MOB SISTERS - Part III - Victoria

12.

Vic was still having nothing but tsouris. It just seemed like one thing after another.

"I can't believe it," she said to Harry. "It's like there's a jinx preventing everything I want from happening."

No sooner had she recovered from the clap than inexplicably, she came down with another sexually transmitted disease, herpes this time, which cut into her plans and took another few weeks to cure. Luckily she still had Charles on the hook —she told him she had a virus — he was understanding and willing to wait for the deal to culminate. Over the phone she promised they'd definitely meet soon, in a matter of just a week or two.

The National Commission was going to come up with the compromise for a smaller order, and she would be working with Lucille together with connections abroad to sell a large order of counterfeit money, so even though her goals had long been thwarted, the horizon appeared promising now. She needed have to be patient only a short while longer.

It had been some time since Vic had heard from Judge Robert Francis Casey. As enthusiastic as the potential future New York Governor had seemed about her in the beginning, lately he'd pulled in his horns by seeing less of her. Could he have been a venereal disease victim as well and didn't want to reveal it? Possible. Of course Casey was a busy man, and due to his position might want to play it safe by not getting too involved with one person; or maybe you could chalk it up to the judge's endless search for the novelty of a new cunt and wanting to move forward in a new direction.

Ok, listen, she didn't really mind that much. She'd been pretty occupied herself. A few fucks was all it had taken to get the Casey situation operating to suit her ends. He'd gone to bat for her and seen to it that the New York State Court of Appeals reversed a decision she wanted fixed. That in itself was an enormous accomplishment. And in addition, her wiretaps and surveillance of Casey were yielding results in the form of potential blackmail material that at the right time would come in handy. In any event, she considered Bob Casey a friend, no matter what the status of their sex life.

After not hearing from the judge for a while, to her surprise he made one of his famous how's-your-cunt calls, saying he wanted to get together. They made a date for the following evening at the Carlyle. Meantime Georgia phoned. She said, "I'm hopping on a Path and I'll be at your place in a half hour. Wait till you hear what I have to tell you."

Forty minutes later, an excited Georgia arrived. "I thought you'd like to know about your friend, the Honorable RFC."

"Casey? What about him?"

Georgia had found out through Mike Giordano that Casey was gunrunning to the IRA. "The guy's eating out of Mike's hand," Georgia said. "Mike's also made illegal contributions to the Casey for Governor campaign and he has Casey over a barrel, practically owns the guy. The arms are mostly happening out of Elizabethport."

"That's great news," Victoria said. "I'm sure the Department of the United States Treasury would be interested to know about Neutrality Treaty violations, don't you think, Harry?"

"Definitely. The right time comes, I'd say we have some further dynamite information we can use to advantage here."

Victoria pondered a moment, then said, "I have a plan. When Casey and I get together tomorrow night, while he's in the shower I'm going to try to break into the desk in his office. I have a feeling there could be some more material to round out our already strong evidence against the SOB."

"Don't take unnecessary risks," Harry advised. "We already have plenty on the guy."

"Sure, but the more the better."

To make a long story short, Casey caught Vic rifling through his papers, became justifiably livid and threw her out. That was the last she saw of him. But the story hardly ended there.

Next, Georgia and Rose F. Dyson ended up at a cocktail party at the Carlyle given by one of Casey's fellow tenants at which Casey was a guest. They started thinking about that desk Vic wanted to get at and decided why not do the job themselves? One of them would detain Casey at the party while the other broke into his place upstairs. So Georgia and her dog Marlene Dietrich went up. Georgia had a look around, microfilmed whatever looked important to her, helped herself to a few documents, and was coming back downstairs to the party when she ran smack into Casey, who was leaving. Rose had kept him occupied as long as she could.

Call it intuition, Casey had a belly hunch she was up to no good. At the same time, with her animal sixth sense, Marlene Dietrich must have realized Casey was onto her mistress, because suddenly she leapt at Casey, knocked him over and practically mauled him to death. It was in all the papers. "German Shepherd Bitch Attacks Noted Judge: Gubernatorial Hopeful Recuperating From Dog Bites."

