by Thomas Perry
Pauly the Bag Man was over fifty years old and hadn’t needed to run from anyone since the February night in 1972 when the brain of a man named Fritz Hinckel short-circuited in Pastorelli’s Family Restaurant, and that time it hadn’t been personal. Pauly had been just one of fifty or sixty people whom Hinckel was trying to stick with a steak knife, and he had only needed to run five or six steps before an anonymous diner dropped Hinckel with five shots from a Colt Cobra that happened to be part of his evening wear. Pauly was long-legged, but his muscles were slack and slow from riding in the Town Car, and the leather soles of the new three-hundred-dollar shoes he was wearing hadn’t been scraped against anything but floor wax and carpeting until a few minutes ago. He was still striving to attain what he hoped was sufficient speed when he began to hear the Butcher’s Boy’s footsteps.
Pauly kept his head up and elongated his strides, pumping his arms and hitting the pavement with the balls of his feet like a quarter-miler. He had a terrible sense that the Butcher’s Boy was about to put a bullet into his spine, and that he wasn’t going to hear it first. There would be a horrible, wrenching pain, and then he would be down, but the lower part of his body would already be limp and dead. Or maybe the top part. Why not the top part? Just because you never heard about—
Wolf watched Pauly offering a credible imitation of a sprint as he abandoned the concrete and headed out across the wide green lawn. He could see that Pauly wasn’t running toward anything or anybody, which meant that nobody had arrived yet. He was simply a one-man stampede, like a man running from a hornet’s nest. There was no point in going after him. Wolf didn’t slow down; he merely changed directions. Where Pauly had veered to the right onto the lawn, he turned to the left, darted across the street again and sidestepped into the crowd. In a second he was walking in the other direction.
He joined a group of men and women who were walking up the steps of the first big building he came to. He put on the same bored, resigned expression they all wore. The sign said HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, SO he stayed with them. He was reasonably confident that he wasn’t about to stroll into the beam of a metal detector. As soon as he was inside the doorway, he looked back out the glass door at Independence Avenue and saw a car pull up near the spot where the tourists had assembled in front of the Rayburn Building. Three doors opened, three men got out and the car pulled away. As the three men stood on the sidewalk, each of them made a slow 360-degree turn, then picked a favorite point on the horizon and stared at it.
Wolf turned and moved deeper into the hallway. He walked until he came to a corridor that turned off toward Fourth Street, and stayed on it until he could see another, smaller entrance. He ignored the people to the right and left of him, and never paused to look inside an open door. But then without warning a woman coming toward him looked up from a file she was carrying and gave him a perfunctory smile. It was only then that he realized he had been smiling too.
He paused and looked out at the street before going through the door, but there seemed to be nobody out there whom Pauly the Bag Man would ask for if he needed help, so he set off down Fourth Street with his head down and his legs matching the pace of the busy civil servants around him. He was going to have to make it to the car after all. There was no telling what Pauly the Bag Man was doing in Washington, but the three men on Independence Avenue must belong to Vico. If Vico thought he had a reason to send three men to stand around in sight of the Capitol scanning the crowd for somebody to kill, he wouldn’t be shy about sending twenty more. Wolf had to get out of here.
The car was in the garage at the Gateway Tour Center on Fourth and E streets. It was only a couple of blocks, but there was no way to get there except by the sidewalk, and nothing to hide him but the bodies of the other people walking the street. They were a mixed group. The ones who looked like college students or lawyers were in a hurry, moving along in both directions without letting their eyes rest on the ones that looked like derelicts, even when they had to weave a course among them. The ones who complicated the mixture most were in pairs, most of them elderly and from East Jesus, Kentucky, or Marrowbone, Texas, stopping without warning to give the Capitol a proprietary survey or to study the grass on the lawn to see if their employees had given it the proper dose of fertilizer. Each time they did so, one of the quick ones had to do a strange little dance to get around them without stepping on their heels. Wolf did his best to imitate the quick ones.
He was in trouble now. Vico was a scavenger. He had come up in the forties with the Castigliones, and been sent off to Washington to see what he could do about cashing in on the war-surplus business. A lot of Castiglione people had been in the army and seen the unimaginably huge hoards of every known commodity that had been built up in four years, and somebody had been curious enough to wonder what was going to happen to all of it later. The idea had been that a man with a supply of cash could probably pick up some useful stuff cheap. Vico had been the man with the cash, and he had found that it went a long way. He had bought up gigantic lots consisting of everything from unassembled motorcycles packed in oil to leather bridles for a cavalry that didn’t exist anymore to tinned K rations so cheap that he could make money opening them up just to salvage the cigarettes inside. From then on, the story went, he had been the organization’s man in Washington.
Wolf hadn’t even been born then, and by the time he ran into Vico, Washington had been sewn up. The capital was a huge place that had hundreds of thousands of people getting paid for producing nothing. All day and night trucks, trains and planes brought in everything they used, and Vico took whatever was spilled in the process: appliances taken off freight cars, percentages of the food brought in for the markets, even the gasoline left in the hulls of tanker trucks after they had shorted the stations to which they had made deliveries. He would take the money and multiply it by supplying the drugs, whores and gambling the residents needed, and by lending them money to pay for these necessities at fifty percent interest. Vico had an army of vultures working the streets all the time, looking for ways to make money that he hadn’t thought of yet.
