Sleeping Dogs

Wolf was only a little surprised after he had looked through every telephone book the Washington public library had and still couldn’t find a listing for anybody named E. V. Waring. There were lots of Warings in the books, but no E.V. He supposed it wasn’t unusual for somebody who worked for the Justice Department on cases like this not to want his address printed out where everybody could read it. But it was the Department of Motor Vehicles that really surprised him. He paid his ten bucks, filled out the department’s form at the long, stand-up writing table, waited for three hours and finally was told that E. V. Waring didn’t have a vehicle registered to him. This was more peculiar, but Waring was listed on the NCIC printout as “Agent in Charge,” so maybe he had a government car. Still, this was starting to feel like somebody who actually went to some trouble to keep out of sight after the office closed at night.

Wolf was experiencing a sense of increasing uneasiness. Waring had to be the one who was making it hard for him to get out of the country; Waring had figured out his escape route and blocked it within hours. He was also careful enough to keep himself from being found easily, and this was the part that was worrisome. Wolf could find anyone. If he wanted to, he could start going through lists at the county clerk’s office to find the house Waring undoubtedly owned, or pay the credit bureau for a credit report, or use any of a hundred other lists that solid citizens couldn’t help getting their names on. But all of these took time.

On his second day in Washington, he took a bus to Georgetown University. He walked around the fringes of the campus until he found a stationery store that looked as though the owner had been around long enough to be trustworthy, and was prosperous enough to stay. He picked out a folding leather notebook cover of the sort that he had seen people who worked in law offices use for notes. He ordered the engraving on the leather, then picked out the paper for it and selected a serious, businesslike typeface for the printing.

By afternoon Elizabeth had decided that she liked Lana. It was such an odd name for a woman her age. It was a relic of the fifties, and she had to admit that Lana must have been born in the late sixties. But Lana had found another anomaly, so Elizabeth forced herself to think about it.

This time it had happened right inside Cook County. It was a small motel, and the couple who owned it had been murdered. But either before that or afterward, several heavily armed men claiming to be police officers had gone from room to room just before dawn, telling everyone to leave because they had cornered a fugitive in the building. Then they had gone through the place breaking in all the doors, and ended by burning it down. Or maybe they had opened the doors to make the fire move faster. The police had already declared the fire an arson to cover up the murder of the proprietors when they got a call from one of the motel guests who was in a phone booth in Springfield and was curious to know if they had caught the fugitive. A second call came from Carbondale, and that guest wanted to know if the police were going to refund part of his room rental, since he had been forced to leave a full eight hours before checkout time.

Elizabeth picked up the telephone and dialed the number of Jack Hamp’s motel room in Chicago for the third time, listened to six rings and then set it down again. It was infuriating to know that he was practically on the scene, and she couldn’t even tell him it had happened. Finally she took the report and started to walk toward Richardson’s office, then realized that she was walking alone. She stopped and turned. “Come on, Lana.”

Lana hesitated, then caught up with her. “I don’t usually just pop in,” she said, and then gave a nervous, apologetic laugh.

“He’s not doing anything more important than this,” said Elizabeth.

“What have you got?” Richardson asked as they entered.

“We’re not sure,” said Elizabeth. “What I think we’ve got is several men trying to burn him out of a motel near O’Hare. I’m not sure who that would be. It’s Castiglione territory.”

“Maybe Paul Cambria’s men,” said Richardson. “I’ve been trying to sort out the one from yesterday. The night the cop and the two guys with machine guns got killed, Paul Cambria was at a public function in Gary, maybe a mile from the spot. The local cops think he might have been trying to establish an alibi.”

“A mile from the place where his men were going to shoot someone? An alibi should have some distance …”

“More likely, our friend was trying to get Paul Cambria. I’m not sure where the cop fits in.”

But Elizabeth was racing ahead. “And he missed. Or somebody saw him. Anyway, something went wrong, and they followed him to Chicago, or knew where he was going to stay, and …” she stopped.

