“Scarsa ricezione del telefono.”
Yes, Harper was aware of the poor phone reception.
“La ricezione è buona laggiù.” Good reception over there.
She peered down the lane where Pagolo was pointing.
He’d parked the Jeep thirty feet down the dirt lane. The cell phone was positioned on the rear bumper. A long walk facing away from Pagolo.
She turned and examined him closely. He wore denim overalls over a long-sleeve white jersey. The bib of the overalls was stretched flat over his thick chest. Nowhere to hide a pistol, but the bagginess at his waist could easily conceal a weapon.
He read her look and said, “You no trust Pagolo? You think I have gun. No, no gun. You look, you see.”
He unsnapped the buttons on the straps of his overalls, shook it loose, and let the garment fall to his ankles. No underwear. He drew up his white jersey, exposing his hard, hairy belly and chest, then he rotated 360 and came back around and gave her another look at his manhood. Nothing special.
“Is good?” A smirk.
While he was pulling up his pants, Harper started down the pathway, listening for movement behind her.
Ten feet down the path, twenty. She was reaching for the phone when she caught the breathy grunt of effort close by. She ducked and spun to her right and saw the blur of a club whisking past the spot where her skull had been.
She straightened and stepped back. Pagolo was smiling at her, the baseball bat cocked onto his shoulder.
“Drop it.”
His eyes narrowed briefly, and he took another rip at her head, but she easily dodged out of range.
She had no doubt she could outrun this squat, heavyset man. Ordinarily that’s the tactic Marco would have urged. But here in the isolation of the grove, miles from familiar terrain, it didn’t seem a viable option.
Though it was a risky choice and one Marco would have frowned upon, Harper decided to take her chances and grapple with Pagolo, neutralize him, sling away his bat, then inflict enough pain to interrogate him and get an honest answer. Who was he working for? It could be his former employer, Albion, or his current one, Knobel. And what did he know about these spittlebugs and the withered, frostbitten branches she’d discovered?
Pagolo was smiling at her, waggling the club like a batter taking short practice swings. The wooden bat was dented and stained. It had seen hard use. Maybe Pagolo had been Albion’s local enforcer, intimidating the stubborn farmers in the region, pressuring them to sell their properties to Albion Olives.
She kept a buffer of several feet between them, dancing backward at his every forward move. She’d decided to wait till he took another swing and his balance was compromised before making her move, a side kick at whatever target he presented.
Moving past the parked Jeep, she took another backward step as he came closer, then moved another step farther out of range. She hadn’t paid close attention to the lay of the land behind her, and it was too late now to venture a look, but she didn’t remember seeing any rocks or roots or other stumbling blocks down this sandy path.
He backed her down the road another ten feet before she halted. She’d given enough ground. She saw something flicker in Pagolo’s eyes, a cagey smile curling onto his lips.
He cut his eyes to the right. “Mi chiedevo dove cavolo avevo lasciata quella cosa.”
He wondered where he’d left some damn thing.
In her peripheral vision, she caught the glint of metal on the ground nearby.
He took that small opening and lunged and aimed the bat at her head, but a half step back was all she needed, the bat slashing inches in front of her, to reset her feet for the side kick she’d planned, but when she planted her back foot, it found nothing but air beneath her shoe.
She staggered to the right, fanned her arms, and was about to regain her balance before pitching backward into a pit or hole or whatever the hell it was when Pagolo grunted and rammed the head of the bat into her gut like the lance of a jousting knight and sent her sprawling into the freshly turned earth.
Landing on her hands and knees, she scrambled upright, found her footing just as Pagolo took another swipe. She bobbed out of the bat’s path, felt it scrape her right temple.
The hole she was standing in was waist-deep, a shallow oblong six feet long—a goddamn grave. She was trapped but still had room to maneuver.
“You fast,” Pagolo said. “Hard to hit.”
