Assignment - Palermo (8 page)

He scanned the blue sea under the tumbling white clouds. Several sails bent out there under the loom of the mountainous coast. They must be early-bird yachtsmen trying their wings on this windy spring day. The needle in the haystack again. He felt frustrated. He had to reach O’Malley and the girl could take him to O’Malley. But Karl Kronin was somewhere nearby. He could feel it in his bones. And where Kronin walked, death walked on his heels.

He went out on the stone quai, where charter boats were moored. Ten minutes later he was aboard a sleek motor cruiser, passing the mole. The captain was a slim teen-ager from Provence in a singlet, duck pants, and sneakers. The varnished plaque over the sky deck announced his name as Jean Dufours.

“Mademoiselle took the
Manta
,” he told Durell in English. “A real chick, eh, monsieur? You like my English? It is good,
non
? I learn from American college girls.”

“It’s good. Can you spot the
Manta
, Jean?”

“When I see it, dad. She went toward Juan-les-Pins. I watch her trying to—how you say it?—cool it. She burns a blue flame.”

Durell smiled and began to feel his years. “A bonus for you if we find her in the next half hour.”

“You wantto catch her bad?” The boy grinned, showing white teeth. “Another is anxious to catch her, a gentleman your age, and three, maybe four men—damned Germans I think. They took Papa Simone’s boat.”

“What did he look like—this other man and his friends?”

Jean laughed. “
Voyons
. Bald, dressed for the city, like you. Walked with a limp. Hard yellow eyes. I would not let him have my boat at any price.”

He had described, briefly, Karl Kronin. . . .

Durell scanned the mountainous Riviera coast with care. Eastward the resort hotels nestled in their coves and harbors with glittering opulence. To the west, sunlight reflected on a trailer camp located on a small rocky promontory. There was scrub brush, pines, a dark, coarse sand beach, then an area of private villas hugging the steep coast. Jean abruptly throttled his engines.

“
Voila
. The
Manta
, monsieur. Below Madame Kronsky’s house. The yellow one. She has not yet come down for the season.”

“You’re sure it’s the right boat?”

“I know it well. No one is aboard, though.”

The sailboat they sought had been beached on the crescent sands of a tiny inlet under the yellow villa. The trailer camp was a mile to the left, the aluminum trailers and brightly colored tents half-hidden in the pines.

“Take us in,” Durell ordered.

They eased gently into the rock-bound little cove. No other boats were in sight. The boy kicked their stern about with a flat ripple of exhaust, which echoed back from the steep slopes. They grounded twenty feet from the red sloop. “She is not here, dad,” Jean said.

“We’ll go ashore and find her.”

“You wish me to accompany you? I thought you wanted to be alone with her, monsieur.. A rendezvous—” “She’s in trouble. Have you a weapon aboard?” _ The young French boy’s eyes gleamed an electric blue. “I have a Remington—pump gun, is it? I use it for the target shoot. I was right, then. I think you are an agent—a cop,
hein
?"

“I’m not a cop,” Durell said shortly.

“Then it is five hundred extra for me and the gun ashore. In advance.”

Durell paid him. “All right.”

He waded through the cold water and walked across the dark coarse sand to the red sloop. There was no sign of Gabriella. But a clear set of small footprints led across the beach and a deserted terrace under the closed villa. Jean followed, his rifle held easily in the crook of his elbow. He looked tough and competent. Durell was sure that Gabriella had come here for a specific purpose. But her prints led away from the trailer camp to the left. If she had sailed here for a meeting with O’Malley, she’d have headed for the camp. On the other hand, if it was Kronin who had hired the other boat to follow her, then he was desperately far behind. She might have been cut off from her goal. Still, he saw no sign of another charter boat, and when he asked Jean, the blond boy shook his head.

“Papa Simone’s boat is not here.”

“It should be.”

There were only the girl’s prints, and this was briefly reassuring. Gabriella had walked close to the water’s edge and then clambered over mossy rocks into the woods. Her path then became more difficult to follow. Sunlight dappled the soft turf like gold coins. She wore sneakers, however, and here and there a tread was visible. Durell quickened his stride. Beside the graveled road that led to the shuttered villa she had halted uncertainly, taking a few steps in several directions. Then her prints changed abruptly as she began to run along the gravel, the toe marks deeper. Something had frightened her away, driving her up the mountainside.

