After Hannibal (22 page)

He brought the binoculars to bear on the stretch immediately below him, where the terraced land leveled out to the road, pale clay color now after the recent spell of dry weather. The poplars along the road were in full leaf and they fluttered in the light breeze. It was a complex interplay of branch and foliage that the binoculars showed him, arbitrary to the point of hallucination, full of movement and shadow and gloss, with depthless spaces here and there, leading him through the leaves into some radiant world beyond. There was no sign of any dark lump that might have been a warbler.

He moved the glasses in a long sweep over the silver gleam of the olives on the rising ground beyond the road and the rows of vines above them. Perspectives were confused by the nearness of things; the vines and olives meshed together in an intricate trellis of silver and green. At the far edge of vision, on his left, he saw Ritter emerge onto the track, walk a few paces, then stop suddenly and stand quite still with his head lowered. Dangling from his right hand a hooped blade, bright in the sunshine. It was a billhook, Chapman decided after some moments. Ritter must be doing some clearing of the ground.

This sudden, inexplicable immobility confirmed Chapman in the distrust he had felt on first meeting the German. He remembered
the vague eyes, the strange absence of possessions. The man was standing there as if transfixed. What could you make of a man who stopped like that for no apparent reason?

Chapman moved the binoculars away, reinforced in his sense of his own normality, his solidarity with the great majority of the human race. Lying there on an early summer day, under a vast and cloudless sky, dabbing at flies, clutching binoculars, he felt himself to be entirely reasonable. He was waiting for the defeat of his foes. Some were winners in life, some losers. He knew himself to be a winner.

The returning swing of the binoculars gave him a section of the Greens’ roof with the edges of the plastic sheet curling and rippling in the breeze. The Greens were losers. He focused again on the junction of the roads. The lorry would turn off, begin to descend, be brought up short by the stakes halfway down the slope, just below the Checchetti house. Chapman had not seen military service but he felt now like a commander, waiting in ambush with his troops. Hannibal, somebody like that. He had read in his guidebook about that long-ago battle on the northern shores of Trasimeno, how the Carthaginian commander had waited in hiding in the hills above the lake, watched while the Roman troops blundered into the trap. Just as he himself was waiting and watching now. Admittedly the scale was different, the Checchetti could hardly be called an army, except as stragglers from the shadowy host of those who had tried at one time or another to get the better of him, do him down, deny him his rights or his gains—two things often confused in his mind. But the feeling was the same; that elation Hannibal must have felt, he, Harold Chapman was feeling now, the sense of commanding
the heights, like an eagle. Of course, looked at another way, both he and the Checchetti were no more than little colored flags on the spacious map of another’s mind. Mancini was the Supreme Commander. But as he lay there Chapman was content with his role. He would be in at the kill, like Hannibal. He was well provisioned: there were a bottle of white wine and a cheese sandwich in his knapsack. He would lie there and think his thoughts and wait for the prophecies of the amazing Mancini to come true.

Ritter stood still for several minutes, holding the billhook loosely against his side. He had clambered from the gully to get his rake, which was lying some distance away at the edge of the road. But the act of emerging from the tangled slope to the fuller light and uncluttered space above had somehow stilled him, like an exposure. And in the first moments of this stillness a memory from his interpreting days had come to him. A conference in Singapore, ten years before, in the mid-eighties. He had gone as interpreter to the official dinner on the last evening of the conference.

Consecutive interpreting, not simultaneous. Perhaps that was why the memory of it had sprung to his mind so suddenly, coming with the sense of exposure he had felt on emerging from the gully. Consecutive interpreting, when one is alone and unscreened and in full view, speaking for two or three minutes at a time, had always given him a feeling of being overexposed, too much in the open; and this had intensified in the years just before his breakdown.

A private room in a tall building, high up. One wall was plate
glass, through which you could look down on the lights of the city. Someone was speaking after dinner. Which one was it? He could remember the people at the table only in their official functions: representatives of the Relief Agency, the pharmaceutical company, the Singapore government; and their jeweled, bare-shouldered wives. The faces of the men were all one face, benign, calmly prosperous. The words too were the same, whatever the mouth that uttered them, full of friendly sentiment. Heartfelt thanks to our hosts of the Relief Agency, who have made such dedicated efforts … If we had in places of trust more people of this caliber, I venture to suggest … Hear, hear! General euphoria and congratulation. And the reply from the Agency chief, Singapore Chinese—Ritter remembered his face now, shallow-set eyes, full mouth. See it as a privilege as well as a duty … But the true philanthropists are those who like my friends here are ready to accept financial loss in order to make these drugs available to the countries of the Third World …

One of the drugs was called Soronex. He had remembered the connection at that moment, while the Chinese was speaking, like the detail of a dream recalled unwillingly, wrenched into focus by some doleful sensation or event. Soronex. A medical conference in a gray northern city on the other side of the world, some six months before, the briefest of references. Under investigation, deleterious side effects, possible interference in the supply of sugar to the brain. Under investigation—that meant automatic suspension of marketing in countries where controls were enforced. But these were not the countries the Chinese was talking about.

