by Thomas Perry
“Keep your clothes on,” he said. “Your old man will be out here when I finish.”
“Mr. Balacontano?” Elizabeth began.
“That’s right.”
“My name is Elizabeth Waring.”
“Good for you.” The old man stood up, walked to the bucket, placed the mop in the wringer and prepared to go back to work on the floor.
Elizabeth reached into the inner pocket of her purse, pulled out a little leather wallet and held it out toward Balacontano. “U.S. Justice Department.” He glanced at it, but showed no interest. “I have a couple of questions for you if you’ve got time.”
Balacontano leaned on his mop, and the cold eyes turned on Elizabeth as though he had just noticed her presence and found it peculiar. “Is that some lame witticism?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “Not at all.”
“Save your questions,” said the old man. He didn’t sound bitter or angry. “I don’t answer questions.”
Elizabeth had prepared herself for this. “These aren’t hard ones. They’re about an enemy of yours.”
“Just out of curiosity, what are you offering me?”
Elizabeth sighed. “I don’t usually have much to do with the people who run these places.” She looked around the sparsely furnished room with mild distaste. It looked like motels built fifty or sixty years ago, when they had consisted of six little shacks arranged around a gravel drive. “I plan to tell Warden Bateson that you cooperated. I don’t know if that buys you time off for good behavior or just two desserts at dinner.”
Carl Bala looked at her shrewdly. “Come back when you can tell me which.”
Elizabeth met his gaze. “Last night Antonio Talarese was murdered. The killer was somebody named the Butcher’s Boy. Do you know him?”
Balacontano considered his options in a new way. “You’re from the Justice Department?”
She nodded.
“What do you do there?”
She decided that telling part of the truth would give the right impression. “I’m an agent on temporary duty with the Organized Crime section. I’m here because I think there’s something unusual going on. I didn’t bring my résumé with me.”
“What makes you think I know anything about this Tony Talarese or this other guy?”
Elizabeth took a deep breath. This man must be better at detecting lies than any prosecutor. The fact that he was alive and in his sixties proved it. She would have to work into it slowly. “The charts in Organized Crime show an arrow going up from Antonio Talarese to you. That means you’re his boss. If that’s not true, let me know and we’ll change the chart. It’s no trouble. We have to change it anyway because he’s dead.”
“This isn’t how it works, you know. I’m supposed to have my lawyers with me, and then we sit down and talk over your offer. If we can cut a reasonable deal, I tell you something. They can’t just send some special agent in here to flash a badge and ask me questions.”
“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I assure you that you won’t be bothered again for the rest of your sentence.”
Bala looked into her eyes, and the thought occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t lying. This was it, the first time in eight years that they had even bothered to come here. It was one thing to bargain hard, but it was another to see the only buyer on earth walking out the door. “Wait a minute. At least let’s talk for a minute.”
“All right.” She sat down on the chair across from the bed.
“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view. You want me to do something that’s risky. I have a right to something in return.”
“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view,” she said. “At the moment the Justice Department is interested in finding the man who killed Tony Talarese. I believe you are too. The difference is that you’re in jail and I’m not. Oh, and there’s another difference. You know who he is and I don’t.”
“You’re not offering me a pardon or an early release or anything?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not at the level to make that kind of offer, and nobody would approve it. Those things have happened, but much more seldom than you’d think from the amount of publicity they get. And what nobody mentions is that they always involve special conditions.”
“What kind of special conditions?”
It was time for the lie, and she gave it apologetically so that she could look down and avoid his sharp little eyes. “Look, I don’t know an awful lot about your case.” She knew everything about his case. “But I don’t want to lie to you. As I understand it, you’re not a likely candidate. In addition to being cooperative, the person provides some evidence that what he did was minor, or that there were extenuating circumstances.”
“I was innocent. Is that extenuating enough?”
She ignored his protest. “I just thought that since this man murdered a friend of yours last night, you might at least know who he is.”
Carl Bala considered. If he said nothing, that would be the end of his pardon. If he said something, what would this woman do to him? He could tell the story in a way that wouldn’t incriminate anyone but himself for what had happened in the old days. If he did, what were the police going to do to him? Throw him in jail for longer than life? There was omertà to be considered, but if he didn’t mention anybody else’s name, the cops couldn’t go after them, so how would they know he had talked? Besides, from what he had heard, omertà didn’t mean shit to anybody these days. This was just the same as it had been all his life: a simple question of consequences. If he told her what he knew, maybe she could begin a process that would someday get him out. But even if he was making a mistake, there was nothing she could do to him. The one thing he was sure of was that it was his last chance. “Yeah, you bet I know him,” he shouted. He knew that he had spoken too loud, but it had taken such an effort to break the words free that he had forgotten to modulate his voice.
Elizabeth kept her face slack to hide her surprise. “Who is he?”
“He’s the crazy little bastard who framed me for murder.” Balacontano let go of his mop and let the handle topple to the floor, then sat on the bed. Elizabeth watched the discarded glasses bounce once on the tight blanket; Balacontano noticed them too, and went through the ritual of putting them back on. “You want to close out your file on him. I want to close out my file on him too. But not just yet. First he’s got to give me my life back.
