The American Page 17

  ‘No. Another twenty minutes or so.’

  I glanced at her and her head tilted to one side as she smiled.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I am enjoying my ride. In the country I can relax, and the sun is hot.’

  She stretched back to reach for her sunglasses. I checked in the rear view mirror though I knew there was no need as yet. She would not be going for a gun. Not so soon. Her hand found her sunglasses and she faced the front again but did not put them on. Instead, she toyed with them, her thin fingers wrapping around and around the plastic frame. Then she pulled the sun visor down.

  I should have liked to pause at the little bar in Terranera. An espresso would not have gone amiss. Yet it would have been too dangerous: two foreigners, in a grey and maroon Citroën 2CV, with local licence plates, pausing in the middle of nowhere to take coffee. People might remember, put faces to vehicles, recall snatches of conversation. As we came near to the village, it was our good fortune to come up behind a slow-moving truck laden with bales of waste paper. No-one notices one vehicle following another.

  At the turn off for the track, I stopped.

  ‘Just a precaution,’ I told her as I stepped from the car and pretended to urinate into a bush. A car passed by on the road below, a red Alfa Romeo sedan. The driver did not look up. There were no workers in the fields, no sounds of human activity other than the Alfa Romeo changing gear four hundred metres or so away at a sharp corner.

  We set off down the track. The rain had laid the dust and the Citroën made marks on the pristine surface. This worried me slightly. Still, the sun was high and the earth drying out fast. The tyre marks would soon seem old, the tread pattern smudged by an afternoon breeze.

  Eventually, we reached the alpine meadow. It was even more glorious than on my previous visit. The rain had brought out a million more flowers. I stopped the car under the walnut, facing it uphill as before, and killed the engine.

  ‘This is it,’ I said.

  She opened the door and stood in the shade of the tree. The bright sunlight was a worry. I did not want the vehicle to be seen. But she had had to come this day. I could not adjust the weather accordingly.

  Stretching her arms, she asked. ‘Those houses? Are they empty?’

  ‘Derelict. I checked them last time.’

  ‘I think we should do so again, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but I had better do it alone. There are a lot of adders, vipers, in these mountains. Your shoes . . .’

  ‘I shall take care,’ she replied. She did not speak curtly but I knew now she did not entirely trust me.

  We set off. I walked ahead to flush out any snakes and send them slithering for cover. Arriving at the cluster of overgrown ruins, she halted and looked down into the valley, up at the severe stone crags behind, along to the little lake, swollen now to half again its previous area by the rain.

  ‘It is very beautiful here,’ she observed and sat upon a loose stone wall at the edge of what had once been a terraced field. Her dress dipped between her legs. She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees.

  I made no comment. Taking my tiny pair of binoculars from my trouser pocket, I surveyed the valley. The tussock in the pond which had been my target was now six metres out from the bank and half submerged.

  ‘You have tested the gun here before?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She paused and watched a lizard with a bright green and yellow head peer out from under a stone in the wall, observe her and dart back into the shade again.

  ‘There is such peace here. If only all the world were like this.’

  I sensed then this young woman with no real name was a kindred spirit. She too regards the world as a rotten place and seeks to improve it somewhat. She believes the elimination of a politician or someone of that ilk would go towards this betterment. I cannot help but concur with her.

  ‘Tell me, Mr. Butterfly, how often have you been here?’

  ‘Just the once, to test the gun.’

  ‘You’ve never brought a woman here?’

  I was momentarily taken aback.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you do not have a woman in your life? It is not easy for us to keep relationships. Not in our world.’

  ‘I have an acquaintance,’ I replied. ‘And, no. It is not easy.’

  ‘Friendships are transitory.’

  ‘They are,’ I confirm. ‘It is the . . .’

  There was a movement across the valley. I caught it in the corner of my eye and put the binoculars to my face. I sensed she was suddenly as alert as I, scanning the tree cover.

  ‘It is a wild boar.’

  I handed her the binoculars and she refocused them.

  ‘They are quite large. And very hairy. I had not imagined that. On the farm . . .’

