Man on Fire (A Creasy novel Book 1)

by A. J. Quinnell

  It would be good to have some music. The Country and Western was about the only trace left of his youth. Tomorrow he would look around in Milan and see what the record shops had. Probably only new stuff, but he knew Johnny Cash was popular in Italy, and he had heard Dr. Hook on the radio and liked him, and Linda Ronstadt. He had heard her “Blue Bayou.” It had become a favourite. He poured a drink and picked up the book again, but it was no good. The woman was on his mind.

  * * *

  “I’ll be finished at about two-thirty.” She pointed to a side street next to the restaurant. “You can park up there.”

  Creasy nodded and said, “If the police move me on I’ll circle the block. Just wait on the corner.”

  She got out of the car and walked across the street. Creasy’s eyes followed. She wore a slim, straight skirt, something that few Italian women over thirty can do or should do. Her figure was just the right side of voluptuous and her height made it perfect. She disappeared inside and he pulled out into the traffic and glanced at his watch. Two hours to kill.

  He considered it his first real day on the job. They had left the house just before eight, mother and daughter sitting in the back. Rika told him she had left the cassette radio with Maria. Pinta studiously ignored him.

  A uniformed security guard stood outside the school gates. He had peered into the car and Rika introduced Creasy. The guard had studied his face, memorizing it, the gates were slightly ajar and Pinta was about to get out when Creasy’s voice stopped her. “Stay where you are.”

  He got out and walked past the guard and looked inside the gates. Satisfied, he went and opened the back door of the car and nodded at the girl. She kissed her mother and then jumped out and walked past Creasy without a glance. The security guard gave Creasy a hard look and stood and watched as they drove off.

  “You’re careful,” Rika had commented.

  “Habit,” came the reply.

  “I talked to Pinta. Explained that she wasn’t to bother you, just let you get on with your job.”

  “She seems to have got the message,” he said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t mention our talk last night. I just told her that you weren’t used to children. I don’t want her to end up hating you.”

  He drove to the railway station and browsed through the bookstall there, picking up several paperbacks. Then he walked over to the telephone office and put a call through to Guido.

  Yes, he’d started, he told him, and no, he wasn’t sure how he’d like it, but he’d give it a chance. Anyway, the food was good. Then he called Elio and thanked him for his hospitality. In a couple of weeks, he would like Elio and Felicia to have dinner with him on his day off.

  He had felt welcome during the few days he had spent in their house. Felicia was a tall, attractive woman from Rome. She had met Elio at the university. They were happy and their house was relaxed. She had treated Creasy like a prodigal uncle and teased him gently — he liked her.

  He wandered around the station. He liked stations — the movement and noise and people going places. He also liked trains. It was a good way to travel. You saw things go by and felt you were going somewhere. Long journeys on good trains gave him pleasure. You could get up and look around and have a meal.

  He saw a shop selling cassettes and browsed through it and found a couple of Johnny Cash and one by Dr. Hook. He couldn’t find anything by Linda Ronstadt, but when he was paying the girl he inquired and she dug around in the back and found one. It had “Blue Bayou” on it and so far the day was moving along alright.

  At 2:30 he was waiting in the street by the restaurant, At 2:45 a policeman came by and motioned him on. He beckoned the policeman over and Showed him his bodyguard’s license.

  “Does it pay well?” asked the policeman.

  “Not bad. But a lot of sitting around on your ass.”

  “Better than flattening your feet on the streets.”

  A rapport was established and the policeman moved on to harass less fortunate citizens.

  Just after three o’clock Rika appeared with a man and a woman. They were in a relaxed mood. Creasy got out of the car and was introduced.

  ‘This is Vico and Gina Mansutti — Creasy.”

  They were a handsome couple. He might have thought her beautiful but she was shaded in Rika’s light. The man was tanned, impeccably dressed and neat. Fastidious, thought Creasy. The kind of man who would only masturbate into a clean handkerchief.

