Free See Naples and Die by Ray Cleveland

a low profile, and Buckaroo here is getting more attention than a
wildebeest in a lion’s pen.”
    “Can’t you see he’s hyperventilating?”
said Brenda. “It’s the anxiety of meeting these Mafia guys. Ever since this was
arranged he’s been withdrawing into himself. Look at his breathing. It’s ten
times faster than ours. We need to snap him out of it. Let’s go through
everything again … that could calm him down.”
    “Or tip him over the edge, more like,”
sighed Chrissie.
    “Well … let’s try, shall we?” said Megan
calmly. She changed places with Chrissie and sat next to Bruno. “Bruno,” she
whispered, in a soothing tone that came straight from a chocolate advert. “Two
days ago we thought we were in a hopeless situation, with no way out. Then you
came up with this brilliant plan. It is totally brilliant. Well done, you.”
    Chrissie groaned.
    Megan continued. “You actually spoke to
Roberto Vialli and, not only that, you got him to come all the way to London
for a meeting. So now it could be that we have a good Mafia man on our side who
can make the bad Mafia man go away.”
    Chrissie had to interrupt. “What on
earth are you doing? Reading him a bedtime story? You’re supposed to be
snapping him out of it, not sending him into a coma. And, by the way, I don’t
know much about this – but I don’t think there is such a thing as a good Mafia
man. Now I propose we all be quiet for a few minutes and think about what we
are going to say when this Roberto guy gets here, because I have a feeling that
Bruno will be sucking his thumb by then.”
    The girls and Bruno sat on the park
bench and looked across the green fields of Kensington Gardens. They had
entered through Black Lion Gate at the junction of Bayswater Road and
Queensway, and walked past the children’s play area and ice cream van until they
found the first empty bench on Broad Walk.
    It was Brenda’s idea to pick a busy
location with wide open spaces: she reasoned that an assassination here would
be pretty difficult. They also understood how Roberto must be viewing all this.
He receives a phone call out of the blue from someone he’s never heard of, who tempts
him to leave the security of Naples on the pretext of acquiring valuable
information about his arch-enemy. He must be half expecting a trap … so the
park seemed a good idea, all round.
    The only problem was that they were easy
to recognise. Three girls and a priest isn’t something you see every day, even
in London, but these Mafia guys could be anywhere. They were scanning the
groups of people sitting on the grass, who were mostly couples and women with
children. Two skinheads with a pit bull were being a nuisance, and in the
distance four young boys were trying to fly a kite. A continuous flow of people
was passing by, either enjoying a stroll or making their way through the park
towards the more affluent areas of Knightsbridge and Kensington – but, other
than a cursory glance at three pretty girls and what looked like a priest on
drugs, no one seemed interested in them.
    Then Brenda spotted two tall dark-haired
men turning away from the ice cream van. They were smartly dressed – too smart
for a walk in the park. The men very slowly made their way down Broad Walk.
When they got to the bench they stopped and faced the girls. One of the men
looked at his ice cream and said, in broken English, “This-a gelato is
disgustoso.” Then he tossed it into the rubbish bin at the side of their seat.
    The other man smiled. “Forgive my
friend. He hasn’t acclimatised to your English ways. We are from Italy, but I
suppose you know that already.” His English was perfect, and somehow that eased
the tension.
    “But the ice cream man is Italian, so it
should be good,” said Brenda, waffling.
    The man looked at the brilliant white
ice cream in his hand. “The man is Italian, but the products and process that
make the gelato are English. It is what you call a bad reproduction.”