“Vittorio was the best I had, Mrs. Battaglia. I trusted him with my life.”
“He felt the same about you. And I know that once you’ve freed Paulie and me, once I’ve told Vittorio it was you who saved our lives, he’ll respect and care about you as much as he ever did.”
“Vittorio and Gianni are my famiglia. Like part of my blood. It would give me no pleasure to see them come to harm.”
“Thank you, Don Donatti,” she said, and had to consciously resist a sudden, insane urge to call him Godfather. She despised herself for it.
“We’ll be meeting soon, Mrs. Battaglia. Until we do, try to think positively. Things will go well.”
Donatti broke the connection.
Walking about later, followed by a guard, Peggy felt no such confidence. There were just too many unknown factors. Not the least of which was Henry Durning.
The fact of it was, she simply couldn’t picture anyone, not even someone as powerful and resourceful as Carlo Donatti, forcing the attorney general to do something he didn’t want to do.
71
PAULIE FELT THE throb of the ship’s engines going into reverse, then the soft thumping of the prow against the dock. It was morning, and they were in Naples, and he hadn’t died from the pizza after all.
At the moment he was back among the metal drums under the big six-wheeler’s tarp. Nino had thought it the safest place for him to be through the disembarking, and Paulie had agreed. He knew that the police and the haircuts would be all over the place as the cars, trucks, and buses rolled off the ferry. So why take chances? Unless the carabinieri thought they’d frightened him off back in Palermo and that he’d never gotten on the ship at all.
The boy wondered what Nino would think if he knew the truth about him… that he hadn’t run away from home at all, that he’d been kidnapped by gangsters and had escaped after a shootout, and that even now he was carrying a loaded snub-noser in his pocket. He could just picture the trucker’s face if he ever told him. Not that he ever would. But he guessed maybe part of him did want Nino to know that he wasn’t just a silly, crybaby kid who’d run off for some dumb reason, then got scared and changed his mind and started running back home. He guessed he wanted Nino to know he was more than that.
I’m more than that.
Paulie told it to himself. It would have to be enough that he knew.
He heard the truck’s engine start, along with the engines of all the other wheeled things lined up in the belly of the ship. They began slowly moving off the ferry and onto land. Then the boy felt the truck suddenly picking up speed and rolling across the rough cobbles of the Naples waterfront. Until the truck stopped moments later, and Nino came around and lifted the tarp and brought Paulie up front to ride beside him in the cab.
The trucker grinned. “Well, it looks like you made it. Feeling better about things now?”
Paulie nodded.
Nino glanced at him as he drove. “You don’t look too happy. You getting a little nervous now that you’re this close?”
The boy shrugged.
“Don’t you worry.” Nino draped a muscular arm across Paulie’s shoulders. “The worst can happen, they’ll just hug and squeeze you to death a little.”
“Sure,” said Paulie, and wished again that he could tell this nice man how it really was.
An hour later he shook the trucker’s hand, said good-bye to him, and stood there at the cutoff as he watched the huge eighteen-wheeler disappear on its way to Salerno.
It took the boy only twenty minutes to walk the rest of the way home to Positano.
His first sight of his house made everything go weak and soft inside him, as if he suddenly were melting down.
The house is there.
But had he expected it not to be?
He approached cautiously, not using the road but circling around through the trees and growth in back. His dream, his recurrent vision was, of course, of coming home to his parents’ arms. But the hard core of him recognized this as little more than a child’s fairy tale. Since his mother and father had never been home to answer his calls, he didn’t really expect them to be home now. If anyone was waiting for him, he thought, it was more likely to be a couple of mafiosi.
But after crawling around the place twice through the brush, it appeared to Paulie that not even the gangsters were there. No windows were open and no cars were in the parking spaces off the road. Finally, he worked his way to the front door and found it locked. As was the side door. Then he found the secret family emergency key in its special place under a rock and was able to use it to get inside.
The boy quietly closed and locked the door behind him, and stood there breathing the air of the house.
He listened to the silence.
The first thing that caught his eye were the folding easel, paint box, and half-finished canvas he’d been working on when Dom slugged him and carried him away. They lay together in a corner of the entrance foyer, where Paulie figured his father had left them after finding them down near the water.
He walked over and touched the canvas to see if the paint had dried. It had.
Opening his paint box, he saw that all the dirty brushes he’d been using that afternoon lay wrapped together in a rag. Which was what he usually did with them when he finished painting for the day, but which his father must have done for him this time before carrying his things home.
Paulie took the dirty brushes down to the basement, rinsed them in turpentine to soften the half-dried paint, then washed them with brown naphtha soap in one of the two washtubs he and his father always used for cleaning their brushes. In the basement, the smell of paint and turpentine slipped over him like an old shirt, familiar, warming. Down here, as in his father’s big studio upstairs, were things he knew about, that he was prepared for, that he had spent more than half of his eight years learning to handle.
