Deceptions (57 page)

“Why are you here?” he said, without opening his eyes.

“To see if I can keep you from being dead by tomorrow night.”

Gianni opened his eyes and looked at her. The cabin lights had been lowered for sleep, but Mary Yung’s face was still luminous.

“You’re no match for him,” she said. “He’s more dangerous, has more reach than you could ever imagine.”

Gianni said nothing.

“I don’t want you to die, Gianni.”

“What’s so special about
me?”

“The way I feel about you.”

“I’m sorry. I’m unmoved.”

“You didn’t want any part of me after what I did, and who could blame you? But I’ve never stopped wanting you.”

He stared mutely at her.

“Come with me, Gianni.”

“Where?” he said. “To Capri? To fuck with you and Henry?”

“We could just take off from Naples and go anywhere you want. I’ve got all the money we’d ever need and you could paint anyplace.”

Before her eyes, Gianni felt himself shrink in size. “And spend our lives hiding from Durning?”

“If we leave him alone, he’ll leave us alone.”

“You mean leave him alone to murder Vittorio’s wife and boy?”

“He doesn’t have Paul. Besides, he promised he wouldn’t hurt him if he ever found where he was.”

“And Peggy? What did he promise about Peggy?”

She stared hopelessly at Gianni Garetsky.

“Please, Gianni. Your dying isn’t going to help Peggy one damn bit.”

Gianni closed his eyes. It was easier when he didn’t have to look at her.

“Do me a favor,” he said softly to the new dark. “Don’t bury me until I’m dead.”

They sat silently together at thirty thousand feet.

“All right,” Mary Yung said in a voice as soft as Gianni’s. He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“I’ve decided,” she said. “If you won’t come away with me, then I’ll go with you.”

It took him a moment to realize what she was saying.

“You’re either joking or you’re insane.”

“I’m not joking and this may be the only really sane thought I’ve had in my life. I never should have let you drive me away
the last time. I was just so sick with what I’d done that I couldn’t stand up to you.”

Mary paused for breath. She might have just been running, her cheeks were so flushed.

“This time,” she said, “I’m not letting you push me away.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mary.”

“I know exactly. I know better than you. I’ve lived and slept with this man. I’ve seen parts of him that no one has ever seen.
I told you. He
cares
about me.”

Gianni shook his head as if to clear it. Emotion was clogging his brain. “He cares about no one. He’d kill you as fast as
he’d kill me. Faster, once he knows you’ve betrayed him.”

This time Mary smiled full-out. She was truly luminous.

“You can say what you want,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m still going with you.”

“It’s impossible.”

“You’ll see how possible I’ll make it.”

“I won’t let you,” he said.

“You can’t stop me. Whatever
you
do, I’
ll
do.”

“Durning will be calling you at Capri. He’ll be wondering what happened to you.”

“He won’t have to wonder,” Mary Yung said. “He’ll know.”

A
T ABOUT TWENTY
minutes before boarding time, there was a warm holiday spirit, a pleasantly relaxed air of festivity in the VIP lounge at
Dulles Airport.

Like a bunch of kids off to summer camp,
thought Henry Durning, chatting, laughing, and casually moving among them in his role of unofficial host. Except that these
“kids” happened to include a fair cross-section of the country’s leading jurists and Justice Department officials. And since
this was an all-expenses-paid conference at a luxury resort on the sparkling Bay of Naples, a great many spouses were present
as well.

Testifying to the distinguished, high-level nature of the group was the presence of two Supreme Court justices, who
would be addressing the international symposium, and White House Chief of Staff Arthur Michaels, who would not be making the
trip but had come down to wish them all bon voyage on behalf of the president.

The attorney general had been surprised to see Michaels appear earlier. He was close to and knew the chief of staff from way
back. Artie Michaels was a tough, hardworking political strategist who probably had the single most important and influential
job in the country after the presidency. Some said,
before
the presidency. And he rarely wasted five minutes of his average fifteen-hour-a-day work schedule on this sort of ceremonial
nonsense. This was strictly vice-presidential-caliber glad-handing.

Durning wondered why he was here.

He stopped wondering when Michaels suddenly draped an arm across his shoulders, walked him to a quiet corner of the lounge,
and said, “We’ve got us a little problem, Hank.”

Then the attorney general stood impassively, champagne glass steady in his hand, while Arthur Michaels gave him a quick rundown
of pretty much everything that had been said in the Oval Office a few hours earlier.

Durning was silent when the White House chief of staff had finished.

“Does anyone know you’re telling me this?” he finally asked.

“Are you crazy? Norton would have my head if he so much as suspected such a thing. But I feel it’s important for you to know
what’s going on.”

“I appreciate it, Artie.”

“Fuck that shit,” Michaels said softly. “I’m not doing it for you. And I don’t give a damn whether you’re innocent or guilty
of whatever it is those
goombahs
want to blow your head off for. All I care about is keeping you alive, in office, and free of scandal.”

A short, chunky man with narrow eyes and bad skin, Michaels squinted resentfully up at the tall attorney general’s handsome
face. “You have any idea of the odds against the president’s getting reelected in November if his personally chosen head of
Justice gets publicly accused of murder?”

Durning sipped his champagne and said nothing. Good old
Artie. Ever the quintessential pragmatist, he’d happily appoint Jack the Ripper attorney general—providing, of course, that
Jack could guarantee the serial killer vote.

“So I’ve warned you,” said the chief of staff flatly. “Which doesn’t mean one of those crazy Guidos won’t manage to blow your
head off anyway. But at least you’ll be watching out for yourself. And with Tommy Cortlandt’s CIA spooks out there protecting
your back, you shouldn’t be too badly off.”

Michaels squinted curiously at Durning with his little pig eyes. “Interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“All those wild stories about you. All those accusations. You know the single, overriding effect they have on me?”

Durning slowly shook his head.

“I have no idea whether they’re true or not, but they sure do humanize the hell out of you.”

Michaels displayed the crooked grin that was his best feature. “Ever think about making a run for the Rose Garden when Norton’s
finally out of there? You suddenly seem to have all the necessary qualifications.”

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.

S
TILL 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.