“What’s wrong?” asked Richardson.

“The cop. You’re right. Sergeant Lempert. He doesn’t fit in, does he? Maybe he’s what went wrong.”

Richardson was getting excited now. “Maybe he’s the reason the Butcher’s Boy couldn’t get Cambria. Lempert saw him near Cambria doing something suspicious, and chased him.”

“For a mile? Alone?” asked Elizabeth.

“Followed him, then. Kept him under surveillance. Only he wasn’t the only one. But wait. The only reason the two soldiers with machine guns would kill Lempert is if he were with the Butcher’s Boy, and they couldn’t just wait until he left. Which means he must have actually arrested the Butcher’s Boy.”

Lana said, “I don’t follow—”

Elizabeth said, “I do, but I don’t buy it.”

Richardson spoke faster now as his scenario became clearer and more obvious. “The cop and the Butcher’s Boy are in the same store. A Xerox copying business, which probably means the Butcher’s Boy ducked in there to evade capture because there’s nothing else he could conceivably want in a place like that. The other two wouldn’t shoot a cop unless they had to. The only reason they would is if he was going to take the Butcher’s Boy away to someplace where they couldn’t reach him. And where’s that, except the police station?”

“But, then, how …” said Lana, and stopped.

“How what?”

“Well,” Elizabeth said quietly, “they usually handcuff a person with his hands behind his back. But what you’re saying is that the Butcher’s Boy got out of the handcuffs, took the policeman’s gun and shot somebody who couldn’t hit him first with a machine gun.”

“You’re right,” said Richardson. “I got carried away.”

Elizabeth nodded. “He can do that to you.”

“And we’re not even sure he was the one,” said Lana.

“But if he was,” Richardson said, “then you’ve got to take my hypothesis seriously. There’s no vendetta against Balacontano that could include Fratelli in Buffalo and Cambria in Gary.”

“I already take it seriously,” said Elizabeth.

“You do?”

“Sure. I was making a mistake. What I was doing was putting myself in his body, saying, ‘What would I do if—?’ and that’s the wrong approach. In the first place, we don’t have enough information that we can be sure is true, and so we can’t build a theory that’s based on it. In the second place, he wouldn’t do what I’d do. Or rather I wouldn’t do what he does: that’s a better way of saying it because it’s a proposition I can prove, and it means the same thing in the end. We don’t know what he feels, or if he has any sensations that we would recognize as feelings, so we can’t build a theory on that. All we can do is try to figure out what would be the smartest thing for him to do, because that’s pure logic, and catch him while he’s trying to do it.”

Elizabeth saw that Lana had slipped away, and turned to see where she had gone. She was outside in the hallway talking to a deliveryman.

“Is she any good?” asked Richardson.

“Didn’t you hire her?”

“Not really. The system hired her. She was in the pool of applicants and had the best school record. When she came in for an interview she was wearing clean clothes and showed no symptom of mental illness, so I would have had to make a written argument to hire anybody else.”

“Nicely put,” said Elizabeth. “I think she’s smart. Eventually she’s probably going to figure out that she’s wasting her time here and do a lateral transfer.”

Lana signed the man’s clipboard and came back with a wrapped package. “It’s for you, Elizabeth.”

“Thanks.” She put the package under her arm.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” asked Richardson.

“Weren’t we in the middle of something?”

“Open it.”

The other two watched while Elizabeth looked for a return address, then tore the brown paper off and opened the plain white box. Inside was a leather folder with gold leaf that said “?. V. Waring.” When she opened it, she saw the stationery with the heading “?. V. Waring” on it. “I didn’t order this,” she said.

“Maybe it’s a present,” said Lana.

“Is there a card?” asked Richardson.

“There’s an envelope for one, but nothing inside. See?”

“What a shame,” said Lana. “It’s beautiful.”

