He started to walk away, but Rosacher said, “Wait! I need to speak to Bruno Cerruti.”
The man turned. “What for?”
“Are you Cerruti?”
“Ain’t much point denying it. What you want?”
“Did a man named Aldo visit you recently.”
“Man was out here a few weeks ago with some soldiers. Don’t recall his name, but those soldiers scared the hell out of Frederick. It was a chore holding him back.”
Rosacher didn’t understand the reference to Frederick, but let it pass, sensing from Cerruti’s truculent manner and clipped speech that he had a limited amount of time in which to make his inquiries and state his business. “What did Aldo want with you?”
“That’s between me and him.”
Sweat rolled down Rosacher’s back, beaded on his forehead. “That’s no longer the case. Aldo’s dead.”
“Huh. Too bad. Seemed like a nice little fellow.” Cerruti spat out a brown wad of, Rosacher assumed, tobacco. “He was right took by Frederick. Said he had somebody needed killing. But the soldiers got Frederick excited and I advised him to leave. He said he’d come back later and we’d finish discussing the matter.”
Rosacher wiped sweat from his eyes. “Is there someplace out of this heat where we can talk?”
Cerruti hesitated. “Guess we can head over to the house, but you best leave your animal here. Frederick loves horse meat.”
+
Cerruti’s house was several hundred yards out onto the plain—it was almost impossible to see until you were close upon it, because its walls were woven of yellow grass, hardened (Cerruti said) by a paste derived from animal fat, and the roof was fabricated of palmetto fronds. The interior of the place held a rank odor and consisted of two large, windowless rooms separated by a canvas cloth; a second structure lay behind the house, nearly twice as high and missing a fourth wall—a storeroom, Rosacher supposed, yet he could see nothing within it, only blackness. It was not significantly cooler inside the house, but it was out of the direct sun. In the air was the sickly sweetish odor of a body that had gone unwashed for many days. Crudely carpentered chairs and a table of unfinished planking centered the room. Light came through chinks in the grass that had been made opaque by the paste and cast an irregular diamond pattern over the dirt floor.
“I was told you lived near the haunch.” Rosacher took a chair and mopped his brow.
“Moved,” Cerruti said.
He placed a jug and a platter bearing a dubious-looking chunk of fatty meat and a half-loaf of bread on the table and joined Rosacher. He nudged the plate toward Rosacher and nodded, indicating that he should help himself.
“I’ve already eaten.” Rosacher shifted his chair forward. “What more can you tell me about your meeting with Aldo?”
“Wasn’t much to it.” Cerruti ripped a hunk of bread from the loaf. “He said he had somebody needed killing. Some high muckety-muck. Asked if me and Frederick would be interested in handling the job. I told him I didn’t see no reason for it, so unless he told me more, he might as well head on back where he come from. That’s when the soldiers started getting on Frederick’s nerves.”
“Where is Frederick?”
“Sleeping. He hates the sun, he does. Don’t hardly ever come out until evening.”
Cerruti tore off some of the meat with his teeth and chewed.
“Did he mention who this person was?” Rosacher asked.
“No. Just said he was a bigwig.”
While Cerruti ate Rosacher studied Aldo’s notebook, the page on which Cerruti’s name had been written, along with “the hunt” and “Carlos.” He remained baffled, unable to make a connection between Cerruti and those two entries.
Cerruti wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “One thing I forgot. He said we’d have to travel a week and a day more to get to the place where the killing would be done.”
Another useless fact—that was Rosacher’s immediate response to this revelation; but as he tried to plot how far in every direction “a week and a day more” would take him (assuming the trip was made on horseback), he realized if he were to travel north and east that would put him within the Temalaguan border, on the edge of the rain forest, the area where Carlos VII, Temalagua’s current ruler, famously pursued his passion for the hunt.
“Was the man he wanted killed named Carlos?” Rosacher asked.
Cerruti answered with his mouth full, shreds of meat falling onto the table. “Didn’t say.”
Had Aldo planned to assassinate the Temalaguan king? Was this his idea of a distraction that would delay an attack by the combined forces of Mospiel and Temalagua? It still made no sense to Rosacher. An ordinary death might cause the day-to-day routines of government to be pushed aside, giving way to the extensive planning and traditional pomp that attended Temalaguan state funerals, and the subsequent period of national mourning; but a political assassination would have the opposite effect, acting to spur on the new king in seeking vengeance. To have the desired effect, the assassination would have to be disguised as something else and, since Carlos would be protected by a sizeable armed guard, Rosacher was unable to fathom how this could be achieved.
He inquired further of Cerruti, but learned nothing more of value and, in order to prolong the conversation, he began asking irrelevant questions, hoping that stalling would give him time to think of something pertinent. Accordingly, one of the questions he asked was, “What happened to your menagerie of pets? I was told you had quite a collection.”
“They didn’t take to Frederick being around,” said Cerruti. “Most of them run off.”
This led Rosacher to think that he at least ought to wait for Frederick to wake up before returning to the House—he might have some intelligence to impart—and asked Cerruti how much longer Frederick could be expected to sleep.
“He’ll be up and about by twilight,” Cerruti said. “He enjoys hunting when it’s cool.”
Rosacher looked to the canvas curtain, behind which he presumed Frederick was sleeping, and was tempted to raise a clatter, a noise of some kind, sufficient to rouse him; but he decided that course of action would not be politic and asked Cerruti if he could wait there until Frederick awoke.
“You’d be putting your horse at risk.” Cerruti chewed, swallowed. “I reckon leaving him out there until night, you’re not going to find nothing but bones and the head. But if you’re willing, it’s all right with me.”
Thankfully, because of Cerruti’s laconic style, Rosacher did not feel it necessary to make conversation and, while his host busied himself with household chores, he tried to work on a plan of attack against Mospiel, given that Temalagua’s involvement could be circumvented. The heat, however, overwhelmed him and he nodded off, drowsing through the long afternoon. He woke late in the day, about five o’clock judging by the rich golden light, and was clearing away the cobwebs, considering how to pass the hours before dusk, when he heard, from near at hand, a vast animal rumbling that raised the hair on the back of his neck. He jumped up from the chair, fumbled for his rifle, and said, “What in God’s name is that?”
Cerruti sat opposite him, sharpening his knife on a whetstone—in the dim light, his hair half-obscuring his face, he seemed for the moment a wildly romantic figure and not an uneducated yokel. “Don’t get all lathered up,” he said. “That’s just Frederick having a dream.”
Rosacher let this sink in. “I thought Frederick was a man.”
“He is. ’Least he says he is. You can make up your own mind.”
Warily, Rosacher took his seat, but did not fall back asleep, his mind racing, alert to every noise. At twilight there came a renewed rumbling from without, louder and more extensive than before, and the sound of something big moving through the grass. Once again Rosacher shot to his feet and caught up his rifle.