Sleeping Dogs (37 page)

As he slipped the bolt on the back door of the office, he had a brief attack of irrational reluctance. There was something horrible about the possibility of dying in this bizarre costume. But he reminded himself that he didn’t know any way of dying that wasn’t horrible, and if they got him, it wouldn’t much matter what he looked like. He swung the door open and bent over to cross the open space as quickly as possible.

Wolf slipped into the old Ford station wagon, started it and pulled away from the back of the motel slowly. There was a car parked across the drive, but nobody seemed to be in it, so he pulled around it and bumped across the lawn and onto the highway. When he saw the fire engines coming toward him, he pulled over to let them pass, but after that, he felt it was probably safe to get into the left lane and give the car its last hard ride. It was probably only good for about a half-hour drive, and after he abandoned it, the heirs would undoubtedly junk it.

“I love you,” said Elizabeth.

“I know,” said Jimmy. He was cheerful about it, and he seemed to mean it, but she wanted him to say, “I love you too,” and he didn’t seem to think this response was appropriate from somebody who was already four and on his way out the door to catch his ride.

“Be good.”

“Okay,” he said, then stepped out the door and ran down the steps toward the van. She watched him climb up the big step and pivot to sit down hard on the bench seat in the back. They grew up so fast. No, it wasn’t growing up; it was growing away–becoming a separate person.

Elizabeth spotted Amanda crawling across the floor toward the pole lamp. As she approached it, she was like a soldier in a movie scrambling up the last few yards of a beach under fire. Her little legs pumped so fast that her knees slipped out from under her and she made a premature grab for the pole. Elizabeth closed the front door and got there in time to hold the lamp upright as Amanda lifted her body, hand over hand, up to a standing position. She looked pleased and proud as she stared up at the bulb, her little face containing a hint of the explorer planting a flag on a peak, as well as a hint of the escaped felon. She had made it in time to keep her mother from stopping her. “Up, up, up so tall,” said Elizabeth helplessly.

It was a simple matter to hold the pole firmly while Amanda bent her knees and bobbed up and down in an attempt to dislodge it and topple it over. “Careful, baby girl. That’s not a good game.” Elizabeth acknowledged that she should have stored it in the garage with the glass coffee table months ago. Maybe tonight, when she had gotten into her jeans and sweatshirt, she could face that corner of the garage. Jim used to do that sort of thing. A lot of the stuff in there was just where he had put it a year ago, and it would probably stay there forever. She wasn’t very good at getting rid of things.

Elizabeth heard Maria open the door behind her and then hang her purse on the doorknob. “Hello, Maria,” she said. “Say hello to Maria, Amanda. Say, ‘Hi, Maria! How’s it going?’ ”

Maria moved into the living room. “I’m here, little Amanda,” she said. “I missed you so much. I wanted to come back just as soon as the sun came up. I said, ‘Where’s my little Amanda? I better get dressed quick and run to the car.’ ” This was to tell Elizabeth that she knew she was late, and that nothing was wrong. “Now we better say bye-bye to Mama.” This was to tell Elizabeth that she was dismissed.

Maria snatched up Amanda and carried her to the door for the ceremony. Elizabeth kissed the baby’s incredibly smooth little cheek, and Amanda’s fat little chin started to quiver, her eyes filled with tears and she began to cry the lament of the forsaken. Elizabeth said, “I’ll be back before you know it. I love you,” and the tiny, uncomprehending victim held her arms out in a final plea as her mother slipped out the door. For some stupid reason, this morning she could feel tears forming in her own eyes as she hurried down the steps toward the garage. She knew that the stupid reason was that her period was going to start, and that a lot of unnecessary hormones were coursing through her and making her feel weepy. But at the same time she also didn’t know it, because even though it always happened, and had since she was thirteen, each time it was as though such a reaction had never occurred before. Because what she was feeling was as real as any other feeling at any other time, and maybe it was, after all, the true reaction. Maybe the difference was that at other times she had the strength to keep herself from seeing things clearly.

