Lone Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘There must be someone who can … you know, put him right.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do about it, Franco.’

  He had someone in mind, of course, someone who might be able to help.

  He cancelled his appointments for the rest of the day, then he made a call.

  It was funny, really, the situation turned around like this. Usually, the doctor came to him, looking to score. Now, he was in the wanker’s private studio, laying a bag of powder on the table, asking for his professional opinion.

  ‘I’ll try and keep this as simple as possible, Vince …’

  ‘You do that, doc. What’s up with him?’

  ‘A most unusual psychotic disorder …’

  ‘His head, you mean?’

  The doctor stroked his hands together as if he was washing them clean.

  ‘That’s the top and bottom of it. Fortunately, there’s some literature on the subject, and there are one or two clinical studies which may prove useful. The most important thing is that we need to make a decision. We don’t have a lot of time, you see. His condition … well, it’s evidently worsening. We’re faced with a choice here. On the one hand, there’s the long-term solution.’

  ‘How long would that be?’

  ‘Many months, maybe years … We’re talking about a mental institution, a padded cell, a strait-jacket, and drugs. Clorazil and sedatives for the most part. However, I really do fear that things may continue to deteriorate.’

  ‘Why’s that, doc?’

  ‘Those cranial CT scans you showed me … Where did they come from?’

  ‘The solicitor sent him to a clinic, thought he had concussion. In the end, there was no need to use them at the trial. The defence got him off on a plea …’

  The doctor stabbed the plastic bag with a biro, took a pinch of powder, stuffed his fingers up his nose, then sniffed and licked his fingers.

  ‘Whoa … Did a consultant see them? No? There’s evidence of a tiny pod or nodule which may be affecting the neurotransmitters in the …’

  ‘Simple, doc, remember?’

  ‘There’s pressure on a certain nerve that produces this kind of violent behaviour. That nodule’s been there a long time, as you told me, probably from when he was a young boy. If it keeps on growing, well … there’s no way of predicting what might happen. But if we can reduce the pressure by removing the cause of it …’

  ‘When you say “we”, doc, who are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, me, as it happens.’

  ‘You?’

  The doctor laughed, said, ‘What sort of a surgeon did you think I was?’

  It took him a minute to get over his surprise.

  ‘When would you be able to do it?’

  ‘The quicker we make a move on this,’ the doctor said, ‘the better.’

  Then another thought popped into Vincent’s mind.

  ‘For a job like this, what sort of money are we talking?’

  The doctor smiled and rubbed his hands together again.

  ‘A year’s supply might do the trick,’ he said.

  He met the boss at the club that night, told him what the doctor had said.

  ‘He thinks he’s nuts, then?’

  ‘He thinks he can help him, that’s what matters, boss. The problem is, where can we take him? No private British clinic would take the risk, that’s what he said …’

  The boss held up his hand, went quiet, sipping his drink, thinking it through.

  ‘Remember when I was away last summer?’ he said at last. ‘Yeah, in Polsi down in the south of Italy. There was someone there who might be able to fix us up, give us a hand. I’ll give him a blow, see what he says.’

  The boss lit a cigarette, blew smoke into the air.

  ‘D’you fancy a foreign holiday, Vince? Get some decent food down you?’

  Before he could answer, Franco was on his feet again, stubbing out his cigarette.

  ‘I’ll be in the office making the call,’ he said. ‘You wait here till I get back.’

  FIVE

  Two weeks later, Valnerina, Italy

  There was still snow at the top of Monte Coscerno.

  The white crusting seemed to glisten in the moonlight like icing on a cake.

  Sebastiano Cangio let out a sigh of relief as he watched them through his binoculars, outlined against the sky, then moving slowly right to left and downwards, following their progress from the summit towards the snowline.

  He’d been searching for them for three nights now, and finally he had found them.

  The lost wolves …

  How could you explain a thing like that to the executive park manager?

  One minute they were there, the next minute I lost track of them? He was supposed to be the expert. That was why they had given him the job. A published Ph.D. on the behaviour of Canis lupus lupus, and he had no idea where they’d gone, or why?

  That was the thing about wolves. Unpredictable wasn’t the word for them. They might stay in one place for years and years, then vanish just as suddenly as they had appeared. As if they had held a conference overnight, and voted to move on.

  That was how it seemed, though he knew that that was not how it worked.

  It was the breeding male who made the decisions. Wherever he decided to go, the female followed, and the younger wolves would trail after her. What had sparked the male to move on? Had he suddenly decided – felt, Cangio thought, hunger niggling at his own stomach – that the food supply was running short?

  Or did he know, given the state of the season, that there would be richer pickings elsewhere in the park, in areas where he had hunted when he was younger, maybe, a member, rather than the head, of another pack?

  Spring was slow in coming this year, food was scarce.

  If they couldn’t find enough to feed the female and the new cubs, they would move on.

  He watched them trailing down the mountainside in single file, moving towards the snowline, heading back towards their old hunting-ground.

