The American (38 page)
As I put my hand on his shoulder, he shrugged at the touch but I took this as a sign of acceptance rather than dismissal. One does not give the worst interpretation at such a moment.
‘Benedetto,’ I whispered. It might have been ‘
Benedicte
.’ I have never been quite sure.
There was a whipping screel of a siren drawing closer and I could hear running footsteps from further down the street, in the direction of the Corso Federico II. The tourists were stirring. I fired again, into the air. There were distant shouts and the footsteps abruptly ceased. The tourists dropped to the ground again. The child squeaked briefly like a rat as the trap springs shut.
I sprinted across the street, jumping over the prone bodies of those lying on the pavements, and went headlong down the marble steps towards the quarter in which was my apartment.
*
The grazes I had suffered on my shins and calves from the shattering stone were slight: they required nothing more than Band-Aids and a smearing of Germolene. I collected my battered holdall from the wardrobe in the bedroom and had a last check round. The ashes in the fire were thoroughly crushed. No forensic scientist would ever glue them together again. I inspected myself in the mirror. The toupee looked good, my jacket was neat, my spectacles polished and the homburg hat balanced nicely upon my head.
As I went to leave, I glanced up the steps to the loggia. I could just make out the dull gold of the stars on the sky in the dome.
Getting out of town, I anticipated, would be difficult: the Italian authorities are much practised at the art of roadblocks. Vehicle checks would have been established within twenty minutes of the shooting. I walked to the Piazza Conca d’Oro, perfecting a limp as I went, and took a bicycle from the fountain. It was not one of those lightweight racers or expensive mountain bikes but just a traditional sturdy black machine. I hung my holdall from the handlebars and, swinging my leg slowly over the saddle, as an old man might, took a last look at the bar. The tables were before the door – the drivers had beaten the patron to the shade under the trees – and seated at one were Visconti and Milo. They looked cursorily in my direction but did not recognize me.
Following an escape route I had reconnoitred long before, through the passageways and alleys to the outskirts of the town, I reached the countryside and, at a leisurely pace, cycled down lanes and paths and farm tracks to a village about fifteen kilometres away where I knew long-distance coach services over the mountains halted on their way to the autostrada.
The bus for Rome was barely half full. I boarded the steps, purchased my ticket and took a seat at the rear. Even here, some distance from the town, the
carabinieri
were on the alert, two officers standing by the entrance to the bus, scrutinizing those boarding and asking questions of several passengers. They ignored me. The doors hissed shut and the driver engaged first gear. By four o’clock, the bus had gone through the first of the autostrada tunnels which cut through the mountains. By six o’clock, I was in Rome.
From the Piazza della Republica I walked a short distance to the Metropolitana in the Piazza del Cinquecento, travelled to the station in the Piazza del Partigiana and caught the suburban train to Fiumicino. At Leonardo da Vinci airport I locked myself in a cubicle in the gentlemen’s lavatory in the departure concourse, changing into my new form. Like a caterpillar, I became a chrysalis then broke free into the finished creature, the imago: I am, indeed, a butterfly. Now was the time to find a thermal, rise over the hill and descend into a new, uncharted valley of flowers and nectar. I collected my leather baggage from the left-luggage locker. It smelled musty from being there for so long.
*
You want to know the identity of the shadow-dweller. He was a millionaire’s son, the asset-stripper’s offspring, the syphilitic philanderer’s brat. And I was right: it was revenge which was his motive for his hunt. His mother had killed herself and his father remarried.
All this I had in my last letter from Larry, who did not condemn me. He was a man of the world, he understood: but he also warned me. The boy had his connections, or the father had: the letter was ambiguous and I could not tell from it which of the two of them was friendly with some of Larry’s more press-worthy clients in Chicago, Miami, or Little Italy. The failure of the attempted killing, he wrote, would not be overlooked. And the public nature of it was, of course, a part of the process. It was his opinion, furthermore – and he should know – that they would consider the lesson had not been learned. As he put it, another teacher would be employed in due course. His postscript was
At least you’ve put the poor asshole out of his agony
. I had to agree with him.
I could not believe the irony of it. This vindictive dilettante had succeeded where the agencies of the world’s governments had failed. Certainly, it had taken him years to track me down. I wondered if this had been a full-time quest or a pastime when he was not otherwise engaged: the sort of undertaking such as Americans make on their summer vacations in Europe, seeking to trace their ancestry.
