Eddie Mastrewski had always had his own philosophy. 'Killing is just one of a lot of things people ought to do for themselves, but end up paying somebody else to do for them. They pay some pimp to provide a woman who will go to bed with them, and they buy a fancy car and hire somebody to drive it for them. That's no way to live, but their mistake is a fortune for people like us. Do your own killing, drive your own car, find your own girls.'
He started the boy in the trade by taking him along on jobs. On the first job, the target was a man who was difficult to approach. He spent his days in a corner office on the tenth floor of a well-guarded office building. There were surveillance cameras, sign-in sheets, calls made to verify appointments before anybody was permitted to go to the elevator. On the tenth floor, all the people in the reception areas, cubicles, and hallways stood between the elevator and the target. When he left work, he walked a hundred yards with a couple of colleagues and went down with thousands of people into a subway. When he came out at his stop, he was a hundred yards from his high- security apartment. The only times to get him were the walk to the subway or his walk from it. When the day came, the boy wore a baseball cap and carried his outfielder's glove. He and Eddie joined the crowd on the sidewalk and came up behind the man. Eddie reached into the boy's glove, pulled out a small pistol fitted with a silencer, shot the man twice behind the ear, and put the pistol back in the glove. The man fell onto the sidewalk, Eddie grabbed the boy and stepped around the body, as though shielding him from the sight of the man dying of a heart attack on the street. Other bystanders stepped between the boy and the dreadful spectacle, trying to get their bodies in his line of sight while others knelt beside the body. In less than a minute Eddie and the boy were down the steps to the platform and getting on the subway train.
The boy found that after a while there were very few jobs that seemed difficult to him. Most of the time it was like turning off a light. Eddie would walk up to the side window of a car stopped in traffic, pull out a pistol, fire a shot into the driver's head, and walk on. Or he would knock on an apartment door, wait until he saw the peephole turn dark because the man inside had his eye up to it, and then fire through the door into the man's chest.
'Learn your trade,' Eddie said. 'You do that and you'll always have the edge. You'll be luring people out into the night when your eyes are used to the dark and theirs aren't. Plan a job for days, but do it in seconds. The guy should be dead before he has the time to figure out if he should be scared or not. You walk into a store or a restaurant to get somebody, you're like an egg in a frying pan. If you take too much time, you heat up and burn. Do it fast and get out.'
By the time he was sixteen, he had acquired the discipline and the skills. He had also picked up Eddie's philosophy. Eddie had said, 'Everybody dies. It's just a question of timing, and whether the one who gets paid for it is you or a bunch of doctors. It might as well be you.'
After all these years, the essentials of killing had not changed. He needed to kill Tosca, and if Tosca wasn't at his house in Glen Cove, the next place to look was his house in Canada. From New Jersey he drove to Rochester, New York, and found a hotel near the airport. He had always liked staying in hotels like this because they were full of men exactly like the one he was pretending to be. They were businessmen, most of them in sales, visiting their clients on regular rounds. But an increasing number of them were entrepreneurs trying to get some fledgling enterprise a loan from a bank or license some bit of software from another company. Sometimes when he was having a meal in a mediocre restaurant in an airport hotel, he would be seated near a table of five or six of them, all smiling and chuckling through the flop sweat as they tried to sell each other things. There would always be one or two so young that they looked unaccustomed to wearing suits. But there would also be a man a generation older who might be a district manager or an owner, depending on the size of the company.
When he had first started working long-distance hits, he had looked just like one of the young ones-a bit skinny and awkward. Now he looked like the older one, the boss who knew the way these trips worked. The older man knew that his side wasn't going to go home with everything they came for, but also knew the company could live without it. The older man was usually a little calmer, less eager.
