face.
Massoni’s head snapped back. The glass slipped onto his chest, rolled over his stomach, fell onto the floor without breaking. Pernazzo swept his hand across the table and scooped up the small pistol in his left hand.
“Jesus!” shouted Alleva, bringing his hand up to his ear.
“How do you think that happened?” said Pernazzo. “The glass not breaking?”
Massoni’s left arm twitched.
Pernazzo said, “Looks as if he’s still alive, what do you say?” He walked around the table and looked at the back of the skull. “Yuck. Looks pretty bad from here.”
“Jesus,” repeated Alleva, cupping both hands over his right ear. “You’ve burst my ear drum.”
“Must have been a nerves thing. Like frog legs twitching when you put a current into them.”
He walked round the table, stood slightly behind Alleva’s left. “You can hear fine with this one, right?”
Alleva nodded.
Pernazzo said, “So how am I doing for a noob?” He tapped Alleva’s good ear with the warm barrel.
Alleva hunched his shoulders, leaned forward. Pernazzo pressed harder, and using the pistol as a pivot, described a semicircle until he was next to Massoni’s slumped body. He unzipped Massoni’s top, then pulled back for a few seconds to double-check. Massoni seemed too warm to be dead, and there wasn’t that much blood either. Carefully he slipped his hand in and pulled out a two-tone pistol with a silver slide and black frame.
“Nice. What sort is this?”
“I can’t see,” said Alleva.
Pernazzo released some of the pressure and Alleva unbowed his head.
“A Sig Sauer I think.”
“And this little one you had?”
“A Davis P-32.”
“I’m still learning,” said Pernazzo, pocketing Alleva’s pistol. It fit nice and neat. He pushed Massoni’s Sig Sauer down the back of his trousers. It was very uncomfortable. “Where were you planning to escape to?”
“Argentina.”
“This evening?”
“What?”
Pernazzo raised his voice. “This evening?”
“Starting from this evening.”
“Any more taxis on their way?”
Alleva hesitated a second, which was all Pernazzo needed. “I see. Phone up the taxi people, tell them you don’t need them anymore.”
“I have to stand up, get the phone out of my pocket.”
“Just so long as you sit down again, and don’t turn around.”
Alleva stood up, took the phone out.
“Give me the phone.” Alleva backhanded it to him. “Last number you called?”
Alleva gave a weary nod. Pernazzo pressed the green button twice, listened to see who answered, then stuck the phone at Alleva’s good ear. The man on the other end did not seem happy.
Alleva finished with, “You can send out who you like, but no one will be here.” Pernazzo hung up for him.
“I’m not sure I like that. They could still send someone,” said Pernazzo.
“What was that? I can’t hear.”
Pernazzo pulled the phone away, brought his mouth closer to Alleva’s left ear, “Better?” he whispered, and huffed some moisture into Alleva’s earhole.
“I can hear you, if that’s what you mean,” replied Alleva.
“I said they might still send someone.”
“You want to talk to them?” asked Alleva.
“No. I want you to talk to me, Renato. That’s your Christian name, Renato, isn’t it? Let me see… I suppose we can begin with where you keep your money, and how you’re going to transfer it to me. Massoni thought he needed my computer expertise for this. I even brought my portable, just in case. But why Massoni there didn’t just beat it out of you is beyond me.”
“Massoni was incapable of turning on a computer. He thought you needed to be good at math to operate one.”
“So he’d have gotten me to do the transfers, then killed both of us.”
“Probably not you,” said Alleva. “He would have needed your help again. He’d have killed me, no problem.”
A fly had settled on Massoni’s blood-speckled forehead and was crawling downward.
“Tell me, this underdog thing… Were you in on it, or was it Massoni’s idea?”
“Underdog? What’s that?”
“You know what it is,” said Pernazzo.
“What was the idea? That some unlikely dog would win in combat?”
“Yeah, that’s the general idea,” said Pernazzo.
“I didn’t even know he was setting you up,” said Alleva. “I didn’t think he had the imagination, though this underdog sounds like a variation on an old con trick. Feed people false inside information; let their greed do the rest.”
“He thought I would bet all my mother’s inheritance.”
“How much was that? A bet over ten thousand euros had to be approved by Innocenzi, who gets twenty percent. Massoni would have had to tell me about it then.”
“It was eight thousand. That’s what I told him. I was just stringing him along, really.”
Alleva took his hand away from his ear and fingered it gently, feeling for damage. Pernazzo felt a tickling on his own hand and glanced down.
A hard-shelled brown and white insect was sitting in the soft spot between thumb and index finger.
“How stupid did that dead man there think I was?” He pointed to a portable computer on the countertop separating the kitchenette from the table where Alleva now sat. “I’m taking it that Compaq notebook on the counter works.”
“It works,” said Alleva.
“You can’t have broadband out here, though. Too far from the digital exchange.”
“No, just a TIM GSM dongle. It’s slow.”
“No broadband, no neighbors, nothing at all out there except hidden Etruscan tombs,” said Pernazzo. He moved over to the counter and opened the computer.
“Password?”
“Sirius69.”
Pernazzo typed it in. “Aww… Now look at that. Nothing in the browser history, all your cache cleared. You are a careful man. This means I’m going to have to trust you to open all your online accounts. Now, how can I be sure you’re going to do that?”
Alleva said, “They only let me transfer to another account that is in my name and that I have already activated. If I transfer into my account, it’ll take a few days before I can transfer from there into yours.”
“You think I would make you do all that work? All I need are the numbers, codes, any electronic keys they gave you. I’ll do all that hard work of transferring the money.”
He placed the notebook in front of Alleva. Then he gave him a pen and a piece of paper. “Start writing down your passwords, and show me that they work.”
After half an hour, Alleva had opened three accounts. They were all he had going, he said.
“Your balances amount to less than three hundred thousand? That’s not so good for a life of crime.”
“There were overheads. And this is an emergency escape. I didn’t have much planning time.”
Pernazzo put his Glock to the back of Alleva’s head and pressed hard, really hard, as if the gun was a knife that would eventually penetrate. He nodded in the direction of a closed door. Judging from what he had seen outside, this had to be the only other room in the place.
“What’s in there?”
