Little Norman chuckled deep inside his chest. “I guess I do have that kind of face.”
“Why did they send you?”
“A few days ago the Butcher’s Boy came to see me.”
“What for?”
“He wanted me to talk to the old men for him. I talked to some of them, and they said I had to come and tell you.”
“What did he want from them?”
“He says the only reason he did Tony T was because Talarese sent people after him. Then he did Mantino and Fratelli because they were trying to keep him from getting out afterward.”
“Good. I thought they were worthless, but now I’m sorry they’re dead—Mantino and Fratelli, anyway.” He looked up at Little Norman with his hard little eyes. “At least they didn’t come around and try to cut a deal for him.”
Little Norman shook his head. “You can play that on me if you want to. By the time I knew he was around, the most I could have done about it was make him kill me. And I did what he asked because I wasn’t going to be the one who decided on his own not to deliver a message to the old men.”
Carl Bala shrugged. “You could live a long time. So they sent you to me.”
“They want to know what you think about it after all these years. He says he’ll disappear forever if you all leave him alone. If you don’t he seems to think he can make some trouble.”
Carlo Balacontano straightened to his full five feet eight inches and began to walk. His face was cold and impassive. It was a feeling he had not experienced since 1951, when he had been hit a glancing blow with a baseball bat in a bar in upstate New York. The man who had hit him had been one of his own soldiers, a big guy named Copella, who was smashing a jukebox, and the bat had bounced off the metal top and into the forehead of Carl Bala. This had been the occasion of a profusion of apologies, and Bala had felt the same terrible frustration. He couldn’t kill Copella for the clumsy accident or his other soldiers would have turned on him, and he couldn’t betray how much it hurt or how angry he was because he would have looked weak. But he had never liked Copella after that, and the man had been forced to seek advancement in Portland, where there was more room to swing a bat.
What Carl Bala wanted to say was that if any of the old men ordered their soldiers to leave this psycho alone, what was it but giving aid and comfort to his enemy? If anybody held back now, they wouldn’t have to worry about some lone maniac slipping arsenic into their milk of magnesia. He would send an army to batter down the walls of their houses, drag them into the street and hack their heads off with hatchets. But he couldn’t say this. In the first place, saying it to Little Norman was about as satisfying as telling the mailman that you were going to write a nasty letter. In the second place, if he said it, they would kill him in jail. Still, it did make something he’d had floating around in the back of his mind push its way to the front of it. He was going to get out of here, and when he did there was going to be a war. Apparently the old men had gotten so old that their balls had shriveled up like dried figs. He was going to get out of here and roll them up one by one.
What Carl Bala said was, “I’m trying to be reasonable about this. I’ve been in here for eight years because of this man. I asked before the trial that my friends and associates do their best to help me. I got no help. I asked that they make this man pay for what he did to me. I was told that nobody could find him. Now he’s back, and he’s killed Mantino and Talarese because they were mine, and Fratelli because he helped me. What am I supposed to say— that it’s all right?”
Little Norman towered silently above Balacontano as he walked along, a half-step behind and to his left.
“Tell them I repeat my respectful request that this man be found and his body turned over to my people in New York.”
“Yes, sir,” said Little Norman. “I’ll tell them that. Anything else I should say?” It was common knowledge that somewhere in New York there was a safe-deposit box full of things that Balacontano’s men had lifted from the house of the man he was convicted of killing. The key was going to be planted on the body of the Butcher’s Boy.
Balacontano wasn’t really listening. He was thinking about how soft and weak the old men must have gotten. It would be easy. With a little probing he could find two or three at the beginning who would probably let him take over just for leaving them alive. Then he would be that much stronger when he was ready to face the ones who still had a little blood in their veins.
He realized that Little Norman was waiting for him to say something. “You can go now. I’m in the middle of a gin game.”
Wolf watched the small green Mazda back out of the driveway across the street, and then walked out his front door in time to be seen. He didn’t want to let her see his face too often, just to be somewhere near the edges of her peripheral vision and consciousness as the man who lived across the street.
He would have preferred to rent a car, but he didn’t have the kind of identification that companies felt comfortable with, and so he had bought this one for cash at a used-car lot in Virginia Beach. It was about as far from Washington as he could conveniently get and still have Virginia plates. These transactions were always delicate. If you walked into a Mercedes showroom and handed them eighty thousand in cash, you had better be able to convince somebody that you were a lovable millionaire. The car had to be a beater, so the amount wasn’t huge. The best way to do it was to find a place small enough so that you could talk to the owner. If the man had just taken something as a trade-in that he wasn’t particularly fond of, cash could be attractive. He wouldn’t have a price he had to get back, and once the car was off the lot, he could put any figure he wanted down in his books. But for Wolfs purposes, the car had to be right. He ended up with an ‘83 Dodge Colt that hadn’t even been put out on the line with the others yet, because they hadn’t had time to spot-paint the nicks on the doors and roll back the odometer. It was plain, unassuming and unmemorable, and it ran well enough. It was a little below the scale for his new neighborhood, but not so much that it attracted attention. He started it, backed out of his driveway and had shifted into first before he caught something in his rearview mirror: Elizabeth Waring’s Mazda wasn’t moving.
As Wolf let the car drift forward, he steered it so that his rearview mirror would show him what was going on. The Mazda was stalled, and she was walking quickly toward the back of his car, waving her arms. It was too late, and the appeal was too blatant, to drive off and pretend that he didn’t see her. In the mirror she seemed to be staring right into his eyes, which meant she must have seen him move his head to spot her. He had to pretend he had seen her all along.
Wolf stopped, backed up until his car was in front of hers, then got out and talked to her over the roof of his Colt. “Hi. I see you’ve got troubles. Anything I can do to help?”
Elizabeth Waring threw up her arms, her brows knitted in despair. “Anything. It just died.”
Wolf turned off his engine and walked to her car. It was unbelievable that he had let this happen to him. He went over it in his mind. He had seen her come out of her house, turn to wave to the Spanish maid and the baby and walk to the garage. Then he had put on his coat and checked the doors of his rented house. If she’d had any trouble starting the Mazda, that’s when it must have happened, because when he had returned to look out the window again, she was already backing out of her driveway. Then he had stopped looking.
He reached under her dashboard and popped the hood, then went around, lifted it and looked at the engine for any obvious sign of trouble. If he could just get the damned thing going before she had time to get bored with her trouble and start looking at his face, he might be able to get through this. Nothing under the hood was disconnected or leaking, but everything looked a little grimy for a car this age. He walked back to the driver’s side, slid in and tried to start the car. He heard the ignition click, but the starter motor didn’t engage, and he smelled gas.
He got out again. “Your carburetor got flooded and your battery gave out—not necessarily in that order. Do you have jumper cables?”
Elizabeth seemed to be thinking about something else. “Look,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get to work. Thanks for trying, but I’ll just call a gas station.”
Wolf decided he had better look at his watch before answering, and he did so. “It’s no problem. Honestly, I don’t have to be there for another hour.”
But she persisted. “No, it’s not right. I’m not one of those women who just assume that any man who
