Deceptions (42 page)

“Thank you.” She began crying again.

“Another thing, Mr. Hinkey,” said the don. “You might like to know your son appeared on national television two days ago.
Assuming you and Mrs. Beekman were murdered, he followed your instructions and went public with everything you’d dug up on
the dead and missing FBI agents. He was very moving and effective. It’s generally believed his
revelations were what drove Wayne to kill his wife and himself.”

John Hinkey nodded, slowly, his body swaying with his head. Beneath the blindfold, his cheeks suddenly appeared flushed and
damp.

“But now you?” he said. “You don’t believe Wayne killed his wife and himself? You think they were murdered by someone higher
up who was afraid of being implicated?”

“I don’t just think. I know.”

“I agree. And I know who it is.”

“Yes?”

“Henry Durning,” Hinkey’s voice was calm. “It has to be him.”

“Why?”

“Because no one else in the world was anywhere near as close to Brian Wayne and his wife.”

“That’s no reason.”

“Maybe not,” said Hinkey. “But it’s sure as hell an answer. And give me a little time and I’ll bet you a million bucks I can
dig up a reason to go with it.”

Carlo Donatti looked at him. It was a beginning.

P
AULIE WALKED QUICKLY
through the dark. He was going mostly downhill toward where the last road marker had said he would reach the next town in
four kilometers. It was hard to read the name on the marker because the stone was old and worn and there was only a small
piece of moon. But the name didn’t matter as long as he was headed in the right direction. Then his map told him the town
had to be Lercara Friddi, so he was doing that part all right.

So far, only two cars had passed while he was walking. He had seen their lights and heard their engines from a long way
off, so he’d had plenty of warning to get off the road until they were gone. He knew it was kind of soon for anyone to be
out looking for him, but why take chances?

After a while a wind came up, and he felt cold in only a shirt and jeans. He guessed he should have taken something of Dom’s
or Tony’s for added warmth, something to throw over his shoulders, but he’d had other things on his mind.

He walked faster. Then he jogged a little to warm himself, and it worked. When he jogged, the gun in his pocket kept bumping
against his leg, so he stuck it inside his belt. He had taken Dom’s small snub-noser instead of his big automatic because
it was easier to hide in one of his pockets. The idea that he better take a gun along had come to him late and hard, just
as he was leaving the house. The hard part was his remembering what he had just seen guns do. It was very different from seeing
it in movies. Suddenly, blood was blood, and dead was dead, and nobody ever got up again for another picture.

The next thing he thought about was food. All of a sudden he was hungry and he had nothing to eat. Stupid. All that great
bread and salami and cheese and fruit and stuff lying back there at the house, and he hadn’t so much as thought about filling
a bag. But he had money. He would buy things when he reached the next town. If he didn’t starve to death by morning.

To get his mind off eating, he did an imaginary night painting as he walked, with the piece of moon turning the road ahead
into a blue-green river that ran between banks of bushes and grass. He felt the mood as soft, with hardly any contrast between
the halftones and darks. Except where the moon glazed the road in tiny pinpoints of light, and these caught the eye right
away.

The boy loved night painting, although he had not done it all that much. It was hard to work from life in the dark, and harder
still if you tried to do it from memory in the studio. But it was easy enough to do it all in your mind, without brushes and
paints. And there wasn’t even the mess to clean up afterward.

Then Paulie saw the faint lights of a car moving in the distance. It was hard to tell direction at first because the lights
kept disappearing around curves and behind trees. Then they came along a straight, open stretch, and it was clear the lights
were headed his way.

He left the road, ducked behind some brush, and stayed there until the car arrived in a rush of sound and light. The boy caught
a quick glimpse of a man and woman sitting close together in front. The woman’s head was on the man’s shoulder, and she looked
as though she might be sleeping. Then the car was gone and the road was a blue-green river again.

Those two, at least, were not chasing him.

Paulie continued his trek.

Moments later, cresting a rise, he saw the glow of what had to be Lercara Friddi.

