by Thomas Perry
In the eighties there had been a number of puzzling incidents, notably the strange death of a known cocaine dealer named Milo “Mucho Más” Figueroa. He had been shot down at his heavily fortified house after firing several ineffective shots with an AK-47 into trees near two officers. In the inquiry it was learned that the two officers had no search warrant because they had not intended to enter the dwelling; in fact, they were off duty and had simply been fired upon as they were passing by. Odder still were Mr. Figueroa’s garb, consisting of a sleeveless T-shirt and silk boxer shorts; the hour he had chosen to go berserk, which was four A.M.; and the fact that he had chosen to defend his fortress from outside its walls. None of this would have merited a page in the annals of cocaine-induced paranoia except that when the premises were thoroughly searched, not a milligram of cocaine was found, nor any currency. One of the off-duty officers who assisted at Mr. Figueroa’s suicide was Bob Lempert.
Lempert could not be considered a bitter man, in spite of all this coincidence and bad luck. He was, in fact, cheerful most of the time. He had stayed on the force long after he had done his twenty years, and showed up for work each day ready with either a joke of his own or a laugh at someone else’s. Today he was in a worse mood than he had been in since the Internal Affairs Division had called him in to ask about the death of Miriam Purnaski, the jeweler. That time he hadn’t really been prepared since it had been such a rush job. Miriam Purnaski was one of the modern practitioners of the ancient process of changing money into gold, then changing it back again in another country. At some point in her career she had lost her appreciation for simplicity and begun performing the same kind of alchemy simultaneously for several local dealers in recreational chemicals. Then she had made the mistake that attorneys and accountants sometimes do, which was to merge the accounts of several clients. Having made this first step into unsound bookkeeping, she had gradually betrayed her fiduciary responsibility for the funds of the Cambria family entirely, and begun feeding what she received into the big end of the funnel, paying out what she needed to at the small end, and paying herself whatever profit she could make in between. When mutual-fund managers did this, it was called an administration fee; when money laundresses did it, it was called skimming. At the moment when Lempert had learned about this, he was told that she was already on her way to the airport and that he had an hour to stop her.
Afterward, when the shooting team had grilled Lempert, he had been able to explain her unfortunate accident adequately. The woman had sideswiped a police car because she was in such a rush to get to the hospital, having been shot in the abdomen by persons unknown, probably in a robbery attempt. But what had put him in a bad mood was learning what was in her suitcases only after the ambulance had arrived. It was more than a million in cash, and bank deposit books with numbers in them that were so big they didn’t have any meaning.
Lempert was in the same kind of mood today. Paul Cambria had told his man Puccio to get the word out: the Butcher’s Boy had come back. If he were the sort of man who had a lot of luck going for him, he might have managed to drop the hammer on the bastard, because Lempert was one of a small, select group of people who had seen the Butcher’s Boy up close in the old days and was still alive. About fifteen years ago, Lempert had worked with him. At least that was the way he would have put it to Paul Cambria if he had been important enough to talk to Cambria personally. Actually, he had been the driver—or he would have been, if necessary. It was the night when the Butcher’s Boy was supposed to walk through the back door of the Garibaldi Social Club and quietly rid the city of the menace of Andy Ugolino. The idea was that afterward, if things weren’t quiet, Lempert would pull up in a squad car, everybody else would run the other way, and the Butcher’s Boy would slip into the back seat and get a ride across town. As it happened, things had gone very quietly, and the police escort hadn’t been necessary, but Lempert had seen him twice—once before, and once while he was walking out of the social club.
The problem was that the Butcher’s Boy had also seen Lempert. At the time Lempert had believed that it was likely to be useful in the future to get to know all the important people he could. Important people knew other important people, and opportunities could come from anywhere. He even had the odd notion that they might get to be friends. Lempert was an ordinary guy, after all, and he had never heard anything about the man that said he wasn’t one too. When he said it to himself, he had a picture in his mind. He didn’t analyze it, but the essential elements were that the guy would be somebody you might drink a beer with in a neighborhood bar, and that he should have some passing interest in sports, maybe enough interest to place a small bet now and then. There was a subtle bond between men whose lives were contested, who could keep living only as long as they won. That wasn’t exactly Lempert, but he had been in some tight spots.
