The American Page 16

  There are no words available to describe the taste of this heavenly conserve. It is the quiddity of an overgrown garden in the deepest of sultry summers, distilled into its primal juices, dulcified with nectar and stirred with ambrosia. Spread upon the bland bread, to bite into it is to eat of a purification of all the perfumes of nature, all the essences and moods that have invoked every line of pastoral poetry since Virgil.

  So. I am here, alone, in the half-darkness of the Italian night, drinking rosy wine and dining on rose blossom. The world is good. Time has stopped. The moon is hidden by the distant storm. The streets are quiet for it is just before one o’clock, even the addicts gone, curled into their puzzle of fallacious dreams, the ground too wet in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre for the lovers. The stars no longer move.

  Yet, around the loggia, my princely tower high above the struggles of men, my own stars are moving. They flash on and off like meteors spending themselves in the stratosphere. They are tiny lightings close to. They are will-o’-the-wisps. If I was a superstitious man, I should say they were the souls of those I has assisted into eternity and, for a lucky few, immortality amongst men, or all the bullets I have ever made, ever caused to be fired, returning to haunt me.

  They are fireflies, here in the centre of the town, above the rooftops, the rows of pantiles and the chasms of the courtyards and narrow, ancient streets.

  Curiously, they do not settle. The stone may be too cold for them, too devoid of life. Fire has no use for stone. I quickly leave the loggia, go below to the sitting room. There is a vase of flowers there. I snatch up a few and return to the loggia. I prop them against one of the pillars. Still, these animate flames, these tiny phosphorescences do not land. They ignore the blossoms.

  I pick up the wine and sip it. It is so sweet. I think of the honey gathered from the Convento do Vallingegno. I lean back in my chair to gaze out at the mountains. The peaks to the south-east are suddenly, briefly, silhouetted against dark clouds spun with lightning. The storm is coming nearer.

  In the town, a clock chimes once. This alone reminds me that time passes unavoidably onwards.

  The glass is drained. I refill it. The bottle is empty now. I press the wide cork into the mouth of the rose-petal jam. Enough of that for tonight. I must save some. It is my intention to take the remnants of the preserve to Clara and Dindina, to make them eat it before we bed each other. Augustus, Nero, Caligula: they will, I am sure, have pressed such a taste upon their women before having them. Such a jam cannot be the invention of modernity. It is too delicious.

  Once more I lean back in my chair and, by chance, look up into the dome above the loggia. The painted horizon I now see is, in the fresco, also bedevilled by a thunderstorm. The azure sky is pricked by gold stars. Yet they are moving now. The meteors have left the heavens and are playing on my ceiling. They are shifting in crazy patterns.

  The fireflies know the storm is coming. They have no time for flowers. They need shelter before the big drops start to pummel them to the ground, knock them from their flimsy shelters under drooping leaves, flood them out of the sanctuary beneath the stones.

  They dart and flicker then, gradually, as if a general in their army has given orders, commissioned billets for his infantry amidst my stars, they settle and wink on and off. Outside the loggia, on the mountains, the scanty lights of the high village also wink in the warm night. Over the hills, the electricity of the storm competes.

  I sit, the wine finished, until the first fat drops of rain strike the parapet. By now the thunder is loud, the lightning coarse and cruel. It would be foolish to remain here, the highest man in the town. I go below, undress slowly and lie beneath the sheet on my bed as the rain pelts down and the storm swings over the town and up the valley like an angry wife, abandoned by her cuckold husband and looking for her treacherous lover.

  As I drift into sleep, not caring for the storm, for fate will do as it will, three thoughts linger: the first is I must have the gun ready within the next two days and the second is I hope the fireflies are safe in their umbrella of private heaven. The third is less a thought than a realisation: this is an agreeable and wonderful place and I should like to settle down in it.

  He is back. The shadow-dweller, the man from the street outside the wine shop. Just an hour ago, as I approached the Citroën, he was sitting at a table outside a bar. He had before him a glass of grappa, nothing more. He was doing the crossword in a copy of the English Daily Telegraph, poring over the clues but I could tell he was using it only as a pretence, to kill time that he might wait all the longer without being pestered by the waiter.

