Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  Pietr pulls out a narrow drawer in the steel box. The interior is lined with red velvet raised in small ridges like tiny red waves. In the padded troughs are rows of crusted rocks, some small, some the size of marbles. ‘Uncut sapphires,’ he says. ‘Ilakaka roughs. Not so pretty to look at.’ He pulls out the drawer above. On the velvet are cut squares of dull gleaming blue, like sea water in a bottle. They catch the light in uneven patterns so the colours seem to shift in a minute universe of swirls and clouds.

  ‘Cut sapphires,’ says Pietr. ‘The business runs on these. You would think it would be diamonds. But no. These are the workhorses of the industry.’

  He closes the drawer and opens the next. Dull green glitters. Emeralds.

  ‘Madagascar, old earth, new gem rush,’ he says. ‘Basaltic sapphires formed in the volcanoes to the north. Emeralds in the east were hurled up when superheated water broke through the earth’s crust and the mountains rose. And in the centre of the region, pegmatites: long rich veins of hardened magma studded with aquamarines. Left totally undisturbed for a millennium. Imagine the animals that must have roamed there: elephant-birds ten feet tall, gorilla-sized lemurs. Even now, war, poverty, bandits keep it isolated.’

  He says, ‘We lease open-cut mines and try to convince the locals that when they dig holes thirty feet deep into soft clay earth they need to put in retaining walls.’

  He says, ‘You mightn’t believe me but we’re better than most bosses.’

  He takes a lumpy stone from the scattered mix in the next drawer. Tawny red flares through crevices in the stone’s crust. ‘Garnets,’ he says. He picks up another and holds it to the light. It glows a deep scarlet.

  ‘Cheap but popular.’ He closes that drawer and pulls out a lower one. The padded velvet here is a royal blue with small mounds of cut stones in each section. He picks up a blue stone which is perfectly clear.

  ‘You want me to say this is the best?’ I say.

  He nods.

  ‘It is too perfect. Too cold.’

  He smiles. ‘You’ve got an eye. It’s synthetic, heat treated. You can tell it apart from the real thing because it is flawless. No cracks, no discoloration. No personality.’

  He picked up a deeply glowing brown stone with traces of toffee yellow.

  ‘The locals call this beerite,’ he says. ‘It’s cut from a locally made and cast beer bottle. The cooling method gives it that unusual colour. They sell sack-loads to the tourists.’

  ‘You wanted to know about my business,’ he says as we climb the stairs.

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘You need to know,’ he says, ‘why the Americans are still taking an interest.’

  ‘You’re using the same route my father used.’

  ‘Not to move anything else. I’ve told my mother that. Just stones from now on.’ He stops abruptly. ‘Yes, we’re not declaring, avoiding the tax. But we’re also not – ’

  ‘Looting,’ I say. ‘Plundering.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I face him. ‘You know all I want is to find out what happened to my brother?’

  He nods. ‘Anything else is . . . irrelevant.’

  FRIDAY

  I go down to the lake to wait for Devlin. The sun sidles behind dark clouds in the lowering sky. There is thick grey mist in the air but the rain has stopped. The branches are hung with frozen tear-drops. Inside one, a small beetle looks at me with pleading eyes. A tiny being trapped in ice. I try not to see the obvious symbolism. I go past the beetle. The ground is hardening: it is growing another layer the way animals grow a layer of fur. An ice beast.

  After three steps, I go back and crack the ice on the branch with my fingernail. The beetle drops, groggy, to the ground and crawls away, leaving a silver trail of water in its wake.

  I wait an hour for Devlin.

  Every few minutes, I get up, stamp my feet. This must be what old age feels like: the legs that refuse to work, the coldness in my knuckles, the ache inside my chest.

  He had told me that it would all be all right. I knew he was lying to me. Yet I had desperately wanted to believe him. It was too intoxicating, the feeling of finally being able to rely on someone else. Of not being alone.

  But now, when I want to conjure up Devlin telling me it would be all right, instead I see a world where fish beat their heads against glass, where the sky is black, the grass is white. I try to find a positive image to counter the rising panic. I make an image of myself reading a book and the book says, I carry your heart. I carry it in my heart.

