The American Read online

  ‘Hey! Mister Butterfly!’

  The voice was almost as high-pitched as the puppeteer’s, somehow effeminate and, for the briefest of instances, I thought it might be Dindina’s: it had the same stridency as did her voice during the fight with Clara. The accent was American, unmistakably upper-crust. It cut through the sounds of the tourists, traffic and the town.

  I turned quickly and glanced up and down the street. There was still no blue Peugeot in sight and nothing seemed out of order except that, pulled in to the kerb between the puppeteer and the no-parking sign to which the flautist tied his umbrella, was a dark grey Fiat Stilo. It was illegally parked and the driver was sitting in it but this did not arouse my suspicions for such a sight is commonplace in Italy.

  Then I noticed the engine was idling. I looked more closely. It had a registration plate from Pescara but these are not uncommon in the region: people from Pescara have houses in the mountains hereabouts. Yet on the windscreen, in the centre and next to the registration documents, was a little yellow disc.

  My hand was in my pocket, my fingers snug around the Walther.

  ‘Hey! Mister Butterfly!’ the voice shouted again, lower in tone, more controlled now.

  It was the driver of the Fiat. I could not see him clearly for he was in the car and I was in the sunlight.

  I did not reply. I wanted to shade my eyes against the sun.

  The car door opened and he stood up. Now I could see him at a range of about twenty metres, his slim torso and brown hair trimmed short. He was wearing the designer cut, stone-washed jeans he had had on when first I saw him, a loose brown jacket over a cream shirt. It might, I thought, have been silk.

  ‘You. Mr. Butterfly,’ he called.

  It was as if he was not too sure and, for a moment, I felt like bluffing it out, turning my back on him as if I had not understood, had mistaken the first call. But this would not drive him away, it would only prolong the business.

  I still did not answer him. I just nodded my head.

  ‘You son of a bitch!’ he yelled more loudly. ‘You goddamn, useless son of a bitch!’

  ‘What do you want?’ I called back.

  He seemed to think for a moment before answering, ‘I want your fucking ass, you incompetent bastard.’ The voice was in pitch again. ‘You bastard!’ it repeated.

  He was definitely American. Now I knew, could tell from his pronunciation of bastard, the long first a like the short bleat of a sheep. His voice was strangely vaguely familiar, too. I tried to place it, give a name to it, but I could not.

  His bellowing caught the attention of the tourists who ignored the puppeteer and the juggler and looked around at the disturbance. An alternative entertainment was commencing.

  ‘You have been following me. Why?’

  He made no response and a taxi drove by between us, momentarily blocking him from my view. My hand took the Walther out of my pocket.

  In the two seconds it took the taxi to go by, he stepped free of the door of the hired Fiat and as he came into my view again I saw he had a submachine gun in his hands, holding it at the waist. The sun was bright and the gun pointed at me: I thought it was a Sterling except that it had a telescopic sight mounted on it.

  As if my attention was focussing through a lens, I saw his finger tighten and I threw myself to one side. There was a quick burst of popping explosions and the rending sound of splintering wood. Nothing more. The noises of the day continued unaffected.

  The Walther fired as if independent of any action I could make. The shadow-dweller ducked as if he could see the bullet coming, swung the submachine gun and fired another brief burst. I heard the buzz of spent rounds and the crack of the muzzle but not the retorts of the discharges.

  Rolling along the steps, I spread my legs, faced him and fired again. Two shots. One smashed the Fiat windscreen, the other I saw penetrate the rear door just beside the shadow-dweller’s leg. He flinched and was momentarily off-balance. I rolled back again.

  Now there were screams, people shouting and shrieking, footsteps running to and fro. The puppeteer’s kiosk had been pushed over and he was scrabbling inside it.

  Over the cacophony of panic, I detected a sound behind me. I could not turn. It would have been most foolish in the circumstances. It was not close to me but not far off, either. It was a soft noise like leaves rubbing in the breeze.

  It could not be an accomplice, for I could see the shadow-dweller’s face assume a mixed feeling of fear and confusion.

