Thomas Perry: Sleeping Dogs

He and Eddie had done a job like this one when he was no more than twelve. Eddie had dressed him for baseball, and had even bought him a new glove to carry folded under his arm. When they had come upon the man in the crowd, he hadn’t even seen them; his eyes were too occupied in studying the crowd for danger to waste a moment on a little kid and his father walking home from a sandlot game. As they passed the man, Eddie had touched the boy’s arm, and he had opened the webbing of the glove so that Eddie could pluck out the pistol with the silencer attached to it. Eddie then turned and put a round behind the man’s ear. He remembered the man taking another step and then toppling forward to the sidewalk. As Eddie hustled him away, he had heard people saying something about heart attacks and strokes. Bystanders had made way for them, apparently feeling sorry that Eddie’s little boy had seen some stranger at the moment when a vessel in his brain exploded.

Schaeffer felt his pulse beginning to settle down now. In the first glance into the parked car, he had known it all as though he had seen it happen. His mind hadn’t raced through a series of steps, or shuffled through the possible implications of the sight to his own survival. In an instant he had been jerked back ten years to the old life: somebody had spotted him. They never forgot, and they never stopped looking.

Mack Talarese leaned his back against the side of the curio shop and tried to catch his breath. He looked at Lucchi with horrified awe. The little waiter had turned out to be something else, and Mario was not entirely comforted by what he had seen. Mario and Baldwin had come up on the driver and the bodyguard from the front of the car as the driver eased the big Rolls into the curb. Mario had formulated a notion of taking the two of them somewhere and shooting them. But then Lucchi came up on the right side of the car behind the driver, and his right hand appeared from behind his thigh, and there was a gravity knife already open, and the hand went inside the open window, and when Lucchi drew it back it was bloody. Then Lucchi had the back door open and was inside the car doing the other one. The man had managed to clamber into the back seat and unlatch the door, but Lucchi was already on him. He was already dead when Lucchi grasped his ankles and hauled him back inside.

Then the little Sicilian walked casually ahead of Mario and Baldwin back toward the racetrack. But Talarese had caught the look on Lucchi’s face as their eyes met. When Mario was a child on Long Island, his dog had caught the scent of a rabbit in the field and run off after it, interpreting Mario’s calls as some kind of exhortation to greater speed. Then the dog had brought the broken, limp thing back with him in his mouth, his eyes looking proud and hopeful, returning for the approval he knew he had earned. Lucchi’s eyes had looked like that.

Baldwin leaned close to Mario as they followed Lucchi. “Ferocious little bastard, isn’t he?” Talarese nodded. Lucchi was dangerous. He was something Mario had never anticipated, a throwback, a Sicilian like the ones who had gotten off the boat at Ellis Island before the First World War, lean, cunning, ambitious and utterly without compunction or reluctance.

Mario decided to let the implications of his discovery wait until the day was over. He was operating on his own already. The Carpaccio brothers would have no idea who the man was. When it was over Mario would be the only one in a position to take advantage of the accomplishment, and he would be transported to the United States and raised to the heights appropriate to young men who had initiative and decisiveness. Lucchi would be a fond memory.

“Come on,” Mario said. “Now that he can’t leave, he’s ours.” He walked out from the side of the shop onto the street, and he could hear the others’ footsteps following. He didn’t look back. He concentrated only on moving through the crowds of people toward the racecourse, where the Butcher’s Boy—Jesus, that was the best part; he must be forty by now—would be sitting in the grandstand with his girlfriend, never suspecting that the forces he had set in motion years ago had already stripped him of his soldiers and cut off his only means of escape. It was like that Shakespeare play they made everybody read in tenth grade. The bastard felt like a king, sitting there in the sunshine with a woman who wore the kind of jewelry a queen might have. Well, today was the day that Birnam Wood was coming to Dunsinane. The trees were closing in on the bastard. Mario smiled, and felt an impulse to say something about it to the others, but of course it would have been pointless. Baldwin was English but probably hadn’t made it to the tenth grade, and Lucchi wouldn’t even know who Shakespeare was.

Margaret Holroyd was fighting disappointment. She looked out across the field to where the beautiful horses were being steadied and reassured by jockeys and trainers. They were festooned with silks in gorgeous, gaudy colors, and the jockeys wore oddly clashing combinations, probably cut from the same ten bolts. They were so far away that she could see very little except the tiny spots of emerald, pink, crimson and gold. What in the world was she going to do without Michael? He had been gone for only ten minutes, and already she missed him and was feeling angry with him. She couldn’t go on playing with him much longer. Soon she would begin to get little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes like Aunt Caroline, and then she would have to be responsible and act as though she’d never had a time like this in her life.

There already was no doubt that she could change, and this was a sign too. Not so long ago, she wouldn’t have believed she could; people would have recognized the hypocrisy immediately and laughed about it. But now she was perfectly competent to carry it off. What a shame. If she had been at home now, she decided, she would have spent the afternoon in the big leather chair by the library window, wallowing in poetry, probably Ubi sunt poems: “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” And she would have let the bright afternoon sun deepen to amber, then darker and darker shades of blue, as the light slowly dimmed the page and finally left her in darkness, a little rehearsal for getting old and dying. No, she wouldn’t, she admitted; it was a lie. She stood up and stepped quickly and recklessly down the steps to the grass. It felt good on her open toes, a little damp and tickly, and there was Michael already.

He was striding quickly toward her, as though he wanted to head her off and say something before she wandered away to the loo or the betting booths. Well, fine, she thought. She was perfectly willing to be distracted from whatever she would have found to pass the time. When he reached her, he didn’t stop walking, just took her arm and swept her along. She kept up with him, conducted smoothly by a gentle pressure that changed directions subtly, telling her where to go. “I was getting bored,” she said.

His face was empty, and he was looking ahead as they walked. “Don’t talk, just listen. We’ve got to get out of here right now. Some people are here to kill us.” He looked at her for a second. It sounded impersonal, as though he had overheard a weather report.

“What is it?” she whispered. “The IRA?”

Schaeffer didn’t understand the question at first. Even after all the years in England, the whole endless, bitter struggle had remained as remote to him as the wars in Lebanon or Mozambique or El Salvador. People had talked at dinners about The Irish Question and he had only been puzzled by what they thought the question was. “No,” he said after a moment. She certainly would know more about it than he did. “It’s my problem, but I’m sure they’ve seen you.”