‘This is stretching things, Reilly,’ I said in disgust.
‘That’s my job. I’m not bad at it,’ she said with a grin, spinning round on the dressing-table stool.
‘And if we don’t know where he is, how do you propose letting him know where I am?’ I asked.
‘That’s a problem we’ll work on when we get there,’ she answered.
I felt a sudden stabbing pain in my guts. Christ, I thought trying to dampen fear with frivolity, if sex is going to accelerate matters, I know how I’m going to go.
‘You OK?’ said Reilly.
I burped.
‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘It’s just that I don’t much care for raw vodka. You said when we get there. Get where?’
‘Where we think he is, of course,’ she replied. ‘Rome.’
‘Rome?’ I exclaimed, stomach pains forgotten. ‘What makes you say Rome?’
‘Just our understanding,’ she said, eyeing me shrewdly. ‘Why, bucko? Is there any particular reason you know why it should or shouldn’t be Rome?’
I returned her shrewdness with open-eyed innocence.
‘No,’ I lied. ‘Not a reason in the world.’
9
… we were once very close …
There’s no place like Rome.
The last time I’d been here I’d been closing the Sam 7 deal with two consiglieri of the Red Brigade. They had been sharply-dressed, keen-eyed, fully accredited Italian lawyers. It had surprised me at first just how legally-minded many of these subversive groups were when it came to arms deals! Worst of all were Italians. Oddly, I’d been reassured by the presence of a nervous girl called Monica who wore huge sun-glasses and a University of Rome T-shirt and kept on reaching into her shoulder-bag every time a car hooted in the Via Nazionale, which is about every two seconds. But those two gimlet-eyed lawyers agreed nothing till they were certain one of her nervous twitches was an affirmative nod.
It occurred to me in my taxi from Leonardo da Vinci airport that this was one of the agreements I hadn’t honoured and that a lot of very nasty people in this city would be very happy to cause me great pain.
It also occurred to me as we slid across two crowded traffic lanes to make a right-angled left turn at 90 kph that perhaps my taxi-driver was one of them.
I felt as weak-legged and as happy as a round-the-world sailor on his first landfall as I climbed out in the Piazza Barberini and I overtipped out of gratitude. The driver treated me with the contempt I deserved, accelerating away so hard that I hardly had time to let go of the door.
Whatever else was wrong with the Brigadier, you couldn’t fault his travel arrangements. I was shown to a comfortable room on the quiet side of the hotel and half an hour later, after I’d unpacked and showered, there was a discreet tap on the door and I was invited to sign for a special delivery package. It contained a million lire in notes of different denominations, plus a little purseful of one-hundred-lire pieces. A nice touch, that. Italian life is impossible without them.
It also contained a Luger automatic. When I examined it closely, I saw it was the same one I’d retrieved from my safe in London. I’d left it and the industrial diamonds in a newly rented deposit box at Coutts. The Brigadier must have decided to combine economy with a reminder of his power.
I lay on the bed and lit a cigarette. I’d given up tobacco years ago, except for the luxury of an occasional after-dinner cigar. But in these last few weeks I’d started smoking again. Why not? It’s not every man who can have a quiet chuckle whenever he reads the Government Health Warning on a packet of English cigarettes.
I drew deep and thought about my father. An old man now. A has-been in pathetic search of one last dose of limelight. Did that make what they wanted me to do easier or more difficult? I thought about what I’d been told he intended to say about Mama. That would have to be my trigger, more even than the memory of his killing her. But the fury wouldn’t come, not here, lying on this soft bed watching the smoke stain the shafts of sunlight like barium meal in a man’s gut. Instead I found myself examining those monstrous allegations critically.
