“Is there anything I can do?”
This was the hard part. If they were listening, it had to be plausible nonsense. “Yeah. It’s funny I should be thinking about this right now, but I can’t get it out of my mind. The best thing you could do is spend today rearranging things. Maybe move your clothes and stuff. A good place might be at the north end, where the bed used to be.” He spent a second hoping she had gotten it, and knowing she couldn’t have. He thought of Yorkshire pudding, and there was an archbishop, but if he got that crude, they would have it before she did.
But she said, “Oh. The present arrangement isn’t good?”
Her voice had the sort of concern he was listening for, but he needed to be sure. “I’ve done a lot of this kind of decorating,” he said. “If you take my advice, I think it will brighten things up a lot.”
“Is it … that dark now?”
He was satisfied. She knew. “It just struck me as a good idea. I’d love to look the place over myself, but I just can’t get away right now. I’m hoping I’ll be able to soon.”
“I’d be very sad if you couldn’t.”
“I would too.”
There was a long silence on the other end, and he thought he could hear her breathing. It began to bring her back as a physical presence: the barely detectable scent on her hair, the incredibly soft skin just in front of her ear, and then, “I wanted to say,” Margaret said, “just in case we don’t get to speak again soon, that I …” She paused and then said the next two words softly: “love you.” He drew in his breath to answer, but she went on rapidly. “Please don’t answer, because it wouldn’t mean anything if you did right now. I wouldn’t have said it today either, but I thought I’d better, given the circumstances. These things often don’t get said, and then you regret it and all that. I know this is being unfair to you in case you wanted to say it for the same reasons, but that’s the way it is.”
“I love you.”
“After all that? It makes me feel worse than I thought, because it’s so typical of you.”
“I’ve got to go now. Don’t forget what I said.”
“Michael, wait!”
“What?”
“That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. I just—you know. I hope it’s not long. But if it is, I’ll—”
“Don’t.”
He hung up the telephone and heard a loud jangle as the machine dumped the load of quarters into its collection box. As he watched for a break in the traffic so that he could get back across the street to his motel, he felt worse. He hadn’t made her understand. He should have told her something closer to the truth. He wasn’t delayed; he was probably dead. The dons might sit back and wait while he disappeared and then tell Carl Bala in his prison cell that it was just one of those things, but if he didn’t disappear, then he was in trouble. After allowing him a decent interval, they would change their minds. And already the people who worked for Carl Bala would be out in force, hanging in all the places where he had ever been seen, watching for him. He might be able to avoid them for a time, but not forever.
He had never worried much about the authorities before. He still didn’t think they could catch him, except by some gigantic stroke of blundering good luck, but what if they could actually keep him from leaving the country? He had just used up the only passport he had that would get him past the computerized scanners they had installed in the airports since he had left, and there was no way he could try again to buy one. What had happened in Buffalo had closed that down for all time.
He had to get out before Bala had time to replace Talarese and Mantino and Fratelli and the new men got things organized enough to come after him. What could it take, two or three days? A week at the outside. What the hell else did the old son of a bitch have to do?
Wolf was starting to feel a kind of claustrophobia. Somehow the country had shrunk. Ten years ago it had been a place full of possibilities. He could disappear simply by fading into a crowd, or take a quick jump that put him five hundred miles away so they would have to start looking for him all over again. Now everything seemed to be a lot closer to everything else. He had to find out something about this FBI business.
Sergeant Bob Lempert had spent most of his career under suspicion. In 1965 he and an older cop named Mulroy had been assigned to stay in a hotel to be sure nothing happened to a bookmaker named Ricky Hinks before he could testify in the conspiracy trial of Paul Cambria. Ricky Hinks was later found to have slipped into the bathroom, cut the shower curtain into strips with a razor and tied them together to make a rope. He had then used it to lower himself from the bathroom window to the alley below, where he had been shot to death by persons unknown. It was considered to be bad luck all around—certainly for Ricky Hinks, who must have lowered himself into the gunsights of some obstructors of justice; but also for officers Mulroy and Lempert, because he had died without revealing how he had managed to slice up the curtain with an electric razor, or lower himself sixty feet on a twenty-foot rope. The internal inquiry was not released in detail, the Gary police chief was quoted as saying, because it was inextricably intertwined with an ongoing investigation. The two officers involved had done their duty.
But from that moment on, Bob Lempert’s career took a detour into limbo. He was considered to be a competent cop at a time when cops who were eager to respond to those two A.M. “domestic disturbance” calls from sparsely patrolled neighborhoods, or to venture into the very asshole of the city to check out “shots fired” reports were at a premium. Jobs were plentiful in Gary, Indiana, for healthy white veterans who could read, and not many of them paid less than a cop made, so there was no point in throwing away a good body. Lempert remained a trusted member of the force, the kind you wanted behind you when you kicked in a door. But this trust went only so far. You didn’t want him behind you if you kicked in certain very expensive doors, and you didn’t want him in plainclothes, where he could get too used to the availability of payoffs. But for your B and E’s, your Aggravated Assaults, your “Shut Up and Go Back in Your House Because I’m the Law” situations, you couldn’t do much better than Bob Lempert.
Lempert had made sergeant when he was pushing fifty. In his case, it was a sort of honorary title because nobody wanted him put in charge of anything. This was not because the aroma of the 1965 incident had lingered in the nostrils of the powerful for so many years; it was because from time to time the odor returned. In the mid- seventies, when Eddie Parnell, the challenger for the presidency of the laundry union, was killed with his two brothers on the eve of the election, people pointed out that Eddie and his family were not completely ignorant that some such thing might happen. All three of them wore pistols in shoulder holsters twenty-four hours a day, and would not have opened the door to just anybody who took the trouble to rap his knuckles on it. It would have had to be somebody they had no reason to suspect, somebody who could walk in armed without being frisked, somebody they couldn’t have simply told to come back tomorrow after the ballots had been counted. It would have had to be a cop.
In the eighties there had been a number of puzzling incidents, notably the strange death of a known cocaine dealer named Milo “Mucho Mas” Figueroa. He had been shot down at his heavily fortified house after firing several ineffective shots with an AK-47 into trees near two officers. In the inquiry it was learned that the two officers had no search warrant because they had not intended to enter the dwelling; in fact, they were off duty and had simply been fired upon as they were passing by. Odder still were Mr. Figueroa’s garb, consisting of a sleeveless T-shirt and silk boxer shorts; the hour he had chosen to go berserk, which was four A.M.; and the fact that he had chosen to defend his fortress from outside its walls. None of this would have merited a page in the annals of cocaine-induced paranoia except that when the premises were thoroughly searched, not a milligram of cocaine was found, nor any currency. One of the off-duty officers who assisted at Mr. Figueroa’s suicide was Bob Lempert.
Lempert could not be considered a bitter man, in spite of all this coincidence and bad luck. He was, in fact, cheerful most of the time. He had stayed on the force long after he had done his twenty years, and showed up for work each day ready with either a joke of his own or a laugh at someone else’s. Today he was in a worse mood than he had been in since the Internal Affairs Division had called him in to ask about the death of Miriam Purnaski, the jeweler. That time he hadn’t really been prepared since it had been such a rush job. Miriam Purnaski was one of the modern practitioners of the ancient process of changing money into gold, then changing it back again in another country. At some point in her career she had lost her appreciation for simplicity and begun performing the same kind of alchemy simultaneously for several local dealers in recreational chemicals. Then she had made the mistake that attorneys and accountants sometimes do, which was to merge the accounts of several clients. Having made this first step into unsound bookkeeping, she had gradually betrayed her fiduciary responsibility for the funds of the
