‘Get in the car,’ he says. ‘Or . . . ’
He dangles the case over the edge. It swings through the black mist leaving a vapour trail. He is black in the rain. I can’t see the expression on his face.
‘Make yourself presentable,’ he says. He opens his hand, lets the suitcase slide an inch down his fingers.
I get up, unsteadily. He is watching my feet, waiting for me to move. But there is too much distance between us. Too much ground to cover.
‘I’ll go over the edge,’ I shout. ‘To spite you.’
‘You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit.’
He opens his hand. The suitcase slides down to the tips of his fingers. He sways. The case arcs, back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, wilder and wilder. His hand is shaking, his arm is growing tired.
I shout, ‘You can’t do the job without me.’
‘And you’ll do jail without me.’ He opens his hand and throws up his arm and lets the suitcase go. I scream his name. His real name. The case rises in the air, parting the rain. It contains everything I have. It rises and rises, turning in slow motion, seems to hover for a moment in the air. A strange drowned kite. I can’t see it, rain fills my eyes. The suitcase falls, turning in the mist, descending into the sea.
The suitcase is almost past Devlin when he reaches out, hooks his fingers through the handle, catches it and holds it above his head. He stands there, looking and not looking at me, the way he does.
‘It’s mine,’ I scream.
He throws the bag at me with both hands. I duck and the case lands beside me.
‘Go then,’ he says. ‘I dare you. It’ll be a relief.’
He gets into the car, slams the door.
I grab the suitcase, hold it to me, look around.
The clearing we are parked in narrows to jagged hillocks of dark treeless earth. I think: Childe Rolande to the dark tower came. The wind is trumpets in my ears. Black knights are among the rocks; the lacing of light is the chain mail on their chests. I know they are only shadows, only tendrils of mist, but I want them to be magnificent harbingers of doom.
It would make the whole thing a little less sordid.
The rain has soaked through my coat. With a feeling of inevitability, I open the case. It is as I thought. My diary is gone. It is a punishment. There is only one person he’s more furious at than me. Himself.
When I open the car door, he gets out without a word and stands under the umbrella while I change.
When I have finished, he gets back in. He looks at his watch – he doesn’t look at me – and starts the engine. There is a taint of Scotch in the air.
The windscreen wipers struggle against the falling torrents, the heater blast is a miniature thermal wind. I bend my head to dry my long blonde hair, watching the dead strands rise in fine silver lines. I hold my hand in front of the vent, warming the wet bandage around my wrist. The green panel fogs.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ says Devlin. He reaches across me to open the glove box. His thick hair has been made completely black by the rain. It is close enough to touch. But I don’t.
He sits back with the first-aid kit. ‘Take the bandage off.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘You’ve got five seconds,’ he says, ‘then I’ll handcuff you and do it myself.’
We look at the burns smeared scarlet around my wrist, the cross-hatching of red lines made by the knife. He takes out a new bandage. ‘You need to keep away from water.’
‘That’ll be hard,’ I say.
We move through the rain. On my left, the cliff drops into nothingness. I imagine all of Sicily un-tethered from the earth’s crust, sailing like a galleon through the black mist. The first Arab sailors landing here, struggling ashore, their ship more likely than not broken on the rocky teeth, watching the cold rain hit their brown skin in shattered blots, smelling the water: acrid, malevolent. Sulfurous.
We enter the tunnel. The engine mutes in the hollow; the sound of sea and rain is cut. Devlin switches on the headlights. The weight of the cliffs presses overhead. There are tiles on the tunnel walls, an exhausted cream crossed with black veins and shiny triangles of reflected water. Midway, a stone vase is bolted to the wall, a bunch of dried flowers inside; a fresh bunch is propped against the lower tiles. The car goes on. I hear his breathing.
I turn to him. I see the tight muscles at the corner of his mouth, the lines at the corner of his eye. The scar on his temple is raised in the light. He looks grim, haggard, worried. Not worried about me, worried because of me.
