by Thomas Perry
Years later he had made his way to Buffalo with a contract on him so huge that it wasn’t expressed in numbers. The word had gone out that the man who got him would never have to do anything again for the rest of his life. So he had found himself one winter night in the musty, dark parlor talking to the quiet old man, with the big clock ticking on the mantel and the old furnace in the basement pumping warm air up through the register at their feet.
“I know who you are,” the old man had said. “It’ll be expensive.”
Ten years later, here he was in the parlor again. This time the old man said, “I remember you. It’ll be expensive.”
“I know,” Wolf said. He considered himself lucky that the old man was still above ground with ten years added on to the unknowable number he had already lived.
The old man seemed to be thinking about how long ten years was too. “How hard are they looking after all these years? Don’t lie to me.”
“They found me,” he said. “They must be trying hard.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“No. Why now?”
“I’ve been living far away all this time. I wasn’t stupid enough to even think about coming back, but Tony Talarese found me.”
“So you killed him, which makes four. Peter Mantino makes six, because you had to shoot a man to get to him.”
“So everybody knows.”
“People talk. This time I listened.”
“Why?”
“I knew you’d been away. That meant you don’t have anybody you didn’t know ten years ago.”
“So you waited for me to come.”
“I waited.”
“Are you going to help me?”
“When you were in trouble before, you didn’t want to run away from it until you hurt them. You killed about twenty of them before you let it go.”
“It wasn’t twenty.”
The old man shrugged. “It don’t matter. I want to know if you’re going to do that again.”
“No,” Wolf said. “It was worth trying to get Talarese before he told anybody where I was. I thought he was too greedy to let anybody else collect. Then there was a shooter waiting for me at the L.A. airport. Unless things have changed a lot, there’s nobody who could have arranged that except Mantino.”
“Who else do you want? Did you come to town to get Angelo Fratelli?”
“No. All I want is a passport and a way out. I want to go under again.”
“Then I’ll go see a man.” The old man pushed himself up out of the chair with his arms, and stayed bent over for a second before straightening. As he dressed for his errand, he looked frail and antique. He put on a sleeveless sweater, wrapped a scarf around his neck, put on a dark brown overcoat and then snapped a pair of rubbers over his sturdy leather shoes to keep his feet dry, as though it were midwinter. He walked carefully to the door. “Lock it behind me. Anybody comes who don’t have a key, shoot him.”
“I didn’t bring a gun.”
The old man had to turn the whole upper part of his body around to look at him. “There’s a shotgun in the closet.” He closed the door, and Wolf could hear him slowly and carefully moving over the elastic boards of the porch toward the steps, and then silence returned.
The house was still fiercely neat. The knives hanging from hooks in the kitchen had been sharpened so many times that they all had fillet blades, but they were hung in unbroken descending order of length. The old man’s collection of boots was lined up in ranks in the front of the closet. The shotgun was a Remington that might have been acquired any time after the turn of the century, and it rested in a stand that the old man had made, with a block at the floor cut with a jigsaw to fit the butt, and a pair of bent clamps on the barrel to keep it from toppling over. The plastic cap of an aspirin bottle had been fitted over the muzzle to keep out the dust. Wolf lifted it out of its stand and sniffed it: linseed oil on the stock and gun oil on the barrel. He pumped the slide and felt the smooth, easy clicks as he ejected a shell onto the carpet. He glanced at it before he slipped it back in: double-ought buckshot. The old man didn’t want to have to shoot anybody twice.
He had been awake most of the time for seventy-two hours now, and his mind was beginning to feel the wear. He had to force himself to stay alert for a few more minutes. He found the box of shotgun shells on the floor behind the boots, filled his coat pockets with them and took the shotgun with him.
He was beginning to feel an exhaustion almost like dizziness, so that when he turned his head he had to take a moment to focus on the new sight. He knew he was probably reacting to this more than to the danger of sleeping alone in the old man’s house, but he felt a nervous restlessness that made him afraid to close his eyes.
