Blood Makes Noise (29 page)

The young Carabinieri officer had stopped muttering and lay now in the truck silently, chest heaving up and down, eyes fixed glassily on the dashboard. He still gripped his service Beretta, and Michael gently pried it from his hand, slid out of the cab, and moved through the maze of haystacks, seeking a vantage.

The truck’s idle was laying a pale-blue strata of exhaust that caught beams of morning and bent them. He crouched between bales of hay, aimed at a single open loading door ten feet up the wall, and waited. He’d never held this kind of automatic before. The last time he’d pulled a trigger had been on his wife, and the gun shook now in his hand with its promise of disorder.

Straw stuck to his pants, wet with Carabinieri blood. He’d left the engine on, afraid it might not start again, but its drone kept him from hearing any movement outside. There was the barn door, locked, and the loading window leading to a china sky.

Something stirred and he spun on it, furious, and it was feral kittens nesting in the hay. The abrupt move strained a muscle in his eye and the pain radiated back into his head. He rubbed it with the cold butt of the cop’s Beretta, turned again to the loading window—just as the Fiat driver swung in firing.

Their weapons erupted follow-the-leader, and if Michael never saw where his rounds hit, the other’s announced themselves by slicing straw and rattling planks before dying in the clay floor. Michael’s leg suddenly numbed and he realized one of the rounds must have died there too. The Fiat driver dropped from the window, and Michael followed the motion with two shots, but the gun bucked and he was so
fucking
bad at this.

The driver was moving the moment he hit the clay, and Michael backed up on all fours in a panic. He couldn’t make out his own blood from the cop’s on his trousers, and it wasn’t till his foot collapsed under the weight that he realized the shot had gone clean through his ankle. Hopping, he retreated through the stacks, fell, heard two single pistol cracks, and figured the driver finally out of submachine-gun rounds.

There was a tractor in a corner, and Michael crawled behind one of its tires. His own gun was empty and he knew it would only be a moment before the driver flanked and killed him.

“Michael Suslov.”

Michael’s blood seized with unreality at hearing his name.

“Michael Suslov,” he called out again. “You’re shot, no? You have nowhere to go, no?”

Michael’s arm was getting soaked with oil from the tractor’s bleeding crankcase. A bullet had found its way there, and Michael had a desperate thought.

“Who the fuck are you?” he called back at the driver.

“We only want the truck.”

“We?”

And he could hear the son of a bitch smile. “I.”

Michael unfolded his pocketknife, jammed it into the spare plastic gas can on the tractor, felt cool evaporation roll over his arm and spill onto the clay.

The driver spoke Spanish now, and it was an ancient sound from his throat. “You work for murderers, Michael Suslov. Why
go to the wall for them? You’re outnumbered, hunted by police in a foreign land. We just want the Senora. We will care for Her, I promise.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“And certainly you’re wrong.”

He didn’t think the voice was moving, but it was hard to tell. The floor had a slight tilt, and the gas was slithering away from him, soaking up hay.

“What can possibly be worth all this to you, Michael Suslov? What is it that you could need so badly?”

“How about the name of the town I’m dying in?”

“Torrazza.”

Michael had a lighter in one hand and was sliding on his ass away from the tractor.
If I’ve gotta die, at least all of Torrazza’s going to hear it.
He was only seven or eight feet from the tractor when the Fiat driver appeared over the top of the bale. So the voice had been moving after all. Michael struck the lighter, and the fuel on his hand ignited in a festival of racing blue flames. The driver fired once, and Michael struck his arm out across the cool floor, touched a fuel-soaked clump of hay…

And the place blew up.

Tongues of hay-fed flame ratcheted violently to the terra-cotta roof as he ground out the fire on his hand. Michael couldn’t see the driver and hobbled on one leg to the truck as a shot he never heard spun away a side mirror. The cop was where he left him, and Michael climbed over the officer, shrieked the transmission into reverse, and looked up. The Fiat driver was standing atop one of the blazing haystacks like a nether angel, holding in one hand his pistol and in the other its empty clip. He cried out, and the voice rose above the burning tirade below as a note played on shattered glass.

