A hundred miles out of Milan he crossed the Forty-Fifth Parallel, and the plain turned a pinkish chalk. Caesar had earned his fame on that chalk, and it had tempted every generation since—French, Austrians, Goths, Nazis, papal mercenaries. Still the flowers glowed, the grain flourished, covering over a hundred million boot prints, taking the land, always, back again.
Small hillocks appeared on the smoky plain, standing as gateway sentinels to Asti Province. Beyond them the land began to softly undulate in a motion that a hundred miles further would yield the Alps.
Michael slipped on sunglasses against the building glare. The truck had evened out its hum on the road. He had a headache and his eyes stung, but he was feeling better, more confident…
When the flashing blue light appeared behind him.
A broad, pebbly riverbed fronted the highway, and he could hear the soft rill of shallow water. Alders winked in the breeze, surrounded by plowed fields crinkling with tiny harvest flames.
The Carabinieri four-wheel had just sat there after pulling him over, considering. Michael stayed behind the wheel, fought a thousand possibilities now jockeying for purchase in his mind. Had he been speeding? Didn’t Italian autostradas not have real speed limits? Did he have a taillight out? Did they fucking know?
The two Carabinieri officers climbed warily out of their vehicle. White shoulder boards and chest strap, high peaked hats, red-striped blue trousers. A radio blurted distorted unintelligibles. They wore old-fashioned military-style holsters, and as Michael watched in the rearview, they unbuckled the flaps on them.
The driver—older, belly folding over his belt—hung back near the front bumper of the four-wheel as his younger partner moved gingerly along the side of the truck to Michael’s window.
“Good morning.”
He was speaking English. A car shot past and puckered the air, but traffic was light. “May I see your driving papers, please?”
His manner was correct, but he was standing almost completely to the side of the window, as if expecting trouble. Michael took an international driver’s permit in the name of Gary Phillips from his wallet and passed it over.
“Can you step out of the truck, please?”
Michael opened the door, and the both of them tensed, so he slowed down, kept his hands in view. “Is there a problem?”
“Wait here, please.”
Michael felt his armpits chill as the officer walked back to his partner and compared the driver’s license to something on a clipboard. Another clump of minutes standing there as the air rocked with a passing truck. The older officer got on the radio as the partner watched Michael. The radio conversation went on forever, Michael feeling lightheaded and leaning against the door of the Bedford.
The older officer climbed out of the four-wheel, and the two conversed before the younger partner walked back to Michael, carrying a telex in his hand.
“May I see your passport, please?”
“It’s in the truck.”
“Very well.”
Michael slowly unzipped his overnight in plain view and handed the Gary Phillips passport to the officer.
“What are you doing in Italia?”
“I’m a tourist.”
“Why this truck?”
“I’m moving some things for a friend.”
“What things?”
“A chest with a few belongings.”
At that the older officer edged to the back of the truck, and Michael used every ounce of concentration not to watch him peek under the tarp.
“Where are you moving them to?”
“Torino.”
“And you came from?”
“America.”
“The truck.”
“Parma.”
“Your friend lives in Parma?”
“Nearby.”
The driver was tapping the steel box. “Does this open?” he called from the rear.
“No. It’s locked. I don’t have a key.”
“Your friend didn’t give you a key?”
“It didn’t occur to me to ask.”
“May I see the truck’s papers, please?”
He had no idea where the truck had been registered, but it sure as hell wasn’t Parma. If they were following a lead off the cemetery caper in Milan—a witness?—and the truck’s registration read Milan, the water in this pot was going to suddenly heat up several degrees.
Michael opened the glove box and rooted through it, but there was no registration to be found. He stepped back out. “I can’t find it.”
“Where did you get this truck?”
“I rented it.”
“From?”
“A man in Parma.”
“He lived there?”
“I have no idea. That’s where I met him.”
“And he just rented you this on the spot?”
“It’s not much of a truck.”
