The American (33 page)

Tonight, I am the hunter. The lamb has turned from the slaughter and shrugged on the wolfskin. To draw out my quarry, I have taken a few steps to confuse him, maybe to ensnare him.

Firstly, I have booked my car into Alfonso’s garage for a tune-up. He will do the work as soon as he arrives in the morning, but I have spun him a line by saying I shall be away, so he has agreed to keep the car overnight. This should have the shadow-dweller out in the open, searching for it.

Secondly, I have sat for some time at one of the bars in the Corso Federico II, making myself prominent, reading a paper. Twice I have felt his presence, but he has not hung about.

Thirdly, I have walked through the town window-shopping. He has followed me, from time to time, keeping an eye on me. I have made him feel he has me on edge by looking round just a little too obviously, but never in his direction.

I have discovered the blue Peugeot, too. It was cleverly parked behind a bank of rubbish containers in a residential street on the outskirts of the town. It has had two new tyres fitted to it. I am sure he does not know I have found the whereabouts of his vehicle.

It would have been child’s play to plant a bomb in it, wired perhaps to the reversing light. Yet I want to see this man, get close to him, know him for what he is. So now I am hunting him.

He is at present dining in a restaurant down a narrow street off the Via Roviano. He has been in there for nearly an hour and I expect him to reappear soon. A lone diner always eats more quickly than one with a companion, but I know the service in the restaurant to be on the slow side.

It is now I who am dwelling in the shadows, standing at the entrance to an alleyway not wide enough to accommodate a bicycle. It is not a cold night, but I am wearing a dark brown suit. I might pass for a businessman out canvassing for a whore were it not for the fact that I am wearing high-laced jogging boots, not leather shoes. They are new: I bought them this afternoon in the course of my window-peering circuit. They are navy blue with white bands which I have darkened with polish.

No one has noticed me. It is not unusual to see people standing in the shadows, as I am. There are heroin addicts in the town and their pushers inhabit the alleys.

He has come out of the restaurant and is looking up and down the street. Satisfied, he is setting off towards the Via Roviano. I am on his tail.

Stalking is the sport of men. It requires patience, skill, tact, physical and mental tension and a degree of risk. I enjoy it. Perhaps I should have been the commissioner of guns, not the artist of them.

He is making for the street where the Citroën was parked. He is so confident he does not look round, does not prime his senses to discover my existence. He thinks he has me where he wants me, cautious as a rabbit a long way from its warren.

He rounds the corner and abruptly stops. He has seen a Fiat Uno in the space previously occupied by my motor. He looks about, not to see if I am there but to see if the car has shifted to another place.

For a moment, he thinks. Then he sets off at a brisk pace with me on his trail.

We are doing a tour of all the streets in which I have parked the Citroën. But we draw a blank. He enters a bar and orders a coffee which I see him drinking standing at the counter. He pays and leaves, turns left and walks purposefully down the street. I follow.

Damn the man! He is going towards Alfonso’s garage. He must have guessed. Sure enough, he is standing outside the garage, looking up and down the street. He does not see the Citroën. Now he is crouching to peer through the hinges of the old steel shutters that close the garage. Inside, a light has been left on to deter burglars. It bars his face briefly. He stands up. I can sense the grin of smug satisfaction on his face.

The street is empty. It is nearly eleven o’clock and the citizens of the town are drawing to their beds. From a window overhead, I can hear the soundtrack of a late-night film on television. It is a romantic film, the violins muffled and thin with sorrow. From somewhere down the street comes the faint sound of jazz.

The shadow-dweller is standing under a street lamp which hangs from an ancient bracket on the wall of a building. He is pondering his next move or trying to ascertain what mine might be.

He will soon find out. The time has come.

I take the Walther out of my pocket and, holding it behind my back, cock it. It clicks. He does not hear this. I would, in his position. He is not a fully qualified expert.

I step out from the shadows and start to walk quickly towards him. My right arm hangs by my side as if the pistol weighs heavily in the hand. It does not. I hardly feel it. It is an extension of my body, like a sixth and deadly finger. My left arm swings.

He does not hear me. My jogging shoes are silent. I have about fifty metres to cover. He is looking at the garage door as if he might wish it open.

I raise my right hand. The gun is pointing at him. Thirty metres. I feel my finger take up the slack of the trigger. Twenty metres.

A car turns into the street behind me, its headlights on beam. I drop my right arm, thrusting the Walther into my pocket. The shadow-dweller looks my way, almost casually. He sees me outlined by the halogen beams. For the merest of moments I see his eyes, wide open and shocked. Then he is gone. I do not see where. There is no alleyway opposite Alfonso’s workshop, no deep doorway, no parked vehicles close by. The car headlights are illuminating the whole street as if it were a film set. He has disappeared.

An invisible man is worse than a shadow-dweller. I double back quickly and run silently for several streets. As I go, I curse him and the driver of the car and I curse myself. Each oath is muttered in time with my breathing.

Today the regulars are at the Bar Conca d’Oro, sitting at the tables inside. Those outside are on the pavement: the Fiat drivers and moped riders have beaten the bar owner to the space under the trees. I stand and watch.

One of the tables is occupied by a group of English tourists. The father is the proud owner of a brand-new camcorder: the aluminium carrying case with a navy blue webbing strap lies on the ground by his foot. His shoe is resting on the strap so that, should any street urchin grab at it, he will instantly know of the attempted theft: he is abroad where the streets teem with petty criminals, and forgets the burglaries in his own home town.

I idly ponder the possibility of concealing an automatic weapon within a camcorder. It should be feasible. The size is convenient. The little jutting microphone could easily disguise a barrel, the camera itself be used as the sighting device. Indeed, it would be the ultimate tool of the assassin if it could be totally silenced: the operator could not only carry out the hit but film the whole action for future replay, much as athletes play back videotape of their races to judge, criticize and improve their performance. It is a few moments before I realize such problems are no longer mine.

I regret never having taken an apprentice. What I could have taught him. Or her. With my retirement, a facet of technology’s folk-craft dies.

The tourist wife is hot and flustered. Her blouse is adhering to her back, her hair verging on the untidy. She has been following her husband all morning, filming this church and that market, this street and that view. Behind her have followed their two children, a boy of about twelve and a girl a few years younger. Both are fed up. They each have an ice cream which they are devouring with avidity, yet they are still jaded with the day. It is hot. They have not been to the seaside, only to the museum to see the skeleton of the ichthyosaurus and to the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre to view the vista of the valley. They are arguing as to how a marine dinosaur could have been found halfway up a mountain.

For a minute or two, I study this little group with a degree of caution. If the shadow-dweller has called for backup, these could readily be his accomplices. I recall the lesson learnt from the couple with the pseudo-daughter in Washington, DC. 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 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 statement. 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 knob. She does so, using both hands, for it is stiff. There is a metallic click like a bolt sliding into a breech 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.