Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  Gianni dialed the special, easy-to-remember number, even panic won’t block it out… and heard the don answer on the third ring.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “Gianni! I’ve been worried sick. You OK?”

  “I’m alive, Don Donatti. How are you?”

  “I asked you to keep in touch. It’s been four days. I didn’t know what to think.”

  Gianni heard the reprisal of the neglected parent in his tone. “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me. But it’s been a hard few days, with a lot of running. Still, that’s no excuse and I apologize.”

  “Grazie a Dio you’re all right. Something bad happened and I had no way to warn you.”

  Garetsky waited in silence.

  “All that safe stuff I gave you?” said Donatti. “Burn it. None of it’s any good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a terrible embarrassment for me, Gianni. It’s lucky you didn’t use any of the credit cards. They would have had you if you did.”

  “But I did use a card.”

  The wire hummed briefly.

  “Whose name?” asked Donatti.

  “Kevin Gantry’s. It was for airline tickets.”

  “And nothing happened?”

  “It could have. But I spotted a couple of agents at the departure gate before they spotted me, and took a different flight.”

  Donatti swore softly in Italian.

  “What you must have thought of me, Gianni.”

  Garetsky watched the flow of traffic on Northern Boulevard. He didn’t think there could be any trace tie-in with the don’s phone, but he still kept an eye out in both directions.

  “Accidents happen,” he said.

  “This was no accidente. Someone I trusted like my right arm sold you to the FBI to get his brother out of Leavenworth. My deepest apologies, Gianni. What more can I say?”

  “You don’t have to say anything, Don Donatti.” In the distance, Garetsky heard the faint sound of police sirens. “Have you learned anything about why they want Vittorio?” he asked.

  “Niente. But it’s the Bureau that wants him, all right.”

  The line hung soundless between them.

  “I’m so sorry, Gianni.”

  Donatti didn’t seem to know what else to say.

  “What about your right arm?” said Gianni. “The one who sold me?”

  “I cut it off. You’ll call me again soon?”

  “Of course. I’ll try to do better with that.”

  “It’s good just hearing your voice. Take care, Gianni.”

  “You, too, Godfather.”

  The sirens were only a few blocks away and getting closer as Gianni hung up. His car was parked just around the corner and he got in and circled the block.

  Three Nassau County police cruisers were clustered around the phone booth as he drove past.

  Naturally, there was no good right arm to be cut off, and no brother waiting to be released from Leavenworth. The need to deal had been strictly the don’s. Who knew what the feds had on the godfather these days? The only real thing in the whole conversation was his apology. Gianni didn’t doubt that part. He was sorry.

  But Gianni Garetsky had to go back twenty years to get the true feel of what Carlo Donatti had been to him.

  It was the don himself who came to tell him about his mother and father the evening it happened, just appearing unannounced at the door and letting him see his eyes.

  Then he stayed all night, staring through and filling Gianni’s silences with his lush tales of la famiglia and all it meant. In Don Carlo Donatti’s world there was no evil, no calamity, that couldn’t be considered as a source of good. This was what sentiment did. It cut the sharp edges off reality and taught that what you did out of necessity was far more precious than what you did from choice. Sentiment reconsidered tragedy as a test of courage. Suffering, personal loss, became purification rites on the road to manhood.

  “It’ll pass, Gianni. It’ll make you stronger.”

  Strength, of course, being the ultimate good. When the only thing Gianni wanted was to get even. In his mind there was a chill, blue haze. In this light there were only his murdered parents. It drained meaning from everything else and left him dry.

  “Who killed them?” he asked Don Donatti.

  “A man named Vincenzo.”

  “Why? What did my mother and father ever do to him?”

  “Nothing. It wasn’t personal. It was to make a point with la famiglia. Don’t worry, Gianni. We’ll take care of him.”

  “With all respect, Godfather. I’ll take care of him.”

  Donatti looked at him. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  The single word hung in the air between them. Donatti spent time considering it.

  “All right,” he finally said. “I understand your feeling in this. But I won’t have you going off like some crazy and getting yourself killed. I must prepare you.”

  He did.

  He brought Gianni a well-oiled, 9mm automatic, explained its workings, showed him how to field-strip and put it back together blindfolded, and taught him how to shoot properly, with live ammunition, in a basement firing range. Donatti prepared him for the almost ceremonial act of killing with as much love and care as any offered novice matadors being sent out to face their first potentially lethal bulls.

  When the don felt Gianni had the knowledge and physical skills to properly do the job, he tried to prepare him psychologically.

  “This is no game,” he said. “There are no rules. If you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you. Forget any ideas you might have about being fair. This is an assassination, an assassinio… not a tennis match. He wasn’t fair to your mama and papa. He shot them in the back of the head. You understand what I’m telling you, Gianni?”

  Gianni Garetsky understood.

  When the big night came, he stood in the shadows outside the riverfront warehouse where Vincenzo worked and would soon leave to walk to his Cadillac’s parking space. He had a silencer on his automatic and his mother and father heavy in his chest. He was so frightened he couldn’t squeeze out enough saliva to spit. But he welcomed even the fear. He could touch his parents through it.

