The Informant

23

MAYBE THE EASE of the old men's lives had made them forget how it felt to be vulnerable like other people. A human being was a small, pink, weak creature that trained itself from its first discovery of death to keep changing the subject, and they seemed to have forgotten this.

Or maybe it was the theatrical quality of their daily existence. From the time they came into power they were placed one level away from real dirt and blood and tears, and became actors in a pageant. They strutted down city streets with big stone-faced bodyguards who looked like bulls to exemplify their power. As long as they were awake, there were people opening their doors and driving their cars and pulling out their chairs as though they were eastern princes. They sat at tables in the backs of restaurants that were kept empty just in case they came in, their faces set in an imperial scowl. They were surrounded by oily advisors and lieutenants who whispered schemes in their ears while messengers stood by waiting for the chance to deliver some bad news to somebody. Now and then one of them would go into a tantrum, a barrage of threats and curses intended to make an audience feel fear strong enough so the jolt would be conducted down the branching circuits of the organization to the people who did the work.

It seemed to Schaeffer that they must have forgotten a great many things they needed to remember. The biggest of them this week was whom they had casually agreed to kill. It had been completely unnecessary, and it apparently had been decreed without much thought. Did it even occur to any of them that there might be a price to pay? They seemed to have forgotten that down at street level killing looked different.

There was a simple clarity to killing, and it was his only way forward. He had to remind a group of multimillionaires who had gotten used to thinking of themselves as immortal that death could overtake them at any time. He also had to teach them that even a solitary enemy could do them terrible harm.

During much of the long drive from Denver to Chicago, he had been considering exactly what he wanted to accomplish, and now he had decided. He stopped to buy a pair of thin leather gloves, some hooded sweatshirts, some running shoes.

He had kept the two Beretta M92 pistols he had stolen in Houston. Before he had left Texas he had bought two spare magazines and two boxes of nine-millimeter ammo. He was aware that the brass casings of the bullets loaded into the guns carried the fingerprints of the owners in Houston, and he liked that. He loaded the spare magazines wearing gloves.

He was going to have to work quickly to make the proper impression. He began by thinking about the Castiglione organization in Chicago. All three of the Castiglione brothers had been at the ranch in Arizona, and so they were all implicated in the decision to have him killed. And since Vincent Pugliese was their underboss, he had certainly put the personal ad in all the newspapers with their knowledge and approval. It was not a surprise that the brothers had no love for him. Twenty years ago, when he had been trying to cause enough confusion to get the families to believe a war had broken out, he had killed old Salvatore Castiglione, their grandfather. He had gotten old and gone to live in Las Vegas, where he did little besides meet once a month with the men who oversaw the family's interests there. The stratagem had worked. Schaeffer had gotten out of the country and lived twenty years that they would have denied him.

He drove toward the old Castiglione mansion on Lake Shore Drive. In the days before old Salvatore, the Mafia families in Chicago were insular. They lived in Italian neighborhoods, where everybody spoke Italian. The women went to the big churches in the center of the city. The men went on Christmas and Easter and never confessed or took Communion. There was always the shadow of Al Capone, who was considered to be the prime example of what publicity did to people. But old Salvatore had simply drawn the line in a different place. He bought a mansion that had been built fifty years earlier for the heir of one of the big meatpacking fortunes. He never spoke a word in public and lived conservatively like a bank president—which, for a while, he was. After he retired to Las Vegas, his son took over for him, and when the son was ready to retire, he said he didn't want his sons to split the family three ways, so they shared power.

Schaeffer drove north on Lake Shore Drive, with the bright blue lake on his right and the houses on the left. After a half mile of big old houses, the Castiglione mansion appeared. It looked just about the way it had twenty years ago. It had a shell of brownish-gray stone and sat on a big green lawn behind a fence of the same brown-gray stone. Its slate roofs were steep, like the mansard roofs of French châteaux. Maybe because of the family name, and maybe because of the way it looked, people called it the Castle.

The second time he had been inside was when Vince Pugliese brought him here to get his pay for solving the Milwaukee problem. When the rounded front door opened, he noticed that the wood was three inches thick. Later Vince had told him that the doors were designed to sandwich a quarter-inch steel plate between two layers of oak. The windows were recessed into the outer walls such that the glass was only about five inches wide. It wasn't until he moved to Europe that he recognized the design was a copy of the arrow slits of castles.

He and Vince had followed one of the bodyguards through a big room with long tables and a raised gallery that ran around the room near the high ceiling. At the end of the big room was a smaller room like a study where the old man waited. Another bodyguard stood near the door. The old man was bald with a close-cropped fringe of white hair. He had the eyes of a vulture—penetrating, but devoid of any heat except voracity and irritability.

People addressed him as Don Salvatore, and when he spoke to his men, it was in Italian. He stared at Schaeffer as he produced a manila envelope and held it out to Vincent Pugliese, who handed it to Schaeffer. He whispered, "Don't count it here."

Schaeffer nodded at Salvatore and said, "Thank you," and put it in the pocket under his left arm. Vince said a few sentences in Italian. Schaeffer could see it was an account of the gunfight in the cornfield, which ended in his holding up both hands wide-eyed and counting off eight fingers. The old man laughed and the bodyguards laughed harder. The old man opened the drawer again, selected a banded stack of bills, and tossed it to Schaeffer, who caught it. Then the old man waved his hand in a shooing gesture, and they left.

They went outside, walked to Schaeffer's rental car, and got in. Schaeffer handed Pugliese the stack of bills.

Pugliese looked at him in surprise. "You giving this to me?"

"He paid me for what I did. That was for the story."

Pugliese put it into his coat pocket and patted it to make it lie flat. "Yeah, the old man loves stories where people get killed."

As he drove past, he could see two cars in the circular driveway in front of the house and three more in the garage. Somebody was still living there. It would be Joe, the oldest of the three grandsons. Schaeffer kept going to find the houses of the other brothers. He needed to be sure they hadn't moved.