by Thomas Perry
Schaeffer drove to a large chain drugstore and used cash to buy four more disposable cell phones and more minutes of talk time. He used the early evening to do his laundry at a small strip mall, then take it to the hotel and hang it in the closet of his room.
He watched the local news at eleven to see the zoo footage again. When it ended, he drove out toward Richmond for a half hour, so it was after midnight when he put the first of his new phones together and called Elizabeth Waring’s number. He let it ring.
When the phone went to voice mail, he said, “You tried to play tricks on me today, and now it seems you’re trying to do it again. I want to know about James Pastore, age thirty, and John Sarcone, age forty-one, both from Long Island. I want to know who they work for. If you want to tell me, then cut out the bullshit and answer my next call. If you don’t answer, there won’t be another one.”
23
Elizabeth Waring was in Deputy Assistant AG Holstra’s office, watching his expressions as he listened to her phone playing on speaker on his desk. “If you don’t answer, there won’t be another one.”
They both heard the click as he hung up. Holstra said, “Do we know where this call came from?”
“Yes. He was along I-95 approximately at Falmouth, Virginia. We’ve got people looking along that stretch of highway for any pieces of the phone. They can figure out where he bought it, but I don’t have that yet. And the next call will be from a different number. He’s been changing them after one call.”
“I guess you’re right. He is good at this kind of thing.”
“Yes,” she said. “And at every other thing that makes a person scary. I thought he wouldn’t let us get a cell phone number and use it to find his location. It’s actually kind of a relief that he hasn’t retaliated.”
“Would he do that? How?”
“He could have turned on the cell phone and left it anywhere, and then from a distance killed the first five or six FBI agents who came to find it. Or he could have just killed me. He knows where I live, and he said on the recording that he believes I set him up.”
“Are you still safe to be his contact?”
She hid her frustration behind her facade of professional calm. “I never was. Nobody is safe being his contact. He’s a killer. He thinks I was playing tricks on him to capture him.”
Holstra said, “You know, maybe we have no business even trying this kind of operation. We might be better off trying to narrow his location to a manageable area, surround it with SWAT teams and tighten the circle until he surrenders or gets shot.”
“I think we can do this,” she said. “He’s not grandiose or delusional or permanently enraged. He’s not fulfilling fantasies about killing people. He has none. He’s protecting himself from people trying to destroy him. He’s rational.”
“So you think we can make some reasonable deal with him for information in exchange for safety?”
“I think it’s worth a try. I can’t pretend we didn’t just lose a lot of ground with him on this phone thing. If I’d known it was happening, I would have tried to stop it. I might be able to convince some criminals that I personally had nothing to do with it, but not him. The question is whether he thinks of me now as a fed doing my job or as his enemy. If I can’t get back some of his trust, we’re done. He’ll break contact forever.”
“How does a person regain his trust?”
“I plan to give him what he asked for—tell him who those two men were.”
“Were?”
She shrugged. “If he knows their names, ages, and addresses but not who they work for, I think he must be reading that information off their driver’s licenses.” She saw Holstra’s troubled expression. “That tells me he already killed them.”
It was after 3:00 a.m. when his next call came. She went instantly from a sound sleep to full alertness before the second ring. She picked it up. “Yes?”
“Sorry, it’s not your boyfriend this time,” Schaeffer said.
“I’m sorry he’s not my boyfriend too,” she said. “He’s just a nice man who likes me.”
“Is he around?”
“Not tonight. Neither is anybody else.”
“So what happened on my last two calls?”
She knew he was far too experienced and aware to believe that she had simply not been able to answer because she was in a meeting or something. It had been after midnight. She had to try a version that contained a bit of truth. “I told my boss I’d been talking to you, and he decided to take a bigger role. He had the tech people intercept your call and use your phone’s location to throw a net over you. He thought you might not bother to change phones after not reaching me.”
“So he’s an idiot?”
“No. He wants what I want. Information. It’s his job and my job.”
“Is he listening now?”
“He told me he wouldn’t.”
“Have you got any information for me?”
“Yes. Your two names are both members of the Balacontano family. Sarcone is married to Frank Tosca’s sister Janine. You remember Tosca, I’m sure.”
“I do.” He knew that Waring knew he had killed Frank Tosca on his last visit to the United States. “I’ll call you in half an hour.”
“Why?”
He had already hung up. She knew that right now he was disabling the phone he’d just used and driving fast so he would be far away before he called again. She knew he was less trusting than he had been the first night in her house, and that from now on every time their orbits overlapped for even an instant, he would think first about evading any traps she had set. All she could do was wait.
About thirty minutes later, he called again. She assumed he must be in a new location. He said, “I want to tell you about a killing.”
“Of whom?”
“His name was Boccio. Rocco Paglia shot him to death in Newark in front of twenty or thirty witnesses.”
“Go ahead. I’ll be recording you.”