  He took two quick paces to his left, to alter his arc of fire, and opened up again. Slugs bounced off the steps beside me, chips of marble stinging against my calves.

  Again, I fired. He dropped his weapon and fell to his knees, slouching slightly forward. I took hasty but careful aim. He was nothing more to me now than the tussock in the pool high up in the pagliara. For the briefest of moments, he was not surrounded by the street, the church and the parked cars but by the oak and chestnut forests of the mountains, the clear air of altitude.

  I did not go for a head shot. I wanted to see who he was and a bullet in the skull would blow half his face away. I aimed at his neck and the Walther did the rest. He reeled back under the impact of the slug, his hand flashed to his throat then dropped. He fell against the Fiat and slid to the ground.

  There was silence now. The traffic seemed to have stopped, the town holding its breath.

  At a half-crouch, I ran across to him, looking round. Everyone was lying on the ground except the puppeteer, who was crawling out of his kiosk. I knelt by the shadow-dweller.

  His hand twitched spasmodically. There was a crude scarlet mess in the left side of his chest. His shirt was torn in a jagged gash around it. The mercury-filled bullet had done its job. His neck was oozing blood which was flowing down the nape and on to the back of his jacket. His head had fallen forward. On the side of the Fiat was spattered blood, which was running down like poorly applied gloss paint.

  Rapidly, I searched his jacket pockets: nothing, no wallet, passport.

  I gripped his chin and lifted his head up. It weighed little in death. One of Roberto’s watermelons was heavier.

  I did not know him although there was something about him I could not place. Perhaps, I thought, he was merely a stereotype of all the shadow-dwellers I have ever seen or sensed and, for this reason, was familiar. I let his head drop forward. It lolled to one side. His right cheek had a tic in it. There was his blood on my fingers and I quickly wiped them clean on the shoulder of his jacket.

  Then it occurred to me: he was an American and Americans keep their wallets in their trouser back pockets. I pushed him slightly to one side, fumbled under him, found the button, tore the pocket open. His wallet was there, his passport, with the United States insignia on the cover, folded into it. I opened the pages.

  Now I knew him, the shadow-dweller. And I knew where I had heard the voice before.

  Beside him on the road lay a Socimi 821, the barrel extended with a sound suppressor. In dropping it, he had knocked the scope awry. There were thick gobs of gellified blood on the metal yet I saw the last line if the inscription—To Kill I will not faile.

  I went to pick the gun up. Perhaps that was what the shadow-dweller had wanted in his death, for me to mark his weapon with my fingerprints. Yet I did not touch it. Instead, I stared at it from the core of a silent darkness within myself. My mind filled with the one thought, that my last gun had in the final test failed to do its job.

  The tourists were still not getting to their feet. Everyone lay prone. Then a child called out in a voice shrill with uncomprehending panic. I could not understand its words but it shook me alert.

  I ran back to the entrance to the church. The main door, splintered by the Socimi and the ancient wood showing brighter where it was newly split, was open and, on the ground before it, was a black heap.

  Father Benedetto was lying crouched on his side like a foetus, his hands to his belly. Between his fingers was a thick clot of blood and flesh. He
was breathing in rapid, shallow swallows as if hurriedly testing his last glass of armagnac. From his glazed eyes, I could tell he was only semi-conscious.

  As I put my hand on his shoulder, he shrugged at the touch but I took this as a sign of acceptance rather than dismissal. One does not give the worst interpretation at such a moment.

  ‘Benedetto,’ I whispered. It might have been, ‘Benedicte.’ I have never been quite sure.

  There was a whipping screel of a siren drawing closer and I could hear running footsteps from further down the street, in the direction of the Corso Federico II. The tourists were stirring. I fired again, into the air. There were distant shouts and the footsteps abruptly ceased. The tourists dropped to the ground again. The child squeaked briefly like a rat as the trap springs shut.

  I sprinted across the street, jumping over the prone bodies of those lying on the pavements and went headlong down the marble steps towards the quarter in which was my apartment.

