Again he felt the shudder of recognition. There was no mistaking the vein-riddled cranium or the wormy skin that looked so incongruous in the blazing Italian sun. It was the man in the midnight-blue suit, the one he had encountered at Scratch Hill Junction, the night they had traded the heart. The creature with the teeth in its hand.
For a moment Winter was convinced his target knew he was being watched. The man in the blue suit paused, tilting his head as if sensing the sights upon him. Sweat glistened like a larval trail across his hollow cheek. He searched the air, his quartz-clear eyes never quite straying to the trees, then carried on walking.
Winter kept his eye to the scope and his finger to the trigger. He tried to make sense of what he was seeing, decode the body language of the three men. Zerbinati and Kulganek were engaged in conversation and looked reasonably relaxed. Their smiles were easy, their hand gestures broad and expansive. The cadaverous figure that had joined them appeared to be shadowing the Russian, keeping the kind of discreet but umbilical distance Winter associated with professional bodyguards.
What did this mean? How did Soviet Intelligence and Zerbinati’s empire intersect? Did the Reds have a damned vampire in their ranks?
He focused once more on Zerbinati, irritated at himself for being intrigued. He owed nothing to London, nothing to Faulkner, nothing to the machinery that had used him for so many years, keeping him numb and ignorant, withholding the truth of his past, the truth of the man he had been. He simply had to pull the trigger to pocket the fortune that waited for him. Cracknell had been assigned to Naples. She could take care of the intelligence implications. This wasn’t his concern anymore.
Zerbinati’s chest filled the lens. Winter lowered the sights a fraction, past an immaculately folded pocket square of white silk. The cross hairs framed the heart. In that moment the fine wires in the lens reminded him irresistibly of a crucifix.
His finger closed, a tremor of pressure against the trigger. He could sense the bullet, thirsting for release, for fulfilment.
Operation Paragon.
The words itched, insistent as a wound. And there were other words inside him. Words that he heard in the voice of Bernard Gately, facing that gun on a hill in Budapest. ‘You killed one of our own.’
Who had he killed? A decent man?
Winter tried to block the thought. Any thought, any distraction. He was the gun and he was the bullet and he was the money and he was the moment. This was just some vestigial rattle of duty. A ghost trace of Christopher Winter, SIS officer. Ignore it. Take the shot.
The wind from the headland stirred the leaves of the olive tree.
Operation Paragon was ongoing, he realised. It was playing out here and now, not at the dark edges of the last war but in the hot sun of 1965. Don Zerbinati was part of it. Kulganek was part of it. And Winter, in spite of himself, was part of it.
The heart waited for the bullet. The bullet that Alessandra had given her life for.
‘You killed one of our own.’
It was the optimum moment to shoot.
Winter exhaled and took his eye from the scope. As he did so a fresh rush of adrenalin electrified his veins. There was a flicker of movement below, through the cradle of branches.
A second guard was walking the perimeter path. He was advancing from the right. An anti-clockwise patrol, doubling back on the first guard’s beat. They must have stepped up security for the Russian delegation. Winter had been concentrating so hard on the shot he hadn’t even registered the man’s approach.
Without breathing he drew the rifle tight against his chest. The barrel was warm and slick with his own sweat and he fought to keep a grip on it.
The man was right beneath him now.
Winter put his back to the trunk, leaning as far out of sight as he could. As the seconds passed he could hear fallen twigs cracking beneath the man’s shoes.
A bird broke through the leaves, a blue-black flap of wings.
The guard turned, hunting the source of the sound. He slanted his head, looking upwards.
Winter locked eyes with the man. They held each other’s gaze. For a moment it felt like they would hold it forever.
The guard tore the walkie-talkie from his lapel. There was an urgent crackle of static.
Winter sprang from the tree. The ground slammed into his knees. Back on his feet he swung the rifle by the barrel, smashing the radio from the man’s hand. The device spun into the grass, still hissing on an open channel.
Winter brandished the butt of the gun again. This time he punched it into the man’s throat, sending him reeling.
