When their eyes met, Wolf saw the alarm in the man’s face. Immediately the man pretended to look past him, but he must have known it was too late. The face was familiar. It took Wolf a few seconds to bring it back because it was buried somewhere deep in his memory, in Chicago or somewhere—no, it was Detroit. It was Pauly the Bag Man. His throat tightened in a feeling of regret and disappointment that was like pain. He had been very young in Detroit, maybe nineteen, and he had let them use his face for a few months. If somebody didn’t pay his nut one week, the next week he would be in his store or on his way home from the office, trying to think of something to tell Pauly the Bag Man, but the one who showed up to ask him about it wasn’t the friendly Pauly, but the boy. He would simply arrive quietly and give the man an inquiring look. People knew who he was, and told each other things that made them sweat when they saw him.
What the hell was Pauly the Bag Man doing in Washington, D.C., wearing a tailored suit and women’s shoes? They must have closed the bars and chased out everybody who had ever laid eyes on him in the old days. Hell, they must have dredged the lake for corpses. He had to get out of this man’s sight. He looked for a way to disappear, but the sheer size of the lawns and the sidewalks, like airport runways leading up to broad, high steps, made it hard to imagine how he was going to do it. He could see for a mile in any direction. He hadn’t been expecting to do anything chancy here, just to find a tourist and wait until he was alone. He kept walking toward the subway entrance. If he could make it that far, he could probably step onto the first train before somebody like Pauly the Bag Man overcame his natural caution and followed.
As he walked, Pauly walked along on the other side of the street a few paces ahead. It puzzled Wolf that he would do this. Could he possibly imagine that Wolf hadn’t spotted him? He resisted the temptation to reach into his coat to touch the reassuring weight and solidity of Little Norman’s pistol. Pauly wouldn’t try to take him out on his own, which meant that there must be others somewhere in the stream of people walking along the sidewalks. But as he thought about it, he decided that if there really were others, Pauly wouldn’t be here at all. The man was hanging around to see where he went, which meant that there was going to be somebody he could tell. Somebody was on the way, and Pauly must be expecting him to arrive soon. Directions wouldn’t work if they were an hour old. He walked along the broad avenue knowing that each step was taking him into some kind of ambush. People were on the way, and when they got here, Pauly would see them and he wouldn’t. When enough of them had gotten into position, Pauly would stop walking, turn and point his finger.
Wolf was beginning to feel hot, and his heart began to pound in his chest as he thought about it. He had made a decision a long time ago that he wasn’t going to let something like this happen to him. His jaw tightened and started to chew on nothing. He wasn’t going to walk along like some loser who was preparing to defend himself. They still didn’t get it, and it still astonished him. He wasn’t going to lie down and wait until they took their turn before he took his. He watched Pauly stroll along the sidewalk across the street from him and started to drift toward him.
Wolf was at the curb, then a second later he was in the traffic, slipping into the backstream of one car and out of the lane before the next one arrived. He made it to the double white line in the middle before something about the sound of the cars changed enough to make Pauly turn his head. When he did, Wolf could see his eyes widen. His hands came up and a nervous tremor started to grip him. His head shook so hard that he seemed to be nodding. He was already backing away, and he almost fell as he turned to break into a run.
Pauly the Bag Man was over fifty years old and hadn’t needed to run from anyone since the February night in 1972 when the brain of a man named Fritz Hinckel short-circuited in Pastorelli’s Family Restaurant, and that time it hadn’t been personal. Pauly had been just one of fifty or sixty people whom Hinckel was trying to stick with a steak knife, and he had only needed to run five or six steps before an anonymous diner dropped Hinckel with five shots from a Colt Cobra that happened to be part of his evening wear. Pauly was long-legged, but his muscles were slack and slow from riding in the Town Car, and the leather soles of the new three-hundred-dollar shoes he was wearing hadn’t been scraped against anything but floor wax and carpeting until a few minutes ago. He was still striving to attain what he hoped was sufficient speed when he began to hear the Butcher’s Boy’s footsteps.
Pauly kept his head up and elongated his strides, pumping his arms and hitting the pavement with the balls of his feet like a quarter-miler. He had a terrible sense that the Butcher’s Boy was about to put a bullet into his spine, and that he wasn’t going to hear it first. There would be a horrible, wrenching pain, and then he would be down, but the lower part of his body would already be limp and dead. Or maybe the top part. Why not the top part? Just because you never heard about—
Wolf watched Pauly offering a credible imitation of a sprint as he abandoned the concrete and headed out across the wide green lawn. He could see that Pauly wasn’t running toward anything or anybody, which meant that nobody had arrived yet. He was simply a one-man stampede, like a man running from a hornet’s nest. There was no point in going after him. Wolf didn’t slow down; he merely changed directions. Where Pauly had veered to the right onto the lawn, he turned to the left, darted across the street again and sidestepped into the crowd. In a second he was walking in the other direction.
He joined a group of men and women who were walking up the steps of the first big building he came to. He put on the same bored, resigned expression they all wore. The sign said HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, SO he stayed with them. He was reasonably confident that he wasn’t about to stroll into the beam of a metal detector. As soon as he was inside the doorway, he looked back out the glass door at Independence Avenue and saw a car pull up near the spot where the tourists had assembled in front of the Rayburn Building. Three doors opened, three men got out and the car pulled away. As the three men stood on the sidewalk, each of them made a slow 360-degree turn, then picked a favorite point on the horizon and stared at it.
Wolf turned and moved deeper into the hallway. He walked until he came to a corridor that turned off toward Fourth Street, and stayed on it until he could see another, smaller entrance. He ignored the people to the right and left of him, and never paused to look inside an open door. But then without warning a woman coming toward him looked up from a file she was carrying and gave him a perfunctory smile. It was only then that he realized he had been smiling too.
He paused and looked out at the street before going through the door, but there seemed to be nobody out there whom Pauly the Bag Man would ask for if he needed help, so he set off down Fourth Street with his head down and his legs matching the pace of the busy civil servants around him. He was going to have to make it to the car after all. There was no telling what Pauly the Bag Man was doing in Washington, but the three men on Independence Avenue must belong to Vico. If Vico thought he had a reason to send three men to stand around in sight of the Capitol scanning the crowd for somebody to kill, he wouldn’t be shy about sending twenty more. Wolf had to get out of here.