  She handed the binoculars back. I knew she had let her guard slip and wondered if this had been intentional, a careful moment of stage management in the little play we were going through together, as formally structured as a Greek drama. If I thought she was off-guard, then I might relax and she would seize the opportunity. The double-cross is not unknown in my world: many a gunmaker has finished his job and choked on a garrote or twitched on the end of a swift blade. Trust is not a matter of knowing how things stand but anticipating how they might alter.

  Dusting the earth from her skirt, she stood up and we made our way back to the car.

  ‘Which do you wish to do first,’ I enquired, ‘eat or test the weapon?’

  ‘Test it.’

  I lifted the rucksack from the boot of the car and placed it upon the front passenger seat.

  ‘It is disassembled. I thought you might like to check it from scratch.’

  She unbuckled the rucksack and began to remove the wrapped sections, opening each carefully as if the contents were made of porcelain rather than steel and alloy, placing them on their wrappings on the seat, careful to avoid staining the seat fabric with oil.

  ‘Young’s gun oil is such a heady perfume,’ she remarked, as much to herself as to me.

  I know what she means: that deliciously cloying, awesome, addictive scent of potency which comes with every firearm, lingers upon it like incense in a temple or sweat on a man’s skin.

  With an easy skill, she quickly assembled the weapon and put it to her shoulder. One would have thought she was familiar with the gun. It was strange to see such a masculine, powerful object pressing into such a delicate shoulder. Yet as soon as the butt touched her blouse I could sense the change in her, as I always do when I watch a client touch the purchase for the first time. She was no longer a blond-haired young woman with alluring legs and small, neat breasts but an extension of the gun and all it meant, its potential to shape her future, the future.

  ‘Have you the rounds?’ she asked, lowering the gun and leaning it, butt down, against the wheel of the car.

  ‘I’ve made up two sorts,’ I said, opening the front pocket of the rucksack. ‘Thirty lead and thirty jacketed.’

  ‘I should like a hundred of each.’ It was an order, her voice emotionless. ‘And fifty explosive.’

  ‘That will be no problem.’ I handed her the practice ammunition in two small cartridge boxes, the shells snug in little plastic trays. ‘Will mercury do?’

  She smiled then, a half-smile that did not activate the lines by her eyes. ‘Mercury will do very nicely.’

  She held the boxes of rounds in her hand and looked down without opening them. ‘I have brought my own targets,’ she said.

  From her sports bag, she removed several pieces of folded cardboard strengthened with split bamboo garden cane. Without speaking, she set off through the alpine blooms. In her wake flittered a confetti of butterflies and grass crickets, and I could hear the frantic sizzle of the bees as she disturbed the flowers.

  ‘Watch out for vipers,’ I called after her, keeping my voice down in case it travelled in the mountain air: most probably it would not, for the air was hot and heady, but there was no
point in taking risks.

  She waved back to me with her hand holding the ammunition boxes. She was no fool. Neither was I. I had the gun. I had yet to be paid the second instalment of the fee.

  At ninety metres distance, she stopped beside a pile of stones, overgrown with ground creepers displaying little purple trumpet blooms like those of convolvulus: they gave an aura of amethyst to the heap. It may have once been a field shelter, perhaps a boundary-marking cairn. She unfolded the cardboard but all I could make out at such a distance was a vague silver grey shape against the stones. Returned to the Citroën, she picked up the weapon.

  ‘Muzzle velocity?’ she enquired.

  ‘Not less than 360. The sound suppressor takes at most 20mps off the top.’

  She looked at the marks on the metal where I had scorched off the serial numbers with acid.

  ‘Socimi,’ she remarked with authority.

  ‘821.’

  ‘I’ve not had one before.’

  ‘You’ll find it easy. I’ve re-balanced it for the longer barrel. The centre of balance is just a little forward of the grip now. It should not matter as you will be firing, I would suggest, from a fixed position.’ There was no reply to my supposition. ‘You will find no major recoil problem,’ I continued, ‘and should be able to hold on the smallest of targets.’

  She put just two of the jacketed rounds into the magazine and stood with her feet apart, braced. The breeze under the walnut ruffled her loose summer skirt against her tanned shins. She did not rest the gun on the car, as I had done. She was younger than I, her hands steady with youth and optimism. There was the briefest of ‘put-puts’. For a moment longer, she held on the target then lowered the gun, holding it under her arm. It might have been a 12-bore and she a lady on an estate in the shires, shooting pheasant on an autumnal afternoon.