  It’s going to be all right, I say to myself fiercely. It’s going to be all right.

  To keep warm, I walk around the lake, photographing the light trapped in the crusted surface. Still no Devlin. I climb through the mud and leaves and mouldering branches to the gleam of slate through the trees. I think about climbing the ridge, seeing whether the hut door will open. Peering through the windows.

  A branch snaps behind me. I turn, saying, ‘I thought you stood me up – ’

  But it isn’t Devlin. A red fox, its back darkened by mud and water – or maybe it is blood – runs in front of me. Its nose quivers and it almost stops in mid-stride. I see the wildness of remorseless nature in its eyes, the chilling stare of implacable survival. Then the fox goes on, driven by urges it cannot control. I laugh. I put my hand over my mouth, to stop the brittle sound.

  I wonder what Devlin would say. Too much poetry, he would say.

  I watch Devlin as he walks along the road to the guard rail. He is wearing sunglasses. He hesitates. A few steps more and he could have gone around. But instead he grips the metal between his gloves and awkwardly swings his legs over. The rail is only low but he stumbles when he lets go. He comes down the slope.

  He gets quite close before he seems to register my presence. He takes off his sunglasses and rubs his eyes.

  ‘Too much partying, Dev?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says in a flat tone. ‘Party, party in Trepani.’

  His shoulders are hunched. He avoids my eyes; there’s a grey tinge to his skin.

  He sits heavily on the fallen tree trunk and takes out his flask. ‘Mitch is really on my back.’

  ‘Dev – ’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ he says irritably. He unscrews the cap. ‘It’s a job,’ he says to himself. ‘Just a job.’

  I sit on the other end of the log.

  The surface ice on the lake has thickened although it is still not fully set; there is constant expansion and sounds of cracking and splintering. More cracking as an animal moves through the stiff bushes nearby.

  The distance vibrates into a deep rumble. Devlin puts his face up to the weak sun.

  ‘Car?’ I say.

  He moves his head drowsily. ‘Bigger. Lorry.’ He closes his eyes.

  I climb the slope and stand behind a tree near the road. The rumbling grows louder. An unmarked grey van comes around the corner. It drops down through the gears and shudders past me. The ice on the guard rail falls off in small glassy plates.

  I go back.

  Devlin is swaying on the log, his eyes closed.

  ‘Shouldn’t you write that down?’ I say.

  He mutters under his breath.

  I say, deliberately, ‘For Mitch.’

  He opens his eyes. ‘Mitch wants hard news. On your friend Pietr.’

  ‘There’s nothing there, Dev. He showed me the office. Maps, files, computers.’

  ‘You’ll have to check it out after hours,’ says Devlin.

  ‘It would help if I knew what I was looking for.’

  ‘Transportation documents. Anything passing through Sicily to Africa.’ He thinks for a minute. ‘And maybe the other way.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Could be small.’

  ‘Is it jewellery?’

  ‘Jewellery?’ He stares as though he can’t comprehend the word.

  ‘Gemstones. Garnets.’

  ‘Garnets? For God’s sake, the Americans wouldn’t spend millions on garn
ets.’

  ‘Well,’ I spread my hands. ‘There’s nothing. They lead quiet lives.’

  ‘You need to snoop around.’ He bends to brush black slush off his boot, missing most of it. ‘What do you do all day anyway?’

  ‘Swim, walk around the estate, read. It’s very peaceful. I sleep a lot. I haven’t slept this well in years. Pietr’s teaching me photography.’

  ‘Cosy.’ He stamps his feet, to jolt the ice free.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I say. ‘He’s like an uncle to me.’

  ‘Except he’s not.’

  A bird’s cry climbs the morning air like scales, climbing and falling, over and over. It is sweet and ineffectual and forlorn all at once. Maybe it is looking for its mate.

  The notes rise and fall. Plaintive as crystal across the quiet landscape.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ shouts Devlin. ‘Shut that bloody bird up.’

