. . . Marc Truzzi sends his men away each night from ten to twelve. The ones outside go into the kitchen. The ones who are with Marc everywhere he goes join them. There they eat a late meal, making obscene jokes about their employer while dogs patrol the grounds. Upstairs, in his bedroom, Marc Truzzi hears none of it and if he did, he would not care. No, happiness made him soft, vulnerable, yet he refuses to abandon his nocturnal patterns. Instead, each night he revels in his shy old-country bride.
He purchased her from a photograph, the rumor went. He paid $10,000 to a struggling farmer near Salerno for the privilege of marrying his sixteen-year-old daughter with the pale olive skin and the huge dark eyes. She hadn’t even looked at Marc when she’d first stepped off the plane and he had wooed her for months before the marriage, waiting for the moment when she would shyly reply for herself—yes, yes.
Now, with the dogs drugged on the ground one floor beneath him, Russ Lowell crouches on the deck outside Truzzi’s window, his face close to the glass, recalling the wedding as he watches the girl undress.
He had been an usher, one of the men sent to show Carrera’s respect for his ally. She had come down the aisle, close enough to him that he could have touched her had he dared. She wore eggshell-colored satin styled in a manner that made her look shapeless as a child and almost hid the trembling of her body.
Her eyes had scanned the crowd looking, he guessed, for a familiar face, apparently finding no one. No one but her husband.
And in spite of Marc Truzzi’s crimes, his enemies, his women, she loved him. Russ pitied her then. He pities her now.
Maria. Virgin. Adoring.
Russ has until midnight to make the kill—not his first, but his first that wasn’t personal or part of the war—and escape. Though he is impatient he waits for the perfect moment. Truzzi must make no sound, not even a fall. His wife must never scream.
He watches them move in the dim rose-petal light of the sconces, until the woman turns her face away from the window, Truzzi moving above her. Russ carefully opens the window, one foot and then another inside, pads silently across the carpet, the long, thin blade ready. His free hand lowers, pulls Truzzi’s head back. One stroke through the neck. Truzzi is dead without a sound and Russ covers the woman’s mouth with his hand, holding the bloody knife above her. His orders are to kill her but he holds back. Not yet. He wears a stocking mask and she has not seen his face so maybe not at all.
He waits without moving until she relaxes into a trembling passivity and, humming, he slides Truzzi’s body off of his wife, opens his belt and pants, and takes Truzzi’s place inside her.
It had been years since he felt such pleasure, not since he was a child and, the oldest and the only boy, had beat his little sister with an electric cord while his father looked on, appraising the discipline he had ordered. Russ hadn’t wanted to hit her that first time and he cried and was laughed at for his tears that were of shame not weakness.
Later, when his father was not there to see, he hit her again and again until he taught himself to enjoy it.
He has not cried since. Instead he became strong. Brutal. Psychotic, perhaps, but in the end he created himself. Yes, he knows this and he does not care.
The woman never makes a sound beyond a soft, frightened whimper, even when he is finished and fastening his belt, even when he runs the side of the knife down her body and between her thighs, even when he picks up a pillow and drops it loosely over her face.
“Don’t move,” he whispers in her ear. “Don’t speak.”
She has never seen his face. He turns to go.
And hears the pillow being pushed away, the quick indrawn breath before a scream.
All reflex, he whirls, catching her as he did her husband-through the windpipe so she cannot make a sound. Her eyes unfocus, registering a brief instant of terror, and caught by them, he pauses, the moment broken when he withdraws his knife and his face is sprayed with her blood. He smears it across her body, wishing she could respond with a shudder or a sigh or even the warning he had feared.
He looks at his face in the dark window glass and sees his eyes brighter than they should be. He wipes them before the tears could form, thinking that no one would ever know that he had felt this one brief rush of remorse and weakness. He vowed he would never succumb to it again.
Yes, his father and Carrera had made him what he was but he had asked for the change, welcomed the power. In the end, he was responsible; no one else. And he holds life and death in his hands.
And through his reflection, he sees his sister’s face, staring at him, twisting like his soul into another face with white-blond hair and deep blue eyes.
The other he had killed.
