October Men (12 page)

A little hysterically, physical and mental relief at two distracting jobs done restoring his spirit, he thought: this is the moment when the Englishman and his contact come strolling round the corner, or if not them then the Englishman’s model-girl wife in her wide hat, catching him in the unstoppable moment of midflow.

The thought made him rise on tiptoe and peer round him, and then back away from the spattered wall as he pulled up the zip, still searching the alleyway for prying eyes—

There was a man leaning in a ruined opening halfway down the alley—a man with a bright red cravat like a stain running down his white shirt front—

As he stared, hypnotised, the man raised a red hand to adjust the cravat, turning slightly away from him as he did so, totally ignoring him.

Boselli’s mouth opened—he felt it open as though his lower jaw was falling away from the upper one, its muscles severed—and a meaningless sound rose out of it.

The bright blood rippled over the fingers suddenly and the head sank against the wall as though the man was overcome by weariness. In ghastly slow motion he sank on to his knees, head and shoulder scraping down the stone work; for one instant he remained balanced, then he began to fold forward until he was bent double, the top of his head resting on the ground—

The sound inside Boselli became coherent.

“
Villari
!” he wailed.

As though released at last by the sound, the kneeling man pitched over suddenly on to his side, his back towards Boselli. His left leg straightened and kicked convulsively at the stone doorstep on which he had been standing.

“
Villari!
”
This time the wail was much louder, more like a scream.

There was a low, bubbling rattle ahead of him and the sound of running footsteps behind, but both were lost in the tide of sickness which swept over Boselli: he vomited helplessly and painfully into the dust at his feet, the tears starting from his eyes as he did so.

“What the—“ Villari stopped dead beside him. “
Jesu
!”

“He was standing in the—“ Boselli choked on the lump in his throat. “He—just fell down.”

Villari moved forward, but cautiously now, staring all around him and stooping. As he moved he reached back inside his coat with his right hand, towards his hip. Boselli blinked the tears out of his eyes, fascinated even though fear was now flooding inside him to replace the sickness: it was like watching a cream-fed tomcat transformed into a tiger hunting in the territory of its enemies.

When he reached the opening out of which the man had fallen Villari paused, setting his back against the wall for a moment. Then, with his automatic pistol held at the ready across his chest, its muzzle level with his left breast, he peered into the courtyard over his left shoulder. The movement was smooth and continuous: the right shoulder swung away from the wall and Villari pivoted across the gap, facing it squarely for an instant with the pistol now extended to cover the ulterior, stepping over the legs of the man in the alley without looking down and ending up with his back against the wall on the other side in exactly the same stance as he had started. He looked up and down the alley, shifting his pistol from his right to his left hand as he did so, and then sank down on one knee beside the body, reaching with his free hand for the pulse at the neck.

It was unnecessary, thought Boselli, the memory of the man’s collapse still horrific in his mind. But it was also enormously reassuring: this was an altogether different Villari from the languid, aristocratic brute of a few minutes ago. A brute still, no doubt—but one with all the necessary jungle qualities and skills.

He recalled with a pang of surprise that he had said as much to Villari in the cafe an hour earlier, ascribing it to the General without believing in it himself. Once more he saw that his instinct had been sound, although he had allowed his personal feelings to confuse it and to doubt the wisdom of the General’s design. He should have known better than that.

Villari rose from his knee and beckoned to him.

For a moment Boselli stared at him uncertainly. Irrationally, he felt that so long as he stood where he was then he was somehow safer, and that unseen eyes would disregard him as an innocent passer-by who had stumbled by accident on something in which he had no part and sought none. But the first step forward—if his legs didn’t buckle under him—would bring him into the front line, however.

“And keep your head down,” Villari mouthed at him.

There was no way out or backwards or anywhere except forward. He hunched his shoulders and lurched forward in what he knew was a parody of the other’s catlike wariness.

“Stop there!” Villari hissed.

But Boselli had already stopped on the safe side of the ruined doorway. Nothing short of danger from behind, he felt, would induce him to cross that hundred-mile gap out of which death had come.

“I want you to go back and get Porro,” Villari whispered across the opening.

“Go back—?” Boselli’s squeak was cut off by the registration of the second part of the command. “Who’s Porro?”

He blinked with embarrassment as Villari’s lips tightened with contempt.

“The policeman?”

Villari nodded. “Tell him to come here, to the Temple of Livia,” he whispered patiently, as one explaining a simple game to a dull child. “And tell him that Depretis is dead.”

“Depretis!” Boselli’s voice rose in shocked surprise.

“Who the hell did you think it was?”

“I—I didn’t think—“ Boselli looked down at the body between them and then looked up again quickly. At this distance and from this angle he could see more clearly how Depretis had died and he didn’t like what he saw. He felt the lump in his throat rising again sickeningly.

“You didn’t think policemen get killed?” Villari spoke softly, almost soothingly. “Little clerk—it happens, and now you know it happens.”

“But—“ Boselli did not feel at all soothed. Policemen did get killed, and in this line of duty not only policemen, as he had good reason to know from his files. But it only happened when someone became desperate. He looked pleadingly at Villari, struck hopeless by the recollection of his own forecast once more. It was all happening as he had forecast,
but it was happening to him
!

“Now, Signor Boselli, just don’t panic—just do as I tell you—“ the gentleness of Villari’s voice was hideously counterproductive: it impressed the gravity of the situation on Boselli more convincingly than urgency or anger could ever have done “—walk, don’t run. But don’t stop, keep moving—and tell him—“

Villari never finished the sentence: it was lost in the change in Boselli’s eyes looking over his shoulder past him down the alley, the fishlike
NO
forming on his lips and the contraction of his body against the stone wall in a vain attempt to disappear into it.

Boselli was staring into his own death.

