Authors: Thomas Perry
“Joey,” said Phil. “You met him. He worked for this family. He might have stolen some list of accounts that Bernie wrote down, but he wouldn’t know what to do with it. He could barely read. His idea of a score was stopping over in Tampa when I sent him on errands and screwing Manny Maglione’s wife. He didn’t think I knew it.”
“Then I guess you’re right,” said Joe. “We don’t know who this is. The only one who seems promising is the woman Delfina says was with Bernie’s maid.”
“She’s the only one I’m sure of. She kicked the hell out of Nick Fuletto in the Seattle airport. What I want to know is who she’s working for. The only way to find out is to catch her.”
“Can I just show you what we’ve been thinking here?”
“I already heard,” said Phil. “You’re showing me red dots on a map. I need something people can look at—people like Catania and Molinari and DeLuca—and tell their guys what to do.”
“But that’s what we’ve got,” insisted Joe. “What we think is that they’re spreading everything as thin as they can, so we won’t notice. They’re mailing stuff from every major city they can get to. Phil, look at the map. Don’t look at the red dots. That’s where they’ve already been, and they won’t be back. Look at the spaces that are empty. That’s where they still have to go.”
Phil Langusto stared down at the map for a few seconds, his eyes slowly narrowing until they were slits. Suddenly they widened again, and he hurried to the telephone. He dialed, then stepped as close to the map as his cord would allow. “Bobby? Look, I want you to get the word out as fast as you can. First thing is, we’ve got to call all the families. Tell them to get everybody off the West Coast.”
There was a brief pause while the other man said something.
“Shut up and listen. In fact, move them east of Minneapolis. That was where they saw that woman, right? Milwaukee too? Better not go that far just yet. Tell them to send their guys east, and spread them around between Minneapolis and … Buffalo. Major airports are already covered. Put them in rest stops on the big highways, car rentals, hotels. Have you got that?”
The man on the line said something, and it seemed to satisfy Phil. He said, “The second thing is, get everybody off the East Coast south of … Washington, D.C., and move them north.”
He listened. “Right. I want the area east of the Mississippi and north of Washington, D.C., so full of people that you can’t find a hotel room or a parking space. And what I want them all to look for is the woman in the drawing. She’s going to be mailing letters.”
J
ane awoke, lying on the back seat of the Explorer. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the steady hum of the engine and the low whistle of the wind blowing in the window above her head to cool her. She heard the voices, and realized that she had been hearing them for a long time.
“I’ve seen them come and go,” Bernie said. “Singers, actresses, whatever. If you try to look like them, then when they go, you’ll go too.”
“It’s just a style. Didn’t you have style when you were young?”
“Of course we did. The important thing about styles is that they change. Tattoos don’t change.” He sighed. “Most men aren’t out searching for a woman who matches some particular picture.” He noticed she was looking at him skeptically. “Keep your eyes on the road, or you won’t have to worry about it.”
“I was looking to see if you could say that with a straight face.”
“Of course there are exceptions,” Bernie admitted. “If one of them happens to pick you out, run like hell.”
“I would,” she said. “It would have to be because he recognized me and thought I knew where the money was.”
“I mean because he’s trouble in his own right,” said Bernie. “It’s just something I’ve observed over the years, and believe me, my role in the whole issue has been mostly observation, so I got good at it. Poochie Calamato was like that. Ever hear of him? I suppose not. Every time I saw him, he’d have his arm around the waist of a different woman, only they weren’t
different. It would always be the same type—big and blond, the hair sort of like Marilyn Monroe used to wear it—and each one would be dressed the same as the last one. I don’t know if he found them that way, or he got them to change. It’s possible he took them to the stores himself and picked the clothes off the rack for them.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” said Rita. Jane could hear a little embarrassment in her voice as she added, “It sounds like he looked at them, anyway, and he must have cared about making them feel good.”
“You wouldn’t have liked him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean if the clothes weren’t—you know—weird or something.”
