Not that she was especially big. She was rather on the small side, actually. But young. Very young. Increasingly, youth was
becoming a factor for him. Also, she was one of the new, trendy breed. Which meant she ate sensibly, worked out with weights
and aerobics, and made a working religion of her body.
For all of which, considering the results, Durning was immeasurably grateful.
One of her strong rounded arms hooked around his head and caught his throat.
“Sonofabitch!” he gasped, struggled, and finally worked the arm free.
His eyes were closed, and with his body now fully against her chest, and one knee prying between her legs to work them apart,
he had the mental image he was pressing against a secret barrier that would soon give way and allow him entrance to a beautiful,
sunlit garden.
He ripped her gown and she cried out.
“Don’t! Please… no!”
But her cries and pleas only excited him more, with heat packed behind heat and the pressure building in his groin.
He went at her gown again, hearing the fabric tear, feeling
himself ready to hurt, even to kill her if he had to, and loving the idea that he was capable of inflicting that much damage.
Streaks of light flew from his brain to his arm, and he had a hand on her, then part of it working its way through the damp
heat, fingers taking greedy control as if all the world’s knowledge of such things was centered at their tips. Oh, he knew
her at that moment, knew the burgeoning warmth that was rising from her and would soon be his, knew exactly where it would
be right to touch and where it would be wrong.
She was still fighting him, but Durning could feel her beginning to weaken. He could hear a murmuring in her throat that was
now merely begging him not to hurt her. Holding her body in place with his full dead weight, he began stripping off his clothes.
No lights were on but there was a moon and its pale wash came in through the same open window by which he himself had entered
less than ten minutes earlier. That was always one of his more pleasurable moments. The actual breaking and entering. The
climbing across the darkened sill of a sleeping woman’s window and getting his first glimpse of what was waiting for him.
That wondrous bower of the libido. And there she was… unknowing, vulnerable, her body still her own secret and not yet violated.
While he stood there trembling in his excitement. While he listened to her breathing and watched the gentle rise and fall
of her breasts. While he saw, too, the smooth curve of her belly and the mound of Venus below.
All that waiting for me.
Sweet Jesus Christ.
I ’m fifty-four fucking years old.
I’m the attorney general of the United States.
When will all this degraded clowning finally stop being the absolute core of my life?
Fervently, Henry Durning hoped never.
With his clothes off, naked now, he smothered her cries by covering her mouth with his.
She bit into his lip. Hard. It hurt.
“Do that again and I’ll cut off your nose,” he said.
She didn’t do it again.
But she was still fighting him even as he entered her. Which he didn’t do gently. He certainly didn’t do it as a lover. Nor
even as a friend. If anything, it was with anger, with the sense of a man driving spikes. But that was part of it, too, and
not to be missed. He had never felt more greedy in his life. Nor as powerful.
I have the devil’s own strength.
It was true. Nothing was beyond him at this moment. If some inner voice told him to climb to the top of the Washington Monument
and fly off, he was sure he’d be able to do that, too. There were all these lovely sounds inside his head. New dreams were
being born to him.
I’m my own field of force.
He roughly grabbed a fistful of her hair, rolled her over onto her stomach, and began sodomizing her from the rear.
Struggling for a poor quarter of an inch at a time, he listened to her screaming all the way.
“My God, you’re killing me!”
And that was how he made his final run. Which was always something of a mystery. Maybe even a part of larger mysteries. There
were times when he almost despised the entire act, when he found it a hopeless void from which nothing was ever achieved but
exhaustion, a psychic and physical draining that left him hollow.
But not tonight. Tonight it was better. Tonight, somewhere near the end, he actually had a rare moment that spoke to him of
the aching sweetness of love.
Even for those who had spent their lives betraying it.
She lay holding him close in the dark.
“I do love you,” she said.
He kissed her. It was neither more nor less than a conditioned reflex to her words.
“I’m sorry about your lip,” she told him.
“I’ll live through it.”
“I guess I got a little carried away.”
“You were wonderful,” he said.
