The American (28 page)

Higher up the castle interior are the grander buildings. Here were the lord’s apartments, now destroyed completely, here a small chapel of which only the altar remains, cracked and subdued by the weather. In winter, this place is under snow. In summer, as now, the sun beats down as mercilessly as a plague fever.

At the highest point is a fortification. It, too, has all but crumbled away. Yet here the curtain wall is low, not from time’s ravages, but from choice. Here there is no need for a wall at all. The cliffs suffice.

I lean carefully over, sure to have a firm handhold on the pliable but strong trunk of a woody bush. It is a sheer drop from my chin to a village below, tucked in against the base of the cliff. If I were to throw a stone outwards, it would surely arc out and hit a rooftop. I can see the pantiled roofs spread below me like a crazy patchwork, like the bleak fields of East Anglia, but painted reddish and viewed from an aircraft. The campanile of the church is not a tower but a protuberance. The village piazza is a dusty oblong upon which children no bigger than mites are riding bicycles. In the streets, in the shadows, a cube moves. I see the vehicle yet no sound rises.

I stand erect, step back from the brink a pace or two. From here, the whole of the valley is in view. I can see the town, far off to my left, squatting on its hump of hill like an Italian Jerusalem. I can just make out the dome of S Silvestro and can judge the whereabouts of my apartment: somewhere in the haze lies my temporary home and the Socimi.

The builders of this place were like me. They controlled death. In the valley below, on the mountains behind, nothing stirred without their knowledge or consent, nothing lived save by their concurrence. Their enemies were treated with chivalry. Imprisonment was dishonourable. It was better to die. They killed and were killed, swiftly, with the vengeance of their gods bunched in their fists and forged into their steel. There was not a sword, not a spearhead, not a quiver of arrows or a crossbow in this whole place which was not blessed at the altar.

I sit on a flat-topped boulder and swing my rucksack to the ground. A skink rustles through the tough grass and dead leaves. I see its tail flick under a stone.

For all intents and purposes, I am come home. Whatever I may say to Father Benedetto about the role of history – and he says to me – I have to admit this much: I am part of the process. It is just that I do not allow it to affect me. I accept I owe allegiance, owe precedent to the men who lived here once, to the ghosts who inhabit these walls and tangles of branches. They, too, were a part of the process.

For them, they were not shaping history, not letting it shape them. They thought only of today and the consequence of it upon tomorrow. What was done, was done. They existed to see things improved.

This is just what I am doing. Seeing things improve. Through change. Through the young lady in the skirt with my handiwork pressed to her shoulder and her eye to the scope. The future is, as youths say these days, where it’s at. I cause where it’s at to happen.

There is a great debt due to me, to the young lady. Without us, things would never change. Not truly. Not drastically. And drastic change is what moulds the future, not the gradual, tidy metamorphosis of government and law. Only floods cause the building of arks; only volcanic eruptions the making of islands; only epidemics the discovery of wonder drugs.

Only assassination alters the world.

And so I acknowledge now, in this place, high in the mountains of the Old World where the dreams began, where bees make smoky honey in the ruins and the lizards scuttle, where the birds wheel in the mountain updraughts and the thermals of the plain, the debt I in turn owe to men who blazed the trail of the spear, the trail of the sword and the gun.

I open the rucksack and spread upon the rock beside me a meagre picnic. This is no feast such as I took to the alpine meadow. Just a hunk of bread, some pecorino, an apple and a half-full bottle of red wine.

I break the bread as if it is the host of some long-forgotten god, some pagan deity. This is not the white fine bread of Rome or London but a local loaf, brown as the desiccated earth and just as gritty with wheat-seed and the occasional husk which escaped the winnowing. I bite into it and then, in the same mouthful, snap off a fragment of the cheese. It is hard going on the jaw but satisfying. Before I swallow, I take a swig of the wine. It too is local: not the magnificent vintage of Duilio but a coarse crude liquid better only than vinegar. I masticate these flavours in my mouth and swallow hard.

