The Big Stiffs Page 8

  The shadowy, still-vivid tableau of the Forum receded behind us. A stone, curving pathway, clean and chiseled, beyond the Arch of Titus, was the last lap of the dark safari through the ancient grounds. I could hear Kate Arizona lumbering behind me. Santini was murmuring something under his breath. We hadn't needed his flashlight yet. There was more than enough light to see by. Moonlight and man-made light. The Colosseum was now only a street away. Just across the shadowy boulevard which, in spite of the late hour, was alive with moving cars and vehicles. We could see an ice cream truck parked before the huge amphitheater and two Fiat cabs with their lights on, waiting to pick up some late Colosseum tourists.

  "Hold up, Noon," Kate Arizona breathed in my ear. "We got to do this right." I held up because I knew what she meant. Santini did too. We couldn't march toward the Colosseum with me at gunpoint. There are limits to what the tourist traffic will bear. And excuse.

  Kate Arizona had attired herself in the flowing trenchcoat with the tightly belted, hard-plastic case with handles. In this, she now concealed the Schmeisser, thanks to the collapsible stock which literally halves its length. Santini kept me covered with my own .45 which he seemed to admire. I knew he had a Beretta of his own because it was tucked in the high waistband of his suit trousers. The snappy borsalino adorning his skull was roguishly curved in the Barrymore slouch. It made him a mixed metaphor of time and place, somehow. Such a charming fellow had no business with the likes of Kate Arizona. A lady with a Schmeisser, sleeping pills and murder in her black heart.

  "Convenient," I said, indicating the black case and the now boxed machinegun. "Must be your working kit. Like the Avon Lady. You always carry your Mickey Finns with you, too? For emergencies?"

  She straightened erect, clasping the case close to her side and sneered at me in the half-light. She looked like a witch, now.

  "You bet your ass, cowboy. You'd be surprised how many guys I have to shake off that want to get into my pants. Knockout drops can be easier than wrestling with them though I can handle anybody I want to. Besides, they come in handy---like with you, Noon. Beats pulling a gun on you and kidnapping you in front of a crowd of Dagos at that sidewalk café, don't it?"

  Before Santini could protest, I did it for him. Mockingly.

  "Sure, Kate. You know your stuff. But if there were fifty people at the Café De Paris, the odds are pretty good that maybe only ten of them were Italian. That's a tourist trap, lady."

  Kate Arizona's sneer matured into another snarl.

  "Knock it off," she rumbled. "No sermons, remember? Now just concentrate on what I tell you. We're going to cross that street, go into the cheesebox. All nice and cozy. You in front. Me and the Captain right behind you. He's got your smokewagon and I'm heeled, too. So you do what you're supposed to do. And no funny business. And cowboy, you'd better get those papers for me. I told you what will happen to you if you don't."

  "You told me," I admitted. "So let's go."

  "Listen to her, Signor." Santini said, almost pleadingly. "It is foolish to play games, now. You have come this far. Do as we wish. I will not let her harm you. I give you my word on that."

  "Sure," Kate Arizona agreed with surprising quickness. "Santini called the shot. You play ball with Kate and Kate will treat you like a king. Who knows? I may even take you back to the hotel with me for a few laughs. Know what I mean? You look kinda interesting. In a way."

  "Yeah. I know what you mean," I said. "And it chokes me up."

  But I didn't believe her for a second. She was Hitler and I was Chamberlain as far as I was concerned. And it was Munich and '38 all over again. Who could trust a dame who chopped people down with machine guns? And didn't even give it a second thought. She was pure bitch.

  They didn't all come from Buchenwald, either.

  We crossed the wide avenue just where it racetracks around the huge structure with the Arch of Constantine to our right. A spotty stream of fast-moving vehicles made our progress slow and careful. The hill behind us showing the lofty approach to the Forum was devoid of all tourists or innocent strollers. My mind was busy, accepting and rejecting a dozen different ideas about what to do when we got inside the ancient edifice. Kate Arizona was literally at my elbow, urging me along with a thrust of her big hand. The other one was buried in the side sold of her trenchcoat, probably wrapped around a handgun of some kind. Captain Santini was close enough to her for me to get a waft of some manly after-shave lotion or perfume he might be using. There was no way I could run. Open ground yawned around us in all directions. The Via Del Corso which led directly back into the heart of Rome was ablaze with light. I would have been cut down before I got ten feet no matter how fast I could run or dodge. Instant Victim. Like suicide.

