miracle to Martillo, although he had studied it for twenty years the way a bear studies bee swarms. Everything seemed to be the same as it always had been; it was just that there was all this floating money. It was qualitatively different from regular money, which stayed pretty much where you put it. This was like gambling money because it didn’t seem to really belong to anybody. It moved in and out of the markets and financial centers of the world in huge quantities every day. But without warning the floating money had transferred itself out of the country and into the markets of foreigners, primarily towel-heads, Japs and Krauts. At the moment the Japanese were the big spenders, but what they were spending wasn’t the floating money. It was a kind of by-product of having so much of the floating money trapped in one place for a time. It was like the wetness that formed on the outside of an icy glass on a hot day.
This reminded Martillo that what he really wanted right now was a drink. Making the rounds would have been easier if he had been able to loosen his tongue a little. But this was out of the question; you didn’t just gulp down alcohol when you were on an errand for Vincent Toscanzio. When you were done with work, you could drink yourself into a stupor, or shoot heroin into your jugular if you felt like it, but while you were on his business you were his. In the old days he had once seen Toscanzio explain this to a numbers runner with a sawed-off pool cue.
Stuck in traffic, Martillo watched another busload of tourists forming a new line to wander through the halls of the Capitol building. This group looked like Europeans. Why the hell did any of these people care about looking at another public building? You could take them to an insurance company and tell them it was the Supreme Court. He looked at their faces and watched the way they walked. Foreigners walked different, and he studied them to see if he could figure out where they came from. This bunch was taller than most, very white and they had bad teeth, so they were probably English.
But then Martillo saw something that made the skin on his arms tighten, and his right foot try to stomp an imaginary brake on the floor of the car. “Pull over,” he said. “Let me out.” It was
Wolf moved with the queue of English couples gathering for a mass invasion of the Capitol building. There didn’t seem to be any of the usual ill-behaved British children in short pants chasing each other in circles, which was promising. Children had preternaturally sharp senses, and they lived at the three-foot level, where anything he did would be right in front of their eyes. He had to move slowly enough to keep from spooking the herd, but quickly enough so that he wouldn’t give any of its members the uneasy feeling that he was being stalked. He tried to get a sense of who was carrying what. If they had all left their valuables inside suitcases in the keeping of the bus driver, he had better know it now. As he passed a couple in their late forties, he heard the woman say, “Not again.”
The man said peevishly, “It’s not my fault. It’s the damned water. I’m sure there’ll be one inside the tube station over there.”
The Englishman started a purposeful march away from the herd, his long, skinny legs straight and stiff as he headed for the subway station. Wolf had been wrong when he had told himself that killing E. V. Waring was as far as he could skid; the real end of the line was when you were following a sick tourist to a public restroom so that you could whack him for his wallet and passport. He had walked in the same direction that the herd of tourists was moving so that he could come up behind them; now he was going to have to reverse directions without letting any of them notice. He waited a few moments, until what he did wouldn’t be connected with the man’s departure, then turned and crossed the street.
Wolf timed the cars and dodged between two of them to make it to the other side. But as he reached the curb he wasn’t thinking about the British tourist anymore, but about the man who had gotten out of a black Lincoln behind him, then pivoted and reversed directions when he had. It was a rare advantage to be able to walk along facing the man who had been following him. The man was tall and trim, but not young, and the dark suit he wore appeared to be the regulation uniform of lawyers and politicians in this town when they weren’t playing golf. The fact that his hair was long and wavy didn’t mean anything; it could belong to the director of the FBI. He had the build of a cop, but somehow Wolf couldn’t see the suit as belonging to one. Also, the shoes were wrong; they were some sort of thin, bumpy leather like alligator, and too pointed for a cop’s. The soles were thin and slippery, and the heels gave off a shine when the man walked, as though they were made of a substance harder than rubber. As Wolf proceeded down the street, he never took his eyes off the man. He knew that if there were others, he would never see them unless the man did something to acknowledge them. But then the man did something unexpected: He slowed down, turned and glanced over his shoulder directly at Wolf.
