“I’m not so convinced,” the younger one said brusquely. “You only know them academically. I deal with them every day.”
An expression of deep disquiet passed across the worried face. “They could just be laying low, waiting to be sure of what’s what and who’s who. These are vicious, cunning, unpredictable bastards and I am not about to put myself further at risk until you know! Not think!”
The older one sighed. “Well”—it was said in a carefree tone—“Canvas has removed our source’s options. The psychs agree with his assessment; and I am content.” A smile peeked out. “As long as we maintain our leverage, the source will continue to be most compliant. With that in our hands, we cannot be surprised.”
“What about the French kid?”
“No longer an issue. He comes from nowhere, has no family, no ties in this country. Was a loner in his. No one will miss him. Canvas has been most thorough.” A genuine laugh. “And I understand you have put certain other checks into place, just in case.” A light laugh. “Pure overkill. No one will come looking.”
The younger one nodded. “You’re too damned pleased with yourself.”
“I see the big picture, and the pieces falling into place,” the older one said simply. “I’m not pleased”—he wheezed out the word—“just confident and encouraged.”
“You be confident and encouraged. Me? I’ll stay paranoid. And we’ll see which of us is left standing.”
They continued on, just two more people speaking in quiet abstracts in a city that thrived on them.
Xenos hated abstracts.
Oh, he could think in them, analyze them fairly effortlessly, extrapolate almost infinite conclusions from their colors and shapes. But he had lived in the abstract for too many years, and now longed for solid, immutable definition instead.
Which was largely why he had chosen Toulon as his second home.
The old French naval station, the harbor that sheltered over half of the Mediterranean’s smugglers, the modern city built along the edges of the old city, all masked the rock-solid heart of the French town.
Like Naxos, Toulon was carved from the mountains that surrounded the harbor. It could be tough, unyielding, attacking. It required its residents to be equally hard in return. Strong men and women who made their own rules, then lived strictly by them.
And the heart of this stubborn, bullheaded, unyielding population was the fifteen hundred members of the Corsican community.
That they ran the harbor and the bulk of the city beyond was a given. That the token forces of French Naval Shore Patrol, Metropolitan cops, and GIGN thugs would deal only with the non-Corsican community was also a given. Payoffs were made, penetrations were made, arrangements were made. And the Brotherhood—that most violent, most feared, most insular organized crime group in Europe—ran the Corsicans.
From his earliest days in Toulon, Xenos—known to them as Dureté (“the hard man”)—had known the rules and had made his own arrangements with the Brotherhood. He would leave them alone, not interfere with any operations or plans, would assist them in those things that they needed a non-Corsican for (they had checked out the tough man’s virulent reputation… then apologized for the intrusion).
In exchange they would lend their protection to a small farm on the cliffs above the city.
The Clinic of the Broken Children.
In its forty-five beds lay the shattered remnants of fifteen years of war in Afghanistan. Boys and girls—none over twelve—missing arms, legs; blinded or deafened; massacred all.
How they found their way from the mountain passes (where they would’ve died) to the small clinic on the French Gold Coast (where their destroyed bodies and minds would be healed) was never explained or inquired into. Simply accepted as the right of a man whom the Brotherhood considered completely trustworthy in a deal or a fight.
And it would be watched over during his long absences.
But now, as he stood on the edge of the cliff looking out at the crystal-blue Med, Xenos wondered—not for the first time—what would happen to the clinic if he ever failed to come back. Breathing in the salty, slightly fishy air, he forced the thought away from the present and turned back to Franco.
“Answer’s still no.”
Franco shook his head sadly. “He’s a good boy, Dureté. Sharp as a tack and also bright. It’s not like him. Capito? He’s going to be a big Chaillot attorney one day. Or maybe on Wall Street in America. He’s not in the rackets. Boring, squeaky-clean.”
He laughed a forced, somehow painful laugh. “Hell, he even took another name and life so my Brothers and my reputation wouldn’t hold him back.”
“I’m not a family counselor. If he doesn’t want to talk to you…”
“It’s more than that, I’m telling you. He’s not the kind to run off. Not for pussy, not for money, no way! And no one’s seen him in a week.”
Xenos shook his head. “Go yourself.”
“You know I can’t. No member of the Brotherhood is safe in New York without permission from the Mafia’s Commission. And to get that, I’d have to tell them about Paolo. They’d never believe he wasn’t in the rackets. It could start another war.”
“Jerry!” a small girl squealed in delight as she came limping up. “Jerry! Regardez moi!”
Xenos turned as the little girl displayed her brand-new artificial arm to him. With a pride and dedication that only the small can have, she opened and closed the metal hand, even pulled a cigar out of Xenos’s shirt pocket when he kneeled to hug her.
“Merveilleux, Gabi. Superbe.” He kissed her on the cheek. “How are you today, fair lady? he asked in slow, deliberate English.”
She concentrated hard. “I am well … monsieur.”
“Sir,” he corrected gently.
She nodded fiercely. “I am well, sir. How are you today?”
