He was about to let go with his third try, when Gianni reluctantly put a bullet in his chest and saw him go over on his back.
He heard Vittorio’s voice behind him, but not what he said.
Gianni ran down the steps and bent over the man. Frankie’s eyes were glazing over, but he was still breathing.
“Where’s the boy?” asked Gianni, speaking Italian.
Frankie coughed blood and just stared at him.
“The boy… ” pleaded Gianni. “Is he alive? Come
on,
for Jesus’ sake! He’s just a baby. Help him!”
Frankie moved his lips. “How… ” Red bubbles formed, broke, dribbled down his chin. “How… did you know… we… was… ”
The light starting to go out in his eyes, Frankie coughed a small gusher of crimson. Then he gave a slow look of surprise
and died.
Gianni rocked gently on his knees in a patch of grass. Glancing back at the house, he saw the two women watching from an upstairs
window. Vittorio and the wounded
pistolero
stood in the entrance foyer staring out at the same action.
Garetsky put his automatic in his belt and carried the dead man up to the house. He was heavy. It took hard, concentrated
effort. Battaglia closed and locked the door behind them. Sal stood squeezing his blood-soaked arm, his face showing nothing.
He looked at Frankie’s body, accepting it as part of everything that had happened, and what was probably going to happen next.
Peggy called down from the second floor, her voice low and anxious. “Vittorio?”
“We’re OK,” Battaglia answered. “Just stay up there a while longer. I’ll yell when we have something.”
Vittorio got them all into his studio, a huge, picture-windowed room with a spectacular view of the mountains and the rocky
terrain below.
Gianni placed the dead man on the bare wood flooring. One of Frankie’s legs was crooked and he straightened it.
Battaglia put Sal in a chair. Then, moving slowly, thoughtfully, he sat down facing the man, his automatic pointing at his
chest. Sal was still holding his wounded arm, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Gianni remained standing to one side.
He took his gun out of his belt and flicked off the safety. Beyond the window the sun was low, slanting in over the mountains
and bathing everything in a soft orange light.
Sal and Vittorio stared at each other in an odd sort of way. Each of them seemed to know what was going to happen as
exactly as if they’d already been through it during an earlier incarnation.
But it was to Gianni that Vittorio spoke first. “Did you get anything out of that clown down there?”
“No. Sorry about having to waste him.”
Vittorio shrugged. “What else could you do? You gave him two freebies, which was dumb in itself. If he wasn’t such a lousy
shot, you’d be the wasted one, not him.”
He considered Sal for a long moment. “So who
are
you guys?”
“Undercover
carabinieri.”
“Gianni, get his wallet. Read me what kind of fake paper he’s carrying. The same with the guy on the floor.”
Garetsky did it, and the room was silent.
“They’ve both got
carabiniere
IDs.”
“Where does it say they’re from?”
“Palermo.”
“Names?”
“This one’s Sal Ferrisi. The other guy was Frank Bono-tara.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Several moments were chewed up as Vittorio Battaglia sat looking at Sal Ferrisi.
“You got any kids, Sal?” Vittorio’s voice was so low his lungs and heart might have been in it.
Ferrisi shook his head.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“No.”
“Too bad. Maybe if you’d had a kid of your own, you’d never have taken on this dirty a job. Then you wouldn’t be where you
are now.”
Gripping his bloody arm, Ferrisi sat very still, afraid to move, afraid to abandon this instant. As if by staying where he
was, he could somehow hold back everything he knew was coming.
“Where’s my boy, Sal?”
“I don’t know.”
Vittorio sighed. “Take off your clothes.”
Ferrisi sat there, white faced. Then using his own good
arm, he began struggling out of his clothes. Finally, he was sitting naked in his chair, a sun-bronzed, muscular young man
with a 9mm puncture wound through the fleshy part of his upper arm, and a less-than-bright future.
Vittorio went to one of several painting cabinets and came back with a razor-edged utility knife.
“I really hate this stuff, Sal. Lots of guys love it, but I’m not one of them. What I love is my son. So just tell me where
he is, and you can put your clothes back on and stay in one piece. Otherwise, I’m afraid your friend, Frankie, is going to
end up the lucky one.”
