The Informant (7 page)

The boy said, "I'm not ready to say yet. I want to think about him and watch some more."

"Good start. That's what the cat would do."

The boy watched the cat get up at twilight and start to walk out the back door of the butcher shop. The boy reached for him to scoop him up so he could be watched, but the cat wriggled, turned its head slightly, and placed all four fangs on the boy's wrist, not quite breaking the skin, but showing him the possibility. The boy didn't let go, so the cat's claws came out to give him a quick, shallow slash that made the boy drop him.

The cat landed on his feet with a faint thump, and his body flowed around the door and into the evening.

The boy didn't know Eddie had been watching. "They're faster than we are because their nervous system is quicker. If you beat a cat to something, he's letting you win."

"Why would he do that?"

"He does it for his own reasons, and he doesn't talk. Go ahead. I'll clean up."

It was not a small favor. Every night each surface of the shop had to be cleaned and washed, and all the metal polished before they locked the door. The boy went down and out into the weedy empty lot behind the shop, sat down on a cinder block, and waited, trying to catch sight of the cat.

It took him minutes of patient staring at denser spots in the general darkness, but then a car went by and the light of its headlights reflected off the cat's amber eyes. The boy stayed where he was, watching for three hours while the cat waited in ambush for small creatures of the night, or took up a new position and then melted into nothing more than a concentration of the darkness, something that might be a rock or a clump of grass or a piece of wood—but not a cat. And then, when the cat knew that the prey was too close to escape, it moved like electricity or a thought, and grasped the animal. The cat would hold the prey with its foreclaws and kick with the rear claws to gut it. As the boy got used to watching the cat, he began to learn the things that Eddie wanted him to see, the secrets. A cat could shape himself into a hundred motionless not-cat silhouettes. And the cat could shape time. He would wait as long as the prey thought a cat might wait, and then longer. Then he could move so quickly that the only view the boy had was a memory, an impression of something that had already happened.

When he was finally ready to tell Eddie what he had observed, Eddie said, "Remember that you and the cat are in the same business, and he's the grand champion. He was born into it, kind of like you. People say cats are cruel because they'll play with a mouse, pretend to let him go, and then catch him again. It's not cruelty. He's practicing, trying to get better at being what he is. If you could move through the dark like a cat does, you'd live forever."

Eddie had practically lived forever, long enough to die of his other job. Eating all those precious cuts of meat, marbled with fat and cooked over a flame, had ultimately given him a heart attack. When he finally died, Eddie's funeral was arranged by the same local undertakers who had arranged his parents' funeral, but there was a different feeling to it.

All of the women who had received special attention from Eddie, the wives who had him deliver special cuts of meat to their back doors while their husbands were away at work, showed up.
So did a couple of divorcées and a widow Eddie would let come into the back of the shop to pick out their own delicacies. It was as though Eddie's secret girlfriends had agreed that if they all showed up, no gossip could possibly single out any one of them for disapproval. The boy considered their silent agreement the last noble gesture of his childhood, and was careful to be very polite and respectful to each of the ladies during the funeral and the endless reception held at Eddie's house afterward. When everyone had gone home, he went to the butcher shop and did some defrosting.

Eddie had told him at least five years earlier that when he died, the boy should thaw the big blocks of ice at the back of the freezer. The boy took the blocks to the back of the shop, and used hot water, sunshine, and a blowtorch. Inside the ice, carefully wrapped, the boy found several sealed plastic boxes. Each was labeled
GIBLETS AND GIZZARDS FOR CAT.
In them were stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

The next day the boy gave all the meat in the shop to neighborhood families, gave the shop and its equipment one last cleaning as Eddie had taught him, and put the house and the shop up for sale. He gave the cat to the lady florist two doors down from the shop who always bought cat treats for his daily visits to her store.

