Sleeping Dogs

The New Mexico experience had been a disaster. He couldn’t keep putting himself in positions where some scared cop could pop him in the dark.

Eddie Mastrewski had been the world’s greatest advocate of caution. Wolf could see Eddie again, fat and sweating, his eyes bulging and the veins in his forehead visible as he drove the car onto the highway outside St. Louis. “That wasn’t right, kid,” he had said, glancing up at the rearview mirror, then down at the boy, then into the mirror, then into the other mirror so often that the road in front of him seemed only an afterthought. It was at this moment that the boy had begun to worry. Eddie looked as though he were about to explode. The boy had seen piles of internal organs in the butcher shop, but had only a cloudy notion of how they worked. He thought that the pumping of Eddie’s heart was increasing the pressure in his body, and that if it didn’t stop, he would have a heart attack, which in the boy’s mind meant an explosion of the pump.

“We do this for a living,” said Eddie. “It’s not some kind of contest. We can’t go around getting into gunfights.” The boy had nodded sagely for Eddie’s benefit, and watched him start to settle down slowly.

The boy’s part of it had gone as Eddie had planned. He had sat in the back of the movie theater next to some boys his age, and Mancuso hadn’t even noticed him. To all the adults, he had just seemed to be one of a gang of kids who had come together from the neighborhood to see the movie. When Mancuso got up in the middle of the movie to go to the upstairs bathroom, the boy had followed.

He hadn’t wanted to follow because he was getting interested in the images on the huge screen at the front. The movie was La Dolce Vita, and he could still remember the moment when he’d had to walk out. It was dawn somewhere outside Rome after a night of incomprehensible carousing, and Marcello Mastroianni had climbed onto some woman’s back and was riding her like a horse on the grass. The boy had no clear notion of what was going on, or if indeed it really was going on or was just some foreign way of conveying decadence. It was the only image he now retained of the film thirty years later, because it was what had been on the screen as he had glanced over his shoulder when he reached the aisle. He had longed to stay at least until the scene changed, because although it had never happened in any movie he had ever seen, he had some forlorn hope that somebody was about to have sexual intercourse, or at least that the woman was about to become naked through some happy act of negligence. Even he could see that the rules were different for foreign movies—he had never seen Doris Day and Rock Hudson behave like this—and he hated to leave without knowing.

Because of this he was annoyed with Mancuso when he followed him into the men’s room in the loge. But when he had opened the door, he had forgotten about the movie. Mancuso hadn’t gone in to relieve himself; he had gone in to meet two other men. When the boy walked in, all three had turned to face him, jerking their heads in quick unison like a flock of birds. The boy had looked away from them and gone straight to the urinal because he couldn’t imagine any other act that would explain his presence. He had stood there, straining to coax some urine out of himself. Could they tell he wasn’t pissing? The three had moved away to the end of the room. He could hear their leather soles on the hard white tiles. Mancuso gave the two men crinkly envelopes, and then the men left, swinging the door against the squeaky spring that was supposed to hold it closed.

As Mancuso went to wash his hands at the sink, the boy had wondered why. But Mancuso was using it as an excuse for standing in front of the mirror and admiring his thick brown hair. Then he had run his wet hands through the hair and taken out a black plastic comb. The boy had tried to stop time, to hold everything the way it was while he decided, but it didn’t work.

Mancuso put the comb in the breast pocket of his suit and turned to dry his hands on the filthy rolling towel. The boy turned with him, took the revolver out of his jacket and aimed at the base of his skull. When he fired, the noise was terrible and bright and hollow in the little room. Then he dashed out, as much to escape the ringing in his ears as the corpse. But in the dim light of the small, orange, flame-shaped bulbs mounted on the walls of the mezzanine, he saw his mistake.

The two men hadn’t left at all. They had been waiting just outside the door for Mancuso to join them, and now they pulled guns out of their suit coats and aimed them at the boy. He remembered the puzzled face of one of them, a tall, thin man with a long nose. He looked at the boy, then past him as though he expected someone else to come out of the men’s room. The boy ran.

Years later he understood that it was probably the only thing that had saved him. To pull out the gun again, even to stand in one place long enough to allow the two men to think, would have doomed him. But he ran down the stairs to the lobby, where Eddie was just coming out of the swinging double doors with some scared ushers and three other middle-aged men in hats and long overcoats. At first the boy thought that Eddie had been caught, because they looked like plainclothes cops. But when the two men with guns had appeared behind him on the stairway, everybody but Eddie ran back into the theater. Only the boy and Eddie fired. Both of them aimed at the same man and hit him, and left the other to get off two or three shots over the railing. He was too cunning, because he fired at the big glass door to the street, where Eddie and the boy should have been, instead of into the lobby, where they were. The boy aimed again, but then the railing was a blur because he was being snatched off his feet and hustled through the pile of broken glass into the street.

Eddie had been right to do it. Eddie was a born foot soldier. He always kept in the front of his brain the certainty that anyone who thought he had a valid reason to put his head up when the air was full of flying metal was an idiot. And now it was time for Wolf to put his head down.

It had taken him two days of driving to reach Buffalo, and he felt a kind of empty-headed euphoria to be able to stand and walk. His right foot was cramped and stiff, and the tendon behind his right knee felt stretched and rubbery. He walked along Grant Street and studied the buildings. They hadn’t changed in the ten years since he had seen them except for the signs, so there was some hope. When he had arrived in Buffalo he had found it gripped by some kind of madness. The center of the downtown section had been bulldozed and sandblasted, and now lived a strange, mummified, decorative existence, with a set of trolley tracks running down Main Street and a lot of lights to verify the first impression that there was nobody on the sidewalks. They had hosed the dirty, dangerous occupants out of Chippewa Street and turned the buildings into the core of some imaginary theater district.

