Ackerman turned and crossed the street two blocks down. The only way to approach the restaurant without letting anyone get behind him was to enter through the loading dock. Eddie had taught him to clear his mind and spend a few minutes in calm, dispassionate meditation before he committed himself. “You look, you wait, you think. Then, if it’s doable, you think again. Do you know how you’re going to get out if your first plan gets blown?”
Eddie would have taken him past the restaurant and let him look at it. “Once you’re in, you’re like an egg in a frying pan. You got two seconds to get in, see him and pop him. You got three seconds to get across the floor while they’re wondering if you want them next. You got maybe a second to get out the door. You stand still more than a second at any step, you heat up and fry.”
But this wasn’t Eddie’s kind of job. Eddie would not have understood why he was here. Eddie’s philosophy was, above all, cautious. There were only smart and stupid; Eddie had never understood the word audacity. When he had heard the word applied to Napoleon on television, he had thought about it for a moment and then said it meant pressing your luck. Eddie would have told him he was a fool to come back to New York, but he’d had no choice. He had returned only because there was no practical way for him to stay alive but this. He had to kill the man who possessed the secret knowledge that he had been in England.
If Antonio Talarese had already told the others, they would have insisted on sending someone more formidable than the three hastily armed leg breakers he had seen at Brighton. Obviously Talarese had decided that the chance of a sudden coup was worth the risk. Ackerman still had a hope that he had arrived in New York before the news that Mario Talarese was dead.
As he moved down the narrow alley into the parking lot, he could see that he was much later than he had thought. The telephone call from England had already come. A hearse was parked behind the store, probably waiting to meet the body at the airport. He stood still and looked at it, but there was no sign of the driver. The funeral home must be owned by one of Antonio Talarese’s friends. The driver would be a relative of the owner, a volunteer who had been invited inside with the others for a glass of grappa or anisette to help pass the time while they waited for the plane.
He was all the way back in the old life now, feeling his heart trying to beat stronger, harder, but finding he was still able to keep it slow. Eddie had taught him about noises by making him watch the cat in the butcher shop. If the cat made a sound, it would wait minutes before it moved again. The boy had learned that he could do the same. If his foot dislodged a stone or a board creaked, he rested and waited. In the early days when he had first worked alone, he had sometimes counted to an arbitrary number before moving again. It didn’t matter what the number was, so long as he had waited beyond a human sense of time before he made another noise. Now, even after ten years of inactivity, he was still too good at it to have to think about it. He moved along the side of the building to the loading dock, rolled onto it, waited and listened.
He could hear low voices inside the building. They were coming from the back of the restaurant. He could see them in his imagination, sitting in the kitchen.
“Eat?” said a man’s voice that he placed low and near the wall. “How am I supposed to eat? It’s almost two o’clock in the morning, and I feel like this is my fault.”
“Shhh. You’ll give yourself agita.” The woman was standing up, farther away.
“Nobody said it was your fault.” This one was standing too; another man, and he was moving, probably pacing. “Please, Tony. Eat something. You’ve got to eat.”
Ackerman used the aimless ritual of the conversation to crawl to the door. This was the entrance he had used when he had met Tony T. He pulled on the steel door, but it had an unbudging solidity that told him it was locked and staked down with a dead bolt in the floor. He would have to get in another way. As he moved closer to the kitchen door he could smell something cooking. It was the burning fat of meat mixed with something spicy that burned his nose and made him hungry. He didn’t allow himself to smell it for long because it belonged in the category of irrelevant sensory distractions. It was other people’s food, just part of what pertained to them, like their talk and clothes and names.
He stood in the darkness for a moment and tensed the muscles in his legs, feet, toes and then arms. He took a couple of deep breaths and let his heart rate speed up and the moment of dizziness turn into tension. He took the little pistol out of his coat pocket and flipped off the safety, then opened the door and slipped inside the kitchen, looking around him.
He stared into the eyes of a thin, dark woman in a black dress with a string of pearls around her neck, incongruously wearing a pair of huge, quilted oven mitts that looked like flippers. The woman froze, speechless, as he crouched and moved sideways behind the man seated at the stainless-steel table.
The man at the table saw her, twisted in his chair to see what she was looking at and scowled. In the last decade the face had gotten coarser and thicker, and the wavy black hair now had a few wiry gray strands, but it was unquestionably Tony Talarese. “What?” The mouth was thin and wide, and the pointed chin stuck out in annoyance until the eyes focused on the face that was too close. “You? Why you?”
It seemed an odd question, but Ackerman had no time now to wonder about it. He thought of Eddie’s egg in the frying pan as he placed the gun against Talarese’s temple and fired, then moved, not back toward the door but forward, sidestepping the woman in black, who was running to the body slumped forward on the table, flapping her arms to get rid of the oven mitts like a startled bird trying to take flight.
Nobody else in the kitchen moved as the woman flung herself on the dead man’s back. Their eyes fluttered in their heads, not knowing where to look as he stepped past them: a middle-aged man in a dark suit and an apron, two girls in their twenties, one black-haired and the other blond, but like sisters, wearing short tight black dresses with a lot of stiff lace and explosions of chiffon at the hems as though they had just come from a nightclub. As he reached the swinging door to the dining room, two other young women who had the flat shoes and big forearms of waitresses rushed in past him, one carrying a fire extinguisher upside down. He was prepared for the screams, but the screams didn’t come from them. They came from the woman clutching the dead man to her. He slipped out the door to the dining room.
Inside the kitchen, the woman cried, “Tony!” There was a short pause, and then, “What’s this?” The others flocked to her, trying to pull her away, but she didn’t budge. She tapped on the dead man’s back, and mere was an audible electronic click. “A wire! The son of a bitch is wearing a wire!”
The woman tore at Antonio Talarese’s back. The kitchen had turned into this small dark woman’s personal madhouse, and confronted by the spectacle, the others all seemed to forget about the killer. The woman clawed Talarese’s shirt up out of his belt to his shoulders, so that everyone could see that Tony T did have something taped to the small of his back. The woman squawked again, “See? I never would have believed my husband—” The grieving widow turned to the man in the apron. “Are these things always turned on?”
“What?” The stunned man in the apron looked as though he had been shot too. “What?”
“You know. Can they hear … at night? I’m his wife. You know what I’m asking.”
The man seemed to decipher the words with great difficulty, groping toward the idea but not quite believing that anybody could be asking what he thought she was. When he arrived at it, he reacted with contempt. “For Christ’s sake, Lucille! Who fucks with his coat on?”