The Informant

5

ELIZABETH HAD BEEN keeping files on him for more than twenty years. No, that was not exactly true. She had started a file more than twenty years ago and then, after a few years, had sent it with a number of other files to be placed in long-term storage. She had called him "unknown suspect" for the first part of the file when she was still only positing the existence of a single man who was causing so much disruption in the families. Her superiors had assured her that their long experience told them it was a real war, with the families attacking each other. He had been busy for at least a month before she got close enough to begin hearing informants talking about him and calling him the Butcher's Boy. It led up to the discovery of the body parts buried on the horse farm Carlo Balacontano, aka Carl Bala, owned at Saratoga.

The discovery was prompted by a telephone tip to the FBI. Elizabeth had said right away to anyone who would listen that it was a setup. Why would a smart strategist like Carl Bala have his men bury the head and hands of Arthur Fieldston on his own property, a hundred yards from his summer house? Why would he have them cut the body up in the first place? Weren't there a million pieces of empty land in upstate New York where nobody would find a body? Had the oceans dried up?

Her superiors had said, "He had them bury the head and hands there because it was a place he thought he could protect until he died." And she had said, "Somebody was capable of hiding the rest of the body—say, two hundred pounds of it—where nobody has ever found it. But the head and hands—the only means of identifying a murder victim—had to be right where he would walk past them every day. Carl Bala is not an idiot. He's ordered a lot of people murdered, but not this one. The person who buried the head and hands is the one who made the call to tell us where they were."

Her protests had been futile. The murder charge against Carl Bala stood. Elizabeth had been ordered to take a vacation until the trial was over. She had flown to England and walked in gardens that had been cultivated for seven hundred years and watched plays nearly every night. When she had come home, Carl Bala had been sentenced to life in prison and the Butcher's Boy was already gone, as though he had been made of smoke.

Her job in those days had been to analyze police and coroners' reports, searching for deaths that had been declared suicides or accidents that weren't, or for homicides that formed familiar patterns, or that seemed to benefit someone in organized crime. She was good at it, and she continued to scour the reports for years, but found no sign of him. He had stirred up the families with a few well-chosen murders—ones that would be almost certain to provoke retaliation against some rival group. Probably as soon as Carl Bala was arrested and denied bail as a flight risk, the Butcher's Boy disappeared.

She kept the file she had been building in a lower drawer of her desk in the back. Each time she was promoted she moved it to her new office, until she had moved from the computer rooms in the basement all the way up to the fourth floor seven years later. Only then did she send it to the archives.

Three years after that she was looking for it again. She had noticed the same kind of sudden rampage as before. This time it started with Tony Talarese dying in the kitchen of one of his restaurants. Tony Talarese had been wearing a wire for the FBI at the moment when he'd been killed. It was a macabre scene, as she pictured it while listening to the recording. His wife had been standing at the stove wearing a big pair of oven mitts when the shooter had struck. She had shrieked, rushing toward her fallen husband, flapping her arms like a bird to free her hands of the mitts. When she got to him, she hugged him, pulled up his shirt, and then screamed, "A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!" At the same time, she had spotted the out-of-proportion hysterical tears of two young hostesses and a waitress, and correctly guessed why they were so heartbroken at the death of her husband. At the moment when the FBI agents monitoring the wire burst in, she was shrieking "Whores!" and chasing them with a kitchen knife. The killing moved outward and upward from Talarese. Mafia captains died unexpected, violent deaths, and there were so many explanations for each death that there could be no explanation.

Some experts said it was the young men trying to get the old men out of the way so they could move up. But Elizabeth noticed that the first casualties had been young men. Others said outsiders must be invading the established Mafia territories, but there were no sightings of possible successors—no Latin American gangs, no black gangs, no bikers, or prison gangs. When a capo fell, nobody took over.

She was sure it had been him again. He had come back to create trouble for them once more. It had been her theory at the time, and still was, that he had gone somewhere to retire—Brazil, Thailand, Paraguay—and the Mafia, or just some part of it, really, had tried to make good on its old reputation for hunting down its enemies. They had always had great success with sticky-fingered card dealers and addicted drug runners. It would be very different trying to find and punish him. Months later she had listened to a wiretap recording in which one member of the Lorenzo family had told another, "Stay out of it. Don't look for him. If the Balacontano family still wants him, then he's theirs. If they don't get him on the first try, he'll kill some of them, and we'll see what falls out of their hands as they go down. Maybe we'll be able to pick something up—a business, a territory. But stay away from him."

He was someone they feared with an almost superstitious fear, because they knew him. When he was still in his late teens, he had been the one these men called in when they needed a truly professional murder. In his twenties he knew many of the midlevel soldiers and upper-level dignitaries, at least by sight, and had bargained with some of them, because those were the people who hired outside specialists. Her informants told her he always did what he had agreed to with an icy efficiency, took his pay, and disappeared. There was no trail to his employers, and not much chance that anyone could have followed him away from the final meeting.

Years later, when something had gone wrong and he had decided he needed to cause trouble, his reputation actually helped. When he began cutting down important men, the ones who recognized the work as his were sure that rival bosses must be employing him to destroy the competition. For a long time it had never occurred to anyone that Carl Bala had simply become so arrogant and overconfident in his growing power that rather than paying this man his fee for a hit he'd done, he had told one of his underlings to arrange an ambush in Las Vegas to kill him. It had been the most expensive act of parsimony ever.

