Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  He heard a dry, hacking cough. When it stopped, Gianni eased down the stairs, his steps silent in rubber-soled running shoes. Then leaning as far as possible over the banister, he saw a man sitting and smoking on the fourth-floor landing. Professor Serini lived on the floor directly below the smoker.

  The man was reading a newspaper. His jacket was off and he wore a hip holster that held a .38 caliber police special. A pair of handcuffs hung from his belt.

  Gianni pulled back from the banister and thought it through. When he had it all clear in his mind, he removed his hairpiece, moustache, and glasses, and carefully stowed them in his pockets. If the cop caught a glimpse of him before he was knocked out, he didn’t want him remembering his disguise when he came out of it. Then Gianni drew his automatic and started down the stairs. This time he walked normally, letting his steps be heard.

  The watcher, evidently assuming he was hearing just another tenant coming downstairs behind him, leaned to one side to allow passing room. He never bothered to glance back as Gianni swung the butt of his automatic against the side of the cop’s head. Making only a soft grunt, the watcher went over like a tree with rotten roots.

  Gianni began moving quickly.

  Kneeling, he got his shoulder under the unconscious man’s middle and wrestled him up to the roof. Once there, he stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth, cuffed his hands behind his back, and tied his ankles together with some clothesline. Then he dragged him behind a ventilator and a pile of roofing equipment and went down to the third floor.

  Prof. Eduardo Serini opened his door on the second ring, an old man with liver marks, a thousand wrinkles, and a full head of shining white hair. He squinted at Gianni with rheumy eyes and smiled with all his own teeth.

  “Benvenuto, Gianni. Avanti. Come in, come in.”

  Half leaning on Gianni’s arm, the old man took him into the kitchen, where he’d been reading an Italian paperback. For years, Gianni had made a point of dropping by at least once a week, so Serini showed no surprise. Gianni took his usual chair at the kitchen table, and the professor poured some espresso.

  “So what did you do with the stupid poliziotto waiting for you upstairs?” Serini asked.

  Gianni slowly shook his head. “He’s sleeping up on the roof. You still know everything, eh, Professore?”

  “Why not? What else have I got to do?”

  “Then you were questioned?”

  “That’s their job. They don’t protect people. They ask them questions.”

  Serini squinted at Gianni’s battered face. “I see they questioned you pretty damn good.”

  “Did they hurt you?” Gianni asked.

  “Nan. They wouldn’t lay a finger on me. I’m too old. All I’d do for them if they touched me is die. Besides, I have un posto nel loggione.”

  This last meant a seat among the gods, and was characteristic of the old man’s speech, a patois of English and Italian that he’d developed and honed over the nearly seventy years he’d been in America. II professore had arrived in New York on his honeymoon with his bride of two weeks and top honors from the Royal Academy of Art in Rome and never left. The honeymoon trip had been his graduation prize for painting, and the winning canvas itself still hung in his living room. Gianni could see it from where he sat, a huge somber oil of an actual shipwreck in which hundreds had died, including Serini’s parents and sister. It gave off a bad mood.

  “What did the police ask?” said Gianni.

  “Where you and Vittorio were. And since I didn’t know, it was a very short conversation.” Serini sighed. “So what are you here to ask me?”

  “The same things the police did.”

  “You don’t know where you are, Gianni?”

  “Not really, Professore. And it looks like I’m not going to find out unless I find Vittorio.”

  “What makes you think I know where that crazy assassino is?”

  “Didn’t we just agree you know everything?”

  The old man nodded as if that was really an answer. Then he remained silent for several moments over his espresso.

  “I’ll be honest,” he said. “I hear Vittorio’s name and all I want to do is vomit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he had it all… everything… the best. And he turned himself into a first-class piece of shit. Veramente prima classe. I got no patience for that. I mean, I look at you. I see what he could have been. And I just get sick.”

  “We’re two different people.”

  “That’s garbage. You were like one. Brothers. And you both started in the same toilet. Only you got out, and he’s still floating with the turds.”

  “That’s where I’ll end up, too, if I don’t find him, Professore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just take my word for it and help me. Will you do that much?”

  Eduardo Serini looked off somewhere. Finally, he nodded.

  “I think Vittorio came to see you for the last time about ten years ago,” said Gianni. “Is that true?”

  “Si.”

  “And what did he want?”

  “To show me a painting.”

  “Whose?”

  “His own.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Besides, I don’t see—”

  “Please, Professore. Just tell me what happened.”

  The old man allowed himself several moments to put it together.

  “A surprise is what happened,” he said. “Vittorio shows me this painting he says he’s just done, and wants to know if I think it’s any good. I tell him, yes, it’s good.‘Good enough to sell?’ he asks. And again I tell him, yes.”

