Wolf finished his coffee and walked out into the cavernous train station. The place was not just wide but vertically immense, in a way that buildings constructed now could never be unless they were designed to shield some sport from the weather. The ceiling must have been seventy or eighty feet above him, and they could have held a cattle drive through the waiting area without taking up more than a third of the marble floor. These places had seemed archaic to him when he was a child, remnants of some richer time when there was more stone and wood and leather in the world, and more time to think about what things looked like. In the old days these places were always noisy with the echoes of feet, luggage carts, yelling and amplified announcements, but for some reason he couldn’t remember ever hearing a train. Now the station still echoed, but the sound of his shoes on the marble was all he heard as he walked to the one ticket window that wasn’t boarded up and bought a ticket to Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth looked at the list she had made before falling asleep last night. The way to keep the cost down was to get in touch with the people who already were paid to watch things and give them something specific to look for. If she was right about what was happening, he was running; that meant small motels, cars fraudulently rented or stolen, bogus identification and credit cards and paying cash for merchandise anybody else would buy with a check. These were details that gave him a chance to make a mistake. If he did, he might come to the attention of a police department somewhere. All she could do was to send out circulars to introduce the possibility that the next time it could be him.
It was essential to keep the Butcher’s Boy from getting out of the country as long as she could. If he had survived for ten years with Carlo Balacontano screaming for his head, then he must have lived someplace where Carlo Balacontano’s voice wasn’t very loud. She had made a formal request to the State Department to examine new passport applications for male Caucasians aged thirty to forty-five with extreme care, checking independently at least two of the statements or supporting documents supplied. It might not turn him up, but it would delay the processing, which might keep him here a little longer. This had brought a strange inquiry from the CIA, but the questions they had asked had been about McCarron, the man who had been found dead with Fratelli in Buffalo. Maybe he was a former agent or something. Whatever their interest was, it couldn’t hurt.
The main thing was to keep trying. If every policeman in every department asked his informants about the Butcher’s Boy, and every person who watched airports and steamships and provided passports and rented cars kept alert, somebody just might notice him. The most depressing thing about it was that the only way she was going to recognize him was if he did something, and what he would have to do to identify himself was to kill someone else.
Elizabeth started to move her eyes down the list again, but now Richardson was standing over her desk. “You know what I think is going on?” he asked. “I think this is a cleansing ritual.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Who was Tony Talarese? He was about forty-five years old, a capo at the time of his life when he should have been out there scrambling. But what was he doing? He wore fancy clothes, spent lots of money, had a house that Al Capone would have thought was too ostentatious. But the main thing was, he was corrupt. He’d been schtupping the waitresses in his brother’s restaurant, the wives of at least two of his soldiers and his brother’s wife’s niece, which in those old-time families is incest. But most of all, he’d been robbing his boss while he was in prison, and he was wearing a wire for the FBI. Think about it.”
Elizabeth rested her head on her fist. “Okay, I’m thinking about it. What conclusion am I supposed to be reaching?”
Richardson frowned and churned his hand in the air to conjure the next example. “Peter Mantino. He was about the same age. He’d been in charge of the western operations for a while. Was he in Las Vegas robbing the suckers? No. Was he in L.A. cutting into the drug trade? No. Was he in Portland or Seattle trying to organize the ports? No. He lived in Santa Fe like a retired homosexual art dealer. He did nothing to increase his family’s stake in the richest, fastest-growing region in the country. He was lazy and corrupt.”
Elizabeth squinted her eyes and tilted her head to look up at Richardson. “It’s been a long time since you actually prosecuted a case, hasn’t it? I mean in front of a jury.”
“Angelo Fratelli.” Richardson stopped for a moment. “You’re not buying this, are you?”
“Go on, Angelo Fratelli,” she prompted. “Corrupt.”
“What I’m getting at is this. We suddenly get three killings, at least two of them done by a very special professional exterminator. Forget everything else we think we know about him. In fact, forget him completely. One correspondence that we seem to have overlooked is that these three people were lousy specimens, and that raises the possibility that their deaths were purchased by reformers.”
“What sort of reformers were you thinking of?”
“Two kinds come to mind. One is the old men at the top—the last generation, who came to power before World War Two. They see that the next generation has grown up into a bunch of slobs, and they don’t like it. They decide, in effect, to replace all of middle management.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “That’s possible. But you said two kinds.”
“The other one is conservatives.”
“Somebody out there who’s older than the old men?”
“In a way. An ultra-neoconservative movement.”
“This is something you know about, or are you making it up?”
“A little of each. You’ve got the generation that’s coming up now, in their twenties and thirties. All over the world—in the Middle East, in Europe, in this country—you have a big stampede toward the past. Every last one of them is dirt-ignorant, and more conservative than their great-grandmothers. Why should the Mafia be immune?”
“No reason that I know of. So what would these people be after?”
“Power. They’re old enough now to have seen a little action and done some dirty work. When they see the degenerate jerks who are in charge they become instant reformers.”
“Okay, then what?”
“They get in touch with a hit man.”
Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”
“What do you mean?”
“Reformers have to pull the trigger themselves. If they think the generation that’s in power is fat and lazy, they have to prove that they themselves are not by killing them personally. I can see the old dons hiring some messenger to go out and clean house, but I can’t see a revolution by proxy.”
Richardson paused. “No,” he said. “I guess I can’t either. What are the other alternatives?”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t prove that the lieutenant in Buffalo was wrong. It makes perfect sense that with Carl Bala in jail, somebody might kill his caretakers and take over his holdings. And what you were saying about the three victims makes it seem more likely. If you have a business with terrific potential but inefficient management, you have unfriendly takeovers, right?”
“Okay, let’s start with what we know. Tony T was killed by the Butcher’s Boy. He waltzed in there alone and flew out on the next flight. Is that how you’d do an unfriendly takeover?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a bad start. You hire somebody who’s supposed to be the most efficient and reliable at that kind of work but who has no known connection with you. He spends a couple of days decapitating the hierarchy and disappears again. That leaves the field clear, with Carlo Balacontano locked in jail, his lieutenants dead and his troops presumably in disarray.”