A Glancing Light (A Chris Norgren Mystery) (7 page)

"You can in Winslow," I couldn't help saying. I wasn't so sure about Seattle or New York. Or Bologna, when it came down to it, considering the stories at dinner. I glanced nervously around. Across the street a man and a woman, arms wrapped around each other, were quietly mooning along, walking the other way. Half a block behind us, in the darkness, a car coughed softly and started up. It couldn't have been more peaceful.

"Ah, Chris," Max raved on, "just think about it. How do you compare two and a half thousand years of history to— to Michael Jackson and—and McDonald's?"

In some deeply buried vault, patriotism stirred. "Now wait a minute, Max, you're comparing unlike things. Besides, I think the Italians would be happy to trade in some of that history if they could."

"Oh, you mean Mussolini? The Borgias?" He dismissed them with a wave. "Every culture has—What are we stopping for?"

I pointed to the street sign on the corner of a building. "Via Montegrappa. My hotel's down here."

"Oh." He was crestfallen. "You wouldn't want to have one more drink?"
 

"No, thanks." Overeating, overdrinking, and jet lag had finally, irrevocably, caught up with me. All I wanted to do was fall into bed. "You want to come in and call a cab?"

He shook his head contemptuously. "To go six blocks?"

Max lived on the other side of Via Marconi, in a section where big, block-like, modern apartment houses had replaced buildings destroyed in World War II. "You going to have time to get together again for dinner in the next couple of days?"

"Sure, anytime."

"Day after tomorrow? Come by the gallery about six, and we'll go from there."

"You're on. See you then."

I turned onto the unlit Via Montegrappa, which was more medieval alley than Renaissance boulevard, while Max continued down Indipendenza. After a quarter of a block I stopped abruptly, listening hard. I wasn't sure what had alerted me. Something. I stood stock-still. What had I heard? No, nothing. Behind me, on Indipendenza, an automobile had driven slowly by, that was all. I'd heard the engine purring, the tires crackling on the pavement.

I started walking again, puzzled, replaying the sounds. Something wasn't right. The car had been going too slowly, cruising at a walker's pace. In the direction Max was going. The same car I'd heard before, the same quiet engine? Is that what had caught my attention? The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I turned and made quickly for Indipendenza, thinking about all those bullets falling out of Paolo Salvatorelli. Via dell'Indipendenza was empty and silent. It was still raining, but the clouds had thinned, and moonlight glistened on the wet street. I stood still again for a moment, straining to hear. There was a scraping noise, sounds of scuffling, a muffled grunt. With my mouth suddenly dry I ran to the corner where Max would have turned to head home.

He was there, a few yards down Via Ugo Bassi, struggling awkwardly with two men, a tall, lean one in a leather jacket, and a fat, bald monster with a neck that was thicker than his head, and arms and shoulders like Conan the Barbarian. The tall one was roughly shoving Max backward a step at a time, his palms flat against Max's chest, the way a kid does when he's daring another kid to do something about it. Max was stumbling back, trying to hold his ground, making small, outraged noises.

Just as I came in sight of them the fat, muscular one drew back his fist and punched Max in the face. If you have never heard the sound made when a powerful adult male hits someone in the face with all his might—and I guess I hadn't—it comes as a surprise. It isn't the crisp
krak
of old movies or the explosive
crump
of new ones. It's nothing at all like the clean slap of a boxing glove. It's a mushy, hollow sound, bare knuckles grinding against bone, and it makes your knees weak to hear it.

At least it made my knees weak. The man drew back his fist again.

"Hey," I said.

I know you will be amazed to learn that they were not paralyzed with fright. They didn't even jump. They just turned very slowly and looked coldly at me for a long time, which didn't do anything for my knees. Meanwhile, Max slid down the wall of the building, moaning softly. The two men glanced at each other. I think they nodded. The bull-necked one calmly turned back to Max. The tall, thin one walked toward me, not hurrying. Sauntering, in fact, with his hands held out a little from his hips, gunfighter-style.

