The girl shrieked and slipped on the rock; her brother whipped around and grabbed her hand, preventing the fall. The plunge was no more than twenty feet, and the soldier wondered whether it might be better to break the grip between them and let her fall. If the girl snapped an ankle or a leg, she wouldn’t go anywhere; she certainly could not make it down through the trails to the flat ground and the road below. It was twelve miles behind them now. They had covered the initial terrain during the night.
He could bypass the initial trails of that journey into the mountains fifty years ago. If others began the search, they wouldn’t know that; he did. He could read maps the way most men read simple books. From symbols, colors, and numbers, he could visualize terrain with the accuracy of a camera. There was no one better in the army. He was a master of everything real, from men to machines to maps.
The detailed map used by climbers in the Champoluc district showed the railroad from Zermatt angling west around the curve of the mountains. It straightened out for approximately five miles before the station at Champoluc. The areas directly east of the final flat stretches of track were heavily traversed throughout the year. These were the first trails described in Goldoni’s journal. No one concealing anything of value would consider them.
Yet farther north, at the start of the railroad’s western curve, were the old clearings that led to the numerous trails specifically listed in the pages he had ripped out of the Goldoni ledger for July 14 and 15 of 1920. Any of these might be the one. Once he saw them in daylight, and studied the possibilities, he could determine which of the trails he would trace.
Those selections would be based on fact. Fact one: The size and weight of the vault mandated vehicle or animal transportation. Fact two: The train from Salonika made its journey in the month of December—a time of year when the weather was bitter cold and the mountain passes clogged with snow. Fact three: The spring and summer thaws, with their rushing waters and erosion of earth, would call for a recess in the high ground to hide the vault, enveloped by rock for protection. Fact four: That recess would be away from frequently traveled areas, high above an established route, but with an offshoot trail that could be negotiated by an animal or a vehicle. Fact five: That trail had to emanate from a section of the track where a train could pull to a stop, the ground level on both sides flat and straight. Fact six: The specific clearing, in current use or abandoned, would lead into the crisscrossing trails recorded in the Goldoni ledger. By retracing each one to the tracks and picturing the feasibility of traveling over it—in the cold and snow, by animal or vehicle—the number of trails would be further reduced until there was one that led to the hiding place.
He had time. Days, if he needed them. He had supplies for a week strapped to his back. The stump, Goldoni, the woman, Capomonti, and Lefrac and his family were too frightened to make a move. He had covered himself brilliantly. The unseen was always more effective than the observable in combat. He had told the terrified Swiss that he had associates in Champoluc. They would be watching; they would get word to him in the mountains should a Goldoni or a Capomonti or a Lefrac reach the police. Communications were no problem for soldiers. And the result of their reaching him would be the execution of his hostages.
He had fantasized the presence of Eye Corps. Eye Corps the way it had been—efficient, strong, quick to maneuver.
He would build a new Corps one day, stronger and more efficient, without weakness. He would find the vault from Salonika, carry the documents out of the mountains, summon the holy men and watch their faces as he described the imminent, global collapse of their institutions.
… The contents of that vault are as staggering to the civilized world as any in history.…
That was comforting. It could not be in better hands.
They were on a flat stretch now, the first elevation to the west no more than a mile away. The girl fell to her knees, sobbing. Her brother looked at him, his eyes conveying hatred, fear, supplication. Andrew would kill them both, but not for a while. One disposed of hostages when they no longer served a purpose.
Only fools killed indiscriminately. Death was an instrument, a means to be used in reaching an objective or completing an assignment, and that was all it was.
Adrian drove the Fiat off the road into the fields. The rocks ripped the undercarriage. He could drive no farther; he had reached the first of several step hills that led to the first plateau described on the Leinkraus diagram. He was eight and a half miles north of Champoluc. The grave was precisely five miles beyond the first of the plateaus that were the landmarks of the journey to the burial ground.
He got out of the car and walked across the field of tall grass. He looked up. The hill in front of him sprang suddenly out of the ground, an impromptu bulge of nature, more rock than greenery, with no discernible path on which to scale it. He knelt down and retied the laces on his rubber-soled shoes as tightly as he could. The weight of the pistol was heavy in his raincoat pocket.
For a moment he closed his eyes. He could not think. O God! Keep me from thinking!
He was a mover now. He got to his feet and started to climb.
