Blood Money by Thomas Perry Page B

the world was in progress. He had not been in this building in three years, and would never have come except that it was the only safe place he owned in Niagara Falls. After a moment he was satisfied that there was nobody in a car watching the door. He slipped out and locked the door behind him.
    As he walked off carrying the roses, he breathed in and out rapidly and deeply, then forced a cough to clear his lungs of pollen and perfume. He looked around again to be sure he wasn’t under surveillance, dropped the flowers into a trash can, then got into the car he had rented and drove off alone toward his hotel. In the silence, he had time to think.
    In the settlement after the failed coup twelve years ago, Castiglione had been forced into exile in Arizona, and his holdings had been crudely split up. Tommy DeLuca had gotten the Castiglione territory that amounted to half of Chicago, and Frank Delfina had gotten all the far-flung enterprises, the feelers that Castiglione had been extending outward for years before he made his failed attempt to gobble up his rivals. People still talked about the inequality of the partition: DeLuca had inherited an only slightly diminished empire, and Delfina had gotten an illusion—laughable assets like a flower business in Niagara Falls, a few radio stations in places like Omaha and Reno, a bakery in California. The partition had satisfied the coalition of families that had assembled against Castiglione: no single man would retain the power to harm them.
    What nobody seemed to have known was that DeLuca had won the right to preside over a dying carcass. The old neighborhood-based mob that controlled city blocks and paid off the cops in the precinct and depended on enterprises like bookmaking on sports and moving stolen TV sets was dying before he and DeLuca were born. What DeLuca had inherited was the tentative loyalty of three hundred men with rap sheetswho needed to be fed and kept occupied, and the attention of a variety of state and federal agencies that had been invented in the last generation for the sole purpose of harassing the publicity-cursed Chicago families.
    Delfina had left Chicago within two days of the Commission’s ruling and begun to learn. He had taken a lesson from conglomerates, and begun to slowly, quietly, build the enterprises he had. He didn’t buy out his competitors. He starved them to death, then bought up their facilities and customer lists for practically nothing. He studied the suppliers and services his businesses used, induced them to borrow money so they could expand and meet his companies’ needs, then canceled the contracts. In a year he could buy them for the price of their loans.
    The distance between his various businesses had made other people assume there was no way he could do anything with them. The distance had been full of advantages. He could move anything—money, people, contraband—from Niagara Falls to Reno, or Omaha to Los Angeles in trucks registered to corporations. When they got there, he could make even the trucks disappear into the fleets of other businesses. He could transfer profits from one company to another: declare income in states that had no income tax, report sales where there was no sales tax, or sell things to himself at a loss and write off the loss. He could do anything the big corporations did.
    He had begun early to construct a culture that would separate his men from the old attachments to particular neighborhoods and the families that had run them for generations. What he had been given to work with was a small cadre of displaced Castiglione soldiers like Caporetto. If he had dispensed with them at the beginning, he knew, he would not have lasted a month. He had needed to find a new way to use them.
    He paid them extravagantly, gave them praise and assurances, then split them up and sent them to regions as far apart as possible. He let them recruit new, younger men and assigned the trainees as overseers of his