In position near the crest of a wooded hill, at a distance of about three hundred yards, they spelled each other behind a
pair of high-powered field glasses. Their car was out of sight in back of some brush, and far off to the right they could
faintly make out the traffic to and from Palermo along the coast road.
It had been a long, sleepless night and day of travel, planning, and surveillance, and now they took turns stretching out
in the high grass and dozing. They would not be making their move until close to midnight, and it was important for them to
be as rested and sharply tuned as possible when they finally went in. It would have been much easier to have just flown over
and rented a car at the Palermo airport, but there had been their trunkful of weapons to consider. And because they had missed
the last ferry of the night from Naples, they had been forced to drive over four hundred kilometers on the Italian mainland,
take the ferry to Messina, and drive another three hundred kilometers west along the Sicilian coast road to Palermo.
They watched the sprawling white villa, and waited, and dozed, and felt the growing tension of what lay ahead.
At about six o’clock, two men who had been working on the shrubs and flower beds got into an old pickup and drove off.
The housekeeper, a heavy-set woman in a black dress, left an hour later.
A car arrived and picked up another woman, probably the cook, at shortly after eight.
By then it was growing dark and the stillness of evening drifted in and muted all sound. They saw the warm yellow glow of
the houselights come on, and the cool white of the outside floods. The guards threw long shadows as they walked.
“Just so you understand,” Vittorio Battaglia’s voice came
softly through the dark. “One sound from a guard, and we’re as good as gone. And so is my boy. That means we do them all with
silencers. Four outside, patrolling, and one inside, at the closed-circuit monitors.”
Gianni said nothing.
“You OK with that? “asked Vittorio.
Gianni Garetsky nodded.
Vittorio took a long, deep breath and slowly let it out.
They began blackening their faces and hands. They already were wearing the necessary dark shirts and trousers.
The second-floor bedroom light went off just before eleven.
At midnight, they silently went over the wall and dropped into the shadows of some bushes. Earlier, Vittorio had checked and
determined that neither the wall nor the house was wired.
Two guards with submachine guns stood together about fifty meters to the right. They were smoking and talking. They should
have been apart and patrolling. Gianni and Vittorio crouched in the shadows and waited.
One of the moving floodlights passed over their heads, and Gianni saw the television camera timed to go with it. He felt himself
sweating and was disgusted by his fear.
It’s allowed,
he told himself.
The two guards strolled their way, still together and still talking. As they were going they would pass within five feet of
the bushes where Garetsky and Battaglia were waiting.
“Let them pass,” whispered Vittorio. “Then you take the nearest one and I’ll take the other. Make it a head shot. We can’t
have them crying out. So for Christ’s sake, don’t miss.”
Gianni wiped the sweat from his eyes.
The guards came by and Gianni and Vittorio aimed and fired. Their silenced shots made only a single, soft whooshing sound.
The two men made no sound at all. They fell forward on their faces and didn’t move. Gianni and Vittorio dragged them behind
the bushes before the traveling floodlight and camera swung back.
Keeping to the shadows, they moved cautiously around to the rear of the house.
The next security man was dozing, sitting up, his back to a tree. Vittorio shot him once through the forehead without waking
or stirring him.
They crept forward, looking for the fourth and last of the exterior guards.
At the back of the house, they heard rather than saw him. He was softly humming what Gianni recognized as the most lyric segment
of the love duet from
La Boheme. Italians,
he thought sadly.
Vittorio pressed Gianni’s arm. He motioned for him to stay where he was, and disappeared in the direction of the man’s voice.
Moments later the humming suddenly stopped, and Vittorio seemed to float back out of the dark.
They approached a lighted ground-floor window on the far side of the house. It was the only interior light on and they had
not been able to see it from their position on the hill. A single, uncurtained window was open to the cool night air.
His back to the window, a man sat reading a newspaper in front of a bank of television monitors. He never so much as glanced
at the screens.
Vittorio stepped close to the window. He drew a careful bead on the back of the guard’s head and fired once. It was done.
