“Julia,” he said, “this is Michael, your husband. We’ve got to get out of here.”
The rigid blankness left her face, and she gave him a grotesquely delighted smile. She seemed about to speak, but he just grinned as cheerfully as he could and led her toward the arch and the street beyond, waving Emile’s knife reassuringly back at the bewildered nuns.
He bumped into one of the life-size wooden statues, and in a moment of panic stabbed at it with the knife, striking it in the face.
The knife-grip was suddenly red-hot, and he snatched his scorched hand away. His palm was red, with a black spot in the center.
He thought he heard a shout far away in the night, and on a sudden impulse that he didn’t bother to analyze, he left the knife sticking in the wooden saint’s cheek.
He pulled Josephine out into the street.
The rain was coming down even more heavily than before, raising waves of splash-spray that swept like nets across the pavement. There were no carriages on the street, and he hadn’t brought any money anyway. He had one arm draped around Josephine; with the other he drew Emile’s blood-slick pistol, and he kept glancing back at the nurses’ home as the two of them reeled across the street.
They had nearly got to an alley on the far side when something punched his thigh like a hammer blow, and he folded, at the same moment feeling Josephine jerk and pitch forward away from him; and as he landed on his hands and knees on the cobblestones he realized that the two heavy bams that had for a moment battered the building fronts had been gunshots.
He knew he was being killed, but he was too exhausted and hurt to derive any alarm from the thought, only depression and a leaden impatience that it was taking so long, and hurting so much.
He wondered if Josephine was dead and, if not, if he could somehow get her free of this before the men behind them came over to finish off the job. He swung his head dizzily back and forth, squinting in the cold rain, and finally saw her sprawled only a few yards from him. Her skirt, already dark from the rain, was pulled up, and he could see the quickly diluted blood running from two gashes in her right calf.
He crawled over to her, dragging his shot left leg, and lifted her face. Her hair was full of fresh, hot blood—evidently she’d been shot in the head—but he put his ear to her mouth.
She was breathing, in fast gasps.
Over the ringing in his ears he could hear footsteps thudding and splashing,
louder by the second, behind him. He had dropped the pistol when he fell, but it was next to Josephine’s head, and he picked it up; he rolled over, careful not to jar his mercifully numb left leg, and sat up, facing back the way he’d come. It was hard to see through the rain, and he pushed wet hair away from his eyes with his free hand.
He raised the pistol in shaking hands. He could dimly see two figures approaching through the veil of the rain, and he waited for them to come closer.
They did, in great bounding leaps, and at nearly the last moment he remembered to click the hammer back, wondering if he could pull the trigger on a human being again.
Then there was the sound of hoofbeats from the direction of the Via Montebello, and the two men in the street halted and turned toward the noise, raising pistols of their own.
Not caring who the newcomers might be, but grateful for the diversion, Crawford aimed at one of the men in the street and, unconsciously whispering curses and fragments of half-remembered prayers, carefully squeezed the trigger of Emile’s pistol.
The bang hammered his already abused eardrums and the gun’s barrel clouted his face as the recoil kicked it up and back—and the man he’d been aiming at did a backflip and disappeared in the spray of the rain above the pavement. Crawford reversed the spent pistol and held it by the hot barrel and waited for the last man to come for him—but the horsemen were galloping forward now, and then he was dazzled into momentary blindness by a muzzle-flash as the last of Crawford’s attackers fired his gun at the riders in the moment before being ridden down.
Crawford couldn’t see if the man’s shot had hit anyone. One of the riders reined in his horse long enough to fire a shot down into the body under the horses’ hooves, and then to call, perhaps to Crawford, “Questo e’ fatto dai Carbonari, chiamato dalla mazze”—and then all of them rode away south. Crawford tried to watch them, but the rain, and the red dazzle-spots floating in his vision, made them invisible within a few yards.
This was done by the Carbonari, summoned by the mazze, Crawford translated mentally—and he was profoundly grateful for the impulse that had made him stick the iron blade into the wooden head—and grateful too that the men on horseback hadn’t recognized him from having glimpsed him earlier this evening in Navona Square.
But of course he had changed his allegiance since then.
Still sitting on the street, he laid the gun down and put his hand under his thigh, scraping the backs of his knuckles against the wet cobblestones.
He found the tear in his trousers and, though it nearly made him faint with sheer horror, he gingerly probed the hole in his leg with a fingertip. It was bleeding, but not so copiously as to indicate a torn artery. There was no exit wound, so the ball must still be inside—that was good news in some ways, bad in some others. The wound was still numb, but a hot ache was building up in there, and he knew he needed medical attention soon.
Still sitting up, he now hiked himself back so that he could assess the damage to Josephine’s head. In the rainy darkness he felt the shape of her skull, but it didn’t seem to have been shattered; and her face was fine, except for some rough-feeling scratches on her cheek and jaw from having collided with the street. Then he noticed a hard lump at her right temple, and he traced its outlines gently with his fingers.
It was the pistol ball. It had evidently struck the back of her head at an angle and, instead of punching straight through the skull into the brain, had skidded along the outside of the bone like the tip of a filleting knife.
She’d been lucky—but she could still easily die of this. And even if she lived, her brain might sustain damage from the concussion. Of course with her, he thought, it would have to be a lot of damage, for anyone to be able to tell.
She shifted and groaned, then all at once sat up. One arm came up like a hinged rake and clawed sopping hair back from her forehead. “Is,” she said in a voice like a shovel going into gravel, “the sun … down yet.”
When he’d recovered from his surprise at her abrupt return to consciousness, Crawford laboriously raised his eyes to the dark sky. “Uh,” he said, “I think so.” “We have to go to … Keats. To his apartment.”
Her voice was entirely without inflection, and Crawford found it hard to believe that there was anyone at all behind it. He wondered if her personality—or personalities—were still unconscious from the pistol shot, leaving this … this machine to work the vacated body.
“Keats’s place,” he echoed. “Why?”
“This is … not the one that knows. But we have to … go there.”
Crawford thought about that. They’d be likely to meet more of von Aargau’s men there … but none of them could know of his defection yet. All the witnesses to it were dead—or at least, as in the case of the man whom he had pulled down the stairs, injured and unconscious. He could claim … what, that he had gone to help the assassins, and had been shot at by Carbonari.
Von Aargau’s men would help him—he was a fellow-employee. They would certainly get him medical help, and they might even loan him some money.