The Big Stiffs Page 9

  I hadn't even put a dent in her. Only taken away her armor.

  The gun was lost on the dark earth. The Colosseum abutments and angles and stone conformations, closed us in on all sides. Out there in the moonlight, the arena, with its exposed underground cubicles and cells and rooms, was where the action should have been. But that sandy flood was gone forever. And now the battleground was a cramped passageway along the carved-out circle of the stadium. And the two gladiators, Seventies-Style, was a man. And a woman. And what a woman. Three of anybody else I had ever met. Hands down.

  She never lost a stitch. Or a beat.

  Quick on the up-take, rapid on the comeback and never stopping to check the runs in her stockings. If she ever wore any. There wasn't a moment lost in indecision or measuring the opposition. She knew who I was and now she knew where I was. She came back at me with a flying leap, all the more remarkable for her great bulk. Six feet plus of shapely muscle, all of it contracted into the rage of the woman fooled. Never mind the woman scorned. There's a difference.

  Kate Arizona hit me, claws high, fists doubled.

  If I expected anything like a wrestling match, a grappling, heaving, twisting, free-for-all, I was dead wrong. She was a Pier Six brawler from the school that predated her by thirty years. More.

  She rocked me with a right and a left in almost unbelievable one-two combination delivery. The only reason my head stayed on my shoulders was because I had it tucked down with the chin close to the chest so that no knockout is possible. But my skull rang all the same. Lights danced and shadows thickened with alarming speed. I could hear her happy laugh of cruel pleasure. There was a great feeling of haze in the atmosphere. Instinctively, and only that, I answered back and the cry of hurt and surprise that blurted from her seemed to mean that one of my punching blows had landed somewhere on her bosom. But that too was meaningless. I charged back at her, getting as close as possible, to limit the force of her own punches and it helped me try a few niceties of my own. The close-in school of fighting is just no place for refinements. A man could get killed being polite. Violence breeds its own necessities and hard and fast rules. The major one of which is: don't lost no matter what, pal. You too, lady.

  She kicked me, then. She knew the rules too and what I had done to Santini she wanted to do to me. I ducked in time and her leather book jarred into the high part of one thigh. It gave me a fast chance and I took it. I hooked an arm under the boot and flipped with all I had. It didn't park her on her fanny but she lurched, stumbling backward until a poking formation of stone wall checked her big body. I didn't wait but followed up, swinging roundhouses of lefts and rights. I could feel them sinking in. Thudding into her hawk jaws, telegraphing impact up both elbows, but I was a woodpecker starting in on a Sequoia. She could take the best I had and still come up for air. Panic buzzed warningly somewhere in my brain. Kate Arizona was too much for me. I'd need a Mack truck to stop her. Or a gun.

  I had neither.

  And she now knew that, too.

  A gurgling chuckle, dry and like the cackle of a De Sade ready to squash a consenting adult, spread its hot breath over me. I hung on to her, trying to bring her head around in a hammerlock or a half-Nelson. There was so much of her to grab and hold, it was like dancing with a bear, and that too was not funny. Or heartwarming. I wheeled and twisted, trying to bring her around so that she tall body was turned toward the arena. There was empty space down there, just below the protective low iron railing put up for the safety of visitors to the Colosseum. If I could manage to shove her over that, there was hope yet for changing the odds in my favor. I was over-matched.

  Unfortunately, she was way ahead of me.

  She got the idea maybe the same time I did. Maybe faster.

  I could tell by the way she suddenly shifted, allowing me to rock her forward, pulling her to the rail. She came far too willingly, and in a moment, the table wasn't only turned, it was uplifted. And the table was me. A two-legged table abruptly presented with a far different view of the most famous arena in the world. The sky view.

  Kate Arizona, powerfully, perfectly, with barely a change in fighting tempo, had lowered her long arms, wrapped them about my middle and rapidly heaved. And up I went, flying toward the sky but just as quickly, she moved her arms and locked them about my shoulder and hip and I was frozen in still life. Abruptly held fast and powerless, my desperately clawing hands useless, as she held me far above her head in the classic conqueror-and-victim posture. For that long and terrifying moment, she savored the triumph. Almost crooningly.

  "Noon…" The pant of my name was rich with the taste of sweet vengeance. "I'm gona smash you like a bug…down there…on those rocks and…arriverdeci, cowboy…"

  "Kate---don't---you'll never get the papers this way---"

  She didn't answer me.

