The American (29 page)

‘
Buon giorno
,’ one says, the other, ‘
Buona sera
.’

They have their car parked close to mine. It is a dark green Alfa Romeo with local plates. I have checked it over before they arrive: it is an ordinary private vehicle.

I start up my car and push the gear-lever. At that moment, an awful dread climbs my spine. I know the shadow-dweller has arrived. I look in the rear-view mirror. Nothing. I look from side to side. Nothing. Only the lovers who are standing now admiring the view.

Can one of the two men be him? Surely not. I should have known, I should have been able to tell.

I start the Citroën down the track, the bodywork swaying uncomfortably. Around the first bend, tucked in below a thick bush, is the blue Peugeot with Rome registration.

Damn him! He has found me this far off the beaten track, this unprepared. I am underestimating this son of a bitch. And that is dangerous, very dangerous indeed.

I stop the Citroën alongside, take out the Walther and cock it. Now to see who this bastard is. I open the door and step out, the gun at the ready. In the distance I can hear the courting couples laughing.

The Peugeot is empty. No driver, nothing on the seats, no clues. I look quickly into the bush. He is not crouched there. I glance around the bush. He is up the hillside, talking to the lovers.

I shiver. He had chosen his moment and I was utterly oblivious of it. Save for the lovers’ presence, he would have had me at his mercy: but for them, we should have had our confrontation and the whole business would have been settled. One way or the other.

I take out my knife and deftly cut off the valves from two of his tyres, which will stall him here for an hour or two. He must have followed me into the hills, no doubt tracking my progress from the valley below with a pair of binoculars, but he will not tail me back to the town.

This may be somewhat surprising, yet it is a fact: a man in my line of business has a distinct, not inconsiderable pride in his work. You might assume, because my handiwork is usually temporary, used only the once and abandoned at the site of action, I do not regard it highly.

I do.

And I have a trademark.

Many years ago – I shall not say when, but it was soon after the commencement of my present career – it was my task to provide a weapon for the assassination of a major heroin dealer. In those days, a reputation having to be earned, I spent much more time on my craft than I now do. There is, I admit, a degree of eventual redundancy built into my present-day products, just as there is into every modern car and hi-fi and washing machine. It is in the interest of the manufacturer to have a specific, designed obsolescence. However, I do not, as do the makers of cars and hi-fis and washing machines, produce shoddy work.

I was shown, at that time, a block of opium. It was fresh from the Golden Triangle, enclosed in greaseproof paper, the covering as neatly folded and sealed as if the package had been gift-wrapped by the counter staff of Harrods. The corners were creased as if pressed by an iron. Upon this brick of visionary death was branded ‘999 – Bewaare of imitatiouns’. It gave me an idea to which I have adhered ever since.

Upon every weapon I make, or remake, in place of the serial numbers or maker’s name, I engrave my own – how shall I term it? – cachet. There is a practicality to this apparent vanity: the engraving cuts into the acid burns which eradicate the registration numbering. These days, forensic scientists can read an erased number with X-rays as easily as they do the newspaper, but the engraving confuses this substantially. Yet I readily admit egotism plays a larger part here than protection.

When Alexander Selkirk, Defoe’s supposed model for Robinson Crusoe, died at sea of fever on 12 December 1721, he left very little in his bequest: a gold-laced suit, a sea chest which had been with him in his island solitude, a coconut cup he had fashioned, later mounted on silver, and a musket.

I saw the gun once, long ago. It was a nondescript weapon, out of proof for sure. Yet he had carved upon it his name, the picture of a seal on a rock and a rhyme.

To put my name upon my handiwork would be to condemn me to the rope, the chair or the firing squad, depending upon which organization or government found me out. Even a pseudonym was, I considered, risky: I was never one deliberately to seek a sobriquet like Jackal or Fox or Tiger. Better to be known as nothing.

Ever since, instead of a name, I have put the same rhyme on every gun I have fashioned.

Tonight I am etching the Socimi with this little poem, burning it with acid, cutting the words first in wax. It is a simple process and takes but a few minutes, the wax being dripped over the metal and the poem impressed into it with a little steel brand I carved many years ago.

