by Thomas Perry
Angelo passed the men’s room door, went out the fire exit in the hallway near the storeroom and emerged beside the dumpster in the lot behind the restaurant. He was so overwhelmed by the sweet, nauseating smell of fermenting vegetables that he stopped to peer over the edge to see what they were. He was dispirited when he saw that the smell was from a collection of empty quart cans of tomato paste, all opened and dumped hastily without being scraped. These days everybody was in a hurry; in the old days they had made the sauce from fresh plum tomatoes.
He looked for the car Salvatore had left for him, and saw it immediately. It was a small gray Toyota registered to someone named O’Reilly who ran a gas station and used it as a loaner for regular customers. O’Reilly had no idea who would be driving the car, or that it had anything to do with the way Salvatore made his living. It was a favor of no consequence to O’Reilly, but the fact that he had done it had, without his knowledge, made him eligible for dividends in the future. He would probably find that over time he would gain a few customers who would mention that Salvatore had recommended him. But he might also find that when he was worried about his property taxes they had already been paid, or that his daughter had miraculously moved up the waiting list for admission to the most desirable girls’ school. In the most extreme case, he might find that when his enemies were about to triumph over him, forces that had nothing to do with him would destroy them, suddenly and utterly. The world worked on goodwill, favors and reciprocities, but the system was too crude to keep the exchanges in proportion.
Angelo drove out of the lot without even glancing in the direction of the space where his own Cadillac was parked. In ten or twenty minutes he would be back at his table. He drove carefully. The car was probably like a fingerprint collection by now, having been loaned to half the city without being cleaned, but if he hit something there wouldn’t be much question as to who had been driving it.
* * *
Wolf heard the sound of the Toyota leaving the lot. As soon as its lights had passed, he knew the driver’s eyes would be turned to look up the street, and he sat up in the back seat of Fratelli’s Cadillac. What he saw seemed impossible. The driver of the little car that was going past Angelo Fratelli’s new Caddy was Angelo Fratelli. He ducked back down, opened the door a little and kept the light switch in the door frame depressed with his keys while he opened it wide enough to slip out into the darkness. He reached inside to the floor to haul the shotgun out after him, then hurried to his own car.
Angelo wasn’t sure why he was going to the trouble of meeting McCarron in secret and alone, but he was intrigued by the request. McCarron was the president of a small bank that operated only in Erie County. Banks had always titillated Angelo, and they had titillated him even more since he had begun to read the stories about savings and loans being closed by the government. It amazed him that so much crude bad-boy thievery had gone on behind the substantial institutional columns of those places. There had been clowns who had imagined they could practically stuff their briefcases with their depositors’ money and walk out the door free and clear the day they had declared bankruptcy. But oddly enough, it seemed that the clowns were right. The government was picking up the tab, and those former savings-and-loan officers were sitting on their yachts drinking champagne. Obviously Mr. McCarron had been reading the same newspapers Angelo had. He would be thinking that right now, as the army of sweaty little federal bookkeepers were busy breaking their pencils and gnashing their teeth while they worked their second year of double shifts to figure out what had happened to all the money in the savings and loans, they would be letting the banks alone.
McCarron obviously had a scheme. Those guys must all know each other too, just the way Angelo and his colleagues did. They weren’t exactly competitors, because there was plenty to go around, but they kept an eye on each other because nobody ever knew the future, and if one of them got too big he would be dangerous. McCarron would be sitting in his big old Victorian mansion on Delaware Park Lake, and he would read about how the dumbest bastard he had known at Harvard Business School had just gone under. He would say to himself, “It makes sense.” Then he would read on to learn that two hundred million dollars had somehow disappeared on bad loans, and he would know. For an hour or a day he might pretend he didn’t but he would know. The dumb bastard had somehow ended up with the money. The federal regulators wouldn’t be able to figure out how, but McCarron would because he was in the same business.
