Deceptions (62 page)

He saw the man called Henry standing with the big gun in his hand, and the other man, Carlo, down in the grass with his shirt
getting red all around his right shoulder.

But Carlo’s eyes were still open and he was pushing himself up with his left arm so he could see Henry better, and maybe know
what he was going to do next. Which was pretty dumb, the boy thought, because anybody should know that what Henry was going
to do next was shoot Carlo right through his head.

Then something else suddenly seemed even dumber. Because where was Frank Langiono? If he was supposed to be Carlo’s bodyguard,
why wasn’t he out here doing something?

Because he was dead.

Paulie understood this even as he thought it. Just as he understood that Henry was going to kill Carlo, then his mother, and
then him. He didn’t know why. All he knew was that it was going to happen.

Except that Henry somehow seemed in no rush to do any of it. He just stood there with the big gun in his hand, looking at
Carlo while Carlo looked back at him with this funny expression on his face.

“If you’re going to do it, then goddamn do it,” Carlo said. “I just hate all this messing around.”

“I’m sorry, Carlo.”

“I know. You’re always sorry. Every time. Only it never seems to stop you, does it?”

Henry stood there without answering.

Watching him and moving very carefully, Paulie took his snub-noser out of the pocket where he’d been carrying it for the past
two days and nights. He lifted it with both hands and aimed it at the back of Henry’s head. His mother was no longer holding
him, but he felt her eyes and hoped she wasn’t going to say or do anything to make Henry turn. He knew that Carlo was able
to see him from where he lay sprawled in the grass, but he wasn’t worried about Carlo. He
was someone who would understand exactly what he should and shouldn’t be doing.

“How did you know about my man back there in the brush?” Paulie heard Carlo ask, to keep Henry talking.

“Because it’s how you think.”

The boy took a deep breath, as Dom had taught him, held it, and began to squeeze the trigger.

I’11 get only one shot,
he thought, and it was exactly then that Henry turned and looked at him.

Paulie saw something funny on his face, almost like the beginnings of a smile. As if they had some secret joke that only the
two of them knew about and understood.

Then the revolver fired and blew it all away.

G
IANNI
G
ARETSKY SLOWLY
regained consciousness.

He could see the sky through only one eye. He was on his back in the dirt. But he wasn’t dead. Yet his head burned like hell.

He pushed to a sitting position. With his one good eye, he saw the wasted car a few feet away, and his own car, intact, farther
down the trail.

Then he remembered the man with the bloody face lifting the gun, and felt again the familiar stillness of falling.

Gianni touched his head where it burned, and touched his blinking eye. He felt dried blood in both places. If the bullet had
hit a quarter inch lower, he wouldn’t be sitting up. Ever.

His watch said he had been unconscious for almost two hours.

On his feet, he stumbled over to the man who had shot him. This time he was as dead as his companion. Finally.

With effort, and touches of dizziness, Gianni made it back
to his own car. He lost about ten minutes sitting there. It occurred to him that it was all lost.

It was another five minutes before he was thinking clearly enough to pick up the car phone and call Tom Cortlandt’s direct
line in Brussels.

A woman’s voice answered.

“I’m trying to reach Tom Cortlandt,” said Gianni. “It’s important.”

“Who is this?”

“Charlie’s friend.”

There was a long pause.

“Hold on, please,” said the woman. “I’ll check it.”

She was back in a moment. “I have another number for you to call.”

Gianni wrote the number down, hung up, and sat staring at it. Either the scalp wound had addled his brain, or this was Dr.
Helene Curci’s home number in Monreale, Sicily. It certainly was the number he had called when he last spoke to her cousin,
Lucia. It made no sense. But what did, lately?

Gianni Garetsky called it.

“Cortlandt here,” said the intelligence agent.

Gianni felt a new madness enter him. “Gianni Garetsky,” he managed, and waited.

The phone hummed.

“Where are you?” Cortlandt’s voice had changed but held its calm. “And tell me what’s happened?”

