Man on Fire (A Creasy novel Book 1) Read online

  “My talking to Rika will not save her face and that’s the immediate problem. Besides when I suggested you hire a bodyguard, I didn’t specify what type of bodyguard.”

  They were interrupted by the waiter with the coffee.

  “What do you mean?” Ettore asked when they were alone again. Vico leaned forward, speaking more quietly now.

  “Ettore, there are many sides and angles to this kidnap business. You know that it’s highly organized and nearly always carried out under the auspices of organized crime. It has become a huge business — eighteen billion lire last year. The big boys control it.”

  Ettore nodded. “The Mafia.”

  Vico winced. “Such a melodramatic word. It conjures up a bunch of Sicilian peasants stealing olive oil.”

  He caught the waiter’s eye again, and ordered two cognacs, then took a leather case from an inside pocket and extracted two cigars. A small gold guillotine appeared from his fob pocket and the cigars were meticulously beheaded. He passed one over to Ettore, and the waiter returned with the cognacs and a light. Vico favoured him with a smile, puffed contentedly, and resumed his lecture.

  “Most families who feel threatened either send their children abroad, usually to Switzerland, or arrange very elaborate protection — specially guarded schools, bulletproof cars — and, of course, highly competent bodyguards.”

  “Expensive bodyguards,” Ettore said.

  Vico agreed. “About thirty million lire a year. All told.”

  Ettore raised his eyes expressively, but the lawyer went on unperturbed.

  “Such bodyguards are supplied through specialized agencies. The best are even international, with branches in several cities, including Milan and Rome. There is, however, a shortage brought about by all the terrorism going on in Europe — Red Brigades, Red Army, Basque Nationalists, and so on. So really good bodyguards are hard to find, and the price is rising accordingly.”

  “I understand,” interrupted Ettore, “and it doesn’t solve my problem. Just the opposite.”

  Vico held up a hand. “Be patient, my friend. There is another aspect to this business. As an additional and purely financial consideration, many wealthy families take out insurance against having to pay ransoms. The government does not allow Italian insurance companies to write that kind of policy. They believe, quite reasonably, that it might encourage kidnapping. However, insurance companies abroad are not so restricted. In fact, Lloyd’s of London leads the world in this type of coverage. Last year they collected over one hundred million pounds in premiums. Two of their underwriting partnerships specialize. One even has a subsidiary that will negotiate with the kidnappers. It’s all very civilized and British. There are two conditions. One, that the premiums must be paid outside of Italy, and the other, that the insured must never disclose that he is insured. The reason is obvious.”

  Ettore was slightly bored. “It’s very interesting, Vico, but what’s it got to do with my problem?”

  Vico pointed his cigar at him. “Is your factory insured?”

  “Of course it is, and the beneficiary is the bank.”

  “Right,” said Vico, “But when you negotiated the premium, the rate depended on the amount of security you provided — correct?” Ettore nodded, and Vico continued.

  “Of course they insist on burglar alarms and so on, but if you provide a security service — watchmen, even guard dogs, the premium rate is much reduced. Well, the same thing applies to kidnap premiums, and because the rate is so high, and the amounts very large, any saving is a major factor.”

  He warmed to his subject.

  “Consider a typical case. An industrialist takes out kidnap insurance for one billion lire. The rate could be as high as five percent, or fifty million. If, on the other hand, he hires a fulltime bodyguard, the premium could be reduced to three percent or thirty million lire. So he saves twenty million.”

  Ettore shook his head. “But you just told me that a bodyguard costs thirty million lire a year. Where’s the saving?”

  Vico smiled. ‘There are such people as ‘premium bodyguards.’ They wouldn’t do much to foil a kidnapping, but they do allow a lower premium rate, and they are cheap. About seven million lire a year.”

  “But Vico,” said Ettore, “I don’t want to insure against a kidnapping that isn’t going to happen.”