So now McCarron had done something that not even the most cynical and suspicious of investigators could have anticipated: he had set up a meeting with Angelo Fratelli. This bank president, whose social life was reported in the Buffalo News and seemed always to involve his being in a tuxedo at an odd location like a hospital or the art museum with others like him, needed Angelo. All that remained now was for Angelo to hear what his part in the scheme was, and what he was going to get out of it. It might be that one of Angelo’s companies would be the one to default on a big loan, or even that McCarron had somehow found a way to get the money in cash and needed someone with connections to haul it to offshore banks. Angelo didn’t waste much time speculating on the specifics because he wasn’t dealing with a little teller with a drug habit. This was a bank president, and if he had a scheme, it was probably so complicated and devious that nobody else could even follow it.
Fratelli drove to the park, and along the curving drive around the lake. Across the water he could see the fronts of the art museum and the Buffalo Historical Museum on a little hillside, gleaming white in the moonlight. Then his view was blocked by trees again, and he passed the first brick walls of the zoo. Now he saw McCarron. He was standing on the first of the asphalt basketball courts in the park, and he had a big tan dog on a leash. Angelo was a little unnerved. When McCarron had said he walked his dog at night, Fratelli had imagined a hairy little yapper, not a big slavering monster. But he pulled over anyway, extricated his large body from the little Toyota and stepped onto the lawn.
“What kind of dog is that?” he asked. He leaned against the fence instead of going through the gate onto the court.
“It’s a golden retriever,” said McCarron. He reached down and pounded the dog. To Fratelli it seemed he had hammered it pretty hard, but the dog appeared to love it, so he ventured closer. “Don’t worry,” said McCarron. “He doesn’t bite.”
“Then what good is he?”
McCarron seemed to think about this for a long time. “My wife bought him,” he said finally.
“Come on,” said Angelo. “Get in and we’ll go for a ride. If we stand around here, it’s only a matter of time before kids come to hit us over the head or cops come to save us.”
McCarron and the dog moved out of the basketball court and to the side of the car. As the banker opened the door, Fratelli stopped him. “Has he taken a leak lately?”
McCarron smiled. “He won’t foul the car.”
As Angelo went back to the driver’s side, he thought about that one: “foul the car.” Whatever this McCarron was going to be worth, he was a real dog-and-horse, riding-boots-and-driving-gloves asshole.
As Angelo started the car, he felt it lurch and rock, once as the dog bounded into the back seat, and once as McCarron seated himself in the front. He pulled out onto the drive. He wasn’t surprised that in the enclosed space of the little car he could smell the dog, but he could also smell something fainter. McCarron was wearing some kind of perfumed after-shave or cologne. He had always heard that it was déclassé to slap that stuff on. It seemed to Angelo that as you moved up the social strata, at each step all the rules were reversed. It was like clothes. At a certain level, not wearing nice clothes meant you didn’t have a job. Two levels up from there, it meant you didn’t need one.
Wolf was driving past the park that abutted the zoo when he saw a man and a dog come out of one of the basketball courts. At first he couldn’t be sure what was going on, but in the rearview mirror he saw the man join somebody who could have been Angelo
Fratelli. When the dog and the two men got into the little gray Toyota, he knew. At the first turn Wolf pulled over, stopped and lay down on the front seat. When he saw the headlights flash on the ceiling of his car and then vanish, he sat up and prepared to follow.
Angelo drove to Delaware Avenue and turned left to go out of the city. He had begun to feel that he needed to bring this one up into the light and take a look at him. Driving around in the dark wasn’t going to tell him who he was dealing with. He turned the next corner and then turned again at Elmwood toward the state university. The traffic was consistent and still heavy, but most of it was going away from Buffalo State at dinnertime. On an impulse, he turned on Forest Avenue and went up a short driveway to a parking lot at the edge of the campus. Ahead of him was a carload of young men. They took a ticket from a dispenser, and a wooden beam raised itself to let them in.
“What’s this?” asked McCarron. “Why are we stopping?”
“The university. There’s plenty of people. It’s a good place to talk.”
“Is this safe?”
