He sat until he felt confident he would somehow manage to get what he wanted. He had not gotten where he was out of nothing.
His discipline was still of iron. He wouldn’t fail.
All right,
he thought, and finally got to work transferring the necessary papers from his safety-deposit box to the leather briefcase
he had brought with him.
It all seemed so much easier now that he had decided.
I can do it,
he told himself, and felt something near to exultation. Perhaps as someone might feel, he thought wryly, who had gotten past
those first formidable barriers of fear and gently accepted the inevitability of death.
Consider.
How monumental could the act of dying really be?
Who, finally, had ever failed to accomplish it?
They would be parting in a few hours to leave for Italy on separate flights, so Henry Durning came home early and made love
to Mary Yung.
Yet he found himself curiously surprised. With so many deep-rooted calls for attention drifting through his brain, he hadn’t
expected to react this strongly to her.
I should have known better by now.
But he knew it was more than that. There was something totally new growing inside him that was very different from his usual
blend of erotic compulsions. He had enough hope to believe it might actually be the beginnings of love.
Then the thought occurred that there was a very real chance that this might be the last time for them. Or at least,
for him. Which created enough of an internal disturbance to make him lose it and go soft.
Mary drew back and looked at him.
“What’s wrong?”
Durning smiled. “It can happen, you know.”
“Not to you.”
He lay there holding her. “I’m afraid even with me, it’s still mostly mind controlled.”
Her kiss was light.
“Does that mean I’m
not
the only thing on your mind?” she said.
“You’re the only
important
thing on my mind. But in this case even the distraction had to do with you.”
“How?”
Durning reached for his cigarettes, lit up, and considered how much to tell her. Not everything, of course. But certainly
more than he had told her so far.
“For one thing,” he said, “how, if I don’t end up nearly as lucky and brilliant as I’d hoped on this trip, this could well
be the last time I’ll ever be making love to you.”
Mary Yung was silent.
“Something else you should be aware of,” he said, “is that among the odds and ends I took care of earlier today was adjusting
my will. You now happen to be the legal heir to more than eighty percent of my estate. So for God’s sake, don’t just disappear
if anything happens to me over in Italy. Not unless you want to leave around fifteen to twenty million bucks to be haggled
over and divided among dozens of rapacious lawyers and overstaffed charities.”
“Henry—”
He gently covered her mouth with his hand.
“Please,” he said. “No false cries of protest and gratitude. I loved the idea of your being honestly hungry, greedy, and clever
enough to work that million out of me on our original deal. The only thing that bothers me about making you so rich is that
you’ll probably lose all that tough, streetwise ingenuity that intrigued me, and ruin everything by turning sweet and lovable.”
She worked his hand loose.
“Fuck you, Henry! And fuck your fifteen to twenty million.”
“Ah, you’re still my girl.”
“And you’re still a mean, fucking sonofabitch.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Isn’t that lovely?”
“No. It’s ugly and I hate it.”
“That, too, “he said. “But just remember this. If you live to a hundred and end up dozing and tied to a wheelchair, parts
of you will still know that no one ever even came close to loving you as I did.”
V
ITTORIO
B
ATTAGLIA HAD
awakened in the motel with a bad fever, and it steadily became worse as the day wore on.
Dozing, he crawled through nightmares. He tried to get out of bed, but his head spun and he fell back. Nausea collected all
through him.
At midafternoon, stumbling, falling, and finally crawling, he reached the bathroom, knelt on the tile floor, and tossed the
best and worst of himself into the toilet. Each separate strain and retch tore at his less-than-healed incisions, doing their
best to rip them apart.
And maybe they were.
Because back in bed, he saw a variously colored ooze beginning to drain from them. And being far from inexperienced in such
things, having survived no less than nine individual puncture wounds over the years, he had a clear idea of his options.
He could stay holed-up right here in this motel room until he died of infection or internal bleeding.
He could have an ambulance take him back to the hospital and give Don Sorbino’s soldiers a second chance to get the job on
him done right.
Or he could try to make it to Dr. Curd’s house, figuring that Sorbino’s people had already checked the place out and found
it clean.
Helene and Lucia were his only sensible choice.
He felt bad at having to involve them again, but he just wasn’t ready to die.
Alternately sleeping, sweating, and shivering with fever, Vittorio waited until after dark to prepare.
Then he cleaned himself up, checked the local telephone directory, and found Dr. Helene Curci’s address listed as 846 Via
Tomaso. Next, he called a taxi and asked to be picked up in ten minutes at the ground-level entrance to room 16 of the Palermo
Motor Lodge.
When the taxi arrived, he told the driver to take him to 826 rather than 846 Via Tomaso, so as not to have to stop right in
front of Helene’s house. Vittorio just hoped he’d be able to walk the extra hundred yards.
They were there in a little more than ten minutes and Vittorio paid the driver and watched the cab make a quick U-turn and
disappear. Then holding himself as though he were put together of very fine crystal, Vittorio began walking the short distance
to what he dimly remembered as the last house on the road.
There were no streetlights. There were only lights from some of the houses, and those were yellow and dim. By contrast, the
glow from television sets was bright and colorful. Vittorio glanced in and saw whole families gathered around the sets… watching,
talking, laughing. The sight was too much for him. He had to turn away.
His fever was passing through its chilled-out mode and he shivered as he walked.
Only fifty yards more.
Coming closer to the house, his eyes probed the shadows for watchers. If they were here, these would be the places for them.
His automatic was in his belt and he kept his hand on the butt.
The way I’m shivering, I couldn’t even hit a house if I had to shoot
He was seeing bright, floating spots now, and he hoped he
wasn’t going to fall on his face before he got there. It was as though he had just stared directly into an exploding flashbulb.
