The car careened off the wall and a moment later the gas tanks exploded. The Milena was catapulted across the track toward the other wall when Marza felt the rear blow out, felt the sudden, ghastly rush of heat and then the flames boiling through the back seat, enveloping both him and Di Fiere, and then the air bags burst.
The old man screamed once as the fire rushed into his nose and mouth and scorched his lungs. Then he was dead.
For Marza, it seemed to take forever, although it was no more than a second or two. As the car spun crazily across the track he saw his old enemy, that grinning, obscene apparition he had seen so many times before and shunned, sitting on the wall straight ahead of him, wrapped in flames, motioning to him, drawing him on, and as the car crashed headlong into the wall, Death opened his arms and the driver rushed to his embrace.
VI
Falmouth did not relax until the train was out of Verona station and well on its way north toward the Alps.
His heart was rapping at his ribs and his shirt was damp with sweat when he found his compartment and sat down. He leaned back, closed his eyes and hummed to himself, slowing everything down. He clocked off the list in his head, making sure it had gone right.
He was certain no one had seen him leave the house. The drive to Verona had gone off smoothly; he hadn’t even seen a policeman. He parked the car and checked the case in a locker, from which, he assumed, somebody had already claimed it. He looked at his watch.
Hell, by now someone in Verona was probably melting down the barrel.
He felt the train lurch under him. As it moved Out of the station he went into the bathroom, took off the wig, combed his red hair and shaved off the moustache. Then he burned the wig, driver’s license and passport issued to Harry Spettro and flushed them down. By the time the conductor tapped on the door, he was Anthony Falmouth again.
The ticket man, a short paunchy little fellow in his sixties with watery eyes, took his papers, ‘You are inglese?’ he said in a hushed, quivering voice.
‘Si,’ Falmouth replied.
‘And have you heard our tragic news?’
Falmouth did not want to hear it. Dumbly, he shook his head.
‘Marza is dead. Our great champion. The greatest sportsman in Italy since Novalari. Numero Uno e morto.’
A chill moved up Falmouth’s back. He said, ‘I’m very sorry.’ Then, after a moment, he added, ‘And how did he die?’
The conductor punched several holes in his ticket and then said, rather proudly, ‘In a car, of course,’ and went on.
When the conductor was gone, Falmouth sagged, It all went out of him and suddenly he was drained and overcome with sadness and he felt tears beginning to sting the corners of his eyes.
Hell, he said to himself, I’m getting too old for this kind of shit.
Harry Lansdale paused while making his customary rounds, leaning against the bulkhead of the towering Henry Thoreau and staring grimly through the porthole at the deck of the largest oil rig in the world. He had seen storms before, in every part of the world, but this one, this one was going to be a killer.
It was nearing midnight, and the sea was running 3° to — 40 Celsius and dropping. A harsh Arctic wind had been moaning down from the Beaufort Sea and across the barren grounds north of the Brooks Range since the night before. The temperature was still falling, the sea continuing to grow colder as the sun cast its gray, persistent dusk across the frigid north Alaska wastelands. The wind cried forlornly through the stub pines and grasslands, and the white foxes, foraging for lemmings, lamented their skimpy hunt with mournful dirges to the constant twilight. Chunks of ice were beginning to appear, drifting down from the Arctic Ocean into the Chukchi Sea, where the misting whitecaps tossed them about like wafers.
Now the winter gale, sweeping with fury across the open sea, assaulted the floating oil rig, one hundred and twenty-two miles from land, screaming through its rigging and snapping at its guy wires.
Lansdale was not concerned about the rig. It was built to take anything the Arctic furies could toss at them. From the air the Thoreau looked like a giant bug, with its four enormous steel legs dipping down deep into the thrashing sea. The rig was a monster, twice the length of a football field, its deck sixty feet above the water and the superstructure rising almost five stories above that. Its spidery legs thrust down two hundred feet below the surface of the sea and were anchored to the bottom, two hundred feet farther down, by steel cables.
Lansdale held the flat of his hand against the wall. Not a tremor. Not even the six-foot waves arid the brutal winds could shake his baby.
The Thoreau was indeed Lansdale’s crowning achievement; the largest semisubmersible rig ever built, a floating city, its towering concrete blocks containing apartments for the 200 man crew; three different restaurants, each serving food prepared by a different chef; two theatres showing first-run movies; and a solar dish that beamed in ninety different television channels from around the world to 21 inch TV sets in every apartment.
Everything possible was provided for the crew to make the endless days bearable, for the structure sat off the northwest coast of Alaska, one hundred and forty miles northeast of Point Hope, at the very edge of the polar car, possibly the loneliest human outpost in the world. And it s at on top of one of the richest oil strikes ever tapped.