Michael knew they’d certainly called in the plates and had the owner’s name, that this was a dance to see how long he could keep the balls in the air. Yet they were unsure of something, fishing, and Michael held his narrow ground.
“What was this man’s name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“How were you to return the truck?”
“To a tabacchi shop in Parma a friend of his owns.”
The two officers exchanged glances; the younger one sighed and looked at the passport once more. “Is this the correct spelling of your name?”
It was then Michael got a glimpse of the telex. It was in Italian and listed a Michael Suslov, below which in bold lettering read, WANTED BY AMERICAN FBI. DETAIN. SUSPECT BELIEVED DRIVING A LATE 1950S MODEL LIGHT BLUE BRITISH-MADE TRUCK, HEADING WEST. NO PLATES KNOWN. FORTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, NO CURRENT PICTURE. HOLD FOR CONSULAR OFFICIALS.
He was in a light-blue British truck heading west, but his documents listed him as a thirty-eight-year-old Gary Phillips, not forty-four-year-old Michael Suslov, and so these officers were stalling, waiting to see if he would solve this himself.
The FBI?
Michael couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He stood there swimming in his thoughts, barely heard the red Fiat that passed by slower than the others, hardly noticed even as it stopped, shifted into reverse, and whined back at them.
The popping sounds were like bubble wrap. He looked at the older Carabinieri and the officer looked back not at Michael but way beyond, to something infinitely distant, and there were blooming red circles on his chest swelling and joining, and the officer slumped soundlessly against the sidewall of the truck, crumpling to his knees, head bending to the pavement like a supplicant.
The second officer understood faster than Michael, and his service pistol came out of its holster, the barrel snapping and flaring as he shot at the lingering Fiat, punching windshield blossoms and knocking out pale chunks of radiator. The Fiat driver rolled out his door on the protected side of the car. Michael jumped backward into the truck’s cab as the bubble wrap sounds started again and there was breaking wood in the truck bed, dully tinkling metal and hornet buzzes over the roof.
The Italian cop was still firing, his gun twice as loud as the other’s machine pistol, and Michael flattened on the cab seat and twisted the ignition. The younger cop tumbled through the open door behind him, muttering obscenities. Michael dragged the cop inside right over the top of himself, released the parking brake, and hit the gas pedal with his fist, launching the truck blindly.
Michael couldn’t see out the windshield, and the steering wheel drifted on its own whim. He was tangled in the muttering cop, felt wetness spread over his stomach and realized the cop must have been shot, heard first tires squeal then horns blow as the truck rocked across lanes, hit the median, and there was shushing grass, another howl from opposing traffic, and a wallop as the truck bashed across a drainage ditch and spun out in the plowed, burning earth.
Michael pushed the cop against the back of the seat, got up, and the view was violent Dutch angles of a rumpled field wrapped in
blue haze. The truck was bouncing furiously toward the riverbed, and Michael yanked the wheel. Chunks of mud and charcoaled husks spun up around the windows, and the Bedford slid sideways, the engine screamed, then a tire caught and it bucked along the edge of the short palisade.
Michael was half sitting on the sprawled cop who kept muttering Motherfucker. He whipped a glance back at the autostrada—police four-wheel and Fiat still there—and in the jostling confusion now appeared a single figure running resolutely across the top of the ember-strewn furrows at them.
He stomped the gas and the Bedford fishtailed forward, pitching, and there was no way they’d outrun the guy. Not on this dirt. Michael wrenched the truck away from the riverbed, made for a narrow bricked barn standing in the middle of the field. The truck strained and grinded, and he heard the First Lady of Argentina bounce against the lid of her casket.
The Fiat driver was coming up fast but wasn’t shooting. Not yet. His build was strong but his face was a destroyed mask, and Michael thought of childhood dreams as his mouth dried and stung with smoke.
The truck caught a patch of gravel, spat, and he gunned it along the wall of the barn, shuddered around the back, and drove in through a pair of open doors. The inside was high and stacked with hay rolls, light arcing through spaced hollow bricks. Michael forced the Bedford through tumbling bales, stopped, left the truck idling while he closed the barn doors shut and bolted them.
