Ghosts of the Past

Book 6: Inspector Bordelli

by Marco Vichi

Genres: Mystery; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

The sixth book in the award-winning crime series by Marco Vichi, following Inspector Bordelli.

A family cloaked in secrets. A beguiling woman. A unique setting. Inspector Bordelli is back to solve one of the most difficult cases of his entire career in the sixth book in this atmospheric crime noir series — perfect for fans of Andrea Camilleri.

Florence, 1967. It is winter, and one year has passed since the historic and devastating flood of the Arno, though the memories of that day still linger with the stains on the city walls.

The anniversary of the flood brings with it a new case for Inspector Bordelli, who is weighed down with remorse for having taken justice into his own hands, and yearning for Eleonora, the woman he's lost, when the mystery opens. A local wealthy industrialist — fiercely loved and respected by everyone he knew — has been found murdered in his grand villa in the Fiesole hills, and the killer has left no trace.

With no obvious leads to follow, Bordelli is patiently retracing the victim's last days when he encounters an old friend from the war. Inviting the frail man into his home with the aim of restoring him to strength with good food and wine, Bordelli is yet to realise that this very friend will lead him ever closer to the secrets at the heart of the mystery — starting with a mysterious woman . . .

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 512

Sample

‘Mamma …’

He raised his head from the pillow and opened his eyes. It was pitch black. He’d been dreaming, and he was sure he had spoken in his sleep. He lay back down and closed his eyes. He’d dreamt the phone was ringing in the night. He’d hopped out of bed and down the stairs, staggering, heart racing. When he picked up the phone, he heard his mother’s voice.

‘Franco, what have you done? How could you possibly do such a thing?’

At that moment he’d woken up.

‘Mamma …’ he repeated in a whisper. How long had it been since that name had crossed his lips? For many years now he’d had no reason to utter it. His mother’s last days then came back to him, when she lay in the same bed in which she would soon lie in state for three days, exposed to all, in accordance with her wishes. He’d felt a great void after she died, the very same that sons had been feeling for centuries in those circumstances. And time had since done nothing but expand that void.

This was why he felt so disappointed. His mother’s phone call had been just a dream. It would have been so nice to talk to her … Even nicer to see her, to be able to look her in the eye and squeeze her hands … To tell her all those things which …

‘Franco, what have you done? How could you possibly do such a thing?’

It had only been a dream, and yet he’d heard those words clearly. He could not ignore them. It was his conscience, come to present him with the bill and speaking through his mother. He was guilty of having replaced the justice of the courts with his own personal justice. In his defence he could plead nobility of intention … He’d killed three men, three perverse murderers who’d raped and snuffed out little Giacomo Pellissari … and whom no human law would ever manage to convict. He’d followed his own path, challenging fate, and winning every bet. Only later had he started to feel the pangs of conscience, as though starting awake from a dream. He could perhaps have taken a different course, not let himself get carried away by the idea of being a sort of secular arm of fate …

‘Franco, what have you done?’

‘Mamma …’ said Bordelli, perhaps only in his mind, hugging the pillow and letting himself slip away into distant memories, trying to recover a sense of peace … He was a little boy on the beach at Marina di Massa, with the waves breaking against the shore, one after the other, with an infernal din … His mother held him by the hand, and together they watched the spectacle in silence, faces stinging from a thousand droplets of salt water … That was all he remembered, the two of them at the edge of a rough sea, his hand in his mother’s … Little by little he drifted off into other memories … Family episodes that had been recounted thousands of times around the table, dramatic or comical anecdotes about great-grandparents he’d never met, handed down and mythified by their descendants, secret moments never revealed to anyone … Until, at last, he was able to fall back asleep …

But the night still had plenty of dreams in store for him, and he woke up again softly caressing Eleonora … Beautiful young Eleonora, whom he was unable to forget … Just as he was unable to forget that whole terrible episode … He turned under the covers, still seeing her lovely face, smiling at him in the dream … Poor Eleonora. She’d been made the sacrificial victim in a matter that concerned only him, a police inspector who’d been unable to do his job … who’d failed … and who, after his defeat, had hoped to correct his own mistakes by avenging himself on the three unpunished murderers.

