by Greenberg
“Occasionally. Also in Geneva. On the Riviera. The Isle of Crete. I like a change of scenery.”
“And the palazzo?”
“I’ve rented it for the night, thrown out all the paying guests, and reserved it for us.”
“You’re a dear boy, Peter.” She leaned over and kissed him.
Above them the sky spread up into eternity, and the stars looked down.
“Peter?”
“Yes.”
“It must have cost a mint.”
“Yes.”
“You Americans!”
“Yes, but I never go to America, except to visit,” Baron said, smiling.
“An internationalist?”
“Something like that.”
“Peter.”
“Yes?”
“All that money. Where does it come from?”
He smiled and looked at her. “What an embarassing question. Where do babies come from, carissima? The dollars come from the birds and the bees.”
“You have style,” she said.
“We’ll try it out together later,” Baron promised.
She laughed throatily, expectantly.
They were climbing a country hill outside Naples. Not a single light was visible in the emptiness of space around them. The smell of open fields drifted over them.
“Peter. Can you stop a minute?”
He turned to her questioningly.
“That cheap champagne. I think I may be sick.”
“Sorry.” Baron slowed the Lancia and pulled over to the side of the road. He snapped off the lights. They sat there a moment in silence. Somewhere near crickets chirped. A night animal scuttled through the brush.
“I feel better now,” Elena said weakly. “Let’s just sit.”
Peter Baron heard the sputter of a motor scooter on the road behind them. In the rearview mirror, he could see one glowing head lamp hurtling through the darkness like a fiery eye of an errant cyclops. A Vespa passed them noisily and turned off the main road into a side lane twenty feet ahead. They were parked on the slope of a hill, looking down into a wide, silent valley.
The narrow beam of the Vespa’s head lamp wavered slowly down the dirt road. A young man was driving. The road wound across a rickety wooden bridge over a stream, and then into a clump of trees before passing up the slope of the next hill.
As Peter and the Countess watched idly, they saw the head lamp of the Vespa pick out what seemed to be a barricade of empty barrels in the middle of the road. To one side, a tree was leaning down at an angle, as if the wind had bowled it over.
“That’s strange,” Baron mused.
“What, darling?”
“The barricade.”
They both watched as the young man stopped the Vespa and alighted. In the dim glow of the head lamp, he stepped across a tangle of rope which lay on the road’s surface.
Peter Baron’s jaw dropped. Then he straightened in his seat, instantly alert. He pounded frantically on the Lancia’s horn. Its bleat echoed in the night.
“What are you doing?” the Countess asked.
“The fool! Doesn’t he see?”
“See what?”
The tree by the side of the road straightened with lashing swiftness, as if a rope which had held it pulled down had been released. Simultaneously, the tangle of ropes under the man’s feet gathered themselves together and whipped up around him, forming an enormous net. It drew together at the top, and hoisted him in the air, so that he was caught like a fish.
He hung there trapped, suspended from the tree top.
“My God!” gasped the Countess, as if she could not believe her eyes.
“A varmint trap!” Peter Baron murmured. “I wonder . . .”
Instantly he pressed the Lancia starter, and flicked on the headlights. He drove swifily to the turn-off and onto the dirt road.
“What happened?” the Countess asked.
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Baron said. “But I intend to find out.”
“That man – he’s hanging in the air! In a net!” She stifled a hysterical laugh. “It’s almost funny!”
The Lancia sped down the dusty dirt road toward the wooden bridge. As they passed over the planks, the bridge almost shook itself to pieces.
“Look!” The Countess was pointing upward into the sky. “Peter, I’m afraid!”
Baron lifted his eyes from the road and saw an enormous black shape hovering over the clump of trees, high in the air. There were no lights inside the mass, only a bluish glow. Then, as he squinted, Peter made out the shape of a helicopter, painted, black, without markings, and running without navigation lights. It was hovering like a hummingbird over the man-trap in the tree.
