by Thomas Perry
“All right, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. She noted the change to her first name. “You’ve just come from Fraud, so you know something about revenue-center budgeting. That’s what I’m here about. We have limited resources to work with. This is one case, one man. What do we get if we catch him, and what does it cost?”
Elizabeth thought for a moment, then decided. She was going to have to defeat Hillman by tunneling under whatever position he took so that she got there before he did. “In Fraud that wasn’t hard to answer. We were recovering money stolen from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We just figured out who took the most who was likely to still have it, and we went after him. This is different. I don’t have the slightest idea what it would cost to catch him, and I don’t know what we get.”
The deputy assistant nodded again, and this time he was smiling in contemplation of the triumph he was about to savor. “You have to look at this from the Malthusian point of view. I have to go upstairs and tell our bosses what I think we should do with our finite resources that will result in the greatest good. Or the maximum damage to evil, if you will. The range of options is staggering, and we’d like to do it all. But you have to be hard-nosed about this Is this something we should pursue on a federal level?” He smiled as though he knew the answer, then added, “Of course, you could tell me that this is the kind of decision I get the big bucks for making.” He looked around, and the people at the table chuckled on cue. He seemed pleased. “But I’ve got nothing to go on unless you help me.”
“All right,” said Elizabeth. What a loathsome little man. She would have to argue his position for him, and let him see what was wrong with it. “As I said, I believe that the Butcher’s Boy fell out with his employers ten years ago, and as a result killed a number of organized-crime figures—some important, some not—in order to create the maximum chaos so that he’d have time to get away. I think that he’s an evil man, and in a perfect society would be forced to suffer some punishment. But if you’re asking if you should take, say, two million dollars from enforcing civil rights laws to spend on getting him, I don’t know. I doubt it.” The current administration had spent virtually nothing on enforcing civil rights laws, and everyone at the table knew it.
Richardson looked faint, but the deputy assistant seemed to relish the conversation. “Give me your reasoning, Elizabeth.”
“The reason we wanted him ten years ago was that we believed he knew a great deal about the men who ran organized crime and their activities. He’d have to. He was a sort of contract exterminator for people at a very high level. But I think he’s been in hiding for ten years. If that’s true, what he knows is mostly old news, which might make it hard to get convictions. There’s also the problem that his knowledge is pretty much limited to capital crimes. If we find him, we may not take him alive. If we do, he probably won’t tell us anything. I can’t assume many judges would grant him immunity to testify, or that immunity would be worth much without protection from the Mafia. Which would get us into the area of the Witness Protection Program. If he’s stayed alive while they were looking for him for ten years, he can do better on his own. And, of course, it would put the Department in the position of setting a man free who has probably killed dozens of people.”
“Dozens? Literally?” Hillman raised his eyebrows.
“That’s if the stories are true. It’s hard to tell.”
“And we won’t know unless we go out and catch him?”
Elizabeth didn’t take the bait. “I can’t guarantee we’ll ever know more than we do right now. I’m not qualified to tell you whether taking him off the streets will be of political value to the Department. I do know it probably won’t contribute much to the safety of the average citizen in his home; in fact, what he’s been doing all week is killing off some of the very people we’d most like to take out of the game. That includes the informant you mentioned. Tony T was a bad man.”
“I’m impressed, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. “I asked for hard-nosed, and that’s exactly what I got. What’s your conclusion?”
“I think the opposition is more likely to get him than we are.”
“You do?”
“Sure. They would consider him a more serious problem than we do because his memory can put a lot of them away for life. They know more about him than we do, and they have an unlimited budget.” She hesitated for a second, not because she was considering not saying it, but to be sure he got it. “And they operate on utilitarian principles too.”
Richardson came out of the elevator and stalked directly to Elizabeth’s desk. “He likes you.”
“He does?”
“He thinks you’re the best thing that could happen.”
She shook her head. “I could see it from the minute I walked in there. We were made for each other. The electricity in the air, the—”
“Jesus, Elizabeth, you handled him brilliantly. You won. Now, be gracious in victory and stop fighting. He wants us to go for it.”
Wolf stood in the shower and let the heavy flow of water pour over him. He needed to be soothed. When he moved, he could feel a small hitch in his back where he had taken the jolts of the bus ride across Arizona. He had been awakened a few times during the night, not by the sounds of cars, the motel ice machine or the voices in other rooms, but by his mind running through its accumulated clutter. Each time, when consciousness came, he would find himself in midthought, sometimes in midsentence, fully aware of the specious train of logic he had been following in his sleep.