Then Vittorio was at the house and half stumbling into the driveway. Lights were on in the downstairs rooms. But the blinds
were drawn and he couldn’t see in.
He walked around a parked car and approached the back door. When he was no more than twenty feet away, he felt his arms grabbed
from behind and a big, hard hand go over his mouth.
Oh, shit,
he thought, and found himself being dragged behind a row of hedges and onto a patch of grass. There were three hands, so
there had to be at least two men.
Great thinking.
“Listen,” whispered a man’s voice. “We’re friends. When I take my hand off your mouth don’t cry out. Nod your head if you
understand.”
Vittorio didn’t understand a thing but he nodded anyway, and the hand came away from his mouth. Then the other two hands came
away from his arms and he was able to turn and stare into the faces of two men he had never seen before.
The shivering had stopped. Now he was sweating.
“We figure you’re Charlie,” murmured the man who had spoken before. “If you’re him, you’ll know who we are and who sent us.”
“Holy Jesus,” said Vittorio, and silently blessed Tommy Cortlandt and Gianni.
“Now you got it,” said the second man.
“But how did you know I’d be coming? I didn’t know it myself until a few hours ago.”
“From what we heard, there’s no place else you could have gone in the shape you’re in. Besides, we had to be here to keep
the two women from getting worked over again.”
The man saw Vittorio’s face.
“I guess you didn’t know about that,” he said.
Battaglia shook his head. “When did it happen?”
“A few hours after you did the job on that hitter in the hospital.”
Vittorio stood in the grass pouring sweat. He thought of Lucia and Helene helping him. He thought of their reward.
“Do they know you two are out here?”
The first man nodded. “We thought it would make them feel easier about things.” He looked at Vittorio’s face. “You’d better
get your ass inside. You look like shit.”
Battaglia stood there a moment longer. Then he lightly touched each of the two men on the arm, half stumbled the rest of the
way to the back stoop, struggled up the steps, and rang the bell.
Lucia opened the door and he saw three spinning faces. They were all equally beat up, swollen, and discolored.
“Vittorio!” she said.
He had a vague idea that something was going on with his mouth. In his mind it was trying very hard to smile. He just hoped
it might somehow be doing it.
Then he walked into the kitchen, took exactly two steps, and passed out on the floor.
T
HE PACKAGES ARRIVED
at Carlo Donatti’s Sands Point home just a few hours before he was due to leave for Palermo.
Excitement thumping his chest like a fist, he carried them into his study and took off the wrappings.
What he had in front of him was a rifle wrapped in clear plastic, and a large, unmarked bag of what appeared to be expensive
jewelry. They were the items described by Peggy Walters as having been buried ten years earlier by Henry Durning in the rich
woodland soil of southeastern Connecticut.
There also was a brief typewritten report outlining the packaged contents along with the key elements determined from them,
namely
* * *
That several sets of fingerprints taken from the rifle and other enclosed items matched those of Attorney General Henry Durning
as currently carried by the FBI’s national computer file in Washington.
That ballistics tests had shown that a bullet held by the Connecticut State Police in regard to an unsolved, break-in burglary
and murder had been fired by the weapon described above.
That insurance records indicated that all of the enclosed jewelry had been the legally owned property of the victims of this
same break-in burglary and murder, and that their estate had received settlement payments for whatever claims had been made
for their loss.
There was more, but Carlo Donatti didn’t bother reading any further. This was enough for his needs.
The initial excitement he had felt at the packages’ arrival had faded to no more than mild satisfaction. There certainly was
no real pleasure here. Pleasure had little to do with anything related to the deadly series of unpleasantries initiated by
this man, a series that Donatti hoped would soon end with him.
Still, there did remain the business of the boy. And if that worked out as well as he hoped, there might yet turn out to be
some good in it.
In this regard, Carlo Donatti glanced at his watch and put through a call to La Sirenuse Hotel in Positano, where it was after
11:00
P.M.
and Frank Langiono was likely to be in his room.
When the hotel switchboard connected him to Langiono’s room and he answered, Donatti told him to hang up and call right back
from an outside line.
The don slipped a fresh cigarette into his holder, lit up, and tried to relax for a few minutes as he waited.
Frank Langiono was part of Donatti’s long-held theory of security and survival: it was always best to keep a few people going
for you that nobody else knew about.
In this case, Langiono, a former NYPD lieutenant, had
chosen to take early retirement and triple his earnings by working for Donatti in situations that could be best handled by
someone outside the inevitable jealousies, loose tongues, and infighting of mob politics.
It had worked out well for more than eight years. It was still working out well. And this situation could prove to be its
most important yet.
The telephone rang, and Carlo Donatti picked it up and heard Frank Langiono’s voice greeting him in Italian, because Langiono
always enjoyed speaking and practicing the language.
“How is everything?” said the don.
“Quiet. I just came in from watching. I swear the kid’s unbelievable. He’s so damn careful he won’t even put on a light.”
“How does he get around in the dark?”
“Mostly he seems to stay in one place. But when he does have to move around, he puts a couple of socks over a flashlight.
It leaves him enough of a glow to cut the dark, yet can’t be seen from outside. I only noticed it myself because I was right
up against a window.” Langiono grunted. “You sure hit it on the nose about his coming straight here after he was spotted at
the ferry. But I guess where else would he go but home?”
Carlo Donatti was silent.
“Still figuring on the same time for tomorrow?” asked Langiono.
“Roughly. But it can easily go off by a couple of hours in something like this. Especially with all the road and air time.”
“No problem. I got no other appointments.”
“What about Sorbino’s people?”
“Nothing. At least not since before the kid came in this morning. And like I said. All they did then was take a quick look
around the house and grounds, then drive through town and talk to some of the shopkeepers. My money says we don’t see them
again.”