Traitor's Blood

by Reginald Hill

  I only had a vague notion where Teresa’s apartment was situated and had to hope the driver wouldn’t seek revenge by taking me via an expensive and circuitous route. We swung round the Colosseum, headed down the Via di S. Gregorio and straight across the Piazza di Porta Capena. After that I lost track except that I glimpsed to my left at one point the blackness of open space with some distant ruins dramatically lit and worked out these must be the baths of Caracalla where opera was performed al fresco during the summer.

  My driver confirmed this.

  ‘Aїda,’ he said enthusiastically, though I couldn’t make out whether his enthusiasm was for the music, often inaudible at the back of the amphitheatre, or the spectacle which included great processions, chariots pulled by real horses, and even on occasion a couple of camels.

  Our destination proved to be a quiet, rather gloomy side street somewhere between the Terme di Caracalla and the terminus of the electric railway to Ostia. My driver dropped me at the end of the street, took his money, and accelerated away with what looked to me like the unseemly haste of a coachman who has just deposited a passenger outside Count Dracula’s castle. I couldn’t account for my strange unease but I found myself looking around hopefully for any evidence that my Trinity scholar had indeed stuck to my trail. Naturally there was no sign. Police of any kind are never around when you’d like them.

  I checked the address again and set off down the pavement past a line of ruthlessly parked cars. Ahead I could see the block which I’d worked out must house Teresa’s apartment. It was an uncompromisingly ugly building. Perhaps Communist deputies were warned to eschew conspicuous expenditure. Or perhaps he’d left all his money to the Party and this was the best that Teresa could afford.

  Somewhere behind me I heard a car door slam and suddenly the building didn’t look so ugly after all. Its huge black-painted, brass-studded door looked as attractive but as slow-approaching as that swimming pool wall had done all those years ago. I had to shake off a feeling that my limbs were moving as though cleaving a passage through water, but when my fingertips touched the door I was greatly relieved to find it standing slightly ajar. A list of names behind a semi-opaque celluloid strip revealed dimly that the Carducci apartment was on the second floor. I stepped into a poorly lit, stale-smelling entrance hall with one long dark corridor running off to the rear of the building and a rickety staircase rising wearily to the next landing.

  I went boldly up it. I could hear vague sounds of human habitation, but muffled and distant and as little comforting as the sound of engines when your dinghy is becalmed in thick fog. I didn’t know what kind of welcome Teresa would offer me, but it wouldn’t have to be too warm to make a good impression.

  I found the door of her flat and rang the bell. When there was no reply, I rang it again, then after half a minute essayed a gentle knock. This was real anti-climax, I hadn’t realised how keyed up I’d become in anticipation till this let down. I bent down and squinted at the keyhole. I knew a bit about locks and this didn’t look too difficult to me. With the right implements … but I didn’t have the right implements. I knocked again much more loudly, then started going through my pockets in the hope of finding something I could improvise a pick-lock out of. The best I could come up with was the pocket clip of my rolled-silver pen, a birthday present from Kate which had miraculously survived for fifteen years. I bent it back and stooped to the lock once more, but a few seconds’ probing told me that my pen had been ruined for nothing.

  Behind me a door opened. I looked round. A pair of female eyes gleamed at me through the narrow crack of a door opening on a chain a little way down the corridor. It was shut violently before I could speak. I swore.

  There was only one interpretation a suspicious resident would put on the sight of a stranger poking at the lock of a neighbour’s door. I could only hope she hadn’t a telephone. I crossed over intending to check if I could hear any dialling but another sound intercepted me. A woman’s voice, I thought. Some kind of exclamation cut short, no more than a couple of words which I hadn’t been able to make out. Yet there had been something familiar.

  I waited for more. All that came was a sort of sigh like the last spurt of air from a deflating party balloon, then a diminuendo of what might have been departing footfalls.

