Vittorio was as far into himself as he had ever been. Until spasms began opening and something cried out.
Don’t let the bastards get away with it.
Then the anger and hatred came, passing into him in waves. His hand drove between his legs, and he groped for what remained
of his manhood. Which at this possibly final moment of his life was to be found not in his poor limp thing, but rather in
the sweet hard butt of his automatic.
The wonder was that he had enough control and presence of mind at that point to remember to release the safety.
But he did.
And he aimed straight up against the weighted sheet directly above him.
Then he squeezed once, twice, hearing only the soft sound of the silencer. No more than that. Until there was a single grunt
and he felt the full weight of his intended killer collapse against his chest.
Vittorio pushed the pillow off his face and sucked air. He saw flashing lights that whirled in a dream. When he felt ready
to trust his eyes, he opened them.
A heavyset, dark-haired man he had never seen lay half on and half off the bed. Vittorio felt for a pulse. But both shots
had entered the man’s chest and he was dead.
The door was closed and Vittorio lay aiming his piece at it in case the dead man hadn’t come alone. But no one entered the
room, and the corridor outside was quiet.
So they’d found him. Which was no surprise. The wonder was that it had taken them this long. The mob had eyes and ears everywhere,
and there were simply too many shifts and too many people working in a hospital to keep something like this quiet.
Vittorio Battaglia closed his eyes. Much of his fury had passed, and he felt no great urgency to take action. Not that there
was much he could do, or even felt like doing. Although he was out of intensive care, no longer connected to tubes, and able
to take short walks along the corridor, he was weak as an infirm old man and subject to recurrent bouts of dizziness. Still,
unless he didn’t mind being dead within the next few hours, he would have to get his pale, fevered ass out of here as fast
as possible.
So Vittorio set about doing just that.
He slid the body out of sight under his bed. He got out of
his hospital gown and into his street clothes. And he quietly eased past the nursing station while the two on-duty nurses
were busy in patients’ rooms.
By the time he reached the parking lot behind the hospital, he was soaked through with perspiration and had almost passed
out twice. Finally, he was dizzy enough to have to lean against a car to keep from falling.
Great.
Vittorio wondered if he was hemorrhaging from all the moving about. But he didn’t feel a thing. Which wasn’t to say nothing
was happening to him. Like spirits of the dead, emotions tore at him and refused to leave. He wished he had been smarter,
braver, more gifted and aware, as if it somehow were hidden failures of his own that had wasted his family.
You get what you deserve in this life.
And what kind of idiot had come up with that one?
The dizziness passed and Vittorio pushed himself away from the car and began carefully making his way out of the parking lot.
Heading where?
He had no idea.
Of course he could always call Lucia and her doctor cousin, impose himself on them, and probably end up making them pay with
their lives for all their kindnesses.
But he would sooner wander off into the woods and cover himself with leaves. They deserved better. Inasmuch as the mob had
found out he was in the hospital, they undoubtedly also learned who had brought him there in the first place. Which meant
they would head straight for Dr. Curci’s house as soon as they discovered him gone and their assassin dead.
So much for that.
He was barely out of the parking lot when he saw the lights of a motel off to his right and a few blocks down the road. With
half-a-dozen stops along the way, in just under fifteen minutes, he was able to make it to the entrance of what was called
the Palermo Motor Lodge.
It was a big commercial establishment and the parking area was almost full. Which was good. Because it was the
kind of place where it wasn’t unusual for guests to be checking in at all hours of the night.
Vittorio rested against the hood of a parked car until his breathing was easy and quiet. Then he wiped the sweat from his
face with a handkerchief, finger-combed his hair, and walked into the lobby without falling on his head in front of the desk.
He registered, using one of his several CIA names and credit cards, and said he expected to stay for two or three nights.
Then the clerk gave him his room key, wished him a pleasant stay, and returned to the paperback he had been reading when Battaglia
appeared.
Something took hold of Vittorio and drew him toward the sanctuary. He felt as though he were in a powerful magnetic field
where some force without sensation was leading him to perform one small act of survival after the other without a single contribution
from anything resembling a will of his own.
Until it took him to his room, opened the door with his key, closed and locked the door behind him, and stretched him flat
out on the bed without his turning on a light or taking off his clothes.
Suddenly it was all quite clear. The decision had been made for him in his hospital bed with that pillow over his face and
those steel fingers clutching his throat. He wasn’t going to die tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.
He was going to live and get his strength back, and finally do what had to be done.
He wasn’t going to let the bastards get away with it. It was the thought that had kept him alive when he was nearly gone earlier,
and it would go on keeping him alive for however long it took to get them.
But get them he would.
As poor Gianni would try to do. But wouldn’t be able to. And would finally die of it himself.
He told his old friend good-bye.
As he already had told his wife.
And as he told his son.
Good-bye… good-bye… good-bye.
* * *
It was just 6:30
A.M.
as Vittorio silently offered his final good-byes. Which was about the time Lucia was driving to the Monreale Hospital to
bring him the good news from Gianni.
P
EGGY WAS SITTING
on the back terrace of the Sicilian villa when one of her guards came out with a telephone.
He plugged the jack into a nearby connection and handed her the receiver. “It’s for you, signora,” he said, and went back
into the house to allow her privacy.
Not that she was without surveillance. Another guard sat about a hundred yards away, in the shade of a tree. They were omnipresent.
It was the only visible indication that she was anything other than the pampered lady of the manor she appeared to be.
Except perhaps for the whiteness of her knuckles as she gripped the telephone, and the nest of snakes that never left her
stomach.
“Yes?” she said.
“It’s Carlo Donatti in New York, Mrs. Battaglia. I hope you’re well.”
“If you consider going quietly mad and vomiting every few hours being well.”
