The Lie (3 page)

The four guards glanced around at one another. No one wanted to be the first to do it.

Paulie leveled his machine pistol at the three in front of the urinals. “You guys really want to die with your little pretties
in your hands?”

They dropped facedown on the floor together. The fourth soldier quickly followed.

“Get their pistols,” Paulie told Tutsikov. “Be careful. Don’t get between them and my gun.”

Paulie watched as Tutsikov did as instructed. Every one of these soldiers more than half expected a bullet in the back of
his head.

I hope they don’t make me kill them
.

He waited until Stefan Tutsikov had collected all the guards’ weapons. Then, moving swiftly, he reversed his machine gun and
swung its butt against the back of each of the four heads lined up on the floor.

Paulie checked. They were all unconscious. No great joy, but better than dead.

“Let’s go,” he told Tutsikov.

Outside, Paulie stopped to rip the phone out of the staff car. The three parked rigs were still quiet. Moments later the two
men were on the road and picking up speed.

Stefan Tutsikov kept looking behind them.

“You don’t have to worry,” said Paulie, speaking English now. “I cut their tires before I went in.”

Tutsikov spoke for the first time. “I was sure you were going to kill them.”

“I didn’t have to.”

“
They
would have killed
you
. And worse.”

“I know.”

Tutsikov stared at Paulie Walters. “Who
are
you?”

“One of your American admirers.”

The political leader gazed off at the growing lightness of the sky. “I know what you saved me from. I’m grateful.”

Paulie drove in silence.

“Would you have shot me if you couldn’t get me away from them?”

“Of course.”

“I thank you for that, too.”

Less than an hour later, in response to a coded signal from Paulie’s radio phone, an unmarked helicopter picked them up in
a small clearing not far from the Serbian town of Kula.

Four hours after that, Stefan Tutsikov was aboard a U.S. Air Force flight from Rome to Washington.

Paulie Walters, after being dropped off in Naples and reporting to Tommy Cortlandt by secure telephone, headed home to Ravello
along the Amalfi coast. Nearing Positano in the early afternoon he turned off the main road to stop at his parents’ house
for a brief visit.

Paulie had been born and raised in the house, a white, flat-roofed, Moorish-style villa in the green mountains overlooking
the Bay of Salerno.

Waking in the morning, his first sight of the day for much of his life had been Ulysses’ fabled Rocks of the Sirens, rising
out of the water about a mile offshore. He had painted the scene many times. This afternoon, the rocks stood golden and shining
in a glassy sea.

Paulie saw the two cars in the parking area, so he knew that both his parents were home. Climbing the long, steep path through
the rock garden, he felt the more than thirty-six hours he had gone without sleep.

When no one answered his knock, Paulie Walters opened the door with his own key and went in.

“Anyone home?”

He called out first in English, then in Italian.

Entering his father’s studio, he saw the current canvas on an easel. No paint-filled brushes were in sight, which meant his
father had not been painting today.

Paulie was curious, not concerned. Nothing appeared out of order. Friends sometimes stopped by to pick up his parents for
a day out on their boat or whatever. More than anything, he was disappointed at their not being home to greet him.

He took a cold beer from the refrigerator and sat down with it at the kitchen table.

His day and a half without sleep suddenly hit him again, and he knew he was not about to get behind the wheel for another
hour of driving to Ravello.

Pushing out of his chair, Paulie Walters started up the stairs. The idea of a nap in his old bed seemed very appealing.

The thought never got further than that.

All he saw at first were his father’s bare arms.

They were on the floor.

Reaching.

Paulie breathed the coppery smell of blood.

He entered his parents’ room and saw it all, saw it in that mix of color and black and white that happens in only the worst
of nightmares.

Eyes closed, he knelt on the floor hugging himself with both arms, rocking gently.

The room itself was quiet, but the air was smeared with silent screams. They were all he heard.

Time had passed, yet he had not really looked closely at his parents. He knew he had to now, and he had always done what was
required of him.

