The Informant

4

HE HAD BEEN calling himself Michael Schaeffer since he had moved to England twenty years ago, so he was comfortable with the name. It was the sort of name that wasn't made up, and wasn't simplified or changed from something people couldn't pronounce. Schaeffer was the sort of name that a lot of Americans had, not an attempt to pretend he wasn't American. The British could detect imposture, and they didn't like it.

Before he had gone to England with his Michael Schaeffer passport, he had randomly used a number of other names. Most were just signifiers for landlords who needed to see something filled in on that line. The only name that had meant anything was the one other people called him when he wasn't there. They used the name the Butcher's Boy to refer to him behind his back. In a way, it was the only name he'd had since he was ten that was real. Now that he was back in the country the nickname seemed on the verge of coming back to him like a relapse of a chronic disease.

After all of the years of quiet in the old city of Bath, he was back in New York. He'd had to make a visit some years ago because a couple of young guys had spotted him on a trip to England. This time it was worse. Michael Delamina and two friends of his had tried to sneak into a summer house he'd rented in Brighton and kill him and his wife in their sleep.

He had taken Meg to hide in the cellar, then gone out the cellar window into the narrow space between the window and the privet hedge that surrounded the house. In a minute he had found one of the men had gone through the back door into the pantry. Schaeffer had come up behind him, dragged him outside, and cut his throat there to keep the blood out of the house. He found the second man sixty feet down the road in a car with the lights off because in the three A.M. silence he could hear the motor running. He had used the first man's silenced pistol to put a hole in the side window and through the man's temple. He had then gone back to the house to look for the third man, but he heard the car drive off. He ran to the spot and found the man he had shot lying in the gravel where his comrade had pulled him out onto the ground so he could get behind the wheel. He searched the corpses, and then drove them fifty-four miles to London and pushed them over the side of a bridge onto a stretch of railroad tracks that led up behind an old, dark factory.

He had found a business card in one of the dead men's wallets with the address of a bed-and-breakfast in Brighton run by a Russian émigré named Voltunov. On the top page of the sign-in register on a little podium in the foyer were the names of the two dead men. Between them was the name Michael Delamina.

Schaeffer had packed a suitcase while Meg looked on. "I assume you know where you're going," she said. "Somewhere in the States?"

"Yes. He brought those two here to help him look for me. He's going to run back there now. He'll bring two dozen next time. I can't let him do that."

"I should think not."

They were silent for a few minutes while he threw the rest of the clothes he'd brought from the house in Bath into his suitcase. Meg said, "I wish we were going home."

"So do I."

"Do you know how long this will take?"

"If it goes well, three days to a week. Most likely, a bit longer."

"If it doesn't go well?"

"Then I'll know you're safe in London at your parents' town house for as long as it takes," he said. "Don't go to the house in Bath until I get back. That could be where they first spotted me, and if it is, then it's not safe."

He drove her to the London house and carried her suitcase into the bedroom she had always occupied when the family was in London during her unmarried years. She looked around her unhappily. "I suppose I'll be fine. I didn't sign on in this marriage to be left in this fortress of virginity, though. So when you get back, be prepared to make amends."

He laughed. "I'll be thinking of nothing else."

"That's always been your way." She put her arms around his neck and they kissed. "I know it would be foolish to say be careful. Just come back to me."

"I'll do my best."

He boarded a plane at Heathrow and slept through the long flight to JFK. He devoted the first few hours after he got there to meeting each flight that arrived from London that morning, watching the straggling groups of people come out through the customs corridor into the international terminal. At first he didn't see anyone who looked like he might be Michael Delamina. Nobody who came to England to kill him would have traveled with a wife and children, or brought so much luggage that he had to maneuver it around precariously propped on a rented cart.

Just after noon, Schaeffer saw his mark arrive, dragging a single rolling suitcase. He seemed exhausted, and his suit looked as though it had been on him for a week. He had an irritated expression. His face seemed to be made for it, with a protruding chin, thick brows that almost met in the middle, and a low, wrinkled forehead. Schaeffer scanned the terminal and saw nobody waiting—no family happy to see the man return, no limo driver, nobody from an office.

As the man rolled his suitcase along the shiny floor, Schaeffer began to follow him. When Delamina joined the line at the taxi stand, Schaeffer joined it too. He got close enough at the cabstand to hear him telling the driver the address, then turned and walked away and joined a group far along the drive waiting for the shuttle to the car-rental depot. When he got there, he rented a car to drive to Delamina's house on the north shore of Long Island and look it over. The house was a suburban one-story brick single-family building set on a large green lawn. It had a long driveway that led to a garage set a few feet behind the house. There seemed to be nothing about it that would present an obstacle to him.

Next he drove to a truck-rental lot in the next town, parked his car, and rented a plain white van. At an industrial supply store he bought a uniform consisting of blue coveralls and a blue baseball cap, and a clipboard. Two hours later he drove the van to Delamina's and pretended to be a delivery man. He made his way inside the house to take care of Michael Delamina with one of the knives he found in a wooden block in the kitchen.

