Sleeping Dogs

Carlo Balacontano had been playing gin rummy since he was twelve, and he was very good at it. In October he would be sixty-six, and it was one of the things he could still do as well as he ever had, because even though his arms were no longer heavily muscled and his knees were sometimes a little stiff, his mind was still able to determine and remember the locations of all fifty-two cards, if a game came down to that. Usually he needed to hold only about thirty in his head at once, and he could do that, talk and think about business at the same time. But today he wasn’t doing any of that, because he was sitting across the weight-lifting table from José-Luc Ospina.

Every day Carl Bala came to sit under the overhanging roof of the weight-training area. When he approached in his slow, leisurely stroll, four young men would step up and begin to haul the barbells off the leather-bound table so that he could sit down, take his deck of cards out of the breast pocket of his blue-denim shirt and rip open the package. This ritual had gone on since his second month at Lompoc Federal Correctional Facility eight years ago.

He would have begun to play gin right away, but for the first four weeks he had been out of his mind. His lawyers had assured him right up until the last day that his case would be retried in the Court of Appeals. But the judge had read the trial transcript in one afternoon, then ruled that there were no grounds for appeal. This had somehow stuck with him during the next few weeks, tormenting him, awake or asleep. Carl Bala was not a no-neck whose reading speed was determined by how fast he could move his lips, but he simply did not believe that anyone could read twelve hundred pages of testimony in one afternoon. He suspected that the pompous little bastard was one of those people who had gone to a class where they learned to read by moving their index fingers down the center of the page. The fact that after all these years he had finally been convicted on a bogus charge had not struck him as outrageous. With few exceptions, the people he knew who had gone to jail had been guilty, but not necessarily guilty of the particular crimes discussed at their trials. The system knew its enemies. If he’d had the choice of either accepting the simple murder of Arthur Fieldston or confessing to all the things he had actually done, he would have chosen Fieldston.

These days, the irritant that made Carlo angry most frequently was the existence of José Ospina. Four years ago on a summer afternoon Balacontano had arrived at the weight table to see the usual gaggle of prisoners wearing the thick leather belts cinched around their middles to keep their guts from popping out, straining to raise the heavy weights above their heads and curling the small barbells to make their already-bulging forearms look like ham hocks. He had sat down at the table, pulled the little red string to open the cellophane on his new deck of cards, removed the jokers and begun to shuffle. Then he had looked up to see a tall, dark young man with curly black hair and eyes like a cat sit down across from him. The man had his shirt cut off at the sleeves to reveal bony arms decorated with strange greenish tattoos. They were pictures of some sort of vegetation. They didn’t look like natural plants; they seemed almost architectural. Most maddening of all, they looked familiar. Carlo Balacontano didn’t recognize the tattoos until José Ospina had set his cards down on the table and whispered, “Gin.” Then he had taken off his shirt and Bala had found himself staring at the face of Benjamin Franklin. The tattoos were the flourishes and scrollwork engraved on a hundred-dollar bill.

From that day onward, José Ospina proceeded to ruin Carl Bala’s life. Carl Bala was rich: even now in New York there were large, quiet men who spent all their time driving big, heavy cars to various places of commerce to collect his rake-offs, percentages and tributes. He was also famous, in the way that mattered. Even here, three thousand miles and eight years away from the scenes of his triumphs, he could have walked into a hotel on the shore of the Pacific and taken the best suite in the place on the strength of his name. But that was in the outside world, and Carl Bala wasn’t living in the world. He was in a small, sun-bleached federal prison twenty miles into the dry yellow countryside of central California, hedged between jagged, impassable stone mountains that rose abruptly from the valley floor to the east and broad, open lowlards that stretched to the sea on the west; twenty miles of sparse, ankle-high weeds with every mile or so a crabbed, tortured live oak tree ro more than eight feet tall to provide the only shade.