He spoke rapidly, and she could tell that he must have been there at the murder because of the vivid details. Paglia had hired him and an older and wiser hit man to find Boccio, who had headed a crew, a part of Paglia’s little empire. He recalled sitting in a car for hours waiting for Boccio, watching him come out of the front door of an apartment building, grabbing him and cuffing him, throwing a bag over his head, and closing the trunk lid on him.
“We didn’t usually take jobs like that. We were strictly killers. But Paglia wanted to scare the hell out of this guy Boccio, and having the two of us pick him up was a big part of the scare. The work wasn’t hard, and the job paid well. We pulled up in the parking lot of this bar that Paglia owned. We dragged Boccio in and let Paglia snatch the bag off his head. What does Paglia do next? He pulls a gun out of his coat and shoots Boccio. This takes place in front of at least twenty, maybe thirty of Paglia’s men, who are sitting around in the bar that they used as a hangout. Paglia didn’t know what he was doing.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“When you shoot somebody, the first bullet might kill the guy instantly if it’s in the right place, but it usually isn’t. To pull out a gun and be sure to kill a guy, you have to hit his head, heart, or a major artery. What Paglia did is not that. He waved his pistol around and started shooting. He missed on his first shot, and it hit one of his own guys in the head. Another shot went through an arm of Boccio’s suit and hit somebody else, who probably lived. But Paglia kept shooting at Boccio, who kept taking the shots and not dying. Finally Paglia knew he was going to run out of bullets. If he had to stand there and reload to kill Boccio, he’d look like an idiot. He stepped up so close to him to shoot him in the head that blowback from the shot threw spots on his own face, shirt, and suit. He looked like he had the measles. We left after that, just to get out of there.”
She said, “What am I supposed to do with t
hat?”
“Do what you do. It was in Newark. Rocco Paglia was the capo. The victim’s name was Boccio. Paglia made such a spectacle of himself that any of the people there that day will remember it. Not to mention that he also killed at least one of his loyal men by accident. That would make them remember it even more. You have, somewhere in the federal prison system, at least a couple of old guys from Newark who were there. Offer them a century or two off their three-hundred-year sentences to testify against Rocco Paglia, and they’ll take it. He’s living in luxury somewhere in the West—I think it’s Palm Springs. Or don’t. I don’t care if Rocco Paglia goes to prison or not.”
“Will you testify?”
“Turn the old Newark guys, who will hate him by now. If they won’t turn on him, use the information to make Paglia turn on somebody else.”
“You must know that I’m also going to put the two men you asked about on surveillance. I have to, now that I know you’re interested.”
“Knock yourself out,” he said. “I’ve got to go break this phone now.”
24
The way that Eddie described it, he and the boy were combatants in the Mafia War, even though they had no stake in it. If the two sides and their ever-subdividing factions killed each other off entirely, or one side took over the other or killed the other, it would mean nothing to them. He and Eddie were not among the five thousand or so Mafiosi, were not related to them, and could never really be friends with them, since they had to remain free to accept contracts from any of them to kill any of the others. The “made” members of La Cosa Nostra were tribal. Even during the boy’s time they still held all other members—even enemies—above any of the many people, like Eddie and the boy, who merely provided services.
Eddie maintained his neutrality except when there was a specific reason for favoritism or enmity. He distrusted the five New York families the most because they were in a position to be more ambitious and grasping than the others. They were also the primary source of the men who showed up in Pittsburgh during those years to kill Eddie and the boy.
During that period, Eddie and the boy killed at least fifteen men for money, but they also killed more men defending themselves. A contract was still out to punish someone for shooting the two men outside Yankee Stadium in the early weeks of the war, and now and then somebody new would figure out who had done it.
As the next year began, the boy noticed that their part in the bloodshed had changed. They were more expensive to hire now, but they needed to travel farther and hunt for more important men. It was the end of the 1960s, and the boy had grown his hair long. He wore what other males his age wore—jeans, work shirts or T-shirts, boots, aviator sunglasses. Sometimes during those months he and Eddie would travel by airplane or train and pretend not to know each other. On those occasions they would choose seats ten to twenty feet apart and watch each other’s back.
During this phase, the boy did more and more killing. Eddie would step into a New York bar and distract the people who were guarding some important man. Eddie was big and formidable, and in cold weather he often wore an overcoat that might be hiding a weapon. People looked where their attention was directed, and not where they would have seen something. Bodyguards were so sure a long-haired college student would do no harm that they didn’t seem to see him. He was a distraction to be looked past to detect any real threats in the vicinity.
When the victim was on a street, the boy would approach as part of the passing crowd, a small fraction of the foot traffic. He would detach himself for only a second or two, lift a hand, fire without stopping, and drift back into the stream of people. If enemies noticed him at all, they lost track of him immediately, never sure which one he had been. As the crowd passed a doorway or an alley or turned a corner, he would be there with them and then gone.
They already had a reputation from Eddie’s early killings, when the boy had just started working with him. After they had taken down a few important men through speed and misdirection, their reputation started to grow among the class of people who hired hit men.
