The American Read online

  ‘Where do you get your books from?’ I ask for the umpteenth time. ‘You never cease to amaze me with your range.’

  He smirks secretively and taps his temple with his plastic ballpoint pen. The sound reminds me of Roberto testing a watermelon.

  ‘You would like to know! But does the man who owns the diamond mine tell his friends of its location? Of course not.’ He sips his wine. The base of the glass has made a ring upon the dust wrapper of the diary. ‘In the south. Far south. In the mountains there. An old lady, old as Methuselah’s mother-in-law and just as ugly. She has nothing. A few hectares of peach trees and some olives, just enough to press her own oil. Cloudy stuff her oil, and somehow gritty. She gave me some once: useless for salad, good only for preserving. Her peaches are stripped by caterpillars: if only you studied moths! So she has no harvest but books.’

  ‘How many hectares of books?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish! Drink your wine.’

  I obey.

  ‘Her books are measured not in hectares but kilometres.’

  ‘So how many has she?’

  ‘No one can tell. I have yet to walk all her shelves.’

  A few weeks ago, partly to allay any local gossip and strengthen my artistic credentials, I gave Galeazzo one of my paintings of P. machaon. He has, as I guessed he would, had it framed and hangs it prominently over the till where everyone can see it. This serves my purpose well. I am Signor Farfalla.

  Signora Prasca has been very worried. She tells me so when I return. I said I would be away for two days and have been gone four. She has been most distressed in case her Signor Farfalla met with an accident on the autostrada, been mugged in Rome whither I told her I was going, been caught in the terrible thunderstorms whilst driving through the mountains. She fusses around me as I let myself into the courtyard and start up the stairs with my wooden box. In her hands she holds the four days’ accumulation of mail. It includes a postcard from Pet which I sent three days ago from Firenze.

  I calm her fears. Rome was fine, I assure her. The storms did not reach the capital. The autostrada was free of water. Only tourists are mugged. I do not tell her I have been no nearer to Rome than the staircase I am mounting.

  Do not attempt to guess where I have been. It is not for you to know and I shall give you no clues. Suffice to say I picked up a Socimi 821, a good quality German telescopic sight with Zeiss optics and an assortment of other bits and pieces for under eight thousand US dollars. The sight was a low-light model, too. Just in case. The profit margin on this job will be good.

  The task at hand is not as difficult as I first imagined it might be. There will be little actual fabrication involved, less Bach. I was extremely lucky in being able to obtain a barrel. You need not know the details. No inventor or craftsman divulges his secrets.

  When this job is done, I might sell you the information. If you want to enter the business. When I am gone there will be very few others to carry on the art. I know of only two freelance—how shall I put it?—specialist gun merchants. One of those may well be dead by now. I have not heard of him for several years.

  Perhaps he has retired. As I shall, after this final job.

  It is a pity, really. I had hoped my final project would be much harder than this is proving to be. Another briefcase rifle, perhaps a dart gun inside a typewriter. Miniaturisation is the name of the game these days: lap-top computers, digital watches, PDAs, heart pacemakers, mobile phones the size of a cigarette pack. Evolution will have to start shortening and thinning our fingers.

  An umbrella gun would be a challenge. Of course, it has been done. The Bulgarians used one on a dissident, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978. A 1.52mm pellet was fired by compressed gas into the target’s thigh. The pellet was a masterpiece of micro-engineering long before the super-chip was laser cut from a silicon sliver the thickness of a human hair, or whatever other miracle dimensions are involved. It was spherical and cast from an alloy of platinum and iridium. Two .35 mm holes drilled into it led to a minuscule central reservoir filled with ricin, a poison obtained from the castor oil plant and unconquered by the antidote-makers. Two weeks before, the Bulgarians had used the same weapon unsuccessfully upon another so-called undesirable, one Vladimir Kostov, in Paris. He survived.

  The concept of the weapon was brilliant: perfect disguise, astonishing projectile, simplicity itself. Two seconds and it was all done. Two seconds to change the world and end it for the target. The sadness here was that the poison was slow. Markov took three days to die. That is not a beautiful death, that is a fox-hunter death.