  ‘You have done a good job, Mr. Butterfly. Thank you very much. Very much indeed.’

  She made a minute adjustment to the telescopic sight with her fingernail. She could not have turned the vertical screw more than one notch. She fully loaded and fired again.

  Putting my binoculars to my eyes, I looked at the target. It was the unmistakable silver-painted outline of a Boeing 747–400, about one and a half metres long. The top cabin was elongated. Painted against the cut-out was the upturn at the end of the wing. The front doorway of the aircraft was shaded in, the first class doorway. Standing in it was the silhouette of a man. In the centre of this were two holes. On the stone above the aircraft were the scores of the ricochets.

  So was she going to bring down a passenger on an international flight, embarking on a foreign mission to alter the world, or returning from a successful alteration of the same.

  With the magazine containing the remaining twenty-eight jacketed rounds, she took aim again. I watched the target through my binoculars. Put-put-put-put! Where the silhouette man’s head had been was another scar on the stones. A few scraps of card floated on the warm air.

  ‘You are a very good shot,’ I complimented her.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, almost absent-mindedly. ‘I have to be.’

  She filled the magazine with lead rounds, snapped it into place in the grip and handed the weapon to me.

  ‘Go to the stones,’ she instructed, ‘and fire towards me. Say . . .’ she looked around for a target ‘. . . into that bush behind the yellow fronds of flowers. Two bursts, say five seconds apart.’

  I went down to the stones, turned and looked up at her. The Citroën was well hidden in the deep shade of the walnut. All I could see was her dress and blouse. This was not just a test of the weapon but also a test of trust. She faced me as I raised the weapon to my shoulder.

  I aimed the Socimi at the yellow blossoms, held my breath and squeezed the trigger. The first burst was done. The yellow wands of blossom seemed untouched. I was sure I had aimed straight at them. I counted to five slowly and fired again. Through the sight, I saw two stems of golden blossoms fall sideways.

  ‘That is very good,’ she praised me as I returned to the car. ‘The sound suppression is superb. I could not place the direction of fire.’

  From her sports bag, she took another envelope, exactly the same as the first, plain brown manilla with no marks upon it.

  ‘I shall require the rounds and the weapon at the end of next week. In the meantime, would you please tighten the adjusting screws on the sight. They are too loose. And lengthen the stock by three centimetres. I also want a sixty-shot magazine. I know it will be slightly cumbersome, perhaps upset the point of balance, but . . .’

  I nodded my compliance and said, ‘I had thought of a sixty-round mag. It will, as you deduce, shift the fulcrum of the weapon. However, if you are prepared to accept this, I shall do it. Quite easily done.’

  ‘You have a case?’

  ‘A briefcase,’ I replied. ‘Samsonite. The common pattern. Combination locks. Is there any number you should like used?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘821,’ she said.

  Very efficiently, she disassembled the weapon, wrapped it in its cloth squares and replaced it in the rucksack. I put the envelope of money in with it. She collected up the spent cases.

  ‘What do you want to do with these?’ she asked.

  ‘I threw the last into the lake . . .’

  As I laid out our picnic, she walked down the valley and I watched her toss the brass shells into the water, wondering if the fish would rise to them again.

  Sitting on the blanket at the edge of the walnut’s shade, she picked up the wine bottle and studied the label.

  ‘Asprinio. I do not know Italian wines. It is fizzy.’

  ‘Frizzante,’ I told her. ‘Vino frizzante.’

  ‘Do you come here to paint your butterflies?’

  ‘No. I came here to test the Socimi. And to paint the flowers.’

  ‘It is a good disguise, being an artist. One can be eccentric, wander off the beaten track, keep odd hours, meet strangers. No one regards this as extraordinary. Maybe I shall be an artist one day.’

  ‘It helps,’ I advised, ‘to be able to draw.’

  ‘I can draw,’ she answered with a wry smile. ‘I can draw a bead on a human head at three hundred metres.’

