Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  “I’ve never asked for a handout in my life,” Mary Yung said. “And I’m not asking for one now. I’ll pay my way.”

  “I don’t care about the boy,” said Durning. “It’s his parents I need. Can you give them to me? You never fully came through as promised, you know. In fact it was you who warned them about the Sicilians, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know where they are.”

  He didn’t believe her.

  “You said before that you wanted me,” she told him. “Or was that just talk?”

  He stared at her eyes, two black marbles in the pale oval of her face. When she lit a cigarette, they glowed with exhaustion in the flare of the match. When had she last slept?

  “It wasn’t just talk,” he said.

  “All right.”

  His mouth was suddenly dry. The brandy didn’t help.

  “I can’t promise you anything,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  “Will you stay here with me?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She shrugged. “Why not?”

  He knew her thinking, of course. All she felt she needed was enough time with him. Her confidence alone was exquisite. In its particular way, inspiring. For his own needs, whatever they were or turned out to be, it couldn’t have been better. Durning assumed she felt the same way.

  As long as they understood each other.

  Their deal, like the surrogate marriage contract it resembled, was consummated in bed an hour later. And like the best of such arrangements, both parties believed they had gained the advantage.

  Maybe they both had, thought the attorney general.

  To him, it was an emotional rite of passage, a knowing, burning, drowning experience… a trip to a sensual Holy Land, with him as the barefoot pilgrim, and Mary Yung as his priest and guide.

  And this time it was no fantasy. Yet even alive, even right there with him, her face and body had about them something shadowy and elusive, something prematurely aged or still so young they were not yet fully formed. This smoky creature. She made him weightless. He floated free, knees and body vibrating. Touching her, his hands felt so magical they threatened to fly off at the wrists.

  She had brought her life with her. On the open grounds of his king-size bed, in the half-darkness of his room, they had company. She was breathing an endless parade of her erotic pictures into his brain, all those full color glossies of multiple couplings, all that rosy flesh and those romping bodies.

  Mary Yung’s army.

  I have them all, he thought.

  Mary Yung was thinking something else.

  She had made her plan, put it into action, and was carrying it out as simply a job that had to be done.

  It was no more to her than that.

  Something she had always been able to do. Most women couldn’t. But she wasn’t most women. She had her own secret place, and once in it, she couldn’t be touched. It was never that hard for her. The flesh, the body cover, didn’t mat ter all that much. It was just a protective shell for the important stuff beneath. Nothing sacred lived on top.

  People were only locked rooms to each other, anyway. Even if you heard someone crying in one of them, you couldn’t get in to help. That was the saddest thing of all. The body was just a toy, a plaything. Except that she’d never really had that much chance to enjoy it. It had to be her work tool too early. A very serious thing, very serious flesh. Whatever she’d wanted or needed, her very serious flesh had helped her get. It didn’t matter what men did to it, or it did to men. It was all mechanics. Maybe it was getting to be something more with Gianni, but she’d sure messed that one up good. Now he wouldn’t even spit on the best part of her, and so much for that.

  What the hell. At this point she just wanted to get the boy out of there in one piece, and Durning was the guy who could do it. The sonofabitch. Imagine him so hooked on her and her shit life. As if she’d done something wonderful and holy.

  Fucking and sucking.

  Jesus, look at the sonofabitch go. The attorney general of the whole United States and she was playing him like a hooked fish.

  She could feel him starting his final run, sense it coming from the farthest parts of him.

  Then he broke the surface and she heard him scream, heard him cry out as though he were dying. And she screamed and cried out with him because that was what they always loved and wanted, along with all the lies that came after.

  Enjoy it, she told him deep inside her. Enjoy it while you can. Because if you don’t get me that boy and something happens to him, I swear on the holiness of this less-than-sa-cred act that I’m going to blow your fucking head off.

  44

  THE WORST OF it for Vittorio was having to leave Peggy behind and alone. He had stalled the going, but he had finally run out of reasons and Gianni was waiting in the car.

  For the past half hour of preparations Peg had been on the edge of something, the wide eyes growing wider and darker, the small mouth stretching flat. A confused hurt had slipped over the smoothness of her face like a net. Through it, Vittorio felt her anguish.

  “It’ll be all right,” he assured her for the third time. Or was it the fourth?

  Peggy nodded mechanically, not believing a word.

  “They won’t hurt him. He’s their only hope of reaching us. ] We’re what Durning wants, not Paulie.”

  “No,” she said, “I’m what he wants. I’ m the only material witness against him. You’re just another innocent bystander. Like my poor baby.”

  Tears welled, clung to her lids, and Vittorio pressed her to him. How thin she felt, how frail. When had she gotten so breakable?

  “Listen to me,” he said. “We’ve lived together ten years. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “No.”

  “And I’m not lying now. I swear it, Peg. I’ll bring Paulie home to you.”

  She drew back and nailed him with her eyes. “When?”

  It was a child’s question. When, daddy?

  “1 don’t know. Just finding out where they’ve got him could take days. So don’t sit watching the clock and worrying.”

