Assignment - Palermo (12 page)

“HOW long ago?” Durell asked.

“Four, five minutes.”

Durell hid his immediate anxiety. He told O’Malley to go in the front way, with Milan to cover him. He himself would find the back door and enter that way. “And Gabriella?”

“She comes with me,” Durell said.

O’Malley didn’t like it. “You’re getting real possessive, Cajun. Gabriella is a real swinger, but she belongs to me.”

“She belongs to all of us just now. And she’s the one in the most danger. She stays with me, in the open.” O’Malley nodded reluctantly. It occurred to Durell that O’Malley’s jealousy could turn into a real problem soon. But it had to wait. He went with the girl around the comer, through crowded streets. Traffic was heavy. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary in the scene.

Gabriella spoke quietly. “O’Malley is angry with you, Cajun. What is a ‘swinger?’ ”

“A lovely and attractive girl.”

“You think he regards me that way?”

“He’s in love    with you, Gabriella.”

She was silent. Durell’s mind was on the search for Bruno. What he had seen of the
salumeria
was not encouraging. A small shop with fly-specked windows hiding a variety of Neapolitan sausages, cheeses, and gaudy stacks of canned food. Halfway to the next street he saw the alley. It was just wide enough for a small black Fiat to be jammed between the blank walls of the adjacent buildings. Durell could not see beyond the little car. But vague movement stirred in the deep shadows where the sun never penetrated the alley. An orchestration of garbage smells struck him as he stepped in from the street. Gabriella stepped daintily behind him.

A radio blared, louder than usual, even for Naples. It drowned out all other sounds. He counted blank doorways and decided that it came from the rooms behind the salumeria. But there was no sign of violence, none of Bruno. Only the empty Fiat. It had been slammed into the wall of the opposite house, crumpling the fenders, but its engine still ran. Nobody was behind the wheel.

Durell took out his gun.

“What is it?” Gabriella whispered. “Is Bruno—?”

“I don’t know yet. He’s still around.”

There was just space enough on the opposite side of the Fiat to squeeze through. He waved the girl back for a moment. Then he saw the man who sprawled in the filthy water in the center of the alley. He lay face down, his legs oddly splayed. One arm was broken. It was not Bruno. His face was just a face, narrow and ratty, with a look of surprise on its features. For a moment Durell thought he was dead. Then the man groaned in his unconsciousness.

The back door of the delicatessen was open. It looked as if someone had tom it off its hinges. A man sat there, crosswise, with a broken neck. Beyond, all was in darkness in a narrow hallway that seemed to lead nowhere.

“Bruno?” Durell called softly. There was no answer. He stepped over the dead man.

“Bruno?”

“Goddammit.” Someone spoke in the black stifling hole. “I couldn’t help it, Cajun. They tried to grease me.”

Brutelli lurched into sight. He staggered, and his huge bulk caromed from one wall to the other. He held a wickedly glinting knife with the wide blade flat—the easier to slip between an opponent’s ribs. His other arm was filled with a paper bag bulging with cans and packets of food.

His grin was amiable, almost joyous. “Frank is cornin’ along with Joey. Put away the heat, Cajun. It’s all over.”

“What happened to you?”

There was blood on Bruno’s shirt and a cut over his eye. “Hell, there was only two of them.” He stepped over the dead man in the doorway and eyed him objectively. “Broken neck, huh? I didn’t mean to do that.” He seemed surprised. “So they tol’ me to come inna back room, like, to see some special goodies in the way of groceries, and I was dumb enough to go. They was waitin’ in there. But they didn’t figure on ol’ Bruno. Even so, they almost suckered me into the car before I reasoned it out. I got a little mad.”

“So I see.” Durell hid his vast relief. Bruno put away his knife and heaved his groceries into a more comfortable position in his massive left arm. “Come on, Frank. Let’s go, Joey.”

Out of the gloom came O’Malley and Milan. From beyond, muffled by the intervening walls to the
salumeria
, came a sudden spate of recrimination, a woman’s angry voice, and the placating murmur of a man’s reply.

“I’m ready,” Bruno said amiably. “Let’s find a place where I can cook this stuff.”

