The Assassin

6766."

"When you're on a roll, you're on a roll," Vito Joseph Lanza said with a smile. He pulled the wad of bills with the hundreds on the outside from the side pocket of his yellow slacks, flicked it open, and waited for her to tell him how much it was going to cost him to upgrade the return portion of his thirty-days-in-advance, touristclass, round-trip ticket to first class. Then he counted out what she told him.

She made change, handed him the upgraded ticket and a boarding pass, and said, "Gate 28. They're probably just about to board. Thank you, Mr. Lanza."

"Yeah. Right. Sure," Vito said, stuffed the wad back in his trousers, and looked around for directions to Gate 28.

They were not yet boarding Flight 6766, non-stop service to Philadelphia, when he reached Gate 28. He leaned against the wall and lit a Pall Mall with the gold Dunhill lighter he'd bought in the casino gift shop just before going to bed about three that morning.

I probably could have picked up another couple of grand, if I'd have stuck around, he thought, but the cards had started to run against me, and the one thing a good gambler has to know is when to quit. I certainly wouldn't have lost it all back, but I would probably have lost some, and quitting the way I did, I sort of have the Dunhill to show for quitting when that was the smart thing to do.

He had taken only a couple of puffs when the ticket lady got on the loudspeaker and announced that they were preboarding. Women with small children, people who needed assistance in boarding, and of course passengers holding first-class tickets, who could board at their leisure.

Vito had to wait until a couple of old people on canes and what looked like a real Indian-Indian lady with three kids got on, but he was the first passenger in the first-class cabin. He checked his boarding pass, and then found his seat, on the aisle, on the left, right against the bulkhead that separated the first-class compartment from the tourist-class section.

As soon as he'd dug the seat belt out from where someone had stuffed it between the seats, a stewardess appeared, squatted in the aisle, and asked if she could get him something to drink before they took off.

They don't do that in the back of the airplane, he thought.

"Scotch, rocks," Vito said.

She smiled and went forward and returned almost immediately with his drink. Two things surprised him, first that it came in a plastic cup-Jesus, for what they charge you to sit up here, you'd think they'd at least give you a real glass-and that she didn't hold her hand out for any money. First he thought that they maybe ran a tab, but then he remembered that drinks in first class were on the house.

He examined his surroundings.

Class, he decided. The seats are wide and comfortable, and real leather. This is the way to travel.

He reached up and touched the back of the seat in front of him. That was real leather too.

He watched the other passengers get on. A lot of them looked, he noticed, at the only passenger in first class. He wondered for a moment if the ticket counter had been handing him a line about being lucky to get the only remaining seat in first class, but then some other first-class passengers got on and he decided that maybe she had been telling him the truth.

A good-looking blonde came into the cabin. Nice ass, Vito thought. For some reason she looked familiar. Not a movie or TV star, he decided. She isn't good-looking enough for that. But I'm almost sure I seen her someplace.

A Main Line type came on behind her, wearing a tweed jacket and a dress shirt with no tie. He had the boarding pass stubs in his hand. He glanced at them and stopped the blonde at the second row of seats from the front on the right, asked her did she want the aisle or the window. As she was getting in to sit in the window seat, the young guy looked around the cabin and smiled and nodded at Vito.

I remember him. He was at the craps table in the Flamingo when I was really hot. She wasn't there. I would have remembered her. Neither of them is wearing a wedding ring. She doesn't look like the kind of girl who would go off to Vegas with some guy she isn't married to for a couple of days. Maybe they're brother and sister.

He watched as the stewardess took their order, and then came back with a couple of cans of beer.

Jesus, if it's free booze up here, why drink beer?

Vito Lanza woke up when his ears hurt because they were coming down to land. His mouth was dry. He remembered-what the hell, it was free-that he'd had a lot to drink before they served dinner, and wine with the dinner, and he remembered that they had started to show the movie, and decided that he had fallen asleep during the movie.

Ten minutes later, the airplane landed. Vito was a little disappointed, for they had not flown over Philadelphia. The wind was blowing the wrong way or something, and all he could see out the window was Delaware and the oil refineries around Chester.

When they finally taxied up to the terminal building, Vito looked out the window and saw something that caught his attention. There was an Airport Unit Jeep and a limousine and what looked like an unmarked detective's car sitting down there, with the baggage carts and the other airport equipment.

What the hell is that all about?

