Stunned, Adrian took the cablegram held out for him by the desk clerk. He walked toward the front entrance of the hotel, stopped, and opened it.
Mr. Adrian Fontine
Excelsior Hotel
Rome, Italy
My dear Fontine:
It is urgent we confer, for you must not act alone. You must trust me. You have nothing to fear from me. I understand your anxieties, consequently there will be no intermediaries, none of my people will intercept you. I will wait for you alone and alone we can make our decisions. Check your source.
Theo Dakakos
Dakakos had traced him! The Greek expected to meet. But where? How?
Adrian knew that once he passed through customs in Rome, there was no way he could stop those looking for him from knowing he’d come to Italy; it was the reason for the next step in his strategy. But that Dakakos would openly contact him seemed extraordinary. It was as though Dakakos assumed they were working together. Yet it was Dakakos who had gone after Andrew; gone after his brother relentlessly, ingeniously, wrapping up Eye Corps in a seditious ribbon that had eluded the combined efforts of the inspector general and the Justice Department.
The sons of Victor Fontine—the grandsons of Savarone Fontini-Cristi—were after the vault. Why would Dakakos stop one and not the other?
The answer had to be that he was trying to do just that. Carrots held out in front of the donkey’s nose; offers of safety and trust that were translated to mean control, confinement.
… I will wait for you alone and alone we can make our decisions. Check your source.…
Was Dakakos on his way to Campo di Fiori? How was that possible? And what was the source? An IG colonel named Tarkington with whom Dakakos had set up lines of communication to trap Eye Corps? What other source did he and Dakakos have in common?
“Signor Fontine?” It was the Excelsior manager; the door to his office was open behind him. He had come out quickly.
“Yes?”
“I tried your room, of course. You were not there.” The man smiled nervously.
“Right,” said Adrian. “I’m here. What is it?”
“Our guests are always our first consideration.” The Italian smiled again. It was maddening.
“Please. I’m in a hurry.”
“A few moments ago we had a call from the American embassy. They say they are calling all the hotels in Rome. They are looking for you.”
“What did you say?”
“Our guests are always—”
“What did you say?”
“That you had checked out. You have checked out, signore. However, if you wish to use my telephone.…”
“No, thank you,” said Adrian, starting toward the entrance. Then stopped and turned to the manager. “Call the embassy back. Tell them where I’ve gone. The front desk knows.”
It was the second part of his strategy in Rome, and when he conceived it, he realized it was merely an extension of what he had done in Paris. Before the day was over the professionals who followed him would know exactly where he was. Computers and passport entries and international cooperation made for swift relays of information. He had to make them all think he was going somewhere that he wasn’t.
Rome was the best place to start. Had he flown to Milan, the IG men would dig into their files; Campo di Fiori would appear. He could not allow that.
He had asked the front desk of the Excelsior to draw up a route for a drive south. To Naples, Salerno, and Policastro, along roads that would take him east through Calabria to the Adriatic. He had rented a car at the airport.
Now Theodore Dakakos had joined the hunt. Dakakos, whose relays of information were faster than those of United States Army Intelligence, and far more dangerous. Adrian knew what the United States Army wanted: the killer for Eye Corps. But Dakakos wanted the vault from Constantine. It was a greater prize.
Adrian drove through Rome’s melodramatic traffic back to Leonardo da Vinci Airport. He returned the rented car and bought a ticket on Itavia Airlines for Milan. He stood in line at the departure gate, his head down, his body slouched, seeking the protective cover of the crowd. As he was jostled forward—and for reasons he didn’t know—the words of an extraordinary lawyer came back to him.
You can run with the pack, in the middle of the pack, but if you want to do something, get to the edges and peel away. Darrow.
In Milan he would call his father. He’d lie about Andrew; he’d invent something, he couldn’t think about that now. But he had to know more about Theodore Dakakos.
Dakakos was closing in.
He sat on his bed in Milan’s Hotel di Piemonte as he’d sat on the bed at the Savoy in London, staring at papers in front of him. But these were not airline schedules, they were the Xeroxed pages of his father’s recollection of fifty years ago. He was rereading them—not for any new information; he knew the contents—but because the reading postponed the moment when he would pick up the phone. He wondered how thoroughly his brother had studied these pages, with their rambling descriptions and hesitant, often obsure reflections. Andrew would probably pore over them with the scrutiny of a soldier in combat. There were names. Goldoni, Capomonti, Lefrac. Men who had to be reached.
Adrian knew he could not procrastinate any longer. He folded the pages, put them in his jacket pocket, and reached for the telephone.
Ten minutes later the switchboard called him back; the phone 5,000 miles away in the North Shore house was ringing. His mother answered and when she said the words, she did so simply, without the trappings of grief, for they were extraneous, the grief private.
“Your father died last night.”
Neither spoke for several moments. The silence conveyed a sense of love. As though they were touching.
“I’ll come home right away,” he said.
“No, don’t do that. He wouldn’t want you to. You know what you have to do.”
Again there was silence. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Adrian?”
“Yes?”
“I have two things to tell you, but I don’t want to discuss them. Can you understand that?”
Adrian paused. “I think so.”
“An army officer came to see us. A Colonel Tarkington. He was kind enough to speak only with me. I know about Andrew.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Bring him back. He needs help. All the help we can give him.”
“I’ll try.”