  The bullet is the better way.

  There are some modifications to make to the Socimi. The longer barrel will have to be fitted. This is not too difficult. Merely a matter of milling and lathe-work. The barrel is simply attached with a nut and will allow easy dismantling and re-assembly. I shall have to adjust the connector, only a tiny amount, to make the trigger lighter. My customer, I suspect, has a light finger despite the firm grip.

  The stock will need to be reshaped completely. The present one is too short. It is ideal for a spray-gun, but not for an exact weapon with a ’scope on top. I shall build another. I have to thread the muzzle for the sound suppressor, which will take a while. One has to turn the thread-cutter so carefully, so slowly.

  The barrel I have obtained is already rifled: six lands. I have not fired it and shall have to bed it down, so to speak. It is a technical business. I do not intend to burden you with the jargon of gunsmithing. Just be assured the job will be done to the highest tolerances, to the most precise specifications, to the best standard to be found anywhere in the world.

  I am a craftsman. It is a pity my craftsmanship will be used only the once, like a McDonald’s plastic foam hamburger box, but that is the lot of craftsmen these days. We are fast disappearing in a world of the throw-away. Perhaps that is why we experts tend to seek each other out—why I often look for what I need from Alfonso, why I go to him now.

  Alfonso’s garage is in the Piazza della Vagna. It is a cavernous space beneath a seventeenth-century merchant’s house. Where he repairs Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Lancias there were once stored silks from China, cloves from Zanzibar, dried dates from Egypt, gemstones from India and gold from wherever there was gold to be stolen, bartered or murdered for. Now the place reeks of gearbox oil, the shelves lined with tools, boxes of nuts, bolts and spare parts, most of them secondhand and many retrieved from crashes attended with the breakdown truck. The lights are garish neon strips. In the corner, like a household shrine, blinks the computerised tuning machine. The blip on the oscilloscope screen zig-zags as if registering the death-wheeze of a dying engine block. It reminds me of sickness.

  Alfonso calls his business a hospital. Ill cars arrive and leave healthy. He does not speak of a damaged Mercedes. For him, the vehicle is ‘wounded’ in a battle with a Regata. ‘Wounded’ sounds noble. The Regata on the other hand is merely ‘injured’. He holds Fiats in contempt, declaring them to be rust-buckets. A few weeks ago, he told me that he saw a ‘dead’ Lamborghini on the autostrada south of Florence. Nearby was a ‘slightly hurt’ articulated Scania lorry. Alfonso is the Christiaan Barnard of the BMW, the Fleming of the Fiat. For him, a socket spanner is a scalpel, a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench delicate instruments of surgery.

  ‘Ciao, Alfonso!’ I greet him. He looks sideways at me from beneath the hood of a Lancia.

  ‘She is lazy,’ he declares and thumps his hand against the inside of the wheel arch. ‘This old Roman woman . . .’ he nods in the direction of the license plate ‘. . . can’t climb hills no more. Time she had new blood.’

  For Alfonso, blood is oil, food is fuel, plasma is hydraulic fluid, a coat of paint is a dress or a smart suit. Filler or undercoat is invariably panties or bra, depending on the positioning of the repair.

  I require some pieces of iron. Steel, preferably. Alfonso keeps scrap lying all over the place. Nothing cannot be recycled by him. Once, I heard tell, he welded the burner
rings of an old gas stove into the floor of a baby Fiat that had rotted through. The owner knew no different and the car went on burbling about the valley for years until the brakes failed on a bend. They say the car was a write-off but the burner rings did not so much as buckle.

  He waves his hand in the general direction of the shelves. His gesture implies take what you want, help yourself, my garage is your garage, what are a few scraps of steel between friends.

  Behind an oil pan with a jagged hole in it I discover several off-cuts of steel: then I find three gear wheels with the teeth sheared off. I hold the biggest up.

  ‘Bene?’ I ask.

  ‘Si! Si! Va bene!’

  ‘Quant’è?’

  He growls at me and grins.

  ‘Niente!’

