The Gemini Contenders (7 page)

Three automobiles sped up the east-gate road; long, black, powerful vehicles, their headlights emerging out of the darkness, swallowed by the floodlamps that washed the area in white light. The cars entered the circular drive, careening to the left of the other automobiles, stopping suddenly, equidistant from each other in front of the stone steps that led to the thick oak doors of the entrance.

Men leaped out of the cars. Men dressed alike in black suits and black overcoats; men carrying weapons.

Carrying
weapons!

Vittorio stared as the men—seven, eight, nine—raced up the steps to the door. A tall man in front assumed command; he held his hand up to those behind, ordering them to flank the doors, four on each side. He pulled the bell chain with his left hand, his right holding a pistol at his side.

Vittorio put the binoculars to his eyes. The man’s face was turned away toward the door, but the weapon in his hand came into focus. It was a German Luger. Vittorio swung the binoculars to those on both sides of the doors.

The weapons were all German. Four Lugers, four Bergmann MP38 submachine guns.

Vittorio’s stomach suddenly convulsed; his mind caught fire as he watched in disbelief. What had Rome
permitted?
It was incredible!

He focused the binoculars on the three automobiles. In each was a man; all were in shadows, only the backs of their heads seen through the rear windows. Vittorio concentrated on the nearest car, on the man inside that car.

The man shifted his position in the seat and looked back to his right; the light from the floodlamps caught his hair. It was close-cropped, grayish hair, but with a white streak shooting up from his forehead. There was something familiar about the man—the shape of the head, the streak of white in the hair—but Vittorio could not place him.

The door of the house opened; a maid stood in the frame, startled by the sight of the tall man with a gun. Vittorio stared in fury at the scene below. Rome would pay for the insult. The tall man pushed the maid aside and burst through the door, followed by the squad of eight men, their weapons held in front of them. The maid disappeared in the phalanx of bodies.

Rome would pay dearly!

There were shouts from inside. Vittorio could hear his father’s roar and the subsequent shouted objections of his brothers.

There was a loud crash, a combination of glass and wood. Vittorio reached for the pistol in his pocket. He felt a powerful hand grip his wrist.

It was Barzini. The old stable master held Vittorio’s hand, but he was looking over his shoulder, staring below.

“There are too many guns. You’ll solve nothing,” he said simply.

A third crash came from below, the sound nearer now. The left panel of the huge oak double door had been thrown open and figures emerged. The children, first, bewildered, some crying in fear. Then the women, his sisters and his brothers’ wives. Then his mother, her head defiant, the youngest child in her arms. His father and his brothers followed, prodded violently by the weapons in the hands of the black-suited men.

They were herded onto the pavement of the circular
drive. His father’s voice roared above the others, demanding to know who was responsible for the outrage.

But the outrage had not begun.

When it did, the mind of Vittorio Fontini-Cristi snapped. Cracks of thunder deafened him, streaks of lightning blinded him. He lunged forward, every ounce of his strength trying to wrench his hand free of Barzini’s grip, twisting, turning, trying desperately to free his neck and his jaw from Barzini’s stranglehold.

For the black-suited men below had opened fire. Women threw themselves over the children, his brothers lurched at the weapons that shattered the night with fire and death. The screams of terror and pain and outrage swelled in the blinding light of the execution grounds. Smoke billowed; bodies froze in midair—suspended in blood-soaked garments. Children were cut in half, the bullets ripping out mouths and eyes. Pieces of flesh and skull and intestine shot through the swirling mists. A child’s body exploded in its mother’s arms. And still Vittorio Fontini-Cristi could not free himself, could not go to his own.

He felt dead weight pressing him downward, then a clawing, choking, pulling at his lower jaw that blocked all sound from his lips.

And then the words pierced through the cacophony of gunshot and human screams below. The voice was tremendous, its thunder chopped by the firepower of submachine guns, but not stopped.

It was his father. Calling to him over the chasms of death.

