Good Blood

A movement by one of the driver’s hands caught his eye. “Hey!” he said. “What did I tell you? Marcello, you— Ai!”

His first thought was that a bee had stung him on the wrist, but then he heard a clink, and when he looked down, his own .357 magnum, which he’d thought was still in his right hand, was on the pavement, and his wrist was spouting blood, and he knew he’d been shot. Before he could tear his eyes from his shattered wrist, there was a second stinging jab—he heard the shot this time—in his abdomen, dead center, a little below the breastbone. More like a punch than a jab, and this one really hurt. That bastard driver, he’d had a second piece, some stupid little-old-lady gun, tucked down his back behind his neck. And now he’d ducked down and was rolling around on the front seat, getting off shots, twisting and coiling like a snake, almost too quick to see. Where the hell was Marcello?

Now, hardly aware of what he was doing, Ugo was shooting too, spraying bullets from the driver’s semiautomatic in his left hand—crakcrakcrakcrak—at the writhing, whirling body. “Bastard, you shot me!” Crakcrakcrak. The little pistol flew out of the driver’s hand. For a moment Ugo thought he was throwing it at him, but then the man arched, gave a shuddering sigh, and lay still on his back, one foot sticking out the door on Ugo’s side. There was blood all over his face and on his shirt. Next to his head, the leather seat was wet.

Ugo was shaking. He’d never been shot before. He’d never killed anyone before. He was losing a lot of blood, he saw now, rhythmic gouts from the wrist, a thick, pumping flow from his abdomen. He pressed his right hand against the hole below his breastbone and stuck his wounded left hand under his right arm, but he could still feel the blood pushing out. He struggled to make himself move, to make himself think, but he’d grown confused. He felt frozen, petrified, as if time were flowing by somewhere outside him, too blindingly fast for him to step back into it. He’d lost track of the semiautomatic. He began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to make it back to the car.

“Ugo!” Marcello said, coming tremulously back into sight from where he’d been crouching behind the hood of the car. He looked terrified.

“You lousy—you lousy—” Ugo screamed. “You just let him—you just let me—”

Marcello was staring into the car. “Ugo, Ugo, you shot him!”

“Yeah, I shot him! Where the hell were you?”

He was having a hard time focusing. His pant leg was blood-soaked, clinging to him; his shoe was squishy with it. “Marcello, I’m not...uh...”

He was sitting on the pavement, his back against the jamb between the limo’s front and rear doors. He didn’t remember going down. “Marcello, you better get me back to the car,” he said, only his head was rolling around on his neck and his mouth didn’t work right, and all that came out was this horrible mewling, like a cat that had been run over. He could no longer move his head, but from the corner of his eye he saw Big Paolo running heavily toward them from the rear car. Paolo—big, dumb, stupid Paolo— had forgotten, in his excitement, to put on his mask.

“Paolo,” he heard Marcello say urgently from around the far side of the limo, “the bastard kid’s giving me trouble. Help me out.”

“No, please—” It was the kid’s voice, cut short by a little gasp as Paolo swatted him.

Don’t forget about me, Ugo tried to say, don’t leave me here, but this time not even the mewling sound came out. His chin was on his chest. He couldn’t lift his head; it was as if someone were pushing down on the back of his neck. All he could see were his pants, black and glistening with blood, and even that small field of vision was rimmed with a darkening pink haze, as if he were looking out from a tunnel. The stocking mask was squeezing him, cutting off his air. He couldn’t breathe.

“What about Ugo?” Big Paolo asked. “We’re not gonna leave him here?”

“Forget Ugo,” Marcello said. “Look at him, he’s dead.”

Am I really? Ugo wondered as the pink haze darkened and the tunnel walls squeezed slowly in.

OFFICER Favaretto waited in the open doorway of Comandante Boldini’s office while his chief finished his notso-polite conversation with the mayor of Stresa, who could be seen through the window, gesticulating in his own office just across the Corso.

“I can’t help that, Mr. Mayor,” Boldini was shouting into the telephone. “I know there’s a French tour bus on your front steps, all I have to do is look out my window to see it. Have you looked at my parking lot? You don’t seem to understand, we’re going to have to get a crane in there, for God’s sake, and police business will have to come first. We—” He paused, fuming, holding the receiver away from his ear and rolling his eyes. “Well, that’s too bad, but you’ll just have to wait,” he said abruptly and slammed down the receiver. He wiped a wadded handkerchief around the inside of his stiff, braided collar and stared blackly at the telephone. “Some people,” he muttered. “Does he think I’m Superman?”

Favaretto tapped gingerly at the pebbled glass pane of the door. “Comandante?”

Boldini hauled himself up and used both hands to hitch his pants up over his spreading hips. A bad sign. Here it comes, Favaretto thought sourly. Because I tried to do something, this whole thing is going to get blamed on me. Next time I’ll just pretend I never saw anything and stay the hell out of it. Sadly, it wasn’t the first time he’d been driven to make such a promise to himself.

“Favaretto, I thought you told that truck driver to come and see me.”

“I did, sir. I told him—”

“Well, he never did, how do you explain that? He just left the truck sitting out there and walked off, what do you think of that? The worst traffic jam in the history of Italy, and you, you don’t even bother—What, damn it?” he yelled at the telephone, which had just buzzed twice at him, the signal that his adjutant was on the other end of the line.

“You, don’t go away,” Boldini commanded, leveling a finger at Favaretto, who had indeed been thinking about making his exit. “I want to talk to you.” He turned his back, picked up the telephone, and held it to his ear. “What?” he said roughly. “What?”

He fell into his leather chair as if the carpet had been jerked from under him. “What?” he said again, but far more softly. A few moments later there was an even softer, more tremulous “Who?” followed almost immediately by “Oh, my God.”

The phone was falteringly replaced on its base the way an old, old man—and a blind one at that—might, and