  She no longer cared.

  And she no longer believed anything I might tell her.

  The stadium tilted on me as she strained for that last forceful heave that would fling me down into the ancient arena. Which no longer had a true bottom. Only jutting, eroded marble. The star-studded dark sky, the stone circles and tiers, the multi-niched and recessed old cheesebox of a monument to The Games, whirled and kaleidoscoped in a dazzling succession of shifting, moving stop-freeze views. Balmy breezes washed over me, seeming to pull at my clothes, my deadened muscles.

  I was no more than a weathervane in her mighty hands.

  The Roma night had become one to remember. To never forget.

  I couldn't get a hand free to claw and tear at her, to keep her from flinging me. She was handling me as easily as she might a child. A weight-lifter couldn't have done better. No way.

  And then the world exploded. Careened and disintegrated. Blurred.

  Sirens filled the Colosseum. Screeching, wailing, bansheeing, with that frightening meaningfulness that made so many thousands of Jewish hideouts settings for instant Terror in occupied Europe.

  Hoarse cries sounded. Whistles shrilled. Caterwauling. Dinning.

  Running, pounding footsteps made thunder of their own. Sounding like a multitude. And then the capper. The big capper. In caps.

  The noise to confound Solomon. And confuse God. And mock Mankind.

  The Colosseum seemed to explode. To rock with an earthquake. Violent, heart-stabbing detonations went off all over the banked and tiered interior of the vast amphitheater. Even as powdery bursts of flying stone and rubble and great fiery, smoking flashes of destruction rekindled the dark night, Kate Arizona made her final move. With the stone world all around us beginning to resemble the last days of Pompeii, she gathered up all her strength and sent me soaring out into that chaotic, erupting, upheaval of insanity which the Colosseum had become in fleeting, horrible seconds. The earth was moving, too.

  She flung me.

  Outward and down. Toward the cruel rocks below.

  I sailed into space, heart bursting, brain roaring, senses colliding. The terror of the moment was all mine, now. It belonged to me and nobody else. I had earned it. By bucking Kate Arizona.

  Timed with my free fall, come the sound of two other things happening. Things I had no time to consider or think about.

  Or translate into English.

  A shot rang out.

  A singly, hammering, high-pitched shot. Like a call to arms.

  In the midst of all the tumult and the destruction, the shot found a quiet interval of its own and made itself heard. Piercingly.

  That and something else. A big something else. The biggest.

  Someone shouted. A raucous, amazed Italian blurt of horror.

  "……Arcangeli! The Arcangeli!!!!!"

  There was no more time for anything else. For me.

  No more time for sights, impressions, thoughts. Plans.

  There was only time for falling.

  The worst things in Life are free, too.

  Like Noon-On-The-Rocks.

  Somebody screamed as I fell.

  After that, there was nothi
ng else to hear.

  "It's an old Borgia custom."

  John Garfield in The Fallen Sparrow (1943)

  MURDER LA BELLA RAGAZZA

  "The signorina is dead, Signor Noon," Captain Michele Santini announced in his best three o'clock in the morning voice, "and you are alive. We must begin the discussion we are about to have from that starting point. I trust we will understand one another and behave sensibly. Before we make matters worse than they are, eh? There is much that we can salvage from this affair."

  "It's your story, Captain," I agreed, "and I'm in your hands. Seeing as how I’m not going to be able to navigate for a day or two, at least. I would appreciate some facts. I need them before I can do anything about those documents. Wherever they are."

  I was in a hospital, where I belonged certainly, thanks to three cracked ribs, a badly-bruised femur bone and one awesome lump of hemorrhaged muscle above my right kneecap. When I'd finally come to, there was no Colosseum, no earthquake of exploding stadium, no Kate Arizona and very little memory, either. There was only a small cot in a yellow-walled room with a white metal table at bedside, a little window opening on a patch of darkness, a porcelain pitcher of drinking water and all the aches and pains a man could own without actually breaking anything solid. I only knew what time it was because of an old-style Roman clock on the wall that said three o'clock with its dark hands. And then there was Captain Santini. Still in his sharp officer uniform. Santini did not have a gun on me, in fact he never looked more hospitable, and the borsalino with the Barrymore slouch to its brim, was twirling rhythmically in his tanned hands. Some doctor must have pumped me full of a pain-killer. I was feeling no pain. Just a dim, hazy, flickering recall of sirens screaming, fire and smoke billowing and all that white, crumbling stone at the Colosseum just as Kate Arizona had thrown me away. Down among the ruins.

