October Men

last, spotting it in the shadow beyond Villari's foot.

'Give it to me —argh!' Villari clapped the blood-stained palm back against his side.

It was amazingly heavy for so little a thing. During his military service he had had a rifle, though mercifully for only a short while because he had been no sort of combat soldier and they had soon realised that he was deadlier with his pen and his brain. But this was altogether different from the big, clumsy rifle: its contradictory weight and size, even the snug dummy2

way it fitted into his hand, inspired a sudden confidence in him that resolved the quandary into which he had felt himself falling.

He had wanted to run away, ostensibly to get help, and then he had realised that this would mean leaving Villari wounded and helpless, a sitting target literally. But he himself had been equally helpless, a target also.

Now he was no longer helpless!

'Boselli—you idiot!' Villari coughed painfully. 'Don't try it—'

But Boselli was no longer listening.

He felt disembodied as he started down the narrow street, like a camera swinging this way and that to record images of decay and emptiness. Gaps opened up first on the right, and then on the left: another courtyard, another black and white mosaic half covered with drifting sand, a broken stair ending in a blank wall. Hot sunshine and cool shadow as he zigzagged from one gap to the next. Nothing moving and nothing alien—in this stillness movement itself was the only enemy.

Then he was at the intersection.

This, he fully understood, was the moment of greatest danger, for if the assassin was still bent on finishing them off it would be round one of these corners that he would be waiting. Yet if this was the case he knew he was doing the best thing and the only thing left for him to do, for he had no illusions about his ability to hit anything with Villari's pistol dummy2

at any range other than point-blank. Given a fair chance perhaps Villari might have managed it from where he lay back there—and the killer himself had proved that a marksman could do it. But he knew that he could not— even with his old army rifle he had never harmed a target.

So this way the odds were shortened: it was what the General would have called 'good thinking' and Father Patrick 'a little of God's good sense.' But neither the General nor the Irish Father were here now to stop his knees shaking and his hands trembling as he leaned against the last safe piece of wall, contemplating that bright patch of no-man's-land just ahead of him. For God's good sense also warned him that the odds were still too long and that his best was likely to fall ridiculously short of what was needed out there.

If only Villari were here beside him—or better still ahead of him: he would have known what to do and how to do it. And the General would have known too—and the big Englishman would have known and so would the bastard half-Englishman, Ruelle. . . .

But only he, little useless Boselli, was here, up against the wall. God damn them all to Hell!

The blasphemy served to release him from the paralysis which had threatened to set in, but he couldn't bring himself to leave the wall altogether: he bent down and poked his head awkwardly round the corner.

The movement was so clumsy—it was as though his body was unwilling to risk obeying a self-endangering order—that he dummy2

had already started to lose his balance before he saw what lay ahead of him. And what he actually found was so unexpected that pure surprise completed the loss of coordination, twisting his left foot behind his right ankle to pitch him head first into the open.

Yet this unplanned and unorthodox appearance also possibly saved his life, though he was never conscious of any bullet's passage near him but only heard the sound of the shot as he rolled over in the dusty street. The noise was itself more than enough to keep him rolling in a confusion of knees and elbows until he fetched up flat, breathless and half-concealed behind the body of the man Villari had killed stone-dead with his own single snap- shot.

Miraculously he did not lose his pistol in the fall—rather, he held on to it so convulsively that it began to buck furiously in his hand of its own accord as he thrust it out ahead of him over the body. Where the shots went he had not the least idea; by the time he had begun to gather his wits enough to see what lay ahead the street was the usual empty expanse of brick and stone and parched summer grass, broken only by a dark clump of cypresses far down it. As he focused on the cypresses he had a vague feeling that he had maybe seen something moving against them, or in them, in the split second before he had started to fall. The feeling ran out of his brain, down his arm to the pistol: he closed one eye, aimed the short barrel at the clump and pressed the trigger.

To his dismay the first bullet struck sparks from the paving dummy2

stones ten metres ahead of him, and as the little gun jumped the second lost itself in the blue sky. Then, with one final metallic click, it went dead in his hand.

Boselli cowered down behind the body, fumbling desperately to cock the gun. Again there was a click—it came just as he realised that he was pointing it in the direction of his own foot.

He lay flat against the smooth sun-hot pavement, trying to think. But his thoughts were only a jumble of disjointed cries for help inside his mind. There was a little puddle of blood, bright red, just beyond his fingers: a large ant emerged from a hole in the crevice between the stones just beside it, halted as if bewildered at the edge of the puddle, and then set off purposefully into the shadow under the dead man's outflung arm. Beyond the arm, almost in the centre of the street, lay the long-barrelled weapon down which he had stared so recently—he saw now that the long barrel was actually the black tube of a silencer. At least, he supposed that was what it was now he was so close to it: the classic accessory of the assassin.

Another ant emerged from the hole. Like its predecessor it scurried directly to the blood, as though there was some invisible ant path in that direction, paused in exactly the same way, and then set off in the footsteps of the first ant.

Did these tiny creatures leave a spoor just like the larger wild beasts, then?

The coherence of the question roused Boselli: there ought to dummy2