Richardson said his version of the same thing. “It cost a lot of money. English glove leather, engraved vellum. It adds up quick.”

“What am I going to do?” asked Elizabeth.

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody sends you an expensive present for no reason at all, and you don’t have any idea who did it …”

She noticed that Lana was at her desk talking into the telephone. Of course. The messenger. He would know who had paid for the delivery, or at least the name of the store. There must be paperwork because Lana had signed for it. At least her brain was working, even if Elizabeth’s wasn’t.

The phone on her desk rang and she snatched it up. “Waring.”

“Hi, Elizabeth.”

“Jack, I’ve been trying to call you about—”

“About the fire in the motel. I just heard all about it on the police radio.”

“Police radio? Where are you?”

“Gary. I’ve been talking to the cops at the copying store. I figured you might be looking for me and thought I’d better call you.”

Elizabeth’s mind strained in two directions at once. First things first. Find out what Jack knows. “Good. We’ve been trying to work it out. There’s something missing, so it still doesn’t make sense. This Sergeant Lempert—”

“He’s what I’m calling about,” said Hamp. “What I’m about to tell you doesn’t get written down on paper. It’s an impression, a kind of instinct. I don’t want to have to fly to Washington and try to prove it, okay?”

“If you say so.”

“Lempert was dirty. Watching the cops going over the scene a little while ago. I got the feeling they didn’t think much of him. It’s just a feeling, and I don’t have time to go into it real deep, but he was dirty.”

Elizabeth groaned.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that it so obviously fits, and it’s the one thing that never crossed my mind. I mean it did, but I kept pushing it out because it didn’t lead anywhere. It didn’t take me to the next step. Except that what I was doing was assuming I was the one who got to say what the next step was. That’s stupid.” There was a pause, and now her voice betrayed annoyance. “If the police knew, why didn’t they tell anybody?”

“It’s hard to say what they knew or when they found out. But they’re ashamed, which means that they’re sure. No matter how you look at it, they don’t get anything out of telling somebody like me.”

Elizabeth was already exploring this new terrain. “If the sergeant was taking money from somebody, it wouldn’t have been our friend. There’s nothing we know about him that would lead us to the conclusion that he’d have a corrupt policeman on the payroll. So who would? The local Mafia. And that explains why we have three bodies lying in a copying store: They were all on the same side. The only one that’s missing is the winner. Though I’d love to know what he won.”

“Another wake-up, and that’s about all. The next morning he’s in a motel outside Chicago and they tried to kill him there too.”

“So what did he want in Gary in the first place?”

“I know what I’d want if I were in his place. I’d want a way out. Maybe he thought Lempert could do it for him. People who can be bought once can be bought again, and cops meet a lot of people who can do a lot of things.”

“And Lempert arranged an ambush?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Where are you going next, back to Chicago?”

“Yeah, he’s long gone but I thought I’d go rake through the ashes like everybody else. If we’re lucky, I might be able to talk to somebody who knows something.”

“Jack?”

“What?”

“This is kind of … embarrassing, but did you send anything to me at the office?”

“No. What’s embarrassing about that?”

“Well, it’s a present. It just came, and the card got lost, and … you see what I mean.”

“You didn’t open it, did you?”

“Sure, why?”

“Forget it. I was going to tell you to call the bomb squad, but if it hasn’t exploded yet, I guess it must be from a secret admirer.”

“I guess so.”

“It ain’t me, though. I’ve never laid eyes on you. You might be ugly.”

“Good-bye, Jack.”

It was after six when Elizabeth finished going through the supplemental reports from the Gary police, the Cook County sheriff and the Chicago Fire Department, and then pulling the files on Salcone and Ficcio. There was no question from the rap sheets that Salcone had worked for the Cambria family most of his life, and if Ficcio was carrying an identical weapon and entered the shop with him, then he must have too. But no matter how she put it all together, it still didn’t tell her exactly what had happened. She put away the papers and prepared to go home.