He stood looking off at the town, envying those asleep in their beds, surrounded by families, doors closed against outside
threats. The stores would not be opening for another three or four hours, so he thought it best to wait up here in the woods
until then. A strange kid wandering around the streets in the middle of the night was just asking for trouble.

The boy found a broad-trunked, comfortable-looking tree and sat down with his back to it. He took Dom’s snub-nosed revolver
out of his belt, broke it open, and counted four unused cartridges in the cylinder. The two spent cartridges had sent their
bullets into Tony. Paulie thought again about how Dom had saved his life with those two shots, and how God had rewarded him
for his good deed by letting him get killed on account of the very person he had saved. It didn’t seem right or make sense,
but that sure was how it turned out.

He slid the snub-noser into his right-hand pants pocket, became aware of the thick bulge of lira notes stuffed into his other
pocket, and felt a bit easier about things.

Paulie guessed that money and guns had to be just about two of the most important things in the world.

After a while he grew sleepy and curled up in the grass. He shivered with cold. He couldn’t remember ever having been this
cold. And hungry. He collected some leaves and branches and covered himself with them.

Later, after he had put his thumb in his mouth and stopped shivering, he finally slept.

T
HEY ARRIVED IN
Monreale just as it was growing light, and drove through gray, deserted streets.

Gianni sat behind the wheel, with Lucia beside him to tell him where to make his turns. Vittorio was still stretched out,
unconscious, on the backseat. His strips of bandage were soaked through with fresh blood. His breathing heavy, rasping.

The girl pointed through the windshield. “It’s the next turn on your left. My cousin’s home is the last one on the block.
There’s a doctor’s shingle in front.”

Gianni saw the shingle. The doctor’s name was Helene Curci.

He pulled into the driveway and parked close to a side entrance that had a sign,
OFFICE,
above it. No one was in sight. The road continued past the house, but it ran only across empty fields, finally curving off
and disappearing in the distance.

“Is your cousin married?” asked Gianni.

“She was. Twice. Not anymore.”

Lucia got out and rang the bell beside the office entrance. A moment later she rang it again and the door opened. Watching,
Gianni saw a slender woman. She was still getting into her robe.

“My God, Lucia!”

Vittorio’s blood was on the girl’s clothes.

“It’s not me, Helene. It’s a friend. He’s unconscious in the backseat.”

“Pietro?”

“No. Pietro is dead. His own men murdered him. This is a good one. He saved my life.”

The doctor sighed. Gianni thought she had an intelligent good-looking face with disappointed eyes.

“Knife or gunshot?” she asked.

“Gunshot. Two. Side and upper thigh.”

“Wonderful. Pull the car all the way up and bring him in
the back door.” The doctor bent to look at Gianni behind the wheel. “Who’s he?”

“His friend. He saved my life, too.”

Dr. Curci slowly shook her head. “I’ll put on some clothes,” she said and disappeared into the house.

Gianni followed her instructions. He lifted and wrestled Vittorio out of the car, through the back door, and onto a metal
examining table in her office. He was sweating and stained with blood when he finished.

Vittorio came awake as Gianni put him down. “Where the hell am I?”

“My cousin’s office,” said Lucia. “The doctor.”

Vittorio closed his eyes. Dr. Curci took his pulse, looked at the bloody bandages, and didn’t even bother to cut them open.

“He barely has a pulse. You’ll have to get him to a hospital.”

“No hospital,” said Vittorio.

“You need blood or you’re dead,” said the doctor. “You want to die? Do it in your car, not in my office.”

“You’re all heart,” breathed Vittorio.

With the roads empty, they made it to Monreale Hospital in under eight minutes. A wheeled stretcher took Vittorio through
the emergency entrance. Close beside him, Gianni looked for possible watchers.

Vittorio moved in and out of consciousness. At the end, being rolled toward surgery, he reached for Gianni’s hand. “Don’t
forget my boy,” he said. “You hear, Gianni?”

“I hear.”

