In the Wolf's Mouth (19 page)

Cirò directed Silvio down and out of the town, out into the fields.

‘The Germans were all around here,’ he told Silvio. ‘And the Fascists. We killed them all. I came back with the Americans.’

They crossed one field and carried on down a little way into the valley. ‘Here.’

Silvio swallowed twice and said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. It’ll be very quick.’

‘Tell my mother …’

‘I know. I’ll tell her. There are mines in front of you, about twenty yards away. Walk around and find one. Accidents happen. Go on. Walk in a straight line away and then back. I’ve got a gun so don’t run. It’ll be better than the other way, believe me. Quicker.’

‘Please, Cirò.’

‘Go on.’

Silvio started walking, his hands outspread on either side of him as if to catch hold of something for balance. ‘Please, God,’ he said. ‘Please, God.’

He walked for thirty metres. Cirò whistled and shouted, ‘Turn left.’ Silvio did as he was told. ‘Now walk back towards me.’

Nothing.

Cirò directed him again to the left and sent him away and then back. The walk seemed to take hours. Still nothing. He did it again. When Silvio reached him this time, Cirò was laughing. ‘You’re the luckiest man in the world. How are you not dead yet? We’ll have to do something else.’

Cirò walked up to Silvio and put his hands around Silvio’s throat. The man’s neck was slippery with sweat. Cirò could smell shit in his trousers. He started to
squeeze. Silvio caught hold of his wrists, his eyes wide with surprise. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

‘I know. But it’s better this way. Ow. Stop pulling at my hands. It won’t help.’

Silvio stared at Cirò, his eyes thickening and fading. He stumbled, his legs giving way. Cirò kept up the pressure despite a cramp in his right hand. It was a good thing he was just strangling him until he passed out, not to death. Silvio became soft and heavy in his grip and Cirò let him drop to the ground. Silvio lay face down, one hand by his head, the other arm underneath his body. Cirò took a grenade from his jacket pocket. He pulled the pin, placed it gently on the back of Silvio’s neck, and started to run.

It seemed to take ages. He was a long way back up the hill before he saw light flash on the ground in front of him and his own thrown shadow and heard the explosion. He turned around as earth and small stones pattered back down. In the darkness he saw a hole. He couldn’t see Silvio.

19

The Civilian Affairs Office that Will, Samuels and others were now stationed at had charge of three towns, Montebianco, Portella Corvi and Sant’Attilio, in the mountains south-west of Palermo at the far western edge of British territory. There weren’t many villages or smaller settlements in the hills. The peasants didn’t seem to like them. Instead, those that worked walked long miles out to the fields and the vines and came back again each night, clustering in their stony habitations like bats in caves. Most didn’t work. The rest of the men and boys skulked in the towns. The women went unseen. When Will did spot them, they were receding into the front doors of their homes or they were between those doors and the sculpted fragrant darkness of the churches. One of the first things Will did, in Grand Tour fashion, was to enter the big church on the square in Sant’Attilio. Inside, headscarfed women were on their knees or hunched in the pews. Rosaries clicked, circling slowly in their fingers. Will looked at the building. After the spacious, mathematical elegance of the mosques, the church looked cluttered, superstitious, Hindu. There were dolls everywhere, in every recess. Doves and clouds, lambs, gold, and the executed Christ, starved and agonised, pouring down
his blood. Dark and ugly, full of magic and death, a religion for the ignorant.

One of the first things they needed to do was to get the sappers in and the minefields cleared. Only yesterday one poor peasant had blown himself up just outside Sant’Attilio. But the whole island was mined. It might be days before they arrived.

AMGOT’s main task was what they were referring to as defascistification. The former rulers were rounded up and imprisoned, in part to prevent communication with the mainland, but many were disappearing into the crowds, burning their uniforms and becoming ordinary. Posters were put up calling for information and denunciations. Interviews with locals were arranged. Many denunciations arrived at the town hall handwritten and anonymous. Will and the others were told to find a certain individual who ‘has the eyes of a hypocrite’. Someone else could be identified because ‘he has a mortal fear of cats’. The local police forces were to remain in place, subserving the Allies, because there wasn’t time to replace them. They announced themselves loyal to the new government and thankful to be liberated from the Fascists – but who knew? They would have to be watched too. ‘The eyes of a hypocrite’ was a phrase that lodged itself in Will’s mind. He thought of it often, seeing them everywhere.

