by Thomas Perry
He relaxed his muscles and controlled his breathing while the minds of the two men outside lumbered toward the only possible strategy. He saw a shadow float along the front window toward the alley, and then watched the other shadow loom suddenly at the door. A moment later the glass was hammered inward, and a big arm reached through the hole and tugged at the crash bar. The door swung open and a big man pivoted around it into the restaurant, visible for only a second as his silhouette slid across the broken door into the safety of the darkness.
This man’s movements were an unpleasant surprise. He was big, but he used his strength to move himself gracefully into a corner and hold himself low, silently waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness while he listened for the sound of an intruder. He was crouching in a spot where nobody could get behind him, and he could control both doors. With every heartbeat it became more likely that the man was cunning enough to stay where he was until his partner came in through the loading dock and flushed any intruder out the kitchen door.
In the kitchen, the widow had somehow freed herself from the man with the apron and resumed her tirade right beside the dining-room door, where the words were audible. “Whores!” she shrieked. Then there was the quavering voice of another woman, younger, frightened but steeling herself to defiance. “He was the one who wanted to.” This seemed to enrage the widow even more. “Of course he was the one who wanted to. He wanted everything, like a little boy. I hope they play this on the six o’clock news, so your grandmothers hear it and drop dead. And you with your bleached hair, twitching your ass in his face every day—”
Suddenly the big man in the corner leaped up and knocked over a table on the way to the kitchen, bellowing, “Gloria? What’s she saying?”
He waited for the man to burst through the swinging door, then glided to the front of the restaurant. He pushed gently on the crash bar and opened the door only wide enough to step through it to the street. He put the gun into his pocket as he walked. In a moment he was around the corner, out of sight of the restaurant, a fortyish man in good clothes making his way toward the subway entrance two blocks down the street. As he walked, he had no concern that the two soldiers would be able to sort out what had happened in the two minutes in which they might still catch him. If they did, they would be in their cars looking for a man in a car.
As he approached the subway entrance, he reached into his pocket and felt the pistol. He was reluctant to relinquish it after all the trouble he had gone through to get it from the salesman’s wounded friend, but he reminded himself that it was more dangerous to him than to anybody else now that he had used it. He moved down the steps to the shelter of the underground and used the change machine to buy a token to get him through the turnstile. It was all a sequence of simple, mechanical, logical steps.
He saw that he was alone in the big, echoing tunnel. In the silence he could hear the rails clicking somewhere, but the sound was still far off. He wondered how things had changed so much that he would be alone at a subway stop, even at two in the morning.
He jumped off the platform, ran down the track to the tunnel mouth and looked around again. There was no other human being in sight, and no sound except a train somewhere in a parallel tunnel, not even audible now, just a vibration through the bedrock. It had to be now. He took the little pistol out of his pocket, wiped it clean with his sleeve, laid it carefully across the gleaming steel rail, then turned, ran back to the platform, hauled himself up and waited. In a few minutes, even a few seconds, the New York transit system would effectively dispose of his weapon for him, turning it into something that looked more like a torn orange peel than a firearm. If the serial number miraculously survived, the nearest it would lead the most astute police force to him would be a delirious teenager lying in a hospital bed miles away.
Ackerman heard the reassuring sound of the train long before it arrived. It was rattling through the tunnel as though it had no intention of stopping. He watched the rail where he had placed his pistol. Suddenly there was a flash of light as the nose of the train swept past, and then it was just a strip of windows, most of them empty or nearly so, a few somnolent, dull-eyed faces looking out past him at the walls.
The train came to a stop beyond the boarding zone, and he had to walk quickly to reach the door of the last car as it opened automatically to receive him. He stepped through it just before it slid shut. As he moved to a seat, he took a census. Most of the cars he had seen were nearly empty, and a man alone sitting in the bright light would stand out like a stuffed animal in a diorama in a museum. In this car a dozen people sat in the sleepy boredom of the late shift, or the mildly disappointed memory of an evening out. Four big men sat in the two seats across from him, thick-necked beer swillers with pudgy fingers and bowling bags at their feet. There were two tall, studious-looking black men sitting in the seat in front of him. One of them wore wire-rimmed glasses with small, flat, round lenses that looked as though they had been issued by a Soviet medical mission to Zimbabwe. They caught the overhead lights and glinted whenever he glanced at the four white men across the aisle. His companion seemed to be a little more used to New York subways, and kept his gaze ahead to avoid meeting the eyes of any possible lunatic who might be staring at him in incomprehensible hatred.
The rest of the passengers were like him: solitary men who didn’t want to be either memorable or visible in this place at this time. There were no sales to be made, contracts to be negotiated or friendships to be started on a subway after midnight, and any contact with the people surrounding them was risky. He adopted the same pose; he slouched a little, but only enough to suggest ease, not physical weakness. Like them, he cleared his mind and set his face in an ambiguous, empty expression.