With something like courage, the boy forced himself upstairs into his father’s studio. He was there for several moments before he noticed the hole in the great picture window that made up almost the entire north wall of the room.
Although to Paulie, it was far more than just a hole. It was a tear in the fabric of his life. The size of it alone was daunting. Wanting to close his eyes and cry out, he just stood there staring at the way the jagged edges of glass, tinged with patches of dried blood, caught the light.
His mother and father were dead.
Numbly, the boy walked to the window and gazed out for his first glimpse of his parents’ bodies on the rocks far below.
But nothing was there except rocks.
There was not even the broken glass.
Nor were there any signs of it on the studio door.
God had taken Mom and Dad to heaven.
Along with the glass.
72
GIANNI GARETSKY CAME awake in a cold sweat on his lumpy hotel bed after less than three hours’ sleep.
He had a deep headache behind his eyes and every nerve was alive with messages of alarm. Suddenly ambush was everywhere, and even the air seemed to come into his lungs with the fading warmth of the newly murdered dead.
He saw Vittorio strung out and hanging like a chicken by his intravenous tubes.
He envisioned the boy, Paulie, staring wide-eyed at the sky from a freshly dug, open grave.
He heard Peggy’s poor cries blight the darkness as Henry Durning finally laid the last of his paranoidal fears to rest.
While I do what?
What can I do ?
Vittorio had already told him.
If you need help, anything at all, call this man and tell him it’s for Charlie.
Gianni had, as instructed, memorized the name, Tom Cort-landt, and the number, which was Cortlandt’s direct line at the American embassy in Brussels.
It was 4:22 A.M. in Washington, and 10:22 A.M. in Brussels. Gianni hesitated. Then he dialed the number.
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
“Cortlandt here,” said a man’s voice in E
nglish.
Tempted to hang up, Gianni took a deep breath instead.
“You don’t know me, Mr. Cortlandt, but a man named Charlie told me to call you if I ever needed help.”
Several beats passed in silence.
“What’s your problem?”
“Keeping Charlie and his family from being terminated.”
“Where’s Charlie now?”
“In a hospital in Sicily. With two gunshot wounds.”
“Who are you?”
“An old friend.”
“Your name?”
“Gianni Garetsky.”
“The artist?”
Gianni sighed. “Yes.”
“What names do you have for Charlie’s family?”
“His wife is Peggy. His son is Paul.”
“How old is the boy?”
“About eight.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“A hotel room near Washington’s National Airport.”
There was a long pause.
“All right, Gianni. Here’s what I’d like you to do. As soon as you hang up, go over to the airport and call me collect from a pay phone. It’ll be this same number, but with the last four digits reversed so that they read from right to left. Do you have that?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Cortlandt, and broke the connection.
Twenty minutes later, Gianni was at a public telephone in National Airport with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Brussels chief of station back on the line.
“So what’s this all about, Garetsky?”
“You’re going to find this hard to believe.”
Cortlandt waited in silence at the other end.
“It’s all about Henry Durning,” said Gianni.
Cortlandt barely missed a beat. “I assume you’re talking about the attorney general.”
“I am. He is trying to kill Peggy Walters.”
“You’re right,” said the agent flatly. “I do find it hard to believe. But considering who you are and who told you to call me, I can’t just dismiss you as some kind of nut. But you’re still going to have to tell me about it.”
Gianni stared out at the predawn emptiness of the terminal and said nothing.
“Well?” said Cortlandt.
“It’s such an ugly story.”
“That seems to be about the only kind I ever get to hear.”
“All right,” said Gianni. Then suddenly wishing he had a large snifter of brandy between his palms to help oil the telling, he went into his dark, corrosive tale for an audience of one, four thousand miles away, whom he had never even met.
Tommy Cortlandt listened without question or comment. And when Gianni finally finished, the silence at the other end went on for so long that the artist began to wonder whether the agent was still there.
He was.
“That’s twice you’ve been right,” Cortlandt said. “It is an ugly story. Almost too ugly not to be true.”
Gianni again felt himself bleeding for a brandy.
“But before we go any further,” said the agent, “there are a few things you should know. We operate under a limited mandate. We have nothing to do with matters of criminal justice or internal security at any level. Those are strictly FBI and police functions. Officially, what we deal with are threats to the national security from the outside. Such as from foreign governments, individuals, and the like.”
“And unofficially?”
“There’s no such thing.” Cortlandt paused. “Which doesn’t mean we aren’t always being accused of doing things our own way without regard for little obstacles like laws, mandates, and such. Still, if we feel the safety of our own people and their families are being threatened, we’re not indifferent. And of course there’s always the sanction of general authorization.”
“What does that mean?”
“That if we feel it’s right and necessary, we’ll do whatever the fuck we want. So now that we’ve got the bullshit out of the way, let’s get down to specifics. Exactly what sort of help are you looking for?”
Leaning against the smooth plastic of the pay phone, Gianni Garetsky felt a rush of warmth for this faceless man way off in Brussels.
