October Men (21 page)

The affray in Ostia was the awkward piece in the pattern, the very example of bloody public scandal which men on both sides risked their skins to avoid. It could only have happened because the Italian PS men and the Communist agents who were dogging Audley’s footsteps had collided head-on and had panicked—that was Boselli’s explanation, and if Korbel had been unable to warn his Italian opposite number about Hemingway’s death it was an explanation that made sense. But, even more significantly, the presence of those incompetent Reds surely meant that the opposition didn’t yet know what Audley was up to.

That thought roused another one, much closer to home: the opposition weren’t the only ones in the dark about Audley’s actions there—

“Just what the hell
were
you doing in Ostia this morning?”

Audley didn’t reply. He didn’t even appear to hear the question, but seemed totally abstracted in the great sweep of land and sea.

“For Christ’s sake, David!” Richardson’s sorely-tried cool finally slipped. Only a few hours ago he’d fixed a date with little Bernadette O’Connell of the Dublin Provisional to meet in Mooney’s bar next day and eat at Donovan’s place in Balbriggan and end the evening strictly non-politically in her flat off Clanbrassil Street. She’d be waiting for him now, her passionate Anglo-Italian boyfriend with his sales list of Belgian sniperscopes and American rocket launchers that would never see the soft light of Irish day.

“David—there have been some of your bloody stupid fornicating meddling idiots who’ve stuck out their bloody stupid fornicating necks for you this last twelve hours, including me for one. If you clam up now the Italians’ll turn nasty, and then we’ve really had it.”

Audley met the appeal stone-faced. “If I don’t get out of here smartly, Peter, I agree with you: we’ve all had it. So just get me out.”

“Man—you’re crazy!” Richardson stared at Audley in bewilderment at his obtuseness. “I tell you for the last time, it’s impossible—not after Ostia. And I tell you this too, David: I damn well wouldn’t do it now if it was. Either you work with me and little Ratface or you rot here until Montuori decides what to do with you. It’s shit or bust this time.”

Audley blinked. One corner of his mouth dropped and twitched, though whether in anger or despair Richardson could not tell. He had never before seen quite this look on this face.

“I’m sorry, David. But that’s the way it is.”

“Sorry?” Anger and despair, and bitterness too. “Yes, Peter, I think you very well may be.”

Richardson accepted the bitterness with bitterness of his own at Audley’s lack of understanding that he was sorry already. Sorry for the end of old times’ sake, the end of advice and the exchange of ideas, and of evenings and weekends at the old house in Steeple Horley… Sorry for friendship’s end even where friendship was a luxury, and maybe a dangerous one at that.

Not that there was any choice, because it would be fatal for Audley to have been set loose while the Bastard was at large.

“You know who we’re up against?”

“I’m permitted to know, then?”

Richardson ignored the sarcasm. “You’ve ever heard of George Ruelle?”

“I’ve heard of him, yes.”

It was a flat statement: evidently the Bastard didn’t frighten Audley.

“Those were his men at Ostia. David—you were damn lucky to get out of that.” He grasped childishly at the obvious justification of his refusal to connive at Audley’s escape. “You could have got Faith killed there, never mind yourself.”

Audley showed no reaction at the mention of his wife.

“Where is she now, incidentally?” asked Richardson.

“Back in Rome, of course.”

Another flat statement: it was none of anyone else’s business what Faith Audley was doing, least of all now ex-friend Peter Richardson’s —the message was plain enough.

Richardson sighed. “What were you doing in Ostia?”

Audley looked down his nose at him. “Unlikely as it may seem to you—“ the blandness was insulting, “—I was showing my wife the ruins.”

The simple logic of the answer was embarrassing. He had fallen into the trap of assuming that everything Audley had done was significant, forgetting that the big man had also been unaware of what had been happening in England, and had no reason to suspect that anything could go wrong. If he had he would never have hazarded his wife by keeping her at his side, but as it was there had originally been no particular urgency about this journey southwards; indeed, the whole Italian trip had probably been planned as a holiday, with the descent on Narva as a surreptitious side expedition.

