The Informant

24

IT WAS STILL the middle of the night, and he had driven to look at the houses of the two younger Castiglione brothers. What he wanted to do tonight was going to be difficult. The Castigliones probably had gotten lazy and overconfident by now, but he already had evidence that Vince Pugliese hadn't. Sending men out to motels to kill him before he could make it to town was definitely Vince.

He had shown Vince some things that day so many years ago, when he had killed the eight men who had been waiting in ambush. Vince had shown him some things too—his physical courage, his intelligence, his ability to read and manipulate his bosses. Vince was a stronger, leaner opponent than the others had been. Vince would be aware within an hour or two that four of his men had been killed in the motel. It was possible that he had known they'd be killed, and had been willing to sacrifice them to know where Schaeffer was and when he would enter the city. When he knew, Vince would start moving his other men around, pulling them back toward the center of the city to protect the Castiglione neighborhoods. It was important to be on the inside of the circle before it tightened.

He was almost positive that the oldest brother, Joe, would still be living in old Salvatore's house. The Castle was an important place, a symbol of Castiglione power and legitimacy. He drove past the building and saw that all the lights seemed to be out, but side by side in front of the closed garage were three big black cars, all backed into the driveway so they faced the street. The house was definitely occupied, and the three cars looked as though they belonged to people who thought they might want to get out fast. Joe Castiglione was in the Castle, and Schaeffer was going in after him. The Castle was the hardest target he could have chosen, but that made it the one he had to hit first. Right now, Joe Castiglione would be feeling relieved to be out of Arizona and happy to be back in the big old house where he thought he was safe.

Joe was the oldest of the three grandsons who ran the family now, and he was supposed to be the smartest. The fact that he was still living in the Castle meant that he was still the leader of the three brothers. He looked a little bit like old Salvatore—thin and tall, so his expensive suits hung on him. Everything was loose. Even when he was very young, he was a little bent over, so the resemblance to the grandfather was strong.

His reputation for cunning was earned. The two rivals most likely to kill him and take over were his two younger brothers, but as soon as his father had died, he engaged them in watching his back and overseeing the details of the Castiglione businesses.

Schaeffer drove to the parking lot of a big white hotel a few blocks up Lake Shore Drive from the Castle. He opened the trunk, leaned in, and took apart the shotgun so he could fit most of the barrel and stock into his messenger bag and keep the shotgun from being identifiable from a distance. He put in a box of shells, slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off on foot. He knew it was possible that what he was doing was foolish and that he would be dead before the sun came up. But if he could get the Castigliones, none of the other old men would feel safe.

He felt the weight of the shotgun and shells. He remembered the night thirty-five years ago when he and Eddie had gone after the Mahons in Providence. They had a poker game in the back of a bar called the Pot of Gold. On the roof was a sign, a faint, chipped, and discolored painting of a leprechaun beside a big white vessel that looked like an antique chamber pot. The sign didn't light up anymore, and people just called the place the "Pot."

Eddie took two short-barreled pump shotguns out of a closet and loaded them before he put them in the car trunk.

The boy asked, "Why are you bringing those?"

"Because I don't own a machine gun."

"Huh?"

"There's a reason why a twelve-gauge shotgun is the weapon of choice for home defense. It's a hell of a lot more lethal than anything you can hide in your pants. A double-ought shell has twelve pellets, each of them the size of a .38 bullet. When you're inside a room, your shot travels maybe ten, fifteen feet before it hits something. At that distance, the twelve pellets have hardly separated at all. It's like getting hit with one big slug. It makes a hole you can almost put your hand through. At fifty feet the pattern is still only ten inches. If you shoot one of the Mahons down, he's going to stay down."

Eddie had specific instructions about everything. "We burst in, you go left, and I go right. We shoot the first ones we see. Then shoot the first one who moves. If nobody moves, just shoot the next one. You do that for six shells—one in the chamber and five in the tube—then drop the shotgun and pull your pistol out. By then everybody who's going to die that day should be dead, but if one's not, send him along. I'd like the whole thing done in ten seconds."

That night at the poker game they had burst in and seen a dozen men—seven poker players and five just hanging around—and at least half of them were in the process of reaching for a gun. The boy had shot six men and dropped the empty shotgun, then pulled out his pistol and prepared to fire, but Eddie had already killed the others. "Nicely done, kid," he said, then snatched up some wads of money from the floor where it had fallen and a few wallets from pockets that weren't soaked with blood. The room was a storeroom for beer and spirits, so it had a concrete floor with a drain in the center. The boy could hear the blood trickling into it as he watched the door. As Eddie had planned, the theft made the police think that someone had wanted to rob a poker game, and then panicked when they'd realized they'd picked the Mahons' personal club, and then killed everybody in sight. It made a good story.

