by Thomas Perry
He was slightly off balance, as though he’d been asked an incriminating question. He had lived in England for over thirty years, and tea was everywhere. “I do like tea, yes,” he said.
“I’ll heat some water,” she said, and put a pot on the stove. “Sit down.”
They sat at the kitchen table, which appeared to be the same one where they’d sat the last time, when he was twenty and she was telling him his visits had to stop. He didn’t realize he was smiling at her until she smiled too. “I’ll bet I know what you’re thinking about.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so simpleminded and transparent. I should be old enough to keep from embarrassing myself by now, but I guess I’m not.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I started remembering the old days as soon as you popped out of nowhere. How could I not? I’ve felt guilty since those days. I’ve wanted to apologize to you. I was the adult, and you were, like, six years younger. If it happened now, they’d put me in jail. Aside from committing adultery, I was taking advantage of a minor.”
He shook his head. “If you’ve been feeling that way, I’m even more glad we ran into each other. I want you to know that you did me no harm at all. For a lot of reasons, that was one of the things I desperately needed to have happen in my life. I was kind of a lonely kid. I had no parents or siblings, and the softer, kinder side of the universe never showed up. Knowing a beautiful woman was an incredible gift.”
“You’re still such a sweet person,” she said. “I’m amazed you feel that way. Throwing myself at you was wrong of me. I was selfish and spoiled and careless about what it would do to you. I guess I didn’t realize how bad I was being until I had kids.”
He shook his head. “I always wondered what made you think of me. Did you know about Eddie’s home-delivery customers?”
“Sure. I think most of the neighborhood knew—the women, anyway. People talked. Of course that was what made me think of asking you. I didn’t think anybody would suspect what we were doing. Dan and I looked like the ideal couple, the handsome athlete and the cheerleader who had gone together in high school. Who would think I wasn’t perfectly happy and satisfied with my life? And who would think that I’d pick out somebody so much younger to play with?”
“As far as I know, nobody ever suspected,” he said.
“Except my best friend, Linda.”
“Of course, Linda.”
“Was she fun?”
“Honestly?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Yes. Wonderful, terrific fun.”
Diane laughed, and he laughed too.
“Was she more fun than I was?”
“Of course not,” he said. “That’s not to take anything away from her. She was absolutely beautiful, and had a really alluring way about her. But you were the one—any man, any age, would have loved you.”
“Thanks,” she said. She smiled again and took his hand. “It was the worst thing I ever did in my life, but you make it seem as though it wasn’t so terrible.”
He said, “You made my life better. Not just then. Ever since.”
Diane said, “Oh, God. I’m so happy to hear you say that. I’ve been so ashamed of what I might have done to your life that I hated to think about it.” She got up and poured the tea, then put some cookies from a canister on a plate. They sipped the tea and nibbled cookies. She said, “What sort of life have you had? What have you done for a living?”
“People probably didn’t guess this, but after Eddie died, when I was about twenty, he left more money than I ever suspected. He had no relatives, and his will left everything to me.”
Diane shrugged. “Not married, with a good business. And with his special home-delivery customers, I guess he didn’t waste money flying to Vegas to have fun.”
“Right. No dependents but me, and we spent most of our time working. He never owned more than one car, and all our vacations were three-day holiday weekends. At the end, after he died, I considered going to college, but I was used to working in a small business. I invested Eddie’s money in stocks and bonds and went to Detroit to work in the auto industry. Over the years I started a couple of businesses and let them grow until I could sell them. I’ve done pretty well.”
“I see from your ring that you’re married. Any kids?”
“No,” he said. “That’s one of my few regrets.” He had done so much lying in the past thirty seconds that he had made himself uncomfortable. He had never even considered children.
“Where are you living now?” she said. “Can you give me an email or Facebook or something?”
“We’ve been living in Europe, but we’re starting the process of moving back. Give me yours and I’ll send you mine when I’ve got the new ones.”
She wrote the addresses and her name on a pad and gave the paper to him. With the mention of his marriage, she seemed to sense that he was feeling ready to leave. “You were on your way someplace. I don’t want to hold you up any longer, and I guess I should get my run in before I get too comfortable. I hope you really haven’t been harmed by decisions I had no business making years ago.”
“As I told you, I was—and still am—happier and better off because you called and asked for me that day. I hope you feel the same.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But we did the right thing to end our afternoon visits. My kids never knew. The rest of my life with Dan was good. He died without ever suspecting. Maybe I tried to make it up to him too, and that helped.”
“Can I ask an unrelated question?” he said. “Has anybody around here ever asked about me? Maybe a stranger trying to find out where I was living or anything like that? I don’t mean they asked you, but asked anybody you know?”
“Not that I ever heard. Except Linda. She or I would mention you once in a while over the years, but only to each other.”
