Deceptions (47 page)

One of Sorbino’s interior guards handed Donatti a large brass key, and the don went upstairs alone and unlocked a tall set
of double doors. Then he closed the doors behind him and approached Vittorio Battaglia’s wife, a slender, dark-haired woman
sitting beside a window with an open book in her lap.

So this is the one,
he thought, and felt the faint stir of an excitement he had long ago given up for dead. It was nothing sexual. Although she
was certainly attractive enough as a woman. The feeling was more in the realm of who and what she was, and of all she had
caused to happen. But most importantly, of course, it was born out of what she had it within her to do for him.

“I’m Carlo Donatti,” he told her.

He spoke in English and waited for her response.

But there was none. All Peggy did was sit and stare at him.

“You don’t know who I am?” he said.

“Should I?”

Her voice was flat, her face devoid of all expression.

“Vittorio never mentioned my name?”

Peggy shook her head.

Donatti pulled up a chair and sat down facing her. He was stunned that Vittorio Battaglia had never broken his oath of silence.
And after all that had taken place. It pleased Don Carlo Donatti.

“You had good reason to know my name,” he said. “Ten years ago, I was the one who gave Vittorio the contract to kill you.”

Peggy sat there as it entered her. “You were his
capo?”

“I was. And I was also the one who saved your life yesterday.”

“How did you do that?”

“By not having you shot. As I’d been ordered to do.”

“Who ordered you?”

“You should know by now who wants you dead.”

She was silent.

“Henry Durning,” he told her.

Peggy frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I was to arrange for your second call to Henry to be traced, and then have you shot. But I had you brought here instead.”

“What did you tell Henry?”

“That you were finally dead. This time, for real.”

She sat looking at Carlo Donatti. “All right. Now tell me the important parts.”

“Which are they?”

“The ones you’ve left out.”

Donatti smiled. “What did I leave out?”

“Two things,” she said. “Why someone like you would be taking orders from Henry Durning. And why you’re suddenly so interested
in saving my life.”

The don nodded. “You must have been a very good lawyer, Mrs. Battaglia.” It was the first time anyone had ever addressed her
as Mrs. Battaglia, and it was not without effect. There was a whole life out there that she had not even begun to live.

“I tried my best, Don Donatti.”

Carlo Donatti put on a pair of glasses and looked at Peggy more closely. Was there something about her he might be missing?

“The answers to your two questions are almost pathetically simple. I take orders from Henry Durning because he holds hard
evidence that can put me away forever. And I’m interested in saving your life, because I’ve finally stopped being brain dead
long enough to realize just how valuable you can probably be to me.”

Peggy sat wordless.

“I’ve been a fool,” said Donatti. “Durning himself told me he wanted you dead because you could effectively ruin him anytime
you chose. And that was weeks ago. Yet until now, it never even crossed my mind to use you.”

He paused to consider her.

“And, of course, let
you
use
me
in return.”

Peggy didn’t move. She was almost afraid to breathe. It might change something. And at this moment she wanted nothing changed.

“I’m not your enemy, Mrs. Battaglia. I never was. It’s never been part of my code to make war on women and children. I sent
Vittorio to kill you nine years ago only because Henry Durning, as district attorney, offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse.
Your life in return for quashing a murder indictment against me. Now that you have suddenly turned up alive nine years later,
it’s come back to haunt us all.”

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.”

A
LONE 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.