The whole business alarmed him. What could have become of the old man if there was some urban-renewal craziness going on? But the juggernaut had obviously run its course before it reached Grant Street. The respectable blue-collar sections obviously hadn’t struck anybody in city hall as a priority, and they retained their ancient gritty integrity.
When he had been here on business with Eddie when he was sixteen, they had driven by the house slowly, but didn’t stop. “What is it?” he had asked. Eddie had answered, “There’s a man in there who makes people disappear. He’s black—sort of brown and leathery like my shoes, and he’s about a thousand years old. Remember where it is. Never write it down, just remember.”
Years later he had made his way to Buffalo with a contract on him so huge that it wasn’t expressed in numbers. The word had gone out that the man who got him would never have to do anything again for the rest of his life. So he had found himself one winter night in the musty, dark parlor talking to the quiet old man, with the big clock ticking on the mantel and the old furnace in the basement pumping warm air up through the register at their feet.
“I know who you are,” the old man had said. “It’ll be expensive.”
Ten years later, here he was in the parlor again. This time the old man said, “I remember you. It’ll be expensive.”
“I know,” Wolf said. He considered himself lucky that the old man was still above ground with ten years added on to the unknowable number he had already lived.
The old man seemed to be thinking about how long ten years was too. “How hard are they looking after all these years? Don’t lie to me.”
“They found me,” he said. “They must be trying hard.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“No. Why now?”
“I’ve been living far away all this time. I wasn’t stupid enough to even think about coming back, but Tony Talarese found me.”
“So you killed him, which makes four. Peter Mantino makes six, because you had to shoot a man to get to him.”
“So everybody knows.”
“People talk. This time I listened.”
“Why?”
“I knew you’d been away. That meant you don’t have anybody you didn’t know ten years ago.”
“So you waited for me to come.”
“I waited.”
“Are you going to help me?”
“When you were in trouble before, you didn’t want to run away from it until you hurt them. You killed about twenty of them before you let it go.”
“It wasn’t twenty.”
The old man shrugged. “It don’t matter. I want to know if you’re going to do that again.”
“No,” Wolf said. “It was worth trying to get Talarese before he told anybody where I was. I thought he was too greedy to let anybody else collect. Then there was a shooter waiting for me at the L.A. airport. Unless things have changed a lot, there’s nobody who could have arranged that except Mantino.”
“Who else do you want? Did you come to town to get Angelo Fratelli?”
“No. All I want is a passport and a way out. I want to go under again.”
“Then I’ll go see a man.” The old man pushed himself up out of the chair with his arms, and stayed bent over for a second before straightening. As he dressed for his errand, he looked frail and antique. He put on a sleeveless sweater, wrapped a scarf around his neck, put on a dark brown overcoat and then snapped a pair of rubbers over his sturdy leather shoes to keep his feet dry, as though it were midwinter. He walked carefully to the door. “Lock it behind me. Anybody comes who don’t have a key, shoot him.”
“I didn’t bring a gun.”
The old man had to turn the whole upper part of his body around to look at him. “There’s a shotgun in the closet.” He closed the door, and Wolf could hear him slowly and carefully moving over the elastic boards of the porch toward the steps, and then silence returned.
The house was still fiercely neat. The knives hanging from hooks in the kitchen had been sharpened so many times that they all had fillet blades, but they were hung in unbroken descending order of length. The old man’s collection of boots was lined up in ranks in the front of the closet. The shotgun was a Remington that might have been acquired any time after the turn of the century, and it rested in a stand that the old man had made, with a block at the floor cut with a jigsaw to fit the butt, and a pair of bent clamps on the barrel to keep it from toppling over. The plastic cap of an aspirin bottle had been fitted over the muzzle to keep out the dust. Wolf lifted it out of its stand and sniffed it: linseed oil on the stock and gun oil on the barrel. He pumped the slide and felt the smooth, easy clicks as he ejected a shell onto the carpet. He glanced at it before he slipped it back in: double-ought buckshot. The old man didn’t want to have to shoot anybody twice.
He had been awake most of the time for seventy-two hours now, and his mind was beginning to feel the wear. He had to force himself to stay alert for a few more minutes. He found the box of shotgun shells on the floor behind the boots, filled his coat pockets with them and took the shotgun with him.
He was beginning to feel an exhaustion almost like dizziness, so that when he turned his head he had to take a moment to focus on the new sight. He knew he was probably reacting to this more than to the danger of sleeping alone in the old man’s house, but he felt a nervous restlessness that made him afraid to close his eyes.
Eddie had given him advice on that too. “Before you go to sleep, always be goddamned sure you’re going to be alive when you wake up.” He used to keep the boy up watching the cars behind them while he drove, or sometimes just looking for a likely place to drop a weapon or change a license plate. Once he had even made him check off landmarks to be sure the road map didn’t have any mistakes on it. Sometime in the last few years Wolf had admitted to himself that he had always known it was because Eddie hated to be alone when he was scared. Eddie would have said, “I’m not scared. I’m just alert.” It still made him sad to remember that Eddie had been alone when he had died.
He walked through the house to the pantry, opened the door and turned on the light. The shelves were lined with cans and bottles to last for years, all arranged in rows, front to back like the displays in a tiny supermarket. He found a twenty-five-pound sack of rice, placed it on the floor as a pillow, laid the shotgun on the floor next to it and turned out the light. For a moment he lay there in the dark, opening and closing his eyes and not detecting a difference. He wondered if he would have to try something else. It had been ten years since he had slept on a floor, and the tile squares were harder and colder than they looked. But the idea of getting up again seemed an immense labor at the moment, and then he forgot what he had been thinking, and had to remind himself. He decided he had better move, but later, when he felt more uncomfortable, and then he was asleep.
He didn’t dream. Instead, his mind roamed the house, running hands along the walls, feeling the faint vibration of the old man’s oil furnace, like the sound of an engine pushing it somewhere with glacial slowness. Deep in the timbers there was the almost-inaudible creak of the house standing up to the wind off the river, and outside, tiny particles of grit blowing against the impervious shell of brittle paint on the clapboards. It was like being deep in the hold of a ship at anchor. His mind kept patrolling the surfaces, reassuring itself that the shell was tight and unbroken, and that his sleeping body was secreted in the center, where he had hidden it.
When he awoke, his first sensation was that he had missed something on his rounds, made a mistake. But then his mind tripped on the contradiction: he couldn’t have been both asleep and awake. But he knew there were people in the house. The floor amplified the impacts of their steps, and he could feel them in his body. The old man would have come in alone and warned him if he was bringing somebody back with him.