The young Carabinieri officer had stopped muttering and lay now in the truck silently, chest heaving up and down, eyes fixed glassily on the dashboard. He still gripped his service Beretta, and Michael gently pried it from his hand, slid out of the cab, and moved through the maze of haystacks, seeking a vantage.
The truck’s idle was laying a pale-blue strata of exhaust that caught beams of morning and bent them. He crouched between bales of hay, aimed at a single open loading door ten feet up the wall, and waited. He’d never held this kind of automatic before. The last time he’d pulled a trigger had been on his wife, and the gun shook now in his hand with its promise of disorder.
Straw stuck to his pants, wet with Carabinieri blood. He’d left the engine on, afraid it might not start again, but its drone kept him from hearing any movement outside. There was the barn door, locked, and the loading window leading to a china sky.
Something stirred and he spun on it, furious, and it was feral kittens nesting in the hay. The abrupt move strained a muscle in his eye and the pain radiated back into his head. He rubbed it with the cold butt of the cop’s Beretta, turned again to the loading window—just as the Fiat driver swung in firing.
Their weapons erupted follow-the-leader, and if Michael never saw where his rounds hit, the other’s announced themselves by slicing straw and rattling planks before dying in the clay floor. Michael’s leg suddenly numbed and he realized one of the rounds must have died there too. The Fiat driver dropped from the window, and Michael followed the motion with two shots, but the gun bucked and he was so fucking bad at this.
The driver was moving the moment he hit the clay, and Michael backed up on all fours in a panic. He couldn’t make out his own blood from the cop’s on his trousers, and it wasn’t till his foot collapsed under the weight that he realized the shot had gone clean through his ankle. Hopping, he retreated through the stacks, fell, heard two single pistol cracks, and figured the driver finally out of submachine-gun rounds.
There was a tractor in a corner, and Michael crawled behind one of its tires. His own gun was empty and he knew it would only be a moment before the driver flanked and killed him.
“Michael Suslov.”
Michael’s blood seized with unreality at hearing his name.
“Michael Suslov,” he called out again. “You’re shot, no? You have nowhere to go, no?”
Michael’s arm was getting soaked with oil from the tractor’s bleeding crankcase. A bullet had found its way there, and Michael had a desperate thought.
“Who the fuck are you?” he called back at the driver.
“We only want the truck.”
“We?”
And he could hear the son of a bitch smile. “I.”
Michael unfolded his pocketknife, jammed it into the spare plastic gas can on the tractor, felt cool evaporation roll over his arm and spill onto the clay.
The driver spoke Spanish now, and it was an ancient sound from his throat. “You work for murderers, Michael Suslov. Why go to the wall for them? You’re outnumbered, hunted by police in a foreign land. We just want the Senora. We will care for Her, I promise.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“And certainly you’re wrong.”
He didn’t think the voice was moving, but it was hard to tell. The floor had a slight tilt, and the gas was slithering away from him, soaking up hay.
“What can possibly be worth all this to you, Michael Suslov? What is it that you could need so badly?”
“How about the name of the town I’m dying in?”
“Torrazza.”
Michael had a lighter in one hand and was sliding on his ass away from the tractor. If I’ve gotta die, at least all of Torrazza’s going to hear it. He was only seven or eight feet from the tractor when the Fiat driver appeared over the top of the bale. So the voice had been moving after all. Michael struck the lighter, and the fuel on his hand ignited in a festival of racing blue flames. The driver fired once, and Michael struck his arm out across the cool floor, touched a fuel-soaked clump of hay…
And the place blew up.
Tongues of hay-fed flame ratcheted violently to the terra-cotta roof as he ground out the fire on his hand. Michael couldn’t see the driver and hobbled on one leg to the truck as a shot he never heard spun away a side mirror. The cop was where he left him, and Michael climbed over the officer, shrieked the transmission into reverse, and looked up. The Fiat driver was standing atop one of the blazing haystacks like a nether angel, holding in one hand his pistol and in the other its empty clip. He cried out, and the voice rose above the burning tirade below as a note played on shattered glass.
