The American Page 26

  For a minute or two, I study this little group with a degree of caution. If the shadow-dweller has called for back-up, these could readily be his accomplices. I recall the lesson learnt from the couple with the pseudo-daughter in Washington, D.C. Yet my observations soon confirm that these are the genuine article: they are too sunburned, too bothered, too rattled to be acting the tourist.

  I leave them and enter the cool sanctuary of the bar. Even the hissing of the coffee machine is cool by comparison with the day outside. The radio is not blaring cosmopolitan rock music but Italian opera. It is just as cacophonous and artless. The obscure liquors in their fly-shit mottled bottles stand in sultry ranks on the shelves as if numbed into stillness by the din of screeching voices. The reservoir of little wooden beads in the watch gambling machine is somewhat depleted but there seems to be the same number of watches in the revolving Perspex box above it.

  ‘Ciao! Come stai?’ the regulars welcome me: all but Milo, who sits staring fixedly at the sunlight burning through the plastic curtain on the door.

  ‘Bene! Va bene!’ I reply.

  If I was ill and at death’s door, such would be the reply. Life is good. The illness will pass and therefore all is well.

  Visconti nods in the direction of the window. The tourists are almost whitened in the burning sun as though they were cinematic aliens about to be beamed aboard their spacecraft.

  ‘Inglesi!’ he says with a hint of contempt, tapping his temple with his forefinger. He does not think of me as English. ‘Signor Farfalla?’ He beckons to me with the same finger: this does not mean draw near, just pay attention. ‘One hour, you see, the camera—putt!’

  He makes a popping sound with his lips: it is like the Socimi letting go a round.

  ‘Too hot?’

  Visconti grimaces and nods sagely.

  ‘Giapponese. No so good. The cameras—yes! Good. But the videos . . .’

  He grimaces again, raises his hand a few centimetres off the table. A grimace is worse than a spoken criticism in the mountains.

  Milo is quiet. I enquire after his problem, but he does not answer me. Giuseppe does. A few nights ago, some addicts broke into his stall in the Piazza del Duomo, looking for watches they might steal and sell to tourists in order to maintain their habits. They found nothing: he takes his stock home every evening in a suitcase. Peeved by their lack of success, they smashed the stall to matchwood. He is having another made by one of Alfonso’s mechanics out of sheet steel and angle-iron, but it will be a fortnight before it is completed. In the meantime, he has had to set up his pitch under an umbrella. This makes him look more like a part-time seller of watches rather than an experienced watch repairer. Sales have dropped off.

  I offer my sympathies and Milo brightens at this expression of friendship. All he needs is a little respect, he says. The polizia will do nothing. He shrugs and quietly says what he thinks of the municipal police.

  The plastic curtain parts and the tourist wife comes into the bar. She has her daughter by the hand.

  ‘Scusi,’ she says.

  We all look up. Armando turns around in his chair. Our sudden and apparently undivided attention disconcerts her.

  ‘II . . . il gabinetto, per favore? Per una signora piccolo.’

  She holds up her daughter’s hand as if auctioning the child.

  ‘Through the door at the end of the counter.’ I tell the woman who stares at me as I speak. She did not think of me as English.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, nonplussed. ‘Thank you very much.’

  Gherardo moves his chair so she and the girl might pass. The little girl smiles prettily and Giuseppe is warmed by it.

  With the observant nature of a photographer, Visconti remarks to me. ‘She thinks you Italian.’

  ‘Sì! I am Italian!’

  They all laugh at my admission. Signor Farfalla an Italian? Ridiculous! Yet as I watch them, I notice we are dressed alike, that I sit as they do either hunched over my espresso or leaning back luxuriously in my uncomfortable metal chair. When I speak, my hands move as theirs do.

  This has been my way for years, my chameleon way of blending into the background. Even if I cannot speak the language well, I can fit in as far as the casual observer is concerned.

  The woman returns from the toilet and smiles at me.