He moved in, exploiting his advantage. Now he swung the hilt of the weapon into the guard’s face, smacking wood into bone.
Zerbinati’s man spat blood and barrelled forward. His chest hit like a juggernaut. The impact threw Winter to the earth and the gun from his hands.
A voice sputtered from the walkie-talkie, lying only an arm’s reach away. ‘Vincenzo? Vincenzo?’
The man was on top of him now. His thumbs were moving to the eyes, the flat wedges of flesh already filling Winter’s vision.
‘Vincenzo? Rispondi!’
Winter crashed his knee into his opponent’s groin. The two of them twisted around the roots of the tree, struggling for leverage, for dominance. The rifle strapped to the guard’s shoulder tumbled into Winter’s face, clouting him across the bridge of the nose. His eyes sparked with stars.
He thrust one hand against the guard’s jaw, twisting it away. With the other he reached for his own belt. His fingers shuddered, fighting to release the buckle catch.
‘Rispondi! Vincenzo! Rispondi!’
Winter head-butted Vincenzo, his skull striking the soft cartilage beneath the eyes. Blinking back the spray of blood he whipped the belt free from the hoops of fabric. As Vincenzo swayed, disorientated, he lashed the length of leather around the man’s throat.
The guard’s fingers groped for the walkie-talkie, grasping blindly through the grass. It was only inches away.
Winter drew the belt tight. And then, gathering the spare leather into his fist, he tore it tighter still. A desperate retching came from Vincenzo’s throat, even as his fingers found the edge of the two-way radio, his nails scraping its side. Winter urged the belt until the veins in the man’s neck stood a rigid blue against the skin. He watched as Vincenzo’s tongue lolled between his teeth.
Finally he saw the eyes roll white.
Winter laid the dead man’s head on the ground. He took a moment to gather himself, hearing only the shallow rasp of his own breathing. Then, curious, he lifted Vincenzo’s upper lip, as high as the gum line. The teeth were normal. He had killed a man, he realised, a taste of guilt swilling with the sense of relief. But of course he had. The body beneath him threw a shadow, merging with the black outline of the tree’s own.
The voice from the villa crackled through the grass again, demanding a reply. Winter stared at the walkie-talkie, weighing whether to pick it up and bluff some kind of response.
A rhythmic wailing shattered the hot green hush.
An alarm had been sounded. Someone had spotted the fight. Winter could already see men scrambling in the grounds of the house. He scooped the rifle from the grass and began to run.
Keeping his head low he weaved between the olive trees, batting away branches, the ground falling away beneath him as he clung to the line of the hill. He tried to retrace the path he had taken in the dark but he knew he was trusting instinct over direction. If he could just find the car he could be on the coastal road in minutes.
A gunshot echoed through the orchard. The bullet thudded into a tree just ahead of him. Where had the shot come from? The perimeter ridge? No, he sensed it was closer than that.
Someone else was among the trees now. Winter could hear their feet on the twig-littered earth, moving in pursuit.
He kept running, his heart cannoning against his chest. The car couldn’t be far now.
Another bullet. This one cracked the
air beside him. It had been inches from a head wound. Too close. The next shot would shatter his skull.
Winter turned, swinging the gun around. He saw himself mirrored in a pair of horn-rimmed Wayfarers. It was the first guard, the one keeping to the clockwise patrol.
The two men stared at each other, their rifles levelled, perfectly matched.
Winter had one bullet, he knew. One precious, sacred, impossible bullet. And he couldn’t waste it on the living.
With no other choice he flung the gun to the ground and raised his hands.
‘Mi arrendo…’
He watched Zerbinati’s man approach, directing him to his knees. As he did so a bastard of a thought occurred to him.
He had wasted that bullet already.
22
The light in the locked room was a pale, undulating blue, its shadows created by aquarium glass. It made the walls seem unsteady as water. There were no windows and the heat was intense, adding to Winter’s nausea. He felt like a shipwreck, something submerged.