“About once a year, maybe two, he would find another one that he thought was closer to the ideal picture. Then he’d dump the last one. See, when Poochie dumped you, he dumped you. They found one in the Cuyahoga River, and another one in a ditch outside Memphis.”
Jane sat up and looked around her. “Where are we now?”
Bernie said, “Still on 40. We just left Shamrock, Texas, next stop Texola, Oklahoma.”
“I must have been out a long time,” said Jane. “Rita, I’ll take over at Texola.”
They took the exit at Texola and pulled into a gas station to fill the tank and use the rest rooms. When they came back, Jane took the wheel. Rita climbed in beside her, folding a new stick of gum onto her tongue. “Don’t you want to sleep?” Jane asked.
Rita shook her head. “Bernie drove longer than I did.”
Bernie climbed into the back seat and lay down. He said, “Keep on 40 until Oklahoma City. There you’ll want exit 146, which will take you onto 44 northbound.”
“What are the exits just before it comes up?”
“MacArthur Boulevard, then Meridian Avenue. That’s 145. If you miss 146, you can pick up 44 a few miles on at exit 153.”
“Thanks, Bernie,” said Jane.
Rita rolled her eyes. “I’ll never get used to that,” she whispered.
Jane drove on into Oklahoma, always watching her rearview mirror for signs of cars that might be following. She matched her speed to the traffic and changed lanes only when she needed to. After a half hour, she could hear Bernie snoring.
Rita asked, “Were you listening to what Bernie said?”
Jane nodded.
“You agree with what he said?”
“I agree with what I heard.” She gave Rita a sympathetic look. “He’s been around for a long time, and he seems to have had his eyes open through most of it.”
“I mean about men.”
“The ones he knew probably weren’t an appetizing set of specimens, but I think he has the picture.” Jane looked at Rita again.
She was slouching now, looking down. “Not that I’ll ever know.”
Jane sighed. “Right now, we’re trying to keep you isolated and invisible, and you’re an eighteen-year-old girl who would like to go out and be seen and meet a nice boy and have fun. I’m sorry, but it won’t last forever.”
“I’m not complaining about that,” said Rita. “This is something I wanted to do. But when the money’s gone … ”
“The job isn’t just giving away the money,” said Jane. “It’s surviving afterward. That’s the hard part.”
“If I had your life, I guess I’d feel better about it.” Rita was silent for a moment. “What’s your husband’s name?”
Jane hesitated. “This is another time I’m going to have to say I’m sorry. You’ve already found out more about me on your own than I’ve ever let any runner know.” She looked at Rita, her brows knitted. “If those men—say, Frank Delfina—caught you five years from now, then you would have enough in your head to kill me. They already have a picture of me. I can’t do anything about that, but I don’t think I should make it worse.”
Rita shook her head. “I wouldn’t tell. I never would.”
“I know,” said Jane. “I had … have a nice, quiet life.” She smiled. “That’s my secret.”
“Huh?”
“Staying invisible is hard. The secret is to find a place in the world where you’re surrounded by other people who don’t appear to be very different from you, and spend some time working at making yourself happy.”
“Why? What does that do?”
“It means you won’t take risks because you’re restless or bored. You won’t move around much. Very soon, people around you get used to you. They don’t remember when they first noticed you or how long you’ve been there. Without knowing it at first, you begin to forget too. Time begins to work for you.”
“You told me that in San Diego.”
“It was true,” said Jane. “You have a lot of advantages, but time is the biggest. The men we have to worry about are career criminals. That means our immediate problems are as bad as they can be—they know what they’re doing, and they won’t hesitate to kill you. But time will help a lot. Career criminals spend a lot of their lives moving in and out of jails. Some get killed. The reason they became criminals in the first place is that they wanted quick profits without working very hard, so they don’t have the patience to keep at something that’s not paying off for years.”
“You keep talking about years. You mean I have to hide indoors all that time? How long?”
“It’s not what I mean at all. What you have to do is make yourself a real life, so that while those men are standing in the rain outside some airport day after day watching for you, you’re in some pleasant town having dinner with friends and sleeping in a comfortable bed.”