Eddie had given him advice on that too. “Before you go to sleep, always be goddamned sure you’re going to be alive when you wake up.” He used to keep the boy up watching the cars behind them while he drove, or sometimes just looking for a likely place to drop a weapon or change a license plate. Once he had even made him check off landmarks to be sure the road map didn’t have any mistakes on it. Sometime in the last few years Wolf had admitted to himself that he had always known it was because Eddie hated to be alone when he was scared. Eddie would have said, “I’m not scared. I’m just alert.” It still made him sad to remember that Eddie had been alone when he had died.
He walked through the house to the pantry, opened the door and turned on the light. The shelves were lined with cans and bottles to last for years, all arranged in rows, front to back like the displays in a tiny supermarket. He found a twenty-five-pound sack of rice, placed it on the floor as a pillow, laid the shotgun on the floor next to it and turned out the light. For a moment he lay there in the dark, opening and closing his eyes and not detecting a difference. He wondered if he would have to try something else. It had been ten years since he had slept on a floor, and the tile squares were harder and colder than they looked. But the idea of getting up again seemed an immense labor at the moment, and then he forgot what he had been thinking, and had to remind himself. He decided he had better move, but later, when he felt more uncomfortable, and then he was asleep.
He didn’t dream. Instead, his mind roamed the house, running hands along the walls, feeling the faint vibration of the old man’s oil furnace, like the sound of an engine pushing it somewhere with glacial slowness. Deep in the timbers there was the almost-inaudible creak of the house standing up to the wind off the river, and outside, tiny particles of grit blowing against the impervious shell of brittle paint on the clapboards. It was like being deep in the hold of a ship at anchor. His mind kept patrolling the surfaces, reassuring itself that the shell was tight and unbroken, and that his sleeping body was secreted in the center, where he had hidden it.
When he awoke, his first sensation was that he had missed something on his rounds, made a mistake. But then his mind tripped on the contradiction: he couldn’t have been both asleep and awake. But he knew there were people in the house. The floor amplified the impacts of their steps, and he could feel them in his body. The old man would have come in alone and warned him if he was bringing somebody back with him.
He picked up the shotgun and slowly crawled to the pantry door. He pushed the door open an eighth of an inch and looked out into the kitchen. It was still dark. He listened for a moment, until he was sure they were no longer in the room. He heard the creak of a door in the hallway being pulled open quickly, then a long silence. If there were people sneaking around the house in the dark, then the old man wasn’t one of them. He would have known it was the best way to get his head blown off. Could the old man have sold him? Not after giving him a loaded shotgun. Somebody was looking for Wolf.
At first the search would be quick and cursory. They would duck across doorways and step aside to swing doors open. When they had been through the whole building once without any resistance, they would go through again looking for hiding places. He had to get out before they got to that stage
. He held the shotgun level with the floor as he slipped out of the pantry into the open kitchen. He set his feet down softly, moving to the kitchen door. Now he could hear voices in the parlor, quick and urgent and soft.
He slowly turned the doorknob and pulled the door open before he let the spring turn it back. He took a step over the threshold, then another to take the weight of his body, then another and another until he was down the steps. He took a deep breath of the cool, damp air and blew it out to let it merge with the wind. As his head cleared, he admitted to himself that the old man must be dead.
He walked around to the back of the house, looked in the window and saw them. There were two of them, both carrying pistols in their right hands. One was tall and fat, with bristly gray hair brushed back like porcupine quills. He kept his pistol pointed down at the floor, while the other, a twenty-five-year-old with a pitted complexion and a sharp, chiseled face, danced around opening closet doors and jumping out of the way as though he weren’t sure when his partner might decide to shoot.