  I saw him, mercifully, before he saw me. I side-stepped into a butcher’s shop. Within, there was a line of women waiting to be served. I joined the end of the queue, giving myself good time in which to study the man over the slabs of meat and tripe, of offal and joints. Two old women entered and stood behind me. I stepped aside.

  ‘Prego,’ I said, offering my place with a gesture. They smiled at me, one as toothless as an old dog, and shuffled in front of me.

  I thanked my luck that I kept the car parked well away from the house, some ten minutes’ walk from the vialetto.

  He was dressed casually, not as a tourist but not quite as a local, either. He wore a dark pair of trousers, quite smart but not of Italian cut. His shirt was open-neck and striped with faint blue lines. He wore dark glasses—the morning sun was brilliant—but no hat. In the pockets of his brown jacket he sported a pale blue handkerchief.

  This, I thought, is a man of some class, of some training if not in the best of schools. Not a thorough expert at the artifice of hiding but not a complete amateur. He was making efforts to do his job.

  I wondered if he was not there to tail me but to warn me. I dismissed this reasoning. If this was the case he would be more conspicuous, more arrogant in his threat. His was not a blatant stance but a surreptitious one.

  He cannot be an associate of my visitor. If he was, there would be no need for him to stake out the car. He would know of and stake out my apartment, hang around the end of the vialetto, make himself obvious. Maybe even play a game or two with me.

  I had a tail placed upon me once, in New York, by a client. He knew I knew he was there. One morning, he tipped his cap to me. Another, outside Grand Central, he walked straight up to me and asked for a light for his cigarillo. He grinned as I replied that I did not smoke, as he well knew. He feigned a puzzled air and walked away. The next day, he stood beside me on the subway going up-town. The last time I saw him he was lounging by a pay-phone in the departures hall at one of the terminal buildings at Kennedy. I had checked my baggage on the flight and was queuing at the entrance to the lounge.

  ‘Have a good flight,’ he said as I passed him.

  ‘And you a good day,’ I answered.

  We both grinned and he strolled off. I skipped the queue and followed him. He left the building, crossed a walkway to a car park and opened the door of a Lincoln Continental. The alarm sounded momentarily until he punched in the code. He started the engine and drove off. I watched him go from the shadows behind a bronze-brown Dodge estate wagon. On a bumper of his car was a discreet sticker. It read ‘Mafia Car Pool.’ It must have been the only car in New York to have the joke turned to a reality.

  The shadow-dweller shifted as I watched him. He uncrossed his knees, crossed them again and looked up from the paper as if searching the street for inspiration. The crossword was presumably too difficult for him. He waved his pen over the paper but made no attempt to write. For a moment, his eyes settled on the butcher’s shop but I was certain he had not seen me and could not. There was a sunshade over the window and the shadow would have prevented him from seeing in.

  If he is not with my visitor—and I am certain he is not—then he must be a real threat. He cannot be a member of the international brigade of shadow-dwellers, the CIA band and the FBI mob and the MI5 club and the gang of former KGB. They are far more skilled and, in their own wa
ys, far more obvious. He cannot be a foreign police officer. They go about in pairs like nuns and there is only one of him. Of that I am also quite certain. He cannot be an Italian. He does not look like one, behave like one, dress like one.

  So, who the hell is he?

  As on the previous occasion, I packed a picnic: two bottles of chilled Asprinio, a little like the Moscato in its bouquet but frizzante: a loaf of local bread, a round discus of baked dough; pecorino is not to everyone’s taste, being so strong, so I packed two clods of mozzarella; 150 gms of prosciutto; 100 of parma ham; a large jar of green, pitted olives; as before, a Thermos of black, sweet coffee. For this I did not use a rucksack but a wicker picnic basket. We might have been part players from A Room with a View, my visitor and I.

  The rucksack contained the disassembled Socimi wrapped in squares of cotton cloth.

