Sleeping Dogs (24 page)

At first the search would be quick and cursory. They would duck across doorways and step aside to swing doors open. When they had been through the whole building once without any resistance, they would go through again looking for hiding places. He had to get out before they got to that stage. He held the shotgun level with the floor as he slipped out of the pantry into the open kitchen. He set his feet down softly, moving to the kitchen door. Now he could hear voices in the parlor, quick and urgent and soft.

He slowly turned the doorknob and pulled the door open before he let the spring turn it back. He took a step over the threshold, then another to take the weight of his body, then another and another until he was down the steps. He took a deep breath of the cool, damp air and blew it out to let it merge with the wind. As his head cleared, he admitted to himself that the old man must be dead.

He walked around to the back of the house, looked in the window and saw them. There were two of them, both carrying pistols in their right hands. One was tall and fat, with bristly gray hair brushed back like porcupine quills. He kept his pistol pointed down at the floor, while the other, a twenty-five-year-old with a pitted complexion and a sharp, chiseled face, danced around opening closet doors and jumping out of the way as though he weren’t sure when his partner might decide to shoot.

As he watched them, he studied the eager, predatory expression on the face of the young one. He looked as though he had just watched the old black man die, and the sight had agreed with him. He was in a state of excitement, thrilled that he was going to get to do it again. It took no more than a second for the impulse his look ignited in Wolf to travel its course. He knew Eddie Mastrewski would have said, “What do you get for it?” But by now the impulse was traveling too fast, gaining strength and getting hotter, and it made him raise the shotgun to his shoulder and hug it tight. He fired through the window, pumped it and fired again. After the second shot, as the barrel leveled from the kick and he pumped it again, there was an instant, like the wink of a camera shutter, when he saw pieces of glittering window glass turn end over end and sprinkle the two bodies sprawled on the floor.

He lowered the shotgun, pressed the disconnector and quickly pumped out the last three shells. Then he released the magazine, gave the barrel a quarter-turn and removed it from the receiver. He held both halves under his coat and walked down the driveway to the street. He had told the old man he hadn’t come to town to get Angelo Fratelli, but a lot had changed since then.

Angelo Fratelli hated white wine. It was his belief that it was a weak, sour version of the rich, blood-red Paisano that he had been drinking since he was a child. He had heard the sister say in school that when Jesus was on the cross, the Romans had given him vinegar and water with a sponge, and he had assumed they were talking about something that just tasted like vinegar, maybe cheap Spanish sauterne. That was what Angelo was drinking now. Every year, between Ash Wednesday and Easter, he drank white wine only. It was a legacy from the days when people ate fish on Friday, and although religion had said nothing about what went with it, the Fratellis had always assumed that the Scriptures implied white wine. The drop of cognac or grappa that he liked after dinner was out too, because those concoctions were clearly on the side of luxury. He was still drinking white wine this late in the year because of a promise he had made to Saint Giovanni in return for a favor, and from time to time he wondered if the favor was sufficient to merit the sacrifice.

But he always lost weight during Lent, and on the whole he was satisfied with the return he got on this last vestige of his religion. He weighed two hundred thirty pounds on Easter morning each year. By the time Ash Wednesday came again he weighed two forty-five, and over twenty years that was an extra three hundred pounds. So he calculated that if he hadn’t switched to white wine every Lent and spoiled his appetite, he would weigh about five hundred fifty pounds. He was fifty-three now, and it would have been a real problem; he wouldn’t even have been able to slide into his reserved booth at the Vesuvio Restaurant.

This would have been more than a humiliation, because the booth where he now sat was his place of business. It was under a stained-glass window with a picture of Mount Vesuvius trailing a huge cloud of white smoke across the blue sky. It allowed him to sit with his back to the wall without seeming to, because behind the window were six inches of whitewashed brick with light bulbs cunningly placed to simulate the light of the Italian sun and the glow of the volcano. The booth wasn’t reserved in a crude way; it was simply that the waiters never seated anyone else there. If an outsider asked for it, they would smile and nod and conduct him to another part of the restaurant.

