Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  Paulie still didn’t know what was going on. They kept saying he had nothing to be scared about, that he’d be let go as soon as his father made a business deal with some big shots. But he wasn’t sure how much of that to believe. He figured Dom and Tony were a couple of Sicilian mobsters, holding him to make his father do something he didn’t want to do. He knew all about that from the movies and TV. He guessed he was what they called a hostage. Either his father did what they wanted, or else.

  Paulie didn’t know where he was. All he saw through the windows were mountains and trees. There was no sea, no road, no other houses, and not a sign of anything he could recognize.

  To keep him from trying to run away, they had him on a long chain. One end of the chain was attached to a pair of handcuffs on his ankle. The other end was locked into place around a water pipe. Otherwise, they didn’t bother much about him.

  There were things that came to him without his knowing how. He saw the way Dom and Tony looked at him and at each other, and understood they didn’t like being stuck up here with him any more than he liked being stuck with them.

  Time passed. The minutes leaked into hours and hours ran into each other. There were no beginnings or endings. Early in the day, the sun shone into the house and made the walls a pale yellow. Later on, everything got to be duller, cooler, less bright. The boy thought about how he’d paint the light on different walls at different times of day. He wished Dom had brought his paints and brushes along after he’d knocked him out and put him in the car. They’d be nice to have now.

  Then, thinking of his paints, he thought about his mother and father, how they’d be worrying about what might have happened to him. When he didn’t come home in time for dinner, his father would probably go out looking for him and find all his stuff down there by the water.

  What would his father think then? That he’d gone swim ming off the rocks like he wasn’t supposed to, and drowned? He pictured his father looking for him, calling his name, not finding him, and finally going home with his painting things. He saw his mother and father crying together, and for the first time since all this happened, the boy himself cried.

  Worried that one of the men might see him, he quickly dried his eyes. He didn’t want them thinking he was a crybaby. Which made him doubly careful about making sure they didn’t see him sucking his thumb.

  Sometimes he wandered around as far as his long chain would let him. It made him feel like a dog on a leash. He didn’t think he’d like it very much, being a dog.

  Other times, he thought about escaping. He decided the first thing was to somehow get hold of one of the keys. There were two of them. One for the handcuffs on his ankle. The other for the lock holding the chain to the water pipe. Tony kept both keys in his pants pocket. The boy wished Dom had the keys instead. Or at least kept one of them. Dom was always drinking wine or beer and taking naps on the couch. So there might be a chance of a key falling out of his pocket, or something.

  Once, he tried sitting down next to Dom on the couch to see how it would be. His skin gave off a lot of heat and it felt warm being so close. He could tell Dom liked him. He guessed it was because he reminded him of his little brother before the truck rolled over him. Dom liked to muss his hair, and give him these little shoves, and put up his fists like he wanted to fight him. “This is some tough kid,” he’d say to Tony. “He don’t take no shit from nobody. Took some real hard whacks with a billy to put him out. That’s the kind of tough head he’s got. Watch him, Tony. Come on, kid. Hit me. Hard as you like. Give me a good one right here on the jaw.”

  The boy would swing at him then. With all his might. But somehow no jaw was there when his fist got to it, and Dom would laugh. Tony never laughed. He just shook his head and rolled his eyes like Dom was crazy.

  Both men had guns.

  They wore them in belt holsters and never took them off. When Paulie thought about escaping, his best plan was to grab Dom’s gun while he was dozing on the couch. Then he’d aim it at Tony and ask for the keys. If Tony didn’t hand them over, he’d shoot him and take them. He’d never shot anybody in his life, but he didn’t think he’d mind too much having to shoot Tony. The boy didn’t know about Dom. He didn’t think he’d like having to shoot Domenico. But if he had to, he guessed he could do it.

  Didn’t Dom himself say he was some tough kid?

  Lots of kids got killed. He kept seeing it on the TV news and in the papers. And it wasn’t just a lot of make-believe stuff like in the movies. The news didn’t fool around. They showed it like it was, with all these little kids getting blown up by terrorist bombs, and crashing in cars and airplanes, and getting shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by all kinds of creeps.

  Paulie hoped Dom and Tony weren’t going to have to kill him. But if they did, he wondered which of them would do it and if it would hurt. He’d once seen a dead little boy lying by the side of a road after an accident. The kid lay there all bloody, and Paulie had never forgotten it.

  He imagined himself lying on the floor the same way, and the thought of it made him wish things.

  It made him wish he’d painted more pictures.

  And given his mother and father more hugs.

  And looked at more of those big, white, puffy summer clouds.

  And eaten more ice cream.

  And been more able to stop sucking his thumb.

  43

  TO BE ABLE to appreciate and be amused by the mixed blessings of irony had to rank high among life’s more underrated gifts.

