The Informant (31 page)

"Not that one. It's the Bella Napoli. Somebody in the Castiglione family owns it. Today they're probably using it as a command post for twenty or thirty soldiers. Keep walking, but not too fast. We're a nice, middle-aged couple going somewhere. We heard some noise a few minutes ago, probably, but we don't think it can be any big deal. We think it's a construction crew."

"At night?"

"A road crew, then. The point is, we're not the sort of people who believe we need to run from anything."

"Innocent as babes."

"This isn't funny. The family is stirred up. They aren't going to give up on us."

"Us?"

"They need more revenge than they can get with one person."

"How about that massage place?" It was a white storefront, with four Asian women in white shorts and T-shirts looking out the front window through gauzy curtains to see what the commotion was. "Who owns that?"

"Can't risk it. This close to Vince's place, they might be hookers, and that takes protection." He saw something up the street ahead of them that didn't make him happy. He took her hand and walked with her in a diagonal across the street, around a corner, and then took another diagonal onto State Street, and then up the front steps of an enormous church.

"You think a church is any safer than a restaurant?"

"It's the Holy Name Cathedral. I'm hoping there won't be anybody in there who will rat us out for a tip." He reached up to tug one of the big bronze doors and it opened automatically, powered by a hidden hydraulic system. "That gives me the creeps."

"I guess you're probably not one of their regulars." They slipped inside and the huge bronze door swung shut. The sanctuary was big and ornate, but there seemed to be nobody in it at the moment.

They moved quickly toward the altar past a screen that seemed to repeat the leaf pattern of the bronze doors, staying on the right aisle, trotting past what seemed like a hundred rows of wooden pews. They reached a row of confessional booths. When they heard the big front door opening again, Elizabeth reached for the door of one of the confessionals, but the Butcher's Boy held her arm and shook his head. He held her hand and pulled her with him to the big gallery pipe organ set on the right side of the sanctuary in its own alcove. He dragged her into the alcove where they were shielded from view by clustered marble pillars. There was a seat for the organist and four keyboards, but he went to look at the wood paneling beside the row of gold organ pipes above the keyboards. She whispered, "We could hide in the chapel. It's right up there, past the altar on the right."

He whispered, "They'll search it." He took a small pick the size of a toothpick and an equally small tension wrench out of his wallet. He was staring at a keyhole she hadn't noticed, barely visible at one side of the wooden façade of the organ. He probed the lock and picked it in a few seconds. He opened the door, pulled down a small set of folding steps, and pushed her in front of him. She climbed in, and he followed, then pulled up the steps and closed the door.

They were inside the organ. They took a few steps along a narrow walkway and stopped. Directly in front of them was the row of tall gilded organ pipes and behind them, a mesh screen. The windowless space was open far above to the ceiling of the cathedral, so there was dim light. All the way to the top there were platforms and railings and steps that connected the different levels, all of them in a light-colored hardwood. On each level she could see hundreds of organ pipes arranged in rows graded by length and diameter from the size of a ballpoint pen to the size of her waist, and mounted in wooden enclosures. Most of them were gleaming metal tubes, but others were wooden quadrangles. She and the Butcher's Boy stood side by side behind the row of façade pipes, looking out the narrow spaces between the pipes and through the fabric mesh and listening. She put her right hand on the gun in her pocket and held it there.

There were three of them. She heard them before she saw them. They wore leather-soled shoes, and they were walking along the pews toward the altar. One was on each side, brushing the walls occasionally as they moved ahead. The third came up the center aisle, where there was a long runner that muffled his footsteps. Now and then each of them would stop, bend low, and sight under a section of pews in case someone was hiding under the wooden seats. She wondered if the older one in the center could be Vincent Pugliese. Probably he wasn't. Underbosses of major families didn't do this kind of work.

The men stage-whispered as they reached the front. "I guess he didn't come in here."

"Somebody did. I saw the front door shut from the street."

"Did he have a black suit with a funny white collar?"

"It wasn't a priest. There was a woman with him."

"That's refreshing."

"You think that's funny?"

"Somebody's here, but there's nobody in the pews. Now what?"