In the darkness, inside of a strange house all these years later, he used what he had learned about the night. He had been immobile long enough for his eyes to get used to the dark, and he'd heard no sounds of people. He began to move. He kept the surface of the wall three inches from his right shoulder and never stepped on the hardwood floor except at the edges, avoiding the center where loose boards might creak. His stronger arm and leg were near the wall, where an opponent couldn't neutralize them easily, and he could use them to push off. His knees were bent slightly so he could jump, duck, or dive quickly.

His breathing was even and deep, and his movements were patient. He simply stayed in one place long enough to feel and hear the void before him and then move forward to fill it. Many years earlier, when he was just learning to move in the night, he would stop in a hallway, listen for the sounds of the house, and count to a hundred or two hundred before he moved again. He did these things without having to calculate now. He was living in these seconds, but also sending his mind on ahead, searching for Frank Tosca.

He had to get a feel for the rooms. The living room was sure to be at the front of the house, and a house this size would probably have a foyer at the entrance. The kitchen and pantry would be at the back of the house and have their own entry. Coming forward from the kitchen there would be a formal dining room, so people could enter it from the living room and be served from the kitchen. In a one-story house the bedrooms would be toward the back, probably off a single corridor. That corridor would be the most dangerous part of the house tonight.

He moved in the direction where he predicted the corridor would be and verified that he had found it. The hallway was a single, straight one with three doors on each side. He stopped beside the first door.

He was eager to find Frank Tosca. He had met him a few times when they were both in their twenties. Tosca had been arrogant and sullen, with a habitual expression that hinted he was contemplating violence. But he had managed to endear himself to senior people in the Balacontano family. Tosca had been a particular favorite of Vincent, Carlo's younger brother, who had a reputation for throwing money around, partying, and drinking too much. Tosca was broad shouldered and thick necked, and Vincent liked to go to clubs with two men who looked like that as his bodyguards. It gave Tosca a chance to watch the old capos when they were still near their prime, and his proximity made some of their legitimacy rub off on him. In retrospect, it probably shouldn't have been surprising that he had risen so high in his early forties, but it also wouldn't have been surprising if he had been killed.

Schaeffer stuck his head in the first doorway and saw an empty bed. It was flat, still made. He studied the room in the moonlight from the window and saw that it had nothing out of place, and that there was nothing in it that seemed to belong to anyone in particular. The dresser held a white antimacassar and an empty tray for jewelry or pocket change, but there was nothing in it. The bathroom counter by the sink was bare. He moved to the room across the hall, and found it empty too. These were guest rooms, each with its own bath, a dresser, a chair, and no sign that anyone had stayed there recently. He checked a third room and then moved toward the fourth. He needed to be sure he wasn't leaving anyone behind him as he advanced.

The fourth room was a child's bedroom, a boy's room with an aquarium, an electric guitar on the wall, some posters, and a clothes hamper full of dirty clothes. He could smell musky sweat from ten feet away. This was a terrible discovery. He knew now that Frank Tosca had heard what had happened to Delamina and drawn the right conclusion. He had known that he had no adequate defense against a man like the one who was coming for him, so he had taken his family and left.

The room across the hall belonged to a girl. It seemed the girl was a bit older than the boy because she had abandoned any pretense of order, as though she used the room primarily as a closet. Some of the clothes that were thrown on the floor had the tags still on them, and they seemed to be women's sizes. There were dozens of photographs and clippings on the wall, but it was too dark to make out any images.

The last of the six rooms was a baby's, with a crib and mobiles hanging above it with little winged angels. Along one wall were a changing table with a foot-high cross mounted above it, a dresser, and a set of shelves that held diapers, little outfits, and supplies. Three children's rooms, but so far no master suite.

At the end of the hall, what he found was not a wall, but a door. He was almost certain that what he wanted was behind it. But if Tosca was smart enough to know that he was coming, then he was smart enough to make better use of the information than by just leaving. It was possible that what Tosca had done was set up a booby trap. It might be something as simple as a spring gun or as complicated as an ambush. The most likely place for either was behind that door.

