Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  Generally, wiser heads prevailed, and Don Carlo Donatti was considered high among the wisest, with a law degree from Yale and a carefully nurtured public persona that at least made him appear to fit in anywhere. He had been his father’s consigliere at twenty-five and had taken over entirely at the old don’s death two years later.

  Gianni picked up the security phone and heard it ring at the other end.

  “Who’s there?” said a man’s voice.

  “Gianni Garetsky.”

  “Who?”

  Gianni repeated his name. Few in the new crowd knew him, and he was just as pleased to leave it that way.

  “What d’yuh want?”

  All charm, thought Gianni. “To see Don Donatti.”

  “What about?”

  “Just give him my name.”

  “He doesn’t see anybody this late.”

  “Just give the don my name.”

  Gianni spoke softly but something in his voice must have gotten through.

  “Hang on,” said the man.

  Moments later the iron gate swung open, and Gianni drove up a long driveway edged with Belgian block. He parked the wagon in front of a porticoed entrance and got out under a wash of floodlights.

  A solidly built, big-chested man was waiting at the door. He looked just as unfriendly in person as he had sounded on the phone.

  “You carrying?” he asked.

  Gianni nodded.

  The man held out a king-size hand, and Gianni took the automatic out of his belt and gave it to him. Then he patted Gianni down, front to back, and felt his legs for an ankle holster.

  “Let’s see your driver’s license.”

  He checked the photo against Gianni’s swollen, discolored face and grinned. “You used to be prettier. What happened? Her husband come home?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Hey, I been there.” The man nodded past the stairs. “First room on the right. The door’s open.”

  It was a big room that served as a combination sitting room and study. The don rose from an oversize armchair beside an open fire. He wore an exquisitely tailored silk robe over his pajamas, and his hands fussed with an unlit cigarette in a holder.

  Gianni Garetsky went through the formal greeting ritual, then sat down farther from the fire. The heat was inside him, a slow burning.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, Godfather.”

  Don Donatti sat looking at his face. He might have been weighing and measuring the damage, adding it up for a final total.

  “Who did this to you?”

  “Two men. They said FBI and had all the right credentials, but who knows?”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Buried in some woods.”

  The don sat in silence. He shifted in his chair, barely disturbing the robe and pajamas.

  “You got a light?” he said.

  Gianni took out some matches and lit the don’s cigarette. The man closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

  “So what happened, Gianni?”

  The artist lit a cigarette for himself and began his curious devil’s tale. There was little light in the room, just that of a lamp and the glow from the fire, and the mood was that of a cave. By the time Garetsky finished, he no longer felt connected to himself.

  Donatti sighed. “You have the woman’s picture?”

  Gianni showed it to him. “Did you ever see her with Vitto-rio?”

  “I never saw any of Vittorio’s girls,” said the don flatly. “The great lover’s comedies with women he played somewhere else.” His voice was disapproving. “Cinese,” he said.

  “Why would the FBI want him this bad after so many years?”

  “Who knows with those zotichi?. They sniff after their own assholes. But my feeling is they were not really FBI. As for Vittorio, he just went off on a job for us one day and never come back.”

  “You didn’t think it strange?”

  Muscles worked like wires along Donatti’s jaw. “Let me tell you something about your friend. He was good at what he did, and I trusted him, and he never hurt the family, but there were always spaces inside him I couldn’t reach. Anyway, you live long enough, nothing is strange. It just happens.”

  Cigarette ash dropped on the don’s robe and he brushed it off.

  “But you’ve got the trouble now, not Vittorio,” he said. “So I like it that you came to me. But I won’t fool you, Gianni. You’ve got a bad one here. And you know where they’re coming next? Right here to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Donatti waved his cigarette impatiently. “Vittorio was one of mine. Where else would they go if they want him? But I can still handle those strunzi. What bothers me is you can’t stay here. By morning they’ll be buzzing around like flies on shit.”

  “I didn’t come to stay. I just hoped you might know what this is all about.”

  The don shook his head. He stared dimly for a moment at a wall of pictures. The photos showed him with an assortment of the famous and powerful at every level.

  “America’s leaders, Gianni. And they’re all happy to accept our money. But only anonymously.”

  Donatti rose, opened a hidden wall safe, and took out a black bag. “Do you have a good gun?” he asked the artist.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s another one for you in this bag. The serial number’s filed off and it’s got a beautiful silencer. Also, I’m giving you a hundred thousand in cash so you don’t have to worry about getting picked up in some bank.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just listen to me. You don’t know how long this contami-nazione could drag on or where it could lead. If you need a safe passport, credit card, or driver’s license, there’s some of each in the bag all under clean names. All you need is your own picture taken and stuck on.”

  Don Carlo Donatti closed the safe, walked over to Gianni Garetsky, and placed the black bag on his lap. When Gianni started to protest, the don held up his hand for silence.