The first two railroad clearings proved negative. There was no way animal or vehicle could traverse the routes from the Zermatt railway to the eastern slopes. Two more clearings remained. The names on the old Champoluc map were Hunter’s Folly and Sparrow’s Rook; no mention of hawk. Still, it had to be one of them!
Andrew looked at his hostages. Brother and sister sat together on the ground, talking in quiet, frightened whispers, their eyes darting up at him. The hatred was gone now, only fear and supplication remained. There was something ugly about them, thought the soldier. And then he realized what it was. Across the world in the jungles of Southeast Asia, people their age fought battles, weapons strapped to their backs over uniforms that looked like pajamas. They were his enemy over there, but he respected that enemy.
He had no respect for these children. There was no strength in their faces. Only fear, and fear was repulsive to the major from Eye Corps.
“Get up!” He could not help himself; he shouted angrily at the sight of these pampered, weak brats with no dignity in their faces.
Christ, he despised the spineless!
They would not be missed.
Adrian looked back across the ridge to the plateau in the distance, thankful that old Goldoni had given him gloves. Even without the cold, his bare hands and fingers would have been a bleeding mass of flesh. It wasn’t that the climb was difficult; a man used to minimum exercise in the mountains would find it simple. But he had never been in the mountains except on skis, where tows and trams did the uphill work. He was using muscles rarely employed and had little confidence in his sense of balance.
The last several hundred yards had been the most difficult. The trail in the Leinkraus diagram was landmarked: a cluster of gray rock at the base of a crystalline schistose embankment that all climbers knew should be avoided, for it cracked easily. The crystalline rock evolved into a cliff that rose about a hundred feet from the schist, its edge sharply defined. To the left of the crystalline sheet were abrupt, dense Alpine woods that grew vertically out of the slope, a sudden, thick forest surrounded by rock. The Leinkraus trail was marked off at ten paces from the embankment. It led to the top of the wooded slope whose ridge was the second plateau: the end of the second leg of the journey.
The trail was nowhere to be found. It had disappeared; years of disuse and overgrowth had concealed it. Yet the ridge could be seen clearly above the trees. That he could see it was an indication of the angle of ascent.
He had walked into the dense Alpine underbrush and made his way, yard by yard, up the steep incline, through nettled bush and the skin-piercing needles of the pines.
He sat on the ridge, breathing heavily, his shoulders aching from the constant tension. He estimated the distance from the first plateau to be at least three miles. It had taken nearly three hours. A mile an hour, over rocks and down miniature valleys, and across cold streams, and up endless hills. Just three miles. If that were so, he had two miles to go, perhaps less. He looked up. The overcast had lasted the entire morning. It would continue on throughout the day. The sky above was like the North Shore sky before a heavy squall.
They used to sail in squalls together. Laughing as they bested the weather, sure of their abilities in the water, pitting themselves against the rain and the wind of the Sound.
No, he would not think of that. He got to his feet and looked at his tracing of the Leinkraus diagram, copied from the inside binding of a family Torah.
The diagram was clear but the rising terrain beyond him wasn’t. He saw the objective—due northeast, the third plateau, isolated above a sea of Alpine spruce. But the ridge he was on swept to the right, due east, leading into the base of yet another mountain of boulders, away from any direct line to the pleateau in the distance. He walked around the ledge past the border of the dark, sloping woods he had climbed through. The drop below was sheer and the rocks beneath rose like a bubbling river of stone. The trail as marked in the diagram went from forest to ledge to forest; there was no mention of intersecting rock.
Geological changes had taken place in the intervening years since any member of the Leinkraus family had journeyed to the burial ground. A sudden shift of nature—a quake or an avalanche—had eliminated the trail.
Still, he could see the plateau. What separated him from it seemed impenetrable, but once through it—and over it—he could make out a winding trail on the higher ground that led to the plateau. It was doubtful that that had been altered. He slid down the embankment onto the river of stone, and awkwardly, trying to keep his feet from slipping into a hundred miniature crevices, climbed toward the forest of spruce.
The third clearing was it! Sciocchezza di Cacciatori! Hunter’s Folly! Long abandoned but once perfect for removing the vault. The trail from the mountains to the Zermatt railway was passable, and the area around the tracks was flat and accessible. At first Andrew had not been sure; in spite of the level ground on either side of the tracks, the stretch was short, blocked by a curve. Then he remembered: his father had said that the train from Salonika had been a short freight. Four cars and an engine.
Five railway units could easily pull beyond the curve and come to a stop in a straight line. Whatever car the vault had been in could have been unloaded without difficulty.