Now that she was alone in the office, without the unnerving sensation that somebody could overhear her thoughts by looking at her, she allowed herself to admit the truth. If she set aside the ugliness of what had happened, and thought of it as an event in the Butcher’s Boy’s personal history, the last two reports were promising. Whatever he was trying to do, he was getting himself into deeper trouble. Now he was being hunted by the Mob in Gary, and more ominously in Chicago, the territory of the huge, powerful Castiglione syndicate. He would understand better than she did what this meant. He was still alive, but the chance of his seeing the end of the month was virtually nonexistent. As long as he survived, each day it became more difficult for him to move freely, and eventually he would realize that he couldn’t do it anymore. Years ago she had spent months looking at windows he might have touched, or carpets he might have walked on, talking to people who might have seen him, always arriving after he had left, never getting closer than a few hours behind him. But pretty soon now he was going to have to walk into a police station somewhere. He would have to come to her, if only he could stay alive long enough to realize it.

She almost forgot to take the leather folder with her when she left the office. At home she was going to hold the paper up to the light and try to read the water mark to see if she could find some store that sold that kind of paper. Lana’s inquiry to the delivery service had yielded an order number that helped them to locate a copy of a receipt that said only “Cash” and Elizabeth’s name and office address.

It wasn’t as though she had a lot of friends who might suddenly send her an expensive present. She corrected herself. When she had begun making tactful inquiries this afternoon, she had run through six of them. Then she had forced herself to call Don Yeter, who had been one of Jim’s friends in the old days. Since a few weeks after Jim had died, Don had shown an interest in her that made her nervous and a little queasy, and she was relieved when she realized that he had no idea what she was talking about.

She had left the present in the white box and even retrieved the paper wrapping from the wastebasket, because either might help. Ten minutes after it arrived she had begun wishing the gift hadn’t found its way to her, and now she was beginning to resent the giver. She spent enough of her life trying to decipher puzzles, and the best she could hope for at the end of this one was to get an address for a thank-you note.

When she reached her car it was already looking lonely in this part of the lot. As she unlocked the door, she remembered that it was Thursday and that she still hadn’t taken it to the garage for its rejuvenation treatment. She felt guilty, and as she settled herself in the driver’s seat the feeling escalated to regret. But when the engine started she forgot about it; all that was important now was to get home to the kids.

Wolf watched the woman pull the little green car out of the parking lot and into position for a right turn onto the street. Even though there was nobody behind her, and nobody across from her, and anyone coming down the road could see that her only choices were to turn right or rise into the air like a dirigible, she had her turn signal blinking. She was E.V. Waring, without a doubt. There was no particular reason to switch the signal on, but no particular reason not to, and it made more sense to use up one ten-thousandth of the life of a forty-cent bulb than to surprise a pedestrian she hadn’t seen. The engraving should have said, “E. V. Waring, No Fool.”

As he pulled out after her, he wondered if she had fallen for the stationery after all. It could be a trap. She could lead him out into some spot in rural Maryland where forty FBI agents were waiting to drop on him like an avalanche. He had made sure the gift was something engraved with the name so that E. V. Waring couldn’t give it to his secretary, but he hadn’t considered the sophistication of logic that E. V. Waring might command; suppose she had figured out why he had sent it. But Waring—Miss or Mrs. Waring—was careful and methodical. If it was a setup, there would be at least one car behind him. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror as he drove, but no car stayed long enough to worry him. He concentrated on keeping one vehicle between her car and his so that she couldn’t get a clear view of him for long.

He followed her to a quiet street in Alexandria. There were tall trees and a lot of two-story houses built in the fifties by upscale couples with identical taste. He could have called hers the white one, except that he could have said the same about most of the houses on the street. All of them had some form of brick facing. When she pulled into the driveway, he considered lingering to get a closer look at her. But a glance up the street revealed cars in all the driveways and lights on in the front windows, so there was too much chance of being noticed. He drifted past.

