Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

Palermo shook his head solemnly. He said, “Jesus, you must think I’m stupid, pulling that on me. The specialist? Shit, him I’d give you for free if I could. Problem is, I can’t. I never saw him, and I don’t even know his name. When they talked about him, they just called him ‘the Butcher’s Boy.’ ”

She remembered what she had said: “Nice name.”

“Yeah,” said Palermo. “Isn’t it?” He was trying to make it sound sarcastic: Look at the sort of thing I have to put up with. But he couldn’t carry it off at four-thirty in the morning, still talking in a whisper because he was afraid.

And that was what she was feeling now. It was Nicky Palermo’s fear. He had died of it. Nobody would ever have said it that way, but it was true. He had gotten scared enough to decide in the middle of the night to be a witness for the Justice Department, and the only way he could think of to go about it was to turn himself in to the agent who had been visible serving papers and taking depositions that week. Only he couldn’t know that the agent had been visible not by accident but by choice and foresight, because Justice Department thinking at the time was that the only agent on the case whose anonymity was expendable was the one who shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place: Elizabeth Waring. And this had killed him; not the man he was so afraid of, but his own friends, because he had talked and she couldn’t protect him. Nobody would have said it, but she knew it, and Nicky Palermo knew it, even though he had been dead for ten years now, and was not even a ghost, but an uncomfortable memory.

Elizabeth sat up and turned on the light beside her bed. It was four-thirty again, only now it was Alexandria, Virginia, and Las Vegas was a long time ago. She looked over at Jim’s empty side of the bed. It was four-thirty, the coldest, darkest hour out of every twenty-four, and Nicky Palermo was dead, and her husband was dead, and her career was dead. No, her capacity for having or wanting a career was dead. Next week or a year from now, she would be going through it again. There would be a new office that was almost like the last because it was in the same huge building, and new people, some young and eager, and the others quietly and unofficially burned out but carrying too much rank to be randomly reassigned somewhere to fill in for a GS-7. There would be some new special problem the Justice Department thought it could solve with a crack task force—stock fraud or banks or imported flea collars with so much poison in them that they made Rover roll over with convulsions—and Elizabeth Waring would volunteer for anything except Organized Crime.

She listened to the baby monitor beside the bed. Above the static she could hear Amanda breathing the slow, regular breaths of the innocent.

As the train added power, slowly clacking out of the station, Margaret sat stiffly, willing it to go faster. She timed her breaths to the precise moments when it passed the poles along the track, and found that she felt smothered, until they were floating past too often to have anything to do with her breathing.

Cautiously she pretended to look out the window, but craned her neck to use the reflection to look at the other people in the car. In the very back were two elderly ladies in flowered dresses who had raised a redoubt of oversized purses and shopping sacks to repel any smokers who might try to sit nearby. They were wisely returning from a morning at the shore early enough to miss the crowds of horse fanciers and gamblers and be in their flats in time for tea. There were three young boys in the front who could be misidentified as representatives of the very element the old ladies intended to avoid; they had hair cropped in peculiar patterns of tufts and lawns like little dogs, and sported clothing of leather and denim held together with metal rivets. But they were well mannered, merely nudging one another at intervals and pointing out landmarks and milestones that were invisible to Meg. She guessed that these must have some significance in their lives, perhaps scenes of early exploits as they had widened their range away from Brighton and closer to London.

“Why are we going to London?” she whispered.

Schaeffer studied her and acknowledged the injustice of it. She looked small and young, her bright green eyes even greener because her pumping heart had brought more oxygen than she had ever breathed into her, and even now something hard and admirable was keeping her from going limp and gray from the shock. She had first approached him out of a sense of adventure, and had stayed involved out of some notion that liveliness was better than torpor, but she hadn’t signed on for this. “It’s the sensible thing to do,” he answered. “Most people leaving town will be going to London, and once we’re there, they have to pick us out of millions of people.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m not sure that was what I meant to ask you. I was hoping you’d tell all, as they say.”

He thought about what had happened. She had come to his house this morning in the full and delighted confidence that she was the wildest creature in the little universe she inhabited. Now the walls had shattered and let real monsters in. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never should have let this happen. You were very brave.”

“I’m trying to hold on to my sanity,” she said quietly. “Michael, I can’t even believe this is happening, has happened—no, it’s still happening, isn’t it? I’m afraid, and I want to know if I’m just being weak, or if I’m right to be afraid because in a minute they’re going to stop the train, drag us off and …” She stopped, and he could see her making a conscious effort to beat down the terrors that were spontaneously taking on specific shapes with hard, defined lines. She failed, but he could see she was holding them on one side of a line for the moment. “Or will I always have to be afraid because it’s never going to be over?”

Schaeffer searched for something that would make sense to her. “Sometimes in the newspapers you read that somebody in Parliament made a speech demanding that the warmonger Americans get out. Well, I guess I’m one of the ones they mean.”

It gave him a morbid fascination to watch her mind grab for this little bit of comprehensible nonsense and clutch it to her. “I should have known it,” she said. “I even thought about it, but I told myself there really weren’t any such people, or anyway that I’d never see them. CIA. What could you be but one of them? You move into a big old house all by yourself and never talk about anything that could even begin to give anybody an idea of who you are or what you did before.”

In her mind’s rush to gather evidence to support the lie, she had begun to forget that there were other people on the train. He put his hand on her forearm and moved his eyes toward the three boys at the front of the car. “To answer your question, I think the bad part is over now,” he whispered. “We just have to be sure we aren’t followed.”

“Where are we going? MI5? Your embassy?”

He shook his head. “All of the obvious places will be under surveillance. We’re on our own.” He tried to remember which it was: “in the cold,” or “out of the cold.” “We’re going to have to stay out in the cold for a while.” Then he remembered that he would have to prepare her for the future. “Or I am, anyway.”

“One more thing, and I won’t ask for any more secrets,” she said. “Those men weren’t English, except maybe the last one. They looked like Italians. What has Italy got against you?”

He had to block that avenue of thought. “They were Bulgarians. They probably came in from Yugoslavia across the Adriatic into Italy; that’s the way they usually do it. They look the same, and lots of them speak the language. It’s only a few miles.” He was quoting a travel brochure he had seen once: “An hour or so by boat on a calm, sunlit sea.” Or was that Coleridge: “Down to a sunless sea”? He had been reading some of the books in the library of his house again, and it sounded familiar. He felt a small prickle of alarm. Books were a trap. If he accidentally quoted from one of them, she would recognize it.