by Thomas Perry
He had thought that the two cops he’d seen in the airport station had boarded the train somewhere near the front. He might be able to talk them into arresting his two pursuers, or at least calling for reinforcements to be waiting at the city station. If he couldn’t persuade them, then staying close to the cops would probably keep him alive for a few minutes.
He moved ahead through the next car and saw them. They were inside the very front car, visible through the windows set into the two doors. He stopped at the first door. As he watched, they both took their pistols out of their holsters. One pulled back his pistol’s slide to let a round into the chamber. That was more than odd. Uniformed cops usually carried their weapons in holsters that had some sort of clasp to prevent a criminal from grabbing one without disengaging it, but they carried their pistols ready to fire. And why had they drawn their guns now? There appeared to be no passengers in the front car with them, in the car with Schaeffer, or in the two cars behind him that would warrant that kind of treatment. Only the two men in the fourth car did.
Understanding came to him instantly. They didn’t act like cops because they weren’t cops. They were the shooters who were supposed to kill him. They hadn’t been able to predict which car Schaeffer would choose, so they’d hurried to station themselves in the front car and kept it empty of other passengers. The two big, ugly guys had boarded the last car on the train and come forward to chase him from car to car into the front car, where he’d be alone with the shooters. He looked at his watch. In four minutes the train would be at the station in the city, and there might be a few real cops there.
He reached into his carry-on bag. He needed a way to block the sliding door to the car in front to delay the two fake cops. Could Meg have thrown in something else he could use, like another belt? No. But he had grabbed some neckties, and if he put them together, the silk might be strong enough to delay them a minute or two. He looked deeper into the bag and saw something shiny. It was a cigarette lighter. He had thrown away the wallets and identification of the men in the Manchester lot. But the lighter must have slipped between things to the bottom of his bag, so he’d missed it. He put it into his pants pocket, braided the neckties into a single rope, and tied them to the door handle and the safety bar near the door to prevent the fake cops from opening it. For the moment he was alive, but he was trapped with the other passengers between the two temporarily blocked doors. He rushed away from the forward door toward the back of the car.
He could see the two men still struggling at the second door, trying to get the knife blade to reach the belt he’d buckled there. As he hurried toward them, he saw a man with a shopping bag at his feet from Heinemann’s Tax and Duty Free Shop. He stopped and glanced down into the bag, then took out a packet of Australian hundred-dollar bills he’d bought at the Singapore airport. He knelt down to speak to the man and pointed at the bag. “Three hundred for that bottle of Pincer vodka?”
The man grinned. “You must be a thirsty fella.” He reached into the bag, and Schaeffer made the exchange.
Schaeffer slipped the bottle into his carry-on, said, “Thank you,” and then moved on. When he was twenty paces from the spot where the two men were struggling with the door into the car, he saw first the knife blade and then the tall, thin man’s arm protrude into the car. They’d stretched the belt and were about to cut it. He ran at them.
The two white-painted men looked mad with rage. As the arm brought the knife down over the belt to cut it, Schaeffer swung the bottle into the arm and followed through to smash it against the door frame. The bottle shattered and the quart of vodka splashed over the man’s arm, shoulder, and chest.
Schaeffer opened the lighter and flicked the wheel against the flint. The high-proof vodka made a poof sound, and blue and orange ghostly flames enveloped the man’s hand and arm.
The man dropped the knife and Schaeffer squatted to pick it up while the man withdrew his arm and danced backward, tearing off his overcoat and stamping on it to extinguish the flames.
The strong man didn’t react quickly enough to stop what he was doing. He slid the door open. For a second he stood with one hand on the door handle and the other on the frame, with his body open and unprotected. Schaeffer slashed at his carotid artery with the big knife and charged past him, moving into the aft car toward the tall, thin man, who was now holding his wrist where the bottle had cut it. When the injured man saw his companion drop to his knees on the floor holding his throat and Schaeffer coming for him with the knife, he ran toward the rear of the train.
Schaeffer glanced out the window. The train was now in an area with tall office buildings and crowded streets beneath them. His watch said that eleven minutes had elapsed. Two minutes to go.
He turned and hurried up the aisle toward the front of the train. When he reached the entrance to the second car, he looked and saw that the two fake policemen were aware that the time was nearly up too. They had holstered their guns and were now trying some of the same methods the two leg-breakers had tried, throwing themselves against the immobilized door, trying to make it slide out of their way. They were not oversize and muscled like the first two, but Schaeffer was sure the neckties would not last.
Schaeffer could see they were standing still and arguing now. He could tell they were feeling panicky. Their prey hadn’t come to them, and they couldn’t open the door to get to the prey.
One of the men reached for his pistol and fired four shots at the door’s window. The safety glass took on the look of hammered ice, and the two men began to kick the damaged glass out of its frame. But the shooting had already caused panic in the second car.