In this place, meeting José Ospina was like watching a cockroach scurrying off his dinner plate. At first he had been a shock, but Carl Bala had tried to reconcile himself to it. Then, day after day, he had sat and felt the sting as the young man, looking a little bored, had set his cards on the weight table before him and said in his soft voice, “Gin.” Even worse, there were times when José Ospina would watch Balacontano discard once, then pick up his cards, fan them out, close the fan and say, “I’ll knock with ten.” Or eight or three. And Carlo would be frantically leafing through his brand-new hand, staring at the face cards, aces and tens he hadn’t had time to count up, let alone unload.

Stacked decks Carl Bala could have understood, but these things happened when José Ospina hadn’t so much as cut the cards. Palming and substituting a whole hand was not unheard of on the planet Earth, but José Ospina always played with the sleeves cut off his shirt, the flourishes of scrollwork copied from the currency of the United States visible running up his bare arms. He had no place to hide extra cards, no way of cheating at all. José Ospina was lucky. Admittedly he was a pitiless, competitive, supernaturally alert gin player, but the immutable forces of probability and chance simply kissed him on the forehead and passed by him each day to settle with their customary ferocity on the shoulders of Carl Bala. Bala found himself living in this little penal outpost where the only pleasure permitted him was winning at gin, something that happened so seldom now that when it did it felt like mockery.

Carlo had used his status in the prison underground to find out what he could about José Ospina, and had obtained a copy of Ospina’s official file. He had learned that José Ospina had been transferred to Lompoc after two years of good behavior at Marion, Illinois, where he had been serving five to ten on a conviction for possession of counterfeit money and an arsenal of automatic weapons, including an M-60 machine gun. Under “Distinguishing Marks and Scars” was a description of the greenish tattoos, which the prison rumor establishment later told Balacontano had been done in Marion by Ospina’s partner, a talented engraver named Cardero. Under “Place of Birth” was the entry “Lexington, Kentucky,” suspicious since Ospina had a thick Spanish accent. But when he double-checked “Eye Color,” the form said “hazel,” the category in which the United States government placed all colors other than brown or blue. Ospina’s eyes were certainly not blue or brown; they were bright golden yellow, which was to say “hazel.” There was no sign that he was a card mechanic or a gambler or even intimate with gamblers. So Carlo had concluded that Ospina was merely riding a streak of luck like the vein of gold under Sutter’s mill, long and deep, but still finite, and he had decided to wait it out.

He had been waiting it out for three and a half years of frustration and simmering anger, having run up a tab of $344,000 in the process. In that time he had stepped up his purchases of decks of cards, sometimes bringing out a fresh one twice in a single day. He had also been treated by the prison doctor for an incipient ulcer and given a rubber mouthpiece to keep him from grinding his teeth while he slept. In 1958, when all of the East was at war over territory and dominance, and every three days somebody was found mutilated in the trunk of his car or broke loose from his anchor and popped to the surface of a river, Carl Bala had been able to eat heaping plates of hot sausage and peppers, then sleep like a hibernating bear. But not now; the effort of containing the anger had begun to threaten his robust constitution. The only release he had for his hatred was to send messages to his employees, subordinates, relatives and colleagues who lived in the outer world, demanding that they find the man who had framed him and get him out. Lately his demands had become more urgent, the implied rewards more princely and the veiled threats more dire. There were already those who believed that, like others before him, Carlo had gone mad in prison. But a madman with untold millions of dollars might overspend to reward those who humored him, and nobody doubted that, mad or not, Carlo Balacontano would be capable of finding strong hands to carry out any form of revenge that stayed in his agitated imagination long enough to turn it into words.

These threats had become particularly worrisome to some of the lieutenants who were now serving as stewards and trustees of his empire: Giovanni “John the Baptist” Bautista, Antonio “Tony T” Talarese, Salvatore Callistro, Peter Mantino. These men had covered themselves in advance by mentioning Carl Bala’s mad desires with exaggerated seriousness to their soldiers at more frequent intervals as the years passed and Balacontano’s parole was becoming more easy to imagine. Bautista and Mantino had also quietly discussed the possibility that if the culprit didn’t turn up before the old man’s first parole-board hearing, it might be inconvenient or even suicidal to let him walk out of prison alive. Talarese had come to the same conclusion independently, spurred by the possibility that the old man might figure out that Talarese had been stealing some of the profits.

