The Informant

by Thomas Perry

  Agnoli shrugged. "You were right about why they agreed. They didn't want Tosca to take over the Balacontano family and then hold a grudge because they didn't help when he needed it. But the rest of this pissed them off. It pissed them off that you knew about the meeting, that you got in, and that you killed Tosca. And I think it scared them. If you could do that to Tosca, what's to stop you from killing them?"

  Schaeffer said, "If they changed their minds and left me alone, that's what would stop me. Nothing else. Do you understand?"

  "I understand perfectly. I've seen your work."

  Schaeffer said, "You've treated me honorably. I'll do the same to you. When does your flight board?"

  "About a half hour."

  "Stay here for fifteen minutes. Don't call anybody or try to find me. I won't tell anyone we talked."

  "Thank you," Agnoli said.

  Schaeffer went out the door. Agnoli steadied himself on the sink. After a few minutes of trying to regain his composure, he realized he hadn't looked at his watch to be sure when the fifteen minutes had started. He looked, and started the fifteen minutes then.

  17

  ELIZABETH WARING CALLED Jim and Amanda at one o'clock in the afternoon so she could catch them right at four eastern time when they arrived home from school. "How was school?" brought vague reassurances but no actual information. "Do you have everything you need for dinner? If you don't, you're welcome to go out to pick up something at Koo Koo Roo or California Pizza Kitchen" brought reminders that they had too much homework to waste time on that. She gave up, issued motherly benedictions, and went back to work. She stayed in the Phoenix field office until after midnight and then accepted a ride to a hotel near the airport. As she lay down on the bed, it occurred to her that midnight in Phoenix was three A.M. in Washington. It was a feeble, passing observation, the last before sleep took over her brain.

  When she awoke, it was nearly ten. She called the FBI field office, identified herself, and asked for Special Agent Holman. The woman at the other end said, "I'm sorry, Ms. Waring. This is Agent O'Brien. He had a flight out at eight. He and his team were ordered back to Washington."

  "Then the operation here is over?"

  "Hardly. We have two murders, two hundred persons of interest in custody all over the place, and a wide variety of charges are being filed this morning."

  "I know. I did some of the paperwork last night."

  "That's right. I'm sorry. But I think what's happened is that the rest of this is going to be left to us—permanent party Arizona."

  "Are you feeling overwhelmed?"

  "Everybody is eager. This is a big chance. But this office doesn't see many La Cosa Nostra types except a few retirees and the guys who buy the drugs that are brought in through the desert."

  "I'll be there in about an hour," Elizabeth said. "I can spare another day or two."

  Elizabeth took a cab to the field office, entered the conference room, and began resorting the files on the long table. After a half hour, Krause came in. "Ms. Waring. What are you doing?"

  "I'm going to make some charts so the U.S. attorneys here will know who's who. Do you think you could get me a few more office supplies?"

  "Sure. What do you need?"

  "Twenty-six sheets of poster-size paper. A ruler, a few pens. Black is best, but anything will do."

  He returned just as she finished sorting the files into twenty-six piles. She took the first one, wrote CHICAGO and a horizontal line that said CASTIGLIONE FAMILY. She put horizontal lines in a row below it and wrote JOSEPH, PAUL, AND SALVATORE CASTIGLIONE. Directly under them were eight underbosses, and to their right were three consiglieres. She wrote in the names of four underbosses who had been arrested in Arizona. She went below to the caporegima and then to the soldiers. Below them were the names of the young bodyguards each of the bosses had brought with him.

  By one she had filled in the names of all of the men who had been detained. Each appeared on his line in the hierarchy of his home city. Krause came into the conference room and looked at the charts. He brought with him a woman in her early thirties with red hair. "This is Agent O'Brien," he said. "Elizabeth Waring of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division of Justice."

  "Oh, yes," Elizabeth said. "We introduced ourselves on the phone this morning."

