October Men (30 page)

Ruelle’s eyes shifted to Boselli. “Who’s he?”

Boselli’s heart thumped. Those were butcher’s eyes appraising a bullock, and he hoped desperately that Audley wasn’t going to let slip that the bullock belonged to Rafiaele Montuori.

But before Audley could reply the door at the back of the room swung open again.

“
David!
”

The woman was very thin—he remembered that the soft-drinks vendor at Ostia had said as much—and her long hair was so pale as almost to seem white in the gloom, half covering her face. She was not at all the sort of woman he would have associated with the heavily-built Englishman, and also much younger. He was reminded of the German woman back at Positano, though she was much more beautiful and feminine than this one.

Audley took three quick strides round the end of the table, sending a chair spinning.

“Love—it’s all right—there, it’s all right.” The Englishman enfolded his wife in a bear hug.

“Okay—so you’ve seen her!” Ruelle’s voice was loud and harsh, and the automatic was raised and steady, as though he expected Audley to come at him. “You have a deal—I’ll hear it. I promise nothing, though.”

Audley didn’t let go of his wife, but merely loosened his grip.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes to be out of here, and forty-eight hours to be out of Italy—you two. The others don’t matter. They must leave here with you, but after that it’s up to them.”

“I said a deal. She goes with us.”

“David—“

“I said it was all right, love.” Audley’s arm tightened round his wife again. He looked at Ruelle coldly. “With her you won’t get past the first roadblock, I promise you that! They’ll let four men through in one car—and then only after I’ve given them the next signal … which will be given the moment you drive out of here, not before.”

“That’s no deal at all—without her we have nothing!” Korbel said.

“With her you have nothing. Without her you’ll be alive.”

“No!” Ruelle filled the word with anger. “For your wife there was to be a name—I still want that name!”

“Would you believe any name I gave you now? I could give you a dozen names—good Russian names—and they’d all be false—“ Audley paused, “—because there is no name to give you, and there never was. Except one, and you knew that already—Richard von Hotzendorff—Richard von Hotzendorff first and last and all the way through.”

Boselli stared at the Englishman.

“He took you for a ride—the clever Little Bird—and me too, and Eugenio Narva. He even took his wife for a ride. He made everyone do what he wanted—he even made Death change his plans. He chose a hill in Moscow and threw his little white pills away, his chlorothiazide and his digitalis—they found them lying in the gutter—and he ran and he ran up the hill. Not very far, but far enough to get where he wanted to go. And there wasn’t any KGB man at his back either, just death catching up on him as he intended.”

He looked Ruelle full in the face.

“He was getting old and he had nothing to show for it, so he thought—he was dying and he had nothing to give his wife and children. He couldn’t even give them freedom, it took too much money…

“So I think he sat down and he realised that he knew just one thing for sure—that one day soon his heart was going to give out on him and he was going to die. So he made a plan around that, so that he could use his death to make it believable—“

“But the oil? The North Sea?” Korbel interrupted feverishly. “He knew about the oil—he knew it was there!”

“He didn’t know. Nobody knew—not the experts, not the oilmen. They just thought it was there—they were giving sixty to forty—but they didn’t know, because there wasn’t any way of knowing and there still isn’t… But that didn’t matter to him because he’d worked it out so he couldn’t really lose—because he’d chosen Eugenio Narva for his mark, and Narva’s an honourable man. He reckoned even if he was wrong, Narva would see his widow right—and whichever way it went she’d be out of the East with the children… Maybe he even reckoned that she was good-looking and Narva was a widower who liked children—but at the worst they’d be better off. And if the oil was there—jackpot!”

“But how do you know this?” Korbel’s voice was hoarse.

“I’ve talked to Narva, and to the woman—and the thing had the smell of a trick. Only I thought there was a Russian behind it somewhere.” Audley shook his head slowly. “And then I talked to—a contact of mine who’d checked the man’s death again. … I never could understand why it had been made to look like a heart attack, I couldn’t accept that it really was that until he told me about the pills and the hill. And then I knew it wasn’t a killing made to look like a natural death, but exactly the opposite—a self-induced natural death that no one would believe was natural.”