“Hurry,” he told the boy.

A few moments later they came across several sets of prints in the raked gravel, made by running men. They cut across the steep promontory and turned to follow Gabriella Vanini’s trail.

“Two men,” Jean said. “Will they be armed?”

“Yes. So be careful.” .

“What has the girl done, eh?”

Durell’s reply was cut off by a thin, faint scream from the woods above. It could have been the lonely cry of a bird, but he knew it wasn’t. It came from beyond the private driveway that looped down to the yellow villa. He ran faster. The boy kept pace with an easy, loping stride.

“Papa Simone’s boat,” he called softly.

In another cove, invisible from where they had landed, was a moored motor cruiser. Durell spared it a quick glance from their height above it but did not slacken his pace. He thought he saw someone still aboard, glimpsed

through the intervening pines. A bald head, a very tall and menacing figure, even at this distance. Kronin? But it was too far away to be certain.

The girl screamed again.

Then they heard the heavy, booming shot.

As if it were a signal, scores of seabirds lifted from the rocky, wooded slope and flew screeching into the blue sky. Their cries wiped out any immediate reply to the shot. Durell plunged upward through the shadowed pines, his feet slipping in the needles. He dropped flat behind a thin, gray shelf of granite. The young skipper kept up with him.

“There they are,” Jean breathed.

There were two of them, squat and somehow alien to this quiet place, wearing heavy city clothes. One, with a gun in his hand, walked balancing on a spine of rock toward a copse of trees near the crest of the promontory. Beyond him sea and sky shown benignly. The Riviera coast was hazed by distance toward the Italian frontier. The man wore a narrow-brimmed gray hat and a dark topcoat with a velour collar. The second man was circling right, through the woods. The girl was not in sight.

Durell drew a tight breath. Jean lifted his rifle. “I could give them both a
piqûre
 of lead, eh?”

“Wait.”

“But they hunt her like she was a wounded bird.”

“Let’s spot her first,” Durell said.

There might be more men from the other boat, circling the mountainside to cut off Gabriella’s flight. He couldn’t chance surprise. Defeat could mean a bullet in the back of the head. But why the girl? She hadn’t been mixed up in the business in Switzerland. Was it all just a blood feud for breaking the tribal rules of the Fratelli della Notte? In any case it surely meant that O’Malley was nearby, and she had come to meet him in this lonely place.

But why was Gabriella Vanini, an acrobat in a two-bit gypsy circus, so important? He had to keep her alive to answer his questions.

The man in the narrow-brimmed hat still probed along the tiny cliff-edge. The other had crossed the patch of woods and was climbing higher. He came out of the pines and yelled to his companion, and they both broke into a run.

Durell started up—and swore softly as the boy beside him lost patience and fired at the man on the rocks. The sound was enormous and then it was snatched away by the sigh of the sea wind. The man on the ledge staggered and turned a dark, shocked face toward them. Then he fell or dropped beyond the crest of the hill. Durell did not know if he had been hit or not.

“Come on,” he snapped.

They had lost the advantage of surprise now. He waved Jean to the right and plunged into the pine shadows. The man there had disappeared. Then he saw a small rustic cabin that cast dark shadows on the woody slope. The girl was hiding there, flattened against the peeled-log back wall. She wore dark slacks and a white blouse under a rumpled sweat shirt that had holes in both elbows. He saw everything with a sudden, sharp clarity that took in the details of her enormous frightened eyes, her wind-tangled hair, her open mouth straining for breath after her flight. She looked like a small animal gone to ground after pursuit by a pack of hunting dogs. . . .

Pine needles spurted at her feet as he heard another shot. A third bullet splintered wood from the hut. She pressed deeper into the shadows. But there was no other place for her to go.

Durell swung right and climbed the steep slope toward the shots. He wondered about the second man Jean had shot at. But he couldn’t stop now.

The gray fedora showed briefly through the thick pines. He did not fire at it. The man was thirty yards away, still above him; his attention was focused on the girl. Durell was sure now that they meant to kill her. He climbed faster, his shoes digging into the slippery pine needles. At the last moment the other suddenly whirled, topcoat flapping in the wind, and fired at him. He did not feel the bullet pass his head except as a slight puff! that disturbed the sound of the breeze in the trees.