He circled the hole, Harper swiveling with him, her eyes locked to his, watching for the telltale squint she’d spotted immediately before he took his last swing.
She had to time it right, but it was clear his quickness and agility weren’t close to her own. She plotted it out, step by step, then waited with her hands raised chest high as though she meant to catch a medicine ball.
On Pagolo’s next trip around the hole, she saw the object that earlier had gleamed in her peripheral vision. A red-handled shovel with a shiny new blade propped against the hollowed-out trunk of an olive tree. Near it was a rectangular patch of soil darker than the ground around it. The same shape and size as Harper’s hole. A previous grave.
Her eyes had strayed to the shovel for only a half second, but long enough to miss Pagolo’s warning squint. The bat’s incoming path was different this time. He’d stopped aiming for her skull and was targeting her torso.
As the bat hurtled toward her ribs, she fell away, using her hand speed and timing to snag the cudgel in its downward flight. In a flowing motion, she grabbed it with both hands, softening its momentum, then yanked it toward her body.
Stubborn, Pagolo held his grip, believing he could outmuscle this woman, but Harper dropped to her knees, using the earthen pit’s edge to lever her weight against his handhold. She twisted hard against the grip of his thumbs.
Pagolo should have let go, should have surrendered the bat, made a run for the shovel, a better weapon anyway, but his honor wouldn’t allow such a thing, so he held on and tried to wrestle the bat from her, but she had the better leverage by far, and he tipped forward farther and farther until he lost his balance, Harper yanking him into the hole.
After he tumbled onto her, she wrenched the bat from his grip and squeezed out from under him, clambering to her feet. She found the adhesive grip of the tapered end, raised the bat high, but before she could bring it down, Pagolo squirmed to his knees, lunged forward, and tackled her. He locked his arms around her knees and drove her backward against the far wall of the pit.
She slammed the bat against his spine, but his clenched arms stayed tight around her legs as he continued to jam her body into the dirt wall. Though her angle of attack was blunted, again she raised the club and bashed his backbone. This time his grasp loosened, but he continued to churn his legs as if he meant to bulldoze her straight through the solid earth.
Now he drove upward, his right shoulder crushing into her sternum. She struggled for breath, her ribs nearing the breaking point. Her knees sagged, and a haze crept into the edges of her vision. Leaving her no choice.
She took aim and hacked the bat against the back of his skull and hammered it a second time, harder than the first. He dropped his hold and fell away, but a moment later he swung back and took another shot, clawing at her leg, his long nails drawing blood. He locked his powerful fingers around her right ankle and yanked his full weight against her balance, trying to bring her down, growling as he struggled to rise.
With her free foot, she stomped on his wrist and ground down against those delicate bones, and while the man wailed, Harper took another crack at his head, the blow landing solidly and harder than she intended. Arrasar, Marco liked to say. Obliterate.
Pagolo quivered once, then his body flattened against the dirt and he grew still.
After she caught her breath, she knelt beside him and felt for a pulse at his throat. His flesh was cool, clammy, and mottled, his heartbeat no more than a thready tap.
The interrogation would have to wait.
TWENTY-NINE
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Albion International Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland
“There’s something going on with Bonnie. Something wrong.”
Cradling a load of documents awaiting Albion’s signature, Larissa Bixel sighed impatiently and asked what Bonnie’s problem was.
Lester Albion leaned back in his office chair, swiveled to his left, and gazed out at the Zurich skyline. Beyond the sweep of rooftops, in the far distance, he seemed to regard the magnificent snow-capped Tödi in the Glarus Alps. A billionaire’s unobstructed view.
“She’s lethargic,” Albion said. “She sleeps late, takes naps during the day, which is quite unusual. She’s fallen asleep during the evening meal, simply nodded off while I was talking. She is usually so full of zest, such a spunky dynamo. And lately she seems quite angry all the time, even somewhat bitter.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bixel said.