“Who do you think those kids are going to recognize—you or me?” Angelo waited for a stupid answer, but when it didn’t come, he drove into the lot, stopped the car in the middle of a row, then turned toward his passenger. “Okay, Mr. McCarron. What do you want from me?”
The banker took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “I have a problem. I was going to say ‘I have reason to believe,’ but that’s not strong enough. I know I have a problem. I’ve been borrowing funds from certain accounts. They were secret, set up with false names. I knew that the owners wouldn’t go to the authorities if they discovered a problem, but now they know, and I think someone will come for me at some point.”
Angelo didn’t conceal his disappointment. “Shit,” he said. “What do you want? Protection?”
McCarron said, “I don’t think that if they really want me, bodyguards would be of much use. I’d like to get out of the country. Maybe you could arrange whatever you do for your own people in this situation—plastic surgery, papers and so on.”
Angelo moved his head from side to side and let out a little snort that was partly a laugh. It was absurd, but maybe if he did this man a favor he wouldn’t regret it. After all, McCarron was still the president of a perfectly good bank. “That kind of thing mostly happens in the movies. But if you’ll tell me who’s pissed off at you, I might be able to get him off your back.” He began to calculate how it would work. He could tell McCarron his enemy was demanding a million dollars. Then, with a hundred thousand or so and a slight expenditure of bluster, Angelo could probably convince any reasonably small-time wiseguy that he had saved his honor and had settled his dispute.
“It’s not like that,” said McCarron. “I can’t tell you much. I thought they were drug dealers, but now I believe it’s the … uh, CIA.”
Angelo’s hands gripped the steering wheel, and he could see that his knuckles were turning white and feel that rage was gripping his chest and throat. All of his visions of access to a bank were laughable; this man was insane. He had heard of this kind of thing happening. Sometimes they saw religious visions, or heard voices telling them to do things like drop their pants in some public place. Sometimes they decided the CIA was bombarding their feeble brains with radio waves and listening to what they were thinking. He wasn’t going to get inside the bank, and clearly within a short time McCarron wasn’t going to either. He held his temper. “Gee,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
McCarron was alarmed. “You won’t do it?”
“The C fucking IA … I just don’t know.” Angelo avoided McCarron’s wide-eyed, gaping face, letting his eyes wander to the nearest lighted building. At the corner of the building were two glass doors, so the whole corner was glass. Beyond the door, in the hallway, he could see a few students, but there was also a man in his late thirties or early forties with sandy hair. The man was looking at something on a bulletin board; no, he seemed to be reading everything on the bulletin board. He looked odd to Angelo. What was it? There was something about the way he carried himself, a slight slouch, as though he were keeping most of his weight on one foot, his coat open and his arms down at his sides. Then Angelo realized that the man was looking at him in the reflection on the dark glass of the door beside him.
Angelo studied the face in the window and then began to sweat. “My God,” he said, and realized he had said it aloud in front of this lunatic, but then decided he didn’t care.
“What’s wrong?” asked McCarron. “What is it? Your heart?” He grabbed Angelo’s arm.
“No! Get your hands off me.” Angelo started the car and backed out of the space, then guided the little car around to the exit. He made it down the narrow drive about forty feet, then had to stop to wait for the cars ahead of him to pay the man at the kiosk and drive off.
The station wagon at the head of the line settled its accounts with the man and pulled forward under the raised barrier, but then something very noisy happened to it. At first Angelo didn’t see the bus coming any more than the driver of the wagon did, but just as its nose moved a couple of feet into the street, the bus arrived to occupy the same space. It was on its approach to the bus stop, so it was only inches from the curb when it hit the station wagon. It popped the front bumper off, took the grille and smeared the front end of the station wagon sideways as it came to a stop across the driveway.
