The American (16 page)

The grass is long, the trees offer deep shade. Everywhere there is a profusion of wild meadow flowers. I have never seen anywhere so beautiful, so utterly uncorrupted: delicate yellows and mauves, brash whites, harsh and brilliant crimsons, exquisite blues. The field is as if an artistic god has spattered it with colour, shaken his dripping brush over the lush emerald of the valley. The ground is firm but there is water here and everything thrives. The air is humming with insects, bees fumble the long-stemmed mountain clover. Small butterflies of species I do not recognize dart up as my feet disturb them.

My ankle boots affording protection against vipers, I start to scramble up towards the houses. I cannot set about my business until I am certain no one comes here. Possibly there is another, easier way to this valley from the south-west, and the houses are frequented by lovers seeking a remote, romantic spot.

Quickly, I pass from one ruin to the next. No signs of recent disturbance. No soot marks upon the stones, no campfire circles, no discarded tins and bottles, no condoms hanging in the bushes. From beside the end building, I survey the valley with the binoculars. There are no signs of recent human activity.

Assured I am sharing this place only with the insects, birds and wild boar – for there are trotter prints in a muddy rill leading to the lake – I return to the Citroën and drive down into the valley, swaying over stones hidden in the grass. I turn the car to face the way I have come and park it under the shade of a squat but ample walnut, laden with half-formed nuts, close to where I left the trees. I remove the knapsacks.

It takes approximately one hundred and fifty seconds to assemble the bastardized Socimi. I rest it on the driver’s seat and unroll the length of flannel in which I have forty rounds. I press ten into the magazine, slotting it into the base of the hand grip. I snuggle the butt into my shoulder, putting my eye to the rubber cup on the telescopic sight. Carefully, I survey the pond.

My hand is not as steady as it was. I am getting older. My muscles are too used to moving or, if they are immobile, to relaxing. To be still and tensed is no longer a skill over which I have complete mastery.

Being sure I am in the shade of the walnut, I rest the gun on the car roof and aim at a clump of reeds on the far side of the pond. Very gently, I hold my breath and squeeze the trigger as if it was one of Clara’s insignificant but supple breasts.

There is a brief put-put-put sound. Through the sight I watch the water churn at four o’clock to the reed clump and perhaps four metres off.

From the knapsack I take a watchmaker’s steel-handled screwdriver and adjust the sight. I load another ten rounds into the magazine. Put-put-put! The reeds are clipped, the bullets slapping into the bank behind. I can see the mud spurt tinily. I adjust again and reload. Put-put-put! The reed clump is shot to shit. Feathers drift upon the breeze. There must have been a waterbird’s nest there, deserted now for it is late in the summer and the breeding season is over, the chicks on the wing.

Satisfied, I dismantle the Socimi, returning it to the knapsack which I lock in the boot. There are a few modifications to be made yet, a few refinements to be considered. The sound suppressor must be made a little more efficient and the connector filed down further. The trigger still takes a little too much pressure. Yet, overall, I am smugly pleased with myself.

I spread a blanket upon the grass, lay out my picnic, open the Frascati and eat and drink. The meal over, I collect up the spent cartridge cases, put them in my pocket, walk down into the meadow and sketch and colour over two dozen different flowers. Signora Prasca will need to see the evidence of my excursion.

By the lake, I idly toss the used shell casings, one by one, into the lake. As the last hits the surface, a big fish rises to its brassy gleam.

Clara has given me a gift. It is nothing grand, a tiepin made of base metal coated with fake gold. It is about four centimetres long with a spring-loaded clip on the back bearing little serrated teeth. In the centre of the gold-coloured bar is an enamel coat of arms. It is that of the town and contains features of the Visconti crest within it. The Viscontis, according to a printed slip in the presentation box, poorly printed in English, French, German and Italian, once held the town and most of the surrounding countryside. This makes it an appropriate present for me, although Clara cannot know this: the Viscontis were past masters of the arts of assassination, grand viziers of the game of killing. Indeed, for them, it was a way of life. Or death.