  “I want you to keep in touch, Gianni. Listen to this number… two four six, two four six eight. Remember it. Don’t write it down. It’s my safe phone. Buried in lead cable. No taps. If you hear any voice but mine, it means I’m morto. So hang up. I made the number easy. Even panic won’t block it out. Say it for me.”

  Gianni said it. A schoolboy, he thought, repeating an important lesson in survival.

  “I can’t call you,” said Donatti, “so you have to call me. Don’t worry. I won’t be sitting with my coglioni in my hand. All my old friends aren’t gone. Somebody has to know something.”

  He moved closer to the artist and stared at his eyes. “How do you feel about having to do the job on those two men?”

  “They did it to themselves. So I don’t feel anything.”

  “Fine.”

  The don reached out a hand and stroked the back of Gianni’s head as he would a child’s. “I should know by now what you’ve got. At seventeen you dealt with an assassino as few made men could. Your head is on straight. Just don’t get careless.”

  They looked at each other. Being with the don in this room, listening to him, Gianni could feel exactly what Donatti had become in the strict order he had imposed on himself in his chosen life. He was an educated man, the best of the family’s new breed, but he still insisted on control.

  “About Vittorio?” said Gianni. “That last job you sent him out on before he disappeared? What was it?”

  Donatti shrugged. “I think you were in Italy at the time. We had us a crazy, a real pazzerello. He was screaming his head off, couldn’t be reasoned with anymore. So we sent your friend to quiet him before he caused the family terrible trouble. And that was it. No one ever saw Vittorio or the pazzerello again.”

  “Who was the crazy?”

  The don needed a moment. “Frank Alberto. An old Moustache Pete from downtown. I doubt that you knew him.”

  Gianni sat holding the black bag on his lap. He had known the man’s son from art schoo
l, a fat, curly-haired kid named Angie who was always getting beat up on. Gianni remembered protecting him once, then regretting it because the kid was so grateful he became a pest.

  “One more thing,” said the Don. “Don’t tell me where you’re going when you leave here, and don’t tell me where you are when you call. That way you can be sure I won’t start singing if they put a hot iron to my balls.”

  “I’m not worried about you, Godfather.”

  Donatti’s eyes went dark. “You’re not stupid, Gianni, so don’t say stupid things. Finally, everybody talks.”

  6

  PETER WALTERS WOKE to the sound of a bird and the old man staring at him, one-eyed, from the easel. The eye was a glittering amber that caught the rising sun and threw it back like chipped glass. The other eye, the blind one, gazed out of a milky pool. It had been blinded by the Germans when the old man was a young partisan.

  Now, almost fifty years later, the result gazed out of a still-wet canvas in a corner of his bedroom. The old man had a peasant’s horror of the image and had not wanted to pose. But he needed the lire so he had sat for three hours in Peter’s studio, alternately dozing and mumbling into his beard.

  The painting had life. The old man was there. Not just flesh, bones, rags, hair. The rest, too. It blazed out of the one good eye and hooked across the artist’s chest. The old man hated him, hated anyone young, strong, whole… hated the little he’d had and the still less left to him. And every brush stroke screamed it.

  Other than for Peggy’s soft breathing at Peter’s back, there was no other sound in the room. He soaked it in, lost himself in it. A wonderful sweetness gathered in his throat. This morning, he was an artist.

  It was that first waking glance that told everything. Good or bad, it hit the moment you opened your eyes. The easel was always placed so that whatever canvas was in work would be seen instantly, without time to prepare defenses. And today, at least, he had won.

  He stretched, lengthened his body into the cool margins of the bed, and felt Peggy come awake beside him.

  “What time is it?” she whispered.

  “Love time,” he said and reached for her.

  My reward.

  Coming together now, they made love almost without preliminary. Yet even the heat was cool in mood and without the urgency to take pleasure. Peter’s eyes had been closed but he opened them now and looked at Peggy in the soft dawn light. How familiar, how dear she had become.

  Once years ago, before they had left America, she had come up to him in a large room full of people and said softly, “Don’t go away from me. I couldn’t bear it if you ever went away from me.”

  She had been standing close, seemingly unaware of anyone else about them, looking up at him very seriously. With some wonder, he had thought, She means it, she actually does mean it.

  When they made love for the first time later that night, she called it her first resurrection. Wasn’t she being raised from a particular kind of death? Still, when she saw all the scars on his body, some of the joy went out of her celebration.

  She had cried, and held him.

  He had tried to prepare her by saying he had been in Vietnam. It was a lie. He had not been near the war. Not that one, anyway.

  Later, she let her anger fly. “The bastards! I hate them all.”

  “Who?”

  “The politicians, the generals, all the damned war lovers,” she said bitterly. “All those who got rich and famous and made glorious speeches while thousands of kids like you were out getting shot up for God and country. How I despise those two words.”

  “Why?”

  “Because sooner or later people are asked to die for them.”

