Sleeping Dogs

Meg pulled Schaeffer into the stands and sat him down in the center near the bottom. “Okay, Michael. Let’s appraise these horses. My system is to ascertain which are the tallest, and then place large wagers that they’ll win.”

Schaeffer stared out at the broad green lawn. There were a few horses being exercised on the track, which was little more than a white railing cordoning off a portion of the expanse of grass that stretched from the road to the hills where buildings began. It wasn’t like American tracks, which were almost like freeways for horses, bordered by huge concrete structures for crowds of bettors, electronic tally boards and the subterranean bunkers where money was pushed through windows and machines pumped out tickets. He liked it. Things in England always seemed to him faintly amateurish. “I wonder what’s keeping the others.”

“Jimmy’s always been like that about parking. He cares about machinery. Have I ever told you that’s something I like about you? You don’t care at all about machines.”

“Are you sure you haven’t offended Peter?”

“Positive.” She turned to him and gave him her most enigmatic smile. It looked so open and guileless that he knew it was a practiced artifice. “When we were young, he talked me into taking off my clothes—one garment at a time, of course. He took Polaroid pictures of me. I could see that I was beautiful from the first ones, and I got rather caught up in the whole thing, mainly from the pleasant surprise and narcissistic curiosity. So I kept unbuttoning things further, and letting the cloth slip lower to reveal a little more. When there was nothing left to take off, I found I wanted to see myself from angles I hadn’t seen. Peter still has the pictures, I’m sure. I was just reminding him that I remember too.”

“Why do you tell these stories?” Schaeffer asked.

“Because it should have happened,” she answered. “Or something should have. Something shameful and scandalous. In fact, we were a sad, gangling lot with running noses who were lonely and bored and cold most of the time, but were afraid to speak to each other. It would have been nice if something had happened, and if I tell it that way it will make it seem true. Who does it hurt?”

“No one. I’m going to find them.”

“What on earth for?”

“So when we want to go home they’ll allow us in the car.”

He stepped carefully down the wooden bleachers, then made his way through the people on the ground. As he had since he was young, he avoided looking straight into their eyes when he moved past them, always looking at the place where he would be after a few steps. In the street he turned in the direction Jimmy had taken when he had let them out of the Bentley. A small feeling of discomfort lodged in his throat as he scanned the straggling trail of men and women strolling toward the track. In the years since he had gotten off the airplane at Heathrow carrying a passport in the name of “Charles F. Ackerman,” he had come to depend on an orderly sequence of events that could have passed for a sense of decorum and conformity. He had an instinctive dislike of walking toward a large herd of people, presenting his face for each of them to notice and wonder about.

When at last he saw the Bentley, it was parked at the curb under an ancient walnut tree. Already, the black skins of nuts had specked the mirror finish, and a couple of leaves were plastered on the windshield. Jimmy Pinchasen was an idiot. If the car was so important to him, he should at least have parked it in the open. He walked to the car, stopped and looked around him. If they had come this far, why hadn’t he passed them on the way? He squinted to see through the smoked glass, and froze.

He could dimly see Pinchasen and Filching inside the car. Pinchasen was lying on his side in the front seat, as though he had simply toppled over. Filching was lying facedown in the back seat, and his pant legs had ridden up to his calves. Someone had dragged him by the ankles to his present position. From the quantities of blood that had seeped into pools on the leather seats and the floor, he judged that their throats had been cut.

He straightened, looked to the right up the street and to the left down the street to see that no cars were coming, then started across. The steady stream of people kept coming, a little fester because the races were about to begin, and now he looked at them differently, staring into their eyes, searching for a sign of recognition. All his old habits came back automatically. At a glance he assessed their posture and hands. Was there a man whose fingers curled in a little tremor when their eyes met, a woman whose hand moved to rest inside her handbag? He knew all the practical moves and involuntary gestures, and he scanned everyone, granting no exemptions.