“Ten years ago, I made a mistake. I was an important man, capo di tutti capos. I had a lot on my mind in those days. You probably think it’s like the movies: an old guy with a face like a prune and a shiny suit sits behind a table in a room so dark you can’t hardly see him and sends big zombies out to machine-gun a mom-and-pop grocery store because they didn’t pay their nut that week.”
Looking at Balacontano, Elizabeth decided this was probably accurate. All the old man needed was the suit.
“Well,” said Bala, “it’s not. It’s like any other business. It’s the shifting of capital to where it’s going to do the most good. At the time I came here, at least ninety-five percent of my business was perfectly legal. I had interests in corporations, T-bills, oil leases, franchises, bonds, real estate, stocks. That’s what made the money. Why do you think the people who really own this country put their money in those things? Because they’ve got no balls? Let me tell you, if Citibank or Salomon Brothers thought they could make more money stealing cars, you wouldn’t be able to get a ride from here to the bathroom. Once in a while, when things got rough, I’d cut a corner.”
“Was that your mistake?” asked Elizabeth. She couldn’t believe it. Carlo Balacontano was talking to the Justice Department. “Cutting corners?”
Bala’s left eyebrow formed an arc. “Please, don’t make me think you’re stupid now.”
Elizabeth had allowed herself to get too excited to think clearly. She had to concentrate on what he said and keep him talking. “How did this man fit in? Did he work for you?”
Bala
contano thought about it, then shook his head. “Even the people who worked for me weren’t like that—employees with a lunch bucket. But he was something else. He was a specialist. One day, with no warning, I suddenly developed a tax problem, and I want you to know I wasn’t the only one. Some of the biggest corporations in the country developed the same problem on the same day.”
As Bala remembered it, he could still feel the shock and outrage as though he were hearing it for the first time instead of telling it. A United States senator who had been obsessed with the unfairness of the income-tax laws for twenty years had begun to assemble a list of profitable corporations. They were doing nothing illegal, which was why they made such an effective set of public examples. All they were doing was plowing profits back into the business on capital improvements, acquisitions, new markets, new equipment. But in the computer search the senator’s staff had uncovered, along with the corporate giants, a company called FGE. They had left it on the preliminary list because it sounded big. The G and E might have stood for “Gas and Electric.”
But FGE had been a low, dirty beige building beside a shopping mall on the edge of Las Vegas. Half the building consisted of rented post-office boxes, and the rest was devoted to a small office with secondhand furniture and paneling on the walls that looked like wood but wasn’t. In it a man named Arthur Fieldston did business as Fieldston Growth Enterprises. His entire trade consisted of receiving large amounts of cash from the quiet men Carl Bala sent to him and paying it out to accounts that Carl Bala designated, as payment for imaginary investments and services.
The day Carl Bala learned that FGE was about to become famous, he had experienced a shock that felt as though he had taken a sucker punch from a small, weak opponent. He summoned Harry Orloff, the fat, disreputable lawyer who had invented FGE, to his farm in Saratoga, and ordered him to dismantle his invention. Orloff had whined that it would take weeks, and in the meantime Arthur Fieldston, the last remaining member of a well-known western landowning family, would receive a subpoena to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. At that moment, Carlo Balacontano had experienced a fit of something he would later describe to himself as “mad caution.” He had exaggerated the importance of the problem in his own mind. Then he had told Harry Orloff it was worth his life to be sure Fieldston didn’t testify.
To Elizabeth he said, “My attorney, Harry Orloff, decides that he needs time to get the papers in order. He tells himself the only way is to get to the senator who’s causing the problem. That was Senator Claremont of Colorado.”
Elizabeth was listening to something she had waited ten years to hear. It was what had brought her into the case. At first everyone had thought the senator had committed suicide, but then the lab people had discovered that the poison had been in the glass he’d used to soak his false teeth.
But Carlo Balacontano was still talking. “I didn’t know what Orloff was doing to take care of things until it was too late. I’m sitting in a restaurant in New York one night, a nice family place owned by the son of a friend of mine, and I get the word. This United States senator didn’t die in his sleep in Colorado. Or he did, but the reason he happened to do that was that Harry Orloff had managed to hire a specialist to come in and do him. I’m shocked. I’m knocked on my ass. I’m furious. On the one hand, the hearings are held off, and Arthur Fieldston is hiding so he can’t be dragged in to answer questions. On the other, my little tax problem with Arthur Fieldston is nothing compared to assassinating a fucking senator. I figure my only hope is that the rest of the world is going to look at the list of corporations getting subpoenas and figure that one of the oil companies or the car companies had decided that they might save a couple billion dollars by not answering too many questions. The problem is that when a big public figure dies, everybody in the country with a badge, gun or law degree, or even a typewriter, comes out to beat the bushes.
