by Thomas Perry
“Where are we going? Shouldn’t we get off the street?” McCarron asked.
Now it occurred to Angelo that the reason he was in this situation was the call from this lunatic who was dogging his steps, practically stepping on his heels. He glanced at McCarron again, but the suspicion dissolved into simple anger. McCarron was too crazy to have knowingly betrayed anyone. He really was frightened. “No,” said Angelo. “We go to the bar and call for help. If that one gets us into the darkness off the street, we don’t come out again.”
Behind them a horn honked again. This time it was a long, loud bleat that ended with what sounded like someone beating his fist on the horn six times.
Wolf drifted out of the building with a crowd of curious students. The bus driver and the owner of the station wagon were out of their vehicles and standing on the street, so the onlookers began to lose interest. There was no tragedy to participate in, or even carnage to see. The event had already been diminished to the dull haggling in which the drivers served only as temporary representatives of the insurance companies and lawyers who were the real principals. The horns started again, the two drivers in the accident climbed back into their vehicles, the bus driver pulled away from the wrecked car and stopped at the bus stop, and then a few young men pushed the station wagon away from the exit and around the corner to the curb.
Now the horns began in earnest, and Wolf looked at the source of the commotion. There was the little Toyota stalled in the narrow drive to the exit, and behind it there were now eight or ten cars, all honking their horns. Two of the young men who had pushed the station wagon were looking into the gray car and shaking their heads at someone inside. When the someone lunged over the back seat into the front and began to bark at the horns, he understood their problem; they wanted to get in and move the car out of the way, but they were afraid of the big dog.
As Wolf stepped to the street, he could see two men walking quickly up the sidewalk toward a lighted yellow sign. The big man with Fratelli, whose face he hadn’t been able to see, was probably a bodyguard. He obviously had the knack. There had been no way for the bodyguard to sense that Fratelli was in danger—as in fact he wasn’t, at least for the moment. Wolf had already decided not to make an attempt tonight. There were too many witnesses. When the gray car had entered the university visitors’ lot, he had followed it on a whim. He regretted it now as he walked back toward his car amid the sound of horns. Somehow he had frightened the bodyguard and a whole series of responses had been triggered, each placing additional obstacles in his path. Now Fratelli would dig in, the bodyguard would marshal reinforcements and in an hour Fratelli would be a very difficult man to kill.
Wolf climbed into his car and started the engine. He backed out of his parking space and joined the line of cars waiting to get past the toll gate to the street. He could see that the two men were just coming under the big yellow sign down the sidewalk. Then something odd happened. The two of them tried to squeeze through the front door at once, and got stuck for a second. Then Fratelli stopped and let the other man go in front. It was puzzling behavior for a bodyguard.
Once inside the Canal, Angelo could see that the place was disgusting. It was full of the kind of people he had seen on television buying cars like the one he had just abandoned or talking about tax-sheltered annuities, and every one of them was drinking white wine. The place was dim but full of living plants with little spotlights on them, and the bartender was dressed up like a neutered poodle, with a high collar that had a little black bow around it.
He could see the telephone in the little alcove just this side of the bathrooms, so he rushed across the room, fishing in his pockets for change. He was almost at the telephone before he admitted to himself that he didn’t have any, so he came back to grab McCarron, who had been headed off by a woman in a little blue suit like a man’s. “I’m afraid we’re all booked up,” she was saying.
Angelo said to McCarron, “Give me your change.”
The woman looked at him doubtfully. “I was just telling your friend—”
“Fine,” said Angelo. “I just want to use your phone.” McCarron placed a little pile of coins in his palm. As an afterthought, Angelo added, “And we’d like a drink. White wine.”
Angelo returned to the telephone to find a young woman dropping a coin into the slot. He leaned close and said, “Are you going to be long?”
As she turned to look at him, he could see that she was about twenty-five years old and the sort of young woman he hated most. She smirked at him. “Probably, but it’s none of your business.” She had light brown, almost blond hair, a big pair of glasses with red frames and lenses that glittered in the light of the little spot on the nearest philodendron. The enormity of the situation engulfed Angelo as the young woman took off her earring on the side where she was going to clamp the phone. She was actually going to prolong this just to piss him off. She had no idea of what the planet she lived on was really like. She was probably a clerk in the women’s clothes section of a department store, or, with that arrogance, probably the senior clerk who decided which clothes to buy from the distributor. She was very much like that young woman two years ago who had come up behind him on the street on the day when the computerized timing device on that year’s new Cadillac had malfunctioned. He had been coughing along on about four mistimed cylinders, spewing black smoke and going twenty miles an hour, just trying to make it to the nearest gas station. She had pulled up behind, leaned on the horn for a full minute, then passed him. As she went by, she turned, that same smirk on her face, held out her upturned fist and raised a carefully manicured middle finger at him.
