Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  I opened gently the front of Gabriella’s brown suede coat. There was a jagged tear in the right side, nearest me, and the edges of it were dark. Underneath, the black dress was soaking. I waved my arm wildly round at the people to get them to stand back a bit, and they did take one pace away. A motherly looking woman produced a pair of scissors from her handbag and knelt down on Gabriella’s other side. She pointed at me to open the coat again, and when I’d tucked it back between Gabriella’s body and my own she began to cut away the dress. Gentle as she was, Gabriella moved in my arms and gave a small gasping cry.

  ‘Hush,’ I said, ‘my love, it’s all right.’

  ‘Henry …’ She shut her eyes.

  I held her in anguish while the woman with the scissors carefully cut and peeled away a large piece of dress. When she saw what lay underneath her big face filled with overwhelming compassion, and she began to shake her head. ‘Signer,’ she said to me, ‘mi dispiace molto. Molto.’

  I took the clean white handkerchief out of my top pocket, folded it inside out, and put it over the terrible wound. The bullet had smashed a rib on its way out. There were splinters of it showing in the bleeding area just below her breast. The bottom edge of her white bra had a new scarlet border. I gently untucked the coat and put it over her again to keep her warm and I thought in utter agony that she would die before the doctor came.

  A carabiniere in glossy boots and greenish khaki breeches appeared beside us, but I doubt if I could have spoken to him even if he’d known the same language. The crowd chattered to him in subdued voices and he left me alone.

  Gabriella opened her eyes. Her face was grey and wet with the sweat of appalling pain.

  ‘Henry ….’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I can’t … breathe.’

  I raised her a little more so that she was half sitting, supported by my arm and my bent knee. The movement was almost too much for her. Her pallor became pronounced. The short difficult breaths passed audibly through her slackly open mouth.

  ‘Don’t … leave me.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Hush, my dearest love.’

  ‘What … happened?’

  ‘You were shot,’ I said.

  ‘Shot …’. She showed no surprise. ‘Was it … Billy?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see. Don’t talk, my sweet love, don’t talk. The doctor will be here soon.’

  ‘Henry …’. She was exhausted, her skin the colour of death. ‘Henry … I love you.’

  Her eyes flickered shut again, but she was still conscious, her left hand moving spasmodically and restlessly on the ground beside her and the lines of suffering deepening in her face.

  I would have given anything, anything on earth, to have had her whole again, to have taken that pain away.

  The doctor, when at last he came, was young enough to have been newly qualified. He had thick black curly hair and thin clever hands: this was what I most saw of him as he bent over Gabriella, and all I remembered. He looked briefly under my white handkerchief and turned to speak to the policeman.

  I heard the words ‘auto ambulanza’ and ‘pallota,’ and eager information from the crowd.

  The young doctor went down on one knee and felt Gabriella’s pulse. She opened her eyes, but only a fraction.

  ‘Henry …’.

  ‘I’m here. Don’t talk.’

  ‘Mm …’.

  The young doctor said something soothing to her in Italian, and she said faintly ‘Si.’ He opened his case beside him on the ground and with quick skilful fingers prepared an injection, made a hole in her stocking, swabbed her skin with surgical spirit, and pushed the needle firmly into her thigh. Again he spoke to her gently, and again felt her pulse. I could read nothing but reassurance in his manner, and the reassurance was for her, not me.

  After a while she opened her eyes wider and looked at me, and a smile struggled on to her damp face.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. Her voice was so weak as to be scarcely audible, and she was growing visibly more breathless. Nothing was better, except the pain.

  I smiled back. ‘Good. You’ll be all right soon, when they get you to hospital.’

  She nodded a fraction. The doctor continued to hold her pulse, checking it on his watch.

  Two vehicles drove up and stopped with a screech of tyres. A Citroen police car and an ambulance like a large estate car. Two carabinieri of obvious seniority emerged from one, and stretcher bearers from the other. These last, and the doctor, lifted Gabriella gently out of my arms and on to the stretcher. They piled blankets behind her to support her, and I saw the doctor take a look at what he could see of the small hole in her back. He didn’t try to take off her coat.

