Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  “It didn’t hurt anything.”

  “No? Try telling that to the poor bastards I had to waste just getting my ass out of there.”

  Cortlandt was silent.

  “The thing was, I should have known. It was nothing but carelessness.”

  “It happens.”

  “Not to me.”

  Cortlandt looked at him with his pale New England eyes. “You can’t be that different from the rest of us. Even you are allowed a mistake once in a while.”

  “Not when nine or ten people end up dying of it.”

  Peter stared off at the mountains fading into the distance. They started green, went blue-purple, then ended a misty gray at the horizon.

  Cortlandt touched his arm and brought him back.

  “There’s some news,” he said. “We’re doing Abu Homaidi.”

  Peter looked at the COS and waited. A small, cold action began somewhere inside him.

  “That last horror in Amsterdam finally did it,” said Cortlandt. “Our consul’s whole family. His three little kids and his wife. And not enough left to mop off the sidewalk.”

  “That’s the fourth. I told you right after the first how it would be. You should have taken the sonofabitch out then.”

  “It wasn’t that simple, Charlie. It still isn’t.”

  “Bullshit! In the meantime, between the TWA flight and the other bombings, you’ve got almost three hundred dead that could have still been walking around.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  Peter had to work to put down his anger. The effort alone made him sweat. And this sort of thing was getting worse, not better.

  “We don’t operate in a vacuum,” said Tommy Cortlandt quietly. “Remember. At first we weren’t even sure it was Homaidi. Then the peace talks were going on and we couldn’t risk fouling them up. And after that there was some hope of Syria handing him over for trial.”

  “Does all this mean I’m getting him?” Peter asked.

  “Do you want him?”

  “You kidding? Someone like that, it’s why I’m in this shit to begin with.”

  “As I said, it’s still not that simple. So before we decide, let’s talk.”

  “What’s there to talk about? He needs to be hit, so I’ll hit him. The guy’s a real crazy.”

  Cortlandt gazed at Peter Walters. He seemed to be way ahead somewhere and thinking of other things.

  “That’s just the point,” he said. “Homaidi’s far from a crazy. He’s a brilliant fanatic with a cause he’s willing to kill and die for. He’s never alone. He has better security than most heads of state. And he’s already cost us two good men who were just as gung ho as you for a go at him.”

  “You mean I’m the third choice for this?”

  “You might not even be that. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “You really know how to build up a guy’s confidence.”

  “The first two weren’t mine. They came from other stations. You were my ace in the hole. I didn’t want to use you unless I had to.”

  “Why the devil not?”

  “Pure self-interest. Homaidi’s such a dangerous longshot, I didn’t want to risk losing my best.”

  Cortlandt leaned toward the gunman, studying him, intrud ing into every corner with his eyes. “And also because I know you’ve got a wife and little boy who need you even more than I do.”

  Peter sat there with it, unmoving. A light breeze came off the Pyrenees and he breathed it in, but its scent was that of a freshly opened grave.

  When he spoke, his voice was flat. “How long have you known?”

  “Almost as long as I’ve known you. Which makes it close to eight years. I could never entirely trust a man I knew nothing about, a man who had no human ties. So I stuck a beeper on your car when we met one day near Rome, and followed you back to Positano.”

  Tommy paused. “You needn’t worry. That was solely for my own needs. No one else has ever known.”

  Peter just stared at him, his eyes were cold, chipped glass.

  “It’s been all these years,” said Cortlandt. “If I meant you harm, it would have happened a long time ago.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Your real name.”

  “Say it for me.”

  “Vittorio Battaglia.”

  Just hearing it from someone else’s mouth after nine years brought a chill.

  “How did you find out?”

  “I lifted a set of prints from a car door and checked them when I was in Washington. You don’t have to worry about that, either. I hit the computer buttons myself. No one else saw.”

  Peter’s automatic was suddenly in his hand, its muzzle against Cortlandt’s throat.

