Gianni, bring me some good news. Please.
It was the closest Vittorio had ever come to pleading.
Despite himself, he must have dozed. Because his next awareness was of Gianni Garetsky sitting in his usual bedside chair,
staring at him.
“Did I conjure you up?” he murmured. “Or are you real?”
Gianni’s smile was faint. And even that almost required more effort than he could scrape together.
“I’m real.”
Vittorio’s eyes searched Gianni’s face for messages. They found none that meant anything.
“How long are you here?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I figured you needed the sleep.”
“I need good news more.”
Gianni said nothing, and Vittorio Battagli listened to the silence and heard everything there was to hear.
Vittorio closed his eyes and breathed slowly, deeply.
“Did you find her dead?” he finally asked. “Or was she just not there?”
“She wasn’t there. But she left a message. It was where you said it would be.”
“Read it to me.”
Gianni hesitated. “Maybe you’d better read it yourself.”
“No, I don’t think I can. Read it to me.” Vittorio’s voice was flat, but otherwise controlled. “Please.”
Garetsky took out the blue envelope. He removed the letter, spread it open on his lap, and tried to press out the creases
with the flat of his hand.
Then he tried to clear the thickness from his throat. It was hopeless.
He read the date and the time of day at the top of the page.
“My love,” he began.
Gianni read it slowly, quietly, the words rising and losing themselves quickly in the heavy-aired silence of the hospital
room.
Vittorio lay there, listening, growing angry.
Gianni Garetsky’s soft, slow voice read on. Immutably. It was impossible to stop.
Then the anger went away. It left a deep sickness in its place, an oppressiveness, a ghostly pain in his stomach. No. In his
heart, his lungs, everywhere, that had nothing to do with the real bullets that had entered him earlier. And he knew that
no amount of morphine would be able to make it disappear.
But then the sickness, too, subsided.
And there was nothing.
It took Vittorio a few moments to realize that Gianni had stopped reading. He accepted the silence.
Then even that became too much.
“She’s gone, Gianni,” he said.
Garetsky looked at him. Vittorio appeared dry eyed and blank faced. Then a tear suddenly appeared in a corner of his eye.
It ran down his cheek, moving fast, like sweat on a cold glass.
“We don’t really know that,” said Gianni.
“You just read me her letter.”
“Yes. But that’s all it was. A letter.”
“You think she or Durning didn’t go through with it?”
“I don’t know what I think,” said Gianni. “But no one’s dead until they’re dead.”
Gianni looked into Vittorio Battaglia’s eyes. Until he saw the hope there. Then he had to look away.
Gianni waited until shortly after 9:00
A.M.
Then, using a hospital pay phone, he put through a person-to-person call to the director of the Naples office of the International
Red Cross. When he got the official on the line, a Signor Ferrare, he said, “This is Ralph Billings calling from the United
States consulate in Palermo.”
“Yes, Signor Billings.”
“I’m hoping you can help me,” said Garetsky. “We’ve just received word that an eight-year-old American boy, a Paul Walters,
was to be left with you people for safekeeping until he can be picked up by his father. Offhand, could you give us any information
about that?”
“Exactly what would you like to know?”
“Whether the boy is with you now. And if he’s not, whether your office has heard anything further about him or the situation.”
“I’ll certainly check on it. When was the boy supposed to have been left with us?”
“We don’t know precisely. But it should have been sometime during the past day or two.”
“Please hold on, Signor Billings. I should be able to find that out for you right now.”
Gianni stood waiting. He didn’t know what he wanted to hear. If the boy was there and safe, in all probability his mother
was dead and gone. If the boy wasn’t there, it could mean anything. With the odds strongly in favor of nothing good.
“Signor Billings?”
“Yes,” said Garetsky.
“I’ve just spoken with the two people who would know about such things. So far, neither of them has any information about
a boy being sent here. Would you like us to call you if the boy does come here?”
“Thank you, but I expect to be traveling for the next few days. So I’ll check back with you if I may.”