  "Yes, we did," said O'Brien. "Everyone knows who you are, of course. It's a pleasure to meet you in person."

  Elizabeth was taken aback for a second, but then she realized it was probably true that young agents knew the names of the people who had been on this detail for so many years. "Thank you."

  Krause looked at a few of the organizational charts. "You knew who every one of these guys was?"

  "We knew the big players, of course—the 'old men' is what people call them—because even the ones who aren't exactly old have been around a long time. They're either heads of families, or in a few cases they're underbosses who run some semi-independent group or the Mafia contingent in a small city, and they all have long records. The place where we're going to gain some ground is the two-thirds who aren't famous. Some haven't even been arrested before. We not only have their names, photographs, and addresses, but now we can tell who they work for and where they must fit in. It's a huge update."

  O'Brien said, "So we should assume they're important if they were invited to the conference?"

  "Not important right now. A twenty-two-year-old doesn't run anything in the Mafia, any more than he would at any other major American business. But if he was there, he's trusted. The old men, as a rule, are very suspicious and wary. If they're invited to travel anywhere, they don't necessarily assume it's safe. The young men they bring with them are the ones they would want with them in a fight. Our experience is that these are the men we'll keep seeing for the next twenty or thirty years."

  "Are they the ones we try to pressure to tell us more?"

  "None of these people will talk. Not the bosses, and not the young bodyguards. They take omertà seriously. The only ones we've ever had any luck with were middle-aged soldiers who have done their jobs and kept the secrets for thirty years and have nothing to show for it. That's the only group that isn't invited to this kind of meeting. They're all at home making money for the bosses."

  "Are we wasting our time talking to these men?"

  "No. They sometimes reveal useful information without knowing it. I think what we've got to try for is what they were talking about at the conference. They don't meet like this very often, and anything that might give us the agenda is worthwhile. And relationships are important, particularly blood relations. If you find out Mike Morella in Los Angeles is a cousin of Gaetano Bruni in Chicago, some day that might be important information, so make sure it gets into their intelligence files."

  "Ms. Waring?"

  She turned her head. Agent Collazo was in the doorway. "There's a call from the deputy assistant AG for you. Would you like to take it in my office? It's quieter."

  He meant more private. "That would be great." She got up. "Excuse me." She went into his office and he closed the door after her.

  "Waring," she said.

  "Please hold for Mr. Hunsecker." After a few seconds, a click brought him. "Ms. Waring."

  "Yes?"

  "I understand we reached you in Phoenix."

  "That's right. I'm at the FBI field office."

  "What are you doing there?"

  "There's been an important FBI operation near here in the mountains, a big meeting of the crime families at a resort. It's sort of a dude ranch, and they took over the whole place for a meeting. The FBI did a sweep to see who was there and so on."

  "I asked what you were doing there."

  "When I learned what was happening, I realized that this was a time when they could use my help to figure out who they had. It was also an occasion for us to find out things we might need to know about changes in the current power structure and the up-and-coming generation we don't know a lot about. So I took a couple of personal days and f
lew out to lend a hand."

  "You left Washington without asking permission or approval from higher authority and flew across the country to attach yourself to an operation by another agency. Is that about right?"

  She couldn't tell him that the operation was hers as much as the FBI's. She had learned about it from a source he had already ordered her to drop and gone around him to get the FBI involved because she knew he wouldn't. "Mr. Hunsecker. I took steps in order to avoid any ambiguity about my actions and to prevent the suspicion that I was using Justice Department time or money. I took two personal days to be here, and paid for my own flight and lodging."

  "You left your post without leave."

  "In order to get here while it still mattered, I had to make the arrangements overnight and be on an early morning flight. If my acting alone offended you, I apologize. Often things have to happen before office hours, and Justice Department employees have to act on their own initiative. If one of the people in my section learned that something this big was happening and didn't realize it was more important to be here than to clear it with me, I'd be angry."

  "We're well into the second business day, and the only reason I know about this is that the deputy director of the FBI called to thank me for sending someone to Phoenix."