“Very well. He kissed her again as a clinic sister came up to shepherd her back to the group playing on the lawn. He took an envelope from the nurse as he watched the little girl go.”
“X-ray machine’s breaking down again, he mumbled as he read. “That’s another fifteen grand, easy.”
Franco suddenly brightened, stood, walking over to Xenos, reading over his shoulder. “And I noticed that the ward is overcrowded.”
Xenos nodded. “They just keep coming. No end to it.” No end. He started to walk away, then stopped. “What are you offering?”
Franco smiled his convincingly sincere smile. “A new, state-of-the-art X-ray machine and a new ward … say twenty beds.”
“Forty-five beds.”
Franco nodded. “I misspoke. A new forty-five-bed ward.”
Xenos looked at the man suspiciously. “You don’t have those kinds of resources.”
“The Brotherhood does; and will stand behind my pledge.”
Xenos walked very close to the man. “What aren’t you telling me?”
There was no point in lying any more, and Franco played his last card. “Mio fratello he is, shall we say, a project of the Brotherhood. They sponsored his college entirely. Over six hundred thousand francs.”
Xenos suddenly understood. “And they’re making you responsible.”
Franco grimaced as he nodded. “Paolo repays the Brotherhood with services after he is become a lawyer. Or I must, well…”
“And if I find he’s run off with the money?”
“Then it is between us. I Fratelli. But,” Franco hurriedly added, “the Brotherhood does not believe he has stolen from them. Their concern is for his safety in a city like New York.”
“For the moment,” Xenos finished.
“They feel you can be trusted to find and return the money,” Franco said, ignoring the comment, “if the worst has happened. Or to help Paolo if he has gotten into some kind of trouble.” He shrugged deeply. “He is my brother, Dureté. I would go if I could, but that would only cause more troubles.” He hesitated. “My family. Do it for family.”
Xenos walked to the cliff’s edge, look
ing out at the storm clouds building across the calm Mediterranean waters. “There might be some problem with my getting into the U.S. I’m not real popular over there.” He shook his head at the clouds. “In a lot of places.”
Franco walked over, smiling. “If there is one thing the Brotherhood knows how to do, it is getting things into and out of places.”
Less than twenty-four hours later Xenos Filotimo drove across the New York/Canadian border.
For family.
Two
It was New York.
Loud, run-down, alive. People jammed the sidewalk five abreast, seemingly unaware of the people around them. It was dirty and proud, private and loud, unforgiving and compassionate beyond measure.
It was New York, and Xenos loved every inch of it.
Although he hadn’t set foot there in a decade, it was the one constant in his world, a place that wouldn’t change no matter what. And he easily found his way to the student apartments outside of Columbia University.
The street was filled with the odd mix of working poor, welfare caste, and enthused college students that you might expect for one of the world’s great universities that was located on the border of one of America’s great slums. So, amidst the coloration of so many, he had no problem slipping into the building.
Phone calls from his hotel had provided little more than he had been told in Toulon.
Paolo DiBenetti (known to the college as Paul Satordi) had been a good student, an activist in the university social scene, with a job as a bellman at a midtown hotel on weekends. He also did some freelance research through the university’s Alumni Association.
And he had not been seen on campus or at his jobs since two days after his return from spring break.
That he had returned was witnessed by an occasional girlfriend, people at the hotel he worked at, by his work contact at the Alumni Association.
But that had all been preliminary to this visit to the boy’s apartment.
Xenos casually strolled through the building’s dark corridors, smiling through his own college memories at doors with obscene or amusing signs posted on them. No entry without pizza! Naked girls only need apply. And Don’t fuck with me; I’m a seminary student! People passed him, paying no attention to the man with the backpack and the casual air. It was a building of interchangeable students, transients, and constant changes that went unnoticed.
Everything seemed more than ordinary enough.
At the door to Paolo’s apartment, for the first time Xenos tensed. A nosy neighbor, curious friend, or wandering security (minimum-waged, unarmed) could vastly complicate things. But the boy had chosen a room at the far end of a dark corridor, near the fire escape, with no apartment directly in line with the front door, on the hot or cold side of the building, depending on the time of year.
In classic Corsican style, it was a place that few would just wander by.
Although he had a key supplied by Franco, Xenos took his time outside the door… studying.
It was typically worn pressboard, probably hollow, showing hundreds of routine scratches and nicks. The knob was slightly discolored brass-metal, with scratches around the keyhole. The dead bolt was much the same.
For more than a minute Xenos studied that door, the frame, the wall around it, his mind clicking into analysis mode without being asked.
Something was wrong here, and his instincts wouldn’t let him move until he knew what it was.
He closed his eyes, pictured the door that was only inches away, tried to break it down into individual components and constructs; tried to see inwardly what he couldn’t see with his eyes.
Fire escape.
The window at the end of the corridor with the fire escape had no coverings of any kind. The wall on the apartment side showed the effects of thirty-plus years of direct sunlight eight months a year. And the sun shone equally brightly on the door.
Which was still dark, not dried out, fresh despite the superficial signs of wear and tear.