There was a quiet buzz, and Elizabeth picked up her phone. "Yes?"

"It's the FBI New York office. Agent Holman."

"I'll take it."

When she heard the click, she said, "This is Elizabeth Waring. Is this Agent Holman?"

"Good afternoon," Holman said. "I'm calling because I was assigned to supervise the surveillance of Frank Tosca's home. I'm afraid there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding. I understood that your office had requested an intensive surveillance of Tosca."

"That's right. We appreciate your efforts very much. Has something turned up?"

"Well, yes. Special Agent Carlson, my section chief, sent a request for some paperwork—a designation of the case, some cost approvals—to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Hunsecker, and the response was 'What surveillance?' I thought the least I could do was pick up a phone and see if we could straighten this out. Mr. Hunsecker's staff seems to think he won't approve it."

"It was an emergency request," she said. "It hasn't gone through Mr. Hunsecker yet. I'm pretty sure my second, Bob Fulton, explained it to your duty agent last night. I had an inquiry from a person I know to be a professional assassin of some standing. He wanted to know who Michael Delamina's boss was. Then, late last evening we got the news that Delamina had been murdered some hours before I spoke with the assassin. What we were trying to do was prevent another murder."

"We've observed some significant security precautions around Mr. Tosca's house in Glen Cove. He seems to live at a pretty high level of alertness."

"There are a lot of people with reasons to want him dead. But at the moment, I think he's finally got one who's capable of getting in, killing him, and getting out."

"What's his reason? Is somebody paying him?"

"I don't know his reason for certain. I think he retired a long time ago. But I think that twice in the years since then, some young, ambitious soldiers have found him and tried to collect on the old contracts."

"Who put out the contracts?"

"I know Carl Bala put one out on him before he went to prison. People have said it's in the millions."

"Balacontano? Is he even alive to pay off?"

"As of this moment he is. He's safe and sound in a maximum security special wing, where nobody gets to see him but the doctors and the visitors he listed when he went in. But he'd almost certainly pay off. He's in for life, so there's no use for Bala's money that would bring him more pleasure than the death of this hit man."

Agent Holman was silent for a few seconds. "I'd hate to shut this down now. I can keep up the surveillance on Tosca's house until the end of the day. At that time, if I don't have the official approval for the operation, we'll have to stand down. Do you think you can get it?"

"All I can guarantee is that I'm going to try very hard. Thanks so much for buying me some time."

One of the other phone lines had been blinking for at least thirty seconds. She knew it must be someone from Hunsecker's office calling to find out what she was doing. She couldn't think of a way to answer that without appearing to have disregarded everything Hunsecker had said. She picked up the telephone. "Elizabeth Waring."

"Waring." It wasn't a secretary. It was Hunsecker. Waring was aware that her door was opening and that her assistant, Geoffrey, was holding a hand-scrawled note, looking worried. She nodded to him and pointed at the door. He turned and went through it.

"Hello, Mr. Hunsecker. I'm sorry if I kept you waiting. I was on another call with the FBI in New York."

"So it's true."

"Late last night we received the news that Michael Delamina had been murdered. I realized that I had to try to head off the next murder."

"You did exactly as this killer asked—you started an FBI investigation of his enemy."

"I set up a surveillance to protect Tosca, not investigate him."

"You have a team watching him twenty-four hours a day. The difference is lost on me."

"It's a big one. The target is the killer, not the probable victim."

"And if the FBI just happened to overhear the victim planning a crime, or engaging in a conspiracy, they have orders not to arrest him?"

"No. I didn't think that was necessary."

"Your humanitarian surveillance just happens to put the FBI and the target of your last request in close proximity. I've already called off your request. The FBI goes off the case at six."

"Are you sure you need to call it off? They're already in place."

"The Justice Department of the United States can't be in the position of targeting a killer's enemies, even if he's a potential informant. It's a matter of personal and professional ethics."

"We have a practical disagreement about how best to prevent a murder. That doesn't mean my ethics are any worse than yours. I think it's wrong to let anyone be murdered. For me that supersedes my previous wish to investigate this victim. If you withdraw his protection, he'll be dead in a couple of days."

"If that happens, I'll be amazed."

"As soon as it does, I'll let you know."

"If it does happen in the next couple of days, you probably won't. That will fall during your two-day suspension. You're excused until Monday."

"I can't believe this."

"You'll probably get through this, if you don't say anything else. What will it be?"

She forced herself to say nothing. She hung up, and as she stared down at her big wooden desk, she felt her stomach sink. She was almost dizzy. She had never been suspended from any job before, or even come close. Passing through her mind were the humiliation of being overruled and embarrassed in front of an FBI agent, a pure anger at Hunsecker's rigid stupidity, and fear that she was about to lose her job. She felt like crying, but she knew that Hunsecker's confidants would be looking for that, and hers would be alarmed by it. She wanted to get out of here—had to, if she wanted to keep her job.

She packed the files she'd been reading into her briefcase, turned off the lights in her office, and walked out the door. "Geoff, I've been suspended for the rest of the week. Keep track of my calls, open my mail, and sort it in my in-box in priority order. We'll have a lot of catching up to do on Monday."