bagman, or if Lucchi was in charge and he was sent along only because Lucchi’s English was so bad. But it didn’t matter now because he was going to make his bones on the Butcher’s Boy.
Baldwin winked and nodded to a man in the crowd Mack recognized as a pickpocket. The man sauntered over to the booth, and while Baldwin handed him his stack of betting slips, Mario turned to Lucchi and searched his memory for the Italian words. “It’s a question of honor. This man has acted like an animal.” In fact, Mario had only a vague idea of what the Butcher’s Boy had done, except that he had somehow managed to kill a large number of men and at the same time get Carlo Balacontano convicted of one of the murders, and Bala was still serving a life sentence for it and sending embarrassingly inflammatory reminders through channels to the outside, Mario watched Lucchi’s face as he exhausted his vocabulary. “He violated hospitality, threw loyalty out the window and made my uncle ashamed.”
Lucchi’s eyes flickered in a faint reaction. Mack hoped that something in his stammered litany had meant something. “Si,” said Lucchi quietly. The Carpaccio brothers had not brought Lucchi to England to save him from the endemic poverty of Sicily, but from a sudden manhunt launched by the national police in Rome. When he had killed the banker Giovanni Parla in his bathtub it had been to expunge an insult Parla’s grandfather had committed against Lucchi’s grandmother before Lucchi’s father was born. And since Lucchi’s father had died attaching an oversensitive pipe bomb to a Parla’s automobile, Lucchi had not felt he could honorably stop there. After he had left Parla bleeding to death in the bathroom, he had gone to the other rooms of the house and killed the wife and two children. Now he said in English, “How do you want it done?”
Meg pulled Schaeffer into the stands and sat him down in the center near the bottom. “Okay, Michael. Let’s appraise these horses. My system is to ascertain which are the tallest, and then place large wagers that they’ll win.”
Schaeffer stared out at the broad green lawn. There were a few horses being exercised on the track, which was little more than a white railing cordoning off a portion of the expanse of grass that stretched from the road to the hills where buildings began. It wasn’t like American tracks, which were almost like freeways for horses, bordered by huge concrete structures for crowds of bettors, electronic tally boards and the subterranean bunkers where money was pushed through windows and machines pumped out tickets. He liked it. Things in England always seemed to him faintly amateurish. “I wonder what’s keeping the others.”
“Jimmy’s always been like that about parking. He cares about machinery. Have I ever told you that’s something I like about you? You don’t care at all about machines.”
“Are you sure you haven’t offended Peter?”
“Positive.” She turned to him and gave him her most enigmatic smile. It looked so open and guileless that he knew it was a practiced artifice. “When we were young, he talked me into taking off my clothes—one garment at a time, of course. He took Polaroid pictures of me. I could see that I was beautiful from the first ones, and I got rather caught up in the whole thing, mainly from the pleasant surprise and narcissistic curiosity. So I kept unbuttoning things further, and letting the cloth slip lower to reveal a little more. When there was nothing left to take off, I found I wanted to see myself from angles I hadn’t seen. Peter still has the pictures, I’m sure. I was just reminding him that I remember too.”
“Why do you tell these stories?” Schaeffer asked.
“Because it should have happened,” she answered. “Or
“No one. I’m going to find them.”
“What on earth for?”
“So when we want to go home they’ll allow us in the car.”
He stepped carefully down the wooden bleachers, then made his way through the people on the ground. As he had since he was young, he avoided looking straight into their eyes when he moved past them, always looking at the place where he would be after a few steps. In the street he turned in the direction Jimmy had taken when he had let them out of the Bentley. A small feeling of discomfort lodged in his throat as he scanned the straggling trail of men and women strolling toward the track. In the years since he had gotten off the airplane at Heathrow carrying a passport in the name of “Charles F. Ackerman,” he had come to depend on an orderly sequence of events that could have passed for a sense of decorum and conformity. He had an instinctive dislike of walking toward a large herd of people, presenting his face for each of them to notice and wonder about.
