The Tears of Autumn (29 page)

“It’s all right,” Christopher said. “It’s just an experiment.”

Glavanis nodded; Eycken held out his hand for the flashlight. Christopher gave it to him, and he put it in his pocket and swung athletically into the hole, hanging for a moment by his fingertips before he dropped into the darkness.

“I’m going to close the hatch,” Christopher said. “You’ll see us again in five minutes.”

He turned Glavanis around and showed him that it was impossible to see the villa from where they stood. The house stood in open countryside, and there was no noise and no light.

They went back into the villa. Christopher led Glavanis down the cellar stairs, and then into a long concrete tunnel with strong light bulbs screwed into the ceiling. At the end of the tunnel, Christopher stopped before a rusted steel door.

“Eycken has been in there alone for five minutes, with a flashlight,” Christopher said. “Look at his face, and use your imagination.”

He threw a light switch and pulled open the door. Eycken was standing against the far wall of a bare round concrete room ten feet in diameter. The walls sloped inward like the sides of an inverted funnel. Eycken shielded his eyes from the blinding reflection of high-intensity lights. The walls were painted with white reflective paint.

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?

“We kept on smiling and shrugging,” Glavanis said, “and on the count of ten—Jan and I worked out the drill beforehand —we shot the bodyguards in the face with your .22 birdshot. There was practically no noise.”

Eycken reached into his mouth, extracted a piece of steak gristle, and placed it on the edge of his plate. “I apologize to you,” he said to Christopher. “That’s a very good weapon. They just fell over backward and went out like a light. It draws a hell of a lot of blood. They must have thought they were dead.”

“One shot is enough, usually,” Christopher said.

“We gave them six rounds apiece,” Glavanis said. “They’ll be paying for girls from now on.”

“Don’t worry,” Eycken said, “they’ll live.”

“What about the man?” Christopher asked. He’d given them no name for Pigeon.

“He tried to run,” Glavanis said. “I had to put some bird-shot in his leg, but he’s all right. I treated the wound.”

“He saw your faces?”

Glavanis waved away the question. “For a few seconds. He won’t remember. I’ve never seen a man so astonished. When I gave him the pills I held a gun against his head. He was shaking so badly one of the capsules fell out of his mouth. When I picked it up it was
dry,
Paul—he couldn’t make saliva.”

“Is he blindfolded now?”

“No, but he’s wearing the handcuffs. There was nobody behind us on the autostrada. No one saw the car. The only problem is the police, and it’s a holiday.”

“They won’t call the police,” Christopher said. “You may as well get some sleep. You can start in on him in twelve hours. That ought to be enough.”

Christopher went downstairs and checked the locks on the steel door. Through the peephole he could hear Frankie Pigeon breathing, heavily and quickly, and the shuffle of his bare feet over the stone floor. Christopher had transferred some electronic music from a record to a tape, playing the record over until the tape contained twelve hours of harsh, dissonant noise. He switched on the tape recorder, which was attached to the loudspeakers inside the interrogation room, and turned the volume to the maximum. The music was so loud that it set up vibrations in the steel door. Before he went to bed, he turned on all the alarm systems.

Christopher was drinking coffee the following afternoon when Glavanis and Eycken came downstairs. They had coffee with cognac in it, and Glavanis put two large steaks under the broiler.

Christopher said, “How much money did the man have on him?”

Glavanis shrugged. “None. The bodyguards had about two thousand in dollars, plus maybe two hundred thousand lire.”

“It’s yours.”

“What about our pay?” Eycken asked.

“That, too.”

“What do you want him to spill?” Glavanis asked.

“I’ll ask the final questions when you think he’s ready. Just work on him.”

“We have to ask him something,” Glavanis said. “Otherwise one can’t make the psychological progression—there’s no reason to put on more pressure if he isn’t asked a question he refuses to answer. It’s not logical. There’s no focus of fear.”

“Keep asking about a million dollars. Tell him you know he received it. Just keep hammering on that.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, for now. Talk to him through the loudspeakers—I’ve rigged a microphone. There’s a light for his eyes if you want it.”

“What about the water?”

Christopher hesitated. “If you need it, but be careful. I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”

Eycken sipped his coffee, making a windy noise with his lips. “I have a lot of faith in water,” he said.

Glavanis washed the dishes before they went downstairs. They wore woolen ski masks that concealed their faces and muffled their voices. Eycken’s black beard curled from the bottom of his mask.

They worked for almost three hours. No sound of any kind filtered into the upstairs. Christopher watched a Clark Gable movie, dubbed in Italian, on television. Finally he heard the steel door scrape over the stone floor of the cellar, and Glavanis’s light footsteps on the stairs.

Glavanis came into the sitting room with his mask still on. “He’s ready,” he said. “Jan is with him. He’s a mess, Paul—he can’t control himself.”

Glavanis pinched his nostrils shut through the mask, laughed when this reminded him that he still had it on, and stripped it off his head. He smoothed his short black hair with both hands.

“He’s primitive, that man,” Glavanis said. “At first he kept screaming that he was going to kill us. Jan kept pouring water down his throat through the tube. In the end, he went to pieces in a bad way, he kept on saying ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was very strange—we gave him no pain, just the water.”

“Is he coherent?”

“More or less. He’s afraid Jan will drown him again. The water is very effective.”

“All right, let him rest for a few minutes. Turn off the lights and lock the door. I’ll be right down.”

Christopher went upstairs and put on an Italian suit, with the ribbon of a decoration in the lapel. With a gray wig and mustache and rimless spectacles Christopher looked different enough that Glavanis reached for his pocket when he saw him coming down the stairs. Christopher was carrying a small leather case, the kind used by doctors to transport hypodermics. He had draped a heavy dressing gown over one arm. Before he went into the cellar he removed his wristwatch and put it in his pocket; there were thousands like it, but he did not want Pigeon to remember it.