Angelo had gone mad. He let the Cadillac glide to a stop by the side of the road, ran out into the street to flag down a cab and followed her. She went to the parking lot of a real-estate broker, got out and entered. He waited long enough to see her sit down at a desk and put her purse in a drawer. She was so overconfident that it never occurred to her to look behind to see what might be breathing down her neck. That night, when she walked out the door of the realtor’s office to drive home in her bright red Ford Tempo, she had a surprise. The surprise was embodied in two men who had made the trip over the bridge from Fort Erie in Canada for no purpose other than to demonstrate to this young woman that the world was a much darker and more dangerous place than she or anyone she knew had ever imagined.
Angelo couldn’t believe it. This night was the worst experience he’d had in five years, even before the girl. Now he was stuck in this fern bar with a man so crazy that he might change his mind about his persecutors at any moment and start screaming that they were from Jupiter instead of Langley, Virginia. But even that was nothing. Angelo had seen the Butcher’s Boy. Everything else was a mere distraction in comparison. He had to get on that phone. He waited while the young woman dialed, then watched while she counted the rings. When there was no answer and she hung up, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from his chest, but when she snatched the quarter out of the coin tray and put it into the slot again, he started to have trouble breathing. It was at this moment that the woman’s boyfriend appeared. He stepped up beside her, glanced at Angelo and said, “Everything okay?”
The young woman frowned and said, “Sally’s not answering. Not that I could talk to her without any privacy.”
The young man turned to Angelo and seemed to puff up like a male grouse. “Can I help you?”
Angelo’s eyes burned with a heat that made him feel as though they were sweating into his head. His right forearm came forward and his hand went to the man’s groin and clutched his testicles. The man’s eyes bulged with something beyond surprise. What was happening was so unheard of that it couldn’t be real. The pain told him it was, but it also told him not to attempt to do anything about it. To push this insane demon away from him meant that when the hand came away it would still be holding on to his testicles.
Angelo said, “I need to use the phone. Tell her.”
The man said, “He
needs to use the phone.” His back was to his girlfriend, so she couldn’t see anything except that the two men were face to face.
“I know he does,” she said. “Tough.”
Angelo gave a little squeeze. The man said in a very different voice, “Tracy, get off the fucking telephone. Now. He’s got me by the balls.”
“What?” said the young woman.
“I mean literally. It’s not a figure of speech. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you myself.”
She slammed the phone onto its hook, stomped out into the dining room, grabbed her coat and was out the door before Angelo loosened his grip a little.
“I’m going to let you go,” said Angelo, “but before I do, I want you to know that my name is Angelo Fratelli. You don’t know that name, but you can probably find out who I am. You can tell your girlfriend that if I ever see her again—it doesn’t matter where or how: on the street, in a store, anywhere—she’s going to die.”
He let the man go, and the man walked stiffly to the table, pulled several bills from his wallet, left them on his empty plate and then continued out the door. Angelo put his quarter into the telephone and dialed the number of the Vesuvio.
Driving up Delaware Avenue, Wolf concentrated on the moves he had made in the past few days. He’d never bothered the bastards in ten years, but they had found him and sent three badly chosen messengers to kill him. He was still convinced he had done the only sensible thing. As fast as he could he had followed the trouble to its origin, Tony Talarese. Then he had taken the most direct route out of their way, trying to fly out of the country through Los Angeles, but they had managed to have a shooter in the airport waiting for him. They should have known he would go for the only man who could have sent a specialist, Peter Mantino. But he still had to get out of the country, which required that he go see the old man for a fresh passport. Then soldiers who could only belong to Angelo Fratelli had killed the old man. Of course he would go after Fratelli now. Why didn’t they know that? Or had the ten years made each of them so fat and powerful and overconfident that they all thought he would just lie down and die?
Angelo sat across the table from McCarron, nodding and smiling. The table was the one that had been occupied by the young couple he had met at the telephone. While he was talking to Salvatore on the phone, the hostess had come up to McCarron and told him that a table had unexpectedly become available. Angelo was preoccupied, and his practiced jovial demeanor returned unannounced, like a facial tic. Now he knew the cause of his problem, and it was giving him a tight stomach. Some forger had thought he could pick up some extra money by mentioning to Angelo’s stringers that he had a passport request that sounded a whole lot like somebody who wanted to get out of the country instead of into it. But Angelo’s men had not risen to the occasion. They could have had the forger tell the old black man that the customer needed to come in person to get his picture taken. When he got there, if he was who they thought he was, they could blow his head off; instead, they had killed the fucking middleman. Angelo wasn’t known as an eminent strategist, but at least he knew that when a hornet flies into your house you don’t slam the door shut and consider the problem solved.
“Sure, we can still do the deal,” said Angelo. “If you want to spend the money, I can handle things for you.”
McCarron said, “Thanks. You don’t know how much better that makes me feel.”
Angelo saw the door of the restaurant swing open and Salvatore walk in. Behind him, standing out on the sidewalk, Angelo could see two other men looking the other way at the passing cars. The sheer bulk of Salvatore in his dark gray overcoat reassured Angelo because part of the bulk was the little Uzi submachine gun in a sling inside the coat. Angelo stood up. “Our ride is here. I hope you weren’t hungry.”