Every so often he would try in his mind to push those three murders back to the days of the war, in the hope of classing them among the Nazis he’d killed in combat … but they always came back. He would have to resign himself to bearing the weight of his guilt for the rest of his life. There was only one thing, one realisation that gave him some relief … He hadn’t dragged anyone else into his morbid adventure; he’d confronted it alone, taken upon himself full responsibility for the path he had taken. For this reason, too, he would never tell anyone about it …

He’d dreamt of Eleanora, and he would carry those sweet moments around with him for the whole day. Opening one eye, he saw the dawn’s first light filtering through the slats in the shutter. It must have been about seven o’clock. He put the pillow over his head, to return to the darkness, and tried to think of other things …

The summer had gone by peacefully, with only two murders, both solved by day’s end. In October he’d taken almost a week to get a postal clerk to confess to killing a colleague for revenge, a sordid tale of frustration and vendetta spiced with a former rivalry in love …

All at once he thought he heard a dog barking, and immediately he imagined Blisk, the great white dog who had chosen to live in his house for a few months, until one day he went away. Bordelli got out of bed and went to peer through the shutter, but there was no dog. He put on a jumper, and after a visit to the loo went downstairs. He could barely see, but he couldn’t stand electric light just after waking up. The air smelled of burnt wood, and a few embers were still smoking in the fireplace. Making his way through the penumbra, he prepared a pot of coffee, fascinated by the silence. He’d been living in the country for almost a year now, but the silence still amazed him. When he lived in Via del Leone, at that hour in his half-sleep he already used to hear the sounds of the neighbourhood coming to life. He missed San Frediano a little and sometimes imagined himself buying a small two-room flat so he could sleep in town every now and then.

He put the coffee pot on the burner, and as he waited his eye fell on the telephone. He imagined it ringing and him picking up and hearing his mother’s voice … Franco, what have you done? But he would explain it all, he would defend himself, try to make her understand he’d had no choice … He would do it for her, to lessen her suffering. And in the end they would have said goodbye tenderly, and gone their separate ways …

Eleonora would never come looking for him, he was sure of that. If he ever wanted to see her again, he would have to make the first move himself, knowing it might prove useless. And yet he kept postponing it, sighing and putting it off. At times he felt like burying her memory forever, but then the next minute he would imagine himself phoning her or writing her a letter. He was behaving worse than an adolescent. Had Eleonora gone back to live in her little apartment in San Niccolò? Or had she moved back in with her parents? He looked up at his taciturn tenant, the human skull that for the past few months had reigned over the kitchen from its perch atop the cupboard. It had been a birthday present from Diotivede, the forensic pathologist and his friend. And a very fine skull it was, and rather expressive in its way, a now familiar presence which in no uncertain terms reminded mortals not to grow too fond of earthly matters. Its great antagonist was love, which spread its illusions of eternity all over the world.

He poured the coffee and went and sat down at the table, staring at the smoking embers. This was his first autumn since moving to the country. Nature’s decomposition, the constant sound of drizzle, the grey sky, might seem sad to some people … Him, on the other hand, it made happy. He’d always liked autumn. In truth he liked all the seasons. You might even say he needed them. He could not have lived without them. To see nature die and then come back to life … He needed it. Not just now that he lived out in the country. He’d always needed it.

There were only a few days left till Christmas, and he thought back on his last Christmas dinner with his mother, at the house in Via Volta, just the two of them. After bringing the customary home-made tortellini in brodo to the table, his mother had said a prayer for her husband, and, as always happened, her eyes filled with tears.

He searched farther into his memory, to the last Christmas when his father was still alive. The afternoon dinner with relatives had been pleasant and noisy, and following the meal they’d all gone out for a walk, as was the tradition. For supper, on the other hand, it was just the three of them, and it had its share of melancholy moments. They’d started talking about the war, still so recent in their minds … The terrible months of the occupation, with the city of Florence still in the grip of the Germans and Fascists, the Allied bombings, the black market, the tortures at Villa Triste …1 At a certain point his mother had gone to get the letter he’d written on 9 September 1943, while sailing to Malta, which she’d kept framed on her bedside table. It was the last news she’d had of him at the time, followed by absolute silence until the end of the conflict … I was sure you were dead, but I was also sure you would come back, his mother had said, drying her eyes.