  “If no one else saw it,” he said coldly, “why shouldn’t I do you right now and not have to worry at all?”

  If Cortlandt showed any expression, it was one of total absorption in Peter Walters’ question. “You mean you want reasons?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Because for one thing,” said Cortlandt, “you know by now I’m your friend, and it’s not your nature to shoot friends.”

  “If I feel my wife and son’s lives are threatened, I can change my nature and find another friend.”

  “I don’t believe you really think I’d betray you and your family.”

  “Maybe not willingly. But when our balls are in a wringer, we’d all happily sell our own mothers.” Peter’s gun was tight against Tommy’s throat. “Go on.”

  “Well, you do have to be wondering why I’d suddenly be idiot enough to tell you all this after eight years of silence. You know there has to be a reason, and you’re certainly not going to do me without hearing what it is.”

  Something stirred in the car, and Peter lowered his automatic. He had been watching Tommy’s eyes all the way, and they hadn’t blinked once.

  “I guess I’m ready to hear.”

  “It happened the other day,” said Cortlandt. “It was in one of those bulletins Interpol is always circulating to consulates, embassies, and police stations. It said Vittorio Battaglia was wanted by the FBI on assorted counts of murder and kidnapping.”

  He paused, waiting for Peter Walters to react, to say something. But Peter just sat gazing off somewhere, with the automatic in his lap.

  “There was a picture, too,” said the COS. “But it didn’t look anything like the way you look now. No one could ever spot you from it.”

  Peter nodded slowly, somewhat tiredly. “Did it say why they suddenly wanted me after nine years?”

  “No.”

  Peter was silent. He was looking off at the mountains again, as if everything would be explained for him there if he just stared long and hard enough.

  “Understand,” said Thomas Cortlandt III. “I’m only telling you all this so you’ll know, be warned and forearmed. For me, it doesn’t mean beans. There’s nothing new here for me. I’ve known your history, your work with la famiglia, from the day we met. Those were your credentials, as far as I was concerned. What gave you value to the Company. And you’ve never failed or disappointed me.”

  Tommy smiled. “I even liked what you said when I asked why you wanted to get into all this hellish stuff for us. You remember that?”

  Peter silently stayed with the mountains.

  “You said it was to help your poor old Guinea grandpa finally make his claw marks on Mount Rushmore. Then you grinned like it was some kind of joke. Only I knew it wasn’t.”

  Peter turned, and he and Tommy considered each other in a curious way.

  “My grandpa died about a year before I ever told you that.”

  “My condolences. But Mount Rushmore’s still alive, and you’re still making some of the best claw marks I’ve ever seen.”

  Peter felt himself off somewhere, watching them both from some distant, unfamiliar place.

  “What about Abu Homaidi?” he asked.

  “He’s yours, of course. He always was. But, for all our sakes, including God’s and grandp
a’s… please. Be careful.”

  Vittorio Battaglia’s grandfather, having been newly resurrected, flew all the way home with him.

  Vincenzo Battaglia had been a broad, low man with thick eyebrows and a dark face burned brown by the sun and bruised by hurt. Still, he’d had a softness in his eyes and an abiding love for America in his heart.

  Young Vittorio saw him last in St. Vincent’s Hospital. His hands and face were yellow. He had cancer of the liver. He also had a few dozen tiny American flags he had brought from home and arranged in plastic cups around his hospital room. He died on a rainy day in autumn, and Vittorio planted six of the little flags on his grave. Sometimes, in his dreams, Peter Walters was still planting them.

  He touched his grandfather through the flags. They kept the old man alive for him. At times, it seemed, they kept him alive as well.

  He said nothing to Peggy about the Interpol bulletin.

  She was living with enough fear.

  13

  THE BEST, THE most erotic dreams were sometimes like that. Your hands going over soft, pliant flesh. A shadowy, sweetly scented body pressed close. The sounds of her breathing a warm, whispered promise in your ear.

