by Thomas Perry
He handed it to her. “I saved it for you.”
“Thanks. I’ve got to get a second opinion.” She folded it into her purse and surveyed the bulletin board to see if there was another with a picture of Rita, but if there was, it had not stayed on the board.
He laughed. “You want a hand loading your mail?”
“It’s the least you can do.”
She got her keys out while Dave slipped his hand truck under the first five boxes, tipped it back on its wheels, and brought the boxes out the door.
He followed her to the Explorer and shoved the boxes into the back, then went inside again. When he returned with the last five, Jane was rearranging the first five in the aisle behind the front seat. “Thanks,” she said.
“See you next time,” said Dave.
As Jane drove off, she wondered whether she had paid him a year’s rental in advance to be fair because she never intended to come back, or because it was beginning to look as though she would not live that long. She held the wheel with one hand and pulled out the portrait. If they had this picture, then she had made some terrible mistake.
25
“What the hell is this?” shouted Catania. “Will somebody please tell me?” He stood up so fast that his belt buckle hooked on the edge of the table and upset his glass of orange juice. The two men across the table from him watched the pulpy liquid soak the deck of cards, then moved their chairs back to watch it drip onto the floor near their feet. The floor of the Rivoli Social Club was very old wood, and over the years a lot of things had soaked into it, but neither of the men wanted orange juice stuck to the bottoms of their shoes.
Pescati glanced at the cards in his hand, then at the wet deck on the table, and tossed his cards beside it. “It could be just a story.”
“Yeah?” said Catania. “What’s the point of making up a story that proves you can’t find your own ass with both hands? Or that some little chick kicked the shit out of you and took your car?” Catania began to pace. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered. “It’s got to be a joke.” He stopped, grasped thin air with his hands, and shook it. “Has the whole universe suddenly gone crazy?”
“If it did happen, it’s just one of those things,” said Cotrano.
“One of what things?” The two men could see that Catania was working himself into a blind rage. Since his rage was not directed at them, they were not afraid. If they could be polite long enough to weather it, they would be all right. “What kind of things? Talking dogs? Pigs with wings? Lifetime guarantees?”
“He means it’s just a temporary setback,” said Mosso in a soothing voice from the other side of the room. “They said she surprised Langusto’s guy in the Seattle airport. I suppose it’s possible she did. What does it take to trip a guy in the middle of an airport, with a million people around? Even if he was in the mood, he couldn’t exactly gut her and skin her in the middle of a crowd, could he?”
Catania was calming down. “He could have stopped her, or stopped the plane. This is billions of dollars.”
The other men looked at Mosso expectantly. He took a deep breath and walked closer. “We’ve been thinking about this,” he began. “If I’m wrong, tell me to shut up. But it doesn’t seem to us that everything they told you on that bus is true.”
“They hardly told me anything on the bus,” snapped Catania. “You know what I learned? Tasso thinks it’s Bernie’s ghost, who is pissed off because I wanted him to empty his brain onto a computer disk. Molinari thinks it’s Delfina, who happens to be boss of a family about the size of a pro football team, which makes him a good one to blame it on. The Langusto brothers think we shouldn’t waste time making guesses. We’ve got to do the same things to stop them no matter who it is, and we’ll find out when we find out.”
“That’s the one that strikes me as odd,” said Mosso. He was four years older than Catania, and at sixty-three was beginning to look wise and distinguished, so he cultivated the impression. When Catania had been a small, skinny boy on the streets, Mosso had stepped into the role of protector and quiet adviser, and let Catania speak for him. He had always been uncomfortable when he was singled out for notice, but he had seen instantly that Catania craved attention as though it were sunlight. Whenever Mosso spoke, Catania’s head would turn toward him and he would fall into unaccustomed silence.
“What’s so odd?”
“The Langustos. They kind of took charge, didn’t they?”
“They wish,” said Catania contemptuously. “Joe has connections in brokerage houses and banks, so he was in a position to find things out. The Langustos were supposed to be responsible for Bernie all these years, so they should take on more of the headache. And Phil’s the head of their family, that’s all.”
Mosso nodded, and sat in silence. Catania looked away and walked back to the table, picked up his empty juice glass, then glanced at Mosso, still sitting in mute immobility. His silence was beginning to feel loud. Catania put down his glass. “What?”
“The Langustos call a meeting,” said Mosso. “They tell everybody what they ought to be looking for, but they also tell everybody what they shouldn’t be looking for. And it sounds like an odd choice: who’s doing it. Then this woman nobody knows supposedly shows up in Seattle and hammers a full-grown made guy. But who saw it besides him, and whose guy is this?”
“Langusto’s,” conceded Catania. “But that could just be odds. They’ve got more guys out looking than anybody else. They flew them all over the place. I figured it’s better Phil Langusto pays those travel bills than me.”
Mosso sat in silence. His silence was expanding again, and Catania began to feel it taking up space. Catania said, “Are you thinking that the Langusto family don’t want us to find the money?”
“I don’t want to say the Langustos are trying to get all that money for themselves. Maybe they wouldn’t do that.”
