by Thomas Perry
He had suffered a serious setback last night in not being able to finish the job. All three Castiglione brothers had to go. It wasn't that he had a strong feeling of dislike for Salvatore Castiglione. He had never really known young Sal in the old days. Sal had been no more than fourteen when Schaeffer had arrived to do some more work for the Castiglione family. He had seen him, but they had never spoken. He remembered young Sal in his grandfather's house when he had come in to negotiate a deal on a man named Harrow.
Harrow was a problem for the family, and old Salvatore hated to let problems go on for very long. Harrow had made some odd but unforgivable moves when he had arrived in Chicago. He had gone to a number of restaurants and demanded that they pay him a monthly fee in exchange for a guarantee that the Health Department would pass them on their inspections. He said he was an official for the public employees' union and that he was trying to work with the restaurant owners to improve conditions so the members of his union didn't have to fill out a lot of forms listing hazards and violations. He said it would help the restaurants, the city, and the customers.
Some restaurants paid him, and others didn't. The following month, the ones that hadn't paid were cited for vermin infestation, incorrect water temperature, or dirty kitchens, and closed temporarily by the Health Department. It had apparently not occurred to Harrow that he was not the first person to think of this way of making money. The ancient Romans had done it, and it was familiar to the Castiglione organization, which was already being paid to protect some of these same establishments. There were even some—the Palermo and the Bella Napoli—that were owned by people connected to the Castigliones.
Old Salvatore had not made any telephone calls or filed a complaint with City Hall, as some important men might have done. He simply told one of the young men who hung around his house all day waiting for orders to go call someone who knew how to reach the Butcher's Boy. When the Butcher's Boy arrived, they had a talk, and then Schaeffer went out to study Harrow's movements.
Two days later he reported back to old Salvatore. Harrow was not involved in any way with any union. He had simply put one of the health inspectors on his payroll. But he did have several friends, maybe relatives, who were cops. At the end of the day shift Harrow would sometimes go meet these cops at the Shamrock for a few beers.
"Cops?" said old Salvatore. "What the fuck? He hangs out with cops and they didn't tell him what he was doing to himself?"
"I don't know what they told him, or if they know about his way of getting money. But before I kill him and his inspector, I thought you should know about the cops."
"You're right. Thank you," said Castiglione. "I appreciate your manners and your good judgment. But go ahead and kill the bastards. I'd be happy if you got it done by dinnertime so those cops that drink with him will find out right away."
He went to the Health Department and waited for the inspector, followed him to his first stop, a Chinese restaurant on South LaSalle Street. He waited until the inspector left, walked up the street behind him, and shot him in the back of the head with a silenced pistol. Before the inspector collapsed onto the pavement, Schaeffer was in the middle of a crowd of people walking to the next corner. He turned at the intersection instead of waiting to cross, while some of the others turned around and went back to join the gaggle of people looking down at the fallen man.
He drove directly to Harrow's house. He knew Harrow would have some way of knowing if anyone stood on his front steps, so when he rang the doorbell, he held an envelope full of cash in his left hand, flapping it absentmindedly against his thigh. A man who was used to getting cash in envelopes would know the exact look, feel, sound, and flexibility of money. First-time blackmailers and drug thieves might be fooled by cut paper, but not Harrow.
After a few moments the door opened, and Harrow stood there looking watchful. He was a big man, about forty years old, with a fringe of strawberry blond hair above his pink face. He glowered. "What can I do for you?"
"Compliments of the Bella Napoli restaurant." He held out his left hand with the envelope.
Harrow reached for it as Schaeffer's right hand came up holding the silenced pistol. He fired one shot into Harrow's chest and pushed him backward into the house, where Harrow fell. He stood over him and fired another round through his skull, closed the front door, and walked to his car. As he reached the sidewalk, he had to stop to let three ten-year-old boys flash past on bicycles. They were moving too fast to look at his face or to see him as anything more than a blur.