  One of the policemen said, ‘I understand you speak French.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, standing up. I hadn’t felt the hardness of the pavement until that moment. The leg I’d been kneeling on was numb.

  ‘What are the young lady’s name and address?’

  I told him. He wrote them down.

  ‘And your own?’

  I told him.

  ‘What happened?’ he said, indicating the whole scene with a flickering wave of the hand.

  ‘We were running to catch the tram. Someone shot at us, from back there.’ I pointed down the empty street towards the baker’s.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I didn’t see.’ They were lifting Gabriella into the ambulance. ‘I must go with her,’ I said.

  The policeman shook his head. ‘You can see her later. You must come with us, and tell us exactly what happened.’

  ‘I said I wouldn’t leave her …’ I couldn’t bear to leave her. I took a quick stride and caught the doctor by the arm. ‘Look,’ I said, pulling open my jacket.

  He looked. He tugged my bloodstained shirt out of my trousers to inspect the damage more closely. A ridged furrow five inches long along my lowest rib. Not very deep. It felt like a burn. The doctor told the policeman who also looked.

  ‘All right,’ said the one who spoke French, ‘I suppose you’d better go and have it dressed.’ He wrote an address on a page of his notebook, tore it off and gave it to me. ‘Come here, afterwards.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you your passport with you?’

  I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him, and put the address he’d given me in my wallet. The doctor jerked his head towards the ambulance to get in, and I did.

  ‘Wait,’ said the policeman as they were shutting the door. ‘Did the bullet go through the girl into you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Two bullets. She was hit first, me after.’

  ‘We will look for them,’ he said.

  Gabriella was still alive when we reached the hospital. Still alive when they lifted her, stretcher and all, on to a trolley. Still alive while one of the ambulance men explained rapidly to a doctor what had happened, and while that doctor and another took in her general condition, left my handkerchief undisturbed, and whisked her away at high speed.

  One doctor went with her. The other, a thick set man with the shoulders of a boxer, stayed behind and asked me a question.

  ‘Inglese.’ I shook my head. ‘Non parlo italiano.’

  ‘Sit down,’ he said in English. His accent was thick, his vocabulary tiny, but it was a relief to be able to talk to him at all. He led me into a small white cubicle containing a hard, high narrow bed and a chair. He pointed to the chair and I sat on it. He went away and returned with a nurse carrying some papers.

  ‘The name of the miss?’

  I told him. The nurse wrote it all down, name, address and age, gave me a comforting smile, took the papers away and came back with a trolley of equipment and a message.

  She told it to the doctor, and he translated, as it was for me.

  ‘Telephone from carabinieri. Please go to see them before four.’

  I looked at my watch, blank to the time. It was still less than an hour since Gabriella and I had run for the tram. I had lived severa
l ages.

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘Please now, remove the coat,’ the doctor said.

  I stood up, took off my jacket and slid my right arm out of my shirt. He put two dressings over the bullet mark, an impregnated gauze one and a slightly padded one with adhesive tape. He pressed the tapes firmly into my skin and stood back. I put my arm back into my shirt sleeve.

  ‘Don’t you feel it?’ he said. He seemed surprised.

  ‘No.’

  His rugged face softened. ‘E sua moglie?’

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘I am sorry … is she your wife?’

  ‘I love her,’ I said. The prospect of losing her was past bearing. There were tears suddenly in my eyes and on my cheeks. ‘I love her.’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded, sympathetic and unembarrassed, one of a nation who saw no value in stiff upper lips. ‘Wait here. We will tell you …’ He left the sentence unfinished and went away, and I didn’t know whether it was because he didn’t want to tell me she was dying or because he simply didn’t know enough English to say what he meant.

  I waited an hour I couldn’t endure again. At the end of it another doctor came, a tall grey haired man with a fine boned face.

  ‘You wish to know about Signora Barzini?’ His English was perfect, his voice quiet and very precise.