  He saw Vincenzo come out of the warehouse and start toward his car. His plan was to wait until Vincenzo passed him, then fire into his back until he went down. Gianni had been envisioning it for almost a full week. All very clean and simple. What could go wrong?

  What could go wrong was him.

  Because when it finally came to doing it, to actually squeezing off the shots, when he had Vincenzo’s broad, unmissable back squarely in his sights from a distance of no more than ten feet, he couldn’t get himself to do it.

  And it wasn’t even a matter of being fair. There was just no meaning in it for him this way.

  So he called out, “Vincenzo!”

  The man turned and they stared at each other. It seemed quite natural that just the two of them should be there, that their brains and bodies should be linked at this moment.

  “I’m Gianni Garetsky,” he said, and saw Vincenzo’s eyes as he went for his gun, saw the gun itself as the muzzle swung toward him.

  Then there was some meaning in it for him, and he got off a burst of three quick shots.

  The cluster was right in the killing zone.

  The price was high. He had to leave the country and live a fugitive life for years.

  But the prize was wholeness.

  And Don Carlo Donatti was the one who helped give it to him, who offered comfort, money, protection, who did for him whatever needed to be done, who finally taught him how to make his way in the dark.

  Until this.

  16

  THE HAND OF God, thought Peter Walters. The blood, the devastation, was stunning. All of it was right there in Peter’s living room, with his wife and son sitting alongside him and watching it on the seven o’clock news. The bomb had exploded in the main concourse of Rome’s Fiumicin
o Airport, while a dozen or more camcorders, on hand to record the arrival of some ranking American delegates to the latest Mideast peace talks, recorded this horror instead.

  The explosion had taken place only minutes before the cameras began picking up the results, and the sounds and pictures carried all the bone-chilling immediacy of the best combat reporting. The dead lay about like bundles of old clothes. The wounded screamed. Those able to move ran wildly in every direction. While through and above it all, smoke and dust drifted in the misty gray layers of Dante’s personal vision of hell.

  And the hand of God?

  Merely Peter’s considered reaction, on watching the tragic disaster unfold, to the fact of his leaving in the morning to do Abu Homaidi.

  Not that this particular bombing was necessarily Homaidi’s work. So far, no one had claimed it. But its style was typi cally his. Which meant there was no advance warning. The bloodletting was pitiless and indiscriminate. Women and children suffered their full share of the damage. The primary targets remained American. And the bombing itself took place on European soil.

  Peter Walters glanced at his son, who sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his mother. Watching the seven o’clock news together had become something of a family ritual when Peter was home. But this evening, considering the frightful nature of its content, Peter would rather not have had Paulie exposed to it.

  At the moment, the boy was sitting very still, transfixed. It was as though he knew something terrible was unfolding on the screen in front of him, but he didn’t understand what it meant. Until a camera closed in on a young girl’s screaming, blood-streaked face, and it was terrified. Then Paul’s face became terrified, too.

  “Papa,… ” he said softly, just that, not even knowing he was saying it, then slowly shaking his head back and forth, back and forth, like a suddenly bereaved old man.

  Peter watched him instead of the television screen. He already knew enough, too much, about what had happened inside the Rome airport. He would never know enough about what was taking place inside his son.

  But he did know what was going on inside him now. Paulie was imagining himself at the airport with the screaming girl, was seeing himself with the blood streaming down his face, was hearing his own terrified cries.

  Peter also knew that Paul wanted him to touch his head. So he sat down on the floor behind him, worked his fingers through his hair, and heard him sigh.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “How does a terrible thing like that happen?”

  “They said it was a bomb.”

  “I know. But why? I mean why does anyone want to kill so many people for no reason?”

  Peter looked at his wife. She refused to meet his eyes. Which meant this was all his, and he shouldn’t expect any help from her.

  “I guess whoever did it thought they had a reason,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “To me there can’t be any reason to hurt innocent, helpless women and children. But whoever did this was probably trying to frighten people and get attention for something they wanted.”

  “Why can’t the police catch them?”

  “I’m sure they’re trying.”

  Paul thought about it, his eyes dark. “They’ll never catch them,” he decided.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they never do. But I bet you could if you tried,” said Paul.

  “Me?” Peter was mildly startled. “I’m no policeman. What do I know about catching crazy bombers?”

  The boy turned to look at him.

  “You know everything, Papa.”

  Peter was planning to leave very early in the morning, so Peggy was helping him pack before they went to bed.

  During their early years together, she had given him a hard time before each of his mysterious little trips. Resentful of his leaving her, she had started arguments without apparent cause, had hurled recriminations, had frozen him with long, cold silences. But not anymore.

  Peter thought, she accepted his need to go in much the same way a mother accepted a beloved child’s permanent disabilities. She considered him rather simple in what he felt about his responsibility to America. She believed that in a way his feelings were almost juvenile, that at the age of thirty-eight he had somehow been spared the destruction of certain naive sentiments the way a pet duck was spared the ax.

