by Thomas Perry
He stopped and looked back as though he were waiting for a friend. He leaned against the nearest car, inserted the slim-jim he'd made into the door beside the passenger window, jerked it up, and unlocked the door. He took out his car keys, pretended to unlock the door, and opened it. He leaned in and performed a quick search. He felt under the driver's seat, under the dashboard to the right of the steering wheel for a hidden pistol holder, used his screwdriver to pop the glove compartment, relocked the car, and moved on.
After three cars he began to wonder if he had made a mistake. Maybe the practice of carrying guns was one more thing in America that had changed since he'd left. But the fourth car held what he needed. In the pocket at the front of the driver's seat was a compact Sig Sauer P238 with two full magazines. He put the gun and ammunition in the messenger bag, locked the car, and moved on. His next car was empty, but then he hit two in a row. One had a Glock 17, and the other an M92 Beretta. He kept moving from car to car. When fifteen minutes had passed, he sensed that the odds were getting too high that he would be noticed.
He turned and walked back toward his rental car. The lot was filling up now, and he had to walk close to several groups of men while he was trying to keep the stolen pistols invisible. He had seven pistols in his messenger bag, which was bulging and weighed at least fifteen pounds. He got into his car, set the messenger bag on the floor in front of the passenger seat, started the car, and slowly made his way up the aisle toward the exit.
He had not been wrong. The last time he had thought about the gun laws in Texas had been quite a few years ago, but at that time it was legal to carry a loaded, concealed weapon if the gun owner was in his car. That was pretty much an invitation to keep a gun in the glove compartment, and he'd just verified that many people were in the habit. He drove out onto the highway and headed eastward toward central Houston and his hotel. Tonight he was grateful that some things were eternal.
The hotel was quiet and pleasant, and he felt glad to be back in his room. He opened the newspaper the staff had left outside his door and scanned the pages. There was a small article, no larger than four column inches, about a joint police and FBI raid on an Arizona resort, in which they'd arrested dozens of guests on parole violations, illegal drug and weapons charges. Orders from Washington must have been to keep from releasing too much. He hoped it was because the government was planning to do something more to disrupt the old men's attempts to reorganize themselves. Anything the government could do to frustrate those bastards and keep them off balance right now would help him.
He spread the newspaper on the desk and set the bag on the surface, then took out the seven stolen guns, one at a time. There was the Sig P238, the Glock 17, two Beretta M92s, a Browning Hi-Power .45, a Kimber .45, a Springfield Armory .40. All of them were fully loaded, and three had an extra loaded magazine or two.
It had been a good fifteen minutes' work. Now it was time to sleep and get ready for the next part of the trip. He showered and then soaked his body in the tub, as he had done in Arizona. He was going to do some difficult things in the next few days, and he couldn't afford to be slowed down by any aches or angry scratches or blisters once it began. When the water had cooled, he dried off and went to bed. As soon as he dozed off, he dreamed he was in England again. The strange part was that the dream wasn't strange at all. He did all the things he usually did—woke with Meg in the old manor house, went to the big dining room for breakfast, then went into the library for an hour to read the newspapers while Meg completed her letters and her e-mails. The library was his refuge because it had been hers, and her father's before her. When Schaeffer and Meg had begun to live here after her parents died, he had begun reading his way through the books in the shelves. He had read his way through in about five years and then began to buy books. In the dream-day he and Meg packed a bag and went into Bath, ate at a restaurant, went to a play, and met some friends for a drink afterward. As he looked around in the hotel bar where they had stopped, he noticed that all of the other tables and the stools at the bar were occupied by members of the Mafia he had seen at the ranch. They didn't recognize him, but he kept waiting for one to turn and look at him, then stand and point at him.
At eight in the morning he awoke, got up and dressed, then drove to an electronics store, bought a prepaid cell phone, and dialed Meg's number in London.
"Hello," she said.
"Hi. It's me."
"I've been wishing it would be you every time, but I always remind myself that you would never call in these circumstances. Do you have new circumstances?"
"They're a bit worse than before. I wanted to tell you that I'm doing my best to get through this, but you should be prepared for the probability that it won't work out."
"Oh, my God, Michael. Please. Is there any way to simply leave? If you and I met in a village in Paraguay or one of the thirty thousand islands of the Maldives, couldn't we live some kind of life together? Because I'd do that without hesitation."
"So would I. The problem is that the people I'm worrying about have branches and subsidiaries in a great many countries, and very close ties with a lot of other organizations everywhere. Right now, today, the word is being spread that finding me is worth a lot of money. The figure will be high enough so quite a few people in different places will begin to search."
"What are you going to do?"
"Make getting me seem like a hard way to make money."
"The only other time you went back there, you made up such a pretty story for me. Do you remember? You were with the CIA, and the two boys who had been killed when the Bulgarians came after you would be awarded posthumous medals by the queen?"
"I remember."
"I never bought a word of it. But I loved you for making it up. I've always loved you, from the time you took me to tea after that meeting in Bath, and we talked. I didn't know anything about you—what you had done before, who you knew, and so on. I could see everything about you without any facts to obstruct the view. You do your best to come back to me. If you make it, I'll be here waiting for you. If you don't make it back, then know that I don't regret anything. If I had it to do again, I'd give myself to you in a heartbeat."
