But Baldwin’s mood had brightened considerably since then. Young Mackie T. had spoken without asking for the numbers. B. Baldwin was going to be his own man again, a man with a debt of eight thousand pounds that was about to vanish.
Baldwin kept his hand in his coat pocket as he walked, running his fingers along the big sailor’s clasp knife that he carried there. He had bought it years ago in a pawnshop in Southampton and had it sharpened like a razor, and then spent hours taking the tarnish off the blade with jeweler’s rouge. It shone like a sliver of mirror now. A man who used his knife would have tried to darken the blade, but Baldwin didn’t worry about an opponent seeing the sudden reflection in his hand. He didn’t use his knife. He would just sit facing a man across a table and open it to clean his nails or idly scrape the dirt off the sole of his shoe. He would watch the man’s face, and try to catch a bit of sunlight on the blade so that a flash of the reflection would hit his eye. That sort of thing worked with the small shopkeepers and restaurant help who made up his usual clientele.
Baldwin had once thought of himself as a man ready for anything, but time and a few blows with heavy objects had made him calm and helped him to find his natural niche in the hierarchy of the universe. He was a predator, but too small to take in everything he wanted in one bite. Time gave a man’s luck a chance to kick in.
He was beginning to wonder if Mackie and the little ferret had simply done their work behind the shops and run off. It wouldn’t do for B. Baldwin to be found standing here not fifty yards away with a razor-sharp sailor’s knife in his pocket, not with his previous life history. The police would see him as a gift from heaven, and he suspected they wouldn’t be above giving his knife a little dip in the gore to make sure the gift wasn’t taken away.
He sauntered by the first passageway, then sidestepped into it without missing a step. He moved quietly down the space between the buildings toward the light, feeling a little disappointed in young Mack Talarese. Taking off and leaving a man on the scene was something that just wasn’t done. It was probably his own fault for involving himself with foreigners who didn’t know any better, but it was going to be the last time, he swore. Unless it was Packies, who were for all practical purposes Englishmen with black faces.
B. Baldwin would just take a quick peek to be sure the bodies were there, then go back to work. When he reached the end of the passage he heard a sound. He knitted his brows and held his place, listening. It wasn’t loud enough for a struggle, just a single footfall somewhere in the courtyard behind the shops. Baldwin took his knife out of his pocket and opened it. Could they have walked right past the victim and his woman? Could they still be hiding in the shadows between the next two shops? Well, if, when he stepped into the light, Mackie and the little rat terrier were busy going through the dead woman’s purse and taking the diamond studs out of her ears, he would lose nothing by having the great gleaming knife in his hand. It would make them feel he had been one of them, in on it from the beginning and still ready at the end.
Baldwin crouched low and leaped out of the passageway, his eyes taking in the scene at once. There was the man, kneeling over Mack Talarese’s bloody corpse where it lay on the ground. His hand was in the coat pocket. The man looked up at Baldwin and his face brought Baldwin very bad news; it showed no fear or anger, and, worst of all, no surprise. The eyes weren’t looking at him to size him up as an opponent in a knife fight. They were aiming. The man’s hand was on its way up from Mackie Talarese’s chest, and there was Mack’s little black pistol in it. B. Baldwin noted this with displeasure, but his mind troubled him no longer, because by then the bullet was already bursting through the back of his skull, bringing with it bone fragments, blood and even a tiny bit of the brain tissue that might have cared.
The shot was too much for Margaret. She sprang out into the sunlight in time to see Michael pressing the gun into the hand of the dead man on the ground. The sound had been loud in the passageway, and it still rang in her ears. It seemed to propel her forward, as though it were still sounding behind her.
Michael stood up and took her arm, not slowing her momentum at all, just guiding her in the direction she wanted to go. She was barely aware of him now. She was only thinking about putting space between herself and what lay back there. She wanted to run and he let her, the cloudy sense of the design of the city she carried in her memory taking her across the courtyard to the next passage between two houses, and along a quiet lane away from the ocean and toward the Royal Pavilion. Then he stopped her. “Do you know where the train station is?” She nodded. “Go there.”
In Alexandria, Virginia, Elizabeth Waring Hart stirred in her sleep and opened her eyes. She waited for the whisper to come out of the darkness again. She lifted her head a little from her pillow so that she could hear with both ears, and stared into the shadows near the door for a shape that she hoped wouldn’t remind her of a man. Her muscles were rigid, held in tension more to keep her from moving than because she had any way of fighting or anyplace to run to in her closed second-floor bedroom.
Then she realized that she had already given a name to the voice she had heard, and the name made it impossible that there was a voice. It was Dominic Palermo, and he had been dead for ten years. She collapsed back on the pillow and let him come back, and the room in the Las Vegas hotel came back with him.
When she had awakened that night it was dark, but she’d had the disconcerting feeling that she was already late for something. It was a feeling of urgency: something had begun and she was still in bed. It was then that she had heard the knock on the door, and knew that it had been going on for some time. She turned on the light, but it hadn’t helped, and she had put on her bathrobe and slipped the standard-issue .38 police special into its pocket, but that hadn’t helped either, because she had been a novice in those days, and the Justice Department had hired and trained her to analyze information that might result in a trial, not to shoot people.
But she had opened the door, thinking somehow with sleepy logic that if people were banging on her door at four-thirty in the morning, it had to be urgent, and nobody she didn’t know who had urgent business would bring it to her.
And there he was, standing in the hallway, and that was when she had heard the whisper. He had said, “You’re Elizabeth Waring,” and then, “Please, can I come in?” This was the sound that haunted her now. It was the saddest sound in the whole world, a man saying, “I’m dying out here. Let me in.”
Now the rest of him came back too: the way he looked, his dark hair beginning to turn gray, the wide shoulders made less menacing by the big belly, the big, sad brown eyes protesting that he didn’t deserve this. “For Christ’s sake, look at me,” he had said. “I weigh two-thirty and I’m five-eight. I’m over fifty years old. For the last twenty years I’ve cleared over two hundred thousand a year. Do I look like somebody who takes on wet jobs? Hell, they hired somebody to do that. A specialist.”
Even then, Elizabeth had instinctively understood that what he had told her was immensely important, already more important than anything else about Dominic Palermo. The specialist was the one the Justice Department wanted, the one who would know things. She tried to prompt Palermo. “But we don’t know what to do about a professional like that. Look at all the assassinations. We can’t protect you from that kind of killer unless we know who he is, or at least what to look for.”