'Us?'
'They need more revenge than they can get with one person.'
'How about that massage place?' It was a white storefront, with four Asian women in white shorts and T- shirts looking out the front window through gauzy curtains to see what the commotion was. 'Who owns that?'
'Can't risk it. This close to Vince's place, they might be hookers, and that takes protection.' He saw something up the street ahead of them that didn't make him happy. He took her hand and walked with her in a diagonal across the street, around a corner, and then took another diagonal onto State Street, and then up the front steps of an enormous church.
'You think a church is any safer than a restaurant?'
'It's the Holy Name Cathedral. I'm hoping there won't be anybody in there who will rat us out for a tip.' He reached up to tug one of the big bronze doors and it opened automatically, powered by a hidden hydraulic system. 'That gives me the creeps.'
'I guess you're probably not one of their regulars.' They slipped inside and the huge bronze door swung shut. The sanctuary was big and ornate, but there seemed to be nobody in it at the moment.
They moved quickly toward the altar past a screen that seemed to repeat the leaf pattern of the bronze doors, staying on the right aisle, trotting past what seemed like a hundred rows of wooden pews. They reached a row of confessional booths. When they heard the big front door opening again, Elizabeth reached for the door of one of the confessionals, but the Butcher's Boy held her arm and shook his head. He held her hand and pulled her with him to the big gallery pipe organ set on the right side of the sanctuary in its own alcove. He dragged her into the alcove where they were shielded from view by clustered marble pillars. There was a seat for the organist and four keyboards, but he went to look at the wood paneling beside the row of gold organ pipes above the keyboards. She whispered, 'We could hide in the chapel. It's right up there, past the altar on the right.'
He whispered, 'They'll search it.' He took a small pick the size of a toothpick and an equally small tension wrench out of his wallet. He was staring at a keyhole she hadn't noticed, barely visible at one side of the wooden facade of the organ. He probed the lock and picked it in a few seconds. He opened the door, pulled down a small set of folding steps, and pushed her in front of him. She climbed in, and he followed, then pulled up the steps and closed the door.
They were inside the organ. They took a few steps along a narrow walkway and stopped. Directly in front of them was the row of tall gilded organ pipes and behind them, a mesh screen. The windowless space was open far above to the ceiling of the cathedral, so there was dim light. All the way to the top there were platforms and railings and steps that connected the different levels, all of them in a light-colored hardwood. On each level she could see hundreds of organ pipes arranged in rows graded by length and diameter from the size of a ballpoint pen to the size of her waist, and mounted in wooden enclosures. Most of them were gleaming metal tubes, but others were wooden quadrangles. She and the Butcher's Boy stood side by side behind the row of facade pipes, looking out the narrow spaces between the pipes and through the fabric mesh and listening. She put her right hand on the gun in her pocket and held it there.
There were three of them. She heard them before she saw them. They wore leather-soled shoes, and they were walking along the pews toward the altar. One was on each side, brushing the walls occasionally as they moved ahead. The third came up the center aisle, where there was a long runner that muffled his footsteps. Now and then each of them would stop, bend low, and sight under a section of pews in case someone was hiding under the wooden seats. She wondered if the older one in the center could be Vincent Pugliese. Probably he wasn't. Underbosses of major families didn't do this kind of work.
The men stage-whispered as they reached the front. 'I guess he didn't come in here.'
'Somebody did. I saw the front door shut from the street.'
'Did he have a black suit with a funny white collar?'
'It wasn't a priest. There was a woman with him.'
'That's refreshing.'
'You think that's funny?'
'Somebody's here, but there's nobody in the pews. Now what?'
'Take a look up there around the altar and pulpit.' There was the sound of hard soles on the broad marble steps, and now Elizabeth could see them more clearly. She shuddered. Each time they eliminated a hiding place, they were more likely to find the unlocked door into the organ.
'Check the confessionals.' She heard small doors opening and shutting quickly as the man moved down the line. That was where she would have been if not for him.
There were the sounds of shoes on the floor of the sanctuary again, moving off. The big front door opened and she heard traffic sounds from outside, the whisper of car tires, a distant horn, then silence.
His face was right beside hers. 'They're gone.'
She was so relieved that she felt like grinning, but controlled it. 'I guess they don't spend as much time in churches as you do, or they'd have found us.'
He said, 'You wanted to talk to me. So here we are. Talk, and then we can each go about our business.'
'You're in very big trouble,' she said. 'It looks as though everybody in the Mafia would like you to die.'
'They're doing their best to make it happen.'
'I can make sure it doesn't. You'll be given protection. I don't mean a guard coming by to look through a prison window at you once in a while. I mean dedicated people on duty twenty-four hours a day with nothing else to do but make sure you don't mysteriously beat yourself up and hang yourself with a bed sheet.'
'Why would I be willing to go to a prison? I've never even been charged with anything.'
'It wouldn't need to be a prison. It just has to be safe. Joseph Valachi was on an army base. You could be somewhere like that.'
'Valachi was in prison. He was moved to an army base because he got hit with a pipe.'
'That was half a century ago. We can do better now.'
'So can I.'
'After last night there will be nowhere you can hide. As soon as the old men know you went after the Castigliones, they'll drop everything and make sure of it. They'll be scared. Even the ones who wanted Tosca dead will be after you. You're a menace to them.'
'So what you're offering is some form of protective custody in exchange for testifying against Mafia guys.'
'It's my help for your help. Yes, I hope that there will be some people you can testify against-maybe a Mafioso you personally saw kill somebody. Maybe you killed somebody and he paid you. We can't bring you in to testify against somebody who did something minor. It wouldn't work well in court. But I'm hoping you'll give us tips on whatever you know was going on, and we can follow your leads and get our own evidence about what's happening now. Most likely you and I would spend some months talking every day. Then your job would be to testify in the trials of major criminals. The whole process would probably take a couple of years. You would be protected at whatever level is necessary. And I mean any level.'
He spoke deliberately. 'I'm sure you're sincere about what you're saying,' he said. 'But you'll have to forgive me if I don't jump at the idea of Justice Department protection.'
'I know, you have good reason to believe you're better at this than either the Justice Department or the Mafia. But you have to be able to close your eyes long enough to sleep. And two or three years of invisibility could make a huge difference. Some of the old men could die. Others could ask themselves why they're wasting their time on you and quit. Every day above ground is a good day. I can offer you a thousand days,' she said. 'Face it. If you want guaranteed survival, you're going to be my informant. Nobody else can protect you.'
'You're very open and I can see you're trying to be honest,' he said. 'But no, thank you.'
'But why? Don't you trust me?'
'I don't mean to be insulting. But you work for a huge organization. If I went in with you, within ten minutes nothing would be up to you anymore.' He turned toward the doorway. 'Those guys are long gone. Let's get out of here before somebody comes to play the organ.'
He started to push open the door, but there was another faint hum. Someone was opening the big bronze doors at the back of the church again. 'Wait.' He closed the door.
Six people entered this time. She could tell because as each entered, the door would begin to shut until the