As she started the car, she thought again that it was probably going to begin giving her trouble unless she found time to get it into the shop for maintenance this week. Maybe Thursday, so it would be okay again by Friday and they wouldn’t have any excuse to keep it over the weekend. This morning everything seemed to be overdue and about to fall apart.

As Elizabeth drove into the city, she made a point of looking at the trees. She had read in a doctor’s column in a magazine that looking at trees was a cure for stress. It had something to do with focusing one’s eyes on faraway objects, and something to do with the color of the leaves. But the same column had said that a cure for depression was looking at the light in the sky just before the sun came up. She hadn’t missed a day at that in one year and two weeks.

Elizabeth found herself in the Organized Crime office earlier than expected. Maybe looking at trees was a cure for slow driving. She sat down at her desk and saw with sadness that someone had taken the time to provide her with an “In” box. She didn’t want an “In” box, so now she would have to spend some time trying to find out who had done such a thoughtful thing and then try to keep from hurting her feelings.

Elizabeth had learned years ago that analysis had to do with taking the flow of information that moved through the bureaucracy and preventing it from moving in its normal way through the old channels. Sometimes she collected tidbits and left them lying around for weeks until they made sense, and sometimes she merely scanned the printouts and knew that there was nothing in them but distractions. If you had an “In” box and an “Out” box, you were treating information the way it was meant to be treated, which was the wrong way. The system put you here to process paper, but you had to resist the system in order to make it work.

She put her purse in the “In” box so that nobody would deliver anything there, and walked to the communication room to look at the night’s reports. As she entered, she saw a copy of the NCIC entry lying on the desk. Something had been added to the bottom of it: “Information concerning the suspect: Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”

Wolf sat by himself in the back of the diner in the Chicago railroad station and looked at the pile of folded papers. If they had not been about him, he wouldn’t have had any idea what they said. As he had thought, Charles Ackerman had been burned for all time: the paper referred to him as “AKA Charles Ackerman, AKA the Butcher’s Boy, real name UNK.” They had tagged him with Tony Talarese for sure, but said they also wanted him for questioning about Peter Mantino and Angelo Fratelli. So Little Norman had been right about the wire on Talarese. That had brought the FBI in right away, and then somebody there had told them who he was.

Still, the physical-description part didn’t seem to fit this theory. Hair color, eye color, height, weight: all UNK. If somebody had recognized him, what the hell had they used—smell? What it sounded like was that they had heard about his identity from somebody who didn’t know he was telling them. They must have picked it up from the wiretap. If they had put a wire on Talarese, they would have tapped his phones too.

In one way it was reassuring; they didn’t seem to know anything about him at all—where he was, what he looked like, what he was doing. In about four other ways, it was starting to scare the hell out of him. The reason he was stuck in the United States in the first place was that somehow they had managed to figure out he was using the Charles Ackerman passport, then had shut down an airport three thousand miles away in time to keep him from using it again. Maybe they had shut down every airport in the country with one phone call. He had no way of knowing how they did things, or whether there was any practical limit to what they could do.

In the old days he hadn’t spent much time worrying about the police. He had thought about them only when he was actually doing a job. If he managed to get through it without making too much noise, leaving fingerprints or getting himself hurt, he stopped thinking about them at all. It didn’t take much thought to stay out of their way; once you got out of the water, you could probably stop worrying about getting bitten by a fish.

He wanted to stop worrying about the FBI. He thought about going to Mexico. He could certainly get across the border, but what then? He didn’t know anybody in Mexico, and the Mafia must have lots of people there to keep an eye on its drug interests. It was a fairly obvious place for him to go into hiding, so they would be looking for him, with fewer chances of missing him. Even if he could buy a passport there that would get him into England, it wouldn’t do him much good. The British customs man would ask him a question in Spanish, and he wouldn’t understand it.