“Of course they would,” said Catania. “I would, you would, anybody would.”
Mosso shook his head and feigned bewilderment. “I’m not as smart as a lot of people: you, them.… But wouldn’t a good way be to send everybody else to look in all directions except the one that will pay off?”
Catania’s eyes began to burn. He nodded.
Mosso said, “This is like being in a card game where the dealer is a little too good. You don’t know he’s dealing from the bottom, because you didn’t see it, but you can tell he could if he wanted to. So if he’s not, why isn’t he?”
“It’s true. The Langustos might be trying to keep us all out of the way while they concentrate on finding the people who have the money and then shaking them down.”
Mosso shrugged. “I’m too slow to figure out what they’re doing. It could be that. It seems to me that if the Langustos have all these connections and they’re so good at figuring it all out, why call a meeting? Why cut everybody else in? Are they doing it because they want to be fair and make sure each family gets what it laid off with Bernie? Why? How?”
Catania stared down at the soaked cards on the table. He seemed to be unable to find an answer.
Mosso held up both hands. “I’m not saying it’s one thing or another. We came to you because you’re our capo, and you’re smarter than we are. We came to ask.” Cotrano and Pescati stared at Mosso in undisguised admiration.
Catania said, “You came to tell me I’ve been walking around with my eyes closed.”
Pescati was braver now. “No, Victor. It’s just that to us, the whole thing smells a little ripe, you know? We’re all supposed to spot any of this money moving, and report to Langusto’s guy, Pompi—who, incidentally, would steal the dirt from your fingernails. I’ve known him for years. We’re looking for a bodyguard and a maid. What happens if we find them? Do we bring them to the Langustos?”
Cotrano said quietly, “It’s a little bit like Phil Langusto was the boss, and we all worked for him.”
Catania’s head snapped to face Cotrano.
Pescati said, “He means—”
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“I know what he means,” Catania interrupted. “He means what he says.” Catania walked faster, turning when he came to the wall, walking to the end of the room, and spinning again. “The truth is, I don’t know any more than you do about this. Maybe Bernie really did do what we all thought, and started writing down where he put the money. Maybe he even did it because I asked him to think about it. This could all be my fault. Maybe I got him to write it down, and now there really is somebody moving it around to wash it. But you’re right. Phil Langusto is trying to control this. It might just be that he wants to sucker us all into helping look for these people, then get to the money first and say he never found it—or pay everybody a tenth of what we put in, and hide the rest. But it could be a hell of a lot worse than that.”
“What are you thinking of?” asked Mosso.
Catania’s eyes began to glow again. “Think back a few months. Suppose that, while the rest of us were worrying about what would happen if Bernie died, the Langustos were thinking about it another way.”
“What way?”
“Everybody knew Bernie wouldn’t live forever. The Langustos added up what they would lose if Bernie kicked off right away. It came to—I don’t know—say, a billion dollars. It occurred to them that they might make bigger money if they killed him themselves.”
“I’m lost,” said Pescati.
Catania spoke quickly but patiently. “They kill Bernie. They get every family together who stood to lose money, and say, ‘We’ve all got to look for the money together, because none of us can find it alone. Just for efficiency, report what you find to us and we’ll tell everybody else.’ People get used to talking to the Langustos instead of each other. Pretty soon the Langustos are telling everybody’s people where to look for the money and who to call if they see anything. And they’re deciding who gets to be cut in and who’s cut out. I told you they didn’t invite Frank Delfina to that meeting, right?” His mind seemed to take another turn that surprised him. He asked, “Who have we got out on this right now?”
Mosso pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling. “I guess it’s about three hundred made guys out of town, and the ones who work on their crews. Figure a thousand, fifteen hundred.”
“Suppose something happened right now—today, right here in New York? Say I need guys to line up along Thirty-ninth Street and protect this building from the Langustos? How many will show up?”
Cotrano frowned. “Jesus, Victor … ”
“How many?”
“In twenty-four hours, everybody, with all their crews. In half an hour, I don’t know. Maybe fifty, probably less. We kept the good earners at home, not the guns. We’ve even got some of them out running down bank accounts and addresses and stuff.”
“Mixed right in with people from the other families, right? Molinari’s guys, Langusto’s guys … ”
Pescati and Cotrano began to look increasingly uneasy. Even Mosso seemed uncomfortable.
“See what I mean?” said Catania. “It’s like this was designed to sucker people like me. I figure, if I keep my guys at home and the rest of them find our money, are we going to get it? No. So I send my soldiers away, so I don’t lose out. But what if that was the whole point? The families that go along with the program like they already work for the Langustos … well, pretty soon, they’re going to find out that they do. But the ones the Langustos know will be trouble can be handled. Like me. Instead of having to face my four hundred guys with his four hundred and fifty, they just have to face the fifty guys we kept home because they were good at arithmetic, but not so good in an alley on a dark night.”
“You think Phil Langusto is making his move like Castiglione did?” asked Mosso.
