Assignment - Palermo Page 4

  “Where can we go?” Joey had asked.

  “Outa the country,” Bruno had suggested.

  “Like Mexico,” Joey had said. “I could ride there. Get a license. Fix a race. We could invest the loot—”

  “We stay right here in the U.S.A.,” O’Malley had decided.

  Joey had been incensed. “What’s the matter, you got the patriot bug or something?”

  “Yes, I’m patriotic,” O’Malley had said.

  They had rented a trailer and gone south along the Mississippi into Arkansas. They had been followed. O’Malley had not seen the hunters, but he had known they were near in the night, their cries silent but none the less deadly for the silence. Near Little Rock Bruno had bought groceries. Bruno had loved to cook. Joey Milan had gone shopping with him. O’Malley had found a public phone booth and tried to call an old friend. He had almost run out of friends, but he had had to try.

  They had been lucky because they had been all out of the trailer when someone had blown it into a smoking, tangled mass of aluminum and steel.

  O’Malley had tried to double back north, but they had been waiting in two cars on the only available road. They had abandoned their rented Chevy and had taken to the woods. They had spent a week in an Ozark hillbilly’s shack. They had been hungry and thirsty and tired. It had been cold and raining. O’Malley had made them stay.

  “Nothing but canned beans,” Bruno had complained.

  “Not even a deck of cards,” Milan had said.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?” O’Malley had asked.

  When he had thought it safe, he had bought a battered Ford pickup from the mountaineer and gone east again to the river. They had been waiting at the first bridge, the same black cars. They had been chivvied south again, toward Louisiana.

  It had been spring, and the river had been in flood. The confusion of refugees running from the lowlands had been a help. It also had trapped them like a noose around their necks, blocking the roads they had wanted to take. But O’Malley had used the confusion to lose themselves. The swollen river had cut rail and road traffic. They had lined up for coffee and doughnuts at a Red Cross canteen, standing in the rain and mud with a hundred other flood victims. At the head of the line one of the hunters had waited.

  O’Malley had killed him quietly with a knife he had used in the Vietnam jungles. He had propped the dead man behind the Red Cross shack and had known that time had run out.

  “We go into the bayous,” he had said.

  “That’s like nowhere,” Milan had objected. “They’ll kill us there!”

  “They’ll kill us anywhere. Besides, I’ve got a friend in the delta country.”

  “We’ve got no friends, you said.”

  “I’m talking about the Cajun. A man named Sam Durell.” O’Malley had been weary. “He’ll help. He came from Bayou Peche Rouge and he’s our last chance. He’ll take a piece of the action.” O’Malley had looked ugly. “Someone must listen to us!”

  But Durell hadn’t been in the delta. Still, they had been lucky. The hunters had not been infallible, after all. They had lost the scent in the swamps, which O’Malley had known as a boy, and the trio had chartered a fisherman’s private plane to Columbus, South Carolina. From there they had taken a jet to Washington. But at the FBI Building O’Malley had run into the stone wall of Amos Rand’s pompous contempt. His story about the Fratelli sabotage organization had been dismissed. They assumed it had been a simple case of hoodlums falling out. They hadn’t been able to tell him where to find Durell. O’Malley’s resentment had towered into rage; he would not show Rand the list he had stolen from the Las Vegas head office of the Fratelli della Notte. He had finally yielded to Bruno and Joey, and they had fled to Europe, where he had gone through agonies of indecision until he spotted Durell’s name in the newspapers and came down into the Ticino to find him.

  It grew shadowed in the farmhouse. Joey watched the road from the front window. Bruno cleaned up the kitchen. His pasta had been delicious. O’Malley had flung himself into a chair and sat on the base of his spine, his yellow hair rumpled, his face exhausted. Durell was a tall, dark shadow in the room.

  “You said something about a list,” Durell said. “Do you have it with you now?”

  “It’s not complete. It’s all I could get. There was a lot more I didn’t have time to swipe from the Fratelli.” He hesitated, then reached into a pocket and fingered a folded sheet of dog-eared paper. “If it wasn’t for you, Sam, I’d burn it up and forget it—after the way Rand treated me. But I guess it’s too late for that now, any way. The Fratelli will keep the mark on me for good.

