remember a moment of bemused surprise. Garlic, I might have expected, but tarragon?
We were locked together in a tangle of arms. One of his elbows was in my face, and I think one of mine was in his. He twisted suddenly, too quickly and complexly for me to follow, and broke away. He bobbed and spun, so that his back was to me, and then, seemingly from nowhere, his foot crashed into my face, heel first, just under the eye. I was knocked back, slamming noisily into the wooden side of a boarded-up flower stand at the curb's edge.
From off to the side, near Max, the bull-necked one called to him: '
Until then, I had been by turns concerned, startled, scared, and combative. But such is the nature of the male ego that for the first time I was wholeheartedly hostile. Bug, indeed.
The kick had stung my cheek and knocked me off balance, but hadn't done any real harm. But for Ettore's benefit I sagged against the flower stand, my head nodding. I figured that I was entitled to some subterfuge to make the odds a little more even; Ettore was frighteningly fast, with a repertory of moves I had seen only in martial arts movies. And I hadn't seen many of those. He closed warily in, arms held up and out in front of him, crossed at the wrists.
There were some cardboard trays stacked hip-high at the side of the stand, and I had managed to get my fingers around the rim of one. As he took another step forward I swung it sharply at his head. It startled him, as it was meant to. His crossed hands flew a few inches higher, and as the cardboard bounced harmlessly off his wrists I drove in with a blow to his midsection. This one had everything I had behind it, and it landed just where I'd aimed it; in the center of his flat, hard abdomen. He doubled over instantly, and I managed to get in a second punch, this one not much more than a sloppy swipe at his head as he was going down.
But even when he was on the pavement in a heap, Ettore was formidable. As he hit the tile he twisted like a cat into a compact ball, catching my ankles between his arms and legs. 'Pietro!' he shouted.
While I was struggling to get free something snaked around me from behind; an enormously thick, iron-like arm that pressed the breath out of me with a single squeeze, then kept on squeezing. Pietro had arrived. I panicked, beating with both fists at the gargantuan forearm. If he kept it up for one more second, my ribs would crack.
He didn't. He shifted his hold, plucked me easily from Ettore's grasp, and threw me—simply heaved me—a good eight or ten feet out into the street. On the fly. I didn't even hear him grunt with the effort. I managed to break my fall with my arms and jump quickly if unsteadily to my feet. I was muddled, though, facing in the wrong direction. I turned dizzily, almost losing my balance, until I found the two of them again. Ettore was up now. He and the monster were standing together, next to the flower stand, looking quietly at me again. Ettore had something in his hand that looked like a piece of metal pipe. Max was moaning softly on the ground behind them. The rain drifted lazily down onto my face.
There was a sudden roar to my right, only a dozen or so feet away. Startled, I spun around and found myself facing a small, dark car with its headlights off. I could see a figure behind the wheel.
The car . . . I'd forgotten the car—
Even now, it still seems to me as if the thing literally sprang at me, like a tiger at a deer. And even if I hadn't been as frozen as a terror-stricken deer, there wouldn't have been time to get out of the way. I put out my hands feebly in an absurd effort to keep it off.
And astonishingly I did, after a fashion. When my hands hit the front of it and I pushed, I was bumped upward, not downward, and an instant later I was doing a handstand, or at least a rolling shoulder stand, on the hood while it moved under me. I slid heavily into the windshield, or rather it slid into me—thank God, it didn't break—and then, somehow, I was flipped over and up, landing on the roof.
That was the most painful part, because I landed sharply on the base of my spine and also managed to bang the back of my head somewhere along the way. I felt the car speed up under me, and I skidded the length of the roof on my back, slithered down over the trunk without doing much additional damage, and landed back in the street, amazingly enough on my feet.
I hit hard on both heels, jarring every bone and joint in my body, and then juddered crazily over the pavement, my teeth rattling, until I tripped over the curb and fell onto the terrazzo. On instinct, I dragged myself between two columns, out of reach of the car, then sat shaking, not comprehending what had happened. I had been caught by surprise, after all, and the whole thing couldn't have taken even two seconds. And believe me, it was a lot less intelligible in the experiencing than in the telling. Besides, from the moment I'd seen the car, I'd expected to be killed. Sitting there, I wasn't sure I hadn't been.
A wave of nausea billowed over me, and I leaned sideways and put my forehead down against the smooth tile. My teeth ached appallingly. Something warm was flowing thickly by my ear and along my neck. I saw the column next to me tilt slowly and begin to revolve. I must have passed out then, for how long I'm not sure, but I remember jerking awake with a start at the sound of an approaching siren.
The thugs were gone. The car, too. But Max was still lying there; alive, thank God. He was painfully trying to haul himself to his elbows. His legs, flaccid and boneless-looking, seemed not to belong to him. For the first time, I noticed he was lying beneath the darkened windows of Bologna's newest restaurant, opened a few weeks before on the busy downtown corner of Indipendenza and Ugo Bassi, across from the venerable Piazza Nettuno.
McDonald's.
Chapter 5
The next time I was aware of anything at all I was drifting in and out of cottony, white clouds. I was quite comfortable. Happy, in fact. I was in the Ospedale Maggiore; so I'd been given to understand, and I was going to be just fine. I certainly felt fine. Solicitous, cheerful men and women in white hovered about me, making pleasant sounds and occasionally sticking needles in me with great gentleness. It was very pleasant to simply lie back and be fussed over.
At one indeterminate point I surfaced—or rather descended from somewhere around ceiling level—to find myself listening to someone speaking in Italian with quiet confidence.
'—was named Ettore. I remember because the other one, Pietro, called him that.' The voice was pleasant and familiar.
I was lying peacefully on my back with my eyes closed, and I waited with interest to hear what would follow. Whoever it was, he was talking about the two thugs. Had there been a witness, then?
Another person spoke, also in Italian. 'Thank you. Now I would like to ask another question. Tell me, why did you, signor Scoccimarro, and signor Caboto go out drinking?'
I waited. The question was a little complex. I yawned and settled myself farther into the bed. Time passed. I began to float off again.
'Signor Norgren?'
I started. 'Yes?'
'Why did you, signor Scoccimarro, and signor Caboto go out drinking?'
I opened my eyes. I was in a cranked-up hospital bed. Through the lowered window blinds I could see daylight. Was it Tuesday morning already? To my side were two young, blue- uniformed policemen in chairs, one of them with a pad. On the bedside table, a couple of feet from my face, a tape recorder was whirring softly. I realized belatedly why the first voice had sounded so pleasant and familiar. It was mine.
'How long have we been talking?' I asked.
The two policemen looked at each other. 'About twenty minutes,' the one without the pad said. He seemed to be in charge; a long-limbed, athletic-looking man in his late twenties. 'We won't keep you much longer. Will you