As he watched them, he studied the eager, predatory expression on the face of the young one. He looked as though he had just watched the old black man die, and the sight had agreed with him. He was in a state of excitement, thrilled that he was going to get to do it again. It took no more than a second for the impulse his look ignited in Wolf to travel its course. He knew Eddie Mastrewski would have said, “What do you get for it?” But by now the impulse was traveling too fast, gaining strength and getting hotter, and it made him raise the shotgun to his shoulder and hug it tight. He fired through the window, pumped it and fired again. After the second shot, as the barrel leveled from the kick and he pumped it again, there was an instant, like the wink of a camera shutter, when he saw pieces of glittering window glass turn end over end and sprinkle the two bodies sprawled on the floor.
He lowered the shotgun, pressed the disconnector and quickly pumped out the last three shells. Then he released the magazine, gave the barrel a quarter-turn and removed it from the receiver. He held both halves under his coat and walked down the driveway to the street. He had told the old man he hadn’t come to town to get Angelo Fratelli, but a lot had changed since then.
Angelo Fratelli hated white wine. It was his belief that it was a weak, sour version of the rich, blood-red Paisano that he had been drinking since he was a child. He had heard the sister say in school that when Jesus was on the cross, the Romans had given him vinegar and water with a sponge, and he had assumed they were talking about something that just tasted like vinegar, maybe cheap Spanish sauterne. That was what Angelo was drinking now. Every year, between Ash Wednesday and Easter, he drank white wine only. It was a legacy from the days when people ate fish on Friday, and although religion had said nothing about what went with it, the Fratellis had always assumed that the Scriptures implied white wine. The drop of cognac or grappa that he liked after dinner was out too, because those concoctions were clearly on the side of luxury. He was still drinking white wine this late in the year because of a promise he had made to Saint Giovanni in return for a favor, and from time to time he wondered if the favor was sufficient to merit the sacrifice.
But he always lost weight during Lent, and on the whole he was satisfied with the return he got on this last vestige of his religion. He weighed two hundred thirty pounds on Easter morning each year. By the time Ash Wednesday came again he weighed two forty-five, and over twenty years that was an extra three hundred pounds. So he calculated that if he hadn’t switched to white wine every Lent and spoiled his appetite, he would weigh about five hundred fifty pounds. He was fifty-three now, and it would have been a real problem; he wouldn’t even have been able to slide into his reserved booth at the Vesuvio Restaurant.
This would have been more than a humiliation, because the booth where he now sat was his place of business. It was under a stained-glass window with a picture of Mount Vesuvius trailing a huge cloud of white smoke across the blue sky. It allowed him to sit with his back to the wall without seeming to, because behind the window were six inches of whitewashed brick with light bulbs cunningly placed to simulate the light of the Italian sun and the glow of the volcano. The booth wasn’t reserved in a crude way; it was simply that the waiters never seated anyone else there. If an outsider asked for it, they would smile and nod and conduct him to another part of the restaurant.
Angelo Fratelli was an important man. In a way, he was the restaurant’s biggest attraction. Every night at six he would drive into the lot at the rear of the building, walk around to the front, come in, smile at the older waiters and go through the dining room to his booth. When he sat down, Lorraine, the fiftyish blond waitress he seemed to prefer, would bring him his wine. She would set the carafe on the table roughly, nearly spilling it, and clank down his glass. If he said, “Nice day today,” she would snap, “Can’t prove it by me. I’ve got to be on my feet in this dark hole all day.” If he said she looked good, she’d say, “Don’t even think about it.” For reasons nobody had ever fathomed, Mr. Fratelli found Lorraine amusing, and when he left each night, he would give her a large tip. Since all the employees in the Vesuvio divided their tips equally, Lorraine’s rudeness to Mr. Fratelli was considered a form of heroism. From a certain point of view, she was risking her life for the good of all. Angelo Fratelli was the reigning leader of what in Buffalo was called “The Arm.”
