" Villari!" This time the wail was much louder, more like a scream.
There was a low, bubbling rattle ahead of him and the sound of running footsteps behind, but both were lost in the tide of sickness which swept over Boselli: he vomited helplessly and painfully into the dust at his feet, the tears starting from his eyes as he did so.
"What the—" Villari stopped dead beside him. " Jesu!"
"He was standing in the—" Boselli choked on the lump in his throat. "He—just fell down."
Villari moved forward, but cautiously now, staring all around him and stooping. As he moved he reached back inside his coat with his right hand, towards his hip. Boselli blinked the tears out of his eyes, fascinated even though fear was now flooding inside him to replace the sickness: it was like watching a cream-fed tomcat transformed into a tiger hunting in the territory of its enemies.
When he reached the opening out of which the man had fallen Villari paused, setting his back against the wall for a moment. Then, with his automatic pistol held at the ready across his chest, its muzzle level with his left breast, he dummy2
peered into the courtyard over his left shoulder. The movement was smooth and continuous: the right shoulder swung away from the wall and Villari pivoted across the gap, facing it squarely for an instant with the pistol now extended to cover the ulterior, stepping over the legs of the man in the alley without looking down and ending up with his back against the wall on the other side in exactly the same stance as he had started. He looked up and down the alley, shifting his pistol from his right to his left hand as he did so, and then sank down on one knee beside the body, reaching with his free hand for the pulse at the neck.
It was unnecessary, thought Boselli, the memory of the man's collapse still horrific in his mind. But it was also enormously reassuring: this was an altogether different Villari from the languid, aristocratic brute of a few minutes ago. A brute still, no doubt—but one with all the necessary jungle qualities and skills.
He recalled with a pang of surprise that he had said as much to Villari in the cafe an hour earlier, ascribing it to the General without believing in it himself. Once more he saw that his instinct had been sound, although he had allowed his personal feelings to confuse it and to doubt the wisdom of the General's design. He should have known better than that.
Villari rose from his knee and beckoned to him.
For a moment Boselli stared at him uncertainly. Irrationally, he felt that so long as he stood where he was then he was somehow safer, and that unseen eyes would disregard him as dummy2
an innocent passer-by who had stumbled by accident on something in which he had no part and sought none. But the first step forward—if his legs didn't buckle under him—would bring him into the front line, however.
"And keep your head down," Villari mouthed at him.
There was no way out or backwards or anywhere except forward. He hunched his shoulders and lurched forward in what he knew was a parody of the other's catlike wariness.
"Stop there!" Villari hissed.
But Boselli had already stopped on the safe side of the ruined doorway. Nothing short of danger from behind, he felt, would induce him to cross that hundred-mile gap out of which death had come.
"I want you to go back and get Porro," Villari whispered across the opening.
"Go back—?" Boselli's squeak was cut off by the registration of the second part of the command. "Who's Porro?"
He blinked with embarrassment as Villari's lips tightened with contempt.
"The policeman?"
Villari nodded. "Tell him to come here, to the Temple of Livia," he whispered patiently, as one explaining a simple game to a dull child. "And tell him that Depretis is dead."
"Depretis!" Boselli's voice rose in shocked surprise.
"Who the hell did you think it was?"
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"I—I didn't think—" Boselli looked down at the body between them and then looked up again quickly. At this distance and from this angle he could see more clearly how Depretis had died and he didn't like what he saw. He felt the lump in his throat rising again sickeningly.
"You didn't think policemen get killed?" Villari spoke softly, almost soothingly. "Little clerk—it happens, and now you know it happens."
"But—" Boselli did not feel at all soothed. Policemen did get killed, and in this line of duty not only policemen, as he had good reason to know from his files. But it only happened when someone became desperate. He looked pleadingly at Villari, struck hopeless by the recollection of his own forecast once more. It was all happening as he had forecast, but it was happening to him!
"Now, Signor Boselli, just don't panic—just do as I tell you—"
the gentleness of Villari's voice was hideously counterproductive: it impressed the gravity of the situation on Boselli more convincingly than urgency or anger could ever have done "—walk, don't run. But don't stop, keep moving—and tell him—"
Villari never finished the sentence: it was lost in the change in Boselli's eyes looking over his shoulder past him down the alley, the fishlike NO forming on his lips and the contraction of his body against the stone wall in a vain attempt to disappear into it.
Boselli was staring into his own death.
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His death was a black finger, a finger which was long at first and then foreshortened as it came up to point directly at him: a shocking extension of the hand of the man who had appeared out of nowhere at the end of the alley.
Ever afterwards, when he relived that instant through the light of his candle burning before the altar, it was with a prayer to the Virgin of Miracles for his deliverance from that finger steadying on his heart. But there was no prayer in his mind or on his lips in the instant itself, only blank horror and disbelief, mindless and soundless; and to his private shame he did not even see the manner of that deliverance. His eyes were already closed when Villari moved. . . .
He heard a thump—more like a blow than a true sound—and a much louder crack of Villari's pistol, which almost blotted out the second thump, shattering the silence of the alley.
Then he was alive again, with the wall still at his back and the hot sun beating down on his head.
The sunlight was white, but not too blinding to conceal the miracle from him: the end of the alley was empty, wonderfully empty!
But his exhilaration was even briefer than his despair—it was quenched by a grunt of agony.
Somehow, during those seconds of darkness, Villari had catapulted himself right across the alley—across it, and back dummy2
down it, and into the shadow of the wall opposite. He was sitting in the dust, his weight on his left hand, his right hand pressed tightly against his ribs. His hair was ruffled and his dark glasses had fallen off on to the ground in front of him—
without them his face seemed naked and pale.
As Boselli gazed at him in mute horror he raised his head slowly and grimaced back.
"Don't—just stand there—man!" The words came out slowly but surprisingly clearly. "My gun—I've dropped it—"
Reality came cold into Boselli's brain, rousing him out of confusion: the other man had gone, but it had been Villari who had been hit—it must have been his sudden movement which had changed the target at the last moment from himself—so that any second the killer might appear round the corner again to finish the job on them.
He looked around wildly for the weapon, not finding it in the first sweep, and then, as his legs came to life at last, spotting it in the shadow beyond Villari's foot.
"Give it to me —argh!" Villari clapped the blood-stained palm back against his side.
It was amazingly heavy for so little a thing. During his military service he had had a rifle, though mercifully for only a short while because he had been no sort of combat soldier and they had soon realised that he was deadlier with his pen and his brain. But this was altogether different from the big, clumsy rifle: its contradictory weight and size, even the snug dummy2