The American Read online

  ‘Not that, just your last remarks.’

  She had been smiling with her triumph but now her mouth turned down.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I have upset you.’

  ‘No. You have not. You have upset Dindina. I doubt we shall see her again.’

  ‘No . . . Will you be sad at this?’

  ‘Perhaps . . .’ I answered but this was a perverse dissimulation. I was extremely glad. It reduced the number of people to whom the shadow-dweller could make an approach, who could guide him to me.

  We walked a little further and, as we passed a narrow alleyway, Clara took my hand and guided me into the darkness. For the fleetest of moments, my heart raced with instinctive panic. Such shadows, such dark niches in the walls of the town could contain my incubus, the shadow-dweller. What if, I thought, she was in league with him, that our relationship was just a ploy leading to this one moment of supposed emotion followed by the quick thrust of the Bowie knife or the jab of the hypodermic.

  Yet her hand was not grasping but soft in my own. There was no urgency in her movement save that of the lover wanting love, and my panic subsided as quickly as it arose.

  She halted a few steps in, dropped her plastic bag and pressed herself against me, sobbing. I put my arms around her and held her close. There was no need to speak.

  When she was done crying, I gave her my handkerchief and she wiped her eyes, dabbing at her cheeks.

  ‘I love you,’ she suddenly declared. ‘So much. Molto . . .’

  ‘I am not a young man,’ I reminded her.

  ‘This is no matter.’

  ‘I shall not live here forever. I am not an Italian.’

  As the words left me, I thought of how much I should like to remain in the town, in the valley, in the company of this young girl.

  ‘I do not want always to live here,’ she replied.

  I handed her her plastic bag again.

  ‘It is time to go home.’

  ‘Let me come to your home.’

  ‘I cannot. One day . . .’

  She was upset by my reply but decided not to press her demand. We left the alley and parted in the Corso Federico II.

  ‘Stay forever here,’ she said as she kissed me. It was as much a command as a wish.

  We parted and I made my way home by a very circuitous route. I watched and listened out for every movement, even dodging into the shadows once at the sound of a cat out mousing. The nearer I drew to the vialetto, the more meticulous I became. Yet, despite all the avid attention I was paying to my surroundings, I could not prevent a recurring thought: Clara had fought for me, not for her shoes or her bruised dignity. She loved me and wanted me and, I had to admit, I loved her in my fashion.

  But I had to concentrate upon the shadows, upon the doorways deep in night, upon the alleys and the spaces behind parked cars. Thoughts of Clara could not be allowed to interfere or she would be the death of me.

  The mercury-tipped bullet is so simple yet so utterly devastating. It is more powerful than the Chicago gangster’s dum-dum, more deadly than a commando raider’s soft-nose.

  As I sit in my workshop, the music playing low in the background—Elgar, say: the Enigma Variations—I prepare the ammunition. Some is standard: the lead and the jacketed. The other, the explosives, I have to make.

  It is a fiddly job. The cartridges have to be taken apart and a tiny hole drilled in the nose. This has to be held in a vice tightly enough to stop it revolving with the bit but not so tightly as to distort the slug. Once the hole has been drilled to a depth of precisely 3mm, these being Parabellum, it has to be half filled with mercury. This done, the hole is then plugged with a drop of liquid lead. At no time must the bullet get too hot or else it will expand and deform.

  I have chosen to convert jacketed ammunition. It is harder to drill through the jacket than through a lead slug and refitting the bullet in the cartridge demands greater care and skill, but the result will be far more devastating.

  Whoever it was invented this lethal adaptation was a genius, one of those men who see a simple fact and can extrapolate it into greater realities. The method of working is awesomely basic. As the bullet is fired, the mercury is compacted to the rear of the hole under the force of acceleration. It remains there until the bullet strikes its target. Then the mercury, being liquid, shoots forward in the hole and bursts the lead plug. This is released and spreads outwards like miniscule shrapnel from a tiny bomb. The mercury follows it. Bits of the jacketing peel away. The bullet makes a hole the size of an American dime on entry and a cavern the size of soup plate on exit. Or inside the target. No one survives such a hit.

