by Thomas Perry
Elizabeth returned with a disturbingly large box, set it on the couch between them, untied a string around it, lifted the lid and handed him the first pile of photographs. She looked apologetic and shy and a little sad. “These are London.”
As Wolf glanced at the first few they made his head ache. He had stood on the Embankment right where a younger Elizabeth Waring was standing, only he had been with The Honourable Meg. He was hiding in this woman’s living room because across the street there were men waiting to kill him. He had no clear idea what he was going to do; all he wanted was somehow to be magically transported into those photographs and stand there in the soft British light.
Elizabeth glanced at the pictures as he shuffled through them. He really seemed to be studying them. What a peculiar man. At first he had seemed so empty and dull, but he was sensitive in an odd, quiet way. Maybe he was quiet because he was so intensely interested in other people. Suddenly, without warning, this train of thought reversed itself and she felt a chill move up her spine. Maybe the interest wasn’t healthy; maybe he was some kind of voyeur. It had been so long since anyone had been interested in anything about her life, her world, that maybe she was exposing herself to something awful that she couldn’t name. He had encouraged her to go on a lot longer and more openly than anyone else ever had about things that she had always kept private. It hadn’t started out that way, and it hadn’t seemed peculiar at the time, so how had it happened? Maybe she was becoming—had become—one of those widows who ended up signing over their life insurance to a con man because he had paid attention to her. Maybe even to somebody she just imagined was paying attention to her—say, a television preacher with a wig that looked like a monkey pelt. No, she told herself; I was just being polite. She pretended to go through the box, but kept him in the corner of her eye. He’s nothing out of the ordinary. If you look at him objectively, he’s already giving signs that he’s restless.
When the telephone rang, she sprang to her feet. “Got to grab that before it wakes the kids,” she explained. She managed to snatch it up before the second ring. “Hello?”
Richardson’s voice came to her. “Elizabeth. Sorry to call now, but it’s important.”
“Something happen?”
“Yeah. The police just identified two bodies they picked up in the parking garage at the Gateway Tour Center. One was your basic LCN infantry. His name was Jerry Bartolomeo. The other was a surprise, a guy named Paul Martillo. He was a lobbyist for a bunch of nonprofit organizations, one of them being the Italian American Anti-Libel League.”
“What’s that? Is it legitimate?”
There was a blast of air across the receiver that must have been a kind of laugh. “I forgot you haven’t been on the mailing list for a while. It was founded by Peter Cuccione about thirty years ago to threaten the television networks because he didn’t like having his kids see The Untouchables. Since then it’s been run out of Detroit by the Toscanzio family.”
“Then it’s a definite possibility.”
“I don’t know if this has anything to do with the rest of it, but a guy like Martillo … I thought you’d better know.”
“You bet I want to know. You think it’s him?”
Richardson was cautious. “Well, I don’t know. Martillo wasn’t a big deal, but he worked for people who are a very big deal. And shooting the guy in the middle of a workday near the Federal Triangle is kind of bizarre.”
“It is. Richardson, we’ve got to get somebody down there. Jack’s in Chicago, and I can’t go just like that. I’ve got the kids sleeping.”
“Can’t they … oh, yeah, they’re little, aren’t they?”
“Four and eleven months.”
“How about a neighbor?”
Elizabeth eyes moved to Wolf reflexively, and then away. A minute ago she had been trying to figure out if he was a con man, an emotional vacuum cleaner or a sexual sadist. “No.”
Richardson sighed. “Okay. I guess I’ll drive in myself. I’ll try to get as much from the D.C. police and the FBI as they’ll give me, and I’ll ask them to send you copies of whatever gets committed to paper.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry I can’t do it, but—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I forgot about the kids.”
Wolf picked up the fourth packet of photographs and recognized a shot of Milk Street in Bath. But beneath it, at the bottom of the box, was a pile of papers, tags and things held together with a rubber band. There were long envelopes with the British Airways logo and a couple of receipts that somebody had just tossed in. As he looked at the photographs, he felt the packet with his other hand. It was stiff, and a corner of something blue was sticking out. He recognized its texture and size. She had said they had gone two years ago. It wouldn’t expire for five. He looked at her as she prepared to hang up the phone. In a second she would turn away to put it on the cradle. He gripped the corner hard with his thumb and forefinger. Come on, turn. Come on. Now!
But she didn’t turn. She picked up the whole telephone, brought it around her without looking at it, set the receiver down and returned to the couch. “Sorry. It was work.”
Sorry. He nodded. It was work, all right. Since the start of all this he had been reduced to doing everything the hard way. “Look, I couldn’t help overhearing. If you have to go somewhere …”
She shook her head. “No, thanks. I can’t leave the kids.”
“I’ll keep an eye on them for you. I don’t mind.” She smiled.
“That’s very kind, but they don’t know you. If they woke up, they’d be terrified.”
Jack Hamp sat in his motel room and listened to the big jet engines roaring along the runway at O’Hare, louder and louder as their pilots throttled them up, and then thundering off into the sky before they made the wide turn to bank into their prescribed compass headings.