Since that afternoon he had been following the most basic strategy he knew. It was something he had learned from Eddie Mastrewski when he was a teenager. "If someone attacks you, come back at him fast. Then see who else needs it. Go from the young, low-level shooters up through the one who sent them out after you, and then the boss, the highest one you know. It's just like running up a flight of stairs. If you stop halfway up, you're dead. You have to get all the way to the top. The man who is up there will keep sending new people after you until the end of time."

In the old days he could have done that quickly, before the ones on the upper levels had time to hear what was coming and prepare. He had known enough about the Mafia families then to be able to piece together who someone like Delamina must be. But this time he'd had no idea who Delamina was, or who he had worked for. Schaeffer couldn't go to somebody who was connected and ask him to explain it. He had needed to fly down to Washington and get Elizabeth Waring from the Justice Department to tell him it was Frank Tosca. Tonight he was back on Long Island on his way to Frank Tosca's house.

Schaeffer didn't like being in New York. Manhattan was a tiny, crowded place, and it would be easy to get spotted on the street by somebody from the old days that he didn't even notice. People drove by in cars, or sat at restaurant windows and watched pedestrians pass. And unless the nature of the universe had changed, there were always Mafia underlings moving around the island on their constant rounds of errands, picking up and delivering—taking a rake-off from one business, giving a loan to another, bringing bribes to officials, accepting tributes from even smaller criminals. They all made themselves useful to their superiors by watching for people like him. He was avoiding Manhattan this trip. He had flown into JFK and rented a car to drive to Tosca's house.

He hadn't tried to obtain a weapon. Having to go through metal detectors to fly somewhere, then get off a plane and do a job, had always been difficult. In the old days, when he had been working for hire, the client would sometimes have what he needed waiting for him—a gun that had been stolen in a burglary and could only be traced to its last owner, or one that had temporarily disappeared from a dealer's secondhand inventory and would be cleaned up and returned the next day. There had even been a couple that had been stolen from the intended victim's own arsenal ahead of time.

But he no longer had clients. Tonight he would have to find what he needed as he went along. He stopped at a home-improvement store not far from the airport and paid in cash for a few items that might be useful—a crowbar, a box of rubber gloves, a lock-blade knife, a strong magnet used for picking up lost screws and nails.

He loaded his purchases into the rental car and drove toward Glen Cove. When he reached the little city, he drove up Glen Cove Avenue toward the neighborhood where Tosca lived. He passed the turnoff, backtracked a few blocks, and found it again. He saw a restaurant on Glen Cove Avenue that looked appealing to him, but he decided it was best not to have any contact with the locals. What he was planning to do would be big news, and he didn't want anybody to remember that a stranger had been in the restaurant that evening. He drove on. Glen Cove was a prosperous little town that seemed to be largely horizontal. It was composed of buildings that weren't higher than two stories, most of them one. There were a few banks, boutiques, and restaurants, the sort of businesses that existed in places where people lived rather than worked. He watched people walking along the sidewalks, stopping to glance in the lighted display windows or getting into cars and driving off.

He tried to locate the house where Frank Tosca lived, and eventually found it by counting the streets parallel to Glen Cove Avenue, then counting houses from the corner. There were tall, leafy old hardwood trees on the street and thick hedges that obscured the view. Some lights were on, but he could see little else about the house from the street except that it was big. When he was growing up, the capos at Tosca's level still lived in small, narrow, two-story workingmen's houses in the less desirable parts of Queens or Brooklyn. It wasn't until they got to the point where there was a rational explanation for their having so much money—a real business big enough to produce wealth—that they might settle in Manhattan. None of them lived in places like this, a suburb along the water. It just wasn't done. The old guys had been too paranoid to be away from the neighborhoods where their soldiers lived. They didn't want to take the chance that somebody was talking business without them.

Then he saw something that he hadn't expected. There were three vans parked in the quiet, tree-lined streets a few blocks away. One was a dark-colored plain one across the street from Tosca's house and about three hundred feet down. There was another at the other end of the block. There was a third on the next parallel street, behind Tosca's house.

Another house caught his eye. It was about a block and a half away, behind high hedges. The driveway went straight back from the gated entrance about a hundred feet to a circular turnaround at the front door. After all the years living in England he recognized it as a copy in miniature of the gravel drives that were built to accommodate eighteenth-century carriages visiting large homes. This house had no lights on, but there were four dark-colored cars lined up facing the street.

He found himself smiling. It was clear to him that this was the result of his nighttime visit to Elizabeth Waring in Washington. He had told her that Tosca had kept the weapon from one of his earliest murders, and here was Tosca's house, one day later, under heavy surveillance by federal agents. He was glad he had driven around looking closely at everything before he tried to get into the house. He would have ruined everything. He left Glen Cove and drove twelve miles to Hempstead, checked into a hotel, had dinner, and went to sleep.