by Thomas Perry
She missed him now as she lay on the leather couch, staring up at the vaulted ceiling and wondering if she had seen the last of Michael Schaeffer. The whole day had degenerated from a succession of bright, vivid, jarring sights and sounds into a collection of events she was too exhausted to remember very well. He was gone already, back to a place where serious people had serious things to do, and engaged in awful, deadly struggles to accomplish some ephemeral advantage. It wasn’t so much his disappearance that disturbed her; it was the discovery that he really belonged to that life instead of hers. It didn’t even matter that he’d told her all those lies about being a spy. That she, of all people in the world, understood. He had only wanted to make it all seem nicer and prettier for her. If he came back, she knew she would probably marry him. She already was listed in Debrett’s as the last of the Holroyds, and she was a whole generation too late to do anything selfless about it. Perhaps she couldn’t do anything about the fact that he was obviously some kind of criminal, but she could be his place to hide. Gwendolyn’s aunt Clara would probably have said it was typical of her to fall in love with the worst person she ever met. She devoted a moment to hoping that Clara’s angels had volumes of black marks on her when she had died a few years ago, and this took her mind off the present just long enough for sleep to come.
As the passengers shuffled up the aisle toward the door, Charles Ackerman reached under his seat and retrieved his small suitcase. He had brought only one. The place to trap a man like him was in an airport baggage-claim area, when he had just stepped off an international flight that required going through metal detectors at both ends and was standing mesmerized in front of a turning carousel of luggage.
He joined the agonizingly slow queue with the others. Here it was only ten in the evening, but it was three o’clock in the morning for the load of prisoners straggling into the airport. This suited him perfectly.
When the tired functionary at the Customs and Immigration barrier looked at the passport, a hint of interest almost snapped him out of his lethargy. “You haven’t been home in some time, Mr. Ackerman.”
“No,” he said. “I live in England now.” He watched with fascination as the man placed his open passport on a machine that appeared to be an optical scanner. That was new. He was glad he had used the Ackerman passport. He had obtained it fifteen years ago on the strength of a bogus birth certificate, but the State Department had issued it and he had renewed it regularly, so it was real enough. The man read something on a computer screen that didn’t surprise him, then handed it back.
“Here on business?”
“No,” Ackerman answered. “I just haven’t been home in a long time.”
“Anything to declare?”
“Nothing.” It was all negatives, all denials: I’m nobody, doing nothing here, bringing nothing with me; forget me. The man ran his hands inside the suitcase quickly and moved on to the next person in line.
He latched the suitcase and moved into the open terminal, where rows of faces glanced hopefully at him, scrutinizing his features, and then, instantly failing to recognize the right configuration, discarded him and looked behind him for the brother, the father, the business associate. He passed the waiting throng and moved toward the lockers built into the far wall. He saw one with a key sticking out of it, then remembered he had no American coins. He moved on to the gift shop. There was a woman who seemed to be an Indian behind the counter, staring intently at a garish tabloid she had draped over the cash register. As he approached, she set it aside and he could read the headline: RUSSIANS FIND WORLD WAR II BOMBER IN CRATER ON THE MOON. Meg would have said it had something for everyone she knew.
“I need to change some English money,” he said.
She pointed out into the hall. “The yellow booth.” Then she added confidentially, “They give you more at the bank.”
“Thank you,” he said, and turned to go.
“Haven’t you got an ATM card?”
He had no idea what an ATM card was. There was probably another name for it in England, but he certainly didn’t have one. “No.”
“They’ll screw you out of ten percent. I’ll do it for five.”
He resisted the temptation to smile. New York. It must come from the air or the water. They’ll screw you, but I won’t; we’re in this together. Even the ward politicians got elected that way. “How much can you give me for five hundred pounds?”
“Seven-fifty.”
He had read in The New York Times on the plane that the pound was $1.89, so her five percent was about twenty percent. He counted out five one-hundred-pound notes and accepted the money from the till. He asked for the last ten in singles and the last three in quarters and she gave them without reluctance or an attempt to palm a bill; having taken her fair usury, she wasn’t interested in stealing.
He used the coins to free the locker key, left his belongings in the locker, then strolled to the ticket counter and paid more pounds for a ticket to Los Angeles leaving at seven in the morning. He looked up at the big clock on the wall and reset his watch. He still had almost nine hours.
Out in the street, the cabs were lined up, with an airport policeman flagging them forward whenever a prospect stepped up. As he presented himself, a dirty yellow Dodge shot ahead crazily and rocked to a stop on its useless shock absorbers.
The ride into Manhattan hadn’t changed much in ten years. The buildings were a little older and dirtier than he remembered them, and the cars seemed a little better and cleaner. He was thinking about Antonio Talarese.
The young idiot with the gun had been Mario Talarese. There was no question that he was a relative. More than twelve years ago he had met Antonio Talarese in the back of a small gourmet-food store in lower Manhattan. There had been three men waiting when he had arrived. One had been the owner of the place, an eager shopkeeper type who was standing at a cutting board making a tray of salami and cheese and opening a bottle of wine, as though this were a little party. Talarese had said, “Leave us now,” and the man had gone out to the front to wait on his customers.
