Traitor's Blood

by Reginald Hill

  In it she held a gun. By an interesting coincidence, which I didn’t find very interesting at the time, it too was a Skorpion whose stubby barrel and foldaway wire-stock make it ideal carrying for the lady who prefers a really powerful weapon.

  Monica’s fingers were still drumming when the first bullet tore into her head. My hands moved like lightning as I grabbed for the passenger’s gun. It wasn’t so that he couldn’t use it in defence but so that he didn’t dispatch me with a dying twitch. I rammed my forefingers behind the trigger and felt his finger twitch convulsively as the top of his head joined Monica’s on the dashboard.

  Now I sat quite still while two more blasts set the men on either side of me writhing bloodily all over the back of the car. Only then did I dive for the door, thrusting the still moving body out of my way. It took no more than a couple of seconds to fling my leg over the pillion of the second motor-scooter and then we went into a sharp U-turn as the lights changed and tore away back towards the heart of the city.

  I didn’t look back. A fanfare of horns was already registering the typical Roman protest at the slightest delay. Such impatient music was a fitting elegy for those four young people who’d chosen to take the shortest route possible towards whatever perfect society they envisaged. They’d probably all killed, certainly had no compunction about killing me. But they had been young and vital and I wondered whether a few months more for a cancerous cynical crook could possibly be worth four lifetimes.

  No, that’s bullshit. I thought it later when I was safely out of the way and at my ease. Then I was just delighted to be still alive.

  The scooter halted in the Piazza del Popolo. Reilly and I dismounted. I clapped my driver on the shoulder. He was a man of about thirty with a thin intelligent face and the melancholy introspective expression of one who’d rather have been in a good library rapt in some scholarly project.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said with feeling.

  He smiled slightly and nodded, then he and the other scooterist took off. Reilly led me to an outrageously parked Alfasud and got into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Take your jacket off,’ she commanded as I opened the passenger door.

  Surprised, I obeyed. Then I saw the shoulders were spattered with blood and something that might have been brain.

  ‘I must be costing the Brigadier a fortune in dry-cleaning,’ I said, folding the jacket on my lap.

  ‘And the rest,’ she said.

  ‘OK. Save the reproaches. I don’t want to hear them twice,’ I said. And Reilly. Thanks. That was really smooth.’

  ‘All in the day’s work, bucko,’ she said, adding grudgingly, ‘You acted pretty quick yourself.’

  I smiled at her and patted the thigh.

  ‘I recognized the leg,’ I said. ‘We were once very close.’

  10

  … a good Catholic girl …

  I was surprised when we headed back to my hotel.

  I said, ‘Reilly, shouldn’t we go somewhere else? Those nasty people know I’m here.’

  She said, ‘We want all the nasty people to know you’re here, remember? You’ll be quite safe so long as you do what you’re told.’

  The Brigadier was waiting in my room. He looked more sorrowful than angry, but I got in first anyway saying, ‘Mea culpa.’

  ‘It’s of no account,’ he said generously. ‘I must admit’ I’d forgotten how many enemies you have in low places, Mr Swift. Perhaps you will now admit the importance of following instructions.’

  ‘You mean sitting around here till you pick up news about my sainted father’s intentions?’ I said. ‘Well, I’m not mad keen on spending my few remaining days hanging around hotel rooms. It’s not that I don’t think you’ll come up with something eventually but I thought I’d see if I could help things along.’

  ‘You mean, simply by parading in public?’ said the Brigadier.

  ‘I mean by making contact with what could be my father’s contact,’ I said.

  Reilly, who was busy dismantling and cleaning her machine-pistol on a low tiled table, stopped her work. The Brigadier raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Perhaps you’d explain?’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Indeed there was no reason why not. And I felt truly grateful for the care they’d taken of me. (Bullshit.) Also it’s always pleasant to feel superior to experts. (Asshole.)

