Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  High above the black Atlantic, Henry Durning was indeed thinking. Although his thoughts had nothing to do with the concept of running for president.

  Imagine the goddamn CIA being involved,

  Who would have expected anything like that?

  Not to mention the idea of Vittorio Battaglia covertly working for them all these years.

  It was simply too much. He had been careful. He had done all those ugly, violent, but always necessary things one at a time, hoping each would be the last, yet finding there always seemed to be just one more that absolutely had to be done.

  And now?

  Now, no less than the president himself, sitting with his three wise men in the Oval Office, openly discussing the very things he had done everything humanly possible to bury.

  In the government aircraft full of sleeping officials, Henry Durning pressed his face to the cool glass of a window and watched sheets of rain rip across barely visible clouds. His nose, chin, lips and forehead left prints on the glass.

  According to Artie Michaels’ recital, Gianni Garetsky had requested this flight’s departure and estimated arrival times, so Mary Yung had to have told Garetsky.

  So much for Capri and Mary Yung.

  Well, what had he expected? It had been little more than a dream anyway. She had simply come to him one night out of nothing and gone off the same way. You can’t tie up or nail down a dream.

  Still, there were moments he felt he was touching her. In some crazy taunting way he felt close to her even now.

  Or was he just twice mad?

  Henry Durning stared out at the dark banks of clouds through which they were flying. He stared until a single puffy mass took on the imagined shape of her, a presence as fragile as a shadow on air. He tried to make the image come together, tried to actually see her face. He tried as hard as he knew how. But it never became anything more than a nighttime sky.

  Durning guessed he must have drifted off because he came out of it with a sour taste in his mouth, cold panic in his chest, and the memory of Michaels’ horror story beating at his brain with a dozen hammers.

  He found most of an earlier brandy still waiting for him and took it down with the desperate urgency of a man escaping from a desert. It may well have been the single best drink he’d ever had. For like a gift from the gods, it brought him a new clarity of thought and vision.

  Maybe Artie Michaels’ horror story wasn’t all that horrible.

  It didn’t have to be.

  With the proper handling, he might even turn it to his advantage. No less a force than the White House chief of staff himself had shown him the way.

  Everyone from the president on down wanted to keep the thing quiet. It was absolutely essential that they did. If they kept him pure, he’d be one of the administration’s prime assets during the coming elections. If he was turned into a major national scandal, he could drag down the president, who’d take a goodly share of the party’s House and Senate seats right along with him.

  They had no evidence. They wanted none. And he would make absolutely certain they got none.

  At this point they had only a mob-related artist’s unsupported allegations of his guilt. That was all. Period.

  Henry Durning found himself on a sudden high. His flesh literally tingled with it. He was sure he had only to close his eyes and a fall of soft, velvet warmth would drape itself around him.

  They would even make things simpler for him in his dealings with Carlo Donatti.

  How could he have it any better?

  He had the government itself looking out for his safety.

  With the president’s approval.

  80

  STILL WITH THE delirium, thought Vittorio Battaglia dimly, still with the goddamn hallucinating.

  Stretched out in a small second-floor bedroom of Dr. He-lene Curci’s house, he had become so accustomed to the parade of wild fantasies marching through his fevered brain that he dismissed the sound of Tommy Cortlandt’s voice as just another of his overheated, totally illogical imaginings.

  Even when he saw the slender, fair-haired chief of station enter his room, approach his bed, and stand there grinning at him with his fucking perfect, no doubt capped teeth, he considered him nothing more than his latest visiting apparition.

  “No visiting hours for ghosts,” he whispered vaguely. “Tell your friends to stay away.”

  “Bullshit,” said Cortlandt, and took Battaglia’s wasted hand in both of his. “You’re the ghost. Not me.”

  Vittorio blinked and looked at him more closely. “Tommy?”

  “Damn right. Who areyow?”

  “A useless piece of shit,” Vittorio mumbled, and passed out completely.

  When Vittorio opened his eyes, Tommy Cortlandt was still in the room. But Cortlandt’s back was to him and he was sticking colored pins into a large wall map that hadn’t been there before.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said Vittorio.

  The intelligence agent pressed in his last marking pin and turned. “If you can stay awake and lucid for at least three minutes in a row, I’ll try to fill you in.”

  “Don’t pick on me. I’m fucking dying.”

  “No, you’re not. Your nice lady doctor says you just like hanging out in bed.”

  “My wife and boy,” said Vittorio. “Just tell me. Are they alive or dead?”

  “We believe they’re alive.”

  “What does believe mean?”

  “It means no one we know has actually seen them, but that to the best of our knowledge they haven’t been terminated.”

  Vittorio lay there, concentrating on his breathing.

  “OK,” he said. “Now you can fill me in.”

  Tommy Cortlandt started with Gianni Garetsky’s first call to him in Brussels, went on to his own need to bring it to the president’s attention, and finished with the decision reached in the Oval Office to neutralize Gianni Garetsky and keep Carlo Donatti and Henry Durning under surveillance from the moment their respective flights landed in Palermo and Naples.

