Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  The next thing he thought about was food. All of a sudden he was hungry and he had nothing to eat. Stupid. All that great bread and salami and cheese and fruit and stuff lying back there at the house, and he hadn’t so much as thought about filling a bag. But he had money. He would buy things when he reached the next town. If he didn’t starve to death by morning.

  To get his mind off eating, he did an imaginary night painting as he walked, with the piece of moon turning the road ahead into a blue-green river that ran between banks of bushes and grass. He felt the mood as soft, with hardly any contrast between the halftones and darks. Except where the moon glazed the road in tiny pinpoints of light, and these caught the eye right away.

  The boy loved night painting, although he had not done it all that much. It was hard to work from life in the dark, and harder still if you tried to do it from memory in the studio. But it was easy enough to do it all in your mind, without brushes and paints. And there wasn’t even the mess to clean up afterward.

  Then Paulie saw the faint lights of a car moving in the distance. It was hard to tell direction at first because the lights kept disappearing around curves and behind trees. Then they came along a straight, open stretch, and it was clear the lights were headed his way.

  He left the road, ducked behind some brush, and stayed there until the car arrived in a rush of sound and light. The boy caught a quick glimpse of a man and woman sitting close together in front. The woman’s head was on the man’s shoulder, and she looked as though she might be sleeping. Then the car was gone and the road was a blue-green river again.

  Those two, at least, were not chasing him.

  Paulie continued his trek.

  Moments later, cresting a rise, he saw the glow of what had to be Lercara Friddi.

  He stood looking off at the town, envying those asleep in their beds, surrounded by families, doors closed against outside threats. The stores would not be opening for another three or four hours, so he thought it best to wait up here in the woods until then. A strange kid wandering around the streets in the middle of the night was just asking for trouble.

  The boy found a broad-trunked, comfortable-looking tree and sat down with his back to it. He took Dom’s snub-nosed revolver out of his belt, broke it open, and counted four unused cartridges in the cylinder. The two spent cartridges had sent their bullets into Tony. Paulie thought again about how Dom had saved his life with those two shots, and how God had rewarded him for his good deed by letting him get killed on account of the very person he had saved. It didn’t seem right or make sense, but that sure was how it turned out.

  He slid the snub-noser into his right-hand pants pocket, became aware of the thick bulge of lira notes stuffed into his other pocket, and felt a bit easier about things.

  Paulie guessed that money and guns had to be just about two of the most important things in the world.

  After a while he grew sleepy and curled up in the grass. He shivered with cold. He couldn’t remember ever having been this cold. And hungry. He collected some leaves and branches and covered himself with them.

  Later, after he had put his thumb in his mouth and stopped shivering, he finally slept.

  53

  THEY ARRIVED IN Monreale just as it was growing light, and drove through gray, deserted streets.

  Gianni sat behind the wheel, with Lucia beside him to tell him where to make his turns. Vittorio was still stretched out, unconscious, on the backseat. His strips of bandage were soaked through with fresh blood. His breathing heavy, rasping.

  The girl pointed through the windshield. “It’s the next turn on your left. My cousin’s home is the last one on the block. There’s a doctor’s shingle in front.”

  Gianni saw the shingle. The doctor’s name was Helene Curci.

  He pulled into the driveway and parked close to a side entrance that had a sign, OFFICE, above it. No one was in sight. The road continued past the house, but it ran only across empty fields, finally curving off and disappearing in the distance.

  “Is your cousin married?” asked Gianni.

  “She was. Twice. Not anymore.”

  Lucia got out and rang the bell beside the office entrance. A moment later she rang it again and the door opened. Watching, Gianni saw a slender woman. She was still getting into her robe.

  “My God, Lucia!”

  Vittorio’s blood was on the girl’s clothes.

  “It’s not me, Helene. It’s a friend. He’s unconscious in the backseat.”

  “Pietro?”

  “No. Pietro is dead. His own men murdered him. This is a good one. He saved my life.”

  The doctor sighed. Gianni thought she had an intelligent good-looking face with disappointed eyes.

  “Knife or gunshot?” she asked.

  “Gunshot. Two. Side and upper thigh.”

  “Wonderful. Pull the car all the way up and bring him in the back door.” The doctor bent to look at Gianni behind the wheel. “Who’s he?”

  “His friend. He saved my life, too.”

  Dr. Curci slowly shook her head. “I’ll put on some clothes,” she said and disappeared into the house.

  Gianni followed her instructions. He lifted and wrestled Vittorio out of the car, through the back door, and onto a metal examining table in her office. He was sweating and stained with blood when he finished.

  Vittorio came awake as Gianni put him down. “Where the hell am I?”

  “My cousin’s office,” said Lucia. “The doctor.”

  Vittorio closed his eyes. Dr. Curci took his pulse, looked at the bloody bandages, and didn’t even bother to cut them open.

  “He barely has a pulse. You’ll have to get him to a hospital.”

  “No hospital,” said Vittorio.

  “You need blood or you’re dead,” said the doctor. “You want to die? Do it in your car, not in my office.”