The whole business alarmed him. What could have become of the old man if there was some urban-renewal craziness going on? But the juggernaut had obviously run its course before it reached Grant Street. The respectable blue-collar sections obviously hadn’t struck anybody in city hall as a priority, and they retained their ancient gritty integrity.

When he had been here on business with Eddie when he was sixteen, they had driven by the house slowly, but didn’t stop. “What is it?” he had asked. Eddie had answered, “There’s a man in there who makes people disappear. He’s black—sort of brown and leathery like my shoes, and he’s about a thousand years old. Remember where it is. Never write it down, just remember.”

Years later he had made his way to Buffalo with a contract on him so huge that it wasn’t expressed in numbers. The word had gone out that the man who got him would never have to do anything again for the rest of his life. So he had found himself one winter night in the musty, dark parlor talking to the quiet old man, with the big clock ticking on the mantel and the old furnace in the basement pumping warm air up through the register at their feet.

“I know who you are,” the old man had said. “It’ll be expensive.”

Ten years later, here he was in the parlor again. This time the old man said, “I remember you. It’ll be expensive.”

“I know,” Wolf said. He considered himself lucky that the old man was still above ground with ten years added on to the unknowable number he had already lived.

The old man seemed to be thinking about how long ten years was too. “How hard are they looking after all these years? Don’t lie to me.”

“They found me,” he said. “They must be trying hard.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“No. Why now?”

“I’ve been living far away all this time. I wasn’t stupid enough to even think about coming back, but Tony Talarese found me.”

“So you killed him, which makes four. Peter Mantino makes six, because you had to shoot a man to get to him.”

“So everybody knows.”

“People talk. This time I listened.”

“Why?”

“I knew you’d been away. That meant you don’t have anybody you didn’t know ten years ago.”

“So you waited for me to come.”

“I waited.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“When you were in trouble before, you didn’t want to run away from it until you hurt them. You killed about twenty of them before you let it go.”

“It wasn’t twenty.”

The old man shrugged. “It don’t matter. I want to know if you’re going to do that again.”

“No,” Wolf said. “It was worth trying to get Talarese before he told anybody where I was. I thought he was too greedy to let anybody else collect. Then there was a shooter waiting for me at the L.A. airport. Unless things have changed a lot, there’s nobody who could have arranged that except Mantino.”

“Who else do you want? Did you come to town to get Angelo Fratelli?”

“No. All I want is a passport and a way out. I want to go under again.”

“Then I’ll go see a man.” The old man pushed himself up out of the chair with his arms, and stayed bent over for a second before straightening. As he dressed for his errand, he looked frail and antique. He put on a sleeveless sweater, wrapped a scarf around his neck, put on a dark brown overcoat and then snapped a pair of rubbers over his sturdy leather shoes to keep his feet dry, as though it were midwinter. He walked carefully to the door. “Lock it behind me. Anybody comes who don’t have a key, shoot him.”

“I didn’t bring a gun.”

The old man had to turn the whole upper part of his body around to look at him. “There’s a shotgun in the closet.” He closed the door, and Wolf could hear him slowly and carefully moving over the elastic boards of the porch toward the steps, and then silence returned.

The house was still fiercely neat. The knives hanging from hooks in the kitchen had been sharpened so many times that they all had fillet blades, but they were hung in unbroken descending order of length. The old man’s collection of boots was lined up in ranks in the front of the closet. The shotgun was a Remington that might have been acquired any time after the turn of the century, and it rested in a stand that the old man had made, with a block at the floor cut with a jigsaw to fit the butt, and a pair of bent clamps on the barrel to keep it from toppling over. The plastic cap of an aspirin bottle had been fitted over the muzzle to keep out the dust. Wolf lifted it out of its stand and sniffed it: linseed oil on the stock and gun oil on the barrel. He pumped the slide and felt the smooth, easy clicks as he ejected a shell onto the carpet. He glanced at it before he slipped it back in: double-ought buckshot. The old man didn’t want to have to shoot anybody twice.

He had been awake most of the time for seventy-two hours now, and his mind was beginning to feel the wear. He had to force himself to stay alert for a few more minutes. He found the box of shotgun shells on the floor behind the boots, filled his coat pockets with them and took the shotgun with him.

He was beginning to feel an exhaustion almost like dizziness, so that when he turned his head he had to take a moment to focus on the new sight. He knew he was probably reacting to this more than to the danger of sleeping alone in the old man’s house, but he felt a nervous restlessness that made him afraid to close his eyes.

Eddie had given him advice on that too. “Before you go to sleep, always be goddamned sure you’re going to be alive when you wake up.” He used to keep the boy up watching the cars behind them while he drove, or sometimes just looking for a likely place to drop a weapon or change a license plate. Once he had even made him check off landmarks to be sure the road map didn’t have any mistakes on it. Sometime in the last few years Wolf had admitted to himself that he had always known it was because Eddie hated to be alone when he was scared. Eddie would have said, “I’m not scared. I’m just alert.” It still made him sad to remember that Eddie had been alone when he had died.

He walked through the house to the pantry, opened the door and turned on the light. The shelves were lined with cans and bottles to last for years, all arranged in rows, front to back like the displays in a tiny supermarket. He found a twenty-five-pound sack of rice, placed it on the floor as a pillow, laid the shotgun on the floor next to it and turned out the light. For a moment he lay there in the dark, opening and closing his eyes and not detecting a difference. He wondered if he would have to try something else. It had been ten years since he had slept on a floor, and the tile squares were harder and colder than they looked. But the idea of getting up again seemed an immense labor at the moment, and then he forgot what he had been thinking, and had to remind himself. He decided he had better move, but later, when he felt more uncomfortable, and then he was asleep.