  My pretty young lady is going to use such a crude technology on someone.

  As I replace each completed cartridge in the box, nose up, I think again of who it might be used upon. There are so many possibilities. There are so many people alive in the capitals of the world for whom such a fate should be fitting. For many, it is too good, too noble, too quick. The light of life is on—then it is off. The heart pumps and stops. The brain sends out its micro-amps of electricity and is shut down, decommissioned as they say of wondrous power plants. The muscles relax into the last sleep. The hair, like a fool staying on after a party, continues to grow. Everything else begins to ungrow.

  Yet I cannot agree with other methods. The slow debilitating decline into pain and puzzlement which is brought about by poison, or the ripping anguish as the saw-backed knife rams in and twists, or the blinding thunder as the bomb explodes, the nails and bits of wiring leaping out in a tangle of agonies.

  These are not the way to do it.

  I hum to the Elgar. The tang of molten lead hangs in the air and I open the shutters to dispel it. I am averse to poisoning myself.

  I wonder what she will feel, the pretty lady in the summer dress, with tanned legs and a steady hand. What will course through her mind as her finger takes up the slack of the trigger and the metal parts dance in their clever choreograph? What will she see through the telescopic sight? Will it be a man or a woman, or the devil of hatred wearing a smart suit, stepping from the 747?

  She will, I expect, see nothing. She will feel nothing. At the moment of firing, the hunter’s mind is blank. She will not think of cause or consequence, of the chaos about to be wrought by her actions. Her mind will be utterly empty of thoughts and emotions, of fears and loves.

  They say to kill a man with deliberation, with months of forethought and planning, is like dying oneself. All is silent. The assassin hears no reports, no screams or shouts. It all happens in slow motion, as in the movies. All he might see in the projection room of the mind is a single frame from his past life.

  I wonder if the young lady will see the meadow of the pagliara as she fires.

  I load the new magazines I have made, checking the three of them. Each magazine holds sixty rounds as requested. There are plenty left over. She presumes she will not escape, expects to be found and held at bay, determined to take as many of them with her as she can. She knows she will die, which takes a particular kind of courage.

  Yet she will enjoy it, the sexual orgasm of killing. She will not be hiding on an airport terminal building or crouched on a roof. She will be squatting over her lover, her hands on his biceps, her thighs forcing his down and all will be in her control.

  Was it not Pindar, in his Odes, written ten centuries before a Chinese sage mixed gunpowder, who wrote, ‘For lawless joy a bitter ending waits?’

  When I entered it, the pharmacy was not busy. It never is. I do not go to one of the larger establishments in the Corso Federico II, preferring a discreet little shop in Via Eraclea. It must be as old as the street, once the laboratory of an alchemist or a geomancer.

  The shelves are old oak planks resting on stone corbels. Stone pins hold them in place. The wood is stained with centuries of spilt chemicals, potions, powders and concoctions beyond the modern medical imagination. I consider, as I stand before the counter waiting for the assistant to appear, that i
f one were to section microscopically a shelf there would be, open to discovery, all the strata of chemical knowledge.

  On the topmost shelf are bottles which contain curious looking objects which I cannot make out in the half-light: they might be, for all I can tell, pickled stillborn babies or the antlers of chamois or twisted roots of hemlock. Below them are ranged medicines, cosmetics, bottles of patent cures, perfumes and lipsticks in display boxes. On the counter is the half-life-sized cut-out of a very pretty girl in a bikini holding in her cardboard hand a tube of factor 15 suntan lotion. She herself has faded somewhat from being previously stood in the sunlight in the shop window and now the tube of tanning lotion is a healthier colour than the girl.

  The assistant came through a door at the rear of the shop. She is a young woman of about Clara’s age, thin almost to the point of anorexia. Her face is wan and her hands bony. She might have been assembled by the geomancer from parts pilfered from the town’s graveyards. She might be the ghost of one of the thousands of girls who must have come to this place to seek an abortion, gain a virile lover or rid herself of the pox.