A chain appeared at the open hatch of the helicopter, lowering a jagged grappling hook down toward the tree. Expertly, the grappling hook engaged the top of the fish net and began to draw it upward. A slip knot in the net unfastened, and the net came loose from the tree. The hook drew the man upward toward the helicopter cabin.
Baron slammed the Lancia to a stop behind the parked Vespa and jumped out. As he did so there was a harsh report in the air. A thin pinpoint of rifle flame stabbed out from the helicopter. Near Baron’s feet a bullet cracked into the earth.
“They’re shooting!” he cried to the Countess. “Get down on the floor of the car and don’t move!”
“Yes, Peter. Where are you going?”
“When somebody shoots at me, I shoot back!”
He rushed to the boot and tore it open, removing his Winchester. He raised it to his shoulder and aimed at the nose of the helicopter, firing three times. One shot splintered a part of the Plexiglas bubble, but the other two missed.
Man and net disappeared into the interior of the helicopter. The snout of an ugly machine pistol protruded from the chopper’s nose. Bullets popped up dirt all around Baron. One hit the Lancia. The Countess uttered a muffled shriek.
Baron cursed and ran toward the cover of the trees to draw fire from the Lancia. The helicopter hovered overhead, descending slightly. Peter dashed through the aura of light from the Vespa’s head lamp. A bullet almost hit him in the shoulder, but passed instead into the trunk of a tree behind him. He plunged into the densest part of the wood, whirling to take a bead on the helicopter.
The machine pistol chattered, spraying leaves and bark around him. He fired back. The ’copter came down lower, its nose toward him, like a mechanical dinosaur in some futuristic nightmare. Baron backed down into the undergrowth as best he could.
He fired again. The Plexiglas starred. A voice cursed in a guttural, Balkan tongue. Instantly the chopper rose into the air and vanished over the trees, heading eastward overland.
Peter Baron ran out into the open, firing at the aircraft several times. The ’copter lowered quickly over the brow of the far hill and vanished into the darkened sky.
Baron investigated the Vespa briefly for signs of identification, found none, and snapped off the head lamp. Then he returned to the Lancia.
“Are you all right?” he asked Elena, who was sitting in the seat now, sobbing.
“Yes. What was that all about?”
Baron packed the Winchester back into the boot. “I haven’t the vaguest.” He stared thoughtfully into the eastern sky. Could it be . . . ?
He shook his head. He did not want to speculate. Tonight had been set aside especially for recreation.
He climbed in and slammed the door. “To the palazzo, Contessa?”
“Please, Peter,” she said, trembling against him. He put his arm around her and squeezed her tightly. With his nose in the fragance of her hair, his eyes slowly lifted to the sky again.
He wondered who the man in the net could be. And he wondered who could be flying illegally in an unmarked, unlighted helicopter over Southern Italy – and why.
His neck itched. That was a bad sign. It meant he would be at work soon.
2
DEEP-SLEEP
The shrill tone alternated between high C
and high D. It resembled the beep-beep of sonar on a submarine. In a way, the tones were the beginning of a great and profound symphony – except that no notes past the first two were ever to be heard.
Peter Baron shook himself awake and opened his eyes. On the ceiling shimmered the bright reflection of water. The pink palazzo had a tiny lake outside, he remembered. Also he remembered the Countess. Turning, he saw her bare, golden shoulder peeping from the downy blue coverlet. Her hair fanned out from her head.
He sighed deeply and Contessa Elena Rondi turned toward him, opening her sleep-drenched eyes. Her hands crept out to him. Quickly he was in her arms again, enflooded in warmth and comfort and sensuality.
But still the high C and the high D obtruded on his consciousness.
Encircling her waist with one arm, he reached behind him for the miniature radio-telephone, shaped like a cigarette case, which he always carried. He pushed it down behind his pillow where its tone was somewhat more muffled.
Elena giggled and kissed him.
The beeping continued.
Baron lifted the radio-telephone and put it down on the floor. Then he covered it with the bolster from the bed.