Yet the fact is that he made it in the end. There is nothing so persevering – or so perverse – as a vengeance waiting to be redressed.
That he used my own gun was another of those artful tricks laughing fate plays upon us. It is one I now savour, albeit sardonically. Once he discovered my whereabouts, he must have gone to his ‘connection’, asked for the best to be hired on his behalf. His wish was obeyed: I was employed. He was not to know that it was I who was the finest.
And there is a moral there, I would suggest: it is up to you to decide what it is.
It was he who ruined everything. The whole of my future brought to devastation by the determined, petty hatred of a deranged mother’s boy.
In my retirement, I often think of what might have been. I tell myself this is a pointless exercise but I cannot avoid it. But for him and his never-ending vendetta, I should still be in those peaceful mountains, seeing out my end years secure amongst trustworthy folk. And with Clara.
Clara: she was much on my mind in the weeks immediately after the shooting, the days and nights of running and hiding, ducking and dodging, swerving and backtracking across the world.
I kept recalling her visit to my home. She had somehow fitted there, had not been out of place amongst my books and pictures, sitting on my chairs. I believed she would not have been out of place in my bed and the more I think of her the more I see what I have lost: she doing her work by my side, perhaps translating from the Italian into English with – when it was demanded of me – my help, whilst I read and painted and allowed myself for the first time to fall into a routine of bar and Galeazzo’s bookshop, dinner weekly with Father Benedetto.
I would have been happy. My friend the priest might have shared this: he could have married us in his ornate church with the grotesque ceiling. The service would have meant nothing to me, but I suspect Clara would have wanted it. Onlookers – the puppeteer and the flautist and Roberto – would have wondered how an old bugger like me could be attractive to a young slip of a girl like her. I should have enjoyed that moment of publicity before the quiet years enveloped me once more.
We could have travelled, Clara and I. There are still places to which I could go, where I have not worked. There are a few cities I could have returned to with her as adequate disguise, spending a month or two away each year, always returning to the town, the beautiful seclusion of the mountains.
Of course, we need not have lived in the town. I could perhaps have purchased a house in the countryside around – the derelict farmhouse, perhaps with a hectare of orchards and vineyards, made my own wine as Duilio did, named it
Vino di Casa Clara
. That, I considered, had a certain ring to it. It would have been blood-red, full-bodied, like kisses. Her kisses.
All that is now an impossibility. The shadow-dweller and his backers put paid to it with his public shoot-out, his puerile
High Noon
mentality. I often think, as I sit alone in the evening, that he chose that moment deliberately, knew that by calling my play in front of the church he was killing not only me but also my hopes. Just as I, I suppose, had killed his own.
Worse, I often consider, is what Clara must think of me. I abandoned her. I paid her off with a princely sum as if she was nothing but a high-class tart, let her down, reneged on my protestation of love which she so needed. I admit to myself to hoping she used the money, did not throw it away in a moment of Italian pique. Several times I have thought to write to her, but have never gone beyond picking up the pen. Perhaps, by now, she has discovered her young man from Perugia.
And what of the others’ thoughts – Galeazzo, Visconti, Milo, Gherardo? I was the cause of the death of their priest. I am the Englishman who brought death close to them. They dine out on the story. I am sure I am still a topic of conversation in the bar, will be for many decades. Yet the blood which legend will ooze from the flagstones in front of the church of S Silvestro will be that of Father Benedetto. This much I have given him, a place in history.
Where I have flown off to is a secret. I have to remain a private man, reborn into my new existence and comfortably settled in it. I have my memories, of course. I have not forgotten how to paint insects, that the cyclic rate of a Sterling Para Pistol Mark 7A is 550 rounds per minute and the muzzle velocity 365 metres per second; nor have I forgotten this new life is developed from the last shadow-dweller’s gun. I can recall quite vividly the basement in Marseilles, Father Benedetto’s little garden, the stink-hole in Hong Kong, blood-red wine like the kisses of girls, the workshop in the arches in south London, Visconti and Milo and the others, Galeazzo and Signora Prasca and the exquisite beauty of the
pagliara
. I shall never forget the view from the loggia.
You do not, naturally, expect me to divulge into whom I metamorphosed. Suffice to say Mr Butterfly –
il Signor Farfalla
– still sups at the wild honey of life and is comparatively content. Similarly, he is quite safe.
Yet I cannot drive Clara from my mind, no matter how I try.
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