The Namesake (31 page)
‘She is a good woman. Her husband is a decent and simple man whom I trust. Tony is my honoured companion abroad. Individually, every Megale is a close friend. Collectively . . . I want you to be prepared when the time comes. Promise me that?’
‘I promise,’ said Ruggiero.
Locri
Enrico Megale, in the guise of a fat infant, was standing in a garden of roses, slicing at the branches of a short tree, which bled as it was cut. Thirteen men lay at its feet, thirteen was the number of branches . . . Someone was shaking him, and his dream slipped under his pillow. He tried to grab it with his hands, but the person shook him harder, and then unexpectedly kissed him.
‘Ruggiero?’ said his mother’s voice.
He knew immediately from the tremor in her voice that fear had taken hold of her.
‘We’re going to make a surprise visit to my sister in Catanzaro,’ she said. ‘And then maybe we’ll travel up north to do some shopping. Rome. We could go to Florence.’
The clock beside his bed told him it was 3:30. Wearily, knowing that whatever his mother had planned was not going to work, he climbed out of bed and sat staring at his feet.
‘Get dressed as quick as you can, and come downstairs, quietly,’ said his mother.
She was his mother, so he did as he was told. Reaching around in the dark, he grabbed the same clothes he had been wearing the day before. They felt a bit sticky and cold going on. He had changed his underpants and socks, which were the important things. He turned on the light and blinked at the brightness. His father might have called and told them to flee. His father was courageous but also practical and despised acts of bravado. ‘You are worth more than the fool brandishing a knife in public, showing off on his motorbike. Let him end up with his own knife in his throat, his skull fractured by a car. You have a duty to preserve yourself.’
The upshot of that reasoning was that, like Enrico, he was not allowed a scooter. His father’s philosophy and Zia Rosa’s womanish fears had the same result. But Ruggiero had a knife, which he did not brandish in public. It lay snug beneath his mattress at night.
Sitting on shelves were books and some soft toys that he thought he was saving for Robertino, but, he now saw, were already too old and faded for a new child. On his wall was the amaranth-coloured flag of Reggio Calabria, the only Calabrian football team ever to reach Serie A. In an approximation of the same red colour on a piece of paper he had written ‘Amaranto si nasce’. But in these parts, people were not really ‘born amaranth’. The team belonged to the other side of Aspromonte, where other families and other interests held sway.
A click and the light went off. He had not heard her come in.
‘Keep the lights off, love,’ said his mother who stood there with an empty suitcase in hand. ‘Are you ready?’
Ruggiero pulled on his shoes and watched as his mother, moving swiftly and quietly, added some of his clothes and a pile of battered storybooks that she used to read to him until Robertino was born.
He carried it downstairs for her, and was surprised to find Robertino sitting there in his baby bouncer, in gurgling serenity.
‘Robertino’s always awake and quiet at this time,’ said his mother, picking up on his surprise. She went over to the high chest of drawers in the corner of the room, and ran her hand over it like she did when looking for dust, only this time she did not examine her hand.
‘Did I ever tell you my parents gave me this? My father got it from his grandfather who got it from his father. It was made in the 1500s for the monks of the Abbey of San Giovanni in Fiore. It must be worth thousands. Go upstairs to your room, check to see if your bed is made.’
‘It is made.’
‘Well, go up again. Straighten the cover. Just make sure it’s perfect.’
‘Should I close the shutters on my bedroom window?’
‘No, keep your shutters open. Don’t close any shutters. I am going to put Robertino in the back of the car. You check your room, then come down. Pull the front door closed behind you.’
Ruggiero did as he was told. When he came down, the other two were already in the car. He shut the front door softly behind him. He climbed into the Fiat Panda next to his mother. The car was filled to brimming with jumper suits, little white T-shirts, baby bottles, toys, suitcases, plastic bags and bottles of water.
Behind him, the baby was asleep in a stroller bed that his mother had secured with a crisscrossing of all three seatbelts in the back. She turned around, gave him a smile of reassurance, then slid the key into the ignition and turned the key.
