Luciano's Luck Read Free Page A

truck and two kubelwagens appear on the main road above him. Carter didn't wait to see what would happen, simply pushed on through the trees until he came to the woodcutter's track that ran all the way down through the forest to Bellona. Just enough light to see by if he was lucky. He flung a leg over the broken leather saddle of the old bicycle and rode away.
    There wasn't a great deal to remember of that ride. The trees crowding in on either side, deepening the evening gloom, the rush of the heavy rain. It was rather like being on the kind of monumental drunk where, afterwards, only occasional images surface.
    He opened his eyes to find himself lying on his back, the rain falling on his upturned face, in a ditch on the edge of the village, the bicycle beside him.
    The pain of the gunshot wound was intense now, worse than he would have believed possible. There was no sign of the shotgun and he forced himself to his feet and stumbled along the track through the swiftly falling darkness.
    The smell of wood smoke hung on the damp air and a dog barked hollowly in the distance, but otherwise there was no sign of life except for the occasional light in a window. And yet there were people up there, watching from behind the shutters, waiting.
    He made it across the main square, pausing at the fountain in the centre to put his head under the jet of cold water that gushed from the mouth and nostrils of a bronze dryad, continued past the church and turned into a narrow side street. There was an entrance to a courtyard a few houses along, barred by an oaken gate, a blue lamp above it. The sign painted on the wall in ornate black letters read Vito Barbera Mortician.
    A small judas gate stood next to the main door. Carter leaned against it and pulled the bell chain. There was silence for a while and he held on to the grille with one hand, staring up at the rain falling in a silver spray through the lamplight. A footstep sounded inside and the grille opened.
    Barbera said, ‘What is it?’
    ‘Me, Vito.’
    ‘Harry, is that you?’ Barbera said, this time in the kind of English that came straight from the Bronx. ‘Thank God. I thought they must have lifted you.’
    He opened the judas gate and Carter stepped inside. ‘A damn nearrun thing, Vito, just like Waterloo,’ he said and fainted.
    Carter surfaced slowly and found himself looking up at a cracked plaster ceiling. It was very cold and there was a heavy, medicinal smell to everything that he soon recognized as formaldehyde. He was lying on one of the tables in the mortuary preparation room, his neck pillowed on a wooden block, his stomach and chest expertly bandaged.
    He turned his head and found Barbera, wearing a long rubber apron, working on the corpse of an old man at the next table. Carter pushed himself up.
    Barbera said cheerfully, ‘I wouldn't if I were you. He shot you twice. The one in the side went straight through, but the second is somewhere in the left lung. You'll need a top surgeon.’
    ‘Thanks a million,’ Carter said. ‘That really does make me feel a whole lot better.’
    On the trolley beside Barbera were the tools of the embalmer's trade laid out neatly on a white cloth: forceps, scalpels, surgical needles, artery tubes and a glass jar containing a couple of gallons of embalming fluid.
    There was a look of faint surprise on the corpse's face that many people show in death, jaw dropped, mouth gaping as if in astonishment that this could be happening. Barbera took a long curved needle and passed it from behind the lower lip, up through the nasal septum and down again so that when he tightened the thread and tied it off, the jaw was lifted.
    ‘So you raise people from the dead, too?’ Carter eased himself off the table. ‘I always knew you were a man of parts.’
    Barbera smiled, a small, intenselooking man of fifty whose tangled irongrey beard appeared strangely at odds with the Bronx accent.
    ‘You fucking English, Harry! I mean, when are you going to