I woke with a start. Something had touched me. I opened my eyes and saw Barnes seated on the bed, his hand shaking my shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, looking embarrassed. ‘But it’s time.’
I thanked him gruffly and rubbed my eyes. He left, and I went over to the basin and washed my face. Slowly, the nightmare of the previous evening returned. Curiosity killed the bloody cat, I thought: if I hadn’t left the building, I wouldn’t have found myself blackmailed into an assassination job I couldn’t see any way of completing. But I had left the building, and complete it I must. Pyotr had mixed a few metaphors but I didn’t think he was bluffing, and deep down I knew he was right: I could rattle my cage all I wanted, but there was no way out. I’d read plenty of reports about blackmailed agents, but until now had never really appreciated what it meant, I suppose because I’d never believed it might apply to me.
I went through my fitness regimen, then bathed, dressed in a light linen suit, and collected Barnes from his room. Downstairs at the Station, Severn came to the barrier and told the man on duty to let us through.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Sleep well?’
‘Yes, thanks,’ I said.
I said hello to Cornell-Smith and Miller, and a couple of others who I’d glimpsed but not been introduced to at dinner the evening before. Sarah was seated at a desk in the middle of the main area smoking a cigarette, wearing a crisp white blouse and a dark skirt that showed off her long golden legs. She caught me looking at them and smiled, pushing a wisp of hair away from her eyes.
I looked around. She had been right: it had changed since I’d last been here. There was significantly more radio equipment, some fancy Scandinavian-style furniture – her doing? – and even a cafetière, from which Severn was currently pouring himself a cup. But the layout of the place was basically the same, with the heavy wooden doors to the offices. Severn was in my old one, I saw.
‘There’s been a change of plan,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to meet Barchetti.’
The cup clattered in its saucer as he looked up to see if I were serious. ‘But you can’t,’ he said when he realized I was. ‘You’re under diplomatic cover.’
‘So are you.’
He placed the cup on the table and wiped his hands against his trousers. ‘Well, yes. But I’ve been running him…’
‘I’ve run him, too,’ I said. ‘It’s set for the modern art museum, isn’t it? That’s just by the Borghese Gardens, if I remember rightly.’
He started stammering about unorthodox procedures and prior notice, so I pushed a little harder, reminding him that I was Deputy Chief and claiming for good measure that the Home Secretary had instructed me personally to report ‘from the spot’. It took me a few minutes to make him understand that he had no choice in the matter – the fact that I hadn’t either made it easier to do.
‘I also want you to send a telex to London,’ I said. ‘Message to read as follows: “Rivera and di Angelo in custody in Milan. Italians claim Moscow backing group, possible base on Sardinia, but as yet no evidence. Await further instructions. Dark.”’
‘Did Zimotti give you that bit about Sardinia?’
I nodded. ‘But that’s all I got, unfortunately. He disappeared to make a phone call just as we started talking.’
Severn pursed his lips. ‘I see. Shame. Sarah, did you get all that, darling?’
‘I’ll send it at once,’ she said, standing and walking over to the coding machine. I headed for the door.
‘You won’t be needing me, then, sir?’ asked Barnes, and I shook my head. Slowly but surely, he was catching on.
*
I walked down Via Appia Nuova and found a small bar. The street was emptier than I expected for this time of the day, but then I remembered it was the Friday after a holiday. Many people would have fatto il ponte: made the bridge to the weekend. Half the city would be at the beach, or enjoying a picnic in one of the city’s parks.
I felt for my money clip: ten pounds at the bureau de change in Heathrow had got me just shy of fifteen thousand lire. I went inside and bought a couple of bread rolls and a double espresso, then took one of the outside tables. It hadn’t yet gone nine o’clock, but the sun was already blasting down and my eyes started to throb from the glare. I hoped it was a result of chasing snipers about rather than my Nigerian fever returning. I reached into my jacket pocket for a pair of ancient sunglasses I’d brought along, and as I did my hand brushed against the packet of capsules Urquhart had given me in London. I wondered for a moment if I should crack it open and take one, but decided against it.
