"Retirement is right!" Audley snarled. "But you've picked him up now—and Hemingway, I take it?"
"Hemingway's dead." Richardson decided that it was not the time to elaborate on the circumstances of the Librarian's death. Audley had quite enough to worry about as it was.
"And Korbel?"
"Gone—vanished."
Richardson waited for Audley to swear again, but the big man only stared at him in silence for a few seconds and then turned away once more, his self-discipline clamped back tight again.
"But listen, David—" Richardson felt aggrieved that Audley had still managed to ask all the questions instead of answering them—and that he still seemed set on playing both ends against the middle "—there's still a damn good chance the Russians haven't been able to put two and two together.
Maybe Hemingway didn't hear everything. After Ostia. . . ."
The affray in Ostia was the awkward piece in the pattern, the very example of bloody public scandal which men on both sides risked their skins to avoid. It could only have happened dummy2
because the Italian PS men and the Communist agents who were dogging Audley's footsteps had collided head-on and had panicked—that was Boselli's explanation, and if Korbel had been unable to warn his Italian opposite number about Hemingway's death it was an explanation that made sense.
But, even more significantly, the presence of those incompetent Reds surely meant that the opposition didn't yet know what Audley was up to.
That thought roused another one, much closer to home: the opposition weren't the only ones in the dark about Audley's actions there—
"Just what the hell were you doing in Ostia this morning?"
Audley didn't reply. He didn't even appear to hear the question, but seemed totally abstracted in the great sweep of land and sea.
"For Christ's sake, David!" Richardson's sorely-tried cool finally slipped. Only a few hours ago he'd fixed a date with little Bernadette O'Connell of the Dublin Provisional to meet in Mooney's bar next day and eat at Donovan's place in Balbriggan and end the evening strictly non-politically in her flat off Clanbrassil Street. She'd be waiting for him now, her passionate Anglo-Italian boyfriend with his sales list of Belgian sniperscopes and American rocket launchers that would never see the soft light of Irish day.
"David—there have been some of your bloody stupid fornicating meddling idiots who've stuck out their bloody stupid fornicating necks for you this last twelve hours, dummy2
including me for one. If you clam up now the Italians'll turn nasty, and then we've really had it."
Audley met the appeal stone-faced. "If I don't get out of here smartly, Peter, I agree with you: we've all had it. So just get me out."
"Man—you're crazy!" Richardson stared at Audley in bewilderment at his obtuseness. "I tell you for the last time, it's impossible—not after Ostia. And I tell you this too, David: I damn well wouldn't do it now if it was. Either you work with me and little Ratface or you rot here until Montuori decides what to do with you. It's shit or bust this time."
Audley blinked. One corner of his mouth dropped and twitched, though whether in anger or despair Richardson could not tell. He had never before seen quite this look on this face.
"I'm sorry, David. But that's the way it is."
"Sorry?" Anger and despair, and bitterness too. "Yes, Peter, I think you very well may be."
Richardson accepted the bitterness with bitterness of his own at Audley's lack of understanding that he was sorry already.
Sorry for the end of old times' sake, the end of advice and the exchange of ideas, and of evenings and weekends at the old house in Steeple Horley. . . . Sorry for friendship's end even where friendship was a luxury, and maybe a dangerous one at that.
Not that there was any choice, because it would be fatal for dummy2
Audley to have been set loose while the Bastard was at large.
"You know who we're up against?"
"I'm permitted to know, then?"
Richardson ignored the sarcasm. "You've ever heard of George Ruelle?"
"I've heard of him, yes."
It was a flat statement: evidently the Bastard didn't frighten Audley.
"Those were his men at Ostia. David—you were damn lucky to get out of that." He grasped childishly at the obvious justification of his refusal to connive at Audley's escape. "You could have got Faith killed there, never mind yourself."
Audley showed no reaction at the mention of his wife.
"Where is she now, incidentally?" asked Richardson.
"Back in Rome, of course."
Another flat statement: it was none of anyone else's business what Faith Audley was doing, least of all now ex-friend Peter Richardson's —the message was plain enough.
Richardson sighed. "What were you doing in Ostia?"
Audley looked down his nose at him. "Unlikely as it may seem to you—" the blandness was insulting, "—I was showing my wife the ruins."
The simple logic of the answer was embarrassing. He had fallen into the trap of assuming that everything Audley had done was significant, forgetting that the big man had also dummy2
been unaware of what had been happening in England, and had no reason to suspect that anything could go wrong. If he had he would never have hazarded his wife by keeping her at his side, but as it was there had originally been no particular urgency about this journey southwards; indeed, the whole Italian trip had probably been planned as a holiday, with the descent on Narva as a surreptitious side expedition.
Richardson swore inwardly, recalling his pleasure only a few hours earlier at the sight of the familiar signpost to Upper Horley. Even the wild unpredictability of the Dublin IRA was maybe preferable to this, which already had the smell of disaster about it.
"And now you're heading for Narva?"
Audley nodded a little wearily. "I was. Until your new friends picked me up."
"No friends of mine." He emphasised the words hopefully, offering them like an olive branch. "We've got to work with them—they've got us by the short hairs at the moment. But if we can get the name of Little Bird's contact without their getting it, maybe it'ud put Fred in a better mood. They're not on to the real thing yet, I don't think, David."
Audley shook his head. "Don't kid yourself. Montuori's nobody's fool. When he gets to thinking about this he'll work it out right the way through."
"Maybe. But I've an idea it's Ruelle he wants more than anything else, the way Rat face tightened up at the mention dummy2
of him."
"Rat face?"
"Sorry—Boselli. He sounded nervous when he spoke of him, like he was scared. Which I don't wonder at if the Bastard still has his touch after all these years. . . . But you say he's a gun too—?"
"That's right."
"But a new one? New to you?"
"I don't know him."
The Mediterranean had once been Audley's stamping ground, and his encyclopaedic memory was much admired.
So Rat face must be either very new or very special, or both.
"You know he's a gun, though?" Richardson persisted.
Audley shrugged. "Two of the PS guards here were talking about him below the terrace—I didn't encourage them to think I knew Italian, and they were careless. . . ."
"Yes?"
"It seems they knew the man who was killed at Ostia—the PS
man. But apparently it was Boselli who got the killer. One shot straight through the heart at twenty metres. Whatever he looks like that makes him a pro, I'd say."
Richardson nodded thoughtfully in agreement: that sort of practice ruled out amateurs, sure enough. Which meant he had been dead wrong about Signor Pietro Boselli, because fussy little men didn't use one shot at twenty metres. And if dummy2
he'd been nervous it would not have been with fear, but with a craftsman's excitement at the prospect of demonstrating his special aptitude again.