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Wings ePress
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Wings ePress
ISBN-10: 1613098685
Type: Fiction
Pages: 467
Copyright: May 2013
ISBN-13: 9781613098684
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
Family — you can’t live with them; you can’t live without them.
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK ON CREATESPACE.
Ravaged by sun, mosquitoes and his partner Claudia’s extended family while on a summer holiday to seaside Italy, PI Jake Flintlock is keen — despite having been asked to stay to solve a local murder — to return to London for good. But then, after a second murder, he and his PI associate Bum Park are made an offer they can’t refuse and once in Rome, discover a whole new meaning to the words la famiglia.
LISTEN TO AUTHOR'S READING OF AN EXTRACT FROM FOR THE LOVE OF A WOMAN.
Excerpt
But even on the open road the ride was far from smooth given the absence of rear springs and the smell of first searing rubber, and then sparks flying from the stripped metal of the wheel beneath us. Bum became very tetchy.
“Aw, man,” he said again. “This corpse deal just ain’t comfortable.”
“Criticising this, criticising that, you don’t have no fun,” I grinned. “It was you who suggested we go with Massimo in the first place, right?”
“‘Did I know he was a crap driver?”
And so it went all the way back into town. Bum moaning and writhing about trying to get comfy. Complaining he didn’t like enclosed spaces, didn’t like being dead, didn’t like the heat, didn’t like being in Rome, didn’t like the bumpy ride...didn’t like a whole raft of things. Bum can be very childish when he’s unhappy.
Mind you, he had a point when it came to Massimo’s driving, which reminded me of Steve McQueen’s during the Bullitt car chase over the hilly streets of San Francisco, and I was forced to concede corpse impressions were difficult when your head kept zonking into the roof of the hearse you were riding in.
“Aw, for FUCK,” Bum bawled after maybe an hour of such treatment. “Where the hell are we anyhow?”
“Just going around the Colosseum,” I said, peering through the window in a rare moment of speeds below 100 kph.
“The whut?”
“Colosseum. It’s an amphitheatre where Christians used to get fed to lions by emperors in the old days,” I explained.
“Ol’ days?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Like last century?”
In my experience, American-educated people have little idea of history outside their own. Plus, of course, Bum hadn’t even been properly educated.
“Older than that.”
“Wow,” he was saying as Massimo stomped the brakes thereby catapulting both of us head-first at the glass divider between the death department and the funeral directors’ seat.
“Aw, man, the FUCK is it NOW?” he said as we slithered back down to a sitting position.
“Don’t know. Check it out.”
“You damn right I will,” he said, peering through the same window I’d peered through only moments earlier.
“Well?”
“Lotta guys and gals dressed in black...with some white parts. Kinda like penguins. Christians mebbe?” he said. “You figure they’re gonna be taken to that colossal place an’ fed to those lions you was tellin’ me ’bout?”
“Probably not. Let me see,” I said, elbowing him aside to get a more authoritative take on the situation.
But, sure enough, he’d been right about the Christians if not their likely destination, and I now understood why even Massimo had slammed on his brakes so dramatically. Doubtless double-crossing himself and genuflecting when faced with a no-go line of priests and nuns strung across the road, holding hands and chanting what sounded to me a lot like Gregorian...well...chants.
Cop cars parked with their engines running but not daring to intervene what with the power of the Vatican and everything. A platoon of Swiss Praetorian Guardsmen standing about with their pikestaffs looking bemused. Even more Japanese tourists than I’d encountered in the Piazza Navona taking pictures. Plus Australians and New Zealanders, I reckoned. People in khakis a lot like mine only wearing bush hats against the razoring sun.
“Man, some zoo,” Bum commented. “Whut’d you figure’s happenin’?”
“Protest, looks like,” I said as Massimo loosed off several blasts of the triple klaxon on his roof. Possibly not as good a Catholic as I’d given him credit for, our Massimo. Or maybe he just thought being in the hearse-breakdown business gave him priority.
“’Bout what? Bein’ used as lion food?”
“That was a long time ago, Bum. Things have turned around big time for them since. They practically run the country now. Well, them and the Mafia.”
“So what’s their freakin’ beef?”
“Dunno,” I said, straining to read a banner held aloft by a sexy looking nun in a décolleté habit and a priest the spit of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I’m even worse at reading Italian than I am at speaking it because I never get to see words written down, only hear them being yelled down the phone by Claudia at Loredana. Nonetheless I was able to make out a couple of nouns that looked like AMORE and GUERRA although the preceeding verb made little sense to me--FA something--and, given the slight breeze rippling the flag’s material, I might have been wrong on all parts of speech in any case. Still, keen to demonstrate my linguistic prowess, I went for the nasal-intuition version of translation theory.
“Looks like they want to make love not war,” I therefore told Bum.
“Geez, wow, ookay,” he said, flattening his face against the window for a better look. “Only these guys are, like, religious, right? Like, they can’t make lurve? I heard that.”
“I don’t think it’s that they can’t, Bum. Claudia tells me a lot of them do all the time. With each other. It’s just they’re not allowed to...by their religion.”
“Some damn religion that gotta be, dude. Sheesh, not the kinda church I’d be joinin’ any time soon,” he said. “Waste of good flesh, you aks me. ’Specially the babe wid the big bazoomas,” he added, leering at the nun in the décolleté outfit, swishing open the hearse’s glass divider, and yelling through the window Massimo had smashed: “Hey, darlin’, a piece of my action you can git any time.”
