Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  But the night was hot and windless and the forest was cooler and more comfortable than the car. He lay in the ferns next to the river and slept for four or five hours. His father came to him in his dream. The old man was in one of his Parisian suits, but also a keffiyeh. He was eating an orange with a knife, and he stood under the pines asking his son how many nights he had left on earth. One, two—maybe not even that.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You are not even a vagrant. You have not come far at all. You are a disgrace and you know it.”

  When he woke the stars were still out and shining with indifferent splendor, but lights had come on in the monastery. The monks were chanting as he walked back to the car. One of them had come out to see whose car had parked among them during the night, and the face was mild and unsuspecting. “Are you lost?” he called out in Italian, but, not understanding, Faoud waved and smiled back and got into the car. It was almost six and the morning promised a pure, torrid summer day.

  He drove slowly down a different road from the one he had used the night before. There was a Banca Monte dei Paschi, but it would not be open for hours. A cafe was open and he had enough for an espresso. He felt the eyes upon him, the mild surprise at his odd appearance—the nice clothes spoiled by too much wear—and the glances down at his unwashed hands. Driving a Peugeot 506. He had enough for one last blood-orange spremuta, and he drank that too, his hands shaking and his throat so dry that it contracted. He could feel that things were winding down and that he had no way to escape the net that was drawing in around him. When he went back onto the single street running through Tosi, the sun was almost up and the land beyond the village had suddenly appeared as a soft green carpet of gardens and vines and hazed ridges. He took the downward-spiraling road into the sun and rows of cypresses against the road cast long shadows into the grass. Along this high road, with its views to the right across the valley toward a distant freeway, the villages offered random targets—pharmacies, stores, small restaurants—which might have tempted him had they been open.

  The next little town was called Pian di Sco. As luck would have it, there was a fancy bakery with a window filled with what looked like wedding cakes. Two women inside. It was as good as any other target. He parked opposite it, took one of the polished shotguns from the backseat, and calmly crossed the street to enter the shop.

  The sun was in their eyes, and they squinted to see who had come in. He was very polite. In English he asked them to give him the contents of the cash register, and then he leveled the barrel at the woman standing by the till and waited for her to open it and empty it. It took a few seconds; they said nothing whatsoever. It was about three hundred euros, a good enough haul. She slid it across the counter, and he took the notes with a quiet “thank you.” Then he handed back a twenty-euro note and asked for a handful of cakes. They were bagged for him with the same silent efficiency, and he thanked the women a second time and told them to keep the change. Then he lowered the shotgun, walked out of the shop, and without undue haste got back into the car and drove on.

  The road ran over a high ridge with vineyards sloping down to the right, wineries posted at the road, agriturismi and cellars and a thousand olive trees basking in a still-refreshing sun. It was not yet nine o’clock.

  At Castelfranco, the road pitched down and swung around and rose again. A road without shade or overbearing trees, raised above the world and bright with the promise of wine, that feared and despised temptation. He drove quite fast, eating the cakes from the bag until he was no longer starving. It was impossible not to be in a better mood, to feel slightly uplifted.

  At the turn-off for an ancient church he found a line of cars waiting for no apparent reason. At first he assumed it was a red light, but when he darted out of the car to investigate the matter he saw that it was not. It was an accident. Two cars had collided and swerved to either side of the narrow road. The occupants were unharmed, and they sat also on either side of the road, smartly dressed as if on their way to a wedding party. He sauntered up to the scene and saw the glass shattered all over the tarmac, and two young girls, sitting on folding chairs in their satin skirts and dresses, with expressions of disbelief and sly mischief. They seemed to find the whole thing a lark.

  On the far side of the accident another line of cars stretched up the hill. The police had not yet arrived, and he thought of their inevitable and imminent appearance and realized that he was trapped.

  He walked unhurriedly back to the car and removed the weapons in the blanket he had wrapped them in and slung his bag over his shoulder and walked off toward Gropina, which looked to be a kind of ghost village, but decorated with pots of flowers. Only now did a car draw up behind his, effectively shutting in the Peugeot, and he was above the road by the time two others drew up behind that one. Disputes and flaring tempers seemed desirable from his perspective. Before long, however, he heard the distant approaching sirens of the police, but for whom they were coming was as yet unclear.

  He found the Gropina pieve and walked on until he was once more in the fields. There was no one there, no inhabitants to track him. He passed a copse to his left and the air became suddenly hot, like the air of a quarry, and the drone of bees came out of the edge of the shade. The track dipped back down to the main Setteponti road, and he could have continued and simply walked on in the same direction. But he didn’t know from which direction the police were coming. He left the track therefore and passed into the lines of vines. Beyond them lay a thicker wood where the leaves seemed to be in a dark sweat. By the time he got there the sirens on the far side of Gropina had become loud and then they were shut off. He hurried into the wood and took out both shotguns and laid them at his side.