“First,” he said, “there’s the matter of Vittorio. I mean, Charlie. I had to leave him helpless and alone in the hospital, and I’ve a bad feeling about it. Sooner or later they’re going to find him.”
“What hospital?”
“Monreale Municipal. It’s about thirty kilometers southeast of Palermo.”
“Under what name was he admitted?”
“Franco Denici.”
“And his doctor?”
“Helene Curci.”
“Does she know the truth about him?”
“Only to a point. Only that the mob wants him.”
“I’ll put a few people on him,” said Cortlandt. “What else?”
“Henry Durning will be leaving for Naples on a government plane sometime late today, Washington time. I’d like to know exactly when he’ll be taking off, his estimated time of arrival, and where he’ll be staying while he’s there.”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that in around five hours. How about Durning’s itinerary in Naples?”
“Yes, that, too,” said Gianni Garetsky.
“And I guess you’ll be wanting the same information on Carlo Donatti’s movements.”
“You can get that, too?”
“Gianni, we can walk on water.”
The artist was half-ready to believe it.
Five and a half hours later, Gianni was back at the same airport phone, calling the same Brussels number. Collect. In between, he had been lying in his motel room… thinking, dozing, and staring at the ceiling. This time, the terminal was in its more common manic state.
“Cortlandt here,” said the chief of station.
“Garetsky.”
“Here’s what I’ve got,” said Cortlandt. “To begin with, Charlie’s no longer in the Monreal Hospital.”
Gianni felt a sharp stab of light enter his eyes. “What do you mean? Where is he?”
“No one seems to know. But a local enforcer was found shot to death under his bed.”
“What about Helene Curci? His doctor. Did they go after her, too?”
“She and a woman living with her were worked over pretty good. But apparently they didn’t know anything, either.”
Gianni leaned his forehead against the cool surface of the phone. It didn’t calm him one bit. “How bad are they?”
“Not too. They got away lucky. It’s mostly bruises and lacerations. I have them being watched in case Charlie or the goons show up.”
Gianni was silent.
“Here’s the rest of it. Durning leaves from Dulles at 9:00 P.M. tonight your time. He arrives in Naples at 10:30 A.M. local tomorrow. He and his delegation will be staying at the Amoretto Hotel in Sorrento. They have meetings scheduled there for the next four days.”
“And Donatti?”
“One of his Galatea corporate jets has a flight plan filed to leave JFK for Palermo a few hours before Durning takes off for Naples.”
For several moments neither of them spoke.
“What are your plans?” Cortlandt said at last.
“I don’t really have any. I’ll be playing it mostly by ear. But I appreciate all you’ve done.”
“If you’ll let me, I can do more.”
Dimly, Garetsky was aware that people were hugging, kissing, saying good-bye, and hurrying to catch planes.
“How?” he asked.
“I’ll give you a number that can reach me twenty-four hours a day. I’d never be farther away than the nearest phone. Just keep me informed. Then, if you need it, I can get you backup or information faster than you’d believe possible.”
“You’d really do something like that?”
“I just said I would.”
“Then I accept. What’s the number?”
Cortlandt gave it to him and Gia
nni wrote it down and put it in his pocket until he could memorize it.
“It’s best that you stay in touch anyway,” said the intelligence agent. “I may have something for you soon on Charlie or his boy. In the meantime, be careful. I love your paintings. Good luck.”
Gianni thanked him again, hung up, and went to check the flight schedules to Naples.
Including a change of planes in Rome, there was a 5:00 P.M. Alitalia flight from Dulles that would get him into Naples at least three to four hours ahead of Henry Durning. He booked space on that.
Then he went back to his hotel to prepare once more for Italy.
Vittorio, don’t die on me. I’m getting closer. I just need a little time.
73
HENRY DURNING WENT down into the bank vault with an attendant and felt himself breathing the still, lifeless air of a tomb.
It was all in his mind, of course. The air down here was no different from the air upstairs. Yet a cold breath seemed to come up over his face as if he had blundered through an invisible barrier and into a place of death.
It became even worse when he was left alone in a private viewing room with his tin box. Because now he had the box open, and all its viscera of past deaths were set loose on him at once.
This was it.
This was the original, not a copy, of the evidence collected against Carlo Donatti. It had been Durning’s insurance against sudden death for more than ten years, and Donatti had finally deceived him into surrendering it as his price for escaping a more direct and immediate threat.
The attorney general knew he would deal with it, of course. Those who wouldn’t or couldn’t bend to the inevitable simply broke, and he had no intention of breaking. Yet sitting here alone in a vault with the cost of Donatti’s betrayal fixed him somehow in a mood he didn’t dare to ignore or reject, for it hinted at an additional and far worse penalty on his flesh if he took it too lightly.
With someone like Carlo Donatti there were threads everywhere. It was impossible to know where his reach began and ended. Carlo had only to pick up a phone and someone could die in a remote city on some distant shore. He could touch anyone from a poor hophead in some back alley to a head of state in a gilded palace.
Deceptions Page 42