But what now convinced him he was near his goal was an unexpected discovery. West of the tracks were the unmistakable signs of an abandoned road. The cut through the woods was defined, the trees in the cut shorter than those surrounding them, the brush closer to the ground. It was no longer a road—not even a path—but its former existence was undeniable.
“Lefrac!” he yelled at the eighteen-year-old. “What’s down there?” He pointed northwest, where the cut in the forest sloped.
“A village. About five, six miles away.”
“It’s not on the railroad line?”
“No, signore. It’s in farm country, below the mountains.”
“What roads lead into it?”
“The main road from Zürich and—”
“All right.” He stopped the boy for two reasons. He had heard what he wanted to hear, and twenty feet away the girl had gotten to her feet and was edging toward the woods on the eastern side of the tracks.
Fontine took out his pistol and fired two shots. The explosions thundered throughout the woods; the bullets detonated the ground on either side of the child. She screamed, terrified. Her brother lunged at him in a frenzy of tears; he sidestepped and smashed the barrel of his pistol on the side of the boy’s head.
Lefrac’s son fell to the ground, sobs of frustration and anger filling the silence of the abandoned railroad clearing.
“You’re better than I thought you were,” said the soldier coldly, raising his eyes, turning to the girl. “Help him. He’s not hurt. We’re heading back.”
Give the captured hope, reflected the soldier. The younger and more inexperienced they were, the more hope they should be given. It reduced the fear which was, in itself, detrimental to rapid travel. Fear was an instrument, too. Like death. It was to be used methodically.
He retraced the trail from the Zermatt tracks for a second time. He was certain now. There was nothing that would prevent an animal or a vehicle from negotiating it. The ground was clear and mostly hard. And more important, the terrain rose directly toward the eastern slopes, into the specific trails recorded in the faded pages of the ledger. Light snow and layers of frost covered the earth. With every yard the soldier in him told him he was nearing the enemy zone. For that was what it was.
They reached the first intersecting trail described by the Goldoni guide on the morning of July 14, 1920. To the right, the trail angled downward into some kind of forest, a thick wall of dark green, laced with a roof of white. It seemed impenetrable.
It was a possible hiding place. That mountain forest would not be tempting to the casual climber, and without interest for the experienced. On the other hand, it was forest—wood and earth, not rock—and because it was not rock he could not accept it. The vault would be protected by rock.
To the left, the trail continued up, veering obliquely into the side of a small mountain above them. The trail itself was wide, on solid rock, and bordered by foliage. Boulders rose sharply to the right, forming an abrupt sheer of heavy stone. An animal or a vehicle still had space to walk or roll; the direct line from the Zermatt tracks was unbroken.
“Move it!” he shouted, gesturing to the left. The Lefrac children looked at each other. To the right was the way to Champoluc—the way back. The girl grabbed her brother; Fontine stepped forward, broke the grip, and propelled the girl forward.
“Signore!” The boy shouted and stepped between them, his arms raised in front of him, his young palms flat—a very penetrable shield. “Don’t do that,” he stammered, his voice low, cracking with young fear, his own anger challenging himself.
“Let’s go,” said the soldier. He had no time to waste on children.
“You hear me, signore!”
“I heard you. Now, move.”
At the western flank of the small mountain the width of the rising trail abruptly narrowed. It entered an enormous, natural archway cut out of the boulders and led to the face of a hill of sheer rock. The geologically formed archway was not only the logical extension of the trail, but the mountain of rock beyond must have been irresistible to novice climbers. It could be scaled without great effort, but was sufficiently awesome by its breadth and height to be a good start for the higher regions. Perfect for an enthusiastic seventeen year old, under the watchful eye of a guide and a father.
But the width under the arch was narrow, the rock floor too smooth, especially when heavier snows fell. An animal—a mule or a horse—might cross under but there was considerable danger that hooves would slip.
No vehicle could possibly get through.
Andrew turned and studied the approach they had just made. There were no other trails, but about thirty yards back on the left the ground was flat and filled with Alpine brush. It extended to a short wall of rock that rose up to the ridge of the mountain. That wall, that short cliff, was no more than twenty feet high, almost hidden by shrubs and small, gnarled trees growing out of the rock. But the ground beneath that cliff, beneath that ridge, was flat. Natural obstructions were everywhere else, but not there, not in that particular spot.
