Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  A rifle lay across his lap, and he fingered its stock, trigger guard, and barrel in ritual order. My rosary, he thought. Except that he had no prayers to recite, only the vague wish that everything would go well, quickly and without surprises.

  He was close to the top of a hill that rose steeply above a cluster of houses a short distance below. Closer to where he sat, another house stood apart from the rest. There were lights in several rooms, but they had been on all night and did not mean anything.

  He could see clearly through the lighted windows with his field glasses, and from time to time he had watched the guards talking and moving about. There were five of them, and they tended to huddle together for company instead of patrolling their posts in and around the house. Croats. Whatever their good points, disciplined soldiering was not one of them. Had they done their work right, he could never have moved in this close. As it was, he would have a clear shot, from good cover, at an effective range.

  The sky slowly lightened. He loved this time just before the rising of the sun, with shadows fading to the soft grays of Whistler. These days, all anybody seemed to remember Whistler for was that uptight portrait of his mother, but it was his misty watercolors of London that were the best. You just had to look at them to breathe the Thames. He had al ways envied Whistler those paintings. There was such purity of purpose there, so clear a knowledge of what was right, that it made him wonder if the artist had ever been unsure of anything.

  Beginning to grow stiff, he shifted to a prone position, careful to keep the rifle muzzle off the ground. The few trees below were clear now. He could see a table and chairs on the second-floor veranda of the solitary house. The veranda was open to the sky, and in the distance behind it, the more modern part of Zagreb’s skyline rose above medieval walls.

  Farther west, the first of the early morning flights took off from the city’s airport, and he watched the plane’s lights until they disappeared. If all went well, he would be up there himself in a few hours, heading home. And if it didn’t go well? Then he might be delayed. Like forever.

  For a while he just lay there quietly as the sky lightened further and the day came, a shining spring morning without clouds, and the colors running to soft pinks and purples. To distract himself and help pass the time, he imagined how he would paint it. You had to be careful about the softness because that was the thing in this… not so much the color, but the mood, which was of an absolute serenity.

  You paint a great picture in your mind, he told himself. We’ll see if you can paint it as great when you’re home with a brush in your hand, instead of out here holding a rifle.

  The gunman wished he were home right now. This whole assignment was confusing. Until he had gotten his orders, he had thought Stefan Milokov was high on the State Department’s most favored list in the Balkans: a strong Croatian leader with democratic leanings and a genuine interest in a united Yugoslavia. Evidently he had been wrong. But these days there were so many changes in political alignment, so much switching about of friends into enemies and enemies into friends, that you needed a new briefing each morning.

  The sun came up and shone on the house he was watching. He glanced at his watch. Soon, Colonel Milokov, a man of unswervingly regular habits, would be out on the veranda having his usual breakfast of croissants and coffee.

  It was time to get ready.

  First, he moved a small rock into position for support. Then he stretched flat-out on the ground, rested the rifle barrel on the rock, and squinted through the telescopic sights. The chair in which the colonel would soon be sitting showed sharply behind the crosshairs. The gunman inserted a clip of special explosive rounds into the magazine, worked the bolt action that sent a round into the firing chamber, released the safety, and waited.

  One of the guards came out first. He stretched, scratched himself, and leaned lazily against a wall of the veranda. A heavy-set woman brought out a full tray and prepared the table with a single place setting, a pot of coffee, a basket of croissants, and a folded newspaper. Then she went back inside.

  Moments later, Milokov appeared. He spoke briefly to the guard, who laughed and went into the house.

  The colonel sat alone at the table with the sun shining on him, a husky, thick-chested man with dark hair. He poured himself a cup of coffee and gazed thoughtfully up at the wooded slope.