  “You’re all heart,” breathed Vittorio.

  With the roads empty, they made it to Monreale Hospital in under eight minutes. A wheeled stretcher took Vittorio through the emergency entrance. Close beside him, Gianni looked for possible watchers.

  Vittorio moved in and out of consciousness. At the end, being rolled toward surgery, he reached for Gianni’s hand. “Don’t forget my boy,” he said. “You hear, Gianni?”

  “I hear.”

  Vittorio Battaglia squeezed Garetsky’s hand one last time and disappeared through a pair of green swinging doors. Gianni stood staring after him. Feeling Lucia at his back, he turned and didn’t like what he saw in her eyes. She had dark deep eyes to look into, and they told him things he didn’t want to be told.

  A short while later the girl’s cousin came through the green doors and told him these same things in words.

  “Your friend just went into cardiac arrest,” she said. “We got him going again, but he’s lost so much blood he can go into shock at any second.”

  Gianni stood looking at the messages on the doctor’s face. “Are you telling me he’s going to die?”

  “Only God can tell you that.”

  “I’m not asking God. If He was here at all, He must have left early. I’m asking you.”

  The disappointment Gianni had seen earlier on Helene Curd’s face turned sad. “I can only promise you this,” she said. “Whatever can possibly be done for your friend, everyone here is going to do.”

  Gianni Garetsky believed her.

  He watched her walk back down the corridor and through the green doors. The next time she comes through those doors it will be to tell me whether Vittorio is alive or dead.

  Meanwhile, there were things to do.

  Gianni took Lucia’s arm and led her to a small waiting area off the corridor. It was empty and he sat the girl down where she would have a clear view of the emergency reception desk.

  “Listen,” he said. “Sooner or later someone’s going to be coming in over there to check for gunshot admissions. It’ll probably be one of Ravenelli’s people. Do you know them all?”

  �
�Yes.”

  “Do you know how to use a gun?”

  The girl nodded.

  Gianni took out an automatic and put it in her purse. “For emergency use only. I don’t want you a sitting duck. Just remember it’s on safety. Also, if you know them, they’ll know you. So try to stay out of sight. At least until I get back.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I want to drive our car away from the entrance area before someone spots it. And while I’m out, I can pick up some Sicilian widow’s weeds and turn you into a less easily recognizable old lady.”

  Before leaving the hospital, Gianni slipped an orderly a bunch of lire to lend him a set of whites and toss his own bloodstained clothes into a washing machine.

  Outside, the sun was up and burning away the early mists. The hospital was close to the center of the city, and the streets were coming alive with the day’s business. Gianni could feel each separate sound enter him. A normal world. But no longer his.

  The car was just where he had left it. Including the keys in the ignition. Stupidly careless. And in Sicily, of all places. Car theft capital of the planet. Walking around the automobile, Gianni counted nine separate bullet and shrapnel holes. Anyone looking would have had little trouble picking it out.

  He drove the car a few blocks away and swung into the center of a rapidly filling, municipal parking lot. Before leaving the car, he remembered to take out not only the ignition key, but another automatic to replace the one he had left with Lucia.

  I’m improving. I may even get good at this.

  Walking back to the hospital, he stopped at a clothing store and bought the traditional black dress and head scarf of the island’s elderly to help camouflage Lucia.

  Gianni had been gone from the hospital for no more than half an hour. But simply reentering the place, breathing its air flavored with body things, drugs, sickness, he felt it an alien land that belonged to another life. He glimpsed Lucia, sitting exactly where he had placed her in the small waiting area. The girl nodded slightly to let him know there had been no disasters during his absence, and Gianni nodded in return.

  Then he approached the dark-haired woman at the reception desk and wished her a good morning.

  She smiled. “Good morning to you, too. How is your friend doing?”

  “Not well. They told me his heart stopped beating for a while. But I’m hopeful. It’s my nature.”

  “That’s a good nature to have. You’re lucky.” The woman looked at him. “You speak Italian well, but not like a Sicilian. Where are you from?”

  “The United States. New York. But my mother was Sicilian. She was born in Marsala.”

  “I have cousins living in Marsala.”

  “You’re joking,” said Gianni.

  “No. Seriously. To be exact. Five cousins. And two aunts.”

  “Maybe we’re cousins.”

  The woman laughed. “Stranger things have happened.”

  His eyes solemn, Gianni studied the woman. “Besides maybe dying,” he said, “my friend has this other little problem. Certain people may be coming around asking questions.”

  “I know. Dr. Curci explained about that. You don’t have to worry. No gunshot wounds were admitted here tonight. Not officially, and not any other way.”

  Gianni Garetsky found himself so moved he kissed her hand.

  “Please,” she said. “What are cousins for?”

  Gianni went back to where Lucia was sitting and gave her the black dress and the head scarf.

  “I bought the dress three sizes too large,” he said. “If you stuff a pillow inside, they won’t know you for sure.”