“Champoluc
 … Zürich is
Champoluc
.… Zürich is the
river
 … 
Champoluuuc
.…”

Vittorio gnashed his teeth down on the fingers inside his mouth, pulling his jaw out of its socket. He wrenched his hand free for an instant—the hand with the weapon—and tried to raise the pistol and fire below.

But suddenly he could not. The sea of heaviness was over him again, his wrist twisted beyond endurance; the pistol was shaken loose. The enormous hand that had gripped his jaw was pushing his face into the cold earth. He could feel the blood in his mouth, over his lops, mingled with dirt.

And the horrible scream from the abyss of death came once more.

“Champoluc!”

And then was stilled.

“Champoluc
 … 
Zürich is Champoluc
 … 
Zürich is the river
.…”

The words were screams and they were blurred in agony. His mind’s eye was filled with white light and explosions of smoke and deep red streaks of blood; his ears heard the screams of jolting shock, and terror, and the outrage of infinite pain and terrible murder.

It had happened. He had borne witness to the tableau of execution: strong men, trembling children, wives and mothers. His own.

Oh, my God!

Vittorio twisted his head and buried his face into the coarse cloth of the primitive bed, the tears flowing down his cheeks. It was cloth, not cold rough dirt; he had been moved. The last thing he remembered was his face being pressed with enormous strength into the hard ground of the embankment. Pressed down and held furiously immobile, his eyes blinded, his lips filled with warm blood and cold earth.

Only his ears bearing witness to the agony.

“Champoluc!”

Mother of God, it had happened!

The Fontini-Cristis were massacred in the white lights of Campo di Fiori. All the Fontini-Cristis but one. And that one would make Rome pay. The last Fontini-Cristi would cut the flesh, layer by layer, from
Il Duce
’s face; the eyes would be last, the blade would enter slowly.

“Vittorio. Vittorio.”

He heard his name and yet he did not hear it. It was a whisper, an urgent whisper, and whispers were dreams of agony.

“Vittorio.” The weight was on his arms again; the whisper came from above, in the darkness. The face of Guido Barzini was inches from his, the sad strong eyes of the stablemaster were reflected in a shaft of dim light.

“Barzini?” It was all he could manage to say.

“Forgive me. There was no choice, no other way. You would have been killed with the rest.”

“Yes, I know. Executed. But
why?
In the name of God,
why?”

“The Germans. That’s all we know at the moment. The Germans wanted the Fontini-Cristis dead. They want you dead. The ports, the airfields, the roads, all of northern Italy is sealed off.”

“Rome allowed it.” Vittorio could still taste the blood in his mouth, still feel the pain in his jaw.

“Rome hides,” said Barzini softly. “Only a few speak.”

“What do they say?”

“What the Germans want them to say. That the Fontini-Cristis were traitors, killed by their own people. That the family was aiding the French, sending arms and monies across the borders.”

“Preposterous.”

“Rome is preposterous. And filled with cowards. The informer was found. He hangs naked from his feet in the Piazza del Duomo, his body riddled, his tongue nailed to his head. A
partigiano
placed a sign below; it says, ‘This pig betrayed Italy, his blood flows from the stigmata of the Fontini-Cristis.’ ”

Vittorio turned away. The images burned; the white smoke in the white light, the bodies suspended, abruptly immobile in death, a thousand sudden blots of thick red; the execution of children.

“Champoluc,” whispered Vittorio Fontini-Cristi.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My father. As he was dying, as the gunfire ravaged him, he shouted the name, Champoluc. Something happened in Champoluc.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. Champoluc is in the Alps, deep in the
mountains. ‘Zürich is Champoluc. Zürich is the river.’ He said that. He shouted it as he died. Yet there’s no river in the Champoluc.”

“I cannot help you,” said Barzini, sitting up, the anxiety in his questioning eyes and in the awkward rubbing together of his large hands. “There’s not a great deal of time to dwell on it, or to think. Not now.”

Vittorio looked up at the huge, embarrassed farmhand sitting on the side of the primitive bed. They were in a room built of heavy wood. There was a door, only partially open, ten or fifteen feet away, on his left, but no windows. There were several other beds; he could not tell how many. It was a barracks for laborers.

