Prestin held onto his calm rationality under this barrage. If Fritzy hadn’t disappeared, and if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes a Trug—he hadn’t imagined that, surely?—he wouldn’t believe a word of this farrago of dimensions and treasures that he was being handed. But they all took it so matter-of-factly—no tremendous drama, no heroics, no hysteria. These were three people coolly doing a job and getting on with it. That made him say, “Where do you come into all this?”
“We thought, at first, that the Montevarchi was a normal person, like anyone else. But she isn’t. She fooled us for a time; then we found out about her—and what she had been doing.” Macklin stopped talking and sat for a moment with a face gray and drawn, like granite chipped from a quarry and left to radiate blocky hate beneath ice.
“What—?” began Prestin.
“Hold it a minute, Bob.” Margie spoke sharply and with force, but compassionately, without malice.
Then, “I’m all right, Margie, you old fuss-pot,” said Macklin. “Young Mike—it always gets to me—hell, girl, you and he—it—”
“We’ll find him.” She spoke briskly. “And there’s a cafe or ristorante or what have you ahead. You need the coffee, Dave. That’s for sure.”
“Listen, Bob.” Macklin turned and laid a hand on Prestin’s arm, leaning on the back of the seat. “Mike is my son. The story, very shortly, is that he was the finest, truest, best lad—anyway, the Montevarchi has him. She has him and all the others in Irunium slaving, yes, slaving for her. That’s how she remains rich. She throws her money away on this side. And Mike and the others work to make more for her—”
“Coffee,” said Margie loudly and cheerfully, swinging the Jensen off the road. They bumped up over a concrete ramp and headed into a parking area. Prestin had not looked out since Macklin started speaking of his son Mike.
“Tell me,” he said as Margie cut the engine. “Why are we heading for Foggia? I mean, I know we’re escaping from the consequences of what happened in Rome, but why run to Foggia?”
“Fellow there I know, name of Gerstein, he knows as much about the dimensions as anyone does who’s never been through. He lost his son during the war—Fifteenth Air Force, B-17—and we’ve been collaborating. When he hears about you sending Fritzy he’ll—”
“That’s not fair! You don’t know I—I sent her!”
“How else did she disappear, then?” Macklin opened the car door. He turned to look back at Prestin, glaring angrily after him. “We hear rumors, stories of other people finding keys to the dimensions. There was a man called Crane, an Englishman, he had a map—but he won’t talk about it.”
“You told me,” Prestin said, sliding across after Alec and getting out that side. “You said it was feasible. That means there must be some other way—”
“Sure. But that wasn’t operating in this instance. A fellow called Alan Watkins dreamed up a formula for crossing the dimensions. Unfortunately, they found they had to work a new formula for each dimension, more or less. Guy called Phil Brandon told me. Said he had more information but wasn’t at liberty to divulge it. No, Bob. We’re on our own.”
They walked toward the ristorante, four people caught up together in a tragicomedy hanging between worlds, one of them hardly believing and yet forced to accept the evidence of his own senses. Prestin said, “All those red crosses. You can’t know they’re all nodal points. There must be another system besides me, or others you claim are like me. There must!”
“Maybe.” Macklin held the door open for them to enter. “One thing this guy Brandon did say kind of got to me. ‘Look out for the Porvone,’ he said. Porvone. The way he said it—kind of scary, hushed-voice. Porvone. A whole lot worse than Trugs.”
They went through without speaking for a moment after that, found a table and sat down. Alec, licking his lips, said, “I fancy everything on the menu, plus all the trimmings. I am—as they say—peckish.”
Prestin realized afresh how famished he was. Margie asked the fatly smiling proprietor if he had risotto with mushrooms and saffron available, giving him the necessary fifteen minutes to add the mushrooms and the saffron, pinch by pinch. Prestin followed her lead. Alec settled for a highly colored and spiced pasta dish and Macklin, abstemiously, for a little whitefish and cauliflower, with Genoese fish sauce.
When they had eaten, Prestin, for one, felt replete.
“I’ll drive if you like, Margie,” offered Alec, pushing his empty glass to one side and smiling as Macklin offered to refill it with the excellent local Vesuviana wine.
“I’m as sober as a circuit judge on Monday,” said Margie without offence. “And I’m not tired. And I prefer to drive my own car. And I’m not—”
“You have made,” interrupted Alec, giving in, “your point.”
The fat and smiling wife of the fatly smiling proprietor brought good coffee, not espresso, with cream circling galactically on its rich brownness. Prestin could almost imagine that nothing catastrophic had happened in the last twenty-four hours. This short interlude in the white-painted, flower-boxed little ristorante house, with small, friendly noises creeping in the open window, good food inside him, the wine and the coffee—he sat back in his chair, thinking—was how life should really be.
A buzzing sound drifted in through the window. The blue sky showed no clouds and the southern half of Italy promised a whole summer of heat. They had talked during the meal in a desultory fashion about the dimensions; the proprietor spoke a little Chicago English, however, and they had been discreet.
The buzzing sound grew louder.
“More coffee?”
“No, thank you, Margie.” Alec turned his blocky face toward the window.
“Well, we’d better be making a move. The Montevarchi will probably have found another car by now.” Macklin rose.
The buzzing sound interrupted itself with a regular chopping beat. Alec stood up, listening. “Helicopter,” he said. He held Margie’s chair for her.
After Macklin had paid, stilling Prestin’s instinctive reach for his wallet, the four went outside. The sun shone down gloriously, the sky ached with blueness, scrubbed into an intense paleness after dinner, and the road glimmered with heat. The helicopter had circled back.
“I suppose—?” Margie said, one hand hesitantly going to her lips.
“Could be.” Alec squinted up as he put his hand into his jacket pocket. Prestin thought that pocket had bulged a little too much for any casual contents.
Prestin looked up, shading his eyes. Splinters of sunshine glinted from the helicopter’s rotors. The domed perspex bubble and side windows blazed down eyes of fire. “That’s an Agusta 105. Probably the four seat B. Nifty little chopper.”
Macklin said, very gently, “You are all, indubitably, right. So—Run!”
He started for the Jensen as though his pants were on fire. The others followed. Prestin felt a quick jolt of fear, a sour taste in his mouth, a churning in his stomach—sensations which he had gotten too familiar with and whose acquaintance, nowadays, he had no desire whatsoever to resume.
He ran like hell.
The helicopter swung back. The chop-chop-chopping of the rotors whined a little and was then cut into by a more staccato, harsher, more brutal whick-whick-whick.
The automatic rifle’s bullets skittered across the concrete parking area.
Alec flung an arm up and fired off a full clip from his Luger.
Of course, as Preston saw, the bullets went nowhere.
The ‘copter circled around for another pass.
Margie fumbled with her purse, getting the car keys out. Alec shouted, “Hurry up, Margie! He’s got us cold!”