"Take a look up there around the altar and pulpit." There was the sound of hard soles on the broad marble steps, and now Elizabeth could see them more clearly. She shuddered. Each time they eliminated a hiding place, they were more likely to find the unlocked door into the organ.

"Check the confessionals." She heard small doors opening and shutting quickly as the man moved down the line. That was where she would have been if not for him.

There were the sounds of shoes on the floor of the sanctuary again, moving off. The big front door opened and she heard traffic sounds from outside, the whisper of car tires, a distant horn, then silence.

His face was right beside hers. "They're gone."

She was so relieved that she felt like grinning, but controlled it. "I guess they don't spend as much time in churches as you do, or they'd have found us."

He said, "You wanted to talk to me. So here we are. Talk, and then we can each go about our business."

"You're in very big trouble," she said. "It looks as though everybody in the Mafia would like you to die."

"They're doing their best to make it happen."

"I can make sure it doesn't. You'll be given protection. I don't mean a guard coming by to look through a prison window at you once in a while. I mean dedicated people on duty twenty-four hours a day with nothing else to do but make sure you don't mysteriously beat yourself up and hang yourself with a bed sheet."

"Why would I be willing to go to a prison? I've never even been charged with anything."

"It wouldn't need to be a prison. It just has to be safe. Joseph Valachi was on an army base. You could be somewhere like that."

"Valachi was in prison. He was moved to an army base because he got hit with a pipe."

"That was half a century ago. We can do better now."

"So can I."

"After last night there will be nowhere you can hide. As soon as the old men know you went after the Castigliones, they'll drop everything and make sure of it. They'll be scared. Even the ones who wanted Tosca dead will be after you. You're a menace to them."

"So what you're offering is some form of protective custody in exchange for testifying against Mafia guys."

"It's my help for your help. Yes, I hope that there will be some people you can testify against—maybe a Mafioso you personally saw kill somebody. Maybe you killed somebody and he paid you. We can't bring you in to testify against somebody who did something minor. It wouldn't work well in court. But I'm hoping you'll give us tips on whatever you know was going on, and we can follow your leads and get our own evidence about what's happening now. Most likely you and I would spend some months talking every day. Then your job would be to testify in the trials of major criminals. The whole process would probably take a couple of years. You would be protected at whatever level is necessary. And I mean
any
level."

He spoke deliberately. "I'm sure you're sincere about what you're saying," he said. "But you'll have to forgive me if I don't jump at the idea of Justice Department protection."

"I know, you have good reason to believe you're better at this than either the Justice Department or the Mafia. But you have to be able to close your eyes long enough to sleep. And two or three years of invisibility could make a huge difference. Some of the old men could die. Others could ask themselves why they're wasting their time on you and quit. Every day above ground is a good day. I can offer you a thousand days," she said. "Face it. If you want guaranteed survival, you're going to be my informant. Nobody else can protect you."

"You're very open and I can see you're trying to be honest," he said. "But no, thank you."

"But why? Don't you trust me?"

"I don't mean to be insulting. But you work for a huge organization. If I went in with you, within ten minutes nothing would be up to you anymore." He turned toward the doorway. "Those guys are long gone. Let's get out of here before somebody comes to play the organ."

He started to push open the door, but there was another faint hum. Someone was opening the big bronze doors at the back of the church again. "Wait." He closed the door.

Six people entered this time. She could tell because as each entered, the door would begin to shut until the next touched it and it huffed open again. There was a deep male voice that said, "Griggs, Lattimer, take the wings. Foltz, Talavera, Jackson, you take point." After about ten seconds a voice said, "Left side's clear, Agent Meade."

Elizabeth leaned close to him and whispered, "They're FBI."

He whispered back, "This is a great time to be quiet."

"We can let them know we're here, and you'd be safe."

"You wouldn't. I can hardly miss you from here."

"I've got a gun aimed at you too."

"Then we can kill each other, or we can be quiet."

They stood in silence, unmoving, as they listened to the sounds of the six FBI agents searching the sanctuary. "Right side's clear too, Agent Meade, and so are the confessionals."

"All clear in the choir loft."

"The altar is clear."

"The chapel is clear."

"Check the sacristy."

They heard leather-soled shoes trotting up the aisle toward the sacristy.