The last time, he had been thinking about Meg. He hated to think about her now when he was awake, because she was gone forever. He never had any trouble recalling the sight of her, or even the scent of her perfume. He had been constructing a dream about her; in it he would live, and then he would go back and look at her. It wouldn’t be easy to accomplish, because women of her class ventured off the enclosed, protected parks their husbands inherited less and less often as they grew older. They were occupied with their children until they sent them away to some awful boarding school, and after that they saw a select group of friends who were, after so many generations, so closely related that they looked like sisters. When he reached this part of the dream, the sense of loss and disappointment woke him up, and he began to scheme in the darkness for some way to go home. At some point in the night he had let go of it, and awakened to the one thing the darkness and isolation had let him forget. He had been doing his feeling and thinking on the premise that he was a constant, unchanging being, that the continuity of his memories and consciousness somehow guaranteed that he was the same. But now, as he became more alert to the physical world that chilled his bones, put pressure on his joints and reflected his body in mirrors, he remembered. When he was asleep, or when nothing reminded him of it, he felt exactly the same as he had the first time he had put on his Little League baseball uniform. He could even remember the incredible whiteness of the flannel, and feel the softness of it against his legs. That was the ridiculous part of memory, or one of the ridiculous parts. It was only his body that wasn’t still ten years old.
Wolf dried himself with two of the big rough white towels and walked into the bedroom. There were really two problems now, and the way to get through this was to look at them separately. The old men were the big problem. He had done the right thing by going to Las Vegas. Little Norman might be able to convince them that the best thing they could do was to let Carl Bala stay in his cage and forget about helping him with his revenge.
The other problem was new to him. He knew that Little Norman must have been telling the truth. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire. It was the only thing that explained the commotion in the kitchen when he had popped the bastard. It had been so obvious; why hadn’t he figured it out? Because it was such an outrageous idea that his mind had somehow blocked it. But now the New York police knew something about him. Hell, they must know a lot about him if they could have five cops waiting for him in the Los Angeles ai
rport a few hours later. Because that’s what it had been; he had seen the whole thing wrong. It wasn’t four cops looking for a shooter; it was five cops looking for him.
He sat down on the bed and thought about this, and it was still wrong. The New York police couldn’t have gotten on a plane and caught up with him like that. They would have needed to take practically the next flight out of New York, and what could they expect to do in Los Angeles? They wouldn’t have jurisdiction. Now it fell into place inevitably. It wasn’t the New York police; it was federal cops—the FBI. It fit better anyway. They were the ones who were always bugging telephones and taping microphones to people, and they wouldn’t have to put anybody on a plane; they would simply make a phone call to the Los Angeles office to have their agent bring four bozos across town to scoop him up.
Wolf dressed quickly and walked across the street to the pay phone outside a small diner. He had twenty dollars in quarters, two ten-dollar rolls that he had bought from the sleepy change girl posted near the slot machines in the lobby of his motel in Las Vegas. He had picked up the habit from Little Norman in the old days, and it had come back to him. Little Norman had always told him that his hands were too small to use by themselves. A fist wrapped around a roll of quarters might lose a few hundredths of a second getting there, but when it did it would make an impression.
He put a quarter into the telephone and dialed the number. The operator came on the line and said, “Please deposit three thirty-five.” He laboriously pumped fourteen quarters into the slot, and after the fourteenth, the operator wouldn’t go away until she had said, “You have fifteen cents’ credit.” Then it sounded as though she were climbing into a jar and then screwing the lid on after her. And finally he heard the ring. It sounded different from the ones here, sort of bubbly and quick, and it made him feel as though he were home. It was maddening. He was listening to her phone, and he could see the room in his memory.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” he said. “I’m going to have to talk fast.”
“After leaving me alone this long, I should say you are.” He tried to remember how long it had been since he had heard anyone talk with a smile in her voice.
“Not to make excuses. It’s the connection. Wiring problems, I think.” She would understand that. It was from one of those silly books she had made him read. The British spy had detected a couple of ohms of extra resistance on the line to his reading lamp, and concluded it must be a bug. An American would have gone through the place with a bug detector. You could buy one for twenty-five bucks.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Oh.”
It was the FBI that worried him. In another book she had forced on him he had read that the National Security Agency had the capability of recording every transatlantic telephone call. The book hadn’t said whether they did it, or what use they made of all those tapes, but if they didn’t share them with the FBI, they were stupid. He had heard a lot about American intelligence services, but he hadn’t heard that they weren’t devious enough.
“I’m going to have to stay longer than I thought,” he said.
“Why? Can you-”
“It’s because I made a mistake. I’d like to say it was something else, but it wasn’t.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
This was the hard part. If they were listening, it had to be plausible nonsense. “Yeah. It’s funny I should be thinking about this right now, but I can’t get it out of my mind. The best thing you could do is spend today rearranging things. Maybe move your clothes and stuff. A good place might be at the north end, where the bed used to be.” He spent a second hoping she had gotten it, and knowing she couldn’t have. He thought of Yorkshire pudding, and there was an archbishop, but if he got that crude, they would have it before she did.
But she said, “Oh. The present arrangement isn’t good?”
Her voice had the sort of concern he was listening for, but he needed to be sure. “I’ve done a lot of this kind of decorating,” he said. “If you take my advice, I think it will brighten things up a lot.”
“Is it … that dark now?”
He was satisfied. She knew. “It just struck me as a good idea. I’d love to look the place over myself, but I just can’t get away right now. I’m hoping I’ll be able to soon.”
