by Thomas Perry
* * *
Alexandria wasn’t a bad place to be while he waited for things to sort themselves out. It was important to stay away from the parts of the Washington area that were likely to be full of people who worked for Jerry Vico. Unless things had changed in ten years, they would be out in force looking for just about anybody who was alone, just in case they could take something from him or sell him something. But Alexandria didn’t seem to be that kind of place. He slept in a quiet residential neighborhood, then put on respectable clothes and left each morning at the time when the people who lived there left for work. He timed his departure to coincide with E. V. Waring’s. It was a risk, but he decided that it was more of a risk to be invisible and therefore inexplicable.
Eddie had taught him this method when he was a kid. He had called it turkey hunting. “Everybody thinks turkeys are stupid, because all they ever see is the fat-ass domesticated Butterball kind. But the wild ones are scrawny, tough and smart. They live in the woods and only come out into clearings they know to peck around, and then they go back into the woods. If they see anything that’s different, they don’t come out at all. So what you do is this. Wait until maybe midsummer. Then you take a broomstick and saw it off to about forty-eight inches. You paint it black and go out in the woods to a good clearing. You prop it against a log at a thirty- or forty-degree angle and then go away for a couple of months. The first day of the season you get up in the middle of the night, go out to the clearing and lay your shotgun right where the broom handle was. When the sun comes up, the turkeys peek into the clearing, see your gun, think it’s the broom handle and walk right in front of it. It’s the only way to get them.”
Eddie had bagged Otto Corrigan that way. He had closed the butcher shop for a month and moved into a house in Cincinnati right next door to Corrigan’s with the boy. The month that followed stuck in Wolfs memory as one endless sunny afternoon with the smell of grass and trees and the buzz of seventeen-year locusts. Eddie had him working on the lawn, and trimming the shrubs and planting flowers, tomatoes and radishes all day long while he himself performed less strenuous chores that Wolf could no longer remember in detail. It didn’t matter what either of them did as long as they were visible in the yard. Corrigan was supposed to be a lawyer, but he had only one client, and instead of a secretary or a clerk, he had four big guys in his house who looked like defensive linemen. He almost never went out, and the four guys made sure no one ever came close. By the end of the month, Corrigan and his four bodyguards were so accustomed to the sight of their next-door neighbors that on the last afternoon, when Eddie and the boy came for them, they appeared not to notice.
But Wolf had not needed to rent the house across the street from E. V. Waring to kill her. There was nobody protecting her, and unless she was carrying a firearm in her briefcase, she didn’t appear to be capable of protecting herself. He had taken the risk because he wasn’t sure that what he wanted was to kill E. V. Waring. Now that he had found her, he wanted to stay close enough to watch her. Once he had gotten past the first moments, when his instinct for self-preservation had prompted him to get rid of her as simply and quickly as possible, he had begun to let his imagination work on her. The only thing he wanted now was to get past whatever barriers she had erected to keep him from disappearing, and killing her probably wouldn’t help. But it was just conceivable that there was some way of finding out what those barriers were: who was looking where, and what they were looking for. The solution to his problem might be as simple as reading some papers in her briefcase, but probably it wasn’t.
There were a couple of things about E. V. Waring that gave Wolf something to think about. She had kids. One was a little boy who got picked up in a van that had the name of a private school written on it. The other was a baby who was walked around the block every day in a stroller by a baby-sitter who went home at night. He never saw a husband, although he spent all of one day and night watching for him to show himself. A couple of days later the mailman arrived just after the maid and the baby went out, so he went across the street and pretended to knock on the door, but used the gesture to cover his other hand’s movement into the mailbox to pluck out the letters. He scanned the envelopes, and saw that about a third were addressed to Elizabeth Waring, and that the others were for Mrs. E. Hart, Elizabeth Hart or Occupant. Since a couple of them were utility bills, he decided that there was no husband to worry about.
He began to wonder if the easiness of it was making him complacent. The more he studied her and thought about her, the less impatient he was to do anything about her. He could take her off anytime he wanted to, but as long as he didn’t need to make a move, there was nothing for E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, to interpret. She couldn’t do him any harm unless he made some ripples on the surface. The time for her to die was the day he was ready to leave.
Carlo Balacontano was playing gin with the Mexican counterfeiter. As he laid down the nine of clubs he watched the man’s left arm and saw the tattooed scrollwork on his bicep move a little. He wondered if this was the sign. For years Bala had been studying parts of the hundred-dollar bill the maniac had tattooed on himself to see if he could discover a nervous twitch. But the nine of clubs didn’t attract Ospina. He moved his left arm to scratch an itch on his face, then drew a card from the pile.
Carl Bala hated losing more than he hated death. He was an old man now, sixty-six, but life in the prison had allowed him no vices. He ate plain, nutritious food, breathed clean, dry air and was forced into the moderate exercise of cleaning one of the outbuildings each day. He knew he was living a life that was much like his grandfather’s in the mountains of Sicily, and would probably last the same 104 years. Death was still a remote prospect, but losing was a daily experience.
