“About what?” Had the blow affected her brain?
“You know,” she said. “Toni and Zennaro.”
I looked at her. Her eyes were fixed full on mine, pleading. I thought, Well, I can lose nothing by playing along—and she could lose a hell of lot by my not doing so … starting with intact bones and teeth and fingernails. I turned my expression to one of resigned anger. “You tell them,” I said.
“Who is Zennaro?” Padoan said.
“He’s a painter,” I said—at exactly the same time as Lucy. Well, that was convincing if anything was.
“And so?”
Lucy said, “I don’t know much about this whole thing, but I know Martin said he had to get in touch with this Zennaro because he was looking after a friend.” She said all this in English still.
Padoan’s upturned black nose swiveled around to me—and the eyes, of course. “Where is this Zennaro?”
I opened my mouth—but Padoan suddenly added, “No, don’t tell me. Write it. And you too,” turning and nodding at Lucy.
“But I’ve never been there,” Lucy said. “I just think—”
“Silence. Write.”
I was given a pen and a torn-off piece of newspaper. I wrote, with my left hand dragging along in the ink’s wake, “Far end of Via Garibaldi.” Lucy wrote something on another bit of newspaper. Padoan looked at the two scraps. “Good. They agree. So why all these lies about not knowing?”
I shrugged. “I don’t approve of murder, I suppose.”
“What we are doing is justice: the justice of the people.”
“Yeah, you and Li Peng and Hitler and Ceausescu and—”
“Silence.” My remarks hadn’t angered him in the slightest, though I could hear some of the others stirring and the woman snorting into her mask. Well, I hoped she drowned in her own spittle.
“Zennaro doesn’t have anything to do with the paintings,” I said.
“We will deal with him justly, have no fear.”
Oh, my God. Had I sentenced him to death? “Look, I mean it—he—he—he isn’t anything—”
Lucy came in. “Zennaro’s just a poor painter for the tourists from what I hear. You mustn’t touch him—”
“We will decide. What is the exact address?” The eyes were staring down at me.
I told him, thinking there was no point in trying to go back on it now.
With his usual quick decisiveness he announced, “We will pick him up at once.”
“And the paintings?” one of them said: a new voice, presumably Bruno or Lucio.
“We will get the information from Sambon about them.”
“While he’s still got his tongue,” Luca said, and there was a snigger from behind two or three of the masks.
“Exactly,” Padoan said, with no trace of humor. Why laugh at an accurate statement of fact?
Plans were immediately made over a map of the city, which was spread out on the camp table. Two of them stayed with their guns pointing down at us. I looked at Lucy and she looked at me. I tried by a little raising of the eyebrows and a shrug to get across the message, “So what about Zennaro then? And what do we do when they find out Toni’s not there? Invent another painter?” She gave a faint smile back, which, I felt, suggested she hadn’t fully grasped the subtleties of my questions.
It was decided that only one of them would be left to guard us, and after a certain amount of argument the woman was chosen. The others would set off in two boats, three in each of them. Cruella DeVille clearly rather looked forward to the idea of having us both under her sole control. I could imagine a little serpent tongue flickering around thin lips behind the mask’s toothy grin.
“Put them together,” Luca said. “They’ll like that.” His mask seemed to curl into a sneer as he said it.
We were both made to stand by the window opposite the entrance and Lucy’s wrists were untied, the rope having been judged inadequate. As they only had the one pair of handcuffs (and how does one obtain such things, I found myself wondering, what sort of shop sells them?) they did for both of us. They were clicked onto my right wrist, passed around one of the bars in the window’s grille (which was first tested for solidity), and clicked onto Lucy’s left wrist. We were thus forced to a standing position with our arms raised, but we did at least have one arm free. I used it to touch the back of my head—and at once wished I hadn’t.