The beeping diminished somewhat in intensity, but not in zealousness.
He kissed the countess deeply and she turned to him. She smiled and closed her eyes, wrapping her arms tightly about him.
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
Very reluctantly, Peter Baron emerged from the pleasures of the boudoir and retrieved the radio-telephone from beneath the bolster where it continued its repulsive ululations. On the edge of the bed he sat observing it sourly. He pressed the button and the ignominious beeping ceased.
“Baron.”
“Peter, this is Duke Farinese,” a clipped Oxford voice said.
“Obviously.”
“Emergency. Repeat, emergency. Chadwick is here. He demands a meeting.”
“Chadwick?”
“Oren Chadwick. The Yank.”
“Where is ‘here’?”
“Capri.”
“I thought you were at the house in Geneva?”
“I returned to Italy yesterday. Where are you?”
“Near Avellino.”
“When can you be here?”
“Soon.”
“Come then, immediately.”
“Of course.”
“Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
Peter Baron replaced the miniature radio-telephone, yawned, stretched, and stood. He reached out and yanked on the old-fashioned silken bell cord at the head of the bed.
“Darling,” a drowsy voice asked from the tumbled bed. “What are you doing?”
“Ringing for breakfast. I must be leaving you.”
“Beast.”
“Of the lowest order.”
“Will you have breakfast with me, at least?”
He lifted her chin and kissed her lips. “Sorry. Business, you know.”
She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. The bedsheet had tumbled away from her bosom. She adjusted it slowly.
Peter Baron smiled. “Fresh strawberries flown in from Palmyra. Melon from Damascus. Eggs shirred in 1907 Cognac. Coffee roasted yesterday in Lebanon and ground this morning. Fresh cream from cow’s milk.”
“Luxury,” sighed the Countess. “And you have to miss it.”
“I’ll make do without the breakfast,” Baron said. “But I’ll never be able to make do without you, carissima.”
“Darling.”
By Lancia Peter Baron sped to the dock at Naples and there climbed aboard his launch, La Bonne Chance. Soon he was tying up at the small jetty at his villa on the far side of Capri. Now called Villa di Pietro, it had originally belonged to a fascist millionaire who sold it off to pay debts after Mussolini departed the scene in 1945 with his heels up and his head down in that famed square in Milan.
Peter Baron leaped from the launch and started up the long sandstone steps. He could see Il Duca Francesco di Farinese standing at the top of them in the courtyard of the villa, waiting for him.
Farinese was a Sicilian by birth, but looked completely unlike an ordinary Sicilian. Instead of dark hair he had hair of a strange lemon-yellow color, which bleached albino white in the sunshine. Instead of a squat athletic body, he had a trim, lithe physique. Instead of a rasping accent he spoke English with the purest Oxford inflection. Il Duca, the Duke, was called just that: “Duke.”
“Peter,” he said. “You’re late.”
“No. You’re just early, as usual.”
They shook hands, both standing in the elegant courtyard at the rear of the pale yellow villa. Grapevines hung overhead, trailing new buds down from the heavy crossbeams of the trellis.
“Where’s Chadwick?” Baron asked.
“I woke him when I heard you coming. He was worn out from the Paris flight.”
“What’s the problem?”
“First let me fill you in on some of the personnel,” Duke said.
“Right. Shall we go inside?”
They walked into the living room of the villa, a sumptuously furnished room in excellent and opulent taste. Fine carpeting, lush wall hangings, and decorous chandeliers and lamps: that was the keynote of the Villa di Pietro – “Peter’s Villa.”
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything beautiful,” Duke observed pointedly.
“You terminated nothing more than an elegant companionship,” Baron said. “But I must change the tone of that damned radio-telephone. It grates on my nerves. How about low E and F natural?”
“You have the musical sense of a deaf cow!” Duke protested, scandalized. “We’ll keep it C and D. Let your tin ear adjust.”
