by Gordon Kerr
At first he thought he was delirious. There were noises around him. The scuffling of boots on earth and gruff foreign accents.
‘Good evening, signori! As you can see, you’re surrounded! There are more than twice as many of us as there are of you. So, there are several guns pointing at each of you.’ The man’s Italian was slightly stilted.
They were all around them. Sandro turned his head to one side to see Carlo, trying to get to his knees, only to be returned swiftly to the earth by the point of a boot striking his nose with great force.
‘I said don’t move! Stay very still and you won’t get hurt.’ Sandro tilted his head slightly backwards and saw a German officer with a handgun trained on the recumbent figure of Carlo whose hand was held to his face, blood smearing out from between his fingers. ‘At least, not just yet.’ The German officer smiled as he said this and the dozen or so men who stood around him with machine guns and rifles trained on the partisans also smiled.
Sandro immediately felt a surge of fear paralyse his body as if an electric current was running through it. This was the moment he had feared for months, the moment when finally it would not be a matter of blowing up hydroelectric plants, or of firing on Germans from a distance so that they meant nothing, were rendered barely human by that distance. The moment had arrived when he was face to face with the men he had been intent on killing all through these winter months and they had the upper hand, the power of death over him and his colleagues.
His neck hurt as he arched it to watch the German officer walk amongst them, looking down at each of them, one by one.
‘You know, you’ve been a pain in the arse for some time now. So, we were very grateful for the information that has led us to you. You see – and I think there is no harm in telling you this; in fact, I think you should know – a good friend of yours, and, of course, now equally our good friend, let us know about this regular little piece of activity.’
Luigi, thought Sandro. It could surely be no one else.
‘He even let us know where you would be spending the night. A bit foolish that, really, not to vary your stopping place. Tut-tut. Perhaps you’re not as clever as you think you are!’ The officer laughed. A high-pitched laugh that seemed unfamiliar to him and that almost seemed to surprise him. ‘However, my only wish is that there were more of you to share the pleasure of our meeting.’ He stopped above Sandro, his boots about six inches from his head. Sandro could not help noticing how brilliant their shine was in between the splashes of mud that coated them. ‘Still, perhaps you can help us to make that possible, facilitate a little meeting.’ A stream of German then followed and several of the German soldiers rushed forward with rope and began tying the Italians up, dragging them into a circle ten or fifteen feet from the dying embers of the fire. They did not dare look at each other. The only noise was the heavy sound of Carlo’s breathing. His nose had been reduced to a bloody pulp by the shiny boot of the officer.
‘Now look, meine Herren,’ He spoke standing in front of them, legs apart and hands behind his back, the German words incongruous amongst the Italian: ‘there are only a few hours until dawn. You Valtellinesi are reputed to be deep thinkers, I believe.’ He walked from side to side in front of them. ‘I want you to exercise some of that talent for philosophy during these next few hours, with a view to giving me directions to your camp.’ He stopped and smiled at them. ‘So that I can meet your friends, perhaps share a few reminiscences with them. Remember. At dawn we’ll have some fun together.’
He turned his back on them and went to join the others around the fire. Two Germans were allocated guard duties, although that seemed hardly necessary, given that the partisans were completely immobilised by the tightly-knotted ropes.
The rest of the night was endless. Sandro was both cold and hot, shivering as if he had just awakened on a cold winter’s morning to find all the blankets had fallen off him. The others were motionless. Each man was left with his own thoughts.
Meanwhile, the Germans sat around the fire, talking quietly and occasionally throwing their heads back, laughing at something. How ordinary they seemed, thought Sandro. They were boys, mainly, boys brutalised by the war and turned into machines that ate, slept and killed. Machines that also expected to be killed. Like he and his partisan colleagues, life for them did not stretch effortlessly towards middle age, going through the numerous stages through which a man’s life passed. It stretched only as far as the next exercise, the next piece of this war in which they would play a part. They had all, these young men, seen so many people killed. And not just strangers, but friends, men they had got drunk with, women they had kissed and made love to; shot, killed next to them. They had been covered in their blood, they had held their hands to their friends’ torn bodies, pushing their innards back in through tattered skin, as if somehow they could make them whole again. They had felt the whisper of dying breath moisten their cheeks.
The German soldiers talked quietly by the fire, laughter occasionally shaking the branches of the trees.
Over on the far side of the fire, a lone figure lay with his back to a tree. It was the officer in charge. He held a cigarette lighter in his hand, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. The flame of the lighter illuminated his face. He was a good-looking man, with clear skin and almost gentle blue eyes. Sandro peered into the darkness and saw him extend his left hand horizontally above the flame and then down towards it. He held his hand there for a full fifteen seconds, in the flame, the red glow reflected in his eyes which watched without expression, as if they were watching someone else do this. Gradually, he withdrew his hand, blowing on it and sheathing the flame in the lighter’s cap. He looked at his palm and smiled, and then laughed to himself, his shoulders heaving against the tree. His head fell back and Sandro noticed tears slowly beginning to fall from his eyes and trickle in straight, symmetrical lines down his cheeks, darkening the lapels of his uniform.