Nothing happened.
It was as if there had never been a connection between the ignition and the engine. She turned it again, but the only sound was the soft breaths of Robertino in the back, the squeak of the suspension as she leaned forward and made a third vain attempt.
Ruggiero plucked the house key out of his mother’s bag, which lay open on the seat between them, without her seeming to notice. He climbed out of the car and walked back towards the front door. His mother remained in the dark car, embracing the steering wheel.
Locri
Ruggiero eventually coaxed his mother out of the car, back into the house. Robertino had dozed off in the back seat, then woken up when moved, and was now in no mood for further transfers. He needed feeding, comforting, changing, cuddling, petting, lulling and laying down again.
As his mother carried out these rites, Ruggiero could see she was beginning to shake off the shock that had momentarily disabled her when the car would not start. In calming the baby, she had calmed herself. Even so, he felt the grip of her fear when, as he was passing, she suddenly grabbed him and held on to him, her hand hard like a claw, and said, ‘Get all our stuff out of the car and back into the house.’
Detaching himself, Ruggiero said, ‘So Papà’s in trouble and we must flee?’
She shook her head. ‘Something’s wrong. He called earlier, while you were asleep. He said he could not make the flight to Lamezia Terme, and might even miss the Polsi celebrations.’
‘He will never abandon us,’ said Ruggiero with total conviction.
‘Of course not,’ she said, her voice laced with doubt. ‘Will you please get the stuff out of the car back into the house? I’m going to lie down with Roberto now,’ and so saying she lifted the sleeping bundle, whose small fists were clenched in a communist salute, and took him upstairs.
Ruggiero went out the front door, leaving it slightly ajar. Closed or open made no difference. If they killed his father, they might come looking for his family, but then again they might not. If they failed to find his father, however, they would inflict pain on his family to punish him or draw him into the open. Who would the executioners be? Who would know in advance? Basile, obviously, since not a leaf stirred in the town without his say-so. Pepè and his family were likely to know, and any one of them, Pepè included, would be capable of pulling the trigger, plunging the knife, tightening the wire, igniting the blaze. Or, as his father had intimated, Enrico’s family, the Megales? Not Enrico, because he was weak. Never Zia Rosa. That left Pietro. Yes, Pietro could do it, but he would not be capable of working alone. Pietro needed to be told what to do.
Had his mother done something she should not have? She was acting fearful and seemed unable to find or bring comfort. She would never have gone to the police or anything like that, and her opportunities for an illicit affair were nil. Another possibility was that they were at the start of a new, wide-ranging feud. If it was a feud, the Curmacis would emerge as the winning faction: he could feel it. Soon he would command full respect from all of them. Magnanimous, he would extend protection to Enrico, set out rules for how young heirs to the Society should behave among themselves. Some of the old rules needed to be reinstated. The old stories needed to be heard again.
If his mother wanted to flee, then it was his filial duty to help. But to help her to the best of his ability implied seconding her intentions, not following misguided orders. So he walked by the car, ignoring his mother’s instructions to empty it. He had a better idea to try out first.
He left the overgrown front garden, which protected them from prying eyes, turned on to the unpaved and unlit side street, his thoughts as dark and deep as the night air. If there was a feud in the offing they needed allies, but Ruggiero had not registered any improvement in attitudes towards him. The afternoon in the bar without telephones had indicated the exact opposite. He had convinced himself that Enrico was the target, and the main point had been to teach Enrico not to be so soft and complacent. Before a large-scale feud, some people would change cafés, others would suddenly prefer one side of the street to the other, one petrol station to another, many would vanish. If there was a feud, some people would sit three-quarters turned from him, others would come up and warmly greet him in the street, make loud jokes and recommendations for all to hear, and move on. But no one had approached, no one had visited, and no one was offering friendship.
