Ambrogio waited a week to let Mario stew, and then went looking for him.
It wasn't difficult. A few 'phone calls, joining the dots between Naples's middling bars, and half an hour in the car found him shuffling down a sidewalk in the Spanish Quarter. The street was busy – they always were in that congested pit at the bottom of the hill, where all of the detritus of Naples rolled down to accumulate - but no-one called out an alarm at the sight of a middle-aged man being hustled into an alleyway. Most thought that it was none of their business, and those who did either decided that they didn't want a drunk vomiting over the precious shrines and believed that being done over was no more than he deserved, or looked to the same shrines and thanked God that this time the Camorra had not come for them.
"You look tired, Mario. Busy man, on your feet all day. You should sit down. All work and no play…" A hard shove from one of Ambrogio's men sent Mario stumbling and tumbling back against the alley stairwell, and he cried out as the rough-edged stone jarred against his back.
Flanked by a pair of bravos on each side, who formed a solid wall blocking the narrow alley, Ambrogio studied the huddled and crumpled bag of flesh that was Mario. He was worn, he was bedraggled, he was shamed… but two eyes peered at Ambrogio, piercing any drunken fog, and fastened the Camorra leader with a flashing challenge. "So, Ambrogio, getting bored of hitting girls, have we? Moving on to doing in old men instead?"
Ambrogio snorted. It must be the 'liquid courage' that Mario had been imbibing all day which gave him the spunk for backchat. "Well, after that little speech, I certainly am. Fabrizio, show our estranged brother the meaning of manners."
Another of Ambrogio's men grinned in delight and stepped forward. The demonstration took about five minutes.
"Stop mewling, you fat slug! You've got enough podge on you to cushion a bullet!" Ambrogio roared over Mario's cries of pain, taking pleasure in the derision of his enemy as much as he did in the giving of orders.
Eventually, his thoughtful socio-political treatise impressively and persuasively presented, Fabrizio stepped, back, dabbing bloodspots on his white shirt with a handkerchief – they looked for all the world like tomato sauce from a healthy dish of pasta.
"You defiedme, Mario." Ambrogio's chestnut eyes blazed red like a furnace. "And no-one defies me. No-one. Not my father; not my brothers; not my wife; not the police; not prosecutors; not princes nor presidents; not even the Social Welfare Agency's dainty little abominations, who'll get their due in time. And especially not a washed-up, washed-out, fat, gross, backsliding sack of shit such as you.
"Who said that you were privileged enough to have a conscience, Mario? Who gave you the right to be the good guy? Did you ever think what effect you getting all happy and chummy with the police in Amsterdam had on other people, you selfish pig? All of the work that went into the business, squandered? All that many people had invested, wasted? All of your comrades – your brothers – in prison? All of them who were shot down by that fucking Kraut cop, and are dead?
"All that pain. All that suffering. All of that impoverishment. All of those anguished, wailing wives who are never going to see their husbands, ever again. All because pious and white, idiotic and trite, unblemished Saint Mario couldn't bear a spot of dirt on his nice manicured hands. All because you just had to be the… the… the Goddamn hero!" Ambrogio's expression was twisted into a choking and crushing, almost faceless knot of purple rage, so constricting that he was barely coherent.
"Children…" Mario gasped.
"Children! Children!" Ambrogio brayed mockingly. "Oh, think of the children! Kids! Tykes! Tots! Tantrums! The poor blessed producers of stinking diapers! Boo-fucking-hoo, cry me a river!" Ambrogio was bawling openly now. "It's a shitty world, Mario! There's no good there!
"Why did you force me to mutilate Maria to show that to you?"
Ambrogio was apoplectic, and had to pause in his tirade, leaning against the alley wall for support, sucking in great whales of air, his pupils dilating strangely. Even his men exchanged a couple of perturbed glances.
Eventually regaining his composure, Ambrogio stood back up and adjusted his jacket. "I want you to know that you've achieved nothing with your precious little rebellion against the Camorra, Mario." He grated. The great guns of incandescent fury had been fired off, and now he was breathing out the scathing smoke of utter hatred. "Your grassing to the police may have done for my predecessor, but there's always someone to pass on the torch, to pick up the baton, to keep the idea alive. That's the great strength of a family – something which you don't have, not anymore. It's taken a few years to put everything in place, but I'm starting up the business - again."
"It's a shitty world." Ambrogio repeated. "Reflect on that whenever you look upon your ruin of a daughter."
Then he left.