Catania shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought from the beginning that if somebody killed Bernie the Elephant and got his hands on the money, the place we’d find it wasn’t going to be the March of Dimes. The only thing I’m sure of now is that this is a hell of an easy way to take over another family.” His eyes were sad and wistful as he stared down at the street outside the window of the Rivoli Social Club. “I wish I had thought of it myself.”
26
As Jane drove west out of Chicago on Interstate 90, her constant glances into the rearview mirror and her careful appraisals of each car that appeared beside her gave her a chance to study the women that she was trying to impersonate. That one ahead and to the right had probably dropped somebody off in the city—a husband at work, a child at school—and she was driving her Land Rover back to the suburbs. Jane read the frame around the license plate: Valley Imports, Elk Grove Village. Jane pushed a bit harder on the accelerator to pull closer to the woman. The hair looked almost exactly like Jane’s. A lot of women with babies cut their hair to keep little fingers from tangling in it. As Jane drew abreast of the woman, she could see a child strapped in a car seat behind her.
Jane pulled ahead. She had to keep looking for danger, not finding new ways of telling herself it was gone. She had verified that the changes she had made had lowered her profile—made her look like a million other women—and proving it to herself over and over was pointless. She was doing what she had decided to do, and she had known exactly what the risks would be before she had made the choice. There were lots of people who had been dazzled by the sums of money the Mafia took in, and had concocted some clever scheme to divert some of it. There were skimmers and embezzlers and hijackers and con men, young members of gangs who got into grown-up rackets without considering who had been making all that money before they were born. The graveyards of big cities were full of them.
The half disguise she had assumed was not bad, but it was best in situations like this: if all anyone could see were brief glances from a distance, she was difficult to distinguish from the people around her. At close quarters, she was still Jane. She spent a few seconds thinking her way through the rest of her original itinerary, and decided it was not good enough. They had her picture, they knew that she was mailing letters. The only way to fight them was to try to do it quickly.
Jane stopped at mailboxes in Hoffman Estates, Elgin, Rockford. From there she took 39 south until she came to a tollway rest stop just west of De Kalb. After she had mailed her letters she filled the gas tank, spent a few minutes rearranging her boxes of letters in the Explorer to bring the next ones up to the front, and went into the little store to buy a pile of road maps.
Then Jane began to drive. She kept moving across the long, straight highways, always just fast enough to cheat the speed limit a little but not enough to be pulled over by the highway patrol. She drove to Moline, crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa, and stopped in Davenport, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids. She turned west again on Route 30 and reached Ames at six, then went south to Des Moines. She didn’t stop for dinner until she had approached the southern edge of the city.
She ate quickly, spent five minutes moving the next boxes of letters to the front of the Explorer, collapsed the empties and stuffed them into a Dumpster, then drove onto Interstate 35. She reached Kansas City after dark, and found a big central post office just west of the junction with Interstate 70. She was fairly confident that even the most thorough search for her wouldn’t include any surveillance of closed post offices, so she drove up, dropped her mail in the box outside, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 70.
She stopped in Columbia, reached St. Louis just before dawn, and slipped into the city just ahead of the wave of commuters. She made five stops on her way through St. Louis, and as the traffic around her began to crowd and slow, she got back on 70 and crossed the Mississippi again into East St. Louis.
Jane’s nervous energy was beginning to leave her after the night of headlights on nearly empty highways. She considered her options. She didn’t feel ready to settle into a hotel, because it would take too much time, so she pulled off the big highway, made her way back to the park with a little patch of green grass and shady trees she had seen from the road, parked the Explorer, climbed into the back seat, and
slept.
When she awoke, it was to the sound of voices. She lay still and listened for a second, then verified that they were the voices of children. She raised her head and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was noon, and there were other cars in the lot. As she got back into the driver’s seat, she could see that there were three families at the picnic tables, the parents laying out food and drinks, the children running around in that aimless way they did after they had been confined in a car—first chasing one another, then rushing back, then just running. Jane backed out of her parking space and headed for the interstate.
The noon sun was bright, the day was clear, and the stops were far apart. She stopped at Vandalia and Effingham to mail letters, then followed Interstate 70 into Indiana at four o’clock.
She stopped just over the border at Terre Haute, then at Indianapolis, then Fort Wayne. She ate in a truck stop, where she knew there would be little competition for the ladies’ room. She locked the door, washed herself as well as she could, and worked on changing her appearance again.
It was great to be a young suburban matron driving her SUV around during the daytime, but it wasn’t daytime anymore. Tonight she wasn’t going to be driving across long, sparsely populated stretches. She knew that in some of the areas where she was going tonight, suburban matrons were going to be scarce. She tucked her short hair up under her baseball cap, put her thin windbreaker on over a loose sweatshirt, and laced up her running shoes. She evaluated herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like a man, precisely, but she was as tall as many men, and on a dark city street, her silhouette wouldn’t scream out, “What am I doing here alone?” She slipped her wallet into her back pocket like a man, and wondered how they could stand the way that felt. But when she stepped back from the mirror far enough to see herself at full length, she was pleased. It disguised the female shape of her backside pretty well, if she kept the windbreaker down to her hips.