It is a simple little ditty. I have kept Selkirk’s spelling:

With 3 drams powther
3 ounce haill
Ram me well & pryme me
To Kill I will not faile
.

I have made mistakes and half-mistakes. I acknowledge this fact. Although I have done my best to avoid errors, they have occurred. I am only human. Every so often, I sit down and analyse these blunders, recalling each one individually. In this way, I do my best to avoid repetition.

There was the gun that jammed, that winged the philanderer and nobbled the mistress. There was, on another occasion, an explosive bullet which did not explode. This did not matter, in the event: it was a head shot and the target was dead in any case. A wooden stock split on a G3 I was adapting. This was not really my fault. The G3 is not manufactured with wood but the customer required it. I found out why in due course, as a result of the international press. The customer was using the gun in a very hot location and he was afraid the plastic stock would warp. A foolish and unnecessary fear, but there it is. I make the guns, I do not dictate the orders.

My worst errors have not, however, been concerned with my craftmanship but with my own life, or the conduct of it.

Twice, I have stayed too long in a place. London was one, and that led to my having to bring about the demise of the idiot panel-beater. The other was Stockholm and the fault was mine. I grew to like the place.

I lie. I grew to like Ingrid. Let me call her that, though that was not her name, but there are tens of thousands of Ingrids in Scandinavia.

The Swedish are a humourless, sterile race. They regard life as an intensity to be experienced, not a rest from the slog of eternity. For them, there are no lazy hours in the bar, no strolling down the street with an easy gait and a Mediterranean nonchalance. They are like bulldogs, always up-and-at-’em, barking and making an efficient job of it.

For the Swedes, sex is a bodily function. Breasts are primarily for feeding infants, legs for walking or running on, thighs for bearing the next generation. Like their climate and endless coniferous forests, they are cold, reserved, unremittingly boring and insufferably pretentious. Their men are handsome Nordics with blond hair and an arrogance born of being a one-time master race. The women are beautiful, blonde, lithe, supple automatons who are as haughty as well-bred racehorses and as punctilious as accountants.

Ingrid was half Swedish. She had the looks and body of a Norse goddess. Her mother came from Skellefteå in the province of Västerbotten, three-quarters of the way up the Gulf of Bothnia, two hundred kilometres south of the Arctic Circle: a more god-forsaken spot would be hard to find. Her father, however, hailed from Lissycasey, County Clare, and from him she inherited an un-Swedish softness, a lazy voice and a loving nature.

I lingered too long with her. That was my mistake. I did not like Sweden and I hated Stockholm, but she made up for much of the frigidity of the atmosphere. There was something delicious about going to the countryside with her – she owned the Swedish equivalent of a dacha two hours’ drive from the city – and spending the weekend snuggled in animal furs on a wooden settle before a blazing pine-log fire, fornicating every hour or so and drinking Irish whiskey straight from the bottle. Of course, I was younger then.

This idyll lasted for as long as I was working on a commission. Once the work was done, I had planned to leave by ferry for Gotland, change clothes and vessels there for Ystad, travel by road to Trelleborg and catch the night crossing to Travemünde. From there I was to hire a car to Hamburg, then fly out to London and beyond.

Ingrid held me. She knew I was going. I told her so. She wanted one last weekend with me in the snowbound countryside. I let my defences slip and agreed. We drove out in her Saab sedan and arrived late on the Friday night. By Monday morning, she was still not ready to relinquish me to the future. I agreed to remain until the Wednesday.

On the Tuesday evening, as we walked a few kilometres through the forest and down to a lake frozen solid as stone, I sensed someone in the trees. Conifers are forbidding. They hold a private night beneath them like no other vegetation, deep and impenetrable: I have, since that night, understood why Scandinavian culture has such a pantheon of trolls, goblins and supernatural ne’er-do-wells.

I looked about. There was nothing. The thick snow blanketed the world and muffled any sound. There was not the slightest breeze.

‘Why do you look about you?’ Ingrid asked in that sing-song accent of her parental land.

‘Nothing,’ I replied, but my ill ease was evident.

She laughed and said, ‘There are no wolves in the woods so close to the cities.’

Two hours’ drive was not, in my book, close; still, I let it pass.