When he came back to the Castle at six, the old man was in his office. He opened his cash drawer, stood, and handed Schaeffer the money he had offered for the job. Then his black eyes, like beads, flicked to the side, and he smiled, his long, tobacco-stained teeth suddenly visible. "Come in here." He beckoned to someone in the doorway. "That's right. I saw you. Come in here now." The voice was not the hard, imperious one that he used with his men, but the softer, slightly higher, cracked voice was more horrifying because it was so forced, so false.
A boy about thirteen or fourteen appeared from around the corner and stood in the doorway. He wore jeans and high-top basketball sneakers, which was the style then, and a sweatshirt. "This is my grandson," Castiglione said. "He's the youngest, Salvatore. Named after me."
"Hello," Schaeffer said.
The boy looked at him darkly, but said nothing.
Old Salvatore said, "That's right. Take a good look. That's the scariest man you're ever going to see. Doesn't look scary, does he?"
"No."
"Well he is. Look in his eyes. You see now?"
"I don't know."
"Does he like you, or does he hate you?"
"I can't tell."
"That's because the answer is 'neither.' He looks at you the way you look at a fish. It's alive now, maybe not tomorrow, but it doesn't matter which."
"I get it."
"Good." He gave the boy a push. "You see another one like him, make sure he's on your side."
Young Salvatore had grown up. As of last night he was the reigning Castiglione. Schaeffer was irritated that he hadn't managed to kill him. It was a chore, and now it would be harder and more dangerous.
He was fairly certain that the reason Salvatore had gotten away was that he hadn't been able to get to him fast enough. As soon as he had broken into the Castle, the clock had started running. He had killed everyone he'd seen, even the girl in Joe Castiglione's bed. He'd known at the time that even she had to die. He had heard people say that killing somebody was egotism—thinking your own life was more valuable than somebody else's. Those people didn't understand either life or death. Your life wasn't better than someone else's. Your life was valuable to you because it was yours. What was egotistical was thinking you could neglect to do the smart, self-protective thing when you had the chance and still manage to survive. It was thinking your superiority gave you leeway. You could afford to leave your enemies alive because they weren't as smart or as strong or as lucky as you were. Well, you couldn't afford to think that way.
If he'd made a mistake last night, it was not going upstairs in Paul Castiglione's house to kill the woman yelling down the stairs. Presumably it was Paul's wife. He'd made the decision, not to let her live, but not to waste the time going up there to find and kill her and whatever kids there were. Apparently he had made the wrong choice. She must have called Salvatore as soon as she heard the alarm go off.
He dressed and went downstairs to eat dinner, and then came back up and used his laptop computer to find Vincent Pugliese's address. He was tentatively pleased because he knew the area in the center of the city fairly well, unless the Chicago business-people had torn everything down and replaced it since he'd left the country. Finally, he took the time to examine his weapons and give them a hasty cleaning. He cut up a T-shirt, stripped the pistols, and wiped them down. He used a section of a curtain rod to run a patch through the shotgun barrel. He left the shotgun in two pieces in his bag, but reassembled the pistol
s and reloaded them and the spare magazines.
If Eddie could have seen what he was doing, he would have thought he was crazy. He had always been against picking up somebody else's gun and using it. After Eddie and the boy had gotten to Manny Garcia by killing his two bodyguards, the boy had picked up one bodyguard's Colt Commander. Eddie had shaken his head. "That man was not a pro, or he wouldn't be dead."
The boy had replied, "His gun fired fine. There was nothing wrong with it. He just couldn't hit anything. He didn't have the balls to hold the gun steady."
"You should wipe your prints off and drop it," Eddie said. "You don't know where that thing has been."
"Are we talking about germs?"
"No. He might have killed an archbishop, four Supreme Court justices, and Miss America with that damned gun."
