She turned and took a step back toward the other end of the passage. She was ready to run now, her heart pounding in her chest. They would have to get out of this dark place, and she was willing to keep up with him by running as fast or as hard as he wanted her to. But his hand shot out and held her arm. She looked into his eyes, but they weren’t looking at her. He only shook his head and pushed her back against the wall. Then she could tell it was too late. She could hear the footsteps of a man running, and Michael was tensing his muscles, his knees bent a little, one foot ahead of the other, and his arms out from his sides.
Mario stopped running when he saw the legs protruding from the space between the third and fourth stores. Lucchi had done it. The little bastard had stalked the man behind the buildings and cut another throat, and this was the one that counted. Mario was going to be rich. He was going home. He fought an impulse to turn and go back to the street. This was the time when he would have to control himself, if he never had to again. He looked around for Lucchi and felt a little tingle of annoyance. The nasty little faggot could be anywhere. Then Mario remembered the girl. Something occurred to him and he began to sweat. There was no question that Lucchi had gone off after the girl. But what if he was that kind of psycho too? He might be doing something to her, something that Mario didn’t want to think about. He decided that the revulsion was something else he would have to control. These few minutes were the ones that were going to make all the difference for the rest of his life. Nobody back home was going to take his word that he had done this. He had to have something to carry away from here that proved he had found the Butcher’s Boy and killed him. He didn’t have much time.
He walked toward the body. As he passed the opening between the first two stores, then the next one, he turned his face away and moved faster. If people passing on the street happened to see him, they saw nothing. He controlled the impulse to go back to the front of the stores and look for Baldwin on the street.
Now he was close enough to see the legs clearly. His mind took inventory: black, shiny shoes; black, tight pants—Lucchi. Then he heard a footstep behind him. He reached inside his coat for the pistol, but then abandoned the intention because an arm was already around his neck. In the instant before consciousness left him, he felt a sharp pain move up under his ribs toward his heart.
B. Baldwin strolled along the sidewalk in front of the shops, using his peripheral vision to peer into them and around them as he went. He had seen the little dago go around the corner to check behind them, and he calculated that Mack T. would be covering any spillover onto the side street.
When he had come to the racecourse today he had been in a foul humor. He had known that they would show up before the sixth race to see how much cash he had taken in before he could chance handing it off. The life of a debtor was something he wasn’t accustomed to, and he hated it. To owe money was to place everything at someone else’s disposal, from your betting booth to your spectacles. But to owe money to the Carpaccios was to sell yourself into slavery. You couldn’t decide to take a day off and go to London instead of working the football outings, because that night they would send someone to pick up the rake-off. Until they had their money, you were theirs.
But Baldwin’s mood had brightened considerably since then. Young Mackie T. had spoken without asking for the numbers. B. Baldwin was going to be his own man again, a man with a debt of eight thousand pounds that was about to vanish.
Baldwin kept his hand in his coat pocket as he walked, running his fingers along the big sailor’s clasp knife that he carried there. He had bought it years ago in a pawnshop in Southampton and had it sharpened like a razor, and then spent hours taking the tarnish off the blade with jeweler’s rouge. It shone like a sliver of mirror now. A man who used his knife would have tried to darken the blade, but Baldwin didn’t worry about an opponent seeing the sudden reflection in his hand. He didn’t use his knife. He would just sit facing a man across a table and open it to clean his nails or idly scrape the dirt off the sole of his shoe. He would watch the man’s face, and try to catch a bit of sunlight on the blade so that a flash of the reflection would hit his eye. That sort of thing worked with the small shopkeepers and restaurant help who made up his usual clientele.
Baldwin had once thought of himself as a man ready for anything, but time and a few blows with heavy objects had made him calm and helped him to find his natural niche in the hierarchy of the universe. He was a predator, but too small to take in everything he wanted in one bite. Time gave a man’s luck a chance to kick in.