  Nothing. We are friends. A gear wheel with no bite is useless to him. What do I want it for, he asks. A doorstop, I reply. He says it is heavy and should make a good one.

  I wrap it in a sheet of oily newspaper and take it home. Signora Prasca is on the telephone. I can hear her chattering away like a parrot.

  In my apartment, I put the Bach on loud. Then I take it off. I put on my latest purchase, the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture. As the French artillery repulses the Russians, I smash the wheel into five pieces with a four pound mallet.

  I am death’s telegram boy, death’s kissogram. And that is the beauty of it. In my line of business, everything I do flows uncompromisingly towards one tiny moment, a final destination of perfection. How many artists can claim as much?

  The painter finishes his painting and steps back. It is done, the commission met. The picture goes to the framer and from him to the owner. Months later, the artist sees it hanging in his patron’s home and he notices a tiny error. A bee on a flower has only one antenna. Perhaps an oak leaf is the wrong shape. The perfection is imperfect.

  Take a writer: for months, he strives upon a story, finishes it, sends it to his publisher. It is edited, re-written, copy-edited, set, proof-read, corrected, printed. A year later, it stands in the book-shops. The reviewers have praised it. The readers are buying it. The writer skips through his free copy. The gravel driveway to his hero’s Malibu beach-house in Chapter 2 has mysteriously been paved by Chapter 37. The whole is flawed.

  Yet for me, this does not occur. Save just that once. There will come a time when my endeavours succeed. The chain of events which starts with the shattering of a steel gear will culminate in two seconds of action. The finger will tighten, the trigger will move, the connector will shift, the sear will rise, the slide will move, the bolt lock go up, the hammer will hit the firing pin, which will strike the cartridge, the explosion will happen and the bullet will travel to the heart or the head and the perfection be complete. Everything happens to a logical, preordained and flawless design.

  Such a choreography and I am the dancing master of this ballet towards eternity. I am the accomplisher, the cause, the first step and the last step, the producer and director.

  In collaboration with my client, I am the greatest impresario on earth, the Barnum of bullets, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of assassination, the D’Oyly Carte of death. Together, we choose the method and I make it possible. I write the libretto, I write the score. My client chooses the theatre but I dress the stage. I am the spotlights and the backdrop, I am the director. My client is half the cast. You can guess who the other player is in this drama.

  My client is my puppet. I am no different from the puppeteer in front of the church of San Silvestro. I entertain. I put on perhaps the biggest show on earth. But my puppet does not have a precocious penis to pop up. It has an adapted Socimi 821 and a clip of 9 mm specials.

  What I like so much about this play, this tragi-comedy of fate, is that I have a say in the method, the place, the moment. How many people can state unequivocally when they shall die, where and how? Only the suicide can be certain and he cannot be sure, not one hundred per cent, that someone will not come along and cut him down, or drag him from the water, or pump the pills out of his stomach or switch the gas off and open wide the windows. Let in the life again. How many know, are irrefutably certain, when and in what place another will die, shuffle off the mortal coil? The assassin knows. It is this that makes him God.

  The ordinary murderer does not. He is an amateur. He acts on impulse or through panic. He does not think his actions through, does not see the authority he holds by an almost divine right. He blunders and wonders afterwards, as the cuffs lock on his wrists or the bullhorns demand he comes out with his hands up, what it was all about.

  The assassin knows.

  So do I.

  This is the utter, phenomenal miracle of it all.

  The newspaper stand close by Milo’s pitch in the Piazza del Duomo sometimes offers foreign journals and magazines, in the summer when the tourists are about. Today, there is Time, Newsweek and the English Daily Telegraph, as well as the International Herald Tribune and last Sunday’s New York Times. The front cover of Time portrays a revolutionary of indeterminate nationality wearing the international terrorist uniform of flak jacket and balaclava helmet with a Yasser Arafat scarf bunched at the throat, standing before a pile of burning car tyres and brandishing what is clearly, to my practised eye, a Chinese Type 68 automatic rifle.

