Blood Makes Noise (32 page)

“You are an old friend.”

He got in and closed the door.

“There’s a way,” she said. “A small dirt trail that leads up over the border. It isn’t on any map. I could show you. Any other way and they’ll be watching.”

He sat there. Watched the blonde in her hair catch the propane lamp. “Okay.”

They drove without headlights, feeling the ruts by starlight. The Bedford’s engine whinnied at the strain, and Michael thought it impossible that someone didn’t hear them, but no lights showed on the dirt road behind.

“That’s my house. Down there.”

Michael stopped the truck, and taking the low-light binoculars from his overnight bag, stepped to the edge of the embankment. Her house was visible 250 yards below, bathed in rotating police beacons.

Staying in shadow, he edged up behind a pine and lifted the binoculars. There were half a dozen cars in her drive, most unmarked, some Carabinieri four-wheels. Black sweaters wandered the grounds, shadows crossed upper-bedroom windows, shoulder-strapped uniforms leaned on car fenders.

There were a pair of suits, standing apart, watching the others, toeing gravel in a way somehow not European, their faces in shadow. One’s hair was thin and gray, the other thickly black. The gray-haired one turned directly to Michael as if sensing his stare, and a slap of red police light struck his face. It was worn, beaten. It was fifteen years older.

It was Ed Lofton.

The other turned to reach something in his back pocket, and Michael knew the face too: Wintergreen, the embassy marine.

They tossed the house, and he was all over it. Bloody bandages, clothes, poppers of codeine. The old American, Ed Lofton, wondered who the woman was. A long-time resident of the town, she didn’t figure as Hector backup. Still, why did she take him in?

The Carabinieri were pounding doors in town, but Lofton knew Michael was gone. Wintergreen lit a cigarette. “Day late and a dollar short.”

Lofton grunted, strolled away from the whipping lights that were giving him a headache. He leaned on his unmarked at the end of the drive, tugged on a bolt from his flask…

…And was slammed into the driver’s-side window. His cheek bounced off the glass, and he spun around and faced Alejandro, who had his hand on his throat.

“You idiot. What are you doing here?”

Lofton ran a tongue round his cheek for any damage. “We followed you. Cute stunt with the phone number. Should have thought of that.”

“You ruined everything. I had him. I had
Her
.”

“Look, all’s fun, butch, but why don’t you take your hand off my throat?”

Alejandro held him at arm’s length. “This is my operation. My mission. Don’t get in my way.”

“Or?” Wintergreen now, .38 pressed against Alejandro’s temple. “
Or
?”

Alejandro turned and looked directly at the ex-marine, without a flinch. “Or I’ll kill you both.”

“I do like his spirit,” Lofton wheezed, still hanging by his neck.

“Let the man down.” Wintergreen cocked his gun. “C’mon, Al, I was stare-out champion two years running on my school-yard. Save it for someone who cares.”

Alejandro stared at Wintergreen a moment longer, then let the FBI agent go. Lofton coughed and rubbed his neck. Wintergreen lowered his gun.

“Point taken, Senor Morales,” Lofton gasped. “Wintergreen. Be a sport and find my flask.” Wintergreen fished it out of the gravel.

“There’s a good lad.” Lofton drank. “Did you know, Al, that Master Wintergreen here is Spanish Basque? Who knows? Maybe thousands of years ago your ancestors were fucking the same sheep.”

Alejandro looked at them each silently, then turned and faded into the dark.

“We need her before she gets to Spain, Al,” Lofton called to his back. “Before she gets to Spain…”

“We’re gonna have to kill that son of a bitch,” hissed Wintergreen.

Lofton massaged his Adam’s apple. “He’ll find Suslov first.”

“Then?”

Lofton turned back to the car. “Then we’ll worry about then.”

The moon was bright as a blast furnace as the Bedford rocked over short grass and flat slate. They stopped, feeling naked and exposed, the silence enveloping.

They were off the tiny road, following sheep trails, and you could hear them, small tinks on shale rises. The wind carried a gentle chill.

“Across these grasses is an unmarked dirt road. Two kilometers farther…France.”

Michael got out, leaned against the truck.

“How’s your foot?”

He shrugged. It hurt, but the hurt was becoming familiar and dependable.

