Locating the target had been a problem. For tax purposes, they said, Angel maintained no legal residence in the city, although he was always around. Fortunately, the lawyer who had commissioned Bentavagnia had a reporter friend who had made Angel his special study. The reporter said that Angel always showed up on Saturday afternoons at the Department of Public Works building, in the office of his wife’s uncle, where he received instructions about cash pickups and other things Bentavagnia didn’t need or want to know about. Bentavagnia had promised the reporter he wouldn’t reveal his knowledge of Angel’s pattern by making his move in the Public Works building itself, but would wait and follow him a little distance away.
By two o’clock Bentavagnia knew that the promise had been a mistake. The way Angel was mixing up his trail, he was evidently on one of his errands, and it was all Bentavagnia could do to keep from losing him in the savage midday traffic. When his target suddenly pulled over and parked illegally, Bentavagnia had to cruise past him a full block before he could do the same.
It was easier to follow a man on foot, of course, unless he started to run. Bentavagnia picked Angel out of the crowd and slowly began to narrow the block between them. No, Bentavagnia thought, sweating beneath the dirty city sun, we don’t want to run. Angel had something of Bentavagnia’s short, tubby build, which was encouraging, but he was a few years younger and more fit. Besides, this had to be done quietly and with respect.
Within a few minutes, however, Bentavagnia was once again regretting a good resolution. Angel kept taking fast, wide-scanning looks behind him, forcing Bentavagnia to keep to a casual pace. At this rate he would never catch up, and already Angel had crossed one of the invisible lines that bounded off the worst fringe of the city, an area Bentavagnia didn’t even like to drive through. Not that it was unfamiliar territory, exactly, with its burned-out buildings, the squatters hiding from view, and the wolfish kid-packs. Bentavagnia had been there before — in Italy in 1944 and in a dozen nightmares since. The hell with it, he thought, and began to stride more purposefully, heedless of how conspicuous this made him in the increasingly empty streets.
He was gaining on him when suddenly Angel began to run. Swearing, Bentavagnia followed suit. He was twenty paces behind his target when Angel ducked around the corner. It took less than five seconds for Bentavagnia to reach the spot and have a clear field of view. Only about three seconds, surely, no more than four. But Angel was gone.
Both the street Bentavagnia had come from and the street he faced were empty for blocks. There were no parked cars, not even much litter — just the water-sheen indicating that a street-cleaning vehicle had recently passed through and, over to one side, some tarpaulins and a MEN WORKING barricade, as though someone had been doing road or sewer repair work earlier in the day. He walked over to check, halfheartedly. Angel hadn’t had the time to cross the street, lift the tarp, and crawl under it — he’d only had a few seconds. There was no one under the tarp, no trench to hide in — no rational explanation at all.
The buildings at this end of the street were all condemned, their doors boarded up. Even the alleyway entries farther along were blocked off. Angel couldn’t have gone fifty feet from the corner — had he done so, he could have found no place to hide — yet Bentavagnia drifted down the block, impelled, despite the desire to stay near the last place he’d seen Angel, by the frantic feeling that he had to hurry, that Angel was getting away.
Hadn’t there been a sound, a sort of chime, a signal at the moment he’d entered this strangely empty world? Or had that been only the old hypertension, a ringing in the ears?
He was coming to the end of the block. He’d had enough. It was time to leave the place to the arsonists and wreckers. There were still a few storefronts with FOR RENT signs in the windows, but they would never be rented again. Dead end on a through street, Bentavagnia thought.
But what was this? The last storefront on the block looked almost clean. There was a poster in the window: the words TALBOT FOR MAYOR surmounted by a larger-than-life photograph of a prissy, schoolmasterish face. Syndicalist Fusion Party? There was no such group in the city, not on the ballot anyway. And wasn’t it kind of early to campaign for mayor? Yet what little of the shop he could see past the edges of the poster looked kept up, swept out, new.
The storefront door opened. A tall, swarthy man looked at Bentavagnia balefully. “You looking for something around here, buddy?” he asked.
Bentavagnia snatched at the chance. “Freddy Angel?” he said.
“Yeah, O.K., Mr. Angel,” the man said, stepping aside. “We know what you’re here for.” And Bentavagnia stepped in out of the sunlight.
A second guard was sitting in the front room, a shotgun across his knees, peering around the edges of the poster at the bright slivers of street. “Is it him?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said the first. “Tell the Judge Freddy Angel’s here. Right this way, Freddy. We gotta hurry. Your money’s waiting for you.”
They went down a narrow corridor and the swarthy man motioned for Bentavagnia to enter a small dark room at the end of it. The only furniture was a short wooden chair, the only light a flyblown green-glass globe on the ceiling. Bentavagnia sat in the jungly dimness, scared and exhilarated.
The moment the man at the door had mistaken him for Freddy Angel, he should have spoken up — he knew that. But it had seemed the easiest way to collar Angel, to wait at the place where he was expected. He could see himself blustering it out — “Hey, hold on a minute, buddy, I never said I was Freddy Angel!” — and then, they’d mentioned money.
Freddy Angel was a bagman for the Machine. He went to expensive nightclubs, expensive hotels, and every now and then to not-so-expensive places where people gave him briefcases full of fifty-dollar bills, which he took to other places, quickly, secretly, with no one following him. Bentavagnia’s pulse hammered at the thought of that money being handed over to him, no questions asked. The Machine’s money, sure, and that was scary — but they would never know who had taken it, and in hours he could be farther away than they would ever look.
Why not? What would he be leaving behind? The city he’d been born in, his children, the only job he’d ever succeeded at — everything, in short, that blighted his days and poisoned his nights. He was going to do it. He was going to be Freddy Angel and take the money. The only uncertainty lay in the dreamlikeness of it all. As though he’d walked through Angel, into his shoes.
“Well, and if it isn’t himself,” said a stage-Irish voice at the door. This had to be the man they’d called the Judge, Bentavagnia decided — a tall, paunchy man with a florid face and grey-streaked red hair. He smelled drunk; his expensive, conservative suit looked slightly disarrayed. “Freddy Angel, come to collect a widow’s mite from his long-suffering friends in Detroit.”
Bentavagnia smiled uneasily. “You know, I don’t got much time for this,” he said, “so if you’ll just hand over the money—”
“Ah, sure and you can spare me a moment, Mister Freddy,” the Judge said. The two guards had entered behind him, and Bentavagnia didn’t like to be sitting down while the three of them stood. His system had reacted badly to the change in temperature too, and the mustiness of the air. But when one of the underlings handed the Judge a slim briefcase, Bentavagnia’s spirits picked up. “You see, I’ve a message of sorts for your wife’s uncle. In an organization such as ours, it’s sometimes necessary to take the time for these little discussions, isn’t that right?”