Paulie looked at his mother first, where she lay on the bed. A revolver was in her hand, and at a quick glance a stranger
might have thought she had shot her husband and then taken her own life. Paulie knew better. He saw that his mother had been
shot twice in the face, and that a third shot had splintered the bed’s headboard behind her.

Knees shaking, Paulie approached his father slowly and with great care. He saw his naked body stretched out on the floor,
facedown, both arms extended as in a dive. Only his old wounds were visible, no fresh ones. On the pale tile floor around
him, an irregular red stain radiated out from under his chest.

Insanely, Paulie placed two fingers on his father’s wrist, felt for a pulse, and silently called for a miracle.

His father’s flesh was cold.

There was no miracle.

He stayed with them, turning his head from side to side, pretending he was looking for some tangible object. In truth, though,
he was gasping through the fading afternoon light, smothering in the emptiness of the house.

“H
AVING SEX
,”
THOUGHT
K
ATE
D
INNESON
, was the wrong description for what they were doing. When one was engaged in this sort of carnal transaction with Nicko Vorelli,
it had to come more under the heading of an art form.

They were in the master bedroom suite of Nicko’s Sorrento villa, the blinds closed against the afternoon sun, a few pale,
wavering rays still managing to break through. A bedside clock said it was just past four, which was something of a shock
to Kate: imagine her cavorting in bed while the sun was still shining.

But today was different. Today she was still fighting the mixture of panic and remorse she had carried away from the tragic
episode the night before in Positano. She had rushed straight to the bed of
Doctore
Nicholas Vorelli for his unfailing expert therapy.

Nicko
was
an expert. Not only in bed but in everything leading up to and surrounding it. Eroticism, he believed, could change disorder
into harmony, fear into courage, despair into hope. Nicko should know. He had been living for all of fifty-four years—more
than twice as long as she—and had become a practicing philosopher. He had learned that ruin came to flesh, inevitably, that
time wore a person away bit by bit, and that all one faced was the void. So why not live life accordingly?

Now, moving with him through one of those sweet, far places that transcended sex, Kate Dinneson felt lighter than
air, intensely alive. Nicko was still her mentor, still opening new avenues to her. Most important, he cherished and delighted
in her, which he had been doing since she was seventeen, when she had all but forced her way into his bed and seduced
him
.

Being cherished and delighted in by a rich and distinguished man was very comforting. Nicholas Vorelli was a widely respected
doctor of political science whose theories and advice were eagerly sought after for astronomical fees by corporations, financial
and political advisory services, and major governments at a time when the collapse of world Communism had opened great gaps
in the geopolitical order, which chaos was threatening to fill.

In addition, Nicko had a deft, clever way with people and was always being invited to parties at various embassies and famous
town and country mansions. Kate often went with him to these gatherings, usually when there was a chance it might prove useful
to her career as a features writer for several major news services.

Attending these events, she sometimes found herself staring at celebrated guests and deciding she did not like their faces.
They looked too much like the faces of small-town merchants, growing a little too fat, too sleek, too overcomfortable. Nicko
had once asked, “What are you so busy looking at?”

“The faces of our world leaders. I don’t like them.”

He had smiled. “The trouble with you is, you’ve spent so much of your life looking at the dark underside of things, you don’t
even know how the light at the top is supposed to look.”

True enough. Yet it was just as true for Nicko. He had come out of some of the same dark places as she. Even darker. He had
not been too far removed from her mother and father during the worst and bloodiest of their violence-filled days. Yet he had
come out clean and seemingly untouched.

Nicko was above her now, all sweet flowing warmth to her flesh. A rare greed shone in his eyes: he had that special
male look that said the world and everything in it was his. Kate knew she really was no part of it.

A moment later she felt the sudden rushing, that wild blend of scent, sight, and movement. Then with a great urgency, she
took hold of Nicko and felt him dissolve, and herself with him, as everything she had been holding back broke loose.

