Giancarlo raised himself in his seat and pulled from a hip pocket a wad of notes and the autostrada toll ticket taken hundreds of kilometres back from a machine.
' I had not thought of the petrol,' he laughed with a quick nervousness. A drip of weakness before the tap was turned tighter. "Arrison, you will not be silly. You will pay the ticket.
The gun will be at you all the time. You are not concerned with what will happen to me, you are concerned with what will happen to yourself. If you are silly then you are dead; whether I am too does not help you. You understand, 'Arrison?'
'Yes, Giancarlo.'
Harrison pulled the wheel hard to the right, felt the tyres bite beneath him, heard their squeal, and the pace of the autostrada diminished from his windscreen mirror. He had slowed the car as they wound on the tight bend towards the toll gate. Giancarlo reached back to the seat behind and grabbed at his light anorak, arranged it over his lower arm and his fist and the gun and again pressured the barrel into the softness at Harrison's waist.
'You don't speak.'
'What if he talks to me?' Harrison stammered, the tension exuding from the boy spread contagiously.
' I will talk to him, if it is necessary… If I fire the pistol from here I kill you, 'Arrison.'
' I know, Giancarlo.'
Perhaps, but only if it presents itself. You know the answer, Geoffrey. He pressed the brake as the cabins of the toll gate loomed in front of him. He stopped the car as the bonnet edged against the narrow barrier, carefully wound down the window and without looking passed the ticket and a banknote out into the cool dawn air.
'Grazie.'
The voice startled Harrison. Contact again with the real and the permanent life, contact with the clean and the familiar. His eyes followed his arm but there was no face in his vision, only a hand that was dark and hair-covered with a worn greasy palm that took his money, and was gone before snaking back with a fist full of coins. It had not presented itself. The gun gouged at his flesh, and the man would not even have seen their faces. The voice beside him was shrill.
'Una stazione de servizio, per benzina?'
'Cinquen cento metri..'
'Grazie.'
'Prego.'
The barrier was raised, Harrison edged the car into gear.
Shouldn't he have crashed the gears, stalled the engine, dropped the change in the roadway? Shouldn't he have done something?
But the gun was there, round and penetrating at the skin. All right for those who don't know, all right for those without experience. Let them come and sit here, let them find their own answers to cowardice. Within moments the lights of a petrol station shone at them in the half light, diffused with the growing sun.
'You follow my instructions exactly/
'Yes, Giancarlo.'
'Go to the far pumps.'
Where it was darkest, where the light was masked by the building, Harrison stopped. Giancarlo waited till the handbrake was applied, the gear in neutral, before his hand snaked out at speed to rip the keys from the ignition. He snapped open his door, thrust it shut behind him and jogged around the back of the car till he was at Harrison's door. He held his anorak across his waist, with an innocence that was above suspicion.
Harrison saw a man in the blue overalls of Agip stroll without urgency towards the car.
'Venti mila lire di benzina, per fa vore '
' S i. '
Would he look into the car, would the curiosity bred from the long night hours cause him to turn from the boy who stood beside the driver's door, and wish to examine the occupant? Why should it? Why should he care who drives a car? This has to be the moment, Geoffrey. Now, right now, not next time, not next week.
How?
Fling the door open, crash it into Giancarlo's body. You'd knock him back with it, he'd fall, he'd slip. For how long?
Long enough to run. Sure? Well, not sure… but it's a chance.
And how far do you run before he's on his feet, five metres… ?
It's the opportunity. Then he shoots, and he doesn't miss, not this kid, and who else is here other than a half-asleep idiot with his eyes closed, who'll have to play the hero?
Giancarlo passed the man the notes and waited as he walked away, then hissed through the window, 'I am going to walk round the car. If you move I will shoot, it is no problem through the glass. Do not move, 'Arrison.'
Only if it presents itself. Geoffrey Harrison felt the great weakness creeping into his knees and shins, lapping in his stomach.
His tongue smeared a dampness across his lips. You'd have been dead, Geoffrey, if you'd tried anything, you know that, don't you? He supposed he did, supposed he had been sensible, behaved in the intelligent, responsible way that came from education and experience. Wouldn't have lasted long on that mountain-side in 1944, Geoffrey; wouldn't have lasted five bloody minutes.
Beneath the triumphant monastery on Monte Cassino, Giancarlo ordered Harrison to turn off the autostrada.
He held the pistol hidden between his legs as Harrison paid the sleepy toll attendant at the barrier with the money the boy had given him. They drove sharply through the small town, re-built from the ravages of bombardment into a characterless warren of flat blocks and factories, and headed north on a narrow road among the rock defiles, ever watched by the great whitestone eye on the mountain top. They bypassed the sombre war cemetery for the German dead of a battle fought before the birth of Giancarlo and Harrison, and then the road's turns became more vicious, and the high banks more intrusive.
Three kilometres beyond the rugged message of the grave-yard cross, Giancarlo indicated an open field gate through which they should turn. The car lurched over the bare grass covering the hardened ground and was lost to sight behind a gorse hedge of brilliant yellow flowers. Shepherds might come here, or the men who watched the goat flocks, but the chance was reasonable in Giancarlo's mind. Among the grass and weed and climbing thistle and the bushes of the hillside they would rest. Rome lay just one hundred and twenty-five kilometres away. They had done well, they had made good time.
With the car stationary, Giancarlo moved briskly. The flex that he had found in the glove compartment in one hand, the pistol in the other, he followed Harrison between the gorse clumps. He ordered him down, pushed him without unkindness on to his stomach, and then, kneeling with the gun between his thighs, bound Harrison's hands across the small of his back.
The legs next, working at the ankles, wrapping the flex around them, weaving it tight, binding the knot. He walked a few paces away and urinated noisily in the grass and was watching the rivulets when he realized he had not offered the Englishman the same chance. He shrugged and put it from his mind. He had no feelings for his prisoner; the man was just a vehicle, just a machine for bringing him closer to his Franca.
Harrison's eyes were already closed, the breathing deep and regular as the sleep sped to him. Giancarlo watched the slow rise and fall of his shoulders and the gaping mouth that was not irritated by the nibbling attendance of a fly. He put the gun on the grass and scrabbled with his fingers at the buckle of his belt and at the elastic waist of his underpants.
Franca. Darling, sweet, lovely Franca. I am coming, Franca.
And we will be together, always together, Franca, and you will love me for what I have done for you. Love me, too, my beautiful.
Love me.
Giancarlo subsided on the grass and the sun played on his face and there was a light wind and the sound of the flying creatures.
The P38 was close to his hand, and the boy lay still.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Giancarlo asleep seemed little more than a child, hurt by exhaustion and dragged nerves, coiled gently. His real age was betrayed by the premature haggardness of his face, the witness to his participation in the affairs of men. His left forearm acted as a shield to the climbing sun, and his right hand was buried in the grass, fingers among the leaves and stalks and across the handle of the P38.