  I told you, I found everything changed when I got home from Vietnam. The whole organization was geared to something new—defense plants, water supplies, highway bridges, you name it. They’re only testing their strength now. A labor strike here, sand in the gears there, water polluted someplace else. And there are new faces in the Fratelli, new bosses, people nobody really knows.” O’Malley looked angry with himself. “I guess I went too far to back out now. But Rand makes me wish I’d just shut up. So you take it, Sam. There’s a lot more to find out, and that’s up to you.”

  Durell glanced down at the paper. It was a scribbled list of factories, bridges, and city names. Dates had been jotted down after each item, information for future sabotage. He looked at O’Malley and knew the enormity of the man’s danger.

  One of the dates on the list, jotted after a railroad bridge in Massachusetts, was today.

  “I’ll keep this,” he said. “Have you heard the name of Karl Kronin?”

  O’Malley nodded. “What started it all was a girl. My girl. Gabriella Vanini. She’s something special. She made me want to come home, you know. She warned me to quit asking questions. If you cross the Fratelli, it’s begging to get your throat cut. But I had to look into it. And now I’ve got to find Gabriella again. She’s disappeared somewhere here in Europe. So I came here from Washington.”

  “Why is the Vanini girl so important?”

  “She’s important to me. She knows the truth about the Fratelli top brass. Related to somebody up there. But she’s sort of—-uh—innocent about it. I got so sore about what was going on when I got back from Ahk Dap that I told her I had to do something to stop it.” Durell expelled a slow breath. Thunder began to rumble in the long mountain valley. He wished Amos Rand would call back. He wondered what he owed O’Malley. The list, even if incomplete, could be checked out. But these three men were criminals. O’Malley had a charm that always worked him out of the tight spots he’d led Durell into when they were boys. And somehow you always forgave O’Malley for his deceit.

  Joey Milan said lugubriously, “It won’t work, Frankie. He ain’t with us.”

  “He will be,” O’Malley said confidently. But his pale eyes were worried. There was a darkness behind his stare as he regarded Durell. O’Malley got up and went to the front door and opened it and looked down the road that curved into the Ticino valley. His shoulders were hunched, as if for protection against the chill, damp wind that suddenly blew into the room.

  “Somebody’s coming,” he said quietly.

  7

  AMOS RAND said, “Now, cut it out, Ginny.”

  “Oh, lover—”

  “I mean it.”

  But he didn’t sound as if he meant it. She had her right hand in his pants pocket as he drove her red Mercedes SL along the lake corniche, and her tight skirt was hiked far up on her thighs. She took his hand and manipulated his fingers inside her leg and sighed.

  “There now, lover, isn’t that much better?”

  The warmth and softness of her made him tremble. He felt like a starving, thirsty man who’d been lost in the desert for many years. And Ginny was a hot little animal, twisting and gyrating, soft and wet and pliant, her small white teeth biting him here and there; her tongue had searched him in the shadows as they tumbled about the big bed in the Paradiso hotel room.

  It was going to rain. He was worrie
d because he was late, having ignored Durell’s urgency about the bomb in the car, and he hadn’t taken care of it yet. But with Ginny in bed beside you—

  Ordinarily he was a competent man in his job, and his record was a good one. But he was off-balance these days, since his divorce from Janet—how cold, how still, how martyr-suffering-condemning she was in bed! And finding Ginny like this was a shot in the arm to a dying man. Ginny flattered him, inflated his ego, made him feel like something again. He knew her for what she was—empty-headed, frivolous, oversexed, vain, and greedy as a child. No matter. She served her purpose. The images of her pale, silken body—buttocks and warm globular breasts, eagerly clasping thighs—filled his mind, and he drove erratically for a few moments.

  Colonel Mignon’s villa was just up ahead. He felt a squirm of apprehension in his belly for a moment and then he saw the little black Caravelle still parked along the hedges beside the road, just where Durell said he’d left it.

