Two Dark Tales

by Charles Lambert

  Gordon shook his head. ‘No way. Absolutely no way. Are you fucking crazy?’

  ‘We could nip up one day next week, after Angela’s gone,’ said Omar. ‘Just to see.’

  ‘You can nip up if you want,’ said Gordon. He had forgotten Angela was on her way back, more fired up than ever. ‘I’m not coming to see anything.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Gordon glanced at Omar. You have no idea how much you hurt me, he thought, and you never will have. Even if I told you, you wouldn’t listen. Whatever the pilot says. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He read what Cees had written again. ‘It doesn’t make much sense, does it?’ He sighed. ‘It looks as though Jenny was right. He’s totally bonkers.’ He paused. ‘But what’s this bit about you knowing? Knowing what?’

  Omar shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I don’t know jack squat.’

  Angela took photographs with her iPad of every corner of the house, then sent them off into the cloud, where her friends, she said, were waiting. Gordon had a vision of New York socialites decked out like angels on billowing cushions of white, holding smartphones instead of harps. ‘I need their love and prayers,’ she said, ‘to help me find the strength in myself to invest in this.’ As soon as she was done with the house, she stared into the sky and told Omar she had to go to the beach. He pulled a face in Gordon’s direction, then saluted her, clicking his heels. ‘At once, madam,’ he said, but the irony was lost on her.

  Twenty minutes later, they were eating mussels within spitting distance of the sea. It was still too early in the year for more than a row of umbrellas. Angela was halfway through her second bottle of wine and talking about how the ocean was God’s work until a family of Neapolitans edged too close to their table, and she asked Omar how to say fuck off in Italian. ‘Adorabili,’ he told her, but she didn’t fall for it. ‘Yeah, right,’ she said, the London accent breaking through the New York veneer. After the meal was finished she stretched out on a lounger. Ten minutes later, her snores could be heard at a distance of fifty yards. Omar and Gordon had stayed at the empty table and were picking scraps of bread off the tablecloth and organising them into small grey piles. ‘She wants it,’ said Omar in a low voice. ‘It’s a done deal. We just need to get the owners on board.’

  When she woke up two hours later, Angela struggled into a sitting position before letting out a penetrating groan. ‘My back!’ she cried. ‘You need to get me to an ER. Pronto!’

  She sat in the passenger seat, moaning whenever the car hit a bump in the road. ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she kept saying. When they reached the hospital, and Gordon had heaved her upright and helped her into the pronto soccorso, she looked around with a horrified expression. ‘Is this a public hospital?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gordon. He was alone with her for the first time. Omar was parking the car. ‘Don’t worry. It won’t cost you anything. Emergency treatment is free.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said impatiently. ‘But there are all these people.’ She grabbed a passing orderly. ‘I need to see a doctor,’ she said, in English. The orderly lifted her hand from his arm, then spoke to Gordon.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘That you need to get in line,’ said Gordon. ‘There aren’t that many people.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ she snapped. ‘Go and tell someone I’ve got a weak heart.’ She pointed at a family with two small children and a screaming baby. The mother was rocking the baby back and forth while the father read his smartphone and the children rolled on the floor. ‘They can wait,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got a weak heart?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Omar,’ she said. ‘Will you just get me some pain relief?’

  ‘My name’s Gordon,’ he said. ‘Omar drove you here. Remember?’

  ‘I don’t care who you are.’ She took a deep breath. ‘If I don’t get seen to immediately, I’ll scream.’

  They were walking towards the car a few days later, on their way to Cees’s place, when Ciccio called them over to the shop. Omar tossed Gordon the key. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he said, walking off before Gordon had a chance to protest. Ciccio abhorred witnesses, he remembered, the way nature abhorred a vacuum. He waited in the passenger seat, planning his escape. He would need money, he thought. But then, if he had money, Omar would no longer treat him like shit. Would that be enough, he wondered, to make him want to stay? To not be treated like shit for once in his life?