Nobody presumed to guess why Angelo tolerated Lorraine, but it was for a combination of reasons. One was that he thought it made him seem affable and approachable. In reality he was anything but affable. In the wars of the fifties he had filled his share of car trunks, and since then had cultivated a reputation for savagery by ensuring that the kills he wanted attributed to his wrath were found naked and mutilated in fields south of the city. Everything he did was calculated and premeditated. Although he had no interest in spending time with other people, he had found that a good portion of his business was brought to him by people who would never have dared speak to him if it weren’t for his supposed accessibility. His demeanor had been practiced since the forties, when he had been given as a franchise a stable of shopworn and unprepossessing prostitutes by Francisco Del Pecchio, the potentate of that era. Angelo’s natural temper was gloomy and dyspeptic, and at first he found that the prostitution business was tough going. Potential customers were instinctively frightened when they saw him, and often left before they saw the merchandise he was offering because they suspected that the young two-hundred-thirty-pound entrepreneur might have conducted them to his lair in the Albemarle Hotel to garrote them for their wallets and watches. This in fact, was one of the business practices he was reduced to considering, when one day a prospective client, a gypsum buyer from Ohio, enlightened him. “You think I’m crazy enough to go out in the dark in a strange town with you?”
Thereafter Angelo had concentrated his considerable will on changing his image. He had spent some money on decorating the upper floor of the Albemarle, more money on some respectable suits for himself and still more money on presents and clothes for his sullen and underworked talent. He made it a policy never to enter a room without smiling at everyone he saw and, if possible, calling them by name. He developed a comical way of talking to his girls, patterned after the way he and his male colleagues in The Arm talked to each other, a tone that was simultaneously conspiratorial and derisive. He even gave them nicknames like mobsters. One, a girl who had been born with a blond, bovine beauty in a part of Alabama that hadn’t seen fit to reward it suitably, he called “Slowly-butt Shirley.” Another, a tall, bony woman who might have been a fashion model if she had had a pretty face, he called “Olive Oyl,” and a younger girl of similar charms and handicaps, “Extra-Virgin Olive Oyl.” His star, an intense young woman named Gloria Monday, was so inventive in what she did to, on, under and with her clients that she achieved a clientele that wasn’t either blind drunk or lost, but actually knew the way to the Albemarle. Angelo had never heard Latin outside of church, but he could read an inscriptio
n, and when he saw “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” on a tombstone, he started calling her “Sick Transit Gloria.”
That had been a long time ago. Now the girls were old or dead, and Angelo’s hearty, expansive manner had become so habitual that he had often displayed it at the most inappropriate times, such as the night when he had executed a young Canadian named Boromier for being found in close proximity to a truck-load of cigarettes that unofficially belonged to Angelo, and again when he had attended the funeral of a close friend. Because it bore no relation to his feelings, this bogus jocularity could surface at any time when he wasn’t concentrating. It added to his stature and reputation in his later years, because when it appeared it was chilling.
Angelo was alone in his booth tonight; it was a brief vacation for him. Usually he was encumbered by Capella and Salvatore, two young retainers sworn to die to protect him. The problem with young men sworn to die to protect their patrons was that they didn’t actually want to die, so large portions of their mental capacities were devoted to vigilance and suspicion. This left so little for ordinary human commerce that it made them dull and preoccupied companions. But tonight Angelo was to meet with a man who wasn’t willing to speak in the presence of third parties and hadn’t the experience to appreciate the fact that at any given time Capella and Salvatore were only half conscious of anything that was said, and in any case had no interest in it.
Angelo sipped the terrible white wine and rolled it around his mouth so that he could detest it. Then he set the glass down, filled it again, stood up and went to the men’s room. As he walked across the dining room, he felt the eyes of a dozen people on him, all establishing his presence to the satisfaction of a hundred grand juries. He had seldom done what he was about to do. The Vesuvio was his sanctuary, and to use it as an alibi in any illegal activity would have been a violation of trust. But the man he was going to meet was a banker, a solid citizen who had, to Angelo’s knowledge, never done anything that wouldn’t put a grand jury to sleep.
