Sleeping Dogs (23 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“No. Why
now
?”

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

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

“So everybody knows.”

“People talk. This time I listened.”

“Why?”

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

“So you waited for me to come.”

“I waited.”

“Are you going to help me?”

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

“It wasn’t twenty.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t bring a gun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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