‘Who sent you to kill my father?’ The question, again, from the man in the corner.
Winter took his eyes from the fist in front of him, tired of looking at his own blood. He stared instead at the tank that dominated the far wall. A brace of Moray eels twisted and thrashed behind the thick glass. They had demented dots for eyes and ugly little razor smiles and they flashed between the rocks, sleek as snakes. He watched them coil like speckled lengths of muscle. The creatures almost seemed animated by the violence in the room.
‘Hit him again,’ instructed Cesare. ‘Loosen his teeth. His tongue will follow.’
Salvatore balled his fist and struck Winter across the mouth. The edge of the salamander ring scraped the flesh but didn’t quite crack the lip.
Cesare asked once more. ‘Who. Sent. You?’ Each syllable was a demand.
Winter regarded the other captives in the room, distracting himself from the fresh flare of pain. It was a remarkable collection of marine life that was kept here at Villa Tramonto. One tank contained the luminous pulse of a jellyfish, its translucent ghost of a body suspended in the water. In another he saw a squirming, engorged octopus, its suckers kissing like leeches against the glass. Other tanks held flickers of eyes and fins, numberless fish darting behind chinks of reflected light.
Salvatore readied his fist again but this time Cesare stopped him. Winter felt a smooth, cool hand on his jaw, wresting his gaze away from the bubbling tanks. He found himself looking into Cesare’s eyes, bright in the grotto-like gloom. They were so much older than his face.
‘It’s a simple question, Englishman. And I have all the time I need to go on asking it.’
Winter’s mouth had been numbed by Salvatore’s fist. He could barely feel himself forming words. But he gave the reply he needed to.
‘I was sent to assassinate the Russian.’
It was the lie he had been saving for this moment. He had taken so many punches to earn it. Only now, when he could finally pass for being broken by the beating, did it stand a chance of sounding halfway persuasive. ‘The KGB man. That’s who I’m here for.’
Cesare shook his head, unimpressed. ‘Impossible.’
‘I had a target. But it wasn’t your father.’
‘Bullshit. You know it.’
‘I’m telling you. Kulganek was the kill.’
Cesare kept Winter’s chin in his hand. He tightened his grip, puckering the skin. ‘You came to Naples. You infiltrated the brotherhood of I Senz’Ombr. You won my trust. All for a chance at killing a man you cannot possibly have known would come to my father’s house?’
Winter struggled to reply through the lockhold. The words hissed through his teeth. ‘We had good intelligence.’
Cesare considered this, relaxing his grip just enough to let Winter take a lungful of air.
‘You’re lying, Englishman. And that’s as insulting to the house of Zerbinati as the fact you came to our home with a gun in your hand. What were you thinking?’
Winter returned a sour smile through the shifting blue light of the aquarium room. ‘I couldn’t kill your father with a bullet, Cesare. We both know that.’
‘So either your masters are very stupid or the bullet is very special. One of these things we will soon establish.’
Cesare took his hand away. Now the lean, bloodless fingers hovered in front of Winter’s face. The nails extended an inch, sliding like glass blades from the grooves of flesh.
‘My dear father has many enemies. Shall we begin to narrow them down?’
Behind him the eels spun and writhed in their tank, as if maddened with anticipation.
The shadows at Villa Tramonto were cast by the dead.
Winter contemplated their outlines as he paced the marble walkway. The last of the day’s light had flung them across the elegant paving, long and black and scrawny. None of the bodies appeared to be intact and so the shadows were a jumble of parts: limbs, torsos, the occasional severed head, one of which, Winter imagined, had to belong to that luckless eleventh-century saint.
The remains were preserved in glass cases that perfectly mapped their contours, wrapping around the relics like gleaming sheaths of skin. These were mounted on poles placed at intervals in the marble, marching to the furthest part of the walkway, where the edge of the villa balanced on the rocky lip of the headland. Winter was reminded of the grisly displays favoured by medieval tyrants, the ones who would exhibit the corpses of their fallen enemies as exercises in propaganda.
