Good Blood (20 page)

As he began to turn, there was an intake of breath startlingly close behind him, and then his cup went flying and the hot coffee was in his face, the crushed Styrofoam jammed up against his mouth by a bare, muscular forearm pressed against his throat. At first he thought someone was trying to shove him over the balustrade into the water a dozen feet below, but when a knee was forced into his lower spine to bend him over backward, he realized he was being strangled. Somebody had a choke hold on him from behind, clamping his neck between upper arm and forearm and tightening the resulting vise by pulling on his wrist with the other hand.

For a second, gripped by the primal terror that came with having his air cut off, he struggled, clawing at the hold and pummeling futilely behind him with both hands. At six foot one, Gideon was a fairly big man, and strong-he’d been a boxer in his college days and still stayed more or less in shape-but his attacker had forearms as thick as thighs. It was like being squeezed by a boa constrictor. Still, he managed to twist his head a couple of inches to one side so that the front of his neck was now in the small hollow that made up the crook of the man’s arm. The direct pressure was off his windpipe and it was possible to suck in a gasping breath.

With the return of air came sanity. Blind impulse gave way to something like rational thought. And with rational thought came the realization that he had only made matters worse, and not just a little worse. By turning his head, he’d inadvertently changed the man’s grip from a “bar arm” hold, with the forearm pressed directly-and painfully-against the trachea, to a judo hold, the so-called “sleeper hold.” With the crook of the arm now at the front of his throat, his windpipe was free, but the forearm and upper arm, now at either side of his neck, were compressing the carotid arteries. He could breathe again, but the blood supply to his brain was being cut off.

This was bad. The need for air, as overpowering as it was on an instinctive level, was the lesser of his worries. Cutting off a person’s air by compressing the trachea was excruciating, yes, but it could take two or three minutes to shut down the brain. But pressure on the soft tissues of the superior carotid triangles, squeezing shut the arteries-and it didn’t take that much pressure to squeeze them shut-immediately starved the brain of oxygen and created a toxic excess of carbon dioxide. Hypoxia and hypercapnia. And that deadly combination would take only ten seconds to cause unconsciousness, fifteen at the outside. Death would follow. He had very little time. Already he was seeing whirling stars at the backs of his eyes, the first sign of oxygen deprivation to the brain. The first sign of blacking out.

He made himself stop his ineffectual flailing, which was using up what little oxygen he had left. His fingers, already weakening, were never going to budge that tree trunk of an arm, and the feeble blows he was aiming behind him were useless. Instead, he strained to reach his attacker’s face, trying for the eyes or the nose or the lips; anything he could tear at or grind his fingers into. He touched what he thought were nose and upper lip, but the man shook him off and jerked his head back out of the way.

The hold tightened, as if by resisting he’d gotten his attacker good and mad. Gideon could feel the muscles of the biceps and brachioradialis harden and bulge. He could feel the wiry hairs of the forearm against the bottom of his jaw. He was hearing popping sounds in his head now, like static. There were pinprick sensations crawling spider-like over his face and scalp, a scattering of minute explosions, and all at once he was overpoweringly sleepy, so that all he really wanted was to be allowed to lie down and go to sleep. He realized his arms were hanging limply at his sides now. When a bright yellow flash seemed to sear his eyes, he didn’t know if it was in his brain or if it was the sun clearing the mountains. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed.

But one small part of his cerebral cortex was still working; enough to tell him he had perhaps two seconds of consciousness left. If he was going to live, he had to act now. Now. With a tremendous, gasping effort of will, he arched his body and threw his head backward with all his remaining strength. He heard an “Uff!” as his head struck the other man’s face. The hold loosened slightly, and with the returning flow of blood to his brain came a partial return of strength, of clarity of mind. His head had smashed into the bastard’s nose and it had hurt him. What worked once could work twice. He braced his right foot against the balustrade for added leverage and shoved off as hard as he could, flinging himself backward and sharply snapping his head back at the same time.

The time there was a howl of pain, accompanied by the crunch of breaking bone and a strangled “Merda!”

