Mary Yung nodded, not quite ready to trust her voice. She had an automatic aimed at him through her jacket pocket, because
you never knew about these things and she had tried to come prepared. What she wasn’t prepared for was his sheer physical
presence. He was imposing. Yet it was more than just that. She could feel him prowling around inside her.
“What I was most afraid of,” he said, “was that you’d be dead before I ever got to see you.”
Then he took her into his house before she could disappear as suddenly as she had arrived.
He wore the comfortable elegance of his house like a second dinner suit, she thought. It fit him in a way that no house she
had ever been in could fit her. Unless it was a grass hut.
The study was Durning’s favorite room, so this was where he sat her. Even so, he felt himself moving trancelike through an
alien landscape.
“Would you like to take off your jacket?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’m all right.”
“I just want you to be comfortable. You can hold your gun in your lap, if you like. Or put it in your purse.”
Mary Yung was able to smile. “Have you ever in your life been caught off balance?”
“It’s happened to me twice tonight.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
He handed her his plaque, which he had not yet put down. “The first time was when I was given a standing ovation.”
She read the inscription. “Very impressive. But why should that fluster you?”
“Because we both know I’m a lot less than those words make me out to be.”
“And when was the second time?”
“When I saw your face under that streetlight, and was affected as I’ve rarely been in my life.”
“But you don’t even
know
me.”
“I know you, Mary.”
With that, Durning opened a closet, took out a carton, and placed it on the coffee table in front of her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“You. Your file.”
She sat staring at a bunch of folders, photographs, magazine tear sheets, and videocassettes.
“Just look through them,” he told her. “Please.”
“Why?”
“So you’ll understand certain things. So that we can go on from there.”
Mary Yung gazed into Durning’s eyes and saw herself reflected there. What a curious man.
Then choosing a photograph at random, she saw herself again. Except that this time she was naked, and in the company of two
equally naked men.
She looked to be no more than seventeen, although the men were older. They were no one she recognized or remembered. All things
considered, how could she? Caught by the camera at a moment of less-than-classic drama, she was frozen forever in an act of
fellatio with one man while being sodomized by the other. It was all very concentrated, very joyless, an act of intimacy in
which no one was intimate. Each was alone. If she were to choose a title for the picture, Mary Yung would have called it
Solitude.
She felt some mild, initial surprise, then nothing. If the distinguished attorney general was watching her face, hoping for
fireworks, he would be disappointed.
Mary never glanced up to find out. Instead, she quickly and quietly went through the entire carton: she was vaguely amused
by the diligence of the FBI Background Checks and Research Department, and the official comments that were sprinkled in along
the way. As though from the age of six on, she and her pathetic little sexual fumblings had constituted a continuing, insidious
threat to the internal security of the country.
When she was finished, Durning poured some brandy into two large snifters and handed her one.
“Why did you go to all this trouble?” she asked.
“So I’d know you.”
“And do you?”
“As I know myself.”
“Meaning what?” she said.
“That there’s probably nothing either one of us wouldn’t do to survive.”
“Is that a compliment or an indictment?”
“A compliment for you. An indictment for me.”
“Why the difference?”
“Because you started naked, abused, and alone. I started with everything.”
They sipped brandy and considered each other. There were no sounds. The night and the drizzle closed them in.
“As I mentioned before,” he said, “I was just afraid you’d die in Positano and never come to me. Then I’d have been truly
bereft.”
Mary Yung shook her head. “You sound absolutely crazy, Mr. Durning. Women must go wild about you.”
“Women, per se, no longer interest me.”
“What does interest you?”
A distinctive fragrance was in the air around her. It teased the edges of his thoughts, just beyond his reach.
“
You
interest me,” he said. “Or haven’t I made that clear enough?”
They sat silent and unmoving for half a minute.
“From your pictures alone,” Durning said quietly, “I’ve been fantasizing about you like a tumescent schoolboy. I want you
more at this moment than I’ve ever wanted any woman. And you obviously want something equally strongly from me, or you wouldn’t
have come rushing here straight from Positano.”
Elbows on knees, he leaned toward her over his brandy. “Tell me, Mary Yung. Exactly what is it you want from me?”
“The boy.”
It came out as quickly and easily as that.
“Are you so great a lover of children?”
“No.”
“Then why is this child so important to you?”
“Because I was the one who did this to him.”
“You mean you still have it in you to suffer remorse?”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t you?”
Durning slowly nodded. “If I believed in God, I’d say, thank God!” He smiled. “As it is, I have only myself to thank.”
“Why is remorse so important to you?”
“It’s the one thing that separates us from the apes.”
He got the brandy and added to their drinks.
“Please understand,” he said, “I had nothing to do with the taking of the boy. I didn’t even know about it until it was done.”
“Fine. You’re a great human being. Now set him free before your Italians bury him.”
“It’s out of my hands.”
“Nothing is out of your hands.”
“I’ve overly impressed you. I do have my limitations.”
The air in the room suddenly seemed to be getting tired, used up. Mary Yung sat staring at the walls of books, at the signed
photos of the attorney general with the great and near-great. The man had reach. She wanted so badly to get this whole thing
right.
“Would you at least be willing to try?” she asked.
Durning was silent. He felt as though he wanted something that didn’t have a name. He seemed to see her in separate sections…
hair, eyes, nose, lips, the curve of a cheek. And they were real, three-dimensional, not parts of a paper photograph.
“I’ve never asked for a handout in my life,” Mary Yung said. “And I’m not asking for one now. I’ll pay my way.”
“I don’t care about the boy,” said Durning. “It’s his parents I need. Can you give them to me? You never fully came through
as promised, you know. In fact it was you who warned them about the Sicilians, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know where they are.”