I say his name. His real name. His eyelids flicker but he won’t turn his head.
I say, ‘John – ’
‘You’re not my only case,’ he says. ‘We’re all on the clock here.’
A circle of light appears, the size of the bracelet on my wrist. If my wrist wasn’t in it.
‘This is all about time,’ he says. ‘Remember that, will you?’
I wonder what would happen if I reached out and put my hand on the shadows circling the base of his neck.
‘And for God’s sake,’ he says, ‘don’t tell them you were in Venice celebrating your father’s death.’
The storm seems worse on the other side of the tunnel. Whirled spouts of water rise high above us before dumping broken seaweed and crushed shells and fistfuls of gritty dark brown sand. I think hail is hammering the roof until I see hard black pebbles bouncing on the bonnet.
A huge rock the size of a mule smashes down. Chunks hit the windscreen, leaving spider-webs of cracks in the glass, more chunks breaking up on the road or cart-wheeling over the edge of the cliff. Devlin hauls at the wheel to avoid the biggest piece. We hit a water plane and skid sickeningly. As the car jerks to a stop and the engine dies, he flings out his right arm to pin me to my seat. I put my hand over his hand, feel the broad wrist, the long fingers. He is still for a moment, shocked maybe, and I find his pulse, press in. He twists his hand away.
‘This bloody country,’ he says.
He starts the car.
‘I’d like to emphasise,’ he barely opens his mouth, each syllable as compressed as stone, ‘that I didn’t mean – ’ he almost shudders at what he is about to say – ‘on the cliff. I do care about . . . ’
Even for the sake of his work he can’t bring himself to say ‘you’.
He says, ‘I do care about the job.’ The Scotch taint is replaced by sharp mint. The same mouthwash my mother used, by the smell of it.
‘If you care about the job,’ I say, ‘why can’t I have a few days off?’
‘You had a few days off,’ he says. ‘In Venice.’
He slows down to avoid a large white boulder lying in the middle of the road. The fog on the window softens the edges; it looks like someone in cream robes, kneeling in the road, praying to Mecca.
‘This is our only window of opportunity,’ he says in the voice carefully bleached of all emotion that he uses whenever he tries to reason with me. ‘Pietr is putting his affairs in order. He’s relocating – South America. Venezuela. You know the Americans have no extradition deals there. You agreed to do this now.’
I raise my wrist, jangle the tracking bracelet viciously.
He won’t look at me. ‘That wasn’t my idea.’
‘Why then?’
‘If I told you it was as much to keep an eye on me as you . . . ’
I cover the bracelet; the green light hums warmth beneath my fingers. Sending out its little calculations, its little messages. ‘You can take it off.’
‘You made the deal,’ he says. ‘It’s this or jail for being your father’s accessory.’
I turn my head to the glass. The cliffs tremble past in dark blurry shapes.
He says, and maybe his tone is softer, ‘I thought you wanted to find out – ’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘ – what happened to your brother.’
Everyone is so sad now, I think to myself as I draw twisted figures of eight on the fogged windo
w. The cliffs move past in a dark parade. The windscreen wipers beat their faltering rhythm, straining under the heavier falls of water.
When the waves come up the cliff, we move through light dampened to an aquamarine glow. I am immensely relaxed, the way I am when I see a fine piece of art or read a poem from the soul. I feel as safe and secure as when I was a child. I am reminded of the games I played with my brother, draping old blankets over the sofa and chairs in the living room to make intricate tunnels and little rooms; our own tiny kingdom. There was one blanket we liked the best: an old green one. It had holes in it, enough to let the light in, enough to let us look out. Spy on everyone outside.
Everyone is so sad now. Where did I say that? The green curtain falls over the car and I remember. I remember saying it to my father at my brother’s funeral, the funeral with the empty coffin.
I slump, exhausted. ‘The cliffs are black glass. Imagine living in a land which constantly reflected black images of you.’
‘Lava,’ he says. ‘Sicily is a volcanic land. There used to be more volcanoes, not just Etna.’ He presses his lips together.