He had come to the store to talk about a job with Paul Santorini. At that time Santorini was an upwardly mobile manager for Carlo Balacontano, who had been running a Ponzi scheme on the side, taking money first from a greedy New Jersey real estate agent, then from the agent’s friends, telling them he was putting it out on the street at astronomical rates of interest. He had paid the man inflated interest for months, long enough to be sure he would brag to his friends about his profits. Then they were hooked too, a group of doctors and engineers, even a couple of lawyers who obviously hadn’t spent any time defending criminals. Among them they had given the real estate agent about two million dollars to pass on to his underworld friend. Santorini still had about a million and a half of it in hand, and it was time to make the real estate agent disappear.
When that happened, the doctors and engineers and lawyers would remember that none of them had ever actually seen Paul Santorini, and certainly hadn’t handed him any money. About half would be of the opinion that the real estate agent had taken their money to Brazil. The other half would maintain their faith in him, which meant that Paul Santorini had quietly killed him, and could very easily do the same to them. In any case, none of them would go to the police to report that they had been cheated out of their loansharking profits by their Mafioso partner. But Santorini’s clean exit from the venture required that the real estate agent be expertly plucked out of existence, not left butchered somewhere by the likes of Santorini’s best soldier, whom he introduced as “Tony T,” then elongated it to Antonio Talarese. At this point, a boy of about twelve had wandered in to pick up some cardboard cartons and looked surprised to see the men in the back of his father’s store. He had stopped and looked at Tony T; then the store owner had rushed in, grinning and sweating, and jerked the boy out by the shoulder.
The job had been simple enough for the money. The realtor was in the habit of going out alone early on Sunday mornings to
put up OPEN HOUSE signs at the places he was selling. It hadn’t taken much imagination to search the New Jersey newspapers for his listings and be at one of them before he arrived. It was winter, so it was still dark when he had come upon the man taking the signs out of the trunk of his car. He shot him and pushed him into the trunk, then pulled the keys out of the lock and drove him to a woods a few miles away, where he buried him. That was the part that he remembered best. He could still see and smell the thick layer of wet, leathery maple leaves on the ground. He’d had to push at least four inches of them aside before his shovel could break ground, and then he kept hitting tree roots. They were thin, like fingers, but so tough and rubbery that he’d had to push them aside and dig around them; then, when the hole was barely three feet deep, he backed into one of them and it had startled him. At that point he decided to dump the body in and cover it. When he’d finished pushing the leaves back over the dirt, it would have been difficult even for him to find the grave. Then he had left the car in the long-term lot at the Newark airport and taken a cab from the terminal like a passenger.
The man’s wife had reported his absence that night, but even she never came forward with a theory about what had happened to him. Either she hadn’t known about Santorini or she had decided her husband would have wanted her to live to collect his insurance.
Ackerman thought about Antonio Talarese. He was probably a little more substantial than he had been twelve years ago, but he would probably still be in the same part of town. With all the trials that had made the London newspapers in the past couple of years, plenty of vacancies would have opened up above him in the hierarchy. By now Tony T might even be what Santorini had been in the old days, which would mean that he would have some underlings of his own.
In the old days it would have been easier in another way too. There would have been somebody he knew who could supply him with a weapon at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night in New York. This time he couldn’t talk to anybody, and he couldn’t wait. If Mario Talarese was a relative of Tony T, a telephone call from England announcing his death would be coming soon.
As the cab crossed the Triborough Bridge, he spoke. “Don’t go down East River Drive. Take One-twenty-fifth.”
The driver said, “Are you sure? It’s not … real safe.…”
“I’ll give you an extra twenty.”
The cab coasted down the incline onto East 125th, and now he could see the distant glow of the tall buildings below Central Park. As the cab turned off the busy street to head south, he saw four young men standing under the shadow of a billboard high above them on a brick building. The building had boards nailed where windows used to be under the wrought-iron bars. He noticed that while three of them were talking to each other, the fourth never took his eyes off the cars that stopped for the red light on the corner.
There was no question what they were doing here. They were waiting for easy prey, the car that would come off the bridge with its radiator steaming or a tire flapping, or the woman alone who would stop for the light with her window open, her purse on the seat beside her and the radio turned up loud enough to cover the sound of the footsteps coming up behind her car. “I’ll get out here.”
The cab driver’s eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “You from around here?”
“No.”
“Then let me take you a little farther down. This is Harlem. In the Fifties there are a lot of good hotels. You don’t want to get out here.”
“No, thanks.” He handed the driver sixty dollars and climbed out. “Keep the change.” The driver didn’t speak. The buttons on the doors all came down automatically and the cab was already moving to catch the green light. The man had decided not to sit through another red and watch what he was sure would happen.
