“You heard the coins clanging in?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you must have heard an operator tell him how much to dump in.”
“
Probabilmente.”
“OK,” said Gianni. “So what language was the operator speaking?”
Serini stared blankly.
“Come on,
Professore.
Think. Did you understand what she was saying?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it was English?”
The old man tiredly shook his head. “
Non.
That much, I know.”
“So what other languages do you understand?”
“
Solamente italiano.”
They looked at each other.
Reaching an outside phone later, Gianni Garetsky called 911 to report someone lying tied-up on the roof of 45 Mulberry Street.
I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
for the day on official Justice Department business, Henry Durning broke away from his staff at about 5:00
P.M.
and had his driver take him to the huge Mariott Marquis Hotel in midtown.
He took one of the back elevators to the thirty-third floor, walked along the carpeted corridor to suite 3307 without passing
anyone, and let himself in with the key that had been delivered that morning to his own suite at the Waldorf.
Deliberately early for his meeting, he removed his jacket and poured himself a tall Perrier from the minibar instead of his
usual Jack Daniel’s. Then, carrying his drink, he walked to a big picture window facing west and stood in the wash of the
late-afternoon sun. On the river, a distant, incoming freighter moved slowly with the tide.
What he felt most at that moment was a peculiar apathy.
Yet much of his initial shock remained and kept breathing through. The thing was, it had all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly.
Thinking of it now, he found it hard to focus. His mind seemed to slip in and out of gear like a faulty machine. But
he stayed with it. How could he not? It was suddenly the central issue of his life. His survival hung on its outcome.
It was exactly a week ago that it had all gone off inside him like a personal earthquake, and the aftershocks were still spreading.
The note had come to his Georgetown house exactly ten days ago in a plain white envelope marked
Personal.
It was delivered with the regular mail and there was no return address. But the postmark was stamped Freeport, New York,
a town on the south shore of Long Island.
The enclosed, poorly typewritten message said:
Dear Mr. Durning,
Irene Hopper didn’t go down in the ocean with your plane nine years ago like you and everybody thought she did.
She didn’t die. I’m enclosing her old driver’s license so you don’t get the idea I’m just some crackpot.
If you want to see proof of this and hear the whole story of what really happened to her, call me at (516) 828-6796 and I’ll
tell you how to get where I live.
I’m very sick and can’t leave my bed or I’d be happy to come to you in Washington.
Please don’t wait too long to call me. My doctor doesn’t expect me to be around all that much longer.
Mike
Henry Durning had read the note five times. Each time he felt primitive stirrings of dread in his brain. Yet, less than twenty
minutes after his first reading of the brief message, he found himself dialing the man’s number.
“Is this Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Henry Durning. I read your letter a little while ago and I have some questions.”
“Not on the phone, please Mr. Durning. If you want to talk, you’ll have to come to my house.”
“When?”
“The sooner the better. Tonight OK? About eight?”
“Sure.”
The man called Mike gave him directions.
“Just two things, Mr. Durning. Don’t tell anybody about this, and nobody comes with you. No chauffeur, no security, nobody.
It’s nothing personal. Something like this, a man can’t be too careful. Understand?”
Durning understood.
He understood enough to slip an automatic inside his belt. Then he flew his own Lear to La Guardia, picked up a rental car
at the terminal, and fifty minutes later parked a few blocks away from the modest, shingled Cape Cod in which Mike lived.
If there was some sort of mystic dislocation in the heavens that night, Durning was sure it had stayed very close to him all
the way.
A middle-aged woman with thick, graying hair opened the door.
“I’m Henry Durning.”
“I know. I’ve seen you on TV.” She flushed self-consciously. “My husband’s waiting for you.”
He followed her upstairs to a small bedroom smelling of body things, sickness, drugs.
Mike sat propped up in bed. He had not been lying about his condition. His hollowed-out eye sockets, his gaunt face, the yellow-gray
color of his skin, all projected death.
“Hi, Mr. Durning.” His voice was hoarse, rasping. “You met my wife, Emma. You’ll excuse me, but she’ll have to pat you down.
