Invasion of Privacy

DiRienzi’s in the Witness Protection Program.”
    “Yeah, that’s my guess. I’m thinking the feds sent the bookkeeper east, as far from fucking Milwaukee as they could. They dye his hair, change his nose, and put him some place you happen to find him.”
    “But what about the two guys who came to see me?”
    “Not ours, like I told you. This friend, the coordinator— who recognized DiRienzi from the photo?—he thinks they must be freelancers, maybe something to do with the property management people.”
    I filed that as Zuppone took the exit for the Callahan Tunnel. “So why are we going to the airport?”
    Zuppone rolled the toothpick. “Usually, one of our people rats somebody out and goes underground, we catch up to him pretty quick. He doesn’t know how to live without the old neighborhood, the family—his relatives, I mean. He’s gotta stay in touch, telephone, postcard, that kind of shit. Sooner or later he fucks up, and somebody figures out where he is, and that’s the ball game.”
    “Primo, I’m—”
    “Or, the rat goes into the Witness Protection thing there, but he can’t break his other habits, you know? The guy’s got a thing for the ponies, he goes to the racetrack. Somebody spots him, thinks he looks familiar from somewhere, and after a while remembers where. Or maybe the guy likes cards, so he goes to a casino, though I gotta tell you, with all the Indians opening up on their reservations and the states having all these boat games, it’s getting pretty fucking hard to cover them all with enough soldiers, you’re gonna be sure to spot somebody, he shows up.”
    “Primo.”
    Another glance over as Zuppone merged into the traffic entering the tunnel. “What?”
    “I’m not setting this DiRienzi up for a hit.”
    “That’s something else we gotta talk about.”
    “We just did.”
    “I mean we gotta talk about it with some other people.”
    “Primo, I’m also not going to Milwaukee .”
    “You don’t have to.” Zuppone took a breath. “ Milwaukee is coming to us.”
    The traffic in front of the Lincoln made Primo stand on his brakes, and through the windshield I noticed again how being stopped in the tunnel could remind you of lying in a big, beige coffin, lid closed.

    “So, you ever been there, Cuddy?”
    “Where?”
    “Where? Milwaukee where.”
    “Not that comes to mind.”
    We were waiting in the arrival lounge of the Northwest Airlines terminal, the only people around except for a weary gate agent. Before parking the car, Primo had asked me if I was really carrying, and I said no. Then he drew a Beretta semiautomatic from a shoulder holster and slid it under the driver’s seat.
    In the terminal, Zuppone sweet-talked the security people into letting us meet our party at the gate, even though we didn’t have any tickets ourselves. In the ten minutes we’d been sitting in the black-and-chrome chairs near a bank of telephones, he’d gotten up to check the video monitor three times.
    Now Primo stretched some, rocking his heels on the purplish carpet, trying to relax. “I was out there just the once I told you about, but it was enough.”
    To help pass the time, I said, “How come?”
    “Well, first off, Mr. Ianella sends some of his associates to pick us up in Chicago, and we drive north through some of the worst fucking traffic I ever seen. You think the Southeast Expressway is bad? I’m talking eight, ten lanes across, jammed in the middle of the fucking day. Then maybe eighty, ninety miles later, you get up to Milwaukee itself. And the city’s clean as a fucking whistle, only there’s this smell.”
    “Smell?”
    “Yeah. I can’t understand it. The air looks clean—the streets, you could fucking eat off—but there’s this smell. Guy told me later it was probably one of the breweries, the wind was right.”
    “I’ve heard they like their beer.”
    “You kidding? We’re out to dinner with these people, they take us to the one Italian restaurant they say can really do the food justice, and it’s just, like, mediocre. Mediocre at best. Then, instead of wine, they order beer with it. I mean, it was fucking disgusting, they’re drinking beer with pasta. You give them a bottle of wine, I think they would’ve poured it on the fucking salad.”
    I laughed. Zuppone did too, a little looser now.
    “And the hotel, Cuddy. I forget the name of the place, but you should have seen it. Usually when we’re out of town, we stay with some of the people