Andalusia was one of the narrow, cramped streets that ran parallel to Canyon Road, where he remembered that the galleries were. He had never felt an impulse to own paintings, and in the days when he had lived in the United States it would have been foolish, but he had walked down Canyon Road once, years ago, to pass the time, and he remembered the neighborhood. He judged from the map that he would have to leave the car blocks away and find Peter Mantino on foot.
When the waitress came to stand beside him and said, “Ready?” he answered, “Huevos rancheros,” because he hadn’t had time to read the menu, and it was the only thing he remembered that places like this would have. When she left, he studied the map again, letting it suggest the way things would happen. If things were as they should have been, a man like Peter Mantino would put some obstacles between himself and the world. But six or seven years ago, Mantino had been convicted of a bunch of charges that Wolf couldn’t even remember now, all of the bribery-and-suborning variety. Now he was on parole, supposedly living in voluntary seclusion hundreds of miles from the centers of power in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. All of this had been in the newspapers years ago, and even the reporters clearly hadn’t believed a word of it. But the important part was true: if he was on parole, he couldn’t have the sort of protection he was about to begin needing.
Wolf still had not gotten over the shock of seeing the shooter at the airport, but he had never for a second doubted what had happened. The truth was, there was no way even Carl Bala could send a specialist to kill somebody in the Los Angeles airport. The airport lay unambiguously in the center of Peter Mantino’s empire, and any consequences would fall exclusively on his head: the text of every letter to the editor would mention his name, the resulting crackdown would cut into his profits and the token arrests would make his people cautious and unproductive. He had to have been the one who made the decision, and the man must belong to him.
Mantino had started out running a crew for Balacontano in New York in the sixties, and then gotten to run the family’s interests in the West, supposedly as a reward for faithful service. At the time, people had said there was more to it than that. They said Mantino had begun to attract a lot of loyalty in the family, and Balacontano had just wanted him out there and away from the soldiers. The world was full of little men who knew what big men were really thinking.
It didn’t matter why Mantino had reacted so quickly. Maybe he was still loyal to the Balacontano family, and maybe he was making a safe, easy bid for respect while the old man was in prison and Talarese was out of the way. The only thing that was certain was that Mantino was taking enough of an interest to send shooters into public places. That changed Wolf’s problem into figuring out how Wolf was going to stay alive.
He needed to get out of the country, but nobody was going to let him step onto a plane to London without a passport. He knew of only one place where he might be able to get one after all these years, and that was in Buffalo, over fifteen hundred miles away. It would take time to get there, and time to make the contact, and time for the passport. And every second that passed, he was heating up. He needed to buy some time.
The only thing that gave him hope was that word of his return couldn’t have traveled faster than an airplane unless it was passed by telephone from somebody in New York to Mantino. And Mantino wouldn’t have told a lot of people in his organization that he was going to have somebody killed. That was the sort of thing nobody talked about until after it was accomplished. And it hadn’t been accomplished. The shooter had gotten himself busted in the airport. Wolf had to take advantage of that mistake. The only way was to do the unexpected: Mantino takes a swat at a fly, and the fly goes right up his nose.
Twice in his life he had seen what happened when a capo unexpectedly died. People reacted in different ways. A few would check in at out-of-town hotels and start making phone calls. But a lot of them would stay home and wait for somebody to get in touch with them. Usually it would be some acquaintance—a guy they had been introduced to at the races, or somebody’s cousin they had met at a wedding. The guy would say, “Peter’s dead. You have a problem with that?” or just, “What are you going to do now? If you want to go with us, I can talk to some people.” But until they heard from somebody, they were going to be watching a lot of television with the blinds drawn. Sometimes nobody got in touch, and the trouble just got worse. There had even been one famous time when a boss died, and forty of his friends across the country died the same day. That was what they would be afraid of—not that somebody Carlo Balacontano had put a contract on ten years ago had come for Peter Mantino.
The low brown stucco wall around the yard would present no problem unless it had some electronic component that Wolf couldn’t see from the street. He couldn’t see or hear a dog, and the sign on the gate that said NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE was comforting. It made it unlikely that Mantino had anything more sophisticated than a conventional alarm system that would summon untrained night watchmen. The house was a single-story adobe-colored building. Like all the others in this part of town, it was required by the building code to look as though the Spaniards had never left, although he suspected that any Spaniards that had made it this far north and east must have been a forlorn, raggedy-assed bunch.
He maintained an even, leisurely tourist’s pace, and studied all the houses on the street with equal attention. At the corner he turned, walked to the street behind Andalusia and examined the houses there. There appeared to be nothing of any consequence to protect any of them, but the situation was still troublesome. There were no cars parked on the narrow one-way street, and he had passed only a few pedestrians during his walk, none of them within blocks of Andalusia. Even if he could get in, getting out would be difficult.
It was dark now, and the cold air was still and crisp. The patches of dirty snow that had melted in the sunlight were now furrows and tumuli of iron-hard ice, and Wolf watched for them so that he could step around them on the sidewalk. In his left hand he carried a paper sack from the store where he had bought the gloves and channel-lock pliers a few hours ago, but now it also contained the Ruger .38 and its silencer. If necessary, he could drop the bag surreptitiously, but for anyone who might see him, the bag was an indicator that he had gone out on foot for a purpose and was on his way home.
He moved along the storefronts on Galisteo Street, keeping under the roof and away from the thick pillars, where he could remain only a shadow. Santa Fe was still a sunlit town for most of the year, even now. The inhabitants were out and in evidence when the bright sunlight warmed the ground, reaching it unimpeded by the extra mile of clouds, smog and dust that covered other cities, and without being blocked anywhere by tall buildings. But when the sun set, they disappeared behind the stone and clay walls, the oldest ones a yard thick. Even the restaurants that catered to the small, quiet night trade were hidden in mazes of courtyards and passageways.
The office of North American Watch was even more difficult to find. It had an entrance to the street, but that had been closed for hours. Behind the dusty Venetian blinds he could see a thin slice of the light from the dispatcher’s desk. He walked around the building to look for the cars. These people were in the peace-of-mind business. They provided louts to drive by every four hours with flashlights, and since this was a state where anyone could wear a gun in a holster unless the weight of it pulled down his pants, they were armed louts. He didn’t know the current procedures, but if they hadn’t changed radically, on a cold night when there were few people on the streets, the management would save a few dollars by keeping some cars in the lot. If a call came in or an alarm lit up the board, they would call the police and then send one of the men in the office on a slow stroll to a car so that he would arrive about the time the cops were composing their theft reports.