Authors: Thomas Perry
“Money has a way of getting some people to play over their heads.”
Route 2 merged into Interstate 90 at Clearview, and then the traffic moved more quickly until five-thirty, when the cars began to show brake lights and they found themselves in the evening rush hour. Bernie left the interstate at Pearl Road.
“Where are you going?” asked Rita.
“There’s a big post office up near the train station,” said Jane. “It’s on the map.”
“What map?”
“The one in his head.”
After fifteen minutes of driving, the post office appeared a block ahead. Jane and Rita pulled all of the stacks of Cleveland letters out of the suitcases, and Jane slipped them into a big grocery bag. “Pull up somewhere, I’ll jump out and get them into the slots inside,” said Jane. “Rita, keep your head down.”
Bernie stopped at the curb, but as Jane was about to open the door, Rita grabbed her arm. “Wait,” she said. “That man over there.”
Jane looked up the steps of the building and saw a tall man standing near the door lighting a cigarette. “Do you know him?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He looks a little bit like one of the men who came to Bernie’s house after he was gone.”
Bernie stared out the window. “She’s right,” he said. “I’ve seen him.”
“Keep going,” said Jane.
Bernie pulled back out and merged into the line of cars. “I don’t know his name. But he was in a picture I saw once. It was a snapshot of Joe Langusto’s son’s wedding. He was in the last row, third one from the end.”
“Great,” said Jane. “There are New York thugs watching a post office in Cleveland.”
“There may be,” said Bernie. “But he wasn’t in the Langusto family. He works for Frank Delfina.”
Jane craned her neck to get a better look at the man, but he was only a tiny gray dot in front of the big gray building now. “I guess we’ll have to do this differently,” she said. “Keep driving until you find a mailbox—any mailbox on a street.”
Ten minutes later, Bernie pulled the Explorer over in front of a row of shops. Jane got out and dumped her bag of letters into the box, then hurried back to the car.
When Bernie got the car moving again, he said, “We’ve got a problem.”
“A new one?”
“You’ve been going all over the country. Henry’s been going around the country. But you quit for about five days to go pull us out of New Mexico. I think what happened during that time was that everything you had mailed must have arrived, and made a splash.”
“What do you mean?”
“They must know all the places you’ve been. They don’t have enough guys to put one or two in front of every post office in the country, but they’ve got them here. They know where you haven’t been yet.”
“You think they’ve moved all their people into our path?”
“I do.”
“Then we’d better change our path. Get us out of town while Rita and I look at the letters we’ve got left. Head south for now.”
Jane and Rita went to work examining the return addresses of the stacks of letters in the back of the Explorer. Rita would
read the name of a city, and Jane would put the stack on the floor. After a while, all of the stacks were arranged on the floor.
Jane said, “Okay, I think I know how to do this. They may have enough men to put one at each post office in big cities. So let’s skirt the big cities—just pull into the suburbs and back on the road. If we stop even less often than we have been, keep out of the obvious places, and take turns at the wheel, I think we have a chance.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked Bernie.
“Head for Akron.”
The thirty-nine-mile drive south to the west side of Akron took until nearly seven. Rita mailed some letters there and then climbed into the driver’s seat. “Where next?”
“Youngstown,” said Jane.
“Switch to the 76 Interstate just ahead,” said Bernie. “It’s fifty miles. Stop when you get to the Southern Park Mall.”
When they reached the mall, Jane mailed the Youngstown letters and took a turn at the wheel. “That was the last of the Ohio letters,” she said. She glanced back at the sun as she crossed the line onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was still a few degrees above the horizon, and she was glad. They were still moving, still a little bit ahead of the hunters.
It was nearly nine in the evening when Jane skirted the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh and left the turnpike at Monroeville. On a summer night like this one, the traffic was thin, and the people who were out were mostly young. She thought they walked in a leisurely, languorous way, as though the sights on the other side of her window were in a different universe, where things moved at half speed. Jane’s foot was always nudging the gas pedal to keep the needle of the speedometer two or three ticks above the speed limit, and her mind was always on the next city.
