by Thomas Perry
He got out again. “Your carburetor got flooded and your battery gave out—not necessarily in that order. Do you have jumper cables?”
Elizabeth seemed to be thinking about something else. “Look,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get to work. Thanks for trying, but I’ll just call a gas station.”
Wolf decided he had better look at his watch before answering, and he did so. “It’s no problem. Honestly, I don’t have to be there for another hour.”
But she persisted. “No, it’s not right. I’m not one of those women who just assume that any man who happens to be within screaming distance is there to be used. Or at least I don’t want to be.”
“It just takes a minute,” he said. “It’s not hard or dirty or anything. We’ll just see if we can get it started. Have you got cables?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re in the trunk.”
He pulled her keys from the ignition, opened her trunk and surveyed the mess. There were toys, a child’s car seat, a whole package of diapers that looked about the size of a bale of hay, a couple of umbrellas and, at the bottom, a pair of jumper cables whose plastic wrapping was still intact. He unraveled them, hooked the alligator clips to her battery terminals and then turned his car around. When the two cars were nose-to-nose, he unlatched his own hood, connected the cables to his own battery terminals and restarted his car. “Okay,” he said, handing her the keys. “Try it.”
The car started immediately, but as he disconnected the cables, he could hear that the Mazda wasn’t running evenly. It sounded as though the cylinders weren’t all firing. He closed the hood and said, “You got a garage you can take it to?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I take it this means it isn’t healed.”
“That’s right. I can get the heart to beat, but it takes a mechanic to get it off life support. Tell me where it is and I’ll follow you in case it stalls.”
“That’s all right,” she said, and this time she looked worried. “The only reason this happened is that I kept putting off taking it in. I’m guilty.”
“So buy it a new wax job and apologize. If you stall out in a major intersection you’re liable to get hammered.”
“I’d have to be pretty unlucky to have it happen at an intersection.”
Wolf shook his head. “They only stall when you slow down, and you only do that when you’re coming to a corner.”
She seemed to see a vision of it, like a premonition. “It’s on Millwood. The corner of Millwood and Fanshawe.”
“See you there,” he said, and walked back to his car. This was going to change everything.
In an hour Wolf was watching her walk through the doorway of the Justice Department. He pulled away from the curb and drove down Constitution Avenue toward the Federal Triangle. This morning he was on his way to look for tourists. There was no use kidding himself: every day that he spent in the United States was making it more dangerous for him. He would have to see if he could find a British citizen and separate him from the herd. If he got the right one and hid the body well enough, it might be weeks before his relatives made enough noise to get the authorities to do anything about putting him on a list, and by then Michael Schaeffer would be sitting at home again.
He felt a strange reluctance to get out this way, and he weighed and examined the feeling. If he’d had to explain it to somebody he would have had to say that he wasn’t in the mood to do the work. He felt tired. Eddie had always said that if it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t. It had been Eddie’s theory that some little part of the subconscious mind had caught a danger signal—maybe seen something, or figured out a flaw, or even smelled something it didn’t like—but hadn’t yet been able to formulate it into a package the conscious mind would accept. Eddie always said that ninety percent of the brain was never used. Actually, in his case it had probably been more. He had once had himself hypnotized by a dentist because he couldn’t remember any of the words to “Annie Had a Baby” except “… his name was sunny Jim. She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.”
But Wolf wasn’t nervous. He was just tired. He had spent most of the last ten years hoping that he would never have to do this kind of thing again, but here he was, up to his armpits in blood and not even working, just hunting for some harmless stranger so that he could live long enough to get home. He drove into the city with the rest of the world and looked for a place to park that Vico hadn’t bought simply for the chance to have his people slip a slim-jim into the door and pop the locks.