  It was the Colosseum or nothing, for making my play. If any.

  As warm as the night was, a fine sheen of fear dew clung to the flesh of my neck where it met the collar of my shirt. Hotly.

  Fiats, motorcycles and little assorted foreign cars careened around the bend, in from the Del Corso as we walked the symmetrical; white lines which Rome provides for Pedone or Pedestrians to you.

  Up close, only yards away now, the Colosseum climbed like a skyscraper. Huge, towering, enormous. The dome-like niches, only feet apart, were just so many dark doorways leading into the Never-Never Land of the Past. The storied long ago and far away. But it was the Present that counted now. My Present and my Future if I wanted to have one. Documents or no documents. Still, the shadow of the Colosseum filled what was left of that Present. A Colossus.

  We gained the cobbled terrain outside the structure. One of the gaping side entrances opened before us, just like Section Thirty Three at the old Polo Grounds. Designed like the perfect baseball park. Kate Arizona was rigid behind me. Hawk-like, watching, sniffing the air suspiciously like a bird dog. Straggling tourists strolled by, lolling, idling, killing their Roma night with a leisurely, lazy visit to the oldest building they might ever know. There was a murmur of comment audible, words filtering indistinguishably, blending with the motley noises of moving vehicles, chattering Italian cab drivers and then the distant drone of a jet thundering in the sky. I had to wonder what kind of an impression the three of us must have made. Myself, Kate Arizona and Captain Michele Santini. Some trio.

  A giant of a female in a trenchcoat, with long dark hair and a square, black case. A picture postcard Italian male, dapper and roguish and one square, solid Americano turista. Pictures no artist could ever paint, probably, except maybe Michelangelo. In his cups.

  "Which way, Noon?" Kate Arizona hissed at my shoulder. "This is your party, remember." Something very hard probed into my spine.

  "Any entrance will do. This one here. I have to get inside and see the actual arena before I could decipher Flood's instructions. Okay by you, Kate?" I didn't turn around to look at her.

  "Come," Santini said in a low tone. "I know this place well. We will be inside in a moment. There's a fine view from this point---"

  Captain Michele Santini made a classic mistake. One that nobody who is engaged in the business of manhunting should ever make.

  He should have known better. Veteran copper that he was.

  Perhaps it was just his eagerness or his excitement or his anxiety to keep Kate Arizona pacified or just possibly it may have been he under-estimated me. Just that once. A man who had pegged me pretty accurately up until that moment. He simply didn't know how desperate I was because he didn't know that I had lied about Flood telling me anything. Flood who couldn't have told anybody anything.

  Whatever the true reason, Santini suddenly stepped around Kate Arizona, took too many strides forward and for a fraction of a second, which is long enough in the manhunting trade, had placed his broad, well-built body between myself and the tall, trenchcoated lady who was also guilty of relaxing her own guard for that self-same fraction of a second. One hand still held the square black case, the other was still jammed in one of her pockets, closed around a gun of some kind. Santini had hidden the .45 in hi
s own clothing somewhere. I've never needed more than a break like that. Not ever.

  The trick is moving fast enough when the break comes.

  Being ready. Primed for action. Quick to capitalize.

  I capitalized on it as best I knew how.

  There was no time for apologies or second thoughts. Or manners.

  I kicked Captain Michele Santini where it had to do the most good. Right in the erogenous zone. It was a mean kick, a terrible blow to deal out but there was nothing to feel sorry about or forgive, in fact. I had to have him out of the way while I dealt with Kate Arizona. I couldn't have risked a right cross to his jaw that might not have put him out of the picture. Now, he wasn't a consideration, anymore. When a man is kicked where I kicked him, all that man is interested in is sitting down and holding himself together because it hurts so damn bad and he thinks he's coming apart. Any man born of woman.