I can’t take a chance you’re wired.”
“I’m not wired, but I am carrying.”
“I don’t mind a gun. But Emma’s still gotta check you for a wire.”
Durning stood while the woman searched him. She found the automatic in his belt but left it where it was. When she was through,
she nodded to her husband and slid a chair close to his bed for their visitor.
“Would you like some nice red wine, Mr. Durning? Or maybe a little Irish whiskey?”
He looked at the woman, smelled the organic soup in the air, and smelled the entire rest of her life. “Thank you,” he told
her. “The red sounds fine.”
When his wife was out of the room, Mike said, “I’m doing this whole bit for her, Mr. Durning. Between the doctors and drugs
and not working and all, I’m leaving her with shit. So, if you want what I’m selling, it’ll have to cost a few bucks.”
Durning just sat there.
“To be honest,” said Mike, “I hate like hell doing this. In my whole life I never sold out a friend. But Emma’s given me thirty-eight
years and I owe her.”
He coughed and passed blood and mucus into a tissue.
His wife returned with a bottle and two glasses on a silver tray, and Mike watched her serve Durning and herself. Then she
settled on the edge of the bed.
“OK, here’s how it was,” said Mike. “About nine years ago this friend of mine came to me for a favor. Because I could fly,
he asked me to help him work something out. What he needed was to make it look like this woman, flying alone, got killed when
her plane took a dive over the Atlantic.”
Durning moistened his lips with the wine. “This woman was Irene Hopper?”
“Yeah.”
“And who was your friend?”
“That comes later. That’s the part you’re going to have to pay for.”
“Why would Irene Hopper want me to think she was dead?”
“My friend never said it was you she wanted to think she was dead. He never said anything about reasons, and I never asked.
We both figured the less I knew, the better.”
“Then what did you know that made you write to
me
about her being alive?”
“I saw the plane’s papers. They were registered in your name. So, I just figured you might have some interest. Right?”
Durning nodded slowly. “How did you do it?”
“It wasn’t all that hard. Irene just took off from Teterboro,
New Jersey, with a flight plan filed for Palm Beach. You remember that?”
“Yes.”
“You also remember how she made an emergency landing in Florence, South Carolina, ’cause she didn’t like how her engine was
sounding?”
“Yes.”
“Well, when her plane took off from Florence an hour later, I was flying it, not her.”
“Where was she?”
“Driving off in a rented car I left in a parking lot.”
“And then?”
“I just followed her flight plan off the coast of Georgia. When I was about thirty miles out over the ocean from Brunswick,
with no ships or planes in sight, I got into a life vest and parachute, emptied both gas tanks, and bailed out as the plane
was about to go into a stall.”
Mike sucked air and began coughing again until his wife had him sip some water through a straw.
“I was in the ocean maybe five minutes,” he said, “when my friend got me into his boat. We had it figured that close. Then
we dumped enough flotation stuff for the Coast Guard to identify over the next few days. And that’s how it was, Mr. Durning.”
The room was still.
“How do I know you didn’t just make all this up?”
The sick man nodded. “Emma, please get that envelope in the next room for Mr. Durning.”
The woman brought it, and Durning glanced through a sheaf of creased and faded FAA forms, licenses, and flight plans. They
all bore the signature of Irene Hopper, as well as the ID number of the plane she was flying on the day they both vanished
off the Georgia coast.
Also in the envelope was her pilot’s license. Durning held it awkwardly in his hand and felt himself disappear into emotions
that didn’t seem to belong to him. He looked at the attached photograph of a beautiful, fair-haired young woman whom he had
been very close to for a long time but evidently had never even come close to knowing. When he felt his fin
gers starting to lose control, Durning put everything back into the envelope and closed the flap.
“When did you last see her?” he asked Mike.
“Nine years ago. When she got out of your plane in South Carolina and I got in.”
“Did you know where she was going from there?”
“No.”
“And your friend?”
“Same thing. Haven’t heard a word from him since the day he fished me out of the ocean. We agreed it would be best that way.