  They must have been to Biselli or Rocchetta, though there had been no reports of attacks on sheep or other animals from either of the villages in the mountains over to the north.

  He tightened the focus on the night-glasses, moving in close.

  The breeding male wasn’t leading the pack …

  He was bringing up the rear. One of the first-generation cubs, now two years old, was leading them back, and he was limping badly, dragging one of his rear paws in the snow, leaving long slashing trails behind him.

  Had they gone hunting in alien territory, and been obliged to fight? And having fought, had they lost?

  All of them were there: the limping two-year-old, the pregnant she-wolf, the cubs born last season, the other two-year-old male, and the breeding male at the end of the line. Wherever they had been, and whatever they had fought, they’d been chased off. By something bigger and more powerful. A man with a gun, or a larger group of wolves? There were no bears this far west. Not that he knew of, anyway. A wild boar?

  What else could beat off a family of wolves?

  He had heard a report on the radio a few days before.

  A RAV 4, one of those big sporty Japanese SUVs, had come roaring out of a tunnel at high speed heading for Camerino, smacking into a wild boar so big that it had made the national news.

  ‘Twice the size of a baby elephant,’ one of the rangers had reported.

  The car had been a write-off, both passengers in hospital, and still the boar had needed shooting before it finally stopped breathing. The world was breeding monsters, and some of them were living in the national park.

  The leading wolf was setting a slow pace; the others were keeping to it. They were as disciplined as a troop of Navy Seals heading back to base with their wounded.

  What would have happened, he wondered, if the breeding male had been killed?

  The others would have scattered, that was for sure. Some might have made it back to Monte Coscerno, though they might just as easi
ly have separated and fled in all directions. The fate of a lone wolf was written in blood. It either starved to death, or it died fighting. Rival wolf packs were the biggest threat, though hunters and farmers came next on the list. Anyone with a gun seemed tempted to take a pot-shot at a lone wolf.

  They were out of the snow now, heading for home.

  Cangio put his night-glasses away in their case.

  He groaned out loud as he got to his feet.

  The wound in his thigh was still playing up almost a year after getting shot.

  That was what happened if you played the lone wolf …

  He glanced at his watch.

  The luminous fingers told him it was 01.55.

  This lone wolf was going home to bed.

  Six kilometres north-east, 02.00

  A cold draught ruffled the hairs on the back of his hand.

  His hand had a life of its own, moved of its own accord, pulling hard against the needle which was strapped to his wrist, ripping it out, opening up the vein with a spurt of blood, cutting off the sedative flow, waking him up.

  Pain throbbed deep inside his brain.

  A dull ache, like drums in the distance, moving closer, closer.

  His fingers followed the line of the stitches …

  They had opened his head – taken something out, or put something in, he wasn’t sure. He had heard people talking, someone saying, ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do now?’

  The voice was hoarse and desperate.

  Then the black curtain had blanked out his senses again.

  They had told him what would happen before they started. They called it intraoperative brain mapping, something like that. The anaesthetist would wake him up, the surgeon said, or put him to sleep, depending on what they were doing, or what they were about to do next. They called it ‘wide-awake surgery’, telling him it was for the best. He wouldn’t be sleeping all the time. They would wake him up and ask him to do certain stupid things – wiggle your toes, move your left hand, say ‘salt and pepper’, open your right eye, now close it – so that they could see which bits of his brain were working, and which bits weren’t.

  They’d made him do and say these things before they put him to sleep.

  ‘Just to make sure you can do them,’ the surgeon had told him.

  It was a bit like being a kid again.

  Then that voice saying: ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do now?’

  They’d put him back to sleep while they talked about it.

  He didn’t know what they’d said, or what they’d done after that. Maybe they hadn’t done anything, though the stitches seemed to suggest that they had. He wasn’t stupid, after all. He just had these fits that he couldn’t control, when things got out of hand and a part of himself that he didn’t know took over.

  But now he was awake.

  And the air was chilling the back of his hand.

  There was no reaction when he sat up on the operating table.

  Nobody told him to stay still, keep quiet, or wiggle his toes. The room was empty, the tiles cold beneath his feet as the green surgical drape fell away, leaving him naked as he made for the open window, the fresh air, and the night outside.

  There were stars in the sky as he walked through the grass.

  Stars like tiny silver buttons spattered on a black velvet sheet.

  The moon was a big silver ball hanging low above the trees.

  He followed the moon.

  Into the wood, going downhill, letting gravity carry him.

  What am I supposed to do now?

  He knew what he wasn’t supposed to do, but he couldn’t help himself.

  He opened his mouth, and a noise came out, loud and long, a noise that seemed to tear at his throat and burn in his lungs. Then he heard the voices somewhere behind him, coming closer, the sound of something crashing through the trees and the bushes.

  They were coming to get him …

  He started running, moving his legs to the throb of the pain, going downhill.

  He wasn’t going back there.

  Ever …

  One kilometre north, 02.30

  Dino De Angelis held his mobile phone in the air.

  The signal came and went up there, you couldn’t count on it.