20

Cirò Albanese would not have recognised Alvaro Zuffo if he hadn’t been told it was him. Because he did know, however, he looked and slowly saw on the thin face of the old man the features of the person who had, enthroned in his heavy flesh, ruled over so much. Alvaro Zuffo had saved Cirò’s life but he himself had not left Sicily. He had refused to. Instead, he organised and exerted his power in any way he could. People were paid huge amounts of money. Others never woke up again. And all for nothing. The Fascists were not reasonable. They were fanatics with no business instinct. Alvaro Zuffo was arrested for nothing, for rumours and reputation, and he had spent years on a prison island. Cirò was not the only person who had told the Americans that he was one of the most important anti-Fascists they needed to release. Now Zuffo sat in an armchair in a suite in a Palermo hotel, smiling and shaking hands with old friends.

Cirò stared at him. Zuffo seemed surrounded by the ghost of his former flesh. Cirò’s memory kept adding it to the figure in front of him. Zuffo’s neck looked weak. His head trembled, his lips dark and loose. He kept them clamped together, a diagonal line across his face. He patted them with a handkerchief after he had spoken.

‘I never liked the sea,’ he said. ‘And I had to listen to it for years.’ He sipped from a small glass of red wine. ‘The things they did to me in there. Every day. Every day. They tie me to a box on the ground then one fits a gas mask over my head. It has a tube attached to a thing this other guy is holding full of sea water. He squeezes, the mask fills up. I’m drowning, I’m swallowing. I have to. Then they stop. One kicks me in the belly again and again and I puke up all the brine. I piss blood. I shit blood. When I find them …’

‘We’ll find them.’

‘And every night I could hear the fucking sea with it still stinking in my eyes and nose. Now I want to eat swordfish, I want to eat tuna. I want to eat every fucking fish and fuck the sea.’

Everybody laughed. Zuffo waved with his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

Zuffo was a rich man again. American money had arrived with these men. They all brought tributes and tomorrow he would be a fine figure again, beautifully dressed. Some of the men Cirò had known in New York and New Jersey. Others were fellow prisoners. A few had escaped from a prison the other week when it was hit by a bomb. They described kicking through cracked and buckling walls and just walking out into a heavy air raid. ‘To me it was like rain in springtime,’ one of them said. ‘I was so happy.’

For once these men lost all reserve and spoke not in the old arcane figures of speech, and in hints and ellipses. Instead they chattered like schoolgirls about the possibilities ahead. The new currency that was coming in. The prostitution boom. The morphine
market. Food shipments, transportation, the threat of Communism among the peasants, what they were telling the Americans, where certain Fascists had been spotted. They established where they all would be and who would speak to whom. There was much that they would do together. That was the talk in the room. The feeling was something different. Strange and wild, there was a feeling like love between them.

21

Walking through Palermo the following morning, through shouts and sunlight and strangers towards the docks to do some business, Cirò reflected that those men were better than family. They gave you more. And you knew how much you couldn’t trust them.

Having dealt with Silvio, Cirò had walked to his brother’s house in Sant’Attilio. They were all there. Cirò endured the explosion of recognition, of surprise and delight, sensing something else in the silences of each person who stopped talking and stepped back to allow another to come forward and embrace him. Unknown children ran around him. Some bare-arsed babies were carried in the arms of his nephews’ wives, his nephews who were men now. All this that he didn’t have – another thing that had been stolen from him. The grief of this as bitter as sea water. A glass of red wine was put in his hand.

Cirò’s brother was old now. He was still lean, still agile, but he also still had the same muddled, anxious look in his eyes. There was a fog inside. He was stupid and to compensate he made sudden, clumsy moves. He was a man who made mistakes. He took Cirò outside to smoke and said, ‘My boys, they
haven’t been brought up in the old ways.’

‘Probably they’re too old to start now. Maybe they should go to America.’

Cirò’s brother tutted. ‘They can’t leave their families.’