My God, thought Gianni Garetsky.
Five.
He looked at Vittorio in the reflected light. His face showed nothing, and Gianni wondered what he had expected to find there.
Then they were climbing through the open window and he had stopped wondering about anything at all.
Vittorio led the way through the room, along a short corridor and into the front entrance hall. They had bought rubber-soled
running shoes on the drive down and they moved without sound on the tiled floors.
An orange night-light burned on the second-floor landing, and they climbed the stairs in its glow. Gianni felt himself moving
as though in a fever, his face hot, the sweat running like tears.
There were five doors facing the second-floor corridor, but only one was closed. Vittorio eased that door open. Then Gianni
quietly followed him into the darkened room, breathed air redolent with sex, and hit the light switch.
A naked couple lay sleeping on a king-size bed. The man was big, middle aged, dark skinned, and going to fat. The woman was
young, beautiful, and wore a look of sweet, almost holy innocence.
Their silencer-lengthened pistols leveled, Gianni and Vit-torio stood at the foot of the bed waiting for the light to waken
the sleeping lovers.
It was Ravenelli who stirred and blinked open his eyes first. He looked at the two men with their blacked-out faces and hands
and their guns pointing loosely at his head. He half turned to see them better. Gianni admired his control. He did not make
a sound and his face revealed nothing.
The young woman came awake a few seconds later. She cried out just once. Then she carefully held herself silent and unmoving.
It seemed so deliberate a performance that it might have been mistaken for an act of faith. Gianni made no such mistake. He
knew exactly how frightened she was.
The silence stretched until it ran out of air.
Then Vittorio broke it. “You know who I am?”
The don slowly nodded. “What I don’t know is how you got in here to point a gun at my head.”
“Yes, you do.”
Gianni saw the dark face become a lesson in controlled pain. “They were five good men.”
“I’ll cry later,” said Vittorio. “Right now I just want to know where you’ve got my boy.”
“What boy?”
Vittorio fired without warning or movement and a small hole appeared in the girl’s pillow. It was only inches from her head.
Her eyes widened, but that was all.
“The next one does her,” he said. “Now let’s try it again. Where’s my boy?”
“About a half-hour drive from here.”
It came without hesitation this time.
“Your boy is all right,” said Ravenelli. “You don’t have to worry. We’re not animals here. We don’t make war on children.
There was never any intention to do your son harm.”
Vittorio Battaglia just looked at him.
“On my honor,” said the don.
Vittorio’s silence told him what he thought of his honor.
Ravenelli turned to Gianni for the first time. “You must be Gianni Garetsky. I have great respect for your work. I’ve felt
that way for years. Long before the critics. I myself own two of your paintings. They’re hanging downstairs in my living room.
Maybe you saw them coming in.”
Gianni stood there. The only pictures he had seen and still saw were the framed photographs across the bedroom walls… ancient
family pictures of children and old people posing stiffly and unsmiling in their Sunday best. He wondered which of the little
boys pictured was Don Pietro Ravenelli.
The don turned to Vittorio. “You want to listen to me talk to your son on the telephone? Would that make you feel better about
how he’s being treated?”
“What I want is to talk to him myself.”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea. Not for any of us.”
“Why?”
“Because there are two men with him who would know I’m under the gun the second they heard your voice. Then they’d just move
the boy someplace else before we got there. We’d all be unhappy.”
Gianni watched as his friend considered it. He saw Vittorio study first the telephone on the bedside table, then the don and
his wide-eyed, virginal-looking young woman lying so unself-consciously naked together in bed, then the telephone once more.
“What’s your name?” Vittorio asked the girl.
“Lucia.” It was the first word she had spoken and it half stuck, hoarsely, in her throat.
“I’m sorry you had to be caught in this, Lucia. But you won’t be hurt unless your man is lying to me. If he
is
lying, and you don’t tell me about it now, I’m going to shoot you before I shoot him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The girl nodded.