  I nodded, unable to ask.

  ‘We have cleaned and dressed her wound. The bullet passed straight through her lung, breaking a rib on the way out. The lung was collapsed. The air from it, and also a good deal of blood, had passed into the chest cavity. It was necessary to remove the air and blood at once so that the lung would have room to inflate again, and we have done that.’ He was coolly clinical.

  ‘May I … may I see her?’

  ‘Later,’ he said, without considering it. ‘She is unconscious from the anaesthetic and she is in the post-operative unit. You may see her later.’

  ‘And … the future?’

  He half smiled. ‘There is always danger in such a case, but with good care she could certainly recover. The bullet itself hit nothing immediately fatal; none of the big blood vessels. If it had, she would have died soon, in the street. The longer she lived, the better were her chances.’

  ‘She seemed to get worse,’ I said, not daring to believe him.

  ‘In some ways that was so,’ he explained patiently. ‘Her injury was very painful, she was bleeding internally, and she was suffering from the onset of shock, which as you may know is a physical condition often as dangerous as the original damage.’

  I nodded, swallowing.

  ‘We are dealing with all those things. She is young and healthy, which is good, but there will be more pain and there may be difficulties. I can give you no assurances. It is too soon for that. But hope, yes definitely, there is considerable hope.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said dully, ‘for being so honest.’

  He gave his small smile again. ‘Your name is Henry?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You have a brave girl,’ he said.

  If I couldn’t see her yet, I thought, I would have to go and talk to the police. They had said to be with them by four and it was already twenty past; not that that mattered a jot.

  I was so unused to thinking in the terms of the strange half world into which I had stumbled that I failed to take the most elementary precautions. Distraught about Gabriella, it didn’t even cross my mind that if I had been found and shot at in a distant back street I was equally vulnerable outside the hospital.

  There was a taxi standing in the forecourt, the driver reading a newspaper. I waved an arm at him, and he folded the paper, started the engine and drove over. I gave him the paper with the address the policeman had written out for me, and he looked at it in a bored sort of way and nodded. I opened the cab door and got in. He waited politely till I was settled, his head half turned, and then drove smoothly out of the hospital gates. Fifty yards away he turned right down a tree-lined secondary road beside the hospital, and fifty yards down there he stopped. From a tree one yard from the curb a lithe figure peeled itself, wrenched open the nearest door, and stepped inside.

  He was grinning fiercely, unable to contain his triumph. The gun with the silencer grew in his hand as if born there. I had walked right into his ambush.

  Billy the Kid.

  ‘You took your bloody time, you stinking bastard,’ he said.

  I looked at him blankly, trying to keep the shattering dismay from showing. He sat down beside me and shoved his gun into my ribs, just above the line it had already drawn there.

  ‘Get cracking, Vittorio,’ he said. ‘His effing Lordship is late.’

  The taxi rolled smoothly away and gathered speed.

  ‘Four o’clock we said,’ said Billy, grinning widely. ‘Didn’t you get the message?’

  ‘The police …’ I said weakly.

  ‘Hear that, Vittorio?’ Billy laughed. ‘The hospital thought you were the police. Fancy that. How extraordinary.’

  I looked away from him, out of the window on my left.

  ‘You just try it,’ Billy said. ‘You’ll have a bullet through you before you get the door open.’

  I looked back at him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he grinned. ‘Takes a bit of swallowing, don’t it, for you to have to do what I say. Sweet, I call it. And believe me, matey, you’ve hardly bloody started.’

  I didn’t answer. It didn’t worry him. He sat sideways, the gloating grin fixed like a rictus.

  ‘How’s the bird … Miss what’s her name?’ He flicked his fingers. ‘The girl friend.’

  I did some belated thinking.

  I said stonily, ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Billy gleefully. ‘How terribly sad. Do you hear that, Vittorio? His Lordship’s bit of skirt has passed on.’

