The American (14 page)

‘Why do you live in Italy?’

This is a question often upon his lips. I usually make no verbal response but shrug in the Italian manner, and grimace.

‘You should live in . . .’ Every time, he pauses to consider a new country, one not mentioned previously. ‘. . . Indonesia. They have many forests, many strange reptiles. Many butterflies. Why do you paint Italian butterflies? Everyone knows Italian butterflies.’

‘They do not,’ I remonstrate. ‘For example, the genus
Charaxes
–
Charaxes jasius
. Hardly known elsewhere in Europe, it has frequently been seen in the past on Mediterranean shores and in Italy, wherever the strawberry tree grows. Even the
Danaidæ
have been discovered in Italy. A hundred years ago, I grant you, but I may find another. The monarch. The rare
Danaus chrysippus
.’

‘Meagre creatures. You should go to Java.’ He pronounces it Yarvah, like a Jewish festival. ‘There are butterflies as big as birds.’

‘I live in Italy,’ I confide in him, ‘because the wine is cheap, the women beautiful and the rent low. At my age such things are important. I have no pension.’

He pours more wine, Lacrima di Gallipoli. My glass balances unsteadily on an Everyman edition of Darwin’s
Voyage of the Beagle
which Galeazzo has read and knows intimately: his glass teeters on an edition of Ciano’s diary, also in English. He claims to be named after Count Ciano but I believe this to be romantic piffle. The wine he purchases on his book-buying forays to Apulia. Somewhere on the heel of Italy he knows of a library which he can raid from time to time. I try to suss out this seemingly endless supply of cosmopolitan editions. It gives me the opportunity to steer the conversation away from butterflies, of which I have only enough knowledge to fool the casual listener. Put me in a room with even an amateur lepidopterist and he will see through my sham in minutes.

‘Where do you get your books from?’ I ask for the umpteenth time. ‘You never cease to amaze me with your range.’

He smirks secretively and taps his temple with his plastic ballpoint pen. The sound reminds me of Roberto testing a watermelon.

‘You would like to know! But does the man who owns the diamond mine tell his friends of its location? Of course not.’ He sips his wine. The base of the glass has made a ring upon the dust wrapper of the diary. ‘In the south. Far south. In the mountains there. An old lady, old as Methuselah’s mother-in-law and just as ugly. She has nothing. A few hectares of peach trees and some olives, just enough to press her own oil. Cloudy stuff her oil, and somehow gritty. She gave me some once: useless for salad, good only for preserving. Her peaches are stripped by caterpillars: if only you studied moths! So she has no harvest but books.’

‘How many hectares of books?’

‘Don’t be foolish! Drink your wine.’

I obey.

‘Her books are measured not in hectares but kilometres.’

‘So how many has she?’

‘No one can tell. I have yet to walk all her shelves.’

A few weeks ago, partly to allay any local gossip and strengthen my artistic credentials, I gave Galeazzo one of my paintings of
P. machaon
. He has, as I guessed he would, had it framed and hangs it prominently over the till where everyone can see it. This serves my purpose well. I am Signor Farfalla.

Signora Prasca has been very worried. She tells me so when I return. I said I would be away for two days and have been gone four. She has been most distressed in case her Signor Farfalla met with an accident on the autostrada, been mugged in Rome whither I told her I was going, been caught in the terrible thunderstorms whilst driving through the mountains. She fusses around me as I let myself into the courtyard and start up the stairs with my wooden box. In her hands she holds the four days’ accumulation of mail. It includes a postcard from Pet which I sent three days ago from Firenze.

I calm her fears. Rome was fine, I assure her. The storms did not reach the capital. The autostrada was free of water. Only tourists are mugged. I do not tell her I have been no nearer to Rome than the staircase I am mounting.

Do not attempt to guess where I have been. It is not for you to know and I shall give you no clues. Suffice to say I picked up a Socimi 821, a good-quality German telescopic sight with Zeiss optics and an assortment of other bits and pieces for under eight thousand US dollars. The sight was a low-light model, too. Just in case. The profit margin on this job will be good.

The task at hand is not as difficult as I first imagined it might be. There will be little actual fabrication involved, less Bach. I was extremely lucky in being able to obtain a barrel. You need not know the details. No inventor or craftsman divulges his secrets.