  Kate Arizona had had the gun on me. She was the important one.

  As Santini howled in agony, splitting the night with an explosive Roman oath unintelligibly strangled with hurt, Kate Arizona fell back, her right hand flying up from that trenchcoat pocket. A long-nosed, old-fashioned frontier model six-shooter sprang into view. Her hawkish face with its deep-hued Indian coloring went deathly taut. It saw that, too. Faster than the expression reached her eyes.

  Cornball though it be---

  Death was written in each of her blazing eyes. My Death. Twice over. And dreams of documents and green folding money didn't mean a thing anymore. I'd double-crossed her, I'd been funning and that was it, Buster. I was a dead man. The hawk face was a mask of fury.

  The gun jumped upward, the trigger depressed and thunder and lightning rocketed around the narrow confines of that side entrance to the Colosseum. The old shooting iron blasting at such close range made a shambles of the sound effects in the ancient amphitheater. The din might have been a thousand oil drums dropping down a flight of stone steps. All the way down to the bottom. The Colosseum boomed.

  The awesome sound reached me, filling my ears with clanging violence, but the slugs didn't.

  I'd turned and dived headlong, away from the outdoor glow of street lamps, back pedaling like a cornered rat through that side entranceway, hopping madly in a low crouch along the circular ramp of a passageway until I lost myself in the shadowed recesses of the structure. Santini was still bawling in pain, bleating like a sheep and the frontier model six-shooter had shut down. All at once. Kate Arizona had fired at least two shots but I couldn't say how many more. Everything was a blue of heart-thudding, noisy, dizzying fear. And the night air was now filling with that different type of sound but still the old familiar one of surprise, terror and confusion.

  The same kleine nachtmusic which had gone up when Kate Arizona had mowed down seven human beings. All in an unpretty row.

  "Que fai---!"

  "Mama mia---"

  "Hey---that's a gun---somebody's shooting---"

  "Nah. Just fireworks. These quineas light them up all the time I tell you---"

  "MARIO! AVANTI! SHE HAS A GUN IN HER HAND---!"

  All that and more. The atmosphere rung with the mad medley of all kinds of voices, all kinds of accents. A symphony of horror.

  And then came a more terrible noise. A closer one. Nearby.

  The unmistakable clump and click of thick, high-heeled boots rushing down the high-ceilinged little passageway, toward me. Even above Captain Santini's moans of agony, I knew Kate Arizona was coming for me. Coming with all the venom in her big, bruising body.

  I raced out from the darkened bowels of the ancient pile of decaying, towering rock and stone into the full circle of the arena. Toward the pale moonlight washing down over the multi-tiered, eroded banks of stone levels encircling the gutted out bottom of the immense amphitheater where thumbs down had meant no mercy for fallen gladiators. The sanded floor of the arena had long since disappeared but not even the Twentieth Century could change the aura of survive-or-perish.

  Kate Arizona was hunting me down with a six-shooter.

  I didn't want to be trapped like a rat in the dark of the underground. I needed room to swing. Light to see by. Operating room.

  If I was ever going to get out of Roma alive.

  To eat spaghetti again. Like Captain Michele Santini.

  Or do all the things I like to do.

  The Colosseum which had been Death In The Afternoon, was now the setting for another type of entertainment. A night game for Nero.

  Shoot The Running Private Eye.

  Watch The Tall Woman in the Flowing Trenchcoat.

  The odds were terrible

  Even as I rocketed toward the massive basin of the mighty old death trap, ten million ghostly, toga-clad phantoms rose up from their stone stadium seats, their sweaty, excited faces all aglow, their right arms extended, with every thumb down, rendering that ever-popular verdict: Kill the bastard!

  It was a full house, too. From the bleachers to the box seats. The natives wanted blood. My blood. Anybody's blood.

  So did Kate Arizona.

  Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutamas.

  Hail, Caesar! We who are about to die salute you.

  "You shall only be remembered by the fact that

  you broke my nose…."