“And that’s where I made my second mistake. I’m sitting there at the table in the restaurant, and there’s a candle burning on the table. My man tells me that Harry Orloff needs two hundred thousand dollars to pay off the specialist, because he’s done his job and he’s just shown up in Las Vegas to collect. I’m already so pissed off I can barely see. I’m looking at my guy, and it’s like his face is at the end of a red tunnel. My head is pounding, and I notice I’m breathing so hard that the candle flame is flapping like a flag. When I hear the part about the two hundred thousand and the specialist showing up and registering at Caesars, I go absolutely berserk. I tell the people at the table with me that I want out of this. I want it to be like it never happened. And that was it.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth. “That was what?”
Balacontano shrugged. “That’s what put me in here. What I’m guilty of is understating my income to the IRS. I figure two years is enough time on that, so I ought to be out six years ago.”
Elizabeth’s face showed no expression. “Except they tell me you weren’t convicted of tax evasion.”
Balacontano waved his hand in frustration. “You’ve got to understand what we’re talking about here. I don’t know how to make you see it. There’s a lot of talk about hit men and all that, so it sounds like going to an exterminator or something. What people don’t think about is that getting somebody killed isn’t all that hard. I saw a couple of days ago in the paper that some woman in Phoenix hired two teenagers to strangle her husband for a hundred bucks apiece. With competition like that, how does anybody make a living? I’ll tell you how. There are only maybe five or six genuine specialists that I know about, so there can’t be more than two dozen, tops. And they’re an odd bunch. You hear about movie stars and famous heart surgeons and these morons with the guitars, and somebody says they’re prima donnas. They don’t know what the hell a prima donna is.
“These specialists I’m talking about are very hard to deal with. A movie star does it for the money, sure, but he likes the applause too—the glamour, the admiration. Not these people. They honestly and sincerely don’t give a shit what you think, whether you like them or hate them; if people flock around them or avoid them, it’s all the same. A friend of mine once told me it was because their egos were so big that they didn’t think anybody else was even real. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s not out of the question. If you hear about some piece of ass who decides she’s a great actress and throws tantrums at the director, people say she’s impossible. You want to see impossible? Try sitting across a table from a guy who wouldn’t notice it if he had to tear your heart out of your chest on the way out, because he’s done it a hundred times before and he’s so good at it he can do it without having to wash his hands. Well, that was the kind of man Harry Orloff hired to delay the Senate hearings: one of the fifteen or twenty serious specialists. After that, when I said I wanted everything to be as though the whole Fieldston fiasco never happened, I was talking in general terms, and I was misunderstood.”
“What did they do?”
Balacontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out on the Las Vegas Strip and blow his head off.”
“I take it this was without your knowledge.”
“Damned right. They only had it half figured out. They knew he could be terrible trouble and had to be out of the picture as soon as possible. They also knew that nobody strolls up to a professional killer and says, ‘Sorry, pal. It was all a mistake. The man who hired you had no right, so we’re not going to pay you.’ But what didn’t occur to them is that there’s a reason why these characters keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. I’m not saying my people should have known what the reason was, because I sure don’t. I’m saying they should have known that there was a reason, and accepted it, and given the son of a bitch his lousy two hundred thousand and prayed to God they never saw him again. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly
full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred-and-first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”
Elizabeth could see the frustration and anger growing in the old man as the story began to move closer to his own defeat. What he didn’t know was that it was hers too, seen from the other side as though through one-way glass. “What happened?”
Carl Bala smiled a sad little half-smile, and snorted as he thought about it. “You probably wonder why I can tell you all this, don’t you?”
“The question did occur to me,” Elizabeth conceded.
“Because they’re dead. Harry Orloff, all of the people I’m talking about. He killed six or eight people that night. I think he didn’t get Orloff until the next morning.” Carlo felt a little twinge at the mention of Orloff because he had ordered his death personally, but it was the same thing. He wouldn’t have had to if it hadn’t been for the Butcher’s Boy, by that time running amok: a man who had shown that he could and would do anything, who had no allegiance to anybody, no discernible fear and nothing to protect. Balacontano had simply reasoned that if Orloff were gone, the hired killer might not be able to figure out who he had been working for. That had turned out to be his third mistake. “But he didn’t stop there. He went across town to Castiglione’s house.”
“I thought the Castigliones were a Chicago family?”
Balacontano looked at her, distracted, then seemed to collect himself. He spoke patiently. “This is old Paolo I’m talking about. He was retired. Don’t get me wrong, though; Castiglione was still a very important man. In the old days he used to run Chicago. I don’t know how old he was ten years ago, but he had to be in his late eighties. He lived in a big brick house at the edge of Las Vegas because it was supposed to be good for his emphysema. Vegas was under a truce. All the families had business there, and anybody could go there. Castiglione was one of the old ones—strong, didn’t know what pity was. When he retired, he had generations of enemies. You should have seen the place he had there. From the street all you could see was a big wall. When you got through the gate it looked like the Maginot line. There were floodlights and windows like slits in a pillbox. I wouldn’t be able to swear he didn’t have the place booby-trapped too. Somebody new bought it a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they flipped a switch in the den and half the lawn blew up.