  So it was all right. He wasn’t too late. Nobody had been hurt, and he’d enjoyed Ginny for a couple of more hours—

  “Stay in the car,” he told her.

  Her hand made little squeezing motions in his pocket, and she giggled. “Can you leave me now, lover?”

  “It won’t be for long.”

  “I can’t wait. Oh, I can’t wait!”

  “Just a minute, sweetheart.”

  He felt a bit dizzy when he drew away from her and elbowed the Mercedes door open and stood on the edge of the road. Thunder rumbled in the mountains. The lake was the color of dark slate under the heavy evening sky. Mignon’s pink villa had taken on tones of ochre and dark red. No lights shone in the upper windows. Everything was quiet, safe. All to the good.

  He took a handkerchief and dried his palms as he approached Durell’s car and lifted the engine bonnet. Amos knew all about bombs. He’d taken expert courses in demolition and dismantling every imaginable device. He stared down at the twin charges, the one attached to the wiring, the other under the generator. Simple. No trouble at all. And yet—

  He dried his hands again. Ginny tapped the horn of her car, but he didn’t look up. Doubt clouded Amos’ brown eyes. He had a young face, although he was almost forty and felt as vigorous (Ginny could testify to that) as when he was twenty. He was proud of his taut, compact musculature and his hairy barrel chest, although he was always aware of his short stature, which sometimes made him self-conscious next to tall men like Durell. But Durell was too serious, too dedicated, a strange man you couldn’t reach or really talk to or understand. He was hard to work with. You always had the feeling he didn’t need or want you, didn’t quite trust your competence, and kept inviolate a small, reserved corner of his implacable mind.

  Amos Rand drew a deep breath and reached into the engine and touched the yellow wires to the generator bomb. It was shadowed in there. The light was bad. He couldn’t see under the glob of plastic attached to the grease and gunk of the generator. He felt about with his fingers, felt the soft warm grease—thought of Ginny—and then held his breath. A cold burst of sweat broke out all over him, from forehead to groin—and he pulled the wire free.

  Nothing happened.

  He blew out his lips with a little fluttering sound and looked at his hands. They were shaking. But the rest was easy. Quickly, with practiced moves, he worked on the ignition wires, detaching them methodically, loosening the little canister of explosive that was enough to blow him clear over the roofs of the fishing village into the lake below. A few drops of rain fell. Ginny tapped her horn again because the top was down on her car. But he didn’t hurry. When he had everything detached and tested and safe, he picked up his little tool kit, pocketed it, took the two bomb devices, and walked toward the Mercedes, studying them.

  When he looked up, he saw that Ginny was gone.

  “Ginny?” he called.

  “I’m here! It’s raining!”

  She had found a small footpath leading to a summer house just beyond the walls of Mignon’s villa. He saw the flick of her skirt and legs as she entered the little rococo structure, and grinned. That Ginny. Never enough. He tossed the two bombs, perfectly safe now, into the back of the Mercedes and followed her, his legs still a bit trembly.

  It was dark and shadowed in the gazebo. The little building still held much of the sultry heat of the day just ending. He saw the gleam of her shoulders as she slipped out of her silk blouse. She never wore a bra. Her breasts moved as she swung toward him, and he reached for her eagerly now, glad the job was over, glad he could relax and enjoy living again. Her hips slammed against him, squirming, demanding. They sank down to the straw carpet of the summer-house floor, her teeth nibbling at his ear, his hands sliding over her firm, smooth belly into the wetness and the softness—

  “Stand up, please,” someone said.

  The words, in English, came like a blow in the back of the neck. Ginny checked her wild movements and jerked her hand from his trousers as if she had been stung. Amos turned his head and looked at the thick shadow that blocked the doorway he had just entered. “Who—what do you think—?”

  “You are Amos Rand?” the man asked.

  Amos could not see his face. “Yeah. And suppose you just take off—”

  “You are Durell’s friend? His associate?”

