Good Blood

The hold tightened, as if by resisting he’d gotten his attacker good and mad. Gideon could feel the muscles of the biceps and brachioradialis harden and bulge. He could feel the wiry hairs of the forearm against the bottom of his jaw. He was hearing popping sounds in his head now, like static. There were pinprick sensations crawling spider-like over his face and scalp, a scattering of minute explosions, and all at once he was overpoweringly sleepy, so that all he really wanted was to be allowed to lie down and go to sleep. He realized his arms were hanging limply at his sides now. When a bright yellow flash seemed to sear his eyes, he didn’t know if it was in his brain or if it was the sun clearing the mountains. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open or closed.

But one small part of his cerebral cortex was still working; enough to tell him he had perhaps two seconds of consciousness left. If he was going to live, he had to act now. Now. With a tremendous, gasping effort of will, he arched his body and threw his head backward with all his remaining strength. He heard an “Uff!” as his head struck the other man’s face. The hold loosened slightly, and with the returning flow of blood to his brain came a partial return of strength, of clarity of mind. His head had smashed into the bastard’s nose and it had hurt him. What worked once could work twice. He braced his right foot against the balustrade for added leverage and shoved off as hard as he could, flinging himself backward and sharply snapping his head back at the same time.

The time there was a howl of pain, accompanied by the crunch of breaking bone and a strangled “Merda!”

At the same time, there was a cry somewhere off to the right. “Ehi! Che fai la? Che succede?”

The man cursed again, released his hold, and staggered off. Gideon, deprived of support, found his knees didn’t have the strength to hold him up. His legs were like seaweed, squelchy and boneless. He collapsed to the promenade, twisting as he fell and ending up with his back against the balustrade, trembling and barely able to move as the postadrenaline crash hit him. He lay there with his eyes closed, watching the last of the starry pinpoints blink out and listening to the wary approach of his rescuer (“Signore, si sente bene?”), who seemed to be eons off, in some echoing, parallel universe.

There was a piece of something stuck to his lips, and he thought at first that one of his teeth had been broken, but it was only a fragment of the Styrofoam cup that had been smashed against his mouth. He flicked it off. Then, realizing that the hair at the back of his head was sticky, he touched it and opened his eyes to check his fingers. Blood, but not his. He’d broken the guy’s nose, all right. Good. And from the crackling sound of that crunch, it wasn’t just the ossa nasalia—the two bones that formed the bridge of the nose—that had snapped, but some of the delicate bony structures inside as well: the ethmoid, the vomer. He sure as hell hoped so. That sonofabitch was going to remember him for the rest of his life, every time he heard himself breathe. With any luck Gideon had deviated his nasal septum for him as well, so he’d remember him every time he looked in the mirror too. Fine.

Never again, Gideon thought as he slipped into something like an exhausted, relieved doze, would his students hear him utter a word of complaint about the fragility of the human face.

FIFTEEN

WHENthe polizia arrived a few minutes later, they found him still on the ground and a little muddled, but sitting up against the parapet, surrounded by four or five solicitous people, one of whom was trying to get him to swallow some brandy from a paper cup.

“Inglese?” the police wanted to know once they’d heard him say a couple of words in Italian.

“Americano,” he said.

The two cops exchanged an I-thought-as-much glance. Still, they were courteous and concerned, and they dumbed down their Italian to his level. They wanted to run him over to emergency, but by then, with his mind clearing, Gideon was able to convince them that he was all right, that the blood on his collar wasn’t his. And he knew that ten or twelve seconds of having his carotids compressed wasn’t going to do his brain any permanent harm. Twenty seconds, you were a vegetable. Twelve seconds, no problem. Strange but true. So no hospital, thanks all the same.

They used a cotton swab to collect some blood from his hair, presumably for evidence, and then while one of the cops talked to the witnesses, the other one sat him down to take his statement in the front seat of their cruiser—a white Fiat minihatchback with a snazzy green stripe running horizontally around it, the kind of car Gideon might have mistakenly hailed for a taxi if he’d seen it drive by.

With a portable tape recorder running, Gideon told him what he could, which wasn’t much. He’d never seen the man. He’d come up behind him, dug a knee into his back, wrapped one hefty arm around his neck, and squeezed. About all he could say was that he was big and he was strong. But with a little artful probing on the policeman’s part, he was able to come up with a little more: The man had been wearing a short-sleeved shirt, he was Caucasian, with wiry black hair (at least on his forearms), and he’d had a ham and cheese roll or something like it for breakfast, along with a caffe corretto. Oh, and he was pretty definitely Italian: his reaction to getting his nose broken had been a heartfelt “Merda!” That was about it.

“He communicated nothing to you? He didn’t try to take your money?”

“He said “Merda,” but I doubt if that counts as communication. And he wasn’t interested in money. He was interested in killing me.”

“And you don’t know why?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I’m working on a case with Colonel Caravale—”

The cop sat up. “Colonel Caravale? The carabinieri commander?”

“Yes, I’m an anthropologist—”

“A moment, please, signore.” The cop got on his car radio to relay this information. Then, while Gideon drank some bottled water that the second cop offered him, the first one waited to be called back. Five minutes later the call came rattling out of the speaker. Gideon couldn’t understand it, but the cop started up the engine and his partner got in back and slammed the door.

“He wants to see you. Caravale.” He looked impressed.

“How about letting me clean up first? I’m just up the street at the Primavera.”

The cop had his doubts, but when Gideon wiped a hand through his hair and held up bloody fingers, he changed his mind. “Okay, five minutes. We’ll drive you.”