by Thomas Perry
Baldwin’s grin caused the two men with him to follow his gaze to see what was causing the commotion. They saw the beautiful girl get out of the Bentley and listened to Baldwin’s appraisal: “I’d give five hundred pounds.”
“For one of her earrings,” said Mack Talarese. “That’s a Rolls she just got out of.” His name was Mario, but nobody called him that anymore except his relatives. One of them was his uncle, Tony Talarese, whom he called Uncle Antonio with the greatest humility and a hint of gratitude. Uncle Antonio lived in New Jersey, but he had managed to get young Mario a chance to make his bones as a soldier for the Carpaccio brothers, two entrepreneurs who were trying to establish a business in England. Someday, Uncle Antonio hoped, his nephew would wear Savile Row suits and carry a briefcase into a two-hundred-year-old building, where he would manipulate the computers and fax machines Antonio thought of as the instruments of power, buying and selling and controlling the immense flow of cash that would be coming from America. The money would be translated into investments of incalculable value and unassailable strength. But first Mario would need a few years to make himself into the man who could do it. He needed the experience that would make him different from the other men in tailor-made suits in the old, gleaming offices. He had to know without faltering what he would do when a man tried to avoid him on the day his loan was due, what he would do when one of his hookers withheld a portion of her earnings, what he would do when a rival appeared to be surpassing him. He had to know that when the time came he would not hesitate to act with force and certainty. He had to know where all that money came from.
Now Mario saw something that struck him as the greatest good luck. The man who had emerged from the Rolls-Royce looked familiar. Mario couldn’t remember his name, but at home they would sure as hell remember. He was the hired specialist who had gone crazy years ago and whacked all those guys. He had killed even Mr. Castiglione, who must have been eighty at the time, living like a withered emperor in a fortress on a man-made oasis outside Las Vegas. Mario considered how to use his good luck. He could call his uncle Antonio on the telephone and tell him what he had seen. But then his uncle would be the one who would get the credit; he would put a couple of men on a plane. If Mario could just handle this himself, take a careful grasp of the good luck so that it wouldn’t slip through his fingers, he could take years off his apprenticeship. Somebody would hear about it and elevate him to a place of respect that was rare for a man of his years, and free him from dependence on the meager patronage of his conservative uncle.
Mario took inventory of the assets at his command. There was Lucchi, the young Sicilian who was making the rounds with him. Lucchi had been a waiter in a small, dirty London restaurant that the Carpaccio brothers owned. They had brought him here from Sicily and given him a job to pay off some debt they owed someone through the complex and prehistoric accounting system they carried in their heads. Lucchi still dressed like a waiter in tight black pants and loose, bloused white shirts with ancient stains on them, and he walked like a woman.
But Mack also had Bert Baldwin. “See the guy with her?” asked Mack. “He’s somebody we want.” When he had said it, he felt a wave wash over him; it was as though he could feel a huge infusion of heat pump into his blood. What if he were wrong? He had seen him only once, by chance, and he had been a kid then.
“What do you mean, you want him?” asked B. Baldwin. “Does he owe you money?”
Mack gritted his teeth in fierce urgency. “He’s a psycho, so we have to be careful. And I think he had two guys with him in the Rolls.”
B. Baldwin squinted at him. After a moment he was satisfied that he understood, and thought he might be able to wrest something significant out of this. After all, he had been the one who had pointed the victim out, or at least seen the bird, and that was the same thing, wasn’t it? “Well, good luck to you. I’ve got a lot to do before the first race if I’m going to pay you after the last one.”
