‘A greengrocers.’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Zina,’ I called. ‘Where’s the nearest greengrocers’?’
‘Greengrocers? What is?’
‘Where they sell vegetables.’
‘Oh. Fruttivendolo. There’s one just down that street there.’ She pointed past the pump to a narrow, dirty-looking thoroughfare. ‘The others have all gone I think.”
I crossed the piazza.. The fruiterers’ was the third shop on the left and there, sticking out of the doorway, was the bony rump of my mule. I called to him and he backed out and stood looking at me, some green stuff hanging from his mouth. I went to the shop. It was asparagus he’d been eating. I filled a basket with the neatly tied bundles and he followed me back towards the piazza, nuzzling at it. The last house in the street had big doors gaping wide and the smell of manure. It was a stables and inside I found collar and traces.
Hacket stared at us as we crossed the piazza. Then he began to laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’ I snapped at him.
‘Nothing. I was only thinking …‘He stopped laughing and shook his head. ‘Guess I thought the mule wasn’t real, that’s all. Now all we’ve got to do is clear this cart, hack the back part off and we’ve got a buggy.’
We set to with a will. The need for haste drove me and gave me strength. We pushed the pile of furniture overboard and then got to work with axe and saw which we got from a nearby shop. This was the first opportunity I’d had of questioning any of the others and I asked Hacket what had happened after they had entered the monastery.
‘We were had for suckers,’ he said. ‘That’s about all there is to it. We ought to have known considering the door wasn’t locked. But seeing those two poor devils chained to the wall — well, we just forgot everything else. And the next we knew the door had closed and the key was grating in the lock. The doctor fellow must have been waiting for us on the roof. The son-of-a-bitch had the nerve to wish us bon voyage. If I ever get my hands on the bastard…’ He swung the axe viciously.
It didn’t take long to smash the back half off the cart. The wood was old and rotten. Then we harnessed George and backed him in. By the time we’d finished, Hilda had set Max’s leg. ‘I’ve done the best I can for him,’ she said.