“Do you believe I’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Has Don Ravenelli been telling me the truth so far?”
Lucia took a moment. “As far as I know. But there may be
things Pietro hasn’t told me. It’s unfair to blame me for those.”
“What’s happening to my son is even more unfair.”
Vittorio looked at Ravenelli. “Where’s an extension I can listen on?”
“In the next room. On your right.”
“Watch them carefully,” Vittorio told Gianni, and went to hear his son’s voice.
He stood listening to five rings on the other end before a man’s voice finally answered.
“Who’s this?” said the don. “Tony or Dom?”
“It’s Tony, Don Ravenelli.”
“Everything all right?”
“Sure. Everything’s fine.”
“No problems with the boy?”
“Not one, Don Ravenelli. Right now he’s sleeping like a little angel.”
“Good. Wake him up and put him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”
“You mean now?”
“No. Next week. Just put the boy on.”
“Sorry, Don Ravenelli. I’ll get him.”
Waiting, Vittorio gripped the receiver so hard his fingers began to cramp. Then he heard the small, sleep-clogged voice say
hello, and felt something go soft inside him.
“Sorry to wake you, Paul,” said Ravenelli, “but I just wanted to make sure Dom and Tony are treating you OK.”
“Are you the big boss?”
Ravenelli laughed. “I don’t know how big, but I’m the boss.”
“Dom and Tony are treating me good, but I want to go home. When can I go home?”
“Pretty soon now.”
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe a couple of days. Maybe sooner.”
“Will you tell that to my mom and dad so they won’t worry?”
“Sure.”
“Are they OK, too?”
“They’re great.”
“All right,” said the boy.
A moment later Vittorio heard the connection broken.
My son,
he thought, and for the first time in days he was able to consciously allow himself the luxury of hope. Still, even this
was a fine, delicately balanced thing, and he walked cautiously going back to the next room for fear of disturbing some part
of it.
The three-figure tableau appeared unchanged as he reentered Don Pietro Ravenelli’s bedroom.
“Let me explain something,” the don said. “This whole thing isn’t my operation. It’s just a courtesy I’ve been pressured into
doing to accommodate Don Carlo Donatti. And that courtesy has so far cost me seven good men and a lot of dignity. So you don’t
have to worry about me. I’m just as happy to end the whole misery right here.”
Vittorio Battaglia nodded. “Good. Now you and Lucia can put on your clothes and I’ll make you even happier.”
P
AULIE WAS BACK
in bed. But he was very far from falling asleep. His mind was too busy trying to make sense of the phone call, trying to
figure out what it meant. Because the only thing he was sure of at that moment was that it had to mean
something.
The thing was why would the big boss call up in the middle of the night and get him brought to the phone just to ask if Dom
and Tony were treating him OK? As if the boss cared how he was being treated.
Even that business about his going home in maybe a day or two had to be nothing but a lie. If it wasn’t a lie, Dom would have
said something about it after the call. Not Tony. But Dom would have. Yet Dom hadn’t known a thing about it when Paulie asked
him later.
Then there was all that excitement after Tony hung up, with he and Dom arguing, and Tony making his own phone call and yelling
at whoever was at the other end of the phone. The trouble was, they had their bedroom door closed through it all, and Paulie
couldn’t make out what they were saying. They were still going at it, and the boy saw the crack of light under the door that
meant they weren’t even thinking about going back to sleep.
When the whole thing got to be too much, he slid out of bed and trailed his long chain into the living room. He wanted to
get closer to Dom and Tony’s bedroom door. If he got near enough, he might be able to hear something.
The boy never reached the door. He went only as far as the big, overstuffed armchair that Dom had been dozing in earlier.
It was here that he saw the mobster’s holstered automatic, complete with belt, pressed half under the back of the seat cushion.
For an instant, it froze him in place, and something cold ran through his stomach. Then barely breathing, he snatched up the
holstered pistol and attached belt, carried it back to his bed, and slid it under the sheet with him.