What it came down to was that Victor Toscanzio had ordered Martillo to go around and pull some strings. On the face of it this was an odd thing for him to do, but Toscanzio was not a frivolous man, so if he was doing it, Balacontano must have offered him something substantial. The whole lobbying business was something Toscanzio ran for the old men. It wasn’t his to jeopardize on some whim, and he knew it. But he also had a reputation for incredible luck. Only a few old paisans like Martillo knew what kind of luck it was. Toscanzio had the uncanny gift of sensing when a change was going to take place, and getting in before the bell rang. Carl Bala was obviously an active commodity again. Also there were the rumors. From time to time people had said that Carl Bala had gone crazy in prison, and maybe Toscanzio had decided it was going to be important soon to be one of the people who had tried hard to get him out.
Martillo didn’t have any objection to letting his fate ride on Toscanzio’s bet, whatever it was. He had done pretty well so far. Now he was in his black Lincoln Town Car on his way to have a lunch briefing from a senator from Florida. This was the kind of holdup that was getting to be increasingly popular, and he resented it. The bastards would send out invitations to go to lunch at a thousand dollars a plate, and there would be maybe forty or fifty lobbyists paying to sit there and listen to the windbag talk about what his committee was doing to help the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was an attempt to extort money, and it worked up to a point. Most of the lobbyists had some interest they had to protect from the sudden indifference of an incumbent senator. Martillo almost felt sorry for them. His organizations didn’t have a bunch of jobs to protect, or even any real members, only about twenty anonymous donors, so today’s lunch was going to be a little different for the senator. If he didn’t find a way to spend a few minutes alone with Martillo, he was going to watch two million bucks walk out of his campaign fund and into the challenger’s.
Martillo looked out the window of the car as his driver pulled away from the Sam Rayburn Office Building. As usual, the first twenty tourists in line for the tour were Japs. The movement of capital in the world was still a miracle to Martillo, although he had studied it for twenty years the way a bear studies bee swarms. Everything seemed to be the same as it always had been; it was just that there was all this floating money. It was qualitatively different from regular money, which stayed pretty much where you put it. This was like gambling money because it didn’t seem to really belong to anybody. It moved in and out of the markets and financial centers of the world in huge quantities every day. But without warning the floating money had transferred itself out of the country and into the markets of foreigners, primarily towel-heads, Japs and Krauts. At the moment the Japanese were the big spenders, but what they were spending wasn’t the floating money. It was a kind of by-product of having so much of the floating money trapped in one place for a time. It was like the wetness that formed on the outside of an icy glass on a hot day.
This reminded Martillo that what he really wanted right now was a drink. Making the rounds would have been easier if he had been able to loosen his tongue a little. But this was out of the question; you didn’t just gulp down alcohol when you were on an errand for Vincent Toscanzio. When you were done with work, you could drink yourself into a stupor, or shoot heroin into your jugular if you felt like it, but while you were on his business you were his. In the old days he had once seen Toscanzio explain this to a numbers runner with a sawed-off pool cue.
Stuck in traffic, Martillo watched another busload of tourists forming a new line to wander through the halls of the Capitol building. This group looked like Europeans. Why the hell did any of these people care about looking at another public building? You could take them to an insurance company and tell them it was the Supreme Court. He looked at their faces and watched the way they walked. Foreigners walked different, and he studied them to see if he could figure out where they came from. This bunch was taller than most, very white and they had bad teeth, so they were probably English.
But then Martillo saw something that made the skin on his arms tighten, and his right foot try to stomp an imaginary brake on the floor of the car. “Pull over,” he said. “Let me out.” It was him. He couldn’t imagine what the hell he would be doing standing in line with a bunch of Limey tourists, but it was worth his life to find out. “Use the car phone to call Mr. Vico. I need five, ten guys right here as fast as he can get them, and maybe four cars.”
Wolf moved with the queue of English couples gathering for a mass invasion of the Capitol building. There didn’t seem to be any of the usual ill-behaved British children in short pants chasing each other in circles, which was promising. Children had preternaturally sharp senses, and they lived at the three-foot level, where anything he did would be right in front of their eyes. He had to move slowly enough to keep from spooking the herd, but quickly enough so that he wouldn’t give any of its members the uneasy feeling that he was being stalked. He tried to get a sense of who was carrying what. If they had all left their valuables inside suitcases in the keeping of the bus driver, he had better know it now. As he passed a couple in their late forties, he heard the woman say, “Not again.”
The man said peevishly, “It’s not my fault. It’s the damned water. I’m sure there’ll be one inside the tube station over there.”
The Englishman started a purposeful march away from the herd, his long, skinny legs straight and stiff as he headed for the subway station. Wolf had been wrong when he had told himself that killing E. V. Waring was as far as he could skid; the real end of the line was when you were following a sick tourist to a public restroom so that you could whack him for his wallet and passport. He had walked in the same direction that the herd of tourists was moving so that he could come up behind them; now he was going to have to reverse directions without letting any of them notice. He waited a few moments, until what he did wouldn’t be connected with the man’s departure, then turned and crossed the street.
Wolf timed the cars and dodged between two of them to make it to the other side. But as he reached the curb he wasn’t thinking about the British tourist anymore, but about the man who had gotten out of a black Lincoln behind him, then pivoted and reversed directions when he had. It was a rare advantage to be able to walk along facing the man who had been following him. The man was tall and trim, but not young, and the dark suit he wore appeared to be the regulation uniform of lawyers and politicians in this town when they weren’t playing golf. The fact that his hair was long and wavy didn’t mean anything; it could belong to the director of the FBI. He had the build of a cop, but somehow Wolf couldn’t see the suit as belonging to one. Also, the shoes were wrong; they were some sort of thin, bumpy leather like alligator, and too pointed for a cop’s. The soles were thin and slippery, and the heels gave off a shine when the man walked, as though they were made of a substance harder than rubber. As Wolf proceeded down the street, he never took his eyes off the man. He knew that if there were others, he would never see them unless the man did something to acknowledge them. But then the man did something unexpected: He slowed down, turned and glanced over his shoulder directly at Wolf.