He finished his coffee as the daylight filtered into the kitchen. He went upstairs to his bedroom and opened the window wide. It was cold outside, but the sky was clear and the day promised sun even though a veil of fog still hung over the olive trees. Rather than trees they were large stumps with tufts of new leaves on top. The person who’d pruned them so severely was the farmer he’d hired to manage the grove, to rebuild the trees after their long period of neglect. The only advantage in this was the great quantity of wood now stacked in the cellar, but for at least two years he would have to buy his olive oil from the local peasants. Actually, he needed to remind himself to get some. In a few days the olio novo would be available, the kind that stings the tongue. For the past few days he’d been seeing the peasants atop their ladders, with great sheets of cloth or leftover wartime parachutes spread out on the ground below.

Before going out, with the easy movements of habit he stuffed firewood into the cast-iron stove he’d had installed upstairs. Living in a large country house was almost like running a ship; you had to be careful not to forget anything.

Driving slowly down to Florence, he forced himself not to smoke. Meanwhile he thought back on his dreams of the previous night while distractedly looking out at the landscape. Every so often the Beetle backfired, but it was perfectly healthy. That tank had come out of the great flood undamaged, a good wash having sufficed to erase all memory of the mud.

Not infrequently during the short drive from home to office he would let his thoughts coast on autopilot, imagining all kinds of nonsense, fantasising about unforgettable or crazy moments, bouncing blindly from memory to memory without any logical thread to guide him … It was a wonderful interlude of freedom, one that sometimes managed to lighten the burdens of life for at least half an hour.

Every time when passing through Mezzomonte he would turn to look at Dante Pedretti’s big house, where he had spent whole evenings discussing everything under the sun and drinking grappa. He would give it just one long glance, without interrupting his journey through the void …

That morning he also remembered the Christmas of the year before, when Pope Paul VI had come to Florence to lend moral support to the wounded city, fifty-one days after the great flood. Before celebrating midnight mass in the Duomo, he’d made a stop in a very crowded Piazza Santa Croce and embraced the poor and elderly of Monte Domini, as symbols of the entire city’s suffering … Tonight, angels are flying through the sky, he said, eyes turned upwards … Then a voice rose up from the piazza … ‘At the moment a lot of Madonnas are flying …’2 The buzz from the chuckling crowd was mistaken by the pope as a shudder of faith, and he was deeply moved …

At Porta Romana Bordelli was forced to rouse himself. The traffic was moving in fits and starts, as children were dragged along the pavement to school. Every so often, while looking at children, it occurred to him that by natural law they would all survive him, and he would suddenly imagine the world in the year 2000. Would it be a more just world? Would people’s lives be more peaceful, more comfortable? Or would World War III break out? Well, it could of course break out even before he exited the stage, considering the constant tension between the United States and the Soviet Union …

He slipped into Via Romana, which stank of automobile exhaust. Staying with the slow flow of cars and motorbikes, he reached Via Maggio and crossed the Ponte Santa Trinita at a walking pace. The shops had already been decked out in Christmas decorations for several days now, some of them gaudy, others more simple. He watched the groups of youngsters getting out of trolley-buses, and every time he noticed how different they were from the young people of his time. Not only because of the guys’ long hair or the girls’ tight slacks, and not only because of the political demonstrations of the past few months. It must be something in their way of being, of looking around, of walking. They were lighter, freer. The world was changing fast, and he feared he might not be able to keep up with it. He would try to understand, and even adapt; he had nothing against transformations, but personally felt too old to change … Even if, truth be told, he’d experienced more than his share of changes over his fifty-seven years of life.

At one intersection he sat spellbound watching a teenaged couple kissing, and didn’t drive away until a horn honked in protest behind him. He couldn’t help but think of Eleonora … When did they kiss for the first time? He could never remember …

 

 

 

A little more than a year had passed since the flood, and on the façades of many buildings in the centre of town a black line was still visible, a reminder of the level that the Arno had reached when it had swept through the city, devastating everything in its path. At times there was a hint in the air of the stench of oil and sewage. The shop windows dressed with Christmas decorations, coloured lights and long satin ribbons seemed almost to want to push that unpleasant memory away.

Entering the courtyard of the police headquarters he nodded a greeting to Mugnai, who had a thoughtful look on his face, perhaps due to an unsolvable crossword puzzle. He parked in his usual place and headed upstairs. He crossed paths with Lenzi, an inspector from Pistoia whom he had not seen in a long time.