They checked their guns, clicking them open, loading them, snapping them shut, thrusting them into holsters and adjusting their coats over them; the masks looked pretty silly at this point—but even so, I still felt no urge to laugh. Padoan left first, saying nothing; one or two of the others made some remark to the effect, “We’ll be back,” and the woman lifted her rifle in salutation, her Mickey Mouse nose held arrogantly up, and she said, “Good hunting, compagni.” It was, of course, typical that amid all the horror of what was being here prepared, I should be struck by the kitsch of the scene. Well, that’s the decadent kind of elitist I am.
The woman gazed out at the fog, which was gathering thicker and darker, and then swiveled to face us, her rifle leveled. “I shoot first and ask questions afterward,” she said. “So no foolishness.” Clichéd kitsch again: but I felt the real import of it this time: a sick dread in the pit of my stomach.
19
“CAN we talk?” Lucy asked.
“Go ahead and screw if you want. But any suspicious move will be your last.”
She should obviously get a job at Hollywood. I turned to Lucy and said, “Sorry.”
She said nothing, just curled her upraised hand into mine. I held it tight and then brought my free arm around her. I said, “Funny the ways we get brought together.”
“A scream.”
“But look, Zennaro—”
“Zennaren’t you going to keep your mouth a little more carefully buttoned?” Here eyes merely flickered to her left by way of gesture. The woman was sitting on one of the camp stools, the rifle on her lap. We were talking in low voices but she could have exceptional hearing. Lucy suddenly switched to a caricature Scottish accent. “Och, at least make your gab a wee bit tough to crack, will ye no’?”
“Hoots,” was all I could think of saying. Then: “Gotcha.” I went on with a broad West Country accent. “And old Zennarrr, what’ll be of ’ee, then?”
“Och, the puir wee man has done a bunk.”
“And how d’ye ken that?” I switched dialect.
“Because I tried to get a butcher’s at him meself, dinneye? I went round there Wednesday-like, and the li’l old lidy told me ’e’d slung his hook, scarpered, wiv all his stuff. She dinno why.”
“Wotcher go there for?”
“I bin all over, trying to get a line on you.”
“I see.” So they’d find an empty flat, which could mean anything—even that we’d been telling the truth, as far as we knew it. But I wished the empty flat had been a bit farther away. They’d probably be back within an hour and a half.
I let go of Lucy and glanced over at the woman. She hadn’t budged. She was still sitting upright on that stool, not even leaning against the wall, and the rifle was still across her lap. There was of course no way of seeing if she’d been following our conversation; the mask gave no indication of puzzlement and certainly she hadn’t scratched the big round ears.
“Does it hurt?” I said, gesturing down at Lucy’s leg.
“There’ll be a bruise, I guess. Could have been worse.”
“Well, that’s always true.” We’d both settled down to fairly sloppy cockney; the other accents were too much like hard work, and we hadn’t even been getting any amusement out of them. Lucy’s cockney, I noticed, was really quite convincing; a lot better than mine, at any rate. “How’d they get you?”
“Moved in on me when I come out of the flat. They said if I din call yer, they’d go in after yer, and there was a biby, so…”
“Yes, yes, I see.”
“They’d been following me for a bit, though. I’d had a bit of
an idea they were, but couldn’t be sure. Reckon they got onter me when I went round to your hotel asking about yer—yer know, the di after they tried to nab you there. I went along to see if you’d gawn back there and they were keeping tabs on the plice, and they must have recognized me.”
Another pause, and then I said again, “Sorry.”
She let a quick smile flicker up and said, “Well, can’t be helped—spilt milk and all that.”
Some clichés are more effective than others, I thought.
“That’s enough talking,” the woman cut in here. “If you want to say anything, say it aloud. In Italian.”
“Where are we?” Lucy asked in Italian.
“No stupid questions.”
“So what’s an intelligent question?” I asked.
“None you’re likely to ask. You probably haven’t asked a real question all your life.”
“And what’s a real question?” I said.
“One that challenges the system, one that isn’t intended just to reinforce it, and your position within it.”
“Oh, yes, my position within it. My great position down at the slammer.”