He waited until the subway had stopped at Thirty-fourth and Sixth, then watched until a train decorated with a white airplane on a blue background arrived. The gradual replacement of words with colors and pictures had accelerated during his time away, and it made moving around a kind of puzzle. What could it be but an airport express? Maybe an ad for air travel? But it took him to the Howard Beach-JFK Airport station, and a bus came to shuttle him to the terminal.
Ackerman didn’t see people on his route. He saw the backs of heads, collars raised and bodies bundled against the predawn chill, eyes half-closed because there could be nothing to look at until the train stopped moving. When he entered the terminal he took the precaution of finding a door with a little picture of a man on it so that he could wash any invisible traces of burned powder off his hands and forearms to fool a paraffin test. Then he went to his locker, retrieved his suitcase and returned to change his clothes in a stall.
He knew he was acting like a shopkeeper who had just killed his wife for the life insurance, but something unexpected had happened at Talarese’s. He wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but he knew it couldn’t be good.
Elizabeth Waring Hart poured boiling water through the coffee filter, then set the kettle back on the burner without making any noise. She stopped and listened to the baby monitor for a second, poured the coffee into her cup and then sat in the cold predawn darkness. As soon as she raised the cup and touched it tentatively to her lips, she heard Amanda’s first stirrings. There was a faint little gasp that the monitor amplified into a rattling snore, and then came the roll. The crinkle of the biodegradable diaper sounded like the crumpling of a newspaper over the thin layer of static. Then Amanda began to coo to herself in her crib, and Elizabeth listened intently. In a few minutes, she would be crying for rescue, but as long as she was experimenting happily with sounds and running the morning inventory of toys in her crib, it was better to leave her in peace.
Elizabeth took another sip of her coffee. When Jimmy was this age, Jim had been the one to do this. He had been a morning person. Sometimes, soon after he had died, Elizabeth had felt strange when she sat here, taking his place. Sometimes she had even tried to talk to him, because it seemed as though he were nearby. She would say, “You bastard. You stup
id bastard. You should be doing this.” The counselor from the hospital had said that anger was a normal reaction, but counselors were in the business of telling people things were normal that weren’t.
When the telephone rang she snatched it off its cradle before it had finished its first jangle. “Hello?” she said, just above a whisper.
“Elizabeth.” It was a statement, uninflected, and not enough to tell her who would call at this hour.
“Yes.” She matched the emptiness of the tone.
“I think we’ve finally found something that will make you come back to Organized Crime.” So it was Richardson. When she had transferred out of the section ten years ago, Richardson had been at her level, just a data analyst with a law degree. Now he was in charge.
“What’s that?” she asked without curiosity. She had been in two other sections of the Justice Department since then and taken two maternity leaves, and nobody had ever asked her to come back.
“A couple of hours ago in New York a man walked in the back door of a restaurant and put a hole in Tony Talarese’s head.”
“Tony T?” What surprised her was that she remembered who that was. She could be away for a hundred years, and she couldn’t get the names out of her memory.
“There’s only one suspect. He did it in front of Talarese’s brother, his wife and three mistresses.”
“Interesting. Who was it?”
“The Butcher’s Boy.” But she wasn’t really listening, because there was no other reason why this man would call her at this hour. She was already thinking way ahead: about the kids’ babysitter, about the problem of arranging a temporary transfer out of her section when everybody was working double shifts tracing money from Housing and Urban Development into private bank accounts and about the dress at the dry cleaner’s that she wished she could wear if she had to go into that office again. Part of her was also listening to the baby monitor, because Amanda was beginning to change her tone subtly, occasionally pausing in her quiet babble to issue little bulletins of discomfort.
Richardson gave her the old desk. It was amazing that it even existed; no, not that it existed—because anything that had ever been on a government inventory stayed on it—but that it was still here in the same place, not even shifted off the little wooden wedge Elizabeth had jammed under one leg to keep it from wobbling on the uneven floor.
She played the tape recording a second time. The gun was unbelievably loud. She glanced at the report again: .32 caliber. But, of course, he was firing it two feet from the microphone, into Tony T’s head. She listened to the loud scrabbling, tearing sound, and then the woman shrieking, “The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!” She punched the button.
She stood up and walked into what they had called the chief’s office. In the old days she wouldn’t have considered walking into that room without knocking, but Richardson was her contemporary, and, whether he knew it or not, he wasn’t her boss.
He looked up from his desk. “Well?”
“And the grieving widow said it was the Butcher’s Boy?”
“She said that’s what her brother-in-law told her. He, of course, won’t tell anybody anything.”
“She happen to mention what he’s been doing with himself all these years?”
“I don’t get the impression she’d ever heard of him before. When we catch him you can fill each other in.”
Elizabeth felt it. She couldn’t help that. But she reminded herself that Richardson wasn’t complicated enough to try to jab the sensitive spots. Those ten years had been her portion of a decent life, her allotment. She was a widow too. Richardson knew at least that much. She said carefully, “We’re not going to catch him unless we figure things like that out. You called me down here in the middle of the night, so help me.”
