The Lie (4 page)

She had luxuriated in the skylighted marble bathroom many times before, but she had never gotten used to it.

How could she?

She had been the orphaned seven-year-old child of a pretty English terrorist mother and a zealous Italian terrorist father,
the foster daughter of three sets of temporary parents in ter years, the perennial wearer of hand-me-down clothes,
and uncertain eater of irregular, not especially nutritious meals. She did not take easily to the trappings of wealth.

Not that she had to put up with it all that often. Only when she was with Nicko, who took a far simpler approach to the entire
subject. His credo was this: Once you’re past the basics, the only true purpose of money is to smooth out some of the bumps
in living. Very little came smoother than the polished marble of the tub in which she lay.

Still, there was no smoothing away the two deaths that should never have taken place. Yet if she had not been so well trained
in violence by all those hard-edged revolutionaries who had raised her, she herself would be dead this minute.

Nicko Vorelli was on an extension in the next room when Kate heard Klaus Logefeld answer in Rome.

“It’s me,” she said.

“I’ve been waiting to hear. Did it go well?”

“For me. Not for them.”

“You mean you killed
both
?”

“It couldn’t be helped.”

“There’s been nothing on the news,” said Klaus. “I guess they haven’t been found yet.”

“I appreciate what you did, Klaus. I have been waiting forever for this.” Now she was following Nicko’s script.

“Your mother and father were martyred heroes. You deserved your chance to put things right.”

“Well, you’re the one who gave me the chance,” said Kate. “So if there’s ever anything I can do…”

Kate played out her alleged gratitude for a few moments longer. When she finally hung up, Nicko came back into the room.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t like his having lied to me. But in the end I shot those two because Peggy Walters was trying to kill me, not because
of Klaus’s lie. I’d say he’s harmless.”

“He’s German, isn’t he?”

“So?”

“History says there’s no such thing as a harmless German.”

“History doesn’t know about Klaus Logefeld.”

“He’s that special?”

“He’s eaten up with Nazi guilt. He wasn’t born until well after the Holocaust, but he’s still pouring its ashes over his head.”

Kate looked at Nicko. “What’s
your
feeling?”

“The same as always in such situations. It’s never good to leave any loose ends.”

“No, Nicko.”

“It’s the only way to be absolutely sure.”

Kate’s face was set. “I said no. I’ve already killed two people I didn’t really want to kill. With Klaus, I’m sure enough.”

I
N
R
OME
, K
LAUS
L
OGEFELD
was in his apartment on the Via Sistina, studying a sheet of contact prints with a large magnifying glass. He was going over
the pictures for the third time, trying to decide which would be best to enlarge. With a fully equipped darkroom in the apartment,
he had done all the developing and printing himself during the late afternoon. The blowups would be next.

Klaus had used the latest in silent, high-tech cameras for the all-important shoot. Actually, he had used two cameras: one
loaded with infrared film for shooting in the dark, the other holding film suitable for low-level artificial light. Both cameras
were fitted with telephoto lenses. Because of the restrictive shooting conditions, he had been anxious about the possible
results, particularly since clarity and detail were vital and there were no second chances. Judging from the contact prints,
the enlargements would be giving him everything he needed.

He reviewed the pictures in their proper sequence, starting with the first shots of Kate waiting in the midnight dark of the
wood, then catching her as she stood up and headed toward the house, pulling on her mask. He had pictures of her breaking
into the house through the basement window, but no more of her until she was upstairs in the Walterses’ bedroom, turning on
a lamp and waiting for them to waken.

At this point Klaus hit the switch on a small audiocassette, and the sound of Kate’s and the Walterses’ voices gave
sudden life to the pictures. Then there was the business of Peter Walters opening the safe, and his wife shooting at Kate,
and all hell breaking loose as Kate finished them both from flat out on the floor.

That is some little lady, thought Klaus Logefeld, as he wondered how many shooters could have succeeded with that kind of
speed and accuracy.

And there were the photographs of Kate removing the pictures of her parents from the safe, which was something for him to
think about because she had never mentioned the pictures on the phone and even pretended not to know he had lied. Why?

Then came the especially important photos of Kate with her mask off, but still in the bedroom with the two bodies, and the
pictures of her wandering about the house and looking at all the Walters family photographs and paintings, and the total devastation
on her face as she looked.

Sorry, Kate, he thought, because he had never had anything but good feelings about Kate Dinneson and took no pleasure in having
to use and deceive her like this. He had not been born devious. He believed himself to be essentially honest and straightforward
by nature. It had taken a long, hard process of conditioning to change him.

The process had begun in the dark of a Berlin movie theater when he was just twelve years old. It was the day Klaus saw a
documentary showing the end of the Third Reich through the eyes of an advancing American tank battalion. The battalion’s lead
units were the first to confront the evidence of what Corps Intelligence had designated only as Objective 3. Entrance had
required no fighting. The SS guards had left the camp several hours before. Just the dead, the dying, and the walking skeletons
greeted the Americans.

At the end, the guards had evidently butchered an extra few thousand as a farewell gesture, but had not taken time to dispose
of the bodies. The Germans were an efficient people, noted the narrator, and the killing had, typically, gone well. But body
disposal was always a problem. Stripped naked, the corpses were stacked in piles, like cordwood. Occasional
sound and movement emanated from the piles, and the living had to be dug out.

Throughout the film, Klaus maintained an air of careful reserve. He clung to it the way a shipwrecked sailor might cling to
a piece of flotsam in a lonely sea. He was afraid to let it go. He did not know what might take its place. Not until several
weeks later, when he had read and seen everything he could uncover on what the German people,
his
people, had called the
final solution
to the Jewish problem, did he find out. What came was a very fine and continuing madness.

