The Informant

2

HE CAME ONTO the property over the neighbor's back fence and then crouched for a few minutes beside a brick barbecue, getting his eyes used to the darkness and bringing the house back from his memory. It was a warm, pleasant Monday night in September, and he took his time. He had broken into this same house about ten years ago. That night he'd had a tentative plan to kill her if she woke, but he hadn't needed to cause her or her children harm. He had only needed to steal her dead husband's identification.

When he had listened intently for a few minutes and retrieved the memory of the interior of the house, he moved slowly and steadily, still part of the shadows, to the tall windows along the side of the dining room. He knew there was an alarm system.

The way home alarm systems worked was that a contact in the windowsill had to be touching a magnetic contact in the window frame or the alarm would go off. But these tall windows had two big panes, each in its own frame, one at the bottom and one at the top. The alarm contact was in the bottom frame, so if he could get the window unlatched, he could lower the top half and leave the lower half, with its electrical contact, in place.

He had a coil of thin steel wire in his pocket. He took it out and uncoiled it, then took out the lock-blade knife that he'd brought and opened it. He inserted the blade upward between the two frames and pried them apart a bit by wedging the blade in as far as possible. He bent his wire into a loop about an inch in diameter, and then slid the wire up into the space the blade had made. He twirled the wire so the loop went around the latch, then tugged it tight and pulled the latch into the open position. He pulled his knife out, closed it, and pocketed it.

Again he took some time to remain still in the dark shadow of the roof overhang, listen, and study what he could see of the house's interior. No interior lights had been on when he'd arrived. He stepped back to look up at the second-floor windows to be sure nothing had changed, then hooked the fingers of his left hand under a clapboard to steady himself, stepped onto the windowsill, pulled down the upper window, stepped over it with one leg, then the other, and then lowered himself silently from the inner sill to the floor. He carefully closed the upper window and reset the latch. He remembered where the stairs were.

He was standing in Elizabeth Waring's bedroom when she woke. He watched her stir and become aware of him and stifle the quick reflex movement of her right arm to reach for the gun, forcing herself to go limp again to make him believe she had just stirred in a dream. She was extraordinarily disciplined to calculate that she would not have time to grasp the gun and then abandon the attempt and try to make him think she was still asleep.

"I already have the gun," he said aloud. "I don't intend to harm you. I just want to talk for two minutes."

She opened her left eye a little, then sat up slowly and reached toward the lamp by her bed.

"Don't turn it on," he said. "There's no reason for you to see me, and it will be safer for you if you don't."

"I know you," she said. "I know who you are." She paused, seeming to use her fear to make herself more alert, but forcing herself to seem calm. "You've been away a long time. Were you in prison?"

He spoke quietly, without anger. "I know you're good at your job. That's why I became aware of you years ago. You try to surprise me, push me off balance by saying you know me. Then you ask a question that will give you information to help you find me. It's what you're supposed to do, but stop. I have questions. Who does Michael Delamina work for these days?"

"Michael Delamina?" she repeated. "I don't know who that is."

"Then good night. I'll leave your gun outside in the back yard where you can find it. I remember you have kids."

In a few heartbeats, Waring sensed that he had reached her bedroom doorway, but she hadn't seen or heard him move. "Wait."

He was still. "I'm waiting."

"I do know who he is. I just needed to know what rules you were setting—what would happen if I didn't know."

"You mean would I kill you? No. Now you want to know what will happen if you tell me."

"Yes."

"Tell me, and I'll tell you something."

"Frank Tosca. He's an underboss trying to move up to be the head of the Balacontano family. He's an upstart, but he's young and energetic, and the family was stagnant, aging, and fading. Now, one by one, all of the old soldiers and their relatives and hangers-on are being gathered into the fold." She paused. "So what are you going to tell me?"

"I know Frank Tosca."

"So what?"

"I'll tell you something about him. About fifteen years ago he killed a man named Leo Kleiner on Warren Street in New York. He shot him in the left side of the head with a K-frame .38 revolver, like the cops used when we were kids. That one was originally owned by a cop. I'd be surprised if Tosca didn't still have it hidden in his house on the St. Lawrence River in Canada."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I didn't take some oath of omertà like they did. I worked for people who had the money to hire me. What I tell you next is important. There were three men on the street that night who saw it happen—Davey Walker the driver, Boots Cavalli, and Andy Varanese. Cavalli wouldn't tell you anything if you set him on fire. Davey Walker is dead. But if you put enough pressure on Varanese, and promise him protection for the rest of his life, he'll help you out. He hated Tosca."

"Will anybody believe this after fifteen years?"

