- 49 -
For a second Ben toyed with the idea of slamming the door and trying to barricade himself into the cellar. But he decided immediately that course of action would not be appropriate at the moment. He couldn’t abandon Francesca and her father to these criminals. So he stepped into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind him. The man with the knife said something to them.
“What was that?” asked Ben.
“He said to turn round and put your hands on the wall.”
“Not on your life. I don’t want a knife in my ribs.”
“Please do as he says,” she pleaded, “or it will be bad for all of us. He will not knife you now unless Mancino Vitelli tells him to.”
Reluctantly Ben turned round. The two gangsters came forward and frisked them. Ben presumed that they were looking for weapons. He couldn’t help admiring the complete disdain with which Francesca ignored the grubby, lingering paws. She was once again completely self-controlled – the proud, superior lady.
The search wasn’t very well conducted. The man searching Ben removed Donna’s mobile phone from his jacket pocket but missed the little pistol tucked into the back of his belt. They didn’t even bother to search Papa. They just took away the bottle of wine projecting from his coat pocket.
The hood barked out another order.
“We have to go upstairs,” said Francesca with a slight note of relief in her voice.
One of the gangsters preceded them up the steps and through the coat cupboard. On the ground floor they were instructed to turn right after a few yards into the corridor leading into the new wing. They stopped outside the third door on the right. The hood came forward to unlock the door and gestured for them to go inside.
They found themselves in a large, palatial office with full height hardwood panelling around the walls. There were three windows along one side which looked over a grey, early morning garden. Book shelves were let into the walls at either end of the room. To their left was a conference table circled by ten chairs. Filling the right hand end of the room was a large ornate desk with an inlaid leather top and an expensive executive chair behind it.
“What’s going to happen now?” asked Ben.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think they have gone to fetch the capofamiglia - Signor Vitelli.”
They were left to stand in the middle of the floor, guarded by the man with the knife and one of the gangsters. Weary from his exertions, Ben pulled out a chair from the table. It provoked a violent outburst of Italian from the hood.
Francesca translated. “He says you are to remain standing up.”
“Surely he’s not going to make an old man continue to stand up.”
“Yes, you are right.” With a brief comment in Italian, she picked up the chair and took it to her father.
The hood stepped forward with a torrent of abuse. He slapped her sharply across the face and took the chair back to its original position. Francesca gasped but kept herself under control.
“What a charmer.” Ben started forward. He felt an almost overwhelming desire to catch hold of the little bastard by the throat and shake him till his teeth rattled. But the Italian was ready with his knife in case he was attacked.
“Please don’t, Ben. It was really nothing.” She seemed worried in case he started a fight with their captors.
So he clenched his fists and forced his anger to subside. In the long silence that followed he thought furiously about ways of taking his revenge.
After they had been waiting for about ten minutes a hidden door suddenly opened in the panelling behind the magnificent desk. A small man of about of about fifty entered. He was a strange apparition. He had short, brown, furry hair of an unusual hue for this part of the world. Ben wondered if he was wearing a wig.
However, if it was a hairpiece or if it his hair had been dyed then so too had his eyebrows and his small brown moustache. His eyes were also of a neutral brown colour. Even his skin had a dirty tint, as though he’d been soaking in a bath of rust-coloured water. Nevertheless he was smartly dressed in a pale cream suit with a matching shirt and a brown tie. His neatness gave the impression that he had spent some time getting ready. Ben checked his watch and was amazed to find that it was still only ten past seven.
Francesca spoke quickly in Italian to the man whom Ben guessed to be Mancino Vitelli. Her voice had a submissive note. Ben assumed she was asking whether her father could be permitted to sit down. Vitelli asked several questions of the hood, who he called Guido. The man replied expansively with several extravagant gestures. Vitelli made a flapping movement of his hand and the next minute the two gangsters moved in.
“What’s happening?” asked Ben.
“We’re being taken back to Papa’s prison room.”
Ben started to move but the next second he found himself looking at the blade of Guido’s knife. Vitelli reached inside the right hand drawer of his desk and his hand came out holding a large, black automatic.
