He watched the last twenty minutes of
FOURTEEN
AT3:22 that morning a remarkable telephone call was received at Stresa’s Polizia Municipale headquarters on Piazza Marconi. According to the caller, Sister Susanna, the nighttime receptionist at the hospital, there were strange sounds coming from the morgue in the basement. “As if,” she whispered, “something is trying to get out.”
“No, no, Sister,” said Ettore Omodeo, the police dispatcher, with a reassuring laugh. “After all, how could anyone get out of a morgue? But it’s chilly out tonight, it might be someone trying to get in, to keep warm. You stay where you are, Sister. I’ll have someone there right away.”
Omodeo contacted the lone patrol car on duty and gave them the message. Then he shook his head.
***
GIDEON had always been an early riser, often earlier than he wished, and going to sleep at 9 didn’t help any. By
5:00 a.m. he was awake and restless, itching to get moving. And he needed coffee. He did some stretching and enough push-ups and sit-ups to get some blood into his muscles, showered, shaved, slipped on a windbreaker against the predawn chill, and trotted downstairs, feeling a bit more positive about the world in general. He nodded to the teenaged nighttime desk clerk, who greeted him with a mournful shrug.
“No breakfas’ yet, signore. Seven o’clock.”
“I know. See you then.”
He walked past shuttered shops and restaurants to the quiet Corso Italia and crossed it to the Lungolago, the lake-side promenade. Near the ferry terminal there was an espresso and snack stand that he knew from past experience would be open for the benefit of early-arriving ferry workers.
By now the barista knew him by sight.
Relatively contented now, he walked along the promenade, slowly sipping coffee from a giant Styrofoam cup. The only other people he saw were a couple of elderly men walking their dogs and looking lonesome and pensive in the way of early-morning dog walkers everywhere. The ornamental fountains had still to be turned on, and with no traffic whizzing down the Corso yet, he could actually hear the gentle lapping of the lake against the stone bulwark on which the promenade had been built.
It was very peaceful, very pretty. The air smelled of camellias and lemon oil, cut by the pungent, not unpleasant scent of creosote from the ferry terminal pilings. The globe lamps along the promenade were still lit, but the sky had begun to lighten, so the perfectly pruned trees, the brick walking paths, and the dark lake itself were all highlighted with streaks of rose and gold. After a while he stopped to lean on the balustrade and look out over the water, waiting for the sun to top the mountains on the other side, shoot out its brief explosion of brilliant yellow rays, and touch the graceful towers and parapets of the Borromean Islands with the day’s first light. He’d watched it before, and with a still-warm double cappuccino in his hand, it was about as good a way to start the day as any he could imagine; given, that is, that he had to start it without Julie.
It was the smell that brought on the first trickle of apprehension. Old sweat, stale clothing. Someone was standing too close to him. This was Italy, of course, where the perception of personal space wasn’t as expansive as it was in the States, but it made him wary all the same. And now he could even smell the person’s breakfast on his breath— a ham and cheese
As he began to turn, there was an intake of breath startlingly close behind him, and then his cup went flying and the hot coffee was in his face, the crushed Styrofoam jammed up against his mouth by a bare, muscular forearm pressed against his throat. At first he thought someone was trying to shove him over the balustrade into the water a dozen feet below, but when a knee was forced into his lower spine to bend him over backward, he realized he was being strangled. Somebody had a choke hold on him from behind, clamping his neck between upper arm and forearm and tightening the resulting vise by pulling on his wrist with the other hand.
For a second, gripped by the primal terror that came with having his air cut off, he struggled, clawing at the hold and pummeling futilely behind him with both hands. At six foot one, Gideon was a fairly big man, and strong— he’d been a boxer in his college days and still stayed more or less in shape—but his attacker had forearms as thick as thighs. It was like being squeezed by a boa constrictor. Still, he managed to twist his head a couple of inches to one side so that the front of his neck was now in the small hollow that made up the crook of the man’s arm. The direct pressure was off his windpipe and it was possible to suck in a gasping breath.
With the return of air came sanity. Blind impulse gave way to something like rational thought. And with rational thought came the realization that he had only made matters worse, and not just a little worse. By turning his head, he’d inadvertently changed the man’s grip from a “bar arm” hold, with the forearm pressed directly—and painfully— against the trachea, to a judo hold, the so-called “sleeper hold.” With the crook of the arm now at the front of his throat, his windpipe was free, but the forearm and upper arm, now at either side of his neck, were compressing the carotid arteries. He could breathe again, but the blood supply to his brain was being cut off.
This was bad. The need for air, as overpowering as it was on an instinctive level, was the lesser of his worries. Cutting off a person’s air by compressing the trachea was excruciating, yes, but it could take two or three minutes to shut down the brain. But pressure on the soft tissues of the superior carotid triangles, squeezing shut the arteries— and it didn’t take that much pressure to squeeze them shut—immediately starved the brain of oxygen and created a toxic excess of carbon dioxide. Hypoxia and hypercapnia. And that deadly combination would take only ten seconds to cause unconsciousness, fifteen at the outside. Death would follow. He had very little time. Already he was seeing whirling stars at the backs of his eyes, the first sign of oxygen deprivation to the brain. The first sign of blacking out.
He made himself stop his ineffectual flailing, which was using up what little oxygen he had left. His fingers, already weakening, were never going to budge that tree trunk of an arm, and the feeble blows he was aiming behind him were useless. Instead, he strained to reach his attacker’s face, trying for the eyes or the nose or the lips; anything he could tear at or grind his fingers into. He touched what he thought were nose and upper lip, but the man shook him off and jerked his head back out of the way.