Now, thirty years later, he was walking into the Castigliones' neighborhood again, this time carrying a messenger bag with a shotgun inside. He was eager to test his theory about the Castle. He had always believed that the defenses were concentrated in the front, where there was an electric motor that opened a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the gate was a set of holes in the pavement for anchoring barriers so a car or truck couldn't crash the gate and reach the house.

He walked along the stone fence. He knew there must be an alarm system on the property. As soon as he had the thought, he saw the alarm company's sign stuck in the garden, but it didn't worry him too much. There was almost always some part in every house that was too hard or expensive to wire so it was skipped, and he had a theory about this house. He went over the fence and walked to the side of the house. Then he dropped to his belly and looked in the first basement window. There was a room that held a furnace and hot water heater, but the room beside it looked like a gentleman's study. The overhead lights were off, but there were two night-lights plugged in along the cellar stairs leading to the first floor for safety. He examined the frame of the basement window. It was steel, with a latch in the upper edge. He looked closely at the material around the steel frame. It was solid concrete. There seemed to be no way that the jacketed cable for an alarm system could be run through the concrete to the window frame. He looked across the corner of the basement at the next nearest window. He could see no wires or cables running from the wooden floor above the window, and nothing coming up from below. The basement windows didn't seem to be wired into the system.

He put strips of duct tape on the glass of the small, low window, then crossed the strips with vertical ones. He opened his messenger bag, took out the butt end of the shotgun, and rammed the glass once. The glass gave a pop, but the pieces all stayed together. He pulled the glass out and lay it on the ground. He heard no alarm.

Turning to put his feet first, he lowered himself into the room with the furnace. He looked carefully for the small red and green lights that would indicate an electric beam that would set off the alarm if he broke it, but the basement seemed to be clear. He moved into the room that looked like a study, sat on a leather couch, and fitted the two halves of his shotgun together. He reached into the messenger bag, extracted five shells, and loaded the shotgun. He pumped the slide once. The "snick-chuck" sound reminded him again of the night in Providence. The rest of Eddie's instructions came back as he walked to the stairs. "Hold the butt of it tight to your shoulder so the kick doesn't punch you in the face or some damned thing. Never fire a twelve-gauge from your hip. You're a hell of a lot scarier staring down that long barrel so you can hit what you shoot at. And keep both eyes open. In a gunfight everything that's alive is moving, and that's what you've got to see." As an afterthought, he added, "And click that safety off. Once you're in somebody else's building, anybody you kill by accident is just one you won't have to kill on purpose."

He climbed the stairs quietly, switched off the night-light so there would be no glow behind him, opened the door, and raised the shotgun to his right shoulder. He looked down the barrel at the room. It was the kitchen. Big windows let in moonlight, and he could see it was empty. It was a huge room, equipped like an old-fashioned restaurant, with appliances that were heavy, not pretty, and big iron pots and pans.

Beyond the kitchen there was a hallway that led forward toward the front of the house, and he could tell the wall to the right side was the storage space under the staircase. He moved ahead. The closer he got to the heart of the house before the occupants woke, the more damage he could do.

He reached the foyer, an octagonal shape with windows up high that let moonlight in to throw a shine on the black-and-white tile. The stairway to his right was wide and had a curve that reminded him of the stairways to the loge in the movie theater he used to go to when he was about eleven or twelve. It had thick patterned carpet like that and brass rods at the corners to keep it from sliding. He sensed it was a trap. He didn't know how it was managed—an interior alarm system, a motion detector, an electric eye like the ones at the doors of stores, a trip wire, a pressure strip under the carpet—and it didn't matter. If they had an alarm system, what they'd want to protect most was the bedrooms at the top of those stairs. He backtracked toward the kitchen.

He found the other staircase between the pantry and the cellar door where he'd come in. He tested the back stairs to see if they creaked. They were old, part of the original design of the house, probably so the maids could get up and down without disturbing the owners. But they weren't creaking, and they were plain, bare hardwood with no carpet to hide anything. In a moment he was on the second floor, which consisted of a long hallway with bedrooms on either side. He went from doorway to doorway, staring in each room. All eight were furnished, but none of them was occupied tonight.