Ackerman glanced at the four young men beside the building. The watcher was moving his head from side to side rapidly, as he had seen one of the horses do at the post this morning at the racetrack. The life of a petty thief was mostly watching and loitering, and the thought that the waiting was over always seemed to make them twitch and flex and make unnecessary moves just to wake up their limbs.
The guns wouldn’t be in their clothes. If the police surprised them on a sweep, they wouldn’t want the ten-year sentence for carrying a firearm—or worse, to give a cop the excuse to open fire. The weapons would be in a trash can or behind a loose board over a window. He held the thieves in his peripheral vision as he moved up the street. It was a delicate matter to pique their interest enough to get them to reveal their hiding place, and then to induce them to reject him as prey. He knew the critical moment would be the instant when they thought he had stopped looking. Then at least one would make a move, if only to check the place where the weapons were.
He walked past their building and they held their places, but he could feel their eyes moving up and down his body. They would be looking for some sign that he was a cop acting as bait. If he was dangerous, it wasn’t because he could chase down four men half his age and handcuff them; it was because attacking him might bring five or six carloads of cops screeching in from all directions with riot guns and body armor. He sensed that they were making their decision. In a moment one of them would betray the hiding place.
“Hey, man!” came a voice. It disconcerted him. That wasn’t how it was done. The voice came again. “Want some crack? A little blow? Crank?”
He stopped and turned to look at them. What the hell were they doing? Of course it would be drugs these days. The watcher was the salesman. The salesman strutted out to the sidewalk, his head at a slight angle from his shoulder. He was skinny and black, with long legs in fitted jeans that ended in a pair of white high-topped sneakers with big tongues half-laced with red laces. On his left wrist he wore a Piaget watch with a band that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a two-pound gold nugget. He had misread the signs. These weren’t hit-and-run thieves; they were pharmacists.
He stood thinking as the salesman approached. He had been out of the country too long. What else didn’t he know? He glanced over the young man’s shoulder at his three companions. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of their shadowy stand, he could discern that they were all black too. They all wore high-topped sneakers that looked as though they had been designed for players in the NBA, laced haphazardly with red laces. What was that all about—a sign to customers? A uniform? The cops would love that.
The young man smiled. “You be here buying, or looking? Don’t have all night, I got shit to move. Won’t do better anywhere around here.” His smile was vacant, unfeeling and confident. He didn’t speak quietly or look over his shoulder for the patrol car the way street dealers used to.
A line of five cars cruised up to the light, and the other three stood up, walked out into the street and leaned down to speak into the drivers’ windows. Two of them made quick deals, taking money and handing the drivers tiny plastic bags from inside their jackets, then moved on to the next two cars. When one driver didn’t roll down his window, the young man’s expression didn’t change. He just gave the door a lazy, half-hearted pat, already looking ahead at the next potential customer.
Ackerman pushed his amazement to the back of his mind. This was a distraction, and he had to work with the new circumstances, regardless of how they had come about. “I want to buy a gun.”
The salesman cocked his head again and leaned closer. “Say what?” From the exaggeration he could tell that the salesman was already savoring the irony of the situation enough to want to hear it again.
“I don’t want any drugs tonight, but I do want a gun. Can you help me out?”
The grin broadened. “If I have a gun, and you have money but no gun, what’s to stop me from having both of them?”
“You’re making too much here to fuck it up robbing people.”
“Come back tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do.” The young man turned and sidestepped back toward his building’s shadow like a base runner shortening his lead.
He followed the salesman back toward the shadow. “It’s got to be now.”
“Can’t do that. How’m I supposed to hold my corner with no gun?”
So that was it. They weren’t afraid of the police or a tapped-out, desperate customer ready to kill to get the whole hoard. There were so many dealers now that they were fighting over prime locations. “I don’t want all of them. Just a pistol.”
“Pistol? Shit.” The salesman’s professional grin returned. Behind him the light turned green and the traffic moved past again. The three vendors looked up the street, then began to drift toward the shadow of the building, so the salesman felt comfortable enough to turn his back. He removed the board from the window and reached inside with both hands. When he turned, he held a nickel-plated .357 Magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel. A gun like that weighed at least two pounds empty and was fat and squat, like a little cannon with a thick round handgrip. Ackerman could see that the salesman and his friends weren’t in the concealment business. The only conceivable reason they would pick a gun like this was that it wasn’t as heavy to carry around as a .44. But then, with his other hand, the salesman reached deeper into the cache and produced something bigger, black and square and utilitarian, that didn’t resolve itself into a recognizable shape until he had it at chest level.
“How much for the Uzi?”
“It’s not for sale. I’m not giving you a loaded piece and then standing here with nothing in my hands like a fool.”
Ackerman smiled. “May I?” He took the revolver in his hand and examined it. It hadn’t been fired more than a few times, but it had some kind of filmy substance on the barrel. He opened the cylinder, touched the inside of the barrel with the tip of his little finger and sniffed. It was the familiar smell of gun oil, so the kid had at least cleaned it. Then he sniffed the outside of the barrel, and detected a lemony odor.