The American (11 page)

‘You’re not overlooked. That is most important.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, unnecessarily.

‘The range will be about seventy-five metres. Certainly not over ninety. Possibly much closer. I shall have not more than five seconds. Possibly seven, at the most.’

‘How many . . .’ I paused. One never knows how to phrase it. I have had this discussion so many times over the last three decades and I still do not have it worked out to perfection. ‘. . . targets?’

‘Just the one.’

‘Anything else?’

‘A rapid fire rate. A reasonably large magazine capacity. Preferably 9 mm Parabellum.’

The wine glass twisted in those artistic fingers. I watched as the reflection of the windows spun round against the mellow yellow of the wine.

‘And it must be light. Fairly small. Compact. Possible to be broken down into its constituent parts.’

‘How small? Pocket-size?’

‘Bigger would be permissible. A small case. Say a briefcase. Or a lady’s vanity case.’

‘X-rays? Camouflage – transistor radio, tape cassette, camera? In amongst tins, aerosols, that sort of thing?’

‘Not necessary.’

‘Noise?’

‘It needs to be silenced. To be on the safe side.’

The wine glass chimed as the base touched the stone floor and my visitor stood up to leave.

‘Can you do it?’

I nodded again.

‘Most certainly.’

‘How long?’

‘A month. To a trial. Then, say, a week for any final touches.’

‘Today is the sixth. I shall need a trial on the thirtieth. Then four days to delivery.’

‘I do not deliver, not these days,’ I pointed out. I had said as much in my letter.

‘To collection, then. How much?’

‘One hundred thousand. Thirty now, twenty at the trial, fifty on completion.’

‘Dollars?’

‘Of course.’

The smile was less cautious now. There was an edge of relief to it, a hint of satisfaction such as one sees on the face of anyone who has what they want.

‘I shall need a scope. And a case.’

‘Of course.’ I smiled now. ‘I’ll also prepare . . .’

I left the rest unsaid. A pen is no use without ink, a plate without food, a book without words or a gun without ammunition.

‘Excellent, Mr . . . Mr Butterfly.’

The manila envelope fell heavily on to the chair.

‘The first payment.’

The bills, judging by the thickness, must have been hundreds.

‘Until the end of the month, then.’

I rose to my feet.

‘Please don’t get up. I can let myself out.’

It is not good to be a man of habit. I hold in contempt those men who rule their lives by timetables, who run their existence with the efficiency of the German national-railway network. There can be nothing more despicable than for a man to be able to declaim, without demur, that at 13.15 each Tuesday he will be seated at the eighth table on the right from the door in the pizzeria on Via Such-and-Such, a glass of Scansano by his plate and a
pizza ai fungi
before him.

Such a man is puerile, has never been able to escape the security of parental order, the insistent but safe sequence of the school timetable. What for many years was mathematics or geography is now the pizzeria or the barber’s shop, the office coffee break or the morning sales meeting.

How one can determine one’s life seems obscure to me. I could not do this. I escaped from such a routine through fencing stolen knick-knacks and entering into my present life.

When I lived in that English village, hounded by Mrs Ruffords from across the lane, whom I secretly called the Daily News, for she was an inveterate gossip, an enduring community snooper, the person who had the longest stick to prise under my stone of solitude, my day was as compartmentalized as that of a schoolmaster. I rose at six, made coffee, emptied the night’s accumulation of slag from the coke burner, made toast and watched the milkman deliver the milk. At seven thirty I entered the workshop and set about the day’s tasks, written on a sheet of paper the night before and pinned over the end of the bench. I switched on the radio, the volume low. I heard nothing. It was just a noise to break the tedium.

At noon, exactly, as the time pips bleeped the end of the morning, I downed tools, made a cup of soup and drank it at the table in the poky sitting room of my cottage, peering out on a tiny, drab garden upon which the seasons seemed to make little impression.

At one o’clock I returned to the workbench. I did not immediately recommence work. The morning’s toil had untidied the surface. I spent half an hour organizing my tools. The saws hung from hooks over the bench, the chisels and gouges along the windowsill, the hammers in a rack at the end of the bench: that everything was into the original disorder within thirty minutes, and that I knew where everything was in any case, was immaterial. It was the routine I was serving, not the logicality of work.

