Read Online Flight From Honour by Gavin Lyall - Free Book Online

Brussels he stayed at the Palace Hotel . . .”
    Bozan said: “You should have let me kill him there.”
    It was a swipe with a club to the delicate cobweb of unfinished sentences and non-commitment. Silvio smiled wanly. “Bozan is somewhat impetuous.”
    The Padrone nodded gently, his own dark eyes quite as blank in their way as the innocent ones of the young assassin. “I understand. It is no matter. If the senator likes the best hotels, it becomes easier, but London still has many such places. And this is a private matter . . . ?”
    “Only a small matter of business, you understand . . .”
    “Then anything you wish, you have only to ask.” In other words, the Padrone would have been wary of interfering in a feud, but from a business killing he felt free to grab as much profit as he could reach.
    “You are most kind. But even in business there is still a question of honour.” Or: we’ll pay for help, but we promised to do the job and it’s ours.
    “That is understood. But first, you wish a place to stay, safe and comfortable?”
    “We would be most grateful for your advice.”
    The old man stared at the far wall. “There is the house of my son, but he has many children . . . perhaps that of my brother-in-law, only my sister is sick . . . I think the house of my daughter’s husband . . .”
    Silvio smiled outside gritted teeth. They would end up where they were put; the recital had been a warning that the Padrone’s family was all around them. He waited.
    Bored with the silence, or perhaps because he’d forgotten he’d said it before, Bozan asked: “Why didn’t you let me kill him there?”
    The Padrone was listening anyway, so Silvio explained: “We had another man, some Slav, with fancy ideas about arranging an aeroplane to crash, and we had to let him try his way first.”
    “And the aeroplane did not crash?”
    “Oh yes, it crashed and the driver died – but the Senator was not in it. So clever. And the Senator ran to here and now he has, perhaps, a bravo with him.”
    “I can kill them both,” Bozan said indifferently.
    Silvio wasn’t too sure of that. What he said was: “Perhaps now he is in England he will feel safe . . .”
    The Padrone asked: “He has bravoes, this Senator?”
    “In Brussels, there was a man . . .” Silvio was inwardly furious at Bozan for betraying more of their problems. But oddly, it didn’t quite work that way.
    The Padrone had been thinking. “London is a city made of many villages . . . This is . . .
our
village.” He had almost said ‘mine’. “If an important Italian is killed, and it seems it is done by other Italians . . . the police may come first to look here . . .”
    Ah-
hah
, Silvio thought: you’re worried that the police will come and shake your pisspot little kingdom until it spills on your shoes.
I
understand.
    “You can be sure we will do nothing to cause you difficulties,” he said, to show he now knew they could.
    The Padrone smiled and inclined his head graciously. “Good. Now, the matter of finding the Senator . . .”
    And some people thought killing a man was simple.

7
    Apart from the Bureau, Whitehall Court was mainly expensive service flats and small exclusive clubs, ideal neighbours for not poking their noses into each other’s affairs. One of the flats had been leased by the Bureau after the tenant had died suddenly, possibly from a surfeit of William Morris floral wallpaper. It was intended for agents ‘passing through’, but now used by Ranklin and O’Gilroy, who were normally abroad but in any case couldn’t afford anywhere of their own. They also acted as informal night-watchmen to the office upstairs, fielding out-of-hours telephone calls and cablegrams, without making any fetish of staying in to wait for them. The Bureau was serious, but not oppressively so.
    O’Gilroy was still out on the shadowing exercise, so Ranklin made a pot of tea – which just about exhausted his cooking skills but