  "That was thoughtful of him," said Elizabeth. "May I ask what you said to him?"

  "This is beginning to try my patience. We can go into all of it when you return. Make an appointment with my assistant to see me at eight A.M. tomorrow morning."

  "But I'm still accomplishing things here. Can we make it the day after?"

  "No. Consider yourself recalled. Be here at eight A.M."

  "Yes, sir." She heard him hang up, not a click, but the incidental air noise went away, a sound like a door closing.

  She decided she shouldn't be surprised that he had insisted on eight A.M. That was five A.M. Phoenix time, and it meant she would have to take a red-eye flight that arrived at seven. Even then she would have to go from the airport directly to the office to be on time. To be berated for doing her job.

  18

  HE GOT OFF THE plane at George Bush Intercontinental Airport outside Houston and rented a dark blue Buick LaCrosse. He drove to the comfortable old hotel near the Astrodome where he'd made a reservation and checked in. Instead of sleeping on the plane, he had remained alert because his conversation with Agnoli had been disturbing. He could have killed him in the men's room where there were no cameras and probably could have gotten away with it. But his previous dealing with Agnoli had convinced him that Agnoli wouldn't invite trouble he didn't need. And he had the feeling that a man who wasn't one of the capos who had agreed to his death should be left alone right now. There was going to be enough killing soon.

  Two hours later he had dinner in the fish restaurant beside his hotel. He sat in the dark wooden booth thinking about the rest of his life. If he were to stop right now and fly back to the UK, what would happen? He might be able to fit in a few months with Meg before another enterprising young soldier managed to find him. It was possible, if he was very careful about his movements, to make it last a bit longer. He had killed Tosca's first three scouts in Brighton, but dumped their bodies in London. It was difficult for him to know if anyone in the United States knew they'd even been in Brighton.

  It had been bad luck that they found him. He and Meg seldom went to Brighton, partly because that was the city where one of the Talarese family had spotted him ten years ago. For him it had seemed an unnecessary risk, and for Meg Brighton had unpleasant associations. But there he had been again, down in Brighton for the races with Meg, and he had been spotted. He wished there could have been a way to get rid of the three or elude them without killing them. Then nothing more would have happened. Carl Bala could have died of old age after a few more years in prison, and Tosca could have succeeded him, with no personal interest in the Butcher's Boy.

  He hadn't seen the three men coming, and so he hadn't had a chance to do something different—go to a more remote part of the United Kingdom to stay out of sight, or go to France. Even as these thoughts formed, he knew they were lies. If he had noticed the three men looking for him in England, he wouldn't have concocted some clever way to hide. He simply would have killed them sooner and more efficiently.

  The whole issue would have gone away without the old men. It was typical of bosses to listen to Tosca's request and see some advantage in it for themselves that made them indifferent to the risks. Did those fat bastards forget who Tosca was talking about? Didn't they take a moment to reflect on why a man who commanded over three hundred soldiers wanted to share the credit for killing one solitary enemy? And now, even after he had found his way into their meeting to kill Tosca and walked out again, didn't even one of them remember who he was?

  He looked at the window. It was dark out and getting to be evening, time to get busy. He finished his dinner and went out to his rental car to begin his search for the necessary weapons. In the old days he'd had connections in many cities who would sell him guns. Now he was alone, and he would have to scavenge.

  He thought about how he was going to find a gun. At times he had bought guns at garage sales, or from street drug dealers, who he had found would sell just about anything. He'd once known a gunsmith who sometimes had people leave guns with him to be fixed or modified and then never come back for them. Once he'd bought a compact .32 Beretta from a gas station owner outside Las Vegas who had taken it from a busted gambler in exchange for a tank of gas to get home. He knew he would have to work a little harder this time. He would have to prepare.