Albion was decked out in one of his new outfits, a snug turtleneck of pale yellow with slimly tailored trousers and gleaming loafers. Another vain attempt to show off the enhancements in his physique wrought by his long hours in the gym with Coach Horst Schneider.
Then again, maybe Albion wasn’t looking at the sweeping view at all, but admiring his own image. It had been happening a great deal lately, Albion taking furtive, sidelong glances at any reflective surface he passed, mirrors and department store windows and even the black granite walls in the lobby of his building. Turning his head just so to view his profile, his new shoulders-back, head-erect posture, his deepening chest. All of these were, at best, slight improvements in his build. Certainly nothing that would impress Gerda. Though Larissa Bixel would never hint at such a thing to Lester Albion. At this critical juncture of her scheme, fawning had become her primary job.
In the last few months, Albion had been so intent on channeling his energies into physical betterment that he’d neglected more and more of his business chores, paying scant attention to the flood of memos and contracts and accounting documents crossing his desk every day.
Hence, an increasing proportion of the corporate workload had fallen to Bixel. Not that she minded. It was all for an excellent cause, the merger of the Bixel family with the Albion clan, a project that Bixel had been plotting for years.
“So do you have any idea why Bonnie is out of sorts?” he asked.
“I don’t know, perhaps the transfusions are taking a toll.”
Albion swiveled back to her.
The transfusions were most certainly causing a decline in the girl’s health. Bixel had observed it herself while attending the twice-weekly blood exchange in the infirmary. She raised the issue only so she could dismiss it, leaving Albion free to continue pursuing his obsessive goals. His physical-fitness delusion had been a highly useful distraction. For these last few months, the man had been so utterly self-absorbed that Bixel had been free to develop her strategy unhindered.
She stepped forward and set down the load of documents near his elbow. Earlier she’d arranged the paperwork with the precision of a stacked deck. Intersplicing mundane contracts, routine shipping orders, and weekly accounting printouts with the crucial documents that would complete the Manfred Knobel transaction and finish driving a stake through that suitor’s heart.
Bixel stepped back, coming to rest a few feet from his desk, assuming her usual submissive position. Subjugating herself so that Lester Albion would not feel dwarfed by her physical superiority or daunted in any way. This was her daily challenge: to be his sycophant, his faithful lackey, a tool for him to use as he saw fit. Hiding her own supremacy with loose-fitting clothes and deferential remarks, tiptoeing across the eggshells of his insecurity.
“It couldn’t be the transfusions,” he said. “I was assured she would rebound easily. That I would reap great benefits and Bonnie would experience negligible effects. And it’s true, the gains in my vigor and stamina have been quite remarkable.”
“Yes, I quite agree,” she said. “And I think I know what Bonnie’s trouble might be.”
“Do you?”
“Perhaps she is experiencing the first twinges of puberty. That could explain it.”
“Really? So young?”
“In Gerda’s case, the process started at seven. She was a woman by nine.”
A lie, of course. Like most girls who endured the grueling regimens of gymnastics, Gerda’s coming of age was delayed into her middle teens.
Albion exhaled and leaned back in his chair, his eyes drifting off, as if absorbed in imagining Gerda’s blossoming sexuality, which made this the ideal time to secure his signature on the last of the legal instruments and would bring her project a step closer to completion.
“If you don’t mind, sir.” She clicked the gold ballpoint Albion preferred, scooted the stack of papers closer to him, and handed over the pen.
He took it, his eyes still glazed.
Albion removed the first document on the stack and opened it to the SIGN HERE tab, scrawled his signature, and handed it to Bixel. He did three or four more in quick succession, then seemed to tire.
“Puberty? Really? My little girl?”
“Gerda was irritable and drowsy too, but that stage went quickly.”
“Maybe I should call Bonnie’s mother and let her know. She should be alerted to something like this, don’t you think? Such a momentous rite of passage?”