‘Go on.’
He stares ahead. ‘I’m not a tour guide.’
‘You say that in exactly the same tone that women say, I’m not a secretary.’
‘I rest my case.’
‘I am interested, Dev,’ I say, as meekly as I can.
‘Stop talking to me as though you know me.’
I shouldn’t let his disdain get to me – it is what I deserve after all – and I say to myself that I don’t care what he thinks. But I can’t help myself. I can’t not say anything.
‘I’m as interested now as I was the night we met,’ I say slowly.
His face contorts then settles into its usual impassive lines and planes; his Embassy face. But I bet there’s another face under there. Another face revolving in the black wind. I can always tell.
‘Nothing happened that night,’ he says. The emotion has gone again from his voice; he’s forced out any tell-tale inflections. ‘You don’t know me.’
‘No biblical knowings allowed in your schedule.’
His foot comes down hard on the accelerator. The car leaps forward. He can’t remember, that’s his problem. The only thing he can remember is how furious he is with me. All those timetables that he clings to, all those hi-tech gadgets in his briefcase – everything derailed by one too many Scotches.
I look over my shoulder at the briefcase – the new one – on the back seat. I wonder if he knows I picked the lock of his old briefcase the first time I met him. I think so. I never saw that case again. The one he has now is bigger, made of some light steel, with an electronic pad instead of locks. Fingerprint identification. I bet my diary is in there.
‘Can you please check the map,’ he says in that clipped monotone. He thinks I won’t be able to rile him if he stamps everything down. But I am convinced I know what subjects get under his skin. Misguidedly convinced, as it will turn out.
‘You know, we are alike,’ I say. ‘You have your maps, I have my poetry.’
He shakes his head.
‘You don’t like poetry,’ I say, ‘because it seems useless to you. But it is a magnificent uselessness. People die every day for the lack of it.’
‘I don’t like poetry,’ he says, wiping hard at the misted windscreen, ‘because it stirs up emotions. In feeble-minded people who should just get on with the job and stop thinking about their feelings all the time.’
‘You mean me,’ I say. ‘The famous Miss K.’
‘The infamous Miss K,’ he says. ‘It’s not so attractive when you get older, the stories.’
I try to laugh but this is one of those times when the land disappears from under me and I have to scramble to get back.
I unfold the map, trace the red line of road. This section of the coast is sparsely populated, nothing but the inverted black Vs of the mountains running down to the sea, a village or small town here and there. ‘Trepani,’ I read out. ‘Partanna. Santa Margherita. Great names.’
He grunts. ‘Mafia villages. The satellite photos are on the back.’
The other side is covered with blue-grey images. I recognise a farm building and the jagged shadows of a dried-out river. These are aerial shots, taken far above. Up near the moon maybe.
The country in the map is draped with a fine black lattice which clings even to the steep cliffs along the coast road. The land is divided into grey squares; a small number lurks in the right-hand corner of each.
‘These numbers look like scavengers,’ I say. ‘Alien invaders.’
He blows out air, exasperated. ‘Work your way back from 37N 15E. There are no signs in this bloody place.’
‘I know we passed a statue of Saint Agrippina a few kilometres back.’
He looks blank.
‘Near the first rock fall,’ I say helpfully. I don’t bother to say, Near the ruins of the Saracen temple, near the first real reminder that we are in Arabic territory. My father’s old route.
I find the temple on the map: a hatch of pale bones. Even Agrippina’s statue shows as a pale dome and an upraised arm. I trace my way forward, through what must be the tunnel; the road disappears for a while under the mountain’s shroud.
I reach a black circle marking a road running sharply to the right, up the side of a hill. There is a house on the top, and the dark oval of a driveway. But the house is surrounded by what looks like flat panes of water, a ghostly shield where the building’s inner walls, pale and distorted, seem to show through. They are smudged, like Devlin’s face in the rain.
He takes a quick look at the map. ‘Probably a misprint. These things are never as accurate as you want them to be.’
