The Fallen Angel

FIVE

There was a shriek of brakes. The lanky figure ambling down the street cast a glance over his shoulder, surprised, a touch angry too. The bike rider had slowed and was now edging along at a snail’s pace, booted feet rhythmically walking the cobbles as his right hand twitched on the throttle, bouncing the power of its big engine off the walls.

Riggi slammed down the beer on the table, waiting for the machine to get past, all those old phrases running through his head, the ones his uncle used to mutter before he took the tourist dollar and ran.

Kids, kids, kids. Who the hell do they think they are?

He couldn’t hear himself think. Couldn’t hope to exchange a word with the lean, black-haired youth approaching him, not till this deafening machine had got past.

Then the bike came close and stopped altogether, engine purring, settling into a low, happy rumble. It was a huge red Ducati, powerful and expensive. The rider was all in black, a leather suit, the kind old-fashioned racers wore. His head was enclosed in a full shiny helmet the same colour as his gear, with an opaque visor that made the man look like some kind of gigantic insect.

‘Oh my,’ Riggi declared, and began to clap his hands slowly, sarcastically. ‘What’s it they say? Big bike, little dick. Piss off out of here, moron, before I pull you off that stupid thing and give you a damned good. .’

The cop stopped and blinked. The figure in leather had pulled down the shiny silver zip on his chest and removed from beneath it a long-nosed pistol as black and as shiny as his own artificial skin.

‘Cakici?’ he asked, so quietly he realized no one would have heard, not even the youth in front of him, whose face was now as white as the newly painted wall outside the bar where Riggi had bought his overpriced Moretti. ‘Cakici. .?’

The rider stretched out his hand and loosed a single bullet into the kid’s head. A noise like muffled thunder rang round the walls of this shady, constricted Trastevere alley. The shot figure in front of him let out a brief, pained cry of outrage then jerked to the ground, body contorted and twisting as if hit by an electric shock. Two more bullets got pumped into his T-shirt.

Riggi stared at the blood and the way the kid bounced with the impact of the shots, wondering if this was real or some kind of waking nightmare.

A mess of this scale would come back to haunt him, he knew. It had to.

‘Oh, wonderful. How the hell am I supposed to clean up this one?’ He looked up at the helmeted figure and wanted to drag the idiot off the bike, punch him hard, scream at him. ‘How the hell. .?’

Riggi shut up. For the first time in years he was scared, and it felt oddly vivid, as if something he’d been missing for ages had suddenly walked back into his life. Just for one last time, to say good-bye.

‘Don’t be so stupid. .’ he started to say.