  I place my hand on the rough bark between us. ‘Did I ever tell you about waiting on the street for a cab, after an all-nighter? An old man, just a collection of rags and dirty fingernails and a leather tan, was going through the garbage bin next to me.

  ‘I hear these sweet notes, clear as bells. I see a bird on a shop roof, across the intersection. I can’t believe I can hear so far. Yet the bird seems to be singing to me.’

  Devlin has rested his hand on the log. I don’t have the courage to touch him.

  I go on. ‘Then I realise it’s the man next to me. He’s making this pure sound totally in tune with nature. I tell him, I thought you were a bird. He grins at me – he’s missing his front teeth – and he puts his lips together and the light beautiful notes come out. Whenever he wants, he can make that sound, to please himself.’

  I stare up through the trees, trying to find the bird. ‘I’m always glad I told him. Beautiful.’

  ‘I don’t have stories like that,’ says Devlin. ‘I don’t see the way you do.’

  ‘What do you see now?’

  ‘Don’t fucking psycho-analyse me.’ He raises the flask.

  I wait. And wait.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he says. ‘All I see are snow and cold and tall black trees that look like spears. Satisfied?’

  ‘That’s the way I see.’

  ‘We’re nothing alike,’ he says. ‘Nothing.’

  He’s far away on the other side of the plain. Rolande at the dark tower. I can’t reach him.

  He shakes the flask, I hear the liquid slapping the side. For the first time, it occurs to me that he wants to fail. I have an image of him in a minefield, walking out deliberately, arms stretched wide.

  ‘Pietr says you know more about this case than you’re telling,’ I say.

  ‘And you’re going to trust him?’

  He tugs at the collar of his leather jacket. He’s wearing a tie. I wonder if a tie is a dead giveaway in a small village. Sicily is a formal country – maybe he doesn’t stand out.

  Still, it’s as though he wants to be caught.

  His shirt collar has parted. The skin at the base of his throat is almost revealed, the skin he is always so careful to keep covered, the marks he never wants anyone to see. It’s impossible to know what is there unless you have seen them, uncovered. The marks he made on himself in Borneo, in the heat.

  He’s slumped now but I can tell by the tightening in his arm, the slight jerk of his head, that he’s processed where my gaze is. He rubs the back of his neck, yawns too casually and closes his collar. He turns the flask over in his hands. ‘I have to look like I’m getting the job done.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Getting the job done.’

  ‘None of your business.’

  I laugh. There is little humour in it. ‘Whose business is it then?’

  He stands. ‘I have to go. I left the car in a lorry run-off.’

  ‘You’re throwing me to the wolves.’

  ‘You know the rules. I can’t help you.’

  ‘How can I give them information if there’s no information to give?’ I shout.

  He puts the flask away, stares at the steel sky.

  I hold up my arm. The bracelet glints dully above the pink peeling marks. ‘How do think this makes me feel? You say, look what I did to myself. Look what you did to me.’

  He glances at me and turns away.

  I say, pressing my back teeth together to stop from screaming, ‘You told me you would get me proof the Americans have my brother.’

  ‘Had him,’ says Devlin.

  I think, as I write now, that his face shimmered in the light. I thought then that I had something in my eye or there had been a tremor; I held the log, waiting for the earth to steady.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ He takes a small step towards me. ‘What is it? You’re – silent.’

  ‘I can be silent when I want.’ I think for a moment. ‘Occasionally.’

  He grins. It is exactly the way he’d looked at me the night we met. In that brief period of euphoria.

  ‘Dev,’ I say, ‘aren’t you stressed? Doesn’t this make you stressed?’

  I think he was going to come closer but instead he looks at his watch. It is a rote gesture, something he does to fill the time, to put the person he is with in their place. In their place in his schedule.

  He turns to walk up the slope, away from me. He says, over his shoulder, ‘It’s just a job. It won’t kill you.’

  I shout after him, ‘Won’t it?’

  He keeps walking, leaning into the slope, his shoulders hunched. ‘You’ve got three days, four at the most, before Mitch gets here.’