He and Eddie had done a job like this one when he was no more than twelve. Eddie had dressed him for baseball, and had even bought him a new glove to carry folded under his arm. When they had come upon the man in the crowd, he hadn’t even seen them; his eyes were too occupied in studying the crowd for danger to waste a moment on a little kid and his father walking home from a sandlot game. As they passed the man, Eddie had touched the boy’s arm, and he had opened the webbing of the glove so that Eddie could pluck out the pistol with the silencer attached to it. Eddie then turned and put a round behind the man’s ear. He remembered the man taking another step and then toppling forward to the sidewalk. As Eddie hustled him away, he had heard people saying something about heart attacks and strokes. Bystanders had made way for them, apparently feeling sorry that Eddie’s little boy had seen some stranger at the moment when a vessel in his brain exploded.

Schaeffer felt his pulse beginning to settle down now. In the first glance into the parked car, he had known it all as though he had seen it happen. His mind hadn’t raced through a series of steps, or shuffled through the possible implications of the sight to his own survival. In an instant he had been jerked back ten years to the old life: somebody had spotted him. They never forgot, and they never stopped looking.

Mack Talarese leaned his back against the side of the curio shop and tried to catch his breath. He looked at Lucchi with horrified awe. The little waiter had turned out to be something else, and Mario was not entirely comforted by what he had seen. Mario and Baldwin had come up on the driver and the bodyguard from the front of the car as the driver eased the big Rolls into the curb. Mario had formulated a notion of taking the two of them somewhere and shooting them. But then Lucchi came up on the right side of the car behind the driver, and his right hand appeared from behind his thigh, and there was a gravity knife already open, and the hand went inside the open window, and when Lucchi drew it back it was bloody. Then Lucchi had the back door open and was inside the car doing the other one. The man had managed to clamber into the back seat and unlatch the door, but Lucchi was already on him. He was already dead when Lucchi grasped his ankles and hauled him back inside.

Then the little Sicilian walked casually ahead of Mario and Baldwin back toward the racetrack. But Talarese had caught the look on Lucchi’s face as their eyes met. When Mario was a child on Long Island, his dog had caught the scent of a rabbit in the field and run off after it, interpreting Mario’s calls as some kind of exhortation to greater speed. Then the dog had brought the broken, limp thing back with him in his mouth, his eyes looking proud and hopeful, returning for the approval he knew he had earned. Lucchi’s eyes had looked like that.

Baldwin leaned close to Mario as they followed Lucchi. “Ferocious little bastard, isn’t he?” Talarese nodded. Lucchi was dangerous. He was something Mario had never anticipated, a throwback, a Sicilian like the ones who had gotten off the boat at Ellis Island before the First World War, lean, cunning, ambitious and utterly without compunction or reluctance.

Mario decided to let the implications of his discovery wait until the day was over. He was operating on his own already. The Carpaccio brothers would have no idea who the man was. When it was over Mario would be the only one in a position to take advantage of the accomplishment, and he would be transported to the United States and raised to the heights appropriate to young men who had initiative and decisiveness. Lucchi would be a fond memory.

“Come on,” Mario said. “Now that he can’t leave, he’s ours.” He walked out from the side of the shop onto the street, and he could hear the others’ footsteps following. He didn’t look back. He concentrated only on moving through the crowds of people toward the racecourse, where the Butcher’s Boy—Jesus, that was the best part; he must be forty by now—would be sitting in the grandstand with his girlfriend, never suspecting that the forces he had set in motion years ago had already stripped him of his soldiers and cut off his only means of escape. It was like that Shakespeare play they made everybody read in tenth grade. The bastard felt like a king, sitting there in the sunshine with a woman who wore the kind of jewelry a queen might have. Well, today was the day that Birnam Wood was coming to Dunsinane. The trees were closing in on the bastard. Mario smiled, and felt an impulse to say something about it to the others, but of course it would have been pointless. Baldwin was English but probably hadn’t made it to the tenth grade, and Lucchi wouldn’t even know who Shakespeare was.

Margaret Holroyd was fighting disappointment. She looked out across the field to where the beautiful horses were being steadied and reassured by jockeys and trainers. They were festooned with silks in gorgeous, gaudy colors, and the jockeys wore oddly clashing combinations, probably cut from the same ten bolts. They were so far away that she could see very little except the tiny spots of emerald, pink, crimson and gold. What in the world was she going to do without Michael? He had been gone for only ten minutes, and already she missed him and was feeling angry with him. She couldn’t go on playing with him much longer. Soon she would begin to get little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes like Aunt Caroline, and then she would have to be responsible and act as though she’d never had a time like this in her life.