They checked into a hotel near the Theresa Barra glove shop, since Durell felt uneasy about leaving his companions, and especially Gabriella, exposed temporarily on the open streets of Naples. An accident would be simple to arrange in the wild traffic along the Via Partenope. The bay never looked more beautiful or serene. Distant Capri loomed far off in the blue water, the height of Anacapri seeming to float in the incredible sky. The sidewalk cafes were crowded now, and among them were early-bird tourists, with their inevitable festoons of cameras, beating the summer crush.

The hotel apartment was small and dingy, but it seemed safe enough. It was three o’clock. Half an hour to his appointment with Adolfo Cimadori.

“You going alone?” O’Malley asked aggressively.

“Better that way. You three take care of the girl.

She’s more important to us than Fort Knox.”

“You trust that Adolfo flower?”

“No, but he’s our only lead now.”

“I am sorry,” Gabriella apologized. “Perhaps if we went to Palermo and tried some of the roads, I would recognize them, and it might come back to me, the way to Vecchio Zio’s place.”

“ ‘Castle,’ you said,” Durell reminded her.

“Yes, an old Crusader or Norman ruin.”

“Well, that may be a help. Only so many of them are still habitable.” Durell frowned. “But Sicily is too big. It would take a long time to check them all out.” “I am so sorry. I—I wish I had not agreed to this. It was wrong of me. I was mistaken about Zio. I thought —hoped—he would see me at any time.”

“Keep on believing it,” Durell said.

“But these men who try to stop us—they must all take orders from Zio.”

“I doubt it.”

“It could not be otherwise,” she objected. “Zio commands and Zio is obeyed.”

“Maybe not this time.”

But there was more on her mind. Durell was aware of it from the way she hovered near him, as if she were reluctant to stay with O’Malley. She bit her pink lip and made a little sound and traced a faded rose in the carpet with her foot, arching her toe like a ballerina. O’Malley, lounging in the kitchen doorway of the hotel apartment, glowered at her.

“What’s bugging you, kitten?” he asked.

“Nothing, O’Malley. But I would feel safer—” “With the Cajun?”

“Perhaps. Not that I reflect on you, but—”

“But he’s getting to you, is that it?”

“O’Malley, you have no right to criticize me,” she flared. “You have no claim on me.”

“Oh, yes, I have, baby. Lots of claims.” He twitched away from the door and crossed toward Durell. He walked like a fighter crossing a ring, his shoulders hunched. Attracted by the tightness of his voice, Bruno and Joey came to watch. All at once the atmosphere in the drab apartment was electric. “Cajun, are you playing for her?” O’Malley asked.

“No.”

“She’s my girl. You know that?”

Gabriella said in a small voice, “I am not your girl, O’Malley. I am free. I have always been free.”

“You’re not going with the Cajun.”

It was an ultimatum, and Durell saw no profit in taking it up. O’Malley was too volatile. He reminded himself he was dealing with men who had no morality. Shrugging, he moved Gabriella toward the kitchen door.

“Go and help Bruno get his fancy dinner together, like a good girl. O’Malley is right. You’re safer here. What I have to do now is better done alone.”

“But they only want to lure you where they can kill you,” she protested. “O’Malley, you should go with him.”

“You certainly worry about the Cajun, don’t you?” O’Malley asked angrily.

“I worry about all of us.”

“Please do as I say,” Durell told her.

Reluctantly she walked toward the kitchen. Bruno lumbered after her, and his voice made a low growl as they talked in there. Joey Milan picked up a deck of cards he had acquired somewhere and made thin riffling sounds as he shuffled them. His eyes never left Durell. O’Malley paced to the window and back, lean and dangerous. From the kitchen came a clatter of pots and pans. The sound eased him, and he laughed. “All right, Cajun, we won’t knife each other about it, right? Just remember, she’s my girl.”

“If she says so.”

“
I
say so. It’s enough, right?” Some of the feral look left O’Malley’s eyes. “So you go to that pink-pants Adolfo’s place alone. But what if you don’t come back? I’ve given you all I could get on Kronin and the Fratelli. Now I’m only interested in finding a way out for me and Gabriella. Any way, understand? On any terms. Maybe Joey and Bruno and I should’ve gone to Rio or somewhere and forgot the whole business.” O’Malley swore softly. “I don’t know how I ever got stupid enough to get on this patriotic kick in the first place.”

Durell smiled. “We all have our neuroses.”

He had a few minutes to spare. He walked in the sunshine of the Via Partenope, with the cone of Vesuvius looming in the distant haze across the Bay, and on impulse he turned into the Theresa Barra shop and asked an obliging clerk if he could use the telephone in the back room. They remembered him from his last visit, and he was waved on.

