Sleeping Dogs

Wolf watched the small green Mazda back out of the driveway across the street, and then walked out his front door in time to be seen. He didn’t want to let her see his face too often, just to be somewhere near the edges of her peripheral vision and consciousness as the man who lived across the street.

He would have preferred to rent a car, but he didn’t have the kind of identification that companies felt comfortable with, and so he had bought this one for cash at a used-car lot in Virginia Beach. It was about as far from Washington as he could conveniently get and still have Virginia plates. These transactions were always delicate. If you walked into a Mercedes showroom and handed them eighty thousand in cash, you had better be able to convince somebody that you were a lovable millionaire. The car had to be a beater, so the amount wasn’t huge. The best way to do it was to find a place small enough so that you could talk to the owner. If the man had just taken something as a trade-in that he wasn’t particularly fond of, cash could be attractive. He wouldn’t have a price he had to get back, and once the car was off the lot, he could put any figure he wanted down in his books. But for Wolfs purposes, the car had to be right. He ended up with an ‘83 Dodge Colt that hadn’t even been put out on the line with the others yet, because they hadn’t had time to spot-paint the nicks on the doors and roll back the odometer. It was plain, unassuming and unmemorable, and it ran well enough. It was a little below the scale for his new neighborhood, but not so much that it attracted attention. He started it, backed out of his driveway and had shifted into first before he caught something in his rearview mirror: Elizabeth Waring’s Mazda wasn’t moving.

As Wolf let the car drift forward, he steered it so that his rearview mirror would show him what was going on. The Mazda was stalled, and she was walking quickly toward the back of his car, waving her arms. It was too late, and the appeal was too blatant, to drive off and pretend that he didn’t see her. In the mirror she seemed to be staring right into his eyes, which meant she must have seen him move his head to spot her. He had to pretend he had seen her all along.

Wolf stopped, backed up until his car was in front of hers, then got out and talked to her over the roof of his Colt. “Hi. I see you’ve got troubles. Anything I can do to help?”

Elizabeth Waring threw up her arms, her brows knitted in despair. “Anything. It just died.”

Wolf turned off his engine and walked to her car. It was unbelievable that he had let this happen to him. He went over it in his mind. He had seen her come out of her house, turn to wave to the Spanish maid and the baby and walk to the garage. Then he had put on his coat and checked the doors of his rented house. If she’d had any trouble starting the Mazda, that’s when it must have happened, because when he had returned to look out the window again, she was already backing out of her driveway. Then he had stopped looking.

He reached under her dashboard and popped the hood, then went around, lifted it and looked at the engine for any obvious sign of trouble. If he could just get the damned thing going before she had time to get bored with her trouble and start looking at his face, he might be able to get through this. Nothing under the hood was disconnected or leaking, but everything looked a little grimy for a car this age. He walked back to the driver’s side, slid in and tried to start the car. He heard the ignition click, but the starter motor didn’t engage, and he smelled gas.

He got out again. “Your carburetor got flooded and your battery gave out—not necessarily in that order. Do you have jumper cables?”

Elizabeth seemed to be thinking about something else. “Look,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get to work. Thanks for trying, but I’ll just call a gas station.”

Wolf decided he had better look at his watch before answering, and he did so. “It’s no problem. Honestly, I don’t have to be there for another hour.”

But she persisted. “No, it’s not right. I’m not one of those women who just assume that any man who happens to be within screaming distance is there to be used. Or at least I don’t want to be.”

“It just takes a minute,” he said. “It’s not hard or dirty or anything. We’ll just see if we can get it started. Have you got cables?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re in the trunk.”

He pulled her keys from the ignition, opened her trunk and surveyed the mess. There were toys, a child’s car seat, a whole package of diapers that looked about the size of a bale of hay, a couple of umbrellas and, at the bottom, a pair of jumper cables whose plastic wrapping was still intact. He unraveled them, hooked the alligator clips to her battery terminals and then turned his car around. When the two cars were nose-to-nose, he unlatched his own hood, connected the cables to his own battery terminals and restarted his car. “Okay,” he said, handing her the keys. “Try it.”

The car started immediately, but as he disconnected the cables, he could hear that the Mazda wasn’t running evenly. It sounded as though the cylinders weren’t all firing. He closed the hood and said, “You got a garage you can take it to?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I take it this means it isn’t healed.”

“That’s right. I can get the heart to beat, but it takes a mechanic to get it off life support. Tell me where it is and I’ll follow you in case it stalls.”

“That’s all right,” she said, and this time she looked worried. “The only reason this happened is that I kept putting off taking it in. I’m guilty.”