  ‘He can’t find them,’ Omar said, turning the key in the ignition and backing out of the parking space.

  ‘Find what?’

  ‘The owners of Angela’s house. One of the sisters who gave Ciccio the key said she’d be getting in touch, but he hasn’t heard from her. She left a number but there’s no answer. He says it’s some place in the States. He probably hasn’t rung.’ He rubbed his fingers together to indicate money, then tapped his pocket. ‘I’ve got the number from him.’

  ‘California,’ said Gordon. ‘She lives in California. That’s what you told me the last time.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, after your last very private and confidential conversation with Ciccio.’

  Omar threw an exasperated glance at Gordon. ‘You aren’t still in a huff, are you?’

  Gordon shook his head. ‘What would I be in a huff about?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I’m just the driver.’ Omar reached over to give his leg a conciliatory squeeze.

  Gordon didn’t move. The last thing in the world he wanted was to have Angela living within a hundred miles of where he was. So why didn’t this feel like good news? ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What do we do now?’

  Two Indian casual labourers were cycling side by side in front of the car, talking to each other, cardboard boxes filled with artichokes tied to their pannier racks. Omar lifted his hand from Gordon’s leg and punched the horn to move them over. ‘We need to talk about that,’ he said.

  ‘I’m doing this for you,’ said Gordon as they climbed the hill. ‘I don’t care one way or the other.’

  ‘I thought you did,’ said Omar, pausing to take a breath. He looked back down towards the house, with Gordon, ruled by his second nature, following his eyes. The tent, its flaps still open, was where they had left it, beside the Toyota. They had knocked on the door of the neighbouring farmhouse – this had been Gordon’s idea – but without result. Neither of them had ventured near the cistern this time, although it still seemed to Gordon to be the obvious place to look. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t. Walking across the short rough grass of the hillside, he had the sensation of something moving from his feet at every step, something too small or fast to identify. When a fly buzzed near his ear, his reaction was so violent, his arm flying up to brush the insect away, that he almost threw himself off balance. He was doing it for Omar, he said to himself, but he wasn’t convinced. He no longer seemed to know the purpose of anything. Walking past the house, they could smell the shit, but neither he nor Omar mentioned it. How quickly we get used to the stink of it, he thought. The human waste. What had Omar said last week? That he didn’t know jack squat? Where the fuck did that come from? He’d heard someone else say it recently, but couldn’t remember who. On The Wire maybe. Typical of Omar to pick up something like that and think it was his to use.

  Omar was a few steps ahead of him, maybe fifty yards from the mouth of the cave, when they heard a shout from below. They looked down and saw Cees waving.

  ‘Get away from there,’ he was shouting. ‘For God’s sake, get away from there.’ He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt; he looked as though he hadn’t shaved for days. He waved his arms frantically. ‘He’ll see you,’ he cried, his hands cupped to his mouth. ‘Get away from the cave.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Gordon. ‘He knows what he’s talking about.’ He turned to pull Omar towards him, to lead him down the hill. But Omar had continued to walk towards the dark mouth of the cave. It was larger than it had seemed from below, with a curtain of some trail
ing plant, like a crooked fringe, across one side of it. ‘Leave it,’ Gordon called and, for a moment, just this once, he thought Omar would do what he’d been asked. But Omar took a step, and then another step, until he was close enough to stick his head into the cave mouth. He stood there, one hand on the edge of the cave wall, leaning forward, the curtain of foliage falling across his shoulder. Gordon waited for him to speak. He was still waiting when he heard the sound of a car start up. Turning, he saw the Toyota pull away. ‘He’s gone,’ Gordon shouted.

  Omar didn’t seem to have heard at first. Gordon, against his every instinct, was about to hurry up the last stretch of the slope that stood between them when Omar took a step away from the cave mouth, then leant on the wall beside it, staring into the sky. He was breathing heavily, so heavily Gordon could hear him from where he stood. Omar lowered his head finally to look down the slope towards Gordon, who hadn’t, after all, moved.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he called up, a trace of guilt in his voice.