"What's going on now reminds me that I have a few things to regret, but I've never felt anything but lucky I met you. I love you."
"I feel as though we didn't get to say that enough times."
"If I get back, I'll say it every morning before I do anything else."
"I'll remind you."
"I'm sorry, but I've got to keep moving, so I'd better go. Stay safe. Be alert. If anything around you seems odd, assume it's trouble. Visit friends in faraway places for a few weeks. One way or another, this will be over by then. If they find me, they'll stop looking."
"I'll be waiting for you."
He disconnected the call, took the phone apart, and dropped the pieces in trash cans as he walked along the street. When he reached the hotel, he checked out and began to drive northward out of Houston.
19
ELIZABETH HAD A STRANGE, disconnected feeling as she looked down at Washington from the air. She wasn't feeling the way she usually did when she flew into Reagan International—a mixture of comfortable familiarity and pride at how beautiful the place was. She was somewhere else in her mind, and she realized that she was feeling what the Butcher's Boy must be feeling.
He had killed Frank Tosca in the midst of the biggest conference of bosses in fifty years. He must be wondering, as she was, what kind of reaction the old men were having. Most of them were probably busy dealing with the problem of being detained in Arizona. Even if nothing else was lost, each of the old men would be aware that he had been made to look ridiculous—not only careless, but gullible. He must be feeling very alone right now.
Looking foolish was a very serious matter if you were trying to keep a couple of hundred soldiers cowed and respectful. Looking weak had probably been the foremost cause of death in their families for the past five generations. Who would th
ey be blaming today for what had happened in Arizona? The one who had insisted on the meeting was Frank Tosca. But it must be terribly unsatisfying to be angry at a dead man.
Most of them would have no choice but to settle on the Butcher's Boy. He was safe to hate. He was an outsider. None of them would have to deal with retaliation from his cousins and in-laws. When he had killed Tosca, he had robbed the meeting of its purpose. He had contributed to the number and gravity of their potential legal troubles. He had also contributed to the spectacle they presented as a group of impotent, half-senile old men trying to reconstruct a past that could never return. It had been one against two hundred, and once again, the two hundred looked like idiots. That alone would make them want him dead.
She knew, and the Butcher's Boy must know too, that the death of a man like Frank Tosca wasn't entirely bad news to the other bosses. They were the veterans of a great many vendettas and coups. The older ones had lived through a couple of disputes that in some countries would have seemed like civil wars. They knew that a strong man like Tosca might revitalize an organization that had been stagnating for years. But the more success Tosca had and the more people flocked around him, the less power the other bosses would have. He would become the first among equals, and then, ultimately, the boss of bosses— Il capo di tutti capi. Soon they would have been paying percentages to him for the privilege of running businesses, and after that, they would have begun to take orders from him and serve at his pleasure. Many of them must have been delighted that he had not made it home from Arizona.
None of that would help his killer. Getting the killer would be a way to overcome their new image problem and keep their power from leaking away. By killing the Butcher's Boy, they would console any of their own men who had been hoping a new golden age for the Mafia would start when Tosca took over. They would complete this single small accomplishment in concert with all of the other families who had agreed to it, and maybe acting together would bring better things later. These were men who killed on a suspicion, an impulse, a whim. Death always seemed to be the solution to every problem.
If only the Butcher's Boy was astute enough to understand his predicament, he might be ready for an approach from her. He just might be feeling the right kind of desperation. If she offered the kind of sanctuary that only the U.S. government could offer, he just might take it.
As her plane banked and leveled its wings for the approach, she was already trying to think of a way to contact him. He would be watching television and looking at newspapers to find out anything he could about the aftermath of his killing Tosca. She needed to let him know that she understood his predicament and sympathized. She stopped herself. No, that wasn't right. Did she feel sympathy for him? She detected a temptation to feel sorry he was going to suffer, even though she knew the feeling was wasted on him. There were insane serial killers who murdered fewer people than he had just since he'd turned up again, and they served as the models for horror movies.
Still, there had never been an underdog who had worse odds. His opponents were all grown-up men who had needed to commit a murder in order to be "made," and they all had been trying to kill him when he'd attacked them. But she had to resist the impulse to defend him. It made her confused and, if anyone knew, would make her seem crazy, like the women who wrote love letters to convicted serial killers.
The plane landed, gave its usual bounce and shudder, rattled down the runway to a stop, then taxied toward the terminal. By the time the lights came on to illuminate the impatient passengers popping up to get their bags from the overhead compartments, she had composed what she wanted to say.
"I've known about you for twenty years, but only met you on August 30. You've got troubles, so talk to me."
She wrote it out on a page torn from her address book while she was in the cab to the Justice Department building. She got out in front of the building, paid the driver, and went inside, still thinking about what she was going to do. When she walked into the office, she almost handed the little torn page to Geoffrey. No, she thought. This has to be unofficial. No unwitting accomplices to get destroyed if it blows up. She said to him, "Hi, Geoff. Give me fifteen minutes before I see Hunsecker," and went into her office and closed her door.
