Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

“This isn’t how it works, you know. I’m supposed to have my lawyers with me, and then we sit down and talk over your offer. If we can cut a reasonable deal, I tell you something. They can’t just send some special agent in here to flash a badge and ask me questions.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I assure you that you won’t be bothered again for the rest of your sentence.”

Bala looked into her eyes, and the thought occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t lying. This was it, the first time in eight years that they had even bothered to come here. It was one thing to bargain hard, but it was another to see the only buyer on earth walking out the door. “Wait a minute. At least let’s talk for a minute.”

“All right.” She sat down on the chair across from the bed.

“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view. You want me to do something that’s risky. I have a right to something in return.”

“Here’s what it amounts to from my point of view,” she said. “At the moment the Justice Department is interested in finding the man who killed Tony Talarese. I believe you are too. The difference is that you’re in jail and I’m not. Oh, and there’s another difference. You know who he is and I don’t.”

“You’re not offering me a pardon or an early release or anything?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m not at the level to make that kind of offer, and nobody would approve it. Those things have happened, but much more seldom than you’d think from the amount of publicity they get. And what nobody mentions is that they always involve special conditions.”

“What kind of special conditions?”

It was time for the lie, and she gave it apologetically so that she could look down and avoid his sharp little eyes. “Look, I don’t know an awful lot about your case.” She knew everything about his case. “But I don’t want to lie to you. As I understand it, you’re not a likely candidate. In addition to being cooperative, the person provides some evidence that what he did was minor, or that there were extenuating circumstances.”

“I was innocent. Is that extenuating enough?”

She ignored his protest. “I just thought that since this man murdered a friend of yours last night, you might at least know who he is.”

Carl Bala considered. If he said nothing, that would be the end of his pardon. If he said something, what would this woman do to him? He could tell the story in a way that wouldn’t incriminate anyone but himself for what had happened in the old days. If he did, what were the police going to do to him? Throw him in jail for longer than life? There was omertà to be considered, but if he didn’t mention anybody else’s name, the cops couldn’t go after them, so how would they know he had talked? Besides, from what he had heard, omertà didn’t mean shit to anybody these days. This was just the same as it had been all his life: a simple question of consequences. If he told her what he knew, maybe she could begin a process that would someday get him out. But even if he was making a mistake, there was nothing she could do to him. The one thing he was sure of was that it was his last chance. “Yeah, you bet I know him,” he shouted. He knew that he had spoken too loud, but it had taken such an effort to break the words free that he had forgotten to modulate his voice.

Elizabeth kept her face slack to hide her surprise. “Who is he?”

“He’s the crazy little bastard who framed me for murder.” Balacontano let go of his mop and let the handle topple to the floor, then sat on the bed. Elizabeth watched the discarded glasses bounce once on the tight blanket; Balacontano noticed them too, and went through the ritual of putting them back on. “You want to close out your file on him. I want to close out my file on him too. But not just yet. First he’s got to give me my life back.

“Ten years ago, I made a mistake. I was an important man, capo di tutti capos. I had a lot on my mind in those days. You probably think it’s like the movies: an old guy with a face like a prune and a shiny suit sits behind a table in a room so dark you can’t hardly see him and sends big zombies out to machine-gun a mom-and-pop grocery store because they didn’t pay their nut that week.”

Looking at Balacontano, Elizabeth decided this was probably accurate. All the old man needed was the suit.

“Well,” said Bala, “it’s not. It’s like any other business. It’s the shifting of capital to where it’s going to do the most good. At the time I came here, at least ninety-five percent of my business was perfectly legal. I had interests in corporations, T-bills, oil leases, franchises, bonds, real estate, stocks. That’s what made the money. Why do you think the people who really own this country put their money in those things? Because they’ve got no balls? Let me tell you, if Citibank or Salomon Brothers thought they could make more money stealing cars, you wouldn’t be able to get a ride from here to the bathroom. Once in a while, when things got rough, I’d cut a corner.”

“Was that your mistake?” asked Elizabeth. She couldn’t believe it. Carlo Balacontano was talking to the Justice Department. “Cutting corners?”

Bala’s left eyebrow formed an arc. “Please, don’t make me think you’re stupid now.”

Elizabeth had allowed herself to get too excited to think clearly. She had to concentrate on what he said and keep him talking. “How did this man fit in? Did he work for you?”

Balacontano thought about it, then shook his head. “Even the people who worked for me weren’t like that—employees with a lunch bucket. But he was something else. He was a specialist. One day, with no warning, I suddenly developed a tax problem, and I want you to know I wasn’t the only one. Some of the biggest corporations in the country developed the same problem on the same day.”

As Bala remembered it, he could still feel the shock and outrage as though he were hearing it for the first time instead of telling it. A United States senator who had been obsessed with the unfairness of the income-tax laws for twenty years had begun to assemble a list of profitable corporations. They were doing nothing illegal, which was why they made such an effective set of public examples. All they were doing was plowing profits back into the business on capital improvements, acquisitions, new markets, new equipment. But in the computer search the senator’s staff had uncovered, along with the corporate giants, a company called FGE. They had left it on the preliminary list because it sounded big. The G and E might have stood for “Gas and Electric.”

But FGE had been a low, dirty beige building beside a shopping mall on the edge of Las Vegas. Half the building consisted of rented post-office boxes, and the rest was devoted to a small office with secondhand furniture and paneling on the walls that looked like wood but wasn’t. In it a man named Arthur Fieldston did business as Fieldston Growth Enterprises. His entire trade consisted of receiving large amounts of cash from the quiet men Carl Bala sent to him and paying it out to accounts that Carl Bala designated, as payment for imaginary investments and services.

The day Carl Bala learned that FGE was about to become famous, he had experienced a shock that felt as though he had taken a sucker punch from a small, weak opponent. He summoned Harry Orloff, the fat, disreputable lawyer who had invented FGE, to his farm in Saratoga, and ordered him to dismantle his invention. Orloff had whined that it would take weeks, and in the meantime Arthur Fieldston, the last remaining member of a well-known western landowning family, would receive a subpoena to testify before the Senate Finance Committee. At that moment, Carlo Balacontano had experienced a fit of something he would later describe to himself as “mad caution.” He had exaggerated the importance of the problem in his own mind. Then he had told Harry Orloff it was worth his life to be sure Fieldston didn’t testify.