He didn’t dream. Instead, his mind roamed the house, running hands along the walls, feeling the faint vibration of the old man’s oil furnace, like the sound of an engine pushing it somewhere with glacial slowness. Deep in the timbers there was the almost-inaudible creak of the house standing up to the wind off the river, and outside, tiny particles of grit blowing against the impervious shell of brittle paint on the clapboards. It was like being deep in the hold of a ship at anchor. His mind kept patrolling the surfaces, reassuring itself that the shell was tight and unbroken, and that his sleeping body was secreted in the center, where he had hidden it.

When he awoke, his first sensation was that he had missed something on his rounds, made a mistake. But then his mind tripped on the contradiction: he couldn’t have been both asleep and awake. But he knew there were people in the house. The floor amplified the impacts of their steps, and he could feel them in his body. The old man would have come in alone and warned him if he was bringing somebody back with him.

He picked up the shotgun and slowly crawled to the pantry door. He pushed the door open an eighth of an inch and looked out into the kitchen. It was still dark. He listened for a moment, until he was sure they were no longer in the room. He heard the creak of a door in the hallway being pulled open quickly, then a long silence. If there were people sneaking around the house in the dark, then the old man wasn’t one of them. He would have known it was the best way to get his head blown off. Could the old man have sold him? Not after giving him a loaded shotgun. Somebody was looking for Wolf.

At first the search would be quick and cursory. They would duck across doorways and step aside to swing doors open. When they had been through the whole building once without any resistance, they would go through again looking for hiding places. He had to get out before they got to that stage. He held the shotgun level with the floor as he slipped out of the pantry into the open kitchen. He set his feet down softly, moving to the kitchen door. Now he could hear voices in the parlor, quick and urgent and soft.

He slowly turned the doorknob and pulled the door open before he let the spring turn it back. He took a step over the threshold, then another to take the weight of his body, then another and another until he was down the steps. He took a deep breath of the cool, damp air and blew it out to let it merge with the wind. As his head cleared, he admitted to himself that the old man must be dead.

He walked around to the back of the house, looked in the window and saw them. There were two of them, both carrying pistols in their right hands. One was tall and fat, with bristly gray hair brushed back like porcupine quills. He kept his pistol pointed down at the floor, while the other, a twenty-five-year-old with a pitted complexion and a sharp, chiseled face, danced around opening closet doors and jumping out of the way as though he weren’t sure when his partner might decide to shoot.

As he watched them, he studied the eager, predatory expression on the face of the young one. He looked as though he had just watched the old black man die, and the sight had agreed with him. He was in a state of excitement, thrilled that he was going to get to do it again. It took no more than a second for the impulse his look ignited in Wolf to travel its course. He knew Eddie Mastrewski would have said, “What do you get for it?” But by now the impulse was traveling too fast, gaining strength and getting hotter, and it made him raise the shotgun to his shoulder and hug it tight. He fired through the window, pumped it and fired again. After the second shot, as the barrel leveled from the kick and he pumped it again, there was an instant, like the wink of a camera shutter, when he saw pieces of glittering window glass turn end over end and sprinkle the two bodies sprawled on the floor.

He lowered the shotgun, pressed the disconnector and quickly pumped out the last three shells. Then he released the magazine, gave the barrel a quarter-turn and removed it from the receiver. He held both halves under his coat and walked down the driveway to the street. He had told the old man he hadn’t come to town to get Angelo Fratelli, but a lot had changed since then.

Angelo Fratelli hated white wine. It was his belief that it was a weak, sour version of the rich, blood-red Paisano that he had been drinking since he was a child. He had heard the sister say in school that when Jesus was on the cross, the Romans had given him vinegar and water with a sponge, and he had assumed they were talking about something that just tasted like vinegar, maybe cheap Spanish sauterne. That was what Angelo was drinking now. Every year, between Ash Wednesday and Easter, he drank white wine only. It was a legacy from the days when people ate fish on Friday, and although religion had said nothing about what went with it, the Fratellis had always assumed that the Scriptures implied white wine. The drop of cognac or grappa that he liked after dinner was out too, because those concoctions were clearly on the side of luxury. He was still drinking white wine this late in the year because of a promise he had made to Saint Giovanni in return for a favor, and from time to time he wondered if the favor was sufficient to merit the sacrifice.

But he always lost weight during Lent, and on the whole he was satisfied with the return he got on this last vestige of his religion. He weighed two hundred thirty pounds on Easter morning each year. By the time Ash Wednesday came again he weighed two forty-five, and over twenty years that was an extra three hundred pounds. So he calculated that if he hadn’t switched to white wine every Lent and spoiled his appetite, he would weigh about five hundred fifty pounds. He was fifty-three now, and it would have been a real problem; he wouldn’t even have been able to slide into his reserved booth at the Vesuvio Restaurant.

This would have been more than a humiliation, because the booth where he now sat was his place of business. It was under a stained-glass window with a picture of Mount Vesuvius trailing a huge cloud of white smoke across the blue sky. It allowed him to sit with his back to the wall without seeming to, because behind the window were six inches of whitewashed brick with light bulbs cunningly placed to simulate the light of the Italian sun and the glow of the volcano. The booth wasn’t reserved in a crude way; it was simply that the waiters never seated anyone else there. If an outsider asked for it, they would smile and nod and conduct him to another part of the restaurant.