Probably not the most sensible move for Bum to make in the circs, particularly not considering Flavio’s caveat regarding the secrecy of our meeting, for which we were already so cum tempore I reckoned he would already have given it up.
“Shhhhhh,” I told him, “we’re corpses, remember?”
But too late. Big wink and a wave back from the nun with the big bazoomas while the Schwarzenegger lookalike glowered at Bum. And that was only the start of it. Suspicious eyes and camera lenses all over the place suddenly focused on us, and then there were the beginnings of a surge toward the hearse, Massimo’s re-blasting of his triple klaxon notwithstanding.
“Jesus Christ, Bum!” I groaned. “You and your bloody pecker!”
“Pot callin’ the kettle black again, bro, seem to me,” he riposted. “You the big mooner an’ porn addict an’ all. An’ now here’s you...accusin’...me?”
“That was different.”
“It was not different.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Was NOT.”
“Okay, forget it.”
There’s never much point in arguing with Bum because he finds reasoning hard, but in any case now was not the time as Japanese people, Australians, New Zealanders, police, the Praetorian Guard, priests, nuns, the whole raggle-taggle carnivalesque mob left off whatever game they’d been playing and began rubbernecking in our direction to check out our status as the living dead. Muttering prayers, quadruple-crossing themselves, all of that. But you know how it is with schadenfreude. How hard it is for humans to dodge its lure, so on they kept coming.
“Fucking hell, Bum.”
“You don’t like the heat, you keep outta the kitchen,” he said. Elliptically.
“Which is precisely where we don’t need to be right now or else you can bet all deals with Flavio will be off.”
“Any ideas? You the brains in the outfit, right?”
“Um...”
“That the kinda noise a person makes when he thinkin’, dude?” Bum said, with another wave at the buxom nun, who, unfazed on the ghost issue--protected by God, possibly--flicked a nipple and grinned lasciviously.
“Holy hooley,” Bum said.
“Shhhhh,” I’m thinking,” I said, as my eyes lit on the undertaker suits Sandi had used to conceal the guns. A little greasy but...
“Figure I could take the dork next to her, no problemo,” Bum said, eyeballing Arnie and pouting. “All fake bake an’ plastic pecs. Easy peasy...”
“Shut up and put these on,” I told him, scrabbling at the black tail coats and finding beneath them the extra bonus of two equally black top hats with veils hanging from their brims. Why, I don’t ask. This wasn’t the time for questions about Sandi’s funeral/gun-running protocols. This was the time for any available disguise, a swift exit through the hearse’s tailgate, and then legging it pronto before we got ourselves into even more trouble with the law and Flavio washed his hands of us altogther.
Bum was piqued at the lost opportunity to help a hippy nun rediscover her sexuality, but the sight of a load of blokes striding towards us in blue-and-yellow striped knickerbockers wielding pikestaffs changed his mind smartish. Bum had never seen mediaeval people before.
“Wh-who the f-fuck are those guys?” he ululated.
“The Swiss,” I said.
“Swiss?”
“Yes.”
“I thought Swiss dressed in leather pants, milked cows, and were, like, peaceful. These guys look like clowns wid a bad attitude. An’ also wid lances? Boy, oh boy,” he said, donning his undertaker outfit and leaping out through the tailgate.
“Next thing I hear we gonna be lion food too,” he shouted back at me from the pavement. “Whut kinda damn country is this?”
“Italy,” I said, as I joined him and pulled the top-hat veil over my face. “Run!”
And that’s what we did, leaving poor old Massimo all alone to fight his own battles with the police, the Schwizzers, and the rabid crowd of tourists and Christians. It wasn’t until we hit the Piazza Venezia that we stopped to draw breath and ask directions to the Spanish Steps.
~*~
Not that our panic was strictly necessary. It wasn’t until long after the case was over and I was back home ensconced in my TV chair watching Liverpool unaccountably losing 2-0 to AS Roma at half time in a European qualifier that the truth hit home.
“Bugger,” I was moaning as the adverts came on and I was levering myself up to go in search of another can of hope-inspiring Carlsberg. But, in mid-lever, I was stopped in my tracks as the screen filled with the exact scene we had so hurriedly vacated all those months ago. Cleverly spliced, edited, digitally enhanced, reduced to only thirty seconds, but was this a déjà vu or was this a déjà vu?
“Bloody hell,” I said collapsing back in my chair and gawping as two blokes dressed as undertakers are seen leaping from a hearse and doing a runner downtown from the Colosseum as a load of Swiss Guards, cops, tourists and sexy-looking Christians gaze in awe at their retreating figures while licking at monster chocolate and vanilla ice creams with cherries on the top.
I was still gawping as the action was replaced by a close-up of the ice cream and a smarmy voice-over saying: “The new Cornetto from Walls. To die for!”
“Nnnngg?” I said, the logic not stacking up. And not only the gobbledigook of the grab-phrase. The illogic of the whole damn thing. We’d been outside the Colosseum by accident, hadn’t we? So how come...?
I still don’t know the answer to this conundrum. Maybe the crew had been intending to film an advert for anti-papal condoms when we just happened along and then postmodernly rearranged the shoot according to contingent circumstances. Who knew?
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