The Bridge to Caracas, Page 3

  The four entered the building and proceeded directly to the Dominion Club’s ballroom, where the cocktail party was already well advanced. Mike scanned the room for the Kennedys, and then turned to Barbara. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “Sure. White wine, please.”

  Minutes later, Mike returned from the bar with wine for Barbara and scotch for himself. “It was courageous of you to accept a blind date,” he said, handing her the wine and trying avidly not to stare at her perfectly proportioned breasts.

  “Thank you,” Barbara said with a smile. “Although it wasn’t the slightest bit courageous.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Paul told me the Kennedys would be here.”

  “Oh,” Mike said, trying hard to remember that he had approached the night in much the same way.

  Barbara winked, showing a wry smile. “I hoped for the best.”

  Mike changed the subject. “Does Jack Kennedy appeal to you as a man, or a politician?”

  “Both,” Barbara replied. She leaned toward Mike and kissed him on the cheek. “You appeal to me far more than Jack Kennedy.” She smirked as she watched him struggle for an appropriate response, and then grasped his hand. “I think we should join Paul and Florence. Everyone’s moving to the tables. We can continue this conversation later on.”

  “I can’t wait,” Mike replied.

  Everyone stood and clapped as a kilt clad bagpiper led the Kennedys to their seats at the head table. The audience remained standing as a band, consisting of twenty members of the armed forces of both countries, played “The Star Spangled Banner,” followed by “O Canada.”

  After being introduced by Peter Carie, America’s Ambassador to Canada, John Kennedy spoke of the wonderful history of peace and friendship that had existed between Canada and the United States for well over a century, of how the two countries shared a common boundary over five thousand miles and, in addition, a common heritage. Mike listened in sadness when Kennedy spoke of the growing violence of terrorist activity around the world and the need to be on guard and to strive to suppress it. Kennedy concluded his speech by showing the audience a book given to him by Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Canada. “Between Friends is an extremely thoughtful and appropriate title. I shall treasure it forever,” he declared, and then displayed the irresistible Kennedy smile. “Jackie and I wish to thank you all, and indeed all Canadians, for your warm hospitality, and for the opportunity to visit your wonderful country.”

  The audience responded with a loud, standing ovation.

  Later that night, Mike and Barbara stalled in Mike’s car as it idled in front of Barbara’s Spadina Avenue home, a three bedroom apartment she shared with two other girls. While blissfully oblivious to the passing of time, Mike struggled to suppress his re-stimulated hormones. Their conversation covered a wide range of topics, including Karen. He told her the whole story, and then how it ended.

  “I’m so sorry… you obviously loved her very much,” Barbara said, her blue eyes displaying unalloyed sympathy.

  Mike nodded, intoxicated by her eyes. “I did, but that was in the past… I have to go on.”

  Barbara glanced at her watch. “I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s twelve-thirty.”

  “Is there something significant about that time?” Mike asked, disappointed that his surprisingly enjoyable evening was about to end.

  “I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Oh? What do you do for work?”

  “My father’s in the construction business and my job is to help him stay in it.”

  “Then I guess the party’s over,” he said with downcast eyes.

  Barbara looked into Mike’s eyes and grasped his hand. “I want to see you again, Mike.”

  “You will, very soon,” he promised, and then kissed her for the first time. She did not resist.

  Mike and Barbara did see one another again, very soon, and often. He became very fond of her, but it was impossible for him to think of his feelings for her in terms of love. Perhaps it was love, but it was certainly not what he remembered feeling with Karen. The intensity of that lost love was engraved in his heart, and no one else would ever quite fit.

  Still, he came to care for Barbara, and she seemed like a perfect choice. Fiercely denying recurrent worries that he was acting on the rebound, Mike married Barbara in the chapel at Knox College at the University of Toronto. The ceremony was held on a cool, cloudy day in May of 1964. Only Mike and Barbara’s parents and Paul and Florence Sanderson attended.