  Serini looked at the artist across his kitchen table. “So, he says, it’s the first painting he’s done in years and am I sure I’m not just trying to make him feel good. And I tell him I’ve got no reason to want to make a murdering prick feel good, that it’s a stinking sin against God for a Christ-given talent like his to be wasted on shit like him, and to get the hell out of my goddamn house before I throw him out.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the crazy bastardo starts laughing and kissing me on both cheeks. He says he’s always loved me, too, and he’s real sorry he’s been such a murdering prick all these years, but maybe there’s still a little time left so he can change.”

  “That was it?”

  The professor nodded.

  “And you never saw him again?”

  “No.”

  They sat there over their black coffee.

  The professor stirred himself.

  “Vittorio did call me once,” he said.

  “When?”

  “I’m not sure. But I don’t think it could have been more than maybe two, three years ago.”

  “What did he call for?”

  “Just to say a long-delayed grazie. Also, to tell me he had a son who was gifted with a true talento for la bella arte and wouldn’t waste one fly speck of it like his murdering prick of a padre.”

  “Where was he calling from?”

  “He never said. But it must have been a long way off.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it was a pay phone and he dumped in a pile of money.”

  “You heard the coins clanging in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you must have heard an operator tell him how much to dump in.”

  “Probabilmente.”

  “OK,” said Gianni. “So what language was the operator speaking?”

  Serini stared blankly.

  “Come on, Professore. Think. Did you understand what she was saying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it was English?”

  The old man tiredly shook his head. “Non. That much, I know.”

  “So what other languages do you understand?”

  “Solamente italiano.”

  They looked at each other.

  Reaching an outside phone later, Gianni Garetsky called 911 to
report someone lying tied-up on the roof of 45 Mulberry Street.

  19

  IN NEW YORK for the day on official Justice Department business, Henry Durning broke away from his staff at about 5:00 P.M. and had his driver take him to the huge Mariott Marquis Hotel in midtown.

  He took one of the back elevators to the thirty-third floor, walked along the carpeted corridor to suite 3307 without passing anyone, and let himself in with the key that had been delivered that morning to his own suite at the Waldorf.

  Deliberately early for his meeting, he removed his jacket and poured himself a tall Perrier from the minibar instead of his usual Jack Daniel’s. Then, carrying his drink, he walked to a big picture window facing west and stood in the wash of the late-afternoon sun. On the river, a distant, incoming freighter moved slowly with the tide.

  What he felt most at that moment was a peculiar apathy.

  Yet much of his initial shock remained and kept breathing through. The thing was, it had all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly.

  Thinking of it now, he found it hard to focus. His mind seemed to slip in and out of gear like a faulty machine. But he stayed with it. How could he not? It was suddenly the central issue of his life. His survival hung on its outcome.

  It was exactly a week ago that it had all gone off inside him like a personal earthquake, and the aftershocks were still spreading.

  The note had come to his Georgetown house exactly ten days ago in a plain white envelope marked Personal. It was delivered with the regular mail and there was no return address. But the postmark was stamped Freeport, New York, a town on the south shore of Long Island.

  The enclosed, poorly typewritten message said:

  Dear Mr. Durning,

  Irene Hopper didn’t go down in the ocean with your plane nine years ago like you and everybody thought she did.

  She didn’t die. I’m enclosing her old driver’s license so you don’t get the idea I’m just some crackpot.

  If you want to see proof of this and hear the whole story of what really happened to her, call me at (516) 828-6796 and I’ll tell you how to get where I live.

  I’m very sick and can’t leave my bed or I’d be happy to come to you in Washington.

  Please don’t wait too long to call me. My doctor doesn’t expect me to be around all that much longer.

  Mike

  Henry Durning had read the note five times. Each time he felt primitive stirrings of dread in his brain. Yet, less than twenty minutes after his first reading of the brief message, he found himself dialing the man’s number.

  “Is this Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Henry Durning. I read your letter a little while ago and I have some questions.”

  “Not on the phone, please Mr. Durning. If you want to talk, you’ll have to come to my house.”

  “When?”

  “The sooner the better. Tonight OK? About eight?”

  “Sure.”

  The man called Mike gave him directions.

  “Just two things, Mr. Durning. Don’t tell anybody about this, and nobody comes with you. No chauffeur, no security, nobody. It’s nothing personal. Something like this, a man can’t be too careful. Understand?”

  Durning understood.

  He understood enough to slip an automatic inside his belt. Then he flew his own Lear to La Guardia, picked up a rental car at the terminal, and fifty minutes later parked a few blocks away from the modest, shingled Cape Cod in which Mike lived. If there was some sort of mystic dislocation in the heavens that night, Durning was sure it had stayed very close to him all the way.

  A middle-aged woman with thick, graying hair opened the door.

  “I’m Henry Durning.”

  “I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” She flushed self-consciously. “My husband’s waiting for you.”

  He followed her upstairs to a small bedroom smelling of body things, sickness, drugs.

  Mike sat propped up in bed. He had not been lying about his condition. His hollowed-out eye sockets, his gaunt face, the yellow-gray color of his skin, all projected death.

