The Tears Of Autumn

1

When Christopher showed Stavros Glavanis the room in which he would break Frankie Pigeon, the Greek ran his palm over its cold sweating walls and said, “If you’re going to do this to him, you may as well kill him.”

“You have to bring him here in perfect condition and get the information without putting a mark on him,” Christopher said.

“These methods are not your usual ones. Are you growing more realistic?”

“It’s a special case,” Christopher said. “This man can’t be moved by money, and he’s too afraid of his own people to talk, unless you make him more afraid of you.”

Glavanis looked around the bare circular room again. He shrugged. “It may be possible,” he said. “It depends on the man -it always depends on the man, and how quickly you get to know him.”

Glavanis had had trouble finding the second operative Christopher had asked for in his telegram, and more trouble getting out of Corsica during Christmas week, when the boats and planes were fully booked with foreigners on holiday. His standing instructions were to make contact on any even-numbered hour between six in the evening and midnight. Christopher had gone to the meeting place on the Capitoline Hill three times before Glavanis and his companion finally appeared.

By ten o’clock, Christopher was tired, and the wine he had drunk at dinner had given him a headache. At four minutes after the hour, he saw the tall figure of Glavanis, accompanied by a shorter man, climbing the steep street that led from the ruins of the Forum. Christopher, standing in the shadows, snapped his fingers twice and Glavanis came straight for the sound.

He embraced Christopher. “You remember Jan Eycken,” he said.

Christopher nodded and held out his hand. Eycken hesitated for a fraction of a second. He did not like to display his hands: he had lost both thumbs when he fell into the hands of an Algerian rebel unit in the Kabylia, and he had spent his life among simple men who hated deformity.

Glavanis and Eycken had been comrades in the Foreign Legion-Glavanis a sergeant-major, Eycken one of his corporals. Glavanis was amused by Eycken’s stolid Flemish self-absorption. Eycken had been a younger child than Glavanis during the Second World War, and he had seen action only in colonial wars. He thought Glavanis looked down on him because he had never killed a white man. Glavanis, wiping mirth from his eyes, had told Christopher that he planted this notion in Eycken’s mind because it made Eycken very brave when they went into action together.

Stavros Glavanis came from a Macedonian village on the Greek side of the frontier with Yugoslavia, and he had been killing men in battle since the age of thirteen. His father had been a follower of General Napoleon Zervas, and when he went with Zervas’s EDES partisans in 1941, he took Stavros, his oldest son, with him. They remained in the field, ambushing Germans and later fighting Greek Communists in the mountains, until the end of the Greek civil war in 1949.

When they returned to their village, they found that Stav-ros’s mother was dead, and his six brothers and sisters, and most of his cousins, had been taken across the frontier and on to Russia by the Communists, to be trained for some future Greek revolution. Stavros’s father gave him his gold ring and told him to marry and breed new children. Then, carrying his British rifle, he set off through the woods to the east. Stavros never saw him again.

Stavros married an Athenian girl, and found that he had married her too quickly: she cuckolded him within the year with an old lover who had fought against Stavros as a member of the Communist ELAS partisans. Stavros killed his wife’s lover, shipped on a freighter to Marseilles, and joined the Foreign Legion. Christopher met him in Indochina, where he was a sergeant leading a platoon composed mostly of Germans. Because of Stavros’s long experience as a guerrilla fighter and his personal enthusiasm for killing Communists, his platoon was one of the most successful units operating in the Indochina War on the French side.

After Dienbienphu, Glavanis went directly to Algeria, where he was shot in the chest by an Arab terrorist while sitting in a cafe in Oran. He lost a lung as a result of his wound, and Christopher recruited him a week after he was invalided out of the Legion, offering him the prospect of going into action against Communists.

In Vietnam and later in Algeria, during periods when he was recovering from wounds, Glavanis had headed military interrogation teams. He knew a great deal about the natives who had passed through his hands; because the French had lost both wars, many of the people they had tortured were now generals or government ministers or high party officials.

Christopher had often used Glavanis as a source of information, and once or twice as a courier. But he had never until now needed him for his primary skills.