When their eyes met, Wolf saw the alarm in the man’s face. Immediately the man pretended to look past him, but he must have known it was too late. The face was familiar. It took Wolf a few seconds to bring it back because it was buried somewhere deep in his memory, in Chicago or somewhere—no, it was Detroit. It was Pauly the Bag Man. His throat tightened in a feeling of regret and disappointment that was like pain. He had been very young in Detroit, maybe nineteen, and he had let them use his face for a few months. If somebody didn’t pay his nut one week, the next week he would be in his store or on his way home from the office, trying to think of something to tell Pauly the Bag Man, but the one who showed up to ask him about it wasn’t the friendly Pauly, but the boy. He would simply arrive quietly and give the man an inquiring look. People knew who he was, and told each other things that made them sweat when they saw him.
What the hell was Pauly the Bag Man doing in Washington, D.C., wearing a tailored suit and women’s shoes? They must have closed the bars and chased out everybody who had ever laid eyes on him in the old days. Hell, they must have dredged the lake for corpses. He had to get out of this man’s sight. He looked for a way to disappear, but the sheer size of the lawns and the sidewalks, like airport runways leading up to broad, high steps, made it hard to imagine how he was going to do it. He could see for a mile in any direction. He hadn’t been expecting to do anything chancy here, just to find a tourist and wait until he was alone. He kept walking toward the subway entrance. If he could make it that far, he could probably step onto the first train before somebody like Pauly the Bag Man overcame his natural caution and followed.
As he walked, Pauly walked along on the other side of the street a few paces ahead. It puzzled Wolf that he would do this. Could he possibly imagine that Wolf hadn’t spotted him? He resisted the temptation to reach into his coat to touch the reassuring weight and solidity of Little Norman’s pistol. Pauly wouldn’t try to take him out on his own, which meant that there must be others somewhere in the stream of people walking along the sidewalks. But as he thought about it, he decided that if there really were others, Pauly wouldn’t be here at all. The man was hanging around to see where he went, which meant that there was going to be somebody he could tell. Somebody was on the way, and Pauly must be expecting him to arrive soon. Directions wouldn’t work if they were an hour old. He walked along the broad avenue knowing that each step was taking him into some kind of ambush. People were on the way, and when they got here, Pauly would see them and he wouldn’t. When enough of them had gotten into position, Pauly would stop walking, turn and point his finger.
Wolf was beginning to feel hot, and his heart began to pound in his chest as he thought about it. He had made a decision a long time ago that he wasn’t going to let something like this happen to him. His jaw tightened and started to chew on nothing. He wasn’t going to walk along like some loser who was preparing to defend himself. They still didn’t get it, and it still astonished him. He wasn’t going to lie down and wait until they took their turn before he took his. He watched Pauly stroll along the sidewalk across the street from him and started to drift toward him.
Wolf was at the curb, then a second later he was in the traffic, slipping into the backstream of one car and out of the lane before the next one arrived. He made it to the double white line in the middle before something about the sound of the cars changed enough to make Pauly turn his head. When he did, Wolf could see his eyes widen. His hands came up and a nervous tremor started to grip him. His head shook so hard that he seemed to be nodding. He was already backing away, and he almost fell as he turned to break into a run.
Pauly the Bag Man was over fifty years old and hadn’t needed to run from anyone since the February night in 1972 when the brain of a man named Fritz Hinckel short-circuited in Pastorelli’s Family Restaurant, and that time it hadn’t been personal. Pauly had been just one of fifty or sixty people whom Hinckel was trying to stick with a steak knife, and he had only needed to run five or six steps before an anonymous diner dropped Hinckel with five shots from a Colt Cobra that happened to be part of his evening wear. Pauly was long-legged, but his muscles were slack and slow from riding in the Town Car, and the leather soles of the new three-hundred-dollar shoes he was wearing hadn’t been scraped against anything but floor wax and carpeting until a few minutes ago. He was still striving to attain what he hoped was sufficient speed when he began to hear the Butcher’s Boy’s footsteps.
