Wolf turned off his engine and walked to her car. It was unbelievable that he had let this happen to him. He went over it in his mind. He had seen her come out of her house, turn to wave to the Spanish maid and the baby and walk to the garage. Then he had put on his coat and checked the doors of his rented house. If she’d had any trouble starting the Mazda, that’s when it must have happened, because when he had returned to look out the window again, she was already backing out of her driveway. Then he had stopped looking.
He reached under her dashboard and popped the hood, then went around, lifted it and looked at the engine for any obvious sign of trouble. If he could just get the damned thing going before she had time to get bored with her trouble and start looking at his face, he might be able to get through this. Nothing under the hood was disconnected or leaking, but everything looked a little grimy for a car this age. He walked back to the driver’s side, slid in and tried to start the car. He heard the ignition click, but the starter motor didn’t engage, and he smelled gas.
He got out again. “Your carburetor got flooded and your battery gave out—not necessarily in that order. Do you have jumper cables?”
Elizabeth seemed to be thinking about something else. “Look,” she said. “I know you’ve got to get to work. Thanks for trying, but I’ll just call a gas station.”
Wolf decided he had better look at his watch before answering, and he did so. “It’s no problem. Honestly, I don’t have to be there for another hour.”
But she persisted. “No, it’s not right. I’m not one of those women who just assume that any man who happens to be within screaming distance is there to be used. Or at least I don’t want to be.”
“It just takes a minute,” he said. “It’s not hard or dirty or anything. We’ll just see if we can get it started. Have you got cables?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re in the trunk.”
He pulled her keys from the ignition, opened her trunk and surveyed the mess. There were toys, a child’s car seat, a whole package of diapers that looked about the size of a bale of hay, a couple of umbrellas and, at the bottom, a pair of jumper cables whose plastic wrapping was still intact. He unraveled them, hooked the alligator clips to her battery terminals and then turned his car around. When the two cars were nose-to-nose, he unlatched his own hood, connected the cables to his own battery terminals and restarted his car. “Okay,” he said, handing her the keys. “Try it.”
The car started immediately, but as he disconnected the cables, he could hear that the Mazda wasn’t running evenly. It sounded as though the cylinders weren’t all firing. He closed the hood and said, “You got a garage you can take it to?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I take it this means it isn’t healed.”
“That’s right. I can get the heart to beat, but it takes a mechanic to get it off life support. Tell me where it is and I’ll follow you in case it stalls.”
“That’s all right,” she said, and this time she looked worried. “The only reason this happened is that I kept putting off taking it in. I’m guilty.”
“So buy it a new wax job and apologize. If you stall out in a major intersection you’re liable to get hammered.”
“I’d have to be pretty unlucky to have it happen at an intersection.”
Wolf shook his head. “They only stall when you slow down, and you only do that when you’re coming to a corner.”
She seemed to see a vision of it, like a premonition. “It’s on Millwood. The corner of Millwood and Fanshawe.”
“See you there,” he said, and walked back to his car. This was going to change everything.
In an hour Wolf was watching her walk through the doorway of the Justice Department. He pulled away from the curb and drove down Constitution Avenue toward the Federal Triangle. This morning he was on his way to look for tourists. There was no use kidding himself: every day that he spent in the United States was making it more dangerous for him. He would have to see if he could find a British citizen and separate him from the herd. If he got the right one and hid the body well enough, it might be weeks before his relatives made enough noise to get the authorities to do anything about putting him on a list, and by then Michael Schaeffer would be sitting at home again.
He felt a strange reluctance to get out this way, and he weighed and examined the feeling. If he’d had to explain it to somebody he would have had to say that he wasn’t in the mood to do the work. He felt tired. Eddie had always said that if it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t. It had been Eddie’s theory that some little part of the subconscious mind had caught a danger signal—maybe seen something, or figured out a flaw, or even smelled something it didn’t like—but hadn’t yet been able to formulate it into a package the conscious mind would accept. Eddie always said that ninety percent of the brain was never used. Actually, in his case it had probably been more. He had once had himself hypnotized by a dentist because he couldn’t remember any of the words to “Annie Had a Baby” except “… his name was sunny Jim. She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.”
But Wolf wasn’t nervous. He was just tired. He had spent most of the last ten years hoping that he would never have to do this kind of thing again, but here he was, up to his armpits in blood and not even working, just hunting for some harmless stranger so that he could live long enough to get home. He drove into the city with the rest of the world and looked for a place to park that Vico hadn’t bought simply for the chance to have his people slip a slim-jim into the door and pop the locks.
Paul Martillo was in a lousy mood because people treated him like dirt. He wasn’t some chump; he was a registered lobbyist. He wore tailored suits and fine silk ties, and talked to congressmen and even cabinet officers on business involving the limits of civil rights and the responsible exercise of free speech by the electronic media. He represented a confederation of reputable organizations, notably the Italian-American Anti-Libel League, Citizens for Fair Reporting, and the Dorothea Gorro Scholarship Foundation, named after a dead olive-oil heiress but subscribed to by many fine people who were still alive.
Martillo had just left the office of a congressman from New Jersey named Ameroy. He had been told by the congressman’s secretary that he should wait in the outer office and that Ameroy would see him as soon as he got off the phone. Ameroy had kept him waiting two hours, and then, as soon as he had gotten into the private office, the man had started to look at his watch. In fact, before he even shook hands with him, Ameroy was looking at his watch. Martillo hadn’t invented the system. It wasn’t his fault that it cost four or five million dollars to run for Congress. The ambitious jerks had dug their own hole, each time they ran for office putting a little more into the campaign, getting themselves on television a little more often. All that Martillo did was go among them and try to make friends. Then he would make a list of the friends and turn the list over to the groups he represented. When it was time for congressmen to run for reelection, the friends were not forgotten.
This making of friends was not a clandestine activity. It was a growing profession engaged in by about twenty thousand people. There was no corporation of any size, no charity, no union, no city that didn’t have somebody like Paul Martillo on the Hill; so where did a two-bit hack politician who ran for office because he couldn’t make it as a lawyer get off treating him like he was still a bag man making his way around Detroit for Toscanzio? The answer was that somebody had told Ameroy what Martillo was going around talking about this week.
Martillo hadn’t liked bringing it up any more than the congressman had liked hearing it, but he had to say it, and Ameroy damned well had to listen to it, because they were both taking their money from the same place. Ameroy didn’t want to have anybody say anything specific in his presence, so Martillo had to play the stupid kid’s game too. He did it because it meant that Ameroy wanted to be able to continue to take the money. Martillo had said that the members of the organizations Martillo represented continued to be pleased that Ameroy was a leader in the fight for equal justice, so of course he would be interested in the strange case of a man imprisoned for murder on the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence just because he was a well-known and prosperous businessman of Italian descent. The man in question continued, in fact, to be a large contributor to the Dorothea Gorro Foundation in spite of the fact that he had been in a federal prison for eight years. This was how his case had come to the attention of the Foundation, which, as the congressman knew, was nominally dedicated to the promotion of parochial education.