‘Chin up, Bordelli, someone will get killed today, just you wait,’ Lenzi said. It was his favourite quip. Bordelli smiled and continued climbing the stairs, thinking of the bitterness in Lenzi’s words. Unfortunately it was true: when someone was killed, there were others whose lives took on more palpable meaning.

He walked into his office and opened the window to let some air in. He went to his desk and sat down without taking off his coat. He signed some paperwork that he found there, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He would light it later, maybe even after lunch if he managed to resist. His age-old struggle with tobacco was not over yet.

He stood up and closed the window, hung up his coat, and began to pace back and forth, still thinking of Eleonora. That morning he had not been able to get her out of his mind. He had lost other women, and it was never easy, but he had made room for them among his memories. Eleonora, on the other hand …

He had to find a way to talk to her, but the mere thought of ringing her made him upset. Writing her a brief letter was perhaps the least inopportune way of presenting himself, given the circumstances. Several months earlier he had tried this, but after a few attempts had thrown the paper into the fire … It was just too depressing to post a letter and then wait around for a reply that would surely never come … Dear Eleonora …

He shook his head and sat back down, smiling at himself. He chucked the still-unlit cigarette onto the desk. He was behaving worse than a boy in love with his cousin. He’d been on warships, on submarines, had volunteered to serve in the San Marco Battalion, had seen comrades die, and he himself had killed … And now, faced with a beautiful girl …

He began to write up a brief report for the investigating magistrate, something he’d neglected to do for a few days. He wrote slowly, without interrupting his train of thought. He could not deny that he felt different. Despite everything, for some time now he had felt more serene, practically docile. Or perhaps it was simply resignation. At his age he surely could not hope to start a family, or have children …

Only three more years and he would retire. And he was definitely not afraid of being bored. After quitting his job he’d spent six months without working, and never once had he been bored. There was always something to do in the country, and then there were books, the telly, dinners with friends, walks in the hills, and more than anything else, a forest of memories. He wasn’t even afraid of feeling lonely. He had always enjoyed his long hours alone, even as a child …

The phone rang, and he waited to reply until he had finished the sentence he was writing.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, pardon me, I must have dialled the wrong number, I was looking for Inspec …’

‘Hi, Rosa, it’s me,’ Bordelli said, putting his pen down and leaning back in his chair. He was always happy to hear from her. Rosa was a marvellous woman, the living proof that working for more than twenty years in a brothel did not necessarily mean losing one’s childlike innocence.

‘Mamma mia, you sound so sad … I didn’t even recognise you …’ she said.

‘I was lost in thought.’

‘You can’t fool me, Monkey … what’s going on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Hmm, I smell a woman …’

‘Please, Rosa.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve fallen in love yet again …’

‘You know I’m a real man and never fall in love,’ Bordelli said.

‘When are you going to come and see me? I have a surprise for you to put under the tree.’

‘How sweet.’

‘You’re going to love it. I can’t wait to give it to you …’ Rosa said with childlike glee.

‘Rosa, I never thought I would hear you say such things.’

‘What? Oh my goodness, what a pig … You only think of one thing …’

‘It was a stupid joke, I admit it.’

‘You’re such a little pig.’

‘Only when I’m with you, Rosa.’

‘That’s the way I like you … so, when are you coming to see me?’

‘I don’t know, maybe tonight.’

‘Yes, do! That way I can give you your surprise … Briciola! Get down from there!’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘She’s on top of the vitrine, walking between my grandmother’s glasses … Get down immediately, I said!’

Briciola was the black and white kitten that Bordelli had found behind some brambles just before the flood, when she was as small as a chick. Briciola could never have known it at the time, but without her desperate mewling, Bordelli would never have found Giacomo’s killers, and would therefore never have killed them … In short, he could share the burden of his conscience with the kitten …

‘Hey! Have you fallen asleep?’ Rosa asked.

‘Sorry … what were you saying?’

‘I was saying goodbye. I have to get ready to go out.’

‘Going into town to do some clothes shopping?’

‘Clothes shopping?! Today I’m on phone duty at the Misericordia.’

‘Since when?’

‘More than a month, I told you. I like it, you know … It’s nice to do something for others.’

