now. She was tired of measuring her words. She wanted to talk, to tell her old friend everything, to find out what he thought.
As Jane stuffed the four big duffel bags with letters, she became aware that someone was behind her. She turned to see Bernie and Rita watching. Rita said, “Which one is mine?”
“What?”
“You got four bags. We each take one, right?”
“Wrong,” said Jane. “Henry and I are going to mail the letters. I picked four bags because a person can handle two at a time.”
“What are you talking about?” snapped Bernie. “You think I can’t mail a letter?”
“It’s not that you can’t do it,” said Jane. “It’s that people might see you doing it.”
“Nobody’s looking for me,” said Bernie.
“But if they see you, do you think they won’t know who they’re looking at?”
Rita scowled in frustration. “We did everything you asked for. We have a right to see this through. People are looking for me, but I dyed my hair, got new clothes … I’ve changed.”
“You look terrific,” said Jane. “But you don’t look like a different person just yet.” Finally, she stood up. She walked through the dining room and muttered to Ziegler, “Come in here.” She walked into the kitchen, and the others followed her. They watched her open the cupboard and take four glasses down, bringing each one to the counter with a clack that made Ziegler wince. She took the newly opened bottle of white wine from the refrigerator, filled the glasses, and handed one to each of them.
Jane looked around her at each person in turn. Rita and Bernie stared at her stubbornly. Henry Ziegler just looked confused. Jane said, “Lady, gentlemen, and fellow philanthropists—and I mean all of those words sincerely —you have already accomplished the best thing you could have done with your lives if you had been born with the sense to start out with that in mind. You have given your all. Here’s to you.” She raised her glass and took a drink, then smacked it down on the counter.
“That does not mean, however, that I have joined with you in a brave little democracy. The world works on deals. I still have one with each of you. You have kept your end, and I’m going to keep mine. At the end of this, we are all going to walk away and go live some more. You should know that I’ve been in a few airports since this started, and each time there have been a few more big, ugly men standing around to watch the gates and the baggage claims, looking very hard at each face they see.
“The instant the first batch of checks hits the mailbox, the situation is going to get worse. In a matter of weeks, or even hours, the people who thought that money was theirs are going to start feeling wounded and frantic. They’re already looking hard for Rita. If they see Bernie’s face, it will take them a whole half-second to get over their shock that he’s alive, and another half-second to come after him. This means that Bernie and Rita are going to stay in this house, invisible, while Henry and I mail the letters. End of speech, end of discussion.” She walked out of the room.
Rita stared after her for a moment, her eyes unfocused and thoughtful. Ziegler looked uncomfortably at Rita, then went back to his computer.
Bernie patted her shoulder. “I guess she’s right,” he said softly. “We’ll just lay low. It’ll only be for a while.”
Rita said, “That’s not what you said when this started. You said they’d keep looking for forty years.”
Bernie chuckled. “If they do, so what? You’re a kid. You can do that kind of time standing on your head. I just finished doing fifty.” He waited for Rita to see the humor in it, but it seemed to be lost on her. He left her alone in the kitchen.
The next morning, the men helped Jane load her big suitcases into the car. Jane took Rita’s arm and pulled her aside for a moment. “If nothing goes wrong, I should be back in a week or so. You have everything you’ll need, so don’t show your face if you don’t have to.” Something in Rita’s expression worried her. “Are you all right?”
Rita shrugged. “Bernie and I will take care of each other.”
Jane hugged her and then got into the car. Bernie and Ziegler came close to her window. “Keep her safe until I get back,” she said to Bernie. “And yourself, too.”
Bernie answered, “What can happen—sunburn?”
Jane looked at Ziegler. “Good luck, Henry.”
As Jane drove off, she glanced at the small pile of letters on the seat beside her. She took a deep breath and blew it out. As soon as she mailed those first letters in Albuquerque, it would begin.
17
Paul Di Titulo walked out of the bank building into a dull glow of hazy sunlight. Immediately the humidity settled on his neck and shoulders like a weight. He walked ten steps on the sidewalk and began to feel sweat beading on his forehead. The expensive climate-control system in the fourth-floor conference room of the bank had made him more vulnerable to conditions in real-life Cleveland, where invisible bits of grit settled on the starched collar of a white shirt, and the perfumy smell of half-burned diesel fuel tickled his nasal passages and made him wait for a sneeze that never came.
As he walked down the street toward his car, he tried to think of ways to determine whether he was spending his time pondering nothing. He could call other charities to inquire whether unexpectedly large donations had arrived lately. He could try to find out something about this Ronald Wilmont who had sent the check to the Five C’s. If Wilmont was a legitimate donor to the Cleveland Coalition of Caring Corporations and Citizens, then probably there would be someone in town who knew him, or at least knew what connection he had with Cleveland. If he had been born here, then there would be a birth certificate on file in the courthouse. If he’d once had a business here, then there would be a record of a business license. The archives of the
He decided he would have a couple of secretaries at his office start working on Ronald Wilmont today. Di Titulo had to take every step he could to either prove his own suspicion was a daydream or prove it wasn’t before he started making noises.
Di Titulo knew he was one of many people who had been watching whatever parts of the financial landscape were visible to them for the last month. Everybody in the country had been waiting, and by now there had probably been a few false alarms. He was sure that a man who blew the whistle without sufficient evidence would suffer later in prestige. For years, whatever he said or did would be denigrated and discounted. Just because men like him used computers and gold-nibbed fountain pens instead of cracking skulls with baseball bats didn’t mean that they were exempt from the standards of behavior that being part of La Cosa Nostra implied.
As Di Titulo thought about it, he wasn’t even positive that if he blew the whistle now, he wouldn’t be the first. Being first was dangerous, but it had all the rewards. His job in the Castananza family had been to build himself into a pillar of the community, insinuate himself into the local establishment as a prosperous, astute businessman and public-spirited citizen. Getting himself invited to join the board of directors of the Five C’s had been a verification of how well he had accomplished it. He had no idea how well face men in other families in other cities had done. He decided he was not being arrogant to suspect that few had done as well as he had. And now, because of that success, he had received an odd bit of inside information that might mean something.
Everybody in the country had been waiting for signs of unusual financial activity. If somebody had popped old Bernie Lupus for personal reasons, so be it. But the world seldom turned on things done for personal reasons. So the whole LCN had been waiting quietly to see if money in accounts all over the country was going to start sprouting wings and heading to roost in one place.
The whole story of Bernie the Elephant, the version Di Titulo had heard since he was a kid, had been that he never wrote anything down. But not all stories were true, and almost none of them stayed true forever. It was just possible that, as he got old and weak, Bernie the Elephant had begun to make a ledger. The series of coincidences surrounding Bernie’s death had been mostly shrugged off by the old dons who had known him. People died at stupid times for stupid reasons, they said. But if what Di Titulo had heard was true, then it was not so easy to dismiss. He had heard that after Bernie died, his house in Florida had been searched. Nobody had found any papers, but they had also not found Danny Spoleto, one of his bodyguards. And when one of the families—he heard it was the Langustos, from New York—sent people to Detroit to see what the Ogliaro family there had to say, they had found
