Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  Gianni fell among the beans.

  He came out of it like a scuba diver, resting a little at each level. There was pain, but that had become nothing new for him lately. Trying to figure things out, he kept his eyes closed longer than he had to. When he finally opened them, he was ready.

  He was sitting in some woods, propped against the trunk of a tree. It was cool and shady, but shafts of sunlight struck down through the leaves. The bark of the tree felt rough and solid against his back. Frank Alberto sat a few feet away, his shotgun across his lap.

  Alberto pointed to his right. “Look over there.”

  Gianni looked. He saw a large, freshly dug hole with dirt piled around it and a shovel standing in the dirt.

  “That’s for you.”

  Gianni closed his eyes and said nothing.

  “What kinda shit is this?” asked Alberto. “I mean, I’m a goddamn dead man. No one in this whole fucking world… except my son and Vittorio Battaglia… even knows I’m alive. And you walk up to me in the middle of my field and say you want to talk. Just like that.”

  He snapped his fingers.

  Alberto took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Gianni watched his hands. They were strong and steady.

  “I’m dead nine years,” said Alberto. “Vittorio’s my own God. He resurrected me. He’s who I pray to at night. And you wanta talk to me about him? OK. Talk to me. You’ve got ten minutes. Then you talk to Jesus.”

  His mouth dry and tasting of blood, Gianni told his tale for the fourth time. Alberto listened without interruption, smoking, looking faintly bored. He seemed to be balanced on some shrinking spot on the ground.

  When the story was finished, the woods were quiet. That was the first thing Gianni noticed, the quiet.

  “That’s it?” said Frank Alberto.

  Garetsky was silent.

  “You mean now we come to the real shit? What you want from me? Like maybe where Vittorio is?”

  “That’s important, Mr. Alberto.”

  “To who? You and the cinese lady?”

  “To Vittorio, too.”

  “How d’yuh figure that?”

  “He doesn’t even know the feds are out looking for him. If you give me some idea where he is, I can at least warn him, let him know what he might be facing.”

  The man Carlo Donatti had referred to as an old Moustache Pete sat quietly thinking about what Gianni had said. He tossed his cigarette into the open hole. My grave, thought Garetsky. Watching Alberto’s face, Gianni thought he had the look of a man with so many problems, he couldn’t decide which one to worry about first.

  “You called Vittorio your own God,” said Gianni. “You said he saved your life. Don’t you think you owe him a fair shot at his own?”

  “You don’t have to goddamn tell me what I owe him!”

  Gianni said nothing. But the anger in Frank Alberto’s voice was more defensive now and actions were taking place inside him.

  “Anyways,” Alberto grumbled, “I ain’t seen the guy in maybe nine years. So who even knows where he is?”

  “What about the last time the two of you were together?”

  “What about it?”

  “Maybe you both talked,” said Gianni. “Maybe you both said things about where you might be going and what you’d do when you got there. Maybe you could have said something about always wanting to do farming, and this was your chance. You remember anything like that?”

  A black-and-yellow bird flew onto a branch and Alberto stared up at it, watching the way it ruffled its feathers. Alberto had a remote, thoughtful expression on his face. Then the bird flew away and he looked at Garetsky.

  “Painting,” he said. “Vittorio talked about how he wanted to do nothing but knock out all these pictures. I remember that for sure. My Angie always said he was the best painter in the school. Angie said you were good, too. But he thought Vittorio was better.”

  “I thought so, too,” said Gianni. “But what about where he might be doing all this painting? You remember him mentioning anything about that?”

  “He wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell me that. Just as I wouldn’t be crazy enough to tell him where I might be going. Not that I knew. It just worked out I’m here.”

  Alberto studied the shotgun in his lap. He seemed vaguely surprised to find it there. “But he did say he was getting the hell out of the country fast. And he said it would be the smart thing for me to get out, too.” He grunted.”But when have I ever done the smart thing?”

  “If you did get out of the country, where do you think you’d have gone?”

  “I don’t have to think. I know where I’d have gone. Italia. Where else?”

  They looked at each other.

  Alberto nodded slowly. “If I was looking for him, that’s where I’d look first. He speaks the language. He wouldn’t feel strange. He wouldn’t stand out like no foreigner.”

  “Not Sicily?”

  “Hell, no. Too close to la famiglia. Don Donatti still owns half the goats on the island.”

  They considered each other again and there was something between them that went a long way back.

  “Would you really have given my son to the don if he didn’t tell you where I was?” asked Alberto.

  “I knew Angie back when he was eight years old. I didn’t expect to have to do a thing to him.”

  “Hey, we can’t all be heroes.” Alberto shrugged. “Like I ain’t feeling so great myself about having to do you.”

  It went through Garetsky like a dose of salts. Somehow, with all the talking, he’d assumed they’d left his newly dug grave behind. Evidently not.

  “I thought you said everybody’s got a choice.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t like mine. Mostly, what I don’t like is you walking away knowing I’m alive and here. My own son knew, and even he sent me you. Now you know and who do you end up sending me? My own fucking angel of death? Carlo Donatti?”

