Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Years later—maybe seven—somebody had seen Danny Catanno in New York. The Castiglione family, by now run by the son and his two sons since the old man had retired to the Southwest, had quietly made inquiries. It wasn’t that he had done any real damage to the family reputation. The name had been famous since before the son was born. And the family friend had gotten off with a small fine and a wordy warning about fraudulent business practices and shady connections, because he had never been arrested before and had other friends besides the Castigliones. But the Castigliones were curious about the same thing that had attracted the IRS—the BMW that wasn’t attributable to any of Danny Catanno’s personal bank accounts. Danny was a thief.

A contract had been offered for Danny Catanno as soon as he had disappeared, but it had produced no satisfaction. After he had been spotted, the Castigliones had decided to hire a specialist.

Schaeffer had known that the Justice Department had some kind of agreement with Castoria College, which granted degrees to people on the basis of oral examinations given in courtrooms thousands of miles from its campus in New Hampshire. The government lawyers also gave their graduates false birth certificates and driver’s licenses and social security numbers, and then they said, “Good-bye and good luck.” All he had to do was to keep checking Danny’s mother’s mailbox for a month to see that Danny was beginning to forget his troubles. About once a week there was an envelope from a brokerage in New York with a check in it. When he had gotten to New York, all he’d had to do was to pick up a little brochure the company put out advertising the qualifications of its brokers. Among the dozens of brokers who had gone to places that meant nothing to him, he had found David Cutter, an honor graduate of Castoria.

He had looked around the apartment a bit while he waited for David Cutter to come home. It was the sort of place that cost a million or more up front, and another half-million that had to be paid to decorators, furniture dealers and art galleries. In the antique writing desk he had found a pile of credit-card receipts for expensive restaurants. He had been astounded. The man had even gone on a trip to the Bahamas a month before. People had a way of pushing things out of their minds, like the ones who built fancy houses in the floodplain of the Platte River, or on top of fault lines in California. It was a miracle that a man like David Cutter had lived as long as he had. He had gone to restaurants where he couldn’t help but sit next to people who would do anything to gain favor with the Castiglione family. He had spent his days betting large sums of money for people, a lot of whom had gotten it in ways that must have brought them into contact with acquaintances of the Castigliones. What did this man think? When he had made his reservations for the Caribbean, didn’t he Wonder who might be sitting next to him on the plane?

Schaeffer had looked in drawers and closets, bookcases and backlit cabinets, thinking about human folly. All the time he was planning. If ever in his life he had to disappear, he would submerge without a ripple and never come up again. He would never allow himself to become so comfortable and mentally lazy that he forgot he wasn’t the man he was pretending to be. That night he had made the decision to begin the preparations for his own disappearance. He would put money in safe-deposit boxes in towns he never visited. Often in his career he had found it prudent to use false names on credit cards and licenses. But now he would do it in earnest, start to build up a few identities and never use them, so that they would be old enough and deep enough on the day when somebody began to look for him the way he had looked for Danny Catanno.

Eddie Mastrewski had raised him to abhor mistakes. It was better to stay home than to make a mistake, better to pass up the money than to take a chance. The police could be as stupid as cattle, spend the day stumbling over their own feet, but in the evening they could go home, pop open a beer and sleep like stones. But people like Eddie and the boy got to make only one mistake. That was true of people like Danny Catanno too, only Danny didn’t seem to know it. He had accepted an identity as Cutter the stockbroker, and somehow he had forgotten that he wasn’t Cutter the stockbroker. The money and respectability that protected people like Cutter couldn’t protect him.

Before he had satisfied his curiosity in the apartment, he had found Danny Catanno’s gun. It was hidden in a little pop-out compartment in the wall beside the bed. The gun was lying under a pile of gold cuff links, a couple of watches and some hundred-dollar bills. It would have taken Danny thirty seconds in bright light to fumble around for it. It looked as though it had been placed there a long time ago and forgotten. When he examined it, he found it hadn’t even been cleaned and oiled lately. But he found it worked well enough when Danny Catanno came home from the theater. The police told the reporters the next day that David Cutter was a lesson to others: an unlicensed firearm was just as likely to be used by a burglar as by its owner.

Now Schaeffer wondered how he had forgotten about Danny Catanno. He had managed to set aside enough money, and he had nurtured the identities until they had sufficient patina on them to obscure their flaws, but he hadn’t done the rest of it. He had put off getting the plastic surgery, telling himself at first that he needed to get a feel for the country before he could be sure how to go about it. Surgery would involve spending a lot of time in London being photographed and examined by doctors who might wonder why a man with perfectly regular features would want something expensive and painful done to him in a foreign country. Then later, when he had learned to move around comfortably in England and was confident he could have accomplished it, he had developed other reservations. People in Bath knew him by now, and would wonder why he would suddenly do such a strange thing. He had put it off so long the dangerous time was probably past. If anybody had traced him here, they would have gotten him by now. And certainly all that time must have changed him as much as surgery would.…

The truth was that hiding had made him reluctant to obliterate his face, because it was the last thing left that was part of who he really was. He had already destroyed or relinquished everything else. He would never have run out of excuses to put off the plastic surgery. For the first time he understood Danny Catanno.

It was late afternoon. The southern outposts of London began to pass by the train, and brown brick buildings appeared that reminded him of the ride from Kennedy Airport through Queens. Then it struck him that the similarity wasn’t the reason he had thought of it. He was going back. As the train pulled slowly into Victoria Station, he calculated: assuming the police had found all five bodies by now and were questioning everybody at the racetrack, it would still take them a couple of hours to find out that the Bentley had stopped to let out a man and a woman. They would take still longer to satisfy themselves that the man and woman were no longer in Brighton, and that the only place that made any sense if they wanted to hide was London.

Fingerprints didn’t worry him. In spite of the nonsense the police put out for public consumption, not one of them in a hundred could lift a clear print from anything more textured than glass or metal. Neither he nor Meg had touched the windows, and Peter had opened the door for them. And if they had idly grasped the door handles, the killers would have touched them afterward, and probably wiped the surfaces off before they left.

His mind was already working its old, habitual, methodical way through the traps and snares. He turned to her as they stood up, careful to keep his face turned away from their companions on the train. “Keep looking out the window. You said nobody knew we were going there today?”