12
15 November 1999
Lago di Como
North Italy
Blue.
Blue was all he could see at first. A sea of dancing blue whose waves crashed against the walls and splashed against the ceiling.
Then, slowly, more began to leak into his cracked vision. A desk, a few feet from the bottom of the bed, and on it a thick, leather-bound book. A jacket – his own? – hung over the back of a wicker chair in the corner.
Just on the periphery of his vision he sensed something massive and silent. Painfully – the pain was in his neck and shoulders – he turned his head and discovered the oppressive bulk of an ancient armoire, the possessor, it seemed to him, of many dark secrets which lay like hidden bodies behind its massively mirrored doors.
The blue was draining out of the room now, seeping under the door and oozing through the slats of the shutters which lay fast against the light of the sun to his right.
The ceiling began to shimmer, as if light were being reflected on to it from the surface of a swimming pool. From outside came the sound of water lapping gently against stone.
He began to feel as though he were watching rain fall on a watercolour. His vision fell in long, slow elongations down the page of the room.
Michael waited for the inevitable conclusion to his dream – the usual dramatic last act, the flapping of wings with the car miraculously appearing through the brickwork, his wife’s body spread-eagled on its bonnet. But this time it did not happen. The ceiling continued to ripple with the reflection of water from somewhere outside.
He sat up. He was lying on a bed and was surrounded by the paraphernalia of the dream. The wardrobe was huge and solid and was matched on the other side of the room by a dressing table with the wicker chair and his jacket reflected in its large mirror.
His head hurt and his eyes stuck together as if he had been unconscious for some time. His watch had gone from his wrist and there was a pungent chemical smell in his nostrils. As his head began to empty of sleep it all began to come back to him. Or, at least, al
l that was to be remembered.
He recalled being in his hotel room, looking at the photographs he had taken at the Palazzo Ronconi and writing on the backs of them. Then there had been a knock at the door and when he opened it … well, what exactly had happened? All he could remember about opening the door was a cloth of some kind heading for his face. And a smell, the same pungent smell that was now in his head. A chemical of some kind. It had rendered him unconscious and he had been brought to this place, wherever it was.
He put his feet on the floor, his legs reacting to the commands of his brain slowly and stiffly and gathered himself before standing up and walking to the door. As he expected, however, it was locked. He went over to the window, which had wooden shutters half-closed and padlocked. The reflection on the ceiling was a shaft of light that cut between the two shutters. He peered between them, the light at first hurting his eyes and could see water, the lake and its far shore, shimmering in what appeared to him to be bright afternoon sunshine. He thought he recognised Menaggio across the lake. That would mean he was probably somewhere between Verdanno and Beldoro, in one of the buildings that is hidden down by the shore, usually by large palm trees and thick, high walls.
He returned to the door and started to bang on it with his fists, continuing to do so for about a minute, until his hands started to ache. He then stopped and listened, putting his ear to the crack between the doorjamb and the heavy, wooden door. Silence. The silence that screams down long, empty corridors. Only the sound of the water from outside, kissing the shore.
‘Ho!’ he shouted, hesitantly at first, but then louder. ‘Hey! Is there anybody there!’ Again, he persevered for a minute or so and then stopped to listen. And again he was rewarded only with silence. He went back to the window and looked out, but realised that there was no point in shouting out into the vast emptiness of the lake.
He returned to the bed and sat on the edge. He then swung his legs up onto it and began what he feared might be a long wait.
They came as it began to get dark. There was the sound of a door opening in another part of the house and two sets of footsteps approaching briskly and noisily on the tiled floor. Michael stood up beside the bed and stared intently at the door handle, as if an angel was going to turn it and enter the room. The footsteps approached the door and then stopped for a beat before there was the sound of a key turning grudgingly in the lock. The door swung open and two figures in dark suits were outlined from behind by the sun pouring in through a window at the other end of a long corridor.
One was inches taller than the other and much younger. He was very well-built and that made his suit seem almost too small for him. His hair was very dark and cropped short, exposing a large expanse of tanned forehead above a pair of hard-looking eyes.
The other was a man that Michael recognised – the man from the hotel bar. What was his name?
This man began to speak in English.
‘Mr Keats … Michael. Nice to see you again.’
‘What the hell are you playing at? Why have you brought me here?’ Michael shouted. Pedrini, he remembered. That was the name he had given. Rico … Mico … Vito. That was it. Vito Pedrini.
‘It’s Pedrini, isn’t it?’
The other man stiffened, evidently ready to calm Michael down, if necessary.
‘Oh, Michael, please, don’t be like that.’ He was speaking now in Italian. ‘You must understand, we had no choice in this matter. You were getting very close to finding out some things that we … well, we would rather you didn’t know. That knowledge might have interfered with our plans. And there was no way we could let that happen.’