“I am Alejandro, Michael Suslov! I serve Her and you will never keep Her! I am Alejandro!”
Michael slammed the accelerator, and the Bedford flattened the barn door off its hinges, snaked backward over smoldering dirt, and he braked, turned, and churned out over the field for the road. The Fiat, the Carabinieri four-wheel, and the older officer were where they’d been left, unmolested, and the barn was already slow-motion destruction on a smoky plowed sea.
He made the frontage road, thudding bluntly as mud kicked itself free in breaking clumps over the tarmac.
“Should have given him the fucking truck,” the cop said, one eye open, curled like a child on the seat beside him.
The road chinked southwest, shadowing the pebbly river. Michael had no idea what he was doing, but he was going to do it as far as possible from the autostrada. Getting onto a country lane, he ran down faded asphalt, pushing the barn, Alejandro, the whole mess over a burning horizon. He pulled the truck into the shelter of tangled brush and looked at his ankle. The bleeding had slowed but his entire shoe sklished with fluids. It didn’t hurt much, but that was only a matter of time.
Michael listened to the raspy breath of the pallid cop beside him. His shot leg barely bent now when he got out and held on to the truck’s side panel, walking it back to the bed, where he rooted inside for the cleanest rag he could find and fixed it around his ankle. That hurt.
There was a long scrape along Evita’s casket. Scorch marks dotted the Bedford here and there, tufts of hay standing spikily from taillights and wheel wells. Michael tied back the corner of tarp loosened by the older Carabinieri officer lying now face-up on the autostrada.
He’d have to get the wounded cop to a hospital and hide Evita along the road somewhere during the inevitable insinuations that would follow. Doing this would give Alejandro and whatever friends he had time to regroup—Michael might even get summarily deported—but there
really wasn’t any other choice. The Carabinieri bleeding in the cab was the only witness that the Bedford license number his partner called in wasn’t the car that started the shooting. Finishing this would be hard enough with a bullet through his ankle. Getting there on the run as a cop killer—forget it.
And the thought came to him again that he could walk away from this. Through the trees, over the field, a train, a plane, back. Back to nightmares and nothingness and broken circles of life wobbling hopelessly anew each dawn. He could go back. And back, certainly, would be waiting for him.
He finished cinching the tarp, took a handful of rags for the cop’s wounds and hopped back along the truck, his shoe hissing wet prints on the concrete. He tossed the rags into the cab and eased himself in to check on the curled Carabinieri officer.
He was dead.
Mindless miles. Unnamed country bends. Instinctually following the sun southwest, drifting now into regions steeped and flecked with vineyards.
He’d laid the cop among the bramble at roadside, taken the last pistol clips from his white belt, placed a rag over his vacant features—because he’d known him, if just a moment. His ankle had swollen and begun to bark with a low thudding he knew would only build. He cut away his shoe and the skin was tight as a water balloon, blood oozing through the bandage, and there was so much of it—his and the cop’s—over the cab, smeared on the dash, lolling in puddles on the floorboards.
He drove without destination or purpose. He was a cop killer in a blood-soaked truck carrying a dead First Lady with a bullet in his leg, and the border—any border—would soon be as closed to him as the moon. Still he went on, chasing the day through tiny villages of old men sitting beneath tabacchi verandas, sipping brandy, all of them indistinguishable, all of them watching Michael’s truck labor and vibrate noisily over stone lanes.
His blur deepened—blood loss, exhaustion, caffeine jacks, amphetamine withdrawals—and the villages, the space between villages in these rising hills, melded. He lost whole miles, jerked back by the cobblestone drum of another main street. He had nowhere to go and kept going, following the imagined arc of the sun, drawing himself toward dark peaks in a silhouette distance.
Blood Makes Noise Page 21