“No,” said McCarron. He stood up too and, like the young man before him, set some money on the plate before he followed.
Wolf was getting tired. He knew that what he was doing wasn’t certain to work. But Fratelli had picked the man up here in Delaware Park, and there was a small chance that he might come back and drop him off on his way into hiding. Wolf had already decided that there was no way he could hope to get into the mansion Fratelli had built in the hills overlooking the Niagara escarpment in Lewiston. Fifteen or twenty years ago there had been stories about people who had tried, and now Fratelli knew he was in danger. The only hope was to catch him in a place like this, where dark and emptiness would help.
It was taking a long time. He had no choice except to wait, but now he began to study the area for signs that someone else was waiting too. He watched the cars going by on the distant road around the park. They looked the way cars look from an airplane, not unreal like toys, but separated from him so completely by the unfamiliar distance and lack of sound that they were part of art alternative world. As long as none of them stopped, he was safe. Then he saw the gray Toyota. As it pulled up in front of a big brick house, a door opened.
He watched the car, but he couldn’t see how many people were in it. Nobody got out, but then it slowly pulled away. Something had happened that made no sense. The big dog was standing on the front lawn; then it stopped looking after the car and trotted happily around to the back of the house.
Wolf decided it was time to move. He wasn’t sure why they had stopped to let the dog out, but he knew he had to ignore it. He had to keep his eye on the car. He moved out of the woods quickly, glancing to his right from time to time to be sure he was keeping the trunks of the tall trees behind him. He could see the little gray Toyota move along the road toward the zoo, past the basketball courts and then past Wolf’s car. He stopped and watched it go. He could discern a couple of heads in the car, but it was too dark to see the faces.
When the Toyota stopped by the curb, he broke into a run for a spot from which he hoped he could get a clear view. But at this distance the trees seemed to leap into his field of vision, so he went on, finally slipping from the grove of trees to a big oil drum full of trash. As he dropped behind it, he heard a door open and ventured to peer around the can at the car.
Two big men got out of the car and moved around to the trunk. One of them was Fratelli, but he couldn’t be sure the other was the man he had seen with him earlier. This man was wearing a bulky gray overcoat that Wolf hadn’t seen before. Now Fratelli bent over and opened the trunk. Both men leaned in and seemed to be dragging at something inside. Then they both bent their knees and hauled something out.
Wolf moved closer. They were carrying the man who had been with Fratelli in the Toyota. His head lolled to the side at nearly a right angle to his shoulders, and swung a little as the two men staggered into the park carrying him. Wolf had seen too many corpses to have much doubt that this was another. What the hell was going on? He kept moving from tree to tree, closer and closer, as the two men carried the body into the park. He had never seen the man in the overcoat before, but there was no doubt about the other; he was Fratelli.
Angelo wheezed at each step as he backed into the park, his leather soles slipping a little on the wet leaves. McCarron’s legs were heavy, but Angelo was feeling better now. All evening he had been waiting for a chance to get this asshole into a dark place. Every second with the man, his rage had grown and sharpened. Finally, when he had gotten him out of the restaurant, he had made Salvatore take them to the building on Allen Street. Angelo owned the whole block of old brick buildings, and they were all fenced and boarded. He was remodeling them to accommodate restaurants and shops, but for now they were empty. He had told McCarron that this was the ultimate hiding place; but as soon as the man was in the door, he swung his right forearm around McCarron’s neck and gripped his own wrist with his left hand. It had taken only a couple of seconds, so it didn’t last quite as long as he had hoped, but he had felt the neck crack and the muscles tighten spasmodically, then go limp, so he supposed he had gotten as much out of it as possible. He had also been able to tell him a little bit about being a self-important crazy asshole who
didn’t do what he was told, hissing it into McCarron’s ear as he broke his neck. Probably he hadn’t heard all of it, but enough. Angelo had caught a glimpse of Salvatore’s face while he was doing it, and it was a mask of dumb surprise and horror. It was kind of funny to remember it, and now he couldn’t stifle a little laugh, but as his breath huffed out of him, he never got to draw it back in because at that moment there was the blast of a shotgun.
Salvatore had never seen anything like it. Mr. Fratelli’s head just seemed to fly apart as though a bomb had gone off in his brain. When Salvatore started to run, his mind hadn’t yet settled on exactly what he was running from. It didn’t matter, because he managed only one step before the next blast found him.
Wolf trotted toward the woods, wiping off the shotgun with his handkerchief. He was systematic about it, moving from the barrel to the stock and back again, then taking another pass and ending up holding the shotgun with the handkerchief near the muzzle. He dropped the shotgun in some bushes, then turned to run through the woods toward his car. He had owed the old man a debt he couldn’t pay off with money, but now it was over. They could never be even, but he had done all that had been left to do, and now he had to get out.
He was still feeling dazed from the loud roar of the shotgun and the tremendous kick it had delivered; he hadn’t fired anything like it in years. The shots he had taken outside the old man’s house had somehow been muted by anger and outrage, so he had not been prepared for the way the shotgun had torn up the cool, quiet air of the park.