This is what they ate, the men of the castle. Hard food for hard men, crude wine for fighters. I am only maintaining the custom.

Surely this is all I do, me and the girl. Maintain an accepted practice, remove those of power so power may be shared, reassessed, reassimilated. And, in time, when the power has corrupted, redistribute it once more.

Without the likes of the girl and my technology, society would stagnate. There would be no change save through the gradations of politics and the ballot box. That is most unsatisfactory. The ballot box, the politician, the system can be corrupted. The bullet cannot. It is true to its belief, to its aim, and it cannot be misinterpreted. The bullet speaks with firm authority, the ballot box merely whispers platitudes or compromise.

She and I are the vehicles of change, we are the lions of the veldlands of time.

I do not consume all my picnic. After a few mouthfuls, I stop and spread the food on the ground – the bread with the cheese beside it. On to the parched earth beside the food, I pour the wine. The bottle empty, I toss it on to the rocks. It shatters in the sunlight like brief water. The sound of breaking glass is barely audible in the heat.

This, then, is my libation, my offering at the temple of death.

I quarter the apple with my pocket knife. It is very tart. After the rough wine, its acids seem to skin my teeth. I throw the segments of core into the bushes. Many years hence, perhaps, there shall fall a harvest of apples in the castle.

Already, a thin stream of ants has discovered the food. Their tiny mandibles are at work on the bread. They are the ghost army. In each insect dwells the spirit of a man of this castle. They are carrying away the crumbs to stockpile just as the soldiers here stored loot within the caverns of the rocks.

I move across to a spot from which I can survey the entire valley, across which the mountain summits are rising to meet the gathering afternoon clouds. The villages are becoming wraithed in a dusty haze now the sun is lowering its angle through the air. A thread is moving through the valley. It is a train. Minutes later, as it pulls out of a wayside halt, I hear the blow of the horn warning of its arrival.

The forests below the snowline are darkening. The trees are changing from their daytime lazy green to a deeper, more sombre hue, as if night brings them out to discuss serious problems with each other: they are like the old men who gather at the village bars in the dusk to reminisce and regret.

The roads are busy. The sun is too low to strike off the windscreens but the main routes are a line of motion, like the convoy of ants now working on my offering of bread and cheese. On the road into the village tucked under the cliffs there are cars. They are being held up by a motorized farm plough chugging along at a sedate, rural pace. A horse and cart passes it. I see the rachis of filthy smoke pumped out by its exhaust into the still evening. The sun is catching the rocky slopes of the high mountains. They look old and grey yet they are young mountains, still growing, still flexing their muscles like adolescents arm-wrestling, reminding the men in these mountains of their frail fallibility.

There is a noise beyond the bushes behind me. It is a soft noise, like a quiet laugh. I am instantly alert. It is at these times, when the job is virtually done and the customer ready for the next and final rendezvous, the dangers occur of double-cross, of betrayal. Those who are my clients carry no references, no credentials, no papers, no identification. There is always the risk they might not be as they seem. So much in my world is dependent upon instinctive trust.

And then there is the shadow-dweller.

I slip nimbly to the rucksack and from the outside strapped pocket remove my Walther P5. Mine is a Netherlands police-issue model. I thumb the de-cocking lever and, hunched over, move towards the ruins of a building in which is growing a sweet chestnut tree. The spiky orbs are filling on the branches. It will be a good nut harvest.

I am at the end of my trespass upon earth. If there are a hundred of them – and a whole brigade of
carabinieri
are more likely than two or three: it is the way Italians do things – then I shall take some of them with me across the Styx. But if there are just a few, and these are not Italian but British, or American, or Dutch, or Russian, then I stand a chance; they are trained in the schools and on the ranges of their services. I was trained in the streets. If this is the shadow-dweller, however, things might be different again.

I cannot believe he has found me here. I was not followed out of the town, across the valley, up the mountain roads. They twist and cavort like serpents and, at each twist, I looked back down the way I had come. There was nothing – not a blue Peugeot, not so much as a farmer’s motorized plough.