  Perhaps the real reason had more to do with the ambiguous human response to independent thought in. areas of critical importance. It’s a condition more praised than sought after. Free will is one of the pseudonyms of the nameless terrors which send men scuttling to shift responsibility, pass bucks, support football teams, embrace Catholicism, join the Red Brigade. Even the apparent independence of the secret life is mainly illusory. Since my mother’s death, I’d enjoyed the freedom of subterfuge and then that other equally illusory freedom of openness which might be called misère ouvert. Here I am spread out for all to see. Get lower than this if you can!

  The only freedom I’d really had was to be still, to do nothing. Now as the moment of confrontation with my father approached, I was glad to share my knowledge with the Brigadier, glad to put myself back under constraint.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all.

  Reilly, who was rapidly reassembling her gun, said to the magazine she was loading, ‘Do you think a bullet up the arse might hurry the cratur along?’

  The Brigadier smiled and shook his head slightly, not so much in denial as in affectionate wonderment at the precocity of a favoured child. Some child! I wondered suddenly what the precise relationship between the two was. Perhaps he really was her father.

  Some father!

  ‘I think Mr Swift is going to explain without encouragement,’ he said.

  ‘But I do like attentiveness,’ I said reprovingly.

  With a sigh Reilly clicked the magazine home and went into a parody of ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’.

  I said, ‘The Bessacarrs are an old Roman Catholic family, slightly lapsed of course, but they do say, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. You may recall my father made quite a thing of leaving the Church way back. The ego-trip of publicly renouncing his faith was too attractive for him not to buy a ticket.’

  ‘You’re not seriously suggesting,’ interrupted the Brigadier, ‘that your father wants to be in Rome on his seventieth birthday in order to renew his faith?’

  His tone was that of someone addressing an idiot child. Reilly looked more interested. Perhaps at heart she really was a good Catholic girl.

  ‘No, I’m not suggesting that,’ I said. ‘Though I think he’d like the headlines. What I was going to say was that as well as being an old Catholic family, we are also in some ways an old Roman family. My great-grandmama was Italian. The Contessa Dianti, don’t you know? Or perhaps your researches into the Bessacarrs didn’t go back that far?’

  The Brigadier and Reilly were not yet ready to be surprised.

  ‘Dianti. Francesca Maria Dorotea. Born 1870. Died 1956. Two children. A daughter, Susanna, who married the 4th Viscount Bessacarr, your grandfather. A son, Giulio, who married Emilia Dianti, a half-cousin. One child, a son, also Giulio, died 1976 without increase,’ said the Brigadier.

  So Uncle Giulio was dead. Ebullient, enthusiastic and totally inept Uncle Giulio!

  ‘End of Italian line,’ said Reilly smugly.

  I smiled and said, ‘Congratulations. To continue. What I imagine my father hates most about growing old in Russia is that, essentially, now that Kim’s dead, he’s probably alone. No crowds of admiring friends, no adoring wife, no troops of loving children. That’s what he’d love to have, I’m sure. A real family, something halfway between English Victorian and Italian peasant. Hordes of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with himself playing the benevolent, lovable old patriarch.’

  ‘And all he has is you and a granddaughter he’s never seen,’ murmured Reilly. ‘He really got sold short, didn’t he?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Reilly,’ said the
Brigadier. ‘So your father has a strong sentimental streak, Mr Swift? What has that got to do with Italy?’

  ‘Who did your research?’ I wondered. ‘Reilly, I bet it was you. You really should keep her in after school, Brig.’

  ‘Come on, bucko, spit it out,’ said Reilly impatiently. ‘What is it you’re after saying? That Billy Bessacarr is the Pope’s old dad?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘But he certainly fathered his firstborn here in Italy. At the age of seventeen.’

  They exchanged glances, unable to conceal their surprise.

  ‘He was staying with his maternal grandmother at the time,’ I continued. ‘It was probably the heat that did it. It gets awfully hot on the Costa Amalfitana in the summer. Great-grandmama Dianti used to spend most of the summer in her villa on the Campanian coast a few miles west of Amalfi. I think it’s a hotel now. Ah, the sad change!’

  Sad indeed. I remembered nothing but happy days there.

