Sleeping Dogs Page 4

  “What is it?” she whispered. “The IRA?”

  Schaeffer didn’t understand the question at first. Even after all the years in England, the whole endless, bitter struggle had remained as remote to him as the wars in Lebanon or Mozambique or El Salvador. People had talked at dinners about The Irish Question and he had only been puzzled by what they thought the question was. “No,” he said after a moment. She certainly would know more about it than he did. “It’s my problem, but I’m sure they’ve seen you.”

  “Are you trying to make me feel silly because I told you stories?”

  “No,” he said. There was no change in his expression. He was still staring at the people they passed. In spite of her resolve not to be duped, she began to feel afraid. It was impossible, she told herself. Here they were, walking along in the middle of a huge gathering of perfectly respectable people on a sunny afternoon in Brighton. Working women and clerks in London shops loaded their children onto the train and took them here to toss pebbles into the sea and eat the dreadful candy.

  But then she made the mistake of reaching to gather more evidence to bolster her cause, and thought about Michael Schaeffer. She knew nothing about him except what he had said. A cold feeling settled in her stomach. She had somehow gone too far, foolishly strayed across some invisible line, and now she was on the other side of it wishing she could scramble back. But she was already too far away, sinking with this man into some horror. She felt small and weak, and the world was sharp-edged and full of eyes watching her.

  When Michael led her around the stands and up the road toward the city, she had a moment of relief. “Are Peter and Jimmy bringing the car?”

  “They’re dead” he answered.

  It hit her senses like a loud, sharp noise, and she felt herself fall another step downward into the horror, as though her foot had slipped on a ladder, before she stopped herself. When she did, she was surprised by her thought: Well, I’m alive. What it meant she didn’t know, but it reassured her in some simple-minded way. After a moment, she realized it had been a question, and since nobody had contradicted her, she began to feel stronger.

  They walked along the road until they came to a row of curio shops. There were five of them, and the windows seemed to contain crowded troves of identical china souvenirs, postcards and embroidered placemats, all having to do with the seashore at Brighton. When Michael didn’t go inside the first shop or the second, it occurred to her that whatever was after them was too big for that: it wouldn’t wait, foiled by the simple ploy of hiding in a shop while they ordered a taxi on the proprietor’s telephone. It would roll over them like a tide, not delayed at all by the fear that the old ladies buying china would see it. The thought crossed her mind that Michael was being pursued by the police. But he had said, “Some people are here to kill us,” and the Brighton police didn’t do that; they lived in the same world she did. They tipped their hats and gave people directions. When the bomb had gone off in Mrs. Thatcher’s hotel, they had expressed the same surprise and distress that Margaret had felt. They didn’t think in those terms either.

  Michael led her down a long passage between the second and third shops. The buildings were so tall and close, she could feel that the sunlight never fell here. The air was cool and damp and dark, and the stone foundations had a tracing of deep green moss up to where the clapboards began. At the end of the passage, Michael stopped. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she felt affection for him, but then he surprised her by grasping the shoulder strap of her purse and slipping it off.

  He stepped forward into the sunlight, and she saw the white flash. It was a man’s arm, and it had a white sleeve on it, and the hand was in a fist. It punched at Michael, fast and hard, like a piston, but Michael had somehow known it was going to do that. He clutched her purse in both hands and caught the punch on it. Then it was all too fast. He had already wrapped the shoulder strap around the white arm, and now he tugged with all his strength.

  She saw the man dragged across the entrance of the passage. He was thin and dark, and his hand was still in a fist, but somehow stuck on her purse. There was a strange, alert look on his face as he passed, and for that instant his eyes seemed to stare down the passage at her. She heard three distinct noises, hollow and sharp, like a croquet mallet hitting a ball. Then she heard a scraping sound, as though something were being dragged on the ground along the back of the next shop.