She made no reaction to this; nothing that indicated whether she’d understood the idiom or not.
We remained silent for twenty minutes or so. The woman never moved once. We continued to shift our upraised and shackled arms, trying to find a comfortable position. (There wasn’t one, but we kept trying.)
I looked at the iron bars in the window once or twice. On closer examination they didn’t actually form a grille; they were simple vertical bars with ornamental flourishes added at top and bottom—rough curls on either side of each bar. There had obviously been four bars at one time but the one on the far right had disappeared, together with some of the stonework at top and bottom. This made me look at the other bars with some hope, but I soon saw that they were solidly embedded at both ends—or at least solidly enough for any surreptitious fiddling or scraping to be of no use whatsoever.
I looked out of the window; this meant twisting around, with my head crooked over my shoulder; all I could see were bushes and trees, indistinct shapes hulking in the mist.
The woman glanced at her watch: her first movement. She got up and moved over to the table. As she did so I put my head closer to the bars, almost cricking my neck in the process, and I peered out in the hope of seeing anything that might give a clue to where we were. But there was nothing. I dropped my eyes down to the ground below the window: in the dank vegetation I saw something long and straight—too straight to be a twig or branch.
A voice suddenly said, “—direct from our studio in Rome.” My head spun around. She’d turned on the radio. She was watching me carefully: at least the mask was pointing in my direction. The radio went on to announce the evening’s programs.
I wasn’t listening: I was wondering whether the object outside could be the other bar from the window. I didn’t want to call attention to myself—or to it—by having another look. I calmed myself, saying, Well, even if it were, I couldn’t reach it, and even if I could reach it, what use would it be against a gun?
I suddenly realized the news was being read: they were talking about the bomb in Padua. The condition of the two hospitalized carabinieri remained critical. The police were still taking seriously the phone call from the so-called New Front of the Proletariat. Roadblocks were still in force. “And in Venice—”
We all leaned in closer: I could have sworn the Mickey Mouse ears pricked up.
“—the police this afternoon raided the flat of a man suspected of having been a partner of Michele Busetto. Michele Busetto, who was murdered earlier in the week by the New Front of the Proletariat, is known to have trafficked extensively in stolen works of art, and the man whose flat was raided this afternoon, Fabio Zennaro—”
There was a general intake of breath here.
“—is a painter who the police believe may have helped disguise works in order to facilitate their transport abroad. Zennaro had already abandoned the flat, but the police say they have clues that may lead to a speedy arrest.
“Meanwhile Carnival continues apparently unaffected by the recent events. The inflow of visitors to the city, this first weekend of the celebrations, is said in fact to be considerably up from last year. People are being advised not to try to arrive by car, but to use the specially provided car parks on the mainland, since holdups are likely on the causeway into the city, owing to the numbers of visitors.
“In Israel this afternoon—”
The woman turned the volume down and said, “I’m sure my compagni will have listened to this news on their radios in the boat.”
I thought I detected some uncertainty in this statement—or even wishful thinking—but then thought there was probably more wishful thinking in my own detection of it. It was nice to imagine them walking unawares into a flat full of armed carabinieri—or at least nicer than imagining them coming back here. But I remembered that during the day they had apparently not missed a single news bulletin, so if they had radios with them, they probably wouldn’t have missed this one either.
The woman turned the volume back up. There was no more relevant news. She turned toward the building’s open end and looked out into the fog. I looked out of the window again, squinting down at the ground. In the gathering gloom I could only just make out the bar. At one end I thought I saw the ornamental curls still attached.
“Lucy,” I said quietly, “we’ve got to get her away from the building for a few seconds.”
“Why?” Her voice was dull, as were her eyes. The prospect of a speedy return pleased her no more than it did me.
“Too complicated to explain. Have you got anything we can throw out into the bushes? Quickly.”