The manner of her giving me this memento was, to say the least, surreptitious, although whether from shyness or the fear of a taunting from Dindina I cannot tell. She slipped it into the pocket of my jacket either when it lay over the back of the chair in our room in the Via Lampedusa or when we were in the pizzeria. I did not find it until after Dindina had left us, giving me her customary public peck on the cheek.

‘Look in your pocket,’ Clara instructed me.

I felt for the inner pocket of my jacket. This was a natural action for me. I never put anything in the outer for fear of pickpockets. Clara laughed scornfully.

‘Not inside. In your pocket.’

I tapped my jacket and felt the box.

‘What is this?’

I was genuinely surprised. I would never, under normal circumstances, have left myself so open. It is nothing to slip three ounces of Semtex and one of those minuscule detonators into a coat. I have known two people go to their maker in such a fashion: it is another of the skills accredited to the Bulgarians. Or was it Romanians? Maybe Albanians. All the Balkan
ians
are alike when it comes down to it, devious bastards with an instinctive deceitfulness born of centuries of invasion, inbreeding and survival subterfuge.

I took the box out and looked at it. If Clara had not been my mistress and standing close to me, if she had looked ready to bolt, I should have tossed the box as far as I could and thrown myself down on the cobbles. Or, perhaps, I would have thrown the box at her, at her feet. On reflection, that is probably what I would have done. Survival and retribution are not the property of the Balkan peoples alone.

‘
Dono. Regalo
. A – a pre-sent. For you.’

She was smiling at me, the light from a street lamp casting pretty shadows across her face and highlighting her cleavage. She was, I could see, also blushing.

‘This is not necessary.’

‘No. Of course. Not necessary. But it is from me. For you. Why do you not open it?’

I lifted the lid of the box which was hinged with a little spring. The historical explanation fluttered to the ground. My heart missed a beat, my every nerve taut. She bent and picked it up.

The tiepin shone in the lamplight. I moved it to and fro to make it glisten.

‘It is just a small trinket.’

She must have been practising the words for she spoke them perfectly, not dividing the noun into its syllables.

‘This is very sweet of you, Clara,’ I smiled, ‘but you should not spend your money so. You need it.’

‘Yes. But also . . .’

I leaned forward and kissed her just as Dindina had kissed me. Clara put her hand on the nape of my neck and twisted her face into mine, her lips pressing against my own. She held me for a long moment, her lips not moving, not opening to let her tongue push into me.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said as she let me go.

‘For what?’

‘For this tiepin and such a firm kiss.’

‘These are both because I love you, so much.’

I made no reply. There was nothing I could say. She looked into my eyes for a few seconds and I could tell she was pleading in her soul for me to return her love, to say the emotion was mutual, binding, wonderful. Yet I could not. It would not be fair to her.

She turned, not huffily but a little sadly, and walked away.

‘Clara,’ I called softly after her.

She stopped and looked over her shoulder. I held the box up.

‘I shall treasure this,’ I said, and that much was the truth.

She smiled and answered, ‘I shall see you again. Soon. Tomorrow?’

‘The day after. I must work tomorrow.’

‘
Bene!
The next day!’ she exclaimed and walked off with a light step.

Clara loves me. This is not a fallacy but a stark truth. She does not love me as Dindina does, for the lust and the experience and the pocket money, but for what I am, or what she thinks I am. And this is where the fallacy begins.

Her love is a complication. I cannot really allow it, cannot risk it. I do not want to bring her misery, nor do I want to deceive myself. Yet I have to admit to myself that I feel for her: if not love, then certainly a fondness. Her cheap tiepin has increased this sentiment, this dangerous weakness getting into me and worrying me.

I watched her go and made my way home with feelings of anxiety.

Everyone needs a refuge, be it from a spouse or a monotonous job, an objectionable situation or a dangerous enemy. It need not be far off. Indeed, it is often best if it is not. The rabbit, when startled, often stops stock-still before diving for the warren. This can be his error yet it can also save him. A well-placed tussock can be as advantageous as a well-dug tunnel. The hunter expects the rabbit to go subterranean. If he remains on the surface, he may still remain undetected, for his continued presence above ground is not anticipated. The Polish have a card game called, I seem to recall,
gapin
. It means one who looks but does not see. The rabbit is a
gapin
player par excellence.