  Vittorio listened without interruption until the chief of station went silent.

  “Explain neutralizing Garetsky,” he said.

  “Putting him on ice so he doesn’t mess things up by going after Durning and Donatti himself, and maybe killing them or getting himself killed in the process.”

  Vittorio Battaglia’s gaunt, fever-flushed face stared, hot eyed, from his pillow.

  “Listen,” said Cortlandt gently. “Your wife and son are dangling right smack in here someplace with Durning and Donatti pulling the strings. What we absolutely don’t need right now is an emotion-driven amateur with a gun blundering around in the middle.”

  Vittorio lay there with it, filled with an old stillness that seemed to be holding him down.

  Then as if suddenly forcing himself to the surface, he pointed to the intelligence agent’s oversize wall map with its clusters of little colored pins.

  “You’ve brought me your command post?”

  Cortlandt shrugged. “Why not? If I’ve got a phone, I can command anyplace. And this should make it a little easier on you. You won’t have to lie here wondering what’s going on.”

  Bunched muscles showed in Battaglia’s jaw.

  “You’re a real doll,” he said. “Just don’t try to crawl in bed with me.”

  81

  PAULIE WOKE LATER than usual from his first night of sleep at home. He was shocked to see how high the sun had risen.

  I guess I was tired.

  The thought was by way of explanation and apology, as if the mere fact of his being in bed past the hour of eight broke some holy commandment.

  To compensate for the lapse, he showered and dressed in record time.

  Paulie had just finished eating the scrambled eggs he had made for breakfast, when he glanced up and saw the man.

  The man stood in the kitchen doorway, grinning as if they were old friends and he was very happy to see him. He seemed kind of old, with mostly
gray hair and a lot of lines on his face. Especially around the eyes, from grinning.

  “Hello, Paulie,” he said. “Don’t be scared. My name’s Frank. Frank Langiono. I’m an old friend of your dad’s from America, and I’ve got nothing but good news for you.”

  The boy watched Langiono walk over to the table and sit down opposite him as he talked. He spoke Italian, but with an American accent that made some words hard to understand. Up close, Paulie saw that his eyes were very blue and had tiny moving lights in them where they caught the sun. Paulie was still shocked and was watching him very carefully. But he wasn’t frightened. The man wasn’t a haircut, and if he’d wanted to hurt him or anything, he could have already done it.

  “The doors and windows were all locked,” Paulie said. “How did you get in?”

  “With my special burglar’s friend,” said Langiono, and held up a ring full of slender, lock-picking tools. “Ever see one of these?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “If you know how to use this stuff,” said Langiono, “no door is closed to you.”

  “Are you a burglar?”

  Langiono laughed. “No. But I was a New York cop for twenty years so I got to know a lot of the B and E boys real good.”

  “What’s B and E?”

  “Breaking and entering.”

  Paulie stared gravely at Langiono. He had so many things to think about at once that he wasn’t sure where to start. He understood that the man was being especially nice so as not to frighten him, but this in itself tended to make him cautious.

  “How did you know my father in America?” he asked.

  “We were from the same neighborhood. It was in New York. A place called the Lower East Side. A lot of Italians. I was a lot older than him and a cop besides. He was a real tough kid. But we liked each other and always got along great.”

  Paulie thought about it.

  “How did you know I was here in the house?”

  “I’d been watching the place for a while and finally saw you come home yesterday.”

  “How did you know I’d be coming here?”

  Langiono grinned. “You sure you’re not a district attorney or something? You sure got questions enough.”

  The boy didn’t smile back. He just waited.

  “You were seen trying to get on the Palermo ferry to Naples. Which meant you were trying to get home. Right?”

  “What did you mean before when you said you got nothing but good news for me?”

  Frank Langiono put both his hands on the table where Paulie could see them. They were big hands and some of the knuckles had been broken and had healed in crazy ways. Langiono looked at them as though seeing them for the first time. Then he looked up at Paulie with his blue eyes, which had turned quiet now and serious.

  “I’m going to take you to your mother,” he said.

  The boy just sat there. His brown eyes went wide, then blinked rapidly for a moment, then looked gravely into Lan-giono’s blues.

  “Where is she?”

  “Not too far from here.”

  “You’re not just telling me that?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  The boy looked at Langiono without answering.

  “I guess you’ve been having it kind of tough lately, huh?”

  Paulie was still silent. He was suddenly finding it a little hard to breathe. What he didn’t want was to do something stupid in front of this man, whom he kind of liked but didn’t know one damn thing about.

  Langiono dug into his pocket, took out a woman’s brooch, and put it on the table in front of Paulie.

  “Ever see this before?”

  Paulie picked up the pin. He held it in the center of his palm. He felt it with the tips of his fingers.

  “It’s my mom’s. Where did you get it?”

  “She gave it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she knows you’re a smart boy. She was afraid you might not believe me without seeing something like this.”