People screamed, stood, and stampeded in the aisle, the first ones running away from the shooting toward the rear of the train. As they passed others who were seated, they caused more panic, and those people got up too. The two fake police officers had managed to bring the passengers in the second and third cars to their feet, where they all tightly jammed the aisles while the train slowed to pull into the station.
When the train doors opened, people poured out, scrambling toward the escalators and running along the platform toward the stairs. Schaeffer moved into the thickest crowds and went up to the street. Taxicabs were lined up, and people got into them quickly, and the cabs moved off. Schaeffer saw an empty one and slid in.
As the cab pulled away, the driver said, “Why is everybody running?”
Schaeffer said, “I don’t know. I think there was a fight.”
“Where would you like to go?”
“The Four Seasons Hotel.”
9
When the cab reached the Four Seasons Hotel, Schaeffer got out, paid the fare, and went into the lobby. As soon as the cab had pulled away, he went out another exit and took another cab. He said, “I’d like to go to the Adelaide Southern, please.” In a moment he was gone, just another American who had come to the hotel and was probably going sightseeing for the day.
At the Adelaide Southern, the clerk found his reservation easily, could tell that he was very tired, and so gave him his key card and sent him off quickly with few preliminaries.
He went directly up to his room on the twentieth floor, locked all the locks, flopped on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. He was not pleased with his decision to take a detour to Australia. It had sounded like a good idea at 2:30 a.m. in Yorkshire surrounded by bodies.
He reviewed everything that had happened since he’d landed in Australia. It had been a disastrous decision to come here. Somebody in Manchester must have traced him to the Sydney flight and made a phone call to an Australian criminal group. The two sets of killers had been waiting for him, probably had received photos of him twenty-four hours before his plane touched down.
He was hungry but knew he needed to clean up before he ate. He went into the bathroom and took a shower, shaved, brushed his teeth, and combed his hair. Then he came out and dressed in clean clothes. He thought ab
out whether to go to the restaurant downstairs or order room service.
Room service was dangerous. Years ago, when he had been hunting for people who didn’t want to be found, he had often bribed a room service waiter. The people at the front desk would be trained never to divulge information about a guest even for a huge tip, but a room service waiter operated on his own far from his supervisors.
He decided on going out to a restaurant. He looked through the leather-bound book of hotel information left on the coffee table and saw that there was a fancy restaurant on the top floor. A restaurant on a ground floor could be watched by anyone who walked in from the street or just looked in a window. It was easier for a customer in an upper-floor restaurant to keep an eye on the new arrivals.
He went to the top-floor restaurant and was pleased to see it was busy but had a few empty tables. He had a good lunch among guests from a wide variety of countries and remained aware of each person who came in. Nobody showed any interest in him. When he finished eating, he went back downstairs and lay on the bed, intending to sleep.
Sleep was impossible. His mind kept going back to one odd incident that had taken place when he was fifteen, a few months after he and Eddie had killed the two men outside Yankee Stadium. His memory started with the preparations.
Eddie had said, “Shooting this guy outside Yankee Stadium has got to be easy. It’s the first home game of the season, and every seat will be sold. People will be milling around out there, waiting to get in, and others will be in a big rush to get there. It’ll be a crowd, but a moving crowd. That’s the best. And there will be a lot of ticket takers, ushers, and security guys doing their first day on the job. They won’t know where the john is, let alone what to do in an emergency.”
Schaeffer remembered that the Yankees had been away during the first week of the season in Washington and Detroit. Their first home game was on Tuesday, April 15, against the Senators. The weather was perfect, and he and Eddie had only one target. Somehow Eddie knew in advance that the target had a ticket to the game. Years later Eddie told him that with so many certainties, it had seemed to be a perfect job to start the boy in the business and to test him.
The boy said, “Test me? For what?”
Eddie said, “What can I tell you? Not every male human being is a killer. Some guys are too eager, some too cautious, and some have faces that just about anybody can read. When some guys get scared, they freeze. Some guys who can do the work have something about them that makes people remember them. You don’t have those problems. But the only way to know you’re right for it was to test.”
A few days after they got home from the killing, the rest of the money for their fee arrived in the mail. It was in a box about the size of a book. Eddie took a small stack of bills, read the label on it, laughed, and showed it to him. “See this?” he said. “They gave us a bonus for shooting the second guy. You earned this.” He flipped the bills with his thumb so that the boy could see the bills were all hundreds. Then he put the stack in the safe with the rest of the money and spun the dial. “I’m proud of you, kid. You’ve got a great life ahead of you.”
One day two months later, Eddie came back from a trip to Philadelphia looking thoughtful. He said, “I just heard there’s a contract out for the two who shot those guys outside Yankee Stadium on opening day.”
The boy said, “Really? Do they know who did it?”
“The only people who know are the guys who hired us for the hit, and they’re in Detroit. I don’t think they’ll ever talk about it. The people who put out the contract stay in New York.”
Then the articles about shootings began to appear in the newspapers. It seemed to the boy that what he and Eddie had done had somehow sparked a dozen attacks and reprisals.