  Suddenly, he heard the dial tone, and speed-dialled his home number.

  The phone rang twice, but the signal faded away before anyone could answer.

  ‘Cristo santo!’ he said out loud.

  Next time someone said a phone could save your life, he’d tell them a thing or two.

  On his own up there on the mountainside, and at his age, too. No phone, and no one to talk to. He hadn’t even thought to bring a radio.

  Davud, the Albanian lad who usually watched the herd, was stuck in hospital down in Spoleto. There was something wrong with his lungs, they said, some sort of liquid, an inflammation. He’d picked the right bloody time to go sick, two calves the night before, and more on their way at any time now.

  De Angelis had lit himself a fire outside the hut, as much for company as for warmth.

  He had sat on a rock, watching the whimsical jig of the dancing flames, the way the embers glowed when the wind caught hold of them, gusting through the mountains to some strange rhythm of its own.

  He had watched the day fade slowly into night.

  Most of his life had been spent up there.

  As he looked down from the high pasture, he remembered when he’d been the lad who kept watch over the herd each night, then the grown man who had inherited his father’s cows, a married man by that time, the proud father of two little girls. After a while he’d been sufficiently well off to stay at home at night with his family and pay someone else to watch over the animals.

  Bloody Davud, malingering in a hospital bed …

  Like it or not, he was back on the mountain, and the cows were ready for calving.

  He let the fire burn down, then he crushed it out with the heel of his boot.

  A car went past far below in the valley, the sound of the engine no louder than the buzzing of a fly. He followed the headlights along the road beside the river, lost sight of them where the woods began.

  It was getting dark now. Bloody cold, too.

  Inside the hut, he lit the kerosene lamp, then built a fire in the stone hearth.

  Fire was the only company for a man up there on the mountain, alone at night.

  Well, he had his father’s gun, of course. The old Rizzini twelve-bore was hanging up behind the door. He thought of the radio again, and cursed himself. Still, the animals were quiet in the byre next door. Maybe he’d be lucky, and have a quiet night.

  It might seem stupid for a farmer, but that was how he felt about it.

  He hoped no calves would be born that night.

  He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, settled down in the old rocker in front of the fire, and that was the last thing he remembered.

  Then a noise woke him up with a start.

  The fire was low, he was freezing cold.

  It took him a moment to remember where he was, and what he was doing there.

  The cows …

  He grabbed his mobile phone.

  It was dead, no signal.

  ‘Bloody phone,’ he growled, dropping it on the floor.

  Maybe a calf was on its way. If the phone had been working, he might have asked his wife to send someone up there to help him. Davud’s younger brother, Zamir, maybe …

  ‘Cristo santo!’

  He stood up, groaning with the aching stiffness in his bones, threw wood on the embers, then he stopped and listened.

  There was no sound coming from the byre, none of the huffing and groaning that told you a cow was going into labour, that it was time to get the tools and the blankets ready.

  So, what had woken him up?

  He reached for the shotgun, snapped it open, checked it was loaded, then snapped it closed and pointed the two barrels at the door.

  At calving time, the
predators came round.

  Wolves …

  He was up there on his own, without a phone, and the wolves were at the door.

  He started shaking, couldn’t stop it. The gun in his hand bobbed up and down. He should go out there, fire a shot or two, and frighten them away. They might try to take a newborn calf, or even attack the mother while she was weak and stretched out on the ground, but they wouldn’t attack a man with a gun.

  He heard the noise again, but further off this time.

  It didn’t sound like any wolf that he had ever heard.

  A wolf would whoop or bark, or growl and snarl when it went on the attack.

  If it wasn’t a wolf, what was it?

  Someone playing silly beggars?

  Rustlers come to steal his cows?

  He couldn’t decide what to do for the best. Shout out, keep quiet? Start shooting, risk getting shot? Make a fight of it, or let the robbers have what they’d come for, so long as they left him in peace?

  He stood there for a long time, eyes on the door, gun in his hand.

  Then he heard the noise again.

  A shriek of terror, almost.

  Far away now, long and drawn out.

  Coming from the valley down below.

  There was nothing down there apart from the woods, the old Franciscan monastery, and the farmhouse the Argenti family had abandoned years ago.

  A howl of agony, like an animal that was trapped, or being tortured.

  His memory jolted, remembering the tales that had circulated down in the valley long ago, the creature that had roamed the woods and mountainside above the River Nera.

  Not an animal, but not human, either.

  What if the story was true?

  You needed a silver bullet to kill one of those, they said.

  He sat by the fireside in the rocker, nursing his father’s ancient shotgun, pointing it at the door, waiting for the sun to come up.

  One kilometre south-west, 02.45

  You could hear him a kilometre away.

  Not so much a scream, more of a howl, followed by deep gasping breaths.

  They’d been chasing him for ten minutes, following the noise he was making.

  A wild dash through the woods in the dark, leaves and branches slashing at their faces, roots and brambles reaching out to trip them up.

  They kept on running, knowing they had to find him before someone else did.