Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  He had, after all, been a prosecuting attorney.

  All right.

  He did Marcy first, of course, feeling his arm jump with the recoil, and going briefly deaf and numb from the explosion in so small an area.

  Jesus!

  Cotton-mouthed, fighting nausea again, Durning carefully laid the shotgun on Brian’s chest. He placed the muzzle under Brian’s chin, Brian’s left hand around the double barrel, and his right hand on the trigger.

  Then kneeling beside the bed, Durning kept his head down and away as he squeezed Brian’s thumb against the trigger until the second shell exploded.

  He knelt there, neither moving nor looking at the result, but just breathing the smell of cordite as though it were a new antidote for death.

  He felt a scaling wash of sorrow for which he was unprepared.

  We were friends once, and young.

  Still, it was said the best way to die was with someone you loved. And how many were able to arrange that?

  Holding to his discipline, Durning spent fifteen minutes wiping prints from everything he had touched.

  He swept up the bits of broken cocktail glass from the living room floor and threw them in a pile of trash out back.

  He washed his own glass and put it back into the liquor cabinet.

  About to leave, he closed his eyes and felt cold, quiet waters flow over him.

  Then he started home.

  46

  DON CARLO DONATTI was engaged in a long-term love affair with his life. He adored it. Each day he saw it with new and freshly appreciative eyes. It was the thing about him that made him appear and feel younger than his years.

  This morning he was having breakfast on the terrace of his Sands Point home. The house overlooked Long Island Sound, and the don saw the acres of evenly trimmed lawn sweeping down to the water, the specimen trees catching the early sun, the sky as pure a cerulean blue as any he had ever seen over the Mediterranean. And he consciously savored everything he saw.

  The fact was, Donatti took nothing he had, nothing around him for granted. He knew it did not have to be this way. Not his imposing home, not the respect and power he enjoyed, not the soaring midtown Manhattan headquarters of the Galatea Corporation, where he spent the better part of his days and years. In a way, the office tower itself had become the prime symbol of his good life, of his long-hoped-for and ever-growing legitimacy. On clear days, when the light was right, he could sometimes see the tallest of its spires. They gleamed even from here. And suddenly, it was threatened.

  Just the thought of it ruined Carlo Donatti’s mood, brought beads of sweat to his forehead and upper lip. And it took only one man with a safety-deposit box to be able to do this to him. But it was a box that could be more dangerous than a gun. Henry Durning could be dead and the box could still ruin Donatti, send him to prison, take away everything that mattered, force him to march through his remaining years in lockstep.

  Who would have expected anything like this? And all because of something that had happened nearly ten years ago. Or, rather, something that had not happened. Durning had wanted a woman dead. Donatti had thought he had taken care of it for Durning. And now, a decade later, she’d suddenly turned up alive—while all these others kept dying for no better reason than that this woman is still breathing out there someplace.

  Some woman, thought Carlo Donatti.

  He looked off at a scattering of birds working some of the feeders he kept around the grounds. He sipped his second cup of espresso. He thought about the woman whom Vittorio Battaglia, one of the best made men ever, had decided to disappear with almost ten years ago.

  Considering Vittorio’s reputation with women, she had to be something very special. And considering Durning’s need to have her dead, she also had to be very dangerous.

  At least to Henry Durning, Donatti thought.

  Then having thought this, Don Carlo Donatti wondered at his never having thought it before. But he did think about it now, letting the concept drift through his mind while he nibbled at the sudden sweetness of its possibilities.

  Donatti continued to think about Peggy Walters as he finished his espresso and was driven into midtown Manhattan in one of the three identical Lincoln towncars he used to confuse his enemies. And he was still thinking about her as he settled behind his oversize desk high in the Galatea Building like a man who has finally arrived at either the beginning or the end of something.

  Peggy Walters had been alone in their so-called safe house now for more than a day. She had heard nothing from Vittorio. And she was becoming more certain by the minute that no news had to be bad news. If her Paulie was going to end up dying sometime during the next few days, she knew better than anyone that the ultimate blame had to lie with her.

  Yet she did have her moments of hope.

  It was, after all, Vittorio himself who was looking for their son. If anyone could find him, he could. Vittorio knew about such things.

  In her mind, she took to playing out the small progression of hope… the searching, the finding, the coming home… all so real that she was able to weep genuine tears of joy. It was one of the things that helped keep her sane.

  Another thing that helped was staying busy.

  She prepared meals that were not eaten. She scrubbed walls and floors that were already clean. She gathered wild-flowers into endless bouquets until the small stone house resembled an indoor garden.

  Finally, although Peggy Walters had rarely if ever prayed, she prayed now.

  It was nighttime and she stood barefoot in the damp grass, feeling the earth under her feet, her face raised in the darkness like some supplicant to the stars. Although she supposed it was probably less a matter of praying than of trying to work out some sort of deal.

  Take me for my Paulie, Lord, and You’ll never get Yourself a better bargain because nobody will ever work harder for You than I’ll work.