Angelo Fratelli was an important man. In a way, he was the restaurant’s biggest attraction. Every night at six he would drive into the lot at the rear of the building, walk around to the front, come in, smile at the older waiters and go through the dining room to his booth. When he sat down, Lorraine, the fiftyish blond waitress he seemed to prefer, would bring him his wine. She would set the carafe on the table roughly, nearly spilling it, and clank down his glass. If he said, “Nice day today,” she would snap, “Can’t prove it by me. I’ve got to be on my feet in this dark hole all day.” If he said she looked good, she’d say, “Don’t even think about it.” For reasons nobody had ever fathomed, Mr. Fratelli found Lorraine amusing, and when he left each night, he would give her a large tip. Since all the employees in the Vesuvio divided their tips equally, Lorraine’s rudeness to Mr. Fratelli was considered a form of heroism. From a certain point of view, she was risking her life for the good of all. Angelo Fratelli was the reigning leader of what in Buffalo was called “The Arm.”

Nobody presumed to guess why Angelo tolerated Lorraine, but it was for a combination of reasons. One was that he thought it made him seem affable and approachable. In reality he was anything but affable. In the wars of the fifties he had filled his share of car trunks, and since then had cultivated a reputation for savagery by ensuring that the kills he wanted attributed to his wrath were found naked and mutilated in fields south of the city. Everything he did was calculated and premeditated. Although he had no interest in spending time with other people, he had found that a good portion of his business was brought to him by people who would never have dared speak to him if it weren’t for his supposed accessibility. His demeanor had been practiced since the forties, when he had been given as a franchise a stable of shopworn and unprepossessing prostitutes by Francisco Del Pecchio, the potentate of that era. Angelo’s natural temper was gloomy and dyspeptic, and at first he found that the prostitution business was tough going. Potential customers were instinctively frightened when they saw him, and often left before they saw the merchandise he was offering because they suspected that the young two-hundred-thirty-pound entrepreneur might have conducted them to his lair in the Albemarle Hotel to garrote them for their wallets and watches. This in fact, was one of the business practices he was reduced to considering, when one day a prospective client, a gypsum buyer from Ohio, enlightened him. “You think I’m crazy enough to go out in the dark in a strange town with you?”

Thereafter Angelo had concentrated his considerable will on changing his image. He had spent some money on decorating the upper floor of the Albemarle, more money on some respectable suits for himself and still more money on presents and clothes for his sullen and underworked talent. He made it a policy never to enter a room without smiling at everyone he saw and, if possible, calling them by name. He developed a comical way of talking to his girls, patterned after the way he and his male colleagues in The Arm talked to each other, a tone that was simultaneously conspiratorial and derisive. He even gave them nicknames like mobsters. One, a girl who had been born with a blond, bovine beauty in a part of Alabama that hadn’t seen fit to reward it suitably, he called “Slowly-butt Shirley.” Another, a tall, bony woman who might have been a fashion model if she had had a pretty face, he called “Olive Oyl,” and a younger girl of similar charms and handicaps, “Extra-Virgin Olive Oyl.” His star, an intense young woman named Gloria Monday, was so inventive in what she did to, on, under and with her clients that she achieved a clientele that wasn’t either blind drunk or lost, but actually knew the way to the Albemarle. Angelo had never heard Latin outside of church, but he could read an inscription, and when he saw “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” on a tombstone, he started calling her “Sick Transit Gloria.”

That had been a long time ago. Now the girls were old or dead, and Angelo’s hearty, expansive manner had become so habitual that he had often displayed it at the most inappropriate times, such as the night when he had executed a young Canadian named Boromier for being found in close proximity to a truck-load of cigarettes that unofficially belonged to Angelo, and again when he had attended the funeral of a close friend. Because it bore no relation to his feelings, this bogus jocularity could surface at any time when he wasn’t concentrating. It added to his stature and reputation in his later years, because when it appeared it was chilling.

Angelo was alone in his booth tonight; it was a brief vacation for him. Usually he was encumbered by Capella and Salvatore, two young retainers sworn to die to protect him. The problem with young men sworn to die to protect their patrons was that they didn’t actually want to die, so large portions of their mental capacities were devoted to vigilance and suspicion. This left so little for ordinary human commerce that it made them dull and preoccupied companions. But tonight Angelo was to meet with a man who wasn’t willing to speak in the presence of third parties and hadn’t the experience to appreciate the fact that at any given time Capella and Salvatore were only half conscious of anything that was said, and in any case had no interest in it.

Angelo sipped the terrible white wine and rolled it around his mouth so that he could detest it. Then he set the glass down, filled it again, stood up and went to the men’s room. As he walked across the dining room, he felt the eyes of a dozen people on him, all establishing his presence to the satisfaction of a hundred grand juries. He had seldom done what he was about to do. The Vesuvio was his sanctuary, and to use it as an alibi in any illegal activity would have been a violation of trust. But the man he was going to meet was a banker, a solid citizen who had, to Angelo’s knowledge, never done anything that wouldn’t put a grand jury to sleep.

Angelo passed the men’s room door, went out the fire exit in the hallway near the storeroom and emerged beside the dumpster in the lot behind the restaurant. He was so overwhelmed by the sweet, nauseating smell of fermenting vegetables that he stopped to peer over the edge to see what they were. He was dispirited when he saw that the smell was from a collection of empty quart cans of tomato paste, all opened and dumped hastily without being scraped. These days everybody was in a hurry; in the old days they had made the sauce from fresh plum tomatoes.

