by Thomas Perry
The bouncer took a birdlike sip of his beer and returned his eyes to a sad survey of the rest of the patrons sitting at tables ranged around the dark interior of the bar. Behind the eyes he was a small, shy little introvert who had inherited the body of generations of brawlers and laborers, then with introspective concentration had built it into a comic-book picture of a man, with muscles that he compared each day, one by one, with a series of photographs in a glossy magazine. He saw himself as a kind of lifeguard who was always in attendance at a scene of continuous and foolhardy revelry that he was never moved to join.
Ackerman walked past the bouncer to the bar, edged onto a stool and found that he had immediately intersected with the bartender’s orbit. “Perrier,” he said. The bartender’s answer was a warning and a challenge: “That’ll be three-fifty.” He reached for his wallet to signal that he was aware he was going to pay that much for a glass of water, and the man moved to the cooler.
Ackerman placed a five-dollar bill on the bar, then moved toward the sign that said RESTROOMS. There was a dark little hallway, and two doors with the international symbols for the sexes, two gingerbread people so nearly alike that they signified nothing until compared for differences. He had been glad to see the bouncer because it meant that the pay telephone would still be firmly attached to the wall, and the book would be intact. The bouncer was the sort who would have considered the destruction of a telephone book an infraction that required his regretful attention.
He had no difficulty finding the home address. There were only four Talarese numbers, and only one Antonio. But then he noticed the business numbers. The first was Talarese’s Bella Italia, then a number for catering, and one for reservations. The address was on Mott Street in Little Italy. It had to be the same place, the little catering store where he had met Tony T years ago. He walked back to the bar and sipped his bubbly water. The antique clock on the wall over the bar, a plain black face with glowing green numbers and a green neon ring around it, said that it was ten minutes to one.
He sat in the subway car looking at the spray-painted graffiti on the walls. The colors had gotten better, the viridian greens and new shades of orange, and the gold and silver metal-flake, but the script was now so ornate that he couldn’t read any of it. When it occurred to him that it might be a different language, he decided it should still be organized into words. It looked more like the samples of Sumerian and Phoenician in the books he had found in his house in England than like any modern language. The British were always complaining that London was no longer an English city. They should see New York. It had always been a few steps closer to chaos than London was, but now no European would recognize it as having any historical relationship with anything he knew or understood. It was as though the Indians had returned to claim it after a three-hundred-year sojourn in the woods.
The train clattered to a stop, the doors opened and he stood and followed two anorectic heroin addicts onto the platform. They were probably younger than they looked, and they looked about twenty, two pockmarked young men in tight black pants that betrayed the fact that they had sat on the ground at some point, and thin almost-antique jackets of early synthetic materials—one in a silky blue-gray that he remembered seeing on someone when he was a teenager, and the other in a dirty bile-green with a texture almost like foam rubber. He could tell that they were holding, because the shorter of the two kept patting his pocket to reassure himself that he hadn’t dropped the bag or his works. In England they made an effort to keep the poor bastards supplied and off the streets, so he had forgotten about them. But at least these two were holding, so he wouldn’t have to watch his back when he moved out into the darkness. They would be on their way to a peaceful place where they could bring up a vein.
He ascended a set of concrete steps that smelled like a urinal, past old paint that was beginning to peel, taking with it the most recent graffiti and revealing more beneath it. When he reached the street he came around the railing and moved toward the catering shop he remembered.
He had no trouble seeing the store from a distance. It was after one on a Saturday night, and two men in suits were standing on the street like parking attendants. A big gray car pulled up in front, and one of them went to the window to talk to the driver. When the car pulled around the building, Ackerman remembered the loading dock in the back. Even in the old days, the little square of tar had been an unusual extravagance in this part of town, where trucks usually stopped on the street in front of businesses and unloaded onto the sidewalk. By now the Talareses could probably have lived off the rent on that much land. It was a place invisible from the street, where they could park a truck and bring anything in or out of the building. If the police had been both smart and honest for any extended period, they would have given themselves an education by watching that lot.
He walked up the street opposite the store, holding it in his peripheral vision. There was more to it now. There was a restaurant on one side with lights on but drawn curtains, and a big CLOSED sign in the window. The store that he remembered was dark. As he walked, the street began to take on an unreal quality, as though it were part of an old, familiar dream, the changes that time had made in it no more important than the little alterations his mind made when he invoked a landscape to contain his explorations in a dream. Once again he was walking alone on a dark street, clearing his mind and relaxing his muscles for the moment when he would need to decide and act faster than others could. This life should have been over long ago.