  ‘Thank you. That was very kind of you. As you can guess, we don’t speak Italian. We’re on holiday,’ she adds diffidently and unnecessarily.

  ‘You are quite welcome,’ I reply and I sense a slight accent to my voice which sets me apart from her.

  ‘Do you live here?’

  She needs to talk to someone of her own race, her own kind. She feels lost in this bar of Italian men. She is the archetypal foreigner abroad, clinging to any friendly contact like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood.

  ‘Yes. In the town.’

  Her daughter is looking at the watch gambling machine. Giuseppe leaves his chair and crosses the bar to stand beside the child.

  ‘You?’ he asks, pointing from the machine to the child and back again.

  ‘Sì’ the little girl says and, turning, asks politely, ‘Can I have some money, please, mummy?’

  Giuseppe waves his hand in the air and thumbs a euro coin into the slot. He motions for the girl to turn the nob. She does so, using both hands, for it is stiff. There is a metallic click like a bolt sliding into a breach and a wooden bead drops dully into the cup on the front of the machine.

  ‘I’ve got a wooden bead!’ the girl exclaims, clearly delighted and thinking this to be the prize.

  ‘You must now push the paper slip out of the hole in the bead,’ I say. ‘There is a little prong by the cup.’

  The child does this. Giuseppe takes the paper and unfolds it, checking the flag against the chart in the Perspex box. The little girl has won a digital stopwatch and is handed it by the bar owner.

  ‘Look! Look! I won a watch!’

  She turns very solemnly and faces Giuseppe, who has regained his seat, smiling broadly as if he himself had won the useless thing.

  ‘Multo grazie, signore,’ the child says to him.

  ‘Brava!’ Giuseppe exclaims, his arms spread wide with simple joy.

  The mother, who has not spoken during all of this, says, ‘That was most kind of him. Can you say so for me, please?’

  ‘I think he knows.’

  ‘Can I pay him back. For the machine?’

  ‘No. Besides, he probably found the coin. He is the street-sweeper in the market-place.’

  I observe her face. Once again, she is confounded. In her safe and tidy life, one does not meet street-sweepers.

  ‘Can you tell me where the church of Saint Silvester is?’ she enquires, gathering her wits about her.

  I tell her and she leaves, smiling again at Giuseppe who finds this whole episode both very touching and immensely funny. He is still laughing when I leave.

  ‘Arrivederci! Arrivederci a presto!’

  It is a good way to say goodbye, a good memory of the Bar Conca d’Oro and these simple, happy men with their thick coffee cups and glasses of grappa, their tiny conversations and their love of each other.

  The night is cloudy. Instead of hanging overhead, the stars are suspended over the sides of the valley, the lights of the villages and farms, the tiny settlements older than memory. The hills look like the stage curtains in a run-down provincial English theatre, dined on by moths and darned ineffectively by little old ladies with arthritic fingers.

  I sit back in the loggia and listen to the clicks of the bats flying around in the night, can just discern their radar squeaks.

  How often have I gone through the process of decamping from one life into another. It is always a disturbing time. On the move, I am like a hermit crab, grown too big for its shell and seeking out another: as I drag myself across the floor of the world, making for my next abode, my delicate tail and pink-white underside are naked and I am game for any passing predator.

  Some shells
I leave with delight. Hong Kong was one such: the polluted hideaway in Kwun Tong with its chemical air and its plastic food, the urban rail system trundling and screeking endlessly on its piers, the diesel trucks and the offal in the gutter. No typhoon, no matter how boisterous, could shift the filth. The winds merely stirred it around like the ceiling fans in Livingstone interminably blending the hot air.

  Livingstone I enjoyed, in a way. It was only a short distance to the Victoria Falls and the town was an African caricature of the Wild West: a long main street with a wide thoroughfare and with flamboyants, flame of the forest trees, shedding their petals on the pavements like globs of blood spilled by duelling outlaws and trigger-happy sheriffs. I had only a small job to do there. It required no equipment other than a set of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a box of miniature socket spanners and an oxyacetylene torch. So far as I know, the weapon was never used. The Zimbabwe war was in progress then, the area around the Falls out of bounds, a military zone, but I was in with one of the military there and had a pass for the month I was resident in the town. There was something doubly exciting about seeing the awesome grandeur of The Clouds That Thunder, as the falls are named in the local tongue, and knowing at any minute a round might hit me from the Rhodesian side of the gorge.