Richardson swore inwardly, recalling his pleasure only a few hours earlier at the sight of the familiar signpost to Upper Horley. Even the wild unpredictability of the Dublin IRA was maybe preferable to this, which already had the smell of disaster about it.

“And now you’re heading for Narva?”

Audley nodded a little wearily. “I was. Until your new friends picked me up.”

“No friends of mine.” He emphasised the words hopefully, offering them like an olive branch. “We’ve got to work with them—they’ve got us by the short hairs at the moment. But if we can get the name of Little Bird’s contact without their getting it, maybe it’ud put Fred in a better mood. They’re not on to the real thing yet, I don’t think, David.”

Audley shook his head. “Don’t kid yourself. Montuori’s nobody’s fool. When he gets to thinking about this he’ll work it out right the way through.”

“Maybe. But I’ve an idea it’s Ruelle he wants more than anything else, the way Rat face tightened up at the mention of him.”

“Rat face?”

“Sorry—Boselli. He sounded nervous when he spoke of him, like he was scared. Which I don’t wonder at if the Bastard still has his touch after all these years… But you say he’s a gun too—?”

“That’s right.”

“But a new one? New to you?”

“I don’t know him.”

The Mediterranean had once been Audley’s stamping ground, and his encyclopaedic memory was much admired. So Rat face must be either very new or very special, or both.

“You know he’s a gun, though?” Richardson persisted.

Audley shrugged. “Two of the PS guards here were talking about him below the terrace—I didn’t encourage them to think I knew Italian, and they were careless…”

“Yes?”

“It seems they knew the man who was killed at Ostia—the PS man. But apparently it was Boselli who got the killer. One shot straight through the heart at twenty metres. Whatever he looks like that makes him a pro, I’d say.”

Richardson nodded thoughtfully in agreement: that sort of practice ruled out amateurs, sure enough. Which meant he had been dead wrong about Signor Pietro Boselli, because fussy little men didn’t use one shot at twenty metres. And if he’d been nervous it would not have been with fear, but with a craftsman’s excitement at the prospect of demonstrating his special aptitude again.

He shivered at the magnitude of his error of judgement, which was all the more unpardonable when he set this new information in perspective: if Montuori wanted Ruelle so badly he would naturally put one of his best men on the job. Also, Boselli was one good reason why Audley had been so intractably determined to get away again. So long as he was with them there’d be precious little chance of holding out on the Italians.

“Well, we’ll have to make the best of him for the time being,” said Richardson philosophically. “And at least he’ll have an eye cocked for Ruelle.”

“True.” Audley still didn’t sound unduly worried about the Bastard—a little surprisingly in view of his Ostian experience, Richardson thought.

“You know he operated in these parts in the old days?”

“Ruelle? I thought Latium was his province?”

A flicker of interest now.

“Not to start with. He led a partisan group up Avellino way in ‘43.”

“Indeed?” The flicker brightened, steadied. “Well, that might account for it—“

“For what?”

“Eh?” Audley looked at him. “Oh—I mean it might account for the presence of old Peter Korbel.”

“For Korbel?”

“The art of deserting and surviving—Korbel could write a book about that, and it would take the form of an autobiography.” Audley grunted. “You know where he came from?”

“He was born in the Ukraine. The Germans captured him in ‘41 —he came to England as a DP after the war, I thought?”

“Yes and no.” Audley regarded him donnishly over his spectacles. “He started from the Ukraine right enough, but he came to us the long way round—via Italy.”

He paused smugly. “Jack Butler did a rundown on him a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact, after that business of ours in Cumbria… More out of curiosity than necessity, really, because everyone thinks they know everything about Korbel, and none of it matters anyway. But Jack has a more orderly mind than most—he likes to be sure.

“According to him Korbel deserted to the Wehrmacht, he wasn’t captured. Told ‘em he was a Volga German and made his story stick— or stick well enough for them to recruit him and ship him off to the Italian front. The whole world was fighting here anyway, so he’d fit in whatever he was.”

That was true enough, reflected Richardson. The armies which had descended on poor old Italy had been absurdly polyglot. On the Allied side there had been everything from Maoris and Red Indians to Berbers and Japanese Americans, and the ex-Red Army men fighting under the German banner had even included two bewildered Tibetans who strayed across their Himalayan frontier accidentally years before. He himself was a living testimony of that racial confusion, with an Amalfitan mother and a father from Tunbridge Wells.