Baron nodded. The quarrel was an ancient one, ever since they had begun to use the long-range radio-telephone with which they could be kept in direct personal contact anywhere on the Continent.
Baron sat on a couch along the far wall and looked out the window at the sparkling waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
“Let’s have it.”
Duke Farinese lit a cigarette and sat down. “World War II. Remember Prince Filipo Rimini?”
Peter Baron frowned. “You’re taxing my memory. But I have read about him. He was one of Mussolini’s favorites. He went over to the Underground to work for the Allies. He was fantastically successful in uniting the Partisans. Is that the one?”
Duke nodded grudgingly. “He was murdered at the end of World War II by the Communists. They thought he was trying to keep them from seizing control of the Partigiani. Which he was.”
“The books say his assassination created an offensive political scandal.”
“It did. Now, a little geneology. Prince Filipo had two children – twins. His wife died in childbirth. The twins were Filipo’s greatest treasures. They were brought up after his murder with strong emotional ties for one another. A boy and a girl – Paula and Mario Rimini.”
Peter Baron squinted. “Wait a minute. That name Paula Rimini rings a bell. Isn’t she married now?”
The Sicilian’s face relaxed in a bemused smile. “Yes, she is, Peter. But, unfortunately, not with benefit of clergy.”
“Of course! She’s the mistress of Dr. Blake Forester, the American chemical tycoon!”
“Very good. And Forester?”
“I do know that. Forester left the States because of a marital entanglement. His wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. Also, he was in a legal tussle with one of the big chemical combines in the States over the rights to a drug patent he claims was stolen from him.”
Duke smiled. “You Yanks always fight over the wrong things. Imagine – marriage and patents!”
“Forester came over to Italy at the request of a fellow chemist and started that big plant outside Naples – Chimici Consolidati. And it’s been a financial prodigy ever since.”
“Jolly good recital, Peter. One hundred percent correct.”
“What about all this?”
“One more point. Mario Rimini secured a job at the chemica
l plant as a section head through his sister Paula’s influence. Paula runs dutifully in the social strata to which she is accustomed. As they say, she is a Princess. She does have her moments of revolt, however. Mario, even though he is a genuine Prince, thinks Italian high society is decadent, idiotic, and sick.”
“He is right, of course,” Baron murmured.
“Yes, but one can’t say that. Mario prefers to live in seclusion in a tiny farmhouse once owned by a distant relative outside Naples. It’s on the road to Avellino. He’s somewhat of a recluse, an odd-ball. A European beatnik-that sort of thing. He is a sports car enthusiast, has his own Vespa, skin dives, flies a plane, sails a boat, and so on.”
“Avellino?” Baron asked, suddenly alert at the mention of both the Vespa and Avellino.
There were footsteps outside and a man entered the living room. Peter Baron rose. So did Duke.
Oren Chadwick smiled and approached Baron with outstretched hand.
Chadwick was a cool, self-possessed, bland man of forty-five who wore suits with no shoulder padding, shirts with high collars, and trousers with no hips.
He was of medium height, with generous, even features, blue eyes, freckles, and thinning reddish hair. When he sat down opposite Peter Baron, he pulled a pipe out of the pocket of his tweed jacket and filled it with maple-scented tobacco from a plastic pouch.
“We met during the Dietz business in Berlin,” Chadwick reminded Baron, his blue eyes direct and probing.
“I remember it vividly.”
“You did a superb undercover job for Uncle Sam. When this thing broke on us last night, I immediately wired home and suggested your help. I explained that the situation demanded a free-lance agent totally uninvolved with the U.S. – someone exactly like yourself. I received a go signal early this morning. Here I am.”
“In what capacity are you here?” Baron asked.
Chadwick hesitated. “I do not represent anyone officially. I am a direct emissary of that nebulous fellow, Uncle Sam. The relationship between Rome and Washington is extremely touchy because of the rather famous personalities implicated. Do you see?”
“I see,” Baron nodded.
“Right. You were at Quantico and at Fort Holabird, weren’t you?”