“I swear I don’t—”
He was cut off by a quick flash of Battaglia’s knife across his chest. The blade barely broke skin. But it did leave a faint,
almost invisible line that slowly widened and deepened until a single crimson drop formed, rolled down Sal Ferrisi’s lower
chest and stomach, and vanished into the darkness below.
“No more lies,” said Battaglia. “My wife’s upstairs this minute with a great big hole in her heart, and all I’ve got to patch
her up with is you. So give us an answer we can live with, or I swear to Christ I’ll peel you like a fucking apple.”
Ferrisi wasn’t really listening. He was too busy staring at the tiny drops of blood that kept forming, rolling and disappearing
on his body. There had been no pain in the touch of the blade. But the act itself had been so swift and indifferent that he
suddenly felt like a side of beef in a butcher shop. And he knew his nakedness was all part of the softening-up process. He’d
used it himself. It was the first thing you did. You took away clothes, along with an essential human dignity.
“I mean it, Sal,” said Vittorio. “I’m going to tie you to this chair, do you piece by piece, and finally feed you your own
balls for dessert. And I’m not just talking. Believe me.”
Sal Ferrisi believed him. His problem wasn’t belief. His problem was that he was dead either way. Even if he talked, they
could never safely turn him loose. They’d have to bury him with Frankie. And if by some miracle they didn’t, by the time Don
Ravenelli got through with him, he’d be wishing they had. Ferrisi thought it through coldly, without particular
malice. It was just the way these things worked. If he had any slight chance at all, it was to go for broke before they tied
him to the chair. Once they did that, he was gone.
He sat gazing through the big window at the sunset, wondering why he’d never paid any attention to stuff like that before.
He heard Walters asking him the same questions about his boy twice more, and heard himself giving back the same answer.
Then Walters was suddenly looking tired, like someone had cut all his strings. Even his voice sounded worn out when he told
the other guy, Gianni, to go into the kitchen and get some rope he had there.
Sal saw Gianni walk slowly out of the room, not happy about the whole thing. So who was happy about it?
He and Walters were alone, staring at each other. The gun was in Walters’ hand, cocked, and with the safety off. But Walters
seemed to have forgotten about it. At that moment there was an emptiness in his eyes that Sal Ferrisi felt gave him an advantage,
and he entered it, driving his legs like two great pistons, and for a moment everything in the room was calm and slow.
Ferrisi saw Walters’ eyes widen as he came up out of the chair, not going for him and his gun, but driving past him with all
his force to the high window. He took the impact on his head, shoulder, and good arm, feeling the shock for only an instant
before the glass shattered and he sailed on through.
The empty stillness of falling filled his chest. The length and speed of the fall surprised him. It seemed to go on and on,
making him breathless, confused.
He hit the ground before he ever understood.
Then there was no more time.
Vittorio reached him several moments before Gianni.
Sal Ferrisi lay among the rocks and shattered glass with the special awkwardness of the suddenly dead. His eyes were open,
looking a thousand miles beyond Vittorio. His head and neck were twisted into the impossible angles of a broken doll.
Vittorio Battaglia looked up at the remains of his studio
window more than fifty feet above. He guessed Ferrisi hadn’t seen the depth of the gully until it was too late.
A breeze came in off the sea and he turned his face toward it. The smell was as old as the world.
Now I’ve got nothing,
he thought.
“T
HERE’S A LOT
to do,” said Vittorio Battaglia, “so we’d better get started.”
The four of them were gathered in his studio. It was less than ten minutes since Sal Ferrisi had flown through the window.
A gust of air blew past the broken glass and ruffled Frankie’s hair where he still lay on the floor. No one looked at him.
Nor did they look at each other. They had their own things to think about. But they were listening to Vittorio because it
gave them something to do.
“I don’t know who sent these guys or why,” he said. “But I know there’s going to be more of them coming. So we’re getting
out of here.”
Vittorio looked at Mary Yung and Gianni. “Peg and I have this old ruin of a safe house we keep. It’s way up in the Rav-ello
mountains, and no one knows about it. I’m taking Peggy there.”