  Michelangelo to Torreqiano.

  ARRIVEDERCI, SWEETHEART

  She came charging out of the entranceway. Tall, violent, enraged. Her form seemed gigantic with the backdrop of the elliptical-shaped stadium. The long-nosed frontier model jutting from her hand still looked like it was smoking. But that might have been only an optical illusion. She was looking for me, the hawk face jerking almost comically to the left and right. And she had the whole damn place to herself. Whatever tourists and guides there had been must have vamoosed like prudes at a Love-In. There were only small packs of the Colosseum cats, the mangiest, unhealthiest-looking strays ever visited upon a public place. The ancient playground and its environs were literally over-run with the miserable Toms and Tabbies. Great spotlights, advantageously placed around the curving innards of the arena, flooded the field with illumination. In the whitish glare, the hordes of emaciated animals, frightened by the gunfire, had scattered, too. Running, loping, scrambling for the safety of darkened mounds of crumbling rock. Mewing, howling and spitting all the way.

  Kate Arizona still held on to the square, black bag which housed the Schmeisser. But it didn't encumber her at all. It might have been a box of feathers in her huge paw. Nor did she seem in the least bothered by the vocal uproar going up behind her. That awful concert of shouting and yelling. Of people crying out and demanding to know what was going on. She wanted me, that's all. And she was going to kill me if it was her last act on earth. I saw that as perfectly as if I were her own brain. Nothing was going to keep her from doing just that. She came clattering down the stone perimeter, peering quickly and growlingly into each shadowy niche as she passed, poking the six-shooter like a divining rod into every recess. A probe.

  I kept ahead of her, dodging and scooting, working warily in the darkness where the floodlights did not touch. But I couldn't keep that up forever, either. It was show-down time. He and her. So I selected the best possible hump of structure. A jagged, broken arch of stone design angling out from one of the many entrances and exits and climbed. Up to its eroded, clammy crest, some ten feet above the curving aisle down which she would come. Hiding from her forever was not the answer. A thin, skeletal shadow almost gave me away. One of the scrawny cats had picked the same spot to nest in. With a fierce squawl of terror, the animal bolted from the parapet and disappeared into the upper galleries of the amphitheater. I held my breath, head pounding and concentrated on the sound of Kate Arizona's boots thudding my way.

  She was no more than a heartbeat off. The click of her boot leather seemed to thunder in the vaulted depths of my shelter.

  Each click brought her closer. Lady Cruel, First Class. On the prowl. Until her tall shadow was directly below me. A Big Six silhouette.
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  I saw her turn, thrust the six-shooter out like she was jabbing a hole into the newest niche in her travels. The moonlight caught her hawk face, curiously softening it but the fiery gleam of her eyes was the same old Kate Arizona. The Kill-Me-Kate character from somebody's nightmares. Whoever had whelped her must have been an extraordinary couple. Babies like her are just not born any old day of the year. Even as I rose, crouched for the jump that would bring us together again, that fatal memory I own, dixily and crazily, echoed with the words of Broadway at its best. "….a pox upon the life that late I let. Kiss me, Kate!" Arrivederci, Cole Porter.

  This shrew needed all the taming in the world, too.

  With blood singing, I launched from the stone pad. Straight down in a compact, striking ball of bone and muscle. Considering her great height and size, there wasn't as much mustard on the jump as I would have liked but it did have something going for it. Surprise.

  And true grit. The kind that will make you try anything when the chips are down. Stone Colosseum chips, at that.

  One hundred and eighty five pounds of desperate detective, out of New York, hit the big dame squarely. A tremendous grunt and oath of shock and fright, sent an explosive expulsion of breath out of her. Her big, amply endowed figure went down. With me hanging on, knocking the six-shooter from her right hand. She dropped the square black case on her own hook. And I knew in an instant what was worth knowing. She was ready to mix and tangle and lock horns on even terms. I guess she knew what she could do. I didn't. So all I could do was close over her and follow her down to the hard stone ground. In split-seconds, we were both up again, rebounding erect, facing each other. And the battle was on.