Vittorio Battaglia squeezed Garetsky’s hand one last time and disappeared through a pair of green swinging doors. Gianni stood
staring after him. Feeling Lucia at his back, he turned and didn’t like what he saw in her eyes. She had dark deep eyes to
look into, and they told him things he didn’t want to be told.

A short while later the girl’s cousin came through the green doors and told him these same things in words.

“Your friend just went into cardiac arrest,” she said. “We
got him going again, but he’s lost so much blood he can go into shock at any second.”

Gianni stood looking at the messages on the doctor’s face. “Are you telling me he’s going to die?”

“Only God can tell you that.”

“I’m not asking God. If He was here at all, He must have left early. I’m asking
you.”

The disappointment Gianni had seen earlier on Helene Curd’s face turned sad. “I can only promise you this,” she said. “Whatever
can possibly be done for your friend, everyone here is going to do.”

Gianni Garetsky believed her.

He watched her walk back down the corridor and through the green doors. The next time she comes through those doors it will
be to tell me whether Vittorio is alive or dead.

Meanwhile, there were things to do.

Gianni took Lucia’s arm and led her to a small waiting area off the corridor. It was empty and he sat the girl down where
she would have a clear view of the emergency reception desk.

“Listen,” he said. “Sooner or later someone’s going to be coming in over there to check for gunshot admissions. It’ll probably
be one of Ravenelli’s people. Do you know them all?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how to use a gun?”

The girl nodded.

Gianni took out an automatic and put it in her purse. “For emergency use only. I don’t want you a sitting duck. Just remember
it’s on safety. Also, if you know them, they’ll know you. So try to stay out of sight. At least until I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I want to drive our car away from the entrance area before someone spots it. And while I’m out, I can pick up some Sicilian
widow’s weeds and turn you into a less easily recognizable old lady.”

Before leaving the hospital, Gianni slipped an orderly a bunch of lire to lend him a set of whites and toss his own bloodstained
clothes into a washing machine.

Outside, the sun was up and burning away the early mists.
The hospital was close to the center of the city, and the streets were coming alive with the day’s business. Gianni could
feel each separate sound enter him. A normal world. But no longer his.

The car was just where he had left it. Including the keys in the ignition. Stupidly careless. And in Sicily, of all places.
Car theft capital of the planet. Walking around the automobile, Gianni counted nine separate bullet and shrapnel holes. Anyone
looking would have had little trouble picking it out.

He drove the car a few blocks away and swung into the center of a rapidly filling, municipal parking lot. Before leaving the
car, he remembered to take out not only the ignition key, but another automatic to replace the one he had left with Lucia.

I’m improving. I may even get good at this.

Walking back to the hospital, he stopped at a clothing store and bought the traditional black dress and head scarf of the
island’s elderly to help camouflage Lucia.

Gianni had been gone from the hospital for no more than half an hour. But simply reentering the place, breathing its air flavored
with body things, drugs, sickness, he felt it an alien land that belonged to another life. He glimpsed Lucia, sitting exactly
where he had placed her in the small waiting area. The girl nodded slightly to let him know there had been no disasters during
his absence, and Gianni nodded in return.

Then he approached the dark-haired woman at the reception desk and wished her a good morning.

She smiled. “Good morning to you, too. How is your friend doing?”

“Not well. They told me his heart stopped beating for a while. But I’m hopeful. It’s my nature.”

“That’s a good nature to have. You’re lucky.” The woman looked at him. “You speak Italian well, but not like a Sicilian. Where
are you from?”

“The United States. New York. But my mother was Sicilian. She was born in Marsala.”

“I have cousins living in Marsala.”

“You’re joking,” said Gianni.

“No. Seriously. To be exact. Five cousins. And two aunts.”

“Maybe we’re cousins.”

The woman laughed. “Stranger things have happened.”

His eyes solemn, Gianni studied the woman. “Besides maybe dying,” he said, “my friend has this other little problem. Certain
people may be coming around asking questions.”

“I know. Dr. Curci explained about that. You don’t have to worry. No gunshot wounds were admitted here tonight. Not officially,
and not any other way.”