He didn’t believe her.
“You said before that you wanted me,” she told him. “Or was that just talk?”
He stared at her eyes, two black marbles in the pale oval of her face. When she lit a cigarette, they glowed with exhaustion
in the flare of the match. When had she last slept?
“It wasn’t just talk,” he said.
“All right.”
His mouth was suddenly dry. The brandy didn’t help.
“I can’t promise you anything,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Will you stay here with me?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“I have no idea.”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
He knew her thinking, of course. All she felt she needed
was enough time with him. Her confidence alone was exquisite. In its particular way, inspiring. For his own needs, whatever
they were or turned out to be, it couldn’t have been better. Durning assumed she felt the same way.
As long as they understood each other.
Their deal, like the surrogate marriage contract it resembled, was consummated in bed an hour later. And like the best of
such arrangements, both parties believed they had gained the advantage.
Maybe they both had, thought the attorney general.
To him, it was an emotional rite of passage, a knowing, burning, drowning experience… a trip to a sensual Holy Land, with
him as the barefoot pilgrim, and Mary Yung as his priest and guide.
And this time it was no fantasy. Yet even alive, even right there with him, her face and body had about them something shadowy
and elusive, something prematurely aged or still so young they were not yet fully formed. This smoky creature. She made him
weightless. He floated free, knees and body vibrating. Touching her, his hands felt so magical they threatened to fly off
at the wrists.
She had brought her life with her. On the open grounds of his king-size bed, in the half-darkness of his room, they had company.
She was breathing an endless parade of her erotic pictures into his brain, all those full color glossies of multiple couplings,
all that rosy flesh and those romping bodies.
Mary Yung’s army.
I have them all,
he thought.
Mary Yung was thinking something else.
She had made her plan, put it into action, and was carrying it out as simply a job that had to be done.
It was no more to her than that.
Something she had always been able to do. Most women couldn’t. But she wasn’t most women. She had her own secret place, and
once in it, she couldn’t be touched. It was never that hard for her. The flesh, the body cover, didn’t mat
ter all that much. It was just a protective shell for the important stuff beneath. Nothing sacred lived on top.
People were only locked rooms to each other, anyway. Even if you heard someone crying in one of them, you couldn’t get in
to help. That was the saddest thing of all. The body was just a toy, a plaything. Except that she’d never really had that
much chance to enjoy it. It had to be her work tool too early. A very serious thing, very serious flesh. Whatever she’d wanted
or needed, her very serious flesh had helped her get. It didn’t matter what men did to it, or it did to men. It was all mechanics.
Maybe it was getting to be something more with Gianni, but she’d sure messed that one up good. Now he wouldn’t even spit on
the best part of her, and so much for that.
What the hell. At this point she just wanted to get the boy out of there in one piece, and Durning was the guy who could do
it. The
sonofabitch.
Imagine him so hooked on her and her shit life. As if she’d done something wonderful and holy.
Fucking and sucking.
Jesus, look at the sonofabitch go. The attorney general of the whole United States and she was playing him like a hooked fish.
She could feel him starting his final run, sense it coming from the farthest parts of him.
Then he broke the surface and she heard him scream, heard him cry out as though he were dying. And she screamed and cried
out with him because that was what they always loved and wanted, along with all the lies that came after.
Enjoy it,
she told him deep inside her.
Enjoy it while you can. Because if you don’t get me that boy and something happens to him, I swear on the holiness of this
less-than-sa-cred act that I’m going to blow your fucking head off.
T
HE WORST OF
it for Vittorio was having to leave Peggy behind and alone. He had stalled the going, but he had finally run out of reasons
and Gianni was waiting in the car.
For the past half hour of preparations Peg had been on the edge of something, the wide eyes growing wider and darker, the
small mouth stretching flat. A confused hurt had slipped over the smoothness of her face like a net. Through it, Vittorio
felt her anguish.
“It’ll be all right,” he assured her for the third time. Or was it the fourth?
Peggy nodded mechanically, not believing a word.
“They won’t hurt him. He’s their only hope of reaching us. ]
We’re
what Durning wants, not Paulie.”
“No,” she said, “
I
’m what he wants. I’
m
the only material witness against him. You’re just another innocent bystander. Like my poor baby.”
Tears welled, clung to her lids, and Vittorio pressed her to him. How thin she felt, how frail. When had she gotten so breakable?
“Listen to me,” he said. “We’ve lived together ten years. Right?”
She nodded.
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“No.”
“And I’m not lying now. I swear it, Peg. I’ll bring Paulie home to you.”
She drew back and nailed him with her eyes. “When?”
It was a child’s question.
When, daddy?
“1 don’t know. Just finding out where they’ve got him could take days. So don’t sit watching the clock and worrying.”
She shook herself out of it. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve only been making this harder for you.”
Peggy kissed him and forced a smile.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
Sadly, Vittorio didn’t think so.
Vittorio and Gianni left the safe house at about 6:00
P.M.
They went in Gianni’s rental car because it was unidentifiable. But it was Vittorio who drove.
They rode in two separate silences for almost half an hour before Gianni finally spoke.
“How are we figuring this?”
“There’s not all that much to figure,” said Battaglia. “We start with the names of the two pistols we sent over the cliff,
find out who sent them, then keep a gun up his ass until he tells us where Paulie is.”
“Just like that?”
Vittorio watched the road as a big tourist bus crowded them uncomfortably close to a wall of solid rock.
He shrugged. “That’s the core stuff. The rest is detail.”
“I like detail.”
“You’ve got a right. It’s the detail that can end up killing you. Or did you think this was going to be a piece of cake?”