The Gemini Contenders Read Online Free PDF Page B

house.”
    “When?”
    “As soon as possible.”
    Savarone looked at the overcoat and the green felt hat he had thrown over the chair. “Tesca? Do you remember two years ago? The meeting at the apartment on the Duomo?”
    “Yes,
padrone
. It will be six o’clock soon. I’ll be waiting for you.”
    Fontini-Cristi hung up the telephone and reached for his overcoat and his hat. He put them on and checked his watch. It was five forty-five; he had to wait a few minutes. The walk across the concrete lot to the factory was short. He had to time it so that he entered the building at the height of the crowds; when the day shift was leaving and the night shift came to work.
    His son had taken full advantage of
Il Duce
’s war machine.The Fontini-Cristi Industries operated around the clock. When the father had reproached the son, the son had replied, “We don’t make munitions. We’re not geared for that. The conversion would be too expensive. We make only profits, father.”
    His son. The most capable of them all had a hollowness in him.
    Savarone’s eyes fell on the photograph in the silver frame on Vittorio’s desk. Its very existence was a cruel, self-inflicted joke. The face in the picture was that of a young woman, pretty in the accepted sense, with the pert, set features of a spoiled child growing into spoiled maturity. She had been Vittorio’s wife. Ten years ago.
    It had not been a good marriage. It had been more an industrial alliance between two immensely wealthy families. And the bride brought little to the union; she was a pouting, self-indulgent woman whose outlook was guided by possessions.
    She died in an automobile crash in Monte Carlo, early in the morning after the casinos had closed. Vittorio never talked about that early morning; he had not been with his wife. Another had.
    His son had spent four years in turbulent discomfort with a wife he could not stand, and yet the photograph was on his desk. Ten years later. Savarone once asked him why.
    “Being a widower lends a certain respectability to my life-style.”
    It was seven minutes to six. Time to begin. Savarone walked out of his son’s office and spoke to the secretary. “Please call downstairs and have my car brought around to the west gate. Tell my chauffeur I have a meeting at the Duomo.”
    “Yes, sir.… Do you wish to leave a number where your son can reach you?”
    “Campo di Fiori. But by the time he calls, I’ll no doubt be asleep.”
    Savarone took the private elevator to the ground floor and went out the executive entrance onto the concrete. Thirty yards away his chauffeur was walking toward the limousine with the crest of Fontini-Cristi on the door panels. The two men exchanged looks. The chauffeur nodded slightly; he knew what to do. He was a
partigiano
.
    Savarone crossed the yard, aware that people werewatching him. That was good; that was the way it had been two years ago when
Il Duce
’s secret police were tracking his every move, trying to unearth the whereabouts of an antifascist cell. The factory whistles blew; the day shift was released and within minutes the yard and the corridors would be crowded. The incoming workers—due at their stations at six fifteen—were flooding through the west gate.
    He climbed the steps to the employees’ entrance and entered the crowded, noisy corridor, removing his coat and hat in the confusion. Tesca stood by the wall, halfway toward the doors that led to the workers’ lockers. He was tall and slender, very much like Savarone, and he took Savarone’s coat and hat and helped Fontini-Cristi into his own worn, three-quarter-length raincoat with a newspaper in the pocket. Then he handed Savarone a large cloth visor cap. The exchange was completed without words in the jostling crowds. Tesca accepted Savarone’s assistance in putting on the camel’s hair coat; the employer saw that the employee had taken the trouble—as he had done two years ago—to change into pressed trousers, shined