by Thomas Perry
She heard the phone in Richardson’s office ring and watched him snatch it off the hook. At first he looked elated, which meant that it was the FBI calling him from Los Angeles and not a file clerk letting him know that she was going to be late. But now he looked concerned, then frustrated. He leaned his head on his fist and let his shoulders slump from the tense shrug that had held them for the past five minutes, and she knew it was over. She drifted to the doorway and looked at him, lifting an eyebrow. “They lost him,” he said.
“Why?” Her throat was dry, and it was just a sound to make anyway. It didn’t matter.
“They don’t know. He paid cash for a ticket to Hong Kong, then never showed up. Our birdwatcher at the airport says it’s because the FBI sent four identical G-man types who proceeded to walk up to him and ask him to point out the suspect. Who, incidentally, was still calling himself Charles F. Ackerman.”
“Today.”
He nodded. “Today.”
“Did the birdwatcher say anything else?”
“He’s a little annoyed. He said if this guy’s so important, how come nobody told the FBI to send the first team.”
“Good question.”
“I thought it was implied in what I told them, but he said they acted like we were after an eight-o-niner.”
“What’s that?”
“I was afraid I was the only one who didn’t know. It’s what he calls a person carrying money out of the country for illegal purposes. They’re not usually dangerous.”
“What’s eight-o-nine, an IRS regulation?”
“No. It’s a telephone area code. Cayman Islands, Dutch Antilles …”
“I’ll remember that. It’s probably where all the HUD money went.” She turned and walked over to her old desk to get her purse. As she picked it up, she tried to remember whether she had left anything in the conference room. No. She could feel her pen, wallet, keys and glasses through the soft glove leather. It was going to be all right. She could be in her office in the other building in time for work, and none of this would have to take up space in her mind. Then she realized that Richardson had followed her out. In a way it was an appropriate gesture. She had given up several hours of her time to a division she didn’t work for, and somehow the fiction had been allowed to grow between them that they had been friends in the old days, so for the moment it was good to maintain the pretense long enough for her to get out of here gracefully. The truth was that when she had left the section ten years ago, she had officially gone on vacation and then never come back. She’d had no impulse to say good-bye to anyone at the time, and when it had occurred to her that she should have, it was too late. Nobody in the office had called her, either.
“Elizabeth,” Richardson said. He was going to thank her for the favor. Fine, she thought. She’d say it was nothing, and then she would be out of here.
But he said, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”
Carlo Balacontano had been playing gin rummy since he was twelve, and he was very good at it. In October he would be sixty-six, and it was one of the things he could still do as well as he ever had, because even though his arms were no longer heavily muscled and his knees were sometimes a little stiff, his mind was still able to determine and remember the locations of all fifty-two cards, if a game came down to that. Usually he needed to hold only about thirty in his head at once, and he could do that, talk and think about business at the same time. But today he wasn’t doing any of that, because he was sitting across the weight-lifting table from José-Luc Ospina.
Every day Carl Bala came to sit under the overhanging roof of the weight-training area. When he approached in his slow, leisurely stroll, four young men would step up and begin to haul the barbells off the leather-bound table so that he could sit down, take his deck of cards out of the breast pocket of his blue-denim shirt and rip open the package. This ritual had gone on since his second month at Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility eight years ago.
He would have begun to play gin right away, but for the first four weeks he had been out of his mind. His lawyers had assured him right up until the last day that his case would be retried in the Court of Appeals. But the judge had read the trial transcript in one afternoon, then ruled that there were no grounds for appeal. This had somehow stuck with him during the next few weeks, tormenting him, awake or asleep. Carl Bala was not a no-neck whose reading speed was determined by how fast he could move his lips, but he simply did not believe that anyone could read twelve hundred pages of testimony in one afternoon. He suspected that the pompous little bastard was one of those people who had gone to a class where they learned to read by moving their index fingers down the center of the page. The fact that after all these years he had finally been convicted on a bogus charge had not struck him as outrageous. With few exceptions, the people he knew who had gone to jail had been guilty, but not necessarily guilty of the particular crimes discussed at their trials. The system knew its enemies. If he’d had the choice of either accepting the simple murder of Arthur Fieldston or confessing to all the things he had actually done, he would have chosen Fieldston.