There is no human sound. Now, I am acutely aware of every noise. The murmuring, sawing crickets are raucous: the lizards scuttle as if played through stereo headphones. I can pinpoint every source of sound. My pulse is the loudest.

I edge very slowly forward. There is a jag-topped wall before me. I study it for loose stones, branches which may snap underfoot, a bird which might disclose my position.

Then I hear it again, a mumbled voice. It is Italian. I do not comprehend the words, but recognize the tonal quality. There is no reply. Orders are being given.

If I can get to the tunnel, I shall be safe until they bring in dogs. I look at the sun. Unless they have them already present as a precaution, it will be dark before then and I shall be clear away.

There is a hole in the wall. Beyond it I can see a screen of chestnut branches. I decide to risk a glance and move forward on my knees, slowly, like a hesitant penitent. I can see nothing. Not a movement. No olive-green flak jacket, no dark uniform or shiny peak of cap. As my face nears the hole, more of the interior of the building and the trunk of the chestnut come into view.

The ground around the tree is covered in short grass. It might have been cropped by sheep and kept irrigated, so close and verdant is it. It is an oasis in the centre of a desolation of fallen stone.

There is the voice again. It seems to be coming from immediately under the hole in the wall. To put my head through the stones would be extremely foolish. Instead, I half stand and, checking to left and right to ensure I am not being outflanked, look downwards.

On the grass are two lovers. She lies on a green carpet of grass and leaves, her skirt around her waist, her legs apart. She is so close to me I can see the soft down on her belly and her fuzzy black V. He is standing a metre away, removing his trousers. He drops them to the ground beside her slip and knickers. He takes his underpants off and, as they reach his foot, he flips them upwards into his hands. The girl, watching this, laughs lightly. He lowers himself upon her and her arms encircle his waist, tugging his shirt up and pulling him down. His white buttocks contrast with the tan of his legs and the small of his back. He starts to move them from side to side.

They are oblivious to everything, the tree with its prickle fruit like tiny sins, the bird calling at their presence, the rustle of the lizards and scratching of the cicadas and grasshoppers. If the whole garrison of the castle were to return from the Crusades at this very moment, they should not notice it.

I move back from the wall. I am not a voyeur. This is not how I get my kicks, thrill my senses.

Was it not Leonardo da Vinci who said, quite astutely, that the human race would become extinct if every member of it could see themselves having sex? There is something ludicrous in the sight of lovers screwing. There is no beauty in the thrusting buttocks and grinding thighs. There is an urgent animal delight, but this is not beautiful, merely absurd. All that is beautiful about sex is that, for as long as it lasts, it appears you are shaping the world. They believe, those two, that they are approaching their own Armageddon, their own glorious final sunset, their private nirvana.

This is the fallacy of sex. It seems at the time that one is so utterly indestructible, so completely omnipotent, so totally in control of the whole world. Yet one cannot control the world. One can only change it. Most people do not realize this. They are fast in the big sleep, lulled by politicians and power brokers, by guardians of law and ranks of the judiciary, by game-show hosts and soap-opera stars, by lottery winners and ministers of faith: any faith, any god, the dollar or pound or yen, cocaine or the credit card. Most of those who realize their ability make no effort to exercise it.

I am not one of those, the power dreamers, the waiters on chance. Nor is my lady client. We cannot control the world. We can change it. We are not in the conspiracy of the big sleep. And change is, I allow, a form of vicarious control.

There are other voices now, from elsewhere in the ruins. The lovers, who are finished, kiss and unhurriedly dress. Another couple appear, holding hands. They all know each other and talk light-heartedly but in subdued tones.

I thumb the decocking lever again, pocket the pistol, go swiftly to my rucksack, grab it and head for the tunnel. A glance towards the castle gate shows the bars have been levered further apart: beside the grille, tucked under a bush, is a small hydraulic car jack.

I am out of the castle and back at the Citroën before the four romantics appear from the direction of the main gate, cautiously, watching out for a vehicle they may recognize.

‘Good afternoon,’ I say, politely and in English.

The men nod at me and the girls smile sweetly.