Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

But Mack also had Bert Baldwin. “See the guy with her?” asked Mack. “He’s somebody we want.” When he had said it, he felt a wave wash over him; it was as though he could feel a huge infusion of heat pump into his blood. What if he were wrong? He had seen him only once, by chance, and he had been a kid then.

“What do you mean, you want him?” asked B. Baldwin. “Does he owe you money?”

Mack gritted his teeth in fierce urgency. “He’s a psycho, so we have to be careful. And I think he had two guys with him in the Rolls.”

B. Baldwin squinted at him. After a moment he was satisfied that he understood, and thought he might be able to wrest something significant out of this. After all, he had been the one who had pointed the victim out, or at least seen the bird, and that was the same thing, wasn’t it? “Well, good luck to you. I’ve got a lot to do before the first race if I’m going to pay you after the last one.”

Mack clutched his arm. “This is bigger than that. It’s bigger than a hundred damned races. If we get him I’ll pay the Carpaccios myself.” When he saw Baldwin’s sawtoothed smile, the wave washed over him again. He remembered that he had no idea how much Baldwin actually owed the Carpaccio brothers. The two Sicilians kept everything in their heads and told him how much he and Lucchi were supposed to collect from each of their fish. They didn’t even let him carry it. Lucchi was supposed to deliver it, and they talked to him in rapid, low-voiced Italian that only a native-born Sicilian could understand. He still didn’t know if he was in charge and Lucchi was his bagman, or if Lucchi was in charge and he was sent along only because Lucchi’s English was so bad. But it didn’t matter now because he was going to make his bones on the Butcher’s Boy.

Baldwin winked and nodded to a man in the crowd Mack recognized as a pickpocket. The man sauntered over to the booth, and while Baldwin handed him his stack of betting slips, Mario turned to Lucchi and searched his memory for the Italian words. “It’s a question of honor. This man has acted like an animal.” In fact, Mario had only a vague idea of what the Butcher’s Boy had done, except that he had somehow managed to kill a large number of men and at the same time get Carlo Balacontano convicted of one of the murders, and Bala was still serving a life sentence for it and sending embarrassingly inflammatory reminders through channels to the outside, Mario watched Lucchi’s face as he exhausted his vocabulary. “He violated hospitality, threw loyalty out the window and made my uncle ashamed.”

Lucchi’s eyes flickered in a faint reaction. Mack hoped that something in his stammered litany had meant something. “Si,” said Lucchi quietly. The Carpaccio brothers had not brought Lucchi to England to save him from the endemic poverty of Sicily, but from a sudden manhunt launched by the national police in Rome. When he had killed the banker Giovanni Parla in his bathtub it had been to expunge an insult Parla’s grandfather had committed against Lucchi’s grandmother before Lucchi’s father was born. And since Lucchi’s father had died attaching an oversensitive pipe bomb to a Parla’s automobile, Lucchi had not felt he could honorably stop there. After he had left Parla bleeding to death in the bathroom, he had gone to the other rooms of the house and killed the wife and two children. Now he said in English, “How do you want it done?”

Meg pulled Schaeffer into the stands and sat him down in the center near the bottom. “Okay, Michael. Let’s appraise these horses. My system is to ascertain which are the tallest, and then place large wagers that they’ll win.”

Schaeffer stared out at the broad green lawn. There were a few horses being exercised on the track, which was little more than a white railing cordoning off a portion of the expanse of grass that stretched from the road to the hills where buildings began. It wasn’t like American tracks, which were almost like freeways for horses, bordered by huge concrete structures for crowds of bettors, electronic tally boards and the subterranean bunkers where money was pushed through windows and machines pumped out tickets. He liked it. Things in England always seemed to him faintly amateurish. “I wonder what’s keeping the others.”

“Jimmy’s always been like that about parking. He cares about machinery. Have I ever told you that’s something I like about you? You don’t care at all about machines.”

“Are you sure you haven’t offended Peter?”

“Positive.” She turned to him and gave him her most enigmatic smile. It looked so open and guileless that he knew it was a practiced artifice. “When we were young, he talked me into taking off my clothes—one garment at a time, of course. He took Polaroid pictures of me. I could see that I was beautiful from the first ones, and I got rather caught up in the whole thing, mainly from the pleasant surprise and narcissistic curiosity. So I kept unbuttoning things further, and letting the cloth slip lower to reveal a little more. When there was nothing left to take off, I found I wanted to see myself from angles I hadn’t seen. Peter still has the pictures, I’m sure. I was just reminding him that I remember too.”

“Why do you tell these stories?” Schaeffer asked.

“Because it should have happened,” she answered. “Or something should have. Something shameful and scandalous. In fact, we were a sad, gangling lot with running noses who were lonely and bored and cold most of the time, but were afraid to speak to each other. It would have been nice if something had happened, and if I tell it that way it will make it seem true. Who does it hurt?”

“No one. I’m going to find them.”

“What on earth for?”

“So when we want to go home they’ll allow us in the car.”

He stepped carefully down the wooden bleachers, then made his way through the people on the ground. As he had since he was young, he avoided looking straight into their eyes when he moved past them, always looking at the place where he would be after a few steps. In the street he turned in the direction Jimmy had taken when he had let them out of the Bentley. A small feeling of discomfort lodged in his throat as he scanned the straggling trail of men and women strolling toward the track. In the years since he had gotten off the airplane at Heathrow carrying a passport in the name of “Charles F. Ackerman,” he had come to depend on an orderly sequence of events that could have passed for a sense of decorum and conformity. He had an instinctive dislike of walking toward a large herd of people, presenting his face for each of them to notice and wonder about.

When at last he saw the Bentley, it was parked at the curb under an ancient walnut tree. Already, the black skins of nuts had specked the mirror finish, and a couple of leaves were plastered on the windshield. Jimmy Pinchasen was an idiot. If the car was so important to him, he should at least have parked it in the open. He walked to the car, stopped and looked around him. If they had come this far, why hadn’t he passed them on the way? He squinted to see through the smoked glass, and froze.

He could dimly see Pinchasen and Filching inside the car. Pinchasen was lying on his side in the front seat, as though he had simply toppled over. Filching was lying facedown in the back seat, and his pant legs had ridden up to his calves. Someone had dragged him by the ankles to his present position. From the quantities of blood that had seeped into pools on the leather seats and the floor, he judged that their throats had been cut.

He straightened, looked to the right up the street and to the left down the street to see that no cars were coming, then started across. The steady stream of people kept coming, a little fester because the races were about to begin, and now he looked at them differently, staring into their eyes, searching for a sign of recognition. All his old habits came back automatically. At a glance he assessed their posture and hands. Was there a man whose fingers curled in a little tremor when their eyes met, a woman whose hand moved to rest inside her handbag? He knew all the practical moves and involuntary gestures, and he scanned everyone, granting no exemptions.