Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

“See you there,” he said, and walked back to his car. This was going to change everything.

In an hour Wolf was watching her walk through the doorway of the Justice Department. He pulled away from the curb and drove down Constitution Avenue toward the Federal Triangle. This morning he was on his way to look for tourists. There was no use kidding himself: every day that he spent in the United States was making it more dangerous for him. He would have to see if he could find a British citizen and separate him from the herd. If he got the right one and hid the body well enough, it might be weeks before his relatives made enough noise to get the authorities to do anything about putting him on a list, and by then Michael Schaeffer would be sitting at home again.

He felt a strange reluctance to get out this way, and he weighed and examined the feeling. If he’d had to explain it to somebody he would have had to say that he wasn’t in the mood to do the work. He felt tired. Eddie had always said that if it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t. It had been Eddie’s theory that some little part of the subconscious mind had caught a danger signal—maybe seen something, or figured out a flaw, or even smelled something it didn’t like—but hadn’t yet been able to formulate it into a package the conscious mind would accept. Eddie always said that ninety percent of the brain was never used. Actually, in his case it had probably been more. He had once had himself hypnotized by a dentist because he couldn’t remember any of the words to “Annie Had a Baby” except “… his name was sunny Jim. She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.”

But Wolf wasn’t nervous. He was just tired. He had spent most of the last ten years hoping that he would never have to do this kind of thing again, but here he was, up to his armpits in blood and not even working, just hunting for some harmless stranger so that he could live long enough to get home. He drove into the city with the rest of the world and looked for a place to park that Vico hadn’t bought simply for the chance to have his people slip a slim-jim into the door and pop the locks.

Paul Martillo was in a lousy mood because people treated him like dirt. He wasn’t some chump; he was a registered lobbyist. He wore tailored suits and fine silk ties, and talked to congressmen and even cabinet officers on business involving the limits of civil rights and the responsible exercise of free speech by the electronic media. He represented a confederation of reputable organizations, notably the Italian-American Anti-Libel League, Citizens for Fair Reporting, and the Dorothea Gorro Scholarship Foundation, named after a dead olive-oil heiress but subscribed to by many fine people who were still alive.

Martillo had just left the office of a congressman from New Jersey named Ameroy. He had been told by the congressman’s secretary that he should wait in the outer office and that Ameroy would see him as soon as he got off the phone. Ameroy had kept him waiting two hours, and then, as soon as he had gotten into the private office, the man had started to look at his watch. In fact, before he even shook hands with him, Ameroy was looking at his watch. Martillo hadn’t invented the system. It wasn’t his fault that it cost four or five million dollars to run for Congress. The ambitious jerks had dug their own hole, each time they ran for office putting a little more into the campaign, getting themselves on television a little more often. All that Martillo did was go among them and try to make friends. Then he would make a list of the friends and turn the list over to the groups he represented. When it was time for congressmen to run for reelection, the friends were not forgotten.

This making of friends was not a clandestine activity. It was a growing profession engaged in by about twenty thousand people. There was no corporation of any size, no charity, no union, no city that didn’t have somebody like Paul Martillo on the Hill; so where did a two-bit hack politician who ran for office because he couldn’t make it as a lawyer get off treating him like he was still a bag man making his way around Detroit for Toscanzio? The answer was that somebody had told Ameroy what Martillo was going around talking about this week.

Martillo hadn’t liked bringing it up any more than the congressman had liked hearing it, but he had to say it, and Ameroy damned well had to listen to it, because they were both taking their money from the same place. Ameroy didn’t want to have anybody say anything specific in his presence, so Martillo had to play the stupid kid’s game too. He did it because it meant that Ameroy wanted to be able to continue to take the money. Martillo had said that the members of the organizations Martillo represented continued to be pleased that Ameroy was a leader in the fight for equal justice, so of course he would be interested in the strange case of a man imprisoned for murder on the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence just because he was a well-known and prosperous businessman of Italian descent. The man in question continued, in fact, to be a large contributor to the Dorothea Gorro Foundation in spite of the fact that he had been in a federal prison for eight years. This was how his case had come to the attention of the Foundation, which, as the congressman knew, was nominally dedicated to the promotion of parochial education.

What it came down to was that Victor Toscanzio had ordered Martillo to go around and pull some strings. On the face of it this was an odd thing for him to do, but Toscanzio was not a frivolous man, so if he was doing it, Balacontano must have offered him something substantial. The whole lobbying business was something Toscanzio ran for the old men. It wasn’t his to jeopardize on some whim, and he knew it. But he also had a reputation for incredible luck. Only a few old paisans like Martillo knew what kind of luck it was. Toscanzio had the uncanny gift of sensing when a change was going to take place, and getting in before the bell rang. Carl Bala was obviously an active commodity again. Also there were the rumors. From time to time people had said that Carl Bala had gone crazy in prison, and maybe Toscanzio had decided it was going to be important soon to be one of the people who had tried hard to get him out.

Martillo didn’t have any objection to letting his fate ride on Toscanzio’s bet, whatever it was. He had done pretty well so far. Now he was in his black Lincoln Town Car on his way to have a lunch briefing from a senator from Florida. This was the kind of holdup that was getting to be increasingly popular, and he resented it. The bastards would send out invitations to go to lunch at a thousand dollars a plate, and there would be maybe forty or fifty lobbyists paying to sit there and listen to the windbag talk about what his committee was doing to help the ivory-billed woodpecker. It was an attempt to extort money, and it worked up to a point. Most of the lobbyists had some interest they had to protect from the sudden indifference of an incumbent senator. Martillo almost felt sorry for them. His organizations didn’t have a bunch of jobs to protect, or even any real members, only about twenty anonymous donors, so today’s lunch was going to be a little different for the senator. If he didn’t find a way to spend a few minutes alone with Martillo, he was going to watch two million bucks walk out of his campaign fund and into the challenger’s.

Martillo looked out the window of the car as his driver pulled away from the Sam Rayburn Office Building. As usual, the first twenty tourists in line for the tour were Japs. The movement of capital in the world was still a miracle to Martillo, although he had studied it for twenty years the way a bear studies bee swarms. Everything seemed to be the same as it always had been; it was just that there was all this floating money. It was qualitatively different from regular money, which stayed pretty much where you put it. This was like gambling money because it didn’t seem to really belong to anybody. It moved in and out of the markets and financial centers of the world in huge quantities every day. But without warning the floating money had transferred itself out of the country and into the markets of foreigners, primarily towel-heads, Japs and Krauts. At the moment the Japanese were the big spenders, but what they were spending wasn’t the floating money. It was a kind of by-product of having so much of the floating money trapped in one place for a time. It was like the wetness that formed on the outside of an icy glass on a hot day.