“They’re going to be coming very soon now,” Vittorio said.
“How do you know?”
“Because they’ll want to be here before I discover they’ve got my son.”
“You really think they’ve got him?”
“Don’t you?”
“This is your kind of shit, not mine.”
“Maybe it should be yours,” said Vittorio flatly. “You sure found me pretty damn good.”
They reached the four cars and Battaglia got into one.
“Jesus, I’m sorry about this mess,” Gianni said.
Vittorio was silent.
“I swear I don’t know how anyone could have spotted us and got on our tails. I was careful as hell every second. So was Mary.” Gianni looked helplessly at his friend. “I just wasn’t as smart as I thought. They gave me enough rope and I hung us all.”
Battaglia turned the key and started the engine. “That’s history now. Forget it. Let’s just hide these two cars. The fat lady hasn’t even started singing.”
They were back in the house in five minutes, getting ready.
Less than half a mile away, in a small patch of woods, the men in the two Mercedes were making their own final preparations.
Moments earlier, a check with high-powered field glasses had shown only two cars parked in front of 14 Via Contessa. The guests apparently were gone. That had been their only eal stumbling block. The rest was expected to be pretty much standard procedure.
Still, because they were all experienced professionals of he top rank, nothing was being taken for granted.
Another potential loose end, the boy, Paulie, was peacefully asleep on a backseat under a shot of sodium pentothal. He would remain that way for several hours. This was important. Had he returned home at a delicate operational moment, everything might have been thrown off.
With Sal running things, they’d be two and two in the cars. Sal and Frankie would pull right up to the house, knock on the door as a couple of lost tourists asking directions. There’d be no reason for the Walterses to be suspicious, and guns would be flashed only if needed to gain entrance or keep control. There’d be no shooting, no bullets to be found in any walls or bodies. The Walterses would just be knocked unconscious and carried to one of their own cars.
The timetable on the whole job, in and out, should be no more than six or seven minutes.
Meanwhile, in the second Mercedes, Domenico and Tony would be waiting a few hundred yards down the road with the kid. If all went as planned at the house, they’d just follow Sal, driving the first Mercedes, and Frankie, who’d be at the wheel of the Walters car, to the chosen setup point near the Ravello cliffs. If something went wrong at the house, if Domenico and Tony spotted any kind of mess-up, they’d get out of there fast with the kid and contact Don Ravenelli for further instructions.
By 6:00 P.M., with every anticipated move checked over twice, they were ready to go.
34
IT WAS SIX hours earlier in Washington, exactly noon, and the man responsible for all this activity in Positano, Henry Durning, had stayed home to await the results.
By the purest of accidents, a man and woman had been given control of what remained of his life and would have to die because of it. As those others already had done, and still others might yet have to do. In human terms alone, preserving him was becoming very expensive.
Was it worth it?
The attorney general was able to smile. Not to those doing the dying, he thought.
Yet he wasn’t really amused, and he tried to get something for them. But all he could manage to come up with was a poor, sick joke. Here he was, head of the entire U.S. Department of Justice, and he couldn’t even get justice for his own poor victims.
The best he could do was sigh.
And what of his lovely phantom lover, Mary Yung? Had she been able to act on his warning not to reach Positano for at least another twenty-four hours? Or would she and Garet-sky arrive just in time to die with Irene Hopper and Vittorio Battaglia?
It was Durning’s deepest hope that she didn’t. What a pathetic waste if she did.
Just thinking of her reached into him. Without ever having met her, without having once seen, touched or known the sweetness of her flesh, he felt her effect growing on him by the day.
To this end, he had requested and received another package concerning her from Brian Wayne, marked as follow-up material from the FBI Background Checks and Research Department. The Bureau’s covering letter described its contents as early videotapes of the subject at the age of eighteen.
Durning had not yet looked at any of them, but he was about to. Waiting to hear from Donatti was starting to get to him. He could use the distraction. For as long as he could remember, certainly since puberty, sex had been his favorite and most easily accessible opiate of choice. In this, at least, he hadn’t changed. Why should he? It certainly was less damaging, long-term, than drugs or alcohol.
Unless, he thought wryly, it got out of hand and ended up dumping him into something resembling his present less-than-exalted state.
But even that, he hoped, was finally being handled.
“Come on, Mary Yung… distract me.”
Murmured aloud, the few words were enough to set the spark to him.
Durning drew the blinds and darkened his study. He poured himself some vodka, chose a cassette from the FBI’s latest Mary Chan Yung festival pack, and clicked it into the VCR. Then he leaned back on a soft leather couch and was off into that instant bower of the libido where he could usually count on being king.
The video begin rolling.
Trying to achieve some slight social redemption for its hard-core porn base, the movie affected a rudimentary story line in which Mary Yung played the part of a heartbroken Asian high-school girl, whose first romance has just been destroyed by her young white lover’s racially bigoted parents.
Crying herself to sleep that night, Mary dreams of a kinder, more tolerant world in which the color of one’s skin makes no difference, and all that really matters is love.
“Holy Christ,” whispered Henry Durning.
