He wrapped his left hand around the knob, twisted it, then threw his left shoulder against the door. The latch was open; the door banged against the table inside, dislodging papers. The woman let out a shriek and stumbled away from the desk, one hand going to her mouth. Her eyes were like buttons about to pop from too much pressure.
Carmody got to her in three long strides, caught her dark hair in his free hand, spun her around and sat her down hard in one of the chairs. Then he knelt in front of her, his angry face less than six inches from hers, and laid the Beretta’s muzzle against her cheek.
He could see that she wanted to scream again, but nothing came out when she opened her mouth. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets. Carmody slapped her twice, hard. The blows refocused her vision, brought her out of the faint before she had really gone into it.
She stared at him with a mixture of shock and terror. “Signor Carmody...”
“That’s right — alive and well.”
“But you... I believed...”
“I know what you believed,” he said thinly. “But I was luckier than Lucarelli and the boat driver. Where’s the money? And where’s Gambresca?”
“Gambresca! That stronzolo,he was the one...”
“You ought to know, you sold us out to him.”
She blinked. “I do not understand.”
“The hell you don’t understand.”
“I was so afraid,” she whispered. She was trembling now. “I did not wish to die. This is why I run away. Please, I know nothing about Gambresca.”
“Are you trying to tell me you didn’t set up that ambush?”
“Ambush?”
“The boat, the shooting.”
“No! How could I? You cannot think—”
“Why did you run back to the house just before the shooting started?”
“My cosmeticos, I forget them.”
“Sure you did.”
“I tell the truth! Renzo was my man, we go away together, you cannot think I want him to die!”
“Somebody wanted him to die,” Carmody said. “Somebody tipped Gambresca. And you and Lucarelli were the only ones besides me and my man in Rome who knew where the hideaway was. You did it for the money, right? For a cut of the run-out money?”
“No, no, no! I did not, I would not...”
She was shaking her head, forgetting the gun at her cheek; Carmody pulled the Beretta back a little. It was quiet in the office just then — and in that quiet he heard the faint sound of a footfall in the darkness out front.
The hackles raised on his neck. He came up off his knee, turning, and when he did that he saw the vague shape of a man appear next to the drill press out there, just beyond the outspill of light from the desk lamp. In the man’s hand was a familiar, deadly shape.
Carmody threw himself to one side, pushing Rita and the chair over backwards. She screamed again but the sound of it was lost in the stuttering roar of the machine pistol. A slug ripped through the tail of Carmody’s jacket, burned across one buttock. Then the gooseneck lamp flew off the desk, shattered, and the office went dark except for bright flashes from the pistol’s muzzle.
Carmody managed to get the desk between himself and the doorway. He could hear the rap, rap, rap of the bullets digging into the desk, into the wall above him, as the shooter raked the office with another burst. He twisted his body into the kneehole. He could see out on the other side, but without the muzzle flashes the darkness was too thick for him to locate the shooter. The air stank of burnt gunpowder; the silence had an electric quality. Carmody listened, knowing that the shooter was listening too.
The silence seemed to gain magnitude until it was almost deafening. Either the shooter didn’t know where the overhead lights were or he didn’t want to take the chance of putting them on. But with the amount of slugs he’d pumped into the office, he had to be thinking that he was the only one left alive. If he’d opened up with that MAC-10 two seconds earlier he’d have been right.
Pretty soon there was a series of scuffling sounds out beyond the doorway. Carmody still didn’t move. They were the kinds of sounds somebody makes when he’s pretending to leave a place, trying to be clever. The shooter was still out there, waiting. Making up his mind.
Another couple of minutes crawled away. The quiet was so intense it was like a humming in Carmody’s ears. Then there was a nearly inaudible sliding sound: the shooter was moving again. Not going away this time. Coming back into the office.
Carmody steadied the Beretta on his left arm.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then there was another faint, whispery footfall. And another, not more than ten feet away and almost directly ahead—
Carmody emptied most of the Beretta’s clip on a line waist-high and two feet wide.
There was a half-strangled Italian oath; a moment later Carmody heard the metallic clatter of the pistol on concrete, the sound of a body falling heavily. He stayed where he was, listening. A scrabbling movement, a low moan... nothing.
It was another couple of minutes before he was satisfied. He crawled out of the kneehole, got to his feet, moved at an angle to the door. He put his pencil flash on, just for an instant, stepping aside as he did so. Then the tension went out of him and he put the light on again, left it on.
The shooter was lying half in and half out of the office doorway, the MAC-10 alongside him. Face down, not moving. Carmody turned him over with the toe of one shoe, shined the light on his face — on the dead, staring eyes.
Gino Della Robbia.
Carmody swore softly. He wasn’t surprised; nothing surprised him anymore. But that didn’t make Della Robbia’s treachery any easier to take.
He swung the light to the rear of the office, located Rita with it. At first he thought she was dead too because she lay crumpled and still But when he went over there and knelt beside her, he saw that she was breathing Blood glistened on the side of her head: scalp wound. He didn’t see any others. She was lucky. They both were — damned lucky.
He found the switch for the overheads, flipped it on. Then he picked Rita up and sat her in a chair. The movement brought her out of it. For a couple of minutes she was disoriented, hysterical; he slapped her face, got her calmed down. Then she saw Della Robbia and that almost set her off again.
When she could talk she said, “Gino? It was Gino who killed Renzo?”
“And tried to kill me,” Carmody said. “Twice.”
“But I do not understand...”
“It’s simple enough. Gambresca had nothing to do with the ambush, just like you had nothing to do with it. Della Robbia, nobody else. For the money. He didn’t know how much there was but he did know that it would be plenty — enough to take the risks he took.”
She shook her head, winced, sat still.
Carmody said, “You went to him tonight after the ambush, didn’t you? Heard me mention his name to Lucarelli, remembered it, looked up his address and went to him.”
“Yes. I believed you and Renzo were both dead. I had nowhere else to go.”
“And he got you to come here.”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say to you?”
“That this was the squero of a friend. That I should wait here. He gave me a key.”
“Wait for what?”
“For him to come. He said he would help me leave Venezia.”
Carmody nodded. He was thinking that Della Robbia must have been in a hell of a sweat when he got home from San Spirito and one of the men he thought he’d killed called him on the phone — the one man he should have made sure died first. If he could have found out where Carmody was, he’d have gone there to finish the job. But Carmody hadn’t told him and Della Robbia had been afraid to force the issue. So he’d sweated some more and waited for the next call. Then Rita had showed up and he’d thought of this squero — the perfect set-up for another ambush. Except that this time he’d been the one who got caught in it.