Coldly, flatly, feeling like a recording and holding back his own questions, Garetsky told him.

“You’re sure both men are dead?” Cortlandt said when he had finished.

“Yes.”

The agent sucked in air. “This is all terribly unfortunate.”

Gianni sat there feeling sick.

“It’s not your fault,” said Cortlandt. “You had no way of knowing. And it was all handled very badly. But those were our people
you totaled.”

“
Your people?”
Gianni echoed dumbly.

“Yes.”

“What the hell were your people—”

“They were just supposed to get you and Mary Yung off Durning’s back. Not start a goddamn war.”

“Where’s Durning now?”

“We don’t know. He’s not in his hotel. He must have taken off when our people were chasing you.”

It all became too much for Gianni.

“You and your fucking people! What have you goddamn been doing to us? I don’t understand all this shit. I thought you were
trying to help Vittorio and his family?”

“I was,” said Cortlandt. “I still am. Vittorio is right here in the room with me. But Henry Durning’s the attorney general
of the United States. I had certain obligations to the national interest.”

Gianni felt his control going completely, and he let it.

“Fuck you and your goddamn obligations!” he shouted. “You had no goddamn right. I
trusted
you, damn it! You know how many lives this national interest crap of yours has cost? Those Company idiots of yours even went
and killed—”

Gianni stopped himself right there. He was only assuming the worst. He absolutely didn’t know for sure.

But Tommy Cortlandt was with him all the way.

“Mary Yung isn’t dead,” he said. “She’s not all that great, but she’s alive and being cared for.”

Gianni let it filter through him.

“Where is she?” he said thickly.

“Sorrento General.”

About to hang up and start the car, Gianni stayed with it a moment longer.

“What about Carlo Donatti and Vittorio’s wife and boy?” he said. “Did your asshole
people
at least do any better with
them?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Donatti somehow evaded them. And they never did find Mrs. Battaglia and the boy.”

“Absolutely terrific,” said Gianni.

His eyes cleaned, and the wound in his scalp treated, Gianni sat in Mary Yung’s hospital room, waiting for her to wake up.

The late-afternoon light drifted in, and streaks of sun fell on her face, on that incredible nose and mouth, still visible
among the bandages.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a nurse, a doctor who had just stopped by to read her chart, then Gianni.

“Gianni?” It came out as a confused whisper.

He reached for her hand, feeling himself grinning and nodding insanely, a mute maniac clown.

“You’re not dead?” she said.

He shook his head.

“I thought you were,” she told him.

“And I thought
you
were,” he said, feeling dry, helpless tears somewhere deep in his throat. “That’s what it took. That’s when I was finally
able to tell you. When you were no longer there to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“That I love you. That I never stopped. That as far as an idiot like me can tell, I never will.”

Later, as she slept, Gianni explained it all to Teresa. Not that he had to. Who would know any of this better than his wife?

Things were being done to Mary Yung. So Gianni Garet-sky, his head bandaged, was out pacing the corridors of the emergency
area when he passed the small group heading in the opposite direction.

Abstracted, he was vaguely aware of a man being pushed on a wheeled stretcher, with a young boy holding his hand on one side,
and a woman walking beside him on the other.

“Gianni?”

They must have been about twenty feet past him by then, and the woman’s voice was tentative, questioning. Then he turned,
and any faint remaining doubt was removed.

“
Gianni!”

To Garetsky, it came almost in the nature of a private non-religious epiphany, with Peggy clutching him, and the boy, Paulie,
staring with his dark, serious eyes, and Carlo Donatti half raising himself from the wheeled stretcher like a gray-faced,
suddenly resurrected corpse.

Then everyone but Paulie seemed to be talking at once, all
with their questions and stories, but only the two most vital parts finally breaking through and holding.

Vittorio Battaglia, dearly beloved father and husband, was alive.

And Henry Durning, attorney general of the United States, was not.

When Paulie did at last speak, it was to ask one question, “When can I go see my dad?”

