City of War (51 page)

“Jesus Christ, you’re not gonna hold a fuckin’ grudge over a little piss, are ya? Look, I’ll let you smack me in the mouth. Couple of times if you want to. Just open the goddamn door.”

I saw Julien looking at me, but I avoided his eyes. I returned to Tiziano’s cell and unbolted the door. The gaunt, bent figure came out like a ghost, ignoring both Julien and
me. But instead of heading up the corridor toward the exit, he went the other direction.

Julien and I followed, Truman’s curses receding behind us.

Tiziano was dressed the same as in Kim’s photograph. Baggy white long-sleeved shirt over baggy white pants, bare feet. His gray-streaked hair hung to his shoulders, and he walked in fits and starts, stopping for a few seconds then almost leaping forward as he seemed to remember his destination.

The wall that had once ended the corridor had been in-elegantly removed, and the stone floor now turned into a steel walkway. I could tell from the change in sound that we were in a larger area than we had been, and when I trained my Maglite upward, I saw the ceiling was at least forty feet above us. The stone block walls, more roughly hewn here than in the corridor, framed a cavernlike space roughly eighty feet across.

Tiziano had gotten some distance ahead, but he suddenly stopped and looked back, his wild eyes glowing white in the beam of the flashlight. He leaned over the railing and pointed down, and Julien and I turned our lights into the black void.

We were standing on a footbridge built two stories off the ground using steel cross-braces, like a railroad trestle. The floor below was dirt and dotted with man-sized chunks of discarded building stone, interspersed with mounds of straw. A pair of low water troughs fed by a hose and the random piles of scat confirmed what I suspected. This was the hyena den, and the open, electrically operated steel door along the far wall would lead to the fenced-in run. Above the door, a long row of windows had been set into the wall, and through them I could see down over the vineyard to the floodlit gate. There was still activity there, but it was too far away to define.

I turned back and saw that Tiziano had swung open a hinged section of railing and was standing on a steel lift
similar to the ones you see rising out of a New York sidewalk. I pictured Bruzzi and his entourage watching the man named Andre being lowered into the lair. Maybe he was one of those rare guys who had the cool to spit in his tormentor’s face, but probably not. The door to the run would have been open then too, and when the lift stopped, Andre would have had no choice but to start running.

Perhaps the hyenas weren’t interested at first, or maybe they were already outside, which is why he got as far as he did. But Bruzzi didn’t seem like the sporting type. More likely, he would have starved his predators for a few days, then made sure they were waiting. Andre may have even survived the first attack, gotten up and continued running until he finally ran out of time where we’d found him. And Bruzzi had watched it all through the windows, maybe with a pair of binoculars that he passed around. However it had unfolded, Andre had left some of his terror in the room. I could smell it.

When I turned back to the footbridge, Tiziano had disappeared.

We came up through a dungeon door into the kitchen of the main residence. It was a large, industrial-strength place, where eight women, ranging in age from their early twenties to their late sixties, were at work preparing the evening meal. The young blonde woman from the Knights Quarters was among them. I motioned to Julien that we needed to get them out. He nodded and stepped into the room, holding his .45 at his side.

A white-haired, thickly built woman who seemed to be in charge saw him first. Julien put up his hand in a non-threatening gesture and walked toward her. As they spoke I stepped into sight. Seconds later, all of the appliances had been turned off, and the white-haired woman was ushering her staff through a doorway on the far side of the room.

“I told the cook they wouldn’t be coming back,” Julien said when I joined him. “She said she hoped we burned the place to the ground.”

The Bruzzi magic.

“The security room is through that door and down the hall,” he said, pointing.

There were three Headband Boys huddled around a bank of Sony monitors. We went in fast and put them on the ground with only minor resistance. One, a kid in his teens, began to sob, and an older guy with a full complement of legs on his spider lashed out with his foot and kicked him. Julien was removing knives from pockets, and he grabbed the kicker by the hair and banged his face into the floor until he was spitting blood.

I secured wrists to opposing ankles with 100-mile-an-hour tape, then we turned our attention to the monitors. Alain, Guy and Hassan were getting back into the BMW, watched carefully by guards with shouldered Kalashnikovs. I didn’t see Remi, but with the confrontation over, we were about to get more company. I pulled the main cable, darkening the monitors, and we started out.