So he had contrived to meet the bastard. Puccio had told Lempert he was going to see the guy the day before and give him the money. It was supposed to be in a restaurant called The Golden Cock, and Puccio had wanted to be sure there wasn’t some plan to raid the place that day because the cops knew there were slot machines in the room upstairs. Puccio didn’t want to be sitting in the place holding a hundred thousand in cash when some idiot rookie with a fire ax in his hand burst in through the back door to arrest illegal gamblers. But even more fervently, he didn’t want to be sitting across the table from that particular man when the cops came in. Lempert assured him that the place was not due to come up on the list until August, and maybe not even then, but it gave Lempert an excuse to show up and meet the Butcher’s Boy.
It was a mistake. He wasn’t an ordinary guy. Lempert walked up to the booth in the corner just as Puccio was saying something in a low voice about whacking Ugolino. The man was a disappointment at first glance. He didn’t look like much—no big shoulders or bull neck, and he was wearing a herringbone tweed sport coat with no tie. He had thin, sandy brown hair and brown eyes, and his fingers were long and thin, like a musician’s. One hand was sort of playing with his napkin on the table as though he were preoccupied, and his eyes seemed almost dull as they passed across Lempert. Then he looked up. “Sit down.”
Lempert had grinned and pulled out a chair, but then he noticed that Puccio was scared shitless. “What the fuck?” he whispered. “Get out of here.”
Lempert’s grin lingered on his face because he didn’t know what to do with it. The man repeated, “Sit down.” This time he let the napkin slip a little, and Lempert’s grin disappeared. Under the hem of the napkin he could see the black muzzle of a silencer aimed at his belly, and the hand was preparing to pull the trigger of the pistol through the napkin. He sat down.
The man turned his expressionless face on Puccio. “Keep your money.”
“But he’s—”
“I know who he is. He’s your cop.”
“Look,” said Puccio. “He just made a mistake. Please. Don’t kill him.”
Lempert had never heard these terms applied to himself before. Even after he had seen the gun, it had not occurred to him that he had done anything that could conceivably raise the stakes to that level. On reflection, he realized that he should have known before the gun, as soon as he had seen the eyes. They were not the eyes of a man who was afraid or angry. They weren’t even eager, like the eyes of a cat or a dog about to tear something up; those eyes had a kind of excitement or anticipation. This was not an ordinary guy. Lempert had been a cop for a long time by then, and he had seen something like this before. He didn’t know a lot about what he was looking at, but he knew that if this man started to smile, Lempert was going to dive for the floor and try to get his gun out in time.
The Butcher’s Boy said, “I won’t. I’m going to get up in a minute. You’re both going to sit where you are until I’m gone. Don’t send for me again.”
Puccio looked at Lempert, a quick glance that was intended to communicate a lot of things at once. It said something like, “See what you did?” But it also said,
“If you speak or move or even change your expression, we’re going to die. And if I die here like this, I’ll hound you through hell for all eternity.” Puccio was like that. He never forgot or forgave or made allowances. He was a brilliant man, and it was his tragedy that the Cambria businesses had grown so large that he couldn’t handle all the details himself. Lempert let all the life go out of him and sat there, barely breathing. “Look, kid …” said Puccio. “I apologize. I’m embarrassed. The money just doubled. I’ll throw in another hundred thousand out of my own pocket.”
“The job’s not worth that.” It was a strange thing for a man to say. “The price isn’t the issue.”
Puccio nodded, but slowly, and he didn’t talk with his hands the way he usually did. “I know. I’m sincere. I’m trying to make up for this and show you I’m a serious man.”