“Butler reckons he’d aimed to join the winning side, but when he got this far he realised he’d miscalculated. So in ‘43 he mustered out again—and became a Ukranian again too—and joined up with us after the Salerno breakout.”

Again Audley paused. But the drift of his information was clear enough: Korbel had been here in Campania, changing allegiance again, at the exact moment when Ruelle had started operations—Richardson frowned as the curious contradictions in this coincidence began to occur to him. Even if Korbel and Ruelle had known each other all those years ago their connection now was still very odd indeed. If the Russians had, for reasons which were still totally obscure, decided to investigate Audley’s Italian mission, then it would not have been Korbel’s job to start things moving—and even if it had, he would never have called on a bloody-minded old has-been like Ruelle to undertake the job.

In fact, the more he thought about it, the stranger it seemed, because the Russians hadn’t even recruited Korbel until the mid-fifties —and by then the Italian Communists had already dumped Ruelle. “David—“ he tried to sound half-jocular, “—you wouldn’t be putting me on, would you?”

“Putting you on?” Audley looked at him questioningly. “About Korbel?”

“About Korbel getting through to his old pal Ruelle.”

As he stared back at Audley the sheer copper-bottomed absurdity of it mushroomed: not just the idea of Korbel suggesting the recruitment of Ruelle, but of the London KGB
resident
listening to him, getting through to Moscow Centre … and then Centre calling up the Rome
resident—damn
it, the thing required simultaneous brain storms in London, Moscow and Rome: it was like piling the improbable on the unlikely, all on a foundation of the incredible—and no one should know that better than David Audley himself: perhaps that was the strangest thing of all.

Richardson was glad he hadn’t sounded too serious. It left him room for a touch of stupidity.

“Well, it’s one hell of a coincidence, David.” He grinned. “And the Russians don’t go much on the old boys’ network, either, surely?”

“Old boys’ network?” Audley blinked. “No, they don’t… in fact there’s probably nothing in it—“

And that touch left Audley room to wriggle out. Which he was promptly doing.

“—You’re quite right, Peter. But either way it doesn’t matter, because we can leave Korbel to Sir Frederick and Ruelle to General Montuori, anyway. They don’t concern us, thank God.”

If there was one sure thing now, thought Richardson, it was that Korbel and Ruelle concerned him very much indeed.

“We concentrate on Narva, you mean.”

Two sure things, rather: Audley still knew one hell of a lot more about Korbel and Ruelle than he was admitting.

“Right.” Audley bobbed his head in agreement.

“And ‘we’ means me, David.”

“Right.”

“And Boselli comes along for the ride.”

Shrug. “If that’s the way you must have it.”

“It’s the only possible way.”

Audley raised both his hands, fingers spread, in acceptance. “So— we all go to see Narva. Right!”

And thirdly and sadly: ex-friend David was one big ruddy liar.

AT LEAST THE
General’s new instructions made things easy—that was one good thing: all he had to do was to make sure the Englishmen didn’t make a run for it, which under the circumstances of the General’s conversation with Sir Frederick Clinton they were most unlikely to attempt.

Nor was it the only good thing, by any means. One had to beware of optimism, particularly as Villari had not yet regained consciousness after his operation. But there was hope even there, for if he survived his memory might well be vague about that last split second: the farther the whole episode receded into the past in Boselli’s own mind the more vague the truth became and the more he felt disposed to believe what was now the official story. That was the way history was formed after all—by the acceptance of what people wanted to believe.

The important thing was that the General was pleased with him so far. Admittedly, some of that approbation was founded on his edited account of the interview with Richardson, whom he had represented as shrewd and tough and unco-operative, but from whom he had none the less extracted useful information about Narva and the political implications of his industrial espionage activities.

Privately Boselli was convinced that Richardson was by no means as formidable as he had suggested, but that like all the native inhabitants of these parts he was merely untrustworthy and overweeningly sure of himself—and his English blood had merely reinforced those defects of character.