  After a weekend honeymoon on Mackinac Island in Michigan, the happy couple hurried back to Toronto and their tiny one bedroom apartment on St. George Street. Mike resumed his summer job at Molson’s Brewery and Barbara returned to work in her father’s company.

  CHAPTER 6

  June 17, 1964. 3 p.m.

  A large black Lincoln glided to a stop beside one of Pop Williams’s gasoline pumps. The driver rolled his window down and leaned out. “Hey!” he shouted. “You gotta minute?”

  Servito glanced at his visitor, and then turned away. “Nope, I’m busy,” he replied.

  “Then I’ll assume you’re not interested in making a lot of money.”

  Servito turned and glared at the driver, his deep-socketed gray eyes wary but interested. He pointed in the direction of the building. “Join me in there.”

  The large man hoisted himself from his car and waddled to the office. He wore a loose fitting, shiny black suit and matching tie, topped with a thick mane of brown, unruly hair. His shoes were enormous. “My name is Jerry Allison,” he said, removing his sun-glasses with a smile and extending his beefy right hand.

  Servito stared at Allison’s humongous palm. “Tell me how you can make me a lot of money,” he demanded.

  Allison sat on Pop Williams’s gray metal desk, his fat buttocks depressing the surface. “Okay. I’ll get right to the point,” he said with a dimpled grin. “I can supply gasoline to your station at a price that’ll blow your mind.”

  “How do you know this is my station and how do you know what blows my mind?”

  “I know you don’t make nine cents a gallon.”

  “Who the hell does?”

  “My customers.”

  Servito was impressed, but still skeptical. A profit of nine cents a gallon was far more than Pop Williams had ever seen. “How can you supply me when I’m under contract to Canam Oil?” he asked. He didn’t own the station—sure—but Pop had told him enough about it to make it seem as though he did.

  Allison chuckled. “You ever heard of the midnight express?” he asked, flashing a devilish smile.

  “Nope. What the hell is the midnight express?” Servito demanded.

  “Bootleg gas. We’ll bring gasoline in here after midnight and drop it into your tanks. If we do it right, Canam will never know. You pay the driver in cash and get a new life. What do you think of that?”

  “How do I know it’s good gasoline?”

  “You don’t, and you never will unless you try it.”

  Servito stared out the window. He needed time to consider Allison’s proposal and to contemplate how he could take advantage of it. Nine cents a gallon was an absolutely obscene profit. If he presented the idea to Pop Williams, he risked blowing the whole opportunity and losing his job. The old man was far too honest—there was no way he would risk double crossing his relationship with Canam. “I like it,” Servito said with a hint of a nod.

  Allison jumped to his feet and rushed to shake Servito’s hand with both of his own. “Then we have a deal. My driver will be here between midnight and three. He’ll drop six thousand regular and fifteen hundred premium. It’ll cost you two grand, cash up front.”

  Servito completed a quick calculation on the back of an envelope, and then smiled. It would mean a difference of almost four hundred dollars per truck load. Blood rushed to his head when he mentally calculated how much he could make in a year if he dealt exclusively with Allison.

&n
bsp; “See you tonight,” Allison said, and then turned to leave.

  Servito frowned. “Wait a minute. How the hell am I going to convince Canam I’m not buying boot-leg gas? They read my pumps every time they deliver.”

  Allison rolled his eyes and chuckled. “You really are a rookie. I thought you knew the game when I drove in here. Let’s go outside. I’ll show you how we solve that little problem.” After leading Servito to the nearest of Williams’s six gasoline pumps, Allison pointed to the glass panel covering the meters. He lowered his finger to the stainless steel panel below. “Take those panels off,” he ordered.

  Servito lifted the keys from his pocket, unlocked the panels, and quickly removed them.

  Allison pointed to a pipe extending upward from the ground and connecting to the pump. “See that pipe?” he asked.

  Servito nodded.

