Sleeping Dogs

“Yes,” Lorenz said finally.

Hamp smiled. “Good,” he said, and he meant it. He felt the tension begin to go out of him. “I appreciate it.” He stood up and took a step toward the door, then stopped and patted Martha’s shoulder hard. He could feel the muscle and bone under the fur, like a man’s upper arm. A tongue like a wet slice of ham slipped out between the lower teeth, and the thick tail whipped back and forth.

As Hamp walked to the door, Lorenz shook his hand. “Now, that’s something,” he said. “She doesn’t like people much, but she sure likes you.”

* * *

Hamp sat on the bed and looked above him at the big, crude wooden lintel beam over the door that led to the bathroom. There were lots of Spanish touches in La Fonda, little colored designs hand-painted in unlikely places on the white walls, and even the walls themselves, a foot and a half thick on the outside. It was the sort of building that conveyed a sense of security.

Hamp had seen curiosity take some strange forms in his time, and if a man like Peter Mantino was dead, it was conceivable that some of the people who felt close to him were in town. If they were, none of them would be above bugging the room of a Justice Department field man just to see if his leads were any better than theirs. He decided that all he could do was to turn on the television set to mask some of what he was going to say.

When Elizabeth Waring answered, her voice was almost a whisper. “Hello,” said Hamp. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Jack?”

“That’s right. I just finished up with the local police here. They don’t have much to go on, but the best guess is a lone man who probably didn’t have anything in mind except to kill Mantino, The second best guess is what’s going in the papers.”

“What’s that?”

“A robber impersonated a security guard to gain entry, found the victims armed and had to kill them to get out.”

“Do you think it’s the same man?”

“I don’t know that two crimes are enough to establish a reliable pattern.”

She sighed deeply enough so he could hear it. “Jack, yesterday I used up a favor in Personnel to look into who you are. I know you probably don’t expect much from me, but please don’t let that keep you from telling me what you think—not what you know, because nobody really knows anything yet. Because I found out I can expect a lot from you, and I’m going to need it.”

Hamp ran this through a second time, and it surprised him. She was manipulating him with flattery. It was exactly what he would have done if he were the one stuck in Washington. She could easily be one of those blondes with long, straight, shiny hair and light, empty eyes who could look at you without blinking and dazzle you with bullshit. “Ninety-nine to one it’s him.”

“Why?”

“There aren’t a whole lot of people who would do it this way. It takes a certain kind of person to walk into the other fellow’s home ground, look him in the eye, drop the hammer on him and walk away. See, Talarese and Mantino were both people he knew probably weren’t alone. If he knew who they were, then he’d know they were as likely to be armed as he was. It’s not like the sort of thing a psycho does, where he wants to watch some defenseless victim get scared and suffer and all that so he can feel powerful. It’s the opposite. He knows he’s outnumbered and probably being hunted, and he has to be sure because he can’t hang around and try again. He does it this way because he knows that the other fellow is going to take a second or two stuttering and fumbling, and he knows he isn’t. You hear what I’m saying, right? He knows he isn’t.”

There was a pause on Elizabeth’s end of the line that sounded as though she were thinking hard. “What’s he doing now?”

“I think he’s already done it. He wouldn’t have booked a Hong Kong flight if he wasn’t trying to get away. I think the reason he went after Mantino has something to do with that. Maybe it was a payoff to somebody to get him out: Mantino had an outsider for a bodyguard, which to me means that he didn’t trust somebody in his own organization. But it’s just as likely that our boy simply wanted to get everybody in an uproar so they’d be too busy putting in bulletproof glass to go out and look for him.”

“Welcome aboard, Jack.”

“What?”

“You just figured out as much about the way he thinks as anybody else knows after ten years.”

“Save the congratulations.”

“Why?”

“Because if I get too good at this, sometime I just might get a look at him.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I might waste a second or two making up my mind.”

The New Mexico experience had been a disaster. He couldn’t keep putting himself in positions where some scared cop could pop him in the dark.

Eddie Mastrewski had been the world’s greatest advocate of caution. Wolf could see Eddie again, fat and sweating, his eyes bulging and the veins in his forehead visible as he drove the car onto the highway outside St. Louis. “That wasn’t right, kid,” he had said, glancing up at the rearview mirror, then down at the boy, then into the mirror, then into the other mirror so often that the road in front of him seemed only an afterthought. It was at this moment that the boy had begun to worry. Eddie looked as though he were about to explode. The boy had seen piles of internal organs in the butcher shop, but had only a cloudy notion of how they worked. He thought that the pumping of Eddie’s heart was increasing the pressure in his body, and that if it didn’t stop, he would have a heart attack, which in the boy’s mind meant an explosion of the pump.

“We do this for a living,” said Eddie. “It’s not some kind of contest. We can’t go around getting into gunfights.” The boy had nodded sagely for Eddie’s benefit, and watched him start to settle down slowly.

The boy’s part of it had gone as Eddie had planned. He had sat in the back of the movie theater next to some boys his age, and Mancuso hadn’t even noticed him. To all the adults, he had just seemed to be one of a gang of kids who had come together from the neighborhood to see the movie. When Mancuso got up in the middle of the movie to go to the upstairs bathroom, the boy had followed.

He hadn’t wanted to follow because he was getting interested in the images on the huge screen at the front. The movie was La Dolce Vita, and he could still remember the moment when he’d had to walk out. It was dawn somewhere outside Rome after a night of incomprehensible carousing, and Marcello Mastroianni had climbed onto some woman’s back and was riding her like a horse on the grass. The boy had no clear notion of what was going on, or if indeed it really was going on or was just some foreign way of conveying decadence. It was the only image he now retained of the film thirty years later, because it was what had been on the screen as he had glanced over his shoulder when he reached the aisle. He had longed to stay at least until the scene changed, because although it had never happened in any movie he had ever seen, he had some forlorn hope that somebody was about to have sexual intercourse, or at least that the woman was about to become naked through some happy act of negligence. Even he could see that the rules were different for foreign movies—he had never seen Doris Day and Rock Hudson behave like this—and he hated to leave without knowing.

Because of this he was annoyed with Mancuso when he followed him into the men’s room in the loge. But when he had opened the door, he had forgotten about the movie. Mancuso hadn’t gone in to relieve himself; he had gone in to meet two other men. When the boy walked in, all three had turned to face him, jerking their heads in quick unison like a flock of birds. The boy had looked away from them and gone straight to the urinal because he couldn’t imagine any other act that would explain his presence. He had stood there, straining to coax some urine out of himself. Could they tell he wasn’t pissing? The three had moved away to the end of the room. He could hear their leather soles on the hard white tiles. Mancuso gave the two men crinkly envelopes, and then the men left, swinging the door against the squeaky spring that was supposed to hold it closed.

As Mancuso went to wash his hands at the sink, the boy had wondered why. But Mancuso was using it as an excuse for standing in front of the mirror and admiring his thick brown hair. Then he had run his wet hands through