Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  Closing the front door quietly behind him, he locked it again with a horizontal iron bolt and took his bag into a salon to the right of the hallway. It had been created from the former chapel, with arches rising above velvet sofas and a Renaissance dining table. The Codringtons had not departed hastily. The shutters were all bolted shut, the armchairs and tables were sheeted. In the heat of summer the rooms were cool because the outside air had not touched them in weeks.

  He ventured upstairs with his bag and found that the former convent cells were now individual bedrooms, each one decorated differently. Some were painted rose, some green or yellow. But they were all adorned with antiques and wall tapestries. He chose the smallest one and laid his bag there, then went back downstairs and explored the vast Codrington kitchen, a place where the impertinent twenty-first century imposed itself in a score of German gadgets. He scoured the fridge and found nothing there. They had cleaned everything out before leaving, and even the freezer was empty. A little crushed, he tried the pantry and the cupboards. It was the same disaster. Impossible, he thought. Rich people didn’t live in empty houses, even if they left them for weeks or months at a time. But the kitchen, in fact, had been very carefully evacuated and he couldn’t find even a lonely can to offset the calamity. They had emptied it out and probably taken everything with them to Greece. Because the other side of the rich was their hidden and repulsive frugality.

  He decided to sleep instead and deal with the situation the following morning. Going back upstairs, he crashed onto the bed in his clothes and let his gradually accumulated exhaustion overwhelm him. But it didn’t take him into sleep directly. His mind, instead, spun with images of Istanbul. He hadn’t thought about the city for a long time, not even when he was alone in the hut in Episkopi, but now it came back to him, that city of humiliations.

  An adopted city was always held to a lower standard, but even by that standard Istanbul had been rough on him. Driven from a city of mosques by artillery, he had found his first consolation in the mosques of the Ottomans, where he could be alone. There was the Mihrimah near the Roman walls in the north, which was being renovated at that time and which was covered with scaffolds. One of Sinan’s less-known masterpieces, it had been built for a princess of that same name and its marvels were entire walls made of windows. Even at dusk it was intense with light. It was a place in which to think about music, in which to dream his compositions; afterward he walked to the Kariye Church a few streets away where the Christian mosaics furnished the same inspiration. During the first winter, days of solitude could be spun out between these two places, his compositions coming and going inside his head while he never found the time to write them down. And it often felt to him that snow fell every day, though it couldn’t have.

  Through musical connections he found work tutoring the children of Turkish families, and several times a week he took a bus up to Ulus or Etiler or Bebek and entered houses filled with carpets on the quiet lanes that overlooked the Bosphorus where his pupils lived and where he taught them how to sing or how to play the flute. None of them had talent, and none of them improved. But as they failed to improve their parents came to the conclusion that the fault was his, and that he was not really a proper teacher. So one by one they let him go, without explaining why. He took a room near Kadirga Limani in Sultanahmet, a street of bakeries and sut sahlep vendors. The tenements nearby, above the railway lines, were filled with Africans and Syrians, and these were the alleys whose names he still knew by heart: Hemesehri, Alisan, Ismail Sefa. Those were his places of idleness and sorrow. Here he reflected that once he had wanted to be a master of the qanun; a composer, a teacher, or even eventually a professor in Paris teaching Arabic music. But it was dust now. Some of his fellow students from Aleppo had also fled to Istanbul, and together they went to the soirées of master Weiss who had taught them all in their destroyed city. Weiss had also removed himself to Istanbul to continue his career, and he could be seen on windy nights in the streets around Galata in flowing robes, a man of towering beauty and Sufic estrangement. Once a month Weiss played for his friends in an apartment right next to the Galata tower, and there Faoud sat in the background with other students and re-found the world that had once been his. The enchantment of the group. When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music. But he always left alone and without speaking to anyone. It was enough to listen to the master from a distance and to be close to the ghosts that connected him to home. But time passed, and it worked against him.

  Whereas he had at first hoped to save enough to get a decent room, with the passing of months he gave up that hope and fell into grander but more impractical ones. Exodus and escape, flight to Europe. In the spring he drifted to the cafes at Ortakoy under the bridge, where the better-educated Syrians shared their coffees and conspired, three men per cup. There was only a Turkish friend of his father’s who looked over him, arranging his tutoring from afar, while using him as ruthlessly as he could. His name was Mert and he worked in the tea business, but with fingers in matters less open to the light of day. But this man had always remained obscure to him. Faoud never was able to learn much Turkish, and his patron never invited him into his social circles, so his ostracism remained permanent. They used to go to tea together at the Ciragan Palace Kempinski hotel on the Bosphorus and reminisce about Faoud’s father, since the two older men had known each other in Damascus. They had made money together, but Mert would not reveal how they had done it. There was merely a sense of obligation toward the son on his part. So they would chat and evade harder truths, and Faoud would watch the Russian tankers making their way to the Dardanelles as they had tea and wonder how he could escape on the same sea. It was to this enigmatic and unpleasant man that, in the end, he confided his all-too-common desire.