“Well,” he said. “It’s time to go. Thanks for the talk, the tea, and the cookies.” He stood up, kissed her cheek, and walked to the front door. When he got there, he stopped and looked up the stairway leading to the guest room. Then he stepped out into the street.
He headed for Sforza’s. In the old days when he and Eddie had gone for Sunday lunch, they had sometimes seen local mob soldiers there too. A few of them knew Eddie, and the boy could remember these men taking a table in the middle of the day to sit and talk endlessly. When one of them saw Eddie, he would give his head a little nod to acknowledge him and then turn his attention back to his friends. The boy took their presence the way lots of older people in the Flats did—as a guarantee that the restaurant served authentic Italian food. Now he thought that certainly when these men had seen Eddie, they had seen his boy too. The men looking for him might think of Sforza’s as one of his old haunts, a place he might return to.
He had seen the old sign when he’d driven in to the neighborhood. It was tall and vertical, protruding into the sky with neon tubes bent and twisted to say “Sforza’s.” He approached the block from the other side of the street so he could see if anybody was standing around watching the door or the parking lot, the way they used to in the old days. There was nobody. He trotted across to the front door and went in.
The place was stripped. The old dark-wood paneling on the walls was gone, and the red leather booths had disappeared, as had the bad local stained-glass that had covered the windows with pictures of the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, the Tower of Pisa, and the docks of Venice with the gondolas tied up. What had replaced them were plain tables and chairs that could have been in any restaurant. The wall with the swinging doors to the kitchen had been knocked out, and the stoves and vents and hardware were now exposed and polished behind glass.
He glanced at the customers in the brightly lit restaurant and saw nobody who would have come here years ago. The old-fashioned Italian food had been replaced by some kind of Latin-Asian fusion. He
glanced at the bar and saw only wine bottles, no hard liquor. He spun on his heel and went back outside. He was not going to surprise his enemies there. He walked back to his car and drove to the downtown hotel district to have dinner and wait for dark.
Schaeffer would have to go into the areas where the killers would be expecting him, and that was best done at night. It was better to park during the hours of darkness and walk the South Side Flats neighborhood to spot the watchers first.
He hoped there would be someone. The men who would be burdened with ambushing and killing him would probably be young. The men his age or older would be home late at night, falling asleep in front of their television sets.
He was careful when he explored the South Side Flats, studying his surroundings for signs that someone was watching. Now and then he would recognize other old buildings he had forgotten about. He gradually moved closer to the place where Eddie’s shop had been. The streets where he walked began to look familiar, and something in his memory was nagging him to look more closely. Then he passed another house and recognized it.
The house was tall and narrow, two stories and an attic. It had an old-fashioned door with a segmented glass window that was rounded on top and a brass doorknob in the center. It was Linda Casey’s house, the place where his other special customer had lived.
He continued studying the neighborhood, looking for the men he believed would be there to hunt him. He searched systematically, clearing one block of a street and then moving to the next. On some blocks, the process was fast because none of the buildings offered a good vantage point for spotting a victim. On others, he would spend time standing still with his eyes on a row of houses, searching to see if there was one with a head visible in an upper window or a bit of light that might be a reflection off a lens. If he couldn’t be sure during the night, he would return during the day and watch until he saw something that eliminated the house—a child leaving for school or coming home, an elderly woman weeding the front garden.
After a few days he had whole swaths of the South Flats cleared, but he was certain a team of killers was stationed there. He was almost sure of it, because there were few places in the country that the LCN could connect with him. They had to hope his hometown mattered to him, because they had to look somewhere.
Schaeffer studied the neighborhood carefully for three more days before he ventured close to the places where he’d spent his childhood. He began by making a visit to the old butcher shop. When he walked nearby in the middle of the night, he could see that the building had been remodeled and modernized during the decades since Eddie had died. The first floor was now a bar. From outside, the space looked as though it had been a bar for so long that it couldn’t be the same building, but it was. The bar closed at 2:00 a.m., so he could see inside only by the dim light of some plug-in beer signs on the walls. He moved along the windows, peering in.
The old refrigerator room was still in back, probably because tearing it out would have been expensive, and it still could be used to keep the beer cold and the food fresh. They had divided the spacious room where he and Eddie had done the cutting. The stainless-steel tables and sinks and counters were now part of a kitchen, and the overhead tracks where sides of beef had been brought out and butchered were long gone.
He went to the parking lot behind the building and saw the old fire escape was still there. He closed the dumpster beside the wall, climbed onto it, reached up to drag down the fire escape ladder, and climbed up to the window. The upper floor was a storeroom, as it had been for the butcher shop. Now he saw glasses and chairs and trays of silverware, a couple of large wine racks, a few kegs, and many cases. This wasn’t a place where anyone had been stationed to watch for him. He climbed down.