Gianni thanked Ferrare again and hung up. Then he slowly walked back to where Vittorio lay waiting to hear.
“Nothing,” he told his friend. “They haven’t heard a damn thing.”
Each held a separate silence.
“I’ll tell you,” Vittorio said. “I’m not surprised. I didn’t really expect Paulie to be there.”
“Why not?”
“Because it wouldn’t be in that bastard’s nature to make a deal and stick with it. He’d always be looking for an extra edge
of some sort. And Peg wouldn’t have a prayer with a man like that.”
Garetsky started to say something. Then he changed his mind and remained silent. What was there to say without lying and sounding
like a fool, or speaking the truth and making it worse?
“What the man’s done,” said Vittorio tonelessly, “is murder my wife and son. That part’s finished. Now I just have to accept
it. Then maybe I can get on with the rest.”
Gianni turned to him. Vittorio Battaglia’s eyes were two black holes and his skin appeared drained of blood. He was a ghost.
His face, surrounded by hospital pillows, was the size and shape of little more than the bones beneath it. While Vittorio
himself was the same color as the bones.
When did he become a ghost?
I
T REALLY WAS
a small jewel of a villa, thought Peggy, with dazzling views of the mountains and sea, and the grounds spacious and well
tended. And since Carlo Donatti’s visit, she had been treated with all the courtesy and deference of an honored guest. She
had actually begun now to allow herself the almost forgotten luxury of hope.
Or was this just her latest self-delusion to keep herself from flying into a million pieces?
With the thought, panic came off her like a scent, dull and powerful, bringing her close to nausea. Paulie lay buried somewhere
while she sat here being milked with false promises. The image itself was an extinction. She could feel all that was good
in her going away.
Then she breathed slowly and deeply and put all such thinking aside before she flaked out entirely and did no one any good.
T
HE ATTORNEY GENERAL
flew into La Guardia by Justice Department helicopter at about 11:00
P.M.
and dismissed the crew for the night. They were to be ready to fly back to Washington at 7:00 the next morning.
An unlocked Ford Fairlane was waiting for him at a prearranged parking location. The keys were under a floor mat.
A little less than two hours later, Durning drove the Ford behind a small, abandoned factory outside of Liberty, New York,
and found Mac Horgan already parked and waiting.
As
usual
he thought. This time Durning left his own car and joined the private investigator in his.
“Everything all right?” asked Durning.
“Couldn’t be better.”
“How far is it from here?”
Horgan lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of one he had going. “Less than half an hour. It should be a piece of cake. I don’t
know why you had to bother coming.”
Durning opened a window to get rid of the smoke.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “I bothered coming because this whole thing with Donatti has suddenly turned me paranoid.”
Horgan grinned. “Hey. I’m not the fucking godfather.”
“I know. It’s got nothing to do with you. It’s all me. You’ll just have to bear with me on this one.”
Mac Horgan started the car, swung past the old brick factory building, and turned onto the deserted road.
“No problem,” he said.
“When did you get up here?”
“Late this afternoon. I wanted a last look around while it was still daylight. I also wanted to be sure they were still there.
Loose ends we don’t need.”
“And?”
“Full house. Three
goombahs
and the two of
them,’’
They drove north on Route 17 for about ten minutes. Then they turned east for a short while on 52. It was a clear night with
half a moon and lots of stars. There were few cars moving, and the Catskills showed high and dark above the trees.
They spoke little.
Durning had been tense but fine until now. Then as they swung onto a narrow, two-lane blacktop that made up the final stretch,
he felt the first faint stirrings of dread in his stomach.
“What are you using?” he asked.
“
Plastique.”
“Is that smart? There aren’t too many sources. Which makes it eminently traceable.”
Mac Horgan shrugged. “They won’t trace this. I’ve had it stashed for too many years. Besides, it’s the only stuff practical
to use on an operation like this. I wasn’t about to start
scraping together and lugging around five hundred pounds of TNT.”