Wolf turned at the next corner and cruised up the street behind hers. The houses there were almost the same. He tried to assess what he had gained from the time he had spent locating E. V. Waring. Well, for one thing, he had stayed out of sight and given the old men some time to think about the value of peace of mind. For another, he had probably forced the FBI to use up a lot of the money it was allocating to pay its grunts overtime to watch airport departure gates. But E. V. Waring herself was going to take more thought. Miss Waring wouldn’t pay the freight to live in a neighborhood like this, in one of these four-bedroom houses, but Mrs. Something would. Also, the car she had been driving had been Japanese, so it couldn’t have been issued by the United States government without starting a riot in Detroit. That meant it was registered in another name, probably her husband’s. Suddenly it occurred to him that he had fallen about as far as he was likely to go. He was probably going to be reduced to popping a suburban housewife with a deer rifle some morning when she opened the front door to pick up her paper in a pair of fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. The Sport of Kings.

Two days later Elizabeth gave up on the stationery. The paper was made by one of the largest manufacturers in the country, and the engraving, the manager of one of the stores told her, could have been done by anybody in the business, on the premises, in about an hour. The leather folder was impressive to his professional eye, but since it was stamped with a famous French trademark, it could hardly be traced without a great deal of difficulty. Elizabeth felt guilty using the folder, but since she had gone to so much trouble, she decided she had earned it.

On that same day she learned that she had a new neighbor. There was something annoying about having Maria be the one to tell her because a few months earlier she had told Elizabeth that the Bakers were having loud arguments. “They’re going to get the divorce,” she had pronounced with the air of a gypsy fortune-teller. Elizabeth had said she didn’t think so. Then, when the divorce was still in the stage where the opposing lawyers were bluffing each other about assets, Maria had said, “She’s going to take the house.” Elizabeth was more wary this time, and merely asked, “How do you know?” and Maria had answered, “The house is important to a woman,” as though her employer had just arrived from Jupiter. Sure enough, a few weeks later Brad Baker’s car was gone and Ellen was planting tulips in the front yard. Then, only a few days ago, Maria had announced that Ellen Baker would move out soon. “She was a fool and took the house,” she said. “The money was what she needed. Money doesn’t make you weep when you see it.”

Elizabeth never saw the rental sign go up, and never saw it go down. All she saw was the man. He wasn’t anybody she would have noticed except that he was living across the street from her, and therefore couldn’t be ignored. He was of average height and build, about five feet ten or eleven, in his late thirties or early forties, and he had light brown hair that she decided had probably been blond when he was a child. When she looked at him across the distance provided by the width of the street and their two little front lawns, she had to admit that he seemed unremarkable enough to share the general characteristics of a whole physical subgroup of men she’d known, including—there was no way to keep this thought from emerging—her own dead husband, Jim. He wore sport coats that seemed to fit him and ties with subdued patterns, didn’t carry his keys on his belt, have a wallet with a chain attached to it or wear shoes with noticeable heels, so he was probably all right. She was secretly pleased that he left for work every morning when she did because it meant that she didn’t have to rely on Maria for a description. She waited a few days for Maria to tell her he was taking drugs or bringing prostitutes into Ellen Baker’s house during his lunch hour, but he hadn’t stimulated Maria’s interest, and Elizabeth forgot about him.

* * *

Alexandria wasn’t a bad place to be while he waited for things to sort themselves out. It was important to stay away from the parts of the Washington area that were likely to be full of people who worked for Jerry Vico. Unless things had changed in ten years, they would be out in force looking for just about anybody who was alone, just in case they could take something from him or sell him something. But Alexandria didn’t seem to be that kind of place. He slept in a quiet residential neighborhood, then put on respectable clothes and left each morning at the time when the people who lived there left for work. He timed his departure to coincide with E. V. Waring’s. It was a risk, but he decided that it was more of a risk to be invisible and therefore inexplicable.

