You must give great men leave to take their times.
WEBSTER
I
T could not be said often enough that HCI manufactured, sold and used some of the best available technology for detoxification, filter-ing, recycling and high-temperature incineration. However, out of the more than 77 billion pounds of toxic chemical waste produced in the United States every year, HCI was responsible for approximately boo million pounds, and whatever Hardwick could do, within reasonable budget limits, he was still left with a great deal of lethal garbage, which made Chicago crime boss Vincenzo Baglione one of his most important business associates. Not that Baglione could take care of everything.Hardwick was presiding over too many time bombs, such as the Florida ponds, to go through a week without some crisis. Even so, his life had unquestionably become easier since Baglione's Illinois Safe Transport Company, fronted by people without police records, took over the dis-posal of HCI's untreated residues for a very reasonable yearly payment.
In the course of doing business, Hardwick sold Baglione a 2o% share in the new HCI plant in Cubatao, Brazil (known locally as the Vale de Morte), where there were no government regulations to hinder industrial growth. They met regularly, every three months or so, usually some-where far from Chicago, preferably outside the United States. Business was business, though not unnaturally, the more Hardwick had to do with the man, the more he despised him.
Imagining that the waste-shipping operation of the Illinois Safe Trans-port Company was part of the Mafia's general move into legitimate business which he kept reading about in the papers, Hardwick at first believed Baglione's assurances that the truckers were hauling the waste to approved dump sites up in Canada. It was supposed to be a clean operation, but eventually Baglione, who really preferred to have the young industrialist as his willing accomplice, confided that licensed dump sites 183
were prohibitively expensive and so the trucks moved at night with open valves, dripping their contents along the highway, or unloaded them in ditches, quarries, gravel pits, streams and rivers long before they reached the Manitoba border.
Like most businessmen who get involved with criminals in the pious hope that they are helping them onto the path of legitimate enterprise, Hardwick found that it was the other way around: Baglione was drag-ging him into the world of crime. It wasn't so much the random dump-ing of poisons that bothered him — somethdump-ing had to happen to reduce the population, if anybody was to survive. What he found unconscion-able was that Baglione was trying to involve him in indictunconscion-able offenses.
A few murders more or less would mean nothing to a man like that, Hardwick thought.
And they would be child's play compared with the murder of a Pres-ident.
Hardwick had no patience with conspiracy theories; he didn't think that John F. Kennedy was killed by the Cubans or the CIA or the Rus-sians. He was convinced that the assassination was organized by the Mafia.
Of course he knew that a lot of fools thought the same, but he had his reasons: some odd remarks Baglione had made when they first met, at a fund-raising dinner, a few weeks before America's dark day in Dallas.
"JFK's all right," Baglione had told him, "but with a publicity seeker like that Bobby for a brother, the poor guy has no future." Hardwick was amused by Baglione's way of putting down Robert Kennedy, the first U.S. attorney general to seek publicity by trying to rid his country of organized crime, but he couldn't figure why Baglione would call the President of the United States a poor guy. John Kennedy was a popular young President serving his first term; to say that he had no future sounded preposterous at the time — though when the President was dead and his brother no longer ran the Justice Department, it made perfect sense.
Especially on the night of June 5, 1968, when he was wakened by a hysterical call from Marianne in Los Angeles: Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel, only hours after his victory in the California primary. It was then, while listening to the sound of her shrill voice — a voice he had never heard before and found most irritating in the middle of the night — that Hardwick began to think se-riously about asking his mafioso associate for a favor. The second Ken-nedy assassination, which robbed Americans of their chance to elect an anti-Mafia President, confirmed his belief that Baglione could arrange anything for him.
THE next time they got together was at Recife airport, where the Chi-cago crime boss boarded Hardwick's plane for the flight to Cubatao.
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Playing the gracious host, Hardwick offered the old man all the ameni-ties of the 707, and Baglione had a shower and was rubbed down by the quiet and thorough masseuse before the two men sat down to dinner.
