But in private Benario shone. He was an expert. One of the best torches in the business. Those in the know never called him peewee or midget to his face, because they knew they might wake up the next morning in a burning house.
He had learned his trade from Studs Logan, one of the most famous of all Detroit torches, before Logan became a victim of his own handiwork.
For a few years afterward, Benario had worked Logan’s territory, and in ten indictments he had been convicted only once, for setting fire to a warehouse for a client who needed the insurance money more than he needed his business. The boys hired Benario a crack lawyer out of Los Angeles, and in three months Benario was back on the streets, free on a technicality.
Eighteen months ago, Louie had burned down the home of a General Motors executive who had been putting the heat on a union-organized numbers racket. The executive was a fighter, and Louie had been advised by his friends to get out of Motown for a year or two until the smoke cleared.
Louie did just that, and had fallen instantly and deeply in love with New Orleans, whose mild winters and ultra-hot summers reminded him of a furnace. His kind of place.
He stopped for a moment, away from the railway traffic signals, adjusted the heavy pack on his right shoulder, and peered through the dense fog. He knew his objective was less than a block away. But he could see nothing except for the swirling mist, and after a bit he continued forward.
In his years Benario had set fire to no less than thirty warehouses, nineteen hotels, two nursing homes, a dozen or more private residences, and even a Chicago police precinct house for an irate out-of-town client. In those blazes, he had been responsible for at least ninety-five deaths and more than three hundred and fifty serious injuries, including a dozen or so firemen.
But Benario never thought of himself as a murderer. He was a torch, plain and simple; a man devoted to fire.
In the distance to the east, he heard a siren. He stiffened instinctively, a faint smile coming to his lips. There would be sirens after this job. Lots of sirens. The thought broadened his grin, and he chuckled out loud.
This would be his biggest job ever, made even more important by the sheer size of his target. It was the largest grain-elevator complex in the world, and brand new. Owned by the Cargill conglomerate, it had been put in service less than six months ago, to replace hundreds of antiquated elevators up and down the delta. It would burn beautifully, the little man had assured him. The hot yellow flames would reach hundreds of feet into the sky. People for miles around would taste the smoke. Newspaper headlines across the country would blare: GREATEST GRAIN DISASTER IN HISTORY. LARGEST FIRE IN THIS DECADE. THE WORK OF AN EXPERT ARSONIST.
Benario had to laugh out loud with the sheer magnificence of it all.
On top of all that, like frosting on a cake or the cherry atop a sundae, was the fact that Benario had finally come into his own as an internationally known torch. The little man who had hired him for this job was a foreigner. French or Jewish or a Polak or something. Not only was he foreign, he was a little man, not much taller than Benario. They saw eye to eye.
He laughed even louder at his little joke. Eye to eye, watching the flames that’d tower over the tallest man in the world.
“Eye to eye,” he sang a tuneless melody. “Eye to eye, watching the pretty flames. My pretty, my pretty, watching my pretty flames, eye to eye to eye.”
A series of massive structures loomed out of the darkness to the right, toward the waterfront, less than a hundred yards away. Benario stopped in his tracks, hiccoughing as he choked off his song.
He could see now the dim halos formed around the lights at the base of the grain elevator, and around the red lights at the top.
He took a few steps forward, over the rail, and then scrambled down into the ditch beside the tracks. There was activity over there this evening beyond the chainlink fence. Trucks were coming and going with their loads of grain. He could hear the dull, deep-throated mechanical noises of a grain ship tied up at the dock, although he was unable to pick out the ship’s lights from where he stood.
It was there, in front of him. Ready and waiting for his skills.
He climbed up out of the ditch, soaking his trousers to the knees in the wet grass, then crouched down at the base of the fence and fumbled inside his heavy pack for his large wirecutters. Within a couple of minutes he had cut a large hole in the fence and crawled through it. On the other side, he pulled the cut section back in place, so that nothing but a very close examination would reveal the hole.
Spittle was oozing from the corners of his mouth. He licked his lips frequently as he scrambled away from the fence, toward the edge of the blacktop driveway that surrounded the mammoth elevator complex.
Five days ago, the little man had supplied him with a complete set of working blueprints for the complex, along with totally self-destructive fuses and enough plastique to bring down ten such installations. Benario had worked with such materials only once before, up in Detroit, but he had read all the available literature and was certain it would be a piece of cake.
The problem, he had reasoned, would be to contain the initial explosion very low in the complex, in the conveyor system, where the explosive grain dust would be at the highest concentration. The explosion and fire would start, then, from the bottom and quickly work its way upward.
At the edge of the blacktop, Benario worked his way among the long rows of parked trucks, until he came to a grain-unloading bay that wasn’t in use.
He slipped inside through a service hatch that led directly down into the mixing and delivery conveyor system. There he began placing his explosives, attaching each package with loving care, setting the fuses for 8:00 A.M., when, the little man had assured him, the grain would be moving through the system and the dust would be at its maximum concentration in the air.
It was a little after 6:30 on the morning of June 28 when Laura Conley’s bedside telephone rang, the shrill noise bringing her instantly awake. She sat up with a start, the sheet falling away and exposing her bare breasts, looked down at Peter Rossiter still sleeping beside her, then reached across him and picked up the telephone on the second ring.
“Hello?” she said sleepily.
“This is Elizabeth Rossiter. I have to speak with my husband.”
Laura’s heart skipped a beat. She and Peter had been lovers for less than six months, and she had had no idea that his wife even suspected. Today he was supposed to be in Minneapolis, meeting with Cargill executives.
“Miss Conley?” his wife said. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Laura said. “I think you must have the wrong number.”
“Cut the bullshit, I know my husband is there. I telephoned Minneapolis and there is no such meeting. Which leaves only your place. Now put him on the phone.”
Peter was starting to wake up, and Laura began to panic. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about…” she started, but Elizabeth cut her off.
“Goddamn it, there’s trouble down at the elevator center. They need him immediately. If you don’t want him to talk to me, at least pass on that message.”
Laura slowly hung up the telephone. Peter sat up, his eyes still clouded with sleep.
“Who was it?” he asked.
Laura just stared at him for several seconds. It was over for them now. He would never leave his wife and children. His marriage might be ruined, but she would be the loser.