Henrietta skipped along the path leading from the training area, humming happy, tuneless music to herself. It had been a good day today – the building clearance drills had gone off without a hitch (for her, at least - Petrushka had gotten tangled in her zipwire in the wall-scaling exercise, and they'd all shared a good chuckle as the dancer who was normally so sprightly and elegant and light on her feet dangled there flailing in an ungainly mess, like laundry caught in the wind), and even though her P90 had had a stoppage she had worked through the clearance procedure exactly and with practised efficiency. It had elicited an approving nod from Jose! Warmth flooded across her cheeks at the memory of it. She was happy that he was happy – she knew from personal experience the importance of weapon safety, although she couldn't quite recall what the specific experience was…
In any case, even though low, concrete clouds had been threatening rain all day it had held off – that was good as well, because the open ceilings of Building D turned the floors into rivers and the ground around it into a quagmire in anything more than light drizzle – she didn't have to spoil her bright, new shoes, which she had polished to shining pride the night before. She smiled at the world again – she couldn't think of anything to blemish the day.
A small embankment lay alongside the path, and Henrietta saw Triela sat on top of it, her back to the path and looking out towards the fields over which the second-generation girls were currently struggling, blatting off blanks at each other in laborious fire-and-manoeuvre practise.
"Afternoon, Triela! Looking over there for tips?" Henrietta greeted her fellow cyborg gaily.
"Wha--?" Triela turned her head, distracted. "Oh, hey, 'Etta. No, nothing like that. Just thinking."
Henrietta tensed her thighs and popped up to the top of the embankment in a single bound – training had gone well today, and she adored the abilities of her body. "What about? Share a secret, find a friend, eh?" she smiled.
Triela momentarily grimaced, wanting to be alone for her reflections and much preferring Henrietta to go tumbling back down the slope. Still, Henrietta was normally such a meek sort – it was rare for her to be so bouncy and animated, and try as she might Triela wasn't so grumpy and petty as to puncture her light mood.
"Nothing scandalous, you pint-sized muckraker." Triela joshed, before waving a hand across the field. "I'm just wondering… we're always kept so busy, so active but… but do we ever actually do any good with all of this?"
"Of course we do, silly-billy," Henrietta laughed. Triela normally was the one who took charge, and she was secretly pleased that for once she could be the one to instruct their big sister. "When we do well, we make our masters…" A thrilling trill entered her voice, "…very, very happy." Henrietta clutched herself and swayed, almost overcome with a surge of pleasurable memories. Eventually she regained her composure. "Terrorists and criminals hurt people, too – when we kill them, we're saving so many others."
Triela couldn't remember Amsterdam – a blessing from her conditioning - but she remembered what Mario had told her of it in Naples last winter. From their various troubled pasts before they were saved by the Social Welfare Agency, they knew subconsciously all too well just what it was like to be… hurt. "Helping in our own way." Triela studied the palms of her hands, tracing the lines across them with her eyes. She rubbed her wrist, remembering handcuffs clapping around it, hers and Hilshire's cries of astonishment, and a girl's cheeky Cheshire-cat grin. "I suppose that's true."
A few moments' silence passed as the two girls watched the older cyborgs. They glanced at the spectators every so often – Triela wondered if they thought that she was there to size up the competition. Petrushka's distinctive Slavic guttural tones drifted across the field. "Bravo team, give covering fire… Charlie team, prepare to move…"
"Petra always sounds a little odd, don't you think? Strange to hear her speak Italian." Triela mused.
Henrietta remembered something from a book she had read the other day, and felt smart. "I don't think so. You know what they say; variety is the spice of life!"
Mario hadn't been inside a church in years. He didn't think that he was allowed.
It was an odd sensation. The Duomo Di San Gennaro (if he was going to look for God, he may as well go straight to the top) was on the old city's tourist trail and so the side chapels were full of noisy clod-hopping foreigners braying English and chattering their cameras, but nonetheless some peculiar quality ensured that he felt… quiet. Maybe it was just clever acoustic design; maybe the spirit of Saint Januarius suspended the laws of physics so that the discordant bustle was physically funnelled out of the doors. Whatever the reason, Mario felt that he could recline back in a soft, yielding downy serenity that he had not experienced for a long, turbulent time.
Mario sat on a pew, mouthing silently as he half-remembered old prayers from childhood. He even struggled to bring the Angelus to mind. He did remember how uncomfortable he'd found the rough, gnarled old wood back in his home church, though.