“Stay on the road another eight or nine kilometers and you’ll reach a junction in Isola.”

“Thank you. For everything.”

“Wait a week. If your foot doesn’t fall off, thank me then.”

He nodded, touched her once on the shoulder, and turned for the truck. He was reaching for the handle when his foot caught an edge of broken slate and he fell violently on his side.

Gina rushed to him. “Michael…”

He couldn’t even speak through pain-clenched teeth. She lifted his shoulders and cradled his head. “You can’t drive. Not the way you’re hurt.”

“I just need to get in the truck.”

“You’ve reopened the wound. You’ll never be able to shift like this.”

“I have…I just have to…”

“Go home, Michael. Go back to your life. What could possibly be worth this?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I might.”

Clouds crept up from France and tore themselves on granite sores.

“I know hell is only half-full. But maybe, just maybe, if I finish one thing, keep one promise to one woman in my life, even a dead one…hell will forget my name…”

“Do you really believe a person can fool hell?”

“I have to.”

Gina looked out over the ridge and its few scattered German pillboxes, long abandoned and stained with lichen.

“I can drive you further. Get you into France…or Spain.”

He turned, and her face was pale as a candle. “Gina. I have nothing left but this. Do you understand? Nothing. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. But it matters to me what happens to you.”

Gina stood and reached for the driver’s door.

“Maybe that’s reason enough.”

Somewhere they crossed into France.

The road fell off grassy flats, switchbacked down, and pierced a tiny hamlet shuttered tight against mountain ghosts. There were no street lamps or cars, and it passed and was gone.

“What about your family?” He had his head against the seat, window open though the air was cold, because the truck stank of blood and fire and two days of confusion.

“I gave them up.”

“Husband?”

“Him too. Did you marry?”

“Once. Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“I’d given everything else up. It just seemed…natural. Turns out I wasn’t very good at it. Where’s your wife?”

“Dead. A thousand years now.”

She was driving well, shifting better than he, and the Bedford appreciated it.

“Everyone you know dies, Michael.”

A half hour later they reached the edge of Isola, a cluster of bluish street lamps set among tiled roofs. Dogs howled, a single car made the corner and passed indifferently with amber headlights. French headlights. They turned at the small town-center, crossed a bouldered river into the woods on the other side, shut down the Bedford, and the sound was fast-moving water over smashed rock.

“It’ll be morning soon. We probably shouldn’t drive by day.”

“Will the gendarmes be looking for you?”

“Only takes one angry Italian police call. They must know I’m going west. They know everything else about me.”

She did what she could for his ankle and redressed the bandage.

“Those people at my house. You knew them.”

“Two of them.”

“Are they friends?”

“I worked with them once”—he looked through the trees, across the river and into Isola—“and I don’t think they’re friends anymore.”

Michael opened the door. “We better not risk a hotel. You can sleep in the cab. I’ll lie in back.” But he was on amphetamines, and she could hear him as she rested her head on the seat, walking circles in the gravel…

She found him at noon, curled asleep among leaves. She left him there and crossed the bridge into town, where they accepted her lira, selling her brioche, ham, and coffee.

When she returned Michael was up, sitting in the open passenger door reading a Michelin map. He waved off the food but took the coffee, and Gina could see it burn its way down his throat.

“There’s another dirt track.” The map was spread over his knees. “I think it could get us out of the mountains.”

“I don’t know it.”

“We’ll have to take the main road to Saint-Étienne to pick it up.”

“All right.”

Gina turned to the stretched tarp over the truck’s bed. “Is she really in there?”

“Yes.”

“She’s been dead a long time.”

“She hasn’t begun being dead.”

After nightfall they drove the road to Saint-Étienne, picking up the gravel track that wound through crumbling ghost towns going to ruin in the mountain wind. The Alps released them at Barcelonnette and they passed attractive villages. Nobody looked at them. Nobody turned on a flashing blue light. They skirted a man-made lake with shores of concrete dust.

“I smell gasoline.”

Michael did too. The engine was hesitating. “I think something’s wrong with the truck.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Not if it needs anything more than a quart of oil.”

The ground lost its mountain gray and sprouted irrigated fields of apples, peaches, cows. One-blink towns crowded neck to neck on the road.

