The Informant (24 page)

He ignored the parking space right in front of his motel room door and parked his car away from the building so an enemy wouldn't instantly connect it with the room and know which one he was in. He went inside and locked the door, the deadbolt, and the chain, and then pushed the desk in front of the door.

He had spent the first half of his life traveling in the trade, and the long habit of precautions had come back to him. Staying alive was often a matter of premeditation, of anticipating dangers long in advance and doing small things to make them less likely. It was always better to be as close to invisible as possible, better to cut the odds of being noticed, reported, and remembered to a minimum. Everything that could be locked, disguised, or hidden should be. He showered, ate his dinner, watched the television news with the sound on low to see if there was any mention of the incident at the Arizona ranch. When there was none, he put the two loaded Beretta M92 pistols under the spare pillow beside him and lay down to sleep. In a minute or two he dozed off.

He awoke, looked at the glowing clock on the nightstand beside him, and saw that it was only twelve-thirty. There were voices outside. He got out of bed and went to the window. He moved aside a half inch of the curtain at the corner and looked out.

It was a man with brown wavy hair and a woman with long blond hair. They looked about thirty, and wore jeans and T-shirts. The man carried a suitcase about the size of a small carry-on bag. He bent over almost double to fit the key in the door. They'd been drinking. Whenever he said or did anything, the woman would giggle. As they went inside the room beside his, he let the curtain close. The ease he had in hearing them was not good news. Once they were inside, they sounded as though he and they were in the same room. They were no more than eight feet from him, and the wall between them seemed to be without insulation.

He crawled back into the bed and closed his eyes. The two in the next room were fairly quiet. There was a little conversation, barely above a whisper, and then he heard the shower running. The sound was a soft hiss, and after a minute or two it put him back to sleep. A few minutes later he became aware of the voices again, and then the voices stopped. He heard the bed creak as somebody got in. It occurred to him that he should make a noise so they would be aware of how little privacy the wall afforded.

He coughed, and then coughed again. There was whispering. Good. They knew he was here, and they would be aware that if they could hear him, he could hear them. The bed creaked a little more. Someone was getting up. Both of them were. They moved a few feet off. In the dim light he looked at his own room to see where they could be going. There was a small, narrow couch. After a minute he heard a soft moan. "Oh yes. Oh."

"Oh shit," he whispered. He lay down on his side and put the spare pillow over his head so both ears were covered. He was surprised at how little that accomplished. The couple seemed to forget that they had a neighbor.

He sat up, switched on the television set, and watched a late-night talk show, trying to pay attention to the conversation. Over the years he had forgotten about American television, and he saw only a few American films a year so he found he had no idea who the guests were, or the host. Still, it seemed better than allowing himself to listen to the sounds from the next room. The noise grew louder and more distracting until it trailed off. He turned off the television, lay down again, and fell asleep as though he were turning off a light switch.

Then he woke again and thought about the pistols on the bed beside his head. He wished he could go next door and put those two out of his misery. Then he realized the sounds weren't coming from the other side of the wall. They were outside. He looked at the clock again. It was just after three
A.M.
He went to the window and moved the curtain aside a quarter inch.

There were four men walking along the two rows of cars, looking at license plates and in the windshields and side windows. He watched two of them look at his gray Toyota Camry, then move on. He was glad he had stolen a set of Illinois plates.

The men reached the end of the rows of cars, but didn't seem to have found what they were looking for, and that increased his suspicion that what they were looking for was him. He couldn't see anything that might be their car, but he knew they would have parked it out of sight behind the building, very possibly with the motor idling. He had seen other jobs where the shooters had done that. If the keys were in somebody's pocket and he died, then nobody would get out. If the keys were in the car, then anybody who made it that far would get out.

He knew what must have happened. They had gone to various hotels and motels on the major routes into the city and asked night-desk clerks to watch for a lone man about his age and description. To the ones that had connections, they would ask for the favor of a call. At the other hotels, they would pretend to be private detectives and offer a reward. He dressed quickly.

He hoped it would take them a little time to get ready to shoot their way into his room because his idea would take a few minutes. He had learned something from the couple next door. The walls between rooms couldn't consist of anything more substantial than a frame of two-by-fours covered by two sheets of wallboard. He also knew that the room to the right of his was unoccupied. He'd heard nothing from that side.

The lock-blade knife he'd bought was in his pocket. He opened it, then chose the spot on the wall carefully. It had to be the space behind the small dresser. He quietly moved the dresser aside, then stabbed the knife into the wallboard. It punched through. The consistency was like thick cardboard. He punched through again and again, until he had cut an eighteen-inch square, pulled it out, and confirmed his theory. There was a frame holding up two sheets of wallboard. He punched through the next one with less hesitation. When he had cut the second hole, he pushed the piece through into the next room, then the other.

As he worked, he thought about the men outside. What took the longest on jobs like this was getting the men into proper positions, two on either side of the door. Two would hit the door near the knob with all their weight so it would fly open. The first two would run in low and fast, trying to get a shot in. The other two would come in a bit higher, aiming their guns over the shoulders of the first pair.

His hole was finished. He slithered through it into the next room, and then reached back through and strained to pull the empty dresser back up to the wall after him. He tugged on one side, then the other, to walk it to the hole in the wall, then lay still and listened.

There was no bang, no sound of a foot kicking the door in. Instead, there was a jingle of keys and a scrape as the deadbolt slid out. The door to his old room opened a crack, then hit the desk he'd pushed in front of it. There was a labored scrape as they pushed the desk aside, and then quick footsteps that he could feel vibrating up from the floor to his belly.

"What the fuck?"

"Where is he?"

Footsteps shook the floor again as two of them burst into the bathroom. "He's not in here."