At twenty I couldn’t have done it. At twenty most boys of my class and upbringing, perhaps of most classes and upbringings, were innocent, no matter how much experience they’d had. I’d tried buggery at school (Harrow; they didn’t charge you extra); paid five quid for the fastest orgasm on record in the back of a London taxi (we got from Curzon Street to Hyde Park Corner); and even balled a girl called May at a May Ball (she was called Marjory in fact, but May made a better story). But I was innocent. I had no comprehension of debauchery. And as for debauchery involving Mama … I couldn’t even envisage her taking part in the straight-forward legitimate act which had produced me!
And yet I thought of her sexually. Oh yes, I could see that now. That flash of relief I’d felt when I’d realized it was Kim writhing beneath my father was based on sexual jealousy as much as filial piety.
Right. I could acknowledge that. Also now, on the edge of middle age (but not about, or ever, to fall over that edge) I could look back at my own life and see the strange twists and turns sex, that had once seemed so simple, could lead you through. Not that my tastes had ever been particularly exotic. But for ten years, whatever I’d wanted I’d got, by the simple expedient of paying the piper. And that itself must be a kind of debauchery.
So. Could any fraction of what was going to be alleged about Mama be true? Joe, for instance. Big, black Joe. Big in every sense. We used to go swimming together in the lake at Bessacarr and …
I pushed myself off the bed, ground out my cigarette violently and strode across the room and back, across and back, like a caged tiger, longing for one last furious leap at its enemies before it died. I’d found my fury again. Gone was the middle-aged objectivity of a few moments ago. All I saw now was that it didn’t matter whether any of it was true or not.
Truth or lies, the monstrous, unforgivable thing was to offer to speak it in public. Any man who could contemplate that after all these years was indeed a monster.
Such a man deserved to die.
I had to get out and get some exercise. My instructions were strict—remain in the hotel until contacted. But I guessed these instructions were based on ignorance as much as security. The Brigadier wasn’t yet certain of when, where or how my father was coming to Rome, though once he had the details I had no doubt an ingenious plan to effect contact between us would be forthcoming. So I must be kept available.
I smiled as I descended the stairs, thinking that I had one large advantage over the Brigadier. I had a strong suspicion I knew at least one of the reasons why Pa had picked Rome. And if I were right, I knew exactly how to make contact with him.
Outside, I guessed I was being watched but it didn’t bother me. I strolled slowly down the Via de Tritone, crossed the Corso and paused in the Piazza Colonna to admire the spiralling intricacies of Marcus Aurelius’s column. My great-grandmama’s Campanian villa was also named after a column, but that was only a weatherworn stump. I had often fantasized about waking one morning to find it had sprung up to its former glories overnight and towered above the villa. There’s nothing like a child’s mind for imaginative creation.
I continued my walk through crowded little streets in the direction of the Pantheon. I wondered what it would be like to be one of these myriad people about me. Work to do; or, for the tourists, to go back to; bills to pay, families to keep, children to educate, festivals to celebrate, gods to worship; triumphs, tragedies, ecstasies, despairs, pleasures, pains—a man’s life, something worth clinging to when the grim reaper started singing harvest home.
Suddenly I felt terror; or rather I had a sense of empathy with them so strong that I felt the terror I would have felt if I had to lose what they had to lose. Then I was indifferent once more. Death meant nothing to me. The first real pain and I was ready to blow myself away. No hesitation. No qualms.
Why then had I left Margarita? I asked myself.
To see my
daughter? But why? It would hardly be a meeting likely to do much for her health or happiness.
Or mine for that matter.
The answer came to me as sudden and unexpected as that momentary flash of empathy with the normal, the everyday.
I wanted to feel qualms. I wanted that terror to be mine as of right. I wanted to know that death meant loss.
Though this sun on my face, this great arch of unblemished blue overhead, this pleasant anticipation of coming in sight of the Pantheon at any moment and finding a trattoria and sitting outside with a large glass of cold Frascati, all this was much, if not enough, to lose.