  God help me, he had thought, if she ever finds out what I really do.

  All she knew was that his work had to do with something unofficially governmental, and no more than that. The ground rules had been set early. You loved, you trusted, and you asked no questions. It was how they had lived for more than nine years. It was how they were living still.

  She was above him now, all sweet balm to his flesh. The things she aroused in him. It was a mystery. All this time and the excitement remained. How?

  Finally, the original coolness was gone and the rushing had taken over, that wild blend of flesh and feeling that always made you begin. Then with a sudden urgency at his back, she had hold of him and he felt her dissolve, and himself with her.

  The school year had ended so Peter took Paul out for a few hours of painting.

  Art was not something he had ever pressed on his son. The feeling for it was simply there. And his Paulie was good. Not only in the technical skills, which could be learned. But he was good in the quiet, stubborn passion you either had or didn’t have.

  His son looked at things. He saw them. He sat for hours in his father’s studio, silent, unmoving, watching him paint. He felt the emptiness of a room before he entered it. He enclosed himself in stillness until the absence of sound took a shape of its own. Sometimes the shape filled him until he was afraid there might not be room enough inside him to breathe.

  He knew such things about his son because Paul told him about them. The boy had no idea how extraordinary they were.

  He thought everyone experienced the same stuff, and his father was careful not to let him know they didn’t. To a kid, being different meant not being as good.

  Today they had set up their easels on a rocky promontory overlooking the Bay of Salerno and the houses, olive trees, and citrus groves of Positano. Edging the water were the stone towers that had defended the villagers of a thousand years ago against Saracen pirates. Perhaps a mile out to sea rose the great black rocks from which beautiful sirens had once tempted Ulysses.

  They worked about ten yards apart, their canvases shaded by a pair of carob trees. They painted steadily and in silence, though one would sometimes turn to see what the other was doing. When their eyes met, they would smile. But Paul always waited for his father to smile first. He was afraid that if he smiled too much, his father might think he didn’t take his painting seriously enough.

  Next to painting with his father, Paul loved just being with him. Even if it was only taking a walk through the village, and maybe along the beach and finally stopping for a while where the rocks came down to the water.

  They had been to the rocks just last Sunday. It was a clear morning, and his father sat smoking and looking out at the sea. There was no sound but that of the wind in a few trees, and his father had looked up into the leaves and past the leaves into the wide blue sky, not smiling, but with his face as pleased and young as Paul had ever seen it. Then Paul felt his father’s hand on his head. It pushed the hair back from his forehead and smoothed it while Paul pressed his head backward against the big hand until it slipped over the side of Paul’s face and drew his head down against his father’s chest. Paul could feel the beating heart. He heard his father sigh once. Then the hand lifted from him and they both stood up. Walking home, Paul held his father’s hand. He liked it that they could be together without anybody speaking.

  This afternoon they painted until the sky clouded over and the light turned bad. Then they gathered their things and started back toward the village. It was a long climb over steep, twisting paths, and they stopped at one point to rest.

  “Papa,” said Paul.

  He was speaking mostly in Italian today and that was how Peter answered. “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you an important question?”

  “Why not?”

  “But will you tell me the truth?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “No.”

  “Hey! You calling your papa a liar?”

  “You know what I mean,” said the boy. “It’s like when you don’t want me to know something, so you make a kind of joke out of it.”

  “All right. What’s the question?”

  “Are you a mafioso?”

  Peter Walters laughed. “That’s some question.”

  “See? You’re
laughing. You’re making it a joke.”

  Peter looked at his son. Serious. Always so serious. He wished the boy would laugh more.

  “I apologize,” he said. “It’s just that it’s a strange question for a boy to ask his father. So which of your friends said I was a mafioso?”

  “Pietro Dolti. He heard his father talking.”

  “What did his father say?”

  “That you weren’t somebody to fool with. That he thought you knew a lot of bigshots in Palermo. That you always had plenty of money and nobody knew how you got it.”

  “And what do you think, Paulie? You think I’m a bigshot gangster?”

  The boy looked down at his hands. He wondered if his hands would be as big and strong as his father’s one day. He wondered if all the things that were kept so secret inside his father were hidden somewhere inside him, too.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and took a few extra moments to work up his courage. “You go on these trips. I keep wondering where you go. I think about what you do.”

  “I work for a big American company. Sometimes I have to meet with people. They’re in all different places. You know that.”

  “I don’t care if you’re a mafioso, Papa. I don’t care what you are.” Paul felt his lip tremble and covered it with the back of his hand. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I’m no mafioso, Paulie. Forget about Pietro Dolti’s old man. He talks with his tongue dipped in shit.”

  Paul gazed blindly at his father. He pictured him lying in a gutter with blood gushing from his mouth. He had seen The Godfather—parts I, II, and III. He knew all too well what fi nally happened to even the best, the toughest of gangsters. He tried to speak, but something was stuck in his throat and no words came.