Still full of life in his late sixties, Baglione could hardly contain his sat-isfaction with the girl: there were flickers of joy among his wrinkles.
However, as soon as Hardwick began to complain that his wife had been having an affair with a hotel clerk on Santa Catalina, all feelings died on Baglione's face. He wiped the air in front of his nose as if brushing away a fly.
Hardwick, who didn't understand Sicilian body language, went on talking. He wasn't prepared to overlook adultery.
"You mean you want a divorce?"
"I'd be punishing my sons. I'm a family man, I don't have to explain this to an Italian, do I? It's her boyfriend I'm talking about."
Baglione nodded with sympathetic understanding. "Sue him."
"What?"
"You oughta sue him," repeated the Chicago crime boss. A wizened little man who looked as though he had never had enough to eat, he reminded Hardwick of a sad sparrow, but when he smiled, his predatory nose became his most prominent feature: it was the beak of a vulture.
And he had the same rapacious eyes. "You oughta sue him for aliena-tion of affecaliena-tions."
Hardwick shook his head in silence until he got over the old hood-lum's insolence. "Vincenzo, I wouldn't be telling you this if I wanted a lawyer."
Baglione put down his knife and fork and folded his arms to signify that he didn't want to be involved. "I appreciate your problem, Kevin, but what do you expect me to do about a kid?"
"I though you might have some ideas about how to get rid of trou-blesome people who don't know their place. Listen, this guy's writing me love letters."
Baglione raised his head, sniffing the air. "He's writing you love let-ters? My friend!"
"Well, to my wife — it's the same thing. I'm expecting another note from him any day."
Baglione's shriveled face grew thinner and sadder. "You want him roughed up?"
"No," came the firm, pitiless reply.
The old mafioso closed his eyes as if wishing to commune with him-self in private. "A man's life is a sacred thing," he finally said in the most solemn voice.
Hardwick drew himself up in his chair. "I beg your pardon?"
The sharp tone of the question shocked Baglione. This spoiled rich fool dared to assume that he didn't value human life? What did he take 185
him for? An animal who went around killing people, who would shed blood just because Hardwick didn't know how to look after his wife?
Baglione was insulted. He was used to being treated with respect. And by everybody. Some years later, when he died of natural causes, the New York Times paid tribute to him as "the pre-eminent figure in or-ganized crime in the United States." In a country where a vicious thug could be called pre-eminent by the newspaper which set the moral tone for the nation, Baglione had had no difficulty in scaling the summits of crime with his self-respect intact. He was a success in his chosen field, and he didn't take kindly to anyone casting aspersions on his honor.
"A man's life is a sacred thing," he repeated stiffly.
Hardwick didn't like the idea of a common criminal giving himself airs in his presence. "And it isn't just a question of the boyfriend either,"
he went on briskly, ignoring Baglione's sullen expression. "There's a photographer called Masterson."
Baglione kept nodding. "I appreciate your feelings. But feelings can change."
"This Masterson works with telescopic lenses. He filmed my wife with that hotel clerk — the son of a famous actor actually," Hardwick has-tened to add. He wanted the bastard dead, but he didn't wish to make it appear that his wife slept with a nobody. "The two of them are star-ring in a dirty movie. For all I know, Masterson's busy making copies and he'll be selling them to sex shops in Chicago."
"You've got a problem there."
"It could be quite embarrassing for the whole family. I'm thinking mainly of my kids."
"I can send someone to talk to this guy, make sure he gets out of the movie business."
"I don't like half measures."
Baglione bent his birdlike head sideways with a mournful look. "Kevin, why go to extremes?"
Hardwick raised his eyebrows. He stretched himself, smiled broadly, leaned back, leaned forward, smiled again, playing for time like an overgrown schoolboy who had been asked a question by the teacher and didn't know what to say. He had given no thought to justifying his re-quest. He wouldn't have killed the actor's son and the men who made the film if he had to do it himself — but why should he put up with them if he didn't have to? What was the point of doing business with somebody like Baglione if he didn't make maximum use of the relation-ship? He wanted to go to extremes because he knew Baglione and be-cause Baglione made too much money with him to refuse him a favor.
