Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  They sat without speaking. Outside, there was the murmur of voices from the men waiting beside the cars.

  “You’re a powerful man, Don Donatti,” said Peggy. “If Henry’s been such a long and continuing threat, one has to wonder why he’s still alive.”

  “Because he’s no moron. He’s let me know that the moment he dies, the evidence against me goes straight from his vault to the district attorney.”

  Peggy nodded. “Now let’s hear what you want from me.”

  “That’s obvious. I want enough of a hook into Henry’s gut to finally lift him off my back.”

  “And in return?”

  “You and your boy go free.”

  Peggy stared down at the book in her lap. She didn’t want Carlo Donatti to see her eyes at that moment.

  “I know where you have me” she said. “But where do you have Paulie?”

  “One step at a time, Mrs. Battaglia.”

  “Then what’s the next step?”

  “The reason Henry wants you dead.”

  Peggy cleared her throat. The dry sound of a winter leaf.

  “I saw him kill two people. A man and his wife.”

  Carlo Donatti stood unmoving.

  “You were on the scene? An actual eyewitness?”

  “Yes.”

  “When and where was this?”

  “Ten years ago. In Connecticut. In the house of a couple we’d met that same night. I was the only other person present.”

  “Then it was unpremeditated?”

  “Yes.” Peggy stared off somewhere. “At least the first killing was. I’d have to call that one manslaughter. Maybe even self-defense. It was done with a fire iron. But the sec ond was done with a rifle and it was clearly a murder to cover the first killing.”

  “What happened afterward?”

  “Henry staged it to look like a break-in burglary, rape, and murder. And the local police bought it.”

  Donatti began pacing the room, his eyes turning with him.

  “You were lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever threaten to go to the police? To expose him?”

  “Never. I was too scared and too taken with him. He just couldn’t live with the whole idea of my knowing.”

  “Technically, at this point, it would be your word against his. What proof would you have that it ever happened?”

  Peggy thought about it. She watched Donatti’s silhouette pace back and forth across the window. Finally, she put it together.

  “Henry buried the murder rifle and some jewelry nearby, and I’m sure I could help you find them. Then ballistics could match the rifle to the bullet taken from the woman’s body.”

  Carlo Donatti slowly sat down. “That should be enough. At least, as a threat.”

  Then he went silent.

  Peggy watched him, searching for signs. A pot of water waiting to come to a boil.

  “My son,” she said. “When do we talk about my son?”

  Donatti looked at her as though he had forgotten who she was and what she was doing there.

  “Soon.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Please be patient with me, Mrs. Battaglia. You’re a lawyer. I’m sure you understand the subtleties to be worked out in something as complicated as this.”

  Complicated, she thought.

  The last time she had heard the word it was spoken by Henry Durning over a telephone. And moments later she was in the hands of the Amalfi police. Between this bigshot capo di tutti capi and the attorney general of the United States, she felt herself being played like a violin.

  “Do I have your word as a man of honor,” she said, “that my son hasn’t been harmed?”

  “You have my word.”

  Peggy was almost afraid to ask the next question.

  “And my husband? What’s happened to my husband?”

  “God only knows about Vittorio. I don’t.”

  Donatti paused and Peggy listened to herself breathe.

  “The last I heard,” said the don, “he and Gianni Garetsky had blown away eleven of our best Sicilian soldiers while trying to get back your boy.”

  Donatti rose. He smiled but it was somewhat rueful.

  “So you see, Mrs. Battaglia. I’m as anxious to give you back your son as you are to get him. He’s not doing any of us much good where he is. So please bear with me. We’ve made good progress this morning. I’m encouraged about our prospects in regard to Henry Durning, I promise. You won’t have to wait much longer.”

  61

  ALONE IN AN anonymous rented car, Henry Durning drove north along the Potomac until he crossed into Virginia. Then he turned west for the long, final stretch on Kirby Road.

  It was 9:15 P.M. and Durning had put in a full day at his office, enjoyed a satisfying dinner with Mary Yung, and reluctantly left her about twenty minutes ago for an unexpected meeting called for earlier by Mac Horgan.

  Mac was the New York private investigator who had been effectively carrying out his more sensitive covert work since his first years as a district attorney. Durning had always liked and trusted the PI because he wasted no time on scruples, made no moral judgments, and did everything offered him on a cash-and-carry basis with no questions asked. It was Mac who had set up the alleged propane explosion a couple of weeks ago that resulted in the deaths of Vittorio Battaglia’s pilot friend and his wife and started the chain of events that had brought the attorney general to where he was tonight.

  All right. So where was he?

  Not too badly off, considering.

  Considering what?

  That he might have been disgraced and in jail. Or dead and buried. Or any combination of the aforementioned.

  He could be still.

  Yes. But with Irene finally eliminated, there was no longer an eyewitness to stand up in a court of law and accuse him of murder. So he certainly was better off tonight than he’d been only two nights ago.

  Better off? How? With a world-class assassin out there someplace, hoping to avenge the murder of his wife and the disappearance of his son? He wasn’t better off. He was just pathetic, a walking target.

