After Propriano he followed the coastal plain again for a few miles before the D.268 allowed him to turn toward the mountains of Ospédale. He was now off the N (national) roads and onto D (departmental) roads, little more than narrow lanes, yet broad highways compared to the tracks high in the mountains to come.
He passed tiny perched villages of local gray stone houses, sitting on hills and escarpments from which the views were vertiginous, and he wondered how these farmers could make a living from their tiny meadows and orchards.
Always the road climbed, twisting and turning, dipping to cross a fold in the ground but always climbing again after the respite. Beyond Ste. Lucie de Tallano the tree line ended and the hills were covered with that thick, thigh-high cover of heather and myrtle that they call the maquis. During the Second World War, fleeing from one’s home into the mountains to avoid arrest by the Gestapo was called “taking to the maquis”; thus the French underground resistance became known as the maquisards, or just “the Maquis.”
Corsica is as old as her mountains, and men have lived in these hills since prehistoric times. Like Sardinia and Sicily, Corsica has been fought over more times than she can remember, and always the strangers came as conquerors, invaders, and tax-gatherers, to rule and to take, never to give. With so little to live on for themselves, the Corsicans reacted by turning to their hills, the natural ramparts and sanctuaries. Generations of rebels and bandits, guerrillas and partisans have taken to the hills to avoid the authorities marching up from the coast to levy taxes and imposts from people ill able to pay.
Out of these centuries of experience the mountain folk developed their philosophy: clannish and secretive. Authority represented injustice and Paris gathered taxes just as harshly as any other conqueror. Though Corsica is part of France, and gave France Napoléon Bonaparte and a thousand other notables, for the mountain people the foreigner is still the foreigner, harbinger of injustice and the tax levy, whether from France or anywhere else. Corsica might send her sons by the tens of thousands to mainland France to work, but if ever such a son were in trouble, the old mountains would still offer sanctuary.
It was the mountains and the poverty and the perceived persecution that gave rise to the rocklike solidarity, and to the Corsican Union, deemed by some to be more secretive and dangerous than the Mafia. It was into this world, which no twentieth century had managed to change with its Common Markets and European Parliaments, that Quinn drove in the last month of 1991.
Just before the town of Levie there was a sign pointing to Carbini, along a small road called the D.59. The road ran due south and, after four miles, crossed the Fiumicicoli, by now a small stream tumbling out of the Ospédale Range. At Carbini, a one-street village where old men in blue smocks sat outside their stone cottages and a few chickens scratched the dust, Quinn’s gazetteer ran out of steam. Two lanes left the village; the D. 148 ran back west, the way he had come, but along the south flank of the valley.
Straight ahead ran the D.59 toward Orone and, much farther south, to Sotta. He could see the jutting peak of Mount Cagna to the southwest, the silent mass of the Ospédale Range to his left, topped by one of Corsica’s highest peaks, the Punta di la Vacca Morta, so called because from a certain angle it seems to resemble a dead cow. He chose to drive straight on.
Just after Orone the mountains were closer to his left, and the turning for Castelblanc was two miles beyond Orone. It was no more than a track, and since no road led through the Ospédale, it had to be a cul-de-sac. He could see from the road the great pale-gray rock set in the flank of the range that had once caused someone to think he was looking at a white castle, a mistake that had given the hamlet its name long ago. Quinn drove slowly up the track. Three miles farther on, high above the D.59, he entered Castelblanc.
The road ended at the village square, which lay at the end of the village, back to the mountain. The narrow street that led to the square was flanked by low stone houses, all closed and shuttered. No chickens scratched the dirt. No old men sat on their stoops. The place was silent. He drove into the square, stopped, climbed out, and stretched. Down the main street a tractor engine started. The tractor emerged from between two houses, rolled to the center of the road, and stopped. The driver removed the ignition keys, dropped to the ground, and disappeared between the houses. There was enough space between the rear of the tractor and the wall for a motorcycle, but no car could drive back down that street until the tractor was removed.