When at last he saw the Bentley, it was parked at the curb under an ancient walnut tree. Already, the black skins of nuts had specked the mirror finish, and a couple of leaves were plastered on the windshield. Jimmy Pinchasen was an idiot. If the car was so important to him, he should at least have parked it in the open. He walked to the car, stopped and looked around him. If they had come this far, why hadn’t he passed them on the way? He squinted to see through the smoked glass, and froze.
He could dimly see Pinchasen and Filching inside the car. Pinchasen was lying on his side in the front seat, as though he had simply toppled over. Filching was lying facedown in the back seat, and his pant legs had ridden up to his calves. Someone had dragged him by the ankles to his present position. From the quantities of blood that had seeped into pools on the leather seats and the floor, he judged that their throats had been cut.
He straightened, looked to the right up the street and to the left down the street to see that no cars were coming, then started across. The steady stream of people kept coming, a little fester because the races were about to begin, and now he looked at them differently, staring into their eyes, searching for a sign of recognition. All his old habits came back automatically. At a glance he assessed their posture and hands. Was there a man whose fingers curled in a little tremor when their eyes met, a woman whose hand moved to rest inside her handbag? He knew all the practical moves and involuntary gestures, and he scanned everyone, granting no exemptions.
He and Eddie had done a job like this one when he was no more than twelve. Eddie had dressed him for baseball, and had even bought him a new glove to carry folded under his arm. When they had come upon the man in the crowd, he hadn’t even seen them; his eyes were too occupied in studying the crowd for danger to waste a moment on a little kid and his father walking home from a sandlot game. As they passed the man, Eddie had touched the boy’s arm, and he had opened the webbing of the glove so that Eddie could pluck out the pistol with the silencer attached to it. Eddie then turned and put a round behind the man’s ear. He remembered the man taking another step and then toppling forward to the sidewalk. As Eddie hustled him away, he had heard people saying something about heart attacks and strokes. Bystanders had made way for them, apparently feeling sorry that Eddie’s little boy had seen some stranger at the moment when a vessel in his brain exploded.
Schaeffer felt his pulse beginning to settle down now. In the first glance into the parked car, he had known it all as though he had seen it happen. His mind hadn’t raced through a series of steps, or shuffled through the possible implications of the sight to his own survival. In an instant he had been jerked back ten years to the old life: somebody had spotted him. They never forgot, and they never stopped looking.
Mack Talarese leaned his back against the side of the curio shop and tried to catch his breath. He looked at Lucchi with horrified awe. The little waiter had turned out to be something else, and Mario was not entirely comforted by what he had seen. Mario and Baldwin had come up on the driver and the bodyguard from the front of the car as the driver eased the big Rolls into the curb. Mario had formulated a notion of taking the two of them somewhere and shooting them. But then Lucchi came up on the right side of the car behind the driver, and his right hand appeared from behind his thigh, and there was a gravity knife already open, and the hand went inside the open window, and when Lucchi drew it back it was bloody. Then Lucchi had the back door open and was inside the car doing the other one. The man had managed to clamber into the back seat and unlatch the door, but Lucchi was already on him. He was already dead when Lucchi grasped his ankles and hauled him back inside.
Then the little Sicilian walked casually ahead of Mario and Baldwin back toward the racetrack. But Talarese had caught the look on Lucchi’s face as their eyes met. When Mario was a child on Long Island, his dog had caught the scent of a rabbit in the field and run off after it, interpreting Mario’s calls as some kind of exhortation to greater speed. Then the dog had brought the broken, limp thing back with him in his mouth, his eyes looking proud and hopeful, returning for the approval he knew he had earned. Lucchi’s eyes had looked like that.
Baldwin leaned close to Mario as they followed Lucchi. “Ferocious little bastard, isn’t he?” Talarese nodded.
