She smiled and showed me to a table near the fire and pointed out the phone. I got change from the cashier and gave Richard a quick call. For some reason, he was less than thrilled that I was sitting down to some Tyrolean speciality while he was stuck on the verge of the road with nothing in sight but the motorway and a field of the inevitable cows. “Go and get some sandwiches or something,” I instructed him. “I’ll let you know when we set off.”
I went back to my table. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Turner tucking into a steaming bowl of soup, a stein of beer beside him, so I figured I’d have time to eat something. I ordered Tyroler grostl, a mixture of potatoes, onions and ham with a fried egg on top. It looked like the nearest thing to fast food on the menu. I was right. My meal was in front of me in under five minutes. I was halfway through it before Turner’s main course arrived. Judging by the pile of chips that was all I could identify, he was eating for two. Frankly, I could see why he’d made the detour. The food was more than worth it, if my plateful was anything to go by. Definitely one to cut out and keep for next time we were passing Zurich.
By the time I’d finished and lingered over a cup of coffee, Turner had also demolished a huge wedge of lemon meringue pie. If I’d scoffed that much in the middle of the day, I’d have been asleep at the wheel ten miles down the road. I hoped he had a more lively metabolism. When he called for the bill, I took mine to the cashier, rang Richard to warn him we were on the move and headed back to the car. Minutes later, Turner was heading back down the road, with me a couple of bends behind him.
As we hit the motorway, I had another panic. Where I’d expected to see Richard in his Mercedes, there was a black BMW. As I sailed past, I glanced across and saw the familiar grin behind the thumbs-up sign. Moments later, as he swung in behind me, the phone rang. “Sierra Forty-nine to Sierra Oscar,” he said. “Surprise, surprise. I nipped back to Zurich and swapped the cars. I thought it was about time for a change.”
“Nice one,” I conceded. Maybe he wasn’t the liability I’d feared he’d be after all. And there was me thinking that he was as subtle as Jean-Paul Gaultier. This wasn’t the time to reassess the capabilities of the man in my life, but I filed the thought away for future scrutiny.
I figured we must be heading for Liechtenstein, haven for tax dodgers, fraudsters and stamp-collecting anoraks. No such luck. We carried on south, deep into the Alps. Richard was in front of me again, keeping tabs on Turner. The bug kept cutting out because of the mountains, and I was determined that we weren’t going to lose him after coming this far. Now Richard was in another car, I felt happy about him staying in fairly close touch.
A few miles down the road, my bottle started twitching. There was no getting away from it. We were heading for the San Bernadino tunnel. Ten kilometers in that dark tube, aware of the millions of tons of rock just sitting above my head, waiting to crush me thin as a postage stamp. Just the thought of it forced a groan from my lips. I’m terrified of tunnels. Not a lot of people know that. It doesn’t sit well with the fearless, feisty image. I’ve even been known to drive thirty miles out of my way to avoid going through the tunnels under the Mersey.
“With every minute that passed, that gaping hole in the hillside was getting closer and my heart was pounding faster. Desperately, I rattled through the handful of cassettes I’d grabbed when I’d picked up Bill’s car. Not a soothing one among them. No Enya, no Mary Coughlan, not even Everything But The Girl. Plenty of Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and REM. I settled for Crowded House turned up loud to keep the eerie boom of the tunnel traffic at bay and tried to concentrate on their harmonies.
Two minutes into the tunnel and the sweat was clammy on my back. Three minutes in and my upper lip was damp. Four minutes in and my forehead was slimy as a sewer wall. Six minutes in and my knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The walls looked as if they were closing in. I tried telling myself it was only imagination, and Crowded House promised they could ease my pain. They were lying. Ten minutes and I could feel a scream bubbling in my throat. I was on the point of tears when a doughnut of light appeared around the cars in front of me.
As soon as I burst out again into daylight, my phone started ringing. “Yeah?” I gasped.
“You okay?” Richard asked. He knows all about me and tunnels.
“I’ll live.” I swallowed hard. “Thanks for asking.”
“You’re a hero, Brannigan,” he said.
“Never mind that,” I said gruffly. “You still with Turner?”
“Tight as Jagger’s jeans. He’s got his foot down. Looks like we’re heading for la bella Italia.”
At least I’d be somewhere I could speak the language, I thought with relief. I’d been worried all the way down Germany and Switzerland that Turner was going to end up in a close encounter that I couldn’t understand a word of. But my Italian was fluent, a hangover from the summer before university, when I’d worked in the kitchens of Oxford’s most select trattoria. It was learn the language or take a vow of silence. I’d prevented it from getting too rusty by holidaying in Italy whenever I could.
I drove cheerfully down the mountain, glad to be out in the open air again, relieved that we were gradually leaving the peaks behind us. We worked our way round Milan just after five, Richard back behind me, and by seven we were skirting Genoa. This was turning into one hell of a drive. My shoulders were locked, my backside numb, my hips stiff in spite of regular squirming. If they ever start making private eyes work with tachographs, I’m going to be as much use to my clients as a cardboard chip pan. I shuddered to think what this overtime was going to look like on Henry’s bill. He’d run out of buckshee hours awhile back.
At Genoa, we turned east again on the A12, another one of those autostradas carved out of the side of a mountain. I kept telling myself the little tunnels were just like driving under big bridges, but it didn’t help a lot, especially since the receiver kept cutting out, giving me panic attacks every time.
Three quarters of an hour past Genoa, the screen told me Turner was moving off to one side. First, he went right, then crossed back left. I nearly missed the exit, I was concentrating so hard on the screen, but I managed to get off with Richard on my tail. We were on the outskirts of some town called Sestri Levante, but according to my screen, Turner was heading away from it. Praying I was going the right way, I swung left and found myself driving along a river valley, the road lined with shops and houses. Sestri Levante shaded into Casarza Ligure, then we were out into open country, wooded hills on either side of the valley. We hit a small village called Bargonasco just as the direction changed on the receiver. A couple of kilometers farther up, there was a turning on the left. It was a narrow asphalt road, with a sign saying Villa San Pietro. The blip on the screen stayed steady. A kilometer away, straight up the Villa San Pietro’s drive.
Journey’s end.
17
“what now, sam spade?” richard asked as we both bent and stretched in vain attempts to restore our bodies to something like their normal configuration.
“You go back to the village and find us somewhere to stay for the night, then you sit outside in the car in case Turner comes back down the valley,” I told him.
“And what are you doing while I’m doing that?” Richard asked.