She pulled. The door hatch creaked, shrieked and came loose.
There should have been lights in the tunnel but there was darkness. She told the kid what she wanted. He scuttled off to fetch it. She led into the hole and Stefano followed. She called her father, at first softly, then louder but there was no response. She was at the inner door and Stefano was jabbering in her ear about the mechanism, the power needed and the override. The kid was back. He seemed frightened to enter the tunnel – and had cause to be because he was privy now to the family’s greatest secret – but Stefano turned on his haunches, spat an instruction and the kid rolled the torch down the tunnel. Stefano issued more orders and the kid fled.
Giulietta took the torch.
She had seen the small intimacies between Stefano and her mother. They might once have slept together, but long ago. She had wondered whether she might be the bastard daughter of the family’s driver. She had taken comfort in the evidence that she was not. She was her father’s. If she had not been his, he would have registered the signs and Stefano would have gone into the acid or down a cliff, been fed to the pigs or shot and left in a ditch. She was her father’s and would fight with her life for him and— Stefano knew the catch better than she did. He used the reverse of the hammer end, inserted it behind a lever and broke it.
More darkness, and faint moaning. She snatched the torch.
Giulietta went through the entrance, dropped to the floor and found him. She shone the torch and saw the blood. She came only rarely to the bunker, which had been built by her brothers who had expected to use it for their own safety from arrest. She hated the place and the smell. She tried to block out the stench of old sweat, fresh blood and stale food. It was cold in there and damp. She saw where his nose had bled and more dark stains on his trouser leg. There were no lights and she had no idea why the system had failed – the power was on in the house. She remembered.
She lifted her father’s head. He seemed not to recognise her – but she was his daughter. She slapped his face. It was a punishing blow, calculated. His head jerked back and anger soared in his eyes. She dragged him up.
She didn’t tell him. It wouldn’t help her father, as the minutes fled, to know that the English player, travelling with an escort of foreign police, was now inside the bellies of pigs, or that Father Demetrio would by now be on a mortuary slab. Neither did he need to know that a helicopter was flying at speed towards their village, carrying cacciatore, or that a prosecutor was being driven in an armoured limousine, hemmed around by his escort, along the mountain roads. She remembered.
Marcantonio’s return: a story told of a pizzo collection in a fashionable corner of Berlin, the intervention of an idiota, and a girl’s face cut. She remembered that Marcantonio’s car had been scratched, then the City-Van – the vehicle was worthless but not the gesture. She remembered that Francesco, the village butcher, had picked up a tyre iron beside Marcantonio’s body. She remembered that the power was off, leaving her father imprisoned in the dark without explanation. And she remembered the message from the Palace of Justice, the imminence of a raid, that they’d know where to search for him. She remembered it all.
Between them, they were able to get him to his feet, to the hatch, then into the tunnel. No time to collect anything. If she hadn’t slapped him he would have been a dead weight. He had, in part, recovered. They dragged him down the tunnel, metre by metre, and she remembered all that had happened in the few short days since Marcantonio’s return. She wondered who he was – and why.
There was one place she could go, just one. She had never made a judgement on the funds that had launched the family towards success, affluence and a position of respect among the leaders of the mountain villages and coastal towns. She had never asked questions or interrogated her father. There was only one place. She had found it a few days after her thirteenth birthday, had understood why the chain was there, with the bucket and the child’s dress. The place had fascinated and hardened her. She had made no judgement on the long-ago death of a little girl, or on the killing of Annunziata and her lover, or on why men were fed to the pigs. She had made no judgement on killing the priest, who was the family’s friend. They came out into the night and the torch was off. He had regained the use of his legs but his arm was over her shoulders. She hissed to Stefano what he should do.
The kid watched them go, the dogs beside him, and they seemed to hear – a long way off – the throb of a helicopter’s engines.
The path went from the back of the building and climbed.