Part of me wanted to run, of course. All right,
all
of me wanted to run. I'm fit enough, and I don't think I'm any more cowardly than the average man, but I'm an art curator, for God's sake, and these were professional thugs, as even I could tell. This was out of my line; I didn't go around getting into fights in bars. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd been out-and-out angry with anyone. Well, not unless you count the divorce proceedings, which hardly seems fair.

My legs were aching to turn and run. Believe me, all the ready-made rationalizations leaped to my mind: What was the point of getting Max
and
me killed or maimed? What did I think I could do against two bruisers? Wasn't running and shouting for the police, for any kind of help, the best thing I could do for Max?

But I didn't run. I can't claim I was being terrifically brave, because I couldn't stop trembling, but I simply couldn't turn tail and leave him there, and I couldn't make myself start bawling for help, either. I stood my ground, my fists knotted. My stomach, too, if it comes to that.

He came up to me and stopped, examining me with his head tilted to one side. I saw that he wasn't really thin; he was hard, with flesh like weathered teak. He was bigger than I'd thought, two or three inches taller than me, and he'd taken a few punches in the face himself. His brow was spongy with scar tissue and his nose had been pounded into a flat, formless lump that sat like a codfish fillet on the middle of his face. The top half of his left ear was gone. He looked very, very tough, very seasoned.

"Back off, fuckface," I snarled. Not my usual m.o., I admit, but I'd heard somewhere that the best thing to do in situations like this was to establish your authority at the outset.

He didn't back off. Far from it. His right hand—I never saw it coming, but it must have been his right hand; the stiffly extended fingers of his right hand—dug upward into the left side of my abdomen, just beneath the rib cage. The pain was extraordinary. For a horrible instant I thought that I'd been stabbed, that he'd slipped a stiletto under my ribs and up into my lung. I gagged, momentarily unable to breathe, or even to gasp. He drew his hand swiftly back, diagonally over his shoulder, the fingers once again rigidly extended. This, I realized, was going to be a blow to the throat with the edge of his palm. Clutching my left side, incapable of doing much more than warding him off, somehow I had the presence of mind to tuck my chin into my shoulder and step into the blow, toward him rather than away.

As a result, it was his leather-clad upper arm, not his hand, that caught me in the temple, not the neck. Not an enjoyable experience, but a lot better than it might have been. I could draw breath again, and I realized thankfully that I hadn't been stabbed. While his left arm was caught in the crook of my neck and shoulder I punched him just under the armpit— a little gingerly, because 1 wasn't used to hitting people, and then again, harder. His torso jerked and a whoosh of warm air blew onto my cheek. I smelled something sweet on his breath; tarragon. I remember a moment of bemused surprise. Garlic, I might have expected, but tarragon?

We were locked together in a tangle of arms. One of his elbows was in my face, and I think one of mine was in his. He twisted suddenly, too quickly and complexly for me to follow, and broke away. He bobbed and spun, so that his back was to me, and then, seemingly from nowhere, his foot crashed into my face, heel first, just under the eye. I was knocked back, slamming noisily into the wooden side of a boarded-up flower stand at the curb's edge.

From off to the side, near Max, the bull-necked one called to him: "
Presto, Ettore, presto.
"

Come on, Ettore, hurry it up
. It was not said urgently, but with a grousing kind of irritation, as if I were no more than an annoying bug to be squashed.

Until then, I had been by turns concerned, startled, scared, and combative. But such is the nature of the male ego that for the first time I was wholeheartedly hostile. Bug, indeed.

The kick had stung my cheek and knocked me off balance, but hadn't done any real harm. But for Ettore's benefit I sagged against the flower stand, my head nodding. I figured that I was entitled to some subterfuge to make the odds a little more even; Ettore was frighteningly fast, with a repertory of moves I had seen only in martial arts movies. And I hadn't seen many of those. He closed warily in, arms held up and out in front of him, crossed at the wrists.

There were some cardboard trays stacked hip-high at the side of the stand, and I had managed to get my fingers around the rim of one. As he took another step forward I swung it sharply at his head. It startled him, as it was meant to. His crossed hands flew a few inches higher, and as the cardboard bounced harmlessly off his wrists I drove in with a blow to his midsection. This one had everything I had behind it, and it landed just where I'd aimed it; in the center of his flat, hard abdomen. He doubled over instantly, and I managed to get in a second punch, this one not much more than a sloppy swipe at his head as he was going down.

