The Informant

by Thomas Perry

  Elizabeth had moved to McLean, Virginia, a couple of months after Jim died. Even though she had always loved being in D.C. when Jim was alive, it had seemed much better to her to raise the kids in a nice suburb if she had to do it alone. And getting out of the house where her husband had died had been good for her and for the kids, Jimmy and Amanda.

  She had always thought that Special Agent James Hart had been created to use all that courage and strength in some epic struggle to vanquish evil. Thanks to the cancer, he had only used it to endure and falsify his own death, smiling at his wife and children through the pain and suffering of that horrible last year. When it was over, she had cried every night. She had waited until the children were asleep and she could lock her bedroom door and put her face in her pillow. And then, after a year or so, there was a particularly busy time in the organized crime section, and when it had passed, one day she realized she hadn't cried for a month. What she worried about most now was Jim and Amanda. The effects of the early death of a parent on children were huge and life changing, but essentially unknowable. What she had learned was that children became very adept at appearing normal and unscathed, but she could not know what sense of loss or emptiness might be hurting them inside.

  As she drove home, she looked in her mirrors frequently, watching for a car that lingered too long behind her, or one that came up on her too fast. It was not out of the question that some faction that her office had targeted might be watching for her. Prosecutors in Italy had been machine-gunned in their cars a few times in recent years, and some of the American families were still in the habit of taking in apprentices and reinforcements from the old country.

  Organized crime wasn't just the Italian Mafia, either. It was Canadian bikers and Mexican narcotrafficantes, and Russian smugglers and pimps, and groups from every other country of the world. They all brought with them their own money launderers and crooked accountants and assassins. She had been successful enough to have enemies in every group, so she took precautions every day. She watched for things that weren't right, used five alternate routes to get home, and kept her purse open on the seat beside her, so she could quickly grasp the gun inside it.

  When Elizabeth reached the clapboard house with the brick fa- çade on the quiet street in McLean, it was almost eight o'clock. She could see cars in other driveways, other houses with the lights on in kitchen and dining room windows. She pulled up her driveway into the garage attached to the house and pressed the button on the remote control to close the door behind her. She carried her briefcase into the house. She smelled food. "Hi! I'm sorry I'm late."

  Nobody answered. She stepped into the kitchen. She could see the kids had eaten and left one place setting for her. There was a note from her son, Jim. WENT TO SCHOOL FOR A COLLEGE WORKSHOP. He had made his own dinner and driven back to school. She felt deflated and guilty. She was sure it wasn't one of the meetings that parents were supposed to attend, but she went to the bulletin board and checked anyway. The notice was still hanging there. Students only, thank God.

  She kept going and followed a faint clicking to Amanda's room. She was typing at an incredible rate and staring at her computer screen, her iPod's earbuds in her ears. Elizabeth moved closer, into the periphery of Amanda's vision, and waved.

  Amanda gave a little jump, smiled, and said "Hi, Mom" a little too loudly. She pulled the earbud out of one ear.

  "Hi. How was your day?"

  "Not bad," Amanda said. "I got a ninety-eight on that history test we took Friday."

  "Wow. Keep learning those dates, Killer. What are you up to now?"

  "A French paper. In French."

  "What's it about?"

  "I guess I'd translate it as 'The Wondrous Cheeses of France.'"

  "I don't think I'd try that one on an empty stomach. Have you eaten dinner yet?"

  "Hours ago, around five-thirty. Jim had to go back to school."

  "I saw his note." Elizabeth paused, then realized her daughter was waiting patiently for her to leave so she could get back to work. "Well, I'm home if you need me. My French is a little last century."

  "Très mauvais too."

  "True. Somewhere they're keeping my grades to prove it. I'm going to eat something."

  "See you later." Amanda stuck the earbud into her ear and stared at a handwritten note stuck in her French dictionary, then started typing again.

  It occurred to Elizabeth, as it had more and more frequently, that it was going to get very lonely around here in a couple of years, just when she would really need to keep her job to put them both through college. She walked back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out some leftover vegetables and some of the chicken from tonight's dinner, put them in the microwave, and then ate while she read this morning's New York Times and Washington Post.

  She started the dishwasher, went into her room, and changed into blue jeans and an old oversize gray sweatshirt of Jim's that had GEORGETOWN across the chest. Then she went to the dining room and laid out the papers she had brought home. She had requested the records on Michael Delamina, Anthony Varanese, and Frank Tosca. She began at the top of the hierarchy, with Tosca.

  He was forty-one years old. He had a few convictions during his twenties and thirties for the things that young men in the Balacontano family usually did—assault, aggravated assault, and an illegal weapons violation. They weren't even youthful mistakes. They were business, the routine tasks of collecting debts for the family. They had, together, put him in prisons for six years and two months. Prison was a trade school for young Mafiosi. There they got to know important older men and the minor criminals who worked for them, and spent lots of time listening to lectures about methods and systems. They lifted weights and did pull-ups. At the end of a sentence they came out stronger, meaner, and smarter, with allies and sponsors they hadn't had before. Tosca was older and higher in the hierarchy now, and hadn't been arrested for anything in eight years.