Christopher took Glavanis and Eycken to his rented car, parked in a dark street by the Forum. Glavanis stood for a moment, gazing at the broken columns. “I miss Greece,” he said, “these stones remind me.” He lifted his hips off the seat when he got into the front seat, and reached into his pocket. Christopher opened the small box Glavanis handed him and found a gold-plated fingernail clipper inside: the Greek never called on a friend without bringing a gift.

When they drove through the gates of the villa on the Via Flaminia, Glavanis said, “My God, Paul-what is this place?”

The villa, a long, towered building, lay at the end of a drive that passed between perfectly matched cypresses. Gravel walks led through the grounds, past statues and fountains, hedges and fish ponds, flower beds and water jokes-a passerby could be soaked by a hidden jet in any of a dozen places. There was one stretch of walk where fountains formed an arch over the path for a distance of a hundred meters, so cleverly designed that not a drop of water fell on anyone who walked beneath the spray.

“It belonged to some Roman nobility, and afterward to one of Mussolini’s mistresses,” Christopher said. “Late in the war, the SS used it as an interrogation center for important prisoners -after that, nobody wanted it.”

The Rome station had furnished the villa with black leather furniture, antique tables left behind by the Italians and the Germans, and thick carpeting that absorbed the echoes thrown out by the tile floors. An elaborate alarm system that covered the grounds with electric eyes and the interior of the villa with devices that sensed the heat of an intruder’s body had been installed. The bar was stocked with the national drinks of five continents and the library contained books in twenty languages. There was a photographic dark room, a small cinema, a gymnasium. The villa was a place for new agents to be trained and old ones to rest.

Webster had arranged for the young officers who guarded the place to be sent away on Christmas leave. The old-fashioned German microphones implanted in the plaster had been replaced with voice-activated transmitters, and Christopher did not for a moment believe that he had been told where all the bugs were located. He took Glavanis and Eycken outside to explain what he wanted from them.

Glavanis asked only one question: “Is this man a Communist?”

“He works for them,” Christopher said.

Glavanis, standing at the bar, grinned and drank from a glass of ouzo, taking in a noisy breath as he swallowed.

Eycken, who had the face of a suspicious shopkeeper, raised immediate objections. Christopher listened, knowing that it was Glavanis who would set a price on the services of his friend.

“The time element is very short,” Eycken said. “We have to drive all the way to Calabria, take this man out of a guarded house, drive all the way back to Rome. And break him. All in three days or less. What if he doesn’t break?”

“He’ll break,” Christopher said.

He motioned for Glavanis and Eycken to follow him. Glavanis refilled his glass from the bottle of ouzo he had carried into the garden. The three men strolled around the villa, gravel crunching beneath their shoes. In a thick grove of cypresses, a hundred yards behind the villa, Christopher knelt and pulled a lever hidden in a concrete chamber at the base of a tree.

A spring-loaded steel manhole cover opened at their feet. Christopher shone his flashlight into the hole. Twelve feet below, the round beam of the electric torch moved over a damp stone floor.

“Eycken, get in,” Christopher said.

Eycken gave him a hard look and stepped back from the edge. He didn’t move his hands, but Christopher felt his tension.

“It’s all right,” Christopher said. “It’s just an experiment.”

Glavanis nodded; Eycken held out his hand for the flashlight. Christopher gave it to him, and he put it in his pocket and swung athletically into the hole, hanging for a moment by his fingertips before he dropped into the darkness.

“I’m going to close the hatch,” Christopher said. “You’ll see us again in five minutes.”

He turned Glavanis around and showed him that it was impossible to see the villa from where they stood. The house stood in open countryside, and there was no noise and no light.

They went back into the villa. Christopher led Glavanis down the cellar stairs, and then into a long concrete tunnel with strong light bulbs screwed into the ceiling. At the end of the tunnel, Christopher stopped before a rusted steel door.

“Eycken has been in there alone for five minutes, with a flashlight,” Christopher said. “Look at his face, and use your imagination.”

He threw a light switch and pulled open the door. Eycken was standing against the far wall of a bare round concrete room ten feet in diameter. The walls sloped inward like the sides of an inverted funnel. Eycken shielded his eyes from the blinding reflection of high-intensity lights. The walls were painted with white reflective paint.

Eycken held a heavy revolver in his hand. Glavanis stepped between him and Christopher. “It was a joke, Jan,” he said.