‘You’ve always done things for others, Rosa …’

‘In bed! But it’s not the same. And anyway, that’s water under the bridge … Oh my goodness, it’s late! I have to be there in an hour and I haven’t even decided what to wear. Ciao ciao, kisses …’ She hung up without giving him time to say a word.

Bordelli picked up his pen again, but had lost his train of thought. And just as he was recovering his train of thought, the internal line rang.

‘Inspector, a lady just called … her brother has been killed …’ said the police operator, with habitual calm.

‘How did it happen?’

‘I asked but she may not have heard me, and she hung up.’

‘Give me the address.’

‘Via Benedetto da Maiano 18/bis, near the intersection with Salviatino.’

‘I know the area well. Notify Diotivede and the assistant prosecutor … But first find Piras, please. Tell him to wait for me in the courtyard.’

He hung up and stayed where he was, staring at the sky through the dirty windowpanes, thinking that he would like to spend a little time in Paris. He really needed to get organised, to free his mind of clutter. Tabula rasa, and start over again more carefree. He was burdened by too many thoughts, never had a moment’s peace. Remorse, fantasies, regrets, memories, desires, hopes … Everything had randomly piled up, as in a dark old attic where no one had set foot for many years. The time had come to throw away the old trunks full of rubbish. A few weeks in Paris, bistro meals, reading on benches, museum visits, strolls along the Seine looking at women … He had been to Paris once, in December 1939. As soon as he had stepped off the train he had felt at home. He felt as though he had been born there. He spoke French poorly, but made himself understood. He had fallen in love with a girl he never saw again. The war had swept it all away.

He glanced at his watch and stood up with a sigh. He took down his coat and put it on as he was walking. He thought of Lenzi’s quip as he went downstairs, and couldn’t help but smile.

Young Piras was waiting for him in the courtyard, as immobile as a nuraghe.3 Dark, small, and wooden. Although a beat cop, he was dressed, as usual, in street clothes. Bordelli had asked him not to wear the uniform, at least when they were together, to avoid being labelled for what they were, two cops. It was a sort of papal exemption that was accepted by everyone, even by Commissioner Inzipone.

They exchanged greetings and climbed into the Beetle. The Sardinian had joined the Florence police force five years earlier, fresh out of the Academy, when Bordelli had discovered by chance that he was the son of Gavino Piras, who had been his comrade in the San Marco Battalion. But that was not the only reason he had chosen him as his partner, nor was it because he enjoyed being with him. Piras was intelligent, sensitive, conscientious, never got tired and, on top of this, his intuition was superb. He would surely go far in law enforcement.

They reached Piazza San Gallo, made their way through the traffic, and turned onto Viale Don Minzoni.

‘Do you know why I always bring you with me, Piras? So I don’t give in to the demon of tobacco …’ Bordelli said, knowing how much the younger man detested the smell of cigarettes.

‘Good reason.’

‘We’re going up to Via Salviatino. There’s been a murder.’

‘I thought as much.’

‘Everything all right at home?’

‘Same as always.’

‘Sardinians talk little but everything is so clear.’

‘Florentines talk a lot but say little.’

‘You’re definitely not wrong about that …’

After Piazza delle Cure, they turned onto Viale Volta. Just before reaching Via della Piazzuola, the inspector slowed down ever so slightly to glance at the house where he had been born and raised. Nothing had changed, there were the same stains on the walls, the same trees, and the same shadows in the garden. A few melancholy seconds, as pleasant as ever.

‘Are you free for dinner on Saturday, Inspector?’

‘Well, to tell the truth, three or four women are waiting to hear back from me, but I would be happy to consider other offers.’

‘Sonia asked me to invite you to dinner.’

‘I know it isn’t elegant to ask … but who else is invited?’ Bordelli asked, worried about being the old man in a group of young people.

‘No one else.’

‘I would love to come. To hell with the women.’

‘Good.’

‘You never mentioned if your beautiful Sicilian ever finished her degree …’

‘With honours. Now she is studying for the bar and in a few years she’ll become a lawyer.’

‘She’ll be the most beautiful lawyer in Florence.’

‘I know,’ said Piras, sounding almost worried.

‘Will you spend Christmas with your family?’

‘I’m taking the ferry on the twenty-third. And you?’