“
I am Alejandro, Michael Suslov! I serve Her and you will never keep Her! I am Alejandro!”

Michael slammed the accelerator, and the Bedford flattened the barn door off its hinges, snaked backward over smoldering dirt, and he braked, turned, and churned out over the field for the road. The Fiat, the Carabinieri four-wheel, and the older officer were where they’d been left, unmolested, and the barn was already slow-motion destruction on a smoky plowed sea.

He made the frontage road, thudding bluntly as mud kicked itself free in breaking clumps over the tarmac.

“Should have given him the fucking truck,” the cop said, one eye open, curled like a child on the seat beside him.

The road chinked southwest, shadowing the pebbly river. Michael had no idea what he was doing, but he was going to do it as far as possible from the autostrada. Getting onto a country lane, he ran down faded asphalt, pushing the barn, Alejandro, the whole mess over a burning horizon. He pulled the truck into the shelter of tangled brush and looked at his ankle. The bleeding had slowed but his entire shoe sklished with fluids. It didn’t hurt much, but that was only a matter of time.

Michael listened to the raspy breath of the pallid cop beside him. His shot leg barely bent now when he got out and held on to the truck’s side panel, walking it back to the bed, where he rooted inside for the cleanest rag he could find and fixed it around his ankle.
That
hurt.

There was a long scrape along Evita’s casket. Scorch marks dotted the Bedford here and there, tufts of hay standing spikily from taillights and wheel wells. Michael tied back the corner of tarp loosened by the older Carabinieri officer lying now face-up on the autostrada.

He’d have to get the wounded cop to a hospital and hide Evita along the road somewhere during the inevitable insinuations that
would follow. Doing this would give Alejandro and whatever friends he had time to regroup—Michael might even get summarily deported—but there really wasn’t any other choice. The Carabinieri bleeding in the cab was the only witness that the Bedford license number his partner called in wasn’t the car that started the shooting. Finishing this would be hard enough with a bullet through his ankle. Getting there on the run as a cop killer—forget it.

And the thought came to him again that he could walk away from this. Through the trees, over the field, a train, a plane, back. Back to nightmares and nothingness and broken circles of life wobbling hopelessly anew each dawn. He could go back. And back, certainly, would be waiting for him.

He finished cinching the tarp, took a handful of rags for the cop’s wounds and hopped back along the truck, his shoe hissing wet prints on the concrete. He tossed the rags into the cab and eased himself in to check on the curled Carabinieri officer.

He was dead.

Mindless miles. Unnamed country bends. Instinctually following the sun southwest, drifting now into regions steeped and flecked with vineyards.

He’d laid the cop among the bramble at roadside, taken the last pistol clips from his white belt, placed a rag over his vacant features—because he’d known him, if just a moment. His ankle had swollen and begun to bark with a low thudding he knew would only build. He cut away his shoe and the skin was tight as a water balloon, blood oozing through the bandage, and there was so much of it—his and the cop’s—over the cab, smeared on the dash, lolling in puddles on the floorboards.

He drove without destination or purpose. He was a cop killer in a blood-soaked truck carrying a dead First Lady with a bullet in his leg, and the border—any border—would soon be as closed to him as the moon. Still he went on, chasing the day through
tiny villages of old men sitting beneath
tabacchi
verandas, sipping brandy, all of them indistinguishable, all of them watching Michael’s truck labor and vibrate noisily over stone lanes.

His blur deepened—blood loss, exhaustion, caffeine jacks, amphetamine withdrawals—and the villages, the space between villages in these rising hills, melded. He lost whole miles, jerked back by the cobblestone drum of another main street. He had nowhere to go and kept going, following the imagined arc of the sun, drawing himself toward dark peaks in a silhouette distance.