The three took turns driving through the night, letting mailboxes and gas stations represent the cities: Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem. Jane awoke in the passenger seat just as they crossed the Delaware into New
Jersey at 3:30 a.m. She was elated. She sat up and looked into the back seat to see Bernie sleeping peacefully. She tried to dissect the feeling as Rita drove. She felt the way she used to in college when she was running on the track team. She remembered being strained, breathless, her mouth set in an unattractive grimace and her nostrils flared like a horse’s. But the moment when she had seen her foot touch the fine gravel on the first step at the beginning of the final lap, she had felt a change. Her strides would lengthen and her head go up to straighten the airway, and her limp, tired arms would begin to pump faster. Tonight was like that. She was just coming around the short end of the track, and she would see the last lap ahead of her.
She resisted the urge to take the wheel. It was only about fifty miles across the top of New Jersey to Newark, the weather was clear and the road was fast, and at this hour the traffic was light. She gave Rita’s shoulder a friendly pat. “How are you holding up?”
“Fine,” said Rita.
“When you get to Newark, find a place to stop, and I’ll take over.” Jane lay back in her seat and closed her eyes. She had already driven to most of the major cities in about a dozen states and mailed an enormous number of envelopes before she’d gone back for Rita and Bernie. Now, hour by hour, the envelopes were still going out. She had no idea how much money had been mailed since she had taken on her last load in Chicago, but there had been thousands of envelopes. Each time they had emptied a box, she had crushed it flat and laid it on the floor behind the back seat, so now the floor of the cargo bay was littered with them, and there were only five more boxes to go.
Jane sensed another feeling too: a satisfaction that was simple geometry. In another hour, when they reached the Atlantic—no, only forty minutes now—they would cross Henry Ziegler’s path. The pattern would be complete.
When Rita reached the edge of Newark, she pulled off Interstate 78 at a gas station. Jane got out and filled the tank.
When she got into the driver’s seat, Bernie was in the passenger seat looking alert, and Rita was in the back moving boxes of envelopes into order.
Jane pulled back onto the road. “How are you feeling?” she asked Bernie.
“Like I slept a year,” he said. “I took a look at what’s left in the boxes a while back, and I thought over the route. What you want to do is get back on 78, and take the bridge over Newark Bay. We’ll hit Jersey City and Hoboken next.”
Jane drove the route as Bernie dictated it, and Rita hopped out of the Explorer at each stop to drop the letters into the mailbox.
Bernie said, “What time is it?”
“About four-thirty.”
“Want to see if we can make it across Manhattan before daylight?”
Jane said, “If we can.”
They crossed into Manhattan using the Holland Tunnel, and Bernie gave her directions. When they reached the intersection of Broome and Mott in Little Italy, Bernie said, “Stop here. Rita, give me the box. I want to do this one myself.”
Jane watched as Bernie walked to the mailbox and happily slid the letters into it, then deposited the cardboard carton in a public trash receptacle. He climbed back into the Explorer and smiled. “Take Delancey to the Williamsburg Bridge.”
She came off the bridge and onto the Queens Expressway, and Bernie said, “Now onto the Long Island Expressway.” Jane followed his instructions.
After a few minutes, Bernie said, “Stop in Manhasset.” When Jane had stopped the Explorer, Bernie got out and sat in the back seat. He handed Rita the last box. “Put this on your lap. The packets are in order. Just tell Jane what the next one is, and when she stops the car, get out and mail it. I’m going to get some rest.”
Within minutes, Jane could hear Bernie snoring again. Rita called out the stops: Great Neck, Port Washington, Glen Cove, Stony Brook, and Port Jefferson. Then Jane moved south across
the island to Mastic, Center Moriches, Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southhampton, East Hampton, and Sag Harbor.
At each stop, Rita would jump out and mail the letters, then announce the next destination. It was late afternoon when she returned to the car with the last empty box. She found Bernie and Jane staring at each other over the seat.
“You don’t have to do it,” he said.
“It was part of our agreement,” Jane answered. “From the first day, this was the plan.”
