Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Did your husband see Signor Codrington?”

  “No, he didn’t. He saw a black man driving the car.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t see that.”

  “My Roberto has an eagle eye, sir.”

  “That man drove in here and left the car in the orchard?”

  “He must have.”

  “It’s unlikely to have been a black man, Signora Tassi. But at least your husband says he was alone.”

  “He saw what he saw.”

  She drew herself up defiantly.

  “He’s not lying, Signor Rewkhol.”

  “I’m not saying he’s lying. I just mean that sometimes it’s hard to see things correctly.”

  “E cosa vuol dire quello?” she burst out.

  “I’m afraid I don’t speak your lovely language, Signora Tassi, you’ll have to forgive me.”

  He was so polite that she relented at once.

  “It’s an impertinent thing to do,” she said, “coming back here in their car.”

  “He must have stayed in the house,” he muttered.

  “Of course he stayed in the house.”

  Rockhold began to think backward. The shoe shop in Fasano had said it was a young man who bought the shoes. The car had arrived home with only one driver. The man in the cafe in Sovana had a nice smile and idle eyes. Everything hung together on one thread. He suddenly swore, because he had left the car in Sorano and he would have to climb back up there; it would take an hour at least. He asked the signora if she could drive him up there, but her husband had taken their car to Orvieto for the day.

  “You didn’t walk from Sovana?”

  “I did, madame, I did. My heart cried out for it.”

  He set off back to Sovana with a wild feeling of failure and irresponsibility. Halfway there he lost his breath and sat on a stone wall to let the sweat dry. He called Susan and asked her to leave the cards untouched for twenty-four hours. He needed one more clue, one more place-marker, because he was now sure that the man who was driving the car would make a mistake larger than the ones he had already made. When he arrived back in the village he went through all the cars parked in the square but was unsurprised to find that the bird had flown its open-air cage. He therefore went up to his own car parked at the Fortezza, paid the bill at reception, and then sat for a few minutes in the lobby, reading the maps he had brought with him. He would have to guess which of the two roads the man had taken, and in which direction, but almost immediately, and without effort, he knew it was north.

  —

  An hour later, on the autostrada to Florence, Susan called him from London to tell him that a Codrington credit card had been used an hour earlier in a hotel just north of Siena. It was a wine estate called Badia a Coltibuono, not far from Gaiole in Chianti.

  At the dead center of the afternoon, the sun blazing down on thousands of totemic cypresses (“Planted by the English,” he always said to himself), he stopped in Radda and stretched his legs along a panoramic view, climbed up to a cold little church, and sat on the steps to continue his conference with his assistant. The stony calm of the Tuscan villages in high heat; the birds swarmed around him as if attracted to his internal energy.

  “How many charges were there on the card?”

  “Three.”

  “The hotel—”

  “Yes, a charge for 110 euros, which has to be the room. Then two small charges for food and drinks, I think.”

  “So he must be there now, then.”

  “He made the last charge an hour and a half ago.”

  “Almost there,” he said tensely.

  “He’ll be there for the night, so there’s no hurry.”

  “Look at the website for the estate. How is it arranged?”

  She had already done it.

  “It’s not really a hotel,” she said. “The rooms are in various places spread over the property. There’s a tower with three units. Then there’s a separate house. Then four rooms in the main house.”

  “We can’t tell which room he booked or what kind?”

  “No, we just have the charge. It looks like he got a tower room, because they cost 110.”

  “Can you call ahead and book me a tower room?”

  He waited on the steps for her return call and shooed the curious pigeons away. Waiting was a thing he hated to do, and he did it badly. He put on his panama and put together a plan for the evening. The usurper would show himself eventually, but he would have to go about things carefully, with a subtle touch. But where, then, were his friend and his wife?

  Susan called back and told him that the tower was fully booked and that he would have to stay at one of the houses farther down the road. It was as good as she could do.

  “Book it. Tell them I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “What about the Italian police?”

  “Not yet. Let’s wait until tomorrow. I’m not sure yet. I want to wait.”

  He thought that maybe he could ferret out more information working by himself and in secrecy.

  He got up and went back to the car parked by the panorama and felt himself brimming with formless melancholy and unease. They were almost certainly dead, then. Carjacked on the road in southern Italy. The bodies could have been buried anywhere; they would be impossible to find without a detailed confession. That, in a few seconds, was what it had come down to. The entire scenario, the working hypothesis, changed and grew vaster and darker. It did so among slopes of vines and avenues of cypresses, in a humanizing sunshine that made everything under it look preordained for happiness. But, of course, it was an optical illusion. Everywhere is dangerous, he thought, everywhere where human beings exist and multiply and continue to breathe.

  The road in the direction of Montegrossi twisted its way toward a junction, and there he found the first sign for Badia a Coltibuono. The estate’s main complex lay at the top of a hill, and as he parked there he saw that it was actually a small medieval hamlet of some kind taken over by the winery. He went along its cobbled streets and found the reception. They had his booking; a young woman would take him to the house in her car, and he was to follow in his.