Mack clutched his arm. “This is bigger than that. It’s bigger than a hundred damned races. If we get him I’ll pay the Carpaccios myself.” When he saw Baldwin’s sawtoothed smile, the wave washed over him again. He remembered that he had no idea how much Baldwin actually owed the Carpaccio brothers. The two Sicilians kept everything in their heads and told him how much he and Lucchi were supposed to collect from each of their fish. They didn’t even let him carry it. Lucchi was supposed to deliver it, and they talked to him in rapid, low-voiced Italian that only a native-born Sicilian could understand. He still didn’t know if he was in charge and Lucchi was his bagman, or if Lucchi was in charge and he was sent along only because Lucchi’s English was so bad. But it didn’t matter now because he was going to make his bones on the Butcher’s Boy.
Baldwin winked and nodded to a man in the crowd Mack recognized as a pickpocket. The man sauntered over to the booth, and while Baldwin handed him his stack of betting slips, Mario turned to Lucchi and searched his memory for the Italian words. “It’s a question of honor. This man has acted like an animal.” In fact, Mario had only a vague idea of what the Butcher’s Boy had done, except that he had somehow managed to kill a large number of men and at the same time get Carlo Balacontano convicted of one of the murders, and Bala was still serving a life sentence for it and sending embarrassingly inflammatory reminders through channels to the outside, Mario watched Lucchi’s face as he exhausted his vocabulary. “He violated hospitality, threw loyalty out the window and made my uncle ashamed.”
Lucchi’s eyes flickered in a faint reaction. Mack hoped that something in his stammered litany had meant something. “Si,” said Lucchi quietly. The Carpaccio brothers had not brought Lucchi to England to save him from the endemic poverty of Sicily, but from a sudden manhunt launched by the national police in Rome. When he had killed the banker Giovanni Parla in his bathtub it had been to expunge an insult Parla’s grandfather had committed against Lucchi’s grandmother before Lucchi’s father was born. And since Lucchi’s father had died attaching an oversensitive pipe bomb to a Parla’s automobile, Lucchi had not felt he could honorably stop there. After he had left Parla bleeding to death in the bathroom, he had gone to the other rooms of the house and killed the wife and two children. Now he said in English, “How do you want it done?”
Meg pulled Schaeffer into the stands and sat him down in the center near the bottom. “Okay, Michael. Let’s appraise these horses. My system is to ascertain which are the tallest, and then place large wagers that they’ll win.”
Schaeffer stared out at the broad green lawn. There were a few horses being exercised on the track, which was little more than a white railing cordoning off a portion of the expanse of grass that stretched from the road to the hills where buildings began. It wasn’t like American tracks, which were almost like freeways for horses, bordered by huge concrete structures for crowds of bettors, electronic tally boards and the subterranean bunkers where money was pushed through windows and machines pumped out tickets. He liked it. Things in England always seemed to him faintly amateurish. “I wonder what’s keeping the others.”
“Jimmy’s always been like that about parking. He cares about machinery. Have I ever told you that’s something I like about you? You don’t care at all about machines.”
“Are you sure you haven’t offended Peter?”
“Positive.” She turned to him and gave him her most enigmatic smile. It looked so open and guileless that he knew it was a practiced artifice. “When we were young, he talked me into taking off my clothes—one garment at a time, of course. He took Polaroid pictures of me. I could see that I was beautiful from the first ones, and I got rather caught up in the whole thing, mainly from the pleasant surprise and narcissistic curiosity. So I kept unbuttoning things further, and letting the cloth slip lower to reveal a little more. When there was nothing left to take off, I found I wanted to see myself from angles I hadn’t seen. Peter still has the pictures, I’m sure. I was just reminding him that I remember too.”
“Why do
you tell these stories?” Schaeffer asked.
“Because it should have happened,” she answered. “Or something should have. Something shameful and scandalous. In fact, we were a sad, gangling lot with running noses who were lonely and bored and cold most of the time, but were afraid to speak to each other. It would have been nice if something had happened, and if I tell it that way it will make it seem true. Who does it hurt?”
“No one. I’m going to find them.”
“What on earth for?”
“So when we want to go home they’ll allow us in the car.”
