way? But whatever he had done, he had hung around for an hour inside the building before leaving.
Paul Cambria had gone to Ugolino’s funeral, with his foreman, Puccio, in attendance. In the surveillance photographs, the two of them had looked dignified and mournful as they accepted the homage of Ugolino’s family and friends. Two hundred thousand was a bargain. They didn’t just get to see Ugolino dead, they got to eat him afterward, like cannibals.
Now the Butcher’s Boy was supposed to be back. It made Lempert’s jaw ache to think about it. He could get rich in the fraction of a second it took to exert four ounces of pressure with his right forefinger. But it wasn’t just money; the invisible men who quietly owned the planet would be so pleased that they would give him a charmed existence. Nothing could ever touch him again. The secret agony he had felt and lived with since the first time he had been passed over for promotion twenty-odd years ago would be transformed in an instant into a cosmic joke. Sergeant? Hell, governors didn’t live the life he would live if he were just lucky enough to be standing there when the bastard showed his face. It was exactly like winning the lottery.
But there were problems. Puccio had called him to give him the news, and he wasn’t looking at it like an early payday. That meant Paul Cambria wasn’t either. Paul Cambria was one of the men who ran things in the world, and that put him just below the old men themselves, the ones you saw only in blurry photographs. If Paul Cambria had something to worry about, then the rest of the human race was in trouble.
But at work two days later, he learned why a thinking man like Puccio wasn’t seeing this development as an opportunity, but as an occasion that might cause his name to be left out of next year’s phone book. The FBI was in an uproar because suddenly, for no known reason, Antonio Talarese, Angelo Fratelli and Peter Mantino had stopped being suspected organized-crime figures and become homicide victims. The FBI wasn’t just sending circulars, but was making urgent inquiries to learn if anyone in any big-city police station had ever heard of anyone aka “Butcher’s Boy.” Lempert could almost feel the velvety texture of the first cushion-soft stack of hundred-dollar bills. The bastard wasn’t out depopulating the civilized world. He was on some kind of a batch job, slicing off a few of the heads that stuck up above the crowd. Lempert didn’t have to ask himself who was likely to be the next of the heads; Puccio had told him. Lempert was going to get rich.
Lempert sat in the back of the van he had taken from Impound and watched the line of people inching slowly toward the front door of the Cinema Marrakesh. Over the door the giant 1930s marquee had actually been washed, and a couple of thousand burned-out light bulbs had been replaced. Some of the plaster carvings on the lintel had actually had a little gold paint slapped on them too. The green, foot-high letters on the marquee said only BELLADONNA. The movie had so many big stars in it that there wouldn’t have been room for them, and maybe it didn’t make any difference, because everybody knew what it was and who was in it, and the star was supposed to be the director, anyway.
In a way, it was ridiculous for Paul Cambria to take his wife to a movie like that, even if it was an opening. It had to be comical to him. The idea was supposed to be that this beautiful young girl, the daughter of some Mafia guy—not a local boy, but an old Sicilian with a mustache—takes over after his untimely death and gets very rich. To the real thing, someone like Paul Cambria, it had to be pretty strange. Those guys didn’t even tell their wives what the hell they did for a living. It was also odd that Cambria would sit in the dark with a thousand people for two hours. Maybe he thought his guys needed to know that he wasn’t going to pull in his horns just because there was somebody looking for him.
Anyway, it was a one-shot deal. They were having an opening in Gary only because the writer or director or somebody was from here, and because some of it had been filmed in town. One day there were a couple of trucks here, some guys with lights they turned on in the daytime, and a lot of confusion, because this was roughly the place where Punch Mayall had been blown away in the thirties, but that was about it. There hadn’t been any movie stars within a thousand miles of here. The real opening was going to be in Hollywood tomorrow, and that was where you would see the stars, not just these schmucks in corduroy coats with patches on the elbows and big thick glasses.