“I’m sorry,” said Donatti. “But I have some good news for you. Before too long, I believe you should be together with your
son.”
She felt a flutter in the lower eyelid of her right eye. “What does‘before too long’ mean?”
“It’s hard to pinpoint something as complex as this. But I don’t think thirty-six to forty-eight hours would be too far off
the mark.”
Peggy took a long, deep breath. She had a horror of suddenly starting to scream and not being able to stop.
“Can I really believe that?”
“Absolutely. But first we have a few details to take care of. You mentioned buried jewelry and the murder weapon as backup
evidence. You said you could tell me where to find them. I assume that’s true.”
“Yes.”
“Then please tell me now because I must have these things confirmed.”
“You’ll have to write it all down. There’s too much to remember.”
There was a metallic sound from the other end as something hit the phone.
“I’m ready,” said Donatti. “Go ahead.”
Peggy gave it to him then, in full detail. She had carefully memorized it almost ten years ago, hoping she would never have
to use it, but knowing, too, that if she ever did need it, the need would be a critical one.
She started with road and landmark directions that would bring a searcher to within fifty yards of the burial site, and ended
up with the kind of foot-by-foot, inch-by-inch measurements that could only have been produced by a professional surveyor’s
level on a tripod. Which, as Peggy told the don, she actually had rented and learned to use before she and Vittorio fled.
Carlo Donatti was impressed. “You’re an incredible woman, Mrs. Battaglia.”
Knowing you can’t get good news by asking for it, Peggy asked anyway. “Do you know anything about Vittorio?”
“Nothing. And it’s just as well. With Vittorio, any news would have to be bad.”
The line hummed between them and Peggy groped for a way to hold on. She didn’t want the connection broken. It was her one
link to hope.
“Please,” she said. “You’ve known Vittorio since he was a boy. Up until this whole terrible business with Henry, wasn’t he
always loyal to you?”
“Vittorio was the best I had, Mrs. Battaglia. I trusted him with my life.”
“He felt the same about you. And I know that once you’ve freed Paulie and me, once I’ve told Vittorio it was you who saved
our lives, he’ll respect and care about you as much as he ever did.”
“Vittorio and Gianni are my
famiglia.
Like part of my blood. It would give me no pleasure to see them come to harm.”
“Thank you, Don Donatti,” she said, and had to consciously resist a sudden, insane urge to call him Godfather. She despised
herself for it.
“We’ll be meeting soon, Mrs. Battaglia. Until we do, try to think positively. Things will go well.”
Donatti broke the connection.
Walking about later, followed by a guard, Peggy felt no such confidence. There were just too many unknown factors. Not the
least of which was Henry Durning.
The fact of it was, she simply couldn’t picture anyone, not even someone as powerful and resourceful as Carlo Donatti, forcing
the attorney general to do something he didn’t want to do.
P
AULIE FELT THE
throb of the ship’s engines going into reverse, then the soft thumping of the prow against the dock. It was morning, and
they were in Naples, and he hadn’t died from the pizza after all.
At the moment he was back among the metal drums under the big six-wheeler’s tarp. Nino had thought it the safest place for
him to be through the disembarking, and Paulie had agreed. He knew that the police and the haircuts would be all over the
place as the cars, trucks, and buses rolled off the ferry. So why take chances? Unless the
carabinieri
thought
they’d frightened him off back in Palermo and that he’d never gotten on the ship at all.
The boy wondered what Nino would think if he knew the truth about him… that he hadn’t run away from home at all, that he’d
been kidnapped by gangsters and had escaped after a shootout, and that even now he was carrying a loaded snub-noser in his
pocket. He could just picture the trucker’s face if he ever told him. Not that he ever would. But he guessed maybe part of
him did want Nino to know that he wasn’t just a silly, crybaby kid who’d run off for some dumb reason, then got scared and
changed his mind and started running back home. He guessed he wanted Nino to know he was more than that.
I’m more than that.
Paulie told it to himself. It would have to be enough that he knew.
He heard the truck’s engine start, along with the engines of all the other wheeled things lined up in the belly of the ship.
They began slowly moving off the ferry and onto land. Then the boy felt the truck suddenly picking up speed and rolling across
the rough cobbles of the Naples waterfront. Until the truck stopped moments later, and Nino came around and lifted the tarp
and brought Paulie up front to ride beside him in the cab.
The trucker grinned. “Well, it looks like you made it. Feeling better about things now?”
Paulie nodded.
Nino glanced at him as he drove. “You don’t look too happy. You getting a little nervous now that you’re this close?”
The boy shrugged.
“Don’t you worry.” Nino draped a muscular arm across Paulie’s shoulders. “The worst can happen, they’ll just hug and squeeze
you to death a little.”
“Sure,” said Paulie, and wished again that he could tell this nice man how it really was.
An hour later he shook the trucker’s hand, said good-bye to him, and stood there at the cutoff as he watched the huge eighteen-wheeler
disappear on its way to Salerno.
It took the boy only twenty minutes to walk the rest of the way home to Positano.
His first sight of his house made everything go weak and soft inside him, as if he suddenly were melting down.
The house is there.
But had he expected it not to be?
He approached cautiously, not using the road but circling around through the trees and growth in back. His dream, his recurrent
vision was, of course, of coming home to his parents’ arms. But the hard core of him recognized this as little more than a
child’s fairy tale. Since his mother and father had never been home to answer his calls, he didn’t really expect them to be
home now. If anyone was waiting for him, he thought, it was more likely to be a couple of mafiosi.
But after crawling around the place twice through the brush, it appeared to Paulie that not even the gangsters were there.
No windows were open and no cars were in the parking spaces off the road. Finally, he worked his way to the front door and
found it locked. As was the side door. Then he found the secret family emergency key in its special place under a rock and
was able to use it to get inside.