Julien was a step behind me, and when the shot rang out, the close confines made it sound much louder than the caliber that fired it. I wheeled, knelt and leveled my weapon at the three men. The young kid, tears still streaming down his cheeks, was holding a cheap .22 caliber that had been hidden in the pantleg of the bleeding man next to him. Mouse gun is what professionals call pissy little pieces of shit like that, and we’d both missed it. The problem is, history has a habit of turning on pissy little pieces of shit, and Julien was on his knees, grimacing and holding his left side.

I wanted to shoot the kid, but that would have accomplished nothing. I jerked the .22 out of his hand, bending his fingers the wrong way in the process, and threw it hard against one of the monitors. The glass spiderwebbed, and the cheap pistol broke into pieces that clattered to the four corners. The knives we had removed from the three were lying on a desk. I flipped one open, found the kid’s spider tattoo—legless, of course—and sliced a deep X through it.
Junior had maybe fifty to sixty years left to live. He could look at that scar every day and remember.

I got my arm around Julien, helped him to his feet and closed the door behind us.

Keeping to the wall, we entered the refectory, a seventy-five-foot hall lined with white columns. Originally, it would have been set with long tables and served as a dining hall for monks and clergy. Now it had been turned into a forest of statuary. Huge marble emperors, philosophers, gods and goddesses—some on makeshift bases, some lying on their sides—were jammed recklessly amid scores of unopened crates and a pair of Fiat forklifts. One Iwo Jima Memorial-sized piece depicting a naked gladiator in combat with a bear and a lion seemed too large to have been moved at all, let alone to the top of a mountain. It had taken a bold thief and a bolder wallet to steal so many tons of stone, but a profit margin exceeding that of bad wine would be a good motivator.

We had gone halfway across the room when Julien began to stumble. I eased him down between a statue of Zeus and a seraphim-and-cherubim fountain, where I examined his wound. It was a through-and-through and bleeding profusely. Almost certainly, his intestine had been punctured.

“How you doing, partner?” I asked.

“Feels like ground glass in there. I’m not going to be doing any running. Go get Bruzzi. I’ll occupy any assholes who show up.”

“You’re starting to swear like an American.”

“It’s that fuckin’ Eddie.”

Tough as he was, he wasn’t going to get back over the wall to the Pinz either. I laid my .45 and extra clips down next to him.

He looked at them. “Don’t be foolish.”

I ignored him and checked my watch. “Think you can ride a motorcycle?”

“Who knows, but I’d rather die trying than lie here. They’re using the crypt as the garage, right?”

“That’s what the photographers’ notes said. How’s twenty minutes sound?”

“I’ll be there…but if I’m not, don’t wait.”

I clapped him on the shoulder and was gone.

42

Everlast and Fireworks

Evidently, only God sleeps higher than a French pope, because his private quarters had been erected atop the main residence, shadowed only by the fortress’s seven spires. Reached by a steep staircase off the refectory, it was not unlike a New York penthouse, a separate rooftop world of gardens, footpaths and fountains surrounding a two-story, layered limestone building that had been modernized for its current owner.

The main level was sixty-five feet long and set in from the roofline to make it invisible from the ground, which also prevented its 360° panorama from being contaminated by views of the Apollonican unwashed. What one might call Trump
Il Papa
. The upstairs was a third smaller, and presumably housed the bedroom, however, the Musée d’Histoire’s photographers had not been permitted inside, so I was guessing.

Crouching at the top of the stairs, I could see two guards outlined against the night sky. One was average sized, the other squat and round. They both wore
tortils
and held Kalashnikovs. They were engaged in intense conversation.

“It was a gunshot,” said the shorter man angrily in rapid French. “I know you heard it too.”

“I didn’t hear anything, but even if I did, Remi said not to leave under any circumstances, so I’m not moving.”

“But what if—”

“You want to investigate, you’re on your own.”

“Shouldn’t we at least tell Tino?”

“And tell him what? That you heard something I’m going to swear I didn’t hear? Fuck off.”

