Sleeping Dogs

the hair and taken out a black plastic comb. The boy had tried to stop time, to hold everything the way it was while he decided, but it didn’t work.

Mancuso put the comb in the breast pocket of his suit and turned to dry his hands on the filthy rolling towel. The boy turned with him, took the revolver out of his jacket and aimed at the base of his skull. When he fired, the noise was terrible and bright and hollow in the little room. Then he dashed out, as much to escape the ringing in his ears as the corpse. But in the dim light of the small, orange, flame-shaped bulbs mounted on the walls of the mezzanine, he saw his mistake.

The two men hadn’t left at all. They had been waiting just outside the door for Mancuso to join them, and now they pulled guns out of their suit coats and aimed them at the boy. He remembered the puzzled face of one of them, a tall, thin man with a long nose. He looked at the boy, then past him as though he expected someone else to come out of the men’s room. The boy ran.

Years later he understood that it was probably the only thing that had saved him. To pull out the gun again, even to stand in one place long enough to allow the two men to think, would have doomed him. But he ran down the stairs to the lobby, where Eddie was just coming out of the swinging double doors with some scared ushers and three other middle-aged men in hats and long overcoats. At first the boy thought that Eddie had been caught, because they looked like plainclothes cops. But when the two men with guns had appeared behind him on the stairway, everybody but Eddie ran back into the theater. Only the boy and Eddie fired. Both of them aimed at the same man and hit him, and left the other to get off two or three shots over the railing. He was too cunning, because he fired at the big glass door to the street, where Eddie and the boy should have been, instead of into the lobby, where they were. The boy aimed again, but then the railing was a blur because he was being snatched off his feet and hustled through the pile of broken glass into the street.

Eddie had been right to do it. Eddie was a born foot soldier. He always kept in the front of his brain the certainty that anyone who thought he had a valid reason to put his head up when the air was full of flying metal was an idiot. And now it was time for Wolf to put his head down.

It had taken him two days of driving to reach Buffalo, and he felt a kind of empty-headed euphoria to be able to stand and walk. His right foot was cramped and stiff, and the tendon behind his right knee felt stretched and rubbery. He walked along Grant Street and studied the buildings. They hadn’t changed in the ten years since he had seen them except for the signs, so there was some hope. When he had arrived in Buffalo he had found it gripped by some kind of madness. The center of the downtown section had been bulldozed and sandblasted, and now lived a strange, mummified, decorative existence, with a set of trolley tracks running down Main Street and a lot of lights to verify the first impression that there was nobody on the sidewalks. They had hosed the dirty, dangerous occupants out of Chippewa Street and turned the buildings into the core of some imaginary theater district.

The whole business alarmed him. What could have become of the old man if there was some urban-renewal craziness going on? But the juggernaut had obviously run its course before it reached Grant Street. The respectable blue-collar sections obviously hadn’t struck anybody in city hall as a priority, and they retained their ancient gritty integrity.

When he had been here on business with Eddie when he was sixteen, they had driven by the house slowly, but didn’t stop. “What is it?” he had asked. Eddie had answered, “There’s a man in there who makes people disappear. He’s black—sort of brown and leathery like my shoes, and he’s about a thousand years old. Remember where it is. Never write it down, just remember.”

Years later he had made his way to Buffalo with a contract on him so huge that it wasn’t expressed in numbers. The word had gone out that the man who got him would never have to do anything again for the rest of his life. So he had found himself one winter night in the musty, dark parlor talking to the quiet old man, with the big clock ticking on the mantel and the old furnace in the basement pumping warm air up through the register at their feet.

“I know who you are,” the old man had said. “It’ll be expensive.”

Ten years later, here he was in the parlor again. This time the old man said, “I remember you. It’ll be expensive.”

“I know,” Wolf said. He considered himself lucky that the old man was still above ground with ten years added on to the unknowable number he had already lived.

The old man seemed to be thinking about how long ten years was too. “How hard are they looking after all these years? Don’t lie to me.”

“They found me,” he said. “They must be trying hard.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“No. Why now?”

“I’ve been living far away all this time. I wasn’t stupid enough to even think about coming back, but Tony Talarese found me.”

“So you killed him, which makes four. Peter Mantino makes six, because you had to shoot a man to get to him.”

“So everybody knows.”

“People talk. This time I listened.”

“Why?”

“I knew you’d been away. That meant you don’t have anybody you didn’t know ten years ago.”

“So you waited for me to come.”

“I waited.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“When you were in trouble before, you didn’t want to run away from it until you hurt them. You killed about twenty of them before you let it go.”

“It wasn’t twenty.”

The old man shrugged. “It don’t matter. I want to know if you’re going to do that again.”

“No,” Wolf said. “It was worth trying to get Talarese before he told anybody where I was. I thought he was too greedy to let anybody else collect. Then there was a shooter waiting for me at the L.A. airport. Unless things have changed a lot, there’s nobody who could have arranged that except Mantino.”

“Who else do you want? Did you come to town to get Angelo Fratelli?”

“No. All I want is a passport and a way out. I want to go under again.”

“Then I’ll go see a man.” The old man pushed himself up out of the chair with his arms, and stayed bent over for a second before straightening. As he dressed for his errand, he looked frail and antique. He put on a sleeveless sweater, wrapped a scarf around his neck, put on a dark brown overcoat and then snapped a pair of rubbers over his sturdy leather shoes to keep his feet dry, as though it were midwinter. He walked carefully to the door. “Lock it behind me. Anybody comes who don’t have a key, shoot him.”

“I didn’t bring a gun.”

The old man had to turn the whole upper part of his body around to look at him. “There’s a shotgun in the closet.” He closed the door, and Wolf could hear him slowly and carefully moving over the elastic boards of the porch toward the steps, and then silence returned.

The house was still fiercely neat. The knives hanging from hooks in the kitchen had been sharpened so many times that they all had fillet blades, but they were hung in unbroken descending order of length. The old man’s collection of boots was lined up in ranks in the front of the closet. The shotgun was a Remington that might have been acquired any time after the turn of the century, and it rested in a stand that the old man had made, with a block at the floor cut with a jigsaw to fit the butt, and a pair of bent clamps on the barrel to keep it from toppling over. The plastic cap of an aspirin bottle had been fitted over the muzzle to keep out the dust. Wolf lifted it out of its stand and sniffed it: linseed oil on the stock and gun oil on the barrel. He pumped the slide and felt the smooth, easy clicks as he ejected a shell onto the carpet. He glanced at it before he slipped it back in: double-ought buckshot. The old man didn’t want to have to shoot anybody twice.

He had been awake most of the time for seventy-two hours now, and his mind was beginning to feel the wear. He had to force himself to stay alert for a few more minutes. He found the box of shotgun shells on the floor behind the boots, filled his coat pockets with them and took the shotgun with him.

He was beginning to feel an exhaustion almost like dizziness, so that when he turned his head he had to take a moment to focus on the new sight. He knew he was probably reacting to this more than to the danger of sleeping