"The house in Canada used to have a hidden room. If you head down into the basement, right in the middle of the stairway before you get down there is a door built into the wall. That's where he kept his collection of things he couldn't let cops find. He figured the Canadians wouldn't be interested in raiding the house because he never did anything there, and the Americans can't do a surprise search in a foreign country. So I think what I've given you is an eyewitness and the chance to find the murder weapon in the suspect's possession."

She waited for him to say more, then sensed that he wasn't standing where he had been anymore. She stayed still, wondering what he was doing. She heard the door downstairs by the kitchen being locked. She threw off the covers, sprang from the bed, ran to the window, and looked out.

She watched him from above, a dark shadow moving across the back lawn. He stopped at the brick barbecue, opened the stainless steel lid, placed her sidearm on the grill, and closed the lid over it. He turned, looked up at her, then moved to the back of the yard, pulled himself up onto the low stone wall, and rolled over it into the next yard.

Waring snatched up the telephone and speed-dialed her office at the Justice Department. "This is Elizabeth Waring. I just had a home visit from a suspect of the very highest priority. I need a team to set up a perimeter five blocks from my house. He looks about forty-five years old, Caucasian, probably brown hair, wearing a black topcoat, dark clothing." She listened for a few seconds.

"If he looks like every man for a mile, pick up every man for a mile, and I'll try to sort them out. This is not a brainstorming session, it's an order."

***

On Tuesday morning Elizabeth Waring wore a navy blue pants suit and a pair of flat, highly shined shoes. It felt like a uniform, which was what she had designed it to be. It helped her to feel invulnerable. She was forty-six years old now, well past the age when she could be intimidated by one more meeting with a deputy assistant attorney general. But she was still watchful. When she had finished telling him the story, Dale Hunsecker made a serious face, but it was just that—arranging his features into an expression he had practiced, probably for future appearances before congressional committees.

He said, "This man just walked into your house?"

"My bedroom. The doors and windows were all locked, and the alarm system armed. But figuring out how to get around those things is part of what he does. He was also able to avoid or get through the ring of agents we set up afterward. Nobody saw him."

"And he did it just to give you an eyewitness account of a fifteen-year-old killing in New York City?" Hunsecker was about fifty and acted as though he had spent much of his time with underlings who were much younger than he was, so he had gotten used to conducting conversations as though they were seminar dialogues in which he led his pupils to a series of incontestable conclusions.

"No. He knows that my section tries to keep track of all the Mafiosi we know about. He asked me who Michael Delamina's boss was. I told him it was Frank Tosca, who has been beginning to solidify support in the Balacontano family. In return, he told me information about Frank Tosca that he knew I would want."

"Why?"

"You know who Tosca is, right?"

"I've seen his name in briefing papers. It's hard to tell these people apart sometimes, but I understand he's a boss."

She tried to keep her voice from betraying anything but information. "He's the latest incarnation of a bad old school of thought in La Cosa Nostra. He's a throwback. He's young—late thirties when he started making his move upward—physically strong and intimidating at forty-one, and just a little bit crazy. When he turns violent, it's always out of proportion to what made him mad. We think that two years ago he was the one who had Paul Millati shot. Afterward somebody flew to California and killed Millati's son, his daughter-in-law, and their two kids. Somebody in New York killed his wife, daughter, and the family dog. And six months later, when the gravestones were set up in the family plot at the cemetery, a mysterious crew in a white truck came and removed them."

"I can see he would be somebody we'd want in jail."

"We never managed to get this kind of evidence against him before. All we ever had is rumors. What the new information does is give us a chance to go back in time to the period before he and his friends all got used to living with wiretaps and tax audits, and stopped doing things in person. This is something he did himself, and if the tip is reliable, it isn't very well covered up."

"I'm not sure what you're asking permission to do. You still don't have anything to charge him with."

"I'd like to ask the New York FBI people to lay the groundwork to pick up Anthony 'Andy' Varanese. He's the one witness who supposedly saw it happen and might be induced to talk."

"Pick him up for what?"

"He's got a long record. His last conviction was for running a ring in California that stole cargo containers from the port of Long Beach. He's back in New York now, and I think we can be sure he's doing something. I'll ask them to keep him under investigation until they catch him at whatever he's up to. The operation shouldn't take more than two or three weeks."

"I think I need to speak clearly about what you're proposing, Mrs. Waring," Hunsecker said. "There are several problems with this. We're on a war footing. The FBI is just about fully occupied with protecting this country from terror attacks. After that, there's the escalating drug war on our southern border, which has already begun to move north into major cities. We don't get unlimited use of whole squads of FBI agents every day. The Organized Crime and Racketeering Division is just one small part of Justice. And you're talking about wiretaps. In this political climate, if you request a domestic wiretap, it had better be on somebody who is going to be convicted of a crime in fairly short order."