He wasn't godless – it was impossible to be, in the sort of life that he had led. Oh, there were always those who made the grand extravagant pantomime of being macho nihilists – Ambrogino being one of them – but in truth whenever there were bullets zipping overhead you became the most ardent of the faithful; crying out, if not to God or Yahweh, to whoever might be listening. You thanked all hidden and silent powers when each sip of wine wasn't poisoned, or when each subordinate didn't murder you in your bed because a rival had offered them a bare penny's extra pay. There were also times when an associate tearfully wanted to give the boss respect – but couldn't kneel because his legs had smashed to shards by a mallet – that you realised that there was a God, because you'd seen the Devil.
Yes, Mario did believe in God, even if he was far from being His best communicant. The problem was, it was so much easier to assume that He was always there, that He understood, that He in his omniscience could anticipate a prayer that never came, see subconscious contrition beneath outward decadence, and be indulgent enough in His love to assume that humility would be there, if circumstances were different, when you were smashing up a rival's bar in your drunken swagger.
No, not easy. Lazy. Forgiveness was an addictive drug.
Mario didn't know what to expect by coming here. Whether a hard-nosed clergyman would approach and straighten him out with a tough pep talk, whether angels would descend from the rafters bearing understanding between them as golden script on sacred scrollwork, or whether the floor would open up beneath him and send him tumbling down into the seventh circle of the Inferno. He looked about him, suddenly feeling stupid, and his eyes settled on a colourful wall fresco, depicting Renaissance figures contorted around each in what he assumed was profound philosophical significance. Domenichino's Apparition of the Virgin and Child and San Gennaro at the Miraculous Oil Lamp, or so said the plaque at the bottom.
Well that was as clear as muck.
Briefly Mario wondered what it would have been like to have been in the position of those painted saints, to see something with such clarity, to have the special insight to understand his situation just as he struggled to grasp the value of colour being slapped up against the wall. Then he thought about what the people in the picture themselves would have thought when agents of Heaven descended down upon them. Some averted their eyes, finding the light unbearable; others looked to those who had fallen in their passion, seeing the result but not the cause; one even just blitheringly stared into the middle distance, totally oblivious to the wonderment spreading above his head. Regardless of their state, all of the figures were assembled around the same oil lamp which they'd doubtless gathered around to talk or pray, day after day. Mario didn't doubt that all of them were quite happy with their comfortable routines and didn't appreciate the miracle arriving to confuse and uproot all that they'd worked for – but when something unique occurred they were not all suddenly raised up in a pillar of gold, but they still all responded, with the faculties, spirit and resources available to them
Resources available to them.
Mario stayed seated for a while, the awful, creeping realisation of what he had just resolved on pitting his gut. He'd got his answer – God protect him from it!
The sun looked down the length of the street, lighting it all without the hint of a shadow. It was peaceful, but not empty, and the sounds you heard only added to a general atmosphere of soothing serenity.
A girl was dancing on the pavement, jumping, hopping and tripping along in an energetic saltarello. The girl sprung with the full stirring energy of active youth; her movements were precise and skilled, reassuring people that she knew the dance well and that old traditions had not yet expired in a bland modern world; her blonde hair shone like gold, long pigtails curling and swirling around her with the mesmerising intricacy of ribbons; her warm, tanned skin spoke of a life engrossed in the colour and brightness of nature, always under the light of the sun. Anyone inclined to look out of the window or may have turned into the street would have smiled contentedly at the sight, pleased at having the beauty of life affirmed again within them, before continuing on their daily chores with their heads a little higher.
And they did continue on their way, so that eventually the girl was alone, with no witnesses. With a final hop, turning her head to acknowledge silent applause, the girl began to skip down the street, towards the sun.
The skip became a jog.
The jog became a run.
The run became a sprint, and suddenly there was a silver flash whipping around her golden tresses, dancing in front of her as the bag on her back spiralled away down the street and a dark length suddenly materialised in her hands—
Three pounding footfalls brought her to the front door of the target house. She scrunched her toes, clenched her thighs, and one driving piston kick drove through the door, penetrating thick and heavy birchwood like cheap balsa and ripping the lock out of the frame with the whiplash crack of shattered metal and torn wood. Immediately she pulled her leg back and used the momentum to whirl into a balletic pirouette, spinning to the side of the door as it exploded outwards, blasted off its hinges as a thunderous concussion slammed into it from inside the house, and spinning into a hailstorm of shot and splinters that would have flensed flesh from bone.
Wood was still pattering across the ground as she bounced back off the wall and swung around into the darkness of the house.
"Adriano Lippi! My name is Triela!"
A sound! Rack! Track! Fire!
The trap set to cover the door – a shotgun tied to a simple tripwire – was snatched up and flung away into the recesses of the room's shadows, a tangled mess of twisted metal.
A sound! Rack! Track! Fire!
A bureau burst open, billowing clouds of shattered china and cobs of spinning crystal in a discordant din – but multiphase hearing could slice straight through the sense-drowning clamour.