They lay naked in the warm room, the sheets thrown off the bed. Nicko Vorelli’s face lay on Kate Dinneson’s breast.

“All right, let’s hear about it.” Nicko spoke in Italian, although he could just as easily have spoken in English, German,
French, or Spanish. Just as Kate could have understood him in any one of those languages.

“Let’s hear about what?”

“Whatever it was that drove you to this extraordinary hunger for me in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon.”

Kate was silent.

Vorelli moved his head to look at her. “It’s that bad?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Getting out of bed, she padded barefoot and naked to the liquor cabinet and poured some brandy into two snifters. Then she
handed one to Nicko, sat down on the edge of the bed, and sipped her drink. She stared dimly at the pleasantly familiar room,
at its elegant antique lamps and period dressers, at its custom armoires and bed tables.

“I shot a man and a woman last night,” she said quietly. “I didn’t really want to, though I did go to their house with a gun.
The woman began shooting at me and I had to shoot back. When it was over, they both were dead.”

Nicko Vorelli stared at her, obviously shocked.

“Who knows about it?”

‘No one.”

“No one saw you enter or leave their house?”

“No. It was the middle of the night, and dark.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“I wore gloves and never took them off.”

“Did you tell anyone you were going there?”

Kate shook her head.

“Could the man and woman have told someone you were coming?”

“They never knew. I broke in while they were asleep.”

“Who were they?”

“Their names were Paul and Peggy Walters. He was the man who shot my parents, and she was his wife.”

Nicko Vorelli’s eyes were troubled. “From Positano?”

“You knew them?”

“I know Walters was an artist. I know his wife ran a gallery right here in Sorrento.”

“He was also a shooter for the CIA. Or did you know that too?”

Nicko offered no answer. His silence alone was almost enough to convince Kate he knew.

“I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened last night,” he said.

Kate told him, her voice flat. The only thing she left out was what she had begun to consider her curious overreaction to
the Walterses’ son, Paulie, and his paintings.

When she finished, Nicko said, “How did you find out Walters killed your mother and father?”

“A man named Klaus Logefeld told me.”

“Who is he?”

“He was one of the old leftist, anarchist crowd I used to trail after when I went to school for a while in Germany. He must
be about fifteen years older than me and he used to fancy himself an intellectual revolutionary. Probably still does. My parents
were his gods, and I was their little daughter. I keep running into him in different places where the overage ex-Reds cry
in their beer together. The last time was ten days ago in Rome. That’s when he told me about my parents.”

“Did he say how he knew Walters shot them?”

“Just that a friend happened to mention it.”

“What kind of friend?”

“One who once did work for the CIA in Frankfurt.”

“Why do you suppose your Klaus lied about your mother and father being unarmed when they were shot?”

“Maybe he didn’t lie. Maybe that was what his friend told him.”

“Or else it was his way of making sure you killed the Walterses.”

“Why would that matter so much to him?”

“I’ll tell you what I don’t like,” Nicko said. “Mostly, I don’t like this German wildman knowing you’ve just killed two people.
Neither do I like everything leading up to it.”

“Like what?”

“Like God suddenly arranging for you to run into Klaus ten days ago in Rome. Like his friend just happening to mention that
Walters killed your parents eighteen years ago. Like the facts somehow getting twisted into making you believe Walters was
a cold-blooded murderer who deserved to die.”

Nicko Vorelli palmed his brandy snifter in both hands. “Have you called Klaus to tell him what happened last night?’

“No. I wanted to talk to you first. And I guess I just needed time.”

He looked at her. “How are you now?”

“Better. Don’t worry, Nicko. I’ll handle it.”

“Where does Klaus live?” Nicko asked.

“Rome.”

“You have his phone number?”

Kate nodded.

“Do me a favor. Take a nice hot bath, get dressed, then call h m while I listen in. I want to hear how he handles it when
you tell him what happened.”