  The gunman dug his elbows into the damp earth, steadying himself, feeling the rifle stock smooth against his cheek. He let the crosshairs ease down from the dark gloss of Milokov’s hair until they centered between his eyes. Sorry, Colonel, he thought, and meant it, because this had always been the worst time for him and the years had never improved it. He was the best there was at what he did, and he still believed in its final purpose, but the act of killing gave him no joy. It never had. He thanked Christ he wasn’t one of those.

  Then with a touch as sweet and light as a baby’s breath, he squeezed off the round and saw it explode on target.

  There was no need for a second shot.

  Then the sirens went off. One was near the house itself, and the others sounded as though they were howling from the direction in which the gunman had left his car.

  He swore softly. He had not known about the sirens and this bothered him. It was exactly the kind of thing that should not have happened.

  So he sprinted, ducking low, through the brush in this place of green presence and flickering sunlight. He ran easily and without panic, centering everything about himself as though no other world existed. In his mind there was almost a symmetry to where he was that made it the perfect place to be. He swept around trees and under vines, avoiding the whip of branches, while beneath the sound of the sirens, birds chattered and fluttered in fright.

  Then he was going generally downward as the air became cooler and more pine laden. He breathed deeply and evenly, feeling as though he could run like this forever, with the sun catching him in moments of heat and moments of cool, dark shade. He was going just like this through a patch of purple-green darkness when he suddenly came upon the soldiers.

  There must have been a full squad, patrolling no more than fifty yards from where he had hidden his car beneath some thickets and branches. Bunched much too close together for effective patrolling, they whirled in shock as he came dashing down the slope.

  It was too late for him to change direction or take cover, and he was quite prepared to die for his blunder. And by any reasonable show of logic, he should have died, because he just kept running straight at them like a maniac, his rifle slung over one shoulder and both hands working at the grenades, pulling and throwing, pulling and throwing, a madman at a carnival, grabbing at brass rings and tossing fireballs.

  But whatever cosmic forces could have gone right for him during the next few moments did so. The sun angled blind-ingly over the hill behind him. The soldiers were startled enough by his lunacy to throw off their fire. His grenades exploded precisely where they should have. And if the heavens themselves had opened and rained steel, the shower could not have been more deadly.

  Then still running, he had the rifle off his shoulder and in his hands, feeling it spit at the smoking earth that smelled of gunpowder and seared flesh, at the faces that rose up out of it with open mouths and blood and dirt darkening the skin.

  Seconds later, he was over and past the carnage.

  The sirens were still going, but he saw no other soldiers. Sprinting to his car, he removed the camouflage branches and drove out from behind the brush to the dirt trail just be yond. In fifteen minutes he was mingling with the traffic on the main highway to Zagreb.

  Before he reached the city, he made a short detour and dropped his rifle and remaining ordnance into a convenient river. Then he continued on to his hotel.

  There he showered and trimmed the full moustache and neat Vandyke beard that had become so accustomed a part of his carefully chosen persona that it was hard for him to remember how he had once looked without them.

  Adding to the changed appe
arance were the contact lenses that turned his hazel eyes an electric blue, and the fair, sun-streaked hair that had replaced the almost blue-black color with which he had been born.

  He dressed and checked his papers.

  At home, he had stashed away passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards under half-a-dozen different names and nationalities. But on this trip he traveled as Peter Walters, an American businessman born in Miami, Florida, and living in Positano, Italy. A name he had lived under for almost ten years.

  Carrying only a single carry-on bag, he left his hotel room and paid his bill in cash.

  Then he drove himself to the airport and returned his rental car at the main terminal.

  His 5:00 P.M. flight to Naples was airborne at exactly 5:17. I’m going home.

  There were severe electrical storms on their flight path so they were diverted to Rome and forced to lay over for several hours. When the man known as Peter Walters finally walked off the plane in Naples, it was well into the night and he was stiff with frustration.

  But he had left his car parked at the airport, and once he was behind the wheel and moving, he could feel himself ease out of it. There was a full moon, and with its light catching the calm sea, the trip along the Amalfi Drive was even more spectacular than usual.

