The American Read online

  I went to the place because the farmhouse beside the church was for sale. A sun-warped board was nailed to the wall, with Vendesi written crudely upon it in pink distemper. The paint had run like the blood flowing from the stigmata, drying in the fierce heat of the sun before it could reach the bottom of the board.

  Knocking upon the door, I received no reply. The windows were firmly shuttered as if the building had closed its eyes tight against the glaring sun. It was a baking hot day. Grass and weeds grew against the wall. I went round to the back. There was a straw-strewn courtyard of square cobbles and a near-derelict barn. From the smell, cattle were lodged there. A crabby hen scratched in the debris of a broken-open bale of hay from which protruded several three-pronged pitchforks. Upon my approach, the fowl clucked its vehement annoyance at my intrusion and flew clumsily into the rafters.

  The back door was ajar. I knocked again. No response. Carefully, I edged the door wider open.

  It was not that I was afraid or suspicious. I had told no one where I was going: I might have been in the Piazza del Duomo buying cheese. Yet one never knows when the end might come, when someone else, holding hands with fate or the butt of a Beretta 84, decides the time has come.

  Quite often, rising in the dawn hour to dress and commence my work, I let my mind weigh up the odds. Not those of surviving the day, the week, the month: they are too long to estimate. I consider the chances of the method of my death. A bomb is always possible but only if a client decided I need rubbing out, can or would identify him, talk under torture or sodium pentothal: there is a code of honour in my world, but many do not trust it. I rate odds against a bomb at, say, twenty to one. A bullet is much more likely. Generally, three to one. There can be side bets on this one, to increase the profitability of the gamble. Take the rifle or machine-gun bullet. Long odds on a 5.45mm. My stalking angel, for this is how I think of my assassin, may be a Bulgarian but they prefer umbrellas, as I have indicated. Shorter odds on a 5.56 x 45mm: that covers the Americans, the Ml6 and the Armalite combat rifle. I would offer you six to one. Evens for the 7.62mm NATO round. Where hand-guns are concerned, there is no bet. If bullet it is to be, then the 9mm Parabellum is the most likely one, the enforcer of treaties and the settler of old scores. Odds on my dying of disease, a car accident, unless the vehicle was tampered with, a self-admistered drug overdose are slim. Death by boredom is always a possibility but unquantifiable and so therefore not open for a wager.

  The farmhouse was uninhabited, at least by humans. The parlour-cum-kitchen contained a wrought-iron stove, the door welded by rust, a chair with no seat and a rickety table which had plainly been used in recent times as an execution block for the beheading of the scrawny hen’s cousins. Two other downstairs rooms were empty of all but dust and fallen plaster. The stairs were rotten. I trod cautiously, close to the wall. Each step creaked ominously, painfully even. At the top were three rooms. One had a bed-frame in it, the springs awry and tangled. In another, a cat had recently kittened. The mother was absent, but the blind offspring mewed piteously as they sensed my foot upon the floor. From the third, was a view of the valley, the Citroën and an old man studying my insurance and licence dockets on the windscreen.

  Holding on to the wall, trying not to put my full weight on each complaining step for more than a split second, I went down the stairs and out into the yard. The old man was standing there. He was not antagonistic. He assumed there was nothing a man who drives a seven-month-old Citroën 2CV would wish to steal.

  ‘Buon giorno,’ I said.

  He shook his head and mumbled. For him, perhaps, it was not a good day.

  I pointed first to the house and then to myself and said, ‘Vendesi!’

  He grimaced, shaking his head again. The sound of a car passing on the road below, grinding uphill in second gear, drew his attention and he ambled off without uttering a word to me. Either he was dumb, or did not like strangers, or distrusted foreigners, or thought anyone who would wish to purchase the building to be insane and therefore beneath either contempt or conversation.

  I do not know what drew me to the church. Perhaps the chicken pecking at the ground caught my attention, some communication passing between us at a bestial level of telepathy, recognition of which has been lost to civilised man. More likely, it was a hot day and holiness is cool. Putting my hand on the ancient handle, I went in.