Carlo Balacontano had intuited much of this, and informers had kept him abreast of the rest. He could easily have taken his revenge from the prison yard, but he needed these men for now. Thinking that they were working to fill their own pockets, they were amassing a greater hoard that he would come back and reclaim later. But he needed their memories more than their greed. They were all old enough to have seen the man he wanted. The young wise guys, the little weasels who were so eager to sell their bosses to the imprisoned chieftain and take over their fiefs, were too young. The Butcher’s Boy hadn’t been seen by anyone in ten years.

Carlo Balacontano knew how the system worked. In order to get out, he would have to supply the system with someone to take his place. The replacement could be dead, as long as something linking him to the murder of Arthur Fieldston was found with him: a forged suicide note with a confession, the cigarette lighter that Bala had pocketed at Fieldston’s office in the old days, when he had been there to discuss a deal—anything. A reasonable doubt might be enough excuse for someone to sell him a pardon, and would almost certainly be enough to get him a parole after eight years. Then he could get away from this place and from José Ospina, the man who was driving him mad.

Elizabeth Waring sat in the small cinder-block building just inside the gate of the prison, watching the other visitors go through the formalities with the prison guards. There were a pair of lawyers who seemed to know each other, one tall, thin and bespectacled and the other a squat little blond man with a brown suit that looked as though he had bought it cheap in a store that had a fat boys’ department. They kept calling each other “counselor” and “learned colleague,” as though it were a longstanding joke.

Fidgeting nervously on a bench across from her were three women who bore the same dazed, sickly expression on their faces, but had nothing else in common. One was a young, coffee-colored girl who seemed no more than nineteen. She wore a shapeless brown-and-black outfit that seemed to include a kind of sweatshirt and something below that could have been a pair of pants from an Israeli paratrooper’s uniform, but in sizes so large that her shy, cringing posture allowed her to hide in the material. Beside her was a tall, thin blond woman who might have been fifty but had such tight skin on her cheeks and forehead that she might as easily have been thirty-five. Her nose had likewise felt the surgeon’s scalpel, and seemed rightfully to belong to the sort of teenage girl who waited on tables in a short skirt and luminous panty hose. She wore no jewelry except a gold wedding band and an engagement ring with a diamond that might have been two carats. The third woman was about thirty, and Elizabeth had grouped her with the lawyers until she sat down with the other women and her face assumed the same fixed, humiliated expression. She wore a business suit and a white silk blouse with a bow at the neck that wasn’t a good idea. She even carried a briefcase. When the guard called, “Henley,” she stood up, walked to the desk and handed the briefcase to the guard, who opened it and removed a black lace negligee. The guard left the garment on the desk while he went through the briefcase for contraband, and Elizabeth could see that the woman’s ashen face was aimed downward, her eyes not on the guard but on the negligee, as though she were willing it to disappear. The two lawyers stopped talking and stared frankly at the proceedings, then listened while the guard repeated a short orientation speech on the rules of conjugal visits. The young black woman seemed to shrink still deeper into her clothes, but the older woman turned to wood, staring straight ahead like the figurehead on the prow of a sailing ship.

“Miss Waring.” The voice was behind her. She stood up and turned to see a man in a suit waiting for her. He looked like a dentist, serene and well scrubbed, with a shiny bald head. He held the door open and Elizabeth went through it to the concrete steps outside, then shook the man’s hand. “I’m Assistant Warden Bateson,” the man said. “I was told to expect you. Anything special you need?”

Elizabeth would have preferred to hear a list of standard procedures for this kind of meeting. “I’d like to see him alone, and I suppose it would be better if the other prisoners didn’t know about it.”

Bateson smiled. “No problem there. We only have three conjugal visits, so we’ve got a couple of bungalows vacant. He’s been assigned to clean one of them.”

She sighted along Bateson’s pointing finger to a small, low cinder-block building just inside the fence. It looked like a communal bathroom in a trailer campground near a national park. “Can I be of any help?” asked Bateson.

“No,” Elizabeth said.