  I made no response: there seemed none I could make. There was no doubt about it. I was in the company of a real professional, one of the best. I wondered what events she had masterminded of which I had read in the papers or heard mentioned on the BBC World Service.

  She cut a wedge of mozzarella.

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Made of buffalo milk. Probably from somewhere in the vicinity of the little village near the start of the track.’

  ‘Terranera? I saw buffaloes in the fields.’

  ‘You are very observant.’

  ‘Are we not both? It is the way we have survived.’ She glanced at her Seiko. ‘My train leaves the town station at a quarter to six. Had we not best be going?’

  We packed up the uneaten picnic and set off up the track, the Citroën pitching and tossing over the bumps.

  ‘That is a very beautiful valley,’ she said, looking over her shoulder as the car made the first ridge. ‘It is a shame you brought me there. I should like to have discovered it for myself and then, some day, retired there. But you now know . . .’

  ‘I am much older than you,’ I answered. ‘By the time you retire, I shall be dead.’

  As I pulled in to the kerb by the station, she said, ‘I appreciate that you do not usually deliver the goods. But I cannot meet you as before. Would you meet me at the services on the autostrada thirty kilometres north on the northbound carriageway?’

  ‘Very well,’ I acquiesced.

  ‘In a week?’

  I nodded my agreement.

  ‘Around noon?’

  Once again, I nodded.

  She opened the rear door and removed her sports bag.

  ‘Thank you for a lovely day, Mr. Butterfly.’

  She leaned in and kissed
me lightly on the cheek, her lips dry and quick upon my stubble. ‘And you must take your mistress up there.’

  She closed the car door, vanishing through the station entrance. Quite confused, I drove into the town.

  In the Piazza del Duomo, the market bustles. There has been such a gathering here ever since the town was founded: it was probably given its charter because there was a market here before there were buildings, a coming together of traders, of shepherds down from the mountains, of itinerant monks and healers, of charlatans and fakers, of soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, of bandits and horse-thieves, of the dice-throwers and the bone-casters, of money-lenders and sellers of dreams. The whole cosmos of humanity gathered here on the hill above the bridge where the road down the valley crossed the river and the trackways from the mountains converged. Why on the hill, you ask? To catch the breeze.

  Little has changed. The horses are now Fiat vans, the stalls set on trestles not on barrow wheels, the awnings are garish plastic not hessian brushed with pitch, but the traders are the same. Squawking like aged crows, old women dressed in black squat behind the riotous hues of their vegetables, scarlet chillies, loden peppers, cherry tomatoes, berylial celeriac. Young men in tight jeans, charlatans, modern pardoners and summoners, sell not promises and releases from sin but cheap shoes, T-shirts, solar-powered digital watches and ballpoint pens which leak. Older men in vests and trousers hawk kitchen utensils, copper bowls, seconds of crockery, Taiwanese steel knives and cheap Duraflex tumblers. There are stalls purveying cheese and hams, salamis and fresh fish, brought from the ocean that morning, under the mountains by way of the autostrada tunnels.

  Through this mercantile mayhem pass the travellers of life, the housewives and the browsers, the middle-men and the fixers of deals, the hungry and the well-fed, the wealthy and the poor, the old and the young, the cyclists and the Mercedes-Benz drivers, the have-nots and the owners of grandeur.

  This is a crazy circus, a microcosm of the world of humans, of ants, of bees, of every gregarious species which has to exist in droves, crossing and criss-crossing their paths like those complex human dance patterns devised by the sports organisations of Socialist republics, never colliding and never touching, never in touch. Everyone knows their place, knows what to do, knows how to be safe in the ring and avoid the tigers and lions in the cage. A few venture inside the iron bars, crack their whips and come out unscathed. A few go in and are mauled, caught in the jaws, tossed aside like rotten meat for the scavengers to tussle over. The remainder prefer to be safe, to clown about, balance on unicycles, juggle cups, eat fire, train seals to play guitars or chimpanzees to drink tea. Some test themselves on the high wire, swing precariously on the trapeze, but there is always the net, the brake on catastrophe. Those too fearful to clown or ride a gilt-edged pony backwards sit in stalls and applaud the inanities of the show.