  They studied him with interest and the man said, “I understand you were in the Foreign Legion at one time.”

  Creasy nodded.

  “And captured in Vietnam.”

  He nodded again.

  “It must have been unpleasant,”

  Another nod, and Gina giggled and whispered to Rika, “Does he talk?”

  “Of course,” said Rika sharply. She turned to the man and kissed his cheek.

  “Vico, thank you for a lovely lunch. I promise not to let Gina spend too much.” The two women got into the car. Creasy nodded at Vico again and drove off. Vico remained standing at the curb watching as the car negotiated the traffic. Creasy saw him in the rear-view mirror. He seemed preoccupied.

  For the next hour and a half Creasy drove from shop to shop, opening and closing the trunk for a variety of parcels. Then he reminded Rika that he had to pick Pinta up at five. She looked at her watch in surprise. “It’s so late? — Never mind, you go on. I’ll phone Ettore to pick us up.”

  At the school there were several cars in the courtyard and girls were already coming out to them. Creasy sat and waited.

  Finally Pinta came around the side of the building with two other girls. They stood and talked for a while, glancing frequently in his direction. Then they split up, the two girls going over to a blue Mercedes and Pinta going back around the side of the building. The Mercedes left. Twenty minutes later Pinta reappeared, carrying some books held together with a strap. Creasy got out and opened the back door. As she passed him, she held out the books. He took them, holding them by the strap.

  “Your mother’s returning with your father,” he said.

  She inclined her head, and he closed the door.

  They drove home in silence.

  That night Maria made stracciatella from the broth of Friday’s chicken, followed by saltimbocca. They ate in silence. The food was delicious. Then, with the coffee, Creasy picked up a paperback and started to read. He remembered something.

  “You have a talent, Maria — the food was excellent.”

  Maria beamed with pleasure and Creasy went back to his book. Maria and Bruno started discussing the Pope. They accepted Creasy and his silence. The kitchen was relaxed.

  Later, up in his room, Creasy put a cassette into the player and listened to Dr. Hook sing about love and yesterdays. He took down a bottle and poured a drink. He didn’t really hear the words, but the tone and the music crept in under the shell.

  He reviewed the day. Day one as a bodyguard. Not too bad. At least he had established a working attitude. Everyone knew what he was, and what he was not. It was a start.

  One floor below Pinta lay in bed awake. Next to her, with its head on the pillow, lay a very old brown teddy bear with button eyes and a lot of patches holding in the stuffing. Her window was open and she could hear the faint music. After a while it stopped and a different tape started. A woman sang. Pinta didn’t know the song, but when it finished there was a pause and the same song came again. She started to drift into sleep. The music was plaintive, haunting. It was “Blue Bayou.”

  Chapter 6

  With Creasy installed, Rika felt free to travel with Ettore again. One of the unforeseen results of her hastily withdrawing Pinta from school was that she too had been confined to the house. It wouldn’t have done to keep her daughter home for safety and then leave her with only the servants.

  Most of Ettore’s trips lasted a week or ten days and involved visits to the major European cities and occasionally to New York and Toronto. She enjoyed these
excursions and was a help to Ettore. He was usually selling and with her looks and charm she was an asset.

  He had forgotten to discuss with Creasy the question of time off. Obviously, while he and Rika were away, Creasy would have to stay with the girl. He left Rika to break the news and she was relieved at Creasy’s easy acceptance. Time off was not something he had really thought about. Occasionally, he told her, he might want to go out to dinner, but he could do that while they were at home. She realized that having a bodyguard without roots or family had distinct advantages, and she left for Paris with her mind at rest.

  Ettore was going to negotiate the purchase of new Lebocé knitting machines. The total cost would be over four hundred million lire, and unless the French could be persuaded to give very generous credit terms, it would be a nonstarter. Still, he was a persuasive negotiator and, with Rika along to add charm to the social occasions, he was optimistic.