Lempert judged that his chances might be good tonight. If Cambria was in the theater, his guys would be there too. They would be all around, stuck to him like shit to a blanket. The Butcher’s Boy would know that too. Still, he might just be crazy enough to want to go inside anyway and cut Cambria’s throat while they were all sitting around with their thumbs up their asses, but you couldn’t bet your future on how crazy somebody was. You had to assume that he knew what he was doing. He would get Cambria
He had thought this through very carefully, and he was ready. He had a Ruger Mini-14 next to him, all sighted in on the front of the theater with a four-power night scope. It would take about half a second to put his shoulder to it, pop the window and draw a bead on the bastard as soon as he saw him. A beginner wouldn’t have thought of the Ruger. The barrel was short enough to swing around in a van without banging it on something. Lempert was a good target shooter. He knew that if he could just get a clear view for the first shot, so the target would stay put, he could punch four or five holes in him within two seconds after that.
When the ushers in their brand-new, old-fashioned bellboy suits came out and shut the doors, Lempert studied what was left outside. There were eight uniformed patrolmen that he could see, picking up a little overtime pretending to control the crowds that were already inside the building watching the movie. He looked through the scope at each of their faces in turn. There was Jimmy Clinton and his partner, Bucklin—looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy with all the fat he had put on in the last few months. And—oh, shit—Olney and Winks. They were the ones to watch for. They had managed to wangle this assignment, of course. It was probably easier than just signing in and cooping in their car in the cul de sac off Breckinridge. He didn’t like seeing veterans out here. One or two of them might be calm enough to realize what was happening in time to put a round or two into the van. The other four he didn’t know. All of them were young, and one was a woman, so at least it wasn’t the Butcher’s Boy in a uniform. He was certainly capable of thinking of that one.
Lempert turned in his swivel chair to study the upper windows on the street again. If you assumed the bastard wasn’t out-and-out berserk, you had to imagine that he might find his way into one of those buildings with a rifle. Lempert saw no changes from the last time he had looked. There were no glows from dim lights on the ceilings, no shades raised a little, no objects visible. He ducked his head, made his way on his knees to the front of the van and peeked out the windshield. There was nothing up the street that could be construed as a problem. The traffic was moving at the usual rate. He crawled to the back window and moved the curtain half an inch. There were no new vehicles parked along the street, no knots of people the Butcher’s Boy could join to get a closer look at the place.
There was one more thing that Lempert had to check. He opened the back door of the van, swung his legs to the street and quietly closed the door. There wasn’t any point in locking it with eight uniforms loitering around across the street, and unlocking it made noise, so he left it. He walked away from the theater and turned the corner on Fourth before venturing to look over his shoulder. His colleagues were standing around now talking to each other instead of watching the place. Probably not one of them had any idea that Paul Cambria was even here. He wondered if that would have made a difference. Probably not; you had to know the rest of it before it meant anything.
Lempert turned again at the alley behind Chautauqua Avenue, put his head down, pulled his collar up and jammed his right hand into his jacket pocket so that he could grasp his service revolver before he took the first step down the alley. If the Butcher’s Boy was in one of the buildings, he would have a car waiting in back of it, or, at most, one street over. Whatever happened with Paul Cambria, he would need to have a reliable, invisible way of getting in and then getting out. The one thing Lempert remembered about his experience with the bastard ten years ago was that he thought things through. He would probably have a couple of ways out.
Lempert made his way up the alley, trying to look like a schlemiel who was watching the ground to keep from stepping into a puddle, but every few yards he scanned the old brick buildings, fire escapes and the dumpsters, looking for a change. He wasn’t afraid he would miss a parked car, but he might miss something else—a broken window, or a garbage can moved a couple of feet so it could be used to climb in through a vent. It wasn’t that he had any intention of going into an empty building after him: not this one. But if he just knew where the bastard was, he was pretty sure he had him. All he had to do was wait. The waiting reminded him that it was time to take a leak. He looked up and down the alley, then stepped into the shadows behind the shoe store and urinated against the wall. It was a delicious feeling because of the danger and the darkness.
