Free October Men by Anthony Price Page B

Frugoni feverishly attempted to open his own door, only to discover that he had bolted it top and bottom as well as securing it with what sounded like an old-fashioned padlock. It took him a full two minutes of clumsy grappling with the lock and alcoholic puffing and blowing with the bolts to relax its defences. And even then it caught on the uneven floor and shuddered so violently that it was a tossup whether it wouldn’t fall to pieces before it was finally opened.
    Frugoni peered at him uneasily in the greenish light from the unwashed landing window.
    “You remember me, Signor Frugoni,” said Boselli patiently. “We last met when you—ah—consulted the General two or three years ago. About your pension.”
    “My pension?” Frugoni looked at him stupidly.
    “Your war wound, I believe—or a war disability of some sort,” Boselli prompted him with helpful vagueness. “The General didn’t tell me the exact details, but I gathered that you and he were old comrades. Once comrades, always comrades—that’s what he said.”
    Frugoni blinked and screwed up his face with the unexpected mental effort needed to resolve the enormous gap between what he must remember had actually happened when he tried to touch the General for a sucker’s handout, and the rose-tinted pack of lies he had just heard.
    In fact no one knew the extent of that gap better than Boselli himself. It had devolved on him to check up on the man’s tear-jerking tale of a veteran fallen on unmerited hard times, and he had very soon found the General’s suspicions to be well-founded. Frugoni had fallen not so much on hard times as through the skylight of the restaurant he had been robbing—his “war wound” had been the compound fracture of the leg and the mild concussion which had resulted from this descent.
    Central criminal records had also revealed that in addition to being an inveterate and unsuccessful petty thief, Frugoni was a quarrelsome boozer who had abandoned his wife and children—it had been that last detail, rather than the man’s actual misdemeanours, which had finally directed the General’s charity—
    “Put the woman on my list then, Boselli—she’s probably better off without him anyway.”
    “What about the man, sir?”
    “Leave him to me. It’ll be a pleasure to kick his backside again after all these years…”
    “My wound—of course!” Frugoni twitched into full consciousness. “You must pardon me, Signor Boselli—naturally I remember you— but my health, you understand…” He heaved a gallant sigh “… at my age things are hard.”
    Boselli nodded sympathetically.
    “Not that I am grumbling, you understand,” Fragoni added hastily, uncertain of the most profitable role open to him until he could establish just how much Boselli knew. “But let us not speak of such things. You said—I believe you said—?”
    “That I have something for you. That is correct. But something in turn for something, Signor Frugoni. Perhaps I might step inside for a moment, yes?”
    Frugoni regarded him in complete bewilderment; the possibility that he possessed something—anything—which was likely to be saleable, but of which he was totally unaware, seemed to have knocked away what little balance he could muster so early in the day.
    “I—but of course, Signor Boselli—“
    The moment he entered the attic room it was Boselli in his turn who was knocked off balance, however. The smell on the dingy landing had been unpleasant enough, combined as it was of all the different aromas of cooking and concentrated humanity which had risen up the stairway from the warrens below. But in Frugoni’s room this smell graduated to the rank of stench, in which stale wine and the sweet-sour mustiness of old unwashed linen united into a miasma.
    Boselli dragged out his damp silk handkerchief and held it across the lower part of his face, fighting his sickness.
    “Signor Boselli—?” Frugoni was looking at him solicitously, oblivious