Of course Casey discovered the missing documents. When he found out Georgia was close to Mike Giordano, that was the coup de grâce. Right after that Georgia disappeared, and nothing was heard from her for a long time. Then at Vic's birthday bash at Tiro a Segno, the management brought out a humongous cake. Inside was a hand, a human hand, wearing Georgia's ruby ring. "That ring," Vic whispered, aghast. "Mike gave her that ring ... somebody wanted me to know it's Georgia ... "

Not long after that, the rest of Georgia — in the form of her bloated, nearly unrecognizable body — was fished out of the Hudson River midway between the crowded docks of Elizabethport and where the Goethals Bridge connects to Staten Island. It was a sad ending to a beautiful lady.

They held the funeral, of course, at Rose's mortuary. With Marlene Dietrich and Vic's entire borgata in attendance, Harry gave the moving eulogy.

He said, "Georgia Jensen was one of this outfit's best women. Georgia was tough. She dared to do what few women will, and it is precisely this quality we all respected so much in our friend Georgia Jensen. Georgia was doing a great job within this organization, until one person decided to fuck her over, or have her fucked over, as the case may be. Anyway, those of us whom Georgia leaves behind will sorely miss her. And I join everyone in this room in saying that we will have our revenge on the person in question."

Just who was that person in question, though? Was it Casey? Anthony Zino? Mike Giordano? Everyone had their theories. No one knew for sure yet. The thorny issue would have to be resolved.

The chapel was packed with 100 mourners. Georgia was given a great send-off —tons of flowers, organ music, the congregation joining in hymns like "Abide With Me," and "Lead, Kindly Light," Georgia's favorites. Marlene Dietrich, her head resting on outstretched paws, lay mournfully by the steel coffin that was draped in white satin. Everybody swore the devoted animal had tears in her eyes.

Obviously, Georgia was killed because she knew too much. Vic felt herself pulled by a great force, an invisible power of which she was but a helpless victim. Dying happened when you could no longer withstand Powers and Principalities, when you were in their grip and couldn't get away. Now she felt nothing but anger and sorrow. No one would ever understand.

Afterwards when they were dining quietly together back in the city at a 9th Avenue wop joint, Harry checked his firearm, adjusted his shoulder holster and popped the cork off a bottle of Chianti. Sprinkling parmesan cheese on his linguine and twirling the pasta around his fork thoughtfully, he said to Vic, "Any time you're ready we can move in on this cocksucker Casey. In my book he's the one. He arranged it. And even if he didn't, we still want to assert our power over the son of a bitch."

"No, Harry. We wait till we can make him squirm."

"Are you kidding? He'll squirm plenty right now. We can scare the pants off him."

"Not enough. Wait till his usefulness hits a peak. Maybe in the gubernatorial race, maybe even later, when the stakes escalate."

"You mean we want to let this guy to make it to governor?"

"With us pulling the strings, why not?"

"Hey, honey, you're right. We control Casey, only he doesn't know it. Casey's political star is on the rise, we let him do his thing, then call in the markers when he can do us the most good."

Harry noticed Vic wasn't eating much. She looked depressed. "What's the matter, baby?" he asked gently. "Something's wrong. Is it Georgia?"

"Yeah, I guess that's it, Harry. It just reminds me of a lot of stuff, and how unfair life always is — "


They lived on an isolated island in the Florida gulf, cut off from the rest of humanity. She knew all the wildlife — the schools of fish — redfish, trout, sheepshed; the flowers and trees — saspodillas, tamarind, manila palm, frangipani, banyan, night blooming Ceres, incandescent, scarlet-blooming poinsettia, clumps of reeds and mango trees.

There was a stifling sadness in this hot atmosphere; it was a world where people seemed dead, suspended in air, hanging in a weird balance. She ached from the lack of contact with reality. She talked to animals, birds, fish, reptiles, anything that moved and breathed. Life here was strange, primitive. She was a mirage in vaporous space, falling, separate.

She used to sneak off with the sheriff's posse to the swamps and watch the fiddler crab and lizards scurrying away from flashlight beams. She remembered the musty smell of rattlesnakes and the ammonia scent of pelican rookeries, and the dense swarming mosquitos.

