Vendetta in Venice

by Don Pendleton

  Baracco started his second circuit, more warily now, slitted eyes scrutinizing each mass of tortured metal for a shadow, a movement. Beyond the high fence, the mountaintops glowed suddenly against the pale sky as the sun hoisted itself above the eastern peaks.

  Bolan was determined not to repeat the hide-and-seek routine of the Montigny junkyard. He had no weapons, no papers, nothing but the clothes he wore — and two sets of handcuffs. And although his physical stamina had fooled the Corsican, allowing him to fight his way back to consciousness ahead of time, the effects of the gas had left him well below his usual strength.

  So he wasn't going to fall for any eyeball-to-eyeball heroics. Baracco was all muscle and immensely strong: even if the man was taken completely by surprise, Bolan doubted he could best him in his present condition.

  Right now the Executioner's only aim was to get out. And on this one he had no options. There was no way he could quit the yard without Baracco seeing him. He had to neutralize the Uzi, then slip away before the Corsican could reactivate it. Not the easiest brief for a man facing a trigger-happy opponent with thirty-two rounds of 9 mm parabellum ammunition at his disposal. But Bolan figured he could make it.

  He wasn't holed up among the mangled sedans and flattened convertibles this time. He had gone to ground near the boundary fence in a towering rampart of used tires. Crowning the stack was a pile of four heavy-duty covers that had once shod a farm tractor or maybe the front wheels of a bulldozer. Bolan had slid down the sinkhole the tires had formed and now, crouched out of sight, he raised the top one an inch and peered through the gap. Baracco was fifteen yards away, approaching the tires. His face was set in an aggressive scowl, his right forefinger curled around the Uzi's trigger.

  Bolan decided to utilize one of the smaller tires strewn around his hidey-hole. He would have to work superfast, and his choice had to be perfect. If the one he chose was too small, it would bounce off the target. If it was too big, it would drop uselessly to the ground. And if the section was too wide, the tire would be too heavy to place accurately. As an additional hazard, the mound of obsolete rubber was unstable: it quaked with every move Bolan made.

  Baracco had drawn level. The Executioner held his breath as the man's burning gaze raked the tire mountain. Then the Corsican's belligerent jaw swung back toward the wrecks, and he moved another pace forward.

  Bolan rose swiftly, still buried waist-high in heavy-duty rubber. He leaned forward and grabbed the tire he had selected from the stack. It was bald, the canvas showing through the smoothed-out tread, but it was narrow-section, the sidewalls were rigid and it had the right diameter.

  Baracco was six or seven feet below him, about two yards past the center of the stack. Bolan leaned out as far as he could, the tire held flat in his two hands, and spun it forward and down. His aim was true. The old tire dropped neatly over the gunman's head and shoulders.

  At the last moment something — a displacement of air, a movement within the stack — telegraphed the Corsican an alarm signal. His head jerked back, and his mouth opened as the inner edge cf the tire lassoed past his eyes.

  He swore, seeing the Executioner and attempting to raise the barrel of the Uzi at the same time. But the tire had angled down his body, pinioning his arms to his sides even as his finger tightened on the trigger. The machine pistol fired a burst into the ground, and then Baracco was overwhelmed by a cascade of rolling, bouncing, spinning rubber. Leaping down, Bolan had swept the top layer of discards from the pile and sent them hurtling toward the Corsican.

  By the time Baracco, screaming threats, had struggled upright, freed his arms and stepped out of his prison, Bolan had rounded the nearest stack of wreckage and was racing up the aisle toward the yard entrance. The Corsican made the aisle as Bolan turned the far corner. A burst from the Uzi slammed into twisted steel and with splinters of metal stung the warrior's face before he was out of sight.

  Pelting after him, Baracco reached the corner, only to see Bolan vanish behind a flatbed transport truck still loaded with wreckage from an autostrada pileup. The veteran sedan with the wide running boards, its engine idling, was on the far side of the transport.

  Baracco was scarlet in the face and gibbering with rage. He shouted furious threats, circling the massive cab of the transport, his finger itching to release the killstream that would annihilate the man who had fooled him. But his brain urged caution because the bastard had to be taken alive.

