October Men

by Anthony Price

  Then he was alive again, with the wall still at his back and the hot sun beating down on his head.

  The sunlight was white, but not too blinding to conceal the miracle from him: the end of the alley was empty, wonderfully empty!

  But his exhilaration was even briefer than his despair—it was quenched by a grunt of agony.

  Somehow, during those seconds of darkness, Villari had catapulted himself right across the alley—across it, and back down it, and into the shadow of the wall opposite. He was sitting in the dust, his weight on his left hand, his right hand pressed tightly against his ribs. His hair was ruffled and his dark glasses had fallen off on to the ground in front of him—without them his face seemed naked and pale.

  As Boselli gazed at him in mute horror he raised his head slowly and grimaced back.

  “Don’t—just stand there—man!” The words came out slowly but surprisingly clearly. “My gun—I’ve dropped it—“

  Reality came cold into Boselli’s brain, rousing him out of confusion: the other man had gone, but it had been Villari who had been hit—it must have been his sudden movement which had changed the target at the last moment from himself—so that any second the killer might appear round the corner again to finish the job on them.

  He looked around wildly for the weapon, not finding it in the first sweep, and then, as his legs came to life at last, spotting it in the shadow beyond Villari’s foot.

  “Give it to me—argh!” Villari clapped the blood-stained palm back against his side.

  It was amazingly heavy for so little a thing. During his military service he had had a rifle, though mercifully for only a short while because he had been no sort of combat soldier and they had soon realised that he was deadlier with his pen and his brain. But this was altogether different from the big, clumsy rifle: its contradictory weight and size, even the snug way it fitted into his hand, inspired a sudden confidence in him that resolved the quandary into which he had felt himself falling.

  He had wanted to run away, ostensibly to get help, and then he had realised that this would mean leaving Villari wounded and helpless, a sitting target literally. But he himself had been equally helpless, a target also.

  Now he was no longer helpless!

  “Boselli—you idiot!” Villari coughed painfully. “Don’t try it—“

  But Boselli was no longer listening.

  He felt disembodied as he started down the narrow street, like a camera swinging this way and that to record images of decay and emptiness. Gaps opened up first on the right, and then on the left: another courtyard, another black and white mosaic half covered with drifting sand, a broken stair ending in a blank wall. Hot sunshine and cool shadow as he zigzagged from one gap to the next. Nothing moving and nothing alien—in this stillness movement itself was the only enemy.

  Then he was at the intersection.

  This, he fully understood, was the moment of greatest danger, for if the assassin was still bent on finishing them off it would be round one of these corners that he would be waiting. Yet if this was the case he knew he was doing the best thing and the only thing left for him to do, for he had no illusions about his ability to hit anything with Villari’s pistol at any range other than point-blank. Given a fair chance perhaps Villari might have managed it from where he lay back there—and the killer himself had proved that a marksman could do it. But he knew that he could not—even with his old army rifle he had never harmed a target.

  So this way the odds were shortened: it was what the General would have called “good thinking” and Father Patrick “a little of God’s good sense.” But neither the General nor the Irish Father were here now to stop his knees shaking and his hands trembling as he leaned against the last safe piece of wall, contemplating that bright patch of no-man’s-land just ahead of him. For God’s good sense also warned him that the odds were still too long and that his best was likely to fall ridiculously short of what was needed out there.

  If only Villari were here beside him—or better still ahead of him: he would have known what to do and how to do it. And the General would have known too—and the big Englishman would have known and so would the bastard half-Englishman, Ruelle…

  But only he, little useless Boselli, was here, up against the wall. God damn them all to Hell!

  The blasphemy served to release him from the paralysis which had threatened to set in, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave the wall altogether: he bent down and poked his head awkwardly round the corner.

  The movement was so clumsy—it was as though his body was unwilling to risk obeying a self-endangering order—that he had already started to lose his balance before he saw what lay ahead of him. And what he actually found was so unexpected that pure surprise completed the loss of coordination, twisting his left foot behind his right ankle to pitch him head first into the open.

  Yet this unplanned and unorthodox appearance also possibly saved his life, though he was never conscious of any bullet’s passage near him but only heard the sound of the shot as he rolled over in the dusty street. The noise was itself more than enough to keep him rolling in a confusion of knees and elbows until he fetched up flat, breathless and half-concealed behind the body of the man Villari had killed stone-dead with his own single snap-shot.

  Miraculously he did not lose his pistol in the fall—rather, he held on to it so convulsively that it began to buck furiously in his hand of its own accord as he thrust it out ahead of him over the body. Where the shots went he had not the least idea; by the time he had begun to gather his wits enough to see what lay ahead the street was the usual empty expanse of brick and stone and parched summer grass, broken only by a dark clump of cypresses far down it. As he focused on the cypresses he had a vague feeling that he had maybe seen something moving against them, or in them, in the split second before he had started to fall. The feeling ran out of his brain, down his arm to the pistol: he closed one eye, aimed the short barrel at the clump and pressed the trigger.

