Through the gaps in the shutters he peered out at the orchard and the garden with its statues. There was a house nearby, but as far as he could tell it was a ruin. There was no way of telling whether the Codringtons employed year-round staff there, and it was too soon to fling open a window or venture out into the garden. He would wait until the late afternoon before deciding if he was really alone.
While he waited, he went through the house room by room, lingering among their possessions as if he had temporarily inherited them. He went down to the cellars, where there were several rooms: one filled with bottles of wine, another filled with weapons, the third a room of magazines and books. The weapons room was very small and had a table at its center. Its surface was piled with boxes of bullets and shotgun cartridges. On one wall a Benelli Montefeltro Silver semiautomatic shotgun, a Benelli Ethos shotgun, a Tikka bolt-action, and three Beretta Storm semiautomatic pistols. The old man seemed to have had a penchant for Italian guns. Perhaps he acquired them locally and had an Italian gun license in order. The shotguns were not locked into place, and he took down the Montefeltro with its glossy walnut grip and turned and weighed it in his hands. It was a good weapon, strongly built and finely tooled. The pistols too were contemporary models, light and easy to swing, virtually unused as far as he could tell. He laid them all on the table among the boxes and then loaded the Montefeltro and two of the handguns. There was no reason for doing so, but suddenly laying his hands on weapons allayed the impotence and fear that had oppressed him for months. It was purely symbolic as emotions went, but it was not unreal. A surge of animal confidence and a vague stirring of revenge. He didn’t unload them when he laid the guns back down but left them there as if in readiness. It was like the moment that Jimmie came toward him in the other house, forcing him to act—because either you act or you are shipped back in a cage to face an anonymous fate that no one will care about anyway.
He went out onto a terrace on the first floor and looked down at the domain. The orchard was unmanned and it was clear that no one had come to the house all day. Obviously, the Codringtons had chosen a place where they would have no neighbors, where they would enjoy a rural isolation. He went back down to the garden, passed through the iron gate, and on via the quinces to the car. He paused for a moment to reassure himself. He was already thinking of how to change the car’s plates, and he wondered about the garage up in Sorano. But of course they would know Signor Codrington and his opulent Peugeot. He would have to do it further on, in a small place where no one passed through. And then there was the question of money. He had about 140 euros left in cash but had already noticed that even rural Italy was much more expensive than Greece. It wouldn’t last more than two or three days.
An hour after he had returned inside the house, someone came to the door and there was a series of knocks. At first they were gentle, hesitant disturbances, an unsure request as it were. But then came a second round that were a little more impatient. He went down to the basement and took the Montefeltro shotgun, still loaded, and crept quietly back to the front door with the barrel pointed toward the lock. The voice, a female voice, was calling, “Signori, siete a casa?” A telephone began to ring in an upstairs room.
It droned on for five minutes before falling silent. The woman moved away from the door, and he saw her shape flicker against the shutters of the main room as she tried to peer in. At length she walked off and he heard the iron gate creak; so she had a key to enter them. It must be a domestic, someone working the grounds in their absence or a friend entrusted with a key. He put the shotgun against the wall and thought over the implications. Someone must have told her, or suggested to her, that the Codringtons had returned from their holiday in Greece. And that someone must have known that it was not the case. It was a new element: he had an enemy. But then, more calmly, he realized that he had forgotten the more obvious explanation. She had simply seen the car. The car betrayed him here, and this simple fact resolved him to move on.
He decided to take all the weapons with him. He loaded them into the trunk of the car and locked up the house, leaving the keys in a flowerpot in the garden. He drove to Sorano in torrid heat, under a cloudless sky.
TWENTY
At twenty past twelve that day the valley below Sorano baked in a silence that was broken only by the sound of water tumbling across riverbed stones. At the back of the village was a platform with rails where the carless alleys intersected, and from there Rockhold could look down at the dozens of caves that spoke of a past older than the present religion. He gripped the rail, because the heat made him a little faint, and let his ears and eyes do his work: far below, on a small bridge over the stream, a girl was lying in a swimsuit, still and camouflaged as a stick insect and unnoticed by the other eyes above her.
He could not quite bring her into focus, even after he had lifted his sunglasses for a moment, but he thought he recognized her from the Eastern European staff at the Hotel della Fortezza, where he was staying. The hotel was built into the old fortress that loomed above Sorano, and he had checked in there late the night before. Cat-like, she was probably asleep in the sun or quietly absorbing the voyeuristic attention of strangers. He lowered his sunglasses back onto the bridge of his nose and caught from afar the hiss of the cicadas. Earlier in the morning he had glimpsed one or two English bohemian residents padding through the labyrinth, but they didn’t seem to belong to Jimmie’s crowd unless they were avant-garde artists whom he could collect. Nevertheless it wasn’t difficult to imagine him and Phaine strolling arm in arm under these endless vaults or having lunch in the sweet piazza with its town hall. He walked back there now, measuring his steps and humming a bit of La Traviata to himself. It wasn’t such a bad mission, traveling from hotel to hotel across Italy. It had not yet occurred to him that Jimmie wasn’t just playing truant from his own hectic existence. There were two cafes in the piazza, and he chose the one nearer to the entrance to the pedestrian zone because everyone at the hotel said it had the better ice cream. He sat there and got his macchiato. He looked over the cars parked in the piazza, which he had also inspected on his way down, and saw that they were more or less the same cars as had been there an hour earlier. On the terrace with him were a few old-timers, clerks from the town hall, a young male tourist in a nice shirt and two girls he had seen earlier, also at the Fortezza. He leaned back and checked the messages on his phone.