  I waited another moment, then set off down the stairs, cautiously at first but suddenly I was running. I slowed down as the hall came into view. Its shadows seemed void of human presence. But when my gaze dropped to ground level, it fell on something which had not been there before. It lay against the wall by the street door, like a bundle of old rags dumped for collection. But these were no rags. I could see pale limbs spidering awkwardly from a slight torso clad in flowered silk. The crazy certainty hit me that I was looking at my dead daughter and I swayed with the pain at it.

  Dead, that was certain. I had seen bodies before and knew that there was no room for life in that collapsed parcel of flesh, but I knelt beside her and turned her over as carefully as though I might still cause pain.

  My hand beneath the breast touched blood but I didn’t flinch as my eyes gave me the good news that this was a woman much older than Angelica. A narrow face, eyes open and staring, nose pinched and white as the blood drained from it.

  It was partly the alteration of death and partly of time, but mainly I think the relief at seeing who it was not that delayed my recognition of who it was.

  Then I cried out in alarm and incomprehension and something of grief too.

  Beyond belief, this dead woman I was cradling in my arms was my former wife, Kate.

  13

  … through the brightness and into the dark …

  I hadn‘t loved Kate for a long time, perhaps never. And in the end, when even Uncle Percy’s diplomatic circumlocutions couldn’t disguise the extent of her bitchy obstructionism of my efforts to maintain contact with Angelica, I’d come to resent and even hate her.

  But now her empty weight in my arms filled me with grief, and the heavier weight of my awareness that somehow I must be responsible for this squalid, violent end to her life filled me with guilt.

  But slowly rising and blanketing all other feelings there came fear. If this had happened to Kate, what did it imply for Angelica?

  I laid her down, my concern for my daughter allowing me to look at the body more dispassionately. She had been stabbed cleanly and expertly with that killing blow which sweeps up beneath the ribcage and into the heart. A small black leather handbag was twisted round her right shoulder in the recommended Italian anti-snatch style. I began to remove it, hoping it might contain some clue. Distantly I could hear police sirens, but they were a common night sound in Rome. No one knew about Kate’s death yet, except the killer, and he was not likely to have rung the police.

  Nevertheless I found myself hurrying. As the handbag came loose, my knee touched a metal object. I picked it up. It was a bloodstained stiletto, that most traditional of Italian weapons.

  The sirens were nearer, but not yet near enough to concern me, particularly as I still reckoned they could have nothing to do with me. What I’d forgotten of course was Teresa’s neighbour who reckoned she’d seen a burglar in the act of burgling. And what I couldn’t foresee was that a motor-bike carabiniere would arrive silently in advance of his noisy car-bound colleagues.

  The huge black door was flung open. Light spilled in and with it the policeman, looking in his crash helmet and broad goggles like an extra from Star Wars. What I looked like to him, crouched over a body with a handbag in one hand and a bloodstained knife in the other, was obvious. He pointed his pistol at my head and screamed at me not to move.

  If I’d thought about it I’d have seen it was good advice. Clearly no one in his right mind and a horizontal position would even think of attacking an armed Italian policeman, vertical, in a state of considerable excitement.

  So I didn’t think but kicked the door shut with my outstretched foot. The crash and the renewal of darkness startled him but not a
s much as the stiletto point which I swung up at his wrist. I missed, but it gouged a deep channel along his knuckles which were tight around the pistol grip, and drove the pistol itself upward a milli-second before he pressed the trigger and sent a bullet ricocheting like a squash ball round that narrow hallway.

  I think by this time there was also a thought bouncing around somewhere in the area that this perhaps wasn’t such a good idea, but I didn’t wait to have it.

  I went down that dark passage to the rear with the speed of a man testing Zeno’s theory of Achilles and the tortoise. But the expected hail of bullets didn’t write their refutation in my back. The cop must have dropped his gun. I hoped his right hand was too painful to pick it up.

  On the other hand … My mind might be eschewing thought but it couldn’t get away from bad jokes. This corridor seemed endless and a cop didn’t need to be ambidextrous or have night vision to hit a fleeing target in a straight run between narrow walls.