Durning was silent.
“What about Carlo Donatti?” said Horgan.
“What about him?”
“He’s going to know it was you.”
“I expect him to.”
“You don’t think he should be done?”
“He will be,” said Durning.
“I mean before
this
job.”
“No. There are things he has to tell me first. And I can’t have Hinkey and the woman floating around for however long that’s
going to take. They’re too dangerous.”
“Whatever you say, Hank. It’s all the same to me.”
The attorney general fixed on Horgan as he drove. Not true. It
wasn’t
all the same to Mac. He enjoyed doing the
goombahs
best. And it wasn’t just the historical antipathy between the Irish and Italians. Mac’s dislike for the mob reached all the
way back to his detective days, when he refused to accept bribe money, personally brought down a couple of top family
capi,
and found himself framed and broken as his reward. Durning had been able to keep him out of prison, but not out of forced
retirement.
Mac Horgan suddenly pulled off the stretch of narrow blacktop and parked behind some brush.
“It’s about a five-minute walk from here.” said the PI. “Just over that rise. You can either wait here, or move in closer
with me and see the action. It’s up to you.”
“What kind of security do they have?”
“Only the three guards and some photoelectric stuff across the driveway. There are no fences, no wiring on any windows, and
no TV monitors. It’s an old hunting and fishing place of Donatti’s father, hardly used.”
“I’ll walk in a ways with you,” said Durning.
Horgan had everything in two canvas bags in the trunk, and he carried them both himself.
They walked slowly through high grass, the night quiet and silver-gray about them. There was just enough moonlight to cast
shadows. With each step, Durning felt the dread grow stronger in his stomach.
Then they crested the knoll, and Durning had his first glimpse of the cabin, about two hundred yards away.
It was much bigger than he had expected, a rustic two-story building with three fieldstone chimneys and huge, half-round logs
chinked together in the Adirondack style of many turn-of-the-century camps favored by the old robber barons.
They had approached the cabin from the side and rear. Other than for two night-lights, one upstairs and one down, the place
was entirely dark. The moon silvered a wood-shingled, steeply pitched roof.
Durning glanced at his watch. It was close to 2:00
A.M.
“Stay down and wait here,” said Mac Horgan, and quickly and quietly took off.
The attorney general watched him go with his two bags, crouching low and hugging the shadows of bushes and trees. Then Horgan
was against the cabin and lost in the darkness.
Durning knelt there, listening to the great silence of the wood. Which really was no silence at all, but a thing alive with
a thousand sounds and each one taking up its own separate pitch. He had never heard such a subtle din, and all of it trying
to tell him something.
But what?
Then he heard the hoot of an owl off in a tree somewhere, and the rush of sound seemed to disappear.
Durning never saw Mac Horgan returning until he was less than twenty feet away and approaching from another direction.
“Exactly seven minutes to showtime,” he said, and casually flopped beside Henry Durning. He was not even out of breath.
“How many charges?” Durning asked.
“Four. One on each side. Something like this, you don’t want to fool around.”
“What’s the dynamite equivalent?”
“About a hundred and fifty pounds each charge.”
“Jesus Christ,” Durning whispered.
The PI grinned. “More’s better, right?”
Durning hoped so.
This quiet wood.
Horgan said, “I just wish that fucking Donatti was in there too. Then I’d feel good.”
Henry Durning was silent. There
were
those who took pleasure from such things. He himself just happened not to be one of them.
“Better get below the crest of the hill,” said the investigator, and they moved back about another thirty yards.
Moments later there was a crackling roar that Durning felt as a shudder in the earth beneath his body and saw as a blaze of
red in the night sky.
Then great chunks of things went whistling and tearing through the leaves overhead, and Durning felt the blast from the explosion
roll back over him as he lay with his hands tight over his head. His face was down against the grass, and the yellow smell
of the blast rolled over him in bitter smoke. Then it started raining bits and pieces of nameless stuff.