Each day she went for solitary walks along the deserted shell-covered beaches and contemplated a future when everything would be different. She had it all planned. She'd leave here, head up to Charleston, then north to make her way in life. Here, the juices of life were being pressed from her. She was filled with a strange elixir with no place to give herself to, seeking some wondrous future, confronting a void. Why did no one pay attention?

She would remember all the sounds of her childhood, the poignancy and mystery of hidden enclosures, the sounds of gurgling water from the cooler in the kitchen, the never-ceasing hum of the electric fan, the clink of ice cubes in the lemonades and Dr. Peppers and Cokes she never stopped drinking all day, the sound of rain on the roof, and the hushed, oppressive songs of the cicadas.

The loneliness was overpowering, the physical heat constantly threatening to engulf her. She would gaze through salt-fogged binoculars at the coral reef, the limestone outcroppings and tangled mangrove swamps of 10,000 islands, the semi-desert isolation/desolation that was her world, and she would long to be lifted out of here into another place, where she would be recognized and rewarded.

In the nearby town of moss-hung streets lying outside the mango jungle, she watched the oyster fishermen, their backs broad from years of swinging their bulky oyster tongs. They all looked like heavyweight champs, the shrimp and oyster fishermen. She wondered if one of them might be her father, but she would never know. Where had she come from? Who were her antecedents? Her aunt refused to tell her who her parents were.

She looked with envy at the luxury of Palm Beach and Miami, feeling an aching emptiness that so much was beyond her reach. She was hungry and full of the grievance that others were getting and she was not. The power she wanted she would have, even through violence if that were the only way. A chain of circumstances drove her to the breaking point. She knew that if she were pushed to it, conditions could force her to kill.

She was engulfed by a sense of calamity when her aunt died and she was sent to an orphanage. First chance that came along, four months short of age 15, she eloped to escape. Her spouse, Herby, 62, took her to Tallahassee. Then one day while she was out shopping at the supermarket, she came home to find Herby dead. She didn't know what to do about it, who to tell; she had no friends.

She lived there with the body until it started stinking up the house. Nauseated by the stench, she had to split. Hitchhiking, she worked her way up north to the Carolinas, married again, got out of that, picked up a trucker who dumped her in Spanish Harlem, New York. Over and over again setbacks plagued her. It was tough out there. She was a fabulous human being but nobody knew it.

She began reading the Wall Street Journal and it moved her as nothing else in life ever had. This was something she understood: money. She wanted to make money, that was her answer in life. Carefully, she laid out a plan. She continued reading the Wall Street Journal cover to cover. Then when she was fully prepared, she went over to Goldman Sachs and applied for a job.

She was confident as she sat down face to face with a human resources counselor, and assuming any personnel director would be interested in hiring a well-informed person, Vic made it her business to show this bitch what she knew. And by now she knew a whole lot.

She was full of fascinating tales of the past, how dynasties were made, how for instance, the entire city of Boston built its fortunes on opium, how most of the revered brahmin families of today owed their inherited wealth to drugs. "Astor, Perkins, Russell, Lowell, Lodge, Forbes -- all of them amassed millions from the trade. But for opium, the world might never have seen the likes of a Henry Cabot Lodge or a Malcolm Forbes," she told the somewhat startled human resources interviewer.

"It was called `trade,' but it really amounted to piracy, privateering, theft on the high seas. The Forbes family, who like the others, made their fortune on opium, later invested it in railroads. Thanks to the opium trade, by the War of 1812 the Perkins family had enough money to put it to work at 18% interest. The Astors, though they started out in furs, went into opium in the 1820's. At that time opium in fact was the only profitable commodity in the trade with China. Peabody, Russell, Cushing, Appleton, Lowell, the Cabots and the Lodges, the Girards, the Sturgis family, the Boardmans -- they were all into it, cleaning up in narcotics. Thriving illicit commerce made all the great Boston fortunes. Bostonians were noted for smuggling."