  —

  That morning Rockhold was woken in the hotel above Donnini where he had taken a room for the night. The Villa Pitiana was originally a noble’s villa, but now it was a threadbare hotel barely able to keep up with itself. Susan was calling him and the phone’s ringing brought him back to consciousness, but as it did he looked up at the lofty ceiling and had no idea where he was. The night before he had lost the Peugeot somewhere near the town of Poppi and, furious with himself, had decided to stay on the same road in the hope that the following morning would give him a second chance. And so it did. He stumbled to the shutters and threw them open. A sunlit landscape appeared, a cool morning edged with coming heat. Susan told him everything that had happened that morning, which she had heard about only minutes before.

  “A robbery where?”

  He paused the conversation to order some coffee from downstairs and then sat by the window in the sun, a lizard getting its warmth back.

  “Pian di Sco?” he went on, unfolding his map on the table and looking for the tiny settlement. The police had been summoned but were making their way to a different place down the road, where an accident had happened. She had heard it from their contact inside the Italian police.

  “What time was that?”

  It had been an hour ago.

  “So they’re already at Gropina. Maybe it’s not him.”

  But he knew it must be. Leaving everything behind and grabbing his room-service coffee in the lobby before it arrived in his room, he left the Villa Pitiana and drove along the sinuous road that overlooked the valley.

  The road to Gropina was not so easy to find, and when he was finally on it he called Susan for updates. Eventually he, too, came to Pian di Sco. There was a police car parked outside the bakery, but no commotion. He called his Italian colleague in Florence. The police had found the abandoned Peugeot, but its driver had vanished. There was an accident at the scene that they also had to deal with. Confusion reigned, and when he himself arrived there he found the same people gathered around the two crashed cars that Faoud had seen. The police were taking evidence and four officers were walking slowly through the lines of vines to the right of the road. Rockhold parked in the verge behind the line of bottlenecked cars and walked first to the Peugeot with the English plates
that he had, at last, found. A policeman stood there, and they shook hands. They had been told who he was, but their English was limited. The doors of the car were open and he peered inside. It was evidence that should not be touched, and so he merely walked around it and examined the mud-flecked surface of the metal. He was told that detectives were on their way, they would be there within two hours. The suspect had escaped on foot. The robbery had been reported by the owners of the bakery, and it was unusual for the area that the police had reacted with such admirable efficiency.

  “Escaped?” Rockhold said.

  “Ran away. We’re looking in the fields.”

  Then he moved on to the shattered pieces of glass and introduced himself to the officers taking notes there. It was surprising to him that absolute priority would not be given to an armed robbery in a cake shop only a few miles away. But they were locals interacting with locals; they all knew each other and insurance claims were at stake. Things had become heated between the two car owners and shouting had erupted. The police tried to calm them down, and Rockhold wandered off to the hamlet above the road, where something told him a man would go if he had to escape. But they had not posted any men there. A question of manpower and confusion. He walked up to the little church, dark and ancient on its platform overlooking a sea of vines, and then moved through the lanes, coming almost immediately to the end of Gropina.

  But at the edge of the olive groves an old woman stood with a bucket and a rake, and as he walked past her she pointed to the wood farther down the path. It was a silent gesture, and he took it gratefully. Ahead of him the somber trees echoed with cuckoos.

  As he came through the vines and into the first clammy pools of shade inside these same trees, a shot rang out and something seemed to whizz past his left shoulder. Almost without remembering it, he saw that he was himself holding his Glock in one hand with the barrel pointing carelessly downward. He would have crouched in the following moment, but almost instantly a second shot rang out, this time from something bigger and more purposeful, and the shotgun slugs hit him in the chest, sending him rolling backward into the vines in a silent stupefaction that held his tongue. He lay on his back, trying to breathe and gazing up at the sky, which seemed, in some surprising way, to have suddenly released him from its grip. The man within the wood, seeing him fall, himself stood up, shouldered the shotgun that he had just used, and turned to move deeper into the wood. He had recognized Rockhold from the square in Sorano at once.

  He got as far as the olive groves that surrounded a large house nearby, from where the road could be seen. Police cars swarmed along it now, and the men from them had begun to fan out through the vineyards with dogs. Naturally, they had heard the two shots, and were now making their way toward the wood with the pack leading.

  He came to a path with high cypresses and with more forest beyond it. To his right the police moved up through a steep vineyard and the dogs barked furiously. There were cries and shouts: they had discovered the dead Rockhold. Faoud slipped across the track and into the new woods and began to run stealthily through the olive trees beyond. Eventually he dropped the bag and retained only one shotgun and one pistol. He came to another house, and here there was a swimming pool brilliantly lit by the sun. A woman was lying next to it, and in a moment she had seen him. She had raised her head, her mouth had opened, and a short scream had been uttered. He darted up the slope above it, vaguely conscious of the dogs also darting through the trees below. They brought his fear back. One of them appeared right behind him; he turned and shot at it with the shotgun, missed, and then resumed his run. But the pack caught up with him as he came to the edge of yet another copse, and there he turned on them with the pistol and fired off three rounds, scattering them and giving him time to settle behind a tree and reload the shotgun. It was midday before the police had controlled the area and set up their cordon and begun to talk to him through a loudspeaker. But he had already decided not to play games with his honor.