For at that point he had begun watching a girlishly slender, eighteen-year-old Mary launching her own sexual paean to the brotherhood of man with the glistening naked bodies of a black, a white, and an Asian.
In consort.
For there was this lovely flower child… she really was wearing a garland of white in her hair… taking on all three men at once in the lewdest of triple plays, and doing it with only the purest, most generous, and guileless of motives.
The girl had a gift, if not a true calling.
This Mary Chan Yung.
She literally romped. She was musical, her lips playing the sweetest of woodwinds. Her tongue whispered undreamed of secrets. She had choices to make and she made them, every one.
Rampant on a king-size bed, she was a living metaphor for universal love.
She was new born each moment.
She was a gold medal athlete, a sensual gymnast taking pride in her turns. Her variously skin-colored lovers were becoming hers as they’d never been, nor were ever likely to be, anyone else’s.
Bending forward on his couch, watching, Durning ached to join in and make a quartet of the lucky trio. He longed to become part of her will, to share in her. This one delicate, dark-haired girl who was fighting bigotry in the most eloquent of all possible ways. See how even the men were becoming one, these three living stalks growing out of this single, smooth-skinned, amply orificed mother earth.
A hired performer in a cheap porn flick, she transformed the coldest of cash bargains into a salient act of love.
She’s mine. She’s custom made for me. She matches me point for point and leaves me crawling in her dust
Never mind her intentions regarding him, or how many others she’d lain with in between. Just watching her, his chest was an empty cage from which all his dark birds had flown. He felt free of his anxieties, lighter than air. She stared straight
at him through the camera’s lens and perhaps fifteen years, while her black eyes rose from the surface of her cheeks in the same way her breasts rose from the surface of her body.
And all with the same miraculously unsoiled air of innocence.
There has to be a distant garden somewhere, he thought, a place where mysterious exotic objects grow… and there, in a lovely pink haze, the heart of Mary Chan Yung hangs like a soft, sweet peach.
“Please,” he said quietly, on the off-chance that someone with influence that reached far beyond even his own, might just be listening. “Whatever else happens there, it would be the worst sort of foolishness to have her die today in Posi-tano.”
35
THEY CAME JUST about as Vittorio Battaglia had expected them to come… out of the early evening glow and in a single car.
The second Mercedes would have to be off somewhere with his son. The only things Vittorio hadn’t been sure about was how many they’d be leaving with Paulie. As the car swung off the road and parked beside Peggy’s red Fiat, he saw that there were only two men in it. So they’d left the other two to handle his dangerous son.
Three dull thumps sounded on the ceiling directly overhead. Which was Peggy, letting them know they’d seen the car arrive. Vittorio had wanted to send her and Mary Yung to a friend’s house in the mountains above Atrani, but they’d refused to go. The best he could get from them was the promise to stay upstairs in the bedroom until whatever was going to happen had happened. In the event of an emergency, they both had guns and knew how to use them.
Vittorio and Gianni knelt together on the floor, peering between the blinds. The house was still. Occasionally a gull cried out as it flew up from the water, then glided back down.
The two men got out of the Mercedes. They stood staring up at the house for a moment. Then they started climbing the garden steps. One of them, Sal, still had his camera around his neck as he went on playing tourist. The other, the one called Frankie, kept laughing and talking, playing his part in their little two-character charade.
“You know them?” Gianni asked.
Vittorio shook his head. “Whoever sent them wouldn’t be dumb enough to send anyone I might have seen before.”
He looked at Gianni. “You OK?”
“Better than OK. I goddamn can’t wait.”
“Don’t be too eager. They’re no good to us dead.”
“I know.”
They stood up and moved into position on either side of the front door. They both carried automatics with attached silencers.
Gianni released his safety. He felt the sweat forming in his armpits and tried to keep his mind empty of everything but the action immediately ahead. The wall blocked his view, but in his mind he still saw the two men climbing the stone steps toward the house.
They’ve come to wipe out this whole family like a medieval plague, and I’m the one who brought them here.
Thinking that, he fed his rage to keep it up to full strength. Let Vittorio stay cool. He himself was at his best with anger. Good God, they had his boy. How could he stand there, waiting with such icy control? Simple. The guy was a pro.
The knocker banged three times and Vittorio’s color-coded blue eyes met Gianni’s and held them.
My once and closest friend, thought Garetsky, and knew that the human soul had more sides and corners than he would ever know or touch.
With seeming casualness, Vittorio opened the door and pointed his automatic at the head of the lead man, Sal, who was the one who had knocked. Frankie was in the middle of one of his better, more authentic-sounding laughs, and stood several feet behind Sal. Gianni showed himself and brought his own gun to Vittorio’s side, and the four men stood in a silent tableau, staring at one another.
Vittorio took a few steps back to clear the doorway, forcing Gianni to move with him.
Speaking Italian, Vittorio said, “Come in. And do it slowly and carefully. Just one stupid move and you’re both dead.”
Neither man budged an inch. They seemed frozen in place. All they appeared able to do was look at the two long, si lenced automatics and wonder why and how they had come to be aimed at them.
“What the hell’s this?” said Sal. “We just got lost and wanted to ask directions to Amalfi. Are all you natives this jumpy?”