  We did not meet in the Piazza del Duomo, nor at my apartment. Instead, we arranged to rendezvous at a rural railway station down the line from the town, down the valley and not far from the road which climbs into the mountains and our destination.

  The station was little more than a halt, one platform just two or three carriages long lying alongside a single track with a two-room station house. On either side of the line, the narrow valley rose very steeply, covered in deciduous forest. Two hundred metres up the mountainside opposite the station perched a small village of buff stone houses which looked down their noses at the concrete block buildings of the halt.

  The station house was locked up. The road, which led only to the station, where it ended in a circle of tarmac through the cracks in which sprouted weeds, was slippery with loose grey grit washed down the hillside by the storms. Every so often, damp slicks ran across the road, where the mountainside was still weeping. A rapid, tumbling river coursed along beside the railway track, swollen by the rain and gathering a debris of branches and grass under a steel bridge.

  The sun beat down on the Citroën. I undid the clips and slid back the canvas roof. The sun was hot on my neck and I put on the panama hat I keep on the back seat of the car. Expatriate Englishmen of my age wear panama hats. So do painters, even of butterflies.

  The train was on time, a three-carriage local which rattled around the bend in the track up the valley, diesel fumes pluming from its exhaust like feathers from a knight’s helmet. Indeed, the track ran along the valley which had seen the Templars march to fight for God and gold, tantamount to the same thing. The trees seemed to cower back from the intrusion of the leading carriage.

  There were no more than a dozen passengers aboard. No one alighted at the halt save my visitor.

  We shook hands. The train belched a honking noise and the diesels thumped. Slowly, the wheels turned, gathering momentum. The train rattled over the girders of the bridge and was quickly out of sight down the line, around a bend in the forest. The trees suddenly cut off the sound of the train.

  ‘Mr. Butterfly. How good to see you again.’

  The handshake was as firm as I remembered it. I could see myself reflected in the sunglasses, the same pair that had studied me at the cheese stall in the market, surveyed me over the top of il Messaggero.

  ‘Have you had a good journey?’ I asked. ‘Italian trains are not my favoured mode of transport. Too enclosed.’

  ‘Indeed. Yet the journey was quite enjoyable. From . . . Well, from farther up the line, the views are spectacular. You have chosen a very beautiful region in which to retire.’

  The last word was said with such irony we both smiled.

  ‘One never retires,’ I replied. ‘One merely fades away.’

  She laughed and removed her sunglasses, slipping them into a pocket on the navy blue sports bag she was carrying.

  Yes, my visitor is a woman. It is near the end now. I can let you know. By the time you can act, we shall be gone.

  Perhaps you are surprised. Once, I should have been utterly astonished. Astonished and very wary. Yet the world has changed since I began in this profession. Women have taken their place in the world—bank managers, airline pilots, high court judges, movie moguls, multinational corporate presidents, prime ministers . . . I see no reason to exclude them from our business. It is highly select employment, ideal for the manipulator, for the cautious and intuitive. There is not a woman under the sun who has not all those qualifications. All that will have to be done is a slight tweak to the computer of the Oxford English Dictionary, or Websters’: hit-man, see also hit-woman. Perhaps the less feminine will demand to be known as hit-persons.

  Possibly, it takes a hit-woman to kill another woman.

  Do not think I am being chauvinistic. I am not. I have no time for the intrigues of human gender classification. It is a matter of horses for courses. Or fillies for fields.

  I have brought some light refreshment,’ she said. I opened the rear door of the car and she slid the sports bag onto the upholstery, pushing it against the wicker hamper. ‘I see you have, too.’

  ‘There is no reason not to mix business with pleasure. It is a beautiful day and we are going—well, you shall see.’

  We got into the car, snapping open the windows and drove out of the station, the Citroën swaying as it went over the stone road bridge, the walls bounding back the stutter of the engine.

  ‘You will be hard-pressed to make a swift getaway in this,’ she commented, looking around the sparse interior. ‘I would have thought you to have had at least an Audi.’

  ‘The painters of butterflies are not rich men. Not the flash sort.’