  Once upon a time, as I have stated, I was a Catholic. It was a long time ago. I have no use for religion now. The older one gets, either the more pious one becomes or the more cynical. My parents were devout beyond the call of duty. My mother wore her knees raw scrubbing the church floor tiles after a burst water main flooded the place. My father paid to have them waxed and sealed with varnish. This was as an indemnity against further damage by flooding, not to save my mother from future hours of agony. My father, I recall, was much angered when the man from the Ecclesiastical Insurance Society referred to the burst main as an Act of God.

  To the age of eight, I was educated in a convent school. There were seven boys in the establishment. The nuns taught us well, indocrinated us to a higher, more invidious standard than that to which our parents or Father McConnell could aspire. The other six kowtowed to the domination of these virgins with wilted souls and milky flesh. I would not. I thought of them as bats with white faces. The Mother Superior, a dumpy Irish woman endowed with the quick temper of piety, looked like a corpse in its shroud, only mobile. Witches in my dreams wore wimples, not pointed hats.

  At eight, I was sent to a Catholic preparatory school. Here, the brothers from the nearby community taught us. They were not as spiritually shrivelled as their sisters-in-God. Instead, they had been somehow brutalised by prayer and solitude. They beat us for the most inconsequential misdemeanours. They caned hands, always the left, even on left-handed pupils, bare buttocks and the soft fleshy rear sides of thighs. They boxed ears and cuffed heads. They were obscene.

  Yet, through them, I learnt so much of such value to me ever since: Geometry to assess trajectory and range; English; Geography to know the world and its hiding places; History, that I might know it and shape it and take my back-seat place in its cavalcade; Metalwork; Hate.

  When I was thirteen, I was sent to a Catholic public school in the shires. I will not tell you which one. You could trace me through it. I was academically competent, particularly at mathematics and the sciences. I have never been much of a linguist. I was never beaten as others were because I kept a low profile, as they say. I did not creep to the masters. I merely kept my head well down behind the barricades.

  Public school teaches you how to hide in the crowd. I got on with my studies, played the required sports with enough gusto and house spirit to get by without achieving house colours. I was never the scorer of goals, always the handy lad on the right wing who passed the ball at the appropriate moment to the centre-forward, to the striker. In the school’s Combined Cadet Force, I was the best shot, though. They taught me how to assemble a Bren gun when I was fourteen. And they taught me how to pray without thinking. Both skills have served me well.

  Catholicism—all the perversions of Christianity—is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologise and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity? As you can tell, age makes me contemptuous.

  The little church was not cool inside. It was cold. There were no windows save for a few thin slices of sunlight like archers’ slits. It took a while for me to adjust my eyes to the gloom. I left the door open so I could see. Once accustomed to the midday twilight, I was astounded by the sights surrounding me.

  Every square inch of the interior was painted. The frescoes started at the flagstones and went up to the roof timbers. Over the sim
ple altar—a table bedecked with a white cloth smutted by mould—the ceiling was domed and entirely decorated in royal blue with gold stars and a pale, limpid moon.

  The paintings were pre-Brunelleschi, with no sense of perspective. They were visually two-dimensional yet had the third dimension of magic about them. Upon one wall was a five-metre long depiction of the Last Supper. All the diners had halos, but Christ’s was primrose yellow with golden radiates, the others mere circles drawn with a dull red line and coloured in black, light brown or blue. Upon the table was a loaf of bread like a large hot cross bun and some objects looking remarkably like leeks. No other food. They must either have been waiting for the meal to arrive or had finished it and were about to depart. There was some crockery, two jugs of wine, several bowls and a chalice. The only cutlery was a knife like a butcher’s cleaver.

  All the diners looked alike. Men with beards, men with halos, men with staring eyes and long hair. One was a red-head, with no halo. Of course. At the foot of the table was a dog, lying asleep with its muzzle upon its paws. The meal must have been over, for the dog appeared well-fed and contented.

  The same wall carried several portrayals of Knights Templar on piebald mounts with white shields and red crosses: one was Saint George, or his archetype, slaying a dragon of almost oriental appearance. The artist was reasonably competent with figures and horses but the trees looked more like multi-stemmed fungi of the genus Amanita. Quite possibly, they were meant to represent these toadstools, the magic mushroom, the soma plant, the bringer of the dreams of the gods.