“I said come inside,” Vittorio quietly told them again.
They still stood there, staring.
Without moving or taking any apparent aim, Vittorio squeezed the trigger. There was a soft, whooshing sound and Sal cried out and spun to his left. A crimson edged hole showed in the upper part of his left sleeve.
White-faced, he stood clutching his arm. He looked at it. Then he looked at Vittorio Battaglia.
“You’re fucking crazy!”
“Here’s how it is,” said Battaglia. “The next one’ll be a gut shot. And if you need any more after that, I’m going to shoot out both your eyes. So why don’t you just get your ass in here and save us both trouble.”
Without another word, and still holding his arm, Sal half stumbled into the house.
Gianni felt as though he had been watching the entire scene performed from a long way off and underwater. Then he saw a sudden blur of movement as the other man, Frankie, panicked and took off down the steps.
“Get the bastard,” said Battaglia, now in back of Gianni Garetsky.
Gianni aimed low, for the legs. He squeezed off a single round and watched the laughing man go down, roll, and come up on his knees with a gun in his hand.
The man wasn’t laughing now. He was staring at Gianni with a jester’s deep gloom. Then he fired at Gianni and missed, and fired again and missed once more.
He was about to let go with his third try, when Gianni reluctantly put a bullet in his chest and saw him go over on his back. He heard Vittorio’s voice behind him, but not what he said.
Gianni ran down the steps and bent over the man. Frankie’s eyes were glazing over, but he was still breathing.
“Where’s the boy?” asked Gianni, speaking Italian.
Frankie coughed blood and just stared at him.
“The boy… ” pleaded Gianni. “Is he alive? Come on, for Jesus’ sake! He’s just a baby. Help him!”
Frankie moved his lips. “How… ” Red bubbles formed, broke, dribbled down his chin. “How… did you know… we… was… ”
The light starting to go out in his eyes, Frankie coughed a small gusher of crimson. Then he gave a slow look of surprise and died.
Gianni rocked gently on his knees in a patch of grass. Glancing back at the house, he saw the two women watching from an upstairs window. Vittorio and the wounded pistolero stood in the entrance foyer staring out at the same action.
Garetsky put his automatic in his belt and carried the dead man up to the house. He was heavy. It took hard, concentrated effort. Battaglia closed and locked the door behind them. Sal stood squeezing his blood-soaked arm, his face showing nothing. He looked at Frankie’s body, accepting it as part of everything that had happened, and what was probably going to happen next.
Peggy called down from the second floor, her voice low and anxious. “Vittorio?”
“We’re OK,” Battaglia answered. “Just stay up there a while longer. I’ll yell when we have something.”
Vittorio got them all into his studio, a huge, picture-windowed room with a spectacular view of the mountains and the rocky terrain below.
Gianni placed the dead man on the bare wood flooring. One of Frankie’s legs was crooked and he straightened it.
Battaglia put Sal in a chair. Then, moving slowly, thoughtfully, he sat down facing the man, his automatic pointing at his chest. Sal was still holding his wounded arm, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Gianni remained standing to one side. He took his gun out of his belt and flicked off the safety. Beyond the window the sun was low, slanting in over the mountains and bathing everything in a soft orange light.
Sal and Vittorio stared at each other in an odd sort of way. Each of them se
emed to know what was going to happen as exactly as if they’d already been through it during an earlier incarnation.
But it was to Gianni that Vittorio spoke first. “Did you get anything out of that clown down there?”
“No. Sorry about having to waste him.”
Vittorio shrugged. “What else could you do? You gave him two freebies, which was dumb in itself. If he wasn’t such a lousy shot, you’d be the wasted one, not him.”
He considered Sal for a long moment. “So who are you guys?”
“Undercover carabinieri.”
“Gianni, get his wallet. Read me what kind of fake paper he’s carrying. The same with the guy on the floor.”
Garetsky did it, and the room was silent.
“They’ve both got carabiniere IDs.”
“Where does it say they’re from?”
“Palermo.”
“Names?”
“This one’s Sal Ferrisi. The other guy was Frank Bono-tara.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Several moments were chewed up as Vittorio Battaglia sat looking at Sal Ferrisi.
“You got any kids, Sal?” Vittorio’s voice was so low his lungs and heart might have been in it.
Ferrisi shook his head.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“No.”
“Too bad. Maybe if you’d had a kid of your own, you’d never have taken on this dirty a job. Then you wouldn’t be where you are now.”
Gripping his bloody arm, Ferrisi sat very still, afraid to move, afraid to abandon this instant. As if by staying where he was, he could somehow hold back everything he knew was coming.
“Where’s my boy, Sal?”
“I don’t know.”
Vittorio sighed. “Take off your clothes.”
Ferrisi sat there, white faced. Then using his own good arm, he began struggling out of his clothes. Finally, he was sitting naked in his chair, a sun-bronzed, muscular young man with a 9mm puncture wound through the fleshy part of his upper arm, and a less-than-bright future.
Vittorio went to one of several painting cabinets and came back with a razor-edged utility knife.
Deceptions Page 22