Now it was about nine-thirty in the evening, time to drive back to Chicago. He stepped outside and went to his car. On the drive to Chicago along Lake Michigan he could feel his alertness growing as night came on. The sky was turning dark, and a few white clouds high above the lake east of the road were illuminated by the last of the sunlight to the west.
There was really no good plan but to go to Vincent Pugliese's address in Chicago and study it for vulnerabilities. Sal Castiglione would be trying to save himself now, and the logical way was to surround himself with his own people. That meant using Vince Pugliese to reassure the soldiers and rally them. But it was possible that Castiglione would simply leave town for a time and wait until calm returned.
Seeing Vincent Pugliese's address was daunting. It was an old gray stone office building six stories high with an imposing façade built in the early part of the last century. There was a stone arch with a pair of concrete pillars, and through the glass doors he caught a glimpse of a black-and-white marble mosaic floor in the lobby. As he moved slowly past the front of the building in traffic, he saw that the bottom floor held several businesses with separate entrances—a coffee shop, a travel agency, a credit union, a restaurant called Mimi's.
After studying the place for two minutes, he could read Vince Pugliese's intention in every aspect of it. Pugliese would want to achieve a low profile, but still have Castiglione soldiers coming and going. The first-floor businesses were sure to be a tangle of legal agreements between fourteen or fifteen different entities, all companies that didn't involve a door you could knock on or the name of an actual person. They would be as insubstantial as cobwebs. When all were brushed away, the owner would be another company owned by Vincent Pugliese.
He turned to drive around the building. It was perfect. Old Salvatore Castiglione had bought a fantasy castle for himself, but Pugliese had built a village. One reason the Mafia worked was that a powerful man could offer jobs to all of his relatives and friends, giving them all a visible means of support and lots of free time for schemes and sidelines. Pugliese had his whole first floor occupied by businesses, all of which were ones he could use for money laundering and reinvesting. And the constant presence of people loyal to him behind those ground-floor windows meant he was a very difficult man to sneak up on. The lobby was a bare marble floor with two elevators. It was guarded by a pair of security men behind a desk facing the door. If something happened, Pugliese's people could probably cut the power to the elevators and engage the locks on the door and turn the place into a slaughtering floor.
Off the alley behind the building was the entrance to an underground parking garage where Pugliese and his friends could park their cars off the street. Pugliese was as well protected as a man in Chicago could be. There were not likely to be any surprises in his life.
Schaeffer drove another two blocks farther on and parked in a parking structure beside a movie theater. It was a mild September night, with a slow stream of moving air coming in off the lake. He had already decided that the most likely way to defeat the security of Pugliese's building would be to enter through the underground garage. From there he would look for the features that he couldn't see from the outside. He knew there would be some kind of exit there. Vince was too smart to let his fortress become a prison. He wouldn't let himself be trapped by his own defenses. He would have built in a private way around the barriers. It might be a separate elevator from the sixth floor down to the garage that skipped the intervening floors. It might be a walkway that led from this building to the one beside it or even a tunnel to another building. But his guess was that somewhere in the underground garage would be a plain steel door painted the same color as the walls. On it would be a sign that said something like ELECTRICAL or STAND PIPES or SHUT-OFF VALVE, something that would help the mind move past the door because the words gave the impression that all the questions had been answered. But that door would be Pugliese's way out.
He walked toward the gray building, his eyes constantly scanning, his mind evaluating and contemplating the thousand details they passed over. He looked at traffic patterns in the neighborhood to be sure there wouldn't be a jam that kept him from getting out, searched for security cameras high on the sides of the building or in the ceiling of the garage, watched for police cars to determine the frequency of routine police patrols. He looked at the people walking along the street, and even more closely at anyone who was not walking, just standing by a building or a bus stop. He looked at upper windows for any sign of a police surveillance team or the dark silhouette of a sniper a few feet back from an open window. He studied faces, watching for eyes that stared back at him with too much interest, ones that looked away quickly, or any he had seen before. Always he had a hand close to one of the guns. As he walked he could feel the hard handgrip of the gun beneath the fabric of his coat brush the inside of his wrist.