So the only thing I can tell you is his name.”
Mike took in more water through his straw. “That’s if you want it.”
Henry Durning looked at the man propped on his pillows, and his wife sitting on the edge of his bed. He saw the fragile looks
exchanged between them and understood that in these exchanges there were elements of panic.
“I want it,” he said.
“Like I told you, that’s the part that has to cost.”
“How much?”
Mike took the long, deep breath of a man about to go over a fall. “A hundred grand. And it has to be all cash.”
“Who knows about all this?”
“Just Emma and you.” Mike’s shame wouldn’t let him leave it alone. “And even you wouldn’t know if I wasn’t this sick and broke.”
“Did you tell anyone I was coming here tonight?”
“Hell, no. You think I’m nuts?”
Durning’s eyes were off somewhere. He felt lost in the surprise of who he was.
“If it’s all right with you,” he said, “I can pick up the cash and be back at eight tomorrow night.”
The sick man’s lips worked dryly. He tried to smile, but the required muscles seemed to have forgotten what to do.
When Emma opened the door for Durning the next night, she gazed at him as though he were an exciting new suitor. She had brushed
her hair until it shone, and her eyes had new lights. She half glanced at the briefcase in Durning’s hand, then avoided looking
at it again.
Upstairs, Mike, too, seemed to have reconstituted himself. His breathing had deepened, and new blood, ordered like reinforcements,
had added color to the pale translucence of his skin. This time, his muscles remembered how to smile. A pine spray had improved
even the air.
Durning opened his briefcase and placed it on the bed.
“The bills are all hundreds,” he said. “They’re in fifty packs of twenty apiece. You can count them.”
Mike lay there, looking at the open briefcase. Then he briefly closed his eyes, and a tiny moment seemed to stall inside him.
“I don’t have to count anything. My friend’s name is Battaglia… Vittorio Battaglia.”
Mike said it again, more slowly. Finally, he spelled it. Durning took out a pen and small notebook and wrote the name. Staring
at the two words, he felt himself looking someplace he couldn’t see.
“Where is he from?”
“New York.”
“What kind of work did he do?”
“He never really talked about it, but I’m sure it was mob connected.”
Durning nodded his head, looking slow and tired.
Mike started to cough again and Emma brought him some tissues and water. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, holding the
glass for him while he sipped through a straw.
Durning sat watching them. He saw Emma’s full, curving back as she leaned toward her husband, and the way the overhead light
caught the gray streaks in her hair. He saw that Mike’s eyes were closed as he lay there, as if he might be drinking the water
in his sleep.
This was how Durning would remember them.
Exactly twenty-nine hours later, an explosion and fire eliminated Mike, his wife, his house, and everything in it. Evidence
of a propane tank was found in the basement. Little remained above it except clouds, scarred scraps, and ashes.
Reading about it in the news, the attorney general had felt the fact of it enter him. You never appreciate the true urgency
of life if you haven’t seen how easily it can be taken away.
In his mind, there was nothing else he could have done, of course. Considering what they knew, there was no way he could have
just left them there.
Still, it brought him no joy.
Ten days,
thought Durning, and stared off at the river thirty-three stories down and half a mile west.
It had been a bad period of time for him and things showed every promise of getting worse. There was even a way in which his
sudden personal trials seemed to proclaim the entire country. Like something dying in a brightly colored candy box, he thought.
Terrible to watch, yet darkly fascinating. But then the dead had always fascinated him. They looked so indifferent to what
had happened that dying almost didn’t seem so bad.
He was well into his third Perrier when there was a soft knock and he opened the door for Don Carlo Donatti.
They embraced and the attorney general breathed the don’s once familiar designer cologne. Some things did stay the same.
Donatti held him with some deep authority of feeling. But whether it was for Donatti’s own need or Durning’s was impossible
to tell. They had not, after all, met face to face for years. But inasmuch as it was Durning who had requested the meeting,
and Donatti still had no idea of its purpose, the edge remained in the attorney general’s favor.