From the Monferrato headlands the way opened in a long, narrow valley to Cuneo. The truck wandered the road, skirted shoulders that became abysses then shoulders again. He had trouble remembering where he was, what he was doing. The throb in his ankle shook all the way up his thigh, and all he knew how to do was keep on.

He began closing his eyes in shifts, snatching thimblefuls of peace, and the howls of cross traffic always brought him back and he repeated his name, Her name, and not the name of this place, for he didn’t know where he was, only that he was tailing the day, ambivalent now at noon, and he guessed roads—always small ones, always steeper—leaving the narrow valley onto plateaus where the air cooled and bushy foothills emerged from the haze. They rose and fell in rhythms apart from the road, until falling away completely before the Alps, appearing now as an impenetrable granite wall unknowable miles ahead.

He closed his eyes again and everything packed and grinding in his mind loosened, floated, and he held on to the feeling—a moment, more—and when he opened them the world was a white flare. He teared, wiped his eyes with a hand smelling of gasoline, burned hair, rough with tiny blisters. He’d lost the road, was on a smaller one that quickly went gruff, and led his truck out over a spur of mountain and into the insecure town fastened to its spine.

A thousand sparrows exploded through the glare in furious chevrons. There were hot smells of manure and damp, rotting grass, then there was the town and he was quickly lost in its old, meandering streets, passing the same fountain, the same butcher, the same curious child over and over, and it was like a dream as he tried to find his way out looking through cotton, feeling through cotton, thinking through cotton, driving in circles, a merry-go-round with stripped gears, and he gave up trying to slow the slur of movement out his window and let it all stop instantly of its own volition and the world was suddenly quiet and dark and he let it be.

A minute or year he sat, happy in darkness, reluctantly pulling his face off the steering wheel. The impact had only been the low brick of a planter but it lit up the radio, and he was drowning in Austrian
oompah,
pawing at the dash till it snapped off and the afternoon was ghost quiet, blood-savvy gnats humming softly on marionette strings out his window.

He’d come to a stop in the small piazza of a small town full of silence and poverty in equal measure. Three cows lingered in the square enjoying views over the steep ridge. Across the short, sloping campo of rough cement was a humble Romanesque church cheesed up with Doric columns and a baroque portico only painted on, this being a poverty town even then.

Michael breathed through his mouth—deep, fat gulps to slow the sour bile fighting up his throat. The cab smelled of blood iron and burned hay, and he had to get out, out of the glare, out of here. Stiff and swollen, he moved deliberately from the truck. There were coffee-colored leaves blown over the square and they stuck when he dragged his shot ankle. He shuffled like this a dozen steps before sitting down hard and silly like a rodeo clown.

He was dimly aware of the horror he presented: singed clothes, rigor-mortis leg, blood worn like pudding head to toe. He resolved to make the shade of the Romanesque church and
rose, swaying drunk in cool shock. The three cows followed his agonizing movements, rechewing their lunch, and one took a step forward and bellowed warningly.

At the speed of a frustration dream he crossed the patched concrete and lent his weight in a stumble against the carved church door, opening it. As Michael’s eyes adjusted, the church inside rose in gaudy blue wash and more fake baroque paintings of high-fluted columns and windows that didn’t exist looking out on imagined fields of romantic splendor. The altar was sculptured like a general’s tomb. No candles burned atop it and the pews were empty. Pigeons roosted somewhere in the tower.

It was a church originally raised in times of chaos and fear, thick walled with windows high and small, built to both serve God and protect the village as a keep. In the centuries that followed it had been tricked up with vanity into a painted harlot of its former simplicity. There were echoes of it, tombs of forgotten cardinals beneath Michael’s weakening gait, each etched with a crude skull and crossbones wearing a churchman’s miter, reminding a later era that despite all the blue wash, the marble statues to merchant barons, we were all just bones under the floor, and God knew it.