Disconnected bits of memory began to merge as he walked. Eddie Mastrewski must have been about forty on the winter day in Cleveland when they had sat in the car and watched the man walking through the snow toward the parking lot, and had both realized that if Eddie used his gun someone would hear. Eddie had leaned down to zip up his rubber boots over the cuffs of his pants, whispering “Aw shit, Aw shit” to himself more than to the boy. Then he had said, “It has to be now. Tomorrow he’ll know, and then nobody will ever get near him.” So Eddie chased the man down and killed him quietly with a tire chain. He came back red, sweating and gasping for breath, his eyes bulging as he started the car. “I’m too old for this,” he had said. The boy had said nothing. Eddie hadn’t been entirely serious, but from the boy’s position in the front seat next to him, watching his big chest heaving under the heavy overcoat, and the bloated cheeks inflating as he blew out air, it had seemed true. Eddie had lasted a long time in the trade, and by now he had come to understand what that meant. Nobody could go on for thirty years now. It had been a generation that had something more than strength and stamina. They had some kind of animal stupidity, something that made them unaware of the pointlessness of going on. Some of the men who had dialed the telephones in the early 1950s and heard Eddie’s cheerful, resonant baritone sing “Eddie the Butcher” over the wire were still at it: wizened, desiccated old skeletons, still studying the changing configurations of people and money to discern a pattern that would give them another way to steal. Eddie, younger than they were, was long dead.
Eddie had been a butcher, and the shop hadn’t been a simple disguise. It was part of Eddie’s homemade philosophy that a false identity was always a transparent, amateurish ruse. He had raised the boy in the butcher shop, first teaching him to sweep and wash the floors, then to care for the gleaming knives and saws, then finally to use them himself, as though Eddie had expected him to follow that trade rather than the other one. But Eddie hadn’t thought things through clearly. He simply taught the boy what he knew, some of it nonsense and some of it useful. Sometimes the long days in the shop came back to him now.
“I never knew a man named Earl that you could trust. For some reason they’re all thieves.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. But knowing it gives you an edge, because they don’t know you know.”
He had taught the boy the skills of the butcher shop, but Eddie had never imagined that in such a short time butchers would become as anachronistic as blacksm
iths. Now only the rich bought their meat from a real butcher. The shops were like boutiques, and the only reason customers came was because they had the illusion that the prices they paid made the chemicals and hormones disappear from the meat. All the butchers worked for big meat-packing plants now and punched time clocks and belonged to the meat cutters’ local. They couldn’t accept part-time work that might take them out of town any time they got a telephone call. Eddie had lived to see the beginning of this change. He would notice that some of his old customers drove past the shop on the way to the supermarket. He would shake his head as though the small profit he made from the shop mattered to him. “You know what those bastards charge for a chicken? Two dollars a pound. When I was your age I could get laid for two dollars.”
“Did you?”
“Hell, no. You think the clap is a joke?”
Ackerman turned and crossed the street two blocks down. The only way to approach the restaurant without letting anyone get behind him was to enter through the loading dock. Eddie had taught him to clear his mind and spend a few minutes in calm, dispassionate meditation before he committed himself. “You look, you wait, you think. Then, if it’s doable, you think again. Do you know how you’re going to get out if your first plan gets blown?”
Eddie would have taken him past the restaurant and let him look at it. “Once you’re in, you’re like an egg in a frying pan. You got two seconds to get in, see him and pop him. You got three seconds to get across the floor while they’re wondering if you want them next. You got maybe a second to get out the door. You stand still more than a second at any step, you heat up and fry.”
But this wasn’t Eddie’s kind of job. Eddie would not have understood why he was here. Eddie’s philosophy was, above all, cautious. There were only smart and stupid; Eddie had never understood the word audacity. When he had heard the word applied to Napoleon on television, he had thought about it for a moment and then said it meant pressing your luck. Eddie would have told him he was a fool to come back to New York, but he’d had no choice. He had returned only because there was no practical way for him to stay alive but this. He had to kill the man who possessed the secret knowledge that he had been in England.
If Antonio Talarese had already told the others, they would have insisted on sending someone more formidable than the three hastily armed leg breakers he had seen at Brighton. Obviously Talarese had decided that the chance of a sudden coup was worth the risk. Ackerman still had a hope that he had arrived in New York before the news that Mario Talarese was dead.
As he moved down the narrow alley into the parking lot, he could see that he was much later than he had thought. The telephone call from England had already come. A hearse was parked behind the store, probably waiting to meet the body at the airport. He stood still and looked at it, but there was no sign of the driver. The funeral home must be owned by one of Antonio Talarese’s friends. The driver would be a relative of the owner, a volunteer who had been invited inside with the others for a glass of grappa or anisette to help pass the time while they waited for the plane.
He was all the way back in the old life now, feeling his heart trying to beat stronger, harder, but finding he was still able to keep it slow. Eddie had taught him about noises by making him watch the cat in the butcher shop. If the cat made a sound, it would wait minutes before it moved again. The boy had learned that he could do the same. If his foot dislodged a stone or a board creaked, he rested and waited. In the early days when he had first worked alone, he had sometimes counted to an arbitrary number before moving again. It didn’t matter what the number was, so long as he had waited beyond a human sense of time before he made another noise. Now, even after ten years of inactivity, he was still too good at it to have to think about it. He moved along the side of the building to the loading dock, rolled onto it, waited and listened.
He could hear low voices inside the building. They were coming from the back of the restaurant. He could see them in his imagination, sitting in the kitchen.
“Eat?” said a man’s voice that he placed low and near the wall. “How am I supposed to eat? It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, and I feel like this is my fault.”