  Still, he wasn’t exactly helpless. He was head of the United States Department of Justice. He had thousands of armed federal agents available for his protection. If he felt himself in danger, he had only to pick up a phone to have a hundred sharpshooters closing around him.

  Wonderful. And this was the lifestyle he would be looking forward to enjoying from now on?

  Then disliking how he was thinking, Durning just drove and thought of nothing. Yet he was vastly excited, in a steaming emotional state. And he decided that for the time being he was either free of his brain or crazy.

  The attorney general arrived at the ruined barn at precisely 9:35 P.M. He drove around to the back and found Mac waiting in his car. In all their years of covert meetings, Durning couldn’t recall a single instance of the PI either failing to show up or being as much as five minutes late.

  Horgan was out of his car and coming toward him by the time Durning parked and cut his lights. Woods and overgrown fields were dark all around. Other than a fragment of moon and great clusters of stars, nothing else was in sight.

  They shook hands and Mac Horgan settled himself beside the attorney general. Horgan was a tall, lean man with quick eyes and hands, who always smelled of English Leather and something else; to Durning, it was like a whiff of the iodine in a piece of marine life left to bleach on the sand.

  “How is the gang?” Durning asked.

  “The usual,” said Horgan. “With that many, there’s always some new disaster of the day.”

  But it was said lightly, even with a certain amount of pride. The gang referred to was Horgan’s nine children. In numbers alone, they were an unending source of wonder to Durning. To make up for nonproducers like me.

  The PI took a small notebook from his pocket, flipped through a few pages, and put it away.

  “Something I thought you
should know about that happened a few days ago,” he said. “Like you told me, I was following Carlo Donatti. One night he went all the way the hell up into the Catskills. To this big log cabin with three goom-bahs in residence. I can’t get too close, but there are lights on upstairs, and I see Donatti talking to a man and woman who’ve got blindfolds on.”

  “Could you make out their faces?”

  “I tried. But with the distance and blindfolds and all, it was no go. But I stayed overnight at a motel and went back next morning. I hung out in the brush, hoping they’d come out.

  Horgan paused to light a cigarette.

  “And?” said Durning impatiently. He knew the investigator well. If he was dragging it out this much, he had to have something.

  “After a few hours they came out with a couple of the goombahs. It must have been a kind of exercise period for them. Though their hands were cuffed and they just sort of stood around in the sun.”

  “Did you see them any better?”

  “Yeah. They had no blindfolds on now, and it was daylight, and I was using my best binoc. But I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. And neither will you when you hear.”

  Durning waited, letting Mac milk his big moment. It was part of what made him so good. Pride of achievement. Each new revelation was like finding a cure for cancer.

  “How about Hinkey and that Beekman woman who’ve been missing all this time?”

  Henry Durning stared at him. Mac, of course, knew nothing about their having been terminated more than a week ago. “What made you think of them?”

  “Hey! I didn’t just think of them. I saw them.”

  “Maybe you made a mistake at that distance.”

  “No mistake, Mr. Attorney General, sir.” Mac grinned as he handed Durning a clutch of snapshots and flicked on the dome light. “I took these shots with a telephoto lens just in case you had doubts.”

  Durning put on his reading glasses and looked at the pictures. There must have been about a dozen, but he looked at only the first three. Then there was some sort of injunction in his brain not to go on. It was as though he had lived his entire life in a blacked-out cave, and now lights were being brought in. He couldn’t deal with them all at once.

  Never underestimate the enemy.

  A lifesaving aphorism in Vietnam, but obviously just as valuable here at home. It was just that he had somehow failed to keep in mind that Carlo Donatti was his enemy. With my safety-deposit box rammed against his jugular like a hunting knife, how could the sonofabitch love me?

  But suddenly there were other, less abstract things to be dealt with.

  “What made you think that John Hinkey and his client were so important to me?” he said.

  Mac Horgan was still giving it his best, most disarming grin. “Come on, Hank. I’m not stupid.”

  “I never said you were stupid. And your intelligence or lack of it has absolutely nothing to do with what I asked you.”

  Durning switched off the interior light, and the two men sat looking at each other in the sudden blue dark.

  “All I meant was, I know what’s going on.”

  “Do you?”

  The PI’s smile was gone now. “Well, I don’t really know, of course. But it’s not that hard to figure out.”

  Durning just stared evenly at his eyes.

  “Look,” said Horgan. “These were the two who sank Brian Wayne and his wife with what they were threatening to expose. And everyone knows the Waynes were your closest friends, right?”

  Durning was silent.

  “So like the real good friend you are, you made a deal with this head goombah to do a job on Hinkey and Beekman to save Wayne’s career. Except two things went wrong. One, you never knew about Hinkey’s letter telling his son to air his dirt on national TV if he died or disappeared. And two, Donatti decided to go in business for himself and keep Hinkey and the woman on ice. I don’t know for what. But it sure as hell can’t be good fox you”

  Durning nodded slowly, weighing everything.

  “It’s true,” he said. “You’re not stupid.”

