A Nasty Piece of Work by Robert Littell Page B

Coffin said. He unzipped his varsity jacket, revealing a T-shirt with FBI in bold black letters across the chest. “To understand who Emilio Gava is you need to understand where he comes from. Just inside the Nevada state line, a few miles from Nipton, California, which is a fleabag of a town at the edge of the Mojave Desert, there’s an old stagecoach station called Clinch Corners. About eight years ago, two minor Mafia families that couldn’t get a foot in the door in Vegas or Atlantic City decided to set up shop there. The result was and is two small casino operations, one on each side of what passes for a main drag, in the middle of nowhere—but only seventy-five minutes out of Los Angeles by automobile, twenty minutes by helicopter. The two families that run the two casinos, the Baldinis and the Ruggeris, avoided stepping on each other’s toes until eighteen months ago when Guido Baldini, the youngest son of Giancarlo Baldini, the godfather of the Baldini family, was arrested and sent to prison for income tax evasion. The Baldinis naturally suspected that the paperwork that turned up in the FBI’s hands was supplied by a member of the Ruggeri family, which happened to be not true—we got the ledgers from a disgruntled bookkeeper who thought he’d been cheated out of a year-end bonus. To get even, the Baldinis had Guido Baldini’s brother Salvatore turn state’s evidence, implicating the youngest son of the head of the Ruggeri clan, Fabio Ruggeri, on racketeering charges. You with me so far, Gunn?”
    “A tooth-for-a-tooth situation.”
    “Exactly. The scheme worked. Fabio Ruggeri was sentenced to twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary, which is where he is today. Salvatore Baldini, who turned state’s evidence, went into the FBI’s witness protection program. We gave him a new identity and a nest egg and resettled him in Arizona, which is where I come into the picture. I run the witness protection program for the western states. Things back in Clinch Corners quieted down for several months and we assumed the two families had worked out a modus vivendi. Then, one day ’long about ten months ago, someone named Silvio Restivo, a.k.a. the Wrestler, waltzed into our Flagstaff office and offered to turn state’s evidence against Salvatore Baldini who, by this time, was safely tucked away in our witness protection program. Silvio—he was nicknamed ‘the Wrestler’ because nobody could whip him at arm wrestling—turned out to be a dealer at the Ruggeris’ casino, and a cousin of the jailed Fabio Ruggeri. The Wrestler swore on a stack of Bibles that he was the driver of the car from which Salvatore Baldini gunned down two Italians who had cheated the casino two years before. By law we were required to submit the Wrestler’s deposition to the grand jury, which indicted Salvatore for murder and then demanded we bring him back from witness protection purdah to face trial.”
    Coffin was one of those rare characters who could drink and talk at the same time, as if the beer irrigated the vocal cords. He turned his bottle upside down to show me that it was empty. I padded into the galley and fetched him another.
    “Where was I?” he demanded.
    “You were being obliged to bring Salvatore back to stand trial for murder.”
    “You’re a good listener, Gunn. The FBI was of two minds. The majority opinion believed the Wrestler’s testimony and felt that Salvatore was guilty and ought to be sent to prison for life. The minority view, represented by yours truly and a handful of my associates in the Albuquerque office, thought the Wrestler’s testimony stank. To us it was part of a Ruggeri plot to get even with the Baldinis for sending the youngest son up the river. For Marco Ruggeri, the godfather of the Ruggeri clan, it was a matter of family honor. If someone can betray one of theirs and get away with it, others might be tempted to do the same. Still, the law was the law, so we gift-wrapped Salvatore and