At six o’clock I stopped work, listening to the television news as I prepared my evening meal. Even this was routine. I had steak most nights, or lamb chops for variation. They required only grilling. I forced myself to cook a different vegetable each night, my concession to originality.

Saturday mornings I went to the supermarket. Wednesday afternoons I went to the antiques fair and did a round of the dealers, buying and selling, accepting commissions for repair.

Now, I deliberately fight routine. Not only to stave off boredom but also, I admit, as an act of preservation. Not just the preservation of which a man in my line of business has to be constantly conscious, the stranger on the corner, the reader of a newspaper under a street lamp, the man who changes trains at the same station, but the preservation of the mind. I should go crazy if I had to follow the hours with the religious observance of a time-server.

So it is I never go to the bar every Monday, or every lunchtime, and I have several which I patronize. No one can say of me it is Thursday because I am in the Piazza Conca d’Oro, in the Bar Conca d’Oro, at the table by the counter.

Let me tell you of this bar. It is on the corner of the piazza, which is cobbled with those square stones so loved of Italian street pavers, set in patterns, shell patterns in this piazza, quite obviously. There are two islands in the piazza: one contains a fountain, the other three trees. The fountain does not work and has no water in it. Students from the university use it as a bicycle park. Where there should be the music of water there is a tangle of cycle frames, handlebars and pedals. Under the trees the proprietor of the bar has set tables, monopolizing the public space for the sake of his profit margin and, he claims, the good of the residents. If he had no tables there the space would be filled with parked Fiats and mopeds, all leaking oil and fouling the air with fumes. In fact, few vehicles drive into the piazza, which is a backwater of the town.

The interior of the bar is indistinguishable from that of any other throughout Italy. British pubs are all, in their own fashion, unique. They may have jukeboxes or one-armed bandits in common but there the similarities end. Italian bars are not like this: they all have a plastic curtain at the doorway, a shop window to let in the light, plastic or wooden chairs around shaky tables, a bar and a hissing cappuccino maker, racks of fly-blown bottles of obscure liquors and tumblers with chipped rims and sides scratched from many thousands of washings. There is often a dusty radio hidden on a high shelf muttering pop music and on the bar one of those gambling machines into which one puts a coin and receives a coloured wooden bead in the centre of which is a hole drilled through, containing a paper slip with a national flag printed upon it. Get the correct flag and win a plastic digital wristwatch worth next to nothing.

I am known in the Bar Conca d’Oro as an irregular regular. Sometimes I sit at the tables in the piazza, sometimes in the bar. I may have a cup of cappuccino, or an espresso. If it is cold I order hot chocolate. I may, if it is early in the day, request a brioche to break my fast.

The other customers who frequent the place are slaves to timetables, are regular regulars. I know them all by name. I remember names. It is an important part of the preservation process.

They are a jolly crew: Visconti is a photographer with a tiny studio nearby in the Via S Lucio, Armando is a cobbler, Emilio (whom everyone calls Milo for he has lived in Chicago and was so named over there) operates a watch-repairing stall in the Piazza del Duomo, Giuseppe is a street-sweeper, Gherardo owns a taxi. They are men of little future but huge and happy vision.

When I enter, they all look up. I may be a stranger and worth talking to, or about. They all say, ‘
Ciao! Come stai? Signor Farfalla
.’ It is a chorus.

‘
Ciao!
’ I reply. ‘
Bene!
’

My Italian is poor. We converse in a bastard Esperanto of our own invention, the language changing as the mood changes, as the grappa is drunk or the wine uncorked.

They ask after my butterfly hunting. They have not seen me for a week or two, maybe longer, not since the feast day of San Bernadino di Siena: Gherardo remembers it was that day because it was when the taxi broke its rear shock absorber on the road to his mother’s house.

I say the butterfly hunting is good, the paintings coming along. I say I have an exhibition coming off in a gallery in Munich. The German collectors are starting to take an interest in European wildlife. Milo, I suggest, should start painting the portraits of wild boars, not illegally shooting them in the mountains for salami. He should become green. Europe is turning green, I say.