Paul Martillo was in a lousy mood because people treated him like dirt. He wasn’t some chump; he was a registered lobbyist. He wore tailored suits and fine silk ties, and talked to congressmen and even cabinet officers on business involving the limits of civil rights and the responsible exercise of free speech by the electronic media. He represented a confederation of reputable organizations, notably the Italian-American Anti-Libel League, Citizens for Fair Reporting, and the Dorothea Gorro Scholarship Foundation, named after a dead olive-oil heiress but subscribed to by many fine people who were still alive.
Martillo had just left the office of a congressman from New Jersey named Ameroy. He had been told by the congressman’s secretary that he should wait in the outer office and that Ameroy would see him as soon as he got off the phone. Ameroy had kept him waiting two hours, and then, as soon as he had gotten into the private office, the man had started to look at his watch. In fact, before he even shook hands with him, Ameroy was looking at his watch. Martillo hadn’t invented the system. It wasn’t his fault that it cost four or five million dollars to run for Congress. The ambitious jerks had dug their own hole, each time they ran for office putting a little more into the campaign, getting themselves on television a little more often. All that Martillo did was go among them and try to make friends. Then he would make a list of the friends and turn the list over to the groups he represented. When it was time for congressmen to run for reelection, the friends were not forgotten.
This making of friends was not a clandestine activity. It was a growing profession engaged in by about twenty thousand people. There was no corporation of any size, no charity, no union, no city that didn’t have somebody like Paul Martillo on the Hill; so where did a two-bit hack politician who ran for office because he couldn’t make it as a lawyer get off treating him like he was still a bag man making his way around Detroit for Toscanzio? The answer was that somebody had told Ameroy what Martillo was going around talking about this week.
Martillo hadn’t liked bringing it up any more than the congressman had liked hearing it, but he had to say it, and Ameroy damned well had to listen to it, because they were both taking their money from the same place. Ameroy didn’t want to have anybody say anything specific in his presence, so Martillo had to play the stupid kid’s game too. He did it because it meant that Ameroy wanted to be able to continue to take the money. Martillo had said that the members of the organizations Martillo represented continued to be pleased that Ameroy was a leader in the fight for equal justice, so of course he would be interested in the strange case of a man imprisoned for murder on the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence just because he was a well-known and prosperous businessman of Italian descent. The man in question continued, in fact, to be a large contributor to the Dorothea Gorro Foundation in spite of the fact that he had been in a federal prison for eight years. This was how his case had come to the attention of the Foundation, which, as the congressman knew, was nominally dedicated to the promotion of parochial education.
What it came down to was that Victor Toscanzio had ordered Martillo to go around and pull some strings. On the face of it this was an odd thing for him to do, but Toscanzio was not a frivolous man, so if he was doing it, Balacontano must have offered him something substantial. The whole lobbying business was something Toscanzio ran for the old men. It wasn’t his to jeopardize on some whim, and he knew it. But he also had a reputation for incredible luck. Only a few old paisans like Martillo knew what kind of luck it
was. Toscanzio had the uncanny gift of sensing when a change was going to take place, and getting in before the bell rang. Carl Bala was obviously an active commodity again. Also there were the rumors. From time to time people had said that Carl Bala had gone crazy in prison, and maybe Toscanzio had decided it was going to be important soon to be one of the people who had tried hard to get him out.
Martillo didn’t have any objection to letting his fate ride on Toscanzio’s bet, whatever it was. He had done pretty well so far. Now he was in his black Lincoln Town Car on his way to have a lunch briefing from a senator from Florida. This was the kind of holdup that was getting to be increasingly popular, and he resented it. The bastards would send out invitations to go to lunch at a thousand dollars a plate, and there would be maybe forty or fifty lobbyists paying to sit there and listen to the windbag talk about what his committee was doing to help the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was an attempt to extort money, and it worked up to a point. Most of the lobbyists had some interest they had to protect from the sudden indifference of an incumbent senator. Martillo almost felt sorry for them. His organizations didn’t have a bunch of jobs to protect, or even any real members, only about twenty anonymous donors, so today’s lunch was going to be a little different for the senator. If he didn’t find a way to spend a few minutes alone with Martillo, he was going to watch two million bucks walk out of his campaign fund and into the challenger’s.