For the next twenty minutes Xenos checked the ends of all the other corridors of the building that corresponded to Paolo’s end of the building. All the doors were faded and dry.
Paolo’s door had recently been replaced.
Returning to the apartment, he pulled a small set of what looked like opera glasses (that oddly came together at a point in the front) from his pack. Checking to be sure he was alone, he pressed them up against the one-way peephole installed in the door. The prism-reversal imaging system (developed by the United States Secret Service) allowed him to reverse the qualities of the peephole’s optics and get a fish-eye look into the apartment.
It seemed empty.
After carefully looking over the entire perimeter of the door, and not wanting to take the time and have the visibility that running an ion meter over the door frame would involve, he was convinced the door was unalarmed. Using the key, he let himself in.
“Six-eight.”
“Go.”
“We have a shake at target.”
“Specify.”
“Single individual. White male, forties. Baggy clothes, Yankee cap, shades, backpack.”
“Will relay. Tag Indigo One.” Continue observation.”“Six-eight.”
The place was empty. As empty as an apartment could possibly be. No furniture, curtains, carpet, possessions of any kind. No marks on the floor where furniture might’ve been. No stains, dirt, cobwebs, nothing. As devoid of identity as any place had ever been. As he moved through the living room, kitchen, and one bedroom, Xenos’s sense of wrong dramatically increased.
Even new homes, freshly built and never occupied, were less empty.
Xenos had personally emptied enough places over the years in precisely the same way to understand the message behind it. Someone—maybe Paolo, maybe not—wanted nothing left behind that could trace him or give hints of what had happened.
And there was the door.
Maybe the kid had run off with the money, and knowing that the Corsicans would send someone after him, was taking no chances. That was the simple answer, but Xenos hated simple answers.
So he continued to wander the small rooms.
He pulled out a small camcorder and began to video the room, the view from each of the three windows. He opened the traps on the drains and bagged the small amount of sludge he could scrape from the almost clean pipes. Moved the shut-off refrigerator, tested the floorboards for hollows, leaned out the window and checked the outside of the building around it.
Nothing of note.
Finally he reached into his backpack and pulled out a lineman’s test phone, plugging it into the phone socket.
Surprisingly he got a dial tone.
“That’s not right,” he mumbled as he unplugged the phone, and plugged in a palm-sized—less than half-inch-thick—plastic box with an LCD readout. “Not right.” He pressed some buttons on the box, then watched the display.
212-473-3749
“Why go to all this trouble and leave the goddamned phone…” He pressed a different sequence of buttons.
96.3265%
Xenos smiled without realizing it. He began to enter another sequence. “Now, what’s drawing off less than four percent of your natural impedance, little fellow?”
Tracer Line Confirmed
The smile remained frozen as he began to enter a final, longer sequence. Then he quickly gathered his equipment and left the apartment.
“Six-eight.”
“Go.”
“Indigo One on the move.”
“Seven-one will pick up Indigo One on exit.”
“Six-eight.”
It would take several hours for his invisible electronic hunter to follow the signs, cut its way through the digital brush, and locate the receiver on the other end of that tracer line. Hours during which little else could be done. So Xenos found himself driving randomly through the early afternoon traffic; allowing the car to find its way as his mind floated over the problem.
Franco had
no reason to lie, so Paolo wasn’t involved in the rackets. But he still might have picked up—over the years—the skills of disappearing and covering his tracks. It was a natural thing for someone that close to the Brotherhood.
But it didn’t feel right.
The young Corsican masquerading as a French student might have been uncovered by the local Mafia, kidnapped and killed as yet another chapter in that two-hundred-year-old feud. But the Mafia had never been known to professionally clear a victim’s apartment.
And there was the door.
And there was the tap.
Only a professional, someone very good, would’ve thought to replace a door that had been kicked in or forced. The doors in the building were flimsy at best, easily manhandled. But would just as easily show the violence done to them.
Maintaining a tracer tap on a line that had no phone or modem attached was also a pro’s touch.
Take someone by force or guile, expunge all physical evidence, then leave an active tap in place. Not to listen to calls that could never be placed, but to determine who might be calling the young student. And, by extrapolation, who might be looking for him.
It was a thing Xenos might’ve done, had done, in his not-distant-enough past.
He pulled out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel shaking his head.
“There’s got to be another answer,” he mumbled as he looked around. “Got to be.”
Ten minutes later he pulled to a stop on Linwood Avenue, convincing himself that he was looking for conspiracies out of habit, not evidence. Paolo DiBenetti was born to the Brotherhood, whether he was an active member or not. He was a law student at one of the top law schools in the world, so he was not only intelligent but sharp. He could have thought it through as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the nearly $100,000 the Brotherhood had given him for his education.
Xenos wanted to believe that, desperately! It would’ve removed all pressures, made the job easier. It would’ve allowed him to avoid that part of his personality—which he’d exiled to a tightly bound place within himself—to stay tautly under control. For him to maintain at least the counterfeit peace that he’d so barely established in the last years.
The 4 Phase Man Page 3
