Free October Men by Anthony Price Page A

now raised the prickle of perspiration on his back.
    He had never stepped out of line like this before, at least not so dangerously. But this, he admitted candidly to himself, was partly because his work rarely exposed him to such temptations. Indeed, it had been one of his little tasks to watch for signs of such curiosity in others—what the General described as the itch to know a little too much for their own good—and he had become adept at spotting them. Only now he was beginning for the first time to sympathise with the deviationists.
    He looked up and down the narrow street suspiciously. The prospect of the General’s discovery that he was being surreptitiously investigated by one of his own staff didn’t really bear thinking about; it made him shiver at the same time as he perspired, which in turn made him remember inconsequentially that his wife had said only yesterday that she had gone “all hot and cold” after nearly being run over by some foreign driver who’d tried to change his mind in the Via Labicana. He’d been on the point of telling her that such a contradictory physical condition was unlikely, and here he was experiencing it himself.
    He paused at a street fountain and drank greedily from it. It seemed to have a bitter flavour, but he knew that it was not the water, only the taste already in his mouth.
    He splashed his face and wiped it with his silk handkerchief, glancing again up and down the street. It was the General’s fault, anyway, even if that was one excuse he would never dare to advance openly. The Ruelle File started—or appeared to start—with impossible abruptness in 1944, as though George Ruelle had sprung from the ground full-grown into the middle management ranks of the newly-respectable Italian Communist Party. From nowhere usually meant from Moscow, but that clearly didn’t apply in Ruelle’s case; he had been fighting in the south in ‘43, if not earlier, and his first Moscow trip had not been until ‘46—there was no mystery about those dates. Indeed, there wasn’t even any mystery as to just where that missing pre-1944 section of the dossier was: it was reposing safely in the General’s own safe—no betting man, Boselli would happily have bet his last lire on that, at hundred to one odds.
    Under cover of folding the handkerchief Boselli took a final look at the street. Nothing, as far as he could see, had changed and no one was watching him. Which left him with the reassuring but galling probability that there was no one on his tail and that the General had given him this task because he was the least likely of all men to scratch that dangerous itch.
    Half a dozen hurried steps carried him across the pavement and into the alleyway—well, for once the great General hadn’t been as clever as he thought he’d been.
    Frugoni’s apartment—it was a ridiculous exaggeration to call two crummy little rooms an apartment—was predictably jammed under the eaves, without any access to the roof, a rathole fit for a rat.
    And that was good, thought Boselli as he knocked sharply on the scarred door: the worse off Frugoni was (and with any luck he would have gone considerably farther downhill since he had last come round bumming for a handout), the cheaper his tongue would be to loosen. There ought to be some juicy expenses in this work, but Frugoni’s name could never be listed in the accounting so there was no question of generosity, real or fabricated, in his case.
    “Who is it?”
    That was the voice, the hoarse whine rather.
    “Boselli—Pietro Boselli.”
    “Who? Pietro who?” The whine was suspicious, as though its owner was accustomed to bad news knocking at his door. “I don’t know any Pietro.”
    “Pietro Boselli—General Montuori’s personal assistant.” Boselli paused to let the names sink into the man’s befuddled mind. “I’ve got something for you, Signor Frugoni.”
    “Something for me?”
    “That’s right. Open up.”
    There was a rattle as