much less get to. There are classified military installations here and abroad. Nobody can overhear the name of the facility and have the faintest idea where or what it is. A lot of these places are somewhere in the middle of huge bases that are themselves remote and difficult to get into. You and I would meet once a day for a few weeks at a time, to chat. This might go on for a year or two, longer if you want. You would have to make your own deal for immunity with your own lawyer.'
'You're not offering blanket immunity?'
'They approve that for people who give us suspects who are much worse than the informants are. I don't think the attorney general's office would approve blanket immunity for you. Everything you've done is a capital crime. I think I can get you some kind of immunity for the crimes you tell us about. Anything else, and you'd be fair game.'
'And the court testimony?'
'You would have to testify in the cases where that's the best route to a conviction. If you're the eyewitness, it's unavoidable. But they wouldn't have you testifying against bookies and bagmen and corrupt accountants. The prosecution would look ridiculous bringing in someone like you for that. I'd say you should expect to testify against a few bosses. Just having you in a court saying you know them and have worked for them would be a big strike against them in the minds of a jury.'
'There's a lot of showmanship in your business, isn't there?'
'Yes,' she said. 'Right now, we're talking about big, news-making prosecutions of Mafia bosses. This is how we do them. We find somebody who was on the inside, who knows enough details so there can't be a mistake, and we make a deal with him to testify.'
'Is this your whole pitch?' he asked. 'Your whole offer?'
'I can't give you money, except in the form of support while you're working with us.'
'I don't need money.'
'Good.'
'And your bosses have agreed to everything else?'
'No,' she said. 'Right now, nobody knows I'm talking to you. This is an emergency. I have to make my best offer to you now, before you're dead. I can talk to them after you're safe.'
'Then what you're offering is theoretical. Your boss isn't behind you on this, or you wouldn't be flying around the country without telling him what you're doing.'
She sighed. 'I'll be completely open with you. My boss, the deputy assistant attorney general in charge of my section, is a political appointee. He's still green, and has no experience making deals with informants, and feels suspicious about the practice. He'll learn as he goes. If we didn't make arrangements of this sort, we'd still be trying to prove the Mafia exists. His bosses know that, and if I can bring in the offer of your services, they'll explain it to him. But no. At this moment he doesn't know what I'm doing.'
'So you haven't actually got any offer.'
'What I've described is what I believe I can get approved, even over the objections of my boss. If his bosses feel reluctant to overrule him, I have other allies I've collected over the years who would help persuade them. Some are powerful people. A call from any of them would almost certainly work wonders.'
'I'm impressed by your commitment,' he said. 'You'll use up all your markers and call in all the one-time favors. It will leave you without the power to do much else.'
'You'll give it back to me. If I can get convictions of a fair number of the old men, then I'll have more friends than I can use. It will also accomplish what you want most. Putting these people in prison forever, just like you did Carlo Balacontano, is as good as killing them, isn't it?'
He pursed his lips, and there was a pained expression in his eyes. 'I appreciate the offer, and I believe it's real. But I can't accept it.'
'What's wrong? What is it that's missing? I'm offering to keep you alive for as long as you want federal protection. If you don't get off the streets to a place where they can't reach you, they'll kill you.'
'They'll keep trying, certainly.'
She watched him as he drove back along Ventura Boulevard to Lankershim and then up the steep hill to her hotel. As he pulled into the circle in front of the entrance, she said, 'Maybe this isn't the best I can do. Give me a chance. You haven't said what's missing. Just tell me, and I'll try to get it.'
'Freedom,' he said.
'I don't know how to give you that,' she said. 'The things you've done don't leave me a way.'
'Exactly.'
He stopped in front of the entrance and looked at her expectantly. She got out of the car and then stood for a moment, watching him as he moved the car forward and turned to leave the circular drive.
30
He drove off the circle and onto the driveway, watching her in the rearview mirror as she turned, walked into the hotel, and disappeared. He felt a small twinge of regret as he turned from the driveway onto the sloping road down the hill. He had begun to feel a kind of interest in her. It wasn't affection, just a kind of sympathy for her position in this mess. He thought about the little he knew about her. She had, about twenty years ago, signed on at the Justice Department. Since then, she had apparently given her job an honest effort. She had lost her husband somehow-cancer, if he remembered right-before he had even become aware of who she was, and she had raised her two kids alone. He was glad she hadn't done anything foolish to try to get him captured. He would have hated killing her.
He coasted down the long hill from the Universal complex, keeping his speed from increasing too quickly. The steep road headed due west to Lankershim Boulevard, then flattened and crossed it onto the bridge over the freeway. As he reached the level pavement at the bottom of the hill at the intersection, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw something that disturbed him. The car coming down the hill behind him was a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria. There was a driver wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, a tan short-sleeved shirt over a black T-shirt. A man in the passenger seat wore a brimmed cap that was a drab beige. He had a moustache and wore a pair of yellow shooting glasses.
It was this man that disturbed him. He was fiddling with something that rested on his lap. The fact that the car was pointed downward on the hill allowed Schaeffer to see through the windshield over the dashboard into the front seats. What the man in the passenger seat had on his lap appeared to be a small automatic weapon with a long silencer fitted on the short barrel. It looked like an Ingram MAC-10. He lifted it slightly, barrel upward, and slid a long magazine into the handle. Then he turned the weapon slightly and fiddled with the selector lever.
The light turned green, but Schaeffer didn't cross Lankershim. Instead, he quickly turned right just as the first of a large group of pedestrians was stepping off the curb into the crosswalk that led to the Universal Studios entrance from the bus and subway station across the street. He glanced in the mirror and saw that the stream of people that had spilled into the wake of his car had blocked the blue Crown Victoria. He memorized the car's exact color and shape as he sped up Lankershim.
He veered to the right at the fork onto Cahuenga, then turned right again to try to lose himself in the residential streets on that side. He had no real knowledge of the neighborhood, but he had the sense that in the flats of the east valley, there was a grid of north-south streets crossed by the big east-west boulevards-Ventura, Moorpark, Riverside, Magnolia, Burbank. He made a zigzag pattern as he sped away from Universal. He turned right on Riverside and drove east. He remembered that in this direction were Griffith Park and Burbank and Pasadena.
He had to find a telephone. As he drove along Riverside, he saw a Marie Callender's restaurant. He swung into the parking lot, trotted into the building, and put coins into the pay phone by the men's room. He dialed Elizabeth Waring's cell number. He heard her say 'Hello?'
'It's me,' he said.
'Have you changed-'
'No. Just listen. When I drove away from your hotel, two men in a blue Crown Vic pulled out after me. If they don't belong to you, then they're more shooters.'