  As a city, I adored Marseilles despite the abomination of my quarters. The criminality of the place was a good cover. Whereas here my friends are a priest and a bookseller, a street-sweeper and a watch-repairer, there I counted amongst my temporary chums a share-certificate forger, a marijuana dealer, a pornographic-film distributor (who was also the producer, director, cameraman, sound engineer and casting agent), a passport maker, a credit-card fraudster who could reset the magnetic code on the rear strips, and—most improbably—an illegal parrot importer. They were a rum, friendly, coarse, eccentric and trustworthy bunch. They thought my job was pressing out US dollar coins. I let them think so.

  Madrid was unpleasant. There was much corruption in the lower echelons of the local constabulary, as was the case in Athens, and I try to avoid places where the squeeze is on, the touch is made, the backhander is accepted practice. It is not that I begrudge these petty men their graft. Everyone must make a living. But the man who pays the graft has, per se, something to hide and is, therefore, the subject of attention and gossip in the locker room or the mess of the local headquarters. I stayed in both capitals only weeks and got out as fast I could.

  In Madrid, this was no loss. I despise Spain for its oily women with their slick-backed hair in tight-combed buns and its men with waists like girls. I abhor the undercurrent of blood-lust in Spanish life. The Spaniards sell little velveteen bulls with miniature picadors’ shafts sticking out of red-painted wounds. The Spanish are not civilised: there is too much of the fanatical, mediaeval Moor in them.

  On the other hand, Athens was a sorrow. That was in the days of the Colonels: military juntas have always been a good source of income to those of my profession much as a good storm is for a jobbing builder. In my stay there, I did not visit the Parthenon, did not take the tourist bus to Cape Sounion, did not drive to Thermopylae or Delphi or Epidaurus. I saw nothing but the inside of a dreary workshop in the suburbs and the ever-opening palm of a police officer called Vassillios Tsochatzopoulos. I complained to my employer about this man’s greed. He disappeared. I was told wolves ate him on Mount Parnassus: my employer thought this was a fitting and noble end for a policeman who had written a book of mediocre verse.

  It is late. The traffic in the town has died down. After midnight, in this valley, time reverses itself until dawn. I am not sitting up here just tonight. I am here on every night which has ever fallen since the building was made. Five hundred years of night are compressed into just this one, brief span.

  The clouds break. The stars are through. The lights on the mountains are extinguished. The patterns of the stars have hardly changed since the loggia was roofed, since the painting within it was executed by a man who wanted not only to see the vista but own it, too.

  I so want to stay here. Father Benedetto was right. I have found peace: love is important.

  The shadow-dweller makes it all so damned uncertain. As much as I want to stay I want him to make his move, cast the die.

  I have decided to change my tactic. I am no longer hunting the hunter. For three days now, I have tried to draw the shadow-dweller. I have deliberately put myself at his mercy.

  I have driven out into the countryside and, parking my car, have walked into the hills, going along paths that have wound through guillies, through copses of oak and chestnut. On every walk, I have feigned vigilance, feigned painting butterflies or sketching. Not once has he followed me. He has been offered the opportunity time and again to confront me, kill me. There have been no wayward lovers to disturb his plan.

  In the evening, I have strolled through the town, frequenting alleyways and uncrowded streets. Here he has followed me, but always at a discreet distance. Once, pretending not to notice him, I doubled back on my tracks. He melted away.

  I cannot fathom him out. He hovers like a vulture, waiting for the corpse to still: he is a persistent nuisance, the bluebottle one cannot quite reach with the folded sports section of the Sunday paper. He is the wasp at the picnic cloth. He is biding his time. But why?

