Deceptions (15 page)

“Where’s your Kevlar vest?” she asked.

Peter opened his eyes. He hated wearing the body armor, and rarely did. Besides, Kevlar couldn’t protect him from a head shot.
But Peggy had an almost religious faith in the vest’s ability to keep him alive and undamaged, so he took it along for
her
sake. Not that she ever knew where he went on his trips, or what he did when he got there. All she did know was that danger,
injury, and death were always distinct possibilities.

“It’s in my closet,” he said.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Maybe it’s in the hall closet.”

Peggy went to look. She came back without it. “It’s not there, either. Where else could you have put it?”

“Beats me.”

“You’re the one who unpacked it last time.”

He was silent.

“This is infuriating,” she said, and the quiver spread from her cheek to her lower lip like a traveling ague.

He rose from the bed. “Peggy… ”

“It couldn’t just get up and walk away. The damn thing’s got to be here
someplace.”

“Did you try the refrigerator? The way my mind’s working these days, I might have put it there or in the freezer.”

She didn’t smile. Here and there the cracks began to show.
All that poise,
he thought with regret,
all that great control.
His insides felt suspended, as before some dangerous action. She touched her cheeks in a youthful gesture, and he remembered
her as she had been nine years ago. Then she let her
hands hang heavy beside her hips, and she almost seemed to tumble into the beginnings of middle age. Surprise!
He
was no boy.

“You think it’s funny, don’t you?” she said. “You think I’m being silly and stupid about a crazy bullet-proof thing you take
along just to soothe me and probably never wear anyway. Admit it.”

He said nothing.

“Admit it!” she wailed.

Her brow was troubled, and she had slid into that state where the pain was coming right through her skin. Looking at her,
and against all thought and wish, he said, “Do you have any idea how much I love you?”

Peggy looked as though he had clubbed her. It was unfair, he thought. You don’t say things like that to a woman you’ve lived
with for so many years. And surely not when you’re about to go off and leave her.

“Yes.” She sounded tired. “I know how much you love me. Only sometimes I wish you didn’t love me so damned much. Sometimes
I wish you’d love me less and consider me a little more.”

She got back her control, and Peter found the Kevlar vest hanging under a jacket in his closet.

Then he quietly finished his packing.

But in bed later, with the dark soft all around and the moon patchy as quicksilver, they made love for what might possibly
be the last time, and Peggy said, “I didn’t mean that before. About wishing you didn’t love me so much. I lied.”

“I know.”

She sighed. “The things I can get my mouth to say.”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“Yes, I do. That’s a cheap, wife’s trick. Trying to load you with guilt. I’m ashamed of it.” She held him. “I’m glad you love
me as you do. I wouldn’t have had it any different. Not for a minute.”

He looked down at the drawn, wounded, beloved face, pale and a little misty in the moonlight. If I come back to her all right
from this one, he swore, I’ll never do anything to hurt her again. Never.

Yet, even at that moment, swearing to every word, he just wished he could believe it.

“T
HE WORST OF
it is, Hank, I keep wondering where the whole mess is finally going to end.”

It was near midnight and they were well into the Remy Martin in the study of the attorney general’s Georgetown house. Earlier,
they had enjoyed dinner and a concert at the Kennedy Center. In another room, Wayne’s wife and Durn-ing’s female companion
for the evening were doing their own drinking and talking.

“That is,” Wayne added, “if it ever does finally end.”

Durning looked at his friend’s eyes, which seemed to have been without sleep for days. It gave them a roughened edge of grief.
In fact, all of Wayne’s features, crooked to begin with, appeared to sag in a curious mix of concern and sorrow. Not too unlike
the equally sad looks of the more benighted sections of the city itself, thought Durning. Which meant that Brian and the worst
of Washington’s depressed areas had apparently reached the point where they both knew that many hurtful things weren’t likely
to get any better.

“I’m really sorry I had to pull you into this,” he said.