Ritter thought again of the faces around the table. He had glanced aside at that moment of unwilling recall, seen a sudden
scatter of raindrops across the glass wall that divided them from the darkness outside. Every evening during his stay in Singapore the rain came just at this time, as if seeking still to nourish the roots of the lost forest buried beneath the great complex of banks and hotels and shopping precincts that is the modern city.

Well-fed and well-satisfied humanitarians sitting at the long table. The drug would be available at a much lower price. Quite frankly we have accepted substantial cuts in our profit margins. In India, for example, where gastric disorders are endemic, Soronex will be of great, of inestimable …

Nothing official yet, of course: tests on suspected drugs take a long time. But an unfavorable response expected. No further manufacture, naturally. A smooth switch in marketing to sell off stockpiles in the Third World. Some few at that dinner would have known; most would have guarded their ignorance carefully. Perhaps one or two genuine innocents.

Ritter began to move forward again, as if that possibility of innocence had released him. A medical conference in Brussels, a celebratory dinner in Singapore. Quite different people, no connection; but interpreters are wanderers, they move from conference to conference over the face of the earth, sometimes they see connections that were never intended to be seen. He had thought himself a mouthpiece for these people and others like them. But since his breakdown and illness he had understood that they too were merely conduits, that the stream had been fouled somewhere higher up, nearer the source, by other people making other speeches, or no speeches at all. His father too, he knew it now, nothing so dignified as a spokesman, a mouthpiece only.

He took the rake and returned to the gully. The cuttings he had made below the mouth of the cave had gathered into a mound, blocking his way; they had to be raked back before he could proceed farther. When this was done he was able to see into the cave more clearly. It went some two meters into the hillside, deep enough for a man to sleep in shelter. Leaf mold lay thickly over the mouth; but when this was swept away he discovered the ground to be clear and level. There was an old wine bottle, cracked at the neck, among mold and the loose earth at the entrance.

As he stood there with the bottle in his hands it seemed to him that the water running in the stream below sounded suddenly louder. He was near it now, there was only the final close-growing barrier of bramble and blackthorn, then the leaning, smothered poplars that lay just above the stream. He could see nothing of the water yet, the level had fallen in this drier weather, the course of the stream was still invisible.

He was in a green twilight here. Wild clematis had clambered up through the branches of the poplars to a height of thirty or forty feet and they mingled their darker leaves with the foliage of their host, shutting out the light. The trunks of the trees were ragged with ivy. Ritter saw great clumps of it, thick with dark berries, bending the upper branches with their weight. The new shoots of the parasite, higher up, showed a delicate tracery of leaf and a beautiful spiraling growth of the gently adhesive creepers; but the reality of the ivy, to Ritter’s sense at least, lay in the ground roots, dense and hairy and hideously matted, like a thick pelt around the base of the tree. Cutting through this dealt a mortal blow to the whole: it withered there where it had clambered and triumphed, high up in the sunlight.
But the ancient cables of the ivy were embedded, they could not relax their grip, could not be removed without death to the host. Strangle marks that would never be healed, they would stay there on the tree till the tree died …

Late in the afternoon Harold Chapman’s patience was rewarded. Through his binoculars he saw the approach of the lorry, saw it turn off into the
strada vicinale
, saw it halt, saw the driver accosted by three gesturing figures. He made out the slack-faced Bruno, the rancid-looking woolen hat of the Checchetti father, the powerful bosom of the daughter, whose hair today was a mass of newly permed Medusa curls. He saw the driver get down from his cab.

A lot depended, of course, on the character of this driver. He might choose the path of least resistance, as Mancini had shrewdly thought, preferring not to risk any brush with officialdom. On the other hand, he might be a quick-tempered man or by nature intransigent; he might kick the Checchetti stakes out of the ground and so ruin everything.

Chapman watched with bated breath. The colloquy was not protracted. After perhaps two minutes the driver climbed back into his seat. Chapman saw the lorry reverse away up the slope and turn back toward the village.

Clutching the binoculars and his jacket and the knapsack in which he had brought his picnic provisions, he scrambled down the hillside and made his way around to the back door of his house. He
found Cecilia making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. “They have turned him away,” he said. “It has worked out just as Mancini said it would.”

Chapman’s usual mode of showing pleasure or satisfaction was a wide stretching of the lips with the mouth remaining closed; in moments of particular glee, however, he had a grin which changed the look of his face altogether, the upper lip rising well clear of the teeth, which were widely spaced and sharp-looking. The grin was in evidence now as he said, with a rather hissing emphasis, “Now we shall see, now we shall see.”

Cecilia paused for a moment in the act of measuring out the tea into the pot to look at the triumphantly grinning person before her. More strongly than ever before there came to her the feeling that she had somehow opened the wrong door, entered the wrong hallway, as she had once done years before in England in a street of terraced houses, houses closely similar on the outside, strangely different within. The umbrella stand in the hall, the color of the walls, something different in the smell … “See what?” she said.

“For God’s sake, Cecilia. We shall see these bloody people get their comeuppance.” Chapman was rendered more downright than usual by his immediate irritation at his wife’s vague and distrait manner and by the loose-fitting, lilac-colored smock she was wearing, a garment that seemed, in its paleness and shapelessness, to sum up Cecilia’s perpetual inability to exert a grip. “I am going to phone Mancini and give him the news,” he said.