Eycken swore, a long elaborate Arab curse, and moved around to the door before he put his gun away.

Christopher explained that the Germans had built the room. During the war they would bring a man through the dark fields, strip him, and drop him through the trapdoor. He would be left naked in the dark room, sometimes with a dozen rats, sometimes with music or recorded human screams playing at high volume through the loudspeakers in the wall. The door was faced with concrete and cleverly concealed; it was impossible to tell that it was there by sense of touch. When, after two or three days, the wall opened and the lights went on, and the prisoner-already half-crazed by thirst and the rats and the loudspeakers-saw a German in an SS uniform standing in the door, it had a certain effect.

“Is that how we begin with this Communist?” Glavanis asked.

“Yes. You may not have to do much more. He’s used to being protected, being invulnerable. He thinks of himself as a dangerous man. That’s one of the pressure points-he won’t know how to handle being helpless. Also, he’s a hypochondriac. He’s going to get very cold in here with no clothes on, and he’s going to be worried about pneumonia.”

“Can we use water?”

“If you have to,” Christopher said. “I don’t know that it’ll be necessary. I have something to keep him quiet when you take him, and when we let him go.”

“You’re going to let him go?”

“Yes. Don’t let him see your faces at all. You’ll have to tape his eyes as soon as you take him.”

Eycken smiled, his white teeth glittering beneath the hair on his lips. “I’d better shave,” he said.

“Afterward would be better,” Christopher said. “I want you to start in the morning. You fly to Reggio and pick up the car there. Stavros, you still have the papers I gave you? The car is booked in that name, at Auto Maggiore at the airport.”

“Yes, I still have the papers. What information does this type have, that he’s worth all this trouble?”

“If I knew, we wouldn’t have to go through all this,” Christopher said. “Come on upstairs. I’ll explain the operation.”

Christopher showed them the maps he had drawn on the basis of Klimenko’s description of the house in Calabria, and gave them photographs of Frankie Pigeon.

“It would be better to know more about his habits,” Glavanis said.

“I agree, but there’s no time. You have to have him back here before first light day after tomorrow. You’ll have to lie up and watch, and take the first chance you get.”

“What about the bodyguards? Can we deal with them as we think best?”

Christopher handed Glavanis a small briefcase. Glavanis removed two.22 caliber pistols from it and looked quizzically at Christopher. He pushed a cartridge from one of the clips; there was no lead bullet as in ordinary ammunition. The nose of the cartridge case was pinched shut. “What’s this supposed to be?” Glavanis asked.

“It’s birdshot. You can’t kill with it, but if you fire into the face from close range, you produce a lot of pain and shock. You want to immobilize these people for an hour or two, that’s all.”

“There’s a better method of immobilizing people,” Eycken said.

“No doubt. But this isn’t a war zone, Eycken. If you kill somebody, you’ll have carabinieri all over you before you get to Naples.”

Eycken slid a clip loaded with the birdshot cartridges into one of the pistols and felt the weight of the weapon, holding it at arm’s length. “I suppose it’ll work if you get close enough and hit the eyes,” he said.

“There’s no need to hit the eyes.”

Glavanis, seeing the contempt in Eycken’s face, grinned broadly. “Jan isn’t used to working with a man who has scruples,” he said.

Glavanis sorted out the other things in the briefcase: two airplane tickets to Reggio, an envelope fat with dirty thousand-lire notes, bandage and tape, handcuffs, a hundred feet of light manila rope, a pair of binoculars, a bottle of pills. He shook the bottle and asked a question.

“Seconal,” Christopher said. “Give him two or three if he’s conscious when you take him. It should take seven or eight hours to drive back to Rome. He’ll sleep most of the way in the trunk. Don’t give him too much Seconal. We want him awake when you put him in the hole.”

Glavanis prodded the contents of the briefcase with his blunt fingers. He nodded in satisfaction. “Everything we’ll need is there,” he said. “We’d better sleep now.” Before he went upstairs, he winked at Christopher. “Do you know what day it is tomorrow?”

“Christmas.”

Glavanis nodded rapidly and uttered a short, sharp laugh.