  She turned to the files on Anthony Varanese. He wasn't in the same league as Tosca. He didn't appear ever to have been in the running to become one of the little tyrants who ran the families. His life was a perfect example of something she had learned over the years: the life of a Mafioso wasn't a profession, it was an audition. Everybody was in a competition to rise in the hierarchy—to run a crew, to be a big earner, to run a network of crews, and eventually, to master the complicated web of personal and business relationships that made up a crime family. If you weren't moving up, it was just a series of ill-paid, dangerous, and unpleasant jobs. And you always worked for an employer who was volatile, suspicious, and dishonest. Varanese had fallen out of the race a long time ago. His arrests looked to her like failed starts in different parts of the country, always working for new people on some new scheme every couple of years. Tosca had shot straight up, not moving his business address more than a couple of blocks since he had begun.

  It seemed so simple to do what she had asked Hunsecker for permission to do. She could have set a surveillance team on Varanese, and within a week or two she would have had a clear idea of what he was doing these days. In another week, they'd have had enough evidence to convict him of some form of larceny, since that seemed to be his specialty. With some nudging, he would agree to testify against Tosca. Meanwhile, another team could concentrate on Tosca, pursue the cold case murder of Kleiner, and see if there was a way to get the Canadians to search his summer house for the weapon.

  Hunsecker was a terrible obstacle. Some day he would move on, up, and out. Until that day she would have to devise a way to live with him. She couldn't simply stop working while she waited for him to get bored with organized crime, but she couldn't circumvent him either. There had to be some middle way. She was tired now. She put away the papers, went to the living room couch, and turned on the television set.

  The eleven o'clock news was on, flashing its moving logos and slogans. The teaser was already over, so she didn't know what the top stories were. The two anchor people came on, an attractive
, well-dressed man named Curt Wendler, and a pretty blond woman in her late thirties named Kate Lathrop.

  Kate Lathrop was frowning. "A man police believe to be a midlevel New York organized crime figure was found dead in his home on Long Island's north shore yesterday. Michael Delamina, age thirty-six, was found on the floor of his home with a single stab wound to the heart."

  Elizabeth found herself standing, staring at the screen image of the front of a long, low white house across a vast green lawn shaded by tall oaks and maples. There were police cars with blue stripes, and an ambulance. A couple of coroner's men pushed a wheeled stretcher down the driveway with a bagged body strapped to it.

  "Police have declined to speculate on a motive for the killing. They said the victim had several felony convictions, and that he had probably made many enemies over the years. But they do confirm that he had ties to the Balacontano family."

  The screen was now filled with an accident on a narrow bridge over a river somewhere. A tractor-trailer was jackknifed across three lanes, and two small cars appeared to have tried to veer around it at the same time, but Elizabeth had stopped listening because she was already dialing the phone.

  She heard the voice. "Justice, this is Fulton."

  "Bob."

  "Hi, Elizabeth," Fulton said. "You heard about Delamina?"

  "Yes. Why am I watching it on the eleven o'clock news?"

  "Everything we know about it has been forwarded to you in an e-mail. It isn't much."

  "Do we know when it happened, approximately?"

  "Only approximately. The body temperature indicates he died yesterday, probably late in the afternoon."

  Elizabeth thought. It had happened before the Butcher's Boy had come to Washington. He had killed Delamina, then decided that his next move would be to kill Delamina's boss. He had been out of the crime world for too long to know who that was, but he knew that the Justice Department would know. He had flown to Washington and asked her. She couldn't quite bring back now why she had told him.

  "Bob, call the FBI office in New York and say I have a very special request. I would like them to put Frank Tosca under surveillance. He's going to need some protection—set up a perimeter around him that will alert them to anybody attempting to get to him."

  "Are you thinking that Tosca had a hit man do Delamina, and now the guy is coming for his pay?"

  "No," she said. "It's a long story, but the man who killed Michael Delamina went to some trouble to find out who Delamina was working for. Now he knows, so he's going to kill Frank Tosca unless we can catch him when he comes to do it."

  "Oh, boy," Fulton said. "You want me to tell the FBI that?"

  "We don't have any choice. Warn them that this guy is very good at what he does. If he wants Tosca, it wouldn't bother him if he also had to take out an FBI agent or two on the way in. If we can possibly capture him alive, he could be the best domestic catch we've made in about twenty years. He knows a million things we'd like to know."

  "When would he be likely to get there?"

  "He's probably on his way."

  "All right, I'm on it."

  "If there's a problem, anything at all, call and wake me, or have them do it."

  "I will." He hung up.

  Elizabeth stood in the middle of her living room holding the dead telephone. She put it back on its cradle and looked at the television set again, but didn't really see it. It occurred to her that what she had just done was exactly what Hunsecker had ordered her not to do.

  4

  HE HAD BEEN calling himself Michael Schaeffer since he had moved to England twenty years ago, so he was comfortable with the name. It was the sort of name that wasn't made up, and wasn't simplified or changed from something people couldn't pronounce. Schaeffer was the sort of name that a lot of Americans had, not an attempt to pretend he wasn't American. The British could detect imposture, and they didn't like it.