These days, the irritant that made Carlo angry most frequently was the existence of José Ospina. Four years ago on a summer afternoon Balacontano had arrived at the weight table to see the usual gaggle of prisoners wearing the thick leather belts cinched around their middles to keep their guts from popping out, straining to raise the heavy weights above their heads and curling the small barbells to make their already-bulging forearms look like ham hocks. He had sat down at the table, pulled the little red string to open the cellophane on his new deck of cards, removed the jokers and begun to shuffle. Then he had looked up to see a tall, dark young man with curly black hair and eyes like a cat sit down across from him. The man had his shirt cut off at the sleeves to reveal bony arms decorated with strange greenish tattoos. They were pictures of some sort of vegetation. They didn’t look like natural plants; they seemed almost architectural. Most maddening of all, they looked familiar. Carlo Balacontano didn’t recognize the tattoos until José Ospina had set his cards down on the table and whispered, “Gin.” Then he had taken off his shirt and Bala had found himself staring at the face of Benjamin Franklin. The tattoos were the flourishes and scrollwork engraved on a hundred-dollar bill.
From that day onward, José Ospina proceeded to ruin Carl Bala’s life. Carl Bala was rich: even now in New York there were large, quiet men who spent all their time driving big, heavy cars to various places of commerce to collect his rake-offs, percentages and tributes. He was also famous, in the way that mattered. Even here, three thousand miles and eight years away from the scenes of his triumphs, he could have walked into a hotel on the shore of the Pacific and taken the best suite in the place on the strength of his name. But that was in the outside world, and Carl Bala wasn’t living in the world. He was in a small, sun-bleached federal prison twenty miles into the dry yellow countryside of central California, hedged between jagged, impassable stone mountains that rose abruptly from the valley floor to the east and broad, open lowlards that stretched to the sea on the west; twenty miles of sparse, ankle-high weeds with every mile or so a crabbed, tortured live oak tree ro more than eight feet tall to provide the only shade.
In this place, meeting José Ospina was like watching a cockroach scurrying off his dinner plate. At first he had been a shock, but Carl Bala had tried to reconcile himself to it. Then, day after day, he had sat and felt the sting as the young man, looking a little bored, had set his cards on the weight table before him and said in his soft voice, “Gin.” Even worse, there were times when José Ospina would watch Balacontano discard once, then pick up his cards, fan them out, close the fan and say, “I’ll knock with ten.” Or eight or three. And Carlo would be frantically leafing through his brand-new hand, staring at the face cards, aces and tens he hadn’t had time to count up, let alone unload.
Stacked decks Carl Bala could have understood, but these things happened when José Ospina hadn’t so much as
cut the cards. Palming and substituting a whole hand was not unheard of on the planet Earth, but José Ospina always played with the sleeves cut off his shirt, the flourishes of scrollwork copied from the currency of the United States visible running up his bare arms. He had no place to hide extra cards, no way of cheating at all. José Ospina was lucky. Admittedly he was a pitiless, competitive, supernaturally alert gin player, but the immutable forces of probability and chance simply kissed him on the forehead and passed by him each day to settle with their customary ferocity on the shoulders of Carl Bala. Bala found himself living in this little penal outpost where the only pleasure permitted him was winning at gin, something that happened so seldom now that when it did it felt like mockery.