There already was no doubt that she could change, and this was a sign too. Not so long ago, she wouldn’t have believed she could; people would have recognized the hypocrisy immediately and laughed about it. But now she was perfectly competent to carry it off. What a shame. If she had been at home now, she decided, she would have spent the afternoon in the big leather chair by the library window, wallowing in poetry, probably Ubi sunt poems: “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” And she would have let the bright afternoon sun deepen to amber, then darker and darker shades of blue, as the light slowly dimmed the page and finally left her in darkness, a little rehearsal for getting old and dying. No, she wouldn’t, she admitted; it was a lie. She stood up and stepped quickly and recklessly down the steps to the grass. It felt good on her open toes, a little damp and tickly, and there was Michael already.

He was striding quickly toward her, as though he wanted to head her off and say something before she wandered away to the loo or the betting booths. Well, fine, she thought. She was perfectly willing to be distracted from whatever she would have found to pass the time. When he reached her, he didn’t stop walking, just took her arm and swept her along. She kept up with him, conducted smoothly by a gentle pressure that changed directions subtly, telling her where to go. “I was getting bored,” she said.

His face was empty, and he was looking ahead as they walked. “Don’t talk, just listen. We’ve got to get out of here right now. Some people are here to kill us.” He looked at her for a second. It sounded impersonal, as though he had overheard a weather report.

“What is it?” she whispered. “The IRA?”

Schaeffer didn’t understand the question at first. Even after all the years in England, the whole endless, bitter struggle had remained as remote to him as the wars in Lebanon or Mozambique or El Salvador. People had talked at dinners about The Irish Question and he had only been puzzled by what they thought the question was. “No,” he said after a moment. She certainly would know more about it than he did. “It’s my problem, but I’m sure they’ve seen you.”

“Are you trying to make me feel silly because I told you stories?”

“No,” he said. There was no change in his expression. He was still staring at the people they passed. In spite of her resolve not to be duped, she began to feel afraid. It was impossible, she told herself. Here they were, walking along in the middle of a huge gathering of perfectly respectable people on a sunny afternoon in Brighton. Working women and clerks in London shops loaded their children onto the train and took them here to toss pebbles into the sea and eat the dreadful candy.

But then she made the mistake of reaching to gather more evidence to bolster her cause, and thought about Michael Schaeffer. She knew nothing about him except what he had said. A cold feeling settled in her stomach. She had somehow gone too far, foolishly strayed across some invisible line, and now she was on the other side of it wishing she could scramble back. But she was already too far away, sinking with this man into some horror. She felt small and weak, and the world was sharp-edged and full of eyes watching her.

When Michael led her around the stands and up the road toward the city, she had a moment of relief. “Are Peter and Jimmy bringing the car?”

“They’re dead” he answered.

It hit her senses like a loud, sharp noise, and she felt herself fall another step downward into the horror, as though her foot had slipped on a ladder, before she stopped herself. When she did, she was surprised by her thought: Well, I’m alive. What it meant she didn’t know, but it reassured her in some simple-minded way. After a moment, she realized it had been a question, and since nobody had contradicted her, she began to feel stronger.

They walked along the road until they came to a row of curio shops. There were five of them, and the windows seemed to contain crowded troves of identical china souvenirs, postcards and embroidered placemats, all having to do with the seashore at Brighton. When Michael didn’t go inside the first shop or the second, it occurred to her that whatever was after them was too big for that: it wouldn’t wait, foiled by the simple ploy of hiding in a shop while they ordered a taxi on the proprietor’s telephone. It would roll over them like a tide, not delayed at all by the fear that the old ladies buying china would see it. The thought crossed her mind that Michael was being pursued by the police. But he had said, “Some people are here to kill us,” and the Brighton police didn’t do that; they lived in the same world she did. They tipped their hats and gave people directions. When the bomb had gone off in Mrs. Thatcher’s hotel, they had expressed the same surprise and distress that Margaret had felt. They didn’t think in those terms either.