  Across the little nave, Adam and Eve were receiving their just deserts for having it off in Eden. Nearby, the Three Wise Men knelt to the Virgin and Child, the latter reaching out for the gold. How appropriate, I think: ever since, the Catholics have been after the money.

  I ignored the other scenes from the lives of Christ and the saintly ones. They made me seethe. So much time and effort spent to decorate this unknown chapel in the middle of the mountains, to record a history much of which is trivial poppycock.

  I turned to leave. It was then the horror struck, the horror of history, of religion, of politics, the manipulation of people, the twisting of lives to unquestioning acquiescence, the bowing to the status quo.

  The wall in which the door was set was entirely decorated by hell. Open coffins lay with the rotting dead rising from their delicious corruption. Whores, with their bosoms bare and their sex in full, pinkly view, lay on their backs, spread for a phalanx of red demons to enter them. Words spewed from the mouth of one whore in a bubble, as if from a modern cartoon character.

  I cannot read stylised Latin script but guess, if it were translated by a modern academic, it would say ‘Here comes the Devil syphilis.’

  Other Satans, with three-pronged pitchforks just like those in the derelict barn outside, were prodding sinners into a well of fire. Jasmine and scarlet flames licked around their buttocks. A cauldron of sulphur, the devil’s own brew, was pouring upon them like syrup. A huge fiend, the master Beelzebub himself, stood close to the ceiling, close to heaven. He was grey black with red eyes like the fog lamps on expensive cars. His feet were a phoenix’s, his head was a gryphon’s, his hands were those of a man. A naked woman balanced upon his tail, the tip in her cunt. She was screaming with pain. Or pleasure. I could not tell.

  I walked quickly out, into the daylight. The door slammed behind me. I looked up and the sun burnt into me.

  By stepping from the fantasy of the little church into the reality of the day, I had seemed to pass through hell, yet, as I started the Citroën, the engine ticking over, it occurred to me I had not passed through but entered into it. For what is hell if it is not the modern world, crumbling into dissolution, polluted by sins against the people and the earth mother, twisted by the whims of politicians and soured by the incantations of hypocrites.

  I drove away in a hurry. My spine itched as if the devils were tailing me—as if the shadow-dweller was in the vicinity.

  On the road, I passed the old man standing beside a blue sedan with a driver’s side mirror awry and catching the sun. To my surprise, he waved to me as I went by: perhaps he was pointing at me, telling his friend in the car of the fool of a foreigner who was considering the purchase of the old farmhouse.

  Later, in the solitude of my apartment, I remembered Dante.

  Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

  With considerable thought and care, I have decided to remove the telescopic sight mountings, shifting them slightly forward. The rubber eye-cup was just a little too far back. I could have altered the length of the butt yet that would have put the gun off-balance.

  Balance is vitally important. This gun will not be used from a stable platform, a safe position. It will be fired from a rooftop, from a casement window open only a few centimetres, from beneath a bush, on a tree, from the rear of a stationary van, from a precarious place. The shooter must have utter confidence in the weapon so that all concentration can be given to the target and to remaining inconspicuous.

  Re-aligning the sight mountings is not difficult but it is finicky. One has to work to minute tolerances.

  Long into the evening, I work on the task, every so often weighing the gun, poising it on a ruler over the pencil mark I have determined to be the centre of balance. At last, about eleven o’clock, I am finished. My eyes are sore from the spotlamp over my workbench. My fingers are tired. My head aches monotonously.

  I put the gun down, switch off the lights, take a beer from the refrigerator and go up to the loggia.

  The town still hums but indistinctly. The old quarter around me is quiet, the peace broken only now and again by the echo of a vehicle in the canyons of the narrow ways or the call of a voice from the Via Ceresio.

  I sit at the table and sip the beer. Though it is late, the stones are still warm. The sky is moonless, the stars punctures of light on the satin of the night. The mountains are the veils of black-clad widows peering into an open casket, the villages the glint of funeral candles in their eyes.