Quinn looked around. The square had three sides, apart from the road. To the right were four cottages; ahead, a small gray stone church. To his left was what must be the center of life in Castelblanc, a low tavern of two floors under a tiled roof and an alley leading to what else there was of Castelblanc that was not on the road—a cluster of cottages, barns, and yards that terminated in the flank of the mountain.
From the church door a small and very old priest emerged, failed to see Quinn, and turned to lock the door behind him.
“Bonjour, mon père,” Quinn called cheerfully. The man of God jumped like a shot rabbit, glanced at Quinn in near panic, and scuttled across the square to disappear down the alley beside the tavern. As he did so he crossed himself.
Quinn’s appearance would have surprised any Corsican priest, for the specialist menswear shop in Marseilles had done him proud. He had tooled Western boots, pale-blue jeans, a bright-red plaid shirt, fringed buckskin jacket, and a tall Stetson hat. If he wished to look like a caricature off a dude ranch, he had succeeded. He took his ignition keys and his canvas bag and strolled into the bar.
It was dark inside. The proprietor was behind the bar, earnestly polishing glasses—something of a novelty, Quinn surmised. Otherwise there were four plain oak tables, each surrounded by four chairs. Only one was occupied; four men sat studying hands of cards.
Quinn went to the bar and set down his bag, but kept his tall hat on. The barman looked up.
“Monsieur?”
No curiosity, no surprise. Quinn pretended not to notice, flashed a beaming smile.
“A glass of red wine, if you please,” he said formally. The wine was local, rough but good. Quinn sipped appreciatively. From behind the bar the landlord’s plump wife appeared, deposited several dishes of olives, cheese, and bread, cast not a glance at Quinn and, at a short word in the local dialect from her husband, disappeared back into the kitchen. The men playing cards refused to look at him either. Quinn addressed the barman.
“I am looking,” he said, “for a gentleman I believe lives here. Name of Orsini. Do you know him?”
The barman glanced at the card players as if for a prompt. None came.
“Would that be Monsieur Dominique Orsini?” asked the barman. Quinn looked thoughtful. They had blocked the road, admitted Orsini existed. For both reasons they wished him to stay. Until when? He glanced behind him. The sky outside the windows was pale-blue in the wintry sun. Until dark perhaps. Quinn turned back to the bar and drew a fingertip down his cheek.
“Man with a knife scar? Dominique Orsini?”
The barman nodded.
“Can you tell me where I can find his house?”
Again the barman looked urgently at the card players for a prompt. This time it came. One of the men, the only one in a formal suit, looked up from his cards and spoke.
“Monsieur Orsini is away today, monsieur. He will return tomorrow. If you wait, you will meet him.”
“Well, thank you, friend. That’s real neighborly of you.” To the barman he said, “Could I take a room here for the night?”
The man just nodded. Ten minutes later Quinn had his room, shown him by the proprietor’s wife, who still refused to meet his gaze. When she left, Quinn examined the room. It was at the back, overlooking a yard surrounded by lean-to open-fronted barns. The mattress on the bed was thin, stuffed with lumpy horsehair, but adequate for his purpose. With his penknife he eased up two floorboards under the bed and secreted one of the items contained in his bag. The rest he left for inspectio
n. He closed the bag, left it on the bed, took a hair from his head, and stuck it with saliva across the zip.
Back in the bar he made a good lunch of goat cheese, fresh crusty bread, local pork pâté, and juicy olives, washed down with wine. Then he took a walk around the village. He knew he was safe until sundown; his hosts had received and understood their orders.
There was not a lot to see. No people came to the street to greet him. He saw one small child hastily pulled back into a doorway by a pair of hard-worked female hands. The tractor on the main street had its big rear wheels just clear of the alley from which it had emerged, leaving a two-foot gap. Its front was up against a timber barn.
A chill came into the air about five o’clock. Quinn retired to the bar, where a cheerful fire of olive logs crackled in the hearth. He went to his room for a book, satisfied himself that his bag had been searched, nothing taken, and the floorboards beneath the bed had not been discovered.