“Please sit down, Signor Cartwright,” he lisped in passable English. Sylvia had said her father could not speak English. However it seemed the capofamiglia was a man of hidden talents.
Ben subsided into a seat as Francesca and Papa were led from the room. He wondered whether they would be able to get back into the prison room since Dino’s key still nestled in his pocket. When they did get in Ben’s problems would start to multiply.
Vitelli looked across at him. “Signor Cartwright, how did you get here?”
There was no doubt that a quick search would uncover his route, but Ben didn’t see why he should help them at this moment.
“I climbed in.”
“I don’t believe you.” Vitelli’s eyebrows rose. “Nobody has ever climbed into the Villa Rafallo.”
“I’m a good climber.”
The Italian’s face darkened. His eyes turned into little intense black dots. “Perhaps that is right but you are the man who left my son Carlos to die on the Brow of the Devil.”
“That is not correct.” Ben was startled. Had the man been nursing a grievance against him for the last two years? “I did all I could to try to reach him but I couldn’t move his rope. Then I raised the alarm. When the rescuers arrived they said he had been dead since he fell and hit the rock.”
“Mr Cartwright, I read the report. Carlos was left hanging from a rope for sixteen hours before the rescuers got to him. Nobody can survive like that for sixteen hours.” Suddenly the little man was seething with outrage. “You were there all the time. You tell me you are a good climber. Why did you not rescue him in sixteen hours?”
“I tried.”
His moustache bristled pugnaciously. “You managed to save your friend Antonio. Why didn’t you try to do the same for Carlos?”
“Toni was close to the chimney where I was anchored. He was alive. I did my best to try to reach Carlos. But my strength was giving out.”
“The report also said that you lost your nerve and had to be lifted off the mountain. In Italy we just say that men are afraid.” He pointed a finger at Ben. “It was your fear that killed my son.”
Ben looked at the floor in shame. It hadn’t occurred to him before that this man might hold him responsible for Carlos’ death. He had always assumed that everyone else would agree that it was the fellow’s own foolishness which had caused the accident.
“Signor Cartwright.” The capofamiglia’s head was jutting forward. His eyes were fastened on Ben as he pushed home his message. “To me you are the man who killed my son because you did not try to save him when he was still alive.”
“That is not true,” Ben burst out. “You read the report. It said that he probably died much earlier. He might have been killed by the shock of the fall. He fell a hundred feet – more than thirty metres – before the rope stopped him. That would have been enough to kill him.”
“But he still had his safety helmet on. Why did you not try to reach him?”
“I did try. I tried for at least half an hour. But he
was dangling sixty feet down the rope. It was nearly dark. It had taken three hours to get Toni up into the chimney.” But now Ben felt a terrible shame again, for he knew that he really ought to have tried harder.
“So you saved a Cimbrone but did not try to save a Vitelli. That is not liked by my family. In Italy we believe that you owe us a debt of honour.”
“What do you mean? How does one pay a debt of honour?”
“Only by giving your life for his.”
Ben was stunned into silence. He couldn’t explain to this man who was thirsting for vengeance what it had been like on the mountain. The man would never understand what it felt like to be at the end of your resistance – to be exhausted and cold and (he might as well admit it) frightened of death. But Ben couldn’t blame him. Nobody else understood either. The accident had been foolish and unnecessary. It was his mistake to have survived it without injury. The Vitelli seemed to be unable to forgive him for that.
The capofamiglia switched the line of his attack. “You have come into the Villa Rafallo without an invitation. Why did you come?”
Ben dragged his mind away from that dreadful day on the mountain and back to the present. “I came because I am told that you are the man who is trying to take my business away from me.” Now he found that he could look him in the face again. “I want to know why.”
Signor Vitelli paused for a moment, as if weighing his answer in his mind. “I would say that the business is not yours.”
“Part of it is mine - a large part. My father started the shop and I took it over. Then together Toni and I built it up to the position that it is now in.”
The man looked thoughtful. After a while he said, “Well, it may be that we can be of some use to each other. You also have something that is mine.”
“What is that?”
“You mean you do not know?”
At that moment the door suddenly burst open and Francesco’s brother stormed in.
The Mafia Emblem Page 49