At the door of the little building, Elizabeth stopped and listened. There was a slow, rhythmic, scraping sound, then a splash and clank, then silence. She opened the door slowly, which set off another clank. She took the scene in at a glance. The mop had been set in the bucket and leaned against the door, so that it would warn Balacontano in time to get up off the bed.

When he saw her, the old man was swinging his feet to the floor, not looking toward the door at all, but reaching for his shoe and pretending to tie the lace. She hadn’t seen even a picture of him in ten years, but he looked about the way she remembered him. He was short and stocky, and wore his hair combed straight back, but close at the neck so that it didn’t touch the collar of his blue work shirt. The prison jeans looked odd and baggy on him, as jeans always do on old men, the unaccustomed informality of them evoking a businessman who had bought them to wear on vacation and never broken them in. Balacontano’s face was pinched and the nose hawklike, his little eyes glaring back at Elizabeth from behind a pair of glasses with a slight brownish tint. He finished tying his shoelace, then put the other foot up on his knee to tighten its lace to show he hadn’t been caught at anything.

“Keep your clothes on,” he said. “Your old man will be out here when I finish.”

“Mr. Balacontano?” Elizabeth began.

“That’s right.”

“My name is Elizabeth Waring.”

“Good for you.” The old man stood up, walked to the bucket, placed the mop in the wringer and prepared to go back to work on the floor.

Elizabeth reached into the inner pocket of her purse, pulled out a little leather wallet and held it out toward Balacontano. “U.S. Justice Department.” He glanced at it, but showed no interest. “I have a couple of questions for you if you’ve got time.”

Balacontano leaned on his mop, and the cold eyes turned on Elizabeth as though he had just noticed her presence and found it peculiar. “Is that some lame witticism?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “Not at all.”

“Save your questions,” said the old man. He didn’t sound bitter or angry. “I don’t answer questions.”

Elizabeth had prepared herself for this. “These aren’t hard ones. They’re about an enemy of yours.”

“Just out of curiosity, what are you offering me?”

Elizabeth sighed. “I don’t usually have much to do with the people who run these places.” She looked around the sparsely furnished room with mild distaste. It looked like motels built fifty or sixty years ago, when they had consisted of six little shacks arranged around a gravel drive. “I plan to tell Warden Bateson that you cooperated. I don’t know if that buys you time off for good behavior or just two desserts at dinner.”

Carl Bala looked at her shrewdly. “Come back when you can tell me which.”

Elizabeth met his gaze. “Last night Antonio Talarese was murdered. The killer was somebody named the Butcher’s Boy. Do you know him?”

Balacontano considered his options in a new way. “You’re from the Justice Department?”

She nodded.

“What do you do there?”

She decided that telling part of the truth would give the right impression. “I’m an agent on temporary duty with the Organized Crime section. I’m here because I think there’s something unusual going on. I didn’t bring my résumé with me.”

“What makes you think I know anything about this Tony Talarese or this other guy?”

Elizabeth took a deep breath. This man must be better at detecting lies than any prosecutor. The fact that he was alive and in his sixties proved it. She would have to work into it slowly. “The charts in Organized Crime show an arrow going up from Antonio Talarese to you. That means you’re his boss. If that’s not true, let me know and we’ll change the chart. It’s no trouble. We have to change it anyway because he’s dead.”

“This isn’t how it works, you know. I’m supposed to have my lawyers with me, and then we sit down and talk over your offer. If we can cut a reasonable deal, I tell you something. They can’t just send some special agent in here to flash a badge and ask me questions.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I assure you that you won’t be bothered again for the rest of your sentence.”

Bala looked into her eyes, and the thought occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t lying. This was it, the first time in eight years that they had even bothered to come here. It was one thing to bargain hard, but it was another to see the only buyer on earth walking out the door. “Wait a minute. At least let’s talk for a minute.”

“All right.” She sat down on the chair across from the bed.

“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view. You want me to do something that’s risky. I have a right to something in return.”