Schaeffer aimed one of his pistols under the dresser through the hole he had cut. A man lay on the floor in his room to look under the bed. Schaeffer waited. If the man rolled and looked in his direction, he would have to kill him. The man stood up. "What if we got the wrong room?"

"Does that bathroom window open?"

More footsteps. "I don't think so. And how would he get up there?"

"The son of a bitch is famous for doing stuff like that. Jerry said he killed a guy once who locked himself in a bank vault. They opened it up the next morning and there he was."

Whoever Jerry was, he had gotten the story wrong. The bank vault was just a safe room in Angelo Turcio's house in New Jersey. Schaeffer had boiled some bleach beside the air intake, and the chlorine had made Turcio sick. He had opened the door himself and tried to shoot his way out.

"Bobby, go to the desk to be sure we got the right room number and ask if he checked out already."

Somebody said, "We don't even know if he was the right guy."

"Some traveling salesman didn't figure this out and get away before we could slip a key in the door."

He took a couple of seconds to prepare himself for what was going to happen. In a minute they would suspect he'd made a hole and look for it. He saw the two sets of shoes approaching. The dresser was lifted suddenly, one man on each side.

He fired upward into the one on his right, the bullet going toward the groin. The other dropped the dresser as though it were hot, leaving himself open for a moment while Schaeffer fired into his side.

Schaeffer rolled away from the hole and dashed in the direction of the door. As he ran, the other two men fired at the hole, then moved their aim along the wall, punching small blooming holes in the wallboard behind him. He beat them to the door and stopped with both his pistols aimed at the door beside him, the only exit from his room.

The two men spilled out the door of his room, fully expecting to head him off before he got out, but they were terribly late. For a moment their faces showed identical expressions of unwelcome surprise, but he opened fire with both pistols, and left them lying in front of the door.

He sprinted to his car, got in, and drove. He was feeling alert and ready now. He swerved out of the lot onto the highway and quickly found the sign that said 57
NORTH—CHICAGO.
It was time to go and see his old friend Vince Pugliese.

ELIZABETH WARING WAS
in her office early in the morning once again. Yesterday's meeting with the deputy assistant AG had been worse than she had anticipated. A few days ago, she had been worried that she had forfeited the chance for a good working relationship with her new boss. Today, she was worried that she was about to lose her job. She was uneasy, not only because he was now openly contemptuous of her performance, but also because, from a certain point of view, she was guilty. If he chose to call a personnel hearing right now, it would be difficult to defend herself. She tried to imagine what that would be like. At the end of it, did they say, "We'll get in touch to announce our decision," or did they ask for the Justice Department identification and the gun and the office key right away?

What would she do? She was nearly fifty. She had a law degree, but could she even find a job as a lawyer at her age? Even if she didn't admit to being fired, she couldn't hide that she'd left because of trouble. All this time she had been encouraging Jim—and in a year, Amanda—to apply to the famous private colleges that would give them advantages in life. If she lost her job, that was over.

As she sat at her desk, paralyzed, trying to get herself to start on her work, she thought about Dale Hunsecker. Without ever wanting to, she had become his enemy, and he was going to try to crush her. What frightened her was that he was the champion idiot in a succession of amateurs appointed to hold that position. There was no way for her to work her way into his good graces. He combined strong, inflexible opinions with a complete innocence of facts. He had no instinct for law enforcement and a temperamental distaste for what it actually involved. He didn't want to learn anything about organized crime, but he wanted to know everything that anyone in the organized crime division was doing before they did it so he could arbitrarily veto about half of it. Each time she saw him, she was more deeply convinced that she must keep him from knowing about anything important and try to survive until he moved on. And right now, there was one thing that was more important than anything else.

Three days had passed, and the Butcher's Boy had made no new attempt to get in touch with her. She was almost certain that he had seen her ad by now. He would have wanted to see every single bit of information about the Arizona meeting and the resulting charges. The simplest places to look were the Arizona papers and the big metropolitan papers that covered organized crime. He must also be watching for any attempt by individual bosses to talk to him. No matter what the old men had promised Frank Tosca, he was dead now, and there was no benefit to be had by keeping their word to him. The Butcher's Boy, on the other hand, was alive, and there wasn't much sense in hunting him if it might get them killed.

She had made her own bid, but had she used the wrong way to get his attention? No. The personal ad from VP that she had seen in the same papers was a confirmation that this was a likely way to reach him. It had also diminished her hope. She could only succeed if he was alone and in trouble. If he had other invitations to talk, then he might think he had other options.

She had very complicated feelings this morning. She was frustrated that VP had reached out to him the same day she had, and she was sure that VP's ad would interest him more than hers. It seemed to be a chance for rapprochement and reconciliation with at least some small faction of the Mafia. Her offer could only amount to protection in some kind of confinement. If he could trust both offers, he would pick the offer from VP.

But VP's invitation was a trap. Did he know it was a trap? He must at least be suspicious and wary at this point. Who was VP, anyway? It was probably somebody he might trust, somebody he had known in the old days, when he was every family's favorite hit man. Who did he know from those days who could pose as a friend? It had to be somebody who was at least forty-five years old. The ad had said, "I missed you at the ranch." Did that mean VP had been there?

She had typed the list of names into her laptop the first day, then added notes to each entry as she learned details and what charges were filed. She opened the file and scrolled down the list to the Ps. There seemed to be three VPs—Victor Perrone, Vito Pastore, and Vincent Pugliese. She hesitated. VP might not even be a name. It could be VP for vice president, some reference to an old fake business he would understand. Or it could be one of those childish nicknames they gave each other—Pete "the Postman" Calvatti or Sammy "Antennas" Antonino.