Angelo Fratelli was an important man. In a way, he was the restaurant’s biggest attraction. Every night at six he would drive into the lot at the rear of the building, walk around to the front, come in, smile at the older waiters and go through the dining room to his booth. When he sat down, Lorraine, the fiftyish blond waitress he seemed to prefer, would bring him his wine. She would set the carafe on the table roughly, nearly spilling it, and clank down his glass. If he said, “Nice day today,” she would snap, “Can’t prove it by me. I’ve got to be on my feet in this dark hole all day.” If he said she looked good, she’d say, “Don’t even think about it.” For reasons nobody had ever fathomed, Mr. Fratelli found Lorraine amusing, and when he left each night, he would give her a large tip. Since all the employees in the Vesuvio divided their tips equally, Lorraine’s rudeness to Mr. Fratelli was considered a form of heroism. From a certain point of view, she was risking her life for the good of all. Angelo Fratelli was the reigning leader of what in Buffalo was called “The Arm.”

Nobody presumed to guess why Angelo tolerated Lorraine, but it was for a combination of reasons. One was that he thought it made him seem affable and approachable. In reality he was anything but affable. In the wars of the fifties he had filled his share of car trunks, and since then had cultivated a reputation for savagery by ensuring that the kills he wanted attributed to his wrath were found naked and mutilated in fields south of the city. Everything he did was calculated and premeditated. Although he had no interest in spending time with other people, he had found that a good portion of his business was brought to him by people who would never have dared speak to him if it weren’t for his supposed accessibility. His demeanor had been practiced since the forties, when he had been given as a franchise a stable of shopworn and unprepossessing prostitutes by Francisco Del Pecchio, the potentate of that era. Angelo’s natural temper was gloomy and dyspeptic, and at first he found that the prostitution business was tough going. Potential customers were instinctively frightened when they saw him, and often left before they saw the merchandise he was offering because they suspected that the young two-hundred-thirty-pound entrepreneur might have conducted them to his lair in the Albemarle Hotel to garrote them for their wallets and watches. This in fact, was one of the business practices he was reduced to considering, when one day a prospective client, a gypsum buyer from Ohio, enlightened him. “You think I’m crazy enough to go out in the dark in a strange town with you?”

Thereafter Angelo had concentrated his considerable will on changing his image. He had spent some money on decorating the upper floor of the Albemarle, more money on some respectable suits for himself and still more money on presents and clothes for his sullen and underworked talent. He made it a policy never to enter a room without smiling at everyone he saw and, if possible, calling them by name. He developed a comical way of talking to his girls, patterned after the way he and his male colleagues in The Arm talked to each other, a tone that was simultaneously conspiratorial and derisive. He even gave them nicknames like mobsters. One, a girl who had been born with a blond, bovine beauty in a part of Alabama that hadn’t seen fit to reward it suitably, he called “Slowly-butt Shirley.” Another, a tall, bony woman who might have been a fashion model if she had had a pretty face, he called “Olive Oyl,” and a younger girl of similar charms and handicaps, “Extra-Virgin Olive Oyl.” His star, an intense young woman named Gloria Monday, was so inventive in what she did to, on, under and with her clients that she achieved a clientele that wasn’t either blind drunk or lost, but actually knew the way to the Albemarle. Angelo had never heard Latin outside of church, but he could read an inscription, and when he saw “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” on a tombstone, he started calling her “Sick Transit Gloria.”

That had been a long time ago. Now the girls were old or dead, and Angelo’s hearty, expansive manner had become so habitual that he had often displayed it at the most inappropriate times, such as the night when he had executed a young Canadian named Boromier for being found in close proximity to a truck-load of cigarettes that unofficially belonged to Angelo, and again when he had attended the funeral of a close friend. Because it bore no relation to his feelings, this bogus jocularity could surface at any time when he wasn’t concentrating. It added to his stature and reputation in his later years, because when it appeared it was chilling.