When this job is done, I might sell you the information. If you want to enter the business. When I am gone there will be very few others to carry on the art. I know of only two freelance – how shall I put it? – specialist gun merchants. One of those may well be dead by now. I have not heard of him for several years.

Perhaps he has retired. As I shall, after this final job.

It is a pity, really. I had hoped my final project would be much harder than this is proving to be. Another briefcase rifle, perhaps a dart gun inside a typewriter. Miniaturization is the name of the game these days: laptop computers, digital watches, PDAs, heart pacemakers, mobile phones the size of a cigarette pack. Evolution will have to start shortening and thinning our fingers.

An umbrella gun would be a challenge. Of course, it has been done. The Bulgarians used one on a dissident, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978. A 1.52 mm pellet was fired by compressed gas into the target’s thigh. The pellet was a masterpiece of microengineering long before the superchip was laser-cut from a silicon sliver the thickness of a human hair, or whatever other miracle dimensions are involved. It was spherical and cast from an alloy of platinum and iridium. Two .35 mm holes drilled into it led to a minuscule central reservoir filled with ricin, a poison obtained from the castor oil plant and unconquered by the antidote-makers. Two weeks before, the Bulgarians had used the same weapon unsuccessfully upon another so-called undesirable, one Vladimir Kostov, in Paris. He survived.

The concept of the weapon was brilliant: perfect disguise, astonishing projectile, simplicity itself. Two seconds and it was all done. Two seconds to change the world and end it for the target. The sadness here was that the poison was slow. Markov took three days to die. That is not a beautiful death, that is a fox-hunter death.

The bullet is the better way.

There are some modifications to make to the Socimi. The longer barrel will have to be fitted. This is not too difficult. Merely a matter of milling and lathe-work. The barrel is simply attached with a nut and will allow easy dismantling and reassembly. I shall have to adjust the connector, only a tiny amount, to make the trigger lighter. My customer, I suspect, has a light finger despite the firm grip.

The stock will need to be reshaped completely. The present one is too short. It is ideal for a spray gun, but not for an exact weapon with a scope on top. I shall build another. I have to thread the muzzle for the sound suppressor, which will take a while. One has to turn the thread-cutter so carefully, so slowly.

The barrel I have obtained is already rifled: six lands. I have not fired it and shall have to bed it down, so to speak. It is a technical business. I do not intend to burden you with the jargon of gunsmithing. Just be assured the job will be done to the highest tolerances, to the most precise specifications, to the best standard to be found anywhere in the world.

I am a craftsman. It is a pity my craftsmanship will be used only the once, like a McDonald’s plastic-foam hamburger box, but that is the lot of craftsmen these days. We are fast disappearing in a world of the throwaway. Perhaps that is why we experts tend to seek each other out – why I often look for what I need from Alfonso, why I go to him now.

Alfonso’s garage is in the Piazza della Vagna. It is a cavernous space beneath a seventeenth-century merchant’s house. Where he repairs Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Lancias there were once stored silks from China, cloves from Zanzibar, dried dates from Egypt, gemstones from India and gold from wherever there was gold to be stolen, bartered or murdered for. Now the place reeks of gearbox oil, the shelves lined with tools, boxes of nuts, bolts and spare parts, most of them secondhand and many retrieved from crashes attended with the breakdown truck. The lights are garish neon strips. In the corner, like a household shrine, blinks the computerized tuning machine. The blip on the oscilloscope screen zigzags as if registering the death wheeze of a dying engine block. It reminds me of sickness.

Alfonso calls his business a hospital. Ill cars arrive and leave healthy. He does not speak of a damaged Mercedes. For him, the vehicle is ‘wounded’ in a battle with a Regata. ‘Wounded’ sounds noble. The Regata on the other hand is merely ‘injured’. He holds Fiats in contempt, declaring them to be rust buckets. A few weeks ago he told me that he saw a ‘dead’ Lamborghini on the autostrada south of Florence. Nearby was a ‘slightly hurt’ articulated Scania lorry. Alfonso is the Christiaan Barnard of the BMW, the Fleming of the Fiat. For him, a socket spanner is a scalpel, a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench delicate instruments of surgery.

‘
Ciao
, Alfonso!’ I greet him. He looks sideways at me from beneath the hood of a Lancia.