The tattooed Mexican grinned at him, laid down his hand in a fan and said, “Gin.” Balacontano looked at the ten cards with distaste. The wily little bastard hadn’t even been collecting clubs; he had picked up the eight just to make four eights. Bala forced a smile and wrote down the thirty-six still in his hand. The horror of it was that he didn’t see a way for it to end. Ospina would probably leave here in a few years, but he was so crazy that he would be rolling out hundreds in a basement in L.A. as soon as he’d had a decent meal. How hard was it to catch a counterfeiter with a green Benjamin Franklin on his belly and “Federal Reserve Note” on his chest? So he would be back, this time with a longer sentence.
For some time Bala had been quietly nourishing a hope. The visit from that woman had raised a distinct possibility. He wouldn’t be the first one to have secretly cut a deal with the authorities and been rewarded for it. He had attained a high position in life by developing a shrewdness about people, and he was sure that Elizabeth Waring had believed him. She hadn’t believed Bala’s necessary disclaimers, but she had believed the part that was true. There really was a Butcher’s Boy, and he really had set up Carlo Balacontano for a killing he himself had committed, and that sure as hell ought to be enough for an appeal or a pardon.
In a little while Bala was going to have another visitor. This one was a second surprise. He was coming as an emissary from the old men. This pleased Bala enormously. To the outside world, he was one of the old men, but not to the old men; to them he had always been a kind of younger brother. He was powerful and controlled a lot of bodies and a lot of territory, but when he had started having his troubles he was only in his fifties. He had never had time to get white hair and sit on the Commission demonstrating his wisdom. Now they were sending somebody to consult him about an important matter. Maybe he had spent so much time in prison that people had begun to think of him as older and more important than he was, like that guy Nelson Mandela in Africa. But he doubted it; it was more likely that something was going on out there. They had heard something about his pardon coming up and wanted to make the effort now to keep on his good side. Maybe they would even imply that they had done something to bring about his release, although he knew different.
; He saw the guard coming for him from a hundred feet away. They always looked around at other people as they made their way across the yard, but the man’s eyes kept coming back to him. Bala stopped shuffling the cards and stood up. He noticed that Ospina didn’t seem disappointed. He was confident that Carl Bala would be back, that the endless gin game would continue and that by the time he took his next vacation in the world he would be another million points ahead. But Carlo Balacontano just might have a surprise for him.
Bala held his arms up and submitted to the pat-down. The guards had never been particularly thorough with him because they knew that a man like Bala didn’t need to carry a homemade knife for protection, and that if he felt a sudden urge to harm somebody, he wouldn’t do it himself in a waiting room. They only did what the prison regulations required them to do, then guided him out the door and turned him loose in the pen.
He looked along the fence and saw his visitor immediately. It was Little Norman. He was disappointed and insulted. What the hell were they doing sending that giant black Mau Mau son of a bitch? What kind of emissary was that? Then it occurred to him that although Little Norman might not be an important person, he wouldn’t be a bad choice if you wanted somebody killed without a struggle. His head spun first to the right, over his shoulder, and then to the left. If the guards had suddenly disappeared, he was going to try to make it to the fence. They were there, though, still looking bored, but alert enough to look up. He stood where he was and let Little Norman take a couple of long strides to him.
“Mr. Balacontano,” said Little Norman. “I don’t know if you remember me.”
“How the hell could anybody forget you?” said Carl Bala. “You lose five pounds or something?”
Little Norman chuckled deep inside his chest. “I guess I do have that kind of face.”
“Why did they send you?”
“A few days ago the Butcher’s Boy came to see me.”
“What for?”
“He wanted me to talk to the old men for him. I talked to some of them, and they said I had to come and tell you.”
“What did he want from them?”
“He says the only reason he did Tony T was because Talarese sent people after him. Then he did Mantino and Fratelli because they were trying to keep him from getting out afterward.”
“Good. I thought they were worthless, but now I’m sorry they’re dead—Mantino and Fratelli, anyway.” He looked up at Little Norman with his hard little eyes. “At least they didn’t come around and try to cut a deal for him.”
Little Norman shook his head. “You can play that on me if you want to. By the time I knew he was around, the most I could have done about it was make him kill me. And I did what he asked because I wasn’t going to be the one who decided on his own not to deliver a message to the old men.”
Carl Bala shrugged. “You could live a long time. So they sent you to me.”
“They want to know what you think about it after all these years. He says he’ll disappear forever if you all leave him alone. If you don’t he seems to think he can make some trouble.”
Carlo Balacontano straightened to his full five feet eight inches and began to walk. His face was cold and impassive. It was a feeling he had not experienced since 1951, when he had been hit a glancing blow with a baseball bat in a bar in upstate New York. The man who had hit him had been one of his own soldiers, a big guy named Copella, who was smashing a jukebox, and the bat had bounced off the metal top and into the forehead of Carl Bala. This had been the occasion of a profusion of apologies, and Bala had felt the same terrible frustration. He couldn’t kill Copella for the clumsy accident or his other soldiers would have turned on him, and he couldn’t betray how much it hurt or how angry he was because he would have looked weak. But he had never liked Copella after that, and the man had been forced to seek advancement in Portland, where there was more room to swing a bat.
