by Thomas Perry
Caporetto nodded. “We’re already working on it. As soon as the girl disappeared, that was the best guess as to where she was going first.” He added, “We’re still looking for boyfriends or just girls she used to hang out with, but nothing has come up yet.” He waited for a moment for what Delfina was going to say next, but he got the familiar cold stare that always made him feel as though Delfina were a machine that had suddenly turned itself off. He hurried to the door of the garage and slipped out.
Delfina went out through the work room and shut the door. He picked up a bouquet of roses lying on the table, then moved through the shop carrying them. He paused in the darkened room and looked out the front window, up and down the street. He hated the inside of the florist business. The cutting rooms always smelled like the biggest funeral in 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 sheets who 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 businesses. He rotated the young men regularly from one part of the country to another, the way major corporations did. They never stayed settled long enough in a single city to be tied to it. Within a year or two they knew all the cities well enough to navigate them comfortably, and by the end of the second cycle, they were experts. Each of them had spent some time working for all of Delfina’s underbosses, and their loyalty was to the only constant he permitted them: Delfina.
For Delfina, the scattered and diverse nature of his holdings provided various forms of security. He could count on the predictable, quasi-legitimate profits of his visible companies to pay his people. If one industry or region hit hard times, the others could subsidize Delfina’s stake in it until times changed.
Delfina was part of a new world, but he knew he was not invulnerable to the one he had come from, so he looked for new models of physical security. He had read in the newspapers about the habits of foreign potentates, and studied them. It seemed to him that the most ingenious self-protectors were men like Qaddafi and Hussein. They could have surrounded themselves with thousands of troops and lived in hardened bunkers, but that would have made them bigger targets. What worked for them was a combination of anonymity and mobility. Delfina imitated them. He had no permanent residence. Instead he shuttled about the country, showed up unannounced at each of his businesses in turn, stayed for an hour or a month, and moved on.
As he drove through the dark streets toward the river, the steamy night air noticeably cooled, and big drops of summer rain splashed on his windshield. He turned on his wipers and slowed down. He thought about the two men going out to bury Danny Spoleto, then shrugged them off. They deserved a little discomfort, and the rain would hide any disturbance in the soil. By this time tomorrow they would be in California. They wouldn’t see rain again until November.
He wondered what his life would be like in November. By then he would have had time to get used to having Bernie Lupus’s money, and would have begun to put it to use. All of those cities that he had conscientiously, prudently bypassed in his endless commuting—New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh—would probably already be his. People like DeLuca, John Augustino, Al Castananza, the Langusto brothers, and Molinari would just be more underbosses he would have to visit now and then. It was almost inevitable. Bernie the Elephant had spent fifty years collecting their money and salting it away and making it grow, and now it was ready for Delfina to take. When he had it, those men would lose control of their own soldiers. The guys who had been making peanuts shaking down mom-and-pop grocery stores for their local bosses would make quiet inquiries to see if there was anything they could do for Delfina. And when that happened, the bosses would come too. He would use the money to attract their allegiance, or finance their retirement, or buy their deaths.
8
As Jane drove along the highway into Illinois, Bernie’s patience seemed to be slipping away. Finally, he asked, “Where are we going?”
“Chicago.”
Bernie said, “I don’t know about Chicago. If Delfina’s started looking for her, the others will be too. There are people in Chicago who have seen her.”
“Really?” asked Jane. “Who?”
“Tommy DeLuca used to send a bagman down about once a month.”
Jane said, “That’s one out of three million. You can wait for me outside Chicago in case he happens to be at the bank. I have some things in a safe-deposit box there that I’ll need.”
“Look, I don’t know what it is, but—”
>
“Forged IDs that I can work over to fit the two of you.”
Bernie seemed unable to think of a suitable argument, so he sat in disapproving silence. After a few minutes, Rita said, “Anybody mind if I play the radio?” as she turned it on and punched buttons to flood the car with a rhythmic noise punctuated by a man’s voice chanting incomprehensible words. She turned down the volume to keep it from irritating Jane and Bernie.
