Thomas Perry: The Informant

Amanda gave a little jump, smiled, and said "Hi, Mom" a little too loudly. She pulled the earbud out of one ear.

"Hi. How was your day?"

"Not bad," Amanda said. "I got a ninety-eight on that history test we took Friday."

"Wow. Keep learning those dates, Killer. What are you up to now?"

"A French paper. In French."

"What's it about?"

"I guess I'd translate it as 'The Wondrous Cheeses of France.'"

"I don't think I'd try that one on an empty stomach. Have you eaten dinner yet?"

"Hours ago, around five-thirty. Jim had to go back to school."

"I saw his note." Elizabeth paused, then realized her daughter was waiting patiently for her to leave so she could get back to work. "Well, I'm home if you need me. My French is a little last century."

" Tres mauvais too."

"True. Somewhere they're keeping my grades to prove it. I'm going to eat something."

"See you later." Amanda stuck the earbud into her ear and stared at a handwritten note stuck in her French dictionary, then started typing again.

It occurred to Elizabeth, as it had more and more frequently, that it was going to get very lonely around here in a couple of years, just when she would really need to keep her job to put them both through college. She walked back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out some leftover vegetables and some of the chicken from tonight's dinner, put them in the microwave, and then ate while she read this morning's New York Times and Washington Post.

She started the dishwasher, went into her room, and changed into blue jeans and an old oversize gray sweatshirt of Jim's that had GEORGETOWN across the chest. Then she went to the dining room and laid out the papers she had brought home. She had requested the records on Michael Delamina, Anthony Varanese, and Frank Tosca. She began at the top of the hierarchy, with Tosca.

He was forty-one years old. He had a few convictions during his twenties and thirties for the things that young men in the Balacontano family usually did-assault, aggravated assault, and an illegal weapons violation. They weren't even youthful mistakes. They were business, the routine tasks of collecting debts for the family. They had, together, put him in prisons for six years and two months. Prison was a trade school for young Mafiosi. There they got to know important older men and the minor criminals who worked for them, and spent lots of time listening to lectures about methods and systems. They lifted weights and did pull-ups. At the end of a sentence they came out stronger, meaner, and smarter, with allies and sponsors they hadn't had before. Tosca was older and higher in the hierarchy now, and hadn't been arrested for anything in eight years.

She turned to the files on Anthony Varanese. He wasn't in the same league as Tosca. He didn't appear ever to have been in the running to become one of the little tyrants who ran the families. His life was a perfect example of something she had learned over the years: the life of a Mafioso wasn't a profession, it was an audition. Everybody was in a competition to rise in the hierarchy-to run a crew, to be a big earner, to run a network of crews, and eventually, to master the complicated web of personal and business relationships that made up a crime family. If you weren't moving up, it was just a series of ill-paid, dangerous, and unpleasant jobs. And you always worked for an employer who was volatile, suspicious, and dishonest. Varanese had fallen out of the race a long time ago. His arrests looked to her like failed starts in different parts of the country, always working for new people on some new scheme every couple of years. Tosca had shot straight up, not moving his business address more than a couple of blocks since he had begun.

It seemed so simple to do what she had asked Hunsecker for permission to do. She could have set a surveillance team on Varanese, and within a week or two she would have had a clear idea of what he was doing these days. In another week, they'd have had enough evidence to convict him of some form of larceny, since that seemed to be his specialty. With some nudging, he would agree to testify against Tosca. Meanwhile, another team could concentrate on Tosca, pursue the cold case murder of Kleiner, and see if there was a way to get the Canadians to search his summer house for the weapon.

Hunsecker was a terrible obstacle. Some day he would move on, up, and out. Until that day she would have to devise a way to live with him. She couldn't simply stop working while she waited for him to get bored with organized crime, but she couldn't circumvent him either. There had to be some middle way. She was tired now. She put away the papers, went to the living room couch, and turned on the television set.

The eleven o'clock news was on, flashing its moving logos and slogans. The teaser was already over, so she didn't know what the top stories were. The two anchor people came on, an attractive, well-dressed man named Curt Wendler, and a pretty blond woman in her late thirties named Kate Lathrop.

Kate Lathrop was frowning. "A man police believe to be a midlevel New York organized crime figure was found dead in his home on Long Island's north shore yesterday. Michael Delamina, age thirty-six, was found on the floor of his home with a single stab wound to the heart."

Elizabeth found herself standing, staring at the screen image of the front of a long, low white house across a vast green lawn shaded by tall oaks and maples. There were police cars with blue stripes, and an ambulance. A couple of coroner's men pushed a wheeled stretcher down the driveway with a bagged body strapped to it.

"Police have declined to speculate on a motive for the killing. They said the victim had several felony convictions, and that he had probably made many enemies over the years. But they do confirm that he had ties to the Balacontano family."

The screen was now filled with an accident on a narrow bridge over a river somewhere. A tractor-trailer was jackknifed across three lanes, and two small cars appeared to have tried to veer around it at the same time, but Elizabeth had stopped listening because she was already dialing the phone.

She heard the voice. "Justice, this is Fulton."

"Bob."

"Hi, Elizabeth," Fulton said. "You heard about Delamina?"

"Yes. Why am I watching it on the eleven o'clock news?"

"Everything we know about it has been forwarded to you in an e-mail. It isn't much."

"Do we know when it happened, approximately?"

"Only approximately. The body temperature indicates he died yesterday, probably late in the afternoon."

Elizabeth thought. It had happened before the Butcher's Boy had come to Washington. He had killed Delamina, then decided that his next move would be to kill Delamina's boss. He had been out of the crime world for too long to know who that was, but he knew that the Justice Department would know. He had flown to Washington and asked her. She couldn't quite bring back now why she had told him.

"Bob, call the FBI office in New York and say I have a very special request. I would like them to put Frank Tosca under surveillance. He's going to need some protection-set up a perimeter around him that will alert them to anybody attempting to get to him."

"Are you thinking that Tosca had a hit man do Delamina, and now the guy is coming for his pay?"

"No," she said. "It's a long story, but the man who killed Michael Delamina went to some trouble to find out who Delamina was working for. Now he knows, so he's going to kill Frank Tosca unless we can catch him when he comes to do it."

"Oh, boy," Fulton said. "You want me to tell the FBI that?"

"We don't have any choice. Warn them that this guy is very good at what he does. If he wants Tosca, it wouldn't bother him if he also had to take out an FBI agent or two on the way in. If we can possibly capture him alive, he could be the best domestic catch we've made in about twenty years. He knows a million things we'd like to know."