Eddie had taught him this method when he was a kid. He had called it turkey hunting. “Everybody thinks turkeys are stupid, because all they ever see is the fat-ass domesticated Butterball kind. But the wild ones are scrawny, tough and smart. They live in the woods and only come out into clearings they know to peck around, and then they go back into the woods. If they see anything that’s different, they don’t come out at all. So what you do is this. Wait until maybe midsummer. Then you take a broomstick and saw it off to about forty-eight inches. You paint it black and go out in the woods to a good clearing. You prop it against a log at a thirty- or forty-degree angle and then go away for a couple of months. The first day of the season you get up in the middle of the night, go out to the clearing and lay your shotgun right where the broom handle was. When the sun comes up, the turkeys peek into the clearing, see your gun, think it’s the broom handle and walk right in front of it. It’s the only way to get them.”

Eddie had bagged Otto Corrigan that way. He had closed the butcher shop for a month and moved into a house in Cincinnati right next door to Corrigan’s with the boy. The month that followed stuck in Wolfs memory as one endless sunny afternoon with the smell of grass and trees and the buzz of seventeen-year locusts. Eddie had him working on the lawn, and trimming the shrubs and planting flowers, tomatoes and radishes all day long while he himself performed less strenuous chores that Wolf could no longer remember in detail. It didn’t matter what either of them did as long as they were visible in the yard. Corrigan was supposed to be a lawyer, but he had only one client, and instead of a secretary or a clerk, he had four big guys in his house who looked like defensive linemen. He almost never went out, and the four guys made sure no one ever came close. By the end of the month, Corrigan and his four bodyguards were so accustomed to the sight of their next-door neighbors that on the last afternoon, when Eddie and the boy came for them, they appeared not to notice.

But Wolf had not needed to rent the house across the street from E. V. Waring to kill her. There was nobody protecting her, and unless she was carrying a firearm in her briefcase, she didn’t appear to be capable of protecting herself. He had taken the risk because he wasn’t sure that what he wanted was to kill E. V. Waring. Now that he had found her, he wanted to stay close enough to watch her. Once he had gotten past the first moments, when his instinct for self-preservation had prompted him to get rid of her as simply and quickly as possible, he had begun to let his imagination work on her. The only thing he wanted now was to get past whatever barriers she had erected to keep him from disappearing, and killing her probably wouldn’t help. But it was just conceivable that there was some way of finding out what those barriers were: who was looking where, and what they were looking for. The solution to his problem might be as simple as reading some papers in her briefcase, but probably it wasn’t.

There were a couple of things about E. V. Waring that gave Wolf something to think about. She had kids. One was a little boy who got picked up in a van that had the name of a private school written on it. The other was a baby who was walked around the block every day in a stroller by a baby-sitter who went home at night. He never saw a husband, although he spent all of one day and night watching for him to show himself. A couple of days later the mailman arrived just after the maid and the baby went out, so he went across the street and pretended to knock on the door, but used the gesture to cover his other hand’s movement into the mailbox to pluck out the letters. He scanned the envelopes, and saw that about a third were addressed to Elizabeth Waring, and that the others were for Mrs. E. Hart, Elizabeth Hart or Occupant. Since a couple of them were utility bills, he decided that there was no husband to worry about.

He began to wonder if the easiness of it was making him complacent. The more he studied her and thought about her, the less impatient he was to do anything about her. He could take her off anytime he wanted to, but as long as he didn’t need to make a move, there was nothing for E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, to interpret. She couldn’t do him any harm unless he made some ripples on the surface. The time for her to die was the day he was ready to leave.

Carlo Balacontano was playing gin with the Mexican counterfeiter. As he laid down the nine of clubs he watched the man’s left arm and saw the tattooed scrollwork on his bicep move a little. He wondered if this was the sign. For years Bala had been studying parts of the hundred-dollar bill the maniac had tattooed on himself to see if he could discover a nervous twitch. But the nine of clubs didn’t attract Ospina. He moved his left arm to scratch an itch on his face, then drew a card from the pile.