  Or was deal making with God just another form of blasphemy?

  If it was, no offense intended.

  Anyway, she was doing her bargaining with the wrong party. Because if she was at all serious about this, the one she really had to deal with was the devil, Henry Durning.

  Which was precisely how the idea was born.

  Still, it did take one of her worst waves of fear to convince her of what she must do. It hit her when she realized the odds against Vittorio and Gianni getting themselves anything but dead in what they were attempting to do, and that this was finally going to have to be all hers.

  Paulie was her baby.

  It was decided as simply as that.

  She sat with it for a long time in the grass in the night, loving the new calm that came with it.

  She breathed the cool night air and studied the way the dark rim of the mountains stood out against the lesser dark of the sky. All her reverence for life, all the love she felt for her son and husband sang softly inside her. For a while it kept her from feeling quite so alone.

  It was quiet in the small house high among the Sicilian hills. Paulie was doing a pencil sketch of Domenico as he sat posing. Tony was sprawled on the couch, glancing through a picture magazine and sipping beer.

  At the moment, Paulie was having a problem with Dom’s mouth. It was closed and didn’t seem to look natural that way. But that was how Dom kept it, so that was how Paulie was sketching it. Mouths and eyes were always the hardest for him. They kept changing. They looked different every minute.

  “What are you working on now?” Dom asked, intrigued by the whole process of reproducing his face on paper.

  “Your mouth,” said Paulie.

  “Women tell me that’s my best feature. They say it drives them crazy. Be very careful how you handle that mouth. It’s my whole future.”

  The boy sketched the same way he did everything. With quiet solemnity. He wished he had his paints and a canvas so he could do a proper, full-color portrait. But a pencil was still better than nothing, and drawing did make the time go faster. And he liked Dom’s face
, liked the rough, crooked features. They looked as if they had once been broken apart in the middle, and never been put back together exactly right.

  Although working on Dom’s face, Paulie was watching Tony as well. He felt it important for him not to miss anything about either of the two men. He saw how Tony kept glancing around even as he flipped through his magazine. It seemed to him that Tony was always looking around and waiting for something to happen. Even when he was very still, his eyes were moving. The boy guessed they were gun-fighters’ eyes. In Westerns he had seen about gunfighters, they always watched a man’s eyes to know when he was going to draw.

  “Why is it taking so long?” Dom said.

  “This isn’t long. Leonardo da Vinci took seven years to do the Mona Lisa.”

  “Hey. I’ll be dead in seven years.”

  When the sketch was finished, Paulie gave it to the mobster to see. Dom laughed and shook his head in wonder.

  “That’s me, all right. You’re a genius, kid. You even got my beautiful mouth.” He showed the portrait to Tony. “Great, huh?”

  “Just what the world needs. Another face like yours to look at.”

  “You want me to do one of you?” the boy asked. He was trying to be nice to them both. It had come to him that it would be better if they got to like him and believe he liked them, too. Then they might get a little careless and give him a chance at something.

  Tony shook his head. “The carabinieri got too many pictures of me as it is.”

  Later, Paulie sat at the end of his long dog chain watching Domenico clean and oil his gun. The boy appreciated the way he did it, touching and holding the separate parts as though each was something special. Paulie guessed that in a gangster’s business, everything had to be special. If just one tiny part wasn’t right and got messed up, you could be dead.

  Dom glanced up at him. “You like guns?”

  “I don’t know. I never had one. I don’t know anything about them.” Then by way of explanation. “I’m only eight.”

  Dom laughed. “When I was eight, I’d already shot four guys.”

  Paulie stared gravely at him.

  “Hey, I was only joking.”

  The boy was silent for a few moments. “If you teach me about guns, I’ll teach you how to draw.”

  “It’s a deal, kid. Then maybe you can grow up to be a rich made man, and I can retire and be a famous artist.”

  The pistol was a 9mm automatic, and Domenico explained the parts and the way they worked, with the weapon’s mechanism automatically throwing out the empty shell after each shot, putting a new one into the chamber, and preparing the pistol to be fired again.

  When Paulie understood all this, Dom taught him about shooting.

  Tony sat shaking his head. “I don’t believe I’m seeing this shit.”

  The boy noticed the change that came over Domenico, how serious he became as he talked and described how things should be done. There was none of his fooling around now, no teasing him as a child. Paulie understood that Dom wanted him to know that guns were a man’s business, not a kid’s, and that people got killed by them. You didn’t play games with guns. You didn’t point one at somebody unless you were ready to shoot that person. And if you ever did have to shoot, there was a right and a wrong way of doing that, too.

  The right way was to first make sure that if the gun had a safety switch, you turned it off. Then you aimed the pistol with both hands, extended your arms, held your breath, and gently squeezed, not jerked, the trigger.

  With the ammunition clip removed, Dom demonstrated how all this was done. Then he handed the empty automatic to Paulie and told him to try it himself.