Jane glanced at Rita. She was chewing gum in time with the music and rocking slightly as she listened. There was a peculiar innocence to the expression, and Jane wondered if kids still had those conversations she remembered about what the lyrics actually were. They must, she decided. “How about you?” she asked. “Are you afraid of Chicago?”
“Nope,” said Rita distractedly. “I’m afraid of the places I’ve been already. Are you sure the music is okay?”
Bernie answered hastily, “It’s fine, kid.” Jane could tell he was lying. “The silence was getting on our nerves.”
Jane told them no more until she had stopped and rented two rooms at a hotel in Frankfort. She brought Bernie and Rita inside the first of the two rooms, put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, sorted through her purse at the table, and handed each of them a key.
“Here are your keys. I’m going to be gone for a while.”
Rita asked, “Can I go with you?”
“I didn’t mean an hour or two,” said Jane. “It should be a few days.”
Rita looked uncomfortable. “You’re leaving us here?”
Jane looked around her. “It’s a nice enough hotel. If you do as I say, you’ll be fine. Don’t go out. Order your meals from room service. When the waiter comes, take the tray at the door, sign the bill, and send him off.”
“What’s this about?” asked Rita. “Where are you going?”
“First I’m going to my safe-deposit box, then I’m going to shop for a place that’s safer than this one.”
“How do we even know you’re going to come back?”
“You don’t.” She let Rita get used to the idea, then walked toward the door. “If I’m not back in a week, check out. Rita, you’ll have to do it, I’m afraid. The credit card is in the name Katherine Sanders. It’s on the dresser with the receipt. Make your way to Decatur and check in at the Marriott.”
“You going to meet us there?” asked Bernie.
“If I miss you here, I will. If I’m not there within a week after that, something happened to me. Go to a quiet town somewhere and do your best to make it on your own.”
On the fifth day at eleven in the morning, Jane returned to the hotel. She found Bernie sitting on the bed where she had left him, and Rita curled up in a chair in front of the television set. The set was tuned to a music video station, where a girl who didn’t seem much older than Rita was wearing something that looked like the top of an unflattering suit and the bottom of a bikini, and angrily singing words that she emphasized by pointing fingers with inch-long nails at the camera.
Rita said, “Do you think that’s a real tattoo?”
Bernie answered, “Looks real to me. But I don’t remember it from her last album.”
Jane closed the door, and they both looked at her in alarm. Rita recovered, then pretended it had not happened. “Oh, hi,” she said coolly, and turned her attention back to the screen.
Bernie stood up. “Well?”
“I’ve already paid the bill and checked us out. I just have to drop your keys at the desk.” She accepted the two keys and turned to go. “The car is in the third row from the north end of the building.”
When Jane joined Rita and Bernie in the car and they were on the highway, Bernie asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I think I did,” she said. “It’s a little far, but it seems right.”
“Just how far?” he asked.
“New Mexico. You’ll have a couple of days on the road to think about it.”
“Where in New Mexico?”
“Santa Fe. Or, just outside it, really. I found a house. It’s small, but it’s got two stories. That’s something that runners don’t always think about in advance, but it’s worth trying for. You can make it very difficult for anybody to get to you while you’re sleeping. It’s on a sparsely populated road, set back about two hundred feet on a little rise, so you can see people coming from a long way off. The country around it is mostly low brush and rocks.”
Bernie squinted doubtfully. “I don’t know about Santa Fe.”
“Have you been to Santa Fe?” asked Jane patiently.
“No, but it’s famous. People know about it.”
Jane smiled. “That’s right. People go there on vacations. Other people live there for part of the year, and might rent a different house each time. All of it means that strangers don’t rate a second look—even strangers carrying a lot of cash.”
“It also means a lot of pairs of eyes pass through town. What if one of them is—”
“Who?” she interrupted. “You must know a lot about the people who would recognize your face. When they travel, do any of them go to Santa Fe?”
He looked away and said grudgingly, “I never heard of any. But they might stop on the way to Las Vegas or Hawaii or someplace.”