As he walked across the parking lot toward the sidewalk, he thought about the old house where he and Eddie lived. He studied the images of the house’s interior in his memory. The best window for an ambush would be the second-floor front one in the big bedroom where Eddie had slept before the troubles. It certainly had the best view of the street and much of the rest of the neighborhood. This thought made him turn and walk the other way, around the block toward the backyard. The windows there were smaller and higher, and only gave a view of the house behind Eddie’s.
He came through the yard of the house on the next street and went to stand behind Eddie’s house. He picked a spot half hidden by a tree and saw that there were a couple of lights on in the back of the house. They were small bulbs, yellowish, the way old-fashioned forty-watt bulbs used to be. Now people used something like eight watts to make that kind of light. The rooms he was looking at had been the two regular bedrooms. The one on the right had been the boy’s room, empty most of the time because he never slept there during the Mafia War.
The other had been a room he and Eddie both used for storage and closet space. They’d kept various kinds of clothes there—sport coats and suits worn as disguises, winter coats stored during the summer, the bleached and starched white aprons and hats they’d worn in the shop to wait on customers. Eddie had looked like a doctor when he was behind the counter. Early in the morning when they were butchering, they both looked like surgeons.
Schaeffer stared at the back of the house. The clapboards showed some cracking and peeling paint. He wondered who had been living in the house since he’d sold it. He remembered that the old stained-glass window that provided sunlight for the first landing on the interior staircase had always been defective. He looked to see if it was still there. Whatever subsequent owners had done to the house, they had left the colored window—green, blue, and white.
He stepped to the rear of the house and climbed up on an old oak tree with a thick, low branch that he’d always used as a bridge to the stained-glass window. He reached out and touched the glass with the back of his hand. The window was on a horizontal steel spindle, so if it was pushed at the top and pulled outward at the bottom, it would open. He had done this many times when he was young, slithering in over the sill.
He ducked and eased the upper part of his body in, slid in after it until both his hands reached the floor, and walked the rest of his body in on his hands. He shut the window.
The stairway looked almost the same as it had when Eddie had first taken the boy in, except that nobody had been caring for it the way Eddie did. He and the boy polished it frequently and varnished it at least once a year. He supposed that the whole place would be a more worn and dilapidated than it had been the last time he had seen it. He crouched on the stairs and listened.
Schaeffer expected that there would be three men in Eddie’s house tonight. That way they could station one of them in the front window at all times. If the lookout spotted Schaeffer on the street, there would suddenly be three shooters, at least one of them fresh from sleep.
He assumed that right now the man on duty would be sitting in the darkened front window in the big bedroom that was Eddie’s old room. The door would be closed behind him, so that whatever the other two might be doing wouldn’t throw any light that could be seen from the street.
Schaeffer climbed the last few stairs to the second floor, as always placing each foot only on the inner edge, because stairs usually creaked in the middle.
His first objective was to find the man who was on watch at the front of the house. That man would be wide awake at this hour. He would have a loaded weapon inches from his hand. When Schaeffer reached the second floor, he turned his steps toward the front of the house.
He held his pistol in his right hand, crouched, reached up to the doorknob with his left, turned it, moved into the room, and closed it again. In those seconds of motion, he had spotted the head and shoulders of the lookout in silhouette against the dim lights from the street.
The man gave a little jump, as though he had been trying to stay awake and had dozed off for a second. Schaeffer was still crouching. When he saw the man’s head and shoulders tilt forward as if he w
as about to stand, Schaeffer sprang against the man’s back and knocked the wind out of him. His forearm hooked around the man’s neck and tightened. He squeezed the man’s throat as hard as he could, fighting against the man’s attempts to throw his head back against Schaeffer’s face, kick, and wrench the arm off his neck. Finally the man was unconscious, and Schaeffer twisted his neck to break it.
Schaeffer felt around on the floor in the dark until his hand touched the smooth, hard surface of a rifle’s stock. He lifted it so he could see its silhouette against the indirect light through the window. It had a short profile, and he recognized it as an H&K MP5 or a close copy. It would have been a good weapon for the dead man, because he could swing it around in the closed space of the house without banging it against anything. It was a good weapon for Schaeffer because of the thirty-round magazine.
A second man in the house must have heard some of the scuffling because he gave Schaeffer little time. He strode down the hall to the front room and flung the door open. Schaeffer could only whirl and pound the rifle’s steel butt into the side of the man’s head until he fell unconscious, then drag him far enough into the room so that he could shut the door again. He touched the man’s head, and his hand came back wet. He cracked open the door to let a little light inside and confirmed his suspicion. The blow had caved in the side of the man’s skull. The blood was pooling on the floor under his head. Schaeffer patted the man’s pockets and felt a familiar shape, reached in, and came back with a folding knife. Schaeffer opened it and cut the man’s throat.
One more. Schaeffer wiped the knife and his hand on the man’s shirt, sidestepped out the door, and moved along the hallway. He could see an open door at the end of the hall where the man he’d just killed must have been. He took a moment to be sure that the rifle’s magazine was still properly seated after the hard blow and that the safety was off.