At first Eddie simply waited for the talk to go away. He told the boy that when acquaintances asked if he had heard about the killing outside Yankee Stadium, he denied having any knowledge of it. He listened to the rumors instead of talking. He spent more time working at the butcher shop and left the other job to other people.
But the boy noticed Eddie made a few changes during those days. He placed an eight-shot semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun loaded with Winchester rifled slugs under the counter where he waited on customers. He tested the accuracy of the slugs at fifty yards and then walked the fifty yards and put his big thumb through each of the holes in the wooden target. He could put the eight slugs into a five-inch pattern at that distance. He also began to keep two pistols attached to the underside of his cutting table. Every morning he reminded the boy where the guns were.
During the next few months, bodies started to be found in fields and in rivers all over the eastern states, but Eddie kept trying to wait out the disturbance. He said to the boy, “We’re not in the Mafia, and we don’t give a flying fuck who runs it, or if anybody does. That’s between them. We can wait forever for them to settle it.”
Then the day came that the boy had been sure would come. Eddie was offered a job, and the money was so tempting, he took it. They went by car again. In those days nobody at an airport checked passengers’ identification on domestic flights or searched luggage for guns, but a car was cheaper, easier, and more anonymous than an airplane. Eddie and the boy were supposed to check into a particular hotel in Chicago and wait for a phone call to tell them when and where to move on their target. Their victim was a member of the Castiglione crime family who had grown ambitious and begun plotting against his bosses. One of them, an underboss named Taddio, was the one who had hired Eddie to get rid of him.
The boy didn’t know if Eddie had been told more than that, and it didn’t matter. The constant competitions and short-term alliances and tiny wars over territories or insults were impossible for him to follow. They were also issues that he and Eddie could never know from inside. What was at stake for them was only money.
Eddie and the boy arrived in Chicago at night and stopped outside the hotel where Eddie had been told to stay. Eddie had the boy wait in the car. If there was trouble, he was to start the engine and drive to Eddie, who would be running toward the corner of the hotel, and pick him up where the hotel wall gave them cover.
Eddie went into the hotel, stayed for about five minutes, and came out walking. When he reached the car, the boy slid over to the passenger seat to let Eddie drive. As he pulled forward he said, “It doesn’t feel right.”
The boy watched and listened, but asked no questions. Asking questions would only have distracted Eddie while he was identifying his feeling. Finally Eddie said, “It’s not the way things go. There were four guys in the room with Taddio. I didn’t know any of them. Why would they need five guys to tell me where and when to find one man? Taddio said they can’t do it themselves or it’ll cause hard feelings in the family, but”—he ended the sentence with a shrug.
The boy waited. Apparently he was not expected to answer. Eddie said, “Well, they all got a good look at me. They’ll know me if they see me again. And you know what else? Taddio comped a room for us to sleep in at a motel on the south end outside of town. That means they’ll know exactly where we’re going to be.”
When they reached the motel where they were supposed to stay, Eddie turned into the parking lot and said, “Motor running, gun in your hand, eyes on every door.” He got out while the boy moved over to the driver’s seat and rolled down the window.
The boy watched Eddie go and then studied the motel. It was the old-fashioned kind that consisted of two long, low wings, with two rows of identical doors to identical rooms, like arms embracing the parking lot. Where the two long wings met was the lighted office and lobby, so the whole place was V-shaped. The boy paid close attention to the doors with cars parked in front of them.
He saw Eddie step into the lighted lobby. He and the clerk looked like the crafted figures in a diorama on display in a museum. The boy turned his attention to the two long rows of doors where somebody could be hiding, wa
iting for Eddie to get out into the open again.
None of the doors opened and Eddie returned. The boy moved over and Eddie backed up to a door numbered 208 and parked. He said, “This whole thing is still bothering me, kid. Keep your eyes open.”
They both got out and Eddie went to the back, opened the trunk, took his suitcase out, and let the boy carry his own. The boy knew this was so each could keep his gun hand free. He followed Eddie to the door marked 212. It seemed odd to him that Eddie hadn’t parked in front of 212 if that was their room. Eddie opened the door so that he wasn’t standing in front of it, and that told the boy an ambush wasn’t out of the question. Eddie went in and then looked outward from the doorway while the boy came into the dark room. Only when the door was closed did the light come on.
Eddie spoke quietly as he looked in the bathroom, in the closet, and under the bed. “I think we might get a late visit from the four men I met at the hotel uptown.”
“Are we going home or to another hotel?” asked the boy.
“Neither.” He opened the front curtains an inch. “Look. This is 212. The one across is 112. The fourth door from the end.”
“Okay.”
Eddie stepped to the door of the bathroom and pointed. “See the window?”
“Sure.”
“Can you fit through it?”
“I think so.”
Eddie unlatched the window and pulled it to the side. The boy closed the toilet and stood on the lid, lifted himself up, and put his head and shoulders, then his waist, through the window sideways. Then he reached up to brace against the inner wall while he pulled one leg outside, then the other. He hung there.