  So thought Henry Durning as he sat listening to himself being eulogized as that year’s recipient of the Washington Press Corps Honor in Government Award, a distinct and almost instant outgrowth of his peaceful solution to the Olympian standoff.

  The citation itself, being read now to a large and distinguished black-tie audience, was intended to embody and convey the full spirit of the award.

  “Attorney General Henry Durning reminds us all,” said the speaker, “by his personal example both in and out of office, of our moral obligation to confront those tragedies of the human condition that continue to haunt the world in good times as well as bad.

  “All who have enjoyed even the briefest association with this man feel as if they have had a glimpse of greatness in the guise of justice and compassion.”

  A standing ovation followed the reading. The ovation went on and on and on, while Henry Durning sat there on the dais, eyes suddenly brimming and no longer amused, and felt himself losing what remained of what he had always been pleased to consider his mind.

  It was close to midnight and he was riding home in the back of his official limousine.

  The sound, the sight, the full heart-stopping emotion of the ovation rode with him. It was impossible to lose. The fact was, Durning didn’t want to lose it. He felt it as a core moment in the days and years of his life… beyond irony, beyond not caring, beyond even the easy, knee-jerk cynicism of his usual defenses.

  It was prima facie evidence of his contribution, of the always reassuring fact that he was something more than the poor, less-than-admirable creature he was increasingly discovering himself to be. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Other than for this, it had not been his greatest day.

  None of the news from Italy was good. Another brief meeting with Don Donatti had established the fact that Irene and Vittorio—and the two men who had been sent to take care of them—were still among the missing and had contacted no one about their son.

  The single positive piece of information from Donatti was that John Hinkey and the Beekman woman had been taken care of. That problem was over.

  But even this had its negative side when Brian Wayne reacted to the news with more than his usual panic.

  “You had them killed?”

  Durning had looked into the FBI director’s eyes, heard the shrill pitch of his voice, and poured him a generous shot of bourbon.

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. But Christ! Not this!”


  “They were about to blow everything wide open, Brian. How would you have handled it?”

  “I’m no murderer.”

  “And I am?” Durning had asked.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” said the FBI director.

  Durning had looked hard at his friend’s eyes. Clearly, not too much more.

  That had been this morning, and the attorney general had neither seen nor spoken to him since. Wayne and his wife were supposed to have been at tonight’s award dinner. But Marcy had called to say that her husband had come down with a touch of something and wouldn’t be able to make it.

  Durning had a fair idea what the “touch of something” was. He even knew its name. It was called fear.

  Not good.

  Poor Brian. He’s definitely not made for this. But then, who is?

  I am.

  He must have dozed off.

  When he glanced out the car window, they were almost in the area of Georgetown where he lived. The streets glistened and he opened a window and felt a mist of rain on his face. He breathed deeply and the air smelled sour going into his lungs. Was it an omen? Was there suddenly something out of place in the heavens that was following him?

  He sometimes had such presentiments. Not that he really believed in this kind of voodoo. If he had a problem in this realm, it was in not believing in anything outside of his own sight, sound, touch, and mortal limitations. Which automatically cut him off from both God and the devil, and this in itself left him pretty lonely. Where did that leave him to go for comfort?

  They pulled up in front of his house, and the chauffeur opened the door for him.

  “What time in the morning, Mr. Durning?”

  “The usual.”

  Tommy saw the award plaque in the attorney general’s hand.

  “Congratulations, Sir. I heard the presentation. I’ve listened to a lot of them over the years and they’re mostly bullshit. But not yours. Every word they said was true. I feel honored to be working for you.”

  “Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate that.”

  Durning stood in the drizzle as the limousine drove off.

  He didn’t see the other car until he turned and started up the brick walk to his house. The car was parked about fifty yards down the block, and he probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all if the door hadn’t opened at that moment, putting on the interior lights.

  A woman got out and started toward him through the mist. She was slender, almost wraithlike, and she moved with a certain grace. Watching her approach, Durning had the sense he had seen her before.

  Then she passed beneath a streetlight, and for a brief moment he was almost sure he had seen Mary Yung’s face.

  I’m twice mad, he thought, and everything he had felt and fantasized about her all these past days was suddenly packed so solidly inside his chest that it was hard to breathe.

  She stopped three feet away and they stood staring at each other.

  “It is you,” he said.

  Mary Yung nodded, not quite ready to trust her voice. She had an automatic aimed at him through her jacket pocket, because you never knew about these things and she had tried to come prepared. What she wasn’t prepared for was his sheer physical presence. He was imposing. Yet it was more than just that. She could feel him prowling around inside her.

  “What I was most afraid of,” he said, “was that you’d be dead before I ever got to see you.”

  Then he took her into his house before she could disappear as suddenly as she had arrived.

  He wore the comfortable elegance of his house like a second dinner suit, she thought. It fit him in a way that no house she had ever been in could fit her. Unless it was a grass hut.