The short man hesitated, then said, “I’m going to the bottom of the stairs…take a look.” He started toward the stairway, and I retreated back down and melted into the shadows.

I chopped him in the back of the neck just as he hit the last step and caught him and his rifle before they fell. When I dragged him under the staircase, he wasn’t breathing. I left the Kalashnikov but took his knife. I don’t like them, but sometimes stealth trumps firepower.

The other guard saw me coming through the darkness. I could tell he was unsure about my size. “Remi?” he called out.

I had the knife open at my side. I closed the gap between us and thrust it up under his sternum, jerking the handle back and forth to sever as many blood vessels as possible. I felt some resistance, then it gave way, and I knew I had gotten his heart. He died against me with only a slight rattle.

I dropped him over the side and moved quickly to the exterior of the building, positioning myself between two wide picture windows of four-inch-thick thermoplastic capable of flattening a high-powered rifle slug. The windows were permanently sealed, which was excellent against intruders, not so excellent if you had to get out in a hurry. Leaning around, I could see a study furnished with the masculine accoutrement of a man possessing money and power. Papers were strewn on the desk, and there was a fire burning in the large fireplace, but no people.

As I stood with my back against the thick stone, I suddenly felt a vibration, a thumping. Irregular, but ongoing. Bullet-resistant thermoplastic is specifically designed to absorb shock waves, so I leaned my ear against the window. Whatever it was seemed to be coming from the second floor.

The iron-strapped front door opened silently to my touch, and a heavily carpeted stairway was immediately to the right. Staying against the left wall, I went up.

The stairs opened into a large room whose centerpiece was an immense, silk-canopied bed of such intricate gold-work that only a pope could have afforded such artisans. Bookshelves lined the walls, dotted liberally with eighteen-inch reproductions of famous sculpture. No one was in sight, but the thumping was louder now, punctuated by grunts and an occasional snort of breath.

I crossed to a pair of French doors set into the wall on the right. One was open, and a mirror was positioned so that I could see into the next room. Gaetano Bruzzi, larger and broader than his pictures, was stripped to the waist, his hands taped, as he pounded on a heavy Everlast bag, the floor shaking with the blasts. Across from him, Tino was doing his best to hold the 150-pound piece of equipment steady, but the big man’s fists hit so hard that he jolted the slightly built Corsican off-balance with each punch.

The Hyena’s protruding jaw and mule-sized teeth were accentuated by his thick, white, wavy hair pulled back in a clump of a ponytail. The strands that had worked loose hung in damp strings along his cheeks, and his torso glistened with sweat that collected in half-moons along the waistband of his expensive, shark gray slacks.

I noticed a white dress shirt and matching gray suit coat draped over the back of a chair, which accounted for the thin, black Italian loafers instead of athletic shoes. Marta Videz had been right. He didn’t lumber, he moved with the grace of a dancer, like Jackie Gleason, only much bigger.

He must have felt my presence, because he suddenly looked in the mirror, and we locked eyes. He then did a curi
ous thing: he smiled and kept punching. Mind games. So I stepped forward and pushed open the second French door.

Tino, sporting a newly swollen left eye, probably courtesy of Remi, lost his concentration, and the next slam of Bruzzi’s fist knocked him into an armoire. He recovered quickly and had his knife out in the same motion. There were no words this time. He simply crouched and moved in on me. I still had the dead man’s knife, but I was not nearly skilled enough to face somebody like Tino with a blade, so I left it in my pocket.

I anticipated his first move, but the second was like lightning, and less than two seconds into the confrontation, I had blood running down the inside of my left arm.
A Corsican doesn’t stick his enemy. He slices at muscles, tendons, ears, anything that will terrorize.

I glanced over at Bruzzi and saw him closing in, fists cocked. But it was stupid to have taken my eyes off the guy with the knife, and I paid for it. This time, he got under my upraised arm and jabbed his blade just below my left nipple. I felt it hit bone, then it was gone again, and Tino was circling, trying to bring me into Bruzzi’s range. This had all the earmarks of a samba they’d done before. It wasn’t exactly a Black and Black, but I knew what was coming. Bruzzi would fake, I’d react and Tino would slice, probably my face this time.