Carlo had used his status in the prison underground to find out what he could about José Ospina, and had obtained a copy of Ospina’s official file. He had learned that José Ospina had been transferred to Lompoc after two years of good behavior at Marion, Illinois, where he had been serving five to ten on a conviction for possession of counterfeit money and an arsenal of automatic weapons, including an M-60 machine gun. Under “Distinguishing Marks and Scars” was a description of the greenish tattoos, which the prison rumor establishment later told Balacontano had been done in Marion by Ospina’s partner, a talented engraver named Cardero. Under “Place of Birth” was the entry “Lexington, Kentucky,” suspicious since Ospina had a thick Spanish accent. But when he double-checked “Eye Color,” the form said “hazel,” the category in which the United States government placed all colors other than brown or blue. Ospina’s eyes were certainly not blue or brown; they were bright golden yellow, which was to say “hazel.” There was no sign that he was a card mechanic or a gambler or even intimate with gamblers. So Carlo had concluded that Ospina was merely riding a streak of luck like the vein of gold under Sutter’s mill, long and deep, but still finite, and he had decided to wait it out.
He had been waiting it out for three and a half years of frustration and simmering anger, having run up a tab of $344,000 in the process. In that time he had stepped up his purchases of decks of cards, sometimes bringing out a fresh one twice in a single day. He had also been treated by the prison doctor for an incipient ulcer and given a rubber mouthpiece to keep him from grinding his teeth while he slept. In 1958, when all of the East was at war over territory and dominance, and every three days somebody was found mutilated in the trunk of his car or broke loose from his anchor and popped to the surface of a river, Carl Bala had been able to eat heaping plates of hot sausage and peppers, then sleep like a hibernating bear. But not now; the effort of containing the anger had begun to threaten his robust constitution. The only release he had for his hatred was to send messages to his employees, subordinates, relatives and colleagues who lived in the outer world, demanding that they find the man who had framed him and get him out. Lately his demands had become more urgent, the implied rewards more princely and the veiled threats more dire. There were already those who believed that, like others before him, Carlo had gone mad in prison. But a madman with untold millions of dollars might overspend to reward those who humored him, and nobody doubted that, mad or not, Carlo Balacontano would be capable of finding strong hands to carry out any form of revenge that stayed in his agitated imagination long enough to turn it into words.
These threats had become particularly worrisome to some of the lieutenants who were now serving as stewards and trustees of his empire: Giovanni “John the Baptist” Bautista, Antonio “Tony T” Talarese, Salvatore Callistro, Peter Mantino. These men had covered themselves in advance by mentioning Carl Bala’s mad desires with exaggerated seriousness to their soldiers at more frequent intervals as the years passed and Balacontano’s parole was becoming more easy to imagine. Bautista and Mantino had also quietly discussed the possibility that if the culprit didn’t turn up before the old man’s first parole-board hearing, it might be inconvenient or even suicidal to let him walk out of prison alive. Talarese had come to the same conclusion independently, spurred by the possibility that the old man might figure out that Talarese had been stealing some of the profits.
Carlo Balacontano had intuited much of this, and informers had kept him abreast of the rest. He could easily have taken his revenge from the prison yard, but he needed these men for now. Thinking that they were working to fill their own pockets, they were amassing a greater hoard that he would come back and reclaim later. But he needed their memories more than their greed. They were all old enough to have seen the man he wanted. The young wise guys, the little weasels who were so eager to sell their bosses to the imprisoned chieftain and take over their fiefs, were too young. The Butcher’s Boy hadn’t been seen by anyone in ten years.
Carlo Balacontano knew how the system worked. In order to get out, he would have to supply the system with someone to take his place. The replacement could be dead, as long as something linking him to the murder of Arthur Fieldston was found with him: a forged suicide note with a confession, the cigarette lighter that Bala had pocketed at Fieldston’s office in the old days, when he had been there to discuss a deal—anything. A reasonable doubt might be enough excuse for someone to sell him a pardon, and would almost certainly be enough to get him a parole after eight years. Then he could get away from this place and from José Ospina, the man who was driving him mad.