The pills and the hill. Boselli had heard of them on the telephone tape, and they hadn’t registered. And now he saw them in an altogether different sequence of events on the very margin of credibility, yet somehow more credible than anything he had heard before.

He could see incredulity in their faces, and then the dawning of bitter realisation.

And he knew instinctively why they understood, as the Englishman had gambled they would:
Little Bird was getting old and he had nothing to show for it. And neither had they
!

“The Russians haven’t made a single big offshore strike since ‘67,” said Audley. “I tell you—we’ve been had, the lot of us.”

They had grasped their opportunity just like the German, only with violence and without understanding. And above all without sacrifice.

And for nothing!

“But I’ve managed to make a deal for you.” Audley pointed suddenly towards Boselli. “This is Signor Pietro Boselli—he represents the Ministry of Justice.” He snapped his fingers. “The documents—“

Boselli reached hurriedly towards his pocket, and then froze as the gun came round towards him.

“Go on, Boselli—put it on the table!”

Carefully Boselli extracted the long envelope with his thumb and forefinger.

“A policeman was killed at Ostia, but his killer died too, so to save more bloodshed they’re going to call that square—for forty-eight hours.”

Korbel split open the flap of the envelope and emptied its contents on the table.

“Two passports,” said Audley. “The pictures are from their files, but the names are blank. Work permits for Switzerland and Germany. Swiss francs and Deutschmarks—not many, but enough to keep you for a few weeks. And a letter from the Minister putting your forty-eight hours in black and white.”

Korbel stared at the table wordlessly, but Ruelle’s glare was still fixed on Audley.

Life and death was balanced on Ruelle—they had known that from the start. And now Ruelle was balanced on the edge of despair.

“And one more thing,” said Audley casually. “There’s a letter.”

He added a pale blue envelope to the other debris.

Korbel reached for the envelope.

“It’s addressed—to you.”

“Read it,” said Ruelle.

Bastard—

He wouldn’t read the superscription, Boselli hoped, remembering the General’s face.

“
In exchange for the lives of the woman and the bearers of this letter you will go free. I am required to give you my word of honour to this effect and I hereby do so. You owe me nothing for this, since
it is against my advice—the lives of my men, —whom you betrayed, cannot be exchanged. It is my greatest wish that you will find these terms unacceptable—
“

“
AND SO YOU
were there when it happened?”

Richardson stared out over the treetops. The rain had damped down the exhaust fumes, bringing out the damp leafy smell of the Park. England—even London—was so much greener than midsummer Italy, which now seemed such a world away. But no greener than Peter Richardson.

“Hardly that…”

He recognised the signs. Sir Frederick was in the mood for all the ghoulish details, like an old rugby club buff sniffing the tale of an away win, and he would have to be satisfied one way or another.

“… We’d pissed around a bit. It was maybe twenty minutes later that we caught up with where it happened. …”

Montuori had been laying down the ruddy law. Christ—he’d been working on the Bastard’s epitaph, and the ink hardly dry on his word of honour—

“Which he kept, Peter—don’t forget that. Not one finger did he lift against them!”

Richardson realised that he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. He must be losing his little grip at last, then.

“He didn’t need to, did he?”

“Ah, but that was the whole point of it. He understood that.”

The whole point.

Sir Frederick smiled. “Montuori is a soldier, but he’s also very much a political animal, and David knew that… He’s been itching to get Ruelle for years, only the man was a partisan hero, and a communist one too. If he’d done it himself there would have been awkward questions. So he couldn’t resist the deal.”

“And Ruelle?”

“Ruelle was the danger—“ Sir Frederick paused judicially, “—because he was much less predictable. But if you remind a man like that how much he hates someone else, you do give him a reason for surviving. And that word of honour was a nice touch: Ruelle despised it, but he naturally trusted it nevertheless. I assume that was David’s idea?”

Richardson nodded, poker-faced.