  The boy felt the weight of the gun along with a sudden trembling in his knees. He released the safety. He gripped the butt with both hands, extended his arms, and aimed the front sight at a crack in the wall. He held his breath and gently squeezed the trigger.

  “Bang,” he said.

  The big surprise was that it was all so easy.

  47

  THE HOUSE OF Don Pietro Ravenelli was just about where the old man in Naples had told Vittorio and Gianni it would be. It stood in the foothills of northeastern Sicily, about ten kilometers west of Palermo, and not very far off the coast road to Punta Raisi.

  It was a big, white, Mediterranean-style villa, with an orange tile roof, a high wall surrounding its several acres of manicured grounds, and four heavily armed security guards patrolling the areas between the wall and the house itself. Additionally, there were strategically placed floodlights and closed-circuit television cameras to cover whatever the guards might miss.

  It was getting close to early evening, and Gianni and Vit-torio had been reconnoitering the house and grounds for the past four hours, locating whatever they had to, noting everyone who entered and left the compound, and of course making absolutely sure that Ravenelli himself never drove out of the place.

  In position near the crest of a wooded hill, at a distance of about three hundred yards, they spelled each other behind a pair of high-powered field glasses. Their car was out of sight in back of some brush, and far off to the right they could faintly make out the traffic to and from Palermo along the coast road.

  It had been a long, sleepless night and day of travel, planning, and surveillance, and now they took turns stretching out in the high grass and dozing. They would not be making their move until close to midnight, and it was important for them to be as rested and sharply tuned as possible when they finally went in. It would have been much easier to have just flown over and rented a car at the Palermo airport, but there had been their trunkful of weapons to consider. And because they had missed the last ferry of the night from Naples, they had been forced to drive over four hundred kilometers on the Italian mainland, take the ferry to Messina, and drive another three hundred kilometers west along the Sicilian coast road to Palermo.

  They watched the sprawling white villa, and waited, and dozed, and felt the growing tension of what lay ahead.

  At about six o’clock, two men who had been working on the shrubs and flower beds got into an old pickup and drove off.

  The housekeeper, a heavy-set woman in a black dress, left an hour later.

  A car arrived and picked up another woman, probably the cook, at shortly after eight.

  By then it was growing dark and the stillness of evening drifted in and muted all sound. They saw the warm yellow glow of the houselights come on, and the cool white of the outside floods. The guards threw long shadows as they walked.

  “Just so you understand,” Vittorio Battaglia’s voice came softly through the dark. “One sound from a guard, and we’re as good as gone. And so is my boy. That means we do them all with silencers. Four outside, patrolling, and one inside, at the closed-circuit monitors.”

  Gianni said nothing.

  “You OK with that? “asked Vittorio.

  Gianni Garetsky nodded.

  Vittorio took a long, deep breath and slowly let it out.

  They began blackening their faces and hands. They already were wearing the necessary dark shirts and trousers.

  The second-floor bedroom light went off just before eleven.

  At midnight, they silently went over the wall and dropped into the shadows of some bushes. Earlier, Vittorio had checked and determined that neither the wall nor the house was wired.

  Two guards with submachine guns stood together about fifty meters to the right. They were smoking and talking. They should have been apart and patrolling. Gianni and Vittorio crouched in the shadows and waited.

  One of the moving floodlights passed over their heads, and Gianni saw the television camera timed to go with it. He felt himself sweating and was disgusted by his fear. It’s allowed, he told himself.

  The two guards strolled their way, still together and still talking. As they were going they would pass within five feet of the bushes where Garetsky and Battaglia were waiting.

  “Let them pass,” whispered Vittorio. “Then you take the nea
rest one and I’ll take the other. Make it a head shot. We can’t have them crying out. So for Christ’s sake, don’t miss.”

  Gianni wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  The guards came by and Gianni and Vittorio aimed and fired. Their silenced shots made only a single, soft whooshing sound. The two men made no sound at all. They fell forward on their faces and didn’t move. Gianni and Vittorio dragged them behind the bushes before the traveling floodlight and camera swung back.

  Keeping to the shadows, they moved cautiously around to the rear of the house.

  The next security man was dozing, sitting up, his back to a tree. Vittorio shot him once through the forehead without waking or stirring him.

  They crept forward, looking for the fourth and last of the exterior guards.

  At the back of the house, they heard rather than saw him. He was softly humming what Gianni recognized as the most lyric segment of the love duet from La Boheme. Italians, he thought sadly.

  Vittorio pressed Gianni’s arm. He motioned for him to stay where he was, and disappeared in the direction of the man’s voice. Moments later the humming suddenly stopped, and Vittorio seemed to float back out of the dark.

  They approached a lighted ground-floor window on the far side of the house. It was the only interior light on and they had not been able to see it from their position on the hill. A single, uncurtained window was open to the cool night air.

  His back to the window, a man sat reading a newspaper in front of a bank of television monitors. He never so much as glanced at the screens.

  Vittorio stepped close to the window. He drew a careful bead on the back of the guard’s head and fired once. It was done.