Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  “I know.”

  She sighed. “The things I can get my mouth to say.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Yes, I do. That’s a cheap, wife’s trick. Trying to load you with guilt. I’m ashamed of it.” She held him. “I’m glad you love me as you do. I wouldn’t have had it any different. Not for a minute.”

  He looked down at the drawn, wounded, beloved face, pale and a little misty in the moonlight. If I come back to her all right from this one, he swore, I’ll never do anything to hurt her again. Never.

  Yet, even at that moment, swearing to every word, he just wished he could believe it.

  17

  “THE WORST OF it is, Hank, I keep wondering where the whole mess is finally going to end.”

  It was near midnight and they were well into the Remy Martin in the study of the attorney general’s Georgetown house. Earlier, they had enjoyed dinner and a concert at the Kennedy Center. In another room, Wayne’s wife and Durn-ing’s female companion for the evening were doing their own drinking and talking.

  “That is,” Wayne added, “if it ever does finally end.”

  Durning looked at his friend’s eyes, which seemed to have been without sleep for days. It gave them a roughened edge of grief. In fact, all of Wayne’s features, crooked to begin with, appeared to sag in a curious mix of concern and sorrow. Not too unlike the equally sad looks of the more benighted sections of the city itself, thought Durning. Which meant that Brian and the worst of Washington’s depressed areas had apparently reached the point where they both knew that many hurtful things weren’t likely to get any better.

  “I’m really sorry I had to pull you into this,” he said.

  Wayne stared broodingly at Durning and was even sorrier. They had gone all through college, law school, and the country’s unholiest of wars together, and Durning had almost died saving his life. So there was no way to have turned him down on this incomprehensible manhunt for one Vittorio Battaglia. It was just that Wayne wished he knew more about what was behind it. With five of his agents already missing and presumed dead, and others still out there and in danger, he felt he had a right to know. But Hank felt differently, insisting it was enough to know that his life and future were at risk as long as Vittorio Battaglia, a known mob hitman, re mained at large. The rest was simply a matter of faith and friendship. “For you to know more than that,” Durning had told him, “can’t do either of us any good. So please, Brian, either help me or don’t help me. But leave the rest of it alone.”

  And that was the way it was left.

  The FBI director rose to freshen their drinks.

  “I guess that’s how these things finally happen,” he said.

  Durning looked at him. “What things?”

  “One’s ultimate fall from grace.” Brian Wayne laughed but its sound was chilling. “It creeps up on you so casually, so insidiously, you hardly notice. Like you send a couple of agents to question a man and woman as a favor to a friend, and the next thing you know you’re up to your ears in shit and sinking.”

  “You do have a way with words, Brian.”

  “We’ve both seen enough sad examples. And in case you’ve forgotten, they reach as high as the Oval Office. In fact, the higher you get, the harder the disease hits.”

  “What disease?”

  “A distorted sense of immunity. Believing you’re above it all, that you can’t be touched, that you’re high enough up there to get away with just about any damn thing you please.”

  “You mean you can’t?”

  Wayne’s smile was as cold as his laugh. “Next time you run into Gary Hart, Ivan Boesky, or Mike Milken, try asking one of them that question.”

  Durning’s theory.

  Like a work of art, lovemaking should never be created the same way twice. At its best it had to be a seemingly spontaneous mix of time, place, mood, and partner, blended with whatever else might happily occur along the way.

  Tonight, there had been the entire evening to lead to their finally ending up in bed together. First, the gourmet dinner in perfect surroundings with the Waynes, then the always inspirational music of Mozart, then the best of brandies alone with his old friend, then working up to the penultimate pitch in the bedroom with some of the best grass available anywhere.

  And the woman?

  A young, recently discovered jewel of Hungarian descent named Ilona, whose family name was unpronounceable, but who was an acknowledged master not only in bed but in everything leading up to it.

  She believed reason could make steady progress from disorder to harmony, and the conquest of chaos didn’t have to start all over again each morning. “You attack each new day, hour, minute,” she had told Durning, “as though you’d never fought them before, as though you had to prove your worth all over again.”

  Did she mean he didn’t have to?

  Absolutely.

  Look. He was the attorney general of the United States, a person of eminence. He should learn to relax and enjoy things more.

  What things?

  Her smile could be beatific. Why, her, of course.

  Now, moving with her through that sweet, deep area below sex, Henry Durning felt aerated, weightless, intensely alive. All those cool, blond shadows. How sensuous, how wild she was. What joy she took in everything they did. That in itself was exciting to him. Just lying on her body was like floating on moving heat. It went out of her and took him in. When she breathed, she gave off stirrings of desire.

  Then from nowhere, Brian Wayne and some of his earlier comments intruded, and Durning was put off.

  Ilona felt it. “What’s the matter?”

  “I thought of the wrong things.”

  “I’ll fix it.”

  Crouching like a golden animal drinking water, Ilona went at him. She kissed his lips, his neck, his chest, his stomach, went farther down and stayed. But Durning’s thoughts, once they strayed, weren’t easy to refocus, so that Ilona was working for nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe later.”