“I don’t know how to do those things,” said Rita. “I’ve never done that.”
“The good thing about having to give up being the person you’ve always been is that you get to choose who you’ll be next,” Jane said. “It’s not an impersonation. The new person has your qualities—not your looks, but the things nobody can
see. You’re a pretty unusual young woman. You took over your own life and began acting like an adult a couple of years ago, at least. You’ve worked hard and supported yourself and taken care of your own needs. I’ve been watching you through this whole mess, and you have more courage than is actually good for you. My guess is that all you’re going to need is a new town and a good cover story.”
“You already did that for me. But I was just hiding. I don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want my big accomplishment in life to be staying alive.”
“What can I do?”
“I want to be with Bernie. And he wants to be with me. Then at least we’ll both have somebody to talk to, to do things for.”
“We’ll work on it. Maybe you’ll go to college, if you’re interested. I’ve cooked up some pretty convincing academic records in my time, and I could do it again.”
Rita was silent, as though she was considering it.
“That way you wouldn’t just be hiding. Of course, there are some simple precautions that you’ll always have to take. The Mafia makes most of its money on vices—drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on. You’ll have to stay far away from the places where those things happen. And you can never tell anyone the name you were born with, or anything that’s happened to you up to now.”
“If I get married, I can’t tell my husband?”
Jane shook her head. “The last thing you want to do is to hurt the person you love. There’s nothing about this story that will make him any happier, any stronger, any safer. He’ll never know it, but part of what you’ll bring to the relationship is that you didn’t make him afraid.”
Jane was silent for a long time, until she felt Rita staring at her with curiosity. Rita asked, “Does your husband know?”
“That’s not something I’m going to talk about,” said Jane.
Rita lapsed into silence, and before long, Jane saw her take the gum out of her mouth and settle back into the seat to sleep.
It was only one more day before the road swung up into
Missouri and merged into Interstate 70, which took them into Illinois, then Indiana. They slept in shifts, stopping only to eat and buy gas for the Explorer. Jane insisted that they pull off the big interstate and drive into a small town each time. On the second day at two-thirty in the afternoon, they were driving past the hotel where Jane had stayed in Toledo, Ohio.
Jane stopped the van and let Rita out to mail letters at a box a few blocks away, then turned onto Navarre Avenue, stayed on it after it became Route 2, and drove along the south shore of Lake Erie. At four-thirty, they reached Sandusky, where Bernie put some letters into the mailbox beside a newsstand, then drove eastward toward Cleveland while Rita slept and Jane skimmed the newspapers he had bought.
“What are you looking for?” Bernie asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “It could be anything—some sign that Henry was spotted, some sign that people are beginning to notice the big donations, bad weather that could hold us up.”
“I heard you tell Rita they had a picture of you.”
“It’s a drawing. Would you like to see it?”
Bernie held out his hand as he stared ahead at the road. Jane pulled out the flyer she had gotten from the mailbox rental in Chicago. He took it, looked down at it for a second, then handed it back without speaking.
“Well?” said Jane. “What do you think?”
“It explains your hair. Rita said it was a disguise. I was thinking it was just … bad hair. I don’t know why you have to look in the papers for bad news. The picture ought to be enough bad news for you.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” said Jane.
“I’m sorry, honey,” said Bernie. “I wish we hadn’t talked you into going on with this.”
“You didn’t,” said Jane. “I would have done things differently—tried to get you and Rita settled before I mailed the rest of the letters, probably—but I wouldn’t have given up.” She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have gotten less dangerous. It would have given the other side more time to figure out
what’s going on while I was still out. I just wish I knew where the picture came from.”
“Niagara Falls,” said Bernie. “The day I met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“The picture. It’s not just your face. It shows the collar of the blouse you were wearing. It was white. But whoever described you to the artist must have noticed there was a faint pattern woven into the cloth, see? The artist put the flowers in, but you could only see them close-up. That’s the only time you wore that one.”
“It must have been the desk clerk,” said Jane. “I’m not surprised you remember, but I didn’t think she was in your league.”