“Walk over there,” he ordered the young Lefracs, both to keep them in sight and to provide perspective. “Go into that flat area between the rocks! Spread the bushes and walk in! As far as you can!”
He stepped back off the trail and studied the ridge above. It, too, was flat, or at least appeared so. And it was something else, something that might not be noticed except, perhaps, from where he stood. It was … defined. The edge, though jagged, formed a nearly perfect semicircle. If that circle continued, the ridge itself was like a small, out-of-the-way platform on a small, unimportant mountain, but still high above the lower Alpine hills.
He judged the height of Lefrac’s son as five-ten or -eleven. “Raise your hands!” he shouted.
Arms extended, the boy’s hands were just below the midpoint of the short cliff.
Suppose the method of transport was not an animal but a vehicle. A heavy-wheeled piece of machinery, the carriage a plow, or a tractor. It was consistent; there was no part of the route from the Zermatt tracks or up the Goldoni trail that such a piece of equipment could not traverse. And plows and tractors had winch machinery.…
“Signore! Signore!” It was the girl; her shouts conveyed a strange exaltation, a cross between hope and desperation. “If this is what you look for, let us go!”
Andrew raced back into the trail and toward the Lefracs. He sped into the tangled shrubbery to the face of the rock.
“Down there!” The girl shouted again.
On the ground in the light snow, barely seen through the underbrush, was an old ladder. The wood was rotted, the steps swollen out of their sockets in half a dozen places. But otherwise it was intact. It was not now usable, but neither had it been abused by man. It had lain in that shrubbery for years, perhaps decades, untouched except by nature and time.
Fontine knelt down and touched it, pried it off the ground, watched it crumble as he lifted it. He had found a human tool where none should be; he knew that not fifteen feet above him …
Above him! He whipped his head up and saw the blurred object crashing down. The impact came; his head exploded in a flashing of pain, followed by an instant of numbness, a hundred hammers pounding. He fell forward, struggling to shake the effects of the blow and find light again.
He heard the shouts.
“Fuggi! Presto! In la traccia!” The boy.
“Non senza voi! Tu fuggi anche!” The girl.
Lefrac’s son had found a large rock on the ground. And in his hatred he had lost his fear; holding the primitive weapon in his hand, he had crashed it down on the soldier’s head.
The light was returning. Fontine started to get up and, again, he saw the unfocused hand descending, the rock slashing diagonally down.
“You little fuck! You fuck!”
Lefrac’s son released the rock, hurling it into the soldier’s body—anywhere, a final assault—and ran out of the snow-covered shrubbery onto the trail after his sister.
Andrew recognized the pitch of his own fury. He had felt it perhaps a dozen times in his life, and it had always been in the molten heat of combat when an enemy held an advantage he could not control.
He crawled out of the brush to the edge of the trail and looked below. Beneath him on the winding path were brother and sister, running as best they could over the slippery trail.
He reached under his jacket to the holster strapped to his chest. The Beretta was in his pocket. But a Beretta would be inadequate; it was not that accurate. He pulled out the .357-caliber Magnum he had bought at the Leinkraus store in Champoluc. His hostages were about forty yards away. The boy took the girl’s hand; they were close together, the figures overlapping.
Andrew squeezed the trigger eight times in succession. Both bodies fell, writhing on the rocks. He could hear the screams. In seconds the screaming subsided into moans, the writhing became twists and lurches at nothing. They would die, but not for a while. They would go no farther.
The soldier crawled back through the shrubs into the flat cul de sac and removed the pack from his back, slipping the straps off slowly, moving his bleeding head as little as possible. He opened the pack and slipped out the canvas first-aid kit. He had to patch the broken skin and stop the bleeding as best he could. And move. For Christ’s sake, move!
He had no hostages now. He could tell himself it made no difference, but he knew better. Hostages were a way out. If he came out of the mountains alone, they’d be watching. Jesus, they’d be watching for him—he was a dead man. They’d take the vault and kill him.
There was another way. The Lefrac boy had said it!
The abandoned road west of the abandoned clearing called Hunter’s Folly! Past the tracks, down to a village whose main road led to Zürich.
But he was not going to that village, to that road that led to Zürich, until the contents of the vault were his. And every instinct he possessed told him he’d found it.
Fifteen feet above.
He unwound the ropes clamped to the outside of the pack and spread the grappling hook from its axis; the prongs locked into position. He stood up. His temple throbbed and the wounds stung where he’d applied the antiseptic, but the bleeding had stopped. He was focusing clearly again.