“So buy it a new wax job and apologize. If you stall out in a major intersection you’re liable to get hammered.”

“I’d have to be pretty unlucky to have it happen at an intersection.”

Wolf shook his head. “They only stall when you slow down, and you only do that when you’re coming to a corner.”

She seemed to see a vision of it, like a premonition. “It’s on Millwood. The corner of Millwood and Fanshawe.”

“See you there,” he said, and walked back to his car. This was going to change everything.

In an hour Wolf was watching her walk through the doorway of the Justice Department. He pulled away from the curb and drove down Constitution Avenue toward the Federal Triangle. This morning he was on his way to look for tourists. There was no use kidding himself: every day that he spent in the United States was making it more dangerous for him. He would have to see if he could find a British citizen and separate him from the herd. If he got the right one and hid the body well enough, it might be weeks before his relatives made enough noise to get the authorities to do anything about putting him on a list, and by then Michael Schaeffer would be sitting at home again.

He felt a strange reluctance to get out this way, and he weighed and examined the feeling. If he’d had to explain it to somebody he would have had to say that he wasn’t in the mood to do the work. He felt tired. Eddie had always said that if it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t. It had been Eddie’s theory that some little part of the subconscious mind had caught a danger signal—maybe seen something, or figured out a flaw, or even smelled something it didn’t like—but hadn’t yet been able to formulate it into a package the conscious mind would accept. Eddie always said that ninety percent of the brain was never used. Actually, in his case it had probably been more. He had once had himself hypnotized by a dentist because he couldn’t remember any of the words to “Annie Had a Baby” except “… his name was sunny Jim. She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.”

But Wolf wasn’t nervous. He was just tired. He had spent most of the last ten years hoping that he would never have to do this kind of thing again, but here he was, up to his armpits in blood and not even working, just hunting for some harmless stranger so that he could live long enough to get home. He drove into the city with the rest of the world and looked for a place to park that Vico hadn’t bought simply for the chance to have his people slip a slim-jim into the door and pop the locks.

Paul Martillo was in a lousy mood because people treated him like dirt. He wasn’t some chump; he was a registered lobbyist. He wore tailored suits and fine silk ties, and talked to congressmen and even cabinet officers on business involving the limits of civil rights and the responsible exercise of free speech by the electronic media. He represented a confederation of reputable organizations, notably the Italian-American Anti-Libel League, Citizens for Fair Reporting, and the Dorothea Gorro Scholarship Foundation, named after a dead olive-oil heiress but subscribed to by many fine people who were still alive.

Martillo had just left the office of a congressman from New Jersey named Ameroy. He had been told by the congressman’s secretary that he should wait in the outer office and that Ameroy would see him as soon as he got off the phone. Ameroy had kept him waiting two hours, and then, as soon as he had gotten into the private office, the man had started to look at his watch. In fact, before he even shook hands with him, Ameroy was looking at his watch. Martillo hadn’t invented the system. It wasn’t his fault that it cost four or five million dollars to run for Congress. The ambitious jerks had dug their own hole, each time they ran for office putting a little more into the campaign, getting themselves on television a little more often. All that Martillo did was go among them and try to make friends. Then he would make a list of the friends and turn the list over to the groups he represented. When it was time for congressmen to run for reelection, the friends were not forgotten.

This making of friends was not a clandestine activity. It was a growing profession engaged in by about twenty thousand people. There was no corporation of any size, no charity, no union, no city that didn’t have somebody like Paul Martillo on the Hill; so where did a two-bit hack politician who ran for office because he couldn’t make it as a lawyer get off treating him like he was still a bag man making his way around Detroit for Toscanzio? The answer was that somebody had told Ameroy what Martillo was going around talking about this week.

Martillo hadn’t liked bringing it up any more than the congressman had liked hearing it, but he had to say it, and Ameroy damned well had to listen to it, because they were both taking their money from the same place. Ameroy didn’t want to have anybody say anything specific in his presence, so Martillo had to play the stupid kid’s game too. He did it because it meant that Ameroy wanted to be able to continue to take the money. Martillo had said that the members of the organizations Martillo represented continued to be pleased that Ameroy was a leader in the fight for equal justice, so of course he would be interested in the strange case of a man imprisoned for murder on the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence just because he was a well-known and prosperous businessman of Italian descent. The man in question continued, in fact, to be a large contributor to the Dorothea Gorro Foundation in spite of the fact that he had been in a federal prison for eight years. This was how his case had come to the attention of the Foundation, which, as the congressman knew, was nominally dedicated to the promotion of parochial education.