While Glavanis and Eycken slept, Christopher tested the loudspeaker in the interrogation room and prepared the other things that would be needed there.

Then he spent an hour in the darkroom. Dieter Dimpel’s photographs of the tortora file at Dolder und Co. were in per feet focus. Christopher ran the negatives through the enlarger, but made no prints. The bank records verified Klimenko’s story in every detail. There was one bit of information that Klimenko had omitted. It was an important fact, and Christopher concluded that Klimenko could not have known about it. If word of it ever got back to Moscow, big boils would burst all over the KGB.

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.”

“They won’t call the police,” Christopher said. “You may as well get some sleep. You can start in on him in twelve hours. That ought to be enough.”

Christopher went downstairs and checked the locks on the steel door. Through the peephole he could hear Frankie Pigeon breathing, heavily and quickly, and the shuffle of his bare feet over the stone floor. Christopher had transferred some electronic music from a record to a tape, playing the record over until the tape contained twelve hours of harsh, dissonant noise. He switched on the tape recorder, which was attached to the loudspeakers inside the interrogation room, and turned the volume to the maximum. The music was so loud that it set up vibrations in the steel door. Before he went to bed, he turned on all the alarm systems.

Christopher was drinking coffee the following afternoon when Glavanis and Eycken came downstairs. They had coffee with cognac in it, and Glavanis put two large steaks under the broiler.

Christopher said, “How much money did the man have on him?”

Glavanis shrugged. “None. The bodyguards had about two thousand in dollars, plus maybe two hundred thousand lire.”

“It’s yours.”

“What about our pay?” Eycken asked.

“That, too.”

“What do you want him to spill?” Glavanis asked.

“I’ll ask the final questions when you think he’s ready. Just work on him.”

“We have to ask him something,” Glavanis said. “Otherwise one can’t make the psychological progression-there’s no reason to put on more pressure if he isn’t asked a question he refuses to answer. It’s not logical. There’s no focus of fear.”

“Keep asking about a million dollars. Tell him you know he received it. Just keep hammering on that.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, for now. Talk to him through the loudspeakers-I’ve rigged a microphone. There’s a light for his eyes if you want it.”

“What about the water?”

Christopher hesitated. “If you need it, but be careful. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”

Eycken sipped his coffee, making a windy noise with his lips. “I have a lot of faith in water,” he said.

Glavanis washed the dishes before they went downstairs. They wore woolen ski masks that concealed their faces and muffled their voices. Eycken’s black beard curled from the bottom of his mask.

They worked for almost three hours. No sound of any kind filtered into the upstairs. Christopher watched a Clark Gable movie, dubbed in Italian, on television. Finally he heard the steel door scrape over the stone floor of the cellar, and Glavanis’s light footsteps on the stairs.

Glavanis came into the sitting room with his mask still on. “He’s ready,” he said. “Jan is with him. He’s a mess, Paul-he can’t control himself.”

Glavanis pinched his nostrils shut through the mask, laughed when this reminded him that he still had it on, and stripped it off his head. He smoothed his short black hair with both hands.

“He’s primitive, that man,” Glavanis said. “At first he kept screaming that he was going to kill us. Jan kept pouring water down his throat through the tube. In the end, he went to pieces in a bad way, he kept on saying ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was very strange-we gave him no pain, just the water.”

“Is he coherent?”

“More or less. He’s afraid Jan will drown him again. The water is very effective.”

“All right, let him rest for a few minutes. Turn off the lights and lock the door. I’ll be right down.”

Christopher went upstairs and put on an Italian suit, with the ribbon of a decoration in the lapel. With a gray wig and mustache and rimless spectacles Christopher looked different enough that Glavanis reached for his pocket when he saw him coming down the stairs. Christopher was carrying a small leather case, the kind used by doctors to transport hypodermics. He had draped a heavy dressing gown over one arm. Before he went into the cellar he removed his wristwatch and put it in his pocket; there were thousands like it, but he did not want Pigeon to remember it.

3

With the door closed and the lights reflecting from its polished white walls, the interrogation room looked like the inside of a dry skull. Frankie Pigeon, naked, was tied by his wrists to a ring in the wall. Long yellow stains ran down the inside of his legs. He trembled uncontrollably. The floor was slick with the water he had regurgitated.