The Butcher’s Boy looked at Puccio for a minute, then said, “All right.”
Lempert wasn’t sure he had heard correctly at first because he was busy remembering the sight of the Goschia brothers. Puccio had actually had them hung on meat hooks in the freezer of the Ritzmar Quality Packing Company, like some don in a movie. Only he had taped the button on the electrical track so that they were still going around and around when the rest of the employees came to work on Monday morning. Lempert had arrived just after the Homicide guys, and they were still up there. The rumor was that they had run their own football pool in the plant and had cost Puccio about ten thousand dollars in receipts.
Puccio was already saying, “I know you’ll get out, but just in case …”
The Butcher’s Boy let his eyes settle on Lempert and said, “I want him. No sense having everybody in town see my face.”
Afterward, Puccio didn’t kill Lempert, but he did everything he could to make him think he was going to. As soon as the Butcher’s Boy had gone, he shrugged his shoulders, chuckled and patted Lempert on the back. “We dodged it that time,” he said. The only reason Lempert could think of why Puccio would behave that way was if he didn’t expect to see Lempert again.
When Lempert had tried to stammer out, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Puccio had said, “It’s forgotten. Just don’t do it again.”
It was only after Ugolino was dead and Lempert was still alive that he started to take breaths that actually kept enough oxygen going to his brain. At that point he understood what was going on. By the time he had arrived in his squad car to watch the Butcher’s Boy come out of the social club, Ugolino had been dead almost an hour. That was what the coroner’s report had said. Lempert read it three times to be sure. But what gave him such chills that the skin on his jowls tightened and made his whiskers actually rise to the touch was that the death was listed “natural causes.” The best he could figure it was that the bastard had somehow gotten to Ugolino in the crowd and injected him with something that made his heart stop, and then let him slip down under the table at the booth in the back before anybody saw him. Who the hell would try to kill somebody like Ugolino that way? But whatever he had done, he had hung around for an hour inside the building before leaving.
Paul Cambria had gone to Ugolino’s funeral, with his foreman, Puccio, in attendance. In the surveillance photographs, the two of them had looked dignified and mournful as they accepted the homage of Ugolino’s family and friends. Two hundred thousand was a bargain. They didn’t just get to see Ugolino dead, they got to eat him afterward, like cannibals.
Now the Butcher’s Boy was supposed to be back. It made Lempert’s jaw ache to think about it. He could get rich in the fraction of a second it took to exert four ounces of pressure with his right forefinger. But it wasn’t just money; the invisible men who quietly owned the planet would be so pleased that they would give him a charmed existence. Nothing could ever touch him again. The secret agony he had felt and lived with since the first time he had been passed over for promotion twenty-odd years ago would be transformed in an instant into a cosmic joke. Sergeant? Hell, governors didn’t live the life he would live if he were just lucky enough to be standing there when the bastard showed his face. It was exactly like winning the lottery.
But there were problems. Puccio had called him to give him the news, and he wasn’t looking at it like an early payday. That meant Paul Cambria wasn’t either. Paul Cambria was one of the men who ran things in the world, and that put him just below the old men themselves, the ones you saw only in blurry photographs. If Paul Cambria had something to worry about, then the rest of the human race was in trouble.
But at work two days later, he learned why a thinking man like Puccio wasn’t seeing this development as an opportunity, but as an occasion that might cause his name to be left out of next year’s phone book. The FBI was in an uproar because suddenly, for no known reason, Antonio Talarese, Angelo Fratelli and Peter Mantino had stopped being suspected organized-crime figures and become homicide victims. The FBI wasn’t just sending circulars, but was making urgent inquiries to learn if anyone in any big-city police station had ever heard of anyone aka “Butcher’s Boy.” Lempert could almost feel the velvety texture of the first cushion-soft stack of hundred-dollar bills. The bastard wasn’t out depopulating the civilized world. He was on some kind of a batch job, slicing off a few of the heads that stuck up above the crowd. Lempert didn’t have to ask himself who was likely to be the next of the heads; Puccio had told him. Lempert was going to get rich.