“It’s
you
who were wonderful. You make everything so incredibly exciting.”
“You mean even something as incredibly boring as sex?”
She laughed. “And you’re so funny besides.”
“That’s because I’m really a clown,” he said.
I can touch and save lives. But I’m more than just a clown,
Durning thought as she slept.
I’ve done it.
I did it the other day in West Virginia.
And I’ll do it again.
Yet, even with that, it was hours before he was able to sleep.
I
T WAS AN
area of small truck farms about fifty miles northwest of Pittsburgh, and Gianni Garetsky had driven through a long, depressing
stretch of rustbelt to get there.
Following Angelo Alberto’s directions, he turned east on a dirt road that ran through alternate patches of woods and open
fields. When he came to a weathered gray farmhouse on his left, he turned into a dusty driveway and parked.
An R.F.D. mailbox carried the name Richard Pemberton. A big ethnic change from Frank Alberto, thought Garetsky.
He climbed a front porch, knocked on the door and waited. Then he knocked again, more heavily. When there was still no response,
he walked around to the back of the house.
A pickup truck was parked in front of. the barn. But other than for some goats and cows, the barn was empty. A scattering
of chickens pecked at the ground.
Gianni shielded his eyes against the sun and stared off across the fields. A man was working with a hoe in the distance. Gianni
started toward him, being careful to keep both hands empty and visible.
The man seemed to see him when he was about a hundred
yards away. He stopped working, dropped the hoe, and just stood watching Gianni Garetsky approach. He wore faded overalls,
a peaked cap, and didn’t seem to move at all. Then he slowly bent until he was squatting on his haunches between rows of what
Gianni took to be some sort of beans.
When only about ten yards separated them, the man rose. He had a shotgun in his hands.
“That’s far enough.” He had a distinctly New York accent.
Gianni had the feeling Alberto was never without the gun. What a way to have to live.
Like me.
Except that Frank Alberto had been doing it for nine years. The same as Vittorio Battaglia, wherever he was, had probably
been doing.
“Whatta yuh want?” Frank Alberto asked.
Gianni looked at him and saw nothing of his son, nothing of the lifelong victim. No excess fat here. Angie’s papa was big,
muscular, and clearly tough. A real
pazzerello,
Don Do-natti had called him, a
crazy.
The kind that couldn’t be reasoned with, so you finally had to end up killing.
“I just want to talk,” Gianni said.
“What about?”
“Vittorio Battaglia. I’m his friend, Mr. Alberto. I mean you and Vittorio no harm.”
Alberto’s eyes darkened. “Who the hell are
you?”
“My name’s Gianni Garetsky. From the old neighborhood. I studied art with Vittorio and your Angie.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen pictures of Garetsky. He sure didn’t look like you.”
Gianni carefully peeled off his hairpiece, moustache, and glasses.
With the sun bright and strong overhead, they stood in the beanfield, facing each other.
“Then it was my Angie told you where I was.”
“Don’t be angry with Angie. He had no choice.”
“Everybody’s got a fucking choice.”
“It wasn’t his fault, Mr. Alberto. I said if he didn’t tell me, I’d give him to Don Donatti.”
Frank Alberto walked slowly, almost casually toward Garetsky. When he was no more than three feet away, he stopped and looked
at him. Then seeming barely to move, he brought the butt of his gun across Garetsky’s chin.
Gianni fell among the beans.
He came out of it like a scuba diver, resting a little at each level. There was pain, but that had become nothing new for
him lately. Trying to figure things out, he kept his eyes closed longer than he had to. When he finally opened them, he was
ready.
He was sitting in some woods, propped against the trunk of a tree. It was cool and shady, but shafts of sunlight struck down
through the leaves. The bark of the tree felt rough and solid against his back. Frank Alberto sat a few feet away, his shotgun
across his lap.
Alberto pointed to his right. “Look over there.”
Gianni looked. He saw a large, freshly dug hole with dirt piled around it and a shovel standing in the dirt.
“That’s for you.”
Gianni closed his eyes and said nothing.
