Everything he knew about his early life he had heard from Eddie Mastrewski. He could practically hear him talking now as he drove through the night fifty years later. “Your parents just showed up in Pittsburgh, nobody knew from where. They were new and nobody knew much about them. They were in their mid-twenties, maybe twenty-three and twenty-four. This neighborhood—the Flats—was the way it is now, a nice place to live but not fancy. The only place anybody wore a necktie was to church or their funeral. Things looked the same as now—one-family to four-family houses. Your parents rented an upstairs apartment in a big house. They already had you, so they showed up with a lot of toys and books and kid-size furniture and stuff. They also had a bunch of books for grown-ups, but I don’t know what kind.
“Most of the businesses were already here. The two grocery stores, the three barber shops—Mel’s, the Barbery Coast, and the Hair House—and the four or five women’s salons. There were already the two regular pharmacies, but the chain drugstore hadn’t come in yet. Vincent the tailor has been there since the last ice age, and the same with the Heaven-Scent cleaners and Lana’s Sewing Shop. The liquor stores, the pool hall, Dan’s Shoe Repair, and the pawnshop were left over from when I was a kid. The churches were all around since the 1820s, I think—Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and a few Protestant denominations. I started my butcher shop the year after I got out of the army.
“Your parents never told anybody much, not because they were the kind of people who kept secrets. They just hadn’t been in town long enough to have many conversations before they were killed in the car wreck. In those days I was always in the shop working during the day, and they weren’t customers, so I never actually saw them.”
Other short conversations had taken place at other times. He remembered Eddie saying, “Even the landlady didn’t know much. She didn’t have much to say, except that she thought they might be students because of the books and the fact that they lived a quiet life—no late nights, no boozing—but you could have said that about a lot of people.”
Another time Eddie said, “You were kind of a challenge for the neighborhood. You were about three years old, or a little younger. The cops who came to investigate told somebody that you would probably have to be turned over to the county since they hadn’t located any relatives.”
“The county?” He remembered that he couldn’t imagine what a county would do with him, or with anybody.
“It probably wouldn’t have been so bad,” Eddie said. “What they usually did was place a kid with a foster family, who would take care of him until some other family adopted him.”
“How come they didn’t do it to me?”
“We kind of headed it off. They called a neighborhood meeting one night at Sidderly’s restaurant. We—the grown-ups who sort of owned and operated the neighborhood—talked about it.”
“Who was that?”
“There were three hairdressers, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidderly, since they were there anyway, and the owners of the two pharmacies, the managers who ran the grocery stores, a couple of teachers, some PTA mothers, a couple of ministers, a doctor named Birken who’s since died, and I don’t remember who else. None of us felt we wanted to just hand you to the cops, so we decided to find a way to handle your situation ourselves. After a lot of talk, one of the others said, ‘Does anybody have a suggestion?’
“I’ve always hated long meetings, so I got up and said, ‘You all know me, Eddie the Butcher. I haven’t raised any kids, but I have a good business, a big house, and I can give him a good room, clean clothes, healthy food, and reasonable encouragement. I can also teach him a trade, if he turns out to be up to learning it.’ People talked about it among themselves, and they decided to take me up on it.” He added, “I want you to know I’ve never regretted it. Not for a second.”
Now, looking back on it, Michael Schaeffer had to admit that Eddie had more than lived up to his promise. He had taught him how to cut meat; weigh and wrap the cuts; make change for customers; run a spotlessly clean, sterile shop; pay suppliers, bills, and taxes; and keep up appearances. Eddie had also taught the boy his other profession, the one that the other shopkeepers and businessmen and their families never knew about.
He remembered being about ten when Eddie had begun teaching him that other profession—how to see the best way into a house, how to follow people. They would walk along, and Eddie would deliver muttered observations: “That guy up there? He’s following that woman a hundred feet ahead of him. He’s going too fast. She’s about to go by a bunch of women’s stores, and she’ll slow down to look. Even if she doesn’t go in, she’ll pretend to look at the clothes, but really check her own reflection to see if she looks good. Since she does, she’ll look longer. He should be able to see what’s ahead as well as you and I can, but his brain is in neutral. He’ll come right up on her, close enough for her to feel him. Then he won’t want to pass, so he’ll stop and light a cigarette or something. That will make him stand out even more and spook her.”
“Why is he following her?”
Eddie shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s a cop. Maybe she’s cheating on him or a friend of his. Maybe he’s nuts.”
It seemed odd now that some of the biggest decisions in Schaeffer’s life were ones he hadn’t even made. They had just seemed to be the conditions for keeping life inside him, made before his mind began fitting sights, sounds, and thoughts into memory.
4
Schaeffer fought the forces of physics to keep the Bentley moving as fast as he could without hurtling off into a field or hitting something along the road. He hated that the British government kept adding new CCTV cameras from one end of the country to the other. He could be completely successful tonight, and there might be a video shot from the top of a pole in some out-of-the way-village, and there he would be, driving this opulent death wagon down the road.
He could only comfort himself with the articles he’d read saying that the cameras had not had any effect on crime statistics. None. Since they’re no good at it, he told himself, he was probably safe. And in England, people who could afford cars like the Bentley often felt they had bought the right to drive them at full speed. Maybe that would keep the cops from assuming he was a criminal.
Schaeffer turned his head and used the rearview mirror to check his passengers. He had pulled their seat belts as tight as he could so that none of them toppled over, but as he hit bumps or made hard turns, their heads nodded or leaned slightly.
He wondered where Meg was driving now. Even thinking about her made him angrier. These killers had come all the way to England and then somehow figured out that this was the season when he and Meg went to the house in Yorkshire. They hadn’t tried to find him out alone somewhere and pop him with a rifle or something. They had come to murder him in his bed, which meant killing Meg too, after she’d seen them killing him first.