Eycken held a heavy revolver in his hand. Glavanis stepped between him and Christopher. “It was a joke, Jan,” he said.
Eycken swore, a long elaborate Arab curse, and moved around to the door before he put his gun away.
Christopher explained that the Germans had built the room. During the war they would bring a man through the dark fields, strip him, and drop him through the trapdoor. He would be left naked in the dark room, sometimes with a dozen rats, sometimes with music or recorded human screams playing at high volume through the loudspeakers in the wall. The door was faced with concrete and cleverly concealed; it was impossible to tell that it was there by sense of touch. When, after two or three days, the wall opened and the lights went on, and the prisoner-already half-crazed by thirst and the rats and the loudspeakers-saw a German in an SS uniform standing in the door, it had a certain effect.
“Is that how we begin with this Communist?” Glavanis asked.
“Yes. You may not have to do much more. He’s used to being protected, being invulnerable. He thinks of himself as a dangerous man. That’s one of the pressure points-he won’t know how to handle being helpless. Also, he’s a hypochondriac. He’s going to get very cold in here with no clothes on, and he’s going to be worried about pneumonia.”
“Can we use water?”
“If you have to,” Christopher said. “I don’t know that it’ll be necessary. I have something to keep him quiet when you take him, and when we let him go.”
“You’re going to let him go?”
“Yes. Don’t let him see your faces at all. You’ll have to tape his eyes as soon as you take him.”
Eycken smiled, his white teeth glittering beneath the hair on his lips. “I’d better shave,” he said.
“Afterward would be better,” Christopher said. “I want you to start in the morning. You fly to Reggio and pick up the car there. Stavros, you still have the papers I gave you? The car is booked in that name, at Auto Maggiore at the airport.”
“Yes, I still have the papers. What information does this type have, that he’s worth all this trouble?”
“If I knew, we wouldn’t have to go through all this,” Christopher said. “Come on upstairs. I’ll explain the operation.”
Christopher showed them the maps he had drawn on the basis of Klimenko’s description of the house in Calabria, and gave them photographs of Frankie Pigeon.
“It would be better to know more about his habits,” Glavanis said.
“I agree, but there’s no time. You have to have him back here before first light day after tomorrow. You’ll have to lie up and watch, and take the first chance you get.”
“What about the bodyguards? Can we deal with them as we think best?”
Christopher handed Glavanis a small briefcase. Glavanis removed two.22 caliber pistols from it and looked quizzically at Christopher. He pushed a cartridge from one of the clips; there was no lead bullet as in ordinary ammunition. The nose of the cartridge case was pinched shut. “What’s this supposed to be?” Glavanis asked.
“It’s birdshot. You can’t kill with it, but if you fire into the face from close range, you produce a lot of pain and shock. You want to immobilize these people for an hour or two, that’s all.”
“There’s a better method of immobilizing people,” Eycken said.
“No doubt. But this isn’t a war zone, Eycken. If you kill somebody, you’ll have carabinieri all over you before you get to Naples.”
Eycken slid a clip loaded with the birdshot cartridges into one of the pistols and felt the weight of the weapon, holding it at arm’s length. “I suppose it’ll work if you get close enough and hit the eyes,” he said.
“There’s no need to hit the eyes.”
Glavanis, seeing the contempt in Eycken’s face, grinned broadly. “Jan isn’t used to working with a man who has scruples,” he said.
Glavanis sorted out the other things in the briefcase: two airplane tickets to Reggio, an envelope fat with dirty thousand-lire notes, bandage and tape, handcuffs, a hundred feet of light manila rope, a pair of binoculars, a bottle of pills. He shook the bottle and asked a question.
“Seconal,” Christopher said. “Give him two or three if he’s conscious when you take him. It should take seven or eight hours to drive back to Rome. He’ll sleep most of the way in the trunk. Don’t give him too much Seconal. We want him awake when you put him in the hole.”
Glavanis prodded the contents of the briefcase with his blunt fingers. He nodded in satisfaction. “Everything we’ll need is there,” he said. “We’d better sleep now.” Before he went upstairs, he winked at Christopher. “Do you know what day it is tomorrow?”
“Christmas.”
Glavanis nodded rapidly and uttered a short, sharp laugh.
While Glavanis and Eycken slept, Christopher tested the loudspeaker in the interrogation room and prepared the other things that would be needed there.
Then he spent an hour in the darkroom. Dieter Dimpel’s photographs of the tortora file at Dolder und Co. were in per feet focus. Christopher ran the negatives through the enlarger, but made no prints. The bank records verified Klimenko’s story in every detail. There was one bit of information that Klimenko had omitted. It was an important fact, and Christopher concluded that Klimenko could not have known about it. If word of it ever got back to Moscow, big boils would burst all over the KGB.
At five in the morning, Christopher woke Eycken and Glavanis and cooked breakfast for them. He drove them to the airport, and before Glavanis got out of the car he kissed Christopher on the cheek in the Greek style. “Happy Christmas,” he said.
Christopher drove back to the villa on country roads that wound through muddy winter fields, put the car in the garage, and fell into a deep sleep in a locked room.
2
When he woke it was dark again. Although the furnace was operating, the huge marble living room was cold, and he started a fire of olive wood in the grate and sat before it, reading the short stories of Somerset Maugham. He was most of the way through the thick Penguin paperback when headlights flashed across the ceiling and he heard tires turning on the gravel drive. The car, a dusty blue Fiat 2300 with a Naples number, blinked its lights and continued to the back of the villa. Christopher heard the car doors slam and the hollow double ring of the trapdoor being opened and closed.
Glavanis and Eycken were hungry. They still wore the ill-fitting peasant corduroys that Christopher had given them. Eycken drank three glasses of neat gin, one after the other, and pushed the bottle across the table.
“It’s cold,” Glavanis said. “What I want is brandy.”
Eycken went into the sitting room and came back with a new bottle of Martell. Glavanis drank from the bottle.
When there was food before him, Glavanis said, “It was easy, Paul.”
Glavanis and Eycken had hidden the car in the woods and waited until Frankie Pigeon came out at sunset for his evening walk across the fields. Two bodyguards, young men in American suits, walked beside him. Glavanis and Eycken shadowed Pigeon and his men, keeping inside the edge of the woods, until they were well out of sight of the house.
“We just stepped out and walked right up to them, all smiles,” Glavanis said.
Pigeon smiled at them. Glavanis and Eycken, dark and grinning, wearing work-stained clothes, were the sort of men Pigeon liked to talk to. When one of the bodyguards put a hand on the gun in his pocket, Pigeon gave him a playful backhanded slap on the arm. Pigeon wished Glavanis and Eycken Merry Christmas. In his blurred Italian, he called out a question: What did the sky say? Was it going to rain on Christmas?