He could get into Canada with even less strain. A Canadian passport would be perfect, but the setup there had always been worse than in Mexico. The Mafia had established footholds all along the border during Prohibition in order to bring in liquor. Even before that, a lot of the old Mustache Petes had gotten into the United States by signing up for a wheat harvest in Manitoba or someplace and walking across the invisible line. It was hard to know what the Mob controlled there, but one thing they were sure to have a corner on was forged passports. He kept remembering the computer scanner that Immigration had used on his passport at Kennedy. He needed a real passport or he was going to be stopped. And unless he got out of the country soon, there was no question that he was going to die. The way he had survived in the past was by quick retaliation. The hand would move in his direction, and he’d sting it, and it would hesitate long enough to let him disappear. It still worked, too, except for the part about disappearing.

It wasn’t the Mafia that was keeping him in the fire; it was the damned FBI. But he was overlooking something. Organizations didn’t
do
anything; it was some person in charge, some human intelligence that was working on him. He looked at the sheets of paper again. On the last one was “Attention E. V. Waring, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., as Agent in Charge.”

Wolf finished his coffee and walked out into the cavernous train station. The place was not just wide but vertically immense, in a way that buildings constructed now could never be unless they were designed to shield some sport from the weather. The ceiling must have been seventy or eighty feet above him, and they could have held a cattle drive through the waiting area without taking up more than a
third
of the marble floor. These places had seemed archaic to him when he was a child, remnants of some richer time when there was more stone and wood and leather in the world, and more time to think about what things looked like. In the old days these places were always noisy with the echoes of feet, luggage carts, yelling and amplified announcements, but for some reason he couldn’t remember ever hearing a train. Now the station still echoed, but the sound of his shoes on the marble was all he heard as he walked to the one ticket window that wasn’t boarded up and bought a ticket to Washington, D.C.

Elizabeth looked at the list she had made before falling asleep last night. The way to keep the cost down was to get in touch with the people who already were paid to watch things and give them something specific to look for. If she was right about what was happening, he was running; that meant small motels, cars fraudulently rented or stolen, bogus identification and credit cards and paying cash for merchandise anybody else would buy with a check. These were details that gave him a chance to make a mistake. If he did, he might come to the attention of a police department somewhere. All she could do was to send out circulars to introduce the possibility that the next time it could be him.

It was essential to keep the Butcher’s Boy from getting out of the country as long as she could. If he had survived for ten years with Carlo Balacontano screaming for his head, then he must have lived someplace where Carlo Balacontano’s voice wasn’t very loud. She had made a formal request to the State Department to examine new passport applications for male Caucasians aged thirty to forty-five with extreme care, checking independently at least two of the statements or supporting documents supplied. It might not turn him up, but it would delay the processing, which might keep him here a little longer. This had brought a strange inquiry from the CIA, but the questions they had asked had been about McCarron, the man who had been found dead with Fratelli in Buffalo. Maybe he was a former agent or something. Whatever their interest was, it couldn’t hurt.

The main thing was to keep trying. If every policeman in every department asked his informants about the Butcher’s Boy, and every person who watched airports and steamships and provided passports and rented cars kept alert, somebody just might notice him. The most depressing thing about it was that the only way she was going to recognize him was if he did something, and what he would have to do to identify himself was to kill someone else.

Elizabeth started to move her eyes down the list again, but now Richardson was standing over her desk. “You know what I think is going on?” he asked. “I think this is a cleansing ritual.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who was Tony Talarese? He was about forty-five years old, a capo at the time of his life when he should have been out there scrambling. But what was he doing? He wore fancy clothes, spent lots of money, had a house that Al Capone would have thought was too ostentatious. But the main thing was, he was corrupt. He’d been schtupping the waitresses in his brother’s restaurant, the wives of at least two of his soldiers and his brother’s wife’s niece, which in those old-time families is incest. But most of all, he’d been robbing his boss while he was in prison, and he was wearing a wire for the FBI. Think about it.”