“Shhh. You’ll give yourself agita.” The woman was standing up, farther away.
“Nobody said it was your fault.” This one was standing too; another man, and he was moving, probably pacing. “Please, Tony. Eat something. You’ve got to eat.”
Ackerman used the aimless ritual of the conversation to crawl to the door. This was the entrance he had used when he had met Tony T. He pulled on the steel door, but it had an unbudging solidity that told him it was locked and staked down with a dead bolt in the floor. He would have to get in another way. As he moved closer to the kitchen door he could smell something cooking. It was the burning fat of meat mixed with something spicy that burned his nose and made him hungry. He didn’t allow himself to smell it for long because it belonged in the category of irrelevant sensory distractions. It was other people’s food, just part of what pertained to them, like their talk and clothes and names.
He stood in the darkness for a moment and tensed the muscles in his legs, feet, toes and then arms. He took a couple of deep breaths and let his heart rate speed up and the moment of dizziness turn into tension. He took the little pistol out of his coat pocket and flipped off the safety, then opened the door and slipped inside the kitchen, looking around him.
He stared into the eyes of a thin, dark woman in a black dress with a string of pearls around her neck, incongruously wearing a pair of huge, quilted oven mitts that looked like flippers. The woman froze, speechless, as he crouched and moved sideways behind the man seated at the stainless-steel table.
The man at the table saw her, twisted in his chair to see what she was looking at and scowled. In the last decade the face had gotten coarser and thicker, and the wavy black hair now had a few wiry gray strands, but it was unquestionably Tony Talarese. “What?” The mouth was thin and wide, and the pointed chin stuck out in annoyance until the eyes focused on the face that was too close. “You? Why you?”
It seemed an odd question, but Ackerman had no time now to wonder about it. He thought of Eddie’s egg in the frying pan as he placed the gun against Talarese’s temple and fired, then moved, not back toward the door but forward, sidestepping the woman in black, who was running to the body slumped forward on the table, flapping her arms to get rid of the oven mitts like a startled bird trying to take flight.
Nobody else in the kitchen moved as the woman flung herself on the dead man’s back. Their eyes fluttered in their heads, not knowing where to look as he stepped past them: a middle-aged man in a dark suit and an apron, two girls in their twenties, one black-haired and the other blond, but like sisters, wearing short tight black dresses with a lot of stiff lace and explosions of chiffon at the hems as though they had just come from a nightclub. As he reached the swinging door to the dining room, two other young women who had the flat shoes and big forearms of waitresses rushed in past him, one carrying a fire extinguisher upside down. He was prepared for the screams, but the screams didn’t come from them. They came from the woman clutching the dead man to her. He slipped out the door to the dining room.
Inside the kitchen, the woman cried, “Tony!” There was a short pause, and then, “What’s this?” The others flocked to her, trying to pull her away, but she didn’t budge. She tapped on the dead man’s back, and mere was an audible electronic click. “A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!”
The woman tore at Antonio Talarese’s back. The kitchen had turned into this small dark woman’s personal madhouse, and confronted by the spectacle, the others all seemed to forget about the killer. The woman clawed Talarese’s shirt up out of his belt to his shoulders, so that everyone could see that Tony T did have something taped to the small of his back. The woman squawked again, “See? I never would have believed my husband—” The grieving widow turned to the man in the apron. “Are these things always turne
d on?”
“What?” The stunned man in the apron looked as though he had been shot too. “What?”
“You know. Can they hear … at night? I’m his wife. You know what I’m asking.”
The man seemed to decipher the words with great difficulty, groping toward the idea but not quite believing that anybody could be asking what he thought she was. When he arrived at it, he reacted with contempt. “For Christ’s sake, Lucille! Who fucks with his coat on?”
That seemed to satisfy the wife for a moment, and her bony shoulders drooped. But what he’d said had brought understanding to one of the waitresses, a plump, fair woman about thirty-five. She seemed to remember something. “Oh, my God,” she wailed, and the widow’s eyes flicked toward her and narrowed. The widow’s lips curled back to bare her teeth. “Whore!” she shrieked. As she hurled herself at the buxom, peach-faced waitress, she didn’t notice that both of the young girls in the black dresses and the other waitress were backing toward the loading dock with identical stunned expressions on their faces. One of the young girls was compulsively jerking at the chain of a diamond pendant, trying to snap it off her neck. The widow was so alert she could see into their souls. “You too? You all let him do it wired up like a radio station?” Her voice shattered into a cackle.
Ackerman moved across the dim, empty restaurant, staying low and keeping his eyes on the door. He heard the hysterical woman exploring new octaves beyond soprano, but her screeches didn’t resolve themselves into words.
Behind him in the kitchen there was a series of screams as pots and pans and then a table were knocked over. He watched the front door of the restaurant, crouching in the deep shadows below the bar. He heard the door rattle as one of the men on the street tried to open it, and then saw their shadows moving rapidly back and forth at the windows. Their voices didn’t reach him over the noise in the kitchen, but he knew that eventually one would make a dash around the building to the loading dock while the other came through the front door into the dining room.
