When that happened, the doctors and engineers and lawyers would remember that none of them had ever actually seen Paul Santorini, and certainly hadn’t handed him any money. About half would be of the opinion that the real estate agent had taken their money to Brazil. The other half would maintain their faith in him, which meant that Paul Santorini had quietly killed him, and could very easily do the same to them. In any case, none of them would go to the police to report that they had been cheated out of their loansharking profits by their Mafioso partner. But Santorini’s clean exit from the venture required that the real estate agent be expertly plucked out of existence, not left butchered somewhere by the likes of Santorini’s best soldier, whom he introduced as “Tony T,” then elongated it to Antonio Talarese. At this point, a boy of about twelve had wandered in to pick up some cardboard cartons and looked surprised to see the men in the back of his father’s store. He had stopped and looked at Tony T; then the store owner had rushed in, grinning and sweating, and jerked the boy out by the shoulder.
The job had been simple enough for the money. The realtor was in the habit of going out alone early on Sunday mornings to put up OPEN HOUSE signs at the places he was selling. It hadn’t taken much imagination to search the New Jersey newspapers for his listings and be at one of them before he arrived. It was winter, so it was still dark when he had come upon the man taking the signs out of the trunk of his car. He shot him and pushed him into the trunk, then pulled the keys out of the lock and drove him to a woods a few miles away, where he buried him. That was the part that he remembered best. He could still see and smell the thick layer of wet, leathery maple leaves on the ground. He’d had to push at least four inches of them aside before his shovel could break ground, and then he kept hitting tree roots. They were thin, like fingers, but so tough and rubbery that he’d had to push them aside and dig around them; then, when the hole was barely three feet deep, he backed into one of them and it had startled him. At that point he decided to dump the body in and cover it. When he’d finished pushing the leaves back over the dirt, it would have been difficult even for him to find the grave. Then he had left the car in the long-term lot at the Newark airport and taken a cab from the terminal like a passenger.
The man’s wife had reported his absence that night, but even she never came forward with a theory about what had happened to him. Either she hadn’t known about Santorini or she had decided her husband would have wanted her to live to collect his insurance.
Ackerman thought about Antonio Talarese. He was probably a little more substantial than he had been twelve years ago, but he would probably still be in the same part of town. With all the trials that had made the London newspapers in the past couple of years, plenty of vacancies would have opened up above him in the hierarchy. By now Tony T might even be what Santorini had been in the old days, which would mean that he would have some underlings of his own.
In the old days it would have been easier in another way too. There would have been somebody he knew who could supply him with a weapon at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night in New York. This time he couldn’t talk to anybody, and he couldn’t wait. If Mario Talarese was a relative of Tony T, a telephone call from England announcing his death would be coming soon.
As the cab crossed the Triborough Bridge, he spoke. “Don’t go down East River Drive. Take One-twenty-fifth.”
The driver said, “Are you sure? It’s not … real safe.…”
“I’ll give you an extra twenty.”
The cab coasted down the incline onto East 125th, and now he could see the distant glow of the tall buildings below Central Park. As the cab turned off the busy street to head south, he saw four young men standing under the shadow of a billboard high above them on a brick building. The building had boards nailed where windows used to be under the wrought-iron bars. He noticed that while three of them were talking to each other, the fourth never took his eyes off the cars that stopped for the red light on the corner.
There was no question what they were doing here. They were waiting for easy prey, the car that would come off the bridge with its radiator steaming or a tire flapping, or the woman alone who would stop for the light with her window open, her purse on the seat beside her and the radio turned up loud enough to cover the sound of the footsteps coming up behind her car. “I’ll get out here.”
The cab driver’s eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “You from around here?”
“No.”
“Then let me take you a little farther down. This is Harlem. In the Fifties there are a lot of good hotels. You don’t want to get out here.”
“No, thanks.” He handed the driver sixty dollars and climbed out. “Keep the change.” The driver didn’t speak. The buttons on the doors all came down automatically and the cab was already moving to catch the green light. The man had decided not to sit through another red and watch what he was sure would happen.
Ackerman glanced at the four young men beside the building. The watcher was moving his head from side to side rapidly, as he had seen one of the horses do at the post this morning at the racetrack. The life of a petty thief was mostly watching and loitering, and the thought that the waiting was over always seemed to make them twitch and flex and make unnecessary moves just to wake up their limbs.
The guns wouldn’t be in their clothes. If the police surprised them on a sweep, they wouldn’t want the ten-year sentence for carrying a firearm—or worse, to give a cop the excuse to open fire. The weapons would be in a trash can or behind a loose board over a window. He held the thieves in his peripheral vision as he moved up the street. It was a delicate matter to pique their interest enough to get them to reveal their hiding place, and then to induce them to reject him as prey. He knew the critical moment would be the instant when they thought he had stopped looking. Then at least one would make a move, if only to check the place where the weapons were.
He walked past their building and they held their places, but he could feel their eyes moving up and down his body. They would be looking for some sign that he was a cop acting as bait. If he was dangerous, it wasn’t because he could chase down four men half his age and handcuff them; it was because attacking him might bring five or six carloads of cops screeching in from all directions with riot guns and body armor. He sensed that they were making their decision. In a moment one of them would betray the hiding place.
“Hey, man!” came a voice. It disconcerted him. That wasn’t how it was done. The voice came again. “Want some crack? A little blow? Crank?”
He stopped and turned to look at them. What the hell were they doing? Of course it would be drugs these days. The watcher was the salesman. The salesman strutted out to the sidewalk, his head at a slight angle from his shoulder. He was skinny and black, with long legs in fitted jeans that ended in a pair of white high-topped sneakers with big tongues half-laced with red laces. On his left wrist he wore a Piaget watch with a band that looked as though it had been chiseled out of a two-pound gold nugget. He had misread the signs. These weren’t hit-and-run thieves; they were pharmacists.
He stood thinking as the salesman approached. He had been out of the country too long. What else didn’t he know? He glanced over the young man’s shoulder at his three companions. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness of their shadowy stand, he could discern that they were all black too. They all wore high-topped sneakers that looked as though they had been designed for players in the NBA, laced haphazardly with red laces. What was that all about—a sign to customers? A uniform? The cops would love that.