Bloody Passage - Jack Higgins [29]
Nino picked up his cap. "What do I have to do?"
"Climb a cliff face by night," I said. "A hundred and fifty feet high."
He grinned. "Now that I like. That very definitely sounds a better proposition than this." He emptied his glass and tossed it behind the bar. "Let's go then."
"Always you forget your obligations." Barzini shook his head. "These boys of yours--they've looked after you?"
"My mother couldn't have done more."
Barzini crossed to the two bravos at the corner table. Money changed hands and he came back. "Right, let's get moving."
It was still raining hard, swishing down through the trees in the garden as we moved out on to the terrace and started down the steps to the Mercedes, Barzini leading the way.
The driver got out to open the rear door and on the other side of the path, to one side, there was a trembling as if a small wind had pushed through the bushes and a rifle barrel appeared.
God knows who he was after, presumably Nino, although I didn't bother to ask. I sent Barzini sprawling with a kick in the back, drew the Smith and Wesson and fired three times, one of those instant reflex actions, the product of a good many years of hard living.
A man fell out of the bushes and lay on his face. Everyone went down and as I crouched Barzini said softly, "There'll be another."
I dodged round the back of the Mercedes and jumped into the bushes, tripping over a branch in the process and going down hard. I started to roll, every instinct telling me I'd made a bad mistake, and tried to get up.
In the same instant, a man stepped from behind a tree, a machine pistol in his hand. He wore a dark raincoat and broad-rimmed felt hat so that I couldn't see much of his face, which was a pity because I'd always wondered what Death looked like, and then the hat jumped into the air as a bullet drilled a hole between his eyes. Another shattered his jaw. He bounced from the tree and fell on his face in the long grass.
When I turned, Langley was standing at the top of the steps, perfectly balanced, feet apart, holding the Walther PPK in both hands. He lowered it slowly as I came forward.
"You might thank me, old stick," he said calmly.
"Why should I? You didn't do it for me," I said.
"Good point."
He slipped the Walther into his coat pocket as the two characters from inside the inn joined Nino and Barzini in examining the bodies.
Barzini came back to the Mercedes. "I know one of them, Cerda. He's a Mafia gun. The other's new to me. Nino's friends will put them under the sod after we've gone." He shook his head and said grimly, "God, but that was close."
"All right in the end," I said.
"Thanks to you."
"And Langley," I reminded him.
"That's right." He turned to Langley and he wasn't smiling when he said, "I can see I'm going to have to watch you after all."
"Anything else I can do to help, just call," Langley said and got into the Mercedes beside the driver.
Barzini called to Nino who joined us in the rear. We drove back down the track. As we turned on to the main road, Barzini said, "They must have been in that cattle truck that passed us outside Misilmeri. Cunning bastards." He sighed. "I'm getting old."
"Aren't we all?" I said. "Five years ago I'd have taken both of them. Tonight, I'd have died if it hadn't been for Langley."
It was a sobering thought.
It was just before midnight when we got back to Via San Marco. When we went into the entrance hall the old reception clerk appeared from his tiny room looking like some pale ghost in the guttering candlelight.
"A gentleman to see you, Signor Barzini," he said. "I put him in your office."
"Doesn't he ever go home?" I asked as we moved on.
Barzini shrugged. "Why should he? He likes it here."
He opened a mahogany door at the end of the corridor and led the way into his office. It was a beautiful room, the walls panelled in rosewood, wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor to deaden all sound. A handsome young man in