The Washington report was virtually incoherent. This was one more time when he wished that computers would either take over the world completely so that people would know precisely and promptly what the hell was happening, or else just go away. The combination of human being and machine hadn’t worked out too well. The report had two people dying who at first glance didn’t seem to have much to do with each other, let alone with the Butcher’s Boy, until they both were found lying in a Washington parking ramp. Their occupations were listed as “Driver” and “Lobbyist.” To Hamp’s practiced eye, it looked like a report where one or both of the bodies were misidentified. All it told him was that something had happened in Washington today, and that some people had died. He could have learned as much from the flashing light of his silenced phone beeper.
He glanced at his watch, picked up his suitcase and then walked the room a last time to be sure he hadn’t left anything. That was another thing: The goddamned machines put out so much paper that you practically had to bundle it like a week of newspapers before you could throw it away. Not that you could throw it away, because it was always full of sensitive information that didn’t answer any of the questions any sensible cop would ask.
As Hamp walked into the airport, he considered calling Elizabeth Waring. It wasn’t because she was the person in the home office to whom he was supposed to be reporting. Twenty years of police work didn’t make you more respectful of hierarchies; it only made them one more thing you found out you could live with, like carbon monoxide and bird shit. Ninety-nine percent of the time you were out on your own, driving around town in a car and trying to solve people’s problems by asserting an authority that, if only they knew it, consisted of nothing more than your ability to persuade people that whatever they were contemplating wasn’t worth it. He wanted to call Elizabeth because after a couple of weeks of talking to her two or three times a day, he was fairly sure she would be able to sort the report out for him.
But it was after eleven o’clock in Washington, and young widows with kids had enough to do in the evening without having to explain to somebody who the hell Paul Martillo was, and what he was doin
g in a parking ramp without a car or a set of keys. There would be time enough for that in the morning, after she’d had her meeting. She probably didn’t know she was having one yet, but this kind of thing always caused morning meetings. All bureaucracies worked the same.
Wolf put the photographs back in the box. “Let me help you with the dishes.” It was going to have to be the hard way. He couldn’t even use Little Norman’s gun because the whole neighborhood would hear it, and when the men across the street heard it, they would know what it was. He was going to have to take the serrated bread knife off the counter and slit this woman’s throat while her two children slept. He would have to hold her over the sink while she bled to death, and then grab the passport out of the box. The worst part of it wasn’t that it was messy; it was that he had gone to a lot of trouble to find Elizabeth Waring, and now what he really felt like doing was just leaving her alone. It had probably been the telephone call. She was no threat to him; she wasn’t even capable of going out at night to do whatever her boss had wanted her to do. In fact she had probably been hoping to be in bed by now. She was simply a nice woman with no husband who had a job that she was good at, and today she had met a man who was polite and didn’t scare her. She wouldn’t go out looking for a man, but if she met one by accident, it would seem all right to her. Women like her probably didn’t get laid very often, and something like this wouldn’t have done any harm. She was smart and sensible enough to know that she was still attractive to men, and if things had been different, he would have liked to accommodate her. Cutting her throat with a kitchen knife wasn’t going to throw the FBI into confusion; it wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
“Anyway,” Elizabeth was saying, “the whole point of this was to thank you for helping me this morning. You’re not doing any dishes in my house.”
Wolf stood, and the moment came and went. “All right, then,” he said. “But I’ll take the garbage out for you on my way home.”
“A deal,” she said. “Going out there at night gives me the creeps.”
Wolf carried the garbage bag out to the side of Elizabeth’s garage, where there were four big cans. He set the bag in a can carefully so that it didn’t make any noise, then fit the lid back on. He looked at the kitchen door, and then at the window. At least she wasn’t standing there to watch him walk down the driveway and across the street to whatever was waiting for him. He could go through the back yard to the next street and then circle around.
Carmine stood up again and walked through the house to the back door, where Petri was waiting. “See anything move out there?”
Petri grunted.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I was shaking my head. The answer is no.”
“What time is it?” He hated asking Petri for the time, but it was so dark in here that he couldn’t read his watch, and so he had to keep making up excuses to ask the others. He would have to start eating carrots, or else get a watch that glowed in the dark.
“About a quarter after eleven.”
Carmine thought about it. “I don’t like it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what if he’s not coming? I mean I don’t want to sit around in here until dawn with a car in the garage that doesn’t belong to him, and sure as hell won’t have his fingerprints on it, and has blood splashed all over the inside of it. If he knew we were here, all he’d have to do is call the cops and say somebody had broken into his house, and I’m not sure I want to bet my life he can’t figure that out.”
“He doesn’t know we’re here, Carmine.”
“I’m not sure I want to bet my life on that either. Where’s the phone?”
“What phone?”
“His phone.”
“There is no phone.”
“No phone at all?”
“No. We went through the place. If there’d been one, I’d have seen it.”
Carmine’s heart began to pound, and then the pressure seemed to move upward to his head. “You went through this whole fucking place, there was no fucking telephone and you didn’t tell me?”
Petri said defensively, “So what?”
“I guarantee you this man had a telephone this morning. You can’t live without a telephone. That means he took it out.”
“Not necessarily. My grandmother didn’t have a phone.”