He stood where he was and listened for a minute, then for another. He heard nothing, so he turned around and began to move along the corridor the way he had come. He passed the six bedrooms, reached the end of the hall where there was a turn, and stepped around it into the living room.

He passed into the dining room, looked through the window, and saw that he had misinterpreted something he'd seen. When he had seen the side of a building through the window in the boy's bedroom, he had thought he was looking at the neighbors' house. But it wasn't another building. It was part of this one, a wing he hadn't searched. It ran along the left side of the house and created an enclosed courtyard about fifteen feet wide and fifty feet long, so the family bedrooms looked out on a quiet, private space. The other wing was little more than a walkway, with no doors in it. There was only one curved portal that led through the wing to the other side so a gardener could slip into the enclosure, rake the leaves, and depart without ever entering the house. Tosca's suite windows could only be seen from within the courtyard, and there was no door or window across from his suite. It would be impossible to fire a round into the suite from the other wing.

Schaeffer went back to the boy's room, closed the door, put his magnet on the sill to keep the alarm from tripping, opened the sash, and climbed out. He remained still in the courtyard for a long time, listening and leaning his back against the outside of the house to feel any vibration from movement inside. Then he moved ahead past the girl's room and the baby's room, and reached a pair of French doors. He leaned close and peered in, then withdrew his head without moving his feet.

There were three men in the room, and all he had was a lock-blade knife and a two-foot crowbar. He played with the crowbar for a few seconds, swinging it, twirling it, and letting it slide through his hand and stop so he could feel the weight and balance. It was thick and heavy, with a crook at one end to gain leverage for prying. But the crook gave that end a bit of extra weight, so he held the other end to swing it.

He reached for the handle of the French doors, pushed, but found it locked. He withdrew his hand and peered inside. One man was asleep on the bed with his shoes off, one curled up on the small couch across the room, and one upright in a chair nodding off. Schaeffer could see a shotgun lying on the coffee table in front of him.

They were obviously prepared for the one thing that they thought might happen—that a man would come into the house, walk down the hallway, and enter the suite through the door. Only one man had to be awake to hear him walk down the hallway and try to enter the suite. The one on duty would yell and open fire, and the other two would jump to their feet and add unnecessary shots.

He would make things go a bit differently. He would appear to be in two places simultaneously. He picked up a couple of smooth Chinese river stones from the garden, climbed back through the window in the son's room, closed it, and took his magnet, then went to the baby's room. He placed the magnet, leaned out into the courtyard, and threw his first rock at the French doors, and the other right away at the opening in the courtyard, bouncing the stone so it sounded like someone running away.

The French doors swung open and the man with the shotgun ran along the courtyard to the arched portal, trying to get a shot at the intruder. Schaeffer stationed himself just inside the doorway of the baby's room and listened for sounds from the hallway. In a moment, the door of the master suite swung open and the two men who had been asleep ran up the hallway, trying to get around to the front of the house to head off the imaginary man their companion was chasing.

Schaeffer waited for the first man to pass his doorway, then stepped into the hall, already swinging his crowbar. His swing caught the second man just above his brow and knocked him backward onto the floor, unconscious. Schaeffer ducked back into the cover of the baby's room and used his crowbar to drag the man's pistol along the floor into his waiting hand.

The fallen man's companion was already near the end of the hall, but he had heard the sound of the crowbar blow and his companion's collapse to the floor. He fired twice, pointlessly, at the baby's room doorway.

Inside the baby's room, Schaeffer slipped out the window into the courtyard, aimed the gun in through the open window at the doorway, and removed his magnet from the sill. The alarm began to ring.

The man in the hallway, thinking Schaeffer had opened the window to escape, ran into the room, hoping to catch him in midclimb. Schaeffer fired twice into the surprised man's chest and watched him fall. Schaeffer climbed back in, closed the baby's room window, and hurried down the hallway to the master suite. He waited just inside the French doors that led to the courtyard.