Elizabeth Waring sat in the small cinder-block building just inside the gate of the prison, watching the other visitors go through the formalities with the prison guards. There were a pair of lawyers who seemed to know each other, one tall, thin and bespectacled and the other a squat little blond man with a brown suit that looked as though he had bought it cheap in a store that had a fat boys’ department. They kept calling each other “counselor” and “learned colleague,” as though it were a longstanding joke.
Fidgeting nervously on a bench across from her were three women who bore the same dazed, sickly expression on their faces, but had nothing else in common. One was a young, coffee-colored girl who seemed no more than nineteen. She wore a shapeless brown-and-black outfit that seemed to include a kind of sweatshirt and something below that could have been a pair of pants from an Israeli paratrooper’s uniform, but in sizes so large that her shy, cringing posture allowed her to hide in the material. Beside her was a tall, thin blond woman who might have been fifty but had such tight skin on her cheeks and forehead that she might as easily have been thirty-five. Her nose had likewise felt the surgeon’s scalpel, and seemed rightfully to belong to the sort of teenage girl who waited on tables in a short skirt and luminous panty hose. She wore no jewelry except a gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a diamond that might have been two carats. The third woman was about thirty, and Elizabeth had grouped her with the lawyers until she sat down with the other women and her face assumed the same fixed, humiliated expression. She wore a business suit and a white silk blouse with a bow at the neck that wasn’t a good idea. She even carried a briefcase. When the guard called, “Henley,” she stood up, walked to the desk and handed the briefcase to the guard, who opened it and removed a black lace negligee. The guard left the garment on the desk while he went through the briefcase for contraband, and Elizabeth could see that the woman’s ashen face was aimed downward, her eyes not on the guard but on the negligee, as though she were willing it to disappear. The two lawyers stopped talking and stared frankly at the proceedings, then listened while the guard repeated a short orientation speech on the rules of conjugal visits. The young black woman seemed to shrink still deeper into her clothes, but the older woman turned to wood, staring straight ahead like the figurehead on the prow of a sailing ship.
“Miss Waring.” The voice was behind her. She stood up and turned to see a man in a suit waiting for her. He looked like a dentist, serene and well scrubbed, with a shiny bald head. He held the door open and Elizabeth went through it to the concrete steps outside, then shook the man’s hand. “I’m Assistant Warden Bateson,” the man said. “I was told to expect you. Anything specia
l you need?”
Elizabeth would have preferred to hear a list of standard procedures for this kind of meeting. “I’d like to see him alone, and I suppose it would be better if the other prisoners didn’t know about it.”
Bateson smiled. “No problem there. We only have three conjugal visits, so we’ve got a couple of bungalows vacant. He’s been assigned to clean one of them.”
She sighted along Bateson’s pointing finger to a small, low cinder-block building just inside the fence. It looked like a communal bathroom in a trailer campground near a national park. “Can I be of any help?” asked Bateson.
“No,” Elizabeth said.
At the door of the little building, Elizabeth stopped and listened. There was a slow, rhythmic, scraping sound, then a splash and clank, then silence. She opened the door slowly, which set off another clank. She took the scene in at a glance. The mop had been set in the bucket and leaned against the door, so that it would warn Balacontano in time to get up off the bed.
When he saw her, the old man was swinging his feet to the floor, not looking toward the door at all, but reaching for his shoe and pretending to tie the lace. She hadn’t seen even a picture of him in ten years, but he looked about the way she remembered him. He was short and stocky, and wore his hair combed straight back, but close at the neck so that it didn’t touch the collar of his blue work shirt. The prison jeans looked odd and baggy on him, as jeans always do on old men, the unaccustomed informality of them evoking a businessman who had bought them to wear on vacation and never broken them in. Balacontano’s face was pinched and the nose hawklike, his little eyes glaring back at Elizabeth from behind a pair of glasses with a slight brownish tint. He finished tying his shoelace, then put the other foot up on his knee to tighten its lace to show he hadn’t been caught at anything.