He spent two hours in the bar reading, still refusing to remove his hat, then ate again, a tasty ragout of pork, beans, and mountain herbs, with lentils, bread, apple tart, and coffee. He took water instead of wine. At nine he retired to his room. An hour later the last light in the village was extinguished. No one watched television in the bar that night, though it boasted one of only three sets in the village. No one played cards. By ten the village was in darkness, save only for the single bulb in Quinn’s room.
It was a low-power bulb, unshaded and hanging from a dusty cord in the middle of the room. The best light it gave was directly beneath, and that was where the figure in the tall Stetson hat sat reading in the upright armchair.
The moon rose at half past one, climbed from behind the Ospédale Range, and bathed Castelblanc in an eerie white light thirty minutes later. The lean, silent figure moved through the street by its dim illumination as one who knows exactly where he is going. The figure slid down two narrow alleys and into the complex of barns and yards behind the tavern.
Without a sound the shape leaped onto a hay wain parked in one of the yards and from there to the top of a wall. It ran effortlessly along the top of the wall and jumped another alley to land nimbly on the lean-to roof of the barn directly opposite Quinn’s window.
The curtains were half-drawn—they reached only halfway across the window at full stretch. In the twelve-inch gap Quinn could be plainly seen, book on lap, head tilted slightly forward to read the print in the dim light, the shoulders in the red-plaid shirt visible above the window sill, the tan Stetson on his head.
The young man on the roof grinned; such foolishness would prevent his having to come through the bedroom window to do what had to be done. He unslung the Lupara shotgun on the leather strap across his shoulders, flicked the catch off safety, and took aim. Forty feet away the hatted head filled the space above the twin barrels; the triggers were wired together to detonate both barrels simultaneously. When he fired, the roar would have waked the entire village, but no lights went on. The heavy buckshot from both barrels vaporized the panes in the window and shredded the thin cotton curtains. Beyond the window, the head of the sitting man seemed to explode. The gunman saw the pale Stetson whipped away by the blast. The skull fragmented and a great spray of brilliant-red blood flew in all directions. Without a head, the red-plaid torso toppled sideways to the floor and out of vision.
Satisfied, the young cousin of the Orsini clan, who had just made his bones for the family, ran back off the roof, along the wall, down to the hay cart, to the ground, and into the alley from which he had come. Unhurried, and safe in his triumph, the youth walked through the village to the cottage on the fringes of the hamlet where the man he idolized awaited him. He did not see or hear the quieter and taller man who eased himself out of a darkened doorway and followed him.
The devastation in the room above the bar would later be cleared up by the owner’s wife. Her mattress was beyond salvation, slit from end to end, its springy stuffing used to fill the plaid shirt, the torso, and the arms, until it was stiff enough to sit unaided in the upright chair. She would find long strips of clear gummed tape that had held the dummy torso in the upright position, and the remains of the Stetson hat and the book.
She would pick up, piece by piece, the remnants of the polystyrene head of the store dummy that Quinn had persuaded the Marseilles attendant to filch from the stockroom and sell him. Of the two condoms, bloated with ketchup from the ferry’s dining room, which had once hung inside the dummy head, she would find little trace—just the red splotches all over her room, but these would come off with a damp cloth.
The landlord would wonder why he had not seen the head of the store dummy when he searched the American’s luggage, and would eventually find the loose planks beneath the bed where it had been hidden by Quinn as soon as he arrived.
Finally the angry man in the dark suit who had been playing cards in the bar the previous afternoon would be shown the abandoned tooled cowboy boots, the jeans, the fringed buckskin jacket, and the landlord would inform the local capu that the American must now be dressed in his other set of clothes: dark trousers, black zip-up windbreaker, crepe-soled desert boots, and polo-neck sweater. They would all examine the canvas holdall and find nothing else left in it. This would happen in the hour before dawn.
When the youth reached the cottage he sought, he tapped gently on the door. Quinn slipped into a shadowed doorway fifty yards behind him. There must have been a command to enter, for the youth flipped the door latch and went inside. As the door closed, Quinn moved closer, circled the house, and found a shuttered window with a crack in the timbers large enough to peer through.