What it came down to was that Victor Toscanzio had ordered Martillo to go around and pull some strings. On the face of it this was an odd thing for him to do, but Toscanzio was not a frivolous man, so if he was doing it, Balacontano must have offered him something substantial. The whole lobbying business was something Toscanzio ran for the old men. It wasn’t his to jeopardize on some whim, and he knew it. But he also had a reputation for incredible luck. Only a few old paisans like Martillo knew what kind of luck it was. Toscanzio had the uncanny gift of sensing when a change was going to take place, and getting in before the bell rang. Carl Bala was obviously an active commodity again. Also there were the rumors. From time to time people had said that Carl Bala had gone crazy in prison, and maybe Toscanzio had decided it was going to be important soon to be one of the people who had tried hard to get him out.

Martillo didn’t have any objection to letting his fate ride on Toscanzio’s bet, whatever it was. He had done pretty well so far. Now he was in his black Lincoln Town Car on his way to have a lunch briefing from a senator from Florida. This was the kind of holdup that was getting to be increasingly popular, and he resented it. The bastards would send out invitations to go to lunch at a thousand dollars a plate, and there would be maybe forty or fifty lobbyists paying to sit there and listen to the windbag talk about what his committee was doing to help the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was an attempt to extort money, and it worked up to a point. Most of the lobbyists had some interest they had to protect from the sudden indifference of an incumbent senator. Martillo almost felt sorry for them. His organizations didn’t have a bunch of jobs to protect, or even any real members, only about twenty anonymous donors, so today’s lunch was going to be a little different for the senator. If he didn’t find a way to spend a few minutes alone with Martillo, he was going to watch two million bucks walk out of his campaign fund and into the challenger’s.

Martillo looked out the window of the car as his driver pulled away from the Sam Rayburn Office Building. As usual, the first twenty tourists in line for the tour were Japs. The movement of capital in the world was still a miracle to Martillo, although he had studied it for twenty years the way a bear studies bee swarms. Everything seemed to be the same as it always had been; it was just that there was all this floating money. It was qualitatively different from regular money, which stayed pretty much where you put it. This was like gambling money because it didn’t seem to really belong to anybody. It moved in and out of the markets and financial centers of the world in huge quantities every day. But without warning the floating money had transferred itself out of the country and into the markets of foreigners, primarily towel-heads, Japs and Krauts. At the moment the Japanese were the big spenders, but what they were spending wasn’t the floating money. It was a kind of by-product of having so much of the floating money trapped in one place for a time. It was like the wetness that formed on the outside of an icy glass on a hot day.

This reminded Martillo that what he really wanted right now was a drink. Making the rounds would have been easier if he had been able to loosen his tongue a little. But this was out of the question; you didn’t just gulp down alcohol when you were on an errand for Vincent Toscanzio. When you were done with work, you could drink yourself into a stupor, or shoot heroin into your jugular if you felt like it, but while you were on his business you were his. In the old days he had once seen Toscanzio explain this to a numbers runner with a sawed-off pool cue.

Stuck in traffic, Martillo watched another busload of tourists forming a new line to wander through the halls of the Capitol building. This group looked like Europeans. Why the hell did any of these people care about looking at another public building? You could take them to an insurance company and tell them it was the Supreme Court. He looked at their faces and watched the way they walked. Foreigners walked different, and he studied them to see if he could figure out where they came from. This bunch was taller than most, very white and they had bad teeth, so they were probably English.

But then Martillo saw something that made the skin on his arms tighten, and his right foot try to stomp an imaginary brake on the floor of the car. “Pull over,” he said. “Let me out.” It was him. He couldn’t imagine what the hell he would be doing standing in line with a bunch of Limey tourists, but it was worth his life to find out. “Use the car phone to call Mr. Vico. I need five, ten guys right here as fast as he can get them, and maybe four cars.”

Wolf moved with the queue of English couples gathering for a mass invasion of the Capitol building. There didn’t seem to be any of the usual ill-behaved British children in short pants chasing each other in circles, which was promising. Children had preternaturally sharp senses, and they lived at the three-foot level, where anything he did would be right in front of their eyes. He had to move slowly enough to keep from spooking the herd, but quickly enough so that he wouldn’t give any of its members the uneasy feeling that he was being stalked. He tried to get a sense of who was carrying what. If they had all left their valuables inside suitcases in the keeping of the bus driver, he had better know it now. As he passed a couple in their late forties, he heard the woman say, “Not again.”

The man said peevishly, “It’s not my fault. It’s the damned water. I’m sure there’ll be one inside the tube station over there.”