Carl Bala hated losing more than he hated death. He was an old man now, sixty-six, but life in the prison had allowed him no vices. He ate plain, nutritious food, breathed clean, dry air and was forced into the moderate exercise of cleaning one of the outbuildings each day. He knew he was living a life that was much like his grandfather’s in the mountains of Sicily, and would probably last the same 104 years. Death was still a remote prospect, but losing was a daily experience.

The tattooed Mexican grinned at him, laid down his hand in a fan and said, “Gin.” Balacontano looked at the ten cards with distaste. The wily little bastard hadn’t even been collecting clubs; he had picked up the eight just to make four eights. Bala forced a smile and wrote down the thirty-six still in his hand. The horror of it was that he didn’t see a way for it to end. Ospina would probably leave here in a few years, but he was so crazy that he would be rolling out hundreds in a basement in L.A. as soon as he’d had a decent meal. How hard was it to catch a counterfeiter with a green Benjamin Franklin on his belly and “Federal Reserve Note” on his chest? So he would be back, this time with a longer sentence.

For some time Bala had been quietly nourishing a hope. The visit from that woman had raised a distinct possibility. He wouldn’t be the first one to have secretly cut a deal with the authorities and been rewarded for it. He had attained a high position in life by developing a shrewdness about people, and he was sure that Elizabeth Waring had believed him. She hadn’t believed Bala’s necessary disclaimers, but she had believed the part that was true. There really was a Butcher’s Boy, and he really had set up Carlo Balacontano for a killing he himself had committed, and that sure as hell ought to be enough for an appeal or a pardon.

In a little while Bala was going to have another visitor. This one was a second surprise. He was coming as an emissary from the old men. This pleased Bala enormously. To the outside world, he was one of the old men, but not to the old men; to them he had always been a kind of younger brother. He was powerful and controlled a lot of bodies and a lot of territory, but when he had started having his troubles he was only in his fifties. He had never had time to get white hair and sit on the Commission demonstrating his wisdom. Now they were sending somebody to consult him about an important matter. Maybe he had spent so much time in prison that people had begun to think of him as older and more important than he was, like that guy Nelson Mandela in Africa. But he doubted it; it was more likely that something was going on out there. They had heard something about his pardon coming up and wanted to make the effort now to keep on his good side. Maybe they would even imply that they had done something to bring about his release, although he knew different.

He saw the guard coming for him from a hundred feet away. They always looked around at other people as they made their way across the yard, but the man’s eyes kept coming back to him. Bala stopped shuffling the cards and stood up. He noticed that Ospina didn’t seem disappointed. He was confident that Carl Bala would be back, that the endless gin game would continue and that by the time he took his next vacation in the world he would be another million points ahead. But Carlo Balacontano just might have a surprise for him.

Bala held his arms up and submitted to the pat-down. The guards had never been particularly thorough with him because they knew that a man like Bala didn’t need to carry a homemade knife for protection, and that if he felt a sudden urge to harm somebody, he wouldn’t do it himself in a waiting room. They only did what the prison regulations required them to do, then guided him out the door and turned him loose in the pen.

He looked along the fence and saw his visitor immediately. It was Little Norman. He was disappointed and insulted. What the hell were they doing sending that giant black Mau Mau son of a bitch? What kind of emissary was that? Then it occurred to him that although Little Norman might not be an important person, he wouldn’t be a bad choice if you wanted somebody killed without a struggle. His head spun first to the right, over his shoulder, and then to the left. If the guards had suddenly disappeared, he was going to try to make it to the fence. They were there, though, still looking bored, but alert enough to look up. He stood where he was and let Little Norman take a couple of long strides to him.

“Mr. Balacontano,” said Little Norman. “I don’t know if you remember me.”