"Ladies and gentlemen," the stewardess said over the public address system, "the captain has not yet turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign. Please remain in your seats until he does."

When the stewardess finally got the door open, a stocky, red-faced man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of the Philadelphia Police Department stepped into the cabin and looked around. Vito knew who he was, Lieutenant Paul Ardell of the Airport Unit.

Ardell looked around the first-class cabin, did a double take when he saw Vito, and then looked down at the Main Line type in the second row. He said something to him-Vito couldn't hear what-and the Main Line type got up, backed up a little in the aisle to let the blonde with the nice ass out, and then they both followed Ardell out the door.

A moment later Vito saw the two of them walking toward the limousine. The door opened and a gray-haired guy got out and put his arms around the blonde and hugged her. Then she got into the limousine and the gray-haired guy shook the Main Line type's hand and then gave him a little hug.

The Main Line type then walked out of Vito's sight, under the airplane. Vito guessed, correctly, that he was going to intercept their luggage before it got from the airplane to the baggage conveyor, but he didn't get to see this. The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign went off, and the stewardess gave her little speech about how happy American Airlines was that they had chosen American, and hoped they would do so again in the future, and people started getting off.

Joe Marchessi, and the new guy, the little Spic, was working the baggage claim room when Vito got there. Until somebody who transferred into the Airport Unit got to know his way around, they paired him with somebody with experience.

The Airport Unit was different. In other areas you could move a cop from one district to another, and just about put him right to work. But things were different at the Airport; it was a whole new ballgame. You had to learn what to look for, and what you looked for at the Airport was not what you looked for in an ordinary district.

Airport Unit cops were something special. For one thing, they were sworn in as officers both in Philadelphia and Tinnicum Township, which is in Delaware County. Some parts of the runways and their approaches are in Tinnicum Township, and they need the authority to operate there too.

The mob, over the years, had found the Tinnicum Marshes a good place to dump bodies. But aside from that, there was not much violent crime at the Airport.

Most of what you had to deal with was people stealing luggage, and they were most often professional thieves, not some kid who saw something he decided he could get away with stealing and stole it. Or keeping thieves, professional and amateur, from helping themselves to the air freight in "Cargo City."

Then there was smuggling, but that was handled by the feds, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Customs Service, and sometimes the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and they usually made the arrest, and all the Airport Unit had to do was arrange for the prisoners to be transported.

All things considered, working the job in the Airport Unit was a pretty good job. Most of the time you got to stay inside the terminal, instead of either freezing your balls or getting a heat stroke outside.

Vito didn't think much of Marchessi: He had been on the job ten, twelve years, never even thought about taking the examination for corporal or detective and bettering himself, just wanted to put in his eight hours a day doing as little as possible, inside where it was warm, until he was old enough to retire and get a job as a rent-a-cop or something.

And Officer Marchessi did not, in Vito's opinion, treat him with the respect to which he was entitled as a corporal.

Vito walked up to them. "Whaddaya say, Marchessi?"

"How's it going, Lanza?"

It should have been "Corporal," but Vito let it ride.

"You're Martinez, right?"

"That's right, Corporal."

"Well, what do you think of Airport?"

"So far, I like it."

"It'll get worse, you can bet on that," Lanza said.

At least he calls me "Corporal." He's got the right attitude. I wonder what makes a little fuck like him want to be a cop?

"You were in Las Vegas, somebody said?" Marchessi asked. "Win any money?"

Vito pulled the wad of bills from his pocket and let Marchessi have a look.

"Can't complain. Can't complain a goddamn bit," Vito said. He saw the little Spic's eyes widen when he saw his roll.

Vito stuffed the money back in his pocket.

"What was going on just now on the ramp?" he asked.

From the looks on their faces, it was apparent to Corporal Vito Lanza that neither Officer Joseph Marchessi nor Officer Whatsisname Martinez had a fucking clue what he was talking about.

"Lieutenant Ardell come on the plane, American from Vegas, Gate 23, and took a good-looking blonde and some Main Line asshole off it," Lanza explained. "There was a limousine, one of our cars, and a detective car on the ramp."

"Oh," Marchessi said. "Yeah. That must have been theWhatsername?-Detweilergirl. You remember, three, four months ago, when the mob hit Tony the Zee DeZego in the parking garage downtown?"

Vito remembered. DeZego had been taken down with a shotgun in a mob hit. The word on the street was that the doers were a couple of pros, from Chicago or someplace.