They laugh. Milo is already green, they say: a ‘greenhorn’. It is one of his favourite Americanisms, which he throws as an insult to anyone who questions his knowledge.
Un pivello
. Behind his back and without any spite they call him
il nuovo immigrato
, although he returned home over twenty years ago and has lost much of his command of both English and American.

Yet this is a diversion. Soon they are discussing the green revolution. They are trying to save the world, these five working-class men in a bar in the middle of Italy, in the middle of the seventeenth century.

There is not a building in the Piazza Conca d’Oro newer than 1650. The iron balconies, the shuttered windows, have seen more of history than any professor. The fountain was reputedly built by a cousin of the Borgias. The cellar of a building opposite is said to have been a Templar lodge in the thirteenth century. Now it is a vaulted wine store rented by the bar owner. Up a little dead-end alley, the Vicolo dei Silvestrini, is a chapel incorporated into the basement of a house: it is said San Silvestro once prayed there. From the balcony over the pork butcher’s shop behind the fountain was once hanged a famous brigand, caught in flagrante delicto by a nobleman whose wife was bouncing on the brigand’s belly in the nobleman’s own bed. No one can agree on who the amorous culprit was, nor when he was lynched. It is one of the evening stories the puppeteer enacts.

Together, they come to a unanimous decision. To save the world, all cars must run on water. Visconti claims there exists the process whereby water can be split into its component hydrogen and oxygen, by solar-power electricity. The two gases are mixed in the cylinder head and ignited by a spark of electricity, as with a petrol-engine spark plug. Hydrogen explodes. Everyone knows that. The hydrogen bomb. His hands create a mushroom of destruction over the table. The explosion drives the piston down. And – he laughs ironically at the simplicity of the chemistry – what happens when you explode hydrogen with oxygen? You get water. No need for fuel top-ups. The exhaust pipe gets the burnt-off water and returns it to the fuel tank. A never-ending engine. All it needs is sunlight to charge the batteries.

Gherardo is most pleased. His taxi will run for ever. Giuseppe is doubtful. He sees a fault in the logic. He has much time to think, he says, as he sweeps the streets: street-sweeping is, he suggests, an ideal occupation for a philosopher, for one has to think of nothing except how to avoid getting hit from behind by a Roman driver.

‘
Cosi!
Problem – what?’ Visconti asks in our spurious tongue. His hands shake palm-up in the air. His shoulders shrug with defiance.

If the idea is so good, Giuseppe suggests, why has it not yet been introduced? The hole in the ozone is big already. The petrol fumes still choke you in Rome.

Visconti looks from one to the other of us, seeking support for his disgust at Giuseppe’s ignorance. We all look glum. It is the way.

If the process were made public now, Visconti declares, the petrol companies would go bankrupt. They bought up the process years ago and are sitting on it to protect their profits.

The others shrug now. This they believe. Italy is a land of big-business corruption. The conversation moves on to the fortunes of AC Milano.

I drink the last of my cappuccino and leave. They wave farewell. They will see me again, they say. Have good luck hunting butterflies.

At the very end of the cul-de-sac formed by the southern half of the Via Lampedusa there is a brothel. It is not a grand place. It has no maroon velvet curtains or plush settees, no red lights, either. Downstairs is a hair salon. Upstairs is a three-storey whorehouse.

From time to time, I go there: I am not ashamed of this. It is my way. In my world, one cannot afford the luxury of a wife, or a steady companion. They would be a liability and wives can turn against you. At least lovers seldom do.

There are four full-time whores in the Via Lampedusa.

Maria is the oldest at about forty. She runs the establishment but she does not own it. The owner is an Italian American who lives in Sardinia. Or Sicily. Or Corsica. His actual whereabouts are unknown and subject to rumour. Some say he is in the government, which would not surprise anyone. His cut of the action is paid by direct credit into a bank in Madrid. Maria sends this to him fortnightly. She does not work a great deal, keeping only to three specific clients, men of about her own age who must have been visiting her for years.