  Amos wished the light were better. The man had a bullet head that might have been shaven bald, but he wasn’t sure. Ginny made small whimpering sounds of outrage, pretending modesty, but her breasts were bare, and she knew it and she wanted the other man to look at them.

  “You are stupid,” the man said. He had an accent Amos couldn’t identify. The man took out a gun with the narrow cylinder of a silencer on it and pointed it casually at Amos. “Get away from the girl. Be careful. Move slowly.”

  Ginny said in a high, unnatural voice, “Now, look here, whoever you are, this is none of your business, I think it’s just terrible—”

  “Shut up,” the man said distinctly.

  “What—what are you going to do?” Amos asked. “I want O’Malley’s list.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you?”

  “You do not have O’Malley’s list?”

  “No, I never saw it—”

  “Well, it makes no difference,” the man said. He pointed the gun more closely at Amos. Amos felt stupid, sitting there on the floor, his pants half down around his knees, the smell of Ginny’s lipstick and perfume and body in his nostrils. He smelled something else and knew that the smell came from himself, one of mortal fear.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked again. He couldn’t quite believe what was happening. It was all so fast, so unexpected. “Why the gun? I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about O’Malley or any list—” “That is too bad. Where is Durell?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Be very certain. I will ask you again. Where is Durell at this moment?”

  Amos spoke with sudden anger. “To hell with you, I don’t know—”

  The first shot took him right in the middle of his thick, hairy chest, picked him up and skidded him backward on his backside and slammed him against the fragile wall of the summer house, legs up and kicking. Amos looked at him with astonishment. He didn’t feel anything.

  “But you don’t have to—” he whispered. The moment he spoke, the blood came gushing up through his throat from his torn lungs, a thick and viscous stream, like a second tongue, flowing over his hanging lower Up. He began to cough and strangle.

  The man fired a second shot that tore half of Amos Rand’s face and skull away, and when Amos’ body stopped its reflexive twitching, the man looked at Ginny Jackson, looked at her proud breasts and slim waist and her tumbled bleached hair.

  He didn’t waste a bullet on her.

  He turned and walked away.

  8

  IT WAS only the old peasant woman who ran the farm and owned the farmhouse.

  Durell watched her drive the rickety Citroen truck toward the b
arn. She parked it near the shed where the yellow Cadillac thrust its fins out into the damp wind that blew down the valley.

  “It’s all right,” said O’Malley.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  The woman got out and trudged stolidly across the barnyard toward them. She had a flat face and the resentful, indrawn eyes of the peasant, the hard mouth and knobby hands of one resigned to the years of sweat and anguish poured into the soil. She spoke in Ticinese Italian to Durell as he stepped out of the house.

  “Signore, you are wanted by the colonel. You are to go there at once.”

  “Who told you?” he replied in Italian. “You were in the olive orchard.”

  “My neighbor, Maria Luchese, came and told me. At once, signore.”

  “I did not tell Colonel Mignon where I was.”

  “The colonel knows everything in these valleys. People tell him all he wants to know. He is blind, but he sees everything.” The woman shrugged. “That is all I have to say. You may go or stay, as you wish.”

  Durell did not want to use the flashy Cadillac. “May I rent your truck?” he asked.

  “You have the power to buy or rent all I have,” she said stolidly, without resentment.

  “Grazie, signora.”

  She looked at him with a brief flicker of surprise for his courtesy, then trudged away. O’Malley caught his arm in an angry grip.

  “Look, I didn’t ask to get involved with the U.S. law or with any colonels or anybody. I gave you the list. You’ll need more, and Gabriella Vanini might have it. But I’m not so sure about anything now. I’m not afraid for myself, but I don’t trust that Rand. He’ll shoot off his big mouth and put Gabriella on the spot. I kind of counted on you to help find her, but with the Bureau in it—”

  “Wait for me here,” Durell said. “And be careful.”

  “I’m not so sure. I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it. You bought a piece of this action voluntarily. Now you have to stay at the table until the wheel stops spinning.”

  “I can find Gabriella myself. I don’t want her hurt, can’t you understand? And I can’t trust anybody now. I learned that in Washington.”