  “The pump draws the gasoline from the storage tank, up through that pipe, through the meters and into the customers’ cars.” Allison removed a small screwdriver from his pocket and used it to remove the white metal facing, which obscured a full view of the meters. “Those meters just measure how much gasoline went through. The flow of gasoline through the meters activates an impeller, which activates the volume, dollar, and cents wheels. But you can roll the wheels backwards. The next guy who reads the meters won’t have the slightest idea you moved an extra seventy-five hundred gallons through them.”

  “How do you roll the wheels?”

  “First you have to break the seal,” Allison said. He showed Servito how to break the lead seal installed by the Department of Weights and Measures. “Then you have to make the seal look like it was never broken.” Allison carefully reinstalled the seal in such a way as to make it appear unbroken. He turned to face Servito. “Do we still have a deal?” he asked.

  Servito was amazed. He could move gasoline through the pumps without the Canam driver ever knowing and, if he was careful, he could even do it without Pop Williams ever knowing. “Let’s do it,” he said, flashing a conniving smirk at Allison.

  Servito’s criminal mind was in overdrive. The menial job he had taken as a means of survival had led him to the threshold of a beautiful scam. Pumping gasoline was far from the career he had planned, but his meeting with Allison had brought a whole new light to his prospects. His mind zoomed to the future. If he owned Pop Williams’s station, he could make a lot of money by eliminating the Canam supply agreement and buying his gasoline from independent sources. As an independent retailer, he could control the street price and increase the volume with aggressive discounting. If he owned more than one station, the possibilities were limitless.

  CHAPTER 7

  Mike jerked the telephone to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Mike, I’m sorry I won’t be able to join you for dinner.” It was Barbara. “Dad’s sequestered me until nine, at the earliest.”

  “You lose, Barb. I’ve got the biggest, thickest pizza you ever saw.”

  “Damn! Will you save me some?”

  “Sure. See you later,” Mike said.

  He glanced at the evening newspaper and his jaw dropped as he focused on the front page. There before him were the pictures and names of the five people who had been spared from the tragic explosion that had allegedly killed all passengers aboard Olympic Airways Flight 806. Karen’s plane. The story confirmed that all five had been held as political prisoners in Syria. Informed sources speculated that the information had not been disclosed to the world pending a resolution of differences between the Palestinian terrorist organization Angels of Freedom and the Syrian government. “One of the five survivors was Karen Taylor, of Toronto, Canada, daughter of wealthy industrialist George Taylor.”

  Mike was stunned. Over and over again the pictures shot through his brain like an electric shock. “She’s alive!” he shouted.

  He raced to the telephone, his fingers trembling as he dialed Karen’s home number. “It’s Mike King calling, Mrs. Taylor. I had to call. I just read the—”

  “It’s true, Mike. She’s alive.”

  “Do you know how she is?”

  “No. The Canadian government contacted us this morning and advised us that a British Air Force plane will fly her to London today. She’ll be placed in a hospital there for observation. Karen’s father and I are flying to London tomorrow morning. Is there something you would like us to say to her?”

  Mike was temporarily speechless. He wanted to tell Jean Taylor how much he loved and missed Karen. This was the one thing he could have ever hoped for, and yet he never believed it was possible. He felt a sudden choke in his throat as he remembered Barbara.

  “No thank you,” he said instead. “I think it would be better if I told her in person. When do you expect to be able to return her to Canada?”

  “If there are no complications, I expect we’ll be here by Monday morning.”

  When Barbara returned to the apartment, Mike rushed to greet her. He hugged and kissed her with aggression, hating himself for his feeble attempt to justify his decision to marry her. “Something incredible has happened, Barb. I… do you have a few minutes?”

  “I don’t want to hear it if it’s bad news. I’m on a high and I want to stay there.”

  “It’s not bad news,” he insisted, although he was fully aware that she might take it badly.

  She grinned. “Then what is it?”

  “Karen Taylor’s alive.”

  Barbara’s complexion was suddenly ashen. “How do you know?” she whispered.