  She looked up at him, eyes stricken, looked across the flat plain of his stomach, up between the twin slopes of his chest. “No. Wait. It’ll be all right.”

  Then she was down and at it again.

  He tried, gently, to free himself, tried to ease her away. But she held on and he finally lay back.

  Strange woman. He could feel her body harden, sense hidden tensions and fears. Apart from it all now, he watched her apply what she knew, and she knew a great deal. Another expert. In bed, he seemed to have known only virtuosos. Every one a master. Where did they learn so much? And all so young. Or did it come with the genes?

  And he? Eternally the god, Eros himself. Except not quite so godlike tonight. And, increasingly, other nights. Face it, Henry. You’re reaching, stretching. You’re having to invent more and more. He could still carry it off well enough in most cases, but it was starting to get humiliating.

  A lamp was lit, and Durning stared at its glow on the walls and ceiling. But his thoughts were again with Wayne.

  “One’s ultimate fall from grace” was how his friend had described the growing threat, and it was aptly put. Except that Durning had no intention of falling. Brian was as good as they came, both professionally and as a friend, but he was a confirmed alarmist. Under enough pressure, people like that could be swayed. Which was one of the reasons Durning hadn’t told him the whole miserable story. Another and more vital reason for keeping the details to himself: Brian’s hardcore ethical and moral streak that might just possibly find his friend sitting in judgment on him at what could turn out to be the absolutely wrong time.

  Because Durning was still not thinking of the right things, he continued to be of no help to Ilona. Then he did begin concentrating properly… but seeing her laboring so hard, so desperately now, struck him as terribly sad and washed out all hope. Poor girl.

  He drew her up, finally, and held her.

  “It doesn’t have to be now.”


  Her face blurred, dissolved against his. Her body tensed. Her fingers clutched his chest, dug deep.

  “Hey, it’s no tragedy,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “You mustn’t get so desperate about it.”

  She lay heavily, pliable flesh turned to lead. “I guess I just hate the idea of failing.”

  “If anyone failed, it was me. Not you.”

  “When a woman can’t arouse a man, it’s her failure.”

  “That’s nothing but male chauvinist propaganda.”

  Ilona was silent for several moments. “It’s just never happened to me before,” she said.

  Durning glimpsed erotic images of her successful arousals. They stretched to infinity. “I’m sorry I had to spoil your record.”

  But he’d had enough of this particular conversation. Too much. He knew it had gone too far when, for an instant, he stared past her head and through the window at a distant star and felt something in its mystic light, some less-than-inno-cent radiance out of the legions of women he had known and used through the years, leap through space and into him. So that the emptiness of his loveless couplings suddenly struck him like a blow, and a feeling passed through him that the only true path of reason was from the depth of one being to the heart of another. And that compared to this, all his usual brands of logic meant nothing.

  So he was careful to avoid looking again at that pale, distant light. Although with the passage of a bit of time and a few more puffs of that magical golden weed, the star’s threat did seem to lessen.

  He was, after all, the one in control. He had never yet abandoned himself to any wild emotional pull. Restraint of sentiment had been his watchword, his lifelong philosophy. He was diligent in its practice. He worked at it unendingly and showed steady improvement. With luck, he expected to be in really great shape on his deathbed.

  When they loved later, the last of the star’s menace had faded.

  18

  GIANNI’S ARTISTS’ REP, Marty Ellman, lived in an elegant prewar Fifth Avenue highrise that was about a fifteen-minute walk from his Madison Avenue gallery. In fact, as far as Gianni knew, walking to and from work was pretty much the only exercise his agent had done during their entire ten years together. But Marty did it unfailingly, rain or shine, six days a week.

  As he was doing this morning.

  With one hardly noticeable difference. This morning he was being followed.

  Gianni had spotted the watcher about an hour ago, a paunchy man in a rumpled jacket and slacks, who had been leaning against the Central Park wall across from Ellman’s building and reading the Daily News. The artist had him figured for a local, rather than a fed. But Gianni was still a bit surprised at the expenditure of any surveillance manpower at all on as remote a prospect as Marty.

  Obviously not so remote.

  Walking south on Fifth Avenue, Gianni kept a full-block interval between himself and the plainclothesman, who was only about seventy feet behind Ellman. Gianni wanted to be sure the cop didn’t have any backup, since they often worked in pairs. But this one appeared to be alone.

  Ellman turned east on Sixty-eighth Street to Madison Avenue. Then he walked downtown for two blocks and unlocked and entered the Gotham Gallery of Fine Art.

  Gianni stopped walking and pretended to window shop. He saw the cop cross Madison Avenue and get into a gray sedan parked at a meter just opposite the gallery. Then the detective lit a cigarette and settled in for his day of watching.

  The gallery was in a small, three-story building on the corner of Madison and Sixty-Sixth Street. Gianni walked past it and turned the corner. When he was out of the watcher’s sight, he went down through a basement entrance, climbed a single flight of stairs and rang a bell beside the gallery’s service door.

  It was just 8:15. Marty would be alone until the place opened at 10:00 and his staff arrived.