‘Lots do. And send money back. I did. I had to. I did.’

Cirò’s brother nodded while ignoring this comment, thinking of something else, thinking of himself. ‘You could at least start teaching them how it all works.’

‘How what works? There’s nothing. I’ve only just got back.’

Cirò had no intention of giving anything to them. With their families they would make larger and larger claims for things they hadn’t earned. Cirò just needed a son of his own. He had often imagined one: handsome, taciturn, fearless, reliable.

Cirò turned a corner and saw at the end of the street a dazzle of sea light. That sight, it meant different things now. When he had left it had looked terminal, alien, the end of what he knew. It was where his world collapsed and dissolved. Now it looked familiar. It looked like work and stirred with possibility, particularly if he could be the first to negotiate this area of interest with Zuffo. The business would pay more than enough to give Zuffo his tribute. It would be something for Cirò to get in on this Palermo action but he could do it. The waterfront was busy with naval troops and was guarded. Cirò had to show his papers at a sawhorse barrier – military eyes on him, the card, on him again
and waving him through – before he could go on to find two particular men who knew which ships were delivering the medical supplies.

22

In the chaos of the invasion, as it split and fissured across the island, Ray and Gem had somehow ended up separated from the others a long way east, and now they were a couple of days late for their destination.

They had lost the others in a small town that had rushed out, cheering, to greet the Americans. Sicilian men slapped their chests and declared, ‘My cousin – Chicago!’ Or ‘America best! Is best!’ And if one of the soldiers spoke a word of Italian to them, they threw their hands in the air with delight.

Ray was walking with Gem. Gem had close-set brown eyes, a prominent knob to his chin. When he sweated, his hair separated into little black spikes. He was not very military in his bearing. His uniform hung off a skinny body. His helmet looked on him like something picked up from a fancy dress store. When he saw something he liked, he looked around to share it with someone, beckoning them over with a scoop of his whole hand. He did this now, calling out to Ray, ‘Hey, Ray! Ray! Come and look at this!’

Gem stood at the end of a narrow side street. He disappeared into it and Ray followed. He found Gem staring upwards, mouth open.

Ray looked up and saw a row of wrought-iron
balconies, all with birdcages and little yellow birds hopping about in them.

There was a blazing stripe of brickwork and cornice above the shadow cast by the buildings on the other side of the street. Above that was blue sky, deep hyacinth blue. One of the birds starting to sing, trilling loudly. This set off another. Suddenly the whole alley was ringing with birdsong.

Ray smiled. He thought that this would be a memory, this would be victory in Sicily and how happy the people were.

When they went back to the main street, they’d lost the rest of the unit.

They hitched a lift from a man who drove a small, snarling three-wheeled truck. They mixed their Italian and Sicilian and thought they understood each other. It was only when Ray felt the mellow heat of the sunset on the back of his neck that he realised they were heading in the wrong direction. They were useless soldiers. It was comical. They climbed out of the truck in the next village and knocked on a door. They slept that night on the owner’s mattress, stuffed with what felt like straw and horsehair. However they positioned themselves, it poked and irritated. Fibrous tufts scratched at their faces and stuck into their bellies. They writhed and swore.

In the morning they looked around for a ride but couldn’t find one. They received a number of instructions about where to go and to wait for someone called Beppe who might appear. He did not appear. Ray watched the skulking cats, the men who sat with arms folded and muttered. After a couple of
hours, they started walking west.

Gem stopped to pick up coloured stones. He ran to catch insects. He brought his closed hands up to Ray’s ear so he could hear the dry buzzing inside.

He was new, Gem. He’d hardly seen anything. He wanted to know about Africa. The questions made Ray feel sick. He couldn’t answer. The closest he came was saying that you sure made good friends in those situations. He tried telling Gem about George but found he couldn’t conjure up what was so good about him. He said, ‘He was just a great guy. The best, you know. A pal, for sure. I got his address from him. When we get back I’ll write. All the time we were invading I was thinking of him ahead of us, where he was, you know. I hope he’s doing okay. I’m sure he is. Sometimes when I’m down I fear the worst and it’s like he’s not there any more. Then, when I’m feeling okay, I know he is.’