  He had passed a big thrift store on his way into town from the airport, and he drove back now and went inside. The sales floor looked like a hurricane had blown through and deposited the contents of twenty houses. There were various unmatched pieces of furniture, toys, books, vases, clothing of every sort and size, costume jewelry, old magazines, small appliances, recordings in every format since Edison. The other shoppers were as various as the merchandise. Some appeared to need a cheap way of staying warm, while others scrutinized and evaluated each item like antique collectors.

  In the clothing section, he picked out four different baseball caps, a few T-shirts in dark colors, a couple of zip-up sweatshirts with hoods, an olive drab canvas messenger bag with a shoulder strap, and a navy blue work shirt with an embroidered patch over the left pocket that said BOBBY. At a counter he bought a pair of aviator sunglasses. He bought a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, an adjustable crescent wrench, a cold chisel and hammer, a lock-blade knife. When he got to the car, he put all of his purchases in the trunk.

  His next stop was a huge Home Depot. He bought a short section of sheet metal heating duct, a pair of tin snips, and a roll of electrical tape. A few blocks from the store he parked and used the tin snips to cut a strip of sheet metal about eighteen inches long and two inches wide with a slight hook on the end. He wished he could show Eddie Mastrewski that he still remembered how to do this.

  When Schaeffer had turned sixteen, Eddie had taken him to the Department of Motor Vehicles and signed the papers so he could get a learner's permit. Eddie had sat in silence with beads of sweat running down his forehead while the boy drove up and down the streets, narrowly missing parked cars and stopping so abruptly at each intersection that Eddie was nearly catapulted out of his seat. He endured the lessons for two months, until the boy's test date came along and he passed. The next day Eddie said, "Come on. I want you to meet somebody who knows a lot about cars."

  The boy thought it would be a mechanic who was going to show him about car maintenance. Eddie was particular about his car because he sometimes used it to get away after he and the boy had done a job. It was unthinkable that it wouldn't start and run smoothly. Instead, the man was a thief. He was tall and rangy with blond hair like a clump of hay, and he had a southern accent. He taught the boy how to cut a piece of thin sheet metal into a slim-jim, a tool for opening locked car doors. He showed him how to use a screwdriver
and hammer to pop out the ignition switch to hot-wire it.

  On the way home Eddie said, "I can't buy you a car right now, kid. People would wonder where the money came from. Maybe in a couple of months, after we've mentioned to the right people that you're saving for one. But after today, if it's a matter of life and death, you know how to get one."

  He took his messenger bag and one of the hats and one of the sweatshirts out of the trunk and set them on the car seat, then drove a little farther down the street and stopped near a Starbuck's coffee shop. He opened his laptop computer, found the Starbuck's Internet network, and typed in "Gentlemen's clubs, Houston, Texas." Several addresses appeared, and he began to drive. The place he wanted was easy to imagine. It had to be big, and it would have to have a parking lot that was vast enough so the cameras and patrols wouldn't easily see him. It had to be a loud, popular sort of place with men coming in constantly at this time of the evening and very few leaving yet.

  He drove out of the city on the beltway that surrounded it and found the first club. He drove past and decided it wasn't the sort of place he wanted. There was a small, dark-looking parking lot behind a windowless box of a building. He drove to the second, and it was better. There was a warehouse-size building with a big sign on the roof with a picture of a mischievous-looking pony and the word MUSTANG, and beneath it, HUNDREDS OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. He assumed the beautiful women didn't all dance there on one night.

  He stopped down the road, removed the bulb that illuminated his license plate, and put a few pieces of black electrical tape on the plates so I became T, P became B, 5 became 6, and 9 became 8. He put the messenger bag over his shoulder, a hooded sweatshirt over the bag, and a baseball cap on his head, then drove back to the lot.

  The parking space he selected was as far from the sprawling building as possible. He got out of the car and walked two rows closer to the club. The row where he had parked was still filling up with new arrivals. The one where he stood was full, but the drivers probably hadn't been here very long. He touched the hood of the nearest car as he walked, and it was still hot.