He looks at the bed. The corpse has changed, grown longer and more pale, the dark hair blond, the blue eyes open, watching him. Her bare legs are apart, her arms raised, her naked body inviting him. He takes a step toward her and she begins to laugh.
She is there dead, there alive in the mirror, there burrowing through his mind, calling him, mocking his passion and his fear.
He brushes the back of his hand across his eyes. He hadn’t wanted to kill Maria Truzzi but he had. Tomorrow he would be a made man, one of Carrera’s closest allies, bragging about what he had done and how he did it. Tonight he mourns her death and his own.
Only one person sees him cry. Only one person knows his shame.
Helen Wells . . .
As the vision faded, Russ sank into a deep sleep. When he woke some hours after dark, he recalled his dream and her face and her laughter. He unlocked the storage-room door, stole in, and looked down at the two sleeping boys lying close together, wrapped in the tattered blanket Patrick had refused to relinquish. Exhausted by their fear, they did not stir as Russ crouched beside them, pulling Patrick’s wounded hand from beneath the blanket, unwrapping the cloth. Patrick’s finger was perfect, not even a scar to show where new flesh had replaced the old.
Russ covered the hand and left the room as silently as he had entered it. He lit a cigarette and sat on his cot, staring at the woman on the floor at his feet. Though she was unconscious, he knew she called to him, seducing him with her mind. Yes, more than Maria Truzzi, more than any of the others, he wanted her. Now, he thought he understood why. And as he stared at her, he thought of her son’s strange powers and unusual strength and understood how dangerous Helen Wells could be.
During Prohibition, his grandfather had stored whiskey in this warehouse. The base of the building extended above the water and smugglers’ boats would pull in beneath it. The trapdoors were used for unobserved loading while the pulleys and ropes hanging from the ceiling made the jobs easier. He tried one pulley after another, finding three that were still intact. After studying the location of each, he picked the one closest to a trapdoor and dragged Helen to it. Taking no chances with her, he looped a heavy piece of line through the rope on her feet and fastened it to a trapdoor handle. Then he lowered a pulley almost to the floor and wrapped the chain of the handcuff around its hook, raising the pulley slightly before unfastening one of the cuffs, swinging her arms above her head, and fastening them again. He slowly raised her until her feet just brushed the dirty plank floor, then tightened the line on her feet. Now, assuming she was strong enough to do so, she could not move up to slip the hook above her or get the leverage to break the cuffs.
Lovingly, as if she were his Maria and this their wedding night, he pulled down her slacks and underwear, letting them hang around her ankles. Cursing the dim light of the warehouse, he took a flashlight from the car and played it over her body, holding the light longest on the pale patches of skin on her shoulders and thigh, the only signs that this morning he had cut her and yesterday she had nearly died. Smiling, he took his knife and slowly ran the tip between her breasts to just above her naval, standing back to watch blood bead. As it began to drip, he moved close to her, only his tongue touching, licking the wound in swift upward strokes so that not a drop of it spilled. Afterward, he sat back on his heels, looking at her in the harsh beam of the flashlight until it vanished.
We ‘re so perfectly made for each other
, he thought as he wiped away the dirty smudges the floor had left on her shoulder and face and picked away the bits of sawdust caught in her hair.
So beautiful. So perfect. I can do anything to you, Helen Wells; anything at all, and you will not die.
And when he grew tired of the game, he’d find a way to end it too.
If he had not been so filled with self-satisfaction, he might have detected the soft tinkle of laughter in his mind, the silent sort a young cat makes when it first sharpens its claws.
I
Dick and Stephen flew from late autumn to the final blaze of Ohio’s summer—the crisp mountain air replaced by the muggy, pressing heat of the city. It fell through the open door of the plane, and as Dick walked down the open metal stairs to the tarmac, he had to force himself to breathe. It seemed as if he were underwater, viewing the world around him through a thick haze, foggy and distorted. And the pain he had felt only once since the doctor’s verdict returned to remind him that his time, no matter what the outcome here, was limited.
As was everyone’s, Dick thought as he watched Stephen walking stiffly in front of him, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low, his head bowed to shield his face from the searing rays of the sun.