Wolf had met Vico only for a moment in the year before he’d had to leave the country. He had been hired to kill a man named McPray, who had recently moved to Washington. He had been a Texas businessman who acted like an oil man. It was said that he had some connection with people in oil, but in those days everybody in that part of the world knew somebody who was in oil. Somehow he had been involved in the buying of supplies for the public schools in a large area of the state. It was never explained to Wolf exactly how he had gained a say in the matter, but he had one. For several years he had steered the contract for paper to a company owned by Mike Mascone, but one year, without warning, when Mascone had a huge inventory he had collected in an Amarillo warehouse in anticipation, McPray had simply changed vendors: some relative of his had gone into business. This put Mascone into a bind, and he had made some semipublic threats about having relatives of his own. The truth was that Mascone was a genuine made guy, but he was also of no importance. He wasn’t even very rich. After some stewing, he decided that the only way he was ever going to be rich was to have McPray killed. By now McPray had moved to Washington on some other scheme, and Mascone wanted him killed in a way that would make certain people in Texas believe that Mascone was some kind of serious Mafioso with connections everywhere. After a number of inquiries, he had found out whom to call, and the Butcher’s Boy had collected his money in advance and gone to Washington.
Being isolated in Amarillo, Mascone had an idealistic view of how the world worked. He thought he should call Vico and tell him what was going on because it was a courtesy. Vico was true to his reputation. He sent three men to the Butcher’s Boy’s hotel to demand a third of the price for McPray. It was, they said, the overhead for doing that kind of business in Vico’s territory. The Butcher’s Boy had said he understood, and started to pack his suitcase in front of them. When they asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m not going to do t
hat kind of business in Vico’s territory.” Then he had called Mascone in front of them and told him that calling Vico had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars.
This had created a problem for Vico’s men, who had been told to pick up eighty-three hundred dollars. The Butcher’s Boy was in the airport when he saw them again, only this time Vico was with them. He had been about sixty then and fat. He had sat waiting in the airport coffee shop while his men pointed him out to the Butcher’s Boy, who went in to listen to what Vico had to say. He had said that eight thousand dollars wasn’t the point. It had to do with the way things had always been done. The local capo got a cut of everything that went on, and this covered the aggravation, bad publicity and protection if it was necessary. It was simply overhead. The Butcher’s Boy had answered that he understood, but said that he was keeping Mascone’s money because he too charged for overhead, aggravation and bad publicity. Then he excused himself, stood up from the table and got on his plane. A month later he read that McPray had been found in the Potomac suitably mutilated, and without thinking about it very hard he knew who had done it. He also knew that Vico would have seen it as an opportunity to charge at least fifty thousand.
If Vico thought he had a chance to collect on the contract for the Butcher’s Boy, he would probably come out and walk the streets himself, even though he must have been over seventy by now and had more money than some state treasuries. The fact that it was unseemly for a man in his position to expect money for what the other old men would have considered a favor would not bother him; he would demand it. If Wolf got hit by lightning in the next ten minutes, Vico would send a man to see Carl Bala in prison on the grounds that it was his lightning.
When Wolf was finally inside the garage, he had to control an impulse to run. There was something about getting out of the open that made him feel light and optimistic. He walked quickly toward the stairway, climbed to the first landing and then up to the second level. He moved cautiously. There was no telling where he had been when Pauly the Bag Man had first seen him. If he had been in the car, then he could be walking into something now. He stopped at the doorway onto the second level and waited. He listened to the distant sound of cars on the ramps above, then walked back to the head of the steps and held his breath.
Paul Martillo was dizzy and gasping for breath. The coat of his suit had big sweat spots under the armpits, and his new shoes were scuffed from trying to catch himself when he slipped on the sidewalk, but what was most annoying was that his ears felt like they were plugged up. He had a vague suspicion that having your ears feel pressure must be a sign of heart trouble, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody say it. He still couldn’t believe he wasn’t running anymore. He had gone all the way to Constitution Avenue and was making the turn up Louisiana before he realized he had outrun the son of a bitch. Then Vico’s men had come along in a car, made a U-turn in the middle of Louisiana and picked him up. As he thought about it now, getting into the car probably had been a mistake. In the first place, his leg muscles were certainly going to stiffen up because you were supposed to walk around for a while and stretch your muscles after a dash like that. In the second place, just in case there was one person inside the Beltway who had not seen him running like a madman across the damned Capitol lawn chased by a hit man, he had given them a good chance to see him getting into a brand-new Cadillac with four of the most obvious-looking hoods that he had ever seen. Two of them had even had guns in their hands when they had picked him up.
Now that he had his wind back, he began to think about the fact that this was going to be over in a few minutes, and Paul Martillo still had to live here. In fact, until this interruption, he had been on his way to see a senator. It was hard enough around here. At least the bastards had a phone in their Cadillac so that he could call Bart, his driver, and tell him where to meet him. When he hung up he even made a little joke to hide the way he felt. “I was afraid I was going to have to call the cops and get them to activate the Thiefbuster on the Lincoln.”