The Englishman started a purposeful march away from the herd, his long, skinny legs straight and stiff as he headed for the subway station. Wolf had been wrong when he had told himself that killing E. V. Waring was as far as he could skid; the real end of the line was when you were following a sick tourist to a public restroom so that you could whack him for his wallet and passport. He had walked in the same direction that the herd of tourists was moving so that he could come up behind them; now he was going to have to reverse directions without letting any of them notice. He waited a few moments, until what he did wouldn’t be connected with the man’s departure, then turned and crossed the street.

Wolf timed the cars and dodged between two of them to make it to the other side. But as he reached the curb he wasn’t thinking about the British tourist anymore, but about the man who had gotten out of a black Lincoln behind him, then pivoted and reversed directions when he had. It was a rare advantage to be able to walk along facing the man who had been following him. The man was tall and trim, but not young, and the dark suit he wore appeared to be the regulation uniform of lawyers and politicians in this town when they weren’t playing golf. The fact that his hair was long and wavy didn’t mean anything; it could belong to the director of the FBI. He had the build of a cop, but somehow Wolf couldn’t see the suit as belonging to one. Also, the shoes were wrong; they were some sort of thin, bumpy leather like alligator, and too pointed for a cop’s. The soles were thin and slippery, and the heels gave off a shine when the man walked, as though they were made of a substance harder than rubber. As Wolf proceeded down the street, he never took his eyes off the man. He knew that if there were others, he would never see them unless the man did something to acknowledge them. But then the man did something unexpected: He slowed down, turned and glanced over his shoulder directly at Wolf.

When their eyes met, Wolf saw the alarm in the man’s face. Immediately the man pretended to look past him, but he must have known it was too late. The face was familiar. It took Wolf a few seconds to bring it back because it was buried somewhere deep in his memory, in Chicago or somewhere—no, it was Detroit. It was Pauly the Bag Man. His throat tightened in a feeling of regret and disappointment that was like pain. He had been very young in Detroit, maybe nineteen, and he had let them use his face for a few months. If somebody didn’t pay his nut one week, the next week he would be in his store or on his way home from the office, trying to think of something to tell Pauly the Bag Man, but the one who showed up to ask him about it wasn’t the friendly Pauly, but the boy. He would simply arrive quietly and give the man an inquiring look. People knew who he was, and told each other things that made them sweat when they saw him.

What the hell was Pauly the Bag Man doing in Washington, D.C., wearing a tailored suit and women’s shoes? They must have closed the bars and chased out everybody who had ever laid eyes on him in the old days. Hell, they must have dredged the lake for corpses. He had to get out of this man’s sight. He looked for a way to disappear, but the sheer size of the lawns and the sidewalks, like airport runways leading up to broad, high steps, made it hard to imagine how he was going to do it. He could see for a mile in any direction. He hadn’t been expecting to do anything chancy here, just to find a tourist and wait until he was alone. He kept walking toward the subway entrance. If he could make it that far, he could probably step onto the first train before somebody like Pauly the Bag Man overcame his natural caution and followed.

As he walked, Pauly walked along on the other side of the street a few paces ahead. It puzzled Wolf that he would do this. Could he possibly imagine that Wolf hadn’t spotted him? He resisted the temptation to reach into his coat to touch the reassuring weight and solidity of Little Norman’s pistol. Pauly wouldn’t try to take him out on his own, which meant that there must be others somewhere in the stream of people walking along the sidewalks. But as he thought about it, he decided that if there really were others, Pauly wouldn’t be here at all. The man was hanging around to see where he went, which meant that there was going to be somebody he could tell. Somebody was on the way, and Pauly must be expecting him to arrive soon. Directions wouldn’t work if they were an hour old. He walked along the broad avenue knowing that each step was taking him into some kind of ambush. People were on the way, and when they got here, Pauly would see them and he wouldn’t. When enough of them had gotten into position, Pauly would stop walking, turn and point his finger.

Wolf was beginning to feel hot, and his heart began to pound in his chest as he thought about it. He had made a decision a long time ago that he wasn’t going to let something like this happen to him. His jaw tightened and started to chew on nothing. He wasn’t going to walk along like some loser who was preparing to defend himself. They still didn’t get it, and it still astonished him. He wasn’t going to lie down and wait until they took their turn before he took his. He watched Pauly stroll along the sidewalk across the street from him and started to drift toward him.

Wolf was at the curb, then a second later he was in the traffic, slipping into the backstream of one car and out of the lane before the next one arrived. He made it to the double white line in the middle before something about the sound of the cars changed enough to make Pauly turn his head. When he did, Wolf could see his eyes widen. His hands came up and a nervous tremor started to grip him. His head shook so hard that he seemed to be nodding. He was already backing away, and he almost fell as he turned to break into a run.