He looked for the car Salvatore had left for him, and saw it immediately. It was a small gray Toyota registered to someone named O’Reilly who ran a gas station and used it as a loaner for regular customers. O’Reilly had no idea who would be driving the car, or that it had anything to do with the way Salvatore made his living. It was a favor of no consequence to O’Reilly, but the fact that he had done it had, without his knowledge, made him eligible for dividends in the future. He would probably find that over time he would gain a few customers who would mention that Salvatore had recommended him. But he might also find that when he was worried about his property taxes they had already been paid, or that his daughter had miraculously moved up the waiting list for admission to the most desirable girls’ school. In the most extreme case, he might find that when his enemies were about to triumph over him, forces that had nothing to do with him would destroy them, suddenly and utterly. The world worked on goodwill, favors and reciprocities, but the system was too crude to keep the exchanges in proportion.

Angelo drove out of the lot without even glancing in the direction of the space where his own Cadillac was parked. In ten or twenty minutes he would be back at his table. He drove carefully. The car was probably like a fingerprint collection by now, having been loaned to half the city without being cleaned, but if he hit something there wouldn’t be much question as to who had been driving it.

* * *

Wolf heard the sound of the Toyota leaving the lot. As soon as its lights had passed, he knew the driver’s eyes would be turned to look up the street, and he sat up in the back seat of Fratelli’s Cadillac. What he saw seemed impossible. The driver of the little car that was going past Angelo Fratelli’s new Caddy was Angelo Fratelli. He ducked back down, opened the door a little and kept the light switch in the door frame depressed with his keys while he opened it wide enough to slip out into the darkness. He reached inside to the floor to haul the shotgun out after him, then hurried to his own car.

Angelo wasn’t sure why he was going to the trouble of meeting McCarron in secret and alone, but he was intrigued by the request. McCarron was the president of a small bank that operated only in Erie County. Banks had always titillated Angelo, and they had titillated him even more since he had begun to read the stories about savings and loans being closed by the government. It amazed him that so much crude bad-boy thievery had gone on behind the substantial institutional columns of those places. There had been clowns who had imagined they could practically stuff their briefcases with their depositors’ money and walk out the door free and clear the day they had declared bankruptcy. But oddly enough, it seemed that the clowns were right. The government was picking up the tab, and those former savings-and-loan officers were sitting on their yachts drinking champagne. Obviously Mr. McCarron had been reading the same newspapers Angelo had. He would be thinking that right now, as the army of sweaty little federal bookkeepers were busy breaking their pencils and gnashing their teeth while they worked their second year of double shifts to figure out what had happened to all the money in the savings and loans, they would be letting the banks alone.

McCarron obviously had a scheme. Those guys must all know each other too, just the way Angelo and his colleagues did. They weren’t exactly competitors, because there was plenty to go around, but they kept an eye on each other because nobody ever knew the future, and if one of them got too big he would be dangerous. McCarron would be sitting in his big old Victorian mansion on Delaware Park Lake, and he would read about how the dumbest bastard he had known at Harvard Business School had just gone under. He would say to himself, “It makes sense.” Then he would read on to learn that two hundred million dollars had somehow disappeared on bad loans, and he would know. For an hour or a day he might pretend he didn’t but he would know. The dumb bastard had somehow ended up with the money. The federal regulators wouldn’t be able to figure out how, but McCarron would because he was in the same business.

So now McCarron had done something that not even the most cynical and suspicious of investigators could have anticipated: he had set up a meeting with Angelo Fratelli. This bank president, whose social life was reported in the Buffalo News and seemed always to involve his being in a tuxedo at an odd location like a hospital or the art museum with others like him, needed Angelo. All that remained now was for Angelo to hear what his part in the scheme was, and what he was going to get out of it. It might be that one of Angelo’s companies would be the one to default on a big loan, or even that McCarron had somehow found a way to get the money in cash and needed someone with connections to haul it to offshore banks. Angelo didn’t waste much time speculating on the specifics because he wasn’t dealing with a little teller with a drug habit. This was a bank president, and if he had a scheme, it was probably so complicated and devious that nobody else could even follow it.

Fratelli drove to the park, and along the curving drive around the lake. Across the water he could see the fronts of the art museum and the Buffalo Historical Museum on a little hillside, gleaming white in the moonlight. Then his view was blocked by trees again, and he passed the first brick walls of the zoo. Now he saw McCarron. He was standing on the first of the asphalt basketball courts in the park, and he had a big tan dog on a leash. Angelo was a little unnerved. When McCarron had said he walked his dog at night, Fratelli had imagined a hairy little yapper, not a big slavering monster. But he pulled over anyway, extricated his large body from the little Toyota and stepped onto the lawn.

“What kind of dog is that?” he asked. He leaned against the fence instead of going through the gate onto the court.

“It’s a golden retriever,” said McCarron. He reached down and pounded the dog. To Fratelli it seemed he had hammered it pretty hard, but the dog appeared to love it, so he ventured closer. “Don’t worry,” said McCarron. “He doesn’t bite.”

“Then what good is he?”

McCarron seemed to think about this for a long time. “My wife bought him,” he said finally.

“Come on,” said Angelo. “Get in and we’ll go for a ride. If we stand around here, it’s only a matter of time before kids come to hit us over the head or cops come to save us.”

McCarron and the dog moved out of the basketball court and to the side of the car. As the banker opened the door, Fratelli stopped him. “Has he taken a leak lately?”

McCarron smiled. “He won’t foul the car.”

As Angelo went back to the driver’s side, he thought about that one: “foul the car.” Whatever this McCarron was going to be worth, he was a real dog-and-horse, riding-boots-and-driving-gloves asshole.

As Angelo started the car, he felt it lurch and rock, once as the dog bounded into the back seat, and once as McCarron seated himself in the front. He pulled out onto the drive. He wasn’t surprised that in the enclosed space of the little car he could smell the dog, but he could also smell something fainter. McCarron was wearing some kind of perfumed after-shave or cologne. He had always heard that it was déclassé to slap that stuff on. It seemed to Angelo that as you moved up the social strata, at each step all the rules were reversed. It was like clothes. At a certain level, not wearing nice clothes meant you didn’t have a job. Two levels up from there, it meant you didn’t need one.

