judges would grant him immunity to testify, or that immunity would be worth much without protection from the Mafia. Which would get us into the area of the Witness Protection Program. If he’s stayed alive while they were looking for him for ten years, he can do better on his own. And, of course, it would put the Department in the position of setting a man free who has probably killed dozens of people.”
“Dozens? Literally?” Hillman raised his eyebrows.
“That’s if the stories are true. It’s hard to tell.”
“And we won’t know unless we go out and catch him?”
Elizabeth didn’t take the bait. “I can’t guarantee we’ll ever know more than we do right now. I’m not qualified to tell you whether taking him off the streets will be of political value to the Department. I do know it probably won’t contribute much to the safety of the average citizen in his home; in fact, what he’s been doing all week is killing off some of the very people we’d most like to take out of the game. That includes the informant you mentioned. Tony T was a bad man.”
“I’m impressed, Elizabeth,” said the deputy assistant. “I asked for hard-nosed, and that’s exactly what I got. What’s your conclusion?”
“I think the opposition is more likely to get him than we are.”
“You do?”
“Sure. They would consider him a more serious problem than we do because his memory can put a lot of them away for life. They know more about him than we do, and they have an unlimited budget.” She hesitated for a second, not because she was considering not saying it, but to be sure he got it. “And they operate on utilitarian principles too.”
Richardson came out of the elevator and stalked directly to Elizabeth’s desk. “He likes you.”
“He does?”
“He thinks you’re the best thing that could happen.”
She shook her head. “I could see it from the minute I walked in there. We were made for each other. The electricity in the air, the—”
“Jesus, Elizabeth, you handled him brilliantly. You won. Now, be gracious in victory and stop fighting. He wants us to go for it.”
Wolf stood in the shower and let the heavy flow of water pour over him. He needed to be soothed. When he moved, he could feel a small hitch in his back where he had taken the jolts of the bus ride across Arizona. He had been awakened a few times during the night, not by the sounds of cars, the motel ice machine or the voices in other rooms, but by his mind running through its accumulated clutter. Each time, when consciousness came, he would find himself in midthought, sometimes in midsentence, fully aware of the specious train of logic he had been following in his sleep.
The last time, he had been thinking about Meg. He hated to think about her now when he was awake, because she was gone forever. He never had any trouble recalling the sight of her, or even the scent of her perfume. He had been constructing a dream about her; in it he would live, and then he would go back and look at her. It wouldn’t be easy to accomplish, because women of her class ventured off the enclosed, protected parks their husbands inherited less and less often as they grew older. They were occupied with their children until they sent them away to some awful boarding school, and after that they saw a select group of friends who were, after so many generations, so closely related that they looked like sisters. When he reached this part of the dream, the sense of loss and disappointment woke him up, and he began to scheme in the darkness for some way to go home. At some point in the night he had let go of it, and awakened to the one thing the darkness and isolation had let him forget. He had been doing his feeling and thinking on the premise that he was a constant, unchanging being, that the continuity of his memories and consciousness somehow guaranteed that he was the same. But now, as he became more alert to the physical world that chilled his bones, put pressure on his joints and reflected his body in mirrors, he remembered. When he was asleep, or when nothing reminded him of it, he felt exactly the same as he had the first time he had put on his Little League baseball uniform. He could even remember the incredible whiteness of the flannel, and feel the softness of it against his legs. That was the ridiculous part of memory, or one of the ridiculous parts. It was only his body that wasn’t still ten years old.
Wolf dried himself with two of the big rough white towels and walked into the bedroom. There were really two problems now, and the way to get through this was to look at them separately. The old men were the big problem. He had done the right thing by going to Las Vegas. Little Norman might be able to convince them that the best thing they could do was to let Carl Bala stay in his cage and forget about helping him with his revenge.
The other problem was new to him. He knew that Little Norman must have been telling the truth. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire. It was the only thing that explained the commotion in the kitchen when he had popped the bastard. It had been so obvious; why hadn’t he figured it out? Because it was such an outrageous idea that his mind had somehow blocked it. But now the New York police knew something about him. Hell, they must know a lot about him if they could have five cops waiting for him in the Los Angeles airport a few hours later. Because that’s what it had been; he had seen the whole thing wrong. It wasn’t four cops looking for a shooter; it was five cops looking for him.
He sat down on the bed and thought about this, and it was still wrong. The New York police couldn’t have gotten on a plane and caught up with him like that. They would have needed to take practically the next flight out of New York, and what could they expect to do in Los Angeles? They wouldn’t have jurisdiction. Now it fell into place inevitably. It wasn’t the New York police; it was federal cops—the FBI. It fit better anyway. They were the ones who were always bugging telephones and taping microphones to people, and they wouldn’t have to put anybody on a plane; they would simply make a phone call to the Los Angeles office to have their agent bring four bozos across town to scoop him up.
Wolf dressed quickly and walked across the street to the pay phone outside a small diner. He had twenty dollars in quarters, two ten-dollar rolls that he had bought from the sleepy change girl posted near the slot machines in the lobby of his motel in Las Vegas. He had picked up the habit from Little Norman in the old days, and it had come back to him. Little Norman had always told him that his hands were too small to use by themselves. A fist wrapped around a roll of quarters might lose a few hundredths of a second getting there, but when it did it would make an impression.
He put a quarter into the telephone and dialed the number. The operator came on the line and said, “Please deposit three thirty-five.” He laboriously pumped fourteen quarters into the slot, and after the fourteenth, the operator wouldn’t go away until she had said, “You have fifteen cents’ credit.” Then it sounded as though she were climbing into a jar and then screwing the lid on after her. And finally he heard the ring. It sounded different from the ones here, sort of bubbly and quick, and it made him feel as though he were home. It was maddening. He was listening to her phone, and he could see the room in his memory.
“Hello?”
“Hi,” he said. “I’m going to have to talk fast.”
“After leaving me alone this long, I should say you are.” He tried to remember how long it had been since he had heard anyone talk with a
“Not to make excuses. It’s the connection. Wiring problems, I think.” She would understand that. It was from one of those silly books she had made him read. The British spy had detected a couple of ohms of extra resistance on the line to his reading lamp, and concluded it must be a bug. An American would have gone through the place with a bug detector. You could buy one for twenty-five bucks.
“Oh,” she said. Then, “
It was the FBI that worried him. In another book she had forced on him he had read that the National Security Agency had the capability of recording every transatlantic telephone call. The book hadn’t said whether they did it, or what use they made of all those tapes, but if they didn’t share them with the FBI, they were stupid. He had heard a lot about American intelligence services, but he hadn’t heard that they weren’t devious enough.
“I’m going to have to stay longer than I thought,” he said.
“Why? Can you-”
“It’s because I made a mistake. I’d like to say it was something else, but it wasn’t.”