  He could have stayed much longer if he had found the means. But there was no work and his family had finally gone bankrupt after losing all its assets. He was now just a ghost among ghosts. The Syrians begging in the street along Istiqlal had become unpopular, the war changed form, and the borders had taken on different meanings. The exiles began to be rounded up and taken to a new detention center, which he himself never saw. So then one day you wake and you know that your time is up, that God is no longer watching over you, and the Merts of this world can no longer save you any more than music can. Yet he could have stayed as a ghost. It was just that he no longer had much in common with the other Syrians and there was no one to talk to besides the other scattered music students, his now-homeless peers. He sometimes saw them at the mosques, and they shared a tea afterward, but it was conversation purely for its own sake. Many of them thought of him as a spoiled rich boy who had deserved his comeuppance; he looked at them as people with whom he shared a regrettable accident of origin.

  But then what did Adonis, their shared poet, say about his own dead brother?

  He was the god of love as long as I lived.

  What will love do if I too am gone?

  —

  When he woke he decided at once to run a bath to civilize himself again. In the marital bathroom their toiletries, unlike the provisions of the kitchen, were intact and he wallowed in the bath for an hour washing his hair, his nails, his impoverished skin. It was a long-overdue purification. Not the baths of Istanbul, not the hammam of Sultan Ahmet, but enough. Refreshed and powdered, he went in a bathrobe down to the kitchen. Fetching the service-station provisions he had bought the day before, he made a pot of coffee and a light breakfast of bread and cheese.

  Through the gaps in the shutters he peered out at the orchard and the garden with its statues. There was a house nearby, but as far as he could tell it was a ruin. There was no way of telling whether the Codringtons employed year-round staff there, and it was too soon to fling open a window or venture out into the garden. He would wait until the late afternoon before deciding if he was really alone.

  While he waited, he went through the house room by room, lingering among their possessions as if he had t
emporarily inherited them. He went down to the cellars, where there were several rooms: one filled with bottles of wine, another filled with weapons, the third a room of magazines and books. The weapons room was very small and had a table at its center. Its surface was piled with boxes of bullets and shotgun cartridges. On one wall a Benelli Montefeltro Silver semiautomatic shotgun, a Benelli Ethos shotgun, a Tikka bolt-action, and three Beretta Storm semiautomatic pistols. The old man seemed to have had a penchant for Italian guns. Perhaps he acquired them locally and had an Italian gun license in order. The shotguns were not locked into place, and he took down the Montefeltro with its glossy walnut grip and turned and weighed it in his hands. It was a good weapon, strongly built and finely tooled. The pistols too were contemporary models, light and easy to swing, virtually unused as far as he could tell. He laid them all on the table among the boxes and then loaded the Montefeltro and two of the handguns. There was no reason for doing so, but suddenly laying his hands on weapons allayed the impotence and fear that had oppressed him for months. It was purely symbolic as emotions went, but it was not unreal. A surge of animal confidence and a vague stirring of revenge. He didn’t unload them when he laid the guns back down but left them there as if in readiness. It was like the moment that Jimmie came toward him in the other house, forcing him to act—because either you act or you are shipped back in a cage to face an anonymous fate that no one will care about anyway.

  He went out onto a terrace on the first floor and looked down at the domain. The orchard was unmanned and it was clear that no one had come to the house all day. Obviously, the Codringtons had chosen a place where they would have no neighbors, where they would enjoy a rural isolation. He went back down to the garden, passed through the iron gate, and on via the quinces to the car. He paused for a moment to reassure himself. He was already thinking of how to change the car’s plates, and he wondered about the garage up in Sorano. But of course they would know Signor Codrington and his opulent Peugeot. He would have to do it further on, in a small place where no one passed through. And then there was the question of money. He had about 140 euros left in cash but had already noticed that even rural Italy was much more expensive than Greece. It wouldn’t last more than two or three days.

  An hour after he had returned inside the house, someone came to the door and there was a series of knocks. At first they were gentle, hesitant disturbances, an unsure request as it were. But then came a second round that were a little more impatient. He went down to the basement and took the Montefeltro shotgun, still loaded, and crept quietly back to the front door with the barrel pointed toward the lock. The voice, a female voice, was calling, “Signori, siete a casa?” A telephone began to ring in an upstairs room.

  It droned on for five minutes before falling silent. The woman moved away from the door, and he saw her shape flicker against the shutters of the main room as she tried to peer in. At length she walked off and he heard the iron gate creak; so she had a key to enter them. It must be a domestic, someone working the grounds in their absence or a friend entrusted with a key. He put the shotgun against the wall and thought over the implications. Someone must have told her, or suggested to her, that the Codringtons had returned from their holiday in Greece. And that someone must have known that it was not the case. It was a new element: he had an enemy. But then, more calmly, he realized that he had forgotten the more obvious explanation. She had simply seen the car. The car betrayed him here, and this simple fact resolved him to move on.