  Then the darkness ahead thickened, solidified. I’d reached the end. There was a door. I hit it without any slackening of speed. If it had been locked, I’d have bounced off it nearly all the way back to the carabiniere. But Kate’s assassin must have come this way too and hadn’t paused to turn a key.

  The door burst open and I debouched into a narrow paved courtyard. I knew it was paved because I went sprawling and my hands and knees left large deposits on the hard surface. I rolled over and looked up at a narrow strip of velvety sky, diamanté with a thousand stars and criss-crossed with cords from which drooped a flag-message of defeat.

  They were clothes-lines, I realized, linking the rear of Teresa’s apartment building to an identical one at the other side of the courtyard.

  And if identical …

  I headed straight across, tried a door, it was locked, tried another, locked also, and was just trying a third when the policeman’s pistol opened up behind me.

  How close he was I don’t know, nor whether the third door was unlocked or not. But I was through it and running down yet another dark corridor with a nightmarish feeling growing on me that at the end of it I was going to find Kate’s body once more and the whole ghastly cycle would be run again.

  I even looked when I reached the entrance hall, but the floor was mercifully empty. I burst out into the open air with the sobbing relief of one who feels he’s reached sanctuary, and for a moment the quiet and stillness of this new street supported the delusion.

  Then a police car came planing round the corner, siren pulsating and lights flashing, like a mobile disco.

  It hardly seemed worthwhile running, but I ran. For a man with a cancer on his stomach, and a dead wife on his conscience, and a lost daughter on his mind, I suppose I ran very well. But I knew, as Zeno knew all along, that to stop Achilles catching the tortoise you’d need a deus ex machina.

  He came on cue, not out of a machine, but on one, a Lambretta to be precise. He came towards me, swung the scooter round and watched my approach over his shoulder. On his scholarly face was the mild impatience of one who fears he may be late for a tutorial.

  He was already moving as I reached him and I leapt on the pillion like an Indian brave mounting his pony in those old westerns they don’t make any more.

  As far as I was concerned, that was that. If gods on machines couldn’t rescue mere earthlings, who could? I clung with my arms tight round my Trinity scholar’s waist and my head pressed into his shoulder. I even closed my eyes and enjoyed the rush of air against my head.

  Not that it rushed all that fast. The disadvantage of this machine was its relatively low speed, especially with a passenger. The advantage was manœuvrability, especially with a rider who didn’t care for the basic laws of traffic or of physics.

  There must have been plenty of police cars close to the scene for now they seemed to come dropping out of the sky like seagulls at kitchen-refuse dumping time on the Queen Elizabeth. We twisted and turned and used as much sidewalk as road, but still the lights flashed, the sirens wailed.

  Then suddenly we were in darkness and moving across grass. My scholar cut his engine and dimmed his lights. For a second, comparatively, the darkness seemed Stygian and the silence complete. But then ahead of us I saw a luminescence against which was etched a range of majestic ruins. And I heard a mingling of voices and music swelling up in glorious harmony.

  Heaven, I thought. They got us.

  Alas, no, I realized a moment later. It wasn’t heaven though as near it as, in the ears of many Italians, you can get.

  Verdi.

  We were somewhere in the park which houses the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and over there several thousand people were listening entranced to the famous al fresco performance of Aida.

  My straining ears caught the melody now. It was the triumphal chorus ‘Gloria all’ Egitto’ from Act Two. The victorious Egyptians were returning to their ecstatic reception. And now the trumpets were fanfaring the visual highlight of the production, the entry of Radames in a chariot accompanied by mounted warriors.

  It was a moment to savour here in the warm darkness of a perfect Roman evening.

  An icicle of white light was suddenly thrust sideways through that balmy air. Its pallor touched and chilled us. There was a confusion of whatever passes in Italian hunting circles for view halloos! And my scholar accelerated away with such violence that I was almost dislodged and left sprawling.