Pauly the Bag Man was over fifty years old and hadn’t needed to run from anyone since the February night in 1972 when the brain of a man named Fritz Hinckel short-circuited in Pastorelli’s Family Restaurant, and that time it hadn’t been personal. Pauly had been just one of fifty or sixty people whom Hinckel was trying to stick with a steak knife, and he had only needed to run five or six steps before an anonymous diner dropped Hinckel with five shots from a Colt Cobra that happened to be part of his evening wear. Pauly was long-legged, but his muscles were slack and slow from riding in the Town Car, and the leather soles of the new three-hundred-dollar shoes he was wearing hadn’t been scraped against anything but floor wax and carpeting until a few minutes ago. He was still striving to attain what he hoped was sufficient speed when he began to hear the Butcher’s Boy’s footsteps.

Pauly kept his head up and elongated his strides, pumping his arms and hitting the pavement with the balls of his feet like a quarter-miler. He had a terrible sense that the Butcher’s Boy was about to put a bullet into his spine, and that he wasn’t going to hear it first. There would be a horrible, wrenching pain, and then he would be down, but the lower part of his body would already be limp and dead. Or maybe the top part. Why not the top part? Just because you never heard about—

Wolf watched Pauly offering a credible imitation of a sprint as he abandoned the concrete and headed out across the wide green lawn. He could see that Pauly wasn’t running toward anything or anybody, which meant that nobody had arrived yet. He was simply a one-man stampede, like a man running from a hornet’s nest. There was no point in going after him. Wolf didn’t slow down; he merely changed directions. Where Pauly had veered to the right onto the lawn, he turned to the left, darted across the street again and sidestepped into the crowd. In a second he was walking in the other direction.

He joined a group of men and women who were walking up the steps of the first big building he came to. He put on the same bored, resigned expression they all wore. The sign said HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, SO he stayed with them. He was reasonably confident that he wasn’t about to stroll into the beam of a metal detector. As soon as he was inside the doorway, he looked back out the glass door at Independence Avenue and saw a car pull up near the spot where the tourists had assembled in front of the Rayburn Building. Three doors opened, three men got out and the car pulled away. As the three men stood on the sidewalk, each of them made a slow 360-degree turn, then picked a favorite point on the horizon and stared at it.

Wolf turned and moved deeper into the hallway. He walked until he came to a corridor that turned off toward Fourth Street, and stayed on it until he could see another, smaller entrance. He ignored the people to the right and left of him, and never paused to look inside an open door. But then without warning a woman coming toward him looked up from a file she was carrying and gave him a perfunctory smile. It was only then that he realized he had been smiling too.

He paused and looked out at the street before going through the door, but there seemed to be nobody out there whom Pauly the Bag Man would ask for if he needed help, so he set off down Fourth Street with his head down and his legs matching the pace of the busy civil servants around him. He was going to have to make it to the car after all. There was no telling what Pauly the Bag Man was doing in Washington, but the three men on Independence Avenue must belong to Vico. If Vico thought he had a reason to send three men to stand around in sight of the Capitol scanning the crowd for somebody to kill, he wouldn’t be shy about sending twenty more. Wolf had to get out of here.

The car was in the garage at the Gateway Tour Center on Fourth and E streets. It was only a couple of blocks, but there was no way to get there except by the sidewalk, and nothing to hide him but the bodies of the other people walking the street. They were a mixed group. The ones who looked like college students or lawyers were in a hurry, moving along in both directions without letting their eyes rest on the ones that looked like derelicts, even when they had to weave a course among them. The ones who complicated the mixture most were in pairs, most of them elderly and from East Jesus, Kentucky, or Marrowbone, Texas, stopping without warning to give the Capitol a proprietary survey or to study the grass on the lawn to see if their employees had given it the proper dose of fertilizer. Each time they did so, one of the quick ones had to do a strange little dance to get around them without stepping on their heels. Wolf did his best to imitate the quick ones.

He was in trouble now. Vico was a scavenger. He had come up in the forties with the Castigliones, and been sent off to Washington to see what he could do about cashing in on the war-surplus business. A lot of Castiglione people had been in the army and seen the unimaginably huge hoards of every known commodity that had been built up in four years, and somebody had been curious enough to wonder what was going to happen to all of it later. The idea had been that a man with a supply of cash could probably pick up some useful stuff cheap. Vico had been the man with the cash, and he had found that it went a long way. He had bought up gigantic lots consisting of everything from unassembled motorcycles packed in oil to leather bridles for a cavalry that didn’t exist anymore to tinned K rations so cheap that he could make money opening them up just to salvage the cigarettes inside. From then on, the story went, he had been the organization’s man in Washington.

