The Informant

13

IT WAS GETTING to be morning, and Elizabeth was still staring at the computer screens in the basement of the Robert F. Kennedy Building. It was impossible not to wonder whether she had made a mistake. Maybe she should have told the Butcher's Boy everything she knew. It would only have amounted to "They seem to be heading for the Southwest, probably near Phoenix." She hadn't said that because he knew things that she couldn't even guess. If she had said "Phoenix," he might know of some Mafioso she'd never paid much attention to, who owned a house, some piece of land, some remote ranch outside Phoenix.

She knew that what she should have done was set a trap for him. She should have said, "We know the city is Durango, Colorado," and then told the FBI he was on his way and to detain any man who fit his description. If she got them to detain all the possibles, she might have to look at a hundred photographs tomorrow, but one of them would be his.

Instead she had been stupid and slow, and made a self-righteous speech about not helping him kill people. That had accomplished nothing except to remind him that she was a law enforcement officer and he was a criminal, and that nothing could ever make her his ally. She had been unforgivably stupid. He had given her some valuable information, and in return she had shown him there was no reason for him to give her any more.

He was potentially the best witness against organized crime in forty years, and she had thrown him away in an attack of bitchiness. A witness like that had to be cajoled into believing that the officer handling him felt at least some mild favoritism toward him, some conviction that she believed he was better than the people he was telling her about. He had already told her that the agenda of the meeting included Frank Tosca asking the assembled leaders of the twenty-six families to kill the Butcher's Boy. He had very strong reasons to believe that a minor tip from her might enable him to prevent that and give him a chance to save his life. And what had she said? I'm not helping you.

She felt a wave of resentment toward Hunsecker. If only he'd had a mind equal to the complexity of situations in the real world, she wouldn't be completely on her own, sneaking around like a spy in the building where she had worked for twenty years. His rigid absolutism had transformed a lucky turn of events into nothing. It was worse than nothing, really. Tosca would get the Butcher's Boy killed, exactly as he wanted. The more families involved in the hunt the better. They would be cooperating on a project that he had initiated and directed. He would not only get to be head of the Balacontano family, but a national figure, a symbol of new unity. And he was a vicious thug, a man who could make the Mafia into a terrifying force of a sort it had never been in the old days.

She couldn't help feeling sorry for the Butcher's Boy. He was as alone as a human being could be, put in the position of attacking an international enemy a hundred and fifty years old, that had unlimited people and resources. He could never hope to accomplish anything but to get away and live the rest of his life in some form of hiding. And he had been retired. He hadn't worked—killed anyone for money—in about twenty years. It was hard not to make comparisons, hard not to hope that if any criminal got through this, he did.