  THURSDAY

  The mountain looms above me, black against the light. It is not as tall as it looks from the other side of the plain but it is steep. The wind is harsher here. The metal at my wrist is a ring of cold; I can’t feel the burns at all. I pull my jumper down over them, the jacket over that, tighten my scarf. The wind still creeps in, around my wrist, into my marrow.

  I climb. The ground is patched with mud which skids off the steeper sections like brown paste. But there are enough rocks and small stone chips for traction. Besides, I can see the path she had made.

  The cold air is pricked with seaweed, smoke and other dead, acrid fumes. Gusts of wind hit the back of my jacket with grit and gravel. When I turn, for the first time I see the tip of the tower of the glass house at Castelmontrano, rising above the hunched green of the forest.

  With a soft sucking sound, the ground gives way. I slide, grab the nearest branches, feel wood cutting my hands. My boots find harder earth and dig in. I see a smear of colour.

  I kick with my boot; mud lifts off in a shovel-shaped chunk, revealing stones forming a mouth, the side of a face, a cheek, a slash that could be a beard. A mosaic. The fine edging of black makes it third-century Roman. Or maybe fourth. I think to myself, Third. I never used to lack confidence about this. I always knew instinctively and I was usually right. Always right, I say to myself now. Don’t lose your nerve.

  The panel pulses its malevolent green. The cuts and burns on my wrist creep out. Unstoppable but dead at the heart. Like the look on Devlin’s face when he saw me pouring boiling water over the metal. After I had tried the knife.

  I force my hand into the ground and wonder whether the mud would erode the wires inside the bracelet, make the electrodes short and spark, the moisture spreading like a small lake across the chips and electrodes. Reduce the solid to mush. Re-make.

  The bushes have been trimmed back and I can walk, bent over but still quite fast. It is warmer, the wind fractured against the trees; only the occasional needled gust hints at the cold air outside the canopy. I look for her footsteps, the sharp indents of her stick. Nothing. Either she hasn’t come up this way or she knows the way so well that she didn’t leave any traces.

  Below the summit are the remains of a stone path leading between two narrow boulders. Beyond are steps made of flagstones forced into the hillside and a cobbled path which soon broadens. I come out o
nto the main road of the devastated village just as the rain starts to fall.

  Santa Margherita is like nothing I have ever seen before. I guess that it was once a village covering the entire last third of the hill. Further up I see outlines of houses in the broken rubble but here, no buildings were higher than my waist.

  I am shocked. I had imagined Rosza’s home to be a small villa, or a picturesque cottage, not this blasted and devastated place. The cobbles are black green in the disappearing light, the wind keens down the street. A shutter bangs close by, half off its hinges. Shadows wash past like waves, turning the buildings into the silhouettes of broken animals kneeling in the dusk. I close my eyes, imagine violence being done in the village at the top of the mountain. Dogs would bark, maybe windows would open briefly, but no help would come, no voices would shout out. Only the sound of the wind jostling oranges, plucking at the laundry forgotten on the line.

  I try not to hear misery in the sound of the wind, try to imagine it instead as being something playful: rippling the surface of the lake, sending leaves skittering across the cobblestones in the piazza in Trepani, dancing down the narrow alleys to Devlin’s room.

  A building more intact than the rest lies at the end of the street. I walk towards it, my boots striking the wet cobbles like drums. Black flutters at the corner of my eye – something slips between the houses.

  These buildings have a looted look: no shutters, no window boxes, crumbling mounds of tiles where roofs had been, wrought-iron balconies hanging drunkenly. Through the gaps between the houses I see the rusted metal ladders and the crumbling stone steps which once connected the higher streets. A black door is set in the dark earth at the end of one alley. The sign on it reads Scalini Che Conducono Al Cimitero. Steps To The Graveyard.

  The black wraith flutters again. It reminds me of the months after the news came about my brother’s disappearance in Poland: how I would be convinced I saw him on the edge of my vision, the curve of his back disappearing around an invisible corner. I never caught him, no matter how fast I turned.