Lempert sat in the back of the van he had taken from Impound and watched the line of people inching slowly toward the front door of the Cinema Marrakesh. Over the door the giant 1930s marquee had actually been washed, and a couple of thousand burned-out light bulbs had been replaced. Some of the plaster carvings on the lintel had actually had a little gold paint slapped on them too. The green, foot-high letters on the marquee said only BELLADONNA. The movie had so many big stars in it that there wouldn’t have been room for them, and maybe it didn’t make any difference, because everybody knew what it was and who was in it, and the star was supposed to be the director, anyway.
In a way, it was ridiculous for Paul Cambria to take his wife to a movie like that, even if it was an opening. It had to be comical to him. The idea was supposed to be that this beautiful young girl, the daughter of some Mafia guy—not a local boy, but an old Sicilian with a mustache—takes over after his untimely death and gets very rich. To the real thing, someone like Paul Cambria, it had to be pretty strange. Those guys didn’t even tell their wives what the hell they did for a living. It was also odd that Cambria would sit in the dark with a thousand people for two hours. Maybe he thought his guys needed to know that he wasn’t going to pull in his horns just because there was somebody looking for him.
Anyway, it was a one-shot deal. They were having an opening in Gary only because the writer or director or somebody was from here, and because some of it had been filmed in town. One day there were a couple of trucks here, some guys with lights they turned on in the daytime, and a lot of confusion, because this was roughly the place where Punch Mayall had been blown away in the thirties, but that was about it. There hadn’t been any movie stars within a thousand miles of here. The real opening was going to be in Hollywood tomorrow, and that was where you would see the stars, not just these schmucks in corduroy coats with patches on the elbows and big thick glasses.
Lempert judged that his chances might be good tonight. If Cambria was in the theater, his guys would be there too. They would be all around, stuck to him like shit to a blanket. The Butcher’s Boy would know that too. Still, he might just be crazy enough to want to go inside anyway and cut Cambria’s throat while they were all sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, but you couldn’t bet your future on how crazy somebody was. You had to assume that he knew what he was doing. He would get Cambria afterward. All Lempert had to do was sit in the warm van on the swivel chair and wait and watch for the muzzle flash. It was like a duck hunt. When he had parked the van here this afternoon, he had taken the precaution of writing himself a ticket and sticking it under
the wiper so that nobody else would decide to do it.
He had thought this through very carefully, and he was ready. He had a Ruger Mini-14 next to him, all sighted in on the front of the theater with a four-power night scope. It would take about half a second to put his shoulder to it, pop the window and draw a bead on the bastard as soon as he saw him. A beginner wouldn’t have thought of the Ruger. The barrel was short enough to swing around in a van without banging it on something. Lempert was a good target shooter. He knew that if he could just get a clear view for the first shot, so the target would stay put, he could punch four or five holes in him within two seconds after that.
When the ushers in their brand-new, old-fashioned bellboy suits came out and shut the doors, Lempert studied what was left outside. There were eight uniformed patrolmen that he could see, picking up a little overtime pretending to control the crowds that were already inside the building watching the movie. He looked through the scope at each of their faces in turn. There was Jimmy Clinton and his partner, Bucklin—looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy with all the fat he had put on in the last few months. And—oh, shit—Olney and Winks. They were the ones to watch for. They had managed to wangle this assignment, of course. It was probably easier than just signing in and cooping in their car in the cul de sac off Breckinridge. He didn’t like seeing veterans out here. One or two of them might be calm enough to realize what was happening in time to put a round or two into the van. The other four he didn’t know. All of them were young, and one was a woman, so at least it wasn’t the Butcher’s Boy in a uniform. He was certainly capable of thinking of that one.