  Omar nodded slowly.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Gordon said again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said again.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw something, didn’t you?’

  Omar shook his head.

  ‘No. It was too dark to see anything. It stinks though. It smells like something’s died in there.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Gordon. Without waiting for Omar, he began to stumble down the hill.

  ‘What did you know?’ said Gordon as they drove down through the cork forest away from the house.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said you knew jack squat. What was that all about?’

  ‘Who the hell’s Jack Squat?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Cees said you knew. Omar knows. I want to know what you know.’

  Omar sighed. ‘You don’t think any of that stuff made sense, do you?’

  ‘It did make sense though, some of it.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘All that about the house having four ways in.’

  ‘And no way out? Yes, that was creepy.’ Omar made the noise he made when they watched horror films together, a low-pitched groan. He poked Gordon in the ribs, letting the car swing wildly to the other side of the road, then jerking it back. ‘Wooo-hooo-er,’ he moaned.

  ‘OK, that’s fine. If you don’t want to tell me.’

  Omar sighed again. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘OK,’ said Gordon, unconvinced. ‘If you say so.’

  They were driving along a long straight road, flanked on the inland side by plane trees. It had once been the Via Appia and had the remains of rich men’s tombs dotted along it at regular intervals, drum-shaped heaps of stone, most of them neglected and left to fall into rubble. These days, the road was plagued by articulated lorries and the bicycles of illegal workers. When heavy rains came, usually in early summer, torrents of water descended from the hills to their left, sweeping up whatever they found in their path and depositing it on the ribbon of heat-cracked tarmac. It was held to be one of the most dangerous roads in Italy, which gave it a sort of prestige in Omar’s eyes. He shared this fact with their guests as a matter of course. Cees, Gordon remembered now, had nodded in his bored, distracted way. ‘Roman, you say? Like, original?’ he’d remarked, as if he hadn’t heard the part about danger.

  They were almost home when the traffic came to a halt. It took them half an hour to cover the hundred yards that separated them from the Toyota, the front half buckled and wrapped round a tree on the wrong side of the road. An ambulance, siren howling, was pulling away as they approached. Omar called across to a policeman, propped against his motorbike by the verge. The policeman thought for a moment before strolling across. When Omar asked what had happened, he shrugged.

  ‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Maybe a stray dog. The passenger’s dead, but I didn’t tell you that if anyone asks. No sign of the driver.’

  ‘What did the passenger look like?’ asked Gordon. The policeman bent down to look into the car, to examine him more closely. Gordon should have left the talking to Omar, whose Italian was perfect.

  ‘Believe me,’ the policeman said, straightening up and shaking his head, ‘you don’t want to know.’

  ‘I suppose one of us should call Jenny,’ Gordon said that evening, after they had eaten, or Omar had. Gordon had had no appetite for food. How inconceivable, he thought, that someone they knew and had seen only an hour or two before should be dead. ‘Someone ought to tell her.’

  ‘They’ve split up, haven’t they?’ said Omar. ‘Besides, tell her what, exactly?’

  So I’ll be the one to do it, thought Gordon. Well, I expected that. ‘About the accident.’

  ‘And the phantom driver?’

  ‘You don’t really think that, do you?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. The likeliest thing is that the policeman made a mistake. It wouldn’t be the first time. People get arrested for nothing all the time.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s any of our business,’ said Omar, pushing his plate away with a gesture of irritation. ‘I think we should just leave it. We don’t even know for sure that it was Cees in the car. I mean, did you check the number plate? There must be thousands of grey Toyotas. He’s probably doing coke in Amsterdam as we speak.’ He poured himself another glass of wine. When Gordon held his empty glass out, he filled that too. ‘Anyway, I need to talk to you about something else.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ said Gordon, although he wasn’t. He was imagining the body of Cees in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, his skinny boy’s legs broken and trashed inside a tangled cage of metal, and wondering what part they had played in all this. He was wondering what Omar knew, and continued to know. He was wondering how he could make enough money to leave this place, and if what he wanted was to leave with Omar, or without him. He was wondering what Cees had felt as the car ploughed into the tree. What had the policeman said? A stray dog? Was that all it took, he thought, to bring a life to its end?