  But he suddenly got the drift, and Vico laughed at his change of expression.

  “Now you understand! You hire one of these cheap premium bodyguards for a few months and then fire him for incompetence or something. In the meantime, Pinta is back at school and Rika’s face is saved.”

  Ettore sat quietly thinking a few minutes and then asked, “Where can I locate such a man?”

  Vico smiled contentedly. “First you pay for this excellent lunch and then we go around to my office where I have the name of an agency right here in Milan.”

  Ettore had known that somehow he would end up paying the bill.

  Guido turned off the Naples coast road and drove up a narrow dirt track. It led to an olive grove on the lower slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Just below the grove the hill crowned off, and the track ended on a grassy slope overlooking Naples and the sweep of the great bay. He turned off the ignition and the silence was complete. It was late evening and the sun, blood red, was edging onto the horizon.

  He had been again to see his mother, and the presence of her two sons had healed her. It would be at least another month before the symptoms reappeared. Guido had talked to Elio about Creasy’s arrival three days before, and Elio had offered a possible temporary solution. Guido needed to think it out.

  The truth was that Creasy couldn’t find the reason anymore to go on living. He had reached the point where he was unable to generate even slight enthusiasm for a new morning.

  The night after his arrival, he had talked to Guido in his usual reticent and disjointed way. Sentences related only by the silences in between. Long pauses to think out and frame the next words. Guido had said nothing. Just sat and nursed a drink and let his friend drag out his thoughts. The whole convoluted monologue was summed up at the end when Creasy said:

  “I just get the feeling that I’ve lived enough or too much — a lot happened — I’m a soldier, nothing else ever — never wanted anything else — known anything else — but I’m sick of it. Have been for the last five years or so.”

  He had become embarrassed then. Expressing such feelings, even to his only friend, had been painful and out of character. Guido had stretched out a hand and touched his shoulder in a gesture of understanding.

  For Guido did understand, completely. He had gone through the same thing after Julia’s death. It had been two years before he could adjust to a life without her. But the difference between them was fundamental. He had known a love and a happiness which had sharply defined his outlook on life. Its clarity was partly a result of its unexpectedness. He had fought and killed, drunk and whored his way around the world with hardly a passing thought about the effect he had on others. He had long assumed that the deep feelings of love, or compassion, or jealousy, or possession, were not inside him. His only feeling for any human being was for Creasy and, vaguely, his mother and brother.

  His conversion had been dramatic. After a week with his mother, the two mercenaries had gone to Malta to look up a contact from their Congo days. The contact had been recruiting for a sheikdom in the Persian Gulf, but they hadn’t liked the terms or the prospects. They decided to stay on a few days and look around. They ended up on the sister island of Gozo in a small hotel in a fishing village. It had been warm and relaxing and the people friendly.

  Julia had worked at the hotel as receptionist, Guido had a way with girls, even shy, very religious, and highly protected girls, and within a few days she had agreed to meet him for a drink after work. She was slight and beautiful, and very direct in speech and manner. She repulsed his early advances, telling him she was a good girl and a virgin. Guido was intrigued. He had never known a virgin. Creasy looked o
n at the pursuit with benign amusement and agreed readily to stay on in Gozo while Guido talked and charmed and persuaded.

  The conquest took three weeks, and it was not how Guido had imagined. They had gone, late at night, to swim at Ramla Bay and afterward sat on the dull red sands and talked for a long time. She had told him of her life, simple and unexceptional, her family farmers for generations. He found himself talking also about his life and it was difficult to convey because she kept asking “why” and he couldn’t answer. The sun was coming up before they stopped talking and he had forgotten his original purpose. Then she told him that her parents would be very upset. In Gozo for a girl to stay out all night was the paramount crime.

  “But we haven’t done anything,” protested Guido and saw her enigmatic look and realized that perhaps he was not the pursuer.