I put the glasses on and looked around, just in case Severn had decided to be clever and send someone after me. I also scanned the roofs of the buildings opposite, checking for the glint of a telescopic sight. Whatever Pyotr said, the bullet in St Paul’s had been meant for me, and I had no doubt that whoever had ordered it fired meant to try again.
But, at least for the moment, the coast looked clear.
I had my breakfast, savouring the rich flavour of the coffee and vowing never to have another one in a British airport. Then I left a few coins as a tip and walked over to a kiosk across the road, where I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune. I rolled it under my arm and hailed a taxi.
As the driver manoeuvred through the morning traffic, I considered my old friend and informant ‘Bassetto’ Barchetti. Pyotr had been lying through his teeth about him, of course: whatever information he had managed to pick up, it didn’t have anything to do with me. They’d already been planning to kill him before I arrived, and they couldn’t care less whether I was in danger of being exposed; someone or other was intent on killing me, in fact. No, Pyotr had thrown in that bit about the information as bait to grab my attention. It must be something else, something big that they didn’t want the Service to know, and it had got them into an almighty flap and desperate to get him out of the way for good, and sharpish. So sharpish that they had reached for their stash of negatives and tried to force me into doing the job for them.
I had agreed to report to Pyotr in the Borghese Gardens at noon, but I decided I would have to fob him off somehow, tell him it had been impossible to set up at such short notice. It was a plausible enough excuse, I reckoned. Assassination takes planning, and planning takes time. A museum was not a location I’d have picked, for example. I was not an assassin, but I had assassinated before, and I had studied my targets for weeks – in the case of Cheng in Hong Kong, months. If I had been doing the job I would have needed a weapon, preferably one that was completely untraceable. Thallium, for example, as the French had used with Moumié in Geneva, or a poisoned dart, like the Red Hand had done with Léopold in ’57. Neither was readily available in the centre of Rome on two hours’ notice.
The taxi arrived at the museum, and I paid the driver. As I was walking up to the entrance, a better way out flashed into my mind: discover what Barchetti knew, then use it to blackmail Pyotr! It was an unlikely scenario, but a possibility nonetheless, and I skipped up the steps with a little more gaiety at the thought.
*
From the outside, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna looks like most other temples of great art around the world: a neoclassical façade with grand pillars and a general aura of solemnity and depth. Inside, however, the museum is largely taken over by the imaginings of the deranged fringe of the modern art world. I could understand why Barchetti had picked it. If he were being watched by his Arte come Terrore chums, they wouldn’t be in the least surprised that he would visit this place. And it would be much harder to follow him through than a café or park.
I took off my sunglasses and checked for signs of surveillance. The immediate area looked to be clean, but no doubt Severn or one of the Station staff would be here shortly. Severn had arranged to meet Barchetti in the twentieth-century section of the museum, so I paid for a ticket at the front desk and followed the signs until I came to it.
I spotted him right away. He was standing between a sculpture that resembled a segment of a dinosaur fossil and a painting in which arrows from a large black ‘Z’ pointed towards the number 44 and an ‘X’. Dressed in a dark suit and porkpie hat, he was peering at the canvas as though trying to figure out the solution to the equation – he looked more like a bank clerk on his day off than the infiltrator of a terrorist cell.
As I approached him, he turned and gave me a twitchy grin. His forehead was coated in sweat and his eyes were darting about to an unsettling degree. I recognized the signs at once: he was in far too deep.
‘Hello, Edoardo,’ I said, holding up my copy of the Herald Tribune. ‘Long time no see. Charles couldn’t make it today, so they sent me instead.’
‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
No greeting, no memories of old times. All right. We walked through to one of the other halls, and he hovered by a velvet-covered bench before finally seating himself on it.
‘I thought you worked in London now,’ he said.
‘So did I. What is it you’ve discovered?’
He looked around again.
‘They know,’ he whispered. And then, more urgently: ‘They know!’
‘You’re blown?’ I didn’t follow – why agree a meet, then?
He shook his head furiously. ‘About the attack in the dome.’