  ‘Ciccio says there’s no way those two sisters will sell the place. It isn’t even on the market.’

  ‘What place?’

  ‘Angela’s place.’

  ‘I thought you said it was.’

  Omar shook his head. ‘You’ll see. They’ll both hold on to it to spite the other. That’s how families work.’

  ‘Well, that’s that then.’

  Omar emptied his glass. ‘Well, yes and no.’

  ‘If it isn’t for sale she can’t buy it. What’s yes and no about that?’

  ‘Well, who’s to say whether it’s for sale or not? I mean, if there’s no one to say it isn’t.’

  ‘Come on, Omar. You’re not suggesting we tell her it’s for sale and then, what? Run off with the money?’

  ‘Is that such a terrible idea?’

  Gordon laughed, although he didn’t feel like laughing. He felt as though he had trodden on something that gave way beneath his feet. ‘Well, it’s a dishonest one.’

  ‘And how much has being honest given you? I don’t see people running to the door with offers of honest work for you. Or any other kind.’

  ‘Well, thank you, darling,’ said Gordon. ‘Just the ego boost I needed after seeing a fatal accident involving someone I know.’

  ‘You can’t take that on your shoulders.’ Omar swept some crumbs off the table into his hand, then dropped them back where they had been. ‘You needn’t feel guilty about absolutely everything that goes wrong in the world. Some things just happen.’

  ‘Yes, well, that makes me feel much better. A universe of total utterly meaningless chaos.’

  ‘I knew you’d come round.’

  ‘That’s not coming round, Omar. That’s throwing my arms up in dismay.’

  *

  Half an hour later, they had sorted out the details.

  ‘We’ll need to call her and see if she’s still interested,’ sai
d Omar.

  ‘What time is it in New York?’

  Omar looked at his mobile. ‘Six hours earlier. That makes it just after five. She’ll be having tea with one of her lipstick lesbian society friends.’

  ‘You don’t think?’

  Omar laughed. ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And it’s still OK to cheat her out of almost two hundred thousand euros? What about LGBT solidarity?’

  ‘You have to be out for it to count,’ said Omar. ‘I thought everyone knew that. Otherwise, you’re fair game.’

  ‘And you say Ciccio’s sure he can organise everything this end?’

  ‘So long as he gets his cut, yes. He’s got the keys to an office we can use, and he’ll find someone who’s prepared to play the notaio. He says his sisters-in-law will stand in as the owners. They’re about the right age. Not that it matters. He’ll take the cheque made out to the notaio, and that’s his cut. And we get the rest. In cash.’

  All this has been set up behind my back, thought Gordon. The hours that Omar and Ciccio must have spent sorting out the sordid business details while I played house husband in the kitchen. I might as well have worn an apron and not worried my silly little head about things. He felt weak, and weakly angry, with hopelessness. But then there was the money. And Angela deserved it.

  ‘What if she can’t pay cash?’

  ‘Don’t you remember what she said?’ Omar put on a voice intended to resemble Angela’s. ‘“As my dear friend Leona used to say before God took her, ‘Only the little people pay taxes.’” The last thing she’ll want to do is declare the money. Don’t you remember how she got it?’

  ‘She is vile, isn’t she?’ Gordon still needed reassurance. Somehow, while they’d been talking, he’d persuaded himself that he would be doing this for Cees. That, in some celestial balance, Angela’s getting ripped off would compensate for the death of the other man. Assuming he was dead, of course. The local news programme had spoken of an unidentified foreigner. He would phone Jenny tomorrow, he decided. He would tell her what he knew. Jack Squat, he thought.