"So?"

"She got wounded or something when that happened. She's been in a hospital out west. They didn't want the press getting at her."

"Who's they?"

"Chief Lowenstein himself was down here a couple of hours ago," Marchessi said.

Vito knew who Chief Lowenstein was. Of all the chief inspectors, it was six one way and half a dozen the other if Lowenstein or Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had the most clout. It was unusual that Lowenstein would personally concern himself with seeing that some young woman was not bothered with the press. "How come the special treatment?"

Marchessi said, more than a little sarcastically, "I guess if your father runs and maybe owns a big piece of Nesfoods, you get a little special treatment."

The bell rang, signaling that the luggage conveyor was about to start moving. Vito nodded at Marchessi and Martinez and walked to the conveyor and waited until his luggage appeared. He grabbed it, then went back into the terminal and walked through it to the Airport Unit office. He walked past without going in, and went to the parking area reserved for police officers either working the Airport Unit or visiting it, where he had left his car.

His car, a five-year-old Buick coupe, gave him a hard time starting. He had about given up on it when it finally gasped into life.

"Piece of shit!" he said aloud, and then had a pleasant thought: When he was finished work tomorrow, he would get rid of the sonofabitch. What he would like to have was a four-door Cadillac. He could probably make a good deal on one a year, eighteen months old. That would mean only twelve, fifteen thousand miles. A Caddy is just starting to get broken in with a lousy fifteen thousand miles on the clock, and you save a bunch of money.

Just because you did all right at the tables, Vito Lanza thought, is no reason to throw money away on a new car. Most people can't tell the fucking difference between a new one and one a year, eighteen months old, anyway.

Corporal Vito Lanza lived with his widowed mother, Magdalena, a tiny, intense, silver-haired woman of sixty-six in the house in which he had grown up. She managed to remind him at least once a day that the row house in the 400 block of Ritner Street in South Philadelphia was in her name, and that he was living there, rent free, only out of the goodness of her heart.

When he finally found a place to park the goddamned Buick and walked up to the house, Magdalena Lanza was sitting on a folding aluminum and plastic webbing lawn chair on the sidewalk, in the company of Mrs. D'Angelo (two houses down toward South Broad Street) and Mrs. Marino (the house next door, toward the Delaware River). She had an aluminum colander in her lap, into which she was breaking green beans from a paper bag on the sidewalk beside her.

Vito nodded at Mrs. D'Angelo and Mrs. Marino and kissed his mother and said, "Hi, Ma" and handed her a two-pound box of Italian chocolates he had bought for her in the gift shop at the Flamingo in Vegas.

She nodded her head, but that was all the thanks he got.

"The toilet's running again," Mrs. Lanza said. "And there's rust in the hot water. You either got to fix it, or give me the money to call the plumber."

"I'll look at it," Vito said, and went into the house.

To the right was the living room, a long, dark room full of heavy furniture. A lithograph of Jesus Christ with his arms held out in front of him hung on the wall. Immediately in front of him was the narrow stairway to the second floor, and the equally narrow passageway that led to the kitchen in the rear of the house. Off the kitchen was the small dark dining room furnished with a table, six chairs, and a china cabinet.

He went up the stairs and a few steps down the corridor to his room. It was furnished with a single bed, a dresser, a small desk, and a floor lamp. There were pictures on the wall, showing Vito when he made his first communion at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, his graduation class at Mount Carmel Parochial School, Vito in his graduation gown and tasseled hat at Bishop John Newmann High School, and Vito in police uniform and his father the day he graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy. There was also an eighteen-inch-long plaster representation of Jesus Christ on his crucifix.

Vito tossed his bags on the bed and went down the corridor to the bathroom. He voided his bladder, flushed the toilet, and waited to see if the toilet was indeed running.

It was, and he took the top off the water box and looked at the mechanism.

He didn't know what the fuck was wrong with it. He jiggled the works, and it stopped running. Then he ran the hot water in the sink, letting it fill the bowl. When he had, he couldn't even see the fucking drain in the bottom.

Sonofabitch!

The simplest thing to do would be to give his mother the money and tell her to call the plumber. But if he did that, there was certain to be some crack about his father, May He Rest In Peace, never having once in all the years they were married calling a plumber.

After work tomorrow, Vito decided, I'll go by Sears and get one of those goddamned repair kits. And see what they want to replace the fucking hot water heater.