"There's also a private eye involved in this," he said coolly.
"I'm going to help you, Kevin, it's my nature to help people — sono nano cosi! But I say to you what I say to my own hotheads. This isn't 186
Sicily, this isn't the nineteenth century. And you're not even an Italian, my friend. You northerners are supposed to keep yourselves under con-trol. Do you really believe in drastic solutions?"
"I'm under control," replied the jealous husband with a terse laugh.
"I just want to protect my privacy."
"People want everybody dead when they get mad, but then they change their minds. You can't be hasty about these things."
Hardwick's face flushed, then froze. "I thought you might want to help out a friend, but it's not important. Let's drop it."
They sulked and talked in the sky over Brazil with mutual incompre-hension. Hardwick thought he was talking to a professional killer, but Baglione didn't see himself as a killer. Starting from the premise that it was right and proper to remove people if they stood in his way, and having the power to kill anyone he wanted to, he considered himself an upright and compassionate man of extraordinary restraint. He never thought about the nine men he had gunned down in his youth, the two he had blown up, the one he had strangled and dismembered with his own hands, the scores of others whose executions he had ordered — he thought of the hundreds he had spared. But then, how many people judge themselves by what they have done? The good conscience of the wicked rests on all the villainies they refrain from committing.
The two men, both deeply offended, picked at their smoked salmon and filet mignon in silence, fighting with whatever hostility their bodies could generate. Even sitting down, the tall and fleshy Anglo-Saxon was almost twice as big as the little Italian, yet the fight was a standoff until the masseuse, doubling as serving maid, came in to pour their after-dinner coffee. Her fleeting presence, the perfume she left in the air, had a calming effect.
"I heard of Masterson, that's not his real name, he's an animal," re-called the pre-eminent heroin dealer, beginning to see the possibility of a compromise.
"We're only talking about three men, and two of them are nobod-ies," Hardwick said emphatically. He wasn't asking for much.
Deciding that the industrialist was raving mad in spite of his imperi-ous manner and wouldn't leave him alone until he promised to kill everybody who failed to show sufficient regard for his better feelings as a husband and father, Baglione raised his hands from the table palms upward as if to show that he had nothing but good in them. "I don't know how to say no to a friend."
Visibly relieved, Hardwick reached across to another table for a folder and took from it an enlarged photograph, a frame of Masterson's film, showing the lovers walking on the beach. When Baglione had looked at the photo, Hardwick tore it in half, pocketed his wife's picture and handed over Mark's. "I guess your people will need this."
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Baglione found Mrs. Hardwick quite good-looking and had no inten-tion of harming a young man for making love to a good-looking woman whose husband didn't look after her. Especially not an actor's son. Bag-lione was fond of actors and singers; he liked show business people. But having figured out how to trick his associate, he became most compliant and agreeable.
"How can I say no if it makes you happy," he said, putting the pic-ture of Mark into his briefcase.
"I don't have pictures of the other two," apologized Hardwick. "I have their addresses."
"We'll find them, don't worry." Baglione wasn't planning to do any-thing about the private detective either, but Masterson was a different matter. There were too many complaints about the animal; he was ruining too many marriages, too many reputations. In the spirit of a judge con-demning a criminal, Baglione had resolved to rid the world of the black-mail photographer and to use this one murder as a means of delaying the other two until Hardwick calmed down and came to terms with his horns. "I'll take care of them for you, but I can't take care of them all at once. It'll take time, my friend."
Having got his way, Hardwick became deferential toward the older man. "If you say you'll take care of them, Vincenzo," he said, bending from the waist and spreading his long arms, "I know you'll take care of them."
Baglione never looked more honest and dignified than when he was lying. He assumed a grave expression, stared at Hardwick in a mean-ingful and straightforward manner, then closed his eyes and slowly nod-ded his head to confirm that the people they were talking about would pass away. "You can forget about it."
Protected by a gangster's sense of honor and decency, Mark was left free to do his worst to himself.
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