  Walters drove slowly, wanting to stretch the vista. He had been living on the Amalfian Coast for close to nine years. How familiar it had become. Yet he still remembered the sharp pain that had come with his first sight of it, with his understanding of how much he had missed in his life, and how much his parents had missed and would now never have a chance to experience.

  Still, he was trying.

  When he finally reached Positano, he saw the moon silver the old Arab-Saracen-style houses rising up the mountain from the sea, and felt the place enter him.

  His own house was among the highest, almost halfway up the cliffs, and he left the main road and began the winding climb. Here and there small, twisted trees and bushes had broken through the rock formations… tired, he thought, from struggling to get out to the sun. He understood that. He would not have wanted to stay covered over, either.

  He parked beside his wife’s tiny red Fiat and started up the seventeen curved stone steps that led to the arched entrance to his house. As always, he silently counted each step as he took it. He had forgotten when and why he had started the small rite. But it had become a kind of talisman for his family’s well-being, a crazy little offering to the gods of good fortune that he knew he would probably do until he died.

  A night light was burning in the entrance hall, and he took off his shoes and left them on the tile floor with his bag.

  Upstairs, his son’s bedroom door was open and he quietly went in.

  My son sleeps, he thought, as though he were keeping a secret as desperate as mine. And to him, it undoubtedly was. At the age of eight, Paulie was still a secret thumb-sucker. Though not so secret. Asleep, he couldn’t control it, and the thumb was in his mouth now. Even awake, he had occasional lapses and the kids hammered him unmercifully.

  Pound for pound my son suffers more real pain without complaint or self-pity than anyone since Jesus, and there’s no way I can help him.

  Walters bent and kissed his cheek, feeling the skin still smooth and baby soft against his lips.

  Paul stirred, the thumb instantly out of his mouth.

  “Dad?”

  The whispered word was in English, although he was truly bilingual and could just as easily have awakened in Italian.

  Walters stroked his hair, as silky and blond as Peggy’s had been before she dyed it. Physically, Paul was mostly his mother, with the kind of fair, classic good looks that everyone said was wasted on a boy but which Walters hoped he would one day learn to use to his advantage. What came from his side was the wide mouth, the deep-set eyes, and the vague hint of melancholy that was as much a part of him as his easy smile and hard core of stubbornness.

  When all else failed, it could be a saving grace.

  “Shhh… ,” he said. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Seconds later, Paulie’s breathing was easy and regular, and his thumb was back in his mouth.

  Peter Walters undressed and showered without waking Peggy. She half awakened and reached for him as he slipped into bed.

  “Aah, this is better,” she sighed, adjusting her body to his. “I hate sleeping alone.”

  He smiled, holding her. “I never knew that.”

  “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “Everything is fine.”

  “Miss me?”

  “Like crazy.”

  “Isn’t that lovely,” she whispered and drifted off, still holding him.

  She had no idea what he had been doing, of course. Although he had once tried to tell her, feeling that much need to share.

  “How much do you love me?” he had asked.

  “As much as it’s possible.”

  “No matter what?”

  “You should know that by now.”

  “Yes, but sometimes there are things that I have to do. They don’t always make me feel very lovable.”

  “If you do them,” she had said, with the absolute certainty of the young, the foolish, or the very much in love, “then it can’t be too wrong.”

  “Some might think it is.”

  “Do you?”

  “Sometimes. But even then I believe it has to be done.”

  “Then, it’s all right,” she had said, granting him final absolution.

  4

  GIANNI SAT IN the stationwagon about fifty yards down the block from his studio. It was late afternoon and he had been watching the building since early morning. He was waiting to see whether there would be any immediate follow-up to Jackson and Lindstrom.

  It was just an ordinary day on the block. People walked quickly and with purpose on the sidewalks. Cars, taxis, and trucks passed in steady streams. The spring sun reflected at Gianni off cans and pieces of glass, off the windows of stores and buildings. He breathed slowly and evenly, and the air seemed to breathe with him.

