Far away, beyond the courtyard, beyond the wall with the broken glass, another sound—a small, flat pop.
A suppressed round.
Then a second.
Then a third, no longer suppressed.
Enzo sprung to his feet.
He moved faster than the tremoring hand and the loose throat skin had led me to expect. The wine glass went off the side table and broke on the tile and he did not look at it. He crossed the room in four strides and he pulled open the drawer of a low cabinet by the wall, and when his hand came out it had a pistol in it, small, black, the dull matte of a thing that lived in a drawer for daily reach.
A voice from the corridor, French, urgent. He answered it without looking, in French of his own, three short words. The voice did not answer back. There were running feet. Then more running feet. Then a door slamming somewhere deeper in thehouse, and a man shouting in Maltese, and the shouting cut off in the middle of a syllable.
Enzo turned to me.
His face had done a thing in the last fifteen seconds that I would remember. The patient mask was off. What was under it was not rage. It was the small flat fury of a man who had been pushed and was running out of countermoves. The pale grey eyes were colder than I had thought eyes could be.
“Stand up.”
I stood up.
He walked to me, and his free hand closed on my upper arm, the pistol coming up under my jaw. The barrel was warm from his pocket. He turned me fast, so that my back was to his chest and his arm was across my collarbones and the gun was at the soft place behind my ear.
“Walk,” he said, in my ear. “If you stumble or play games I will shoot you and walk over you. Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
He moved me to the door.
Out in the corridor the light had gone strange—the daylight from the open archway still strong, the interior lamps all dead, the contrast making the dark places darker. Two of his men were in the hall. One was at the staircase, his weapon up, his eyes on the open arch at the top. The other was at the far end where the corridor turned. He saw Enzo and saw me and his face did the small adjustment of a soldier who had not been expecting his employer to come out of the seaward room with a hostage and was adjusting his protocols on the fly.
Enzo barked something in French. The man at the far end nodded and went back around the corner.
We moved.
He walked me down the corridor—fast, not a run, but a fast walk—back the way I had come, past the two closed doors on theright, past the open archway to the lemon-tree courtyard where I now saw a body lying half across the threshold, face down, in the uniform of his gate guard. Past the staircase where the second of his men was crouched now, weapon up.
He turned me away from the front of the house, then pushed me through a doorway I had not noticed on the walk in—small, narrow, almost invisible in the limestone of the wall. Behind it, a flight of stone stairs going down.
Down was bad.
Down was a cellar. Down was a tunnel to the sea—there had to be a tunnel to the sea, this was a coastal villa, there had to be a boat. He had a boat at the bottom of these stairs, or a vehicle in a garage cut into the rock, or a passage to a separate building outside the wall. He was going to put me in something with him and the small flame in my chest understood, very clearly, that if he got me into something I was not coming out of it.
The gun was still at the back of my ear.
I went down two steps. He was going faster than was wise.
I had to do something, I couldn’t let him take me like this. He was a man in his sixties moving fast down a flight of unlit stone stairs in soft leather house shoes, and he had a hostage by the arm and a gun in his hand, and the only thing keeping him upright was the grip on me.
I went limp.
I did not think about it. I let my weight drop, all of it at once, the way you let your weight drop on a man who was using you to balance, and Enzo’s wrist seized at my arm—he held on, he did not lose me—but he stumbled, hard, his lead foot finding a step that was wetter than he had expected, and the gun came off the back of my ear by an inch.
That was the inch.
I drove my elbow up and back. It caught him under the jaw—not hard enough to break a jaw, hard enough to clack his teeth shut on his own tongue.
He made a sound that was not a word, something angry and sharp, and the gun went off.