‘She is lazy,’ he declares and thumps his hand against the inside of the wheel arch. ‘This old Roman woman . . .’ he nods in the direction of the number plate ‘. . . can’t climb hills no more. Time she had new blood.’

For Alfonso, blood is oil, food is fuel, plasma is hydraulic fluid, a coat of paint is a dress or a smart suit. Filler or undercoat is invariably panties or bra, depending on the positioning of the repair.

I require some pieces of iron. Steel, preferably. Alfonso keeps scrap lying all over the place. Nothing cannot be recycled by him. Once, I heard tell, he welded the burner rings of an old gas stove into the floor of a baby Fiat that had rotted through. The owner knew no different and the car went on burbling about the valley for years until the brakes failed on a bend. They say the car was a write-off but the burner rings did not so much as buckle.

He waves his hand in the general direction of the shelves. His gesture implies take what you want, help yourself, my garage is your garage, what are a few scraps of steel between friends.

Behind an oil pan with a jagged hole in it I discover several off-cuts of steel: then I find three gear wheels with the teeth sheared off. I hold the biggest up.

‘
Bene
?’ I ask.

‘
Si! Si! Va bene!
’

‘
Quant’è?
’

He growls at me and grins.

‘
Niente!
’

Nothing. We are friends. A gear wheel with no bite is useless to him. What do I want it for, he asks. A doorstop, I reply. He says it is heavy and should make a good one.

I wrap it in a sheet of oily newspaper and take it home. Signora Prasca is on the telephone. I can hear her chattering away like a parrot.

In my apartment, I put the Bach on loud. Then I take it off. I put on my latest purchase, the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture. As the French artillery repulses the Russians, I smash the wheel into five pieces with a four-pound mallet.

I am death’s telegram boy, death’s kissogram. And that is the beauty of it. In my line of business, everything I do flows uncompromisingly towards one tiny moment, a final destination of perfection. How many artists can claim as much?

The painter finishes his painting and steps back. It is done, the commission met. The picture goes to the framer and from him to the owner. Months later, the artist sees it hanging in his patron’s home and he notices a tiny error. A bee on a flower has only one antenna. Perhaps an oak leaf is the wrong shape. The perfection is imperfect.

Take a writer: for months he strives upon a story, finishes it, sends it to his publisher. It is edited, rewritten, copy-edited, set, proof-read, corrected, printed. A year later it stands in the bookshops. The reviewers have praised it. The readers are buying it. The writer skips through his free copy. The gravel driveway to his hero’s Malibu beach house in Chapter 2 has mysteriously been paved by Chapter 37. The whole is flawed.

Yet for me, this does not occur. Save just that once. There will come a time when my endeavours succeed. The chain of events which starts with the shattering of a steel gear will culminate in two seconds of action. The finger will tighten, the trigger will move, the connector will shift, the sear will rise, the slide will move, the bolt lock go up, the hammer will hit the firing pin, which will strike the cartridge, the explosion will happen and the bullet will travel to the heart or the head and the perfection be complete. Everything happens to a logical, preordained and flawless design.

Such a choreography, and I am the dancing master of this ballet towards eternity. I am the accomplisher, the cause, the first step and the last step, the producer and director.

In collaboration with my client, I am the greatest impresario on earth, the Barnum of bullets, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of assassination, the D’Oyly Carte of death. Together, we choose the method and I make it possible. I write the libretto, I write the score. My client chooses the theatre but I dress the stage. I am the spotlights and the backdrop, I am the director. My client is half the cast. You can guess who the other player is in this drama.

My client is my puppet. I am no different from the puppeteer in front of the church of San Silvestro. I entertain. I put on perhaps the biggest show on earth. But my puppet does not have a precocious penis to pop up. It has an adapted Socimi 821 and a clip of 9 mm specials.

What I like so much about this play, this tragicomedy of fate, is that I have a say in the method, the place, the moment. How many people can state unequivocally when they shall die, where and how? Only the suicide can be certain and he cannot be sure, not one hundred per cent, that someone will not come along and cut him down, or drag him from the water, or pump the pills out of his stomach or switch the gas off and open wide the windows. Let in the life again. How many know, are irrefutably certain, when and in what place another will die, shuffle off the mortal coil? The assassin knows. It is this that makes him God.