He was beginning to wonder if Mackie and the little ferret had simply done their work behind the shops and run off. It wouldn’t do for B. Baldwin to be found standing here not fifty yards away with a razor-sharp sailor’s knife in his pocket, not with his previous life history. The police would see him as a gift from heaven, and he suspected they wouldn’t be above giving his knife a little dip in the gore to make sure the gift wasn’t taken away.
He sauntered by the first passageway, then sidestepped into it without missing a step. He moved quietly down the space between the buildings toward the light, feeling a little disappointed in young Mack Talarese. Taking off and leaving a man on the scene was something that just wasn’t done. It was probably his own fault for involving himself with foreigners who didn’t know any better, but it was going to be the last time, he swore. Unless it was Packies, who were for all practical purposes Englishmen with black faces.
B. Baldwin would just take a quick peek to be sure the bodies were there, then go back to work. When he reached the end of the passage he heard a sound. He knitted his brows and held his place, listening. It wasn’t loud enough for a struggle, just a single footfall somewhere in the courtyard behind the shops. Baldwin took his knife out of his pocket and opened it. Could they have walked right past the victim and his woman? Could they still be hiding in the shadows between the next two shops? Well, if, when he stepped into the light, Mackie and the little rat terrier were busy going through the dead woman’s purse and taking the diamond studs out of her ears, he would lose nothing by having the great gleaming knife in his hand. It would make them feel he had been one of them, in on it from the beginning and still ready at the end.
Baldwin crouched low and leaped out of the passageway, his eyes taking in the scene at once. There was the man, kneeling over Mack Talarese’s bloody corpse where it lay on the ground. His hand was in the coat pocket. The man looked up at Baldwin and his face brought Baldwin very bad news; it showed no fear or anger, and, worst of all, no surprise. The eyes weren’t looking at him to size him up as an opponent in a knife fight. They were aiming. The man’s hand was on its way up from Mackie Talarese’s chest, and there was Mack’s little black pistol in it. B. Baldwin noted this with displeasure, but his mind troubled him no longer, because by then the bullet was already bursting through the back of his skull, bringing with it bone fragments, blood and even a tiny bit of the brain tissue that might have cared.
The shot was too much for Margaret. She sprang out into the sunlight in time to see Michael pressing the gun into the hand of the dead man on the ground. The sound had been loud in the passageway, and it still rang in her ears. It seemed to propel her forward, as though it were still sounding behind her.
Michael stood up and took her arm, not slowing her momentum at all, just guiding her in the direction she wanted to go. She was barely aware of him now. She was only thinking about putting space between herself and what lay back there. She wanted to run and he let her, the cloudy sense of the design of the city she carried in her memory taking her across the courtyard to the next passage between two houses, and along a quiet lane away from the ocean and toward the Royal Pavilion. Then he stopped her. “Do you know where the train station is?” She nodded. “Go there.”
In Alexandria, Virginia, Elizabeth Waring Hart stirred in her sleep and opened her eyes. She waited for the whisper to come out of the darkness again. She lifted her head a little from her pillow so that she could hear with both ears, and stared into the shadows near the door for a shape that she hoped wouldn’t remind her of a man. Her muscles were rigid, held in tension more to keep her from moving than because she had any way of fighting or anyplace to run to in her closed second-floor bedroom.
Then she realized that she had already given a name to the voice she had heard, and the name made it impossible that there was a voice. It was Dominic Palermo, and he had been dead for ten years. She collapsed back on the pillow and let him come back, and the room in the Las Vegas hotel came back with him.
When she had awakened that night it was dark, but she’d had the disconcerting feeling that she was already late for something. It was a feeling of urgency: something had begun and she was still in bed. It was then that she had heard the knock on the door, and knew that it had been going on for some time. She turned on the light, but it hadn’t helped, and she had put on her bathrobe and slipped the standard-issue .38 police special into its pocket, but that hadn’t helped either, because she had been a novice in those days, and the Justice Department had hired and