He called Naples Control and asked for Onan McElroy. He was in luck. Razzatti was on duty. Durell identified himself with the usual code phrase, and Mc-Elroy came on and told him he’d been alerted by Thompson in Geneva and what could he do now for him? Durell asked for a rundown on Adolfo Cimadori and the contessa, his mother, at once.

McElroy replied immediately. “He’s no good, Cajun. The locals know all about him but haven’t touched him yet because he’s small dung. They want the Fratelli, too.” The K Section man paused. “Is your phone safe?” Durell looked through the doorway into the shop. It was empty except for two obviously innocent American tourists, buying gloves for the woman and a Borsalino hat for the man. “Yes, safe enough.”

“Good. We know Adolfo’s trying to break away from Mama’s whip and set himself up as a
pezzo di novanta
—a big shot—in the narcotics business. It’s a small operation, with a sideline in white slavery, what else? So the fuzz hasn’t touched him. They want the contessa badly and hope the son will slip in the muck and give them the break they need. But Cajun, you’re wading into deep and dirty waters.”

“I know. What I want to learn is if Adolfo ever goes to Sicily—and when and where if he goes.”

“Can do. Give me a bit of time.”

“I’ll call back,” Durell said.

He hung up and thanked the clerk and walked around the corner, beyond the American Express office, crossed the Via Santa Lucia to the taxi stand opposite, and gave the villainous cab driver the address of Adolfo Cimadori at Via Mirabella, 45.

Sometimes you had no choice about the tools you used in the business, he reflected, and couldn’t examine too much into their quality. Success was measured by accomplishment and survival. You paid any price for the first and often the second, too. Cruelty was a regular signpost in his shadow world. You had to sacrifice friends if it came to a choice. O’Malley suspected this. Even though there once had been a time when he’d known every vagary of O’Malley’s temperament, he did not feel assured now. O’Malley was sulky, regretting the cause he had taken up. Durell didn’t know how far he could trust O’Malley or the other two.

But Gabriella was different. She had a basic innocence that made her defenseless. She would grow up before this was ended, and the process would be most painful. Already, with the news that her fabled Zio refused to see her, she knew that her security had trembled and turned into a quagmire under her feet. He felt protective toward her, despite the rules he had to obey, and he knew he would defy those rules in order to see her safely through her coming ordeal.

The taxi halted, and the driver pointed to the address he wanted.

For Naples, it was a quiet street. The apartment house was new, built on the rubble of old devastation. It had a garden court with a long facade that faced the tilted uphill street. Concrete balconies were gay with laundry, like a display of flags. An arcade led into a central court, with a piece of concrete statuary as hideous and stupid as most of the undisciplined, phony work that passed as modern art. Children ran and screamed in the sunny corners of the court. Beyond was another entrance and a row of mailboxes with elegantly polished and engraved brass nameplates.

He found Cimadori’s name under number 4C and pushed the bell. There was no elevator. He took the concrete staircase that angled up in a narrow shaft toward a skylight far above.

The afternoon was sultry, but it was cool in this rabbit warren. Originally there had been pretensions to elegance here, but the volatile Neapolitans had dulled this somewhat. At the fourth-floor landing he looked back and thought he saw a shadow move far below. But he wasn’t sure and went on.

The door to 4C was locked. He rang and waited, rang again, then thought he heard the scrape of footsteps on the stairs. He walked back and looked down the shaft.

Nothing. But he felt pretty sure now.

A fire exit led him onto the long balcony that overlooked the courtyard where the children played. Their screaming quarrels drifted up in distorted echoes. Durell walked along the balcony, counting windows under the slanted awnings that had been let down against the afternoon sun. It was the hour in Naples when shops closed and the long siesta took place, and Neapolitans hid from the day’s heat.

He was sweating when he reached the right window, but it was not from the sun that cooked the concrete walls. The window he wanted was open. He stood there, wishing the children below would be silent for just a moment so he could listen better. But he could hear nothing inside Cimadori’s apartment and moved in quickly, past the limp draperies, aware of his shadow shooting ahead to betray him. Danger waited here, but he could not guess where and when it might strike. He was familiar with this fear and considered the primordial tightening in his belly as natural and useful. It alerted his reflexes, and he did not let it stop him.