  “Hi, Mr. Durning.” His voice was hoarse, rasping. “You met my wife, Emma. You’ll excuse me, but she’ll have to pat you down. I can’t take a chance you’re wired.”

  “I’m not wired, but I am carrying.”

  “I don’t mind a gun. But Emma’s still gotta check you for a wire.”

  Durning stood while the woman searched him. She found the automatic in his belt but left it where it was. When she was through, she nodded to her husband and slid a chair close to his bed for their visitor.

  “Would you like some nice red wine, Mr. Durning? Or maybe a little Irish whiskey?”

  He looked at the woman, smelled the organic soup in the air, and smelled the entire rest of her life. “Thank you,” he told her. “The red sounds fine.”

  When his wife was out of the room, Mike said, “I’m doing this whole bit for her, Mr. Durning. Between the doctors and drugs and not working and all, I’m leaving her with shit. So, if you want what I’m selling, it’ll have to cost a few bucks.”

  Durning just sat there.

  “To be honest,” said Mike, “I hate like hell doing this. In my whole life I never sold out a friend. But Emma’s given me thirty-eight years and I owe her.”

  He coughed and passed blood and mucus into a tissue.

  His wife returned with a bottle and two glasses on a silver tray, and Mike watched her serve Durning and herself. Then she settled on the edge of the bed.

  “OK, here’s how it was,” said Mike. “About nine years ago this friend of mine came to me for a favor. Because I could fly, he asked me to help him work something out. What he needed was to make it look like this woman, flying alone, got killed when her plane took a dive over the Atlantic.”

  Durning moistened his lips with the wine. “This woman was Irene Hopper?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And who was your friend?”

  “That comes later. That’s the part you’re going to have to pay for.”

  “Why would Irene Hopper want me to think she was dead?”

  “My friend never said it was you she wanted to think she was dead. He never said anything about reasons, and I never asked. We both figured the less I knew, the better.”

  “Then what did you know that made you write to me about her being alive?”

  “I saw the plane’s papers. They were registered in your name. So, I just figured you might have some interest. Right?”

  Durning nodded slowly. “How did you do it?”

  “It wasn’t all that hard. Irene just took off from Teterboro, New Jersey, with a flight plan filed for Palm Beach. You remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You also remember how she made an emergency landing in Florence, South Carolina, ’cause she didn’t like how her engine was sounding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when her plane took off from Florence an hour later, I was flying it, not her.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Driving off in a rented car I left in a parking lot.”

  “And then?”

  “I just followed her flight plan off the coast of Georgia. When I was about thirty miles out over the ocean from Brunswick, with no ships or planes in sight, I got into a life vest and parachute, emptied both gas tanks, and bailed out as the plane was about to go into a stall.”

  Mike sucked air and began coughing again until his wife had him sip some water through a straw.

  “I was in the ocean maybe five minutes,” he said, “when my friend got me into his boat. We had it figured that close. Then we dumped enough flotation stuff for the Coast Guard to identify over the next few days. And that’s how it was, Mr. Durning.”

  The room was still.

  “How do I know you didn’t just make all this up?”

  The sick man nodded. “Emma, please get that envelope in the next room for Mr. Durning.”

  The woman brought it, and
Durning glanced through a sheaf of creased and faded FAA forms, licenses, and flight plans. They all bore the signature of Irene Hopper, as well as the ID number of the plane she was flying on the day they both vanished off the Georgia coast.

  Also in the envelope was her pilot’s license. Durning held it awkwardly in his hand and felt himself disappear into emotions that didn’t seem to belong to him. He looked at the attached photograph of a beautiful, fair-haired young woman whom he had been very close to for a long time but evidently had never even come close to knowing. When he felt his fin gers starting to lose control, Durning put everything back into the envelope and closed the flap.

  “When did you last see her?” he asked Mike.

  “Nine years ago. When she got out of your plane in South Carolina and I got in.”

  “Did you know where she was going from there?”

  “No.”

  “And your friend?”

  “Same thing. Haven’t heard a word from him since the day he fished me out of the ocean. We agreed it would be best that way. So the only thing I can tell you is his name.”

  Mike took in more water through his straw. “That’s if you want it.”

  Henry Durning looked at the man propped on his pillows, and his wife sitting on the edge of his bed. He saw the fragile looks exchanged between them and understood that in these exchanges there were elements of panic.

  “I want it,” he said.

  “Like I told you, that’s the part that has to cost.”

  “How much?”

  Mike took the long, deep breath of a man about to go over a fall. “A hundred grand. And it has to be all cash.”

  “Who knows about all this?”

  “Just Emma and you.” Mike’s shame wouldn’t let him leave it alone. “And even you wouldn’t know if I wasn’t this sick and broke.”

  “Did you tell anyone I was coming here tonight?”

  “Hell, no. You think I’m nuts?”

  Durning’s eyes were off somewhere. He felt lost in the surprise of who he was.

  “If it’s all right with you,” he said, “I can pick up the cash and be back at eight tomorrow night.”