“Where are we?”

“Across the Maggiore, south of Baveno. On a goat farm.”

“How did we get here?”

“A wild trip. The men at the riverfront drove us out They met us with a fast car on the road west of Campo di Fiori. The
partigiano
from Rome knows the drugs; he gave you a hypodermic needle.”

“You carried me from the embankment to the west road?”

“Yes.”

“It’s more than a mile.”

“Perhaps. You’re large, but not so heavy.” Barzini stood up.

“You saved my life.” Vittorio pressed his hands on the coarse blanket and raised himself to a sitting position, his back against the wall.

“Revenge is not found in one’s own death.”

“I understand.”

“We must both travel. You out of Italy, me to Campo di Fiori.”

“You’re going back?”

“It’s where I can do the most good. The most damage.”

Fontini-Cristi stared for a moment at Barzini. How quickly the unimaginable became the practical reality. How rapidly did men react savagely to the savage; and how necessary was that reaction. But there was no time. Barzini was right; the thinking would come later.

“Is there a way for me to get out of the country? You said all of northern Italy was sealed off.”

“All the usual routes. It is a manhunt mounted by Rome, directed by the Germans. There are other ways. The British will help, I am told.”

“The British?”

“That is the word. They have been on
partigiano
radios all through the night.”

“The British? I don’t understand.”

The vehicle was an old farm truck with poor brakes and a sliding clutch, but it was strudy enough for the badly paved back roads. It was no match for motorcycles or official automobiles, but excellent for traveling from one point to another in the farm country—one more truck carrying a few livestock that lurched unsteadily in the open, slatted van.

Vittorio was dressed, as was his driver, in the filthy, dung-encrusted, sweat-stained clothes of a farm laborer. He was provided with a dirty, mutilated identification card that gave his name as Aldo Ravena, former
soldato semplice
in the Italian army. It could be assumed his schooling was minimal; any conversation he might have with the police would be simple, blunt, and perhaps a touch hostile.

They had been driving since dawn, southwest into Torino, where they swung southeast toward Alba. With no serious interruptions they would reach Alba by nightfall.

At an
espresso
bar in Alba’s main piazza, San Giorno, they would make contact with the British; two operatives sent in by MI6. It would be their job to get Fontini-Cristi down to the coast and through the patrols that guarded every mile of waterfront from Genoa to San Remo. Italian personnel, German efficiency, Vittorio was told.

This area of the coast in the Gulf of Genoa was considered the most conducive to infiltration. For years it had been a primary source route for Corsican smugglers. Indeed the
Unio Corso
claimed the beaches and rocky ocean cliffs as their own. They called this coast the soft belly of Europe; they knew every inch.

Which was fine as far as the British were concerned. They employed the Corsicans, whose services went to the highest bidders. The
Unio Corso
would aid London in getting Fontini-Cristi through the patrols and out on the water where, in a prearranged rendezvous north of Rogliano
on the Corsican coast, a submarine from the Royal Navy would surface and pick him up.

This was the information Vittorio was given—by the ragtail lunatics he had scorned as children playing primitive games. The unkempt, wild-eyed fools who had formed an untenable alliance with such men as his father had saved his life.
Were
saving his life. Skinny peasant thugs who had direct communication with the far-off British … far off and not so distant. No farther than Alba.

How? Why?
What in the name of God were the English doing? Why were they doing it? What were men he had barely acknowledged, hardly spoken to in his life before—except to order and ignore—what were
they
doing. And
why?
He was no friend; no enemy, perhaps, but certainly no friend.

These were the questions that frightened Vittorio Fontini-Cristi. A nightmare had exploded in white light and death, and he was not capable of fathoming—even wanting—his own survival.

They were eight miles from Alba on a curving dirt road that paralleled the main highway from Torino. The
partigiano
driver was weary, his eyes bloodshot from the long day of bright sunlight. The shadows of early evening were now playing tricks on his eyes; his back obviously ached from the constant strain. Except for infrequent fuel stops he had not left his seat. Time was vital.