  If the old widows are peering into a coffin, then I am the corpse. We all are. We are all the dead. We are done with life and it is done with us. The game is over, the long trick finally ended. We are being paid off.

  Certainly, I shall soon be paid off. The visitor will return, the Socimi handed over, the job completed.

  Then what?

  This is my last task. After the Socimi, nothing. I am getting too old.

  The valley is so beautiful at night. As beautiful as death.

  Efisio owns and runs the Cantina R. in the Piazza di S. Rufina. He is about seventy years old and the locals call him The Boss. His cantina, in the coloquial jargon of the streets, is also The Boss. Not il Boss. He left the town in his youth, travelling to America in the flood of immigrants escaping poverty and ruin. In New York, so they say, he robbed a bank with two accomplices and started a cantina in Little Italy. The cantina became a bar and then a speakeasy. Efisio flourished. He joined a Family. They flourished. Then, as an old man, he sold up, left his Family and returned to his roots to do what he knew best. Operate a cantina.

  The Cantina R. existed before Efisio bought it. It never made much money. It was too far from the Piazza del Duomo and the market, too far from the Porta Roma where the carters, long-distance truck drivers today, congregated. Yet, gradually, its reputation grew. The bar counter is made of a solid piece of oak seven metres long and nearly a metre wide, thirty centimetres thick. The wines are the best in town. The range of beer is the most comprehensive. The tables are the cleanest and made of wood not tin plate or plastic. The floors shine like those of a mediaeval monastery. The lights are low and the windows frosted. From outside, no one may see who is drinking within. The Boss is, therefore, an ideal hangout for men ducking their wives, clerks ducking their employers, shop assistants ducking their manager. Women may enter—this is not Britain with its male preserves—but seldom do unless in groups. There is no jukebox, no cheap watch gambling machi
ne, no one-arm bandit. There are no pool tables, dartboards, shove-ha’penny slabs or skittles. This is a serious place, for drinking and talking.

  I never enter alone. I do not know the regulars. Sometimes, Galeazzo takes me there for lunch. We bring our own slices of parma ham and bread, laying them on a square of greaseproof paper upon one of the tables. Then we purchase a bottle of Barolo. It is heady stuff for the middle of the day, and we have to sleep it off afterwards, but it is good to be where there is only talk.

  The clientele of the cantina come from every walk of life. Giuseppe goes in sometimes, if he finds some money in the gutter. The Boss is not cheap. Maria frequents the place, one of the few females to enter alone. She is soon absorbed into a group of conversationalists. Remember, passers-by cannot see in. Husbands are safe here.

  The reason I never go in alone is because Efisio is shrewd. He is what the Americans term street-smart. He is canny in the way bar-owners the world over are receptive to the human condition. They see it all. The impending bankrupts, the committers of tiny sins, the faithless and the unfaithful, the afraid and the whisky-courageous: all pass through their doors, lean upon their counters, press lips to their glasses. A customer with a friend is not scrutinised so closely, is not conversed with, cannot be plumbed and probed like a pond being dredged by police for a body believed drowned in the mud.

  Of such people as Efisio I have to be extra careful. Like any priest in any confessional—and what is a bar if it is not an informal confessional, without the lattice window, the half-curtain and the muffled voices—the barman is a confessor. Yet whereas the priest generally keeps mum about what he hears, the barman is not bonded by oaths of silence. The priest sells his information for Hail Marys. God buys. The barman sells his intelligence for cash. The police buy.

  This is a shame. I should like to talk to Efisio. He is a man who has existed on the fringes of my world. I am sure he has killed; certainly he has arranged the death of others. He could not be where he is, what he is, without such a past. It would, I think, be good to chat over his experiences, compare them to mine. Professionals like us enjoy talking shop once in a while. Yet, as soon as he knew of me, even caught so much as a hint of my past, he would be on the phone to the carabinieri, to the polizia. If he was really shrewd, he would bypass the locals and go straight to Rome, to Interpol, to the American Embassy and the FBI, where I am sure he must still have contacts. And, for a while, he would be feted by the popular press, interviewed on RAI Uno, temporarily become more than an immigrant bar-owner returned from exile in New York.