  Paulie sat staring at the brooch. He remembered touching it on his mother’s dress as a young child. He remembered that she almost always wore it.

  “Is my mom all right?”

  “She’s fine. She just can’t wait to see you.”

  “And you’re taking me to her?”

  “That’s right.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. When I get a phone call. That’s when I’ll know how soon we’ll go.”

  Paulie closed his hand around the brooch. He seemed to have forgotten Langiono was there.

  “You sure don’t look very happy,” the ex-detective said.

  Paulie said nothing.

  “What’s the matter, kid?”

  “If my mom’s so fine and can’t wait to see me, why can’t she come here to see me? At home.”

  Langiono nodded as if he had been expecting precisely that question. “Because a deal’s been cut with another man and these are the arrangements.”

  “What about my dad? Why haven’t you said anything about my father?”

  “Because I don’t know anything about him.”

  “You mean you only know about my mother?”

  “That’s right. Maybe that’s something she knows. When you see her, you can ask.”

  Then it was quiet in the kitchen. It was quiet in the whole house. Outside, too, nothing moved.

  Paulie sat looking across the table at Langiono, who sat looking at his hands again. The boy began to understand. Whatever this Frank Langiono’s job really was, he didn’t like it very much.

  82

  GIANNI GARETSKY’S AND Mary Yung’s Alitalia flight landed at the Naples airport at 7:05 A.M., which was about three and a half hours before Henry Durning’s government charter was due to arrive.

  They disembarked separately, without visible connection. Then they picked up their bags, went through customs, and rented their cars from two different agencies, with the same absence of noticeable ties. Both cars were telephone equipped, and they exchanged numbers by leaving them on slips of paper in an outside phone booth.

  Gianni led the way out of the airport complex. At the first turnoff, he pulled to the side of the road and waited until he saw Mary Yung approaching behind him. Then he continued on with Mary following at a hundred-yard interval.

  Suddenly, all their precautions seemed rather ludicrous to Gianni, strictly overkill. Who could possibly be watching them at this stage? Durning was the only one he had reason to be concerned about, and the attorney general was still someplace high over the Atlantic.

  On impulse, he picked up the phone and hit Mary Yung’s call number. “Just checking you out,” he said when she answered. “Everything OK?”

  “Yes. But I’d like it better if we were in the same car.”

  Gianni Garetsky was silent. He wondered how much of his tension had to do with Mary being along. It had all happened so fast. One minute he had been more alone than ever. Then suddenly there she was, right in his lap.

  So?

  So why kid himself? He loved it. She could still do this to him, he thought, and was smart enough to leave it alone for now.

  “Where do we get the hardware?” she asked.

  “About ten minutes from here. Vittorio told me about this guy. He’s safe.”

  They drove for a while with the line open.

  “It might be a good idea to call your hotel in Capri,” Gianni said. “Tell them you’ll be a few hours late checking in. Then if Durning tries to reach you when he gets to Sorrento, he won’t start thinking the wrong things.”

  “I’ll do it right now,” she said, and broke the connection.

  Fifteen minutes later, Gianni stopped in front of an old stucco house on the outskirts of Naples and saw Mary park a few blocks back. Traffic kept moving in both directions. No other cars stopped.

  Gianni was in and out of the house in less than twenty minutes with everything in a large canvas bag. Having learned from Vittorio and recent experience, he was prepar
ed for the worst.

  He stashed the bag in his car, walked down to where Mary Yung was parked, and slid in beside her.

  “All set,” he said, handing her a 9mm automatic and an extra clip of ammunition. “It’s fully loaded and the safety is on.

  Mary Yung looked at the piece, checked the clip, and slid the weapon inside the belt of her slacks.

  Gianni watched her accept the gun as part of everything that had already happened and would happen next.

  “If it reaches the point where you have to use this on him,” he said, “are you sure you can do it?”

  “Yes.”

  Gianni waited for something more than the one word answer, but Mary Yung was silent.

  “There’s still nothing that says you have to do this,” he told her.

  “I know.”

  She blinked at him, her eyes looking slow and tired.

  “Any more dumb final remarks?” she asked.

  “I’ll try to think of some.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  They sat looking at each other, and Gianni Garetsky saw that everything was settled.

  “All right,” he said. “You saw where their buses were parked, waiting for them?”

  Mary nodded.

  “I’m sure Durning will be riding to Sorrento with the rest of the delegation,” Gianni said. “It’s only about fifty kilometers from the airport to their hotel. But if for some reason he doesn’t get on one of the buses with them… if he gets into a limousine or anything else and the buses leave without him… make sure you stay with him and call me at once.”

  Mary sat listening.

  “If he’s on a bus as expected,” Gianni told her, “there’s no problem. You’ll just follow them at a distance. But remember. They’ll have police cars leading and tailing the convoy. Some of the cars may be unmarked, so you’ll have to stay way back to avoid getting trapped someplace in the middle.”

  “Exactly where will you be?”

  “I can’t answer that until I get to the hotel area and see how things are laid out. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”