‘What plans? What knowledge? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about!’ replied Michael, stretching out his hands, palm upwards, as if to emphasise his ignorance. At that moment, Ignazio Mazzini’s large, dark face appeared in his head like a warning. Were these the men who had thrown the giant farmer over the edge of the cliff?
‘Oh, come now. We know you’ve learned certain things, you’ve spoken to certain people. You have certain evidence of a photographic nature.’ The photographs, Rosa’s photographs. Oh why had he not looked at them before they had been stolen from his room?
Michael looked at them, shaking his head. What were they talking about? It must all tie in with the kidnapping of Teresa Ronconi.
‘Our big problem now, however, is what are we going to do with you?’
The other man reached down to the floor where there stood a black leather briefcase that Michael had not noticed he had been carrying. He walked forward and put it on the table, opening it, taking out a hypodermic syringe and a small phial of clear liquid. He stuck the needle into the plastic top of the phial and withdrew the plunger of the syringe.
‘I think it best that we all sleep on it, don’t you, Michael?’ said Pedrini with a smile as the other man handed the syringe to him. ‘I hope you won’t mind if we give you a little something to help you sleep. Please roll up your sleeve.’
‘Piss off! I’m not rolling …’ The other man placed the syringe on the table and stepped forward with an almost bored look on his face. He drew back his hand and with the back of it, struck Michael hard on the right side of his face. Michael fell back onto the bed, stunned, his head spinning and the side of his face stinging. Dazed, he felt his sleeve being roughly rolled up his arm. There was the sharp sting of the tip of the needle puncturing the skin of his forearm and then there was just the lapping of the water on stone outside and the blue seeping back into the room through the window and under the door. The ceiling shimmered and the wardrobe hid countless secrets. He waited … waited for the sound of the wings and the car … waited for the sight of its bonnet … waited to see a body of a woman sprawled on it once more like a marionette … he waited for the comfortingly familiar sight of Rosa’s body.
Somewhere in the distance there was a sound. It was beyond the water’s gentle teasing of the shoreline and lay outside the roar of silence that filled the corridor stretching behind the door.
He moved his head and the whole world seemed to him to move with it. His eyelids were heavy as if they had been stapled together and any feeling in his body started to fade halfway down his legs and arms. There were no reflections on the ceiling. Only darkness fell through the half-open shutters to his right.
The sound was there again. It came from directly in front of him, beyond the foot of the bed. It was, he realised, the sound of a key in the lock, turning slowly and carefully. The lock turned all the way, settled into place and the door began to open. He could only sense this, because the darkness threw a black curtain across that end of the room.
Someone entered, carefully and silently. He saw a shadow approach. Still, he could not move, could not even lift his head. A rising sense of panic overcame him and he wanted to cry out, but only gasps emerged from his dry throat.
The shadow hovered over him and then a hand covered his mouth, stifling his attempts to shout for his life.
‘Ssssssh!’ The sound came from the darkness close to his face. And then in a whisper, ‘Michael, it’s alright, it’s alright.’
It was a woman’s voice, speaking in an urgent, quiet whisper. Through his stupor, he realized it was somehow familiar.
‘What have they done to you?’ She put a hand behind his head and lifted it. ‘Can you get up? Can you stand? Let me help.’
She pulled his legs round onto the floor and put a hand behind his back to keep him upright. He shook his head, trying to clear it of the fog that swirled through it.
‘Come on. Stand up. We have to get out of here.’ She whispered. ‘I’ll help. Try to be as quiet as you can.’
She helped him to his feet, his legs buckling once beneath him, before she pulled his right arm around her neck, placing her left arm around his waist.
‘Please help me Michael,’ she whispered. ‘Come on, one foot in front of the other. Concentrate on that. It’s not far.’
He focused as hard as he could on lifting each
foot and then placing it on the stone floor as quietly as possible. He was coming to a bit more and began to remember what was at stake. She breathed hard as she bore his weight at every step.
Light blazed out into the darkened corridor from a doorway ten feet ahead of them and the voices of a couple arguing on television raged from inside the room. Suddenly another voice, a voice in the room, not on television, erupted into a deep smoker’s cough. She stopped dead, froze in mid-step, her next breath caught in her throat and staggered slightly as Michael’s forward momentum almost brought them both to the ground. The cough continued and there was the chink of glass, the sound of a bottle pouring liquid and then another, shallower cough and an agitated clearing of the throat before once more only the sounds of the voices on the television could be heard, quieter now, the argument waning.
They turned away from this into another corridor, at the end of which they entered a kitchen in which the lights were on. At first she feared that someone was in there and hesitated before entering. She let Michael lean on the wall a few feet from the doorway, praying he would not slide to the floor, and crawled carefully along the cold plaster to peer in. No one. On the table, however, lay a large brown envelope with what appeared to be photographs sticking out of the top. She stuffed it inside her jacket. There was a small revolver on the table. She stuffed that carefully into her jacket pocket. She then stole carefully through the darkness and opened the door at the other end of the room before returning to Michael, who had begun to slump towards the floor.