  Vittorio’s head nodded. He concentrated on his driving, mostly down side streets, avoiding heavy traffic. I stared numbly at the greasy back of his neck and wondered what chance I had of grabbing Billy’s gun before he pulled the trigger. The answer to that, I decided, feeling its steady pressure against my side, was none.

  ‘Come on now, come on,’ said Billy. ‘Don’t you think I’m clever.’

  I didn’t answer. Out of the corner of my eye I sensed the grin change from triumph to vindictiveness.

  ‘I’ll wipe that bloody superior look off your face,’ he said. ‘You sodding blue-arsed———’

  I said nothing. He jerked the gun hard into my ribs.

  ‘You just wait, your high and mighty Lordship, you just bloody well wait.’

  There didn’t in fact seem to be much else I could do. The taxi bowled steadily on, leaving the city centre behind.

  ‘Hurry it up, Vittorio,’ said Billy. ‘We’re late.’

  Vittorio put his foot down and we drove on away from the town and out into an area of scrubland. The road twisted twice and then ran straight, and I stared in astonishment and disbelief at what lay ahead at the end of it. It was the broad open sweep of Malpensa Airport. We had approached it from the side road leading away from the loading bay, the road the horseboxes sometimes took.

  The D.C.4 stood there on the tarmac less than a hundred yards away, still waiting to take four mares back to England. Vittorio stopped the taxi fifty yards from the loading area. ‘Now,’ said Billy to me, enjoying himself again. ‘You listen and do as you are told, otherwise I’ll put a hole in you. And it’ll be in the breadbasket, not the heart. That’s a promise.’ I didn’t doubt him. ‘Walk down the road, straight across to the plane, up the ramp and into the toilet. Get it? I’ll be two steps behind you, all the way.’

  I was puzzled, but greatly relieved. I had hardly expected such a mild end to the ride. Without a word I opened the door and climbed out. Billy wriggled agilely across and stood up beside me, the triumphant sneer reasserting itself on his babyish mouth.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  There was no one about at that side of the airfield. Four hundred yard
s ahead there were people moving round the main building, but four hundred yards across open tarmac looked a very long way. Behind lay scrubland and the taxi. Mentally shrugging, I followed Billy’s instructions: walked down the short stretch of road, across to the plane, and up the ramp. Billy stalked a steady two paces behind me, too far to touch, too near to miss.

  At the top of the ramp stood Yardman. He was frowning heavily, though his eyes were as usual inscrutable behind the glasses, and he was tapping his watch.

  ‘You’ve cut it very fine,’ he said in annoyance. ‘Another quarter of an hour and we’d have been in trouble.’

  My chief feeling was still of astonishment and unreality. Billy broke the bubble, speaking over my shoulder.

  ‘Yeah, he was dead late coming out of the hospital. Another five minutes, and we’d have had to go in for him.’

  My skin rose in goose pimples. The ride had after all led straight to the heart of things. The pit yawned before me.

  ‘Get in then,’ Yardman said. ‘I’ll go and tell the pilot our wandering boy has at last returned from lunch and we can start back for England.’ He went past us and down the ramp, hurrying.

  Billy sniggered. ‘Move, your effing Lordship,’ he said. ‘Open the toilet door and go in. The one on the left.’ The pistol jabbed against the bottom of my spine. ‘Do as you’re told.’

  I walked the three necessary steps, opened the left hand door, and went in.

  ‘Put your hands on the wall,’ said Billy. ‘Right there in front of you, so that I can see them.’

  I did as he said. He swung the door shut behind him and leaned against it. We waited in silence. He sniggered complacently from time to time, and I considered my blind stupidity.

  Yardman. Yardman transports men. Simon had fought through to a conclusion, where I had only gone halfway. Billy’s smoke screen had filled my eyes. I hadn’t seen beyond it to Yardman. And instead of grasping from Simon’s message and my own memory that it had to be Yardman too, I had kissed Gabriella and lost the thread of it. And five minutes later she had been bleeding on the pavement …

  I shut my eyes and rested my forehead momentarily against the wall. Whatever the future held it meant nothing to me if Gabriella didn’t live.