“What kinda shit is this?” asked Alberto. “I mean, I’m a goddamn dead man. No one in this whole fucking world… except my son
and Vittorio Battaglia… even knows I’m alive. And you walk up to me in the middle of my field and say you want to talk. Just
like that.”
He snapped his fingers.
Alberto took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Gianni watched his hands. They were strong and steady.
“I’m dead nine years,” said Alberto. “Vittorio’s my own God. He resurrected me. He’s who I pray to at night. And you wanta
talk to me about him? OK. Talk to me. You’ve got ten minutes. Then you talk to Jesus.”
His mouth dry and tasting of blood, Gianni told his tale for the fourth time. Alberto listened without interruption, smoking,
looking faintly bored. He seemed to be balanced on some shrinking spot on the ground.
When the story was finished, the woods were quiet. That was the first thing Gianni noticed, the quiet.
“That’s it?” said Frank Alberto.
Garetsky was silent.
“You mean now we come to the real shit? What you want from me? Like maybe where Vittorio is?”
“That’s important, Mr. Alberto.”
“To who? You and the
cinese
lady?”
“To Vittorio, too.”
“How d’yuh figure that?”
“He doesn’t even know the feds are out looking for him. If you give me some idea where he is, I can at least warn him, let
him know what he might be facing.”
The man Carlo Donatti had referred to as an old Moustache Pete sat quietly thinking about what Gianni had said. He tossed
his cigarette into the open hole.
My grave,
thought Garetsky. Watching Alberto’s face, Gianni thought he had the look of a man with so many problems, he couldn’t decide
which one to worry about first.
“You called Vittorio your own God,” said Gianni. “You said he saved your life. Don’t you think you owe him a fair shot at
his own?”
“You don’t have to goddamn tell me what I owe him!”
Gianni said nothing. But the anger in Frank Alberto’s voice was more defensive now and actions were taking place inside him.
“Anyways,” Alberto grumbled, “I ain’t seen the guy in maybe nine years. So who even knows where he is?”
“What about the last time the two of you were together?”
“What about it?”
“Maybe you both talked,” said Gianni. “Maybe you both said things about where you might be going and what you’d do when you
got there. Maybe you could have said something about always wanting to do farming, and this was your chance. You remember
anything like that?”
A black-and-yellow bird flew onto a branch and Alberto stared up at it, watching the way it ruffled its feathers. Alberto
had a remote, thoughtful expression on his face. Then the bird flew away and he looked at Garetsky.
“Painting,” he said. “Vittorio talked about how he wanted to do nothing but knock out all these pictures. I remember that
for sure. My Angie always said he was the best painter in the school. Angie said you were good, too. But he thought Vittorio
was better.”
“I thought so, too,” said Gianni. “But what about where he
might be doing all this painting? You remember him mentioning anything about that?”
“He wouldn’t be dumb enough to tell me that. Just as I wouldn’t be crazy enough to tell him where I might be going. Not that
I knew. It just worked out I’m here.”
Alberto studied the shotgun in his lap. He seemed vaguely surprised to find it there. “But he did say he was getting the hell
out of the country fast. And he said it would be the smart thing for me to get out, too.” He grunted.”But when have I ever
done the smart thing?”
“If you did get out of the country, where do you think you’d have gone?”
“I don’t have to think. I know where I’d have gone.
Italia.
Where else?”
They looked at each other.
Alberto nodded slowly. “If I was looking for him, that’s where I’d look first. He speaks the language. He wouldn’t feel strange.
He wouldn’t stand out like no foreigner.”
“Not Sicily?”
“Hell, no. Too close to
la famiglia.
Don Donatti still owns half the goats on the island.”
They considered each other again and there was something between them that went a long way back.
“Would you really have given my son to the don if he didn’t tell you where I was?” asked Alberto.
“I knew Angie back when he was eight years old. I didn’t expect to have to do a thing to him.”
“Hey, we can’t all be heroes.” Alberto shrugged. “Like I ain’t feeling so great myself about having to
do you.”