  Alberto’s words hung in the stillness, numbing the air, and Gianni knew there was nothing more to talk about. He had already accepted it as part of what had happened and what would probably happen next.

  He briefly closed, then opened his eyes. “If you’re in no great rush, how about a last butt?”

  “Sure. I just wish my Angie had your guts.”

  “Why? So he could die young, too?”

  Frank Alberto was reaching for his cigarettes when a handful of dirt caught him in the face and eyes.

  An instant later Gianni had Alberto’s shotgun by its barrel and needed to swing it just once.

  The old Moustache Pete was still unconscious but breathing evenly when Gianni left him beside the open grave and headed for the Pittsburgh airport.

  Gianni had done the express drop-off on his rental car and was approaching the gate 10 boarding area for his return flight to New York, when he spotted the two men.

  There really was nothing unusual about them. They were dark haired, of medium build, and dressed respectably enough in sport coats and slacks. But Gianni had been born into and lived his entire life with this sort of thing, and all he had to see were those ever-so-slight bulges around the left armpits, and the restless, searching eyes. Of course they might just as easily have been local plainclothes cops, not feds. But he didn’t think so.

  He picked up a courtesy phone about forty feet from where the two men were standing, and he called the Passenger Service Counter in the main terminal lobby.

  “Could you please help me?” he said. “I’m calling from gate twenty-five, and I’ve somehow missed some friends who were supposed to be meeting my flight.”

  “What’s your name?” the attendant asked.

  “Gantry… Kevin Gantry,” said the artist, which was the name on one of the clean credit cards that Don Donatti had given him, and the card he had used early that morning to book his round-trip flight from New York to Pittsburgh.

  “Please stay just where you are, Mr. Gantry.”

  Moments later, the announcement came over the public ad
dress system. “Attention, please. Will those meeting arriv ing passenger Kevin Gantry please go to gate twenty-five, where your passenger is now waiting.”

  Watching the two men, Garetsky saw them turn and stare at each other as the words faded. Then half jogging down the crowded corridor, they headed in the direction of gate 25.

  Bingo!

  Gianni swore softly to himself.

  Don Donatti?

  Impossible.

  Until he remembered the don’s own words.

  You’re not stupid, Gianni, so don’t say stupid things. Finally, everybody talks.

  But it still didn’t go down easily, and he stood there, trying to work it through. You didn’t give up a lifetime of that kind of feeling… that kind of friendship, loyalty, even love, without a fight.

  Then the very intensity of his sentiment sickened him and he lost patience with it.

  Think, damn it!

  Flying directly back was out. They’d be monitoring every flight to New York for at least the rest of the night. Maybe longer. Although after the fake paging of Kevin Gantry they’d know he was on to them and expand their surveillance to other flights. Possibly even to rental cars and bus terminals. It depended on how many people they were using. He couldn’t believe he was that high a priority. Until he remembered it wasn’t him. It was Vittorio Battaglia. Yet even that explained nothing.

  A sudden weakness filtered through him. The past days had taken their toll, and he was beginning to feel like an aging fighter near the end of a grueling twelve-rounder, when his legs were rubber and he could barely hold up his arms. In the distance, he could still make out the bobbing heads of the two hunters on their futile run to gate 25. He was nothing but game to them, a fox in a swamp with the hounds baying all around.

  The bastards, he thought, and the anger itself brought a much-needed rush of adrenaline.

  Checking the posted flight schedules, he rushed to a ticket counter and booked himself onto a 6:15 to Boston, which would be taking off in less than ten minutes.

  He paid with cash, wishing he’d done the same with his Pittsburgh tickets, instead of trying to preserve his hard currency for possible future emergencies. Although he was probably lucky to have found out where he stood with Don Donatti while he could still control the damage. At a different time and place, using another of the credit cards, licenses, or passports so graciously provided by the don, he might have been picked up cold.

  Gianni Garetsky thought about Carlo Donatti all the way to Boston.

  Every act of betrayal carried its own level of hurt, and this one cut deep. The don wasn’t of his blood, but since the deaths of his parents, Carlo Donatti was the closest thing to blood that Gianni had left.

  No more than five nights ago the don had come to the Met to honor and embrace him with flooding eyes. One night after that, he had given him a gun, a hundred thousand in cash, allegedly clean papers, his heartfelt blessing, and a warning not to trust even him.

  This was the man he had known all his life.

  At Boston’s Logan Airport, he caught the next shuttle to New York without incident and arrived at La Guardia less than an hour later.

  He called the Sheraton from the first phone he saw on leaving the arrival gate, and heard Mary Yung’s voice say hello.

  “How are things?” he asked, according to their agreed-upon code.

  “Terrible.”

  Something ran cold in him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve missed you like the devil.”

  He stood there, the receiver shaking in his hand. “For Christ’s sake, Mary!”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I mean fine. Things are fine.”

  The wire hummed between them.

  “But I still missed you like the devil,” she said.

  * * *

  It was well past eleven, but neither of them had eaten so Mary Chan Yung had room service send up a late supper.

  Gianni found something curiously domestic in it. The breed was insanely adaptable. Their fourth night together, and there was already a sense of shared histories. Another two nights, and they’d be hanging new curtains and going into family planning.