  She shook herself out of it. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve only been making this harder for you.”

  Peggy kissed him and forced a smile.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Sadly, Vittorio didn’t think so.

  Vittorio and Gianni left the safe house at about 6:00 P.M. They went in Gianni’s rental car because it was unidentifiable. But it was Vittorio who drove.

  They rode in two separate silences for almost half an hour before Gianni finally spoke.

  “How are we figuring this?”

  “There’s not all that much to figure,” said Battaglia. “We start with the names of the two pistols we sent over the cliff, find out who sent them, then keep a gun up his ass until he tells us where Paulie is.”

  “Just like that?”

  Vittorio watched the road as a big tourist bus crowded them uncomfortably close to a wall of solid rock.

  He shrugged. “That’s the core stuff. The rest is detail.”

  “I like detail.”

  “You’ve got a right. It’s the detail that can end up killing you. Or did you think this was going to be a piece of cake?”

  “I’ve learned something in the twenty years since you saw me. Nothing’s a piece of cake.”

  Vittorio groped out a cigarette and lit it with the dashboard lighter. The orange glow reflected on his face.

  “There’s this old man in Naples who owes me a few big ones,” he said. “He knows every famiglia in the area, and what he doesn’t know he’ll find out. So we go there first.”

  “You mean the United States attorney general has Neapolitan mafiosi in his back pocket?”

  The car was quiet.

  �
�A little background,” said Battaglia. “I first met Peggy almost ten years ago when Don Donatti sent me to kill her. It seems clear now that it was Durning who took out the contract for the hit. But I’m sure it’s the don who’s got the long reach.”

  Battaglia glanced at Gianni and saw his confusion. What the hell, he thought. The guy’d been dragged into this only because they’d been friends. Didn’t he at least deserve to know what he might be dying for?

  “You’d better hear the rest,” he said, and went into it as he drove.

  Vittorio told the full story, and just the fact of putting it into words and sharing it with someone brought a measure of comfort. Then carried away by the further euphoria of the confessional, he threw in his covert government work as well. Something that not even Peg knew for certain.

  “Now you have it all,” he said. “Or have I just confused you more?”

  Gianni felt the full weight of the tale pressing him. While I’ve been painting my pictures.

  “You haven’t confused me,” he said. “You’ve just made me see the kind of self-absorbed, make-believe life I’ve been living all these years.”

  Vittorio came up on a slow-moving truck, hit the horn, swung out of lane, and passed it.

  “You’re not complaining, are you?”

  Gianni was silent.

  “For Christ’s sake!” said Battaglia. “You’ve done it all. Everything we ever used to dream about and more. While I’ve been swimming in blood and crawling through shit.”

  “I’d change with you in a minute.”

  “You’re out of your skull. Where the hell do you think I’m goddamn sitting?”

  “I know the kind of trouble your family’s in. And it’s awful. But at least you’ve got a family.”

  Vittorio looked at Gianni’s face. He glimpsed what crossed it and disappeared.

  “I read about your wife,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Gianni nodded. At that moment Teresa and all his years with her suddenly seemed very far away. It almost panicked him. Then he put things in place.

  The car stayed quiet for a while. It was nearly dark, with the last of the light turning the distant sea red.

  “Listen,” said Vittorio Battaglia. “I talk big about getting my boy back, but it’s just talk. I’m so scared I could puke. They’re going to keep him just so long. Then that’s it. Past a certain point, he’s too dangerous to hold.”

  Gianni remembered enough from the old days to know it was true. No matter what anyone wanted, sometimes you got into things and there was no way to get out.

  Battaglia sighed. “You know how I keep my lid on? I’ll tell you my secret. I just think about what I’ll do if the sons ofbitches kill my Paulie. In my mind I do them one at a time, and nice and slow. First I do Henry Durning, then Carlo Do-natti, then everybody over here who had anything at all to do with it. And that’s how I keep from screaming and beating my fucking head against the wall.”

  For a long time they rode in silence.

  “I’m glad you’re with me,” said Vittorio. “I can still talk to you like to nobody else. Peg is my life, but some things I could never say to her. Stuff she couldn’t take, or understand, or might sit in judgment on. Know what I mean?”

  They were in the center of Naples by 8:30 P.M.

  Vittorio stopped at a gas station, left the car, and made a phone call. He was back in five minutes.

  “Our man is home,” he said. “He’ll have the apartment clear and be alone by the time we get there.”

  They headed north on the Via Santa Rosa.

  “Who does he think you are?” asked Gianni.

  “An Italian-American businessman with good connections.”

  “And I?”

  “A close friend. Anonymous. It’s all right. He knows better than to ask questions.”

  “You said he owed you. What did you do for him?”

  “Save his life. Also, his wife’s.”

  “What do I call him?”

  “Nothing. You won’t be introduced.”

  Vittorio parked on a poorly lighted street three blocks west of the Via Santa Rosa. They crossed a cobbled courtyard, entered a building lobby, and rode up three flights in a highly polished brass elevator. Vittorio knocked three times on the door of apartment 4B, and they stood waiting.