When Pigeon saw the door open, he pressed his knees together and turned his lower body to one side in a convulsive movement, to protect his genitals. He looked at Christopher, then closed his eyes tightly. His limp gray hair had fallen over his face. Pigeon’s chalky body had been powerful in youth; now it sagged, and his round stomach heaved in and out as he worked to control his breathing.

Christopher put his briefcase on the table. “Buonasera, Don Franco,” he said.

Pigeon did not open his eyes. Christopher turned off the overhead lights. Now only the table lamp, fitted with a brilliant photographic bulb, was burning. Christopher stood behind the lamp in the shadows. He removed a large hypodermic syringe from the leather case, and holding his hands in the light, filled it from an ampule of yellow liquid. He laid the syringe on a white towel. Then he focused the lamp on Pigeon’s face. His eyes were open, and he stared wildly at the syringe.

“This is a very unhealthy place, Don Franco,” Christopher said, continuing to speak Italian.

Frankie Pigeon tried to speak and failed; he closed his eyes, concentrated, and tried again. “You get nothing from me,” he said in English.

“We have time,” Christopher said. “You must be very cold.”

He put a chair in the center of the room, in front of the table, and untied Pigeon’s hands. Pigeon fell to the floor, shuddering. Christopher lifted him and helped him into the bathrobe. “Please sit down,” he said. He went back to the table and adjusted the light so that it shone on Pigeon’s haggard features, but did not altogether blind him. Pigeon sat with one flaccid leg wrapped around the other; his body shook and he wedged his hands between his crossed legs.

“I want you to understand your situation,” Christopher said. “It’s possible for you to remain in this room indefinitely. Conditions will not change, except to get worse. No one will find you.”

Pigeon had stopped trying to control his shivering. “They’ll find me,” he said, “and when they do, you bastard…”

“No. You can forget about being rescued. It’s not realistic. Your men have no chance. You saw what happened in Calabria, within earshot of your house.”

Pigeon tried to speak again. It was difficult for him-his mouth opened and no voice came out. When finally he was able to utter sound, it was a high thin shriek; a beaded string of phlegm leaped out of his throat and fell through the beam of light.

“Who?” he screamed.

Christopher didn’t answer. He waited until Pigeon had calmed a little before he touched the hypodermic with the tip of a finger. As he spoke to Pigeon, he tapped the glass barrel of the syringe with his fingernail.

“This hypodermic is filled with the live bacteria of Hansen’s disease,” Christopher said. “I wonder what you know about Hansen’s disease.”

Frankie Pigeon’s eyes were fixed on the syringe and on Christopher’s rhythmically tapping finger.

“Hansen’s disease is caused by the Mycobacterium leprae,” Christopher said, “which is why it’s more usually called leprosy. It’s a peculiar disease. The incubation period varies greatly Sometimes the disease develops in a year or two after infection, but sometimes fifteen or even twenty years can pass before any symptoms appear. All that time, the germ works inside the body. It takes various forms. The neural form may be the worst -lesions develop on the central nervous system. It causes madness, loss of sexual potency, loss of bowel control, and so on. It can paralyze the lungs or eat them away. Other forms cause the fingers, the nose, the toes-even whole legs and arms-to rot. Parts of the victim’s body just fall off. Lepers have a strong, disagreeable odor. There is no cure once the disease establishes itself.”

Pigeon pushed back his chair, the legs moving silently over the wet floor. He stood up, crouching with one hand on the back of the chair to keep himself from falling.

“Get away from me,” he cried.

Christopher covered the syringe with a corner of the towel. “I want some information,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your organization. There’s no question of your betraying your own people-I’ve no interest in them or their activities.”

Now that the syringe was out of sight, Pigeon was less agitated. But when he spoke, he stammered and his voice broke. He was not used to being powerless. “Those guys in the masks,” he said. “They don’t even know who I am.”

“No, they don’t. Here, Mr. Pigeon, you’re nobody.”

“They took fucking pictures of me!”

“Yes, those were their orders. We’ll keep the photographs. We may want to mail them to the United States, to certain of your friends.”

“Do that, and they’ll come after you.”

“Will they? I thought they’d be more likely to ask you if you talked, and what you talked about.”

