Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

As the passengers shuffled up the aisle toward the door, Charles Ackerman reached under his seat and retrieved his small suitcase. He had brought only one. The place to trap a man like him was in an airport baggage-claim area, when he had just stepped off an international flight that required going through metal detectors at both ends and was standing mesmerized in front of a turning carousel of luggage.

He joined the agonizingly slow queue with the others. Here it was only ten in the evening, but it was three o’clock in the morning for the load of prisoners straggling into the airport. This suited him perfectly.

When the tired functionary at the Customs and Immigration barrier looked at the passport, a hint of interest almost snapped him out of his lethargy. “You haven’t been home in some time, Mr. Ackerman.”

“No,” he said. “I live in England now.” He watched with fascination as the man placed his open passport on a machine that appeared to be an optical scanner. That was new. He was glad he had used the Ackerman passport. He had obtained it fifteen years ago on the strength of a bogus birth certificate, but the State Department had issued it and he had renewed it regularly, so it was real enough. The man read something on a computer screen that didn’t surprise him, then handed it back.

“Here on business?”

“No,” Ackerman answered. “I just haven’t been home in a long time.”

“Anything to declare?”

“Nothing.” It was all negatives, all denials: I’m nobody, doing nothing here, bringing nothing with me; forget me. The man ran his hands inside the suitcase quickly and moved on to the next person in line.

He latched the suitcase and moved into the open terminal, where rows of faces glanced hopefully at him, scrutinizing his features, and then, instantly failing to recognize the right configuration, discarded him and looked behind him for the brother, the father, the business associate. He passed the waiting throng and moved toward the lockers built into the far wall. He saw one with a key sticking out of it, then remembered he had no American coins. He moved on to the gift shop. There was a woman who seemed to be an Indian behind the counter, staring intently at a garish tabloid she had draped over the cash register. As he approached, she set it aside and he could read the headline: RUSSIANS FIND WORLD WAR II BOMBER IN CRATER ON THE MOON. Meg would have said it had something for everyone she knew.

“I need to change some English money,” he said.

She pointed out into the hall. “The yellow booth.” Then she added confidentially, “They give you more at the bank.”

“Thank you,” he said, and turned to go.

“Haven’t you got an ATM card?”

He had no idea what an ATM card was. There was probably another name for it in England, but he certainly didn’t have one. “No.”

“They’ll screw you out of ten percent. I’ll do it for five.”

He resisted the temptation to smile. New York. It must come from the air or the water. They’ll screw you, but I won’t; we’re in this together. Even the ward politicians got elected that way. “How much can you give me for five hundred pounds?”

“Seven-fifty.”

He had read in The New York Times on the plane that the pound was $1.89, so her five percent was about twenty percent. He counted out five one-hundred-pound notes and accepted the money from the till. He asked for the last ten in singles and the last three in quarters and she gave them without reluctance or an attempt to palm a bill; having taken her fair usury, she wasn’t interested in stealing.

He used the coins to free the locker key, left his belongings in the locker, then strolled to the ticket counter and paid more pounds for a ticket to Los Angeles leaving at seven in the morning. He looked up at the big clock on the wall and reset his watch. He still had almost nine hours.

Out in the street, the cabs were lined up, with an airport policeman flagging them forward whenever a prospect stepped up. As he presented himself, a dirty yellow Dodge shot ahead crazily and rocked to a stop on its useless shock absorbers.

The ride into Manhattan hadn’t changed much in ten years. The buildings were a little older and dirtier than he remembered them, and the cars seemed a little better and cleaner. He was thinking about Antonio Talarese.

The young idiot with the gun had been Mario Talarese. There was no question that he was a relative. More than twelve years ago he had met Antonio Talarese in the back of a small gourmet-food store in lower Manhattan. There had been three men waiting when he had arrived. One had been the owner of the place, an eager shopkeeper type who was standing at a cutting board making a tray of salami and cheese and opening a bottle of wine, as though this were a little party. Talarese had said, “Leave us now,” and the man had gone out to the front to wait on his customers.

He had come to the store to talk about a job with Paul Santorini. At that time Santorini was an upwardly mobile manager for Carlo Balacontano, who had been running a Ponzi scheme on the side, taking money first from a greedy New Jersey real estate agent, then from the agent’s friends, telling them he was putting it out on the street at astronomical rates of interest. He had paid the man inflated interest for months, long enough to be sure he would brag to his friends about his profits. Then they were hooked too, a group of doctors and engineers, even a couple of lawyers who obviously hadn’t spent any time defending criminals. Among them they had given the real estate agent about two million dollars to pass on to his underworld friend. Santorini still had about a million and a half of it in hand, and it was time to make the real estate agent disappear.

When that happened, the doctors and engineers and lawyers would remember that none of them had ever actually seen Paul Santorini, and certainly hadn’t handed him any money. About half would be of the opinion that the real estate agent had taken their money to Brazil. The other half would maintain their faith in him, which meant that Paul Santorini had quietly killed him, and could very easily do the same to them. In any case, none of them would go to the police to report that they had been cheated out of their loansharking profits by their Mafioso partner. But Santorini’s clean exit from the venture required that the real estate agent be expertly plucked out of existence, not left butchered somewhere by the likes of Santorini’s best soldier, whom he introduced as “Tony T,” then elongated it to Antonio Talarese. At this point, a boy of about twelve had wandered in to pick up some cardboard cartons and looked surprised to see the men in the back of his father’s store. He had stopped and looked at Tony T; then the store owner had rushed in, grinning and sweating, and jerked the boy out by the shoulder.

The job had been simple enough for the money. The realtor was in the habit of going out alone early on Sunday mornings to put up OPEN HOUSE signs at the places he was selling. It hadn’t taken much imagination to search the New Jersey newspapers for his listings and be at one of them before he arrived. It was winter, so it was still dark when he had come upon the man taking the signs out of the trunk of his car. He shot him and pushed him into the trunk, then pulled the keys out of the lock and drove him to a woods a few miles away, where he buried him. That was the part that he remembered best. He could still see and smell the thick layer of wet, leathery maple leaves on the ground. He’d had to push at least four inches of them aside before his shovel could break ground, and then he kept hitting tree roots. They were thin, like fingers, but so tough and rubbery that he’d had to push them aside and dig around them; then, when the hole was barely three feet deep, he backed into one of them and it had startled him. At that point he decided to dump the body in and cover it. When he’d finished pushing the leaves back over the dirt, it would have been difficult even for him to find the grave. Then he had left the car in the long-term lot at the Newark airport and taken a cab from the terminal like a passenger.