  The PI’s grin came back. “I hit it right?”

  “On the nose,” said the attorney general. “Now tell me this. Did Donatti go anyplace else this week that was a break from his usual routine?”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact he did.” Horgan took out his notebook and checked a few pages. “He took off from Kennedy at 7:18 P.M. yesterday in one of the Galatea Corporation’s long-range jets.”

  “Who was on board? Any corporate executives?”

  “No. Just a flight crew of four and two personal bodyguards.”

  “Did you find out where they were headed?”

  “Yeah. Sicily. Palermo airport.”

  Naturally, thought Durning.

  He awoke in the night. The curtains at the windows were silver. The moon was a cool stone over the city. Mary Yung lay naked and asleep beside him. She had been asleep when he came to bed at about one o’clock, she hadn’t wakened, and she was sleeping still. The luminous hands of the clock by his bedside put the time at after three.

  Durning wished she was awake. He needed her. But for perhaps the first time, his need was more than physical. Still, he wouldn’t wake her. He felt his waking her would somehow spoil it, take away the good, rob it of its magic. For it to work she had to feel his need and come to him out of herself.

  A child’s game.

  Yet he was no child. Nor was she. Although lying there, face up in the moonlight, she was pure virgin. Clean.

  Come on, love, he thought. Come on… come on… come on… .

  His incantation.

  I’m Merlin.

  Her eyelids fluttered as if at his touch. Her eyeballs appeared blind in the silver light, without pupils. Then she saw him. He was up on one elbow, looking at her.

  “I tried to wait up,” she said. “But I guess I didn’t.”

  He lay close and held her. His breath tore from his throat so quickly it burned.

  She suddenly was wide awake and alert.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  Her voice was soft, anxious. My little mother, Durning thought, comforting me. It made him smile.

  “Something is funny?” she asked.

  “You’re so sweet.”

  “No one has ever called me that before.”

  “Only because no one has ever known you before,” he said.

  “Who taught you to say things like that?”

  He laughed softly. “You can’t be taught. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

  They lay holding each other. All the space in the room, from the walls and windows in, seemed to be composed of delicate glass. A wrong move from either of them would shatter it.

  “Are you ready to tell me now?” she said.

  “It seems I’ve been played for a fool,” he said. “Which is never enjoyable. But in this case it can also be dangerous.”

  “Whom are you talking about?”

  “My big American don. My capo di tutti capi, who’s been the Master of the Hunt for me in all this.”

  “What has he done?”

  “It’s more like what he hasn’t done,” said Henry Durning.

  “I’ve learned just tonight that a couple of supposedly buried threats haven’t been buried at all but are being primed to use against me. And it suddenly looks as though Vittorio’s wife falls into that same category.”

  “You mean Peggy hasn’t been eliminated after all? She’s still alive?”

  “It does seem that way.”

  Mary Yung looked at Durning in the silver light. “Forgive me if I can’t get too upset about that.”

  “I never really expected you to, love.” Durning found himself smiling once more. “As a matter of fact, in an insane sort of way, I don’t really feel all that terrible about it myself. Unless that’s because I’m suddenly faced with so many more immediate threats.”

  “Like what? How do you think all this affects Peggy’s boy?”
asked Mary.

  “I don’t know. Other than I obviously can’t believe anything the lying sonofabitch has told me about him.”

  62

  PAULIE FELT THE tightness all through him as soon as he entered the streets of Palermo.

  He didn’t like the noise, and the traffic, and the crowds of people, and the policemen wherever you turned, and the feeling that every one of them had strict orders to watch for him.

  The feeling became worse when he reached the harbor area and walked onto the dock where the ferry to Naples was waiting to be boarded. The ship looked as big as an ocean liner, and there were all these cars, trucks, and buses lined up in rows, and lots of people with baggage pushing and yelling as if they were angry and looking for a fight.

  The boy saw signs pointing to where you had to go to buy your ticket, and he headed in that direction. When he finally got to the place, he stopped a short distance away and watched to see how it worked.

  There was just one ticket office, with men selling tickets at three different windows and a line of passengers slowly moving in front of each. Two carabinieri kept a careful eye on those buying tickets. As did three young guys with good haircuts and nice suits who could have been brothers to Dom and Tony.

  Thinking it through earlier, Paulie had decided this would be the most dangerous part of all for him. They knew he would have to leave the island to get home to Positano, and there were just two places where he could catch a ferry to the Italian mainland… Palermo and Messina. So all they needed were a few people to watch the ticket lines in each port.

  And what made it even easier for them was that there probably wouldn’t be any other eight-year-old kid alone and buying his own ticket.

  How could he have been so dumb?

  But he had to do something pretty quick because the ferry was due to sail in less than an hour, and another one wasn’t scheduled to leave for Naples until tomorrow.

  Or was he doing all this worrying for nothing?

  Paulie decided to find out.

  He saw a boy of about his own age kicking around a soccer ball and joined in the play for a few minutes. Then he stopped and said, “Hey! you want to do me a big favor and I’ll give you three thousand lire?”