His death was a black finger, a finger which was long at first and then foreshortened as it came up to point directly at him: a shocking extension of the hand of the man who had appeared out of nowhere at the end of the alley.

Ever afterwards, when he relived that instant through the light of his candle burning before the altar, it was with a prayer to the Virgin of Miracles for his deliverance from that finger steadying on his heart. But there was no prayer in his mind or on his lips in the instant itself, only blank horror and disbelief, mindless and soundless; and to his private shame he did not even see the manner of that deliverance. His eyes were already closed when Villari moved…

He heard a
thump
—more like a blow than a true sound—and a much louder
crack
of Villari’s pistol, which almost blotted out the second
thump
, shattering the silence of the alley.

Then he was alive again, with the wall still at his back and the hot sun beating down on his head.

The sunlight was white, but not too blinding to conceal the miracle from him: the end of the alley was empty, wonderfully empty!

But his exhilaration was even briefer than his despair—it was quenched by a grunt of agony.

Somehow, during those seconds of darkness, Villari had catapulted himself right across the alley—across it, and back down it, and into the shadow of the wall opposite. He was sitting in the dust, his weight on his left hand, his right hand pressed tightly against his ribs. His hair was ruffled and his dark glasses had fallen off on to the ground in front of him—without them his face seemed naked and pale.

As Boselli gazed at him in mute horror he raised his head slowly and grimaced back.

“Don’t—just stand there—man!” The words came out slowly but surprisingly clearly. “My gun—I’ve dropped it—“

Reality came cold into Boselli’s brain, rousing him out of confusion: the other man had gone, but it had been Villari who had been hit—it must have been his sudden movement which had changed the target at the last moment from himself—so that any second the killer might appear round the corner again to finish the job on them.

He looked around wildly for the weapon, not finding it in the first sweep, and then, as his legs came to life at last, spotting it in the shadow beyond Villari’s foot.

“Give it to
me—argh
!” Villari clapped the blood-stained palm back against his side.

It was amazingly heavy for so little a thing. During his military service he had had a rifle, though mercifully for only a short while because he had been no sort of combat soldier and they had soon realised that he was deadlier with his pen and his brain. But this was altogether different from the big, clumsy rifle: its contradictory weight and size, even the snug way it fitted into his hand, inspired a sudden confidence in him that resolved the quandary into which he had felt himself falling.

He had wanted to run away, ostensibly to get help, and then he had realised that this would mean leaving Villari wounded and helpless, a sitting target literally. But he himself had been equally helpless, a target also.

Now he was no longer helpless!

“Boselli—you idiot!” Villari coughed painfully. “Don’t try it—“

But Boselli was no longer listening.

He felt disembodied as he started down the narrow street, like a camera swinging this way and that to record images of decay and emptiness. Gaps opened up first on the right, and then on the left: another courtyard, another black and white mosaic half covered with drifting sand, a broken stair ending in a blank wall. Hot sunshine and cool shadow as he zigzagged from one gap to the next. Nothing moving and nothing alien—in this stillness movement itself was the only enemy.

Then he was at the intersection.

This, he fully understood, was the moment of greatest danger, for if the assassin was still bent on finishing them off it would be round one of these corners that he would be waiting. Yet if this was the case he knew he was doing the best thing and the only thing left for him to do, for he had no illusions about his ability to hit anything with Villari’s pistol at any range other than point-blank. Given a fair chance perhaps Villari might have managed it from where he lay back there—and the killer himself had proved that a marksman could do it. But he knew that he could
not—
even with his old army rifle he had never harmed a target.

So this way the odds were shortened: it was what the General would have called “good thinking” and Father Patrick “a little of God’s good sense.” But neither the General nor the Irish Father were here now to stop his knees shaking and his hands trembling as he leaned against the last safe piece of wall, contemplating that bright patch of no-man’s-land just ahead of him. For God’s good sense also warned him that the odds were still too long and that his best was likely to fall ridiculously short of what was needed out there.

If only Villari were here beside him—or better still ahead of him: he would have known what to do and how to do it. And the General would have known too—and the big Englishman would have known and so would the bastard half-Englishman, Ruelle…

But only he, little useless Boselli, was here, up against the wall. God damn them all to Hell!

The blasphemy served to release him from the paralysis which had threatened to set in, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the wall altogether: he bent down and poked his head awkwardly round the corner.

The movement was so clumsy—it was as though his body was unwilling to risk obeying a self-endangering order—that he had already started to lose his balance before he saw what lay ahead of him. And what he actually found was so unexpected that pure surprise completed the loss of coordination, twisting his left foot behind his right ankle to pitch him head first into the open.

Yet this unplanned and unorthodox appearance also possibly saved his life, though he was never conscious of any bullet’s passage near him but only heard the sound of the shot as he rolled over in the dusty street. The noise was itself more than enough to keep him rolling in a confusion of knees and elbows until he fetched up flat, breathless and half-concealed behind the body of the man Villari had killed stone-dead with his own single snap-shot.

Miraculously he did not lose his pistol in the fall—rather, he held on to it so convulsively that it began to buck furiously in his hand of its own accord as he thrust it out ahead of him over the body. Where the shots went he had not the least idea; by the time he had begun to gather his wits enough to see what lay ahead the street was the usual empty expanse of brick and stone and parched summer grass, broken only by a dark clump of cypresses far down it. As he focused on the cypresses he had a vague feeling that he had maybe seen something moving against them, or in them, in the split second before he had started to fall. The feeling ran out of his brain, down his arm to the pistol: he closed one eye, aimed the short barrel at the clump and pressed the trigger.

To his dismay the first bullet struck sparks from the paving stones ten metres ahead of him, and as the little gun jumped the second lost itself in the blue sky. Then, with one final metallic click, it went dead in his hand.