At the same time, there was a cry somewhere off to the right. “Ehi! Che fai la? Che succede?”

The man cursed again, released his hold, and staggered off. Gideon, deprived of support, found his knees didn’t have the strength to hold him up. His legs were like seaweed, squelchy and boneless. He collapsed to the promenade, twisting as he fell and ending up with his back against the balustrade, trembling and barely able to move as the postadrenaline crash hit him. He lay there with his eyes closed, watching the last of the starry pinpoints blink out and listening to the wary approach of his rescuer (“Signore, si sente bene?”), who seemed to be eons off, in some echoing, parallel universe.

There was a piece of something stuck to his lips, and he thought at first that one of his teeth had been broken, but it was only a fragment of the Styrofoam cup that had been smashed against his mouth. He flicked it off. Then, realizing that the hair at the back of his head was sticky, he touched it and opened his eyes to check his fingers. Blood, but not his. He’d broken the guy’s nose, all right. Good. And from the crackling sound of that crunch, it wasn’t just the ossa nasalia -the two bones that formed the bridge of the nose-that had snapped, but some of the delicate bony structures inside as well: the ethmoid, the vomer. He sure as hell hoped so. That sonofabitch was going to remember him for the rest of his life, every time he heard himself breathe. With any luck Gideon had deviated his nasal septum for him as well, so he’d remember him every time he looked in the mirror too. Fine.

Never again, Gideon thought as he slipped into something like an exhausted, relieved doze, would his students hear him utter a word of complaint about the fragility of the human face.

When the polizia arrived a few minutes later, they found him still on the ground and a little muddled, but sitting up against the parapet, surrounded by four or five solicitous people, one of whom was trying to get him to swallow some brandy from a paper cup.

“Inglese?” the police wanted to know once they’d heard him say a couple of words in Italian.

“Americano,” he said.

The two cops exchanged an I-thought-as-much glance. Still, they were courteous and concerned, and they dumbed down their Italian to his level. They wanted to run him over to emergency, but by then, with his mind clearing, Gideon was able to convince them that he was all right, that the blood on his collar wasn’t his. And he knew that ten or twelve seconds of having his carotids compressed wasn’t going to do his brain any permanent harm. Twenty seconds, you were a vegetable. Twelve seconds, no problem. Strange but true. So no hospital, thanks all the same.

They used a cotton swab to collect some blood from his hair, presumably for evidence, and then while one of the cops talked to the witnesses, the other one sat him down to take his statement in the front seat of their cruiser-a white Fiat minihatchback with a snazzy green stripe running horizontally around it, the kind of car Gideon might have mistakenly hailed for a taxi if he’d seen it drive by.

With a portable tape recorder running, Gideon told him what he could, which wasn’t much. He’d never seen the man. He’d come up behind him, dug a knee into his back, wrapped one hefty arm around his neck, and squeezed. About all he could say was that he was big and he was strong. But with a little artful probing on the policeman’s part, he was able to come up with a little more: The man had been wearing a short-sleeved shirt, he was Caucasian, with wiry black hair (at least on his forearms), and he’d had a ham and cheese roll or something like it for breakfast, along with a caffe corretto. Oh, and he was pretty definitely Italian: his reaction to getting his nose broken had been a heartfelt “Merda!” That was about it.

“He communicated nothing to you? He didn’t try to take your money?”

“He said “Merda,” but I doubt if that counts as communication. And he wasn’t interested in money. He was interested in killing me.”

“And you don’t know why?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I’m working on a case with Colonel Caravale-”

The cop sat up. “Colonel Caravale? The carabinieri commander?”

“Yes, I’m an anthropologist-”

“A moment, please, signore.” The cop got on his car radio to relay this information. Then, while Gideon drank some bottled water that the second cop offered him, the first one waited to be called back. Five minutes later the call came rattling out of the speaker. Gideon couldn’t understand it, but the cop started up the engine and his partner got in back and slammed the door.

“He wants to see you. Caravale.” He looked impressed.

“How about letting me clean up first? I’m just up the street at the Primavera.”

