There was a pause on Elizabeth’s end of the line that sounded as though she were thinking hard. “What’s he doing now?”
“I think he’s already done it. He wouldn’t have booked a Hong Kong flight if he wasn’t trying to get away. I think the reason he went after Mantino has something to do with that. Maybe it was a payoff to somebody to get him out: Mantino had an outsider for a bodyguard, which to me means that he didn’t trust somebody in his own organization. But it’s just as likely that our boy simply wanted to get everybody in an uproar so they’d be too busy putting in bulletproof glass to go out and look for him.”
“Welcome aboard, Jack.”
“What?”
“You just figured out as much about the way he thinks as anybody else knows after ten years.”
“Save the congratulations.”
“Why?”
“Because if I get too good at this, sometime I just might get a look at him.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I might waste a second or two making up my mind.”
The New Mexico experience had been a disaster. He couldn’t keep putting himself in positions where some scared cop could pop him in the dark.
Eddie Mastrewski had been the world’s greatest advocate of caution. Wolf could see Eddie again, fat and sweating, his eyes bulging and the veins in his forehead visible as he drove the car onto the highway outside St. Louis. “That wasn’t right, kid,” he had said, glancing up at the rearview mirror, then down at the boy, then into the mirror, then into the other mirror so often that the road in front of him seemed only an afterthought. It was at this moment that the boy had begun to worry. Eddie looked as though he were about to explode. The boy had seen piles of internal organs in the butcher shop, but had only a cloudy notion of how they worked. He thought that the pumping of Eddie’s heart was increasing the pressure in his body, and that if it didn’t stop, he would have a heart attack, which in the boy’s mind meant an explosion of the pump.
“We do this for a living,” said Eddie. “It’s not some kind of contest. We can’t go around getting into gunfights.” The boy had nodded sagely for Eddie’s benefit, and watched him start to settle down slowly.
The boy’s part of it had gone as Eddie had planned. He had sat in the back of the movie theater next to some boys his age, and Mancuso hadn’t even noticed him. To all the adults, he had just seemed to be one of a gang of kids who had come together from the neighborhood to see the movie. When Mancuso got up in the middle of the movie to go to the upstairs bathroom, the boy had followed.
He hadn’t wanted to follow because he was getting interested in the images on the huge screen at the front. The movie was La Dolce Vita, and he could still remember the moment when he’d had to walk out. It was dawn somewhere outside Rome after a night of incomprehensible carousing, and Marcello Mastroianni had climbed onto some woman’s back and was riding her like a horse on the grass. The boy had no clear notion of what was going on, or if indeed it really was going on or was just some foreign way of conveying decadence. It was the only image he now retained of the film thirty years later, because it was what had been on the screen as he had glanced over his shoulder when he reached the aisle. He had longed to stay at least until the scene changed, because although it had never happened in any movie he had ever seen, he had some forlorn hope that somebody was about to have sexual intercourse, or at least that the woman was about to become naked through some happy act of negligence. Even he could see that the rules were different for foreign movies—he had never seen Doris Day and Rock Hudson behave like this—and he hated to leave without knowing.
Because of this he was annoyed with Mancuso when he followed him into the men’s room in the loge. But when he had opened the door, he had forgotten about the movie. Mancuso hadn’t gone in to relieve himself; he had gone in to meet two other men. When the boy walked in, all three had turned to face him, jerking their heads in quick unison like a flock of birds. The boy had looked away from them and gone straight to the urinal because he couldn’t imagine any other act that would explain his presence. He had stood there, straining to coax some urine out of himself. Could they tell he wasn’t pissing? The three had moved away to the end of the room. He could hear their leather soles on the hard white tiles. Mancuso gave the two men crinkly envelopes, and then the men left, swinging the door against the squeaky spring that was supposed to hold it closed.
As Mancuso went to wash his hands at the sink, the boy had wondered why. But Mancuso was using it as an excuse for standing in front of the mirror and admiring his thick brown hair. Then he had run his wet hands through the hair and taken out a black plastic comb. The boy had tried to stop time, to hold everything the way it was while he decided, but it didn’t work.
Mancuso put the comb in the breast pocket of his suit and turned to dry his hands on the filthy rolling towel. The boy turned with him, took the revolver out of his jacket and aimed at the base of his skull. When he fired, the noise was terrible and bright and hollow in the little room. Then he dashed out, as much to escape the ringing in his ears as the corpse. But in the dim light of the small, orange, flame-shaped bulbs mounted on the walls of the mezzanine, he saw his mistake.
The two men hadn’t left at all. They had been waiting just outside the door for Mancuso to join them, and now they pulled guns out of their suit coats and aimed them at the boy. He remembered the puzzled face of one of them, a tall, thin man with a long nose. He looked at the boy, then past him as though he expected someone else to come out of the men’s room. The boy ran.
Years later he understood that it was probably the only thing that had saved him. To pull out the gun again, even to stand in one place long enough to allow the two men to think, would have doomed him. But he ran down the stairs to the lobby, where Eddie was just coming out of the swinging double doors with some scared ushers and three other middle-aged men in hats and long overcoats. At first the boy thought that Eddie had been caught, because they looked like plainclothes cops. But when the two men with guns had appeared behind him on the stairway, everybody but Eddie ran back into the theater. Only the boy and Eddie fired. Both of them aimed at the same man and hit him, and left the other to get off two or three shots over the railing. He was too cunning, because he fired at the big glass door to the street, where Eddie and the boy should have been, instead of into the lobby, where they were. The boy aimed again, but then the railing was a blur because he was being snatched off his feet and hustled through the pile of broken glass into the street.
Eddie had been right to do it. Eddie was a born foot soldier. He always kept in the front of his brain the certainty that anyone who thought he had a valid reason to put his head up when the air was full of flying metal was an idiot. And now it was time for Wolf to put his head down.
It had taken him two days of driving to reach Buffalo, and he felt a kind of empty-headed euphoria to be able to stand and walk. His right foot was cramped and stiff, and the tendon behind his right knee felt stretched and rubbery. He walked along Grant Street and studied the buildings. They hadn’t changed in the ten years since he had seen them except for the signs, so there was some hope. When he had arrived in Buffalo he had found it gripped by some kind of madness. The center of the downtown section had been bulldozed and sandblasted, and now lived a strange, mummified, decorative existence, with a set of trolley tracks running down Main Street and a lot of lights to verify the first impression that there was nobody on the sidewalks. They had hosed the dirty, dangerous occupants out of Chippewa Street and turned the buildings into the core of some imaginary theater district.