  As she appeared to sleep.

  Then she erupted against him and Henry Durning knew it was no dream. Nor did he want it to be. What he wanted was for it to be exactly what it was, with every part of it real, with the fevers of his lust real, and the brandy in the maze of his stomach, and the pressure in his chest, and the straining of her every fiber as she fought him… all real.

  And Lord, how she did fight.

  Not that she was especially big. She was rather on the small side, actually. But young. Very young. Increasingly, youth was becoming a factor for him. Also, she was one of the new, trendy breed. Which meant she ate sensibly, worked out with weights and aerobics, and made a working religion of her body.

  For all of which, considering the results, Durning was immeasurably grateful.

  One of her strong rounded arms hooked around his head and caught his throat.

  “Sonofabitch!” he gasped, struggled, and finally worked the arm free.

  His eyes were closed, and with his body now fully against her chest, and one knee prying between her legs to work them apart, he had the mental image he was pressing against a secret barrier that would soon give way and allow him entrance to a beautiful, sunlit garden.

  He ripped her gown and she cried out.

  “Don’t! Please… no!”

  But her cries and pleas only excited him more, with heat packed behind heat and the pressure building in his groin.

  He went at her gown again, hearing the fabric tear, feeling himself ready to hurt, even to kill her if he had to, and loving the idea that he was capable of inflicting that much damage.

  Streaks of light flew from his brain to his arm, and he had a hand on her, then part of it working its way through the damp heat, fingers taking greedy control as if all the world’s knowledge of such things was centered at their tips. Oh, he knew her at that moment, knew the burgeoning warmth that was rising from her and would soon be his, knew exactly where it would be right to touch and where it would be wrong.

  She was still fighting him, but Durning could feel her beginning to weaken. He could hear a murmuring in her throat that was now merely begging him not to hurt her. Holding her body in place with his full dead weight, he began stripping off his clothes.

  No lights were on but there was a moon and its pale wash came in through the same open window by which he himself had entered less than ten minutes earlier. That was always one of his more pleasurable moments. The actual breaking and entering. The climbing across the darkened sill of a sleeping woman’s window and getting his first glimpse of what was waiting for him. That wondrous bower of the libido. And there she was… unknowing, vulnerable, her body still her own secret and not yet violated. While he stood there trembling in his excitement. While he listened to her breathing and watched the gentle rise and fall of her breasts. While he saw, too, the smooth curve of her belly and the mound of Venus below.

  All that waiting for me.

  Sweet Jesus Christ.

  I ’m fifty-four fucking years old.

  I’m the attorney general of the United States.

  When will all this degraded clowning finally stop being the absolute core of my life?

  Fervently, Henry Durning hoped never.

  With his clothes off, naked now, he smothered her cries by covering her mouth with his.

  She bit into his lip. Hard. It hurt.

  “Do that again and I’ll cut off your nose,” he said.

  She didn’t do it again.

  But she was still fighting him even as he entered her. Which he didn’t do gently. He certainly didn’t do it as a lover. Nor even as a friend. If anything, it was with anger, with the sense of a man driving spikes. But that was part of it, too, and not to be missed. He had never felt more greedy in his life. Nor as powerful.

  I have the devil’s own strength.

  It was true. Nothing was beyond him at this moment. If some inner voice told him to climb to the top of the Washington Monument and fly off, he was sure he’d be able to do that, too. There were all these lovely sounds inside his head. New dreams were being born to him.

  I’m my own field of force.

  He roughly grabbed a fistful of her hair, rolled her over onto her stomach, and began sodomizing her from the rear.

  Struggling for a poor quarter of an inch at a time, he listened to her screaming all the way.

  “My God, you’re killing me!”

  And that was how he made his final run. Which was always something of a mystery. Maybe even a part of larger mysteries. There were times when he almost despised the entire act, when he found it a hopeless void from which nothing was ever achieved but exhaustion, a psychic and physical draining that left him hollow.