  They had made love, and she had truly been a virgin and Guido had hesitated but she pulled him into her, cried out, and pulled him against her still harder. Guido would never forget those moments and all the women he had known were suddenly not women.

  In the growing light he saw the blood on her thighs, the only blood he had ever seen caused by love. He watched her wipe it from her and look up at him and smile, shy but proud, and he knew that his life had changed.

  They had walked together up over the hill, through Nadur to her parents’ farm. Her father, already in the fields, watched them, still and silent, as they approached.

  “This is Guido,” she had said. “We are going to be married.”

  Her father had nodded and gone back to work. He knew his daughter. A night away from home meant a son-in-law.

  They were married in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nadur. A young priest officiated. He was big and strong and reminded Guido a little of Creasy. He didn’t look like a priest and his manner was abrupt and gruff, but the people of Nadur liked him. He worked hard and was practical. Farmers appreciate that. Gozitans give everyone nicknames and this priest they called “the Cowboy.”

  Guido had been concerned over how Creasy would react to this marriage. They had been friends for over fifteen years and had hardly ever been separated. But Creasy had been pleased and not really surprised. He had realized the girl loved Guido and had seen the strength in her and was happy for his friend.

  He was best man at the wedding, silent and as gruff as “the Cowboy,” and afterward at the wedding feast had drunk a lot of the strong Gozo wine and felt in himself a great deal of Guido’s joy. It was happiness by proxy, but for all that a good emotion.

  Julia had instinctively understood the friendship and didn’t resent it. She looked upon Creasy as an integral part of Guido. When they left to go to Naples, Creasy had taken them to the airport, and when he bent down to kiss her cheek she had put her arms around him and held onto him for a long moment, and when she drew away he saw the tears in her eyes,

  “Our home is your home,” she said simply.

  He nodded, his face strangely set, and said, “If he snores at night, just whistle — it shuts him up.”

  She had smiled and turned away unable to say any more. In the plane she had asked Guido what Creasy would do and he had answered that he would go and find a war somewhere.

  So Guido returned to Naples with a wife and bought back the lease on his property and turned it into the Pensione Splendide. His mother’s cup had run over and the church in Positano was bright with candles.

  Creasy had visited them in Naples several times, coming or going to a war. He never wrote or phoned, just arrived. He always brought a present for Julia. Something distinctive. Once it had been a batik painting from Indonesia, rich and detailed, another time a string of natural aquamarine pearls from Japan. They were presents not bought on the spur of the moment, but thought about and distinct. She knew this and it gave her more pleasure than their beauty or obvious value.

  He usually stayed only a few days, relaxed and comfortable, and then one evening would announce he was leaving and in the morning would be gone. But on the last occasion he had stayed more than a month. He was never idle, busying himself with small repairs around the building. He liked working with his hands.

  When the last customers had left after dinner, the three of them would sit around the big kitchen table, watch television or read or just talk. Julia used to smile at the conversation of the two men, their mental rapport so acute that whole sentences would be reduced to one or two words. Guido might start it off with a question about a past acquaintance.

  “Miller?”

  “Angola.”

  “Still bitching?”

  “As ever.”

  “But sharp?”

  “A needle.”

  “The Uzi?”

  “Wedded to it.”

  Much of the conversation would be incomprehensible to her, especially when they talked of weapons. After the first couple of visits, Guido would be restless for a few days following Creasy’s departure, but she said nothing. And by the last visit he was settled and adjusted and happy. On that last visit when Creasy announced he was leaving in the morning she had told him flatly that he was welcome to stay with them and make his home. Guido had said nothing; he didn’t need to. Creasy had smiled at her, one of his rare smiles, and said, “One day I might do that and fix all your wiring and paint the place once a month.” They knew he meant it. He would come and just never announce that he was leaving, and it would be good and right.

  But Julia had gone shopping one day and the local football team had won and the supporters were driving in convoy through the city, horns blowing and flags flying, and one of the cars with eight drunks aboard had lost control and smeared her against a wall.