Richardson pushed aside his papers and looked at her evenly. “Right.”
“What were they doing in a closed restaurant—a party?”
“Hardly,” said Richardson. “There was an empty hearse in the back lot. They were going to the airport to pick up Tony’s nephew. It’s been a bad week for Clan Talarese.”
“He was killed too? Where?”
“England.”
She jumped up. “My God, we’re wasting time. Get me the flight lists from London to New York. Every flight since the nephew died. And every flight out of New York since he killed Tony T.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. We don’t even know what happened to the nephew. It might have been AIDS.”
“Then find out. But later. First the airline flight lists.”
Elizabeth worked alone. In the old days it used to take hours of negotiations to get anything from the airlines. Now any question from the Justice Department—at least the Washington office-induced a special kind of panic. Too many planes had been dropping out of the sky. The fax machine kept buzzing, and Richardson’s secretary had to keep walking back into the little cubicle to change the paper.
Elizabeth crossed off all the names of women, then all the names of travelers with Frequent Flyer credits, then all the reservations made more than a week ago, then all the passengers with names he couldn’t be expected to use—Yamaguchi, Babatundi, Gupta, Hernandez and Nguyen—then looked through the sheets again. What else? What was it that made him special? Nothing. That had to be it. There would be nothing special at all: no special seat, special meals, special luggage arrangements. He didn’t give a damn if he rode naked in the baggage compartment; all he wanted was to get out fast and disappear again. She checked the notations on the printouts once more, crossing off any passenger who had a special request.
That left an encouragingly short list. There wasn’t time to count the names, but there were still too many. She thought about what he had done. He had walked into a kitchen, shot Tony T in front of a lot of people and walked out. It was the middle of the night. Of course he had known Tony T was dangerous. What he would have wanted to do was to sneak into Talarese’s bedroom while he was asleep and empty the pistol into his head. It would have been between three and five in the morning, the time the police always picked for a raid, when he would be deep asleep, and the plane reservation would be based on what he had wanted to do, not what he’d had to do. He would expect to be finished and on the street by five-thirty at the latest, at the airport again by six-thirty and on a plane by seven-thirty or eight. That was the absolute outside limit.
Elizabeth pushed aside half of the flights. Would he sit around in an airport until 10:55 waiting for a way out, when anybody could walk in and see him? Not a chance. He would be long gone by then. He’d be up in the air about thirty thousand feet on his way to … where? Not someplace where there would be two flights a day, eight hours apart. If he missed the first one, there had to be another one warming its engines on the runway. Someplace big and busy. She went through the pile of flights again, pulling out the small cities, losing hundreds of names as she did it, and feeling warmer now, closer to him. Once, years ago, she had gone through the airline lists, knowing that he was one of the names, and never gotten this close. He had already landed somewhere before she even knew he had taken a plane. But this time was different; these flights were still in the air. Maybe this time.
He was running, and he wasn’t going to cross his own path. No return reservation. She obliterated all the round-trip tickets, now finding reasons for eliminating names faster than her hand could move to strike them out. Almost all the remaining names had booked return flights.
Form of payment. He would certainly have credit cards, probably in a lot of different names. But if he did, he wasn’t going to let them be used to trace him away from the crime scene, and he wasn’t going to throw one away for an airline ticket. He would use them for hotels after he had come to earth someplace safe. He would pay cash for the ticket.
There were only five names remaining on three flight lists now, and she laid them all out on the table and stared at them. One of them looked wrong: Hagedorn, David. She was sure she had crossed that one off a
lready. She looked quickly from sheet to sheet. Hagedorn, Mary, traveling with Hagedorn, Marissa. Parents. At one time she wouldn’t have understood, but now she did. It was that awful, depressing anxiety that one of the planes was going to fall out of the sky, and some sort of magic would keep Marissa from being an orphan. She crossed off Hagedorn, David.
There was nothing to distinguish any of the other four. They had all bought tickets with cash on the day of the flight. All had chosen to leave New York on morning flights. All were males traveling alone, taking any seat they could get. Somebody undoubtedly had heard a relative was sick, another had been called for a job interview, another had a girlfriend who wanted him to join her after all. The fourth had just fired a pistol into the head of a New York caporegima, and was understandably impatient to get out.
Richardson came in behind her, but she didn’t look up. “How’s it going?”
“I’ve got it down to four,” she said.
“How the hell did you do that? What are the criteria?”
“It would take an hour to show you. We don’t have an hour.”
“Give me the four.”
She handed him the three passenger lists with four names left untouched. “I don’t know how to get it down to one.”
He glanced at the lists. “Dallas … Chicago … Los Angeles … another Chicago. What do you want to do?”
“If there’s any way in the world to hold all four of them, do it,” Elizabeth said. “He’s running. Though he doesn’t exactly run; he just sort of fades out. He won’t stay put. He’ll get on another flight under another name. He’ll pay cash.”