Wayne stared broodingly at Durning and was even sorrier. They had gone all through college, law school, and the country’s
unholiest of wars together, and Durning had almost died saving his life. So there was no way to have turned him down on this
incomprehensible manhunt for one Vittorio Battaglia. It was just that Wayne wished he knew more about what was behind it.
With five of his agents already missing and presumed dead, and others still out there and in danger, he felt he had a right
to know. But Hank felt differently, insisting it was enough to know that his life and future were at risk as long as Vittorio
Battaglia, a known mob hitman, re
mained at large. The rest was simply a matter of faith and friendship. “For you to know more than that,” Durning had told
him, “can’t do either of us any good. So please, Brian, either help me or don’t help me. But leave the rest of it alone.”

And that was the way it was left.

The FBI director rose to freshen their drinks.

“I guess that’s how these things finally happen,” he said.

Durning looked at him. “What things?”

“One’s ultimate fall from grace.” Brian Wayne laughed but its sound was chilling. “It creeps up on you so casually, so insidiously,
you hardly notice. Like you send a couple of agents to question a man and woman as a favor to a friend, and the next thing
you know you’re up to your ears in shit and sinking.”

“You do have a way with words, Brian.”

“We’ve both seen enough sad examples. And in case you’ve forgotten, they reach as high as the Oval Office. In fact, the higher
you get, the harder the disease hits.”

“What disease?”

“A distorted sense of immunity. Believing you’re above it all, that you can’t be touched, that you’re high enough up there
to get away with just about any damn thing you please.”

“You mean you
can’t?”

Wayne’s smile was as cold as his laugh. “Next time you run into Gary Hart, Ivan Boesky, or Mike Milken, try asking one of
them that question.”

Durning’s theory.

Like a work of art, lovemaking should never be created the same way twice. At its best it had to be a seemingly spontaneous
mix of time, place, mood, and partner, blended with whatever else might happily occur along the way.

Tonight, there had been the entire evening to lead to their finally ending up in bed together. First, the gourmet dinner in
perfect surroundings with the Waynes, then the always inspirational music of Mozart, then the best of brandies alone with
his old friend, then working up to the penultimate pitch
in the bedroom with some of the best grass available anywhere.

And the woman?

A young, recently discovered jewel of Hungarian descent named Ilona, whose family name was unpronounceable, but who was an
acknowledged master not only in bed but in everything leading up to it.

She believed reason could make steady progress from disorder to harmony, and the conquest of chaos didn’t have to start all
over again each morning. “You attack each new day, hour, minute,” she had told Durning, “as though you’d never fought them
before, as though you had to prove your worth all over again.”

Did she mean he didn’t have to?

Absolutely.

Look. He was the attorney general of the United States, a person of eminence. He should learn to relax and enjoy things more.

What things?

Her smile could be beatific. Why, her, of course.

Now, moving with her through that sweet, deep area below sex, Henry Durning felt aerated, weightless, intensely alive. All
those cool, blond shadows. How sensuous, how wild she was. What joy she took in everything they did. That in itself was exciting
to him. Just lying on her body was like floating on moving heat. It went out of her and took him in. When she breathed, she
gave off stirrings of desire.

Then from nowhere, Brian Wayne and some of his earlier comments intruded, and Durning was put off.

Ilona felt it. “What’s the matter?”

“I thought of the wrong things.”

“I’ll fix it.”

Crouching like a golden animal drinking water, Ilona went at him. She kissed his lips, his neck, his chest, his stomach, went
farther down and stayed. But Durning’s thoughts, once they strayed, weren’t easy to refocus, so that Ilona was working for
nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe later.”

She looked up at him, eyes stricken, looked across the flat
plain of his stomach, up between the twin slopes of his chest. “No. Wait. It’ll be all right.”

Then she was down and at it again.

He tried, gently, to free himself, tried to ease her away. But she held on and he finally lay back.

Strange woman. He could feel her body harden, sense hidden tensions and fears. Apart from it all now, he watched her apply
what she knew, and she knew a great deal. Another expert. In bed, he seemed to have known only virtuosos. Every one a master.
Where did they learn so much? And all so young. Or did it come with the genes?