“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view,” she said. “At the moment the Justice Department is interested in finding the man who killed Tony Talarese. I believe you are too. The difference is that you’re in jail and I’m not. Oh, and there’s another difference. You know who he is and I don’t.”

“You’re not offering me a pardon or an early release or anything?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not at the level to make that kind of offer, and nobody would approve it. Those things have happened, but much more seldom than you’d think from the amount of publicity they get. And what nobody mentions is that they always involve special conditions.”

“What kind of special conditions?”

It was time for the lie, and she gave it apologetically so that she could look down and avoid his sharp little eyes. “Look, I don’t know an awful lot about your case.” She knew everything about his case. “But I don’t want to lie to you. As I understand it, you’re not a likely candidate. In addition to being cooperative, the person provides some evidence that what he did was minor, or that there were extenuating circumstances.”

“I was innocent. Is that extenuating enough?”

She ignored his protest. “I just thought that since this man murdered a friend of yours last night, you might at least know who he is.”

Carl Bala considered. If he said nothing, that would be the end of his pardon. If he said something, what would this woman do to him? He could tell the story in a way that wouldn’t incriminate anyone but himself for what had happened in the old days. If he did, what were the police going to do to him? Throw him in jail for longer than life? There was omertà to be considered, but if he didn’t mention anybody else’s name, the cops couldn’t go after them, so how would they know he had talked? Besides, from what he had heard, omertà didn’t mean shit to anybody these days. This was just the same as it had been all his life: a simple question of consequences. If he told her what he knew, maybe she could begin a process that would someday get him out. But even if he was making a mistake, there was nothing she could do to him. The one thing he was sure of was that it was his last chance. “Yeah, you bet I know him,” he shouted. He knew that he had spoken too loud, but it had taken such an effort to break the words free that he had forgotten to modulate his voice.

Elizabeth kept her face slack to hide her surprise. “Who is he?”

“He’s the crazy little bastard who framed me for murder.” Balacontano let go of his mop and let the handle topple to the floor, then sat on the bed. Elizabeth watched the discarded glasses bounce once on the tight blanket; Balacontano noticed them too, and went through the ritual of putting them back on. “You want to close out your file on him. I want to close out my file on him too. But not just yet. First he’s got to give me my life back.

“Ten years ago, I made a mistake. I was an important man, capo di tutti capos. I had a lot on my mind in those days. You probably think it’s like the movies: an old guy with a face like a prune and a shiny suit sits behind a table in a room so dark you can’t hardly see him and sends big zombies out to machine-gun a mom-and-pop grocery store because they didn’t pay their nut that week.”

Looking at Balacontano, Elizabeth decided this was probably accurate. All the old man needed was the suit.

“Well,” said Bala, “it’s not. It’s like any other business. It’s the shifting of capital to where it’s going to do the most good. At the time I came here, at least ninety-five percent of my business was perfectly legal. I had interests in corporations, T-bills, oil leases, franchises, bonds, real estate, stocks. That’s what made the money. Why do you think the people who really own this country put their money in those things? Because they’ve got no balls? Let me tell you, if Citibank or Salomon Brothers thought they could make more money stealing cars, you wouldn’t be able to get a ride from here to the bathroom. Once in a while, when things got rough, I’d cut a corner.”

“Was that your mistake?” asked Elizabeth. She couldn’t believe it. Carlo Balacontano was talking to the Justice Department. “Cutting corners?”

Bala’s left eyebrow formed an arc. “Please, don’t make me think you’re stupid now.”

Elizabeth had allowed herself to get too excited to think clearly. She had to concentrate on what he said and keep him talking. “How did this man fit in? Did he work for you?”

Balacontano thought about it, then shook his head. “Even the people who worked for me weren’t like that—employees with a lunch bucket. But he was something else. He was a specialist. One day, with no warning, I suddenly developed a tax problem, and I want you to know I wasn’t the only one. Some of the biggest corporations in the country developed the same problem on the same day.”