“I want those pictures,” Pigeon said. “I’m not having any goddamn pictures of me with no clothes on and…” He saw his fouled legs and turned his head aside, biting his lip like a shamed child.

“Let me tell you what we know,” Christopher said. “In 1956 you received a retainer of one hundred thousand dollars from a short bald man with a foreign accent who told you his name was Blanchard. You didn’t hear from Blanchard again until the last week in November of this year. You then received a cable from Naples stating that your Uncle Giuseppe had died. Following the plan Blanchard had given you seven years before, you went to an apartment on Cedar Street in Chicago, and received instructions for a job. You carried out the job. On November 25, two of your men, Anthony Rugged and Ronald Prince, went to the bank of Dolder und Co. in Zurich, and collected a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. They identified themselves with the code name tortora, which, as you know, means ‘pigeon’ in English.”

“You know so much, tell me what the job was,” Pigeon said.

Christopher picked up the hypodermic and depressed the plunger, so that a thin stream of the yellow serum squirted out of the needle and through the light. “That’s what you’re going to tell me,” he said.

“You can kill me!”

“No. I give you my word I won’t do that. Not with a gun or a knife, or anything quick.”

The trembling of Pigeon’s body intensified. He stared into the light, then turned his whole body away from its glare. He swallowed noisily. When at last he was able to speak, he did so in a rapid soprano voice, like a castrato.

Christopher had to ask him only two or three questions. When Pigeon was done, Christopher left the room, taking the hypodermic with him, and the spool of tape on which he had recorded Pigeon’s hysterical spillage of what he had done to earn Klimenko’s money.

Upstairs, Christopher typed out a summary of Pigeon’s statement on a single sheet of foolscap. When he was finished, he removed the ribbon from the typewriter and put the spools in his pocket; on his way back to the interrogation room, he dropped the ribbon into the red coals of the furnace and watched it burn.

Frankie Pigeon sat where Christopher had left him, his bloodless legs intertwined, his hands gripping the seat of the folding chair. Christopher put the sheet of foolscap on the table and told Pigeon to read it. He ran his empty eyes over the paper.

“Sign it, and give me your right hand,” Christopher said. He inked each of Pigeon’s limp fingers and rolled them over the paper, so that he had a full set of prints to authenticate the signature that ran drunkenly down the page.

He left Pigeon staring at his own hand, blackened by the ink. He still wore a large diamond on his small finger.

4

In the kitchen Glavanis and Eycken were playing piquet with fierce concentration. When they finished the hand, Christopher gave them their pay.

“Give the man this injection,” Christopher said, handing Glavanis the hypodermic. “He’ll be terrified, so you’ll have to subdue him.”

“What is it?”

“It’ll knock him out for eight hours or so, it’s harmless. He thinks it’s leprosy germs. Dress him, and blindfold and gag him. Drive north on the Via Flaminia and drop him in a field, away from the main roads, at least three hundred kilometers from Rome. Then turn in the car at Auto Maggiore in Milan and leave the country.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Glavanis said. “He did see our faces.”

“He won’t want to see them again. He has no idea where he is now, or where to look for you.”

“All the same, Paul-if you have what you want…”

“There’s an operational reason why he must stay alive.”

Glavanis rested his brown eyes, which were as steady and as liquid as those of a young bride, on Christopher for a moment, then laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You always have a reason to let them live,” he said. “One day you’ll wish you hadn’t been so merciful.”

Christopher shook hands with both men. He stared at Eycken’s thumbless hands, and looked questioningly at Glavanis.

“It’s all right,” Glavanis said. “Eycken wore rubber gloves all the time we were downstairs.”

As soon as he heard the car go down the drive, Christopher put the villa in order. Glavanis and Eycken had left nothing behind but fingerprints; he removed those with furniture polish and a cloth. He photographed Pigeon’s confession and developed the film.

Before he left, he entered the interrogation room again. He recalled Frankie Pigeon’s clogged treble voice, answering the final questions.

“What did Ruby say when you gave him the contract?”

“Nothing. He was overjoyed to hit that faggot.”

“Didn’t he ask for money?”

“What did Jack want with money?” Pigeon had asked. “He thought he was going to get the Congressional Medal of Honor.”