"There are dozens of surveillance operations on Mafia figures right now."

"All the more reason to question why we need another, particularly if it's just a roundabout way of getting to someone else."

"Let me talk to the New York agent in charge. If they're stretched too thin, maybe we can work something out using a small number of agents from other parts of the country on temporary loan." She could see he was not interested in the idea. His sour face had returned. "Something's bothering you."

"Mrs. Waring."

"Actually, it's not Mrs. Waring. I'm a widow, and his name was Hart. So I'm Mrs. Hart at my kids' school. Just call me Waring."

"What's troubling me most is that this informant of yours is manipulating the Justice Department into launching an operation to put away someone he doesn't like. That's what all of this is about."

"That's probably what it's about for him, but not for us. We just happen to be lucky that he dislikes someone who is a murderer and a public menace."

"But isn't he a murderer and a public menace too? You said he was a professional hit man."

Elizabeth took in a deep breath to calm herself and let it out. "I know it may seem as though they're about the same. They aren't. My informant is a very bad man. There's no question of it. Twenty years ago I was following a series of violent incidents all over the country—some solitary killings of mob leaders, fire fights in the centers of big cities. Most of law enforcement thought it was a war between two or more families. But when I began to look into it closely, I began to hear rumors. What the minor players were most afraid of was a man called the Butcher's Boy. Nice name, isn't it? What I believe now is that this man performed a hit for the Balacontano family, and Carl Bala didn't want to pay him, so he had him ambushed in Las Vegas. It didn't work because the Butcher's Boy read the situation correctly and killed the ambushers. Then he got angry. What looked like a gang war was actually this man reacting to that betrayal."

"And now you're proposing to help what amounts to a serial killer by putting his enemies in prison."

She straightened and stared at him. "We've been handed an opportunity to put away the heir apparent of one of the five New York families—a man who is young, very violent, and growing more powerful every day. I've been trying to help dismantle the Mafia for over twenty years, and I can tell you that I haven't seen any nice snitches. Good, honest people seldom know anything useful about the Mafia. The people who have the information we need are usually criminals."

"I understand. And I caught the reminder that I'm a recent political appointee, and you're a careerist. Our differences are not imaginary. But contrary to your assumption, they're not all in your favor. What you're proposing is the old way of doing business. The government has been protecting one criminal so he'll tell on another for—what? Fifty or sixty years? And what has this gotten us?"

"Half as many criminals."

"That's hardly been demonstrated by the current pervasiveness of organized crime. And it's a deal with the devil that could make this man a bigger problem later. If he's this spectacular hired killer, he could kill anyone—a visiting dignitary, a Supreme Court justice, a president."

"He hasn't been seen in about ten years. He hasn't been working."

"You mean he's been in prison."

"I don't think he has been, or someone would have recognized him and tried to collect the price on his head, or told the guards who he was in exchange for privileges. He's been away—maybe out of the country, or maybe just living a quiet life in some backwater. Something riled him up. Whatever got him upset had to do with Michael Delamina and, therefore, with Frank Tosca. It's what brought him to me."

"You actually sound starstruck."

"I'm not. I told you, he's a bad human being—maybe psychotic. While he was working, he was almost continuously hired by organized crime bosses to do the most important hits, the ones that had to be done by an outsider so that they could never be connected to the bosses. Some of his hits probably didn't even seem to be murders. There are undoubtedly some that seemed to be heart attacks or overdoses. He's potentially the most important informant the Justice Department has ever had. He's not somebody who can tell us about a thousand-dollar drug deal or a football pool that closed down ten years ago. His only business was murder."

"And why would he tell us anything about that?"

"He was always an outsider, not a made guy. He's not even Italian. At this point he has no loyalty to anybody, and now somebody has made him very angry. I didn't find him and ask him questions. He came to me and offered me information. This is an opportunity I don't expect to see again."

Hunsecker stroked his chin and cheeks, shook his head impatiently, stood up, and paced his office. "This opportunity you're bringing me is the news that you've found an unlocked door to the madhouse. Once we're taking orders from this serial killer, arresting whomever he wants us to, we're in an entirely different universe, and it's not one we want to inhabit. If, just to get information, we're going to ignore the crimes of a man who has probably killed scores of people, then what won't we ignore?"

"He—"

"Don't," he said. "It was a rhetorical question. My answer isn't going to change. The U.S. government isn't going to be in business with a man with a name like 'the Butcher's Boy.' We won't act on his information. If you've got something more on him than third-hand stories, then arrest and charge him. If not, we'd both better get back to our responsibilities."

"Yes, sir."