Dominique Orsini sat at a rough wooden table, and cut slices off a fat salami sausage with a razor-sharp knife. The teenager with the Lupara stood in front of him. They were talking in the Corsican language, nothing like French, incomprehensible to a foreigner. The boy was describing the events of the last thirty minutes; Orsini nodded several times.
When the boy had finished, Orsini rose, came around the table, and embraced him. The younger man glowed with pride. As Orsini turned, the lamplight caught the livid scar running down one cheek from the point of the bone to the jaw. He took a wad of notes from his pocket; the boy shook his head and protested. Orsini stuffed the wad in the youth’s top pocket, patted him on the back, and dismissed him. The boy disappeared from view.
To have killed the Corsican hit man would have been easy. Quinn wanted him alive, in the back of his car, and in a cell in Ajaccio police headquarters by sunup. He had noticed the powerful motorcycle parked in the lean-to log store.
Thirty minutes later, in the deep shadow cast by the wooden barn and the parked tractor, Quinn heard the rumble of the motorcycle’s engine starting. Orsini turned the motorcycle slowly out of a side passage and into the main square, then headed down the track out of town. There was enough room for him to pass between the rear of the tractor and the nearest house wall. He passed through a bright patch of moonlight and Quinn stepped out of the shadows, drew a bead, and fired once. The motorcycle’s front tire shredded; the machine slewed violently and went out of control. It fell to its side, threw the rider, and rolled to a stop.
Orsini was hurled by his own momentum into the side of the tractor, but he came back up with remarkable speed. Quinn stood ten yards away, the Smith & Wesson pointing at the Corsican’s chest. Orsini was breathing deeply, in pain, favoring one leg as he leaned against the tractor’s high rear wheel. Quinn could see the glittering black eyes, the dark stubble around the chin. Slowly Orsini raised his hands.
“Orsini,” said Quinn quietly. “Je m’appelle Quinn. Je veux te parler.”
Orsini’s reaction was to put pressure on his damaged leg, gasp in pain, and lower his left hand to his knee. He was good. The left hand moved slowly to massage the knee, taking Quinn’s attention with it for a second. The right hand moved much faster, sweeping down and letting go of the sleeve-knife in the same second. Quinn caught the flicker of steel in the moonlight and jerked
sideways.. The blade missed his throat, twitched the shoulder of his leather jacket, and dug deep into the planks of the barn behind him.
It took Quinn only a second to grab the bone haft and jerk it out of the wood to release his jacket. But it was enough for Orsini. He was behind the tractor and running down the alley behind the vehicle like a cat. But a wounded cat.
Had he been unhurt Quinn would have lost him. Fit though the American was, when a Corsican hits the maquis there are very few who can keep up with him. The tough strands of heather, up to waist height, cling and drag at the clothes like a thousand fingers. The sensation is of wading through water. Within two hundred meters the energy is sapped away; the legs feel like lead. A man can drop to the ground anywhere in that sea of maquis and vanish, invisible at ten feet.
But Orsini was slowed. His other enemy was the moonlight. Quinn saw his shadow reach the end of the alley, which marked the last houses of the hamlet, and then move out into the heather of the hillside. Quinn went after him, down the alley, which became a track, and then into the maquis. He could hear the swish of branches ahead and guided himself by the noise.
Then he saw Orsini’s head again, twenty yards ahead, moving across the flank of the mountain but steadily uphill. A hundred yards farther on, the sounds ceased. Orsini had gone to earth. Quinn stopped and did the same. To go forward with the moon behind him would be madness.
He had hunted before, and been hunted, by night. In the dense bush by the Mekong, through the thick jungle north of Khe Sanh, in the high country with his Montagnard guides. All natives are good in their own terrain, the Viet Cong in their jungle, the Kalahari bushmen in their own desert. Orsini was on his own ground, where he had been born and brought up, slowed by a damaged knee, without his knife but almost certainly with his handgun. And Quinn needed him alive. So both men crouched in the heather and listened to the sounds of the night, to discern that one sound that was not a cicada or coney or fluttering bird, but could only be made by a man. Quinn glanced at the moon; an hour to set. After that he would see nothing until dawn, when help would come for the Corsican from his own village a quarter-mile down the mountain.