Wolf hadn’t even been born then, and by the time he ran into Vico, Washington had been sewn up. The capital was a huge place that had hundreds of thousands of people getting paid for producing nothing. All day and night trucks, trains and planes brought in everything they used, and Vico took whatever was spilled in the process: appliances taken off freight cars, percentages of the food brought in for the markets, even the gasoline left in the hulls of tanker trucks after they had shorted the stations to which they had made deliveries. He would take the money and multiply it by supplying the drugs, whores and gambling the residents needed, and by lending them money to pay for these necessities at fifty percent interest. Vico had an army of vultures working the streets all the time, looking for ways to make money that he hadn’t thought of yet.

Wolf had met Vico only for a moment in the year before he’d had to leave the country. He had been hired to kill a man named McPray, who had recently moved to Washington. He had been a Texas businessman who acted like an oil man. It was said that he had some connection with people in oil, but in those days everybody in that part of the world knew somebody who was in oil. Somehow he had been involved in the buying of supplies for the public schools in a large area of the state. It was never explained to Wolf exactly how he had gained a say in the matter, but he had one. For several years he had steered the contract for paper to a company owned by Mike Mascone, but one year, without warning, when Mascone had a huge inventory he had collected in an Amarillo warehouse in anticipation, McPray had simply changed vendors: some relative of his had gone into business. This put Mascone into a bind, and he had made some semipublic threats about having relatives of his own. The truth was that Mascone was a genuine made guy, but he was also of no importance. He wasn’t even very rich. After some stewing, he decided that the only way he was ever going to be rich was to have McPray killed. By now McPray had moved to Washington on some other scheme, and Mascone wanted him killed in a way that would make certain people in Texas believe that Mascone was some kind of serious Mafioso with connections everywhere. After a number of inquiries, he had found out whom to call, and the Butcher’s Boy had collected his money in advance and gone to Washington.

Being isolated in Amarillo, Mascone had an idealistic view of how the world worked. He thought he should call Vico and tell him what was going on because it was a courtesy. Vico was true to his reputation. He sent three men to the Butcher’s Boy’s hotel to demand a third of the price for McPray. It was, they said, the overhead for doing that kind of business in Vico’s territory. The Butcher’s Boy had said he understood, and started to pack his suitcase in front of them. When they asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m not going to do that kind of business in Vico’s territory.” Then he had called Mascone in front of them and told him that calling Vico had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars.

This had created a problem for Vico’s men, who had been told to pick up eighty-three hundred dollars. The Butcher’s Boy was in the airport when he saw them again, only this time Vico was with them. He had been about sixty then and fat. He had sat waiting in the airport coffee shop while his men pointed him out to the Butcher’s Boy, who went in to listen to what Vico had to say. He had said that eight thousand dollars wasn’t the point. It had to do with the way things had always been done. The local capo got a cut of everything that went on, and this covered the aggravation, bad publicity and protection if it was necessary. It was simply overhead. The Butcher’s Boy had answered that he understood, but said that he was keeping Mascone’s money because he too charged for overhead, aggravation and bad publicity. Then he excused himself, stood up from the table and got on his plane. A month later he read that McPray had been found in the Potomac suitably mutilated, and without thinking about it very hard he knew who had done it. He also knew that Vico would have seen it as an opportunity to charge at least fifty thousand.

If Vico thought he had a chance to collect on the contract for the Butcher’s Boy, he would probably come out and walk the streets himself, even though he must have been over seventy by now and had more money than some state treasuries. The fact that it was unseemly for a man in his position to expect money for what the other old men would have considered a favor would not bother him; he would demand it. If Wolf got hit by lightning in the next ten minutes, Vico would send a man to see Carl Bala in prison on the grounds that it was his lightning.

When Wolf was finally inside the garage, he had to control an impulse to run. There was something about getting out of the open that made him feel light and optimistic. He walked quickly toward the stairway, climbed to the first landing and then up to the second level. He moved cautiously. There was no telling where he had been when Pauly the Bag Man had first seen him. If he had been in the car, then he could be walking into something now. He stopped at the doorway onto the second level and waited. He listened to the distant sound of cars on the ramps above, then walked back to the head of the steps and held his breath.