  But she no longer fought it. And because she didn’t, he felt doubly guilty. Watching her help gather his things, seeing her neatly arrange each item, he nearly wished she would rage at him instead of trying to be so damned helpful.

  “I’m so sorry Paul had to see all those awful things on the news tonight,” she said. “It’s going to hit him hard for the next few days. Too bad you won’t be around to soothe him. He thinks you’re Jesus Himself.”

  It was a not so subtle reminder that he was abandoning the needs of his son. Her first lapse.

  “What are you telling me? That I’m not Jesus?”

  She had stopped lining up his socks to study him, and he spoke cautiously, taking pains to give an impression of complete normalcy. Still, it must be noticeable that he wasn’t in a normal state. Surely his eyes must be dilated with excitement at the prospect of what he was heading for. How could he be so eager to leave this place, this boy sleeping in the next room, this woman close beside him? Peter looked at her face, at one of the most deeply familiar and best loved of all human faces, looked at her in a way that couldn’t be mistaken and thought, Socks and underwear, look how she touches even my goddamn socks and underwear.

  Peggy smiled at his poor little joke and went back to her packing. With what control she’d learned to handle herself, he thought, and what a lot she had to hold down. The anger was still there, of course, but the explosions were all kept inside. And where fire once showed, the darkness came bit by bit. Where was it hiding, the rage of Irene Hopper, now known these many years as Peggy Walters? Under a curtain of poise and quiet humor? Come on, Peggy. Shout! Scream! Make me explain, justify. Make me tell how I am what I am and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

  So why fight it? Or was that just the easy way? Well, it didn’t really matter, did it? One way or another, he’d still go after Abu Homaidi and she’d still be left without him. One way or another, he’d still walk out of this house in the morning and, through actual choice, not necessity, maybe never see it or her again.

  He stood helplessly.

  “Peter, please get some of those handkerchiefs from your drawer.”

  He did as she asked. Then he wandered into the bathroom, dumped his toilet articles into a leather kit, and handed it to her as his contribution.

  “You’ll have to shave and brush your teeth in the morning,” she said.

  He returned his kit to the bathroom.

  Then he stretched out on the bed to watch her do the rest of his packing, finding something intensely touching in just the way she moved. What a woman. She struggled, she fought, she made do with what was finally handed her. Courage was needed to hold such control. She had a lot of it but at times it was unsteady. At times it trembled. Now, as she bent her head to look for something in a corner of his bag, Peter saw her cheek quiver.

  He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to watch that. It hurt too much.

  “Where’s your Kevlar vest?” she asked.

  Peter opened his eyes. He hated wearing the body armor, and rarely did. Besides, Kevlar couldn’t protect him from a head shot. But Peggy had an almost religious faith in the vest’s ability to keep him alive and undamaged, so he took it along for her sake. Not that she ever knew where he went on his trips, or what he did when he got there. All she did know was that danger, injury, and death were always distinct possibilities.

  “It’s in my closet,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Maybe it’s in the hall closet.”

  Peggy went to look. She came back without it. “It’s not there, either. Where else could you have put it?”
/>
  “Beats me.”

  “You’re the one who unpacked it last time.”

  He was silent.

  “This is infuriating,” she said, and the quiver spread from her cheek to her lower lip like a traveling ague.

  He rose from the bed. “Peggy… ”

  “It couldn’t just get up and walk away. The damn thing’s got to be here someplace.”

  “Did you try the refrigerator? The way my mind’s working these days, I might have put it there or in the freezer.”

  She didn’t smile. Here and there the cracks began to show. All that poise, he thought with regret, all that great control. His insides felt suspended, as before some dangerous action. She touched her cheeks in a youthful gesture, and he remembered her as she had been nine years ago. Then she let her hands hang heavy beside her hips, and she almost seemed to tumble into the beginnings of middle age. Surprise! He was no boy.

  “You think it’s funny, don’t you?” she said. “You think I’m being silly and stupid about a crazy bullet-proof thing you take along just to soothe me and probably never wear anyway. Admit it.”

  He said nothing.

  “Admit it!” she wailed.

  Her brow was troubled, and she had slid into that state where the pain was coming right through her skin. Looking at her, and against all thought and wish, he said, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?”

  Peggy looked as though he had clubbed her. It was unfair, he thought. You don’t say things like that to a woman you’ve lived with for so many years. And surely not when you’re about to go off and leave her.

  “Yes.” She sounded tired. “I know how much you love me. Only sometimes I wish you didn’t love me so damned much. Sometimes I wish you’d love me less and consider me a little more.”

  She got back her control, and Peter found the Kevlar vest hanging under a jacket in his closet.

  Then he quietly finished his packing.

  But in bed later, with the dark soft all around and the moon patchy as quicksilver, they made love for what might possibly be the last time, and Peggy said, “I didn’t mean that before. About wishing you didn’t love me so much. I lied.”