The car was in the garage at the Gateway Tour Center on Fourth and E streets. It was only a couple of blocks, but there was no way to get there except by the sidewalk, and nothing to hide him but the bodies of the other people walking the street. They were a mixed group. The ones who looked like college students or lawyers were in a hurry, moving along in both directions without letting their eyes rest on the ones that looked like derelicts, even when they had to weave a course among them. The ones who complicated the mixture most were in pairs, most of them elderly and from East Jesus, Kentucky, or Marrowbone, Texas, stopping without warning to give the Capitol a proprietary survey or to study the grass on the lawn to see if their employees had given it the proper dose of fertilizer. Each time they did so, one of the quick ones had to do a strange little dance to get around them without stepping on their heels. Wolf did his best to imitate the quick ones.
He was in trouble now. Vico was a scavenger. He had come up in the forties with the Castigliones, and been sent off to Washington to see what he could do about cashing in on the war-surplus business. A lot of Castiglione people had been in the army and seen the unimaginably huge hoards of every known commodity that had been built up in four years, and somebody had been curious enough to wonder what was going to happen to all of it later. The idea had been that a man with a supply of cash could probably pick up some useful stuff cheap. Vico had been the man with the cash, and he had found that it went a long way. He had bought up gigantic lots consisting of everything from unassembled motorcycles packed in oil to leather bridles for a cavalry that didn’t exist anymore to tinned K rations so cheap that he could make money opening them up just to salvage the cigarettes inside. From then on, the story went, he had been the organization’s man in Washington.
Wolf hadn’t even been born then, and by the time he ran into Vico, Washington had been sewn up. The capital was a huge place that had hundreds of thousands of people getting paid for producing nothing. All day and night trucks, trains and planes brought in everything they used, and Vico took whatever was spilled in the process: appliances taken off freight cars, percentages of the food brought in for the markets, even the gasoline left in the hulls of tanker trucks after they had shorted the stations to which they had made deliveries. He would take the money and multiply it by supplying the drugs, whores and gambling the residents needed, and by lending them money to pay for these necessities at fifty percent interest. Vico had an army of vultures working the streets all the time, looking for ways to make money that he hadn’t thought of yet.
Wolf had met Vico only for a moment in the year before he’d had to leave the country. He had been hired to kill a man named McPray, who had recently moved to Washington. He had been a Texas businessman who acted like an oil man. It was said that he had some connection with people in oil, but in those days everybody in that part of the world knew somebody who was in oil. Somehow he had been involved in the buying of supplies for the public schools in a large area of the state. It was never explained to Wolf exactly how he had gained a say in the matter, but he had one. For several years he had steered the contract for paper to a company owned by Mike Mascone, but one year, without warning, when Mascone had a huge inventory he had collected in an Amarillo warehouse in anticipation, McPray had simply changed vendors: some relative of his had gone into business. This put Mascone into a bind, and he had made some semipublic threats about having relatives of his own. The truth was that Mascone was a genuine made guy, but he was also of no importance. He wasn’t even very rich. After some stewing, he decided that the only way he was ever going to be rich was to have McPray killed. By now McPray had moved to Washington on some other scheme, and Mascone wanted him killed in a way that would make certain people in Texas believe that Mascone was some kind of serious Mafioso with connections everywhere. After a number of inquiries, he had found out whom to call, and the Butcher’s Boy had collected his money in advance and gone to Washington.
Being isolated in Amarillo, Mascone had an idealistic view of how the world worked. He thought he should call Vico and tell him what was going on because it was a courtesy. Vico was true to his reputation. He sent three men to the Butcher’s Boy’s hotel to demand a third of the price for McPray. It was, they said, the overhead for doing that kind of business in Vico’s territory. The Butcher’s Boy had said he understood, and started to pack his suitcase in front of them. When they asked what he was doing, he said, “I’m not going to do that kind of business in Vico’s territory.” Then he had called Mascone in front of them and told him that calling Vico had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars.
This had created a problem for Vico’s men, who had been told to pick up eighty-three hundred dollars. The Butcher’s Boy was in the airport when he saw them again, only this time Vico was with them. He had been about sixty then and fat. He had sat waiting in the airport coffee shop while his men pointed him out to the Butcher’s Boy, who went in to listen to what Vico had to say. He had said that eight thousand dollars wasn’t the point. It had to do with the way things had always been done. The local capo got a cut of everything that went on, and this covered the aggravation, bad publicity and protection if it was necessary. It was simply overhead. The Butcher’s Boy had answered that he understood, but said that he was keeping Mascone’s money because he too charged for overhead, aggravation and bad publicity. Then he excused himself, stood up from the table and got on his plane. A month later he read that McPray had been found in the Potomac suitably mutilated, and without thinking about it very hard he knew who had done it. He also knew that Vico would have seen it as an opportunity to charge at least fifty thousand.
If Vico thought he had a chance to collect on the contract for the Butcher’s Boy, he would probably come out and walk the streets himself, even though he must have been over seventy by now and had more money than some state treasuries. The fact that it was unseemly for a man in his position to expect money for what the other old men would have considered a favor would not bother him; he would demand it. If Wolf got hit by lightning in the next ten minutes, Vico would send a man to see Carl Bala in prison on the grounds that it was his lightning.
When Wolf was finally inside the garage, he had to control an impulse to run. There was something about getting out of the open that made him feel light and optimistic. He walked quickly toward the stairway, climbed to the first landing and then up to the second level. He moved cautiously. There was no telling where he had been when Pauly the Bag Man had first seen him. If he had been in the car, then he could be walking into something now. He stopped at the doorway onto the second level and waited. He listened to the distant sound of cars on the ramps above, then walked back to the head of the steps and held his breath.
Paul Martillo was dizzy and gasping for breath. The coat of his suit had big sweat spots under the armpits, and his new shoes were scuffed from trying to catch himself when he slipped on the sidewalk, but what was most annoying was that his ears felt like they were plugged up. He had a vague suspicion that having your ears feel pressure must be a sign of heart trouble, but he couldn’t remember ever hearing anybody say it. He still couldn’t believe he wasn’t running anymore. He had gone all the way to Constitution Avenue and was making the turn up Louisiana before he realized he had outrun the son of a bitch. Then Vico’s men had come along in a car, made a U-turn in the middle of Louisiana and picked him up. As he thought about it now, getting into the car probably had been a mistake. In the first place, his leg muscles were certainly going to stiffen up because you were supposed to walk around for a while and stretch your muscles after a dash like that. In the second place, just in case there was one person inside the Beltway who had not seen him running like a madman across the damned Capitol lawn chased by a hit man, he had given them a good chance to see him getting into a brand-new Cadillac with four of the most obvious-looking hoods that he had ever seen. Two of them had even had guns in their hands when they had picked him up.