Paul Martillo was dizzy and gasping for breath. The coat of his suit had big sweat spots under the armpits, and his new shoes were scuffed from trying to catch himself when he slipped on the sidewalk, but what was most annoying was that his ears felt like they were plugged up. He had a vague suspicion that having your ears feel pressure must be a sign of heart trouble, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody say it. He still couldn’t believe he wasn’t running anymore. He had gone all the way to Constitution Avenue and was making the turn up Louisiana before he realized he had outrun the son of a bitch. Then Vico’s men had come along in a car, made a U-turn in the middle of Louisiana and picked him up. As he thought about it now, getting into the car probably had been a mistake. In the first place, his leg muscles were certainly going to stiffen up because you were supposed to walk around for a while and stretch your muscles after a dash like that. In the second place, just in case there was one person inside the Beltway who had not seen him running like a madman across the damned Capitol lawn chased by a hit man, he had given them a good chance to see him getting into a brand-new Cadillac with four of the most obvious-looking hoods that he had ever seen. Two of them had even had guns in their hands when they had picked him up.

Now that he had his wind back, he began to think about the fact that this was going to be over in a few minutes, and Paul Martillo still had to live here. In fact, until this interruption, he had been on his way to see a senator. It was hard enough around here. At least the bastards had a phone in their Cadillac so that he could call Bart, his driver, and tell him where to meet him. When he hung up he even made a little joke to hide the way he felt. “I was afraid I was going to have to call the cops and get them to activate the Thiefbuster on the Lincoln.”

Sitting in the back seat of the Cadillac, he had tolerated the questions from Carmine, the leader of the crew. “So what’s he got on?”

Martillo thought. “I don’t know. A sport coat, a pair of pants. He doesn’t look like anything. Doesn’t Vico have anybody out here who met him?”

“Sure,” said Carmine, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Not long enough,” said Martillo.

There was a little snort that stood for laughter from one of the others. Sure, these jerk-offs thought they were better than Paul Martillo. It was like the guy who came to fix your toilet thinking he was smarter than you because you had to hire him to do it.

At last the car pulled over beside the parking garage. Martillo opened the door and nearly fell out, straightened his tie, pulled his cuffs so that they showed a little beyond the coat and walked into the dark concrete structure. He was a little more upset than he had let Vico’s men see. As he thought about it, he realized it was just possible that Vincent Toscanzio was only doing what the old men had told him to do. They probably figured that if they got Balacontano out, from then on the Butcher’s Boy would be his problem. Carl Bala was a nasty, arrogant maniac in his own right, and he would be capable of getting this one little guy. The old men were smart that way. They thought ahead, which was why they were the old men, and the ones who had come up with them were all buried. On the other hand, this development was good luck for Carl Bala. If somebody didn’t pull some strings in Washington, he was going to sit in jail for a hell of a long time. He would be like the Birdman of Alcatraz, one of those ancient, clean old guys who took up needlepoint or something.

As he walked to the staircase to meet Bart in the Town Car, Martillo noted that the Cadillac was driving up and down the aisles looking for a parking space. This was why those guys were still being sent around town in threes and fours, carrying guns. Given Washington on a day like this at one o’clock, anybody with a brain knew that the lower levels would be filled. It was the only public lot for about ten blocks, for Christ’s sake, and anybody who was ever going to make something of himself would take the ramp to at least the third floor to save some time. That was the real difference between the schmucks and the winners: the winners could think ahead, while the schmucks went around and around the track like donkeys.

Paul Martillo leaned hard on the railing as he started to climb the steps. He knew his shoes must be making a loud noise on the metal steps, but the clanks sounded distant and hollow. He was going to have his ears looked at.

Wolf heard the footsteps, then moved ahead again and looked onto the floor of the garage. The black Lincoln with the driver still in it pretending to read a newspaper wasn’t more than fifty feet from Wolf’s Dodge. He took three deep breaths as he pulled Little Norman’s pistol out of his coat, held it down beside his thigh and turned back to the stairwell. There just wasn’t anywhere to go.

Carmine Fusco had worked for Vico for a long time and he knew what the Butcher’s Boy meant to him. Vico could pick up a couple of million bucks in one morning, just for popping one man. If Vico had a crew working the hotels that was good enough to lift a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of cameras and jewelry every single day, and a guy who trucked it all to another town to sell it for a thousand, which was pretty good, it would still take more than three years to gross a million from the operation. Then you had to add another three years to pay off all those guys. That was how Vico thought, so it was how Fusco thought.

He had let Martillo off at the bottom of the garage and the jerk had stood for it. That was the joke about having somebody like him come to town from someplace like Detroit and not work for Mr. Vico like everybody else. He wasn’t born here, so he didn’t know the city well enough to figure out that anybody who had been spotted in this part of town on foot only had a couple of places where he could have parked.

As Fusco’s brother-in-law, Gilbert, drove slowly up each aisle and turned down the next, Carmine kept the window open and listened. If the Butcher’s Boy was looking for Martillo, he was going to have a chance at him, but if he made any noise it was going to cost him. You had to take some risks to get a guy like this, but Carmine wasn’t about to risk anybody who belonged to Mr. Vico.

