Stay Dead - [16]

God, old age was a curse; things slipped away from you – your strength, your health, even your mind, until finally what was left? Nothing except a pile of bones in a casket. But – and now Gina smiled to herself, a secret, triumphant smile – sometimes you could cheat old age. Sometimes you could even cheat death.

Then the smile faded as she remembered. The mistakes. Oh yes. Lots of them. Her big, dreadful mistakes. Suddenly she grew agitated, trembling, trying to hoist herself from the chair. No, perhaps the man wasn’t one of her own. Now she remembered what had been happening but it was all a jumble, none of it clear. She’d been phoning someone in London. She knew she had. But who? She couldn’t remember. And then this man had started calling the number she’d left – this number, and she had said she would meet, talk. She’d been putting him off because she had no idea what this was all about, but she knew it couldn’t be good.

The only thing she remembered clearly was the furious reaction when they found out what she’d done. She’d heard shouting outside her room and women sobbing – someone calling the nurses silly bitches, demanding to know why they hadn’t done as they’d been told and kept her away from the house phones, telling them they were fired. But when they came in to see her, their voices were calm, telling her what to do. Stall him some more, this Max Carter person.

That was his name. Max Carter. She’d remembered!

So she’d stalled him. Told him she would meet him to discuss it here, then here, then here. And she hadn’t shown up, and then Antonio…

She’d remembered that too! Antonio!

Antonio had said, We will sort this, once and for all. We will go out, Bruto and me, and Bruto will pretend to be poor old Gina in her wheelchair, and all will be well. Tell him the old amphitheatre, and we will finish him there, Antonio told her, his voice as patient and soothing as if he was talking to a naughty child. Yes, she had made some silly mistakes, maybe a lot of them, but there was nothing too impossible to sort out. He was going to sort it.

Gina frowned as she heard doors slamming downstairs, raised voices, the sounds of a struggle, things crashing to the ground. Anxiously she twisted around in the chair to look at the open doorway leading out into the hall. She tried to get up from her chair – she hated the thing, she spent so many hours confined to it – but she was too weak. With her skinny, shaking, blue-veined hands she fumbled with the chair’s wheels, and managed to turn it so that she was facing the door.

‘Fidelia!’ she called in her querulous voice, a voice that had once made people snap to attention. Once she had been respected, even feared, because of her family connections. Not any more.

Fidelia didn’t come.

Suddenly, all was deathly quiet in the villa. Stillness. Silence. And then she heard it. The stealthy tread of footsteps approaching. Frozen there, her heart stuttering in her chest, she clutched at the blanket over her knees and anxiously watched the open door.

‘Fidelia?’ she called again, quieter, her voice trembling.

Then a man stepped into the doorway. He was carrying a gun. He was compact, muscular, with black hair and dark navy-blue eyes. He was aiming the gun steadily, straight at her. As he moved, he left faint bloody footprints on the marble floor. Two other men appeared behind him, both of them armed, both of them looking dangerous.

‘Who are you?’ she asked the one in front, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

‘I’m Max Carter,’ said the man, coming into the room. ‘You wanted to speak to me, didn’t you.’

‘No, I… it was a mistake. That’s all.’ She looked bewildered, then she remembered. A faltering smile lifted her lips back from her yellowing teeth. ‘Antonio has put it right.’

‘No. He hasn’t. Antonio’s in the hospital,’ he said.

Gina said nothing. If I say nothing, she thought, then I can’t do anything wrong. I can’t make another mistake. This mistake was clearly a bad one, far worse than everyone had previously thought. Antonio was in the hospital. For a moment, groping around in her mind, she couldn’t remember who Antonio was, and then she had it. Antonio was the one who had got very angry with her. Antonio was the one who said he’d put it right.

Max stepped further into the luxuriously appointed and sunlit room. He didn’t lower the gun. He was looking at a helpless, confused old lady in a wheelchair, but seeing something very different: the latent, deadly power of the Mafia. The old woman had secrets and in her confused state she had spilled them – and those secrets were dire enough to make her send two men to kill him so that they would never be revealed.

He moved closer to where Gina sat. Leaning in, he grabbed the blanket and threw it aside. Helpless old woman or not, he wasn’t taking any chances. But there was no weapon hidden there; no knife, no gun. He knew these people were dangerous, unpredictable, like scorpions. The sting was in the tail, and the tail would strike when you least expected it.

Max stepped back again, watching her like a hawk. She looked bewildered, but it could be an act; he didn’t trust it. He put himself out of kicking distance, and placed himself so that he could watch her and at the same time not block his back-up’s view from the open doorway.