Sleeping Dogs

fronts of the art museum and the Buffalo Historical Museum on a little hillside, gleaming white in the moonlight. Then his view was blocked by trees again, and he passed the first brick walls of the zoo. Now he saw McCarron. He was standing on the first of the asphalt basketball courts in the park, and he had a big tan dog on a leash. Angelo was a little unnerved. When McCarron had said he walked his dog at night, Fratelli had imagined a hairy little yapper, not a big slavering monster. But he pulled over anyway, extricated his large body from the little Toyota and stepped onto the lawn.

“What kind of dog is that?” he asked. He leaned against the fence instead of going through the gate onto the court.

“It’s a golden retriever,” said McCarron. He reached down and pounded the dog. To Fratelli it seemed he had hammered it pretty hard, but the dog appeared to love it, so he ventured closer. “Don’t worry,” said McCarron. “He doesn’t bite.”

“Then what good is he?”

McCarron seemed to think about this for a long time. “My wife bought him,” he said finally.

“Come on,” said Angelo. “Get in and we’ll go for a ride. If we stand around here, it’s only a matter of time before kids come to hit us over the head or cops come to save us.”

McCarron and the dog moved out of the basketball court and to the side of the car. As the banker opened the door, Fratelli stopped him. “Has he taken a leak lately?”

McCarron smiled. “He won’t foul the car.”

As Angelo went back to the driver’s side, he thought about that one: “foul the car.” Whatever this McCarron was going to be worth, he was a real dog-and-horse, riding-boots-and-driving-gloves asshole.

As Angelo started the car, he felt it lurch and rock, once as the dog bounded into the back seat, and once as McCarron seated himself in the front. He pulled out onto the drive. He wasn’t surprised that in the enclosed space of the little car he could smell the dog, but he could also smell something fainter. McCarron was wearing some kind of perfumed after-shave or cologne. He had always heard that it was declasse to slap that stuff on. It seemed to Angelo that as you moved up the social strata, at each step all the rules were reversed. It was like clothes. At a certain level, not wearing nice clothes meant you didn’t have a job. Two levels up from there, it meant you didn’t need one.

Wolf was driving past the park that abutted the zoo when he saw a man and a dog come out of one of the basketball courts. At first he couldn’t be sure what was going on, but in the rearview mirror he saw the man join somebody who could have been Angelo Fratelli. When the dog and the two men got into the little gray Toyota, he knew. At the first turn Wolf pulled over, stopped and lay down on the front seat. When he saw the headlights flash on the ceiling of his car and then vanish, he sat up and prepared to follow.

Angelo drove to Delaware Avenue and turned left to go out of the city. He had begun to feel that he needed to bring this one up into the light and take a look at him. Driving around in the dark wasn’t going to tell him who he was dealing with. He turned the next corner and then turned again at Elmwood toward the state university. The traffic was consistent and still heavy, but most of it was going away from Buffalo State at dinnertime. On an impulse, he turned on Forest Avenue and went up a short driveway to a parking lot at the edge of the campus. Ahead of him was a carload of young men. They took a ticket from a dispenser, and a wooden beam raised itself to let them in.

“What’s this?” asked McCarron. “Why are we stopping?”

“The university. There’s plenty of people. It’s a good place to talk.”

“Is this safe?”

“Who do you think those kids are going to recognize—you or me?” Angelo waited for a stupid answer, but when it didn’t come, he drove into the lot, stopped the car in the middle of a row, then turned toward his passenger. “Okay, Mr. McCarron. What do you want from me?”

The banker took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “I have a problem. I was going to say ‘I have reason to believe,’ but that’s not strong enough. I know I have a problem. I’ve been borrowing funds from certain accounts. They were secret, set up with false names. I knew that the owners wouldn’t go to the authorities if they discovered a problem, but now they know, and I think someone will come for me at some point.”

Angelo didn’t conceal his disappointment. “Shit,” he said. “What do you want? Protection?”

McCarron said, “I don’t think that if they really want me, bodyguards would be of much use. I’d like to get out of the country. Maybe you could arrange whatever you do for your own people in this situation—plastic surgery, papers and so on.”

Angelo moved his head from side to side and let out a little snort that was partly a laugh. It was absurd, but maybe if he did this man a favor he wouldn’t regret it. After all, McCarron was still the president of a perfectly good bank. “That kind of thing mostly happens in the movies. But if you’ll tell me who’s pissed off at you, I might be able to get him off your back.” He began to calculate how it would work. He could tell McCarron his enemy was demanding a million dollars. Then, with a hundred thousand or so and a slight expenditure of bluster, Angelo could probably convince any reasonably small-time wiseguy that he had saved his honor and had settled his dispute.

“It’s not like that,” said McCarron. “I can’t tell you much. I thought they were drug dealers, but now I believe it’s the … uh, CIA.”

Angelo’s hands gripped the steering wheel, and he could see that his knuckles were turning white and feel that rage was gripping his chest and throat. All of his visions of access to a bank were laughable; this man was insane. He had heard of this kind of thing happening. Sometimes they saw religious visions, or heard voices telling them to do things like drop their pants in some public place. Sometimes they decided the CIA was bombarding their feeble brains with radio waves and listening to what they were thinking. He wasn’t going to get inside the bank, and clearly within a short time McCarron wasn’t going to either. He held his temper. “Gee,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

McCarron was alarmed. “You won’t do it?”

“The C fucking IA … I just don’t know.” Angelo avoided McCarron’s wide-eyed, gaping face, letting his eyes wander to the nearest lighted building. At the corner of the building were two glass doors, so the whole corner was glass. Beyond the door, in the hallway, he could see a few students, but there was also a man in his late thirties or early forties with sandy hair. The man was looking at something on a bulletin board; no, he seemed to be reading everything on the bulletin board. He looked odd to Angelo. What was it? There was something about the way he carried himself, a slight slouch, as though he were keeping most of his weight on one foot, his coat open and his arms down at his sides. Then Angelo realized that the man was looking at him in the reflection on the dark glass of the door beside him.

Angelo studied the face in the window and then began to sweat. “My God,” he said, and realized he had said it aloud in front of this lunatic, but then decided he didn’t care.

“What’s wrong?” asked McCarron. “What is it? Your heart?” He grabbed Angelo’s arm.

“No! Get your hands off me.” Angelo started the car and backed out of the space, then guided the little car around to the exit. He made it down the narrow drive about forty feet, then had to stop to wait for the cars ahead of him to pay the man at the kiosk and drive off.

The station wagon at the head of the line settled its accounts with the man and pulled forward under the raised barrier, but then something very noisy happened to it. At first Angelo didn’t see the bus coming any more than the driver of the wagon did, but just as its nose moved a couple of feet into the street, the bus arrived to occupy the same space. It was on its approach to the bus stop, so it was only inches from the curb when it hit the station wagon. It popped the front bumper off, took the grille and smeared the front end of the station wagon sideways as it came to a stop across the driveway.

Angelo looked for a way out. The curb on both sides of the car was at least a foot high, and if he tried to bump over it he would probably get stuck halfway. His Caddy might have made it, but this little Toyota’s doughnut tires didn’t have a chance. He was stuck in a track like a go-cart in an amusement park. There were two cars and something that looked like the end of the world ahead of him, and at least four or five behind him. Curious people were now beginning to come out of the nearby campus buildings, some of them looking amused, some worried. The man he had seen would wait just long enough for the confusion to peak, and then he would be here. Angelo couldn’t defend himself; he didn’t even have a gun. If he had been in the Cadillac, he could at least have used the phone to call for help. He looked around him. Far down the street to his left was the lighted yellow sign of a bar called The Canal.