Summoning a skilled pair like Eddie and the boy was like conjuring lightning. For that reason, the bosses who knew them, like old Victor Castiglione, did not share information about them widely or often. It was not wise for anyone to talk openly or specifically about who had been hired to kill this man or that man, so it wasn’t done. That information was only whispered between men of a certain age and status, because the ability to call in a high-end killer was a big part of a boss’s power.
The lower-level men who knew didn’t speak openly about them either. That would violate omertà. Telling such secrets would weaken a man’s leader and protector, a mistake that could be fatal.
When Schaeffer looked back on those years, he knew he should have been able to see the rest of it from the start. Eddie had taught him to think ahead. He tried to get him to make plans for a day when everything would change for the worse. “If nothing bad ever happens and we live forever, then great. You’ll just have an extra plan or two taking up space in your brain that you never use. But if you’re around long enough, things will wear out, break apart, and disintegrate.”
Late at night on the way home from a hit in Chicago, Eddie took the boy through Buffalo. They drove beside the dark Niagara River for a while and then along Grant Street. They reached an area where half the street lamps were broken and most of the businesses had steel cages locked down over their front entrances. He stopped the car by the curb at the end of a block of stores, where a narrow sidewalk led back through an overgrown garden to a brown two-story house with windows covered by wooden shutters.
“See the house back there?” Eddie said. “Memorize the sight of it. Never forget it or where it is. On the first day when you find that your time is up and you need to disappear, come here. Wait for night, then go up on the porch and knock on the door. When he opens it, tell him you’re Eddie Mastrewski’s boy.”
“Tell who?”
“The man who lives there. He’s black, a little taller than I am. When everything else has fallen through and you know they’re looking hard for you, he can still help you. People have gone through that door who were as good as dead, and nobody ever saw them come out. I’ve run into a couple of them years later in other places, but they’ll never say how he does it.”
“What does he charge?”
“He’ll tell you, but don’t worry about that. If you get to the point where you need him, I’ll be dead. There will always be enough money in the freezer in the shop to pay him and set yourself up in a nice business somewhere else—one of those big white shops that have rows and rows of wine, and big cheese displays, and cooking equipment, not just meat.”
Fifteen years later, after everything had gone wrong and he was being hunted, he had made his way across the country to the old brown house on Grant Street in Buffalo. Eddie was long dead, but he had been right. The man was still there in the brown house. The man was old by then, but he still knew who Eddie was and knew about the boy that Eddie had raised. Schaeffer’s life had continued past that night because the old man had decided to help him.
Schaeffer stood in the bathroom of his hotel suite and looked in the mirror. His hair was once again sandy brown. He looked a bit younger, partly because this visit to the United States had deepened his tan. His face had some wrinkles, but his body was still trim and strong. His mind was quicker than ever, partly because he had long ago made most of the decisions about things that other men wasted whole seconds thinking about.
He knew that staying in the United States and hiding from the Balacontano organization would only work for a while. The word was already out that finding him and killing him was worth serious money. Even though La Cosa Nostra had become much less visible since the old days, their wealth and power had greatly increased.
Schaeffer felt a sudden wave of hatred for them rise along the back of his neck like heat. The arrogant
bastards had spent over a century infesting the country like parasites, taking a little share of this, a rake-off on that. And he had helped them. He had added teeth to the notion that they were too strong to be defeated, or even resisted. He had killed more Mafiosi than he had civilians, but even that internal fighting had added to the families’ reputation for violence.
He needed to evade the forces that were arrayed against him and find ways to divide them. The families were more afraid of each other than of anything else. The others didn’t care that Carl Bala had been framed and sent to prison, or that he was still locked up three decades later. They didn’t care who had done it or how it had happened.
What would be of interest to them was that after all this time, Carlo Balacontano was getting a parole hearing. If Bala got out of prison, he could be an important problem to them. As a middle-aged capo, he had been alarmingly aggressive, a cunning manipulator and a tireless, implacable enemy. Because of the decisions he had made in his prison cell, the Balacontano family was richer, stronger, and more deeply entrenched in its strongholds than ever. There was no reason to assume that if he went free, he would be any weaker or less aggressive. Schaeffer was sure there were plenty of rivals who would like his parole hearing to fail.
Schaeffer took out his iPad, signed into the hotel Wi-Fi, and began searching current news stories about the five New York families. After a few hours he knew that in their present state, the Balacontanos were doing very well. Carl Bala had spent no money, only directed the businesses and encouraged younger ambitious caretakers to work hard to impress him. Other families had changed over time.
He already knew the Piscata family had been in decline since Angelo “the Fish” Piscata, his two sons, and the underboss Nick Fontana were all caught in a Justice Department sting five years ago. Nothing had changed.
The Vintoretti family had been spinning off their traditional New York operations to other families. Now they were so heavily invested in finance—drowning the world in embezzled securities, smart-sounding blockchain currencies, laundered money, and Ponzi-scheme investment accounts—that they were less a New York crime family than a European fraud empire. They had no reason to care what happened to Carlo Balacontano.