  The girl went into a room to change. When she returned—her hair covered by the black scarf, her plumped-out body stooped over as she walked—she might have been an aging Sicilian peasant woman long widowed and gone to seed.

  They sat together through the waiting. They spoke little. They watched the green doors, a big clock on an opposite wall, and those entering the reception area and speaking to the dark-haired woman at the desk.

  Gianni, having not really slept for almost forty-eight hours, occasionally dozed off. It was while he was briefly in this mode, dreaming of Mary Yung, that Lucia squeezed his arm and woke him with a start.

  “I know those two,” she whispered.

  Gianni followed her glance toward the reception area and saw two men talking to the woman at the desk.

  “They look like police,” he said.

  “They are. But what does that mean around here? Pietro had half the carabinieri on his payroll. I’ve seen those two at the villa at least five or six times.”

  The girl drew back her chair as she huddled under her old woman’s shawl. Gianni fingered the automatic beneath his shirt. He watched the two cops talking to the woman and gazing about the emergency entrance area. The whole concept of the police being involved was disturbing. It brought that much more scope and depth to the search. It meant there would not be a doctor, clinic, or hospital on the island that wouldn’t be checked out several times over the coming days.

  Gianni saw one of the men pull over the emergency room register and examine the admissions for last night and this morning. Then apparently satisfied by what they saw and whatever the woman had told them, they turned and left the hospital.

  Breathing deeply, Gianni blessed his new cousin.

  He saw Dr. Curci come through the green doors. It was more than four hours since she had disappeared behind them, and her movements were slow, tired, almost trancelike in their deliberation. Watching her approach, Gianni sensed Vittorio Battaglia’s death preceding her along the corridor like a dark angel. He felt Lucia stiffen in the chair beside him, confirming his judgment. When the girl put her hand on his, her touch was one of condolence.

  Good-bye, Vittorio.

  They both stood to receive the news. It was instinctive, a show of respect for the newly departed.

  “I don’t know how,” said Dr. Curci, “but your friend did get through surgery.”

  Gianni looked at the drawn-faced woman in her rumpled and spotted hospital garments and suddenly thought her beautiful.

  “Thank you for everything.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. He can still be dead in an hour.”

  Gianni Garetsky nodded. “Where is he now?”

  “In recovery.”

  “And then?”

  “Surgical intensive care.”

  “I have to be with him.”

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “I can’t leave him alone,” said Gianni. “They’ve already been here looking for him. They went away, but others will be back. They’ll finish him for sure. You know these things better than I.”

  Helene Curci thought about it. “Come with me.”

  She prepared Gianni with a sterile mask, cap, and gown and set him up behind a screen in a corner of the room. He sat there, gun in hand, listening to the small, frightening sounds of the monitors.

  What I’ve done to this man and his family.

  54

  IT WAS MORNING and Peggy had decided. Today she would do it.

  She lay on her stomach in bed, in the safe house, her chin resting against the backs of her hands. She thought of her husband and child and what they’d had together. Until it began tearing her apart. I can’t do that. If I do, I’ll be useless. The thought was by way of apology.

  A few strands of hair fell across her eyes and she stared out the window through them.

  She saw some bushes and a tree nearby and a mountain in the distance. A breeze came off the mountain and filled the thin white curtains and pressed them against her face. A stream ran downhill a short distance behind the house, and although she could not see it, she could hear the sound of the water and the sound of the wind blowing above it. The water sounded close enough to be flowing over her feet and washing them.

  After a while she got out of bed and bathed in the stream. Although she was not hungry, she took something to eat because she had never started a
day without eating, and she was not about to change now.

  Then she set about doing all the other things she felt needed to be done. It was all part of the compulsive order by which she had always tried to live her life—as if by imposing order on the small parts, the details, she could soothe the disorder that threatened to tear apart the whole.

  She had no idea whether Vittorio was alive or dead, but she wrote him a note anyway. In case he ever did come back here, she didn’t want him wondering what had happened to her. Then she left the few scrawled sheets of paper where they had long ago agreed to leave such things if it should ever be required.

  At the end, Peggy moved more quickly. As if speed itself would be enough to keep her from thinking too much.

  She walked out of the house, locked the front door, and left the key over the lintel.

  Once, before getting into her car, she stopped and looked back at the house that was supposed to be so safe for them. Then she slid behind the wheel and drove away in the late-afternoon sun, circling slowly down out of the mountains in the direction of Ravello.

  She drove stiffly, tensely, watching the front and rear with the kind of caution she knew had more to do with fear than logic. If they were out searching for her at all, she thought, it wouldn’t be up here on a narrow, winding mountain road. Still, her knuckles were white on the wheel, and her eyes kept glancing back and forth between the road ahead and rearview mirror.

  When Peggy reached Ravello, she made three passes through town, watching for pedestrians or cruising cars that looked the slightest bit suspicious. She had done a dry run the day before and had chosen the pay phone she thought it would be best to use. Ready now with a bag full of the necessary coins, she finally parked her car and walked over to the public phone in the gas station. There she placed a person-to-person call to Attorney General Henry Durning, the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.