Angelo looked for a way out. The curb on both sides of the car was at least a foot high, and if he tried to bump over it he would probably get stuck halfway. His Caddy might have made it, but this little Toyota’s doughnut tires didn’t have a chance. He was stuck in a track like a go-cart in an amusement park. There were two cars and something that looked like the end of the world ahead of him, and at least four or five behind him. Curious people were now beginning to come out of the nearby campus buildings, some of them looking amused, some worried. The man he had seen would wait just long enough for the confusion to peak, and then he would be here. Angelo couldn’t defend himself; he didn’t even have a gun. If he had been in the Cadillac, he could at least have used the phone to call for help. He looked around him. Far down the street to his left was the lighted yellow sign of a bar called The Canal.
He turned to McCarron. “We’ve got a little problem, and here’s what we’re going to do.”
“Problem?” said McCarron. “They’ll have that cleared up in a few minutes.”
Angelo was afraid he was going to break the steering wheel with his bare hands, so he carefully put them in his lap. “I’m going to get out of the car and walk down to that bar with the yellow sign. You slide over, take the wheel—”
“I can’t slide over in this car.”
“You come around, wait for them to clear the exit, drive down to the bar and meet me.”
Angelo’s slow, clear, quiet voice had frightened McCarron more than it would have if he had been screaming and shrieking. He held on to Angelo’s arm with a grip that slowed the circulation. “No. No, you don’t. Tell me first.”
Angelo glared at him. This was when he would have killed him if they hadn’t been stuck here surrounded by people. This was a man who, if left alone, would shortly begin to line his hats with tinfoil to protect his brain from the CIA’s microwaves. But he tried anyway. “There’s a man in that building. Don’t look. I said don’t look. He kills people for a living. He shouldn’t be here. I haven’t seen him for years, and now here he is.”
“See?” said McCarron. “He’s after me.”
Angelo sighed. “He’s not after you, for Christ’s sake. He’s after me.”
McCarron wasn’t to be dissuaded. “I came to you tonight to tell you they want me dead, a hit man shows up and you say he’s not after me?”
“Please,” said Angelo. “Just do it. Come around and take the wheel.”
“No,” said McCarron. “Not a chance.”
Now Angelo grabbed McCarron’s wrist and freed himself of the lunatic’s grip. I
t was much more difficult than he had anticipated; McCarron was as big as he was. “This is not the kind of man the CIA would send—give him a membership card and security clearance and all that shit. He’s a fucking animal.”
“That’s very reassuring. Look, my life depends on you now. Get us out of here.”
Angelo nearly said, “No, my life depends on you,” but the thought was too distasteful. “This guy doesn’t know you from shit. You’re nothing. The people he works for could take out six of you a day and he still wouldn’t make enough to pay for gas. This is my town. If he’s in my town and nobody told me he was coming, he’s looking for me. Now I’ve got to get to a phone.” He gave McCarron’s wrist a little twist as he threw it back in his lap, and got out of the car.
He walked fast, stepping over the high curb and striking out across the shrubbery to the sidewalk. But then he heard a car door slam, and he listened for the other door to slam and let him know that McCarron had gotten into the driver’s seat. Instead, he heard the loud blare of a car horn. Then there were running footsteps, and an unfamiliar voice yelled, “Hey! Get back in the car! Fight it out at home, you old faggots.” He was mortified more deeply than he had been since he was a child. He felt chills in his spine, inside the very bones, but when he touched his face it was hot.
When McCarron caught up with him, Angelo was so angry that patches and bursts of color were floating across his field of vision. “You couldn’t listen, huh?” The man was dead. He might still be walking around, but now the only gratification that Angelo could promise himself was that McCarron was going to know why he was dying while he died.
“You expect me to sit there and let him kill me? My only chance is if I stick with you.”
McCarron obviously didn’t know that he was beyond having chances. His chance had been the chance to do what Angelo had told him to do. “Shut up,” said Angelo. There was no possibility the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t been looking at him, but why would he be looking for him in a university parking lot? If he wanted Angelo, he would look for the Cadillac in the parking lot at the Vesuvio. Of course he had, but he had seen Angelo come out and get into this little Toyota, and had followed him. Tonight, of all nights of the year, he was away from his soldiers, unarmed and alone.