  The absence of her parents meant that Pinta took her meals in the kitchen. Creasy was relieved that they had developed what to him was a sensible and satisfactory relationship — she ignored him. She wasn’t rude and had dropped her attitude of hurt indignation — she simply treated him as a necessary but uninteresting fixture.

  So at meals she would talk only to Bruno and Maria, being serious and respectful to the old man and lightly teasing the woman, especially about some supposed suitor in Como. Creasy could see that they were very fond of the girl and enjoyed having her eat with them.

  But it was a pose. Like her mother, she was a natural actress. Her attitude to Creasy was assumed.

  Children are tenacious. She wanted to be friends. The obstacles made her even more determined. She had nodded dutifully when her mother instructed her not to bother Creasy, and then she had considered long and carefully and finally arrived at her strategy. She was an intelligent girl and warm-hearted and her character, unlike her mother’s, was composed of two main elements. On the one hand, her parents’ lifestyle and her lack of brothers or sisters had matured her beyond her eleven years. She was used to the company of adults and was an accurate observer of their behaviour. On the other hand, she had a keen and stimulating curiosity and was constantly delighted with new discoveries. She was moving into life expectantly and with a wonderfully open mind. Disappointments and setbacks would not cloud her optimism. She was like a small puppy, all energetic curiosity, jumping back a pace when confronted with something strange, but then inching forward again, nose twitching.

  So, she had jumped back when Creasy had rounded on her in the car, and now she was edging forward, but cleverly, and from an angle slightly outside his vision.

  She judged him right. Any frontal attack would be instantly recognized and repulsed.

  She would just wait and watch for any weakness in his defence. She was sure it was there. Nobody could be as disinterested in life and the world as he appeared. So she waited, and chatted lightly to Maria and Bruno, and seemingly ignored him.

  Over the days, Creasy’s state of mind solidified into tolerance of his current position. Without consciously thinking about it, he was holding himself in abeyance, his brain slipping into neutral. No decisions were necessary, no plans, no emotional issues. The job itself was undemanding, and the conditions comfortable. He didn’t consider how long he could go on. For the moment he was reasonably content and felt that he had stopped, or at least slowed on a path that had confused and upset him. He had no external responsibilities, no ties, and no demands on him. He could take each day as it came, not expectantly, but not with total resignation.

  His drinking had eased slightly. It was still a malign factor, dulling him and sapping the strength in his body; but occasionally now, in the mornings, there would be some Scotch left in the bottle. It was no longer desperate drinking but more an overdone habit. Still, he knew that if he wanted to arrest his physical decline before it was too late he would have to cut back sharply. It was something to think about— but not strenuously.

  The routine settled in. Creasy would drive Pinta to school in the mornings and pick her up at five o’clock. In between he had free time. Occasionally he would go into Milan and buy a few books or cassettes, but usually he went back to the house. There he would help Bruno on the large grounds. He liked using his hands, building things. Guido had once joked that it was a guilt complex from spending most of his life blowing things up or knocking them down.

  In the Legion there had been opportunity for both destruction and construction, for the Legion had a history of civil engineering, particularly road building. In the early days in Algeria they had, like the Romans, built roads to help pacify the country. They had carried on this tradition in other parts of Africa and in Vietnam. Legionnaires were trained for this work, and Creasy enjoyed it.

  Bruno was hard put to keep the large grounds tidy. He had concentrated on the front garden and lawn, which extended down to the roadway. At the back of the house the ground rose steeply up a pine covered, rock-strewn hill. This part was largely overgrown. A wooden fence surrounded the property but was in a state of bad disrepair. Bruno had asked for funds and a casual labourer to help fix it, and Ettore had promised to do something about it but never had. Creasy worked on this fence. He went into Como and bought some timber, spending his own money. He would tell Ettore that it was a security need, although even the repaired fence wouldn’t keep out a determined intruder.

  He spent several hours a day on this job, but it was going to take a good few weeks to finish it. Meanwhile it occupied his spare time, and he managed to sweat out some of the whisky even though it was barely spring and still cold.