“It’s so easy to look back and say ‘Yes, I see now. I realize.’ He always saw the results of strength; he never understood its complications, its essential compassion, I think.”
“Let’s not discuss it,” reminded the son.
“Yes. I don’t want to discuss—. Oh, God, I’m so frightened!”
“Please, mother.”
Jane breathed deeply, the sound carried over the wire. “There’s something else. Dakakos was here. He spoke to your father. To both of us together. You must trust him. Your father wished it; he was convinced of it. So am I.”
… check your source.…
“He sent me a cable. He said he’d be waiting for me.”
“At Campo di Fiori,” completed Jane.
“What did he say about Andrew?”
“That he thought your brother might be delayed. He didn’t elaborate; he talked only about you. He used your name repeatedly.”
“You’re sure you don’t want me to come home?”
“No. There’s nothing you can do here. He wouldn’t want it.” She paused for a moment. “Adrian, tell your brother his father never knew. He died thinking both his Geminis were the men he believed them to be.”
“I’ll tell him. I’ll call again soon.”
They said quiet good-byes.
His father was dead. The source was gone, and the void was terrible. He sat by the telephone, aware that perspiration had formed on his forehead, though the room was cool. He got up from the bed; there were things to do and he had to move quickly. Dakakos was on his way to Campo di Fiori. So was the killer of Eye Corps, and Dakakos did not know that.
So he sat down at the desk and began writing. He might have been back in his Boston apartment, jotting down items in preparation for the next day’s cross-examination.
But in this case it was not the next day. It was tonight. And very few items came to mind.
He stopped the car at the fork in the road, picked up the map, and held it under the dashboard light. The fork was detailed on the map. There were no other roads until the town of Laveno. His father had said there were large stone gateposts on the left; they were the entrance to Campo di Fiori.
He started the car up, straining his eyes in the darkness, waiting to catch a glimpse of erected stone in the wall of forest on his left. Four miles up the road he found them. He stopped the car opposite the huge, crumbling stone pillars and aimed his flashlight out the window. There was the winding road beyond as his father had described it, angling sharply, disappearing into the woods.
He swung the automobile to the left and drove through the gates. His mouth was suddenly dry, his heart accelerated, its beat echoing in his throat. It was the fear of the immediate unknown that gripped him. He wanted to face it quickly, before the fear controlled him. He drove faster.
There were no lights anywhere.
The enormous white house stood in eerie stillness, a deathlike splendor in the darkness. Adrian parked the car on the left side of the circle, opposite the marble steps, shut off the motor and, reluctantly, the headlights. He got out, took the flashlight from his raincoat pocket, and started across the rutted pavement toward the stairs.
Dull moonlight briefly illuminated the macabre setting and then disappeared. The sky was overcast but no rain would come; the clouds were everywhere above, but thin and traveling too fast. The air was dry; everything was still.
Adrian reached the bottom step and switched on his flashlight to look at his watch. It was eleven thirty. Dakakos was not there. Nor his brother. Either or both would have heard the car; neither nor both would be asleep at this hour. That left the old priest. An old man in the country would have gone to bed by now. He called out.
“Hello in there! My name is Adrian Fontine and I’d like to talk to you!”
Nothing.
And not nothing! There was movement. A pattering, a series of scratches accompanied by tiny, indistinguishable screeches. He swung the flashlight to the source. In its beam was caught the blurred, rushing figures of rats—three, four, five—scampering over the ledge of an open window.
He held the flashlight steady. The windows was smashed; he could see jagged edges of glass. He approached it slowly, suddenly afraid.
His feet sank into the earth; his shoes crunched broken glass. He stood in front of the window and raised the flashlight.
He lost his breath in an involuntary gasp as two pairs of animal’s eyes were suddenly caught in the blinding shaft. They darted up, startled yet furious, and a terrible muted screeching was heard as the creatures fled into the darkness of another part of the house. There was a crash. A crazed, frightened animal had collided with an unstable object of china or glass.
Adrian breathed again, then shuddered. His nostrils were filled with an overpowering stench, a putrid, rotting aroma that caused his eyes to water and his throat to swell and choke. He held his breath and he climbed over the window ledge. He pressed his open left hand against his mouth and his nose, filtering the foul stench; he cast the beam of the flashlight over the enormous room.
The shock of it staggered him. The figures of two dead men, one in torn robes strapped to a chair, the other half-naked on the floor, were hideous. The clothes were torn by animal teeth, flesh ripped out by animal jaws, dried blood made moist by animal urine and saliva.
Adrian reeled. Vomit spewed out of his mouth. He lurched to his left; the light caught a doorway and he lunged into it gasping for breath, for air that could be swallowed.
He was in the study of Savarone Fontini-Cristi, a man he never knew, but now hated with all the hatred of which he was capable. The grandfather who had triggered a chain of killing and suspicion that in itself brought more death and greater hatred.
Over what? For what?
“Goddamnnn youuu! …”
He screamed uncontrollably; he gripped the high back of an old chair and threw it crashing to the floor.
Suddenly, in silence and in full knowledge of what he had to do, Adrian stood immobile and aimed the flashlight on the wall behind the desk. To the right, he remembered, beneath a painting of the Madonna.
The frame was there, the glass shattered.
And the painting was gone.
He sank to his knees, trembling. Tears welled his eyes and he sobbed uncontrollably.
“Oh, God,” he whispered, the pain unbearable. “Oh, my brother!”