General Robert Kennedy had founded it in the early 1960s. Politics could sometimes have a terrible effect on the efforts of the Justice Department, but there had been no political faction in those years that didn't at least profess to be opposed to organized crime and racketeering, so the nonsense from above was barely audible in her section.
What had bothered her was the regular infusion every four years of political appointees at the top of the system. During her time, there had been at least three attorneys general who had, at best, rudimentary knowledge of the law, and two who had never practiced law at all. Only one had ever had any experience in the sort of crime fighting that included conducting investigations of actual criminals and convicting them of crimes, but it wasn't recent and he wasn't very good at it. The AG's hired underlings were no better qualified. The lawyers who were really good at criminal law were too rich and too busy to consider taking a government job.
Elizabeth finished reading and initialing the memos and reports that her people had submitted during the afternoon, wrote a query in the margin of the last one, put them all in the outgoing office mail, and closed her office door. The more challenging pieces of paperwork she put into her briefcase with her laptop. She went to the elevator, rode it to the cavernous parking garage beneath the building, got into her car, and drove to the exit. The armed guard waved her past and she was out on the street. She was pleased to see that in waiting she had missed the worst of the evening traffic, the segment of the commuter population who were willing to take risks to get home fast.
Elizabeth had moved to McLean, Virginia, a couple of months after Jim died. Even though she had always loved being in D.C. when Jim was alive, it had seemed much better to her to raise the kids in a nice suburb if she had to do it alone. And getting out of the house where her husband had died had been good for her and for the kids, Jimmy and Amanda.
She had always thought that Special Agent James Hart had been created to use all that courage and strength in some epic struggle to vanquish evil. Thanks to the cancer, he had only used it to endure and falsify his own death, smiling at his wife and children through the pain and suffering of that horrible last year. When it was over, she had cried every night. She had waited until the children were asleep and she could lock her bedroom door and put her face in her pillow. And then, after a year or so, there was a particularly busy time in the organized crime section, and when it had passed, one day she realized she hadn't cried for a month. What she worried about most now was Jim and Amanda. The effects of the early death of a parent on children were huge and life changing, but essentially unknowable. What she had learned was that children became very adept at appearing normal and unscathed, but she could not know what sense of loss or emptiness might be hurting them inside.
As she drove home, she looked in her mirrors frequently, watching for a car that lingered too long behind her, or one that came up on her too fast. It was not out of the question that some faction that her office had targeted might be watching for her. Prosecutors in Italy had been machine-gunned in their cars a few times in recent years, and some of the American families were still in the habit of taking in apprentices and reinforcements from the old country.
Organized crime wasn't just the Italian Mafia, either. It was Canadian bikers and Mexican narcotrafficantes, and Russian smugglers and pimps, and groups from every other country of the world. They all brought with them their own money launderers and crooked accountants and assassins. She had been successful enough to have enemies in every group, so she took precautions every day. She watched for things that weren't right, used five alternate routes to get home, and kept her purse open on the seat beside her, so she could quickly grasp the gun inside it.
When Elizabeth reached the clapboard house with the brick fa- cade on the quiet street in McLean, it was almost eight o'clock. She could see cars in other driveways, other houses with the lights on in kitchen and dining room windows. She pulled up her driveway into the garage attached to the house and pressed the button on the remote control to close the door behind her. She carried her briefcase into the house. She smelled food. 'Hi! I'm sorry I'm late.'
Nobody answered. She stepped into the kitchen. She could see the kids had eaten and left one place setting for her. There was a note from her son, Jim. WENT TO SCHOOL FOR A COLLEGE WORKSHOP. He had made his own dinner and driven back to school. She felt deflated and guilty. She was sure it wasn't one of the meetings that parents were supposed to attend, but she went to the bulletin board and checked anyway. The notice was still hanging there. Students only, thank God.
She kept going and followed a faint clicking to Amanda's room. She was typing at an incredible rate and staring at her computer screen, her iPod's earbuds in her ears. Elizabeth moved closer, into the periphery of Amanda's vision, and waved.
Amanda gave a little jump, smiled, and said 'Hi, Mom' a little too loudly. She pulled the earbud out of one ear.
'Hi. How was your day?'
'Not bad,' Amanda said. 'I got a ninety-eight on that history test we took Friday.'
'Wow. Keep learning those dates, Killer. What are you up to now?'
'A French paper. In French.'
'What's it about?'
'I guess I'd translate it as 'The Wondrous Cheeses of France.''
'I don't think I'd try that one on an empty stomach. Have you eaten dinner yet?'
'Hours ago, around five-thirty. Jim had to go back to school.'
'I saw his note.' Elizabeth paused, then realized her daughter was waiting patiently for her to leave so she could get back to work. 'Well, I'm home if you need me. My French is a little last century.'
' Tres mauvais too.'
'True. Somewhere they're keeping my grades to prove it. I'm going to eat something.'
'See you later.' Amanda stuck the earbud into her ear and stared at a handwritten note stuck in her French dictionary, then started typing again.
It occurred to Elizabeth, as it had more and more frequently, that it was going to get very lonely around here in a couple of years, just when she would really need to keep her job to put them both through college. She walked back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out some leftover vegetables and some of the chicken from tonight's dinner, put them in the microwave, and then ate while she read this morning's New York Times and Washington Post.
She started the dishwasher, went into her room, and changed into blue jeans and an old oversize gray sweatshirt of Jim's that had GEORGETOWN across the chest. Then she went to the dining room and laid out the papers she had brought home. She had requested the records on Michael Delamina, Anthony Varanese, and Frank Tosca. She began at the top of the hierarchy, with Tosca.
He was forty-one years old. He had a few convictions during his twenties and thirties for the things that young men in the Balacontano family usually did-assault, aggravated assault, and an illegal weapons violation. They weren't even youthful mistakes. They were business, the routine tasks of collecting debts for the family. They had, together, put him in prisons for six years and two months. Prison was a trade school for young Mafiosi. There they got to know important older men and the minor criminals who worked for them, and spent lots of time listening to lectures about methods and systems. They lifted weights and did pull-ups. At the end of a sentence they came out stronger, meaner, and smarter, with allies and sponsors they hadn't had before. Tosca was older and higher in the hierarchy now, and hadn't been arrested for anything in eight years.
She turned to the files on Anthony Varanese. He wasn't in the same league as Tosca. He didn't appear ever to have been in the running to become one of the little tyrants who ran the families. His life was a perfect example of something she had learned over the years: the life of a Mafioso wasn't a profession, it was an audition. Everybody was in a competition to rise in the hierarchy-to run a crew, to be a big earner, to run a network of crews, and eventually, to master the complicated web of personal and business relationships that made up a crime family. If you weren't moving up, it was just a series of ill-paid, dangerous, and unpleasant jobs. And you always worked for an employer who was volatile, suspicious, and dishonest. Varanese had fallen out of the race a long time ago. His arrests looked to her like failed starts in different parts of the country, always working for new people on some new scheme every couple of years. Tosca had shot straight up, not moving his business address more than a couple of blocks since he had begun.
It seemed so simple to do what she had asked Hunsecker for permission to do. She could have set a surveillance team on Varanese, and within a week or two she would have had a clear idea of what he was doing
