Occasion for Disaster Part 36

Palveri nodded. "The mayor's resigned, remember?" he said. "You saw that. Everybody's getting investigated. A couple of weeks ago the Golden Palace guy knocked himself off, and where does that leave me?

He's my only contact with half the State boys; h.e.l.l, he ran the whole string of clubs here, more or less. Castelnuovo knows all that."

"Sure," Malone said. "But you can make new contacts."

"Where?" Palveri said. He flung out his arms. "When n.o.body knows what's going to happen tomorrow? I tell you, Malone, it's like a curse on me."

Malone decided to push the man a little farther. "Castelnuovo," he said with what he hoped was a steely glint in his eyes, "isn't going to like a curse ruining business." He took another deep breath of tobacco smoke.

"Primo Palveri don't like it either," Palveri said. "You think whatever you like but that's the way things are. It's like Prohibition except we're losing all the way down the line. Listen, and I'll tell you something you didn't pick up around town."

"Go ahead," Malone said.

Palveri blew out some more smoke. "You know about the shipments?" he said. "The stuff from out on the desert?"

Malone nodded. The FBI had a long file on the possibility of Castelnuovo, through Palveri or someone else in the vicinity, shipping peyotl b.u.t.tons from Nevada and New Mexico all over the country. Until this moment, it had only been a possibility.

"Mike Sand wanted to get in on some of that," Palveri said. "Well, it's big money, a guy figures he's got to have compet.i.tion. But it's business nowadays, not a shooting war. That went out forty years ago."

"So?" Malone said, acting impatient.

"I'm getting there," Palveri said. "I'm getting there. Mike Sand and his truckers, they tried to high jack a shipment coming through out on the desert. Now, the Trucker's Union is old and experienced, maybe, but not as old and experienced as the Mafia. It figures we can take them, right?"

"It figures," Malone agreed. "But you didn't?"

Palveri looked doleful. "It's like a curse," he said. "Two boys wounded and one of them dead, right there on the sand. The shipment gone, and Mike Sand on his way to the East with it. A curse." He sucked some more at the cigar.

Malone looked thoughtful and concerned. "Things are certainly bad," he said. "But how's money going to make things any better?"

Palveri almost dropped his cigar. Malone watched it lovingly. "Help?"

the club owner said. "With money I could stay open, I could stay alive. Listen, I had investments, nice guaranteed stuff: real estate, some California oil stuff ... you know the kind of thing."

"Sure," Malone said.

"Now that the contacts are gone and everybody's dead or resigned or being investigated," Palveri said, "what do you think's happened to all that? Down the drain, Malone."

Malone said: "But--"

"And not only that," Palveri said, waving the cigar. "The club was going good, and you know I thought about building a second one a little farther out. A straight investment, get me: an honest one."

Malone nodded as if he knew all about it.

"So I got the foundation in, Malone," Palveri said, "and it's just sitting there, not doing anything. A whole foundation going to pot because I can't do anything more with it. Just sitting there because everything's going to h.e.l.l with itself."

"In a handbasket," Malone said automatically.

Palveri gave him a violent nod. "You said it, Malone," he added.

"Everything. My men, too." He sighed. "And the contractor after me for his dough. Good old Harry Seldon, everybody's friend. Sure. Owe him some money and find out how friendly he is. Talks about nothing but figures. Ten thousand. Twelve thousand."

"Tough," Malone said. "But what do you mean about your men?"

"Mistakes," Palveri said. "Book-keepers throwing the computers off and croupiers making mistakes paying off and collecting--and always mistakes against me, Malone. Always. It's like a curse. Even the hotel bills--three of them this week were made out too small and the customer paid up and went before I found out about it."

"It sounds like a curse," Malone said. "Either that or there are spies in the organization."

"Spies?" Palveri said. "With the checking we do? With the way I've known some of these guys from childhood? They were little kids with me, Malone. They stuck with me all the way. And with Castelnuovo, too," he added hurriedly.

"Sure," Malone said. "But they could still be spies."

Palveri nodded sadly. "I thought of that," he said. "I fired four of them. Four of my childhood friends, Malone. It was like cutting off an arm. And all it did was leave me with one arm less. The same mistakes go on happening."

Malone stood up and heaved a sigh. "Well," he said, "I'll see what I can do."

"I'd appreciate it, Malone," Palveri said. "And when Primo Palveri appreciates something, he _appreciates_ it. Get what I mean?"

"Sure," Malone said. "I'll report back and let you know what happens."

Palveri looked just as anxious, but a little hopeful. "I need the dough," he said. "I really need it."

"With dough," Malone said, "you could fix up what's been happening?"

Palveri shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "But I could stay open long enough to find out."

Malone went back to the gaming room feeling that he had learned something, but not being quite sure what. Obviously whatever organization was mixing everything up was paying just as much attention to gangsters as to congressmen and businessmen. The simple justice of this arrangement did not escape Malone, but he failed to see where it led him.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

He considered the small chance that Palveri would actually call Castelnuovo and check up on Kenneth J. Malone, but he didn't think it was probable. Palveri was too desperate to take the chance of making his boss mad in case Malone's story were true. And, even if the check were made, Malone felt reasonably confident. It's hard to kill a man who has a good, accurate sense of precognition and who can teleport himself out of any danger he might get into. Not impossible, but hard.

Being taken for a ride in the desert, for instance, might be an interesting experience, but could hardly prove inconvenient to anybody except the driver of the car and the men holding the guns.

The gaming room wasn't any fuller, he noticed. He wended his way back to the bar for a bourbon-and-water and greeted the bartender morosely.

The drink came along and he sipped at it quietly, trying to put things together in his mind. The talk with Palveri, he felt sure, had provided an essential clue--maybe _the_ essential clue--to what was going on. But he couldn't find it.

"Mess," he said quietly. "Everything's in a mess. And so what?"

A voice behind him picked that second to say: "Gezundheit." Malone didn't turn. Instead he looked at the bar mirror, and one glance at what was reflected there was enough to freeze him as solid as the core of Pluto.

Lou was there. Lou Gehrig or whatever her name was, the girl behind the reception desk of the New York offices of the Psychical Research Society. That, in itself, didn't bother him. The company of a beautiful girl while drinking was not something Malone actually hated.

But she knew he was an FBI Agent, and she might pick any second to blat it out in the face of an astonished bartender. This, Malone told himself, would not be pleasant. He wondered just how to hush her up without attracting attention. Knock-out pills in her drink? A hand over her mouth? A sudden stream of unstoppable words?

He had reached no decision when she sat down on the stool beside him, turned a bright, cheerful smile in his direction and said: "I've forgotten your name. Mine's Luba Ardanko."

"Oh," Malone said dully. Even the disclosure of what "Lou" stood for did nothing to raise his spirits.

"I'm always forgetting things," Lou went on. "I've forgotten just about everything about you."

Malone breathed a long, inaudible sigh of relief. If more people, he thought, had the brains not to greet FBI Agents by name, rank and serial number when meeting them in a strange place, there would be fewer casualties among the FBI.