Darkness had reclaimed the city as he approached the gray stone building. The lights were on in the travel agency and the credit union, but all the desks were empty, the surfaces cleared except for computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The magenta neon at Mimi's Ristorante was brighter now, and the coffee shop had taken on the forlorn look they all had in the evening, empty except for a few solitary people.
Then, unexpectedly, Vincent Pugliese came out of the building, flanked by two men in dark suits. He looked almost the same as he had twenty years ago. The slicked-back hair was more gray than brown now, and his frame looked a bit broader. The expression on his face was a pinch at the eyebrows, slack skin in the cheeks. He looked as though he hadn't had much sleep. He and his two men went to the curb and looked up the street in the direction of the garage.
A gleaming black Mercedes sedan that had to be Pugliese's came out of the driveway behind the building, turned to the right, and glided toward the curb where Pugliese and his two men waited. Schaeffer kept moving along the street toward them. He stepped into the space behind an accidental grouping of five men who had just come out of a big building up the street, probably all leaving at quitting time. He kept them ahead of him like blockers as they walked toward Pugliese.
"I need to talk to you."
He turned only his eyes. It was Elizabeth Waring. She had separated herself from the stream of pedestrians beside him, appeared at his shoulder, and spoken close to his ear. He spun on his heel, put his arm around her waist, and walked her back in the direction he had come from. They walked a hundred feet or more before he said, with barely contained anger, "What do you want to talk about?"
She was aware that their body language, him embracing her that way and leaning close to her to speak, was intended to make them look like a couple. She said, "The way we start is that I tell you not to kill Vincent Pugliese."
"You've already made that impossible. Now go tell him not to kill me."
"What you did last night has made a lot of people come to this part of town who weren't here yesterday. Besides the regular contingent of FBI from the Chicago office, there are planeloads on their way from Washington and from all over the Midwest. How much more the wiseguys are doing, I can only imagine. But I'll know in another day because it's my job."
"Go do your job. You
don't belong out here."
He released her and took a step that separated them by a few inches. Suddenly a shot tore the air, then four more at once, all incredibly loud, and beside him a wall of glass at the front of a closed women's clothing store had a constellation of holes. Cracks appeared to connect them, and the glass came down like a curtain at his feet.
He grasped Elizabeth's arm so hard it hurt and yanked her up into the windowless display, dragging her with him between headless manikins wearing cotton jackets and shorts. There were more shots, some blasting chips from the plaster manikins and pounding one of them backward onto the display. Elizabeth could see there were men firing from the windows of a big black car that was pulling up to the curb near where they had stood.
He pulled Elizabeth through the display of manikins, artificial grass, and colored leaves and down into the center aisle of the store. They ran toward the back of the dimly lighted building. At the end of the sales floor, there were two doors. The one he chose took them into a room full of more racks of dresses and coats, stacks of boxes, a table set up for wrapping. He saw a door to the side of the room and pulled Elizabeth through it.
They were out the side door into the alley, and they both ran hard without speaking. They knew that in a moment the black car could drive around the building and into the alley in front of them. They had to be out of sight before that happened or they would be trapped. They turned into the narrow space between two buildings and ran toward the next street. When they approached the end of the dark passageway, he held up his hand for her to stop, and she managed to do it without running into him. She turned to look behind her down the long, narrow space and put her hand in her pocket to wrap her fingers around the grips of the gun.
He grasped her arm again and tugged her out onto the sidewalk and to the right. He walked purposefully down the street with his arm around her, squeezing her affectionately. Now and then he would look around, not in a panicky, harried way, but calmly, as though he were just checking the crowds of people to see if any of their friends were among them. Elizabeth was surprised for a second at how good a physical actor he was, but then reminded herself that he'd have to be to get close to his victims and walk away after he'd killed them.