Angelo was alone in his booth tonight; it was a brief vacation for him. Usually he was encumbered by Capella and Salvatore, two young retainers sworn to die to protect him. The problem with young men sworn to die to protect their patrons was that they didn’t actually want to die, so large portions of their mental capacities were devoted to vigilance and suspicion. This left so little for ordinary human commerce that it made them dull and preoccupied companions. But tonight Angelo was to meet with a man who wasn’t willing to speak in the presence of third parties and hadn’t the experience to appreciate the fact that at any given time Capella and Salvatore were only half conscious of anything that was said, and in any case had no interest in it.

Angelo sipped the terrible white wine and rolled it around his mouth so that he could detest it. Then he set the glass down, filled it again, stood up and went to the men’s room. As he walked across the dining room, he felt the eyes of a dozen people on him, all establishing his presence to the satisfaction of a hundred grand juries. He had seldom done what he was about to do. The Vesuvio was his sanctuary, and to use it as an alibi in any illegal activity would have been a violation of trust. But the man he was going to meet was a banker, a solid citizen who had, to Angelo’s knowledge, never done anything that wouldn’t put a grand jury to sleep.

Angelo passed the men’s room door, went out the fire exit in the hallway near the storeroom and emerged beside the dumpster in the lot behind the restaurant. He was so overwhelmed by the sweet, nauseating smell of fermenting vegetables that he stopped to peer over the edge to see what they were. He was dispirited when he saw that the smell was from a collection of empty quart cans of tomato paste, all opened and dumped hastily without being scraped. These days everybody was in a hurry; in the old days they had made the sauce from fresh plum tomatoes.

He looked for the car Salvatore had left for him, and saw it immediately. It was a small gray Toyota registered to someone named O’Reilly who ran a gas station and used it as a loaner for regular customers. O’Reilly had no idea who would be driving the car, or that it had anything to do with the way Salvatore made his living. It was a favor of no consequence to O’Reilly, but the fact that he had done it had, without his knowledge, made him eligible for dividends in the future. He would probably find that over time he would gain a few customers who would mention that Salvatore had recommended him. But he might also find that when he was worried about his property taxes they had already been paid, or that his daughter had miraculously moved up the waiting list for admission to the most desirable girls’ school. In the most extreme case, he might find that when his enemies were about to triumph over him, forces that had nothing to do with him would destroy them, suddenly and utterly. The world worked on goodwill, favors and reciprocities, but the system was too crude to keep the exchanges in proportion.

Angelo drove out of the lot without even glancing in the direction of the space where his own Cadillac was parked. In ten or twenty minutes he would be back at his table. He drove carefully. The car was probably like a fingerprint collection by now, having been loaned to half the city without being cleaned, but if he hit something there wouldn’t be much question as to who had been driving it.

* * *

Wolf heard the sound of the Toyota leaving the lot. As soon as its lights had passed, he knew the driver’s eyes would be turned to look up the street, and he sat up in the back seat of Fratelli’s Cadillac. What he saw seemed impossible. The driver of the little car that was going past Angelo Fratelli’s new Caddy was Angelo Fratelli. He ducked back down, opened the door a little and kept the light switch in the door frame depressed with his keys while he opened it wide enough to slip out into the darkness. He reached inside to the floor to haul the shotgun out after him, then hurried to his own car.

Angelo wasn’t sure why he was going to the trouble of meeting McCarron in secret and alone, but he was intrigued by the request. McCarron was the president of a small bank that operated only in Erie County. Banks had always titillated Angelo, and they had titillated him even more since he had begun to read the stories about savings and loans being closed by the government. It amazed him that so much crude bad-boy thievery had gone on behind the substantial institutional columns of those places. There had been clowns who had imagined they could practically stuff their briefcases with their depositors’ money and walk out the door free and clear the day they had declared bankruptcy. But oddly enough, it seemed that the clowns were right. The government was picking up the tab, and those former savings-and-loan officers were sitting on their yachts drinking champagne. Obviously Mr. McCarron had been reading the same newspapers Angelo had. He would be thinking that right now, as the army of sweaty little federal bookkeepers were busy breaking their pencils and gnashing their teeth while they worked their second year of double shifts to figure out what had happened to all the money in the savings and loans, they would be letting the banks alone.