He walked unhurriedly back to the car and removed the weapons in the blanket he had wrapped them in and slung his bag over his shoulder and walked off toward Gropina, which looked to be a kind of ghost village, but decorated with pots of flowers. Only now did a car draw up behind his, effectively shutting in the Peugeot, and he was above the road by the time two others drew up behind that one. Disputes and flaring tempers seemed desirable from his perspective. Before long, however, he heard the distant approaching sirens of the police, but for whom they were coming was as yet unclear.
He found the Gropina pieve and walked on until he was once more in the fields. There was no one there, no inhabitants to track him. He passed a copse to his left and the air became suddenly hot, like the air of a quarry, and the drone of bees came out of the edge of the shade. The track dipped back down to the main Setteponti road, and he could have continued and simply walked on in the same direction. But he didn’t know from which direction the police were coming. He left the track therefore and passed into the lines of vines. Beyond them lay a thicker wood where the leaves seemed to be in a dark sweat. By the time he got there the sirens on the far side of Gropina had become loud and then they were shut off. He hurried into the wood and took out both shotguns and laid them at his side.
—
That morning Rockhold was woken in the hotel above Donnini where he had taken a room for the night. The Villa Pitiana was originally a noble’s villa, but now it was a threadbare hotel barely able to keep up with itself. Susan was calling him and the phone’s ringing brought him back to consciousness, but as it did he looked up at the lofty ceiling and had no idea where he was. The night before he had lost the Peugeot somewhere near the town of Poppi and, furious with himself, had decided to stay on the same road in the hope that the following morning would give him a second chance. And so it did. He stumbled to the shutters and threw them open. A sunlit landscape appeared, a cool morning edged with coming heat. Susan told him everything that had happened that morning, which she had heard about only minutes before.
“A robbery where?”
He paused the conversation to order some coffee from downstairs and then sat by the window in the sun, a lizard getting its warmth back.
“Pian di Sco?” he went on, unfolding his map on the table and looking for the tiny settlement. The police had been summoned but were making their way to a different place down the road, where an accident had happened. She had heard it from their contact inside the Italian police.
“What time was that?”
It had been an hour ago.
“So they’re already at Gropina. Maybe it’s not him.”
But he knew it must be. Leaving everything behind and grabbing his room-service coffee in the lobby before it arrived in his room, he left the Villa Pitiana and drove along the sinuous road that overlooked the valley.
The road to Gropina was not so easy to find, and when he was finally on it he called Susan for updates. Eventually he, too, came to Pian di Sco. There was a police car parked outside the bakery, but no commotion. He called his Italian colleague in Florence. The police had found the abandoned Peugeot, but its driver had vanished. There was an accident at the scene that they also had to deal with. Confusion reigned, and when he himself arrived there he found the same people gathered around the two crashed cars that Faoud had seen. The police were taking evidence and four officers were walking slowly through the lines of vines to the right of the road. Rockhold parked in the verge behind the line of bottlenecked cars and walked first to the Peugeot with the English plates that he had, at last, found. A policeman stood there, and they shook hands. They had been told who he was, but their English was limited. The doors of the car were open and he peered inside. It was evidence that should not be touched, and so he merely walked around it and examined the mud-flecked surface of the metal. He was told that detectives were on their way, they would be there within two hours. The suspect had escaped on foot. The robbery had been reported by the owners of the bakery, and it was unusual for the area that the police had reacted with such admirable efficiency.
“Escaped?” Rockhold said.
“Ran away. We’re looking in the fields.”
Then he moved on to the shattered pieces of glass and introduced himself to the officers taking notes there. It was surprising to him that absolute priority would not be given to an armed robbery in a cake shop only a few miles away. But they were locals interacting with locals; they all knew each other and insurance claims were at stake. Things had become heated between the two car owners and shouting had erupted. The police tried to calm them down, and Rockhold wandered off to the hamlet above the road, where something told him a man would go if he had to escape. But they had not posted any men there. A question of manpower and confusion. He walked up to the little church, dark and ancient on its platform overlooking a sea of vines, and then moved through the lanes, coming almost immediately to the end of Gropina.
But at the edge of the olive groves an old woman stood with a bucket and a rake, and as he walked past her she pointed to the wood farther down the path. It was a silent gesture, and he took it gratefully. Ahead of him the somber trees echoed with cuckoos.
As he came through the vines and into the first clammy pools of shade inside these same trees, a shot rang out and something seemed to whizz past his left shoulder. Almost without remembering it, he saw that he was himself holding his Glock in one hand with the barrel pointing carelessly downward. He would have crouched in the following moment, but almost instantly a second shot rang out, this time from something bigger and more purposeful, and the shotgun slugs hit him in the chest, sending him rolling backward into the vines in a silent stupefaction that held his tongue. He lay on his back, trying to breathe and gazing up at the sky, which seemed, in some surprising way, to have suddenly released him from its grip. The man within the wood, seeing him fall, himself stood up, shouldered the shotgun that he had just used, and turned to move deeper into the wood. He had recognized Rockhold from the square in Sorano at once.