The Negotiator

It was a low-power bulb, unshaded and hanging from a dusty cord in the middle of the room. The best light it gave was directly beneath, and that was where the figure in the tall Stetson hat sat reading in the upright armchair.

The moon rose at half past one, climbed from behind the Ospédale Range, and bathed Castelblanc in an eerie white light thirty minutes later. The lean, silent figure moved through the street by its dim illumination as one who knows exactly where he is going. The figure slid down two narrow alleys and into the complex of barns and yards behind the tavern.

Without a sound the shape leaped onto a hay wain parked in one of the yards and from there to the top of a wall. It ran effortlessly along the top of the wall and jumped another alley to land nimbly on the lean-to roof of the barn directly opposite Qui

The curtains were half-drawn-they reached only halfway across the window at full stretch. In the twelve-inch gap Qui

The young man on the roof gri

Satisfied, the young cousin of the Orsini clan, who had just made his bones for the family, ran back off the roof, along the wall, down to the hay cart, to the ground, and into the alley from which he had come. Unhurried, and safe in his triumph, the youth walked through the village to the cottage on the fringes of the hamlet where the man he idolized awaited him. He did not see or hear the quieter and taller man who eased himself out of a darkened doorway and followed him.

The devastation in the room above the bar would later be cleared up by the owner’s wife. Her mattress was beyond salvation, slit from end to end, its springy stuffing used to fill the plaid shirt, the torso, and the arms, until it was stiff enough to sit unaided in the upright chair. She would find long strips of clear gummed tape that had held the dummy torso in the upright position, and the remains of the Stetson hat and the book.

She would pick up, piece by piece, the remnants of the polystyrene head of the store dummy that Qui

The landlord would wonder why he had not seen the head of the store dummy when he searched the American’s luggage, and would eventually find the loose planks beneath the bed where it had been hidden by Qui

Finally the angry man in the dark suit who had been playing cards in the bar the previous afternoon would be shown the abandoned tooled cowboy boots, the jeans, the fringed buckskin jacket, and the landlord would inform the local capu that the American must now be dressed in his other set of clothes: dark trousers, black zip-up windbreaker, crepe-soled desert boots, and polo-neck sweater. They would all examine the canvas holdall and find nothing else left in it. This would happen in the hour before dawn.

When the youth reached the cottage he sought, he tapped gently on the door. Qui

Dominique Orsini sat at a rough wooden table, and cut slices off a fat salami sausage with a razor-sharp knife. The teenager with the Lupara stood in front of him. They were talking in the Corsican language, nothing like French, incomprehensible to a foreigner. The boy was describing the events of the last thirty minutes; Orsini nodded several times.

When the boy had finished, Orsini rose, came around the table, and embraced him. The younger man glowed with pride. As Orsini turned, the lamplight caught the livid scar ru

To have killed the Corsican hit man would have been easy. Qui

Thirty minutes later, in the deep shadow cast by the wooden barn and the parked tractor, Qui

Orsini was hurled by his own momentum into the side of the tractor, but he came back up with remarkable speed. Qui

“Orsini,” said Qui

Orsini’s reaction was to put pressure on his damaged leg, gasp in pain, and lower his left hand to his knee. He was good. The left hand moved slowly to massage the knee, taking Qui

It took Qui

Had he been unhurt Qui