Solo - Jack Higgins [5]
He could have given the police the information. He did not. This was personal. Something he had to handle for himself. His ancestors would have understood perfectly, for in Hydra, for centuries, the code of the vendetta had been absolute. The man who did not take vengeance for the wrong done to his own was himself cursed.
And yet there was more to it than that. A strange, cold excitement that filled his entire being as he waited in the shadows opposite the garage at six o'clock that evening.
At half past, the two mechanics left. He waited another five minutes, then crossed the road to the entrance. The double doors stood open to the night, the Citroen parked pointing towards the street and behind, a concrete ramp sloped steeply down to the basement.
Galley was working at a bench against the wall. Mikali's right hand slipped into the pocket of his raincoat and tightened on the handle of the kitchen knife he carried there. Then he saw there was an easier way. One that carried with it a considerable measure of poetic justice.
He leaned into the cab of the Citroen, pushed the gear lever into neutral with one gloved hand, then released the handbrake. The vehicle gathered momentum, started to roll faster. Galley, half-drunk as usual, only became aware of the movement at the last moment, and turned, screaming, as the three-ton truck squashed him against the wall.
But there was no satisfaction in it at all, for Katina had gone, gone for good, just like the father he had never known, the mother who was only a vague memory, his grandmother.
He walked for hours in the rain in a kind of daze and was finally accosted by a prostitute on the embankment, close to midnight.
She was forty and looked older, which was why she didn't turn the light up too high when they reached her apartment. Not that it mattered for at that particular moment, John Makali was not sure what was real and what was not. In any case, he had never been with a woman in his life.
A fact which his inexpert fumblings soon disclosed and with the amused tenderness such women often show in these circumstances, she initiated him into the mysteries as quickly as anyone could.
He learned fast, riding her in a controlled fury, once, twice, making her come for the first time in years, groaning beneath him, begging for more. Afterwards, when she slept, he lay in the dark, marvelling at this power he possessed that could make a woman act as she had; do the things she had done. Strange, because it had little meaning for him, this thing that he had always understood was so important.
Afterwards, walking the streets again towards dawn, he had never felt so alone in his life. When he finally came to the central market it was a bustle of activity as porters unloaded heavy wagons with produce from the country, and yet they seemed to move in slow motion as if under water. It was as if he existed on a separate plane.
He ordered tea in an all-night cafe and sat by the window smoking a cigarette, then became aware of a face staring out at him from the cover of a magazine on the stand beside him. A slim, wiry figure in camouflaged uniform, sun-blackened face, expressionless eyes, a rifle crooked in one arm.
The article inside, when he took the magazine down, discussed the role of the Foreign Legion in the war in Algiers, which was then at its height. Men who only a year or two before had been stoned by dock workers at Marseilles on their return from Indochina and the Viet prison camps were fighting France's battles again in a dirty and senseless war. Men with no hope, the writer called them. Men who had nowhere else to go. On the next page there was a photo of another legionnaire, half-raised on a stretcher, chest bandaged, blood soaking through. The head was shaven, the cheeks hollow, the face sunken beyond pain, and the eyes staring into an abyss of loneliness. To Mikali it was like staring at his own mirror image. He closed the magazine. He placed it carefully on the stand, then took a deep breath to stop his hands from shaking. Something