  In any case, the choice became academic. Bolan leaped into the sedan and slammed the heavy lever into first. The old car lurched toward the gate and began to accelerate.

  Baracco dropped to one knee and hosed lead after it, slugs thunking into the custom-built bodywork and drilling the rear fenders. The oval window in back shattered; a sideview mirror flew into fragments that glittered in the early-morning sun. But the tires remained intact, and Bolan kept his foot to the floor.

  By the time Baracco had emptied the Uzi and then run back and coaxed the engine of the Wartburg into life, the sedan was a mile away down the dirt road and heading for the autostrada.

  20

  Bolan didn't take the autostrada. His first priority was to lose Baracco, his second to contact the Rome embassy, alert Brognola and equip himself with an armory, an identity and unmanacled hands.

  For the second, he figured a small town would be best. And, as for the first, it was simply a question of doing the unexpected.

  He turned off the dirt road, maneuvered the sedan along a trail separating fields of rice and alfalfa and steered through an access tunnel that ran beneath the freeway. There was a vineyard on the far side, and beyond that a country road lined with Lombardy poplars.

  Bolan turned left, heading back into the hills they had traversed during the night. He reckoned that was the least likely course for a fugitive from frontier guards to take.

  He realized the rear fuel tank had been hit when the needle of the gauge bounced to empty and the engine choked into silence. He coasted the vehicle in behind the trees and climbed out. After the racket of the ancient six-liter engine — the car was an Austro-Daimler, dating back to the late twenties — it was very quiet beneath the poplars. The highway ran, together with the railroad and a river, along the floor of a narrow valley that twisted up toward the foothills of the Dolomites. It was probably, Bolan thought, the old road leading to Venzone, Malborghetto and the Austrian frontier. Udine and the plain would be ten miles or more downstream and to the west.

  He closed the door of the car and began to walk northward in the direction he had been driving. Each time he heard a vehicle approaching from behind, he left the road and ducked behind the undergrowth under the trees. But in thirty minutes he was passed only by a tractor hauling a load of hay, a clapped-out flatbed piled high with crates of live chickens and a couple of locally registered Fiat sedans. In any case, he wouldn't have recognized the Wartburg if he saw it.

  He stopped when there were no more poplar trees to provide cover and the sun was high in the sky. He could hear a tremble of sheep bells, the shallow river babbling over stones, a breeze hissing through the roadside grasses. Shading his eyes with one hand, Bolan looked around him.

  He had to be quite high up by now, but thin skeletons of vines still clung to stony terraces rising above the road on one side. Beyond the tracks and the river on the other, he saw the gray slate roofs of a village among the trees on the edge of a chestnut forest. At the head of the valley the mountains stood bare and brown against the blue sky.

  Bolan deliberated. Should he cross the river and try his luck in the village? Or would the small-town mentality, always suspicious of strangers, be a hindrance, delaying or even preventing any chance of making contact with a foreign embassy in far-off Rome?

  A bigger place would be better, but he hadn't passed any signposts and he hadn't seen anyone working in the fields. He had no idea how far the nearest town would be. He made up his mind — the village.

  The river flowed fast between banks of shingles,
but Bolan had no difficulty wading across. On the far side he found a footpath curving toward the village. Halfway there he noticed a length of twine caught on a brier. He grinned: that could be the solution to one problem!

  He stripped off his jacket. Then, freeing the twine, he tied one end to the empty handcuff attached to his left wrist, pulled it and the circles manacling the wrist as far up his arm as possible, passed the twine around his neck and then down the other arm to secure the second pair of cuffs in the same way. The handcuffs weren't visible when he shrugged back into the jacket.

  He continued along the footpath. Second problem: how to make a long-distance phone call in a remote Italian village with no money, no ID and not a single article of value on him? The village wasn't exactly the hub of the Western world. It had a wide, dusty piazza, an arched colonnade that ran beneath the ocher facade of a block covering one side of the square, several smaller houses with stained stucco walls, and a barn with open doors.