"See if there are any doors around that organ up there." One of the agents who had been by the altar came down the steps and walked back and forth in front of the organ. Now the Butcher's Boy had his gun in his hand. Through the mesh and between the organ pipes, Elizabeth watched the FBI agent moving around a few feet in front of her, but she kept the gun in the corner of her eye. If it came up to aim, she was going to drag that arm down with all her weight. But the agent didn't seem to notice the keyhole in the wooden panel.

"All right. Let's move on," said Agent Meade. The door at the rear of the church opened once, then again and again, until the church was in silence.

The Butcher's Boy pushed the organ door open, and he lowered the steps to the floor. They both came down into the sanctuary. He replaced the steps, closed the door, and inserted his pick into the keyhole to push a pin tumbler or two out of line to lock the organ door. Elizabeth looked toward the cathedral entrance, then back at him, but he was already walking toward the other side of the sanctuary. "Wait," she said.

He stopped, and when he turned toward her, the gun was already in his hand. She showed him she still had her gun, and left it pointing in his general direction, but didn't aim. "I just wanted to stay together."

"I'm going out through the rectory door. Catch up with the FBI agents on the street and you'll be fine."

"But we're not done talking."

"That's not what I want to talk about," he said. He began to back toward the other side, his gun still held steady. "You've got nothing to offer me."

"In another day or two, protective custody might sound really good."

"Then we'll talk another day." He kept moving slowly backward.

"Give me a phone number," she said.

"I don't have a phone."

"Take mine." She pulled it out and prepared to toss it.

"So you can track me by GPS satellite?"

"Then take my number. 202 555-8990. Can you remember it?"

"202 555-8990."

He turned into the space to the left of the altar and past the sacristy. After a second she heard a standard-size door open and then shut.

Elizabeth put her gun into her purse and stood still, listening. It was only after about a minute that she realized what she had been listening for was gunshots.

HE WAS OUT
on the street alone again. There was a feeling he was getting from Elizabeth Waring that she wasn't exactly telling the truth. She wasn't telling him something that she considered important. She said she was interested in getting him into a guarded room someplace and asking him questions. That wasn't a surprise. But she was alone. When the FBI showed up, she wasn't much happier to see them than he was. She had told him the arrival of FBI agents was an opportunity to save both of them, but it had sounded like a bluff. When he had refused, she had seemed almost relieved.

She must have been making offers she hadn't cleared with any of her bosses. She was just hoping if she got him, they'd be glad enough to back her up. But for the moment, she wasn't telling anybody what she was up to because they would have stopped her. That was the way her pitch felt to him. It wasn't even a very good deal. She hadn't even offered immunity from prosecution. Was he supposed to think that was an oversight? The most peculiar part of her behavior was that she wasn't just hunting with the hounds anymore. She was hiding with the foxes too. That had to be a new experience for her, and it might make her easier to deal with later if he needed to.

He reached into his pocket and took out the little leather wallet he had picked out of her jacket pocket while he'd had his arm around her on the street. On the front was a deeply etched seal with an eagle on it. He opened the wallet and saw it was her Justice Department identification. He put it back into his pocket and kept walking to the parking structure where he'd left his car.

Parking structures were often good places to kill people. He'd used them a number of times, but it was important to check first for surveillance cameras, to be sure they were clear like this one. But he'd been in and out of this one already and it was fairly well lighted, so it was possible he'd been seen by people working for Vince Pugliese. He took a few moments to look for smudged finger marks on the car, unlocked it, and opened the hood to see if there were any signs of tampering. He didn't see any. He knew that if there was a device, there would be an attempt to place it where he wouldn't see it. He looked under the car, then closed the hood, and started the car. Searching for bombs was really only looking for an amateur's clumsy errors. A pro's work was invisible. A bomb could be set off by turning the ignition key, but it could also be done by running a wire from the brake lights or the headlights, or by making a call with a cell phone that sent a current to an initiator, or by a rocker switch that closed a circuit when the car hit a bump. Since the army had been fighting enemies for years in the Middle East who used improvised explosive devices, there were now probably thousands of young guys with fresh discharge papers who knew their way around explosives better than he did.