She put her free hand into her coat pocket and came out with some coins and a notebook. I took the coins, keeping my eye on the woman, who was still gazing out at the fog. I then swiveled around to face Lucy and with my free hand flung them out over her shoulder. I drew my hand back in and dropped it to Lucy’s waist even before they landed. There was the faintest of distant scuffling noises. Nothing else. The woman turned around and came back in. She probably hadn’t heard anything, and the rain of gold hadn’t awakened any scurrying little animals, as I’d hoped. I broke away from Lucy as if embarrassed at the intimate pose we’d been discovered in.
Lucy looked at me and shrugged. We waited another five minutes or so during which the woman lit a gas lamp. Then she moved again to the entrance and stared out. I took the notebook; it was solidly bound and satisfyingly heavy. Once again I moved around to Lucy’s side. I threw it, upward, outward, and to the side. My hand was at her waist again before we heard it hit the bushes: a few seconds’ threshing of leaves, even a tiny crack of a twig, and then a little thud. The woman definitely heard this. I heard her turn and I glanced over my shoulder and saw her with the gun raised and pointing at us. We broke free again with another display of embarrassment, raising our free arms at the same time, but she was already turning to stare around the side of the chapel. She made a few steps in that direction—stopped—and then a few more, disappearing around the side.
I pulled a pen and a pencil from my pockets and threw those. More faint pattering noises and we now heard the woman moving farther from the building.
My hand dropped to my trouser belt and started fiddling at the buckle. “Help me undo it,” I whispered.
Lucy’s face was a picture of surprise and puzzlement. Fortunately she wasted no time in asking questions but put her fingers to the buckle and helped me flip the tongue from the hole. I then tugged at the belt to free it: as ever it snagged halfway around, and as ever I told myself, More haste, less speed, while continuing nonetheless to tug savagely. It came away with a sudden jerk that suggested a loop on the trousers had given.
I stood there holding the belt in one hand and listening to the woman outside: just a faint rustling of distant leaves and an occasional squelch, which I hoped meant her feet were g
etting soaked.
I said to Lucy, “I’m going to try and fish something up from outside.” I’m quite sure she had no idea what I meant, but I felt I had to say something before my next action. Which was to close in on her again—but really crushing her this time as I dangled the belt out over her shoulder, the buckle hanging down to the grass. There was a moment’s desperation when I was sure it wouldn’t reach, but Lucy somehow made herself yet smaller and I felt the belt brushing against grass: I couldn’t see anything unfortunately. Then there was a tiny dull clink as the buckle touched something metal. I slowly trailed it up the bar, my arm stretching to its full length, and Lucy obligingly managing to lose one of her dimensions. It caught on something and I guessed I’d reached the end where the loop was attached. I gently jiggled my arm until I thought I could feel the buckle actually slipping over the end of the curl and snagging on it.
I was now reduced to two senses: tactile and aural. Every quiver and every extra tug of tension in the belt transmitted itself up my arm: the bar, belt, and arm became one thing. And my ear was tuned in to every tiny noise outside the barn as the woman continued to poke around in the bushes. I started lifting—gently, gently—and I felt the extra weight of something coming up with the belt. I continued to lift my arm.
Suddenly the woman’s cautious padding became a decisive thrashing: she’d given up and was coming back. As I realized this I jerked my arm upward with the panicky intention of catching the bar in midtoss. I merely succeeded in jerking it off the buckle. It dropped with a clatter back to earth. I only just managed to stop myself swearing.
The woman’s returning footsteps stopped at this noise and suddenly she was moving away again.
I restarted the process. By now I’d completely forgotten Lucy’s existence: her body was a mere irritating obstacle, one that wasn’t as reducible in size as I would have liked.
The buckle snagged again, I pulled upward, and seconds later I had the whole thing off the ground, hanging from the buckle. I suddenly thought, And suppose the woman comes round to this window now, and tried not to let the agitation communicate itself to my arm again. In another three seconds my handcuffed hand had grasped the rough metal of the bar. I dropped the belt and transferred the bar to my free hand.
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