  Before he had gone to England with his Michael Schaeffer passport, he had randomly used a number of other names. Most were just signifiers for landlords who needed to see something filled in on that line. The only name that had meant anything was the one other people called him when he wasn't there. They used the name the Butcher's Boy to refer to him behind his back. In a way, it was the only name he'd had since he was ten that was real. Now that he was back in the country the nickname seemed on the verge of coming back to him like a relapse of a chronic disease.

  After all of the years of quiet in the old city of Bath, he was back in New York. He'd had to make a visit some years ago because a couple of young guys had spotted him on a trip to England. This time it was worse. Michael Delamina and two friends of his had tried to sneak into a summer house he'd rented in Brighton and kill him and his wife in their sleep.

  He had taken Meg to hide in the cellar, then gone out the cellar window into the narrow space between the window and the privet hedge that surrounded the house. In a minute he had found one of the men had gone through the back door into the pantry. Schaeffer had come up behind him, dragged him outside, and cut his throat there to keep the blood out of the house. He found the second man sixty feet down the road in a car with the lights off because in the three A.M. silence he could hear the motor running. He had used the first man's silenced pistol to put a hole in the side window and through the man's temple. He had then gone back to the house to look for the third man, but he heard the car drive off. He ran to the spot and found the man he had shot lying in the gravel where his comrade had pulled him out onto the ground so he could get behind the wheel. He searched the corpses, and then drove them fifty-four miles to London and pushed them over the side of a bridge onto a stretch of railroad tracks that led up behind an old, dark factory.

  He had found a business card in one of the dead men's wallets with the address of a bed-and-breakfast in Brighton run by a Russian émigré named Voltunov. On the top page of the sign-in register on a little podium in the foyer were the names of the two dead men. Between them was the name Michael Delamina.

  Schaeffer had packed a suitcase while Meg looked on. "I assume you know where you're going," she said. "Somewhere in the States?"

  "Yes. He brought those two here to help him look for me. He's going to run back there now. He'll bring two dozen next time. I can't let him do that."

  "I should think not."

  They were silent for a few minutes while he threw the rest of the clothes he'd brought from the house in Bath into his suitcase. Meg said, "I wish we were going home."

  "So do I."

  "Do you know how long this will take?"

  "If it goes well, three days to a week. Most likely, a bit longer."

  "If it doesn't go well?"

  "Then I'll know you're safe in London at your parents' town house for as long as it takes," he said. "Don't go to the house in Bath until I get back. That could be where they first spotted me, and if it is, then it's not safe."

  He drove her to the London house and carried her suitcase into the bedroom she had always occupied when the family was in London during her unmarried years. She looked around her unhappily. "I suppose I'll be fine. I didn't sign on in this marriage to be left in this fortress of virginity, though. So when you get back, be prepared to make amends."

  He laughed. "I'll be thinking of nothing else."

  "That's always been your way." She put her arms around his neck and they kissed. "I know it would be foolish to say be careful. Just come back to me."

  "I'll do my best."

  He boarded a plane at Heathrow and slept through the long flight to JFK. He devoted the first few hours after he got there to meeting each flight that arrived from London that morning, watching the straggling groups of people come out through the customs corridor into the international terminal. At first he didn't see anyone who looked like he might be Michael Delamina. Nobody who came to England to kill him would have traveled with a wife and children, or brought so much luggage that he had to maneuver it around precariously propped on a rented cart.
>
  Just after noon, Schaeffer saw his mark arrive, dragging a single rolling suitcase. He seemed exhausted, and his suit looked as though it had been on him for a week. He had an irritated expression. His face seemed to be made for it, with a protruding chin, thick brows that almost met in the middle, and a low, wrinkled forehead. Schaeffer scanned the terminal and saw nobody waiting—no family happy to see the man return, no limo driver, nobody from an office.

  As the man rolled his suitcase along the shiny floor, Schaeffer began to follow him. When Delamina joined the line at the taxi stand, Schaeffer joined it too. He got close enough at the cabstand to hear him telling the driver the address, then turned and walked away and joined a group far along the drive waiting for the shuttle to the car-rental depot. When he got there, he rented a car to drive to Delamina's house on the north shore of Long Island and look it over. The house was a suburban one-story brick single-family building set on a large green lawn. It had a long driveway that led to a garage set a few feet behind the house. There seemed to be nothing about it that would present an obstacle to him.

  Next he drove to a truck-rental lot in the next town, parked his car, and rented a plain white van. At an industrial supply store he bought a uniform consisting of blue coveralls and a blue baseball cap, and a clipboard. Two hours later he drove the van to Delamina's and pretended to be a delivery man. He made his way inside the house to take care of Michael Delamina with one of the knives he found in a wooden block in the kitchen.

  Since that afternoon he had been following the most basic strategy he knew. It was something he had learned from Eddie Mastrewski when he was a teenager. "If someone attacks you, come back at him fast. Then see who else needs it. Go from the young, low-level shooters up through the one who sent them out after you, and then the boss, the highest one you know. It's just like running up a flight of stairs. If you stop halfway up, you're dead. You have to get all the way to the top. The man who is up there will keep sending new people after you until the end of time."