“Santa Fe doesn’t have a major airport. Most people who want to get there fly into Albuquerque and drive the last sixty miles. It’s not on the way to anywhere else except Taos.”
“But what goes on there?” asked Rita. “What do people do?”
“Nothing we have to worry about. It’s the state capital, but states in the Southwest don’t take much governing—lots of land, not many people.”
“But what about him?” asked Rita protectively. “He’s got to be happy.”
Bernie said, “I’ll be happy just to get out of the damned car.”
But for the next two days, he would suddenly stir and a question would come from nowhere. “What am I supposed to be doing there?”
“You’re pretty much what you really are. You worked for a large company for fifty years, then retired. You’ve been living in Florida but didn’t like it, so you moved. You shouldn’t have any trouble learning all about some legitimate business. Just read a book and you’ll be able to recite it. But you should still avoid specific questions about it. If somebody asks, talk about the people from those days. That’s all they’re interested in anyway: people stories.”
They arrived in Santa Fe in the evening. The route Jane chose through the city was calculated to give her two passengers a good impression. She drove in on Federal Place, past the post office and the Federal Courthouse, then down Lincoln Avenue between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of the Governors, skirted the seventeenth-century Plaza, where they could see the lighted shops and restaurants, then went along East San Francisco Street to Saint Francis Cathedral.
Before she turned right to reach Canyon Road, she was sure she had given Rita and Bernie enough of a taste of the place to reassure them a little. It wasn’t the sort of city they were used to, where enormous corporations elbowed their forty-story steel-and-glass towers onto the main streets. But it wasn’t a desert outpost with one stop light and a gas station either.
She kept up a running commentary as she drove. “The Plaza is a great place, but it would be best to go in the evening.”
“Why?” asked Rita.
“Cameras. Most of the time, the picture ends up in a family album in Dubuque, Iowa. But if it gets blown up on the cover of Travel & Leisure, Bernie’s face could be on a lot of newsstands. There are a dozen restaurants on all sides of the Plaza. Just go down any of these smaller streets leading away from it.” Then she added, “But the places that will be safest are the ones that don’t interest tourists: grocery stores, dry cleaners, and so on. Any time you find yourself surrounded by Navajo rugs, silver jewelry, or Zuni pots, be alert and get ready to move on.”
She drove out on Canyon Road for four miles, then turned up a gravel drive between two wooden posts.
She turned around the house, pushed a remote control to open the garage, and pulled the car into it.
Bernie looked glum as he got out of the car and stretched. Jane stood close to him and whispered, “Go out, walk about two hundred feet that way, and then watch me from there. If somebody is in there waiting to blow my head off, go to the riverbank and follow it back into town. Don’t try to walk on the road.”
“Jesus, honey,” he whispered. “If you’re not sure, then what are we doing here?”
“I do it because this is the way the game is played. You take all of the precautions the first time. Right now I need to see that the house is the way I left it, and I can’t do it if you two are making footprints and moving things. So go.”
She exerted light pressure on his shoulder and watched him take a couple of steps, then stop. But Rita quickly took his hand and led him off into the darkness.
Before Jane had settled on this house, she had been careful to visit it at night as well as in daylight. There were no street lamps, no neighbors close enough to throw light on the surrounding land. That gave her control. If she needed to light the yard up, she could do it from a switch inside the house. If it was time to run, she could get Rita and Bernie out in darkness.
Jane took a flashlight out of the car and bent low as she walked the long way around the house to the front door, studying the ground. Three times she knelt close to the dirt and switched the flashlight on, but none of the variations on the surface were footprints. As Jane moved silently beside the house she passed close to each window to be sure the glass was intact, the latch still closed, and the layer of windblown dust still on the sill. By the time she had reached the front door she was reasonably sure nobody had been here.
She used her key to open the door, stepped inside, and turned on the light. Before she had left, she had poured some talcum powder into the palm of her hand and blown it over the hardwood floor inside the entrance, so it formed a thin, nearly invisible film. She bent and examined it, but it had not been disturbed.