He stepped carefully down the wooden bleachers, then made his way through the people on the ground. As he had since he was young, he avoided looking straight into their eyes when he moved past them, always looking at the place where he would be after a few steps. In the street he turned in the direction Jimmy had taken when he had let them out of the Bentley. A small feeling of discomfort lodged in his throat as he scanned the straggling trail of men and women strolling toward the track. In the years since he had gotten off the airplane at Heathrow carrying a passport in the name of “Charles F. Ackerman,” he had come to depend on an orderly sequence of events that could have passed for a sense of decorum and conformity. He had an instinctive dislike of walking toward a large herd of people, presenting his face for each of them to notice and wonder about.
When at last he saw the Bentley, it was parked at the curb under an ancient walnut tree. Already, the black skins of nuts had specked the mirror finish, and a couple of leaves were plastered on the windshield. Jimmy Pinchasen was an idiot. If the car was so important to him, he should at least have parked it in the open. He walked to the car, stopped and looked around him. If they had come this far, why hadn’t he passed them on the way? He squinted to see through the smoked glass, and froze.
He could dimly see Pinchasen and Filching inside the car. Pinchasen was lying on his side in the front seat, as though he had simply toppled over. Filching was lying facedown in the back seat, and his pant legs had ridden up to his calves. Someone had dragged him by the ankles to his present position. From the quantities of blood that had seeped into pools on the leather seats and the floor, he judged that their throats had been cut.
He straightened, looked to the right up the street and to the left down the street to see that no cars were coming, then started across. The steady stream of people kept coming, a little fester because the races were about to begin, and now he looked at them differently, staring into their eyes, searching for a sign of recognition. All his old habits came back automatically. At a glance he assessed their posture and hands. Was there a man whose fingers curled in a little tremor when their eyes met, a woman whose hand moved to rest inside her handbag? He knew all the practical moves and involuntary gestures, and he scanned everyone, granting no exemptions.
He and Eddie had done a job like this one when he was no more than twelve. Eddie had dressed him for baseball, and had even bought him a new glove to carry folded under his arm. When they had come upon the man in the crowd, he hadn’t even seen them; his eyes were too occupied in studying the crowd for danger to waste a moment on a little kid and his father walking home from a sandlot game. As they passed the man, Eddie had touched the boy’s arm, and he had opened the webbing of the glove so that Eddie could pluck out the pistol with the silencer attached to it. Eddie then turned and put a round behind the man’s ear. He remembered the man taking another step and then toppling forward to the sidewalk. As Eddie hustled him away, he had heard people saying something about heart attacks and strokes. Bystanders had made way for them, apparently feeling sorry that Eddie’s little boy had seen some stranger at the moment when a vessel in his brain exploded.
Schaeffer felt his pulse beginning to settle down now. In the first glance into the parked car, he had known it all as though he had seen it happen. His mind hadn’t raced through a series of steps, or shuffled through the possible implications of the sight to his own survival. In an instant he had been jerked back ten years to the old life: somebody had spotted him. They never forgot, and they never stopped looking.
Mack Talarese leaned his back against the side of the curio shop and tried to catch his breath. He looked at Lucchi with horrified awe. The little waiter had turned out to be something else, and Mario was not entirely comforted by what he had seen. Mario and Baldwin had come up on the driver and the bodyguard from the front of the car as the driver eased the big Rolls into the curb. Mario had formulated a notion of taking the two of them somewhere and shooting them. But then Lucchi came up on the right side of the car behind the driver, and his right hand appeared from behind his thigh, and there was a gravity knife already open, and the hand went inside the open window, and when Lucchi drew it back it was bloody. Then Lucchi had the back door open and was inside the car doing the other one. The man had managed to clamber into the back seat and unlatch the door, but Lucchi was already on him. He was already dead when Lucchi grasped his ankles and hauled him back inside.