Michael led her down a long passage between the second and third shops. The buildings were so tall and close, she could feel that the sunlight never fell here. The air was cool and damp and dark, and the stone foundations had a tracing of deep green moss up to where the clapboards began. At the end of the passage, Michael stopped. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt affection for him, but then he surprised her by grasping the shoulder strap of her purse and slipping it off.

He stepped forward into the sunlight, and she saw the white flash. It was a man’s arm, and it had a white sleeve on it, and the hand was in a fist. It punched at Michael, fast and hard, like a piston, but Michael had somehow known it was going to do that. He clutched her purse in both hands and caught the punch on it. Then it was all too fast. He had already wrapped the shoulder strap around the white arm, and now he tugged with all his strength.

She saw the man dragged across the entrance of the passage. He was thin and dark, and his hand was still in a fist, but somehow stuck on her purse. There was a strange, alert look on his face as he passed, and for that instant his eyes seemed to stare down the passage at her. She heard three distinct noises, hollow and sharp, like a croquet mallet hitting a ball. Then she heard a scraping sound, as though something were being dragged on the ground along the back of the next shop.

Michael reappeared. Now he was sweating and his hair was hanging in his eyes. He had her purse, and he jerked a knife out of the side of it and hung it on her shoulder. He swept his hair back with his hand. She looked at his face, but there was no expression she could identify as fear or remorse or disgust, which amazed her because she could still hear the three cracks and knew that they had been the sound a man’s head made when it was broken on concrete. Michael was already thinking about something ahead of them in time or space, like a cricket batsman anticipating where the bowler was going to throw the ball.

She turned and took a step back toward the other end of the passage. She was ready to run now, her heart pounding in her chest. They would have to get out of this dark place, and she was willing to keep up with him by running as fast or as hard as he wanted her to. But his hand shot out and held her arm. She looked into his eyes, but they weren’t looking at her. He only shook his head and pushed her back against the wall. Then she could tell it was too late. She could hear the footsteps of a man running, and Michael was tensing his muscles, his knees bent a little, one foot ahead of the other, and his arms out from his sides.

Mario stopped running when he saw the legs protruding from the space between the third and fourth stores. Lucchi had done it. The little bastard had stalked the man behind the buildings and cut another throat, and this was the one that counted. Mario was going to be rich. He was going home. He fought an impulse to turn and go back to the street. This was the time when he would have to control himself, if he never had to again. He looked around for Lucchi and felt a little tingle of annoyance. The nasty little faggot could be anywhere. Then Mario remembered the girl. Something occurred to him and he began to sweat. There was no question that Lucchi had gone off after the girl. But what if he was that kind of psycho too? He might be doing something to her, something that Mario didn’t want to think about. He decided that the revulsion was something else he would have to control. These few minutes were the ones that were going to make all the difference for the rest of his life. Nobody back home was going to take his word that he had done this. He had to have something to carry away from here that proved he had found the Butcher’s Boy and killed him. He didn’t have much time.

He walked toward the body. As he passed the opening between the first two stores, then the next one, he turned his face away and moved faster. If people passing on the street happened to see him, they saw nothing. He controlled the impulse to go back to the front of the stores and look for Baldwin on the street.

Now he was close enough to see the legs clearly. His mind took inventory: black, shiny shoes; black, tight pants—Lucchi. Then he heard a footstep behind him. He reached inside his coat for the pistol, but then abandoned the intention because an arm was already around his neck. In the instant before consciousness left him, he felt a sharp pain move up under his ribs toward his heart.

B. Baldwin strolled along the sidewalk in front of the shops, using his peripheral vision to peer into them and around them as he went. He had seen the little dago go around the corner to check behind them, and he calculated that Mack T. would be covering any spillover onto the side street.

When he had come to the racecourse today he had been in a foul humor. He had known that they would show up before the sixth race to see how much cash he had taken in before he could chance handing it off. The life of a debtor was something he wasn’t accustomed to, and he hated it. To owe money was to place everything at someone else’s disposal, from your betting booth to your spectacles. But to owe money to the Carpaccios was to sell yourself into slavery. You couldn’t decide to take a day off and go to London instead of working the football outings, because that night they would send someone to pick up the rake-off. Until they had their money, you were theirs.