  To his dismay the first bullet struck sparks from the paving stones ten metres ahead of him, and as the little gun jumped the second lost itself in the blue sky. Then, with one final metallic click, it went dead in his hand.

  Boselli cowered down behind the body, fumbling desperately to cock the gun. Again there was a click—it came just as he realised that he was pointing it in the direction of his own foot.

  He lay flat against the smooth sun-hot pavement, trying to think. But his thoughts were only a jumble of disjointed cries for help inside his mind. There was a little puddle of blood, bright red, just beyond his fingers: a large ant emerged from a hole in the crevice between the stones just beside it, halted as if bewildered at the edge of the puddle, and then set off purposefully into the shadow under the dead man’s outflung arm. Beyond the arm, almost in the centre of the street, lay the long-barrelled weapon down which he had stared so recently—he saw now that the long barrel was actually the black tube of a silencer. At least, he supposed that was what it was now he was so close to it: the classic accessory of the assassin.

  Another ant emerged from the hole. Like its predecessor it scurried directly to the blood, as though there was some invisible ant path in that direction, paused in exactly the same way, and then set off in the footsteps of the first ant. Did these tiny creatures leave a spoor just like the larger wild beasts, then?

  The coherence of the question roused Boselli: there ought to be more bullets in the killer’s gun and it was there almost within his reach. But even as he lifted his hand to stretch out for it he heard a tiny scraping sound behind him which turned the movement to stone instantly.

  “Signore!”

  The voice was almost as startled as he was, but it was not an enemy’s voice. With a sigh of relief Boselli relaxed in exhaustion against the paving stones.

  “Signore—are you all right?”

  Boselli raised his head suddenly as he remembered the hidden marksman: his rescuer must be in plain view behind him. He turned on his elb
ow just as Porro bent over him.

  “There’s—“ his own voice cracked hoarsely, “—there’s someone down the street with a gun. … By the bushes, I think—“

  The concern vanished from Porro’s face immediately as his eyes followed Boselli’s nod. But after he had studied the empty street for five seconds he shook his head and sank on to one knee beside Boselli.

  “I think he’s gone, signore… There was a car just now—somewhere beyond the trees on the upper road, beside the museum—did you not hear it?”

  Boselli shook his head. He had heard nothing and Porro sounded decidedly relieved that the enemy had retreated; certainly under his tan he was almost as pale as Villari had been when—

  Villari!

  “Where are you hit? Can you walk?”

  “Hit—?” Boselli frowned.

  “There’s blood on your face,” Porro spoke slowly. “Are you wounded?”

  Boselli instinctively raised his right hand to search for the injury. There was a stickiness on his temple, and what might be the beginning of a bump.

  “I don’t know—I don’t think so.” He stared at his fingers: there was blood on them, but only a little. “I must have grazed myself when I—when he fired at me I threw myself down in the street. I’m not hurt.”

  “And you got the murdering swine!” There was grim satisfaction in Porro’s voice and admiration—undoubted admiration—as his glance shifted briefly to the body and then returned to Boselli. For a moment Boselli was confused both by the tone and the look. Then he saw Porro’s error and the circumstantial reasons for it.

  “I didn’t—“ he began, embarrassed, “I didn’t mean—“

  Porro patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. “That’s all right, signore. This is one they won’t blame you for—it was him or you and no time for questions.” He stood up. “I must get back to the car, signore—we can’t get the other swine, but at least we can pick up the Englishman double-quick. And I can call up an ambulance for your friend.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Your friend’s alive—he was a minute ago, anyway,” said Porro heavily. “Sergeant Depretis is dead.”

  “Wait!” Boselli scrambled to his feet. His clothes were covered with dust and there was a tear in his trousers at the knee—his best office trousers. He brushed at himself ineffectually. Alive or dead, Villari was out of it now, and the immediate decisions were up to him.

  “We’ll lose ‘em both, signore—if I stay here.”

  Boselli screwed up his brain.

  “Don’t pick the Englishman up. Phone General Montuori’s office. Tell him what has happened—get through to the General himself, not some—some underling. Don’t touch the Englishman unless he says so. That’s an order.”

  Porro stared at him.

  Boselli took a deep breath. He felt appallingly tired—drained. With the last shred of his will he met Porro’s stare.

  “That’s an order,” he repeated.

  After Porro had gone he stood in a dream, thinking of nothing. Then he stumbled the few paces to the junction of the streets. It was remarkable, he thought, how his immediate surroundings had contracted: Villari and the dead police sergeant lay only a very short distance up the alley on his left and the killer just those two or three steps behind him. Yet the distances had seemed immense only a few minutes ago.

  How many minutes? Maybe it was no more than a matter of seconds, during which time as well as distance had somehow been elongated.

  The effort of thinking was beyond him. There were probably other things he should have done, or should be doing. But he knew so pathetically little about what was going on. He looked up the alley again: the place was like a battlefield with himself the sole unlikely survivor on it—and he didn’t even know why he was fighting. Or who.

  But he ought to do something for Villari, anyway.

  It was up the General now.

  He had done his best.