Wolf was driving past the park that abutted the zoo when he saw a man and a dog come out of one of the basketball courts. At first he couldn’t be sure what was going on, but in the rearview mirror he saw the man join somebody who could have been Angelo Fratelli. When the dog and the two men got into the little gray Toyota, he knew. At the first turn Wolf pulled over, stopped and lay down on the front seat. When he saw the headlights flash on the ceiling of his car and then vanish, he sat up and prepared to follow.

Angelo drove to Delaware Avenue and turned left to go out of the city. He had begun to feel that he needed to bring this one up into the light and take a look at him. Driving around in the dark wasn’t going to tell him who he was dealing with. He turned the next corner and then turned again at Elmwood toward the state university. The traffic was consistent and still heavy, but most of it was going away from Buffalo State at dinnertime. On an impulse, he turned on Forest Avenue and went up a short driveway to a parking lot at the edge of the campus. Ahead of him was a carload of young men. They took a ticket from a dispenser, and a wooden beam raised itself to let them in.

“What’s this?” asked McCarron. “Why are we stopping?”

“The university. There’s plenty of people. It’s a good place to talk.”

“Is this safe?”

“Who do you think those kids are going to recognize—you or me?” Angelo waited for a stupid answer, but when it didn’t come, he drove into the lot, stopped the car in the middle of a row, then turned toward his passenger. “Okay, Mr. McCarron. What do you want from me?”

The banker took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “I have a problem. I was going to say ‘I have reason to believe,’ but that’s not strong enough. I know I have a problem. I’ve been borrowing funds from certain accounts. They were secret, set up with false names. I knew that the owners wouldn’t go to the authorities if they discovered a problem, but now they know, and I think someone will come for me at some point.”

Angelo didn’t conceal his disappointment. “Shit,” he said. “What do you want? Protection?”

McCarron said, “I don’t think that if they really want me, bodyguards would be of much use. I’d like to get out of the country. Maybe you could arrange whatever you do for your own people in this situation—plastic surgery, papers and so on.”

Angelo moved his head from side to side and let out a little snort that was partly a laugh. It was absurd, but maybe if he did this man a favor he wouldn’t regret it. After all, McCarron was still the president of a perfectly good bank. “That kind of thing mostly happens in the movies. But if you’ll tell me who’s pissed off at you, I might be able to get him off your back.” He began to calculate how it would work. He could tell McCarron his enemy was demanding a million dollars. Then, with a hundred thousand or so and a slight expenditure of bluster, Angelo could probably convince any reasonably small-time wiseguy that he had saved his honor and had settled his dispute.

“It’s not like that,” said McCarron. “I can’t tell you much. I thought they were drug dealers, but now I believe it’s the … uh, CIA.”

Angelo’s hands gripped the steering wheel, and he could see that his knuckles were turning white and feel that rage was gripping his chest and throat. All of his visions of access to a bank were laughable; this man was insane. He had heard of this kind of thing happening. Sometimes they saw religious visions, or heard voices telling them to do things like drop their pants in some public place. Sometimes they decided the CIA was bombarding their feeble brains with radio waves and listening to what they were thinking. He wasn’t going to get inside the bank, and clearly within a short time McCarron wasn’t going to either. He held his temper. “Gee,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

McCarron was alarmed. “You won’t do it?”

“The C fucking IA … I just don’t know.” Angelo avoided McCarron’s wide-eyed, gaping face, letting his eyes wander to the nearest lighted building. At the corner of the building were two glass doors, so the whole corner was glass. Beyond the door, in the hallway, he could see a few students, but there was also a man in his late thirties or early forties with sandy hair. The man was looking at something on a bulletin board; no, he seemed to be reading everything on the bulletin board. He looked odd to Angelo. What was it? There was something about the way he carried himself, a slight slouch, as though he were keeping most of his weight on one foot, his coat open and his arms down at his sides. Then Angelo realized that the man was looking at him in the reflection on the dark glass of the door beside him.

Angelo studied the face in the window and then began to sweat. “My God,” he said, and realized he had said it aloud in front of this lunatic, but then decided he didn’t care.

“What’s wrong?” asked McCarron. “What is it? Your heart?” He grabbed Angelo’s arm.

“No! Get your hands off me.” Angelo started the car and backed out of the space, then guided the little car around to the exit. He made it down the narrow drive about forty feet, then had to stop to wait for the cars ahead of him to pay the man at the kiosk and drive off.

The station wagon at the head of the line settled its accounts with the man and pulled forward under the raised barrier, but then something very noisy happened to it. At first Angelo didn’t see the bus coming any more than the driver of the wagon did, but just as its nose moved a couple of feet into the street, the bus arrived to occupy the same space. It was on its approach to the bus stop, so it was only inches from the curb when it hit the station wagon. It popped the front bumper off, took the grille and smeared the front end of the station wagon sideways as it came to a stop across the driveway.

Angelo looked for a way out. The curb on both sides of the car was at least a foot high, and if he tried to bump over it he would probably get stuck halfway. His Caddy might have made it, but this little Toyota’s doughnut tires didn’t have a chance. He was stuck in a track like a go-cart in an amusement park. There were two cars and something that looked like the end of the world ahead of him, and at least four or five behind him. Curious people were now beginning to come out of the nearby campus buildings, some of them looking amused, some worried. The man he had seen would wait just long enough for the confusion to peak, and then he would be here. Angelo couldn’t defend himself; he didn’t even have a gun. If he had been in the Cadillac, he could at least have used the phone to call for help. He looked around him. Far down the street to his left was the lighted yellow sign of a bar called The Canal.

