His father stared at him, his face a mask of confusion.
Luca leaned forward and kissed his father on the left cheek.
“What? What is—” His father’s eyes went wide and he strained violently against the two men who held him in their grip. He struggled for breath. His lips formed words that would not come.
“Luca?” Emile cried out as the skeleton handed Luca the pistol. “Luca! What are you—what is happening—I am a loyal soldier of the Corse! I—”
“You are loyal to the Corse, Papa,” he said, his voice barely over a whisper, “but you killed a brother of the Brigade Rouge.”
He raised the automatic until it was aimed between his father’s eyes.
“Luca, no. Listen to me. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Luca increased the pressure on the trigger.
“Put the gun down, son. Listen to your father. Whatever your crazy Brigade Rouge people are saying, it isn’t true. I made some mistakes, yes. But, not—this. Don’t do this, Luca. I love you.”
The boy couldn’t do it. He lowered the muzzle slowly, never taking his eyes off his father’s own pleading eyes.
“My son! What—”
“The Brigade Rouge has no forgiveness for traitors,” Luca said, his voice flat.
“The party! Wait! You don’t—let me—”
The gun came up.
“Luca! For God’s sake! You can’t—”
Luca pulled the trigger.
The muzzle flash was brilliant and the crack of the explosion reverberated throughout the great domed chapel. His father was blown back against the balustrade, a bubble of blood forming on his lips as he sank to his knees. Luca looked down, letting the gun slip from his hand and clatter to the marble floor. His father lay gasping on the cold stone. In the dim light, the spreading stain on his chest was thick and black. He was vomiting blood. Luca stepped back and the two goons bent to their work. They looped the thick rope over Emile’s head, forming a heavy noose around his neck.
“You got balls, kid,” Joe Bones said, looking down at the dying man. “I gotta give you that.”
Emile Bonaparte’s right leg was still jerking spasmodically and he was taking shallow ragged breaths. Luca knelt beside him, taking his father’s still-warm hand and holding it to his cheek. Luca made every effort to force his eyes to fill with tears. It was the one test he would fail on this historic night. He could not cry on demand.
“Arrivederci, Comrade Papa.”
A fresh gout of blood erupted from his father’s mouth, and Luca’s hands were covered in the thick warm fluid. It had to be this way, he said to himself. In just this place, in just this way. He pinned a red floret to his father’s lapel and got to his feet.
“Do it,” Luca finally barked at the skeleton. “Finish the damn thing. Hang him.”
Then the two large men—Luca recognized them now as the two men who looked like brothers from the station platform—bent and picked up his father’s body. One had the feet, the other held his wrists. They began to swing the body to and fro, in ever greater arcs, the blood looping out of his father’s mortal wound.
Luca watched in stony silence as his father’s body sailed high out over the curvature of the balcony. He moved to the railing and looked down as the rope snapped taut, taking the full weight of the old man’s body.
Emile Bonaparte jerked to a stop at the end of the rope, his body swaying gently just a few meters above Napoleon’s sarcophagus. A cloud shifted high above, and blue moonlight once again lit the scene. Two dead Bonapartes, one grave. A red floret pinned on the traitor’s lapel. It was all intended to send a message to those in government who had something to fear from the Brigade Rouge. It was also a call to arms to Luca’s fellow conspirators, to unite in their struggle to overthrow the old leadership of the Corse.
“Wait till the cops get a load of this little picture,” Joe Bones said, staring at the scene. “I mean, this shit is friggin’ dramatic!”
Luca felt Benny Sangster’s big rough hand on his shoulder.
“You got the money, kid? I know you popped him. But we got expenses to cover.”
Luca handed him the envelope containing the ten thousand dollars, U.S. The price the Brigade Rouge had put on his father’s head.
“I never would have believed it, kid,” he said, pocketing the cash. “I told them Red Brigade Corsicans you was too wet behind the ears. You know. That you didn’t have the moxie. I mean, c’mon. What kind of kid could—”
“I am capable of absolutely anything,” Luca said, in a voice as cold as stone. “I am a son of Napoleon.”
And, in that pit where his soul would have been if he’d had one, he truly believed it.
“Well, you certainly made your bones the hard way, kid,” Benny said. “Never seen anything like it.”
A death rattle came from the twisted throat of the man hanging by his neck in the moonlight.
“Whoa,” Joe Bones said, digging his knuckles into his sunken eye sockets, “this shit is intense.”
“This is just the beginning,” Luca Bonaparte said as he walked away into the shadows.
Chapter Eight
Hampstead Heath
SOME FEW MINUTES AFTER MRS. PURVIS HAD ADMITTED THE two policemen, Ambrose was seated comfortably in his worn leather armchair; it was situated behind the walnut desk in his book-lined study. Beneath a sunny south window stood his painting table where all of his watercolor materials were laid out just so. The low stone fireplace, swept clean this time of year, would be crackling merrily with nice pine logs come the first fall chill.
The room was his favorite. It housed, among its treasures, not only his collections of Buchan, Ambler, Dorothy L. Sayers, Zane Grey, and Rex Stout, but the complete first edition of Conan Doyle, and his Holmes memorabilia collection as well. A rare Moroccan bound edition of Hound of the Baskervilles lay on his desktop, and he drummed his fingers upon it impatiently.
Blast. He was not in the mood for company. He was in the mood for eggs.
The two young coppers (they were MI5, surprisingly, not the local constabulary as he’d deduced) had moved the side chairs up to the desk and were getting into their topic rapidly. Ambrose had retired only recently from New Scotland Yard as the Number One, so his bona fides had been quickly dispensed with at the door.
He was pleased to find that, despite a few years of assisting his dear friend Alexander Hawke in some messy undercover work abroad, he still enjoyed something of a reputation at Thames House, the MI5 headquarters building, and in the British law enforcement community. Or so it would appear by the sunny look of adulation on the face of the young chap opposite.
This eager junior man, Agent H. H. Davies was his name, was ogling Ambrose as if he might be some aging exhibit in the Yard’s Legends of Crime museum.
“The Georgi Markov affair, Chief Inspector,” Davies said, shaking his head in wonder. “When the KGB took out the Bulgarian dissident waiting for his bus. Ricin pellets in the umbrella tip. No one had ever even heard of the stuff and yet you, you—”
“Well,” Ambrose smiled, “I can hardly claim credit for—”
There was a loud cough from the other chair.
“So you know this Henry Bulling, Chief Inspector,” the senior agent, George Winfrey, interrupted, glowering at Davies. “Your nephew, I believe.”
“Ah. Facts, Winfrey, facts. He’s not my nephew. He’s my cousin, in point of fact.”
“And you were running him? For the Yard? Looking into the Chinese connection? I know that’s Topic A with you fellows these days.”
“Chinese connection? You mean, with the French? Really. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I am a detective, not a spymaster.”
“But you were running him, were you not?”