“I’ll have the copter take you and your mom right now,” said Donatti. “You’ll be in Monreale in an hour.”

The don was still holding Paulie’s hand. “You see this boy, Gianni? You know what this boy did?”

Gianni knew exactly what Paulie had done. He had just been told. But this was nowhere near enough for Carlo Donatti. He had
to tell it again.

“He just goddamn saved the three of us. That’s all. At eight years of age,
questo fanciullo,
this boy had the
coglioni
to draw down on that
assassino,
blow him away, and turn himself into a made man.”

P
AULIE DIDN’T FEEL
much like a
made man
when he walked into his father’s room in the doctor’s house in Sicily. He felt more like a baby.

The thing was, finally seeing his father was nothing like he had thought it would be during all those days and nights of imagining
it.

The boy had many different visions of his moment of return, but his most transcendently joyous was the one in which his father
would be alone and hard at work in his studio. “Papa?” he would say. And as his father turned and looked at him with eyes
worn red from worrying and not sleeping, Paulie would run across the studio and jump into
his arms. In the fantasy, all movements were slow, silent, dreamy, a ballet without music, in which his father’s paintbrushes
were thrown into the air and floated, and he and his father hugged and kissed and sailed right along with them. Then the only
sound was that of his father laughing, and when Paulie looked at him, his eyes were no longer worn and red but were bright
and laughing.

Not so.

When Paulie actually walked into the room and saw his father, Vittorio Battaglia lay asleep in bed, his face so pale and thin
and old looking that the boy almost didn’t recognize him.

What had they done to his father?

He heard his mother make a small sound behind him, a sigh like that of escaping steam. It merely confirmed the tragedy.

“Papa?”

He barely got the word through the sudden flood of tears.

A baby.

The boy pressed his lids together to stem the shameful flow. What was wrong with him? Hands fluttering like birds, he brushed
angrily at his cheeks. Quick. His father mustn’t see.

But his father saw.

First, his son. Then, his wife. He saw.

Yet with all the fever, not even near to believing it.

Then finally, somehow, believing it.

When something close to rational talk was at last possible, Vittorio Battaglia said to his son, “So tell me, Paulie. Tell
me where you were and what you’ve been doing.”

The boy told him.

He told him from the beginning, from the moment Dom whacked him over the head and carried him away, to the squeezing off of
that single final shot in the clearing. He left nothing out. A son telling a father a bedtime story, a fairy tale, a dream
of magic landscapes peopled by dragons and a lone giant. Who really was just a little boy.

Vittorio felt weak, confused, baffled. His little boy, his secret thumb-sucker had done
this?
While he, his father, had
been doing what? Shooting up the wrong people, getting shot up in return, and lying here dreaming of death.

He had proven unfit, unprepared. He had owed things to his wife and son that he hadn’t been able to provide. Wild beasts roamed
loose in the streets.

Yet, somehow incredibly, he had raised a tiger, he thought, and felt the first faint stirring among the tombstones in his
chest.

It made the best of him want to lift up and fly.

I
T WAS
V
ITTORIO
who told Tommy Cortlandt. But Peggy was the one who had to take the CIA chief of station back to the clearing where it had
all happened.

Cortlandt was alone as he looked at Henry Durning in the grass. Peggy had just pointed the way and stayed in the car. The
high grass moved in a breeze. The attorney general did not move. Over the years, Cortlandt had looked at a lot of bodies.
Sometimes they looked as though they were sleeping. But not Henry Durning. This was not sleep.

Cortlandt returned to the car and asked Peggy to please leave him alone for a few moments. Then he used the cellular phone
to call Arthur Michaels on his secure line at the White House.

“Just listen,” he said, and told the White House chief of staff where he was and what had happened.

Uncharacteristically, it took Michaels several beats to respond. “I’m afraid we’re going to need the president on this, Tommy.
Hold on a moment.”

It turned out to be a lot more than a moment. But when the president did finally get on an extension, Michaels had already
briefed him.