He turned to McCarron. “We’ve got a little problem, and here’s what we’re going to do.”

“Problem?” said McCarron. “They’ll have that cleared up in a few minutes.”

Angelo was afraid he was going to break the steering wheel with his bare hands, so he carefully put them in his lap. “I’m going to get out of the car and walk down to that bar with the yellow sign. You slide over, take the wheel—”

“I can’t slide over in this car.”

“You come around, wait for them to clear the exit, drive down to the bar and meet me.”

Angelo’s slow, clear, quiet voice had frightened McCarron more than it would have if he had been screaming and shrieking. He held on to Angelo’s arm with a grip that slowed the circulation. “No. No, you don’t. Tell me first.”

Angelo glared at him. This was when he would have killed him if they hadn’t been stuck here surrounded by people. This was a man who, if left alone, would shortly begin to line his hats with tinfoil to protect his brain from the CIA’s microwaves. But he tried anyway. “There’s a man in that building. Don’t look. I said don’t look. He kills people for a living. He shouldn’t be here. I haven’t seen him for years, and now here he is.”

“See?” said McCarron. “He’s after me.”

Angelo sighed. “He’s not after you, for Christ’s sake. He’s after me.”

McCarron wasn’t to be dissuaded. “I came to you tonight to tell you they want me dead, a hit man shows up and you say he’s not after me?”

“Please,” said Angelo. “Just do it. Come around and take the wheel.”

“No,” said McCarron. “Not a chance.”

Now Angelo grabbed McCarron’s wrist and freed himself of the lunatic’s grip. It was much more difficult than he had anticipated; McCarron was as big as he was. “This is not the kind of man the CIA would send—give him a membership card and security clearance and all that shit. He’s a fucking animal.”

“That’s very reassuring. Look, my life depends on you now. Get us out of here.”

Angelo nearly said, “No, my life depends on you,” but the thought was too distasteful. “This guy doesn’t know you from shit. You’re nothing. The people he works for could take out six of you a day and he still wouldn’t make enough to pay for gas. This is my town. If he’s in my town and nobody told me he was coming, he’s looking for me. Now I’ve got to get to a phone.” He gave McCarron’s wrist a little twist as he threw it back in his lap, and got out of the car.

He walked fast, stepping over the high curb and striking out across the shrubbery to the sidewalk. But then he heard a car door slam, and he listened for the other door to slam and let him know that McCarron had gotten into the driver’s seat. Instead, he heard the loud blare of a car horn. Then there were running footsteps, and an unfamiliar voice yelled, “Hey! Get back in the car! Fight it out at home, you old faggots.” He was mortified more deeply than he had been since he was a child. He felt chills in his spine, inside the very bones, but when he touched his face it was hot.

When McCarron caught up with him, Angelo was so angry that patches and bursts of color were floating across his field of vision. “You couldn’t listen, huh?” The man was dead. He might still be walking around, but now the only gratification that Angelo could promise himself was that McCarron was going to know why he was dying while he died.

“You expect me to sit there and let him kill me? My only chance is if I stick with you.”

McCarron obviously didn’t know that he was beyond having chances. His chance had been the chance to do what Angelo had told him to do. “Shut up,” said Angelo. There was no possibility the Butcher’s Boy hadn’t been looking at him, but why would he be looking for him in a university parking lot? If he wanted Angelo, he would look for the Cadillac in the parking lot at the Vesuvio. Of course he had, but he had seen Angelo come out and get into this little Toyota, and had followed him. Tonight, of all nights of the year, he was away from his soldiers, unarmed and alone.

“Where are we going? Shouldn’t we get off the street?” McCarron asked.

Now it occurred to Angelo that the reason he was in this situation was the call from this lunatic who was dogging his steps, practically stepping on his heels. He glanced at McCarron again, but the suspicion dissolved into simple anger. McCarron was too crazy to have knowingly betrayed anyone. He really was frightened. “No,” said Angelo. “We go to the bar and call for help. If that one gets us into the darkness off the street, we don’t come out again.”

Behind them a horn honked again. This time it was a long, loud bleat that ended with what sounded like someone beating his fist on the horn six times.

Wolf drifted out of the building with a crowd of curious students. The bus driver and the owner of the station wagon were out of their vehicles and standing on the street, so the onlookers began to lose interest. There was no tragedy to participate in, or even carnage to see. The event had already been diminished to the dull haggling in which the drivers served only as temporary representatives of the insurance companies and lawyers who were the real principals. The horns started again, the two drivers in the accident climbed back into their vehicles, the bus driver pulled away from the wrecked car and stopped at the bus stop, and then a few young men pushed the station wagon away from the exit and around the corner to the curb.

Now the horns began in earnest, and Wolf looked at the source of the commotion. There was the little Toyota stalled in the narrow drive to the exit, and behind it there were now eight or ten cars, all honking their horns. Two of the young men who had pushed the station wagon were looking into the gray car and shaking their heads at someone inside. When the someone lunged over the back seat into the front and began to bark at the horns, he understood their problem; they wanted to get in and move the car out of the way, but they were afraid of the big dog.

As Wolf stepped to the street, he could see two men walking quickly up the sidewalk toward a lighted yellow sign. The big man with Fratelli, whose face he hadn’t been able to see, was probably a bodyguard. He obviously had the knack. There had been no way for the bodyguard to sense that Fratelli was in danger—as in fact he wasn’t, at least for the moment. Wolf had already decided not to make an attempt tonight. There were too many witnesses. When the gray car had entered the university visitors’ lot, he had followed it on a whim. He regretted it now as he walked back toward his car amid the sound of horns. Somehow he had frightened the bodyguard and a whole series of responses had been triggered, each placing additional obstacles in his path. Now Fratelli would dig in, the bodyguard would marshal reinforcements and in an hour Fratelli would be a very difficult man to kill.