  They drove in the two cars out into the estate on gravel roads. His room was a mile from the winery and the reception, and they passed the tower on the way. There were three cars parked there, but he would have to return there later to see if the Codrington car eventually appeared among them. The track then ran through woods and sloping vineyards before arriving at a stone farmhouse with a few outhouses around it. He would be alone in the house, the other units were not yet booked, and he could drive up to the winery to have dinner in the restaurant. The woman left him there and he went up to the room, leaving his bag in the car, and took out only his swimming trunks, which had gone lamentably unused on Hydra. He went back down to the edge of the vines, which rolled serenely to the horizon. He warmed up in the last of the sun’s rays and then went to the indoor pool for a quick swim. Under the greenhouse glass panes the water was tropically warm, and after three righteously strenuous laps he lay on his back on the surface and stared up at the darkening sky. He had a sense that he could nail his man without his knowing it, until it was too late for him. If he could find the Peugeot he might finally call in the Italian police and the matter could be wrapped up. He was already in contact with an old friend in the Italian force, though he had not disclosed the nature of the matter. Everything would fall into place at the last moment.

  He went back up to his room and took out the small Glock pistol he was licensed to carry, looked it over, made sure it was fully loaded, and slipped on the shoulder harness which held it snug and unobtrusive against his chest. Even under a lightweight cotton jacket it was unnoticeable. Then he returned to the courtyard and his car. The sun was setting and the Albanian and Serbian workers in the vines were heading off. At the winery the tables were set up at the restaurant and a few guests had ventured out onto a large patio area on the roof. Rockhold had a sudden inspiration. He stopped at the
restaurant bar and asked the man working it if Signor Codrington was booked for dinner that night.

  “He’s on the terrace upstairs,” the man said.

  Rockhold went into the courtyard and up a flight of steps to the terrace, which was spacious and made of two levels. At its far end was the panorama, the distant vision of Siena, the dusk. Here a man stood alone, facing the city, his arms folded, isolated from the other guests. From behind it was hard to say if it was the same man he had seen earlier in Sorano. It could go either way. Tempting fate, he stepped out onto the terrace and sat on one of the benches as swallows swooped around the eaves and into the nearby vines. The Italian dusk was always a place of sibilant swallows. He watched the well-heeled foreigners drift back into the restaurant until it was just himself and the stranger on the terrace. The man began to stir as if thinking of leaving, but as soon as he did Rockhold was quietly gone. He had decided that he wanted to observe him. He was curious about him.

  He therefore went down to the restaurant, procured a table in an obscure corner of the room and turned his chair away from the other diners. Resolutely relaxed, he ordered a plate of gnudi with ricotta, a deboned and roasted guinea fowl and some roasted potatoes. He added, naturally, a bottle of the Badia a Coltibuono Riserva. The room soon filled with wealthy Russians, exactly like the hotels in Hydra, though one had to imagine that their buying power was now on the decline. It was otherwise with the Chinese there; they ordered Riservas from the 1980s that had to be brought up from the cellars. Rockhold drank half his own modest bottle before turning to check out the other tables one by one, but the man he had seen on the terrace was not there. He had not taken a table even briefly, so he must have left without Rockhold’s noticing him go. It was a slip on his part, and he paid the bill quickly in order to make up for it.

  The car park above the winery was right against the vines, and the roads were still visible in the half-light. There was a thin pall of dust above the downward-tending track along which the guest residences lay, as if a car had just driven there. He was a little wine-groggy—another careless mistake—but as soon as he was in the car his senses sharpened. He went down the hill and then parked the car to one side of the track in deep forest and walked down to the tower on foot.

  The track ran between two majestic vineyards before ending in the forecourt of the ancient building, a tower from the Middle Ages. There was only one car here, but it was not the Peugeot. The upper rooms were occupied. He went up silently and explored the landing that connected the two doors. From one room came the sound of Italian television and a rustling of papers; from the other, nothing at all. Disappointed, he went back down to the parking area and from there out to the terrace, filled with sofas and cushions, and he sat in filtered moonlight thinking it over. It made little sense. He wondered if the impostor had been aroused by some instinct, as impostors often were.

  When he returned to the parking area, the vineyards were dark and the track itself was difficult to see. But he was halfway to the car when he saw a pair of headlights barreling down toward him. He stepped aside into the undergrowth and the blue Peugeot swept past him at high speed, swerving to a stop by the tower. He was sure that the driver had seen him—he fancied that he caught the white flare of his eyes for a split second—and that the driving was nervous and frenetic. From the undergrowth he saw the door open and a man step out onto the gravel. He decided not to follow, however: the exit to the road was behind Rockhold and so all he had to do, in theory, was wait.

  He got back into his car and turned on the engine. But he kept the lights off since they would be seen from the tower. As he began to reverse up the hill, he saw the man from the Peugeot approach the gates and stare at him. He was clearly unsure, puzzled. He advanced a few paces and then stopped. There was, obviously, some dumb confusion between them. Rockhold had reached a clearing where he could turn the car, and he drove off to the winery at the summit where any car already inside the estate would have to pass in order to gain the main road. There he waited while wondering if the man was going to retire to his room and sleep away the night. He was uncertain one way or the other, and caught in his confusion, he called Susan.