He stepped back and lobbed the grappling hook up to the ledge. It caught. He yanked on the rope.
The rock splintered; fragments plummeted down, followed by larger sections of limestone. He sprang to the side to avoid the falling hook; it embedded itself through the thin layers of snow into the ground.
He swore and once more heaved the hook skyward, arcing it over the ledge, far into the flat surface above. He tugged in swift, short movements; the hook caught. He pulled harder; it held.
The line was ready; he could climb. He reached down, grabbed the straps of his pack and slipped his arms through, not bothering to secure the front clamps. He yanked on the rope a last time; he was satisfied. He jumped as high as he could, thrusting his legs out against the stone, allowing himself to swing back into the rock as he manipulated his hands—one over the other—in rapid ascent. He swung his left leg over the jagged ledge, and pushed his right hand against the stone beneath, forcing his body into a lateral roll that propelled him onto the surface. He started to get up, his eyes traveling to the source of the grappling hook’s anchor.
But he remained kneeling in shock as he stared at the strange sight ten feet away, in the center of the plateau. Embedded in the stone was an old, rusted metal star: a Star of David.
The grappling hook enveloped it, the prongs moored around the iron.
He was looking at a grave.
He heard the echoes throughout the mountains like repeated, sharp cracks of thunder, one right after another. As if bolts of lightning had sliced through the roof of the forest, splitting the wood of a hundred trees around him. But they signified neither lightning nor thunder; they were gunshots.
In spite of the cold, perspiration stream down Adrian’s face, and despite the darkness of the forest, his eyes were filled with unwanted images. His brother had killed again. The major from Eye Corps was efficiently going about his business of death. The screams that followed the shots were faint, muted by the forest barrier, but unmistakable.
Why? For God’s sake, why?!
He could not think. Not about things like that. Not now. He had to think only on one level—the level of motion. He had made a half-dozen attempts to climb out of the dark labyrinth, each time allowing himself ten minutes to see the light of the forest’s edge. Twice he had allowed himself extra time because his eyes played tricks, and in each case there was only further darkness, no end in sight.
He was rapidly going out of his mind. He was caught in a maze; thick shafts of bark and unending, prickling branches and cracked limbs creased his face and his legs. How many times had he gone in circles? He could not tell. Everything began to look like everything else. He’d seen that tree! That particular cluster of branches had been his wall five minutes ago! His flashlight was no help. Its illuminations imitated themselves; he could not tell one from another. He was lost in the middle of an impenetrable slope of Alpine woods. Nature had altered the trail in the decades since the Leinkraus mourners made their final pilgrimage. The seepage of melting summer snows had spread, inundating the once-negotiable forest, providing a bed of moist earth receptive to unlimited growth.
But knowing this was as useless as his flashlight’s distortions. The initial reports of gunfire exploded from over there. In that direction. He had very little to lose except his breath and what remained of his sanity. He began to run, his head filled with the echoes of the gunfire he had heard seconds ago.
The faster he ran the straighter seemed his course. He slashed a path with his arms, bending, breaking, cracking everything that got in his way.
And he saw the light. He fell to his knees, out of breath, no more than thirty feet from the forest’s edge. Gray stone, covered with patches of snow, rose beyond the dense trees and surged out of sight above the highest limbs. He had reached the base of the third plateau.
And so had his brother. The killer from Eye Corps had done what Goldoni believed he could not do: He had taken long-forgotten descriptions written down a half century ago and refined them, made them applicable to the present search. There was a time when brother would have taken pride in brother; that time had passed. There remained only the necessity of stopping him.
Adrian had tried not to think about it, wondering if he’d be capable of accepting it when the moment came. The moment of anguish unlike anything in his imagination. He was accepting it now. Calmly, strangely unmoved, though filled with a cold sadness. For it was the only eminently logical, undeniable response to the horror and the chaos.
He would kill his brother. Or his brother would kill him.
He got to his feet, walked slowly out of the forest and found the path of rock diagramed on the Leinkraus map. It wound up the mountain, a series of wide curves to lessen the angle of ascent, veering always clockwise until it reached the top. Or almost the top, for at the base of the plateau was a sheet of rock that Paul Leinkraus recalled was quite high. He had made the journey only twice—in the first and second years of the war—and was very young. The sheet of rock might not be as high as he remembered it to be, for the memory was in the context of a boy’s perspective. But they had used a ladder, he recalled that clearly.