  She nodded and said, ‘I suppose a 2CV is as good a disguise as any.’

  ‘Where we are going, no Audi could pass.’

  ‘It is far?’

  ‘Quite. Say fifty minutes. High in the mountains.’

  I waved my hand above my head. She looked up at the mountain range rising steeply over us.

  ‘Up there?’

  ‘Yes, but we have to take the long way round. There are no direct roads.’

  She eased herself back, closing her eyes. I saw the lines form, the young lines.

  ‘The train was tiring. One has to keep alert so much in cities, in trains, in streets.’

  ‘I understand entirely.’

  ‘If I doze off, forgive me.’

  ‘I shall wake you when we are out of the valley.’

  She smiled again, but her eyes did not open.

  I drove on, wishing the gear change was floor mounted and not one of these ridiculous French inventions which pokes out of the fascia like a walking-stick handle. It would have been pleasant, just occasionally, to brush my fingers against her skirt.

  Let me describe her to you. We are too far along the highway of my story for this to do any harm. Besides, how can you otherwise trust me to tell you the truth? Of course, we know each other, to some extent, by now. I suspect you can tell some of the truth from the untruth.

  She is in her mid-twenties, I should say. Her hair is cut modishly short, like a page-boy’s: it curls under at her neck. She does not have one of those masculine cuts so favoured these days by young women who would rather be men, wear dungarees and working-men’s boiler-suits disguised as the latest in fashion. She is blonde now, not mousy-brown as previously. Not fair-skinned, though. She has a light tan, is not one of those lie-in-the-sun-and-burn creatures one sees prone on the beaches of the Adriatic. Her cheekbones are slightly higher than normal, her lips not thin, not full, enticing. Her eyes, when they are open, are a mix of grey and brown: the former hazel must have been tinted lenses. Her eyelashes are long, not false, and she wears only the lightest of make-up. Her wrists are delicate but wiry, her arms—she is wearing a short-sleeved blouse—strong but not muscled. Her breasts do not press against the blouse but snuggle under it. She has pulled her loose summer skirt up to her knees. It is hot in the sardine-tin of the Citroën. The ventilator system under the dashboard is useless. Her legs are shapely and, I should say, recently waxed. Her low-heeled shoes are expensive. She wears no jewellery except a Seiko wrist-watc
h on a metal strap and a thin gold chain at her throat.

  If you were to see her in the Corso Federico II, you would think she was a secretary out shopping, a tourist taking in the sights, the middle-class daughter of middle-class parents making her way through college. She might be Clara but she is not as pretty.

  For all her sexual experience, there is still an innocence about Clara. When she sits astride me, and closes her eyes, and starts to moan, there is still a naïve purity about her. No matter how frantic her movements become, no matter how loud her groaning, she is still a girl at the start of her womanhood, enjoying her romping sex and also being reimbursed for it.

  Conversely, there is about my visitor an air of worldly experience, of careworn time having indelibly marked her. She looks young, half asleep in the Citroën as I start to take the first of the mountain bends, younger than Clara, even. Yet there is a definite depth to her which Clara lacks, a certain edge of hardness, a severity I cannot describe or directly point to: it is just there, and I know it. It has nothing to do with understanding this young woman’s secret. It has nothing to do with being in the same profession. It is more instinctive. Just as the grasshopper fears the woodpecker which, in its brief life, it has never known.

  I am aware I must exercise caution with my lady visitor. She may be a cute little blonde dozing in the car but she is as ruthless as a cat with a sparrow. If she were not, she would not be alive, would not be another of death’s travelling representatives.

  Once the Socimi is in her hands, I am redundant and, therefore, expendable. I know her secret, know who she is. I become a threat to her, although I do not know her name, her nationality, her address, her contacts and her ideologies.

  As I turned the steering wheel this way and that, negotiating the hairpin bends, struggling with the gear-change, I thought of our first meeting. I prefer her summer dress and blouse to the austere well-cut suit.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  She opened her eyes and spoke like a child bored with a tedious journey by car.