  The study was Durning’s favorite room, so this was where he sat her. Even so, he felt himself moving trancelike through an alien landscape.

  “Would you like to take off your jacket?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m all right.”

  “I just want you to be comfortable. You can hold your gun in your lap, if you like. Or put it in your purse.”

  Mary Yung was able to smile. “Have you ever in your life been caught off balance?”

  “It’s happened to me twice tonight.”

  “I can’t imagine it.”

  He handed her his plaque, which he had not yet put down. “The first time was when I was given a standing ovation.”

  She read the inscription. “Very impressive. But why should that fluster you?”

  “Because we both know I’m a lot less than those words make me out to be.”

  “And when was the second time?”

  “When I saw your face under that streetlight, and was affected as I’ve rarely been in my life.”

  “But you don’t even know me.”

  “I know you, Mary.”

  With that, Durning opened a closet, took out a carton, and placed it on the coffee table in front of her.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “You. Your file.”

  She sat staring at a bunch of folders, photographs, magazine tear sheets, and videocassettes.

  “Just look through them,” he told her. “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’ll understand certain things. So that we can go on from there.”

  Mary Yung gazed into Durning’s eyes and saw herself reflected there. What a curious man.

  Then choosing a photograph at random, she saw herself again. Except that this time she was naked, and in the company of two equally naked men.

  She looked to be no more than seventeen, although the men were older. They were no one she recognized or remembered. All things considered, how could she? Caught by the camera at a moment of less-than-classic drama, she was frozen forever in an act of fellatio with one man while being sodomized by the other. It was all very concentrated, very joyless, an act of intimacy in which no one was intimate. Each was alone. If she were to choose a title for the picture, Mary Yung would have called it Solitude.

  She felt some mild, initial surprise, then nothing. If the distinguished attorney general was watching her face, hoping for fireworks, he would be disappointed.

  Mary never glanced up to find out. Instead, she quickly and quietly went through the entire carton: she was vaguely amused by the diligence of the FBI Background Checks and Research Department, and the official comments that were sprinkled in along the way. As though from the age of six on, she and her pathetic little sexual fumblings had constituted a continuing, insidious threat to the internal security of the country.

  When she was finished, Durning poured some brandy into two large snifters and handed her one.

  “Why did you go to all this trouble?” she asked.

  “So I’d know you.”

  “And do you?”

  “As I know myself.”

  “Meaning what?” she said.

  “That there’s probably nothing either one of us wouldn’t do to survive.”

  “Is that a compliment or an indictment?”

  “A compliment for you. An indictment for me.”

  “Why the difference?”

  “Because you started naked, abused, and alone. I started with everything.”

  They sipped brandy and considered each other. There were no sounds. The night and the drizzle closed them in.

  “As I mentioned before,” he said, “I was just afraid you’d die in Positano and never come to me. Then I’d have been truly bereft.”

  Mary Yung shook her head. “You sound absolutely crazy, Mr. Durning. Women must go wild about you.”

  “Women, per se, no longer interest me.”

  “What does interest you?”

  A distinctive fragrance was in the air around her. It teased the edges of his thoughts, just beyond his reach.

  “You interest me,” he said. “Or haven’t I made that clear enough?”

  They sat silent and unmoving for half a minute.

  “From your pictures alo
ne,” Durning said quietly, “I’ve been fantasizing about you like a tumescent schoolboy. I want you more at this moment than I’ve ever wanted any woman. And you obviously want something equally strongly from me, or you wouldn’t have come rushing here straight from Positano.”

  Elbows on knees, he leaned toward her over his brandy. “Tell me, Mary Yung. Exactly what is it you want from me?”

  “The boy.”

  It came out as quickly and easily as that.

  “Are you so great a lover of children?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is this child so important to you?”

  “Because I was the one who did this to him.”

  “You mean you still have it in you to suffer remorse?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  Durning slowly nodded. “If I believed in God, I’d say, thank God!” He smiled. “As it is, I have only myself to thank.”

  “Why is remorse so important to you?”

  “It’s the one thing that separates us from the apes.”

  He got the brandy and added to their drinks.

  “Please understand,” he said, “I had nothing to do with the taking of the boy. I didn’t even know about it until it was done.”

  “Fine. You’re a great human being. Now set him free before your Italians bury him.”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  “Nothing is out of your hands.”

  “I’ve overly impressed you. I do have my limitations.”

  The air in the room suddenly seemed to be getting tired, used up. Mary Yung sat staring at the walls of books, at the signed photos of the attorney general with the great and near-great. The man had reach. She wanted so badly to get this whole thing right.

  “Would you at least be willing to try?” she asked.

  Durning was silent. He felt as though he wanted something that didn’t have a name. He seemed to see her in separate sections… hair, eyes, nose, lips, the curve of a cheek. And they were real, three-dimensional, not parts of a paper photograph.