  The grazes I had suffered on my shins and calves from the shattering stone were slight: they required nothing more than Band-aids and a smearing of Germolene. I collected my battered holdall from the wardrobe in the bedroom and had a last check round. The ashes in the fire were thoroughly crushed. No forensic scientist would ever glue them together again. I inspected myself in the mirror. The toupee looked good, my jacket was neat, my spectacles polished and the homburg hat balanced nicely upon my head.

  As I went to leave, I glanced up the steps to the loggia. I could just make out the dull gold of the stars on the sky in the dome.

  Getting out of town, I anticipated, would be difficult: the Italian authorities are much practised at the art of roadblocks. Vehicle checks would have been established within twenty minutes of the shooting. I walked to the Piazza Conca d’Oro, perfecting a limp as I went and took a bicycle from the fountain. It was not one of those lightweight racers or expensive mountain bikes but just a traditional, black sturdy machine. I hung my holdall from the handlebars and, swinging my leg slowly over the saddle, as an old man might, took a last look at the bar. The tables were before the door—the drivers had beaten the patron to the shade under the trees—and seated at one were Visconti and Milo. They looked cursorily in my direction but did not recognise me.

  Following an escape route I had reconnoitred long before, through the passageways and alleys to the outskirts of the town, I reached the countryside and, at a leisurely pace, cycled down lanes and paths and farmtracks to a village about fifteen kilometres away where I knew long distance coach services over the mountains halted on their way to the autostrada.

  The bus for Rome was barely half full. I boarded the steps, purchased my ticket and took a seat at the rear. Even here, some distance from the town, the carabinieri were on the alert, two officers standing by the entrance to the bus, scrutinising those boarding and asking questions of several passengers. They ignored me. The doors hissed shut and the driver engaged first gear. By four o’clock, the bus had gone through the first of the autostrada tunnels which cut through the mountains. By six o’clock, I was in Rome.

  From the Piazza della Republica, I walked a short distance to the Metropolitana in the Piazza del Cinquecento, travelled to the station in the Piazza del Partigiana and caught the suburban train to Fiumicino. At Leonardo da Vinci airport, I locked myself in a cubicle in the gentleman’s lavatory in the departure concourse, changing into my new form. Like a caterpillar, I became a chrysalis then broke free into the finished creature, the imago: I am, indeed, a butterfly. Now was the time to find a thermal, rise over the hill and descend into a new, uncharted valley of flowers and nectar. I collected my leather baggage from the left luggage locker. It smelled musty from being there for so long.

  You want to know the identity of the shadow-dweller. He was a millionaire’s son, the asset-stripper’s offspring, the syphilitic philanderer’s brat. And I was right: it was revenge which was his motive for his hunt. His mother had killed herself and his father remarried.

  All this I had in my last letter from Larry, who did not condemn me. He was a man of the world, he understood: but he also warned me. The boy had his connections, or the father had: the letter was ambiguous and I could not tell from it which of the two of them was friendly with some of Larry’s more press-worthy clients in Chicago, Miami, or Little Italy. The failure of the attempted killing, he wrote, would not be overlooked. And the public nature of it was, of course, a part of the process. It was his opinion, furthermore—and he should know—that they would consider the lesson had not been learned. As he put it, another teacher would be employed in due course. His postscript was At least you’ve put the poor asshole out of his agony. I had to agree with him.

  I could not believe the irony of it. This vindictive dilettante had succeeded where the agencies of the world’s governments had failed. Certainly, it had taken him years to track me down. I wondered if this had been a full-time quest or a pastime when he was not otherwise engaged: the sort of undertaking such as Americans make on their summer vacations in Europe, seeking to trace their ancestry.

  Yet the fact is that he made it in the end. There is nothing so persevering—or so perverse—as a vengeance waiting to be redressed.

  That he used my own gun was another of those artful tricks laughing fate plays upon us. It is one I now savour, albeit sardonically. Once he discovered my whereabouts, he must have gone to his ‘connection’, asked for the best to be hired on his behalf. His wish was obeyed: I was employed. He was not to know that it was I who was the finest.

