October Men

by Anthony Price

  “Follow him?” Villari replied casually over his shoulder. “We shall let the police follow him. That’s what they’re paid to do.”

  “Then what—shall we do?”

  Villari stopped suddenly beside a monstrous sports car parked in defiance of the sign above it. Boselli’s spirits sank at the sight of it. It was so exactly the sort of car he would have imagined for this sort of man that it did not surprise him, yet its shocking disregard of common prudence was dismaying nevertheless—a tank or an armoured carrier would have been hardly less ostentatious.

  His reaction must have been evidently headlined across his face, for Villari grinned at him mischievously across the blinding roof— at least the prospect of physical (as opposed to mental) activity appeared to purge his bullying streak and dissolve his petulance, anyway. When he spoke there was almost no cutting edge in his voice.

  “Don’t panic, little Boselli—this is the easy part. The Englishman drives like an old woman on the way to Sunday Mass—I could catch him if he was already halfway to the coast. But it isn’t necessary. The police will follow him in their car, and we will follow them in ours, if I can make myself drive slowly enough. So stop worrying and get in.”

  Boselli clambered awkwardly into the low-slung black leather bucket seat, first overawed and then abruptly slammed back into the padding by the Ferrari’s explosive acceleration.

  Then, as he gathered his wits, all thought of the problems and difficulties ahead was submerged in the heady pleasures of speed and power and opulence: this—the snarl of horsepower and the wide bonnet stretching ahead of him away into the distance—was the very stuff of his own private dreams. If success and promotion ever came, if patience and application were ever rewarded, if merit and intelligence were recognised, it would be thus and with this that it would be celebrated, not with the petty family aspirations of his wife and her crow of a mother and that rapacious crew of nonentities from Viterbo who had pinned their hopes of comfortable old age on the clever civil servant their only sister had married…

  “Chase has joined the Via del Mare—Chase has joined the Via del Mare—Over.”

  The crackling voice jerked him back to reality, and a reality in which there could be no more day-dreaming if he was to pass the tests ahead.

  Villari threw a small switch. “Acknowledge—over and out.” He threw the switch again and smiled almost conspiratorially at Boselli. “You see? Nothing at all to worry about. Nothing to do but talk.”

  The Tiber sparkled momentarily in a gap on his left and then was gone as the accompanying traffic fell away from them, unwilling to match their insolent speed. That boast at least had substance—and substance which aroused Boselli’s reluctant admiration: whatever the Clotheshorse’s defects, he used the road like a prince in his own territory, disdainful of laws made for lesser men.

  But a prince who was going out of his way to be affable to one lesser man now: patently Villari had at last recognised the need to work with him—or at least to tap that “special knowledge” he had hinted at. Only the working would be on Villari’s terms, with Villari leading and getting the credit. The nuance of command had been clear in those last words—“nothing to do but talk” meant that he must now spill all his hard-won information on pain of displeasure. “It rather looks like the Lido, then,” he began cautiously. “There is nowhere else to go from the autostrada unless they are heading for the airport. And as they have left the baby and the au pair, I would think—“

  But Villari was not prepared to accept this conversational gambit.

  “And I would think,” he interrupted, “that you have not quite finished telling me why the General wants this man Ruelle dead.”

  Boselli gestured vaguely. “They are old enemies, signore. From the war. …”

  Villari looked at him quickly, unsmiling now. “Don’t start playing your little games with me again—I know they were in the war together, and I know the General doesn’t love Reds. Answer the question.”

  Boselli pretended to give in obsequiously. “No, of course—I beg your pardon, signore! It was in 1943, just at the beginning of the— period of co-belligerency, at the time the Anglo-Americans landed at Salerno, that this thing happened. There was a German column crossing the Appennines from Foggia, and the General and Ruelle joined their forces to block the road … or they were supposed to join, that is.”

  “Go on!”

  “Well, I do not know the full details of it, but Ruelle double-crossed him, that is what it amounts to … and he did it cleverly, so that it looked like a misunderstanding. Half the General’s men were cut off without a chance—and the Germans did not take any prisoners, either.”

  Villari grunted. “Typical Red trick—the scum!” The Clotheshorse was probably summing it up more accurately than he knew, Boselli reflected. Ruelle had undoubtedly fought the Germans in his own savage way; but at that stage in the war he was already looking ahead to the struggle for power in postwar Italy, and he had merely used the Germans to weaken his future political opponents, who would be needing men like the fire-eating Bersaglieri major he had betrayed.

  “Yes,” he nodded, “and the General guessed as much, but there wasn’t anything he could do at the time.”

  “And afterwards? He let the scum get away with it? That doesn’t sound like our Raffaele!”

  It was typical of Villari that he understood nothing of the realities of the postwar period.

  “He had even less chance then, actually. After the war, you remember, signore, the Government sent him with the negotiators to London—he had fought beside the Anglo-Americans and they had given him one of their medals. And then he went with the arms commission to Washington. By the time he returned it was too late to settle such a score without causing great scandal.” He shrugged. “The Bastard was too important in the Party hierarchy by then—that’s what they call him, by the way: The Bastard.”

