Chapter 9
Romina heard the gunfire first, raising her head from Il Volpe's chest and listening to the sound of running feet and finally Roberto's voice as he burst into the cottage shouting Il Volpe's name.
The bandit leader, reacting with the brute instincts of a cornered animal, was off the bed and into his pants before the American girl had time to catch her breath and Tullio was not far behind, knocking her out of the way in his dash towards the door.
Then Roberto burst into the room, his chest heaving with excitement. His eyes widened as he saw Romina naked on the bed, drops of expended semen still clinging lewdly to her chin, but he lost no time in asking questions.
"Barzini's coming up the path with a squad of men!" he stated, urgency but not panic in his tone. "They saw me and opened fire!"
"How many men has he got with him?" asked Il Volpe quickly, his voice steady but tense.
"At least ten, all carrying automatic weapons," replied the younger man. "I don't see any way of standing them off with that kind of firepower!"
"You're right, we've got to clear out fast," their leader snapped, clearly in control of the situation and of his emotions. "The boys have been drinking and they're probably still sleeping. You two get them on their feet and moving. How much time do you think we have?"
"Five minutes at the most," answered his second-in-command.
"We'll have to go up the cliff. Nobody can carry anything but a weapon, because we'll have to move quickly. Everything else stays here."
"What about her?" questioned Roberto as Tullio pushed by him to begin executing the orders he had received. Roberto's eyes, despite the urgency of the situation, lingered on the girl's lush naked form.
"I'll deal with her!" Il Volpe snapped angrily. "I told you to get the others moving."
As the younger man wheeled obediently and ran down the hallway to rouse the other members of the gang, Il Volpe thrust his arms into a jacket and strapped a pistol around his waist.
"I don't know how you managed to lead them up here," he said, bitterly spitting the words at her like bullets. "I suppose you have a portable transmitter hidden somewhere. But you'll never live to see Il Volpe a prisoner."
Romina heard a commotion at the end of the corridor as Roberto and Tullio passed the warning to Selenia and the sleeping outlaws, rousing them into activity with kicks and curses. Then her eyes widened with horror as she saw the famous outlaw remove his pistol deliberately from his holster and level it at her.
"In this part of the world, the penalty for treason is death," he informed her coldly, a strange quietness in his voice. The girl was too terrified to speak and huddled back against the wall in absolute horror, holding the blanket in front of her breasts as if the thin fabric of cotton could somehow stop the bullets.
"And to think ... to think that when I first saw you I thought ... you were someone else...." his voice cracked as he spoke these last few words, and Romina, her mind frozen by fear, closed her eyes and whimpered with fright as Il Volpe raised the pistol and cocked it.
At that instant, the door flew open a second time and Roberto again burst into the room.
"We're ready to go. They should be here any second now and ... what are you doing?" The ex-school teacher's eyes narrowed as he took in the horrifying scene.
"Executing a police spy," Il Volpe answered shortly, his pistol still trained on Romina's exposed vulnerable breasts.
"No!" cried the young man. "Don't shoot her!"
"You don't know the situation," snarled the older man. It was she who brought them up here."
"We haven't got time to argue," insisted the younger man. "I brought her up here and she received our hospitality from my hands. According to the traditional law, I must be consulted before the right of hospitality is withdrawn!"
"You'd let a police spy live?" asked Il Volpe acidly.
"I'm not convinced she's a spy and you haven't got time to convince me," Roberto countered. "Let's just lock her in here and leave her for Barzini. Please, I never asked you for anything much and I'm asking for this!"
There was a long moment of suspense and Romina felt as if her heartbeats could be heard all across the room.
"We'd better get going," Il Volpe finally decided, shaking his head as if to drive away some evil thought and jamming the pistol back into his holster, before leaving the room with scarcely a backward glance.
Roberto lingered for a split second at the doorway, gazing at her with a strange faraway expression.
"I will be seeing you again," he said definitely before slamming the door behind him. And then she was alone. Romina listened to the retreating footsteps of the band and Il Volpe's whispered urgent instructions as they filed out the back door of the cottage and started the arduous climb up the face of the almost-vertical cliff which rose immediately behind the cottage. The harsh lieutenant would be here in another few minutes, angry at having missed Il Volpe one more time. And she would be his prisoner again, available for any kind of revenge he chose to inflict upon her.
Her entire body shivering with fear and desperation, the girl rose unsteadily from the bed where she had been so horribly misused and she walked, still naked, to the window. The opening was barred and small and offered no possibility for escape, but through it she commanded a view of the entire situation. High in the left hand corner of her field of vision, she could see the bandits inching their way painfully up the steep cliff. She strained her eyes as she tried to pick out the figure of Il Volpe, the man she now knew to be her father, the man with whom she had just performed two hideously obscene sex acts and who had been ready to shoot her in cold-blood just a few minutes later. She spotted him, only a dozen yards from the top of the cliff, apparently urging the others to hurry.
She could also see Roberto, the tall bearded young man who had already saved her life twice and had mysteriously promised that she had not seen the last of him.
Suddenly the sound of machine gun fire rippled across the clearing and Romina saw the bandits dive for cover, cramming their bodies wherever they could find concealment on the almost-barren cliff. It was Barzini and his men!
Romina went pale at the sight of the big muscular lieutenant as he led his squad out of the trees near the trail and ordered them to continue firing against the group huddled on the cliff.
There seemed to be about eight or nine policemen, all shooting with automatic weapons and Romina quickly saw that the situation was completely hopeless as far as the bandits were concerned. The gang had all managed to find cover for the moment but it was clear that they could go no further up the cliff without exposing themselves to certain death, and climbing back down meant facing surrender or summary execution. The police could lie in the comfort of the cool grass for days, if need be, with food water and plenty of ammunition.