  Earlier in the day, near dawn, he had caught brief snatches of sleep in the wagon, followed by breakfast at an all-night truck stop. It was characteristic of the place that no one looked twice at his battered face. And sitting there, he had suddenly envied the truckers the sweet, simple clarity of their lives, of their daily comings and goings. As never before, he understood the appeal of what they did in their big rigs. Everything was open, known, laid out for them like the rules of a supportive religion. Unlike him, they had no mortal decisions to thrash out with their eggs and fries.

  The thing was, would it be better for him to go back to SoHo and watch for more visitors? Or head straight for Greenwich and find out if Mary Yung was dead or alive? Gianni settled for getting the woman’s number and making a call. But all he heard was a voice on an answering machine saying she was unavailable at the moment and to please leave a name and number.

  Yes, but is she dead or alive?

  So now he sat behind the tinted windows of his Cherokee, on his street in SoHo, lunching on the sandwich and soda he had picked up early that morning, and popping aspirin to keep his head from going off like a bomb.

  Shortly after 4:00 P.M., two men Gianni didn’t recognize stopped on the sidewalk in front of his loft building. They wore business suits and dark ties and, from a distance, might have been blood brothers to Jackson and Lindstrom. After peering at the cast-iron facade of the old building for several moments and looking up and down the block, they went inside.

  Gianni fixed his eyes on the entrance and kept them there for almost two hours before the men finally came out, walked down the street and disappeared. Then Gianni waited another fifteen minutes and went upstairs.

  What he found was a charnel house with the gore removed.

  Nothing was whole.

  Floorboards were ripped up and scattered like driftwood. Upholstered pieces, chairs and couches, were disemboweled
, their insides streaming. Whatever paintings he had in the studio, both completed and in work, were cut to shreds. Closets and drawers had been emptied onto the floor. Not even Teresa’s things, still undisposed of after all these months, had been spared.

  None of this stuff had been alive, yet things had died here, thought Gianni, and felt he had just lost his wife into another depth of separation.

  Teeth clenched, he moved through the ruin.

  These men in their quiet ties and neat suits. They were looking for connections to Vittorio, but this was far more. Where did such rage and savagery originate? What was its purpose? He knew. The invading Germans in World War I had called it Schrecklichkeit… frightfulness… and it was meant to demoralize the enemy. A calm, deliberate horror.

  Searching for answers, all Gianni found was the fine residue of ruin from a trash pit.

  There was nothing left for him here.

  Wrong. There were still a few things.

  He found a small leather bag that had escaped the general destruction and filled it with a few toilet articles, a couple of shirts, and some slacks and underwear.

  Finally, he climbed a ladder, dug behind a lighting cove under the ceiling, and pulled out a 9mm automatic wrapped in an oil-soaked cloth. He checked the ammunition clip and found it fully loaded.

  Then he tucked the gun inside his belt, closed his jacket over it, and walked out of the door without glancing back.

  He tried calling Mary Chan Yung once more but still reached only her answering machine.

  It was a bit past 8:00 P.M. when he drove over the Williamsburg Bridge and headed for Long Island.

  5

  CARLO DONATTI LIVED in a house, comparatively modest for its five acres of land and Sands Point address, but it was built of brick and stone. For an Italian, thought Garetsky, a house always had to be built of brick and stone. Otherwise, it was considered lacking in substance and unworthy of respect.

  An electronically controlled gate stood across the driveway, and Gianni Garetsky pulled up to the security phone beside it. Such precautions seemed a holdover from the old days. Things were calmer, more intelligent, and better organized now. The current trends all leaned toward legitimacy, and gratuitous violence was frowned upon by the leading famiglia as the worst possible public relations. These days, when a body did occasionally turn up in the trunk of a car, it was more the exception than the rule, and usually the work of some not very bright loose cannon.