  Yesterday, thinking he might rise to a more adroitly cast bait, I acted furtively. I approached the Citroën with stealth and drove out to the derelict farmhouse by Father Benedetto’s church of the frescoes. The ‘for sale’ sign had been removed but nothing else was changed. I parked the car as I had done on my previous visit and snooped about the house. I even entered it, a risky act for it gave him the chance to approach closely without being seen.

  He did follow me in his blue Peugeot but he halted half a kilometre away. I expected him to advance from there on foot and studied him through my binoculars from deep in the shade of one of the upstairs rooms. He made no attempt even to get out of his car: instead, he backed it into the entrance to a field of vines, facing the road, and wound down the window. I watched him as he fanned himself with a newspaper and drove pestering flies away.

  The ruse a failure, I left the farmhouse and drove down the road towards him. I determined to stop fifty metres from him, get out and see what he would do. It was near midday, the heat was up and there was no traffic on the road. As I drew closer to him, he suddenly swung the Peugeot out from the field entrance and accelerated away from me. I pressed my foot to the floor of the Citroën but it was no match for the larger sedan. Within two kilometres, he was out of sight.

  I stopped in a village on the way to the town and entered the bar. Some old men were seated at a table near the rear, playing scopa. They paid me scant attention as I went to the counter.

  ‘Sì?’ the woman behind the counter addressed me, eyeing me up and down in a cursory fashion. On a table behind her was a fresh fruit juice dispenser.

  ‘Una spremuta, per favore,’ I ordered. ‘Di pompelmo.’

  She poured the grapefruit juice into a thick tumbler and handed it to me. She smiled pleasantly and I paid her before taking the glass outside to drink standing in the hot sun. The juice was chilled and tart, furring my teeth.

  What was he up to, the shadow-dweller? I sipped the juice and wondered about him. His refusal to attack me, to confront me, was puzzling. He must know that, at some time, he must act or prompt me into making a move. And yet that is what I had been doing. I had given him the advantage: he had not taken it. I had stalked him in the night streets and he had fled. I wondered, as I drained the sludge of pulped fruit at the bottom of the tumbler, if he has been on his way to attack me in the castle or was simply following me, observing me. Perhaps the lovers had not protected me but had foiled his observations.

  The manner in which he was behaving would suggest he was no threat were it not for Father Benedetto’s noticing he carried a handgun. And yet, on the occasions I had succeeded in observing him carefully, he appeared not to be armed. I saw no tell-tale bu
lge under the armpit, no stretching of the waistband, no wider-than-average belt, no misformed jacket pocket. If he had a piece, it must be of a very small calibre, useless except at very close range. And he avoids close quarter contact.

  Where was he from? I had eliminated from my mind all the obvious sources of the man, the various permutations of most likely possibility: he was not CIA, MI5, or former GRU or KGB—nothing of that sort. They would not play games. They would survey the hit, study him briefly for a day or two at the most, move in and do it. They are government men, civil servants packing heat, and they have to work within the parameters of time set by their superiors behind desks. They keep the office hours of the government servant.

  What if he was a freelance operating for a government agency? No. I dismissed that option quickly. They would not employ a cat-and-mouser. Whoever came under their pay came under their rules. He would have to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible: tax-payers’ money and all that.

  He was not from my world. I tried hard to think of who might bear me a grudge strong enough to kill me. There was no one. I have cuckolded no husbands, robbed no widows, kidnapped no children. It is true, I suppose, the mechanic’s family would like to see me suffer but they all thought it was a suicide. The tabloids and the coroner told them so. Besides, they would not have the tenacity or resource to track me down so many years later.

  It was over a decade since I had taken a commission for the American syndicates and then none of my weapons was used on a mob hit, not even an inter-Family rivalry. No political group for whom I had worked would kill me, not after so long. If they wanted me silenced they would have done it there and then, not waited years for me to jot down my memoirs. It was not the girl: if she wanted me dead, her driver would have blown me away in the car park of the service centre.