A sound! Rack! Track! Fire!
A toolbox balanced on the mezzanine banister was caught in the gale and dashed against the ceiling, exploding mangled implements to rain down around her like shrapnel. Trowels. Pruners. Forks. Funny.
And metal howling with enough of a racket to smother the creaking floorboards, the click of the slide running home, the faint rush of air as the pistol was raised –
Triela threw herself down as whickering streams of metal creased the air around her head, and scrambled behind a settee as another barking shot parted the fabric of her coat and kissed a stinging weal on her back. The settee shuddered as a pair of shots thudded into it, and Triela grunted as they pushed through and struck her, but their power was spent and they did no more than bruise.
There was a soft thup as the spent cartridge from Triela's third shot hit the carpet, and a cacophonous crash as the pulverised toolbox fell down from the ceiling onto a side-table and smashed a lamp.
Triela exhaled. She quickly felt herself for injury, and blinked as she saw small golden hairs drift languidly in the air, glowing like thin mortal threads in the light. She ran a hand through her hair, and discovered that one of her pigtails had been scissored away by the fire.
She'd been meaning to get to the hairdresser's, anyway.
Triela quickly stripped off her jacket, frowned critically at the tear in the back, and hung it on her Winchester's bayonet. Jabbing it outside of her cover didn't provoke a fresh spasm of shots – Adriano must have withdrawn further into the building.
Discarding the jacket, Triela plastered the mezzanine with a further cartridge as she rushed out to press herself against the wall and outside the field of fire.
Adriano stifled a curse as the buffeting blast of shot forced him to roll back deeper into the upper room. He was confronting a professional, obviously, but the girl had to be running short on ammunition now, and as much as he strained his ears he couldn't hear her slotting home fresh cartridges. He was clever. He had more firepower. He had the advantage.
"You just ruined a lovely coat there, Adriano. It was Versace, new this season – my master had spent a fortune on it."
Adriano blinked. What was she going on about? Fashion? Was this some sort of psychological taunting to tempt him out of cover? Jabber all you want, girly-girl, he thought, I'm made of sterner stuff than that.
"I really liked that coat. It was suede, tough but comfortable. It was the first time I asked for something other than a bear. Way to go and spoil something lovely."
Adriano's ears pricked up as he heard the crunch of broken china underfoot. He revised down his estimate of his enemy's proficiency – maybe she was really just a girl, after all. Tread carefully all you want, my dearest Triela, he smiled, it'll only make you easier to spot.
"We've found Mrs. Basile's body, by the way. A tramp fished a bag of her out of the bay. Naples has a lot of tramps, a lot of poor, a lot of destitute."
Crunch.
"Not you though, eh? You have a skill. As Mrs. Basile shows, you're good with your hands – a honest, manual, working man."
Crunch.
"Not having a landlady also cuts down on the outgoings from your rent, I daresay."
Adriano jumped slightly as he heard the noisy clatter of metal being kicked across the floor.
"Great work on those mechanical thumpers, by the way. They really did distract my fire. You ought to patent them."
Crunch.
"Speaking of your handiwork, I'd like to comment on your last, ah, 'performance piece'. The mined soccer pitch?"
Crunch.
"Putting a bomb underneath the penalty spot. Penalties, punishment for Mario Bossi. Very witty. Very clever. Incisive. Pointed. Poetic, even."
Crunch.
"I'm not trying to brag, but I'm quite perceptive at making inferences and interpretations, and identifying the subtleties of poetic expression. My master is a fine scholar and he educates me in the whole Classical milieu. Catallus. Horace. Virgil. Ovid."
Creeeeeeeaaak.
First loose stair. Still too low to shoot – the joint between floor and wall at head height at that level made it too thick to fire through – but she was getting closer… Adriano shifted his grip on his pistol and cautiously rose to a kneeling position in the upper room.
"So then, attend, Adriano. 'The Plucking of the Flower'. Or 'Transfiguration of a Young Girl'. She needs to be transfigured – the spiritual side of life's all that left to her after you blew off her limbs."
Crunch.
"There is a girl. Happy, bubbly, active, effusive. A bit of a tearaway when she was younger, and still fond of mischief now, but provoking playfulness only confirmed her… her zest for life."
Several seconds passed before Adriano heard her move again. Adriano looked puzzled for a moment. Did he hear a--? No, he couldn't have, this girl was obviously full of herself and imagined that she was some cool calculating hyper-bitch, so she wouldn't be getting emotional in front of an enemy.
"Now her ruined body's lain out on a hospital trolley like a joint of meat at a butcher's."