We reached the shoreline of the lake. There were indistinct animal tracks going out across the ice. Ingrid announced they were a snow hare’s. Those beside them were a man’s. A hunter, she decided. But the hare was heading out on to the ice and the footsteps were heading in.

I spun round. There was no one, but a low branch dipped and a thick rug of snow slid from it. I pushed Ingrid down into the snow. She grunted, winded. I lay beside her and heard the crack of a bullet. It might have been a bough snapping under the weight of winter but I knew it was not.

I pulled my Colt out of my parka and cocked it. It was a hunter for sure, but he was not after small game. I bobbed up and down once. There was a crack from the trees. I pinpointed the spot from the drift of blue smoke, almost invisible in the winter air. I rubbed snow into my woollen hat, edged up until I could just see over the snow and pumped three shots into the darkness under the tree. I heard a muttering groan, then a sliding noise as if I had shot a toboggan. More snow fell off the tree.

We waited, Ingrid gathering her breath but losing her wits.

‘You have a gun,’ she murmured. ‘How do you have a gun? Why should you carry such a weapon? Are you a police officer? Or . . .’

I made no reply. She was busy thinking. So was I.

I stood up, slowly, and walked towards the man. He was slouched forward in a drift of snow, his body deep in the white softness. I kicked at the sole of his boot. He was dead. I grabbed his collar and turned him over. I did not recognize him.

‘Who is he?’ Ingrid blurted out.

I fumbled at his buttons and rummaged in his clothing. In his breast pocket I found a military identity pass.

‘He is a shadow-dweller,’ I replied, thinking of the trolls and goblins. It was the first time I used the phrase: since then, it has always seemed so appropriate.

‘He is not dressed like a hunter. Why is he alone? Hunters always go in pairs, for safety.’

Hunters always go in pairs, for safety
. In that she was surely right. He might not be alone. I removed the bolt from the man’s rifle and tossed it far into the trees.

‘Go for help,’ I instructed her. ‘Call the police.’

There was no telephone in the dacha. She would have to drive to the village six kilometres away. I needed her Saab. She set off, stumbling up the track we had made through the snow. I shot her just the once, in the nape of the neck. She twitched in the snow, her blood staining the white fur of her coat collar. She looked at a distance like a shot snow hare.

At the dacha there was another man, standing by a black Mercedes-Benz sedan. He was holding an automatic pistol but he was not on the alert. The bleak winter and the snow-covered trees had prevented him from hearing our shots. I felled him easily with a bullet in the ear, removed the clip from the Colt and reloaded it. I then took my holdall and few belongings out of the house, smashed the two-way radio in the sedan and removed the distributor cap from the engine, burying it deep into the snow just in case there were others about. I then drove off.

I admit to crying on the drive to Stockholm, not only from sorrow but also from the realization of my stupidity. It was a lesson well learned, but at a cost.

And now, I admit, I should like to stay here, in the Italian mountains, in a little town where my friends are loyal, the wine is good and another young woman loves me and wants me to linger.

Yet my safety is in jeopardy. The shadow-dweller has come here. I should not want Clara to follow Ingrid into the short but drastic catalogue of my expediencies.

In Pantano, in the village piazza, there is a pizzeria, the Pizzeria la Castellina. They serve, I consider, the best pizza in the whole valley, perhaps in all Italy. One eats at tables on a patio overlooking a garden of rose bushes and fruit trees. Upon the tables are placed simple oil lamps and a candle in a pot beneath an earthenware saucer containing perfumed oil. This keeps the midges and moths away.

Usually I go alone, exchange a few words of greeting in broken English with the owner, Paolo: he shows me to the same corner table on the patio. I habitually order
calzoni alla napoletana
and a bottle of Bardolino. This is a man’s wine.

Tonight, however, I have brought Clara. Dindina has left, quit her classes and the town. We do not know for where exactly. To the north. She has taken up with a young man from Perugia who drives a Ferrari 360 Modena and sports a solid gold Audemars Piguet wristwatch. He has given Dindina an old but serviceable MGB. And so she has departed the university, renounced the sisterhood of the whorehouse in the Via Lampedusa, gone out of our lives. Clara declares she is glad, but I suspect her joy camouflages a bittersweet envy. I am mightily relieved, for it places her beyond the range of possible contact with the shadow-dweller.