  “It’s Gianni.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then locks and dead bolts clicked, the door swung open, and they stood looking at each other. Marty Ellman’s myopic eyes went wide behind thick lenses. He stared at the gray hair, moustache, and glasses. Then he focused on Gianni’s eyes, which were unchanged.

  “What in God’s name… ?”

  “You alone?”

  Ellman nodded dumbly, a slender man with a pink, unreasonably youthful face. “I’ve been calling you since the night of the reception. Where on earth have you been? And what’s with the trick-or-treat hair?”

  Gianni Garetsky closed and locked the metal fire door behind him. Then leading the agent into his own office, he settled tiredly into a chair. He had been on his feet for a long time.

  “You’ll never believe it, Marty.”

  “Try me.”

  Under the much brighter lights of the office, Ellman had his first good look at the artist’s face and went pale.

  “What the hell have you done? Gone back with the mob?”

  “Nothing that good.”

  Reciting the words almost by rote at this point, Gianni gave Marty Ellman the heart of it. He told no more than was necessary for the purpose of his visit. But even this brief recital made him feel as if he were spilling his own seed, weakening some vital part of his future. Had death itself already invaded him? Unfair. Especially with Marty, who had literally changed his life, who’d had enough faith to stay with him when the art world was passing him by. His only real problem with Marty, he often thought, was trying not to kiss him too much in public.

  Unable to hold himself still through it, Ellman had begun to pace. His pink face glistened with sweat by the time Gianni finished.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said flatly. “This is the United States of America, for God’s sake! The land of apple pie and chicken soup.”

  “OK. So we’ve got a few dead cockroaches floating in the soup.”

  “But you’re talking FBI, not KGB. Hell. Not even the Russians dare pull that kind of nonsense anymore.”

  Garetsky was silent. He found something oddly comforting in Marty’s reaction. Like a crazy man, he thought, being assured it’s really the rest of the world that’s crazy, not him.

  Ellman mopped his face with a handkerchief. “You took a big chance coming here. They could be watching me.”

  “They are watching you. I followed one of them all the way from your building. He’s in a car on Madison Avenue right this minute, smoking himself to death. I’d have called, but I’m sure your phones are tapped.”

  Ellman left the office and walked to the front of the gallery. When he returned, his lips were tight.

  “That gray Ford across the street?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Marvelous. Absolutely superb.”

  Shaking his head, the art dealer took a bottle of Dewars from a liquor cabinet, filled a couple of old-fashioned glasses, and took a solid belt from one.

  “It’s 8:30 in the morning, Marty. Besides, you’re Jewish.”

  “When it comes to scotch, I’m Irish.”

  Gianni allowed Ellman a moment to settle himself. Like Vittorio and Angie, the dealer had been part of the same boyhood group at art school. But in the end, he had found his juices flowing more toward the marketing of art than the creation of it. “I was lucky” was how he enjoyed explaining his career choice. “I discovered it early. I was simply too Jewish to ever be a major talent. Meaning, I wasn’t self-absorbed enough, and I enjoyed eating too much.”

  “All right,” he grumbled over his drink. “Now that you’ve got all the really good stuff out of the way, what else have you got for me? Cancer?”

  “Just a few questions, Marty. When was the last time you spoke to Vittorio?”

  The art dealer shrugged. “Hard to say. Had to be at least nine or ten years ago.”

  “How did it come about? Did you just run into him? Did he call about something? Or what?”

  “He called. Said he wanted to come over and talk. Which surprised me. I hadn’t spoken to him in years before that. He was strict
ly big-time mob by then.”

  Without thinking, Gianni picked up the scotch Ellman had poured for him, took a swallow, and made a face. “I was still in Italy at the time. So what did he want to talk about?”

  “Nothing in particular. He came to see me here at the gallery and just sort of wandered around for a while, looking at the paintings and asking questions about them.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  Ellman locked on Gianni’s eyes. “Art questions. You know… style, technique, subject matter. What was most popular with the public? Which brought the highest prices and why? What percentages the gallery took? Things like that.”

  “You mean as if he might be thinking about going into the art business himself?”

  “Exactly. In fact, I even made a joke about it. At least I hoped it was a joke. I asked him if Don Donatti was thinking of branching out into gallery protection.”

  Gianni leaned forward in his chair. “And then he asked you some of the same things about the European art markets?”

  “How did you know?”

  Gianni felt a sudden warmth. “I guess I’m just fucking psychic.”

  Prof. Eduardo Serini still lived in the same building in Little Italy that had once housed the Serini School of Art. It was on the Lower East Side’s Mulberry Street, and Gianni Garet-sky walked past the building four times, twice in each direction, and spotted nothing suspicious.

  Then Gianni went up on the roof of a five-story walk-up directly across the street from Serini’s house. From there he studied the action on the block for a full half-hour. Still, he saw nothing to bother him.

  Even so, when he finally entered Professor Serini’s tene ment, it was from across several adjoining rooftops, where he had played Follow the Leader as a boy.

  He slipped into the stairwell from the roof entrance and caught an instant whiff of cigarette smoke. It came floating up from below in a blue-gray spiral, and Gianni stood absolutely still, listening.