Free Assignment - Palermo by Edward S. Aarons Page B

down to the yellow villa. He ran faster. The boy kept pace with an easy, loping stride.
    “Papa Simone’s boat,” he called softly.
    In another cove, invisible from where they had landed, was a moored motor cruiser. Durell spared it a quick glance from their height above it but did not slacken his pace. He thought he saw someone still aboard, glimpsed
    through the intervening pines. A bald head, a very tall and menacing figure, even at this distance. Kronin? But it was too far away to be certain.
    The girl screamed again.
    Then they heard the heavy, booming shot.
    As if it were a signal, scores of seabirds lifted from the rocky, wooded slope and flew screeching into the blue sky. Their cries wiped out any immediate reply to the shot. Durell plunged upward through the shadowed pines, his feet slipping in the needles. He dropped flat behind a thin, gray shelf of granite. The young skipper kept up with him.
    “There they are,” Jean breathed.
    There were two of them, squat and somehow alien to this quiet place, wearing heavy city clothes. One, with a gun in his hand, walked balancing on a spine of rock toward a copse of trees near the crest of the promontory. Beyond him sea and sky shown benignly. The Riviera coast was hazed by distance toward the Italian frontier. The man wore a narrow-brimmed gray hat and a dark topcoat with a velour collar. The second man was circling right, through the woods. The girl was not in sight.
    Durell drew a tight breath. Jean lifted his rifle. “I could give them both a piqûre  of lead, eh?”
    “Wait.”
    “But they hunt her like she was a wounded bird.”
    “Let’s spot her first,” Durell said.
    There might be more men from the other boat, circling the mountainside to cut off Gabriella’s flight. He couldn’t chance surprise. Defeat could mean a bullet in the back of the head. But why the girl? She hadn’t been mixed up in the business in Switzerland. Was it all just a blood feud for breaking the tribal rules of the Fratelli della Notte? In any case it surely meant that O’Malley was nearby, and she had come to meet him in this lonely place.
    But why was Gabriella Vanini, an acrobat in a two-bit gypsy circus, so important? He had to keep her alive to answer his questions.
    The man in the narrow-brimmed hat still probed along the tiny cliff-edge. The other had crossed the patch of woods and was climbing higher. He came out of the pines and yelled to his companion, and they both broke into a run.
    Durell started up—and swore softly as the boy beside him lost patience and fired at the man on the rocks. The sound was enormous and then it was snatched away by the sigh of the sea wind. The man on the ledge staggered and turned a dark, shocked face toward them. Then he fell or dropped beyond the crest of the hill. Durell did not know if he had been hit or not.
    “Come on,” he snapped.
    They had lost the advantage of surprise now. He waved Jean to the right and plunged into the pine shadows. The man there had disappeared. Then he saw a small rustic cabin that cast dark shadows on the woody slope. The girl was hiding there, flattened against the peeled-log back wall. She wore dark slacks and a white blouse under a rumpled sweat shirt that had holes in both elbows. He saw everything with a sudden, sharp clarity that took in the details of her enormous frightened eyes, her wind-tangled hair, her open mouth straining for breath after her flight. She looked like a small animal gone to ground after pursuit by a pack of hunting dogs. . . .
    Pine needles spurted at her feet as he heard another shot. A third bullet splintered wood from the hut. She pressed deeper into the shadows. But there was no other place for her to go.
    Durell swung right and climbed the steep slope toward the shots. He wondered about the second man Jean had shot at. But he couldn’t stop now.
    The gray fedora showed briefly through the thick pines. He did not fire at it. The man was thirty yards away, still above him;