Thomas Perry - The Informant

When he came back to the Castle at six, the old man was in his office. He opened his cash drawer, stood, and handed Schaeffer the money he had offered for the job. Then his black eyes, like beads, flicked to the side, and he smiled, his long, tobacco-stained teeth suddenly visible. "Come in here." He beckoned to someone in the doorway. "That's right. I saw you. Come in here now." The voice was not the hard, imperious one that he used with his men, but the softer, slightly higher, cracked voice was more horrifying because it was so forced, so false.

A boy about thirteen or fourteen appeared from around the corner and stood in the doorway. He wore jeans and high-top basketball sneakers, which was the style then, and a sweatshirt. "This is my grandson," Castiglione said. "He's the youngest, Salvatore. Named after me."

"Hello," Schaeffer said.

The boy looked at him darkly, but said nothing.

Old Salvatore said, "That's right. Take a good look. That's the scariest man you're ever going to see. Doesn't look scary, does he?"

"No."

"Well he is. Look in his eyes. You see now?"

"I don't know."

"Does he like you, or does he hate you?"

"I can't tell."

"That's because the answer is 'neither.' He looks at you the way you look at a fish. It's alive now, maybe not tomorrow, but it doesn't matter which."

"I get it."

"Good." He gave the boy a push. "You see another one like him, make sure he's on your side."

Young Salvatore had grown up. As of last night he was the reigning Castiglione. Schaeffer was irritated that he hadn't managed to kill him. It was a chore, and now it would be harder and more dangerous.

He was fairly certain that the reason Salvatore had gotten away was that he hadn't been able to get to him fast enough. As soon as he had broken into the Castle, the clock had started running. He had killed everyone he'd seen, even the girl in Joe Castiglione's bed. He'd known at the time that even she had to die. He had heard people say that killing somebody was egotism-thinking your own life was more valuable than somebody else's. Those people didn't understand either life or death. Your life wasn't better than someone else's. Your life was valuable to you because it was yours. What was egotistical was thinking you could neglect to do the smart, self-protective thing when you had the chance and still manage to survive. It was thinking your superiority gave you leeway. You could afford to leave your enemies alive because they weren't as smart or as strong or as lucky as you were. Well, you couldn't afford to think that way.

If he'd made a mistake last night, it was not going upstairs in Paul Castiglione's house to kill the woman yelling down the stairs. Presumably it was Paul's wife. He'd made the decision, not to let her live, but not to waste the time going up there to find and kill her and whatever kids there were. Apparently he had made the wrong choice. She must have called Salvatore as soon as she heard the alarm go off.

He dressed and went downstairs to eat dinner, and then came back up and used his laptop computer to find Vincent Pugliese's address. He was tentatively pleased because he knew the area in the center of the city fairly well, unless the Chicago business-people had torn everything down and replaced it since he'd left the country. Finally, he took the time to examine his weapons and give them a hasty cleaning. He cut up a T-shirt, stripped the pistols, and wiped them down. He used a section of a curtain rod to run a patch through the shotgun barrel. He left the shotgun in two pieces in his bag, but reassembled the pistols and reloaded them and the spare magazines.

If Eddie could have seen what he was doing, he would have thought he was crazy. He had always been against picking up somebody else's gun and using it. After Eddie and the boy had gotten to Manny Garcia by killing his two bodyguards, the boy had picked up one bodyguard's Colt Commander. Eddie had shaken his head. "That man was not a pro, or he wouldn't be dead."

The boy had replied, "His gun fired fine. There was nothing wrong with it. He just couldn't hit anything. He didn't have the balls to hold the gun steady."

"You should wipe your prints off and drop it," Eddie said. "You don't know where that thing has been."

"Are we talking about germs?"

"No. He might have killed an archbishop, four Supreme Court justices, and Miss America with that damned gun."

Now it was about nine-thirty in the evening, time to drive back to Chicago. He stepped outside and went to his car. On the drive to Chicago along Lake Michigan he could feel his alertness growing as night came on. The sky was turning dark, and a few white clouds high above the lake east of the road were illuminated by the last of the sunlight to the west.

There was really no good plan but to go to Vincent Pugliese's address in Chicago and study it for vulnerabilities. Sal Castiglione would be trying to save himself now, and the logical way was to surround himself with his own people. That meant using Vince Pugliese to reassure the soldiers and rally them. But it was possible that Castiglione would simply leave town for a time and wait until calm returned.

Seeing Vincent Pugliese's address was daunting. It was an old gray stone office building six stories high with an imposing facade built in the early part of the last century. There was a stone arch with a pair of concrete pillars, and through the glass doors he caught a glimpse of a black-and-white marble mosaic floor in the lobby. As he moved slowly past the front of the building in traffic, he saw that the bottom floor held several businesses with separate entrances-a coffee shop, a travel agency, a credit union, a restaurant called Mimi's.

After studying the place for two minutes, he could read Vince Pugliese's intention in every aspect of it. Pugliese would want to achieve a low profile, but still have Castiglione soldiers coming and going. The first-floor businesses were sure to be a tangle of legal agreements between fourteen or fifteen different entities, all companies that didn't involve a door you could knock on or the name of an actual person. They would be as insubstantial as cobwebs. When all were brushed away, the owner would be another company owned by Vincent Pugliese.

He turned to drive around the building. It was perfect. Old Salvatore Castiglione had bought a fantasy castle for himself, but Pugliese had built a village. One reason the Mafia worked was that a powerful man could offer jobs to all of his relatives and friends, giving them all a visible means of support and lots of free time for schemes and sidelines. Pugliese had his whole first floor occupied by businesses, all of which were ones he could use for money laundering and reinvesting. And the constant presence of people loyal to him behind those ground-floor windows meant he was a very difficult man to sneak up on. The lobby was a bare marble floor with two elevators. It was guarded by a pair of security men behind a desk facing the door. If something happened, Pugliese's people could probably cut the power to the elevators and engage the locks on the door and turn the place into a slaughtering floor.

Off the alley behind the building was the entrance to an underground parking garage where Pugliese and his friends could park their cars off the street. Pugliese was as well protected as a man in Chicago could be. There were not likely to be any surprises in his life.

Schaeffer drove another two blocks farther on and parked in a parking structure beside a movie theater. It was a mild September night, with a slow stream of moving air coming in off the lake. He had already decided that the most likely way to defeat the security of Pugliese's building would be to enter through the underground garage. From there he would look for the features that he couldn't see from the outside. He knew there would be some kind of exit there. Vince was too smart to let his fortress become a prison. He wouldn't let himself be trapped by his own defenses. He would have built in a private way around the barriers. It might be a separate elevator from the sixth floor down to the garage that skipped the intervening floors. It might be a walkway that led from this building to the one beside it or even a tunnel to another building. But his guess was that somewhere in the underground garage would be a plain steel door painted the same color as the walls. On it would be a sign that said something like ELECTRICAL or STAND PIPES or SHUT-OFF VALVE, something that would help the mind move past the door because the words gave the impression that all the questions had been answered. But that door would be Pugliese's way out.