Joe's children had apparently all grown up and moved out. But it was odd that there weren't any bodyguards asleep on the second floor. He had seen cars in the space in front of the garage. It occurred to him that it was possible Castiglione wasn't at home. He might have been held for some infraction at the ranch in Arizona or decided not to be available to reporters.

Schaeffer returned to the servants' staircase and climbed to the third floor. As soon as he opened the door into the hallway, he knew this floor was inhabited. He heard snoring. There were two bedrooms at his end of the hall, and a single door at the opposite end, which he guessed was a master suite that took up one wing.

Between the ends of the hall there was one huge room with big windows facing the lake, and a wide-open portal. The room must once have been an upstairs sitting room because it offered a spectacular view. In the morning, it would be filled with sunlight. In the afternoon, when the sun was on the other side of the house, it would be a good place to look out at the boats on the lake. Probably parties had been held up here.

But this end of it had been transformed into what looked like a barrack. There were eight sets of bunk beds set up in two rows. The bunks didn't look like a recent development, something someone would do just for a couple of days. It would be too much trouble. A number of times over the years the Castigliones had been involved in rivalries and struggles for dominance. There must have been times when they gathered a group of their soldiers into the Castle to defend it and themselves. He heard more sounds of snoring and deep, unconscious breathing and stepped closer, studying the bunk beds from different angles. There was a man asleep in the big room.

Before he did anything else, he needed to clear the rooms by the back stairs to be sure his escape wouldn't be blocked. He opened the first, and it looked like a hotel storeroom with shelves full of linens and blankets and paper goods. The second was a large bathroom remodeled for multiple people, with toilet stalls and a shower room with three stations. He moved quietly back into the big room.

He looked down at the sleeping man in the bunk. The moment that he started the killing, all of this silence and stillness was going to shatter, and he would have to be in motion. He prepared himself.

He aimed the shotgun at the head of the man in the bunk and fired. The roar was deafening, and the man's body jumped on the springs, but there wasn't much left of his head.

Schaeffer's left hand was pumping his shotgun as he ran for the single door at the end of the short hall. He knew that the less time he took, the better his chances were, so he lifted his right foot and stomp-kicked the door. The door swung inward, splinters flying, and he dashed in after it, his shotgun aimed at the bed. He flicked on the overhead light.

There were two people in it, a man and a woman. The man was Joe Castiglione, but the woman was much younger, probably her mid twenties, with long bleach-blond hair. Castiglione was in the middle of a half roll, reaching into a drawer in his nightstand.

As Castiglione fumbled to get the gun in his hand, Schaeffer shot him in the back of the head. The woman screamed, her hands clawing at the sides of her head like talons.

"Shut up," he said.

She took a deep breath to scream again so he shot her, and she sprawled backward on the bed, her arms spread like wings.

He picked up the ejected shotgun shells in the bedroom and then the one he'd fired in the big room, and then went down the back stairs. He climbed out the basement window and pushed it shut behind him, and then took his shotgun apart and put it in his messenger bag. He walked quickly away from the house along Lake Shore Drive toward the parking lot where he had left his car, put the bag in the trunk, and drove off toward the next house.

The point would not be made without the other two brothers. The second one was Paul, and the youngest Sal. He knew he had no more than an hour or two to do the rest of the job and get out of town.

When he arrived in Paul's neighborhood, it was three A.M. The night air was cool and fresh, just a stealthy breeze flowing onto the land off Lake Michigan. In the evening it had seemed hot, but as he walked along the street, the air felt alive to him. It filled his lungs and gave him new energy.

Paul Castiglione lived only a couple of minutes from his older brother. His house was an old redbrick two-story cubical building that had a white wooden porch in front with Doric columns. It wasn't quite a mansion, but the sort of house that had probably been built just after the Great Chicago Fire and painstakingly restored by whomever Paul had bought it from.

Schaeffer drove past and scanned to be sure there were no clusters of cars and that the street behind looked about the same as the last time he'd been here. He parked just around the corner, where he could reach his car quickly, but where it couldn't be seen from the house. He opened the trunk, took the two Beretta pistols, and put them in his jacket. He closed the trunk, walked up to the house, and looked into the window of the garage. There were three cars inside, a black Cadillac, a black Corvette, and a black SUV that seemed to be about seven feet tall. Even though he'd been in the United States ten years ago, the sight of those big SUVs still startled him with their ugliness and impracticality. But he was pleased. The three cars looked as though they represented three moods of Paul Castiglione—pretentious, childish, and stupid.