Crunch.
"What's the hidden meaning there, Adriano?"
Clu-tang! Some garden tool – his little jeering jibe – went skittering down the stairs.
"What's the subtext?"
Crunch.
"The parabasis?"
Crunch.
"The Derridan deconstructive metatextuality?"
Crunch.
"You are a slimy piece of shit and I am going to take great pleasure in making you fucking bleed."
Criiiiiiik.
Second loose stair! Three steps down! He had her cold!
In one fluid motion and with a cackle of victory, Adriano sprung to his feet, punched three rounds through the wall, and rushed out onto the mezzanine to finish the kill—
Triela was standing a few steps further down. She was gripping her Winchester by the barrel, and pressing on the stair with the stock. She looked up at Adriano, and tipped her head in a sweet, genial smile, one that looked almost comical with only one pigtail dangling from her head.
Adriano was flummoxed for a moment, and before he could adjust his aim Triela flicked her weapon up, catching Adriano's pistol-hand with the edge of the butt and slamming it against the wall. He howled in pain, but didn't drop the pistol, and Triela was investing her energy in grinding it loose. Fatal mistake – flashing a vicarious grin down at the girl, he wrenched his hand free, took a step back and had her covered.
A weapon report roared. His arm bucked. And his hand exploded.
Adriano stumbled backwards, staring uncomprehendingly at the ragged stump and the crimson life pumping from it. Shock numbed and slackened his legs, and the sledgehammer-blow of incomparable agony threatened to topple him completely, but a spike of adrenalin drove into his system and flooded his body with stirring and refortifying electric power. Adriano turned to run back into the upper room—
A second report resounded off the walls, gouging through Adriano's thigh. There was a wet slap as a chunk of sodden and misshapen flesh squelched onto the floor in front of him.
Adriano was spun by the blow. Gripping the doorframe with his remaining hand, clenching onto it with a vice-grip as though it was his sole anchor preventing from drifting into oblivion. With quaking effort, he forced himself, inch by inch, to lean upright against the frame. Then through one of the upper windows, with awful, final clarity, he could see a lock of bright falk hair, shimmering, sky-blue eyes, and the ebony glint of a lens—
The Dragunov sang, and Adriano was floored by its music.
"Thanks a bunch, Rico." Triela smiled into her collar microphone.
"Glad to be of help, Trinny! Go get 'im!" Rico's sunny, chirpy, perky voice tripped back across to her.
Triela turned her Winchester 1897 back into a normal grip, thoughtfully rubbing the thin scratched groove on the breech housing – where she'd blocked one of Pinnochio's knives back in Montalcino – with her thumb. She mounted the top of the stairs, surveying the detritus that the furious exchange had left on the mezzanine. She gave a sharp intake of breath when she saw the ruins of Adriano's pistol – Rico's shot had totally obliterated the grip and chewed out a chunk of the mechanism, but she could still recognise an F.N. Five-Seven from its barrel. She pawed the bruises on her breasts where the spent bullets had struck her – the Five-Seven was the notorious "cop-killer", a favourite of gangsters as its enlarged rounds could defeat body armour; Triela didn't doubt that they wouldn't have shown much respect for her enhanced physique, either. She'd been fortunate – she didn't want to distress Hilshire with another injury.
Adriano lay across the threshold – his twitching, bloodied legs in the mezzanine, his torso in the darkness of the upper room. Triela felt around the door for a light switch, and flicked it on.
Rico's third shot had lanced through Adriano's lung. He lay flopping and sucking like a beached fish, drowning in air, bubbling pink froth like some rabid creature and choking on his own blood. His eyes bulged at Triela as he saw her, and his twitching arms banged against the floor as he tried to will them to push himself upright. Triela let him manage about thirty stuttering and hacking degrees before pushing him back down with the light press of the flat of the Winchester's bayonet against his cheek.
Blood burbled up between Adriano's lips. Spite was strong in his gut, though, and he coughed and gargled through it, "Not… revenge… should… alone… face to face… coward."
"Actually, Adriano, I'm blessed with friends. We're not seeing any of your 'brothers' running here to haul a comrade's fat out of the fire, are we?" Triela moved her Winchester so that the tip of the bayonet hovered poised over Adriano's throat, and waited for a few seconds for emphasis.
Adriano blinked, and brought up gross bronchitic spew to poison his last gasps of draining blood. "Triela. See… you… Hell."
"Don't the Camorra keep files on us cyborgs, Adriano? I died years ago. My soul's already there, waiting to pick up where we leave off here."
Triela gripped the stock of her shotgun tightly, and thrust once.
(Continued)