“I’d be very sad if you couldn’t.”
“I would too.”
There was a long silence on the other end, and he thought he could hear her breathing. It began to bring her back as a physical presence: the barely detectable scent on her hair, the incredibly soft skin just in front of her ear, and then, “I wanted to say,” Margaret said, “just in case we don’t get to speak again soon, that I …” She paused and then said the next two words softly: “love you.” He drew in his breath to answer, but she went on rapidly. “Please don’t answer, because it wouldn’t mean anything if you did right now. I wouldn’t have said it today either, but I thought I’d better, given the circumstances. These things often don’t get said, and then you regret it and all that. I know this is being unfair to you in case you wanted to say it for the same reasons, but that’s the way it is.”
“I love you.”
“After all that? It makes me feel worse than I thought, because it’s so typical of you.”
“I’ve got to go now. Don’t forget what I said.”
“Michael, wait!”
“What?”
“That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I just—you know. I hope it’s not long. But if it is, I’ll—”
“Don’t.”
He hung up the telephone and heard a loud jangle as the machine dumped the load of quarters into its collection box. As he watched for a break in the traffic so that he could get back across the street to his motel, he felt worse. He hadn’t made her understand. He should have told her something closer to the truth. He wasn’t delayed; he was probably dead. The dons might sit back and wait while he disappeared and then tell Carl Bala in his prison cell that it was just one of those things, but if he didn’t disappear, then he was in trouble. After allowing him a decent interval, they would change their minds. And already the people who worked for Carl Bala would be out in force, hanging in all the places where he had ever been seen, watching for him. He might be able to avoid them for a time, but not forever.
He had never worried much about the authorities before. He still didn’t think they could catch him, except by some gigantic stroke of blundering good luck, but what if they could actually keep him from leaving the country? He had just used up the only passport he had that would get him past the computerized scanners they had installed in the airports since he had left, and there was no way he could try again to buy one. What had happened in Buffalo had closed that down for all time.
He had to get out before Bala had time to replace Talarese and Mantino and Fratelli and the new men got things organized enough to come after him. What could it take, two or three days? A week at the outside. What the hell else did the old son of a bitch have to do?
Wolf was starting to feel a kind of claustrophobia. Somehow the country had shrunk. Ten years ago it had been a place full of possibilities. He could disappear simply by fading into a crowd, or take a quick jump that put him five hundred miles away so they would have to start looking for him all over again. Now everything seemed to be a lot closer to everything else. He had to find out something about this FBI business.
Sergeant Bob Lempert had spent most of his career under suspicion. In 1965 he and an older cop named Mulroy had been assigned to stay in a hotel to be sure nothing happened to a bookmaker named Ricky Hinks before he could testify in the conspiracy trial of Paul Cambria. Ricky Hinks was later found to have slipped into the bathroom, cut the shower curtain into strips with a razor and tied them together to make a rope. He had then used it to lower himself from the bathroom window to the alley below, where he had been shot to death by persons unknown. It was considered to be bad luck all around—certainly for Ricky Hinks, who must have lowered himsel
f into the gunsights of some obstructors of justice; but also for officers Mulroy and Lempert, because he had died without revealing how he had managed to slice up the curtain with an electric razor, or lower himself sixty feet on a twenty-foot rope. The internal inquiry was not released in detail, the Gary police chief was quoted as saying, because it was inextricably intertwined with an ongoing investigation. The two officers involved had done their duty.
But from that moment on, Bob Lempert’s career took a detour into limbo. He was considered to be a competent cop at a time when cops who were eager to respond to those two A.M. “domestic disturbance” calls from sparsely patrolled neighborhoods, or to venture into the very asshole of the city to check out “shots fired” reports were at a premium. Jobs were plentiful in Gary, Indiana, for healthy white veterans who could read, and not many of them paid less than a cop made, so there was no point in throwing away a good body. Lempert remained a trusted member of the force, the kind you wanted behind you when you kicked in a door. But this trust went only so far. You didn’t want him behind you if you kicked in certain very expensive doors, and you didn’t want him in plainclothes, where he could get too used to the availability of payoffs. But for your B and E’s, your Aggravated Assaults, your “Shut Up and Go Back in Your House Because I’m the Law” situations, you couldn’t do much better than Bob Lempert.
Lempert had made sergeant when he was pushing fifty. In his case, it was a sort of honorary title because nobody wanted him put in charge of anything. This was not because the aroma of the 1965 incident had lingered in the nostrils of the powerful for so many years; it was because from time to time the odor returned. In the mid-seventies, when Eddie Parnell, the challenger for the presidency of the laundry union, was killed with his two brothers on the eve of the election, people pointed out that Eddie and his family were not completely ignorant that some such thing might happen. All three of them wore pistols in shoulder holsters twenty-four hours a day, and would not have opened the door to just anybody who took the trouble to rap his knuckles on it. It would have had to be somebody they had no reason to suspect, somebody who could walk in armed without being frisked, somebody they couldn’t have simply told to come back tomorrow after the ballots had been counted. It would have had to be a cop.