The cop had his doubts, but when Gideon wiped a hand through his hair and held up bloody fingers, he changed his mind. “Okay, five minutes. We’ll drive you.”

In the lobby, the nighttime clerk, on his final hour of duty, looked up from his copy of Playboy Italy to see Gideon step out of the police car and come in, bloodied and disheveled, and still a little unsteady.

He blinked slowly a couple of times. “Sorry, signore, no breakfas’ yet for one more ’alf-hour,” he said.

Carabinieri headquarters were at the corner of Viale Duchessa di Genova and Via Fratelli Omarini, one block from the railroad station and two from the water, in what passed for Stresa’s low-rent district. Surrounded by a grim, spike-topped wall of rough-hewn stone, the featureless concrete building was painted white, but that had been done long ago. Now it was splotched and streaky with a black mold that seemed to spread as you looked at it. On one side the three-story building overlooked an eighteenth-century church; on the other a ruined villa with a jungly, once-ambitious estate garden that looked as if it hadn’t been pruned in a century.

But hidden within the forbidding walls that surrounded the unlovely building was a beautiful little ornamental garden of flowers and shrubs, devotedly tended, and it was onto this garden of fresh reds and pinks that Caravale’s ground-floor office looked. The office itself was as neat and orderly as a monk’s cell, but considerably more plush. Thick, plum-colored carpet, a big old wooden desk near the window with a few framed family photographs on it, two matched, leather-upholstered desk chairs, and in a corner on the opposite side of the room a large chestnut butler’s table with four more soft leather armchairs. It was at the table that Gideon and Caravale sat, with two cups of killer espresso, as thick as Turkish coffee, that had been brought in from a vending machine in the hallway. Unlike just about every other cop’s office he’d ever seen, there were no taped-up maps or charts or reminders on the walls. The only object on the beige grass-cloth wallpaper was a corroded pair of giant pincers centered in pride of place above the butler’s table.

Caravale saw him looking at them. “Those? They’re for use on uncooperative prisoners. And,” he added darkly, “on consultants who get above themselves.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Caravale smiled at him. “They belonged to my grandfather,” he said, turning to look fondly at them. “ Nonno Fortunato. They’re ice tongs. All his life my grandfather, my sainted grandfather, drove an ice wagon. A runt of a man, soaking wet he didn’t weigh fifty kilos, but with those tongs he’d lift a block of ice half his own weight, throw it over his shoulder, and walk up three flights with it. And then come down and get the next block. A truly good man, worth all those de Grazias put together, and yet all his life what did he have? Nothing. Just work, and poverty, and worry. But from those heavy, freezing blocks of ice that finally broke him, he sent my father to college. And my father sent me.”

Gideon was as surprised by these confidences as by the depth of feeling that came with them. “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

“He was, indeed,” Caravale said appreciatively. “It was because of him that I enrolled in the police academy. I had to fight my father every step of the way.”

“Your father didn’t want you to go into police work?”

“My father,” Caravale said wryly, “was of the opinion that we carabinieri are no more than an apparatus of the established order-willing tools of the oppressor class.”

“Ah,” Gideon said, not knowing what else to say.

“I beg your pardon. I’m talking too much. It was the tongs.” He hunched his shoulders. He was in civilian clothes again, and without the shoulder boards, there wasn’t much to hunch. “Ah, it’s all long ago. They don’t make men like that anymore. Now what about you, Gideon, are you all right? Not hurt or anything?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks for the coffee. It’s just what I need.”

Caravale nodded. “I just listened to your statement.”

“It wasn’t much help, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” He permitted himself another small smile. “All forces in the region are now on the look-out for a large man with ham and cheese on his breath.”

“And who speaks Italian, don’t forget that part.”

“Yes, of course.” Caravale, pretending to write in the notebook on the table, murmured: “Large man. Ham. Cheese. Speaks Italian. Wonderful, he’s as good as caught. It’s only a question of time now.”

Gideon laughed. “Next time I’ll be more observant.”

“Good, I’ll appreciate it.” He vacuumed up his espresso, swished it once around his mouth, and swallowed. “So tell me, what do you suppose this was about?”