  In the evenings they would have an early dinner and afterward Creasy would stay on in the kitchen for an hour or two, either reading or watching television, listening with half an ear to the conversation of the others.

  It was at such a time, a couple of days before her parents returned, that Pinta first spotted her opening. If there was nothing good on television, she would read the day’s newspaper and magazines.

  Her lively curiosity meant that Maria and Bruno were often asked questions.

  Neither of them was well read or had travelled and their answers were limited. Creasy heard these conversations only as a background murmur but on this particular evening the name ‘Vietnam” caught his attention.

  Pinta had been reading about the mass exodus of refugees from the south — the boat people. She asked Bruno why so many were fleeing their own country. He shrugged and talked vaguely of Communism.

  Creasy’s interest was stirred and for the first time he found himself drawn into the conversation. The girl listened with interest as he explained that the majority of the boat people were ethnic Chinese and had always lived as a separate community. They were not liked by the Vietnamese, who traditionally distrusted them. With the ending of the war, a united Vietnam decided to get rid of them. As a community the Chinese were wealthy and could afford to pay the middlemen, usually Hong Kong Chinese, to smuggle them out by boat. It didn’t take much smuggling since the authorities turned a blind eye and even actively encouraged the departures. So it wasn’t so much the effects of Communism that caused the problem but deep-seated racial differences.

  Pinta astutely drew a comparison with the migration of labour in Europe from poor countries to rich. She had read recently about the bad feelings Italian workers were facing in Switzerland and Germany.

  It was deftly done, and a follow-up question had Creasy explaining about the effects of minority Chinese communities in Malaysia and Indonesia, where they controlled most of the economy and again created resentment. He told her that over one hundred thousand Chinese had been slaughtered in Indonesia after the failure of a Communist coup.

  She wanted to know how the Chinese got there in the first place, and he told her of the great labour importing by the early colonial powers. The Chinese made good workers for the plantations, clearing jungle and building roads. The local populations were less inclined to work as hard. There were many examples
, he told her: the Asians in East Africa who had been imported to build the railroads and who had stayed on to take over almost all the retailing and distributing networks, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, imported from southern India to work the tea plantations. There were examples all over the world, and usually they created a rift that led to hatred and bloodshed in later years.

  Abruptly he stopped talking and picked up his book. It had been an uncharacteristic monologue. She didn’t press him or say another word to him. Instead she started to talk to Maria. A few minutes later Creasy stood up, said a gruff good night, and went up to his room.

  As the door closed behind him, Pinta smiled inwardly.

  “The first step, Creasy bear,” she said to herself.

  The next day on the way to school, and on the way back, Pinta didn’t say a word, and after dinner that night she watched television. Creasy didn’t exist. He was relieved. The night before, up in his room, he’d felt disturbed, a feeling he always got when he’d done something out of character. But if he had realized the girl’s strategy, he would have been even more disturbed, although forced to admire it from a military point of view: Reconnoitre the target carefully. Note points of weakness. Make a diversionary attack to draw fire and then quietly slip in the back way and effect a capture. Pinta would have made an excellent guerrilla leader.

  Creasy took Elio and Felicia to dinner at Zagone’s in Milan. Maria had recommended it. She had worked there as a waitress when she had first come north; the owner was from Florence and she vouched for the food, although — she explained apologetically — it was expensive. For Felicia it was an occasion. Having two young children kept her at home in the evenings, but tonight a trusted neighbour was babysitting and she was determined to enjoy herself.

  Maria had phoned for a reservation, and she had obviously been a good waitress and popular, because the owner gave them personal attention and a good table. He told Creasy that Maria was being modest in telling him that she had been a mere waitress. She had helped in the kitchen as well, and was a fine cook. The Ballettos often ate there and that was how they came to hire her. He joked with Creasy that, after Maria’s cooking, the meal would be an anti-climax.