“How the hell could anybody forget you?” said Carl Bala. “You lose five pounds or something?”

Little Norman chuckled deep inside his chest. “I guess I do have that kind of face.”

“Why did they send you?”

“A few days ago the Butcher’s Boy came to see me.”

“What for?”

“He wanted me to talk to the old men for him. I talked to some of them, and they said I had to come and tell you.”

“What did he want from them?”

“He says the only reason he did Tony T was because Talarese sent people after him. Then he did Mantino and Fratelli because they were trying to keep him from getting out afterward.”

“Good. I thought they were worthless, but now I’m sorry they’re dead—Mantino and Fratelli, anyway.” He looked up at Little Norman with his hard little eyes. “At least they didn’t come around and try to cut a deal for him.”

Little Norman shook his head. “You can play that on me if you want to. By the time I knew he was around, the most I could have done about it was make him kill me. And I did what he asked because I wasn’t going to be the one who decided on his own not to deliver a message to the old men.”

Carl Bala shrugged. “You could live a long time. So they sent you to me.”

“They want to know what you think about it after all these years. He says he’ll disappear forever if you all leave him alone. If you don’t he seems to think he can make some trouble.”

Carlo Balacontano straightened to his full five feet eight inches and began to walk. His face was cold and impassive. It was a feeling he had not experienced since 1951, when he had been hit a glancing blow with a baseball bat in a bar in upstate New York. The man who had hit him had been one of his own soldiers, a big guy named Copella, who was smashing a jukebox, and the bat had bounced off the metal top and into the forehead of Carl Bala. This had been the occasion of a profusion of apologies, and Bala had felt the same terrible frustration. He couldn’t kill Copella for the clumsy accident or his other soldiers would have turned on him, and he couldn’t betray how much it hurt or how angry he was because he would have looked weak. But he had never liked Copella after that, and the man had been forced to seek advancement in Portland, where there was more room to swing a bat.

What Carl Bala wanted to say was that if any of the old men ordered their soldiers to leave this psycho alone, what was it but giving aid and comfort to his enemy? If anybody held back now, they wouldn’t have to worry about some lone maniac slipping arsenic into their milk of magnesia. He would send an army to batter down the walls of their houses, drag them into the street and hack their heads off with hatchets. But he couldn’t say this. In the first place, saying it to Little Norman was about as satisfying as telling the mailman that you were going to write a nasty letter. In the second place, if he said it, they would kill him in jail. Still, it did make something he’d had floating around in the back of his mind push its way to the front of it. He was going to get out of here, and when he did there was going to be a war. Apparently the old men had gotten so old that their balls had shriveled up like dried figs. He was going to get out of here and roll them up one by one.

What Carl Bala said was, “I’m trying to be reasonable about this. I’ve been in here for eight years because of this man. I asked before the trial that my friends and associates do their best to help me. I got no help. I asked that they make this man pay for what he did to me. I was told that nobody could find him. Now he’s back, and he’s killed Mantino and Talarese because they were mine, and Fratelli because he helped me. What am I supposed to say—that it’s all right?”

Little Norman towered silently above Balacontano as he walked along, a half-step behind and to his left.

“Tell them I repeat my respectful request that this man be found and his body turned over to my people in New York.”

“Yes, sir,” said Little Norman. “I’ll tell them that. Anything else I should say?” It was common knowledge that somewhere in New York there was a safe-deposit box full of things that Balacontano’s men had lifted from the house of the man he was convicted of killing. The key was going to be planted on the body of the Butcher’s Boy.

Balacontano wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about how soft and weak the old men must have gotten. It would be easy. With a little probing he could find two or three at the beginning who would probably let him take over just for leaving them alive. Then he would be that much stronger when he was ready to face the ones who still had a little blood in their veins.

He realized that Little Norman was waiting for him to say something. “You can go now. I’m in the middle of a gin game.”