He cultivated the appearance, watching the businessmen to be sure he got it right. Now at half of these business lunches there would be at least one laptop computer on the table. That night he decided that he should buy a laptop and carry it around with him. It was a small concession that would cement his identity as a business traveler. The next morning he drove to a computer store and bought one, signed on to the hotel's wireless system, and searched for news articles about the Balacontano family
There were plenty of old articles about Carlo, some available in newspaper archives going back to the 1950s. There was a flurry of hits for the year when Carlo had been convicted of killing Arthur Fieldston and burying his head and hands and the silenced pistol on his horse farm outside Saratoga Springs. Schaeffer knew all about that because he had done the killing and the burying and made the anonymous call to the FBI. What he was looking for was new information about what was going on right now. MAFIA ON THE RUN. THE DECLINE OF A DYNASTY. There were six of that one, in three different decades. Newspaper writers had said the Mafia was dead so many times that he had sometimes wondered if the Mafia was paying them to say it.
There were hundreds of articles, but they told him virtually nothing. Some guy in California was denied a liquor license because he had been seen with members of the Balacontano family. A few basketball players who were apparently well known were under investigation because their favorite strip club was owned by a Balacontano soldier and their bills were comped. There were investigative reports about companies in the trash-hauling business, the linen-supply business, investment banking, sports, music. There was even one on the link between the Balacontanos and a company that ran prisons in Midwestern states. The search engines picked up anything with the right key words in it. Apparently there were Balacontanos who had nothing to do with the crime family, and the Internet picked up every time one of their kids pitched in a high school game, got married, or got promoted. He left the laptop plugged in to charge the battery while he lay on the bed, looked up at the ceiling, and considered.
He wasn't certain where Frank Tosca had gone, but his best guess was that he had taken his family to Canada, to the house he owned on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. He might have noticed all the surveillance teams outside his house on Long Island and figured a good way to stop the clock on any federal proceedings against him would be to go to Canada for a while. He had owned the house on the river for a long time and could hardly be accused of fleeing the country to avoid prosecution.
Over the years in England, Schaeffer had kept renewing his U.S. passports in the names Michael Schaeffer and Charles F. Ackerman. He chose the Ackerman passport for this crossing because he didn't want to compromise the Schaeffer identity. He decided to take some minor precautions with the two pistols he had taken from Tosca's soldiers. First he drove to a sporting-goods store and shopped for something that was the right size and shape. He settled on a tennis net that had posts at either end that could be sunk into holes in a court. They were essentially two three-inch steel pipes with caps at the upper ends and plugs at the lower. He brought the set back to his hotel and opened the lower ends of the pipes.
The two pistols he dismantled on the bed. He slid the slides, springs, barrels, triggers, sears, handgrips, and magazines into the two pipes, then plugged the pipes again. That left the two flat steel pistol frames, which he placed on the floor of his car on the driver's side under the floor mat.
Two hours later, at seven in the evening, he was crossing the Rainbow Bridge over the wide, blue Niagara toward Niagara Falls, Ontario, with the daily caravan of Americans coming over the river to leave their money on the green felt tables of the casinos. He could see the incongruous new additions to the staid architecture he remembered from the time before he'd gone to England. The colored lights looked as though a small part of Las Vegas had been brought here and planted. When he got to the end of the bridge, the Canadian customs woman looked at him and barely focused her eyes on his passport, handed it back, then waved him into Canada.
He drove east on the Queen Elizabeth Way along Lake Ontario toward the St. Lawrence. As he approached Toronto, night was falling, and he was once again on a dark highway that could have been anywhere on the continent. He could remember clearly the only time he had been to Tosca's summer house. It had been a hot summer day, and they had come over the bridge at Alexandria Bay and entered Canada east of Gananoque. The house was on a narrow, pebbly beach, one of a stretch of houses that were not the usual small, wooden buildings that were everywhere on the Canadian side of the river and the Great Lakes. These belonged to prosperous people from Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, and they were as substantial as their houses in the city. Tosca's was made of brick, had two stories, a garage, a brick patio, and a boathouse with a ramp like a little railway to let the boat glide down over the pebbly beach into the water just beyond the shallows. Once the boat was in the water, four of Tosca's men would remove the ramp in sections, then put it back in when they were ready to take the boat back to its boathouse.
He stopped a few miles past Toronto to eat dinner. He liked to travel later at night, when traffic would thin out and little about him was visible. When he came out to the parking lot, it was full night. The sun had gone down
