“These specialists I’m talking about are very hard to deal with. A movie star does it for the money, sure, but he likes the applause too—the glamour, the admiration. Not these people. They honestly and sincerely don’t give a shit what you think, whether you like them or hate them; if people flock around them or avoid them, it’s all the same. A friend of mine once told me it was because their egos were so big that they didn’t think anybody else was even real. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s not out of the question. If you hear about some piece of ass who decides she’s a great actress and throws tantrums at the director, people say she’s impossible. You want to see impossible? Try sitting across a table from a guy who wouldn’t notice it if he had to tear your heart out of your chest on the way out, because he’s done it a hundred times before and he’s so good at it he can do it without having to wash his hands. Well, that was the kind of man Harry Orloff hired to delay the Senate hearings: one of the fifteen or twenty serious specialists. After that, when I said I wanted everything to be as though the whole Fieldston fiasco never happened, I was talking in general terms, and I was misunderstood.”
“What did they do?”
Balacontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out on the Las Vegas Strip and blow his head off.”
“I take it this was without your knowledge.”
“Damned right. They only had it half figured out. They knew he could be terrible trouble and had to be out of the picture as soon as possible. They also knew that nobody strolls up to a professional killer and says, ‘Sorry, pal. It was all a mistake. The man who hired you had no right, so we’re not going to pay you.’ But what didn’t occur to them is that there’s a reason why these characters keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. I’m not saying my people should have known what the reason was, because I sure don’t. I’m saying they should have known that there was a reason, and accepted it, and given the son of a bitch his lousy two hundred thousand and prayed to God they never saw him again. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred-and-first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”
Elizabeth could see the frustration and anger growing in the old man as the story began to move closer to his own defeat. What he didn’t know was that it was hers too, seen from the other side as though through one-way glass. “What happened?”
Carl Bala smiled a sad little half-smile, and snorted as he thought about it. “You probably wonder why I can tell you all this, don’t you?”
“The question did occur to me,” Elizabeth conceded.
“Because they’re dead. Harry Orloff, all of the people I’m talking about. He killed six or eight people that night. I think he didn’t get Orloff until the next morning.” Carlo felt a little twinge at the mention of Orloff because he had ordered his death personally, but it was the same thing. He wouldn’t have had to if it hadn’t been for the Butcher’s Boy, by that time running amok: a man who had shown that he could and would do anything, who had no allegiance to anybody, no discernible fear and nothing to protect. Balacontano had simply reasoned that if Orloff were gone, the hired killer might not be able to figure out who he had been working for. That had turned out to be his third mistake. “But he didn’t stop there. He went across town to Castiglione’s house.”
“I thought the Castigliones were a Chicago family?”
Balacontano looked at her, distracted, then seemed to collect himself. He spoke patiently. “This is old Paolo I’m talking about. He was retired. Don’t get me wrong, though; Castiglione was still a very important man. In the old days he used to run Chicago. I don’t know how old he was ten years ago, but he had to be in his late eighties. He lived in a big brick house at the edge of Las Vegas because it was supposed to be good for his emphysema. Vegas was under a truce. All the families had business there, and anybody could go there. Castiglione was one of the old ones—strong, didn’t know what pity was. When he retired, he had generations of enemies. You should have seen the place he had there. From the street all you could see was a big wall. When you got through the gate it looked like the Maginot line. There were floodlights and windows like slits in a pillbox. I wouldn’t be able to swear he didn’t have the place booby-trapped too. Somebody new bought it a few years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someday they flipped a switch in the den and half the lawn blew up.
“Anyway, it’s late at night, and this character has just finished turning my friends’ little ambush into what looked like a busy day on the Eastern front. But he doesn’t go away. Instead he takes a little drive over to Castiglione’s. The rest of it nobody knows much about, because everybody there is, as usual, dead. This includes old Castiglione, his four bodyguards and—get this—a special agent of the FBI who just happened to be there because his job was to sit in a car down the street and take pictures of everybody who came to the old man’s house.
“So when I wake up the next morning, not only is Senator Claremont still dead, but so are five or six men who worked for me, and the lawyer who set up some corporations for me and who hid Arthur Fieldston so he couldn’t accept a subpoena. So I’ve got millions of dollars in accounts that only Arthur Fieldston can sign on, and no living people on the spot to find him, and my little tax problem has turned into a multiple-murder case involving a federal officer. Then around noon things got ugly. I didn’t get any phone calls; I got visitors. All day and most of the night, lots of very important men pulled into my driveway and came into my parlor and sat in my chairs and asked me what the hell I was doing breaking a truce that had kept Las Vegas open for forty years. Some of them thought I’d killed Castiglione, some of them didn’t know what to think, but all of them knew that when the sun came up in Vegas there were about a dozen corpses lying around out there, and that maybe half of them belonged to me and the others were Castiglione’s.” Balacontano seemed to be out of breath, but he added quickly, “Except for the federal cop, who was going to attract such an army of federal undercover types that even the pay phones would be tapped for the next hundred years.”
“Why did he go to Castiglione’s? Did he think Orloff was working for Castiglione?”
“Hell, no,” said Balacontano. “He did it because he knew it was going to create confusion. And it worked. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he had any idea who those guys were working for. But he was sure that as soon as the newspapers printed their names, there’d be people a whole lot scarier than he was who would know. The thing that scared me wasn’t who showed up at my house; it was who didn’t. I spent the next few days kissing powerful asses because I was going to need them on my side if things blew up. Even after I did, it was a near thing.”
Elizabeth prompted him. “What did you do about the killer?”
Balacontano studied the little woman who sat across from him and had a thought, but then dismissed it. She was a bureaucrat. “I did what anybody would do. I hunted him with everything I had.”