  And there is a moral there, I would suggest: it is up to you to decide upon what it is.

  It was he who ruined everything. The whole of my future brought to devastation by the determined, petty hatred of a deranged mother’s boy.

  In my retirement, I often think of what might have been. I tell myself this is a pointless exercise but I cannot avoid it. But for him and his never-ending vendetta, I should still be in those peaceful mountains, seeing out my end years secure amongst trustworthy folk. And with Clara.

  Clara: she was much on my mind in the weeks immediately after the shooting, the days and nights of running and hiding, ducking and dodging, swerving and backtracking across the world.

  I kept recalling her visit to my home. She had somehow fitted there, had not been out of place amongst my books and pictures, sitting on my chairs. I believed she would not have been out of place in my bed and the more I think of her the more I see what I have lost: she doing her work by my side, perhaps translating from the Italian into English with—when it was demanded of me—my help, whilst I read and painted and allowed myself for the first time to fall into a routine of bar and Galeazzo’s bookshop, dinner weekly with Father Benedetto.

  I would have been happy. My friend the priest might have shared this: he could have married us in his ornate church with the grotesque ceiling. The service would have meant nothing to me but I suspect Clara would have wanted it. Onlookers—the puppeteer and the flautist and Roberto—would have wondered how an old bugger like me could be attractive to a young slip of a girl like her. I should have enjoyed that moment of publicity before the quiet years enveloped me once more.

  We could have travelled, Clara and I. There are still places to which I could go, where I have not worked. There are a few cities I could have returned to with her as adequate disguise, spending a month or two away each year, always returning to the town, the beautiful seclusion of the mountains.

  Of course, we need not have lived in the town. I could perhaps have purchased a house in the countryside around—the derelict farmhouse, perhaps with a hectare of orchards and vineyards, make my own wine as Duilio did, named it Vino di Casa Clara. That, I considered, had a certain ring to it. It would have been blood red, full-bodied, like kisses. Her kisses.

  All that is now an impossibility. The shadow-dweller and his backers put paid to it with, his public shoot-out, his puerile High Noon mentality. I often think, as I sit alone in the evening, that he chose that moment d
eliberately, knew that by calling my play in front of the church he was killing not only me but also my hopes. Just as I, I suppose, had killed his own.

  Worse, I often consider, is what Clara must think of me. I abandoned her. I paid her off with a princely sum as if she was nothing but a high-class tart, let her down, reneged on my protestation of love which she so needed. I admit to myself to hoping she used the money, did not throw it away in a moment of Italian pique. Several times, I have thought to write to her but have never gone beyond picking up the pen. Perhaps, by now, she has discovered her young man from Perugia.

  And what of the others’ thoughts—Galeazzo, Visconti, Milo, Gherardo . . . I was the cause of the death of their priest. I am the Englishman who brought death close to them. They dine out on the story. I am sure I am still a topic of conversation in the bar, will be for many decades. Yet the blood which legend will ooze from the flagstones in front of the church of S. Silvestro will be that of Father Benedetto. This much I have given him, a place in history.

  Where I have flown off to is a secret. I have to remain a private man, reborn into my new existence and comfortably settled into it. I have my memories, of course. I have not forgotten how to paint insects, that the cyclic rate of a Sterling Para Pistol Mark 7A is 550 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity 365 metres per second; nor have I forgotten that it is developed from the last shadow-dweller’s gun. I can recall quite vividly the basement in Marseilles, Father Benedetto’s little garden, the stink-hole in Hong Kong, blood-red wine like the kisses of girls, the workshop in the arches in South London, Visconti and Milo and the others, Galeazzo and Signora Prasca and the exquisite beauty of the pagliara. I shall never forget the view from the loggia.

  You do not, naturally, expect me to divulge into whom I metamorphosed. Suffice to say Mr. Butterfly—il Signor Farfalla—still sups at the wild honey of life and is comparatively content. Similarly, he is quite safe.