  Gianni heard slow, halting steps and the tap of a cane. Then the door was opened by an elderly, gray-haired man with the bearing of an Italian general out of central casting.

  “Come in, come in. I’m honored.”

  He had a husky smoker’s voice and a cigarette between his teeth. He embraced Vittorio, shook Gianni’s hand, and led them into a large, high-ceilinged room crammed with heavy furniture and dark oil paintings. As Vittorio had promised, no introductions were made and no names were mentioned.

  The old man seated them around an elaborately carved coffee table and filled three glasses with red wine. He made a small ceremony of it. The aromas of that night’s dinner still hung in the air.

  They all sipped the wine and put down their glasses. It was only then that Vittorio Battaglia spoke.

  “I need your help, my friend,” he said. “I have one child. A young boy. I’m sorry to say that yesterday he was taken from me.”

  The old man had a high forehead that was knotted by veins. Gianni saw one of them begin to pulse.

  “He was taken?” said the man.

  “Abducted. Kidnapped.”

  “Ah. By whom?”

  “I don’t know.” Battaglia paused to light a cigarette. “Four men, strangers, were seen coming into Positano in separate cars. One behind the other. Two of the men took my boy, who was alone by the water, and disappeared. The others came to my house to do away with my wife and me. But with the help of my friend here, they were killed instead.”

  The old man slowly nodded. “And ended up at the bottom of a cliff not far from Ravello?”

  “Then they’ve found them?”

  “It was on tonight’s news. There was no identification yet. The explosion and fire didn’t leave much to identify.”

  “I took their wallets,” said Vittorio. “Their names were Sal Ferrisi and Frank Bonotara.”

  The old man was silent.

  “Do you know them?” asked Vittorio.

  The old man looked at the two men facing him, suddenly dreading having them in his home. Gianni Garetsky understood his fear, along with the reasoning behind it. Just their presence here could kill him.

  “I’ve never met them,” he said.

  “But you’ve heard of them? You know who they are?”

  The old man nodded and cigarette ash dropped on the front of his shirt. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “They’re local mafiosi?”

  “Not so local.”

  “How far away?”

  The old man drank some wine. His eyes were off somewhere and he appeared not to have heard the questions.

  “How far away?” Vittorio asked again.

  “Sicily.”

  “Where in Sicily?”

  The old man’s face went slack. He sat diminished in his chair, no longer looking quite so militarylike. He stared ap-pealingly at Battaglia, but Vittorio’s face was cut stone. Watching the man’s silent struggle, Gianni found himself almost feeling sorry for him.

  “Palermo.” The answer was little more than a hoarse whisper.

  “Who did they work for?” asked Vittorio. “Who would have sent them on a hit like this?”

  “You know what you’re asking me?”

  Vittorio didn’t answer.

  A fly buzzed around the room and the old man’s eyes followed it hopelessly. He seemed to be growing more inert by the second. Then something took hold in him, and Gianni saw it as an image of a man reconstituting himself out of sheer will.

  “I’m in your debt,” he said. “But what you’re doing is pointing a loaded gun at my head and asking me to squeeze the trigger.”

  “No one saw us come in here. No one will see us lea
ve. And no one will ever know who told us.”

  “Unless they got one of you alive. Then they’ll know soon enough.”

  “That’s not part of our plan.”

  “Men plan and God laughs,” said the old man.

  Vittorio stared long and hard at him. It seemed to Gianni that for a full minute there was no sound anywhere in the room, in the building, or in the city of Naples.

  “You’re embarrassing me,” Vittorio finally said.

  The old man reached for his wine. But when he picked up the glass, his hand was shaking so badly that he had to put it down without drinking.

  “But even worse,” said Vittorio quietly, “you’re shaming yourself. Which you’re too good a man to be doing.”

  The old man tried to swallow but couldn’t scrape together enough saliva.

  “How old are you?” Vittorio asked.

  The man looked startled. “I’m seventy-nine.”

  “My son isn’t even nine.”

  The old man stared out of his age and frailty. “And that makes his life more valuable than mine? You think being old makes me ready to be thrown out with the garbage?”

  Everyone understood that Battaglia had said the absolute wrong thing. It lay in the room like a long dead rat, numbing the air and the three men breathing it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Battaglia. “I apologize.” He gestured tiredly. “I’m getting desperate. It’s making me cruel and stupid. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, you did,” said the man. “You were just being honest. And who can blame you? You love your son and you’d happily sell ten old farts like me to save him.” He sighed. “One of the things about getting old. Instead of making you smarter, it makes you more afraid. It’s crazy. The less you’ve got left to lose, the more worried you get about losing it. And you were right about my shaming myself. A few years ago I’d never have behaved in such a disgusting way.”

  He made a small bow with his head. “It’s I who apologize to you.”

  This time he was able to drink his wine. Gianni looked at his hand. It was an old hand with sunken, spotted skin, and every bone was visible. But it suddenly seemed strong.