  I study the picture under the shade of the news-stand awning. It is an interesting rifle. I have not handled one for a number of years. It looks like the Russian Simonov SKS but the barrel is longer and the gas regulator different. The bolt locking is similar to the AK47, the magazine dissimilar. To use AK47 magazines on this rifle one has to file down the bolt stop: I had to do so once. I remember the statistics: a heavy-ish weapon at nearly four kilos loaded, a 15 round magazine—30 if the AK47 version is attached—cyclic rate 750 rounds per minute, muzzle velocity 730 metres per second. Fires a 7.62mm round, Soviet M43 ball slug, 25 gr charge weight, 122 gr bullet weight. The title over the portrait, which is a half length photograph, reads ‘Men of Violence: the enemy in our midst.’

  I thumb over the pages. The drift of the article is that we must root out these forces of brutality, these perpetrators of quick death and the transistor radio bomb. There is no place in the world for the priests of gunfire, the missionaries of pain.

  I put the magazine down. I have no time for proselytising. Life is too short to spend it reading messages from presidential aids in political bunkers preaching peace from behind the stock of a legal weapon.

  Men of violence. There is no such exclusive category. Everyone is a terrorist. Everyone carries a gun in his heart. Most do not fire simply because they have no cause to pursue. For want of a rationale, or courage, we are all assassins.

  The propensity men have for causing terror is boundless. The British and, even here in the heart of civilisation, the Italians, hunt foxes and throw live cubs to the hounds for the pleasure of seeing the blood, hearing the pain, sensing the thrills of agony pulse in their own veins; the Swedish hamstring wolves; the Americans disembowel live rattlesnakes. Violence is an inherent characteristic of the species Homo. I should know. I am a man.

  There is no difference between a Simonov look-alike in the fist of a freedom-fighter, my bastardised Socimi in a young person’s briefcase, and an M16 carbine in the hands of a US Marine.

  People accept violence. On television, men die by the gun, by the fist of righteousness as if every film producer was a finger on the hand of his God. Death by violence is a commonplace. No-one crowds to see the drunk dead of booze in the gutter, the old man dead of cancer in the terminal ward of the old folks’ home. A few relatives mourn, cluck about like grateful hens, thankful the departed was not in pain long. A dignified death: that is what they want for him, want for themselves. Yet look at the rubber-necking drivers at a pile-up on the autostrada, the sightseeing hordes massing at the trackside of a railway crash, flocking to see where the plane came down, where the unfortunates were killed.

  And the brutalities of law: people accept violence if it is legitimised by authority, ac
cept it as a way of doling out justice. Certain people, certain classes of people, the niggers and the wops and the kafirs and the chinks and the trash, may be dealt violence rightfully, no matter who governs it, who dispenses it. It has always been like this. It always will be.

  I am one of that class, one of those who may be gunned down in the name of peace. I am the bounty. I and my visitor whom I am to meet again in a few days.

  Violence is the monopoly of the state, like the post office and the revenue department. We buy violence with our taxes, live under its protection.

  Or most do. I do not. I pay no taxes. No-one knows me. I have no long, sleek yachts moored in the best marinas.

  I live by the rule of Malcolm X: I am peaceful, I am courteous, I obey the law, I respect all the world. Yet if someone puts his hand on me, I send him to the cemetery.

  I should expand this a little for you will otherwise label me a liar. The law I obey is that of natural justice. The peace to which I adhere is that of quietude.

  As I sit in the second bedroom, the compact disc quietly playing, let us say, Pachelbel and work on the connectors, fashioning them from the smashed steel gear, I think of assassination and I think of poison, the coward’s way of killing, and I think of Italy, the home of poisoning.

  It was the Romans who refined the poisoner’s prowess and the Church of Rome which perfected it. Livia, the Emperor Augustus’ wife, was an expert: she drugged and laid low half her family. In ancient Rome, there was a guild of poisoners, but it was popes and cardinals who were the real experts.

  To bring death by the gun is noble. To bring it by poison is not: it is to corrupt. It is borne of a corruption, of the machinations of a malignant and ruthless soul. True assassination is impersonal yet the assassin takes an active part in the process. Poisoning involves hatred and envy and is, therefore, personal but the perpetrator merely applies the drug and runs, does not join in the meting out of death.