But even when he was on the pavement in a heap, Ettore was formidable. As he hit the tile he twisted like a cat into a compact ball, catching my ankles between his arms and legs. "Pietro!" he shouted.

While I was struggling to get free something snaked around me from behind; an enormously thick, iron-like arm that pressed the breath out of me with a single squeeze, then kept on squeezing. Pietro had arrived. I panicked, beating with both fists at the gargantuan forearm. If he kept it up for one more second, my ribs would crack.

He didn't. He shifted his hold, plucked me easily from Ettore's grasp, and threw me—simply heaved me—a good eight or ten feet out into the street. On the fly. I didn't even hear him grunt with the effort. I managed to break my fall with my arms and jump quickly if unsteadily to my feet. I was muddled, though, facing in the wrong direction. I turned dizzily, almost losing my balance, until I found the two of them again. Ettore was up now. He and the monster were standing together, next to the flower stand, looking quietly at me again. Ettore had something in his hand that looked like a piece of metal pipe. Max was moaning softly on the ground behind them. The rain drifted lazily down onto my face.

There was a sudden roar to my right, only a dozen or so feet away. Startled, I spun around and found myself facing a small, dark car with its headlights off. I could see a figure behind the wheel.

The car . . . I'd forgotten the car—

Even now, it still seems to me as if the thing literally sprang at me, like a tiger at a deer. And even if I hadn't been as frozen as a terror-stricken deer, there wouldn't have been time to get out of the way. I put out my hands feebly in an absurd effort to keep it off.

And astonishingly I did, after a fashion. When my hands hit the front of it and I pushed, I was bumped upward, not downward, and an instant later I was doing a handstand, or at least a rolling shoulder stand, on the hood while it moved under me. I slid heavily into the windshield, or rather it slid into me—thank God, it didn't break—and then, somehow, I was flipped over and up, landing on the roof.

That was the most painful part, because I landed sharply on the base of my spine and also managed to bang the back of my head somewhere along the way. I felt the car speed up under me, and I skidded the length of the roof on my back, slithered down over the trunk without doing much additional damage, and landed back in the street, amazingly enough on my feet.

I hit hard on both heels, jarring every bone and joint in my body, and then juddered crazily over the pavement, my teeth rattling, until I tripped over the curb and fell onto the terrazzo. On instinct, I dragged myself between two columns, out of reach of the car, then sat shaking, not comprehending what had happened. I had been caught by surprise, after all, and the whole thing couldn't have taken even two seconds. And believe me, it was a lot less intelligible in the experiencing than in the telling. Besides, from the moment I'd seen the car, I'd expected to be killed. Sitting there, I wasn't sure I hadn't been.

A wave of nausea billowed over me, and I leaned sideways and put my forehead down against the smooth tile. My teeth ached appallingly. Something warm was flowing thickly by my ear and along my neck. I saw the column next to me tilt slowly and begin to revolve. I must have passed out then, for how long I'm not sure, but I remember jerking awake with a start at the sound of an approaching siren.

The thugs were gone. The car, too. But Max was still lying there; alive, thank God. He was painfully trying to haul himself to his elbows. His legs, flaccid and boneless-looking, seemed not to belong to him. For the first time, I noticed he was lying beneath the darkened windows of Bologna's newest restaurant, opened a few weeks before on the busy downtown corner of Indipendenza and Ugo Bassi, across from the venerable Piazza Nettuno.

McDonald's.

Chapter 5

The next time I was aware of anything at all I was drifting in and out of cottony, white clouds. I was quite comfortable. Happy, in fact. I was in the Ospedale Maggiore
_;
so I'd been given to understand, and I was going to be just fine. I certainly felt fine. Solicitous, cheerful men and women in white hovered about me, making pleasant sounds and occasionally sticking needles in me with great gentleness. It was very pleasant to simply lie back and be fussed over.

At one indeterminate point I surfaced—or rather descended from somewhere around ceiling level—to find myself listening to someone speaking in Italian with quiet confidence.