9

After Willie dumped his wife he stood at the forward edge of the crowd, where he had a good view of everyone who moved in front of the building. He watched Hanly come out and go in again. Willie sensed that something was happening. They were setting something up, he was sure, because the task force was bunching up outside the building. They must be organizing to take Vito out. He almost jumped straight up when he spotted Charley Partanna on the far side, edging through the crowd to the west entrance of the building. He watched Charley go in, then he had a figure on it. He decided to wait around and see if they brought Vito out feetfirst. If they did, Charley had done the work. Willie grinned. He could now sink the hooks into Angelo for what he called Joey.

When Charley was inside, the stand-up TV reporters, fed by Gallagher, identified him as Detective-Sergeant George Fearons, who was going to try to persuade the suspect to give himself up. Fearons, they reported to an audience later rated at thirty-one percent nationally, was one of the new breed of psychologist cops. He was going in to face, entirely unarmed, an alleged killer, relying on his own knowledge of human motivation to protect himself and to get a hunted man to surrender. Either he would come out with his prisoner in handcuffs or the final assault would be made to bring Daspisa out by force. There was a short break for commercial messages.

Charley picked up the assault rifle from Davey Hanly inside the building, where Hanly was waiting with Sergeant Ueli Munger, the officer in charge of the task force. Munger had been demoted from the rank of captain recently for knocking down two superior officers following a nineteen-hour ordeal of getting a woman down from the high cables on the George Washington Bridge.

“You wanna go through a short course on the weapon?” Munger asked Charley. Charley shook his head. He was getting depressed. Twenty years of hanging around with Vito, and now he had to blow him away. He looked at the rifle and hefted it. It could blow anybody away.

“It’s a sweet piece of equipment,” Munger said. “It gives about ten rounds a second and each one travels 2,300 feet a second. The beauty part about these babies is that like if the bullet goes in at the shoulder it can come out in the thigh, so if you got ten of them going in every second God knows where they come out.”

“You got thirty bullets in the magazine, Charley,” Hanly said. “That oughta do it.”

Charley took the noisy elevator up to Vito’s floor. Riding up, he remembered an article he had read once that said there was only an imaginary connection between the past and the present. The article, written by a big scientist, had asked Charley directly how could there even be a present when it was always, instantaneously, becoming the past. Charley could look back and see all the great times he and Vito had, but, as the magazine article said, those two people didn’t exist anymore, they had existed only while those other things he remembered were actually happening—and only when they were happening. The friend of Vito’s he had been back in the past wasn’t the same Charley Partanna who was going to zotz Vito now. The Vito he would be doing the work on wouldn’t be the same Vito he had all the good times with. There were hundreds of Vitos and hundreds of Charleys all existing separately in time, strung out across their memory like beads; spaced out like separate frames of film on a continually running, irreversible reel. He hadn’t even met the Vito he was going to have to put away.

Charley didn’t flatten himself against the wall. He rang the doorbell of Vito’s apartment, admiring the nice, clean hallway, his kind of place.

“Davey?” Vito yelled from behind the door.

“It’s Charley.”

“Charley Partanna?”

“Who else?”

“Where’s Davey?”

“Angelo sent me. He talked to the don.”

“How come?”

“Eduardo had everything handled. He had it set so the state troopers were gonna take you out with a two-inch-thick armor plate over your head. The cops wouldn’ta been able to touch you. The mayor was gonna lose you for two years, then Eduardo woulda talked to the right judge.”

“So—what happened?”

“You blew it, Vito. Eduardo had it all set up for you but you hadda tell Davey you’d give them the Prizzi shit operation.”

“How could I blow it? I been right here.”

“You talked to Davey, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Who do you think Davey talked to when he went back to the street—his mother?”

“Ah, shit—I blew it.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m all wore out. I shouldn’ta whacked that cop with the car, but Teddy Egan had it coming. Hey, Charley?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on in and we’ll have a cuppa coffee.”

“Why not?”

“All I got is instant.”

“Instant is okay.”

“Hey—in case I forget it, will you tell them to give out my ring name like when I fought under it. Okay?”

“Absolutely.”

Vito checked the load and the safety on his gun. He held it at ready as he took the chain off and unlocked the three dead bolts. His face was sad. What the hell, he figured, he had to do it, it was Charley or himself. Vito flung open the door and fired. The shot went into the ceiling because Vito was flung backward so far and so fast by the force of the rounds that were piling into him and jerking him crazily like he was being pulled everyway by powered steel cables.

The assault rifle was on automatic. Charley had opened it up, holding the rifle waist-high. Vito was slammed back across the entrance hall to crash into the furniture on the far side of the living room. Charley went into the apartment and gave Vito one more burst until the magazine was empty. He said, “Vito?” but there was no answer.

He went back to the main floor. Hanly and Munger were waiting for him.

“From what it sounded like, he’ll go quietly now,” Hanly said.

“Yeah.”

“You gonna bring the TV in?” Munger asked Davey.

“That’s the name of the game, ain’t it?”

“Listen, Davey,” Charley said, “I hadda promise him that you guys would give out his name under his ring name he fought under, Dimples Tancredi.”

“Holy shit,” Munger said excitedly, “you mean that guy up there was Dimples Tancredi, the great Armory fighter?”

The task force, led by Sergeant Munger—who, the networks revealed, was a courageous Swiss who had been born in Schaffhausen, one of the relatively few in the Department—rushed into the apartment of the alleged killer, just ahead of the NBC camera crews, with guns blazing, subduing and killing the suspect instantly and delivering a terrific camera shot that one network used beginning eight months later in three separate cop series and miniseries. Munger was decorated for valor and eventually repromoted to the rank of captain although subsequently it appeared that that could have happened for reasons of mayoral politics. Almost all of the resolution of the thrilling stakeout was seen on television nationwide, repeated for the requisite three days, then bumped by a serial murderer who was terrorizing the nation’s capital, who in turn was bumped by the hijacking of the Orient Express by a fanatical Middle Eastern sect, all of it covered, day and night, by the oculus mundi and nineteen Canadian stations.