foretold by a psychic.
The psychic was Penny Wright, a nearly blind woman who had helped Schneider on several cases. The marshal had taken Bender to meet her several weeks earlier, and she had predicted that they would capture their next fugitive in a building with a large column. After the Vorhauer arrest at the Quality Inn, Schneider and Bender realized the hotel’s unusual architecture was itself a large column. With new significance, they recalled Wright’s other prediction that after the column arrest the next fugitive they would catch would be a man with a bad stomach. Schneider was fired with excitement. “Nauss was shot in the stomach by a fellow Warlock gang member when he was younger,” he said. “I bet his stomach is giving him trouble.”
Bender agreed. Schneider looked at his Visual Detective partner with a widening sense of possibilities. He’d been chasing fugitives for a decade, to country safe houses and urban hideaways, against impossible odds. But now it seemed that even the Most Wanted criminals were merely hiding in folds and twists in time, their movements apparent to the strangely light-colored eyes of Frank Bender.
“Mr. Nauss,” Schneider said, “must be the Man with the Bad Stomach.”
Bender grinned.
“No doubt.”
• CHAPTER 13 •
THE MAN WITH THE BAD STOMACH
After midnight, Bender took Joan to the white underground room. They danced and drank vodka in clear glasses. Outside the wind wailed over the dark shuttered row houses and dying river. They watched David Lynch’s
In the middle of the night Joan returned home to her husband and two children in New Jersey. Bender crawled into bed with Jan for a brief, tortured rest. The sun rose pale and fractured by the dirt-streaked skylights. It was July, the steaming summer of 1987, and nothing could possibly help. His muse was gone.
“The Harmony of Form” was the name he gave his muse. Harmony was the blissful grace that allowed him to feel the inevitable shape of a dead man’s mouth based on the eyes and nose. He entered a trancelike state of creation that others mistook for God-like arrogance. In fact, in these moments Bender felt the lowest humility and love for the implicit order of things. “There’s a harmony flowing through everything: art, music, shape. Sometimes you can just feel the way things are and ought to be,” he said. Sometimes not. And then he was like a junkie standing before the last clinic cut from the budget.
Without his muse, the half-formed head of the sadistic killer Robert Thomas Nauss was a stubborn scornful lump of undead clay, a brown-mud Beelzebub. The reborn killer, of Bender’s own creation, seemed to be hiding from his true form, mocking him in a battle of wills. He felt like he lived with the spirit of his subjects, and Nauss was proving even trickier and nastier than Vorhauer. He was staring at the Warlock’s merciless clay eyes when the telephone scattered the cats in the shadows of the warehouse.
“Frank Bender.” His voice was clear and strong, an inverse of the chaos around him. The man on the phone introduced himself as Bob Leschorn, chief inspector of the U.S. Marshals Service at headquarters in McLean, Virginia. He sounded smooth and businesslike, with that commanding charm that’s a half size too small to cover the blunt impatience of power.
“I’ve heard about your work on Vorhauer and Nauss, Frank. We need your help on a very important and sensitive case. I’m calling to see if you’ll consider doing it.”
“Sure, great! I’ll do anything I can to help.” Bender’s breath came a little faster. His commercial photography was inconsistent and money was tight; he needed the work badly. Jan would be thrilled with another federal case —this time from the very top of the pyramid.
“Good. But let’s take it one step at a time. We can’t talk about this on the phone. We have to be very covert about this. It’s an extremely dangerous fugitive, Ten Most Wanted. My assistants will bring you to me. Meanwhile, Frank, I don’t want you to mention this to anyone. Not to friends in the police department, the FBI, even marshals not working on the case.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
“We don’t want anyone to know, not even your wife.”
Jan wasn’t interested in the details of his work, and Bender was uncomfortable sharing case information with anyone, even with Joan. He’d just have to be careful to cover or hide the new bust when anyone visited the studio.
“OK,” he replied.
Three mornings later, marshals Tom Conti and Steve Quinn picked him up in a dark sedan with tinted windows. As they hurtled south on I-95, the deputies said they were driving him to the Philadelphia airport, and the chief inspector was flying up from Virginia to meet him. The only flight information the chief supplied was “afternoon.” As the marshals scurried around the airport trying to find his flight, Bender sensed the chief was testing him and his men, as well as taking security precautions. They waited two hours for the flight to arrive.
Leschorn was in his fifties, tall and graying, a spit-and-polish lawman in an expensive suit and tie. He took them into an airport restaurant and chose a table in a back corner. After the waitress disappeared with their order, he leaned toward Bender and lowered his voice to describe the case while the deputies kept a watchful eye on the door. Leschorn said they were looking for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, the underboss of the Colombo crime family in New York City. Persico, fifty-seven, had been groomed to be the godfather of one of the five major American crime families, along with his even more notorious brother, Carmine “The Snake” Persico. The Persico brothers had come up through the ranks as feared enforcers for the Colombo family. The titular heirs to the late, legendary godfather Joseph Colombo, the Persico boys had trouble staying out of jail. Allie Boy had served sixteen years for murder in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York—allegedly taking the rap for his brother. After his conviction in 1980 for extortion and loan sharking, he jumped a $250,000 bail and went into hiding rather than face twenty more years in jail. He’d been on the lam for seven years.
The high-profile Persico had been so elusive a fugitive the FBI decided to wash its hands of the case and had recently pushed it over to the marshals. After spending a fortune on a worldwide manhunt following a trail of fake identifications and aliases, the bureau didn’t even know if the mafioso was still alive. “The last seven years basically we have been getting anonymous tips,” a federal spokesman said. “They were taking us all over the world—tips that he was in Honolulu, Japan, Miami, South America. They were numerous but they never panned out.”
Leschorn emphasized the need for secrecy and speed. Even among the marshals, Persico had attained the status of He Who Must Not Be Named. Deputies could refer to him only by a code name.
“This is a top priority for the service,” he said. “We’re putting a lot of resources into this.”
Bender smiled to himself. He knew the marshals liked to show up the FBI on big cases to affirm their reputation as the world’s best bounty hunters. They saw themselves as the true hard-nosed federal lawmen, little known compared to their more glamorous, pretentious federal brethren.
Leschorn pushed two small prison photographs of Persico across the table to Bender. The three-by-five head shots showed the mobster in profile and also looking straight out of the photograph. They were nearly twelve years old. Like for Vorhauer and Nauss, current photographic evidence was nonexistent.
“What happened to his face?” Bender asked. The whole left side of his face below the eye looked like he’d slept on a pillow of pebbles and nails, leaving permanent scars. Trailing the swath of scars, part of his lower lip was dark blue.
“He got in a fight in Sing Sing and someone threw acid in his face,” Leschorn said.
Whether he’d had plastic surgery since then nobody knew.
“This isn’t much,” Bender said.
“Are you willing to do it?” Leschorn wanted a finished bust in ten days.
Bender would need the same unlikely combination of art, science, and divination known as “age progression” that had nabbed Vorhauer and was stymieing him with Nauss.
