October Men Read Free Page B

breakable crashed to the floor.
    Four more paces took him down the passage to the foot of the stairs—the last footfall was muffled by the carpet with the eastern writing on it that his wife had told him never to put a boot on. Well, he’d got both boots on it now!
    The tingling silence abruptly descended around him again. And yet not a true silence any more, but the moment when the gamekeeper and the poacher sensed each other’s presence in the same covert, the moment of held breath and stretched senses.
    It had not been like this in the farmhouse, it had been just how the sergeant had wanted it, all noise and terror.
    Charlie reached out for the light switch.
    “I knows you’re up there,” he said in a loud voice. “You just come on down quiet, an’ don’t make no trouble. Police is comin’. So you just come on down.”
    He clicked the switch.
    There was bursting paper-bag noise—that had been the farmhouse noise he’d never been able to recall—and a hornet stung his ear.
    Same noise with same result: as the man at the head of the stairs sighted the pistol again, this time on Charlie’s heart, Charlie shot him dead.

II
    VILLARI ’ S MANNERS, OR more exactly his attitude towards those whom he considered inferior to himself, had not improved, that was evident.
    First the fellow had idly fingered the files and envelopes on Boselli’s desk, disarranging their mathematical relation to one another. Then he had admired himself in the little round mirror beside the door, patting the golden perfection of his hair and checking his flawless complexion. And then he had sauntered over to the window to gaze without apparent interest over the roofscape towards the Vittorio Emanuele monument. And finally, when he deigned at last to speak, he didn’t even bother to turn round to face Boselli.
    “Who’s this guy Audley then?”
    Boselli stared at the well-tailored back with hatred. If looks could kill he felt that his would have materialised into six inches of steel angled slightly upwards just beneath the left shoulder blade.
    “Audley?” The anger blurred his voice.
    “The guy you’re getting steamed up about, yes.”
    It was typical of Villari to use that aggravating and unfair “you,” even though he’d come running across a heat-stricken Rome obediently enough himself. But then Villari had always known when to temper his native insolence with a shrewd instinct for the whims of his superiors. The feet that kicked the Bosellis of the world at every opportunity trod very carefully on the carpets of men like Raffaele Montuori.
    “We’re not getting steamed up.”
    “So you’re not getting steamed up—fine.” Villari moved across the airless room, back to the mirror again. “You’re not getting steamed up, but you’re here.”
    That “here” carried the same disparagement as the earlier “you,” turning Boselli’s own beloved sanctuary, with its rows of battered steel cabinets and its signed portrait of John XXIII into an unspeakable slum.
    “And you are here too,” replied Boselli acidly. He mopped his brow with the big silk handkerchief his eldest daughter had given him on his last birthday, fancying as he did so that Villari had chosen even those words “steamed up” with deliberate scorn also. For all his North Italian, almost Scandinavian blondness, the younger man showed not a sign of discomfort in the swelter—it was Boselli himself, the Roman, who was already wilting.
    But that bitter little thought raised another much more interesting one which momentarily chased away Boselli’s private discomforts. There had to be a reason for the General to recall this gilded Clotheshorse from his leave beyond the fact that he happened to be here in Rome. If the General had wanted someone from Venice or Messina —or Benghazi—he wouldn’t have thought twice about summoning him. So it was Villari and none other that he wanted now. And since Villari combined fluency in the North European languages