I stare at the fine squares, the land reduced to its essentials. I see Agrippina’s pleading hand. The grey tree tops tremble in my lap as the car slides on the wet road. The map seems very accurate to me.
We go on. Twice we have to swerve sharply as boulders hit the road. The next time, a rock lands on the roof and makes a bulge in the metal over the back seat.
I touch the distortion. The vinyl has stretched but held.
‘They’ll need to fish-oil that quick smart,’ I say, ‘to keep the rust out.’
‘Like you know anything about cars,’ says Devlin. ‘The party princess.’
‘My brother loved cars. I helped him fix up his first one.’ I have a sharp image of blue sky and jacaranda. My brother wiping his hands on an oily rag and saying, ‘It’s a long way to the shop if you want a sausage roll.’
I smell wattle and gum leaves. ‘Aren’t you ever homesick?’ I say to Devlin.
He says, ‘Don’t even think of trying that one on me.’
The rain comes down, harder. The windscreen wipers are barely clearing the water when he says, ‘There.’
The side road looks as though it rises almost vertically. But it is paved with large heavy stones wedged into the earth, enough surface for the tyres to grip. There are thick stone columns on either side; on top of each is a wolf’s head, cast in steel. In the glowering light, the rain running down the twisted grey metal looks like tears.
The car climbs the steep hill, the motor whining. We lean forward in our seats to stay upright, feel the weight pulling at us, in our lower backs, in our stomachs, the pressure wanting us to slide back into the sea. The bracelet is heavy on my wrist. I wonder how high we will go. I wonder if the light on the bracelet will change.
Balls of mist roll slowly past the windows. The land is black wet scrub: stubby bushes cling to small pockets of soil between the scattered rocks. I wipe a circle in the smudged window and look into the side mirror. Behind us, the drifting sheets of rain have settled into steady, falling walls. There is no sign of the horizon, just a glimpse of clouds swelling like sails out of the sea. The road disappears into them.
The slope seems to ease; statues appear on either side: more wolves, a boar with long curving tusks, a bear on its hind legs, clawing up out of the grey mist.
A garland of mist as thick as fairy floss is wrapped around its throat.
‘Do they have bears here?’
‘Probably some homage to the local Mafia leader,’ Devlin says as the car crawls on.
Here are statues of women, saints presumably, bowed heads under lovingly carved cowls, their clasped hands protruding from the carefully draped robes. Their eyes are downcast, their faces long-suffering. Passive. Resigned. Ineffectuality as survival.
I have an image of black shawls, hidden faces. Imagine never feeling the sun on your head. I feel a moment’s pity for them: living in this backwater, far from the world, cut off from all events.
I stare at the panel at the top of Devlin’s map: a miniaturised outline of Sicily, set between Europe and Africa. There is barely a square’s width between Sicily and Tunisia, just under three to where Iraq sits, an innocuous patch to the right.
I think of my father’s business. For business, Sicily was the most strategic point in the world to him. And to Pietr’s grandfather. Only Pietr’s father escaped – what had they called it at the trial? ‘A century of deliberately orchestrated looting and plundering.’ Was there a better word than ‘looting’, something other than ‘plundering’, for what my father did? I didn’t think so.
The road flattens; the land on my right falls away more gently. The strain on our lower backs is immediately relieved.
We are on a natural plateau. I rub at the window and see six broken columns reach from the ground like massive arms.
‘Jesus,’ says Devlin, but he is not looking at the ruins.
A mule comes into view, its head bowed beneath the rain. The black sacking it wears has holes to allow the long ears through. The mule tows a painted wooden cart, the vivid blues and reds dulled by the rain. A man sits hunched on the front seat, wearing a black plastic sheet as a poncho. The raindrops hit the plastic, forming small rivers that run down the shiny surface. The mule steps carefully; the sound of its hooves reaches us.
We sit in the road. The idling exhaust blows past us, broken up by the rain. The cart comes on, the man doesn’t raise his head.
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