“Things have changed since the first day. They found us in New Mexico, and they’ve got your picture now. They know what’s going on.”
“What?” asked Rita. “What are you talking about?”
Jane said, “Look around in the seats and things. Be sure every letter is gone.”
“I already did,” said Rita. “We did it. It’s over.”
“Not quite,” said Jane. “We’ll stop and get something to eat up here, and then see who’s up to driving the next leg of the trip while the others sleep.”
“Next leg of the trip?”
“We have just one more stop to make.”
“Where?”
“Marion, Illinois.”
A
l Castananza sat in his booth at the Villa restaurant and waited for his dinner. He had learned as a child that letting people read on his face the contents of his mind was a bad idea. It had gotten him into so much trouble at school that education had been a brief experience and lingered as an incomprehensible
memory after fifty years. After that, he had served the first of his prison terms, and he had learned quickly.
Tonight, he was feeling anxious and confused, but he knew that showing anything except his mask of imperturbability was about the same as putting a gun in his mouth. He sat staring at the poster of the Venice Biennale that hung on the wall across from him, and distracted himself by wondering what it was that happened in Venice every two years. It sounded like a car race, but he couldn’t imagine why anybody would have a car race in a city that was half flooded.
Saachi came in from the front dining room and sat beside him on his right, as he always did. Saachi wouldn’t end up eating anything until nearly midnight, after Castananza went home. He would sit there protecting Castananza’s weak side while Castananza ate. He would make payments from the roll of bills in his pocket and handle all the petty problems that people came in with so Castananza could swallow his food without getting agita.
Castananza always listened while he was eating, but if he didn’t have to gulp down a mouthful of unchewed food to say something, then he didn’t. If Saachi made a wrong decision, he never told him in front of anyone. He waited until they were alone, so Saachi could fix it himself.
Monday night’s special was veal scaloppine, and he felt happy. He could have gone into any restaurant anywhere and ordered the whole menu if he wanted, but he had lived a long life by never doing that. If he had asked Marone, the Villa’s owner, for a special meal made of rare and costly ingredients, Marone would have rushed around trying to make it, but the daily specials were what Castananza liked. If half the people in a restaurant were having the same meal, then it would be pretty damned hard to get a spoonful of rat poison on the right plate.
Saachi sat there for a second, then said, “Al, I’m glad I got here before the waiter.”
Castananza’s hopes fell. Saachi was telling him he wouldn’t
want to hear this while he was eating. “Yeah?” he said. “What sort of problem have we got?”
“It’s this thing with Bernie.”
The owner of the restaurant himself walked toward the table, carrying a tray on which four plates of veal scaloppine were expertly wedged, so the edge of each plate sat on the edge of the next. Castananza gave his head a regretful little shake. Marone saw it and delivered the four plates to other, less distinguished diners without letting them suspect that Castananza had turned them down.
“So tell me.”
“I think maybe we should get out of here and talk in the car.”
Castananza looked at Saachi. His old friend’s face was concerned, the lines over his eyebrows all showing even in the soft light of the Villa, but the eyes weren’t scared. That would have required Castananza to behave differently. He had always been alert to signs that Saachi was scared, because that was the way he would look if he ever decided that being Castananza’s right hand was the same as being Castananza. He said, “Sure. Should we go out the back?”
“I got my car out there,” said Saachi.
The two men slid out of the booth and walked the few steps to the back of the restaurant, past the telephones Castananza’s people never used because they were tapped, and out to the little square of asphalt where the waiters parked their cars.
There were two men standing beside Saachi’s Continental, and Castananza acknowledged them. “Hi, Mike. Bobby, how are you?” He didn’t listen to their respectful mutterings as he got into the passenger seat. They were too much in awe of him to say anything he needed to hear.
Saachi started his car, and the two young men went around the building to another one, and drove up behind them. As Saachi crept down the alley to the street, he sighed to signify that he was ready.
“So?” asked Castananza.
“The two guys we sent to watch Albuquerque airport for
Danny Spoleto and the girl—DiBiaggio and Lomarco. They called the other day and said they saw something strange.”