They made their excuses. They were the first to leave the party, and their departure was barely noticed. The source had his back to them and was on a second orange juice. They went out into the night.
Fred said, ‘I would like to wreck him – far from home and regulation. It would be good to wreck your Bentley Horrocks. I am in that mood.’
It was an hour before dawn. Marcantonio had come inside to make coffee. He might have slept for a while in the chair. The dogs would have growled if they’d been disturbed, but they hadn’t.
He put the shotgun on the table. Tiredness wracked him, but it would be simple to have the call made to the priest, then to estimate when Father Demetrio would be on the road. Marcantonio would use the heavy vehicle with the bars on the front. Easy for him, and he didn’t need to have slept for that. There was a coffee machine in the kitchen. His grandmother detested it, but it was used. It was the sole relic of Annunziata in the house. Giulietta liked it, and Marcantonio didn’t mind it. Four months before she had gone into the acid, Annunziata had bought it for them on a trip to see her husband in gaol in the north. His grandmother hated what was new and mechanical, but there was another in the bunker where his grandfather slept.
The light blazed over him. He heard the door handle turning, then saw Giulietta. No love was lost between nephew and aunt. She gave him a withering glance and her lip curled: her eyes had settled on the shotgun. He had not broken it so she did. She was dressed formally in a dark trouser suit and white blouse. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail. She wore no jewellery or makeup. He glanced at her nose – twisted from the break. That morning she would play the professional, who could put together an agreement, carrying detail in her head – all that he did not. She would tie together the ends left loose from his meeting with the Englishman, an arrogant shit, and she would do it over breakfast, as if she were a Berlin businesswoman. She looked at him as she peeled a banana, then started to eat it.
She spoke through a mouthful: ‘I hear that my father met other men recently to discuss whom you should marry – what alliances we can make with you. A piece of horsemeat for trading.’
Marcantonio couldn’t tell her – yet – to go shag herself. One day, not far away, she could go out through the door with her bag and the family would belong to him. His word would rule. Soon. Not yet.
‘When, Aunt, will you consider marriage?’ It was said with exaggerated politeness that would not have fooled her.
‘When I find the right man, and he will be my choice, not arranged as a matter of political gain.’ The banana was finished, the skin thrown into the bin. She drank from a water bottle, then rounded on him. ‘Is he there, the man who followed you from Germany? You brought this down on us. You sit all night with a gun on your knee because you need to make a few euros. You are responsible for this inconvenience to us. Are you stupid?’
He went out into the night with his gun and the dogs, slipped back across the yard, then behind the trellis, and went to his chair.
He had seen the light come on in the kitchen.
He heard the wind, soft, and the hushed whimpers of the wolf. Jago thought it near the time. He would linger a little longer, to be certain, then move. He thought it enough that the leader of the family should be trapped in his bunker in darkness, panic surging. Then he could climb back up the hillside, find the guys in the camouflage suits, wish them well and thank them for their kindness. He thought again of the huge wealth of the old man in the bunker, the power he wielded over life and death, saw him groping for a hand torch or a candle and matches, the air around him getting damper and colder. He would wait a few more minutes, then move. He was calm and the birds above him were still and quiet. He shared the night with the wolf but could do nothing to salve its wound.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded.
It had been Fred’s idea. He had taken the lead and rung a bell, then beaten his fist on the door. The camera above had swivelled to gain better focus on them. Three hours’ sleep. Through the wall Fred had heard Carlo snoring. The door opened and he’d asked for her.
When they had driven into Archi, a sprawled suburb to the north of Reggio, Carlo had told Fred that he’d have preferred to be snug in the belly of a main battle tank, not in the small airport hire car. It was still night-time and there were watchers on the street: men leaning against lampposts and smoking, men with skinny dogs on leashes, men sitting on benches . . . No one seemed to have anything to do – they weren’t hurrying to work or sweeping a pavement before opening a business. They were just watching and keeping track of visitors. Fred had said it was the ‘alternative state’, demonstrating that strangers were logged in, monitored. He thought it important to be there.