Solo. Jack Higgins

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СКАЧАТЬ of them asked him to play, the boy agreed without hesitation, sitting at the piano and playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat, mirror-brilliant, ice-cold stuff, that reduced everyone present to astonished silence.

      Later, after the applause, after they had left, the professor had gone out to his grandson, standing on the balcony, listening to the roar of the early-morning traffic which never seemed to stop.

      ‘So, you’ve decided to join the living again? What now?’

      ‘Paris, I think,’ John Mikali said. ‘The Conservatoire.’

      ‘I see. The concert platform? Is this your intention?’

      ‘If you agree.’

      Dimitri Mikali embraced him gently. ‘You are everything to me, you must know this now. What you want, I want. I’ll tell Katina to pack.’

      He found an apartment near the Sorbonne in a narrow street not far from the river, one of those village areas so common to the French capital with its own shops, cafés and bars. The sort of neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else.

      Mikali attended the Conservatoire, practised between eight and ten hours each day and dedicated himself solely to the piano to the exclusion of all else, even girls. Katina, as always, cooked and kept house and fussed over him.

      On 22 February 1960, two days before his eighteenth birthday he had an important examination at the Conservatoire, the chance of a gold medal. He had practised for most of the night and at six o’clock in the morning, Katina had gone out to get fresh rolls from the bakery, and milk.

      He had just emerged from the shower, was fastening the belt of his robe, when he heard the screech of brakes in the street outside, a dull thud. Mikali rushed to the window and looked down. Katina lay sprawled in the gutter, the bread rolls scattered across the pavement. The Citroën truck which had hit her reversed quickly. Mikali had a brief glimpse of the driver’s face and then the truck was round the corner and away.

      She took several hours to die and he sat in the hospital beside her bed, holding her hand, never letting go, even when her fingers stiffened in death. The police were subdued and apologetic. Unfortunately, there had been no witnesses, which made matters difficult, but they would keep looking, of course.

      Not that it was necessary, for Mikali knew the driver of the Citroën truck well enough. Claude Galley, a coarse brute of a man who ran a small garage close to the river, with the aid of two mechanics.

      He could have given the police the information. He did not. This was personal. Something he had to handle for himself. His ancestors would have understood perfectly, for in Hydra, for centuries, the code of the vendetta had been absolute. The man who did not take vengeance for the wrong done to his own was himself cursed.

      And yet there was more to it than that. A strange, cold excitement that filled his entire being as he waited in the shadows opposite the garage at six o’clock that evening.

      At half past, the two mechanics left. He waited another five minutes, then crossed the road to the entrance. The double doors stood open to the night, the Citroën parked pointing towards the street and behind, a concrete ramp sloped steeply down to the basement.

      Galley was working at a bench against the wall. Mikali’s right hand slipped into the pocket of his raincoat and tightened on the handle of the kitchen knife he carried there. Then he saw there was an easier way. One that carried with it a considerable measure of poetic justice.

      He leaned into the cab of the Citroën, pushed the gear lever into neutral with one gloved hand, then released the handbrake. The vehicle gathered momentum, started to roll faster. Galley, half-drunk as usual, only became aware of the movement at the last moment, and turned, screaming, as the three-ton truck squashed him against the wall.

      But there was no satisfaction in it at all, for Katina had gone, gone for good, just like the father he had never known, the mother who was only a vague memory, his grandmother.

      He walked for hours in the rain in a kind of daze and was finally accosted by a prostitute on the embankment, close to midnight.

      She was forty and looked older, which was why she didn’t turn the light up too high when they reached her apartment. Not that it mattered for at that particular moment, John Mikali was not sure what was real and what was not. In any case, he had never been with a woman in his life.

      A fact which his inexpert fumblings soon disclosed and with the amused tenderness such women often show in these circumstances, she initiated him into the mysteries as quickly as anyone could.

      He learned fast, riding her in a controlled fury, once, twice, making her come for the first time in years, groaning beneath him, begging for more. Afterwards, when she slept, he lay in the dark, marvelling at this power he possessed that could make a woman act as she had; do the things she had done. Strange, because it had little meaning for him, this thing that he had always understood was so important.

      Afterwards, walking the streets again towards dawn, he had never felt so alone in his life. When he finally came to the central market it was a bustle of activity as porters unloaded heavy wagons with produce from the country, and yet they seemed to move in slow motion as if under water. It was as if he existed on a separate plane.

      He ordered tea in an all-night café and sat by the window smoking a cigarette, then became aware of a face staring out at him from the cover of a magazine on the stand beside him. A slim, wiry figure in camouflage uniform, sun-blackened face, expressionless eyes, a rifle crooked in one arm.

      The article inside, when he took the magazine down, discussed the role of the Foreign Legion in the war in Algiers, which was then at its height. Men who only a year or two before had been stoned by dock workers at Marseilles on their return from Indochina and the Viet prison camps were fighting France’s battles again in a dirty and senseless war. Men with no hope, the writer called them. Men who had nowhere else to go. On the next page there was a photo of another légionnaire, half-raised on a stretcher, chest bandaged, blood soaking through. The head was shaven, the cheeks hollow, the face sunken beyond pain, and the eyes staring into an abyss of loneliness. To Mikali it was like staring at his own mirror image. He closed the magazine. He placed it carefully on the stand, then took a deep breath to stop his hands from shaking. Something clicked in his head. Sounds came up to the surface again. He was aware of the early-morning bustle around him. The world had come back to life, though he was no longer a part of it, nor had he ever been.

      God, but he was cold. He stood up, went out and walked quickly through the streets, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

      It was six o’clock in the morning when he returned to the apartment. It seemed grey and empty, devoid of all life. The piano lid was open, music still on the stand as he had left it. He had missed the examination, not that it mattered now. He sat down and started to play slowly and with great feeling that haunting little piece ‘Le Pastour’ by Grovlez that he had been playing on the day of his grandmother’s funeral in New York when Dimitri Mikali had arrived.

      As the last notes died away, he closed the lid of the piano, stood up, crossed to a bureau and found his passports, both Greek and American, for he had dual nationality. He looked around the apartment for the last time, then let himself out.

      At seven o’clock, he was on the Métro on his way to Vincennes. Once there, he walked briskly through the streets to the Old Fort, the recruiting centre for the Foreign Legion.

      By noon, he had handed over his passports as proof of identity СКАЧАТЬ