  Bolan strode toward the colonnade, scattering chickens, ducks and a mongrel dog. Beneath the arches he could see old men sitting in cane chairs outside the village store, and beyond the block a dirt road curled past a church and then vanished among the trees.

  From the shadowed colonnade he could sense eyes watching him. He guessed the smart thing to do would be to ask for some official and explain the problem. His car had been stolen and his papers and money had been in a wallet on the front seat. Would it be possible to arrange a call, collect, to a number in Rome?

  Maybe 'he priest would be a better bet. He would have been to some kind of college; he might be in a better position to grasp the problem.

  A hum of conversation ceased as Bolan approached. He was aware then of a different hum, not too far distant. It was a mechanical noise, rising and falling, altering its pitch and cadence but signaling all the time a single unalterable, unmistakable fact: high-speed traffic — a lot of it — moving somewhere beyond the trees.

  He changed direction and headed for the dirt road. A woman cranking water from a hand pump lowered her pail and watched him with her hands on her hips. He turned a corner in the road.

  Cheek.

  Carving an arrow-straight swath through the forest, the new turnpike linking Klagenfurt in Austria with Udine and Venice ran within five hundred yards of the village. Above the Armco barriers, the roofs of cars, trucks and buses hurtling past in each direction glinted in the sun. Maybe he could hitch a ride up to Carnia or back down to Udine. He quickened his pace, heading for a bridge that carried the dirt road over the autostrada. Halfway up the grade he halted. This time he had really hit pay dirt.

  A quarter of a mile to the south there was a rest area with parking lots, a multipump gas station, a cigar store and newspaper kiosk... and a Pavese cafeteria built over the twin three-track motorway like a glassed-in steel-and-concrete bridge.

  The Executioner had a hunch he would find a sympathetic ear. Vaulting over a fence at the side of the road, he ran down a grassy bank and hurried along the shoulder toward the rest area.

  It was in the parking lot nearest the stairs that led to the cafeteria that he was hit by that day's biggest surprise. A low-slung red roadster whose battered bodywork dated back to the mid-thirties stood among the bulbous, shining products of the automotive age. There was a yellow Dutch license plate below the tarnished chrome Alfa Romeo lettering on the radiator honeycomb.

  Bolan didn't believe in coincidences. Not in coincidences with an arm that long — an arm stretching over six countries, seven if you counted Luxembourg, with a reach of some 950 kilometers.

  He ran up the steps and into the crowded cafeteria. The woman was sitting alone in a pitch-pine booth. Her elbows were planted on the red checkered tablecloth, and there was a cup of untasted coffee between them. Bolan slid into the vacant seat on the other side of the table.

  "The trout with almonds is quite good," she said without looking up, "and they have an Orvieto in half-liter flasks that's a must."

  "Sold to the man with the hungry eyes," Bolan replied lightly. He realized he hadn't eaten since Baracco had brought a liverwurst and a can of beer to the panel truck twenty-four hours before. And talking of hungry eyes...

  He stared at the woman. Hell, yes. He knew there was something different. The green eyes were the same, but the halo of blond hair was gone. He was looking at a woman with a voice he knew, who was stacked the way he remembered. Only now she was a redhead.

  "Which one is the wig?" he asked.

  "You're looking at the real me."

  "What are you doing in this neck of the Italian woods?" "Waiting for a guy to offer me a brandy. A gentleman who doesn't aim to get fresh with me."

  Bolan held up a finger to summon a waiter. He continued staring at her with raised eyebrows.

  "Okay, I'll answer your question if you'll answer mine first," she said at last. "What are you doing here, Mr. Bolan?" Her uptilted nose was slightly red at the tip. She looked as if she had been crying.

  "You know what I'm doing here. I'm trying to catch a man who runs an escape service for criminals and break up his organization."

  Gudrun caught her breath. A tear welled from her right eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. She sniffed.

  Bolan had a flash of insight. "It's him, isn't it? He cut you loose."

  "How do you know?"