He arrived at Enrico’s rusty gate. He lifted the deadbolt and began edging the gate inwards, pausing after every creak and crunch. Enrico, Zia Rosa and Zio Pietro had a dog, a vicious, sheep-mauling, sly mongrel that had arrived when he and Enrico were still toddlers. The dog, never allowed in the house, spent most of its day running after traffic, yet had never been hit by a car. Its unnatural luck had been noted, especially since it was assumed that some people in the neighbourhood must have deliberately tried to crush the beast below their wheels and put an end to its reign of terror over small children and other dogs. The animal had every reason to like him more than Enrico who had never treated it with any kindness, but it was still capable of emerging from the prickly mesh of bush where it lived, and growling and baring its teeth, just to say it knew he could not have a legitimate reason for being here at this time of night. But no white fangs and shiny eyes appeared in the darkness. The beast was probably off killing chickens somewhere.
The car he was aiming for was parked directly in front of the kitchen window. It was an old, uninsured Fiat Ritmo, treated almost as badly by Zio Pietro as the dog. They used the old car to drive across fields and drag pieces of farm equipment around. When they wanted to arrive in style at church or in town, they drove the Range Rover with tinted windows and polished hubcaps that they kept locked in a cowshed.
The door on the driver’s side did not even close properly, let alone lock, but on opening it creaked almost as much as the gate. The kitchen window in front of him remained dark as did the window above that, where Zia Rosa and Zio Pietro slept in separate beds. Enrico’s room was on the other side of the house, overlooking a disused vineyard, defined by a line of crumbling cement posts linked by sagging wires.
Ruggiero climbed into the front seat, holding hard on to the door to stop it both from creaking open and from banging closed. He figured he could afford to slam it once he had the car out of the gate. Sometimes Zio Pietro left a few keys in the glove compartment, any one of which, with a bit of twisting and turning, could be used to turn on the ignition and engine: and there they were. Good. He would start the engine on the road outside, halfway between their gate and his own – or maybe he’d push the car down the last few yards of road as far as his own house, just to be on the safe side. The Ritmo had a shuddering motor that sounded like a two-stroke, and was audible from a distance. The important thing now was to freewheel quietly out of the gate on to the road. He eased the driver’s door inward towards himself with exaggerated care, and so when it struck the object that had invisibly interposed itself the impact, though soft, ran through him like an electric shock. The car door was being impeded by something heavy, dark and alive. Inches from his wrist a white smile of sharp teeth appeared at the same time as the dog growled.
Ruggiero felt his fear melt into rage, which ran down his arm as sweat, and he knew the dog would smell it and react.
‘Shh. It’s me. Shh. There’s a good boy, you lousy stinking filthy animal, get away from here.’ He put out his hand, and the dog growled again and bared its teeth. ‘Me,’ repeated Ruggiero. The dog growled again, and Ruggiero pushed his upturned wrist into the mouth so that one bite could split his veins. ‘Me. It’s me, the only human who ever loved you, you fucking evil beast.’
The dog pushed its head forward so that when it closed its mouth on Ruggiero’s hand it merely massaged it with its blunter back teeth. Ruggiero ran his hand against the side of the hot mouth and then slapped the animal on the side of the neck. ‘Stop it, good boy, now move.’
The dog backed away, vanishing almost at once, and Ruggiero released the handbrake and pressed down on the clutch. The car began to roll very slowly backwards, the driver’s door swung out and he pulled it in again. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of movement at the bedroom window. For a moment, he thought it was a reflection of the dog moving, but the image was pale, and the dog was dark. Besides the image had appeared on the second floor, at a height where the dog could not be. As the car gathered some speed and rolled away towards the gate, he imagined a face staring out at him from behind the glass, but he had to turn his head back to guide the car, which was moving faster than he had expected. It took all his force to avoid sideswiping the hanging gate. He spun the steering wheel to direct the car into the road, and the gravel below crackled and snarled beneath the bald tyres. Suddenly the steering column lock engaged, and the car, now losing speed, made a slow but inexorable turn towards the low wall. He braced for impact, but before he hit the wall, the back wheels dipped into a dry ditch, and Ruggiero was thrown backwards and then forwards, hitting the horn with his chest. The horn sounded for no more than half a second, but it was the loudest noise he had ever heard.