He took a drag on his cigarette and looked up to see a shrivelled husk of a head. This one had a chest attached to it, or at least the torn remains of one. The eyes were closed beneath the glass, the lids fused by the passing centuries, and the desiccated skin looked as if it might explode into dust if the air as much as touched it. It was a grim bit of decoration to be sure but somehow it made sense here, high above a city so morbidly obsessed by death.
Dusk hung over the Bay of Naples, the sun scissoring through blue-grey banks of cloud. There were hydrofoils on the water and a couple of racing speedboats clearly reluctant to return to shore. The lights of the coast already burned in a bright strip of traffic and nightlife along the Sorrentine Peninsula. Winter thought of all those people out there enjoying their freedom tonight in the summer heat. Those simple lives were so easy to take for granted.
Zerbinati’s men hadn’t taken their eyes off him for the past hour. They carried small-bore rifles and he had heard the safety catches being unlocked as they escorted him from the aquarium. They stood vigilantly either side of the pool. The water was calm now, barely stirring as the day faded.
Why were they allowing him this sunset, Winter pondered. He had survived the interrogation, keeping to the Kulganek story even as Cesare’s nails had lingered around his eyes, threatening to scrape the truth out of him. Cesare could have gone further but Winter sensed his patience had been exhausted. Little wonder. It had to be tedious hearing the same response spat back at you, over and over. No wonder the best interrogators had a twist of sadism in their psyche, taking their victim’s defiance as a licence to play. Then again, by the end perhaps Cesare had simply bought the bullshit.
They were keeping him alive. Maybe they planned to hand him to the Russians. A gift from the Shadowless, greasing whatever deal they were making with Moscow. Given he had insisted he was here to kill an officer of the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security, Winter imagined this wouldn’t exactly be an improvement in his situation.
He decided to savour this warm, still dusk as best he could. He stopped at the furthest edge of the walkway and looked out across the sea, never less than aware of the guns at his back.
‘There is considerable debate as to whether the great white shark hunts in these waters.’
The voice was calm and cultured. An Italian accent, seasoned by age. At first Winter found it impossible to place where it was coming from. It whispered against his ear, almost as close as his own thoughts, then a second
later it seemed to recede, becoming a murmur and then an echo.
‘Some insist the currents of the Tyrrhenian are altogether too temperate for the beast.’
The man was closing behind him, his footsteps as measured as his words. Winter didn’t turn but he glanced down. There was no trace of shadow moving across the marble.
‘But every sea has a pulse. Every great body of water holds the promise of blood. And where there is blood there is inevitably a predator.’
The air itself had changed with the man’s presence. The dusk carried a chill now, though there was only the thinnest breeze across the headland, barely enough to stir the orchids that lined the wall at the edge of the cliff.
‘An apex predator is especially determined. Do you regard yourself as an apex predator, signore?’
The man was at his side. The temperature had sharpened again, dropping another couple of degrees. Winter saw that the orchids were suddenly crawling with aphids, the tiny, lime-bright insects feasting on the leaves.
‘Is that why you came to my city? To prove yourself? To claim your status?’
Winter finally turned. Don Zerbinati looked back at him, his eyes cool and ancient.
Winter spoke. ‘I wasn’t sent here to kill you. I had another target.’
Zerbinati waved away the lie. ‘Please, signore. Respect me.’
‘I respect you enough not to put a bullet in you. I was here to kill the Russian.’
‘Were you, now?’
Zerbinati reached inside his jacket pocket. When his hand returned Winter’s bullet was balanced on the palm. The skin around it was a vicious red, inflamed like a fresh burn and blistering even as Zerbinati displayed the projectile. It had to be the power of the thorn. Just the act of holding it was clearly an ordeal for the vampire, though his face gave nothing away. Winter could only imagine what a direct hit might have done to the heart.
Zerbinati smiled, and it wasn’t without charm. ‘Such an ostentatious bullet to waste on a KGB man, wouldn’t you say?’
The Spider Dance Page 21