In searching for just such a tussock, I yesterday discovered a church not far from the town in which resides one of the most astounding works of art I have ever been privileged to view.

There is no way under the sky to force me to share the knowledge with you. I may be a rabbit after all and hold a good hand. Perhaps I should do as
Charaxes jasius
does: squat low and close my wings, be a dead leaf, lie low. I should then at least be living up to my name.

The church is no bigger than an eighteenth-century English coach house. It stands next to a barn from which it is detached by a lane scarcely wide enough for my Citroën, definitely too narrow for, say, a
carabinieri
Alfa Romeo. Even in the Citroën, I had to fold in the side-view mirror to squeeze the vehicle through.

I went to the place because the farmhouse beside the church was for sale. A sun-warped board was nailed to the wall, with
Vendesi
written crudely upon it in pink distemper. The paint had run like the blood flowing from the stigmata, drying in the fierce heat of the sun before it could reach the bottom of the board.

Knocking upon the door, I received no reply. The windows were firmly shuttered, as if the building had closed its eyes tight against the glaring sun. It was a baking hot day. Grass and weeds grew against the wall. I went round to the back. There was a straw-strewn courtyard of square cobbles and a near-derelict barn. From the smell, cattle were lodged there. A crabby hen scratched in the debris of a broken-open bale of hay from which protruded several three-pronged pitchforks. Upon my approach, the fowl clucked its vehement annoyance at my intrusion and flew clumsily into the rafters.

The back door was ajar. I knocked again. No response. Carefully, I edged the door wider open.

It was not that I was afraid or suspicious. I had told no one where I was going: I might have been in the Piazza del Duomo buying cheese. Yet one never knows when the end might come, when someone else, holding hands with fate or the butt of a Beretta 84, decides the time has come.

Quite often, rising in the dawn hour to dress and commence my work, I let my mind weigh up the odds. Not those of surviving the day, the week, the month: they are too long to estimate. I consider the chances of the method of my death. A bomb is always possible but only if a client decided I need rubbing out, can or would identify him, talk under torture or sodium pentothal: there is a code of honour in my world, but many do not trust it. I rate odds against a bomb at, say, twenty to one. A bullet is much more likely. Generally, three to one. There can be side bets on this one, to increase the profitability of the gamble. Take the rifle or machine-gun bullet. Long odds on a 5.45 mm. My stalking angel, for this is how I think of my assassin, may be a Bulgarian but they prefer umbrellas, as I have indicated. Shorter odds on a
5.56
x 45 mm: that covers the Americans, the Ml6 and the Armalite combat rifle. I would offer you six to one. Evens for the 7.62 mm NATO round. Where handguns are concerned, there is no bet. If bullet it is to be, then the 9 mm Parabellum is the most likely one, the enforcer of treaties and the settler of old scores. Odds on my dying of disease, a car accident, unless the vehicle was tampered with, a self-administered drug overdose, are slim. Death by boredom is always a possibility but unquantifiable and so therefore not open for a wager.

The farmhouse was uninhabited, at least by humans. The parlour-cum-kitchen contained a wrought-iron stove, the door welded by rust, a chair with no seat and a rickety table which had plainly been used in recent times as an execution block for the beheading of the scrawny hen’s cousins. Two other downstairs rooms were empty of all but dust and fallen plaster. The stairs were rotten. I trod cautiously, close to the wall. Each step creaked ominously, painfully even. At the top were three rooms. One had a bed-frame in it, the springs awry and tangled. In another, a cat had recently kittened. The mother was absent, but the blind offspring mewed piteously as they sensed my foot upon the floor. From the third was a view of the valley, the Citroën and an old man studying my insurance and licence dockets on the windscreen.

Holding on to the wall, trying not to put my full weight on each complaining step for more than a split second, I went down the stairs and out into the yard. The old man was standing there. He was not antagonistic. He assumed there was nothing a man who drives a seven-month-old Citroën 2CV would wish to steal.

‘
Buon giorno
,’ I said.