Rapt in thought though I’d been, I had let one part of my mind rove in search of the hypothesized Brigadier’s man and I soon had him spotted. I checked by going into a newsagent’s to buy a two-day-old English paper. I noticed they had an even older El Universal, so I got that too. When I came out, he was still there, peering into a shop window a few yards away. Not yet terribly good at his job perhaps, but I gave the Brigadier full marks for his choice in terms of camouflage. He was a slight, dark youth with a black moustache and wearing jeans and T-shirt, indistinguishable from thousands of other young Romans.
I continued and found my café table with a view of the Pantheon, ordered my Frascati and settled down to read the papers. The Times was still as dull as it used to be. There was no mention of my name, which was all the news I was interested in. My Frascati arrived. I asked the waiter if there was a telephone. He jerked his head towards the shadowy interior. I went inside, first shading my wine in a tent made out of El Universal. When I returned, I sipped the Frascati with a sensuous slowness, then began to read the Venezuelan paper. Again there was no sign of my name as lazily I scanned the pages.
But a name did tug at the corner of my eye the way they often do. I had to go back over three or four columns before I found it.
Ramón Dario.
A body had been found floating in the dock at La Guaira. It had been identified as that of Ramón Dario, a philosophy lecturer at the Central University. Cause of death was a bullet through the spine and the body had been badly mutilated. The police (clever police) were treating it as murder.
Shit! I thought. Bastard Dario the great fixer! So confident of his ability to manipulate the movement. And in the end they had grown suspicious and manipulated him, in every sense. I shuddered as I imagined his desperate and ingenious lies. Swift had escaped. Swift had had a heart attack and been dumped in the sea. I bet he was convincing. But I knew the kind of people he was double-crossing. One hint of treachery and they’d rather tear the fingernails off a dozen innocent hands than risk letting a traitor get away with it.
So, before he died, Dario would have told them the lot.
Did it make any difference to me?
Hardly. They’d have got the money I paid Dario, that was sure. And they’d probably keep up the pretence a little longer, both to save face and just in case there really was any chance of squeezing some more cash or at least some concession from the authorities in return for my promised safety.
Some hope, I thought, laying the paper down and returning to my Frascati. This time it tasted a little sour through the chill and the Pantheon looked more like an overblown tomb than a memorial of some nobler, greater age.
If my shadow had still been visible I think I would have called him over for a chat. I felt like talking to someone. But he had disappeared, probably taking advantage of my apparent immobility to phone through for instructions.
I rose, paid and left. He’d just have to be disappointed when he came back. It would be a useful lesson to him.
But I’d done him an injustice. As I began to retrace my steps, suddenly keen to get under cover again, I saw him ahead of me, approaching.
He stopped about five yards away and smiled uncertainly. I kept going. As I drew alongside him he said, ‘Mr Swift?’
The poor sod’s been told to fetch me back, I thought.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I just wanted a walk. I’m on my way back to the hotel now, OK?’
He nodded. I took this for agreement and made to move past him. He struck me lightly in the stomach, not enough to drive me backwards, but enough to wind me.
As I doubled up, the rear door of a light blue Fiat Strada parked alongside the kerb opened. Hands reached out and pulled me in. Behind, my shadow pushed. I didn’t resist, thinking if the bastard wanted me that much, he’d better have me.
The shadow got in beside me and the car accelerated violently away.
It was crowded in the back seat despite the slimness of the two young men sandwiching me. They could have been brothers, as could the man in the passenger seat. All I could see of the driver was the back of his head with black hair curling from under a floppy camouflage sun-hat, but he looked much the same type. Dangerous.
I took a couple of deep breaths and got my wind back. No one spoke, but the young man in the passenger seat remained half turned round with his gaze fixed intensely on my face.
‘You’ll know me again,’ I said finally, half jocular, half in irritation. This seemed an absurd example of Italian overkill, quite out of keeping with the Brigadiers’ fondness for the understated and elegantly cool threat.
‘Shut up,’ said the man in the passenger seat.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ I began.