Martillo looked out the window of the car as his driver pulled away from the Sam Rayburn Office Building. As usual, the first twenty tourists in line for the tour were Japs. The movement of capital in the world was still a miracle to Martillo, although he had studied it for twenty years the way a bear studies bee swarms. Everything seemed to be the same as it always had been; it was just that there was all this floating money. It was qualitatively different from regular money, which stayed pretty much where you put it. This was like gambling money because it didn’t seem to really belong to anybody. It moved in and out of the markets and financial centers of the world in huge quantities every day. But without warning the floating money had transferred itself out of the country and into the markets of foreigners, primarily towel-heads, Japs and Krauts. At the moment the Japanese were the big spenders, but what they were spending wasn’t the floating money. It was a kind of by-product of having so much of the floating money trapped in one place for a time. It was like the wetness that formed on the outside of an icy glass on a hot day.
This reminded Martillo that what he really wanted right now was a drink. Making the rounds would have been easier if he had been able to loosen his tongue a little. But this was out of the question; you didn’t just gulp down alcohol when you were on an errand for Vincent Toscanzio. When you were done with work, you could drink yourself into a stupor, or shoot heroin into your jugular if you felt like it, but while you were on his business you were his. In the old days he had once seen Toscanzio explain this to a numbers runner with a sawed-off pool cue.
Stuck in traffic, Martillo watched another busload of tourists forming a new line to wander through the halls of the Capitol building. This group looked like Europeans. Why the hell did any of these people care about looking at another public building? You could take them to an insurance company and tell them it was the Supreme Court. He looked at their faces and watched the way they walked. Foreigners walked different, and he studied them to see if he could figure out where they came from. This bunch was taller than most, very white and they had bad teeth, so they were probably English.
But then Martillo saw something that made the skin on his arms tighten, and his right foot try to stomp an imaginary brake on the floor of the car. “Pull over,” he said. “Let me out.” It was him. He couldn’t imagine what the hell he would be doing standing in line with a bunch of Limey tourists, but it was worth his life to find out. “Use the car phone to call Mr. Vico. I need five, ten guys right here as fast as he can get them, and maybe four cars.”
Wolf moved with the queue of English couples gathering for a mass invasion of the Capitol building. There didn’t seem to be any of the usual ill-behaved British children in short pants chasing each other in circles, which was promising. Children had preternaturally sharp senses, and they lived at the three-foot level, where anything he did would be right in front of their eyes. He had to move slowly enough to keep from spooking the herd, but quickly enough so that he wouldn’t give any of its members the uneasy feeling that he was being stalked. He tried to get a sense of who was carrying what. If they had all left their valuables inside suitcases in the keeping of the bus driver, he had better know it now. As he passed a couple in their late forties, he heard the woman say, “Not again.”
The man said peevishly, “It’s not my fault. It’s the damned water. I’m sure there’ll be one inside the tube station over there.”
The Englishman started a purposeful march away from the herd, his long, skinny legs straight and stiff as he headed for the subway station. Wolf had been wrong when he had told himself that killing E. V. Waring was as far as he could skid; the real end of the line was when you were following a sick tourist to a public restroom so that you could whack him for his wallet and passport. He had walked in the same direction that the herd of tourists was moving so that he could come up behind them; now he was going to have to reverse directions without letting any of them notice. He waited a few moments, until what he did wouldn’t be connected with the man’s departure, then turned and crossed the street.