  I couldn't remember the fall at all.

  It was as if there was a wall of black between my mind and the fact itself. There were no details. Not any. Temporary shock, maybe.

  All I did know, thanks to Santini's fast report on my condition before he talked to me about what had happened, was that I was in the Hospitale Maggiori, somewhere in Rome, not too far from the Colosseum. And the entire situation, the complete set-up, had changed drastically. I was alive, Kate Arizona was dead and Santini was suddenly a good guy again. A miracle of sorts in a city famed for miracles. La bella Roma.

  There was a lot to think about. And talk about. Fa subito!

  Captain Michele Santini seemed to be the first to admit that.

  "You killed Kate," I said as if it was nothing more than a weather forecast. "Is that it, Santini?"

  But the question hung like a noose in the close quarters.

  The Captain stopped fiddling with the borsalino and placed it on the cane chair by the door of the room. Turning, he regarded me very closely, as if trying to read my mind. His midnight black eyes were intent. Then, he sighed wearily. Grandiosely.

  "Understand me, Signor. So that you do not feel the need to call for help. Or resist what I tell you. A few hours ago I was but a corrupt official fully prepared to do an unlawful thing to earn a good deal of money. But--the buono Dio does move in mysterious ways his wonder to perform. Yes, I was that woman's ally, her co-conspirator, if you will, but you yourself saw with what horror I regarded the slaughter at the Trinita dei Monti." His theatrical shudder was no less honest for that. "Truly, a putana that Signorina Arizona! But who am I to call her names? Santini---who forgot himself---in his hour of greed. Were it not for the hand of God, Signor, all would be very different as of this very moment! It is uncanny----"

  "Santini," I begged. "Prego, will you? Forget the roses and string music. What the hell happened?"

  "Pardon me." His smile was noble. His eyes glowed with a sparkle of affection. "My dear friend---amico mio---the Arcangeli chose that moment to appear on the scene. There you were---making a struggle of it with the woman because we had pushed you too far---and there was I, a whimpering, foolish official, squeezing his private parts where you kicked in your own desperation---I forgive you for that, too, though it still pains like the very Devil---and then the police were arriving. The sirens, the automobiles, the investigators. In a flash, I saw it all. I would be ruined. I---Santini---involved with that woman and yourself in an escapade for money over some valuable papers---" He rolled his eyes ceilingward. "I saw my chance then to re-coup. To make it all turn to my own advantage. It was then that I shot the Signorina. Exactly at the moments the bombs exploded and the Vatican City squad came pouring into the Colosseum! It was a master stroke. How else was I to justify my being there with the lady and you? Out of uniform? If I could not say I was working on a police problem? One which will not concern the Vatican too much---they do not deal in espionage---"

  "Santini," I said his name as quietly as I could without yelling. "You're trying to tell me in your flamboyant Italian way---"

  "I am telling you, Signor, that the Arcangeli are no myth! I was not spinning yarns yesterday when I detained you under that ruse about your diary. Those devils are blowing up Roma, as if the pollution, the traffic and the lack of maintenance was not enough. They planted devices all over the amphitheater tonight. The very night you chose to lead us on a wild goose chase. You were lying, weren't you, Signor? Flood could have told you nothing. I went to see his corpse at the morgue while you were unconscious. Mama mia---I have never seen a body so riddled. Like a sieve. So---" The Captain's shrug was a poem of grace and tradition. "I had no qualms about shooting the lady with my little Beretta. A woman who massacres people so unfeelingly is not the sort of woman for me. So you see---with one turn of the wheel---I restore myself to the side of the angels. I help you, I am considered a smart policeman who apprehends murderers and my conscience is clear. I only wish I could have stopped her before she threw you down. It is a marvel you are not dead but my bullet must have checked her somewhat. You did not fall the full distance into the arena. You merely struck a wall of the closest underground cell and bounced about a bit---"

  I could only stare at him. He was the marvel. A wonder of the world where people can deceive themselves over and over again, in the name of some private, personal God. Or conviction. Or principle. But he was a good guy for the time being, at least. I had to settle for that. There was no choice. No reason not to. I was hors de, anyhow.