Then he heard the pop. It sounded more like something blew up than a gunshot, because the concrete made it reverberate for a second. He poked Gilbert. “Hit it.”

The Cadillac didn’t make much noise when it accelerated, so there was just a scream of tires as the car floated around the corner like a sailboat in a high wind. It was one big, fat slob of a car. In a few seconds it was on its way up the ramp. Now there was a second shot, this one even louder than the first, and it made Carmine see yellow for a second. So much for Martillo. It had to be the coup de grâce, the guy putting a hole in his head to make sure he stayed dead. “Stop,” he said. “Let us out, and get ready to block the ramp.”

He and Castelli and Petri climbed out, and then Carmine had a vision of black and silver. With a roar the front of Martillo’s Lincoln skidded around the bend, the rear end swinging about so that the grille and headlights were no more than ten feet in front of him. As he realized that it wasn’t going to stop, he took three steps back to get up on the railing and out of its way. It passed him so close that he felt the wind. He somehow knew that there was a bullet hole with a big crack in the driver’s side window without knowing how he saw it because the car was moving so fast. As it tilted down the ramp it seemed to be flying, and when it hit the first floor it bottomed out and sent up a spray of sparks.

Fusco gave Castelli a push toward the stairs, then looked at Petri and pointed to the left. Fusco walked up the ramp himself. It was good for his status to have the others think that he had all the guts, but the truth was that it was the safest place to be. This guy wasn’t going to shoot the man in the middle first. You might shoot the one on the right, or the one on the left, but you never shot the one in the middle. It was one of those odd things.

Fusco was a little suprised when he made it to the top of the ramp without hearing another shot. But then he saw Martillo’s driver, who was dead as a can of tuna. When he turned his head, he could see Castelli bending over another body in the stairwell. It was Martillo, which left only one likely candidate for the driver of the Lincoln.

“Carmine,” said Petri.

“Wait a minute,” Fusco said. “I’m thinking.”

“Didn’t that guy Martillo say his car had a Thiefbuster?”

Fusco smiled. It figured that Petri would have picked up on that. Ever since those things had gone on the market, Mr. Vico had been on Petri’s butt to think of a way to locate and disconnect them. They were making it dangerous and nerve-racking to boost a car.

Wolf finally found the button that rolled down the window and pushed it. It went only halfway down before the place where his bullet had punched through stuck in the slot and the electric motor hummed without moving it. When he rested his elbow and forearm on the window and leaned, it rolled all the way in. This didn’t help make him feel any more comfortable, but it did make the car look normal from the outside. On the inside it wasn’t normal at all. He had walked up to the driver and shot him through the window. The bullet had gone through his forehead and out the back of his skull, and he had fallen across the front seat. The problem with head wounds was that they produced a lot of blood. Even though he had pushed the body out the passenger side within a few seconds, there was blood all over the interior; the leather upholstery of the passenger seat had a pool of blood on it that sloshed onto the floor every time he applied the brake, and seeped backward when he stepped on the gas pedal.

The only thing on his mind now was getting onto 1-395 and back to Alexandria before somebody spotted him. He had to find a way to slow everything down. It was as though the pace of things had changed in his absence. Events happened too quickly now, which made it seem as though they didn’t have any relationship to each other. He needed an hour or two in a place where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder. He would have to duck under the surface again and come up someplace else where he could be the one who made things happen. He wished now that he had killed Little Norman instead of talking to him. He had considered it carefully, and thought he’d had nothing to lose. If everybody he had ever known was already eagerly looking for him so that they could get rich, then there was no way he could make things worse, so he had offered a rational, measured bargain: in effect, he would cease to exist, and all they had to do was to let him. But they hadn’t let him, and this was why things were happening so fast.

He reached Alexandria with a small feeling of surprise. He had managed to sedate himself with the simple mechanical task of keeping the car between the lines. He turned onto his street, then into the driveway, opened the garage door, drove the car in and shut the door with the briefest, most economical movements he could manage. As he walked to the front door, he glanced across the street at the house of E. V. Waring. Tonight was going to have to be the night. If he left her body inside the trunk of Pauly the Bag Man’s car and parked it in the right place, maybe he could cause some trouble for them.

As he opened his front door, he saw a piece of paper stuck in the mail slot. When he plucked it out, he could see the engraving that he had selected: “E. V. Waring.” It read, “Please stop by around eight for coffee and dessert. It’s the only way I can thank you for your help this morning, and my pride demands it. The least I can do is welcome you to the neighborhood. Sincerely, E.”