  Mike pointed to the newspaper on the coffee table. “She was taken off the airplane before it blew up. The story’s right there on the front page.”

  Barbara glanced at the paper and then stared into Mike’s eyes, her face pained. “Does this… change anything?” she asked.

  “I won’t let it,” Mike promised, shaking his head. “I also won’t lie to you. I won’t try to deny that the news affected me… I don’t think it’s possible for a caring human being to turn emotions on and off like a light switch. I loved Karen, but that was in the past. You’re my wife, and I have no intention of ever changing that.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Allison’s red and yellow striped tractor-trailer arrived at Pop Williams’s station at 2:45 a.m. It parked parallel to the fill-pipes of the gasoline storage tanks. Allison climbed from the cab of the tractor and slammed the door behind him, having replaced his wrinkled black suit with tight green trousers and an under-sized, matching green jacket. “Sorry I’m late. I had a few traffic problems,” he explained, looking entirely too much like an overstuffed sausage as he waddled toward Servito.

  “Just hurry up and drop the gasoline,” Servito growled.

  “You got the cash?”

  “Just drop the fucking gasoline, Jerry! I’ll give you the cash when you’re finished,” Servito shouted.

  Allison shook his huge head, his thatch of brown hair flying in the wind. “That isn’t going to happen. Once I drop that gasoline, it’s a son of a bitch to get it out. Then if I find out you don’t have the cash, we’ve both got big problems.”

  “How do I know you’ve got seventy-five hundred gallons on that truck?”

  “Climb up and check it out,” Allison suggested, pointing to the top of the truck. “The trailer has five compartments. All you have to do is lift the manhole cover on each and look inside. You’ll see that each one’s filled to a government-regulated brass finger.” He removed a flashlight from the cab of the truck and handed it to Servito. “Here. You can use this.”

  Servito climbed the metal ladder at the rear of the trailer and carefully examined each compartment. As Allison had promised, each was filled with gasoline to the level of the brass finger. Servito returned to the ground. “Get your hoses hooked up,” he said as he marched toward the office. “I’ll get the cash.”

  Servito had swiped two thousand dollars from Williams’s cash register, planning to replace the money with first receipts from the sale of Allison’s gasoline. “Here’s your bread
,” he said, handing a large brown paper bag to Allison.

  Allison snatched the bag and looked inside. “Jesus!” he hissed, glaring at Servito.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “How the hell did you expect me to count it? I’ll be here all night!”

  Servito flashed a devilish smirk. “You said you wanted two thousand cash. That’s it. Where did you think I’d get the money? I pulled it from the register. If I take all those small bills to the bank and ask for large ones, somebody’s going to ask questions.”

  Allison crumpled the bag from the top, and then pointed an angry index finger at Servito. “I’m going to count it later, kid. If there isn’t two grand in this bag, I’m going to come back here and break your knee-caps.” He hurled the bag through the opened window of his truck.

  Karen stared in silence at the window of an airport limousine as it glided southward on Avenue Road. Jean Taylor placed her hand on top of Karen’s. “You’re so quiet, dear,” she implored.

  Karen gave her mother an expressionless glance, and then turned away and shook her head. “It’s over, Mom. I just want to forget it. Those bastards stole sixteen months of my life, and there’s no way I’ll ever get them back.”

  “What are you going to do now? Have you thought about that?”

  Karen again turned to face her mother, her brown eyes showing a burning resolve. “I’m going to find Mike and spend the rest of my life with him. He’s all I could think of while I was in that hellhole. I’d be absolutely insane by now if it wasn’t for that.”

  “How did it go?” Allison asked, leaning from the window of his black Lincoln.

  Servito smiled, oozing pride. “I sold the whole load.” It had taken less than twelve hours for Pop Williams’s station to sell seventy-five hundred gallons of Jerry Allison’s boot-leg gasoline. Servito had brazenly rolled back the wheels in the pump meters by exactly that volume. He had replaced the two thousand dollars he had removed from Williams’s cash register, and happily pocketed the difference.