  ‘Do carry on,’ said the Brigadier. He spoke soothingly and I realized that I must have been letting some emotion show in my voice and on my face. Perhaps the shooting had affected my nerves more than I’d realized. I suppose I should have been glad to know I wasn’t made of stone, but stone’s a pretty good building material when you think about it.

  ‘OK. Right.’ I said, switching from my Anglo to my American register. ‘It was a maid, who else? I mean, a yes’m, straightaway’m maid, not a never-had-it maid, though that too, maybe. Anyhow, now she’d had it, and good. There was a child, a girl. No scandal, I mean these old European families really know about these things. The child, Teresa, was brought up decent in my great-grandmama’s house till her mother got married. And there the family connection ceased, for the man she married was a young Fascist activist whose one aim in life was to emulate his beloved Duce. Come 1939, that was not the kind of connection, however distant, the Bessacarrs were about to admit to. There was a bit of an anxious moment towards the end of the war when it seemed that hubby was wanted by the War Crimes Commission, but some friendly partisans got to him first and he emulated his beloved Duce in death as in life. His wife did the wifely thing and died of grief or TB a few months later. Teresa, born a bastard, was now an orphan.’

  I’d moved back to the Anglo mode, I realized. Perhaps I was linguistically schizoid. What could it mean?

  ‘How do you know all this?’ enquired the Brigadier.

  ‘You mean, ifyou don’t?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘Well, I was fairly close to the family, you see. And I even met Teresa. I was staying with my great-grandmama in the late ‘forties. She’d gone to work there after her parents’ death. She didn’t know of her connection with the family, just thought that great-grandmama was very kind. But, hell, my father had to tell her of course. Never missed a cue for a big scene, did good old dad. I eavesdropped. I was seven, I think. I was accustomed to being at the centre of things at the Villa Colonna and I didn’t take too kindly to being left to my own devices. So I eavesdropped. Teresa’s reaction was very calm. She just repeated the information so that she was sure she’d got it straight. Then ignoring, or perhaps it’s truer to say, indifferent to my father’s invitation to join him in the big scene, she said a quiet grazie and left the house. I followed her. Well, hell, she was the nearest thing to a sister I had. She set off down the road towards Amalfi. When she got there she headed for the Carducci bakehouse and spoke to someone at the door. A few moments later a young man stripped to the waist against the heat came out. His face lit up like a birthday cake when he saw her. She spoke to him. He grabbed her, crushed her, I thought he was trying to kill her, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘It turned out he was one of the partisans who had killed her stepfather who she thought was her real father, so she’d been much troubled to find she fancied him like mad and he likewise. But now it was OK. That’s the trouble with blood, isn’t it? Where there’s a blood link, even though you may hate the bastard you’re linked with, you can’t shrug it off, can you? But now good old dad had set her free.

  ‘She left my great-grandmama’s villa that night. Two weeks later she got married. I represented the Bessacarrs at the wedding! End of story. Except …’

  ‘Except,’ prompted the Brigadier, which was nice of him. Reilly would have let my dramatic pause stretch into bathos.

  ‘Except that the man she married, Bruno Carducci, from being a partisan in the field became a politician in the town, Communist of course, and eventually sought elective office, first at regional level but ultimately as a Deputy, here in Rome. He never made it really big, I gather, and five years ago he died of a heart attack. But his widow, their six children, and their eleven grandchildren still live here in Rome.’

  ‘Well, hello, Uncle,’ said Reilly.

  ‘So you believe that the presence of a large, readymade family might well attract your father to Rome?’ said the Brigadier.

  ‘Like honey to a bear,’ I said.

  ‘And quite clearly, if he makes contact with his daughter, your half-sister, he would do it before he organized the press conference.’

  ‘He won’t be able to stir without fifty journalists afterwards,’ I said.

  ‘So if what you say is true, then the surest way of letting your father know you are in Rome is to let your half-sister know you’re in Rome,’ he mused. ‘You are quite sure of your facts, Mr Swift?’

  He shot me a sharply interrogative glance.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘You see, I’ve got this secret source of information. It’s called the telephone directory. Which reminds me, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better be on my way. I’ve got a luncheon appointment with Signora Teresa Carducci.’