As Bala remembered it, he could still feel the shock and outrage as though he were hearing it for the first time instead of telling it. A United States senator who had been obsessed with the unfairness of the income-tax laws for twenty years had begun to assemble a list of profitable corporations. They were doing nothing illegal, which was why they made such an effective set of public examples. All they were doing was plowing profits back into the business on capital improvements, acquisitions, new markets, new equipment. But in the computer search the senator’s staff had uncovered, along with the corporate giants, a company called FGE. They had left it on the preliminary list because it sounded big. The G and E might have stood for “Gas and Electric.”

But FGE had been a low, dirty beige building beside a shopping mall on the edge of Las Vegas. Half the building consisted of rented post-office boxes, and the rest was devoted to a small office with secondhand furniture and paneling on the walls that looked like wood but wasn’t. In it a man named Arthur Fieldston did business as Fieldston Growth Enterprises. His entire trade consisted of receiving large amounts of cash from the quiet men Carl Bala sent to him and paying it out to accounts that Carl Bala designated, as payment for imaginary investments and services.

The day Carl Bala learned that FGE was about to become famous, he had experienced a shock that felt as though he had taken a sucker punch from a small, weak opponent. He summoned Harry Orloff, the fat, disreputable lawyer who had invented FGE, to his farm in Saratoga, and ordered him to dismantle his invention. Orloff had whined that it would take weeks, and in the meantime Arthur Fieldston, the last remaining member of a well-known western landowning family, would receive a subpoena to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. At that moment, Carlo Balacontano had experienced a fit of something he would later describe to himself as “mad caution.” He had exaggerated the importance of the problem in his own mind. Then he had told Harry Orloff it was worth his life to be sure Fieldston didn’t testify.

To Elizabeth he said, “My attorney, Harry Orloff, decides that he needs time to get the papers in order. He tells himself the only way is to get to the senator who’s causing the problem. That was Senator Claremont of Colorado.”

Elizabeth was listening to something she had waited ten years to hear. It was what had brought her into the case. At first everyone had thought the senator had committed suicide, but then the lab people had discovered that the poison had been in the glass he’d used to soak his false teeth.

But Carlo Balacontano was still talking. “I didn’t know what Orloff was doing to take care of things until it was too late. I’m sitting in a restaurant in New York one night, a nice family place owned by the son of a friend of mine, and I get the word. This United States senator didn’t die in his sleep in Colorado. Or he did, but the reason he happened to do that was that Harry Orloff had managed to hire a specialist to come in and do him. I’m shocked. I’m knocked on my ass. I’m furious. On the one hand, the hearings are held off, and Arthur Fieldston is hiding so he can’t be dragged in to answer questions. On the other, my little tax problem with Arthur Fieldston is nothing compared to assassinating a fucking senator. I figure my only hope is that the rest of the world is going to look at the list of corporations getting subpoenas and figure that one of the oil companies or the car companies had decided that they might save a couple billion dollars by not answering too many questions. The problem is that when a big public figure dies, everybody in the country with a badge, gun or law degree, or even a typewriter, comes out to beat the bushes.

“And that’s where I made my second mistake. I’m sitting there at the table in the restaurant, and there’s a candle burning on the table. My man tells me that Harry Orloff needs two hundred thousand dollars to pay off the specialist, because he’s done his job and he’s just shown up in Las Vegas to collect. I’m already so pissed off I can barely see. I’m looking at my guy, and it’s like his face is at the end of a red tunnel. My head is pounding, and I notice I’m breathing so hard that the candle flame is flapping like a flag. When I hear the part about the two hundred thousand and the specialist showing up and registering at Caesars, I go absolutely berserk. I tell the people at the table with me that I want out of this. I want it to be like it never happened. And that was it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Elizabeth. “That was what?”

Balacontano shrugged. “That’s what put me in here. What I’m guilty of is understating my income to the IRS. I figure two years is enough time on that, so I ought to be out six years ago.”

Elizabeth’s face showed no expression. “Except they tell me you weren’t convicted of tax evasion.”

