Lights were on throughout the house. There were more lights down the track that went to the village. Short of the house he saw cigarettes glowing, smoked by the men who watched, night and day. The mother had been out of the kitchen door and had adjusted a rug at the trellis. The daughter had been on the gravel at the front, smoking and pacing. Later she had been at her bedroom window and had not drawn the curtains or lowered a blind. The driver had spent some time with the City-Van, its bonnet open – he might have been checking the oil, but had now gone inside. Jago had to factor in the dogs, but they were quiet. Enough light came from the kitchen for him to see that the kid was tickling their throats, relaxing them.
The kitchen door opened and Marcantonio stepped out. He carried a big flashlight in his left hand, and the sawn-off shotgun in his right. He gazed around him, stood tall, then went behind the draped rug and the trellis. A little of his shadow showed between the vine leaves. The air was clean, cool and quiet, and Jago believed he heard the scrape of metal on concrete – he took it to be a chair’s legs grating on a paving stone. He had confirmation of sorts when a cigarette lighter flared.
Time for calculations. Marcantonio had settled near to the point where the join in the cable had been excavated during the storm. The dogs had disappeared from the yard, and he imagined them now close to Marcantonio. It was quiet. The birds in the oaks and birches were calmer – they cackled and flapped but were undisturbed. He didn’t know what to do.
Minutes passed. Jago wondered how comfortable Marcantonio was on a hard chair, how long it would be before he was bored and went inside. He heard another cry, the gentlest whimper: the wound must be deeper in the animal’s flank than he’d thought. He was surprised that it had stayed on the rock slab. He would have expected it to search for a refuge in which it could curl up and die. He thought for a long time about the wolf and its injury. A clock chimed far down the valley. Some lights had gone off in the house – in the kitchen and in Giulietta’s bedroom – but the flash of the lighter warned him that Marcantonio was still keeping watch.
Jago cursed his stupidity. If he hadn’t scratched the side of the City-Van, the chair, the flashlight and the shotgun would not be there. He waited. He didn’t dare to step back and burrow into his hiding place under the boulders. If he turned, he would keep walking, might see the guys in the sniper suits and say to them, in English: Sorry, guys, didn’t work out so I’m quitting. Thanks for the rations. I’m an idiot for getting involved and should have stayed at my desk. He knew he would not turn.
Above him the birds had settled. Below, there were the shotgun and the dogs. Jago watched and waited. He thought of the wolf and its pain. He could only watch, wait and hope.
He had the dogs around him.
The pack leader, still troubled by its watering eyes, was curled across Marcantonio’s feet. The shotgun, loaded, was on his lap, the flashlight balanced beside the barrels. When he drew on the cigarette, he cupped his hand over the glowing end to shield it. The chair was hard, the evening air chilly, and the wind blew in the upper trees . . . He could picture the man.
A few years older than himself, a little taller but less muscular at the shoulders, his face far paler, northern European, a straight back, big eyes that widened in astonishment and lips that thinned in anger. He remembered how the man had surged from the park and across the road, how they had felled him – it had been the second time – and remembered the girl’s face, the cut and the spilling blood. For Christ’s sake, he hadn’t intended to split her cheek and if the bitch hadn’t . . . It was an ‘incident’ in his life.
Marcantonio had shot a man for his grandfather and that had, too, been an incident; he had strangled a man for his grandfather, another incident; for his grandfather he had put his aunt into a tank of acid, yet another ‘incident’. Incidents littered the life of Marcantonio, aged twenty, and there would be many more. The face of the girl in Charlottenburg was a small incident, trivial.
The chair was hard and his legs cramped. The dogs breathed in a regular rhythm.
He had shot a man. Marcantonio could recall with great clarity how it had felt to arm the pistol, aim at the man’s temple, see the flinch in the eyes, the opening of the mouth and the failed scream, the body frozen with fear, unable to escape the car seat, the squeeze on the trigger, and the spatter that had exploded on the inside of the windscreen. And the pressure required to close the windpipe inside a flabby throat – there had been a jowl to push up and out of the way with his thumbs – and the long ache in the muscles he’d used. No problem in recalling the tipping of Annunziata, bound and gagged, into the shimmering darkness of the acid tank. He saw again her eyes, the hatred, the despising, her lover already dead. The last he could barely remember – the girl’s face, the pistol raised as a bludgeon, never about to fire it, then the impact and the cutting edge that was the foresight. An incident, but not meaningful.