanks to his own. He seems to go out every night and never with the same woman, assuming you can believe what’s in the gossip pages.”
    “You read that shit?” my uncle asked.
    “Guilty,” I said. “That and the sports section.”
    “Stick to the business pages,” my uncle said, “it’s time better spent.”
    “You always say make it your business to know your business,” I told him. “Reading everything, even the gossip pages, helps me know my business.”
    My uncle nodded. “And what do those pages tell you?”
    “He’s got quite a few buildings going up, mostly in Manhattan, East side and West,” I said. “Mortgages them pretty heavily, and the monthly rates in his buildings are three, sometimes four, times as high as the other luxury apartment towers. Then again, he does offer a full-service ride. You live in one of his places, more like a hotel than a home.”
    “So you
do
read the business section?”
    “I got all that from
People
, truth be told,” I said.
    My uncle slid a thick manila envelope from his side of the booth to mine. “What’s in there will tell you what you
don’t
know about him. Real estate is not the only place he gets his money from. He’s branching out into casinos, the tracks, some of the airport action, high-end call girls, and, rumor has it, is eager for a taste of the drug business.”
    “And we’re not happy about any of that?” I asked.
    “I wouldn’t be that upset about it, had he come to me and asked in,” Uncle Carlo