Outside of Sisteron, at the joining of two valleys, the Bedford went into steep motorized senility, forgetting how to shift, how to
combust gasoline, forgetting which way was left and which right. “It’s dying,” Gina said.

He decided on the next repair stop and parked at a small garage, till dawn brought the owner, older and thickset in dirty blue coveralls and crushed beret. He listened patiently to Michael describing the truck’s death rattles, then told him this wasn’t a repair garage but part of the local farm, which he worked for. The next service garage was ten or fifteen kilometers.

“English?” he asked.

“Irish,” Michael lied.

“Ah. Then we both hate the English.” With that bond he insisted on looking under the hood. Gina took up a position beside him as assistant, and he liked the attention. Michael felt his mind drifting and sat on a stone curb. The sun burned here but the air held its cold. The old mechanic was grumbling localisms about the engine’s condition when he pulled out of its gullet the crushed remains of a bullet.

“You know. Kids,” Gina said.

A few minutes more and he came up with additional lead remains and clumps of burned hay.

“Were you in the Resistance?” he called out jovially to Michael.

“Wasn’t everyone?”

The mechanic laughed. It was an old and—at the time Michael was in college here—touchy joke about how this most accommodating of countries to its conquerors produced, during the war, a resistance movement a thousand times larger in memory than it ever was in real life. It was shameful history and so now didn’t exist. Everyone, you know, had been part of the Resistance.

The mechanic stuck his head back under the hood. Gina walked over to Michael just in time to see him slip two white pills into his mouth. He shrugged. “Helps keep me awake.”

“How long have you been awake?”

“Fifteen years.”

The mechanic looked up from the engine and drew a finger across his throat. “It’s finished.”

Michael sighed. “Can it be fixed?”

“It’s old. It wants to die.”

“But I don’t want it to die.”

“Such is life.”

Michael concentrated on his wounded foot. “Do you have another?”

“Another opinion?”

“Another truck.”

“To buy? Right now?”

“This moment.”

“I admire your style.” He smiled to Gina. “Is he this way with his women too?”

“In all things but his past.”

“I’ve seen the past,” the mechanic nodded. “It’s not as good as they say.”

“I agree,” Michael said, and he knew this was a piece of it. Old men like the mechanic, in tattered sweaters and philosophy, had once been everywhere. But they were disappearing from the villages, expendable weight in the race for a future somehow more Teutonic than French. Such men had courage and memories, and the courage of memory was a sometimes dangerous thing in France.

“I have a truck.”

At least that’s what he called it, one of those horrendous Renault clatter traps with corrugated metal floors, three speeds, and a rubber-band engine. “Does it run?” Michael asked.

“It has never failed me.”

“When was the last time you drove it?”

“1968.” The bed was big enough. Barely. “I’ll give you a good price.”

At that moment an army truck rumbled past, full of weapon-ready conscripts, and Michael was standing there, right in plain view, and they didn’t stop. He watched the soldiers fade, waited for his heart to steady, then turned to the mechanic. “I need it today.”

They agreed on a price, US dollars from the money Hector had given him, and the old mechanic spent fifteen minutes oiling, fussing, and wiping down the dust inside with a rag. He helped load the box, and Michael tried to hide his lame foot, for surely it marked him. But then the casket, which the man never inquired after, probably marked them more than anything. They settled the tarp, settled the paperwork, on which Michael lied from one end to the other, and Gina and he got inside.

“The battery is good but low. It will be fine after an hour or so.” With that he gave them a push, Gina let the clutch pop, and the engine started gasping in neck-crunching bursts. “Choke! Choke!” the mechanic cried out. She yanked on it and the engine revved uncontrollably. “Less choke! Less choke!” He was running alongside them now, coaching her. “There, you have it!” He stopped, let the Renault rattle away and called out to them, “Enjoy your vacation!”

First stop on said vacation was another license plate off a field junker. The afternoon had turned warm and swooned with lavender and thyme. Vineyards appeared at Mollans, and Michael had an idea. They bought bread and meats at a market in Entrechaux, pilfered some wooden crates, and under the cover of a vineyard hedge, filled them with stolen grapes so ripe you could see the liquid slosh inside. The crates they stacked in the rear of the Renault, hiding Evita’s box.