  "How bad was the damage at the Colosseum?"

  "Two or three tiers of the upper levels. And one wall was collapsed. You should have seen it, Signor. Unhappily, the black-hearted Arcangeli had placed their devil's bombs and did not linger to see the results. No arrests were made. They must be caught before all Roma falls! What can they hope to accomplish by destroying all our priceless relics and antiques? Truly, it is barbarous."

  "I wish you luck. Maybe they're trying to tell you people something. When the Colosseum falls, so falls the world---" I let up on the quote and changed the subject. "The woman. Tell me about her. How did you ever get tied up with a she-wolf, anyway? And more specifically, just who was she?"

  Santini extracted a hammered silver cigarette case from his inside jacket pocket. Extending a hand, clicking the lid open, his sad smile was attractive and suddenly of a far different stamp. I let him light a butt for me. He was way ahead of everybody. The brand was American and not one of the usual European rope stuff.

  "Signor, she came to me one day last week. To my own office. And made her proposition. It seemed she knew of yourself and your mission in Rome. She explained to me how I must detain you with a false arrest. She seemed to also know that you were keeping a day-book. She was much interested in the contents of that, also." The Captain chuckled grimly. "The gall of the woman! She was so certain I would not arrest her for attempting to bribe me. That I would go the way of all corrupt officials. Veramente---she was correct! What she offered---fifty thousand American dollars, you see---made my poor head swim. In all my career, I could never made as much lira. Still, it was nothing more than to d
etain you, examine your luggage, and the diary and then contact her. It was she, you see, who also asked me to release you when I did. She must have attempted to fool Signor Flood and failing that, realized she must allow you to contact him and then try to intercept the papers---these mysterious documents of which I swear to you I know nothing. Niente!" His chuckle changed to bitter sighs. "Had I but known she would stop at nothing---well, the Trinita dei Monti was a carnage. And after that, I was deeply involved. Yet it all seems to have come to the proper end."

  "Don't hold out on me, Captain," I said. "You're not that stupid. You wouldn't let a strange woman walk into your office, say Yes and let it go at that. Not you. You're too much the fox for that Simple Simon routine. Tell me true, Santini."

  His eyebrows shot up and the magnetic black eyes assumed an air of hurt. Then the expression vanished and he shrugged, conceding the point with genuine modesty. His own brand of coyness.

  "You are too wise for me, caro mio. It was as you say. I had the lady investigated. Through our Interpol here in Roma. And several other agencies it is not necessary for you to know of. Si, I learned much about Signorina Caterina Arizona. Enough to make the blood go cold. She was una donna diabola! Never have I seen such a dossier."

  "For instance?"

  He held up his right hand, his own cigarette tucked in one corner of his mouth, his eyes lidded against the rising blue smoke. He began to tick off all the virtues of Kate Arizona by using his left hand to close around each of the fingers of the right one.

  It was a report card from Hell. Demerits all down the line.

  "Uno---she was an assassin for hire. Believed to be the murderer of three officials in South America. Unfortunately, it was not proven. Due---she was employed by the Soviet in regard to acquiring some other very important documents relating to the Space Program of Great Britain. Tre--the French government was certain she was the lady who accomplished the ruin and disgrace of one of their highest officials in De Gaulle's regime through the humiliating process of revealing sexual perversions of the official. There were films and tape recordings of the---ah---acts---turned over to the opposing political party. The official committed suicide. La signorina Arizona was prominently seen in the films and heard on the tapes. Quatro---there is a royal family in the Balkans that can no longer hold their pride or their position because each and every member of the menage tutta famiglia---have been exposed as users of drugs. Again, the feeling is that the woman Arizona is responsible. Again, nothing proven. But---" Santini expelled a deep and noisy breath. "Cinque---all of this is rather ancient history, Signor, dating back a few years but most recently, your own Federal Bureau of Investigation has placed her on their Open File. Which means--should you not be too familiar with your own country's tactics---the lady was to be watched, kept under surveillance---should she ever return to the United States. The charge is relative to the Sedition Act. So you see, Signor Noon, Signorina Arizona was no lady at all. Rather, she was a most treacherous human being. One who cruelties only came home to me in front of the Trinita dei Monti. But now---I am a big hero. I have stopped her. Ended her criminal career. I have let it be known that she was involved with the operations of the Arcangeli! Who will think otherwise?"