Balacontano waved his hand in frustration. “You’ve got to understand what we’re talking about here. I don’t know how to make you see it. There’s a lot of talk about hit men and all that, so it sounds like going to an exterminator or something. What people don’t think about is that getting somebody killed isn’t all that hard. I saw a couple of days ago in the paper that some woman in Phoenix hired two teenagers to strangle her husband for a hundred bucks apiece. With competition like that, how does anybody make a living? I’ll tell you how. There are only maybe five or six genuine specialists that I know about, so there can’t be more than two dozen, tops. And they’re an odd bunch. You hear about movie stars and famous heart surgeons and these morons with the guitars, and somebody says they’re prima donnas. They don’t know what the hell a prima donna is.

“These specialists I’m talking about are very hard to deal with. A movie star does it for the money, sure, but he likes the applause too—the glamour, the admiration. Not these people. They honestly and sincerely don’t give a shit what you think, whether you like them or hate them; if people flock around them or avoid them, it’s all the same. A friend of mine once told me it was because their egos were so big that they didn’t think anybody else was even real. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s not out of the question. If you hear about some piece of ass who decides she’s a great actress and throws tantrums at the director, people say she’s impossible. You want to see impossible? Try sitting across a table from a guy who wouldn’t notice it if he had to tear your heart out of your chest on the way out, because he’s done it a hundred times before and he’s so good at it he can do it without having to wash his hands. Well, that was the kind of man Harry Orloff hired to delay the Senate hearings: one of the fifteen or twenty serious specialists. After that, when I said I wanted everything to be as though the whole Fieldston fiasco never happened, I was talking in general terms, and I was misunderstood.”

“What did they do?”

Balacontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out on the Las Vegas Strip and blow his head off.”

“I take it this was without your knowledge.”

“Damned right. They only had it half figured out. They knew he could be terrible trouble and had to be out of the picture as soon as possible. They also knew that nobody strolls up to a professional killer and says, ‘Sorry, pal. It was all a mistake. The man who hired you had no right, so we’re not going to pay you.’ But what didn’t occur to them is that there’s a reason why these characters keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. I’m not saying my people should have known what the reason was, because I sure don’t. I’m saying they should have known that there was a reason, and accepted it, and given the son of a bitch his lousy two hundred thousand and prayed to God they never saw him again. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred-and-first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”

Elizabeth could see the frustration and anger growing in the old man as the story began to move closer to his own defeat. What he didn’t know was that it was hers too, seen from the other side as though through one-way glass. “What happened?”

Carl Bala smiled a sad little half-smile, and snorted as he thought about it. “You probably wonder why I can tell you all this, don’t you?”

“The question did occur to me,” Elizabeth conceded.

“Because they’re dead. Harry Orloff, all of the people I’m talking about. He killed six or eight people that night. I think he didn’t get Orloff until the next morning.” Carlo felt a little twinge at the mention of Orloff because he had ordered his death personally, but it was the same thing. He wouldn’t have had to if it hadn’t been for the Butcher’s Boy, by that time running amok: a man who had shown that he could and would do anything, who had no allegiance to anybody, no discernible fear and nothing to protect. Balacontano had simply reasoned that if Orloff were gone, the hired killer might not be able to figure out who he had been working for. That had turned out to be his third mistake. “But he didn’t stop there. He went across town to Castiglione’s house.”

“I thought the Castigliones were a Chicago family?”

Balacontano looked at her, distracted, then seemed to collect himself. He spoke patiently. “This is old Paolo I’m talking about. He was retired. Don’t get me wrong, though; Castiglione was still a very important man. In the old days he used to run Chicago. I don’t know how old he was ten years ago, but he had to be in his late eighties. He lived in a big brick house at the edge of Las Vegas because it was supposed to be good for his emphysema. Vegas was under a truce. All the families had business there, and anybody could go there. Castiglione was one of the old ones—strong, didn’t know what pity was. When he retired, he had generations of enemies. You should have seen the place he had there. From the street all you could see was a big wall. When you got through the gate it looked like the Maginot line. There were floodlights and windows like slits in a pillbox. I wouldn’t be able to swear he didn’t have the place booby-trapped too. Somebody new bought it a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they flipped a switch in the den and half the lawn blew up.