He walked around the building, examining window latches through the glass, testing doorknobs. Through the window near the front door he saw that there was an alarm system. It probably wasn't the kind that rang in the office of a security service or a police station because Paul Castiglione wouldn't want to give the cops a legal excuse for bursting into his house, but he was sure it would make noise. He could see the keypad lights glowing on the wall. He thought it probably wasn't necessary, but in case he made a mistake, he went to the rear of the house, opened the phone junction box, and disconnected the telephone wires.

There had to be a way around the alarm system because there always was. As he continued around the house, he found it. Set in the wall beside the kitchen door was an old-fashioned milk delivery box. There was a small wooden cabinet door with a weathered brass latch on the outside so the milkman could put the bottles of milk in it. Inside there would be another door that opened inward so the cook could bring the milk bottles into the kitchen.

It was a long-obsolete feature. Nobody now would have a little door set into the brick facing like that. The renovators must have left it there because antique details reminded people that this house was the real thing and not a copy. He reached up and turned the little knob and the milk door opened. He pushed on the inner door, but it was locked. He looked in and he could see four small brass screw heads flush with the surface of the door. He looked at the inner side of the outer door to compare, then used his lock-blade knife to unscrew the four screws. When he pushed the door inward, it moved. He jiggled it a bit, moving it inward until he could get his hand in and pull the latch free.

He studied the dimensions of the milk door. In the years since he had left the trade, he had aged, but he was still relatively flexible, and he judged that he could fit his middle through the two-foot square. He took off his jacket, heavy with his two pistols, and hung it on the brass handle on the door. He ducked to get his head and arms into the opening, turned sideways to get his shoulders in, and then pushed against the inner wall to slide in to his hips. He could reach a counter to his right now so he used it to pull himself the rest of the way in and get his left foot on the floor and then the right.

Turning to reach outside, he grasped his jacket and brought it in with him. He put it on, closed the milk door, stood with his back against the wall with the two pistols in his hands, and listened. There were only the tiny, barely audible sounds of a house—the refrigerator compressor, the air-conditioning system.

He moved forward into the kitchen. He had always preferred to take a great deal of time so a listener would not connect one of his moves or sounds with another. Tonight he had to bend time in the opposite direction, moving from place to place more quickly than anyone would expect. He had to find and kill Paul Castiglione, and then get inside Sal's defenses before he knew his brothers were dead.

He was halfway across the kitchen when Paul Castiglione materialized in the doorway in a big, loose-fitting bathrobe and bare feet. Castiglione took a couple of steps and opened the refrigerator door. The light spilled out of it onto the floor and splashed the walls.

Castiglione leaned over and squinted into the refrigerator, and then the sight he'd seen in his peripheral vision as he'd turned registered in his brain, and he jerked his head and looked. "Holy shit."

"Hello, Paul." The two pistols came up in Schaeffer's hands, so that Castiglione saw not only the shape of a man in his kitchen, but also a vaguely familiar face staring at him above the dark, gleaming muzzles of the two Berettas.

"It's you. What would you come to me for? I can't save you."

"I never asked." He shot Castiglione. In the light of the open refrigerator, he could see that the single shot had passed through his forehead. Schaeffer heard a woman's voice call from upstairs, "Paul? What was that? Did you knock something over?"

Schaeffer had to make a decision. Going through the house, first killing the woman and then maybe Castiglione's kids, would take time and do nothing for him. It was too late to preserve the quiet. He had to get to the third brother as quickly as he could. He turned, stepped out the kitchen door, and closed it again. Beyond the door he could hear the alarm, an electronic imitation of a bell ringing. He ran hard toward the car, got in, and drove off. The first time he had to stop at a traffic signal, he retrieved the shotgun from the trunk and reloaded it, then propped it on the passenger seat beside him.

It took him fifteen minutes to reach Salvatore Castiglione's house, and he could see he had not made it in time. Paul Castiglione's wife must have come downstairs, seen her husband's body, and started dialing the phone. The house was a suburban one-story ranch-style house set on a large lawn with a pine grove behind it and along the sides to form a narrow privacy barrier at the edges of the property. As he drove past, he could see that in spite of the fact that it was nearly four A.M., there were already lights on in the house and the shapes of men moving across the front windows. A big black car with tinted windows sat in the driveway with its motor idling. It had to be Pugliese's men, here to get Sal out of danger. Schaeffer kept going, heading his car to the north toward Milwaukee.