‘They know we suspect them, you mean? Or you have proof they were involved?’
His head swivelled and he looked up at me, his expression one of undisguised shock. There was a strange moment when our eyes met, and then I realized what he was going to do. He stood up from the bench and began walking away from me, fast but not so fast that he would attract attention. I had no choice: a shout would have ruined everything, and he wouldn’t have turned back anyway. I walked after him.
*
He headed into the next room and then took a right through a curtained archway into another one. As I got closer I realized that it was a dark room – some sort of installation. A few people were straggling by the entrance, either waiting for companions to emerge or contemplating going in themselves. Barchetti had already gone through, so I plunged into the darkness.
An old jazz number was being piped through the space, but it sounded like it was being played through several amplifiers at the wrong speed, giving everything a woozy, underwater feel. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted and I began to get my bearings. There were objects descending from the ceiling, coloured shapes. They looked like pieces from a child’s mobile, sparkling as they turned through the air.
As I moved deeper into the room I started to make out the far end of it: there was a line of strip lighting running across the middle of the wall, half-obscured by some artificial fog spraying up every few seconds from the floor. I suddenly had the impression of being in a shower facility in a concentration camp, and had an urge to run back out into the main gallery. But I had to find Barchetti first. Did his information relate to me after all? Had he somehow realized who I was?
The floor started to shift gently, like a conveyor belt, adding a layer of nausea to the claustrophobic air: the artist was evidently some sort of sadist. A man wearing a hat moved past me, and I stepped forward to grab him. But he’d already gone.
The music was getting louder and louder, throbbing strangely, and I felt completely lost. I came across several treelike sculptures, their thin branches glowing and twisting around me. I reached into my pocket, hastily unwrapped one of Urquhart’s pills and swallowed it whole. I immediately regretted it, as the thing tasted foul, bitter and chalky.
The music intensified, turning atonal: the sound of clocks ticking, crashing cymbals and a bass cello seemingly scraped at random. And then I saw him, just a foot in front of me, his face clearly lit for a moment by one of the fluorescent branches: Barchetti. I lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm.
‘Vattene, idiota! Sciò!’ he snarled, lashing out at me with his arms. There was a flash of light and I realized he had a knife. I leapt away and sensed the blade pierce the cloth of my jacket, but he’d missed me and I leaned forward again, kicking out towards his legs. I made contact with bone and he fell to the ground, cursing. The knife fell from his hands and I watched it skitter across the floor, the blade catching the light from the mobiles hanging from the ceiling. I immediately knelt down and grabbed it. He managed to get a foot under me and aimed it at my solar plexus and I was pushed back against a wall, winded.
But I had the knife.
There was more movement around us now: people were starting to become restless, perhaps wondering what the disturbance was. Through the speakers, a gospel choir had begun competing with the underwater whale music, and it was becoming louder by the moment. Barchetti leapt on top of me and started trying to scratch at my eyes and throat. My instinct was to use the knife on him, but I needed to get him away from here, alive. I tried to fend him away, but he was surprisingly heavy for such a small man. He was now sitting on my upper chest, restricting my breathing. The music was almost deafening, and I willed my mind to block it out. I reached out and managed to grab hold of Barchetti’s shirt, and then pulled him towards me with all the force I could muster. It shifted him forward a little, but it wasn’t enough and I could feel my lungs reaching their limit, so in desperation I threw my other arm up to his throat and squeezed it. He let out a scream and tried to bite me, but my chest was burning up and he didn’t seem to be aware that I needed him to get off me, until there was no choice and I squeezed and squeezed and then his head jerked forward and his muscles slackened and I could roll him off me and, finally, breathe. I felt for his carotid and checked his pulse: nothing. The music took another unexpected turn, the woozy whale sounds switching to a jumpy jive, and I stood and reeled towards a sliver of light, my throat dry and my chest thumping and my hands wet.
I pushed the curtain aside and came into the adjoining room. I had to stop for a moment to gather myself, and someone came out right behind me, knocking my shoulder.
‘Esilarante, no?’
I nodded dumbly, and then moved away, heading towards the exit.