  ‘Un barattolo di . . .’ I could not think of the expression I wanted. ‘. . . antisepsi. Crema antisepsi. Per favore.’

  She smiled faintly and reached up to one of the ancient shelves. Her arm was as thin as a stick, as if she had been recently released from some hideous prison. She was, I thought, so like the cardboard sun-tan girl and felt a wave of sorrow pass over me. For the sake of a few weeks and good meals, she could be as pretty and comely as Clara.

  ‘Questo?’

  She held before my face a small tin of Germolene. I took it from her and twisted the lid off. The smell of the zinc oxide and the surgical pink of the cream remided me instantly of my public school, of the matron who pressed the stuff into grazes, rubbing it hard as if, by doing so, she was forcing us to repent for having disturbed her afternoon tea. I could see, as if through the mist of its metallic stink, Brother Dominic standing on the touchline and shouting incomprehensible orders to the scrum.

  ‘Quant’è?’ I enquired.

  ‘Cinque euros.’

  I purchased the tin and, while the girl sorted my change, rubbed a dab of ointment gently on a cut on the back of my hand. I had gashed the skin on the lathe, a foolish little accident. I sucked the wound as soon as it was made and took it as another sign that I am ageing, drawing near the end of my working life. Even a year ago I should not have been so clumsy.

  As I slipped the tin into the pocket of my jacket, it thudded against the Walther. I am not used to having to carry a gun and momentarily forgot it was there. The tin reminded me and I shifted it to the other pocket.

  I looked up and down the street before I left the pharmacy. No-one was walking on the cobbles except for two men strolling arm in arm and talking animatedly. I made my way to the Bar Conca d’Oro.

  Around one of the outside tables under the trees in the centre of the piazza were gathered Visconti, Milo and Gherardo. Nearby, Gherardo’s taxi was standing in the shade of a building, double parked before a row of vehicles.

  Since the appearance of the shadow-dweller, it is not wise for me to sit outside. The tables under the trees can be approached from all directions and there is no way I could sit at one with my back to a wall. If the shadow-dweller was to arrive I might not see him and that risk I cannot take.

  ‘Ciao! Come stai? Signor Farfalla,’ Milo called.

  ‘Ciao!’ I replied in the usual manner. ‘Bene!’

  Then Visconti shouted, ‘Stay out! The sun is warm. It is good.’

  He waved his hand about his head as if swatting flies, but he meant simply to stir the hot air that I might see its balm and join them.

  ‘Too hot,’ I answered and I went into the bar, sat down and ordered a cappuccino.

  I kept a look-out on the piazza. A few vehicles drove by, cruising in vain for a parking space. Some students walked over to the fountain, removed their bicycles and pedalled away. Two men sat at one of the tables under the trees and the bar owner went out to take their order. They wanted nothing: just a place to rest. There followed a brief altercation at the end of which the men left and the patron returned indoors, muttering angrily. He grinned at me as he passed. He was pleased at his victory.

  I ordered a second coffee and borrowed the patron’s tabloid. The headlines, I surmised from the pictures and huge print, concerned a government scandal in which a minister without portfolio had been caught without trousers in the company of a lady best known for her tits on prime-time television. There was a photograph of her swathed in a tiger’s skin. The caption, so far as I could manage to translate it, implied she had more than one tiger in her life.

  A car started up in the piazza. It was Gherardo’s Fiat taxi. A pall of diesel smoke was drifting over the bicycles. As I watched, Milo got into the front passenger seat. They drove away, Visconti stood up and walked across the piazza to the bar.

  ‘So! Too hot for you, Signor Farfalla?’

  ‘Yes. It is today. I have been working . . .’

  ‘You take too much time for working. You should take a holiday.’ He sat at my table and nodded to the patron, who brought him over a glass of orangeade. ‘You been to the mountains, painting little friends?’

  ‘No, not this week. I am finishing off some work at home.’

  ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed and sipped his juice.