‘I have no plans yet. I might read a book in front of the fire.’

They drove on in silence, but with Piras even silence was like a conversation.

They reached Piazza Edison and turned right on to Viale Righi, where many years earlier Bordelli had seen an unforgettable woman … and in fact he remembered her well. It was summer, she moved along the pavement as if carried by the wind, wearing a light white dress, her gaze lost in infinity, far from the miseries of the world … She had light blond hair, and her red lips stood out against her fair skin. She was not just beautiful, she was a dream. Her eyes were those of an angel who had spent the night making love. He had stopped the Fiat 600 and got out, entranced. He had spent the following days scolding himself for not having had the courage to speak to her …

Exploring that memory, he came to the end of the Viale, drove across the small bridge over the Affrico and turned onto Via del Cantone. At the top of the street they turned left, on to Via da Maiano, which was lined with beautiful villas and ancient trees.

‘They just can’t stop killing,’ Bordelli said. He was curious to see whether it would be an easy case, or whether once more he would find himself flailing about in a dark wood searching for the right path, hoping that a small flame might appear to lead him out of the darkness …

 

 

 

They continued driving up the deserted street. At number 18/bis they found an open gate, and the Beetle putt-putted its way into a well-tended but austere garden. They parked alongside a baby-blue Fiat 1100 in front of a fine, three-storey late nineteenth-century villa. The stone façade boasted an elevated entrance with a short staircase on either side. Above the balustrade they saw the motionless head of a woman with her hair pulled back. They got out of the car and went up to meet her. The woman awaited them with a wrinkled brow, standing as straight and dark as a cypress. She was elegant, no longer young, but rather beautiful. Climbing the stairs, Bordelli was quick to introduce himself.

‘Good morning, signora … I am Inspector Bordelli, police …’

‘Laura Borrani. I am Antonio’s sister,’ said the woman, voice slightly quavering, twisting her fingers nervously. Her eyes were red, her lips hardened with tension.

‘And this is Piras, special agent.’

‘My condolences …’ the Sardinian muttered. The inspector was ready to kiss her hand, but the lady kept her hands folded over her chest.

‘It was I who phoned … I’m still unable to …’ She couldn’t finish her sentence. It was clear she was quite upset, but good breeding forced her to master her emotions.

‘You must be strong,’ said the inspector, trying to be comfort her. If the woman hadn’t kept her distance, he would have stroked her shoulder.

‘Come …’ she said. They followed her into the villa and found themselves in a large, dimly lit atrium. Sitting at the foot of a majestic staircase in pietra serena, a slender woman in an apron was weeping, face buried in her hands.

‘This is Amalia. It was she who found him …’ said the lady of the house, lightly stroking the woman’s grey hair.

They all started up the stairs, watched from above by a large oil portrait of a man from another era in ceremonial dress. No one had opened any windows, and twilight reigned.

‘I imagine Signora Amalia has the keys to the villa …’ the inspector said softly.

‘Of course,’ the lady whispered, letting it be known that Amalia enjoyed her absolute trust.

‘What was your brother’s name?’

‘Antonio Migliorini.’

‘Did he live alone?’

‘Yes. It’s been more than ten years since his wife passed away. He never got over it.’

‘Does he have any children?’

‘Yes, two males, both grown up.’

‘Have they been notified?’

‘I tried to reach them at their office, but the secretary said they’d gone out on some appointments. She’ll have them call me back at this number as soon as they return. I also tried calling both of them at home, but there was no answer.’

They’d reached the second floor, and Signora Borrani led them down a corridor in shadow. She stopped a few steps away from the only open door, from which a good amount of light was pouring in.

‘My brother’s study …’ she said in a whisper.

‘Has anyone touched anything?’

‘No …’ said the lady, voice cracking, barely able to hold back a sob. Covering her mouth with her hand, she walked away with her head down and shoulders heaving. Piras and Bordelli went into the victim’s study and found themselves looking at a scene out of the theatre … In front of a sober desk, on a beautiful oriental carpet with blue motifs, a man of about fifty, in dressing gown and slippers, lay on his back, eyes wide open, a fencing foil stuck between his ribs, hands clutching the blade.

‘He must have been a fascinating man,’ Bordelli muttered, looking at the victim from up close. The foil shot up from his chest like a jet of water from a fountain.

They looked