“Anyway, it’s late at night, and this character has just finished turning my friends’ little ambush into what looked like a busy day on the Eastern front. But he doesn’t go away. Instead he takes a little drive over to Castiglione’s. The rest of it nobody knows much about, because everybody there is, as usual, dead. This includes old Castiglione, his four bodyguards and—get this—a special agent of the FBI who just happened to be there because his job was to sit in a car down the street and take pictures of everybody who came to the old man’s house.

“So when I wake up the next morning, not only is Senator Claremont still dead, but so are five or six men who worked for me, and the lawyer who set up some corporations for me and who hid Arthur Fieldston so he couldn’t accept a subpoena. So I’ve got millions of dollars in accounts that only Arthur Fieldston can sign on, and no living people on the spot to find him, and my little tax problem has turned into a multiple-murder case involving a federal officer. Then around noon things got ugly. I didn’t get any phone calls; I got visitors. All day and most of the night, lots of very important men pulled into my driveway and came into my parlor and sat in my chairs and asked me what the hell I was doing breaking a truce that had kept Las Vegas open for forty years. Some of them thought I’d killed Castiglione, some of them didn’t know what to think, but all of them knew that when the sun came up in Vegas there were about a dozen corpses lying around out there, and that maybe half of them belonged to me and the others were Castiglione’s.” Balacontano seemed to be out of breath, but he added quickly, “Except for the federal cop, who was going to attract such an army of federal undercover types that even the pay phones would be tapped for the next hundred years.”

“Why did he go to Castiglione’s? Did he think Orloff was working for Castiglione?”

“Hell, no,” said Balacontano. “He did it because he knew it was going to create confusion. And it worked. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he had any idea who those guys were working for. But he was sure that as soon as the newspapers printed their names, there’d be people a whole lot scarier than he was who would know. The thing that scared me wasn’t who showed up at my house; it was who didn’t. I spent the next few days kissing powerful asses because I was going to need them on my side if things blew up. Even after I did, it was a near thing.”

Elizabeth prompted him. “What did you do about the killer?”

Balacontano studied the little woman who sat across from him and had a thought, but then dismissed it. She was a bureaucrat. “I did what anybody would do. I hunted him with everything I had.”

He stared at her for a reaction, but she waited in silence. Balacontano shrugged. “He found Arthur Fieldston before I did. I don’t know how far he was thinking ahead. Maybe he knew that I couldn’t get my money back if Fieldston was dead, and then he thought of the rest of it after he’d killed him. He buried Fieldston’s head and hands behind the stable at my farm, then made a phone call to the Justice Department. Nobody ever saw him again until now.” He looked at Elizabeth. “You’ve got to help me.”

“I’ll do my best to find him.”

“I’m not talking about him; I’m talking about me. He’s just the way to get me out of here.”

“I’m not your attorney, but if you do get an appeal, I wouldn’t tell the judge everything,” said Elizabeth.

“I shouldn’t have to tell the bastard anything,” Balacontano said. “I’m not … wasn’t some errand boy. Does anybody seriously think I went out and shot Arthur Fieldston, then sawed off his head and hands in Arizona and brought them across the country to bury them in my yard? The only two parts you can use to prove who it was? What do you think I am, Edgar Allan Poe? Well?”

“I’m wondering who you think Edgar Allan Poe was,” said Elizabeth.

“You know what I mean. I was an important man. When they have those cars with power surges that kill people, do they go to the president of the company and dig up his back yard to see if he’s buried some suspicious carburetors? No. Does anybody even wonder who made the anonymous phone call to the Justice Department?”

Elizabeth had asked the same question in as many words ten years ago, but her superiors had been too eager to convict Balacontano to listen. She had asked it so many times that they had sent her on a vacation and deleted her name from the record of the investigation so that the defense couldn’t call her to testify. “Can you tell me where to find him?”

The old man’s anger and frustration were barely controllable now. “If I knew that, do you think I’d be sitting here talking to you? You’re the one who’s got to hunt him down.”

Elizabeth stood up and glanced at her watch. “Just for the record, do you want to tell me his name?”

“No,” said Balacontano. “I don’t know his name. What the hell does he need a name for?”