  Michael reappeared. Now he was sweating and his hair was hanging in his eyes. He had her purse, and he jerked a knife out of the side of it and hung it on her shoulder. He swept his hair back with his hand. She looked at his face, but there was no expression she could identify as fear or remorse or disgust, which amazed her because she could still hear the three cracks and knew that they had been the sound a man’s head made when it was broken on concrete. Michael was already thinking about something ahead of them in time or space, like a cricket batsman anticipating where the bowler was going to throw the ball.

  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 sla
very. 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 trained her to analyze information that might result in a trial, not to shoot people.

  But she had opened the door, thinking somehow with sleepy logic that if people were banging on her door at four-thirty in the morning, it had to be urgent, and nobody she didn’t know who had urgent business would bring it to her.

  And there he was, standing in the hallway, and that was when she had heard the whisper. He had said, “You’re Elizabeth Waring,” and then, “Please, can I come in?” This was the sound that haunted her now. It was the saddest sound in the whole world, a man saying, “I’m dying out here. Let me in.”

  Now the rest of him came back too: the way he looked, his dark hair beginning to turn gray, the wide shoulders made less menacing by the big belly, the big, sad brown eyes protesting that he didn’t deserve this. “For Christ’s sake, look at me,” he had said. “I weigh two-thirty and I’m five-eight. I’m over fifty years old. For the last twenty years I’ve cleared over two hundred thousand a year. Do I look like somebody who takes on wet jobs? Hell, they hired somebody to do that. A specialist.”

  Even then, Elizabeth had instinctively understood that what he had told her was immensely important, already more important than anything else about Dominic Palermo. The specialist was the one the Justice Department wanted, the one who would know things. She tried to prompt Palermo. “But we don’t know what to do about a professional like that. Look at all the assassinations. We can’t protect you from that kind of killer unless we know who he is, or at least what to look for.”

  Palermo shook his head solemnly. He said, “Jesus, you must think I’m stupid, pulling that on me. The specialist? Shit, him I’d give you for free if I could. Problem is, I can’t. I never saw him, and I don’t even know his name. When they talked about him, they just called him ‘the Butcher’s Boy.’ ”

  She remembered what she had said: “Nice name.”

  “Yeah,” said Palermo. “Isn’t it?”
He was trying to make it sound sarcastic: Look at the sort of thing I have to put up with. But he couldn’t carry it off at four-thirty in the morning, still talking in a whisper because he was afraid.

  And that was what she was feeling now. It was Nicky Palermo’s fear. He had died of it. Nobody would ever have said it that way, but it was true. He had gotten scared enough to decide in the middle of the night to be a witness for the Justice Department, and the only way he could think of to go about it was to turn himself in to the agent who had been visible serving papers and taking depositions that week. Only he couldn’t know that the agent had been visible not by accident but by choice and foresight, because Justice Department thinking at the time was that the only agent on the case whose anonymity was expendable was the one who shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place: Elizabeth Waring. And this had killed him; not the man he was so afraid of, but his own friends, because he had talked and she couldn’t protect him. Nobody would have said it, but she knew it, and Nicky Palermo knew it, even though he had been dead for ten years now, and was not even a ghost, but an uncomfortable memory.

  Elizabeth sat up and turned on the light beside her bed. It was four-thirty again, only now it was Alexandria, Virginia, and Las Vegas was a long time ago. She looked over at Jim’s empty side of the bed. It was four-thirty, the coldest, darkest hour out of every twenty-four, and Nicky Palermo was dead, and her husband was dead, and her career was dead. No, her capacity for having or wanting a career was dead. Next week or a year from now, she would be going through it again. There would be a new office that was almost like the last because it was in the same huge building, and new people, some young and eager, and the others quietly and unofficially burned out but carrying too much rank to be randomly reassigned somewhere to fill in for a GS-7. There would be some new special problem the Justice Department thought it could solve with a crack task force—stock fraud or banks or imported flea collars with so much poison in them that they made Rover roll over with convulsions—and Elizabeth Waring would volunteer for anything except Organized Crime.