  Creasy had arrived a week later, tired from a long journey. Guido had forgotten to ask how he knew. He stayed a couple of weeks and his presence brought Guido through.

  Now Guido sat in his car and watched the twilight over the bay. The sun had gone, leaving only refracted light. He tried to imagine his life if he had never known Julia and he could picture it and so could understand Creasy now.

  He needed to do something different, if only for a while. Something to occupy his time and his mind. Something to halt the slide.

  Creasy had gone to Rhodesia and tried to fit in. He had trained young white recruits and led them in the bush. But it was a different world, and he couldn’t identify. He didn’t try to differentiate between right and wrong on the war. He sympathized with the whites. They were not bad people. Time had just caught up. They lived in the wrong century. They had come as pioneers, opening up a new country, and they looked on themselves as akin to the early American settlers. But times had changed. They couldn’t wipe out the blacks as the American Indians had been wiped out, or the Australian aboriginals. Most of the whites wouldn’t have wanted to and the few that did found that some of the blacks had land mines, grenades, rocket launchers, and Kalashnikovs. It was a different world. The terrible thing was the futility. It stared Creasy in the face. The others couldn’t see it, but he had a lifetime to recognize it. Dien Bien Phu to Algeria to Katanga, back to Vietnam and into endless circles of futility. The war in Rhodesia brought his whole past into focus. Futile battles fighting for people who talked of patriotism, final stands, and never say die — but death to the last man. He looked into his future and saw the exact same sequence. If not in Rhodesia, then somewhere else. Futile: it was an epitaph on his past and an adjective for his tomorrow.

  He had lost interest. He started drinking heavily and let his body slacken and become lethargic. Finally they took him off operations and made him just an adviser. They would have kicked him out, but they remembered his earlier days and were grateful. It wasn’t long before he realized the charity, and his pride picked him up and took him away. He went to Brussels, where he had known a woman, but she had moved on and so he took the train to Marseilles and on an impulse caught the ferry to Corsica. The main contingent of the Legion was based in Corsica and an instinct led him there. Many years had passed since the 1st R.E.P
. had mutinied. The Legion itself had forgiven. There was a home there. Maybe the orphan could return to the orphanage.

  He had arrived in Calvi in the afternoon and sat in the square and had a drink. The barracks lay up the hill and as he tried to decide whether to go up or not he heard the sound of singing. It was the Legion marching hymn, “Le Boudin,” and then they came around the corner with the distinctive slow march — eighty-five paces a minute. It was a unit of recruits, smart in their new uniforms, showing off their drill for the first time. He looked at the faces, young and scrubbed, and he felt a thousand years old.

  When they had passed and the last sounds had died away, he finished his drink and walked to the station. The next day he was in Bastia, sitting by the docks drinking again and waiting for the ferry to Livorno. He would go and see Guido. Maybe they would get together again. Maybe it wouldn’t be futile.

  He had watched the few passengers go aboard and crossed the road to join them, passing the boy. As the ferry pulled out, he stood at the stern and saw the boy wave at him. He waved back. Goodbye, Corsica. Goodbye, boy.

  “A bodyguard,” said Guido.

  Creasy looked at him blankly.

  They sat in the kitchen and Guido explained about Elio’s suggestion.

  His brother had prospered. After a good education he had qualified as an accountant, all paid for by Guido. He had joined a firm of auditors in Milan and had done well. He had explained to Guido that one of his clients was a security agency that supplied bodyguards to industrialists. There was a great demand and a shortage of trained men. The pay was excellent. Guido had demurred. Creasy was totally unfit and virtually an alcoholic. It would be taking a job under false pretences, and Creasy wouldn’t do it. Then Elio had explained about “premium bodyguards” and Guido had become interested. “But the pay is lousy,” Elio had remarked. That didn’t matter, thought Guido. He knew that Creasy had plenty of money. He had earned a great deal over the years and spent little.