Now the horns began in earnest, and Wolf looked at the source of the commotion. There was the little Toyota stalled in the narrow drive to the exit, and behind it there were now eight or ten cars, all honking their horns. Two of the young men who had pushed the station wagon were looking into the gray car and shaking their heads at someone inside. When the someone lunged over the back seat into the front and began to bark at the horns, he understood their problem; they wanted to get in and move the car out of the way, but they were afraid of the big dog.
As Wolf stepped to the street, he could see two men walking quickly up the sidewalk toward a lighted yellow sign. The big man with Fratelli, whose face he hadn’t been able to see, was probably a bodyguard. He obviously had the knack. There had been no way for the bodyguard to sense that Fratelli was in danger—as in fact he wasn’t, at least for the moment. Wolf had already decided not to make an attempt tonight. There were too many witnesses. When the gray car had entered the university visitors’ lot, he had followed it on a whim. He regretted it now as he walked back toward his car amid the sound of horns. Somehow he had frightened the bodyguard and a whole series of responses had been triggered, each placing additional obstacles in his path. Now Fratelli would dig in, the bodyguard would marshal reinforcements and in an hour Fratelli would be a very difficult man to kill.
Wolf climbed into his car and started the engine. He backed out of his parking space and joined the line of cars waiting to get past the toll gate to the street. He could see that the two men were just coming under the big yellow sign down the sidewalk. Then something odd happened. The two of them tried to squeeze through the front door at once, and got stuck for a second. Then Fratelli stopped and let the other man go in front. It was puzzling behavior for a bodyguard.
Once inside the Canal, Angelo could see that the place was disgusting. It was full of the kind of people he had seen on television buying cars like the one he had just abandoned or talking about tax-sheltered annuities, and every one of them was drinking white wine. The place was dim but full of living plants with little spotlights on them, and the bartender was dressed up like a neutered poodle, with a high collar that had a little black bow around it.
He could see the telephone in the little alcove just this side of the bathrooms, so he rushed across the room, fishing in his pockets for change. He was almost at the telephone before he admitted to himself that he didn’t have any, so he came back to grab McCarron, who had been headed off by a woman in a little blue suit like a man’s. “I’m afraid we’re all booked up,” she was saying.
Angelo said to McCarron, “Give me your change.”
The woman looked at him doubtfully. “I was just telling your friend—”
“Fine,” said Angelo. “I just want to use your phone.” McCarron placed a little pile of coins in his palm. As an afterthought, Angelo added, “And we’d like a drink. White wine.”
Angelo returned to the telephone to find a young woman dropping a coin into the slot. He leaned close and said, “Are you going to be long?”
As she turned to look at him, he could see that she was about twenty-five years old and the sort of young woman he hated most. She smirked at him. “Probably, but it’s none of your business.” She had light brown, almost blond hair, a big pair of glasses with red frames and lenses that glittered in the light of the little spot on the nearest philodendron. The enormity of the situation engulfed Angelo as the young woman took off her earring on the side where she was going to clamp the phone. She was actually going to prolong this just to piss him off. She had no idea of what the planet she lived on was really like. She was probably a clerk in the women’s clothes section of a department store, or, with that arrogance, probably the senior clerk who decided which clothes to buy from the distributor. She was very much like that young woman two years ago who had come up behind him on the street on the day when the computerized timing device on that year’s new Cadillac had malfunctioned. He had been coughing along on about four mistimed cylinders, spewing black smoke and going twenty miles an hour, just trying to make it to the nearest gas station. She had pulled up behind, leaned on the horn for a full minute, then passed him. As she went by, she turned, that same smirk on her face, held out her upturned fist and raised a carefully manicured middle finger at him.
Angelo had gone mad. He let the Cadillac glide to a stop by the side of the road, ran out into the street to flag down a cab and followed her. She went to the parking lot of a real-estate broker, got out and entered. He waited long enough to see her sit down at a desk and put her purse in a drawer. She was so overconfident that it never occurred to her to look behind to see what might be breathing down her neck. That night, when she walked out the door of the realtor’s office to drive home in her bright red Ford Tempo, she had a surprise. The surprise was embodied in two men who had made the trip over the bridge from Fort Erie in Canada for no purpose other than to demonstrate to this young woman that the world was a much darker and more dangerous place than she or anyone she knew had ever imagined.
Angelo couldn’t believe it. This night was the worst experience he’d had in five years, even before the girl. Now he was stuck in this fern bar with a man so crazy that he might change his mind about his persecutors at any moment and start screaming that they were from Jupiter instead of Langley, Virginia. But even that was nothing. Angelo had seen the Butcher’s Boy. Everything else was a mere distraction in comparison. He had to get on that phone. He waited while the young woman dialed, then watched while she counted the rings. When there was no answer and she hung up, he felt as though a weight had been lifted from his chest, but when she snatched the quarter out of the coin tray and put it into the slot again, he started to have trouble breathing. It was at this moment that the woman’s boyfriend appeared. He stepped up beside her, glanced at Angelo and said, “Everything okay?”
The young woman frowned and said, “Sally’s not answering. Not that I could talk to her without any privacy.”
The young man turned to Angelo and seemed to puff up like a male grouse. “Can I help you?”
Angelo’s eyes burned with a heat that made him feel as though they were sweating into his head. His right forearm came forward and his hand went to the man’s groin and clutched his testicles. The man’s eyes bulged with something beyond surprise. What was happening was so unheard of that it couldn’t be real. The pain told him it was, but it also told him not to attempt to do anything about it. To push this insane demon away from him meant that when the hand came away it would still be holding on to his testicles.
Angelo said, “I need to use the phone. Tell her.”
The man said, “He needs to use the phone.” His back was to his girlfriend, so she couldn’t see anything except that the two men were face to face.
“I know he does,” she said. “Tough.”
Angelo gave a little squeeze. The man said in a very different voice, “Tracy, get off the fucking telephone. Now. He’s got me by the balls.”
“What?” said the young woman.
“I mean literally. It’s not a figure of speech. If you don’t, I’m going to kill you myself.”
She slammed the phone onto its hook, stomped out into the dining room, grabbed her coat and was out the door before Angelo loosened his grip a little.