What Carl Bala wanted to say was that if any of the old men ordered their soldiers to leave this psycho alone, what was it but giving aid and comfort to his enemy? If anybody held back now, they wouldn’t have to worry about some lone maniac slipping arsenic into their milk of magnesia. He would send an army to batter down the walls of their houses, drag them into the street and hack their heads off with hatchets. But he couldn’t say this. In the first place, saying it to Little Norman was about as satisfying as telling the mailman that you were going to write a nasty letter. In the second place, if he said it, they would kill him in jail. Still, it did make something he’d had floating around in the back of his mind push its way to the front of it. He was going to get out of here, and when he did there was going to be a war. Apparently the old men had gotten so old that their balls had shriveled up like dried figs. He was going to get out of here and roll them up one by one.
What Carl Bala said was, “I’m trying to be reasonable about this. I’ve been in here for eight years because of this man. I asked before the trial that my friends and associates do their best to help me. I got no help. I asked that they make this man pay for what he did to me. I was told that nobody could find him. Now he’s back, and he’s killed Mantino and Talarese because they were mine, and Fratelli because he helped me. What am I supposed to say—that it’s all right?”
Little Norman towered silently above Balacontano as he walked along, a half-step behind and to his left.
“Tell them I repeat my respectful request that this man be found and his body turned over to my people in New York.”
“Yes, sir,” said Little Norman. “I’ll tell them that. Anything else I should say?” It was common knowledge that somewhere in New York there was a safe-deposit box full of things that Balacontano’s men had lifted from the house of the man he was convicted of killing. The key was going to be planted on the body of the Butcher’s Boy.
Balacontano wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about how soft and weak the old men must have gotten. It would be easy. With a little probing he could find two or three at the beginning who would probably let him take over just for leaving them alive. Then he would be that much stronger when he was ready to face the ones who still had a little blood in their veins.
He realized that Little Norman was waiting for him to say something. “You can go now. I’m in the middle of a gin game.”
Wolf watched the small green Mazda back out of the driveway across the street, and then walked out his front door in time to be seen. He didn’t want to let her see his face too often, just to be somewhere near the edges of her peripheral vision and consciousness as the man who lived across the street.
He would have preferred to rent a car, but he didn’t have the kind of identification that companies felt comfortable with, and so he had bought this one for cash at a used-car lot in Virginia Beach. It was about as far from Washington as he could conveniently get and still have Virginia plates. These transactions were always delicate. If you walked into a Mercedes showroom and handed them eighty thousand in cash, you had better be able to convince somebody that you were a lovable millionaire. The car had to be a beater, so the amount wasn’t huge. The best way to do it was to find a place small enough so that you could talk to the owner. If the man had just taken something as a trade-in that he wasn’t particularly fond of, cash could be attractive. He wouldn’t have a price he had to get back, and once the car was off the lot, he could put any figure he wanted down in his books. But for Wolfs purposes, the car had to be right. He ended up with an ‘83 Dodge Colt that hadn’t even been put out on the line with the others yet, because they hadn’t had time to spot-paint the nicks on the doors and roll back the odometer. It was plain, unassuming and unmemorable, and it ran well enough. It was a little below the scale for his new neighborhood, but not so much that it attracted attention. He started it, backed out of his driveway and had shifted into first before he caught something in his rearview mirror: Elizabeth Waring’s Mazda wasn’t moving.
As Wolf let the car drift forward, he steered it so that his rearview mirror w
ould show him what was going on. The Mazda was stalled, and she was walking quickly toward the back of his car, waving her arms. It was too late, and the appeal was too blatant, to drive off and pretend that he didn’t see her. In the mirror she seemed to be staring right into his eyes, which meant she must have seen him move his head to spot her. He had to pretend he had seen her all along.
Wolf stopped, backed up until his car was in front of hers, then got out and talked to her over the roof of his Colt. “Hi. I see you’ve got troubles. Anything I can do to help?”
Elizabeth Waring threw up her arms, her brows knitted in despair. “Anything. It just died.”
Wolf turned off his engine and walked to her car. It was unbelievable that he had let this happen to him. He went over it in his mind. He had seen her come out of her house, turn to wave to the Spanish maid and the baby and walk to the garage. Then he had put on his coat and checked the doors of his rented house. If she’d had any trouble starting the Mazda, that’s when it must have happened, because when he had returned to look out the window again, she was already backing out of her driveway. Then he had stopped looking.
He reached under her dashboard and popped the hood, then went around, lifted it and looked at the engine for any obvious sign of trouble. If he could just get the damned thing going before she had time to get bored with her trouble and start looking at his face, he might be able to get through this. Nothing under the hood was disconnected or leaking, but everything looked a little grimy for a car this age. He walked back to the driver’s side, slid in and tried to start the car. He heard the ignition click, but the starter motor didn’t engage, and he smelled gas.