  VIII

  THE ELGIN MARBLES gallery wasn’t difficult to find, which was just as well in view of the time shortage; and although it was by no means empty a merciful providence had just cleared it of chattering schoolchildren.

  It seemed to Richardson that the British Museum itself hadn’t changed much in fifteen years: the foyer was still jammed with the little monsters. That last and only time he had been inside the hallowed portals he had been one of the monsters himself, but unlike the present crop he had been a monster regimented and controlled into silence. The crowds through which he had just passed had obviously been just as bored as he had been (the BM probably ranked a poor third to the Imperial War Museum and the Science Museum now, as then) but they were as belligerent as a football crowd.

  “Professor Freisler.”

  There was no doubt about the identification, even though he had only seen the old man once before: the huge close-shaven head was unmistakable—it might have served as a model for those old Punch cartoons of square-headed Prussians stamping on the bleeding body of Gallant Little Belgium.

  The head froze, and then began to revolve on its jowls until Freisler was facing him.

  “Sir?” A hairy hand adjusted the spectacles. Then the little piggy eyes brightened with recognition.

  “It is—it is Captain Richardson—is it not?”

  “Plain ‘Mister’ nowadays, Professor.”

  “Mister Richardson—I beg your pardon!” The old man flashed a hideous steel-toothed smile. “Mr. Richardson—so!”

  Richardson returned the smile.

  “There was a notice on your door saying you were here. I hope I’m not disturbing you in the middle of something important?”

  Freisler dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “There is no disturbance. The notice—it is for my students. They come to me when it suits them, and I come here when it suits me. Then they come here and we talk just as well, perhaps better.”

  “You come here often, then?”

  Freisler nodded. “Indeed so! To live so close to all this beauty and not live with it, I think that would be foolishness, eh? And who knows—one day you British may decide to give it all back to the Greeks. That would be an even greater foolishness of course, but these are foolish days, I am thinking, are they not?”

  The eyes bored into Richardson. Thinking—he was thinking right enough, but not about the marbles and their ultimate fate. That was merely what he was talking about while he took stock of the situation.

  Richardson stared round the gallery, pretending to consider the question for a moment.

  “I reckon they’re safe enough for the time being, you know—no one even wants to give the present lot in Greece the time of day.” He grinned at Freisler. “Not that I’m any sort of judge of such things.”

  “No, of course.” The old man nodded seriously. “It is not your field of interest—of business. And you have come to—see me, not the marbles, is that not so?”

  “That’s right, Professor.”

  “About your—business?”

  “In a way, yes. But not officially.” Richardson dropped his voice. “I need your help and I need it quickly.”

  “My help?” The eyes were expressionless now, as blank as pebbles. “And in what way can I help you, Mr. Richardson?”

  “You’re a friend of David Audley’s.”

  “I have that honour, yes.” The tone as well as the words had a curious old-fashioned formality about them, and the guttural quality was suddenly more pronounced—the “have” had an explosive, Teutonic sound which had been hitherto absent.

  “And so have I, Professor. That’s why I’m here.”

  No reply. Prove it, Mr. Richardson, prove it.

  “David’s put up a big black, Professor—“

  “A big black?” Freisler frowned. “A big black what? That is an idiom with which I am not familiar, no.”

  “Hell—a black mark. A faux pas.”

  “Now I am with you. An error of judgement, yes?”

  “That’s it. And someh
ow I’ve got to get him off the hook.”

  “I understand. That is to say I am able to guess your meaning, Mr. Richardson. But I beg you to stop using these unfamiliar figures of speech, or I shall not be able to help you quickly… Now, what was this error he made?”

  “He went abroad without telling anyone.”

  “That does not seem to me so very—erroneous.”

  “In our—business—there are rules, Professor.”

  “Rules?” Freisler shook his head quickly. “For a man like David Audley rules are made for other men. I would say—yes, I would say that half his value lies in that alone. Do you not trust your friend then, eh?”

  “Damn it—it’s because I trust David to hell and back that I’m here now, sticking my little neck out!” Richardson paused. “What I mean—“

  Freisler raised his hand. “No. That I do understand. To stick the neck out is a very ancient gesture of trust and submission in the animal kingdom. You have no need to explain it for me. You trust David, but there are others who do not—or they wish to make trouble for him—that I can well appreciate. He is not a man who would be popular everywhere, I would think.”

  “You’re dead right there!”

  “Of course I am right. But there is more to it than that I am thinking, eh?”

  “How do you mean—more?”

  “My good young man—“ Freisler adjusted his glasses “—I am not in your business and I would not be if my life depended upon it—no! Only for David I have answered small questions from time to time. And on occasion I have asked questions for him in certain places back in my fatherland, where I am not yet wholly without influence-all out of friendship, you understand, and maybe a little out of gratitude for my quiet life here.”

  “Professor. I—“

  “Please to hear me out, Mr. Richardson. I am not in your business, but I am not stupid and I have studied for fifty years the way men think and act … causality, Mr. Richardson, causality!”

  Richardson blinked. “You’re losing me now.”