An envelope was waiting for them at the airline counter. Stephen scanned a note and pocketed a set of car keys. A short time later they were heading east in a silver-grey Cadillac convertible with a black leather interior that Dick estimated cost at least twice his annual income. The top, Dick wasn’t surprised to note, stayed up. “Not a very inconspicuous mode of transit, is it?” Dick commented.
“I learned a great deal from Jason Halli in all those hours we spent together, Richard. Carrera respects wealth and power. When we meet, I intend to be ostentatious in my display of both. Check the glove box. There should be a package for you.“
Dick unwrapped a revolver in a shoulder holster along with a box of ammunition. “Standard police issue,” he commented.
“I thought you would want something familiar though I doubt that you will need it.”
On their flights from Dawson, Dick and Stephen had both displayed a kind of stoic bravado that not only hid their concern but kept them from speaking to each other at all. Now, disgusted with the pretense, Dick said, “You know, I’m content to spend a few hours helping you convince Russ Lowell that he’s trapped in the hottest level of hell but if you take out Carrera, the repercussions will be bloody. If he dies, every two-bit hood in town will be trying to take over. I wouldn’t care, hell, I’d relish watching the bastards whack one another if it weren’t for the bystanders who will be caught in the crossfire.”
“You told me that Carrera was going to jail. All of this would happen anyway, yes?”
“No. Jail will just slow him down a little. As long as he’s alive the crooks on the outside will respect him. If they don’t, he can order the hits from his cell.”
“What do you want to do, Richard?”
“Find Helen and our kids and get out of here. The law will take care of Carrera and in a few months I’ll be beyond his reach.”
“Suppose we destroyed Carrera
and
his empire.”
“Empire?” Dick snorted. “I suppose you could call it that. Do you have any ideas for its destruction or do you plan to snap your fingers?”
“Nothing definite. However, we’re probably a day or two ahead of Lowell. That gives us plenty of time for plots. Where would you suggest we stay for the night?”
“If you weren’t playing dead, I’d say my place. But since your face is too well missed on my block, pick any east-side suburb. Newburgh Heights is good. Nobody should know me there.”
It had been a long two days and, by the time they checked into a rear room in a motel painted a muted shade of lawn-flamingo pink, Dick was exhausted. He sat on one of the twin beds eating paper-wrapped hamburgers trying to reason with Stephen. Stephen listened intently but refused to alter his plans. He would destroy Carrera. Helen would destroy Lowell. The boys would be safe. Dick didn’t like the apparent order of Stephen’s priorities though he did not say so. Instead he argued with equally valid concern, “I don’t want to be a party to a murder. Even Carrera’s.”
“Richard, what would happen if we went to the police?”
The question sobered Dick. “This is an international kidnapping. Russ would get word of what we’d done and kill Alan. He’d try to kill Patrick and Helen as well. If he doesn’t know what they are, they’d probably be OK.”
“He shot Helen. She didn’t die. He knows that much, yes? And when he contacts Carrera, I expect him to discuss what he knows. No, I don’t think this is a time for me to hide.”
“Maybe not from Carrera but you have another problem. Carrera’s usual hangouts will be swarming with cops. They’ll be spying in windows, listening in on the phones, and some of his closest allies have probably sold out to the feds.”
“Sounds like a man desperate enough to bargain.”
“So bargain and leave him alone.”
“All right. I will try. My hand may be forced, though, Richard. We must find Helen and the boys but I must also recover those reports as soon as possible. Dozens of lives depend on it. You understand this, yes?”
If those reports fell into government hands, AustraGlass might suffer but Stoddard Design would be ruined. Paul Stoddard would have to leave the country fast or face a federal hearing. Someone like Paul would hardly react to either prospect well. “I understand,” Dick replied. “There’s one other problem. A lot of those cops watching Carrera will know me. Some of them might even know you.”
“I can be careful, Richard. Given the circumstances, it’s best Carrera not see you at all until some agreement is reached.”
“I didn’t come all this way to sit on the sideline.”
“I know. But if Carrera reaches you before we know where Helen and the boys are, it will be far more difficult to find them.”