  "It's a fair deduction. Someone was asking questions about me in Tufik's office. You had the run of the office, so you knew who I was. Then you engineered it so I would return to my hotel. A nice girl like you doesn't make a habit of arranging for a total stranger to be knocked out... unless a guy you're in love with asks you to. So you have the hots for somebody in the organization. And now, since I know it's a one-man show, it figures you're in love with Baracco. You had some time off due you, and you went to see him. But something, evidently, went wrong."

  "The bastard!" Gudrun said venomously. "Oh, the lousy son of a bitch! After all he promised me... and it's only for some thin-faced cow from Czechoslovakia. I could kill him!"

  The waiter brought Bolan's order and set a brandy in front of Gudrun. "How did you get me out of the hotel?" Bolan asked.

  She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes and then rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the universal sign of money changing hands. "They have very large laundry hampers at the Terminus that go down in the service elevator and then get dumped in the yard."

  "Where's the boyfriend now?" Bolan asked.

  "You tell me. He had some job. Ferrying a jerk from Prague to Zurich, I think. If that wasn't just a stall to hide the fact that he's there with that woman."

  "That was no stall," Bolan told her. "Meet Joe Jerk."

  "You mean you'd horned in on the?.. You'd passed yourself off?.."

  Bolan nodded. "But it turned sour. Something loused up our beautiful friendship, too."

  "He figured you out?" Gudrun guessed. "He's smart. But he's a very dangerous man. Is he after you? Is that why you're here?"

  Bolan nodded again.

  "He was probably taking you to his base. He was due there last night. That's why I'm here — to have it out with the swine."

  "His base?" Bolan remembered the phone call from Montigny.

  "It's not far from here. In the chestnut forest. The craziest place you ever saw — kind of a cross between the world's most comprehensive junkyard and a medieval castle!"

  "Is this the birthplace of your roadster?"

  "It was the graveyard. Bart reconditioned the engine, but he won't touch the rest of it. He's got a thing about beat-up cars."

  "I've noticed," Bolan replied dryly.

  Gudrun gave a bitter laugh. "And now he's got a thing about beat-up women. That bitch is years older than me. And it's all because her damn father is a big wheel in the American Mafia. Bart's hoping to talk them into some kind of partnership deal."

  "The Mafia?"

  "Sure. The woman's mother was a Slovak, but the father was born in Sicily. He's been in America for hundred
s of years. I'll bet that cow was born before Czechoslovakia was even a country!" Gudrun said viciously.

  Bolan grinned. If Mariella was the go-between linking Baracco with the Mob, the mission was finally shaping up nicely. "I guess you wouldn't mind getting a little of your own back?" he suggested. "On Bart, I mean. Pay him back."

  "Would I ever!" The redhead was emphatic. "You don't realize what that rotten bastard has done to me. He forced me to break the law, cheat on people I like, risk going to jail, you name it. And he's not just my ex-boyfriend. We were going to get married. God knows how many times I've been sold that line about the cottage on the cliff, the hot Mediterranean sun, the sound of the sea."

  "The wind through the olive trees? The changing colors?"

  "He shoveled that crap your way, too?"

  "And more."

  "The number detailing his childhood in that village in the mountains of Corsica? Well, it's all lies. There's not a word of truth in it. He was born in a Bastia slum. He was leading a street gang when he was eleven, terrorizing old ladies with switchblades. There was never any option on any piece of land overlooking the ocean. Bart's the vainest man you ever met. He has to justify himself — in his own eyes particularly — so he's made himself into the biggest liar in Europe, inventing stories to account for the way he lives."

  "This base of his," Bolan said casually. "Could you take me there?"

  "Of course I could. If you intend to clobber his damn escape network, it would be a pleasure."

  "I have to ask your help another way first."

  "Offer me another brandy, and I'm your girl."

  "I can order you another," Bolan said ruefully, "but I can't offer anything. I can't even pay for what I've eaten myself." He explained his predicament, and added, "If I can borrow enough money from you to pay our bill and make a call to Rome, I'll stick around until a friend contacts me with the gear I want. After that we can be on our way."

  "We'd have to wait anyway," Gudrun replied. "I just remembered — Bart will be in Venice until tomorrow. He has a job to do."