Then the little Sicilian walked casually ahead of Mario and Baldwin back toward the racetrack. But Talarese had caught the look on Lucchi’s face as their eyes met. When Mario was a child on Long Island, his dog had caught the scent of a rabbit in the field and run off after it, interpreting Mario’s calls as some kind of exhortation to greater speed. Then the dog had brought the broken, limp thing back with him in his mouth, his eyes looking proud and hopeful, returning for the approval he knew he had earned. Lucchi’s eyes had looked like that.
Baldwin leaned close to Mario as they followed Lucchi. “Ferocious little bastard, isn’t he?” Talarese nodded. Lucchi was dangerous. He was something Mario had never anticipated, a throwback, a Sicilian like the ones who had gotten off the boat at Ellis Island before the First World War, lean, cunning, ambitious and utterly without compunction or reluctance.
Mario decided to let the implications of his discovery wait until the day was over. He was operating on his own already. The Carpaccio brothers would have no idea who the man was. When it was over Mario would be the only one in a position to take advantage of the accomplishment, and he would be transported to the United States and raised to the heights appropriate to young men who had initiative and decisiveness. Lucchi would be a fond memory.
“Come on,” Mario said. “Now that he can’t leave, he’s ours.” He walked out from the side of the shop onto the street, and he could hear the others’ footsteps following. He didn’t look back. He concentrated only on moving through the crowds of people toward the racecourse, where the Butcher’s Boy—Jesus, that was the best part; he must be forty by now—would be sitting in the grandstand with his girlfriend, never suspecting that the forces he had set in motion years ago had already stripped him of his soldiers and cut off his only means of escape. It was like that Shakespeare play they made everybody read in tenth grade. The bastard felt like a king, sitting there in the sunshine with a woman who wore the kind of jewelry a queen might have. Well, today was the day that Birnam Wood was coming to Dunsinane. The trees were closing in on the bastard. Mario smiled, and felt an impulse to say something about it to the others, but of course it would have been pointless. Baldwin was English but probably hadn’t made it to the tenth grade, and Lucchi wouldn’t even know who Shakespeare was.
Margaret Holroyd was fighting disappointment. She looked out across the field to where the beautiful horses were being steadied and reassured by jockeys and trainers. They were festooned with silks in gorgeous, gaudy colors, and the jockeys wore oddly clashing combinations, probably cut from the same ten bolts. They were so far away that she could see very little except the tiny spots of emerald, pink, crimson and gold. What in the world was she going to do without Michael? He had been gone for only ten minutes, and already she missed him and was feeling angry with him. She couldn’t go on playing with him much longer. Soon she would begin to get little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes like Aunt Caroline, and then she would have to be responsible and act as though she’d neve
r had a time like this in her life.
There already was no doubt that she could change, and this was a sign too. Not so long ago, she wouldn’t have believed she could; people would have recognized the hypocrisy immediately and laughed about it. But now she was perfectly competent to carry it off. What a shame. If she had been at home now, she decided, she would have spent the afternoon in the big leather chair by the library window, wallowing in poetry, probably Ubi sunt poems: “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” And she would have let the bright afternoon sun deepen to amber, then darker and darker shades of blue, as the light slowly dimmed the page and finally left her in darkness, a little rehearsal for getting old and dying. No, she wouldn’t, she admitted; it was a lie. She stood up and stepped quickly and recklessly down the steps to the grass. It felt good on her open toes, a little damp and tickly, and there was Michael already.
He was striding quickly toward her, as though he wanted to head her off and say something before she wandered away to the loo or the betting booths. Well, fine, she thought. She was perfectly willing to be distracted from whatever she would have found to pass the time. When he reached her, he didn’t stop walking, just took her arm and swept her along. She kept up with him, conducted smoothly by a gentle pressure that changed directions subtly, telling her where to go. “I was getting bored,” she said.
His face was empty, and he was looking ahead as they walked. “Don’t talk, just listen. We’ve got to get out of here right now. Some people are here to kill us.” He looked at her for a second. It sounded impersonal, as though he had overheard a weather report.