  “That makes two of them—our Raffaele’s something of a bastard too when the fit takes him.”

  “Ah—but Ruelle really is one. I mean, he was born out of wedlock. The story is that his father was one of the English soldiers who fought alongside our army on the Piave in the Great War. Apparently he left Ruelle’s mother in the lurch, or maybe he was killed in the Vittorio Veneto offensive—no one knows for sure. But Ruelle was born in Treviso in 1919, anyway, and his mother called him George, after the Englishman. And that’s all his father left him, just the name. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t like the English.”

  “He doesn’t like ‘em?”

  “He hates them.”

  “And yet he calls himself ‘George’?”

  “Yes, he does.” It was curious how Villari was echoing the same questions he had put to Frugoni; and in default of that missing section of the Ruelle dossier he could only advance Frugoni’s replies. “Maybe it helps him to keep on hating—a constant reminder. He was a good hater in the old days, so it seems, anyway… Perhaps this other Englishman had better look to his back.” Boselli watched the handsome face carefully. “Unless we are busy making something out of nothing, of course…”

  But there was no hint of change in the aristocratic blankness of Villari’s expression, nor any suggestion that he intended to give anything back in return for all the information he had received. He was not simply ignoring Boselli, but even more simply Boselli had ceased to exist for him while he digested what he had been told.

  Boselli turned back towards the shimmering highway ahead. They were out of the city now, almost magically—he had been too busy answering carefully, playing his answers one by one as frugally as he knew how, to notice how fast they had been travelling. Now they were eating up the kilometres to the sea even more rapidly, rushing to whatever rendezvous lay ahead. For this was not square one again, that at least he knew without Villari having to let slip one helpful word. It had been there from the start, even in the man’s assumed nonchalance in the cafe: if there had really been nothing to report it would have been scorn, or sa
rcasm, or even anger waiting for him there, or certainly something very different from that first guarded hostility. Whereas when he had revealed that he had something to offer, Villari had been eager to take it—eager enough to affect that sickening contemptuous jocularity…

  So one thing was sure: they had staked out Audley’s apartment on the Aventine and against all reasonable expectation it had quietly paid off. He had been right—it no longer mattered for what ridiculous reason; nobody knew about that anyway and looking back on it he felt that in fairness to himself it had been logic and instinct as much as any other consideration which had prompted him to suspect that the English were up to something.

  He had been right. He hugged the knowledge to himself triumphantly. And Villari had been wrong: that was almost as satisfying.

  And he had been right against the odds and in the very presence of the General: that was the sort of thing he needed to establish himself, exactly the sort of thing! He had shown his quality in a way which would be noted: not a man of facts and figures, little more than a clerk, but a man of decision and discernment…

  “Chase is turning off main highway,” the crackling voice on the radio took him unawares again. “Turning right—sign reads … Ostia Antica—do you read me?—Ostia Antica.”

  “Check—Ostia Antica.” Villari flicked the switch and frowned at Boselli. “What is there at Ostia Antica?”

  “The excavations.”

  “Excavations?”

  “It was the port of ancient Rome, signore,” said Boselli patiently. The Clotheshorse was clearly pig-ignorant of everything that did not concern him, but that was only to be expected. “It was the imperial port until the river course changed. I suppose it silted up first. And there would have been the malaria from the marshes too—“

  “I didn’t ask for a history lesson. I know what the place was,” Villari snapped. “But what are the excavations like?”

  Boselli scratched his head. The truth was he had never visited Ostia Antica, although he did not care to admit it just now.

  “Just ruins.” He shrugged. That was safe enough: the past was always in ruins, and one ruin was much like another. “Just ruins. You can see them alongside the road to the Lido—I’m sure you must have seen them sometime.”

  “I do not go to the Lido.” Villari contemptuously relegated the city’s beaches to the city’s rabble. “Do the tourists go there?”

  “To the Lido?” Boselli gazed at him stupidly.

  “To the ruins, you fool—are they crawling with foreign tourists?”

  “I—I suppose so,” Boselli floundered, irritated with himself for having misunderstood the question and also for not having admitted from the start that he knew nothing about the Ostian excavations. But far more irritating was the realisation that Villari had some idea of why the Englishman was making this trip and that he was sitting on his suspicions out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

  Crawling with tourists? He stifled his annoyance and concentrated on the vision the phrase conjured up: of the Trevi submerged and the Forum overrun by hordes of sunbeaten Americans and English and Germans, their cameras endlessly clicking and their dog-eared Blue Guides clutched in sweaty hands.

  So Audley had come to meet someone or to be met under cover of such crowds; an old trick, but one not much to Villari’s taste evidently.

  “Yes,” he smiled at the Clotheshorse maliciously, “I’m sure it will be crawling with foreigners, signore.”

  VII

  BUT OSTIA ANTICA was not crawling with tourists, native or foreign. It was not crawling with anything at all, except heat and solitude.

  Boselli stood miserably in the shadow of an umbrella pine just beyond the entrance building, fanning himself uselessly with the official guidebook, waiting for Villari to finish with the policeman who had stayed behind on the end of the radio. Presumably his partner had gone in after the Englishman and his wife, though there was no sign of them down the tree-lined avenue which led to the ruins.