But the bandits had only carried pistols and no water and they were fully exposed to the heat of the morning sun. The situation was hopeless!
Romina was now very close to absolute despair. Everything had begun so well, and gone so terribly wrong. Falling in love with her own father was bad enough, but now to see him killed, hunted down cruelly and murdered by a ruthless blood-thirsty policeman, this was too much! But she was helpless, a naked defenseless girl in a locked room.
She caught a sob in her throat as she watched the policemen, lying only a hundred feet or so from where she was imprisoned, adjusting their aim and bringing a more intensive fire on the doomed bandits huddled on the cliff. A few pistol shots answered the machine gun fire, but then abruptly stopped and Romina guessed that Il Volpe had recognized that a shoot-out was hopeless and passed the word to save the ammunition.
Suddenly a thought exploded in her mind like a hand grenade. The machine gun!
In his haste, Il Volpe had left a sub-machine gun and a packet of ammunition behind him in the chest, the same place where she had found the mate to her mother's earring. If she could only figure out how to work it.
She flew to the chest and lifted out the gleaming oily weapon, surprised at how heavy it was. The ammo box was even heavier, but she managed to get it open and extract a bandolier.
Running her hands over the murderous-looking piece of weaponry, she located the safety switch and turned it to the "on" position and then stuffed the cartridge belt into a likely-looking aperture in the side of the gun above the trigger.
Obviously there was no way to test-fire it within the confines of the tiny room and so she lifted the gun to her shoulder with difficulty and rested the muzzle on the window sill, the barrel poked through the bars.
Naturally assuming that the cottage was empty, the police had taken no precautions against being fired upon from that direction. Barzini himself was partially concealed behind a tree, but the rest of his men were sitting ducks, protected against fire from the cliff by tree stumps and rocks but completely exposed to Romina.
Can I really do this? she asked herself. Assuming I can get this thing to work, do I really want to pull this trigger and kill a bunch of innocent people?
But then, how innocent are they? Barzini, she knew, was far from innocent and from the stories she had heard while a guest in the cottage, it seemed unlikely that the other policemen were much better.
But still they were human beings! In the course of the past twenty-four hours, she had found herself doing a great many things she had never believed possible, but shooting men with a machine gun had never seemed to be in the cards for a shy Italo-American girl from Boston. She focused her eyes over the sights and trained the weapon on the back of a policeman only a short distance away. At this range she could hardly miss and once again her courage failed her.
After all, why should she? Perhaps no harm would come to her when the lieutenant searched the cottage and found her. There was no reason for him to kill her and he could hardly take off his pants in the presence of eight or nine policemen and rape her again. Or could he? But even if all of them decided to take off their pants and rape her, she had learned-thanks to the bandit gang-that a woman could live through this and more.
They would eventually have to take her back to Strappani and release her and then this whole ugly experiment would be over. She could go back to the United States and look for a job and forget that she ever had a father. Her mother still thought she was enjoying herself in Arizona and life could go on as it always had.
A new ripple of machinegun fire interrupted her thoughts. The day was becoming hot and she saw that the sun was shining directly in the eyes of the trapped men on the cliff, another advantage for the police. Her father's head appeared for a moment from being a rock, studied the situation and then retreated as the policemen opened for a second time. It was hopeless! Before long, they would have to try some desperate measure, a dash for the top, probably, and then Barzini's men would cut them down like dogs.
And then too, there was Roberto to consider. While her own father had handed her over to the depraved lusts of a group of common criminals and then sodomized her himself, Roberto had shown her nothing but kindness. The slender black-bearded ex-school teacher was up on the cliff too, she reminded herself, doomed to be shot and killed like the others. And Selenia, the cheerful peasant girl who had loaned her clothing and made her feel so welcome! No, Selenia could not be forgotten either.
But most of all, there was her father! No matter what he had done to her, he was still her father, the man she had come to Italy to find. Was Il Volpe's daughter so weak she could not pull a trigger? Only a few minutes ago, she had knelt before this man in slave-like submission and taken him willingly into her mouth. Could she stand here now and watch him die? At this very moment, her naked young body was full of his sperm, in her stomach and in her bowels. If he died, something within her died with him. For twenty-four hours she had been trying to find a way to tell him that she was his daughter and that she loved him. Now there was a way.
She could say it with bullets.
The first policeman screamed and pitched over violently when the machine gun shells poured into his body, but Romina did not take the time to study his death agony and shifted her aim immediately to another man. The police were slow to react, apparently believing that the shooting was coming from the cliff and for a wild moment, they all fired furiously at the cowering band high above, while Romina picked them off one by one from the side.
When four or five policemen had been wounded or killed outright, Romina saw Barzini point wildly in her direction and aim his revolver at the window. Determined to win this battle or die in the attempt, the young girl squeezed the trigger again, watching the machine gun eat up the shells from the bandolier and vomit them violently out the muzzle. She covered the entire area with bullets, firing wildly and continuously.
Barzini tried uselessly to order them back to fight, but soon saw that it was useless and lowered his pistol, half hidden behind the tree. Shots were now coming from the cliff, adding desperation to the policeman's position, but for some reason, he held his ground, ignoring the shooting from the cliff and straining his eyes to see into the dark interior of the cottage.
Romina met his glance for a long moment and saw the grim determination on his face turn to amazement as he recognized who it was who had foiled his plan to trap Il Volpe. As she squeezed off another burst in his direction, unfortunately missing him, the lieutenant shook his fist at her and rapidly joined his men in retreat.
The young girl, her body now trembling so wildly that she could barely retain her hold on the vibrating weapon, fought to keep calm and conserve ammunition. As the bandits began working their way cautiously down off the cliff, she continued to fire bursts into the forest, hoping to convince the police that the counter-attack was still in progress and keep them moving.