At the age of twelve, Klaus Logefeld was left with the cold certainty that nothing in his life was ever going to be as it
had been before. All he could think of were the cordwood skeletons, and that it was Germans who had put them there, and that
he
was a German. He learned to control the feeling as he grew into adolescence, but it stayed with him. Finally he became disgusted.
Why was he molesting himself with abstract issues of national guilt, of historical evil? He was no philosopher or priest.
He was just a German with an aching soul. That was hardly a life’s work.

Yet no one could say he had not been trying to turn it into just that. How? By becoming a schoolboy bomb-maker? A particular
irony lay in that, too, since the bombs were always used for good causes.

Human qualities still had to be cherished.

They also had to be protected from the crazies.

There were always the crazies.

Their names and colors might change but they were always there.

At one point Klaus might have become one of them, until he had very deliberately pulled a switch and changed a lot of things.

Changed his name and identity.

Changed his personal history.

Changed his career path from revolutionary to establishment academic.

Changed everything but his long-term goals.

In the general nature of things, he sometimes thought wryly, that still left him pretty much of a crazy.

Except, of course, to his own grandfather, a once celebrated, war-maimed hero of the Third Reich, who mockingly referred to
him as Little Jesus, yet understood and cared about him as no one else ever had.

Klaus still had the old scrapbook, reverently put together and passed on to him by his mother, that heralded his grandfather’s
glory. Tempted to burn it a hundred times, he had kept it as a lesson and a reminder. His legacy. As if he could ever have
forgotten the yellowed news clippings and photographs, especially the one picture that had shown Adolph Hitler himself hanging
the Iron Cross around the neck of Major Helmut Schadt, whose hideously patched together face bore testimony to the heroic
actions that had saved an entire Wehrmacht battalion from certain annihilation.

It had become perhaps the most famous news picture of World War II, shamelessly exploited by all sides for their own purposes.
Pathways of glory, leading straight to hell. For years, antiwar stamps and posters had carried that same silently scream ing
face.

Not only was his grandfather alive and remarkably well, but Klaus still loved him and carried him whole in his heart.

T
HE ONLY WAY
for Paulie to have prevented the public event that the funeral finally became was for him to have spirited away his parents’
bodies in the middle of the night. He had not wanted to do that. His mother and father had lived on the Amalfi coast for twenty-seven
years, he had been born here, and a lot of people cared about them. So he just let things take their course and tried to handle
it as best he could.

Circumstances made even that nearly impossible. With the unsolved double murder of a major artist and his wife sending the
media into an instant feeding frenzy, with hundreds of the morbidly curious gridlocking the roads and plazas surrounding the
church, police from several neighboring towns had to be called in simply to maintain order.

Three big
carabiniere
, running interference, were required to get Paulie through the crush of reporters and photographers working the crowd as
if they were at a championship sporting event. Inside the church it was much calmer, and Paulie was able to slide beneath
the cool quiet that smelled of flowers and distance himself from the rest.

He had already said his own good-byes; the performances taking place here meant nothing to him. Nor would they have meant
anything to his parents, who, for as long as he had known them, had never gone inside a church to pray.

So all this was only a charade—harmless enough, but false. Just as his parents’ names and much of their appearance were false,
having been altered exactly twenty-seven years
ago to help keep them alive. Even these efforts had finally failed. The only unblemished truth about his mother and father,
thought Paulie, was the feeling they had for each other.

Lord, had they been in love
.

If there was anything at all fitting in how they had died, it was in their having died together. That part they might even
have liked. It had been that way for them from the start.

Imagine
.

A top American hit man is ordered to kill a beautiful young woman. He goes wild for her; instead of carrying out his contract,
he fakes her death and carries her off to Italy.

Try and match that one, Paulie thought, and for the first time he let anyone who might be watching see him cry.

Among the watchers was Kate Dinneson.

She was sitting off to the left of Paulie and one row back, so she was able to see his face. When he wept, so did she.

Her reaction disgusted her. Cheap, guilty sentiment. For whom were her tears? Even worse was that she was there at all.

What was it she wanted so desperately from this tall, spare, dark-eyed young man she had dressed in mourning?

Absolution?

He would never give it to her. If he gave her anything at all, it would be a bullet in the heart.

The priest’s voice broke through to Paulie. Father Angelo had been his mother’s and father’s friend, not their priest. He
recalled their coming to Positano from the United States almost thirty years ago, raising their son here and never leaving.
He spoke of the many friends they had made in their adopted land, and of their contributions to its culture. Peter through
his painting, Peggy through her gallery. He celebrated their warmth and kindness, their devotion to their son and one another,
their generous giving to those in need.

From the aging, gentle-voiced Father Angelo, all these overworked platitudes took on a sweet melancholy for Paulie. He found
them a welcome contrast to the almost two days of sharp questioning from a no-nonsense lieutenant of
carabinieri
sent down from Naples. His name was Spadero, and he was far from your friendly, deferential, neighborhood policeman. He was
not one to fool around with a bedroom double murder in which a sophisticated security system was effectively neutralized,
a house was broken into, and nothing apparently was stolen.

Lieutenant Spadero was finally able to punch up enough computer printouts from Rome, Washington, New York, and Interpol to
learn that besides being a celebrated artist, the man who had lived for almost thirty years in Positano as Peter Walters had
lived an earlier life in the United States as a high-level mob assassin named Vittorio Battaglia, followed by a later period
of covert action for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The same man who was being so warmly eulogized by the priest.

All of which Paulie had already known.

Lieutenant Spadero had turned up nothing so violent in his mother’s past. She had merely been witness to a couple of killings.
She had taken no part in them. Of course she had once been a New York lawyer, but no specifically reprehensible acts seemed
to have resulted from that.