Wolf timed the cars and dodged between two of them to make it to the other side. But as he reached the curb he wasn’t thinking about the British tourist anymore, but about the man who had gotten out of a black Lincoln behind him, then pivoted and reversed directions when he had. It was a rare advantage to be able to walk along facing the man who had been following him. The man was tall and trim, but not young, and the dark suit he wore appeared to be the regulation uniform of lawyers and politicians in this town when they weren’t playing golf. The fact that his hair was long and wavy didn’t mean anything; it could belong to the director of the FBI. He had the build of a cop, but somehow Wolf couldn’t see the suit as belonging to one. Also, the shoes were wrong; they were some sort of thin, bumpy leather like alligator, and too pointed for a cop’s. The soles were thin and slippery, and the heels gave off a shine when the man walked, as though they were made of a substance harder than rubber. As Wolf proceeded down the street, he never took his eyes off the man. He knew that if there were others, he would never see them unless the man did something to acknowledge them. But then the man did something unexpected: He slowed down, turned and glanced over his shoulder directly at Wolf.
When their eyes met, Wolf saw the alarm in the man’s face. Immediately the man pretended to look past him, but he must have known it was too late. The face was familiar. It took Wolf a few seconds to bring it back because it was buried somewhere deep in his memory, in Chicago or somewhere—no, it was Detroit. It was Pauly the Bag Man. His throat tightened in a feeling of regret and disappointment that was like pain. He had been very young in Detroit, maybe nineteen, and he had let them use his face for a few months. If somebody didn’t pay his nut one week, the next week he would be in his store or on his way home from the office, trying to think of something to tell Pauly the Bag Man, but the one who showed up to ask him about it wasn’t the friendly Pauly, but the boy. He would simply arrive quietly and give the man an inquiring look. People knew who he was, and told each other things that made them sweat when they saw him.
What the hell was Pauly the Bag Man doing in Washington, D.C., wearing a tailored suit and women’s shoes? They must have closed the bars and chased out everybody who had ever laid eyes on him in the old days. Hell, they must have dredged the lake for corpses. He had to get out of this man’s sight. He looked for a way to disappear, but the sheer size of the lawns and the sidewalks, like airport runways leading up to broad, high steps, made it hard to imagine how he was going to do it. He could see for a mile in any di
rection. He hadn’t been expecting to do anything chancy here, just to find a tourist and wait until he was alone. He kept walking toward the subway entrance. If he could make it that far, he could probably step onto the first train before somebody like Pauly the Bag Man overcame his natural caution and followed.
As he walked, Pauly walked along on the other side of the street a few paces ahead. It puzzled Wolf that he would do this. Could he possibly imagine that Wolf hadn’t spotted him? He resisted the temptation to reach into his coat to touch the reassuring weight and solidity of Little Norman’s pistol. Pauly wouldn’t try to take him out on his own, which meant that there must be others somewhere in the stream of people walking along the sidewalks. But as he thought about it, he decided that if there really were others, Pauly wouldn’t be here at all. The man was hanging around to see where he went, which meant that there was going to be somebody he could tell. Somebody was on the way, and Pauly must be expecting him to arrive soon. Directions wouldn’t work if they were an hour old. He walked along the broad avenue knowing that each step was taking him into some kind of ambush. People were on the way, and when they got here, Pauly would see them and he wouldn’t. When enough of them had gotten into position, Pauly would stop walking, turn and point his finger.
Wolf was beginning to feel hot, and his heart began to pound in his chest as he thought about it. He had made a decision a long time ago that he wasn’t going to let something like this happen to him. His jaw tightened and started to chew on nothing. He wasn’t going to walk along like some loser who was preparing to defend himself. They still didn’t get it, and it still astonished him. He wasn’t going to lie down and wait until they took their turn before he took his. He watched Pauly stroll along the sidewalk across the street from him and started to drift toward him.
Wolf was at the curb, then a second later he was in the traffic, slipping into the backstream of one car and out of the lane before the next one arrived. He made it to the double white line in the middle before something about the sound of the cars changed enough to make Pauly turn his head. When he did, Wolf could see his eyes widen. His hands came up and a nervous tremor started to grip him. His head shook so hard that he seemed to be nodding. He was already backing away, and he almost fell as he turned to break into a run.