No one said anything. Peggy’s face was set. She was looking at the blood Frankie had leaked onto the wood flooring. Mary and
Gianni weren’t looking anyplace.
“Unless you two have other plans,” Vittorio added.
“What other plans?” said Gianni. “We came looking for
you.
That’s why we’re here.”
Mary Yung just stared off somewhere. She didn’t seem to be listening anymore.
Peggy began to weep. She wept silently, not wiping the tears but just letting them run down her cheeks and onto her
blouse. Vittorio watched her. He saw there was nothing that meant anything to her now but her son.
Working quickly, carefully, they cleaned up all traces of blood and broken glass—inside the house and out—and loaded the two
bodies into the Mercedes.
Peggy and Vittorio packed a couple of suitcases and put them into their own cars. One of the bags held a full range of weapons
and ammunition, including grenades, gas, and explosives. Vittorio made a final check of the house. He walked past Paulie’s
room without glancing in. He didn’t have the courage.
Other than for the broken window in the studio, everything seemed in order. None of this was for the benefit of the police,
who would probably know nothing about anything. Actually, Vittorio wasn’t sure who it was for. The only ones likely to enter
the house would be those sent to follow up on Sal and Frankie, and they weren’t about to be fooled by anything they did or
didn’t find. He guessed it was mostly for himself, for his own sense of order. He didn’t change old habits easily. For this,
he wasn’t even trying.
Peggy called Roberta at the gallery to say she was going on an unexpected trip with her son and husband and wouldn’t be in
for about a week. She told her assistant to bring in whatever extra help she needed, and not to worry if she didn’t hear from
her.
Vittorio had to walk out of the room while she was talking. It wasn’t Peggy’s fault. She was handling it very well. It was
just that all at once,
he
wasn’t doing so well.
It was shortly after dark when they pulled away from the house in a four-car convoy.
Battaglia drove the lead car, the Mercedes, with Sal and Frankie in back, neatly folded under a blanket. He headed southeast
at a steady sixty kilometers, feeling like the hearse driver in a funeral cortege. And in an all too real sense, he was.
Peggy came next in her red Fiat. Temporarily shielded from her husband’s eyes, she wept without control. It began
blinding her to the point that she knew she had to either stop crying or stop driving. She stopped crying.
Directly behind her in Vittorio’s Toyota, Mary Yung drove under the unforgiving weight of conscience and dread. For her big
million dollars, she’d as good as murdered a child, and she might yet end up doing the same for his parents, Gianni, and quite
possibly herself if she didn’t get out of here fast. Unless, of course, she told them about the attorney general. And that
would be the same as putting a gun to her head and squeezing the trigger.
Another fifty feet back in his rented Ford, Gianni Garetsky brought up the rear with his own sharply nagging brand of penance
for something he hadn’t even done. But thinking he had, it remained an extinction. In his mind, it no longer seemed to matter
where he went or what he did. He had already done his damage.
Vittorio stopped the convoy on a winding mountain road about ten miles out of Positano.
With the three last cars parked out of sight in a pine grove, Vittorio and Gianni maneuvered the Mercedes to the edge of an
almost vertical three-hundred-foot drop. What remained of a rotted wooden guardrail was broken apart with rocks. They put
Sal in the driver’s seat and Frankie beside him. They fastened the seatbelts around the bodies, kept the engine running in
neutral, and locked the doors. Vittorio dipped a length of rope into the gas tank, reversed it, and left a saturated six-inch
piece hanging out as a fuse.
Then he and Gianni leaned into the rear bumper of the car.
When it started to roll, Vittorio put a match to the end of the rope and saw it flare. They gave the car a final shove and
watched it pick up speed and go over the edge.
The tank blew when it was about halfway down the cliff. The car hit bottom and a giant fireball erupted in a second explosion.
It turned everything a flaming orange.
Then Vittorio got behind the wheel of his wife’s Fiat, and led the remainder of the suddenly bodiless cortege farther up into
the mountains.
A
TTORNEY
G
ENERAL
H
ENRY
Durning’s anxiously awaited call from Carlo Donatti finally reached him at home at 3:16
P.M.,
Washington time. Which made it 9:16
P.M.
in Positano.