“This guy isn’t your grandmother, you dumb shit. That’s the first thing you do in a war; you cut the enemy off and isolate him. He’s severed our communications. He knows we’re here, and he’s going to do something about it.”
“So use the car phone.”
“Huh?”
“The car phone. Martillo had a phone in his car. That’s how he called Mr. Vico when he saw the guy in the first place.”
Fusco’s mind scurried back and forth, looking for something that would negate Petri’s suggestion, but he kept coming up with nothing. Finally he muttered, “I didn’t want to have to do that. But now I haven’t got any choice.” He pulled out his pistol, stepped to the back door and whispered, “Keep your eyes open. This is where he’ll make his move if he’s out there.”
Wolf walked through the yard of the house beside his, staying in the shadows and moving slowly, then stopping to listen. He scanned the back of his house. There were no lights on inside, and he couldn’t detect any broken windows. Suddenly he saw his back door open. He froze, then slowly brought Little Norman’s pistol up in line with the doorknob. He couldn’t quite discern the shape of what was pushing it open, but when the door began to close again, the silhouette of a man materialized against the white clapboards.
Wolf moved his eyes away from the man; maybe they were trying to see if he was out here. He watched the windows and the door itself, but could discern no shape or motion. Then the man began to walk, and since the man wasn’t coming toward him, Wolf watched. The man went to the garage door, opened it, then ducked inside. What he did then was mystifying: he closed the garage door behind him.
That was no cop. At this stage there was no such thing as one cop. There would have been about five of them around Pauly the Bag Man’s car trying to get prints, samples of blood and hair and whatever else they collected these days. But if it wasn’t a cop, it must be Vico’s people, and if this man wasn’t doing what cops did, what was he doing?
Wolf stood still and watched the house. Vico’s crews still seemed to consist of three soldiers and a driver. In the old days he had sent three men to try to hold Wolf up for money. This afternoon Wolf had seen three men get out of a car on Independence Avenue, and then he had seen three men on the parking ramp. Most likely there were two more men inside his house, and one in a car somewhere nearby.
He stood still for another moment. There was still a chance he could simply turn around and walk away. He had enough money on him even now. He could go back the way he had come, walk a mile or so to a liquor store away from the neighborhood and call for a cab. The chances were pretty good that the driver who would come for him would have nothing to do with Vico, and even if he was wrong, the man wouldn’t know who he was. There was no reason for him to go back into that house. He had rented it with the expectation that he was going to kill the woman who lived across the street, then disappear, so he hadn’t touched anything with his bare hands, or left anything that could be traced to him. He had even cut the labels out of his clothes.
But he was angry. What Vico was doing was pure opportunism. Wolf had done nothing to him, and before that, Michael Schaeffer had done nothing to anybody for ten years except sit in his house in Bath and go to an occasional concert with his girlfriend. These guys were waiting inside the house to collect on the Butcher’s Boy. He wondered if they were really prepared to see him face-to-face.
If there were two men inside, one of them would be watching the street. That left the other, and he would be at the kitchen door to cover his companion’s path to the garage. Wolf moved to the side of his house, staying within six inches of the clapboards as he
sidestepped to the back door. He crawled across the steps, then sidestepped again to get to the garage door. He quietly slipped the bolt on the garage door to lock the man inside, then stepped to the back door, knocked quietly on it and whispered, “Let me in. It’s me.”
The door opened inward an inch and he threw his weight against it so that it hit the man hard in the face. The man’s hands went up to cover his bleeding nose and mouth, and he staggered backward. Before he could lower them, Wolf was inside and pushing Little Norman’s pistol against his head. Wolf whispered in his ear, “Lie down on your face. If you make a noise, you’re dead.”
The man sank to the floor. Wolf looked around for the man’s gun and saw it on the floor at his feet. It was a Browning 9 millimeter, with a silencer screwed onto the end of it. He knelt down on the floor and picked it up, but as he did, the kitchen doorway seemed to fill with darkness. It was the shape of a big man looking down at them. “What are you doing on the floor?” Wolf raised his arm and pulled the trigger three times as quickly as he could. There were three hoarse spitting sounds, and the man took a step backward and toppled over into the dining room.
The one on the floor pushed himself upward with his arms and kicked out at Wolf with his feet. Wolf danced to the side to avoid the swinging legs, then fired down into the man’s back. He took his time aiming the second shot, and it went into the top of the man’s head. He walked cautiously into the dining room and shot the other one in the temple.
Wolf sighed. It hadn’t gone well; he had wanted them alive. He turned on the lights, went to the bathroom, gathered all the towels and pushed them under the two men to catch the blood. Then he frisked the man on the kitchen floor to see if he had any more 9-millimeter ammunition. He found a second clip in the man’s right pants pocket, dug it out, pulled the one he had used out of the pistol and inserted the full one.
He went to the kitchen door, stepped outside to the garage and listened. The man inside was already tugging on the garage door to get out. Wolf waited until he heard the man step away, then slipped the bolt on the door and stepped back around the corner of the garage. The man was standing inside a small square enclosure with a car. There were no windows, and the only door was the one he had raised to get inside. Wolf had a certain morbid interest in what the man was going to do.