  He decided to say nothing about Don Donatti and the two men at the Pittsburgh airport. But he did tell Mary Yung what happened with Frank Alberto, his shotgun, and his waiting grave.

  “Your compaesano sounds like a real doll,” she said flatly. “But after sleeping with a shotgun for nine years, who can blame him for being a little cautious?”

  “Not you. Right?”

  Mary Yung looked at him long and evenly. Then she decided to let it go.

  “So what do we do now?” she said. “Take an all-inclusive Parillo Tour of Italy?”

  “I’d like to pick up a bit more to go on.”

  “How?”

  “By talking to a couple of people.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a district attorney.”

  “That’s the nastiest thing you’ve said to me yet.”

  Gianni laughed. It felt strange, and he wondered if he’d ever be laughing again on any kind of regular basis. The warm, sweet feeling this woman was giving him felt even stranger, and he wondered about that, too.

  “I want to talk to my gallery rep and my old art teacher. My teacher was also Vittorio’s teacher.”

  “What can they tell you?”

  The artist worked on his third glass of the special chardon-nay that Mary had ordered to go with their dinner. She seemed to know and care a lot about such things. He didn’t. But neither was he finding it especially painful.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe nothing. But since wherever Vittorio is, he’s probably painting, each one of them knew him well enough as an artist to be able to come up with something I might not think of myself.”

  * * *

  Something awakened Gianni.

  He sat up with a start and stared into the darkness.

  Then he heard Mary Yung cry out and he knew this was the sound that had awakened him.

  Now it just kept coming, a keening, almost childish wail, so sharp and shrill that Gianni felt it enter him like a blade.

  He turned on a lamp between the two beds and the room quivered with a yellow light.

  Face contorted, eyes tightly closed, Mary Yung thrashed about her bed. She might have been fighting an invisible army of wizards and fiends.

  Gianni caught her wrists and held them. “Easy,” he whispered. “Easy, it’s OK.”

  She worked against him, testing his grip. She was surprisingly strong.

  Then her eyes opened, went wide at their centers, and the wailing sound stopped. She lay staring at him, her face and body wet with perspiration, her gown plastered to her skin.

  “It was only a dream,” Gianni said. “Everything’s all right.”

  Everything’s all right.

  She’d shot and buried three government agents who’d come to question, torture, and probably kill her. She was homeless and on the run. Powerful, anonymous forces were out hunting her even now. If she had any future at all, it would more than likely take place in some as yet undefined chamber of horrors.

  How much worse could a mere dream have been?

  She began shivering. It became very bad. It became so bad that Gianni could hear her teeth chattering. He went into the bathroom and brought back a towel and a terry robe.

  “You’d better get that wet gown off,” he said.

  Mary struggled with it. But she was shaking so violently, he had to help her. Then he dried her with the bath towel.

  Naked, she all but took his breath away.

  His reaction was involuntary, pure reflex. Nevertheless, it shamed him. The human animal. It might not always prevail, but it sure as hell was going to survive.

  Back under the covers, Mary Yung was still trembling.

  “Hold me,… ” she pleaded.

  Gianni lay close and held her. She held him. They lay there holding each other. Finally, the trembling stopp
ed.

  But neither of them let go. They might have been imprisoned in each other, which was almost the way Gianni had begun to think about it. Still, good sounds were taking place somewhere in his head, and something bent on pleasure was loose. The fact was, he couldn’t bear to move apart from her. Yet he had an intimation he mustn’t think too much about it. Certainly, not now.

  It was she who offered the first kiss, of course. God help him if he had been the one to start. Some disastrous break in the heavens might have resulted. But when he touched a hand to her breast, he was ready to commit the rest of his life to contemplating the sensation. It was as if something was demonstrating to him that until this instant he had never even come close to understanding the true miracle of a breast.

  Determined to miss nothing now, he moved on to further miracles. And with what a state of grace. Even the excitement held its separate measure of calm. He looked at her eyes, at the lovely riddle of her face, and had never seen anything more open to him. It was true. Whatever he wanted was his. He had only to reach for it.

  And the cost?

  Who could tell with a woman like this?

  Yet, somewhere near the middle of it, like a bonus he didn’t deserve, something wistful and good took root in him, as if a new part of his life had begun. So that going up with it, then down, then up once more, he was able to look at her soft alien eyes, suddenly alight with pure gold, and hope for something he knew in his heart wasn’t there.

  It was only later, when Mary was asleep, that he thought of his wife and went cold with it.

  This has nothing to do with you, he told Teresa. Not Mary Yung, not any woman, can ever touch what we had.

  I’m making progress.

  15

  GIANNI WAS ABOUT to call Don Carlo Donatti on his private safe phone… buried in lead cable, no taps.

  He had decided he couldn’t live with it this way. The evidence was strong, but totally circumstantial. After so many years, the don deserved at least the chance to talk.

  He was at a gas-station phone on Northern Boulevard, just across the Nassau County line and about a twenty-minute drive from Donatti’s Sands Point home. It was a bright, sunny morning, and a cool breeze carried a whiff of the sea off the quiet waters of Little Neck Bay. It was much too nice a day for what he was doing.