  They waited until nightfall before moving in. During the afternoon the fields were peaceful, birds swooped in blustering gangs upon the vines and the silver-backed olive leaves, and Faoud lay on his side remembering the grave of Ibn Taymiyyah, which he had once visited in a parking lot in Damascus when he was a boy. That was courage, if you thought about it. The theologian who rode out of Damascus in the year 1301 to confront the Mongol invader Ghaza Khan and accuse him of being a bad Muslim because he had taken it upon himself to wage war on other Muslims. To face down a conqueror with words and remonstrations. If you meant what you said, you could confront whole empires. Death was far from being the worst thing that could afflict you. Being a slave was more bitter, and being a heretic was darker still. Remembering which, he aimed his shotgun with a calm calculation as the dark blue figures came edging through the vines. He wondered how long it would take for them to kill him, those soft officers of European law who had probably never fired a weapon in their lives. It might last well into the night with all the advantage on his side. They, after all, cared about their lives: it was a tremendous, perhaps fatal, disadvantage.

  THE

  MILLIONAIRES

  TWENTY-TWO

  Rockhold’s funeral was held in the Sussex village of Poynings, hidden in a fold of the South Downs a few miles from Devil’s Dyke. It wasn’t far from where the Rockholds had long lived, and his wife had reserved a place for them in the small cemetery behind the church years before.

  Of course she had realized that, to begin with, it would be occupied by only one of them. But she had never imagined that it would be so soon, and under such circumstances. The Codringtons came down from London as a group, staying for a few days at the Metropole in Brighton: Jimmie’s brother Rupert, his nieces and nephews, and Naomi, who had returned from Greece for the formalities. It rained all week and the service in the chilly church was one that Jimmie would not have liked—so said his brother. The priest who knew him well extolled his virtues; the little crowd was silent. Rockhold’s body was consigned to the earth in the shade of the Victorian yews with the chalk hill behind it, its crust filled with the Iron Age relics he used to collect on Sundays with his metal detector. The gathering afterward at the Plough Inn was awkward. Rockhold had worked for the Codringtons for thirty years, but few of them knew who he was. He was Jimmie’s secret, and Jimmie had still not surfaced nor ever would. The secret, therefore, endured and grew. The survivors did not know what to say or think about Rockhold. They didn’t know the stiff, petite widow in her black pearls, with her air of accusation and fury. They didn’t know what his virtues really were. Only Rupert knew about him.

  He took Naomi aside and they went out into the drizzle of the lonely, steep-pitched lane that ran outside the pub. He suggested that they drive up to the Dyke together and have a talk.

  “I think it would help to get away,” he said. “You look a little shaken.”

  “Better than stirred.”

  He almost smiled.

  “Quite.”

  It was the end of the day when they got there, and the cafe at the summit was barely open. But the summer rain had stopped and they walked together down the open hillside with its grassy fosses. In their funereal dress they looked, she thought, like suitable ambassadors from the afterlife in a place where she had always thought that ghosts were legion.

  “Jimmie used to take me here when I was very small,” she said. “You can see the sea on a clear day.”

  “So you can. Not today, though.”

  There was just a layer of horizontal light where the sea lay. They came to a halt among the stiff flowers of gorse, the grass rippled by wind. The skylarks trilled so far up they couldn’t see them. Rupert was a rugged man, more rugged than his brother, but in the end peas and pods yielded their results and she could see that the two men were made of the same stuff. They were both half self-made and the same bitterness lay at the bottom of both. Rupert, the younger man, had looked up to his elder sibling only until a certain point in his life. Was that
not always an irreparable loss?

  “I’m glad you came to the funeral,” he said, not looking at her. (The view was an excuse for both of them to avoid each other’s eyes.) “I believe you met Rockhold once, did you not?”

  “He came to Greece to interview me.”

  “Would you call it an interview and not an interrogation?”

  “It was both, in a way. I didn’t mind him. He had his reasons.”

  “I’m sorry they haven’t found your father and stepmother. I had a rather long interview with the Italian police—”

  It had taken place in Rome. He had gone down there with his wife, stayed at the Savoy, and the police had come to the hotel every day to brief him. It had been more surreal than one might have expected and he had sat through the whole thing quite passively. They told him that the migrant had, in all likelihood, carjacked Jimmie and Phaine’s vehicle in southern Italy, killed them, and buried them somewhere along this route from Brindisi to Rome. That was the likeliest possibility, anyway. Now that the suspect was dead there was no one to ask and the theory had to remain suspended, as it were, in the air. It was true that the couple had made no mention to anyone of their intention to drive back that week, and when the police had asked Naomi about it she had simply told them that her father and stepmother were prone to such improvisations. Rupert himself had received an e-mail earlier in the month in which Jimmie had expressed his desire to do so—as they did every year. It was only slightly surprising that he had said nothing to Naomi.

  “He did mention something,” she said quietly. “I can’t remember when, though. He was quite impulsive anyway, as you know—”

  “Indeed he was. It was part of his force.”

  “It didn’t do him much good,” she said sourly. “He would have been better off being a bit less impulsive.”