But Baldwin’s mood had brightened considerably since then. Young Mackie T. had spoken without asking for the numbers. B. Baldwin was going to be his own man again, a man with a debt of eight thousand pounds that was about to vanish.

Baldwin kept his hand in his coat pocket as he walked, running his fingers along the big sailor’s clasp knife that he carried there. He had bought it years ago in a pawnshop in Southampton and had it sharpened like a razor, and then spent hours taking the tarnish off the blade with jeweler’s rouge. It shone like a sliver of mirror now. A man who used his knife would have tried to darken the blade, but Baldwin didn’t worry about an opponent seeing the sudden reflection in his hand. He didn’t use his knife. He would just sit facing a man across a table and open it to clean his nails or idly scrape the dirt off the sole of his shoe. He would watch the man’s face, and try to catch a bit of sunlight on the blade so that a flash of the reflection would hit his eye. That sort of thing worked with the small shopkeepers and restaurant help who made up his usual clientele.

Baldwin had once thought of himself as a man ready for anything, but time and a few blows with heavy objects had made him calm and helped him to find his natural niche in the hierarchy of the universe. He was a predator, but too small to take in everything he wanted in one bite. Time gave a man’s luck a chance to kick in.

He was beginning to wonder if Mackie and the little ferret had simply done their work behind the shops and run off. It wouldn’t do for B. Baldwin to be found standing here not fifty yards away with a razor-sharp sailor’s knife in his pocket, not with his previous life history. The police would see him as a gift from heaven, and he suspected they wouldn’t be above giving his knife a little dip in the gore to make sure the gift wasn’t taken away.

He sauntered by the first passageway, then sidestepped into it without missing a step. He moved quietly down the space between the buildings toward the light, feeling a little disappointed in young Mack Talarese. Taking off and leaving a man on the scene was something that just wasn’t done. It was probably his own fault for involving himself with foreigners who didn’t know any better, but it was going to be the last time, he swore. Unless it was Packies, who were for all practical purposes Englishmen with black faces.

B. Baldwin would just take a quick peek to be sure the bodies were there, then go back to work. When he reached the end of the passage he heard a sound. He knitted his brows and held his place, listening. It wasn’t loud enough for a struggle, just a single footfall somewhere in the courtyard behind the shops. Baldwin took his knife out of his pocket and opened it. Could they have walked right past the victim and his woman? Could they still be hiding in the shadows between the next two shops? Well, if, when he stepped into the light, Mackie and the little rat terrier were busy going through the dead woman’s purse and taking the diamond studs out of her ears, he would lose nothing by having the great gleaming knife in his hand. It would make them feel he had been one of them, in on it from the beginning and still ready at the end.

Baldwin crouched low and leaped out of the passageway, his eyes taking in the scene at once. There was the man, kneeling over Mack Talarese’s bloody corpse where it lay on the ground. His hand was in the coat pocket. The man looked up at Baldwin and his face brought Baldwin very bad news; it showed no fear or anger, and, worst of all, no surprise. The eyes weren’t looking at him to size him up as an opponent in a knife fight. They were aiming. The man’s hand was on its way up from Mackie Talarese’s chest, and there was Mack’s little black pistol in it. B. Baldwin noted this with displeasure, but his mind troubled him no longer, because by then the bullet was already bursting through the back of his skull, bringing with it bone fragments, blood and even a tiny bit of the brain tissue that might have cared.

The shot was too much for Margaret. She sprang out into the sunlight in time to see Michael pressing the gun into the hand of the dead man on the ground. The sound had been loud in the passageway, and it still rang in her ears. It seemed to propel her forward, as though it were still sounding behind her.

Michael stood up and took her arm, not slowing her momentum at all, just guiding her in the direction she wanted to go. She was barely aware of him now. She was only thinking about putting space between herself and what lay back there. She wanted to run and he let her, the cloudy sense of the design of the city she carried in her memory taking her across the courtyard to the next passage between two houses, and along a quiet lane away from the ocean and toward the Royal Pavilion. Then he stopped her. “Do you know where the train station is?” She nodded. “Go there.”