David was no defector, certainly. But unlike old Charlie, David was still in trouble.
'But first I'd like to know a bit more about that dinner of yours, Clarkie,' said Richardson.
V
BOSELLI WAS a long way out of line and he knew it; it was this knowledge rather than the first heat of the day which now raised the prickle of perspiration on his back.
He had never stepped out of line like this before, at least not so dangerously. But this, he admitted candidly to himself, was partly because his work rarely exposed him to such temptations. Indeed, it had been one of his little tasks to watch for signs of such curiosity in others—what the General dummy2
described as the itch to know a little too much for their own good—and he had become adept at spotting them. Only now he was beginning for the first time to sympathise with the deviationists.
He looked up and down the narrow street suspiciously. The prospect of the General's discovery that he was being surreptitiously investigated by one of his own staff didn't really bear thinking about; it made him shiver at the same time as he perspired, which in turn made him remember inconsequentially that his wife had said only yesterday that she had gone 'all hot and cold' after nearly being run over by some foreign driver who'd tried to change his mind in the Via Labicana. He'd been on the point of telling her that such a contradictory physical condition was unlikely, and here he was experiencing it himself.
He paused at a street fountain and drank greedily from it. It seemed to have a bitter flavour, but he knew that it was not the water, only the taste already in his mouth.
He splashed his face and wiped it with his silk handkerchief, glancing again up and down the street. It was the General's fault, anyway, even if that was one excuse he would never dare to advance openly. The Ruelle File started—or appeared to start—with impossible abruptness in 1944, as though George Ruelle had sprung from the ground full-grown into the middle management ranks of the newly-respectable Italian Communist Party. From nowhere usually meant from Moscow, but that clearly didn't apply in Ruelle's case; he had dummy2
been fighting in the south in '43, if not earlier, and his first Moscow trip had not been until '46—there was no mystery about those dates. Indeed, there wasn't even any mystery as to just where that missing pre-1944 section of the dossier was: it was reposing safely in the General's own safe—no betting man, Boselli would happily have bet his last
Under cover of folding the handkerchief Boselli took a final look at the street. Nothing, as far as he could see, had changed and no one was watching him. Which left him with the reassuring but galling probability that there was no one on his tail and that the General had given him this task because he was the least likely of all men to scratch that dangerous itch.
Half a dozen hurried steps carried him across the pavement and into the alleyway—well, for once the great General hadn't been as clever as he thought he'd been.
Frugoni's apartment—it was a ridiculous exaggeration to call two crummy little rooms an apartment—was predictably jammed under the eaves, without any access to the roof, a rathole fit for a rat.
And that was good, thought Boselli as he knocked sharply on the scarred door: the worse off Frugoni was (and with any luck he would have gone considerably farther downhill since he had last come round bumming for a handout), the cheaper his tongue would be to loosen. There ought to be dummy2
some juicy expenses in this work, but Frugoni's name could never be listed in the accounting so there was no question of generosity, real or fabricated, in his case.
'Who is it?'
That was the voice, the hoarse whine rather.
'Boselli—Pietro Boselli.'
'Who? Pietro who?' The whine was suspicious, as though its owner was accustomed to bad news knocking at his door. 'I don't know any Pietro.'
'Pietro Boselli—General Montuori's personal assistant.'
Boselli paused to let the names sink into the man's befuddled mind. 'I've got something for you, Signor Frugoni.'
'Something for me?'
'That's right. Open up.'
There was a rattle as Frugoni feverishly attempted to open his own door, only to discover that he had bolted it top and bottom as well as securing it with what sounded like an old-fashioned padlock. It took him a full two minutes of clumsy grappling with the lock and alcoholic puffing and blowing with the bolts to relax its defences. And even then it caught on the uneven floor and shuddered so violently that it was a tossup whether it wouldn't fall to pieces before it was finally opened.
Frugoni peered at him uneasily in the greenish light from the unwashed landing window.
dummy2
'You remember me, Signor Frugoni,' said Boselli patiently.
'We last met when you—ah—consulted the General two or three years ago. About your pension.'
'My pension?' Frugoni looked at him stupidly.
'Your war wound, I believe—or a war disability of some sort,'
Boselli prompted him with helpful vagueness. 'The General didn't tell me the exact details, but I gathered that you and he were old comrades. Once comrades, always comrades—that's what he said.'
Frugoni blinked and screwed up his face with the unexpected mental effort needed to resolve the enormous gap between what he must remember had actually happened when he tried to touch the General for a sucker's handout, and the rose-tinted pack of lies he had just heard.
In fact no one knew the extent of that gap better than Boselli himself. It had devolved on him to check up on the man's tear-jerking tale of a veteran fallen on unmerited hard times, and he had very soon found the General's