  He decided to take all the weapons with him. He loaded them into the trunk of the car and locked up the house, leaving the keys in a flowerpot in the garden. He drove to Sorano in torrid heat, under a cloudless sky.

  TWENTY

  At twenty past twelve that day the valley below Sorano baked in a silence that was broken only by the sound of water tumbling across riverbed stones. At the back of the village was a platform with rails where the carless alleys intersected, and from there Rockhold could look down at the dozens of caves that spoke of a past older than the present religion. He gripped the rail, because the heat made him a little faint, and let his ears and eyes do his work: far below, on a small bridge over the stream, a girl was lying in a swimsuit, still and camouflaged as a stick insect and unnoticed by the other eyes above her.

  He could not quite bring her into focus, even after he had lifted his sunglasses for a moment, but he thought he recognized her from the Eastern European staff at the Hotel della Fortezza, where he was staying. The hotel was built into the old fortress that loomed above Sorano, and he had checked in there late the night before. Cat-like, she was probably asleep in the sun or quietly absorbing the voyeuristic attention of strangers. He lowered his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose and caught from afar the hiss of the cicadas. Earlier in the morning he had glimpsed one or two English bohemian residents padding through the labyrinth, but they didn’t seem to belong to Jimmie’s crowd unless they were avant-garde artists whom he could collect. Nevertheless it wasn’t difficult to imagine him and Phaine strolling arm in arm under these endless vaults or having lunch in the sweet piazza with its town hall. He walked back there now, measuring his steps and humming a bit of La Traviata to himself. It wasn’t such a bad mission, traveling from hotel to hotel across Italy. It had not yet occurred to him that Jimmie wasn’t just playing truant from his own hectic existence. There were two cafes in the piazza, and he chose the one nearer to the entrance to the pedestrian zone because everyone at the hotel said it had the better ice cream. He sat there and got his macchiato. He looked over the cars parked in the piazza, which he had also inspected on his way down, and saw that they were more or less the same cars as had been there an hour earlier. On the terrace with him were a few old-timers, clerks from the town hall, a young male tourist in a nice shirt and two girls he had seen earlier, also at the Fortezza. He leaned back and checked the messages on his phone.

  From London, Susan had asked him if he wanted her to cancel all three cards; the search had been issued for the car as well, but nothing had come back. He thought, I’ll have to go down to the house right now, perhaps they’re there after all. That would be the most welcome surprise under the circumstances. But then his expenses-paid jaunt would be over and that would be a bore. Perhaps he could delay things a day or two.

  He leaned over to the tourist and asked him in English if he had a light for the cigarette he had pulled out and was waiting to use.

  “I don’t smoke,” the man said in the same language, but with a velvet accent.

  “That’s the best policy, I suppose!”

  “I’d advise you to stop.”

  The words were said with a lovely smile.

  “Too late now.” Rockhold laughed.

  He lowered the cigarette and then finally put it away. It was sensible advice, all the same. The man saw this and said, “No, I didn’t mean that. Please smoke, it doesn’t bother me.”

  “My wife agrees with you.” Rockhold sighed. “But for some reason cigarettes make me feel healthier.”

  “Do they?”

  “It’s hard to explain. By the way, do you know the way to Sovana? I have to drive there.”

  The man looked out across the square and pointed to the garage on the far side.

  “It’s down there, I think. It’s about two kilometers.”

  “Thank you very much. I should walk it for my health.”

  “You can walk. It’s not far. But uphill on the way back.”

  “Uphill?” Rockhold echoed.

  “A steep climb on a bad day.”

  That wouldn’t do, but he decided to walk it all the same. To hell with uphill climbs, but pity the aging, unexercised heart. By two he was at the house, to which he had his own key from the office in London along with the number of the woman who looked after the grounds in their absence. He let himself in through the iron gate and then rang the bell at the front door. There was no car parked outside, so it was clear that the Codringtons were not there, not in any case a
t that moment. He called the woman and she answered. In good English she promised to come down at once. He let himself into the house as well and left the door open. Then he entered the salon and saw the sheeted tables and chairs and the atmosphere of abandonment. He understood at once that they had not been there.

  He walked around the vaulted rooms while waiting for the woman and then he happened upon the room where Faoud had slept. The visitor had tidied it up after himself, but it was still obvious that someone had been there, because on the floor there were breadcrumbs and the pillows were dented. He looked at them closely to see if there were hairs to pick from them: there were three to pocket. Just as he was filching them, the woman arrived and he went down to see what her story was. They talked outside in the garden because she didn’t want to go into the house, and there was an eager indignation somewhere in her voice, but not related to himself. She said that she had seen their car the day before parked by the orchard, and that it had appeared out of nowhere, unannounced. The Codringtons always called her two days before they arrived.

  “It was the Peugeot?” Rockhold asked.

  “The same as always. My husband says he saw him driving in during the afternoon?”

  “There was only one?”

  “They weren’t together. There was only one driver. My husband says he was driving erratically.”