She sent text messages to her children. "I'm back and will be in the office for the day. If you need me, don't hesitate to call. Love, Mom."
Then she turned on her laptop and went to the site of the Arizona Republic in Phoenix and placed her personal ad. Next she went to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune.
20
IT TOOK HIM two days to drive the eleven hundred miles from Houston to Denver and a night to recover, but now it was morning and he was a guest in the Brown Palace Hotel in the center of Denver. The hotel was old, with lots of dark, polished wood. He had always thought of it as what some of the old hotels Eddie Mastrewski had stayed in must have looked like before they fell into ruin. Eddie had liked those old hotels, and he would have loved the Brown Palace, with its old-fashioned wallpaper and the antique architecture of the place. It had a central stairwell, so a person on the upper floors could look down into the square enclosure of railings all the way to the lobby.
A few of Eddie's hotels were built that way, but they were all creaky, with stains on the worn carpets that the boy could only make guesses about. Eddie had liked them because they were so devoid of paying guests that he could go to the upper levels and occupy a floor of his own. That way he could use the hallway as his front porch, sit in a chair, read the papers, and look down to see if any of his horde of enemies showed up. He was especially partial to the places where the management wouldn't be too shocked if he left suddenly. He always paid in cash at the start of a stay so any consternation he caused was emotional and had no legal implications.
This morning he missed Eddie more than usual. He would have loved to have Eddie out there in the hallway, tilting back in a desk chair with a cigarette burning in the big sand-filled ashtray and the two .45 automatic pistols in his coat.
Schaeffer took the elevator to the lobby, went into the hotel shop, and bought the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. He walked into the hotel restaurant and went to a booth near the back where he could see the doorway. He was aware of the two other ways out of the dining room—through the bar and past the men's room, and through the kitchen to the alley. He had scanned the room from the doorway and seen no reason to worry, but he looked at all the faces once more before he opened the New York Times.
He ran his eyes down each page, looking for some reference to what had happened in Arizona. He saw nothing. By now the federal cops must have identified the men they had cornered in their raid. It seemed odd that more wasn't being made of it. Maybe the right person at the Times had not yet seen the list and noticed that many of the names were recognizable names of New York gangsters. He opened the Tribune. There was a brief story that said FBI officials had raided a compound in Arizona and arrested "dozens of men" on weapons and drug charges. The story was out. In a day or two, when reporters saw the names, it would probably blow up a bit.
It was possible the L.A. Times would be ahead on this one because Arizona was a bit closer to their orbit, but he found nothing. When the waitress came, he ordered his breakfast, then looked idly at the papers he'd already seen. He wondered if any of the old men still used the personal ads. That had once been the way that people like Eddie knew they were wanted for a job. Eddie would not have liked it if a couple of Mafia soldiers had come to his butcher shop to offer him a contract.
Something caught his eye. An ad said, "BB: Sorry I missed you at the ranch. I'll see what I can do, if you want. VP"
VP had to be Vincent Pugliese. They always used the guy you liked best, the one you'd trust if you had to trust anyone. Pugliese worked for the Castigliones, so the one who had ordered Pugliese to do this was a Castiglione, probably Joe, the oldest brother. He would have asked if anybody thought
he could be the one, and Vince had done that silent nod of his—a serious man's gesture, not bobbing his head up and down like a windup toy, but a single dip of the head.
Schaeffer remembered that nod from the old days, when the Castiglione family had summoned him to Chicago. Old Salvatore Castiglione hired him to go to Milwaukee and demonstrate to the small Mafia contingent there that their way of declaring independence from the Castiglione family in Chicago had been a bad idea. Instead of paying their regular percentage, they had killed the bagman. Salvatore had decided that the one who should pay was Tony Fantano, the boss of the Milwaukee crew.
The boy was twenty years old and he didn't know Tony Fantano by sight or where to find him. He was already resigned to having to find the right bar and start asking questions. But Castiglione said, "We'll give you a guide." The old man looked around the room at the men who were sitting there. That was the first time Schaeffer had seen the nod. Vince Pugliese was the same age as he was, but he had an intelligent, quiet gravity even then. Vince simply nodded once. "Done," said the old man. "Vince will go with you."
They drove to Milwaukee that night. They had a Chevy Impala stolen from Oklahoma City with Illinois plates that were also stolen. They had a pair of .45 pistols, two among the millions of copies of the Colt 1911 model that were issued by the U.S. Army until the end of World War II and then passed from hand to hand for forty years until there was no way of guessing who the recorded owner had been.
He remembered riding into Milwaukee while Vince drove the car. They had talked about everything but the job. They had both been feeling at that time in their lives that they wished they could go to college. Pugliese had noticed that Castiglione's son had sons their age—the grandsons of old Salvatore—and two of the three were away at college. Old Salvatore was paying the insane tuition for both of them. For his own family, Salvatore thought education was a good idea. For the sons of other men—young guys like Vince—it was a stupid waste of time.