Sitting in the back seat of the Cadillac, he had tolerated the questions from Carmine, the leader of the crew. “So what’s he got on?”
Martillo thought. “I don’t know. A sport coat, a pair of pants. He doesn’t look like anything. Doesn’t Vico have anybody out here who met him?”
“Sure,” said Carmine, “but that was a long time ago.”
“Not long enough,” said Martillo.
There was a little snort that stood for laughter from one of the others. Sure, these jerk-offs thought they were better than Paul Martillo. It was like the guy who came to fix your toilet thinking he was smarter than you because you had to hire him to do it.
At last the car pulled over beside the parking garage. Martillo opened the door and nearly fell out, straightened his tie, pulled his cuffs so that they showed a little beyond the coat and walked into the dark concrete structure. He was a little more upset than he had let Vico’s men see. As he thought about it, he realized it was just possible that Vincent Toscanzio was only doing what the old men had told him to do. They probably figured that if they got Balacontano out, from then on the Butcher’s Boy would be his problem. Carl Bala was a nasty, arrogant maniac in his own right, and he would be capable of getting this one little guy. The old men were smart that way. They thought ahead, which was why they were the old men, and the ones who had come up with them were all buried. On the other hand, this development was good luck for Carl Bala. If somebody didn’t pull some strings in Washington, he was going to sit in jail for a hell of a long time. He would be like the Birdman of Alcatraz, one of those ancient, clean old guys who took up needlepoint or something.
As he walked to the staircase to meet Bart in the Town Car, Martillo noted that the Cadillac was driving up and down the aisles looking for a parking space. This was why those guys were still being sent around town in threes and fours, carrying guns. Given Washington on a day like this at one o’clock, anybody with a brain knew that the lower levels would be filled. It was the only public lot for about ten blocks, for Christ’s sake, and anybody who was ever going to make something of himself would take the ramp to at least the third floor to save some time. That was the real difference between the schmucks and the winners: the winners could think ahead, while the schmucks went around and around the track like donkeys.
Paul Martillo leaned hard on the railing as he started to climb the steps. He knew his shoes must be making a loud noise on the metal steps, but the clanks sounded distant and hollow. He was going to have his ears looked at.
Wolf heard the footsteps, then moved ahead again and looked onto the floor of the garage. The black Lincoln with the driver still in it pretending to read a newspaper wasn’t more than fifty feet from Wolf’s Dodge. He took three deep breaths as he pulled Little Norman’s pistol out of his coat, held it down beside his thigh and turned back to the stairwell. There just wasn’t anywhere to go.
Carmine Fusco had worked for Vico for a long time and he knew what the Butcher’s Boy meant to him. Vico could pick up a couple of million bucks in one morning, just for popping one man. If Vico had a crew working the hotels that was good enough to lift a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of cameras and jewelry every single day, and a guy who trucked it all to another town to sell it for a thousand, which was pretty good, it would still take more than three years to gross a million from the operation. Then you had to add another three years to pay off all those guys. That was how Vico thought, so it was how Fusco thought.
He had let Martillo off at the bottom of the garage and the jerk had stood for it. That was the joke about having somebody like him come to town from someplace like Detroit and not work for Mr. Vico like everybody else. He wasn’t born here, so he didn’t know the city well enough to figure out that anybody who had been spotted in this part of town on foot only had a couple of places where he could have parked.
As Fusco’s brother-in-law, Gilbert, drove slowly up each aisle and turned down the next, Carmine kept the wi
ndow open and listened. If the Butcher’s Boy was looking for Martillo, he was going to have a chance at him, but if he made any noise it was going to cost him. You had to take some risks to get a guy like this, but Carmine wasn’t about to risk anybody who belonged to Mr. Vico.
Then he heard the pop. It sounded more like something blew up than a gunshot, because the concrete made it reverberate for a second. He poked Gilbert. “Hit it.”
The Cadillac didn’t make much noise when it accelerated, so there was just a scream of tires as the car floated around the corner like a sailboat in a high wind. It was one big, fat slob of a car. In a few seconds it was on its way up the ramp. Now there was a second shot, this one even louder than the first, and it made Carmine see yellow for a second. So much for Martillo. It had to be the coup de grâce, the guy putting a hole in his head to make sure he stayed dead. “Stop,” he said. “Let us out, and get ready to block the ramp.”
He and Castelli and Petri climbed out, and then Carmine had a vision of black and silver. With a roar the front of Martillo’s Lincoln skidded around the bend, the rear end swinging about so that the grille and headlights were no more than ten feet in front of him. As he realized that it wasn’t going to stop, he took three steps back to get up on the railing and out of its way. It passed him so close that he felt the wind. He somehow knew that there was a bullet hole with a big crack in the driver’s side window without knowing how he saw it because the car was moving so fast. As it tilted down the ramp it seemed to be flying, and when it hit the first floor it bottomed out and sent up a spray of sparks.