  11

  … et tu, soror …

  My date with Teresa was for twelve-thirty at the Trattoria Angelino ai Fori where the Via Cavour joins the Via dei Fori Imperali, usually on two wheels at a hundred kilometres per hour. I arrived early so I could see her coming and get some idea if she had brought company, but at ten past noon she was already sitting under the vine-wreathed trellis of the al fresco section of the restaurant.

  ‘Hello, Teresa,’ I said.

  She offered her hand. I took it and pulled her to her feet. There weren’t many people here yet and I indicated an empty table nearer the pavement.

  ‘I like the draught from the passing cars,’ I explained.

  She followed me without demur. I ordered a Punt e Mes for her and a Campari-soda for me. I couldn’t stand the drink but I loved the colour. A good-looking boy in his late teens and a New York Mets T-shirt had been studying the menu fixed to one of the trellis posts. Now he came and slumped into a chair at the next table and raised his finger at the waiter.

  I said, ‘Is he with you or is he with me?’

  Teresa said calmly. ‘Vasco, come and meet your uncle.’

  Vasco glanced at me sullenly and made much the same gesture as he’d used to summon the waiter, only this time it was faintly obscene.

  ‘Cute kid,’ I said. ‘He should be useful to keep the flies off the food. How’ve you been, Teresa?’

  I was speaking in English, or rather American. Teresa had spoken the language perfectly well in the ‘forties and clearly she’d kept in practice.

  ‘I am well,’ she said. ‘And you, Tonto? How are you?’

  I was taken aback, and taken back too, to hear the old name. Tonto had been my own infant corruption of Antonio which was the one of my six Christian names my mother preferred. From the start my father had insisted on Lemuel, or Lem in the family circle. I’d gone along with my mother till they sent me away to school and I discovered that ‘Lem’ was regarded as merely strange whereas ‘Tonto’ was quite ridiculous. In the holidays I’d even managed to break Mama of the habit, though she still called me Tonio. But the last time I’d seen Teresa at my great-grandmama’s Campanian villa in 1949, I’d still been Tonto.

  ‘I’m as well as can be expected,’ I said.

  ‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Fit and brown.’
>
  I quite enjoyed the dramatic irony. A man’s got to take his pleasures where he can.

  I held up my glass and studied my half-sister over the lucent pink liquor. She was in her early fifties now and her once smooth black hair was grained with grey and the soft clear pallor of her skin had been roughened and ochred by sun and time. But discipline or exercise, or perhaps the Bessacarr genes which like their artefacts to be lean and rangy, had preserved her from that Latin thickening which is frequently the product of too much pasta and too many children.

  ‘You too, Teresa,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  ‘Is it?’ she said.‘Why?’

  I decided a bit of English obliqueness was the best response here so I smiled enigmatically and said, ‘Shall we order?’

  I waved casually at the waiter, who ignored me. But Vasco waggled his finger again and he came. Teresa confirmed my dietary suspicions by saying that all she wanted was prosciutto e melone. I had saltimbocca with mushrooms and peppers on the principle that I might as well enjoy it while I had the stomach for it.

  ‘What about him? Is it his feeding time?’ I asked, nodding at the youth. Vasco glowered at me and Teresa shook her head. I suppose I was bearing down rather hard on the boy, but I was only reacting to the waves of antagonism emanating from him ever since I arrived. Perhaps he was just being over-protective towards his mother. I made a conciliatory gesture by asking for three glasses when I ordered a bottle of Orvieto. This pleased his mother at least, who sent an admonitory glance along with the glass of wine, which he accepted, albeit grudgingly.

  Service was swift and as I tucked into my veal I thought the moment was ripe to touch upon the reasons for my presence.

  ‘What I want to talk about, Teresa,’ I said, ‘is our father which art in Moscow.’

  This produced a small reaction as she worked it out, but possibly all it meant was that her Catholic upbringing had survived her Communist marriage and she didn’t care for my frivolity. Or it could mean that she’d heard something.