He squeezed the trigger twice. The man lost his hat, threw up an arm, and fell, rolling over and over down the slope. At the same moment he heard a yelp of fear and another shot that was not Jean’s weapon. He spun back toward the gravel road in the trees. The boy was sprawled beside it, his rifle lost a few feet from his outstretched arm. His yellow hair looked pale in the sunlight. The second man was scrambling down after his gun.    

Durell shot him three times and watched the body tumble bonelessly down the slope toward the little beach far below.

“Jean!” He knelt beside the youth. It was a shoulder wound, and the boy’s eyes flickered as Durell gently turned him over. Jean coughed, but there was no blood in his mouth.

He looked blind for a moment, then asked, “Did you—did you give him the
piqûre
, dad?”

“They’re both dead.”

“And the young lady?”

“All right, I think.” Durell watched the boy smile, “I must leave you for a moment. I have to get her.” 

“Je resterai ici.”
Jean struggled up, holding his shoulder. Then he suddenly gulped, turned white, and fainted from the pain.

Durell stood up and turned back up the slope to the little cabin where the girl had been hiding.

She was gone.

“GABRIELLA!”

The wind mocked him and snatched her name away. He saw her footsteps in the gravel around the cabin, running toward the body of the first man he’d shot. He followed cautiously until her trail was lost in the pines.

“Gabriella!”

He heard the shot; she was a better marksman than the hoodlums who had hunted her. The slug tore a rip in the sleeve of his coat. Quickly he put down his gun and held his hands out, palms upward.

“Gabriella, don’t shoot again!”

He could not see her, but he admired her presence of mind. When he went back to Jean, she had run from the cabin and snatched up the dead man’s weapon. She thought he was another of those after her. He felt a cold sweat as he walked steadily toward her and called out in English.

“I’m a friend of O’Malley’s!”

Her voice was thin but steady. “Stop where you are.”

“I only want to talk with you.”

“I don’t wish to talk to you or anyone. Stay away from me. The next time I shall shoot to kill.”

He didn’t doubt she could keep her word. But he kept walking. He saw her now, slender and straight, as she stepped from behind a thick pine tree. He walked past the man who had worn the hat. He was quite dead. His face was just a face. He thought of Kronin, down in the cove on his boat, and knew there would be others.

“I warn you ...” the girl called.

He was near enough to see the desperation in her eyes. She breathed shallowly in her loose sweat shirt, but there was a hint of a fine body under the ragged garment, caressed by ripples of the Mediterranean wind. He halted.

“Gabriella, where is O’Malley?”

“Who are you? Why do you want to kill me?”

“I don’t. I followed you to help you.”

She bit her lip, and he decided he was close enough to risk it now. No time to argue with her fear. He made a quick grab for her gun, but the girl was almost too fast for him. She got it up and fired. The muzzle flame blasted past his ear as he caught her wrist and deflected her arm. The next moment he hooked a heel behind her foot and yanked her aside.

But it was like trying to hold a wildcat in his bare hands. She was strong, in perfect condition, thanks to her acrobatic performances; she was as agile as any trained judo expert. She scrambled away, and he tackled her, and they tumbled down and over each other on the slope. Her nails raked his face. Her thick hair swung wildly, and he felt her firmness and at the same time knew the womanliness of her as he landed on top of her near the bottom of the slope. He let his weight rest on her and pinioned her arms above her head. He was panting.

“Now listen, Gabriella. We have no time left. Do you want to get away or not?”

“Who are you?” There were tears in her eyes. “You can kill me, but I’ll never take you to O’Malley!” “My name is Sam Durell,” he said tightly. “And you’ll take me to him and Joey Milan and Bruno as soon as we clean up around here.”

“O’Malley mentioned you—”

“He came to me, and I turned him down, but now I’ve changed my mind. We’ll talk on the way. Come along.”

He pulled her to her feet. She made awkward feminine dabs at the pine needles on her clothes and tried to straighten her tangled hair. He went back and picked up the gun he’d taken from her, then retrieved his own. He threw the hoodlum’s gun far out over the steep slope into the sea below. Then he took her hand. “Hurry.”