Although Albion’s divorce had been finalized last spring, and his ex-wife had shown nothing but contempt for Lester Albion for years, Bixel still felt threatened by the slightest hint of a resumption in their connection. Anything that jeopardized the union of Lester Albion and her daughter could not be abided.
“Let me talk to Bonnie,” Bixel said. “I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“Would you do that? I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Of course, of course.”
Bixel lifted the next document off the stack and laid it before him.
Lester Albion hunched forward and began to sign, but something on the page caught his eye, and he set the pen aside.
“What is this?” he said. “Imposta Municipale Unica.”
“Property taxes, sir. In Italy.”
“Italy? Remind me, what exactly are we doing in Italy?”
“Olive groves, sir, in Puglia, southern Italy. It’s a long-term project.”
“Olive groves? I didn’t realize we were invested in this.”
“The forecasts for rising profits in extra-virgin olive oil are sharply higher. The Americans have been snapping up groves around Tuscany, but we get a far better price per hectare for the orchards in Puglia. And the olives, I’m told, are quite good. Even better than Tuscany.”
He looked up at her, lost.
She smiled supportively. “You’ve been so busy you’ve probably forgotten the discussion in our last sales-and-marketing meeting about the global opportunities in olive-oil production. I believe Margaret Hinshaw described the excellent fit that olives would have with our current grains and oilseed presence. The supply chain is already activated and quite flexible.”
“Yes, I’ve been so busy.”
She handed him the pen, and he signed the payment voucher for the Italian property taxes and set the page aside.
“I should start paying more attention to business,” he said.
“It’s entirely normal to be distracted, a man in your condition.”
He looked up at her with a puzzled frown.
“What condition do you think I’m suffering from?”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘suffering,’ sir.”
“What do you call it?”
“Well, I believe at the very least you’re infatuated, possibly even more than that.”
“What? You think I’m in love?”
“You didn’t realize?”
Lester Albion stared into her eyes, his lips parting as if he were about to speak, but no words came.
“She’s a wonderful girl,” Bixel said. “And I do believe she would be receptive to your a
dvances, but if she has no knowledge of your feelings, if you continue to withhold yourself from her, only gaze at her from a distance, how will she be able to return your affection? At some point you must act. You must be bold.”
“Yes,” Albion said faintly.
“Gerda is presently traveling, but she will be finished with her work soon and will return to Zurich.”
“I will wine and dine her,” Albion said. “I will lavish her with gifts.”
“Gifts are fine, of course. But Gerda is a girl of simple tastes. A restaurant meal, yes, of course, but my girl is not a romantic. Jewelry and gifts have their place, naturally, but I think you should proceed slowly and, first of all, be kind and caring, gentle and sweet. I’m sure Gerda would find that quite appealing.”
He sighed gloomily.
“I have much to learn,” he said. “Are you willing to help me, Bixel?”
“Of course. Nothing would make me happier than to see you find a soul mate.”
He swallowed and looked down at the stack of papers before him.
“I feel like such a child. As though I’m fifteen again, insecure, unsure of how to proceed.”
“You’ll do fine, sir. You’re not a child. You’re a grown man, the head of a powerful corporation. A man of the world. A cosmopolitan. And you’ve worked hard to transform yourself physically.”
“Yes,” he said, turning again to gaze out his window, or revisit his reflection. “A man of the world.”
“Don’t forget, sir, Coach Schneider is at ten.”
Albion glanced at his watch and came to his feet.
“Before you go.” Bixel gestured at the remaining documents.
“Oh yes, yes.” Albion made a peevish grimace and picked up the pen, stooped over the stack, and scribbled his signature on the dozen remaining contracts.
When Albion was out the door, she paged through the pile of papers, extracted the three that would complete the sale of the Puglia groves to Manfred Knobel, slipped them into a separate folder, then neatened the edges of the rest of the stack and carted everything back to her office.
When You Can't Stop (Harper McDaniel Book 2) Page 21