  “Cancel the last card, my dear. I think I have him.”

  “Yes, Mr. Rockhold. I’ll cancel it at once. But are you calling the police?”

  “Soon. I want to talk to him myself.”

  “Do you think that’s wise, Mr. Rockhold?”

  “I didn’t say anything about wisdom, Susan. I said I wanted to talk to him. I want to get a sense of him.”

  Clearly astonished, she made no reply.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll call them soon. Within a few hours.”

  He sat back in the car and waited. Somehow he knew that he would not be there all night, that things would erupt. He was not disappointed this time. When the winery had closed and the last guests had drifted away from the restaurant the Peugeot came up the long track and appeared with its lights off. It crawled slowly and quietly across the car park and reached the downward dip to the surfaced road. There it hesitated for a moment before rolling over it and out of view, and almost in the same moment Rockhold drew out of the car park just as quietly, with his lights also extinguished, and followed the taillights down to the road where the cypresses cast their shadows horizontally across the tarmac.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Faoud drove with the lights off until he was at the bottom of the hill, then turned them on. Confused in a mountainous and unlit landscape, he decided to follow the signs to the autostrada, which would take him up to Arezzo more rapidly. Within minutes he was within sight of a gas station near a junction, with auto-pay pumps standing forlorn in a hot wind. He stopped there and looked around, then turned off the lights and walked around the pumps. He was aware how disheveled he now looked, as if a sharp decline had overtaken him. His shirt had long lost its poise, and his stubble was not a flattering five o’clock shade. He felt exhausted and unloosened from within. There were credit-card machines and no one to man them; he took out his last card and decided to take the risk, since the machine could not swallow it anyway. He had a third of a tank left and not enough cash to fill it. He slipped the card into the slot, selected his fuel, and waited for the authentication. It was refused.

  He tried a second time, and a third. Growing impatient, he cursed and snatched the paper receipts and tossed them into the wind. They whirled away from him toward the office, and he was left with nothing but a third of a tank and a useless piece of plastic. Putting the card back in his pocket, he strode over to the windows and peered through them into a shuttered room. He rapped on the glass, but it was futile. This area lit by lamps and, as he realized now, under surveillance from four cameras was not the place to throw a tantrum. He calmed himself, returned to the car, and drove back onto the smooth and empty highway into Arezzo.

  It was brightly lit with streetlamps, and in the rear mirror he saw, far off, a ghost of a car following him with its lights off. At first he ignored it and then wondered why its lights were off. He slowed, and it seemed to slow as well. The alternative was to accelerate, and he pushed the car to eighty and let it coast into the outskirts of the town.

  The map was of no use in navigating Arezzo, and as soon as he was in the old center he was lost in an infuriating maze of lanes. There were a few bars still open with crowds of teenagers, and he had to pick his way through them slowly. He came out on a wider street that curved around to the railway station. He went past it and onto a highway with roundabouts that clearly led out of town, passing through a suburb and on northward to Bibbiena. Within minutes he was back in the rural darkness, but moving much faster and not concerned about conserving his precious fuel.

  In fifteen minutes he had passed Bibbiena and he could no longer see the ghost in his mirror. Instead of following the main route eastward he swung left onto a much smaller road that shadowed a river, the Arno, of which he had heard long ago in a classroom somewhere. Stopping here for a moment, he go
t out of the car and listened for the motor of the pursuer in the dark, but there was nothing but the sound of pines ruffled by wind. By the road was a sign for a monastery, which he assumed must be secluded. He wondered about it. If he turned off there, anyone following him would be thrown off his trail; the road up to the mountain was narrow and unlit, a surfaced path to nowhere. But the trees near the road glittered with fireflies. He resolved to try it.

  It rose steeply and soon he was winding his way through forests, the air rapidly cooling. By the hairpins there was a faint light falling from above the trees, as if from a partially obscured moon, and by it he could see steep banks of ferns rising from the road and the shafts of ancient pines. The road rose until it reached the monastery, a somber complex built in a clearing next to what must have been a glacially cold river.

  He parked behind the main building and saw that all the lights were off before he silenced the engine and decided to stay the night. Listening for the sound of any approaching car, he waited for some minutes before feeling satisfied that he was truly alone. He then walked behind the monastery, where a path ran along an old wall with vegetable gardens in the wide ditch behind the dormitories.

  On the far side he found the river whose sound he had heard straightaway, a bridge, the white gleam of the water far below. There was a path that rose up the side of the mountain and disappeared out of view. He went up it with one of the pistols in his pocket, taking his steps slowly and making sure that he made no sound. He came to a saint’s shrine built into the mountainside, and from there he could look down at the curving road along which he had just passed. He was safe for the night, and as soon as he knew it he went back down to the river and leaned on the wall of the bridge to gather his wits. He had one piece of bread left and some sliced cheese, and by morning he would be up against the very different wall of hunger.

  He wondered if the monks gave alms or took pity on people who turned up at their doors. But there was also the risk of his being reported by them. The plan was to sleep in the car and leave before first light.