The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [95]
At five in the morning, Christopher woke Eycken and Glavanis and cooked breakfast for them. He drove them to the airport, and before Glavanis got out of the car he kissed Christopher on the cheek in the Greek style. “Happy Christmas,” he said.
Christopher drove back to the villa on country roads that wound through muddy winter fields, put the car in the garage, and fell into a deep sleep in a locked room.
2
When he woke it was dark again. Although the furnace was operating, the huge marble living room was cold, and he started a fire of olive wood in the grate and sat before it, reading the short stories of Somerset Maugham. He was most of the way through the thick Penguin paperback when headlights flashed across the ceiling and he heard tires turning on the gravel drive. The car, a dusty blue Fiat 2300 with a Naples number, blinked its lights and continued to the back of the villa. Christopher heard the car doors slam and the hollow double ring of the trapdoor being opened and closed.
Glavanis and Eycken were hungry. They still wore the ill-fitting peasant corduroys that Christopher had given them. Eycken drank three glasses of neat gin, one after the other, and pushed the bottle across the table.
“It’s cold,” Glavanis said. “What I want is brandy.”
Eycken went into the sitting room and came back with a new bottle of Martell. Glavanis drank from the bottle.
When there was food before him, Glavanis said, “It was easy, Paul.”
Glavanis and Eycken had hidden the car in the woods and waited until Frankie Pigeon came out at sunset for his evening walk across the fields. Two bodyguards, young men in American suits, walked beside him. Glavanis and Eycken shadowed Pigeon and his men, keeping inside the edge of the woods, until they were well out of sight of the house.
“We just stepped out and walked right up to them, all smiles,” Glavanis said.
Pigeon smiled at them. Glavanis and Eycken, dark and grinning, wearing work-stained clothes, were the sort of men Pigeon liked to talk to. When one of the bodyguards put a hand on the gun in his pocket, Pigeon gave him a playful backhanded slap on the arm. Pigeon wished Glavanis and Eycken Merry Christmas. In his blurred Italian, he called out a question: What did the sky say? Was it going to rain on Christmas?
“We kept on smiling and shrugging,” Glavanis said, “and on the count of ten—Jan and I worked out the drill beforehand —we shot the bodyguards in the face with your .22 birdshot. There was practically no noise.”
Eycken reached into his mouth, extracted a piece of steak gristle, and placed it on the edge of his plate. “I apologize to you,” he said to Christopher. “That’s a very good weapon. They just fell over backward and went out like a light. It draws a hell of a lot of blood. They must have thought they were dead.”
“One shot is enough, usually,” Christopher said.
“We gave them six rounds apiece,” Glavanis said. “They’ll be paying for girls from now on.”
“Don’t worry,” Eycken said, “they’ll live.”
“What about the man?” Christopher asked. He’d given them no name for Pigeon.
“He tried to run,” Glavanis said. “I had to put some bird-shot in his leg, but he’s all right. I treated the wound.”
“He saw your faces?”
Glavanis waved away the question. “For a few seconds. He won’t remember. I’ve never seen a man so astonished. When I gave him the pills I held a gun against his head. He was shaking so badly one of the capsules fell out of his mouth. When I picked it up it was dry, Paul—he couldn’t make saliva.”
“Is he blindfolded now?”
“No, but he’s wearing the handcuffs. There was nobody behind us on the autostrada. No one saw the car. The only problem is the police, and it’s a holiday.”