  There was, indeed, no sign of anyone: either it was too hot, or perhaps because of the heat the nearby sea had proved an irresistible counterattraction for all those sightseers who would otherwise have made their pilgrimage to the forgotten port of Rome. But whatever the reason, he could not have been more wrong in his forecast.

  In fact he had been so wrong that Villari had not bothered to rub it in; he had merely grunted derisively at the two cars in the parking lot and had ordered Boselli to purchase the guidebook and wait for him inside, and although Boselli would have dearly loved to hear what the policeman in the car had to say, he had been glad to scuttle off with his tail between his legs, away from the danger of further humiliation and the hot asphalt of the car park under his thin-soled city shoes.

  He knew that he ought now to be using these precious moments to familiarise himself with the town’s layout, but for the life of him he couldn’t, for the place overawed and disquieted him in a way he had not expected.

  For he had been wrong also about the nature and extent of the remains. Those few hurried glances from his own driver’s seat on the family excursions to the Lido had not prepared him for the actuality: there was much more above ground here than could be glimpsed from the roadside, which must have been merely outlying structures far beyond the town’s perimeter.

  Not just above ground—he flicked quickly through the illustrations in the back of the little book—but high above ground. There was an absolute labyrinth of buildings standing to the first and even to the second storey here. The problem of tracking down anyone, and of doing so in this emptiness without making themselves obvious, would be formidable.

  Clearly, this must have been the shrewd Englishman’s idea in coming to such a place. The streets of Rome provided cover for enemies as well as friends; here it would be possible to accept or decline a contact with far greater certainty of having done the wiser thing.

  It was not the Englishman’s cunning that disturbed him—the man was enough of a professional to be wary and amateur enough to be I unconventional at the same time in his choice of a rendezvous. It was just pure bad luck that he had fixed a place which aroused the deepest feeling of unease in Boselli’s soul.

  Ordinarily he was not subject to such odd notions. He was a city-dweller born and bred, with a natural contempt and suspicion for the peasant countryside—he knew those gut reactions of old, and allowed for them. But this place was neither city nor country; nor, without the colourful crowds of tourists and the surrounding noise and bustle of a busy city, was it like the antiquities he was used to back in Rome. It was much more like a bombed and plague-emptied town, something which had been alive yesterday and was newly-dead—a corpse unburied, rather than an old skeleton disinterred … an obscenity. No sooner had he formulated that thought than he was overtaken by embarrassment with it: it was the sort of mental absurdity he would never have dared admit to his colleagues and for which his wife invariably prescribed a laxative. Even the unshockable Father Patrick, his favourite Dominican, had warned him against it: too much imagination, Pietro—a good measure of it is a great blessing, but too much is a weakness…

  “Give me the guide, then—wake up!”

  Villari whipped the book out of his hand, flipped it open, ripped out the folded map from it and thumped it back into his possession before he knew what was happening.

  “Hmm…” Villari scanned the map, frowning at its complexity. Then he turned to the second policeman, who had accompanied him through the entrance, running a slender finger over the paper. “You go ahead along the main street—the Decumano Massimo here—until you spot Depretis. Then you wipe your face with your handkerchief— I assume you’ve got a handkerchief?”

  A muscle twitched in the detective’s cheek, high up and very briefly, as he nodded. He was careful not to look at Boselli, who knew nevertheless with certainty that the Clotheshorse, running true to form, had made another lifelong enemy in the last five minutes. It might not be wholly deliberate now—it might have start
ed as a defence designed to keep inferiors in their place and become second nature over the last few years—but without doubt Villari had perfected the art of being offensive.

  “Very well. You will go on past the theatre—there—“ the finger stabbed the map “—and wait for me to catch up if the theatre is a high building and there is a stairway on it. If there is then I shall climb it and you will wait until I have seen what there is to see—is that understood?”

  Again the detective nodded.

  “Then you will continue down the Decumano Massimo—that is, unless I wipe my face—as far as the Porta Marina.”

  “And if I do not see him by then, signore?” the detective inquired neutrally.

  Villari stared at him for a moment, as though slightly surprised by the question. “Then you will come back, and I will tell you what to do,” he said coolly. “But the important thing for you to remember now is that you are no longer interested in the Englishman—you and Depretis. It is his contact you are interested in: who he is and where he goes—do you understand? Once Depretis is spotted, then you come back here and cover the entrance. When the contact comes out Depretis will be following him, and then it’s up to you both not to lose him. Now—move!”

  The detective took one last glance at the map, and then turned away down the avenue without a word. As he went he slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie; he did not, thought Boselli, look very much like a student of antique remains, but neither did he look like a policeman, although there was a shiny, threadbare air surrounding him which proclaimed the minor and underpaid government functionary—a guide employed by the Ministry of Public Instruction, maybe, nosing the excavations in search of gratuities.

  He watched the thickset figure dwindle among the pines, then faced Villari. “And what do you wish me to do, signore?”

  “Watch him,” Villari nodded down the avenue. “And keep from under my feet if anything happens.”