Thomas Perry: The Informant

Schaeffer didn't like being in New York. Manhattan was a tiny, crowded place, and it would be easy to get spotted on the street by somebody from the old days that he didn't even notice. People drove by in cars, or sat at restaurant windows and watched pedestrians pass. And unless the nature of the universe had changed, there were always Mafia underlings moving around the island on their constant rounds of errands, picking up and delivering-taking a rake-off from one business, giving a loan to another, bringing bribes to officials, accepting tributes from even smaller criminals. They all made themselves useful to their superiors by watching for people like him. He was avoiding Manhattan this trip. He had flown into JFK and rented a car to drive to Tosca's house.

He hadn't tried to obtain a weapon. Having to go through metal detectors to fly somewhere, then get off a plane and do a job, had always been difficult. In the old days, when he had been working for hire, the client would sometimes have what he needed waiting for him-a gun that had been stolen in a burglary and could only be traced to its last owner, or one that had temporarily disappeared from a dealer's secondhand inventory and would be cleaned up and returned the next day. There had even been a couple that had been stolen from the intended victim's own arsenal ahead of time.

But he no longer had clients. Tonight he would have to find what he needed as he went along. He stopped at a home-improvement store not far from the airport and paid in cash for a few items that might be useful-a crowbar, a box of rubber gloves, a lock-blade knife, a strong magnet used for picking up lost screws and nails.

He loaded his purchases into the rental car and drove toward Glen Cove. When he reached the little city, he drove up Glen Cove Avenue toward the neighborhood where Tosca lived. He passed the turnoff, backtracked a few blocks, and found it again. He saw a restaurant on Glen Cove Avenue that looked appealing to him, but he decided it was best not to have any contact with the locals. What he was planning to do would be big news, and he didn't want anybody to remember that a stranger had been in the restaurant that evening. He drove on. Glen Cove was a prosperous little town that seemed to be largely horizontal. It was composed of buildings that weren't higher than two stories, most of them one. There were a few banks, boutiques, and restaurants, the sort of businesses that existed in places where people lived rather than worked. He watched people walking along the sidewalks, stopping to glance in the lighted display windows or getting into cars and driving off.

He tried to locate the house where Frank Tosca lived, and eventually found it by counting the streets parallel to Glen Cove Avenue, then counting houses from the corner. There were tall, leafy old hardwood trees on the street and thick hedges that obscured the view. Some lights were on, but he could see little else about the house from the street except that it was big. When he was growing up, the capos at Tosca's level still lived in small, narrow, two-story workingmen's houses in the less desirable parts of Queens or Brooklyn. It wasn't until they got to the point where there was a rational explanation for their having so much money-a real business big enough to produce wealth-that they might settle in Manhattan. None of them lived in places like this, a suburb along the water. It just wasn't done. The old guys had been too paranoid to be away from the neighborhoods where their soldiers lived. They didn't want to take the chance that somebody was talking business without them.

Then he saw something that he hadn't expected. There were three vans parked in the quiet, tree-lined streets a few blocks away. One was a dark-colored plain one across the street from Tosca's house and about three hundred feet down. There was another at the other end of the block. There was a third on the next parallel street, behind Tosca's house.

Another house caught his eye. It was about a block and a half away, behind high hedges. The driveway went straight back from the gated entrance about a hundred feet to a circular turnaround at the front door. After all the years living in England he recognized it as a copy in miniature of the gravel drives that were built to accommodate eighteenth-century carriages visiting large homes. This house had no lights on, but there were four dark-colored cars lined up facing the street.

He found himself smiling. It was clear to him that this was the result of his nighttime visit to Elizabeth Waring in Washington. He had told her that Tosca had kept the weapon from one of his earliest murders, and here was Tosca's house, one day later, under heavy surveillance by federal agents. He was glad he had driven around looking closely at everything before he tried to get into the house. He would have ruined everything. He left Glen Cove and drove twelve miles to Hempstead, checked into a hotel, had dinner, and went to sleep.

Elizabeth had been keeping files on him for more than twenty years. No, that was not exactly true. She had started a file more than twenty years ago and then, after a few years, had sent it with a number of other files to be placed in long-term storage. She had called him "unknown suspect" for the first part of the file when she was still only positing the existence of a single man who was causing so much disruption in the families. Her superiors had assured her that their long experience told them it was a real war, with the families attacking each other. He had been busy for at least a month before she got close enough to begin hearing informants talking about him and calling him the Butcher's Boy. It led up to the discovery of the body parts buried on the horse farm Carlo Balacontano, aka Carl Bala, owned at Saratoga.

The discovery was prompted by a telephone tip to the FBI. Elizabeth had said right away to anyone who would listen that it was a setup. Why would a smart strategist like Carl Bala have his men bury the head and hands of Arthur Fieldston on his own property, a hundred yards from his summer house? Why would he have them cut the body up in the first place? Weren't there a million pieces of empty land in upstate New York where nobody would find a body? Had the oceans dried up?

Her superiors had said, "He had them bury the head and hands there because it was a place he thought he could protect until he died." And she had said, "Somebody was capable of hiding the rest of the body-say, two hundred pounds of it-where nobody has ever found it. But the head and hands-the only means of identifying a murder victim-had to be right where he would walk past them every day. Carl Bala is not an idiot. He's ordered a lot of people murdered, but not this one. The person who buried the head and hands is the one who made the call to tell us where they were."

Her protests had been futile. The murder charge against Carl Bala stood. Elizabeth had been ordered to take a vacation until the trial was over. She had flown to England and walked in gardens that had been cultivated for seven hundred years and watched plays nearly every night. When she had come home, Carl Bala had been sentenced to life in prison and the Butcher's Boy was already gone, as though he had been made of smoke.

Her job in those days had been to analyze police and coroners' reports, searching for deaths that had been declared suicides or accidents that weren't, or for homicides that formed familiar patterns, or that seemed to benefit someone in organized crime. She was good at it, and she continued to scour the reports for years, but found no sign of him. He had stirred up the families with a few well-chosen murders-ones that would be almost certain to provoke retaliation against some rival group. Probably as soon as Carl Bala was arrested and denied bail as a flight risk, the Butcher's Boy disappeared.