  I folded the newspaper and cast a quick glance outside. There was a man sitting at the tables. He was on his own, and facing the bar. I squinted. It was not the shadow-dweller. This man was old and stooped.

  ‘My friend,’ Visconti interrupted my vigil. ‘I must tell you something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  His face was serious and he leaned forward, pushing his glass to one side. He looked like a man about to commiserate.

  ‘A man has been here to ask a question about you.’

  I tried not to look concerned but Visconti is street-wise. He is no fool. One man asking questions after another is always bad news in his books.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He opened his hands then clasped his fingers. ‘He is not Italian but he speaks it . . . so-so. Milo says he is an American because of the way he speaks some words. I am not so sure. Also Giuseppe. Gherardo took him in the taxi.’

  ‘Where to? A hotel?’

  ‘To the station. He waits then with the other taxis for the train. The man does not go to the train. He goes to a car.’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Blue. A Peugeot. Gherardo tells me this to tell you.’

  ‘What did he ask?’

  ‘He ask for your house. He says he has important news for you. He will not say this news. We tell him nothing.’

  I made no immediate answer. So the shadow-dweller had found the bar and the piazza as he had found Mopolino, but he seemed at a dead end in his investigations. He had not found my home.

  ‘Thank you, Visconti, you are a good friend. And the others. Tell them for me.’

  ‘I will tell them. But what does this mean?’

  ‘Who can tell?’

  ‘If you want help . . .’ Visconti began but I touched his arm to silence him.

  ‘I will be all right, my dear friend.’

  ‘All men have enemies,’ Visconti remarked philosophically.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘They do.’

  I paid for my refreshment and left the bar, going back to my apartment in a very roundabout way, approaching it with all the stealth I could muster. It is only a matter of time before this damn man discovers it.

  My only chance is to finish the gun before this: and that I must do for although my reputation matters no longer in that I shall accept no more commissions, there is my professionalism at stake, my integrity. Integrity cannot be compromised.

  If he beats me to it, I shall be obliged to act.

  Only the roof of the church of San Silvestro overlooks the loggia. Nothing else. There is no campanile, no square tower, no upper stor
ey to which access can be gained but I assume there must be a way up to the roof: a tiny spiral staircase of worn steps perhaps, twisting upward in a cavity somewhere in the wall or a steep series of wooden ladders hidden in some far part of the building unseen by worshippers and tourists, rarely visited even by the clergy.

  It is essential I discover the whereabouts of this access or ascertain for certain it does not exist. If the shadow-dweller is searching for my abode, the church will give him his best vantage-point. An afternoon spent on the roof with a pair of powerful binoculars could pay him handsome dividends.

  The church is not, as it would be if it were almost anywhere else in the world, surrounded by its own grounds. There is no graveyard, no small ‘garden of rest’ or ‘arbour of peace’, not even a place for a clergy car to be parked. The north and south sides of the church are bounded by narrow streets, the walls protected only by granite posts to discourage vehicles from gouging the stone footings with their bumpers. Between the posts, deep scratches attest to their failure to deter. The western end of the church contains the main entrance outside which the puppeteer and flautist may be found. The eastern end, which is rounded, provides a steep wall to one side of a wide piazza. Against it are invariably parked a fan of expensive cars, for this piazza is noted in the town for containing the offices of three of the region’s most prominent lawyers.

  In effect, the church is an island of sanctity in the centre of a secular quarter. It is unapproachable without crossing a public thoroughfare: no one can clamber onto it from an adjacent building.

  To be sure, I walk all round the church. It may be that there are restorations going on. The town was severly jolted by an earth tremor a year ago, and scaffolding maybe erected against walls: there is nothing, not so much as a window-cleaner’s ladder.

  In front of the main entrance, the puppeteer is at work, his squeaky daytime voice competing with the buzz of passing traffic. The flautist is sitting dozing in the shade of his umbrella, which hangs askew from the no parking sign. Roberto is standing by his melon stall, a blue haze of tobacco smoke hovering in the air about his head like bees about an apiarist’s veil.