Vic thought the personnel director looked puzzled, as if she hadn't a clue about the real story of America's wealth. No doubt Vic was blowing her mind. She continued, "One of the Forbes descendants, I believe it was Malcolm, wondered if in the future today's drug dealers will be as honored as his forebears?

"William Appleton was another opium dealer of social position and esteem. In his diary he wrote that his mother at age 81 had used opium for 20 years and showed no signs of wear and tear. That's because they used pure stuff back then. Perkins sold 150,000 pounds of Turkish opium a year at $7.50 a pound profit, Sturgis sold half a million pounds a year. Do you now how much money that is? All for which they were lauded and praised, and their families are at the top of the Social Register today.

"The Forbes House is now a museum in Milton, run by Dr. Crosby Forbes, an expert in Chinese porcelain urns. These people can afford to be effete. They can afford to be anything they damned please. They're untouchables, these people who bribed and skimmed all over the place and didn't pay their taxes. All of these people sent their sons to Harvard. They mingled with the intelligentsia. William Hathaway Forbes married the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance. In Boston there's a great tradition of mind and Mammon. It was a game only the elite could play. All the pirates and privateers became patrons of the arts."

The personnel lady glanced at her watch and asked Vic why she wanted to work for Goldman Sachs. Vic told her because she wanted money, big money. Vic talked of things the average person applying for a job at Goldman Sachs would never know, about the foundations of wealth in the U.S. and how crooked and rigged the system was.

You'd think they'd be glad to hear the truth. She'd been sure they'd welcome her with open arms here at Goldman Sachs — a woman with her superior mind, knowledge and abilities. To her amazement they never called her back and she was rejected for the job. It took a while to sink in. It was cronyism out there in the financial world. Women like her weren't given permission to make money. There was no way she could join the club.

Did those old Bostonians ever feel as she did, cut off from the normal routes to social and occupational mobility?

Boston, that was the ultimate mafia. 100, 200 years ago, the country was full of people who took risks, people who broke the law to create the American dream. Malcolm Forbes even said so, he said it was "the piracy of doing your own thing" that made this country great. That was her ideal too, the mafia, an American phenomenon. If doors were closed and nobody was buying, what else could be done about it?

It was a league out there, the people who stacked the system against those like her. They were the old boy network, operators and wheeler dealers, pirates and pillagers, bustout artists and fancy takeover hotshots who used inflated paper, drained cash and hard assets from acquisitions into their own pockets and fucked the public. They caused inflation, over-taxation and high interest rates for everyone else and wrote in loopholes for themselves. Did anyone call them on their shit? Nobody seemed to mind. How did they steer clear of the law? Via conspiracy. They were as bad, if not worse than the old Bostonians. Her bitterness grew stronger. Clearly, the only way to prosper was outside the mainstream as a creative rebel. There was no way to join the corridors of power, they were too entrenched, they'd never let you in their mafia, so you had to start your own.

It was the ultimate feminist statement.

Time evaporated. Okay, never mind, she looked great. She was aging so phenomenally well it was easy to shave off a few years and have no one be the wiser. Her counterfeit passport listed her age as 27, which was as good a number as any to be. If anyone was rude enough to ask, she'd answer "in her early 20's." Like the Gabors said, a woman should pick a good age and stick to it.

She must project and gain recognition for the person she knew she was and so wanted the world to certify. She had chutzpah and brains and she wasn't going to let anybody interfere with the outcome. She was a Leo, after all, a ruler.

She deserved, goddamnit, she deserved. She was eaten alive with envy. She burned to take action, do something, anything. As a woman, she was limited. Why had she been cheated? By what deceit or trickery or nefarious means did others get there? Being a male of the species helped. Having a penis helped. How to get through life without one? You had to find alternative means. Machiavelli was right. In the end the means didn't matter, the result was what counted.

Being an LFM meant demanding, then seeing the demand was met. Forget morality. Morality had no place here. You were serving a higher purpose. Life wasn't fair, it was unfair to be born a woman; ok, you were starting from behind, but you could bloody well not only catch up but surpass.

And that was just what she'd done and would keep on doing, penis or no penis.