  But not tonight. Tonight it was better. Tonight, somewhere near the end, he actually had a rare moment that spoke to him of the aching sweetness of love.

  Even for those who had spent their lives betraying it.

  She lay holding him close in the dark.

  “I do love you,” she said.

  He kissed her. It was neither more nor less than a conditioned reflex to her words.

  “I’m sorry about your lip,” she told him.

  “I’ll live through it.”

  “I guess I got a little carried away.”

  “You were wonderful,” he said.

  “It’s you who were wonderful. You make everything so incredibly exciting.”

  “You mean even something as incredibly boring as sex?”

  She laughed. “And you’re so funny besides.”

  “That’s because I’m really a clown,” he said.

  I can touch and save lives. But I’m more than just a clown, Durning thought as she slept.

  I’ve done it.

  I did it the other day in West Virginia.

  And I’ll do it again.

  Yet, even with that, it was hours before he was able to sleep.

  14

  IT WAS AN area of small truck farms about fifty miles northwest of Pittsburgh, and Gianni Garetsky had driven through a long, depressing stretch of rustbelt to get there.

  Following Angelo Alberto’s directions, he turned east on a dirt road that ran through alternate patches of woods and open fields. When he came to a weathered gray farmhouse on his left, he turned into a dusty driveway and parked.

  An R.F.D. mailbox carried the name Richard Pemberton. A big ethnic change from Frank Alberto, thought Garetsky.

  He climbed a front porch, knocked on the door and waited. Then he knocked again, more heavily. When there was still no response, he walked around to the back of the house.

  A pickup truck was parked in front of. the barn. But other than for some goats and cows, the barn was empty. A scattering of chickens pecked at the ground.

  Gianni shielded his eyes against the sun and stared off
across the fields. A man was working with a hoe in the distance. Gianni started toward him, being careful to keep both hands empty and visible.

  The man seemed to see him when he was about a hundred yards away. He stopped working, dropped the hoe, and just stood watching Gianni Garetsky approach. He wore faded overalls, a peaked cap, and didn’t seem to move at all. Then he slowly bent until he was squatting on his haunches between rows of what Gianni took to be some sort of beans.

  When only about ten yards separated them, the man rose. He had a shotgun in his hands.

  “That’s far enough.” He had a distinctly New York accent.

  Gianni had the feeling Alberto was never without the gun. What a way to have to live. Like me. Except that Frank Alberto had been doing it for nine years. The same as Vittorio Battaglia, wherever he was, had probably been doing.

  “Whatta yuh want?” Frank Alberto asked.

  Gianni looked at him and saw nothing of his son, nothing of the lifelong victim. No excess fat here. Angie’s papa was big, muscular, and clearly tough. A real pazzerello, Don Do-natti had called him, a crazy. The kind that couldn’t be reasoned with, so you finally had to end up killing.

  “I just want to talk,” Gianni said.

  “What about?”

  “Vittorio Battaglia. I’m his friend, Mr. Alberto. I mean you and Vittorio no harm.”

  Alberto’s eyes darkened. “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Gianni Garetsky. From the old neighborhood. I studied art with Vittorio and your Angie.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve seen pictures of Garetsky. He sure didn’t look like you.”

  Gianni carefully peeled off his hairpiece, moustache, and glasses.

  With the sun bright and strong overhead, they stood in the beanfield, facing each other.

  “Then it was my Angie told you where I was.”

  “Don’t be angry with Angie. He had no choice.”

  “Everybody’s got a fucking choice.”

  “It wasn’t his fault, Mr. Alberto. I said if he didn’t tell me, I’d give him to Don Donatti.”

  Frank Alberto walked slowly, almost casually toward Garetsky. When he was no more than three feet away, he stopped and looked at him. Then seeming barely to move, he brought the butt of his gun across Garetsky’s chin.