Wolf climbed into his car and started the engine. He backed out of his parking space and joined the line of cars waiting to get past the toll gate to the street. He could see that the two men were just coming under the big yellow sign down the sidewalk. Then something odd happened. The two of them tried to squeeze through the front door at once, and got stuck for a second. Then Fratelli stopped and let the other man go in front. It was puzzling behavior for a bodyguard.

Once inside the Canal, Angelo could see that the place was disgusting. It was full of the kind of people he had seen on television buying cars like the one he had just abandoned or talking about tax-sheltered annuities, and every one of them was drinking white wine. The place was dim but full of living plants with little spotlights on them, and the bartender was dressed up like a neutered poodle, with a high collar that had a little black bow around it.

He could see the telephone in the little alcove just this side of the bathrooms, so he rushed across the room, fishing in his pockets for change. He was almost at the telephone before he admitted to himself that he didn’t have any, so he came back to grab McCarron, who had been headed off by a woman in a little blue suit like a man’s. “I’m afraid we’re all booked up,” she was saying.

Angelo said to McCarron, “Give me your change.”

The woman looked at him doubtfully. “I was just telling your friend—”

“Fine,” said Angelo. “I just want to use your phone.” McCarron placed a little pile of coins in his palm. As an afterthought, Angelo added, “And we’d like a drink. White wine.”

Angelo returned to the telephone to find a young woman dropping a coin into the slot. He leaned close and said, “Are you going to be long?”

As she turned to look at him, he could see that she was about twenty-five years old and the sort of young woman he hated most. She smirked at him. “Probably, but it’s none of your business.” She had light brown, almost blond hair, a big pair of glasses with red frames and lenses that glittered in the light of the little spot on the nearest philodendron. The enormity of the situation engulfed Angelo as the young woman took off her earring on the side where she was going to clamp the phone. She was actually going to prolong this just to piss him off. She had no idea of what the planet she lived on was really like. She was probably a clerk in the women’s clothes section of a department store, or, with that arrogance, probably the senior clerk who decided which clothes to buy from the distributor. She was very much like that young woman two years ago who had come up behind him on the street on the day when the computerized timing device on that year’s new Cadillac had malfunctioned. He had been coughing along on about four mistimed cylinders, spewing black smoke and going twenty miles an hour, just trying to make it to the nearest gas station. She had pulled up behind, leaned on the horn for a full minute, then passed him. As she went by, she turned, that same smirk on her face, held out her upturned fist and raised a carefully manicured middle finger at him.

Angelo had gone mad. He let the Cadillac glide to a stop by the side of the road, ran out into the street to flag down a cab and followed her. She went to the parking lot of a real-estate broker, got out and entered. He waited long enough to see her sit down at a desk and put her purse in a drawer. She was so overconfident that it never occurred to her to look behind to see what might be breathing down her neck. That night, when she walked out the door of the realtor’s office to drive home in her bright red Ford Tempo, she had a surprise. The surprise was embodied in two men who had made the trip over the bridge from Fort Erie in Canada for no purpose other than to demonstrate to this young woman that the world was a much darker and more dangerous place than she or anyone she knew had ever imagined.

Angelo couldn’t believe it. This night was the worst experience he’d had in five years, even before the girl. Now he was stuck in this fern bar with a man so crazy that he might change his mind about his persecutors at any moment and start screaming that they were from Jupiter instead of Langley, Virginia. But even that was nothing. Angelo had seen the Butcher’s Boy. Everything else was a mere distraction in comparison. He had to get on that phone. He waited while the young woman dialed, then watched while she counted the rings. When there was no answer and she hung up, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from his chest, but when she snatched the quarter out of the coin tray and put it into the slot again, he started to have trouble breathing. It was at this moment that the woman’s boyfriend appeared. He stepped up beside her, glanced at Angelo and said, “Everything okay?”

The young woman frowned and said, “Sally’s not answering. Not that I could talk to her without any privacy.”

The young man turned to Angelo and seemed to puff up like a male grouse. “Can I help you?”

Angelo’s eyes burned with a heat that made him feel as though they were sweating into his head. His right forearm came forward and his hand went to the man’s groin and clutched his testicles. The man’s eyes bulged with something beyond surprise. What was happening was so unheard of that it couldn’t be real. The pain told him it was, but it also told him not to attempt to do anything about it. To push this insane demon away from him meant that when the hand came away it would still be holding on to his testicles.

Angelo said, “I need to use the phone. Tell her.”

The man said, “He needs to use the phone.” His back was to his girlfriend, so she couldn’t see anything except that the two men were face to face.

“I know he does,” she said. “Tough.”

Angelo gave a little squeeze. The man said in a very different voice, “Tracy, get off the fucking telephone. Now. He’s got me by the balls.”

“What?” said the young woman.

“I mean literally. It’s not a figure of speech. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you myself.”

She slammed the phone onto its hook, stomped out into the dining room, grabbed her coat and was out the door before Angelo loosened his grip a little.

“I’m going to let you go,” said Angelo, “but before I do, I want you to know that my name is Angelo Fratelli. You don’t know that name, but you can probably find out who I am. You can tell your girlfriend that if I ever see her again—it doesn’t matter where or how: on the street, in a store, anywhere—she’s going to die.”

He let the man go, and the man walked stiffly to the table, pulled several bills from his wallet, left them on his empty plate and then continued out the door. Angelo put his quarter into the telephone and dialed the number of the Vesuvio.