And he? Eternally the god, Eros himself. Except not quite so godlike tonight. And, increasingly, other nights.
Face it, Henry. You’re reaching, stretching. You’re having to invent more and more.
He could still carry it off well enough in most cases, but it was starting to get humiliating.

A lamp was lit, and Durning stared at its glow on the walls and ceiling. But his thoughts were again with Wayne.

“One’s ultimate fall from grace” was how his friend had described the growing threat, and it was aptly put. Except that Durning
had no intention of falling. Brian was as good as they came, both professionally and as a friend, but he was a confirmed alarmist.
Under enough pressure, people like that could be swayed. Which was one of the reasons Durning hadn’t told him the whole miserable
story. Another and more vital reason for keeping the details to himself: Brian’s hardcore ethical and moral streak that might
just possibly find his friend sitting in judgment on him at what could turn out to be the absolutely wrong time.

Because Durning was still not thinking of the right things, he continued to be of no help to Ilona. Then he did begin concentrating
properly… but seeing her laboring so hard, so desperately now, struck him as terribly sad and washed out all hope. Poor girl.

He drew her up, finally, and held her.

“It doesn’t have to be now.”

Her face blurred, dissolved against his. Her body tensed. Her fingers clutched his chest, dug deep.

“Hey, it’s no tragedy,” he said.

“It is.”

“You mustn’t get so desperate about it.”

She lay heavily, pliable flesh turned to lead. “I guess I just hate the idea of failing.”

“If anyone failed, it was me. Not you.”

“When a woman can’t arouse a man, it’s
her
failure.”

“That’s nothing but male chauvinist propaganda.”

Ilona was silent for several moments. “It’s just never happened to me before,” she said.

Durning glimpsed erotic images of her successful arousals. They stretched to infinity. “I’m sorry I had to spoil your record.”

But he’d had enough of this particular conversation. Too much. He knew it had gone too far when, for an instant, he stared
past her head and through the window at a distant star and felt something in its mystic light, some less-than-inno-cent radiance
out of the legions of women he had known and used through the years, leap through space and into him. So that the emptiness
of his loveless couplings suddenly struck him like a blow, and a feeling passed through him that the only true path of reason
was from the depth of one being to the heart of another. And that compared to this, all his usual brands of logic meant nothing.

So he was careful to avoid looking again at that pale, distant light. Although with the passage of a bit of time and a few
more puffs of that magical golden weed, the star’s threat did seem to lessen.

He was, after all, the one in control. He had never yet abandoned himself to any wild emotional pull. Restraint of sentiment
had been his watchword, his lifelong philosophy. He was diligent in its practice. He worked at it unendingly and showed steady
improvement. With luck, he expected to be in really great shape on his deathbed.

When they loved later, the last of the star’s menace had faded.

G
IANNI’S ARTISTS’ REP,
Marty Ellman, lived in an elegant prewar Fifth Avenue highrise that was about a fifteen-minute walk from his Madison Avenue
gallery. In fact, as far as Gianni knew, walking to and from work was pretty much the only exercise his agent had done during
their entire ten years together. But Marty did it unfailingly, rain or shine, six days a week.

As he was doing this morning.

With one hardly noticeable difference. This morning he was being followed.

Gianni had spotted the watcher about an hour ago, a paunchy man in a rumpled jacket and slacks, who had been leaning against
the Central Park wall across from Ellman’s building and reading the
Daily News.
The artist had him figured for a local, rather than a fed. But Gianni was still a bit surprised at the expenditure of any
surveillance manpower at all on as remote a prospect as Marty.

Obviously not so remote.

Walking south on Fifth Avenue, Gianni kept a full-block interval between himself and the plainclothesman, who was only about
seventy feet behind Ellman. Gianni wanted to be sure the cop didn’t have any backup, since they often worked in pairs. But
this one appeared to be alone.