‘Shut up!’ he snapped.
His right hand was resting between the front seats and now it jabbed out and I was struck in the stomach again. I gasped, hesitated between jabbing my fingers into his eyes or up his nostrils, and in the same second realized it wasn’t a fist that was poking into my belly.
It was a gun.
A Czech Skorpion machine-pistol with the safety catch off.
I shut up and began to be worried. I got even more worried when we passed my hotel with no diminution of speed and continued up the Via Veneto, through the Porta Pinciana on to the road which skirts the park of the Villa Borghese. Where the road opened out in front of the villa itself, we pulled in to the side. There were one or two other cars around and several people on foot but they didn’t make me feel safe.
Next moment I felt even unsafer.
The driver turned round. I had been mistaken. Under the floppy hat wasn’t another-thin moustachioed male face, but a smooth olive oval. It was a woman, vaguely familiar.
The moment she spoke I knew her. Not that I recognized the voice, but the words made everything fall into place.
‘Mr Swift,’ she said, ‘you owe us a great deal of money.’
Ten years had done a lot for Monica. She was no longer the nervous, jumpy girl I remembered. Perhaps terrorism is a career like everything else. You start with all kinds of anxieties but eventually you become blasé. I didn’t feel blasé. I had cheated these people out of several hundred million lire. They were quite happy to blow up people who hadn’t cheated them out of anything, so what they had in mind for me didn’t bear thinking about.
I said, ‘You’ve made a mistake. My name is Evans …’
She struck me across the mouth, but very lightly, like a lover’s caress, promising pleasure to come.
‘We know who you are, Mr Swift,’ she said. ‘Though you look rather different from when we last met. Did you think that news of your so-called kidnapping would not have been noticed here? And everywhere else you performed your dirty tricks? The brothers everywhere are in close contact now. We asked our comrades in the FALN for a share in you when we read the news. They did not answer for a while but when they did it was strange news. They did not have you. You had left the country. Since then the brothers everywhere have been looking out for you. Finally we heard that a man called Evans en route for Rome might be worth looking at. It seemed too good to be true. But now I see it is true.’
‘Monica!’ said my shadow urgently.
She looked in the direction he was pointing. A police patrol-car was moving slowly toward us flashing its intention to stop close by.
Monica turned away from me
and set the Fiat in motion. In many other countries, such sudden and violent acceleration would have been regarded as most suspicious by an approaching police car, but in Rome it was clearly the norm. The inmates didn’t even turn their heads as we passed them.
‘Where’re we going?’ asked the passenger in Italian.
‘We’ll take him out to the villa,’ said Monica.
‘The villa?’ said the man in a surprised tone. ‘Is that wise? It’s our only really safe house.’
Monica said, ‘So what? He’s not coming back.’
We were soon out of the Park and moving at a good lick along the Via Flaminia. It struck me that it wouldn’t be long before we were in open countryside. Ahead I saw some traffic lights. As we approached they changed from green and I tensed myself for an assault when we stopped. There might not be another chance. But my captors had the same thought.
My arms were gripped with extra firmness by the two on either side of me and the man with the gun dug it deep into my belly once more.
I relaxed. OK, plan two was to try it at full speed and hope I was the one to survive the crash.
We stopped at the lights. Monica sat with her left hand out of the open window drumming impatiently on the roof.
A pair of motor-scooters drew up alongside. On one of them there was a single rider, on the other, the nearer, a woman was riding pillion, her tight skirt pushed high up on her thighs. The man on my left looked appreciatively at the bare leg which was all I could see and spoke for the first time, expressing his. appreciation. The man with the gun didn’t take his eyes off me. One of the conscientious kind, I thought. Well, it got him his reward.
The girl on the pillion had a deep duffel-bag crushed between her belly and the driver’s back. Casually she reached into it.
But there was nothing casual about the way her hand came out.
Traitor's Blood Page 8