Sir Frederick nodded back. “Yes—David wanted his woman back, and he didn’t much care how he did it. But he had to offer each of them something they couldn’t resist in exchange. So of course he offered them each other.”

Clever David. No word of honour for him; he played dirty just like Little Bird, and for the same driving personal reason. But that had been where Ruelle had underestimated his man: he’d reckoned David would do anything to get his woman back, but he’d miscalculated the vengeful limits of David’s
anything
.

“David had a deal for everyone, in fact.”

“But he also took the risk for everyone if it went wrong—and he was careful to cut you out of that, Peter.”

Perhaps that had been part of the deal too, thought Richardson perversely: maybe David had calculated that what Sir Frederick himself couldn’t resist was that ultimate acceptance of responsibility. Or was it more simply that he couldn’t face surviving anything less than success this time?

Was that courage—or cowardice?

“And yet he took Montuori’s man with him—instead of me?”

“That was to make it easier for Montuori if things went wrong, Peter. It would have looked bad if Ruelle had started shooting and there hadn’t been an Italian casualty… But you still haven’t told me what actually happened on the road—“

On the road
…

The mountain road had been hot and bumpy, and the dust from the Police jeep ahead had blown in through the window.

And he had still not really understood, and hadn’t wanted to travel with the General, only David had made it plain that he wanted to be alone with his wife…

“A crude fellow, but fortunately rather stupid,” murmured the General at length.

He made it sound like an epitaph, thought Richardson.

“Now the man Hotzendorff, your Little Bird, he was
not
a crude fellow—to make a killing by dying to order! In fact for a German he was a man of quite remarkable imagination and I’m sorry not to have known him… But then the prospect of extinction is said to have a sharpening effect on the mind, although that doesn’t seem to have sharpened the Bastard’s wits, I must say!”

The Police jeep was slowing down: there was a confusion of cars on the bend ahead.

“I thought you’d pulled off the roadblocks, Pietro?”

Boselli peered ahead distractedly. “I gave the orders, General.”

“Well, kindly go and see they are carried out. I have an appointment in Rome this evening.”

Boselli slid out of the car and marched self-consciously towards the roadblock.

The General sat back. “Yes, a man of remarkable imagination… You know, I wasn’t going to tell Narva about him, but on reflection I think I shall. It will wound his pride, but that woman of Hotzendorff’s is much too fine to waste—she has good hips—and I think he’s inhibited by his conscience, poor fool. Once he knows the truth there’ll be no holding him. Besides—I rather like the idea of completing your Little Bird’s work for him.”

The General in the role of Cupid was an arresting thought which sustained Richardson until Boselli returned.

He looked oddly flustered.

“Well?”

“General—it is not a roadblock. There has been an accident.”

“Indeed?”

“A car has gone over the edge, into the gorge. A car with four men in it—a pale green car—“

“A road accident,” said the General dismissively. “Then there’s no reason for us to be delayed. Get back there and tell them to clear the way.”

“But there is a peasant who says there was a lorry—“ Boselli stopped as he saw the General’s expression, swallowing the words quickly. “Yes, General.”

For one elongated moment of realisation Richardson stared after him. Then he looked at the General accusingly.

“You gave them your word.”

“I did,” said the General.

“And now they’re dead?”

“Very likely. But not at my hands, Captain—I gave my word.”

The General was entirely relaxed, the very model of a cleanhanded, conscience-clear General. Yet one who had somehow contrived to pay all his debts in full, damn it!

“But you ruddy well knew what was going to happen?”

“I was confident that the Russians would do my work for me, Captain—if that’s what you mean.” The General regarded Richardson with fatherly tolerance. “They have never found private enterprise—forgivable.”

The Russians.

Not the General, not Audley—and not the
Pubblica Sicurezza
or one of Sir Frederick’s tame psychopaths. Nothing so messy as that: just the KGB settling everyone’s account.

It was so obvious that it hurt—and so obvious why the General was smugly relaxed about it. In fact, all along he had been relaxed about it, ever since David—