  We went without lights now so perhaps it was the light ahead that attracted him. Or perhaps beneath that academic brow there had always lurked Italian fantasies of rapturous acclaim at La Scala. Or perhaps I simply dreamt the whole episode.

  But it seemed to me that for one long moment we actually found ourselves weaving among the scattering column of Egyptian troops, finally drawing level with a horse-drawn chariot and just pipping him on to a broad floodlit stage before a vast dark amphitheatre. Something like that I saw in my brief open-eyed flashes, though I’m pretty certain the rapturous applause from the thousands of spectators was simply a hysterical delusion. Then, like that allegoric sparrow in Edwin’s banqueting-hall, we were through the brightness and out into the dark again.

  Perhaps the Pope would work us into his next address.

  It was soon after this that the scholar and I parted company. He turned and spoke. I didn’t catch what he said but in his movement he loosened my grip round his waist and a violent piece of cornering did the rest. As I sat and watched him disappear, I thought it was a choice between accident and self-interest (his). Then his lights came on and immediately other lights erupted all over the place, and the sirens mingled once more with the soaring cadences of Verdi.

  The rest was easy. I got up and brushed myself down. I was going to be tie-dyed with bruises in the morning and my hands were badly grazed. But my clothes had suffered only a couple of minor tears and I was quite passable enough to mingle with the crowds as they spilled out towards the bars at the interval. I bought myself two large scotches worth of receipts and by dint of waving them at the bar-boy in company with the thousand-lire note got immediate service. I poured the two drinks into one plastic glass, held it up, muttered my old childish pre-medicine incantation, ‘Look out lips, look out gums, look out stomach, here it comes,’ and downed it in one.

  Most of the crowd began drifting back to the auditorium and I drifted with them. Finding a seat was easy. The first two acts with all their splendid choruses and spectacle play to a full house. But a substantial number of native spectators at Caracalla opt to spend the second half boozing and talking. They’d have preferred the old days at the Colosseum, where no one ever dreamt of following the gladiators with a team of formation dancers.

  I sat in the dark and tried to let the whisky and the music fill my mind to the exclusion of all else. I wanted to think of neither the future nor the past—the future, because I was empty of ideas to make it anything but disastrous, and the past because that was where Kate belonged, now and forever. I’d got into the habit these many years of trying
to avoid confrontation with my own emotions. At first it had been because I feared their violence. But at some point, God knows where, I suspected it changed to a fear that they would no longer be there. To think of Kate and find I needed to primp up a proper emotion was something I didn’t want to risk finding out about myself. I even half suspected there was something rather contrived about my determination to see Angelica again when I learned I was dying. What the hell did I have to do with a young woman who physically, biologically and mentally must have changed almost beyond recognition from the child I had known? If I’d really thought about it, could I have come?

  Perhaps not. But I couldn’t have borne finding out I didn’t want to come.

  And now things had changed. Now it was no longer a case of a lousy father conning himself he had to take a sentimental farewell of an indifferent daughter.

  Now Angelica was in trouble, possibly in danger, and needed my help.

  I’d been stupid to let myself be side-tracked by the Brigadier and all this talk of my father. What did my father matter any more? He had warped my life for years. I was insane to let him warp my death too. If the world wanted to listen to the malicious paranoiac lies of an elderly egocentric traitor, let it listen. Even killing him wouldn’t stop the lies. If the Russians wanted them told, they could find any number of mouths eager to tell them.

  All my remaining energies must now be dedicated to finding and protecting Angelica.

  And as if this resolution required all my strength and therefore drew forces away from all those strong barriers my will had set up, suddenly an image of Kate flashed into my mind, Kate as I first knew her, long auburn tresses shaken over her shoulders, restless brown eyes, mobile mouth with lips wryly twisted as she complained humorously about the mandarins of Whitehall; and I surprised my neighbours by my emotional reaction to the entombment of Aïda and Radames, as I buried my face in my hands and sobbed.

  14