A solemn service for the dead and a young boy’s sense of life were incompatible, Leinkraus had admitted. There was another way to the plateau, hardly practical for old men, but explored by a youngster lacking the proper respect for religious observance. It was at the very end of the seemingly vanished path, well past an enormous natural arch that was the continuation of the mountain trail. It consisted of a series of jagged rocks that followed the line of the narrowing summit, and necessitated sure feet and a willingness to take chances. His father and older brother had scolded him severely for using it. The drop was dangerous; probably not fatal, but sufficiently deep to break an arm or a leg.
If an arm or a leg were broken now, thought Adrian, the danger was fatal. An immobilized man was an easy target.
He started up the winding path, between the intermittent rocks, crouching to conceal his body below their height. The plateau was three hundred to four hundred feet above the path, the distance of a football field. A light snow began to fall, settling itself delicately on the thin layer of white that already covered much of the rock. His feet slipped continuously; he balanced himself by grabbing shrubs and projections of jagged rock.
He reached the midpoint of the climb and pressed his back into a concave flute of stone to catch his breath unseen. He could hear sounds above him, metal against metal, or rock against rock. He lunged out of the recess and ran as fast as he could, up and around the next four bends of the trail, falling once to let untrapped, unswallowed air fill his lungs, to give his aching legs a chance to rest.
He pulled the Leinkraus diagram from his pocket and checked off the curves on the map; he had covered eight, he thought. Whatever, it wasn’t any farther than a hundred feet to the arch, symbolized by an inverted U on the diagram. He raised his head, his face bitter cold from the temporary pillow of frost and snow. There was a straight stretch of trail, bordered on both sides by gray, gnarled shrubbery. According to the map, there were two more hairpin curves above that stretch and then the arch of rock. He jammed the diagram into his pocket, feeling the steel of his gun as he did so. He pulled his legs up under him into a crouch and raced on.
He saw the girl first. She was lying off the trail in the shrubs, her eyes wide, staring at the overcast sky, her legs stretched rigidly in front of her. There were two bullet holes above each knee, the blood matted about the cloth. A third puncture could be seen above her right breast, below her collar bone; blood had formed a solid stream down her white Alpine jacket.
She was alive, but in such a degree of shock that she did not blink her eyes against the particles of falling snow. Her lips were moving, trembling, melted snow forming rivulets of water at the edges. Adrian bent over her.
At the sight of his face, her eyes blinked into focus. She raised her head in convulsion, coughing the start of a scream. Gently, he pressed his gloved hand over the mouth, supporting her neck with his other hand.
“I’m not him,” he whispered.
The brush above them moved. Adrian whipped up, releasing the girl as carefully as he could, and sprang back. A hand edged its way over the snow—what was left of a hand. It was bloodstained flesh, the glove blown off, the fingers shattered. Fontine crept over the girl and up into the tangled, gnarled shrubbery, ripping the intertwined branches apart. The boy lay on his stomach in a bed of wild mountain grass. A straight line of four bullet wounds angled diagonally along his back, across his spine.
Adrian rolled the youth carefully over on his side, cradling his head. Once again he gently pressed a hand over a mouth in shock. The boy’s eyes locked with his and within seconds Adrian’s meaning was clear: He was not the killer. That the boy could speak at all was extraordinary. His whisper was nearly covered by the growing wind, but Fontine heard him.
“Mia sorella.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sister?”
“She’s hurt. So are you. I’ll do everything I can.”
“Pacco. The pack. He wears a pack. Medicina.”
“Don’t talk. Save your strength. A pack?”
“Si!”
… An Alpine pack is not a mere collection of straps and leather casing. It is a work of master craftsmanship.… His father had said that.
The boy would not stop. He knew he was dying. “A way out. The Zermatt railroad. A village. Not far, signore. North, not far. We were going to run.”
“Shhh. Don’t say any more. I’m going to put you next to your sister. Keep as warm as you can.”
He half carried, half dragged the boy over the grass to the girl. They were children; his brother murdered children. He removed his raincoat and jacket, tearing the lining of the jacket in order to tie the strips around the girl’s wounds. There wasn’t much he could do about the boy’s, so he avoided his eyes. He covered them both; they held each other.
He put the heavy pistol in his belt beneath the heavy black sweater and crawled out of the sanctuary of the bushes. He raced up the path to the arch, his eyes stinging but his breath steady, the pain in his legs gone.
It was one against one now. The way it had to be.