Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  “I didn’t say anything, Brother Marco.”

  “In that case, you think too loudly. Where is he, our padre? Where is he?”

  And, knowing full well that Vango always cooked swordfish over a gentle heat, the monk deliberately put two more logs on the fire to show just how exasperated he was.

  “I’ve got no idea where he is,” Vango explained. “When I saw Zefiro . . . he didn’t recognize me.”

  The cook shrieked. He had burned himself.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Zefiro . . . Zefiro didn’t recognize me.”

  Marco turned deathly white.

  “My God.”

  A few hundred meters from the kitchens, Brother Mulligan couldn’t believe what he had just seen. This Sunday, just like every Sunday, John Mulligan was the Cardinal of the South.

  There were four cardinals at all times on the island. The monks alternated in filling these posts. They took it in turns to wear the red skullcap. They held these titles because they were responsible for overseeing the cardinal points: north, south, east, and west.

  Each one had his day and would look forward with a degree of impatience to that period of solitude spent facing the vastness of the sea and sky. Some of the cardinals were dreamers, some mystics, and some just drowsy. But Mulligan was a fisherman.

  Perched on a rock, his breviary and fishing rod between his feet, John Mulligan had taken up his post at daybreak. Every thirty seconds, almost as a refrain to the psalms he was reciting, he would scan the horizon and move the cork on his fishing line.

  He first saw it with his naked eye: a black line passing at high speed on the open sea, trailing a white foamy wake.

  Reaching for his telescope, he couldn’t help exclaiming out loud.

  It was a motorboat with three cockpits. A speedboat as fast as the Hacker-Craft he had seen in New England, where he used to keep company with Al Capone and the Mafia when they were vacationing on the beaches of Cape Cod and Nantucket. The speedboat glided over the water, steering a perfect course.

  In Europe, such boats could be found only in the Venice Lagoon, or on the great lakes of Switzerland or Lombardy. You would always see elegant women aboard, sitting on leather banquettes, their hair billowing in the wind, and gentlemen with their hair slicked back, dressed in white trousers and sleeveless tops.

  But the four men on board this speedboat didn’t look like luxury yachtsmen. They each carried a Thompson submachine gun with a drum magazine that Brother Mulligan was familiar with, having glimpsed enough of them in the cupboards of his parishioners in Chicago at the time of Prohibition.

  The four men also looked like the kind of cutthroats who’d have made Al Capone’s worst cronies run in the opposite direction.

  On seeing the boat speed by without slowing down at all as it steered around the long island of Filicudi before heading for Salina and the crater of Pollara, Brother Mulligan didn’t worry anymore about this sudden apparition.

  He had watched a sperm whale swim by the previous month, and a long time ago now, in the middle of the night, he had even caught sight of an airship.

  Because he that is mighty hath done great things for me. . . .

  John Mulligan returned to his breviary and to the cork on his line.

  An hour later, after morning prayers, Brother Marco addressed the monks gathered before him.

  He had to explain that Father Zefiro would be held up in France for a while. Marco gave them the sorts of excuses you would expect to hear from a stationmaster when the trains were running late. He talked about an unforeseen delay, about a regrettable incident. He was deliberately fudging it.

  His announcement was met with a murmur of disappointment.

  “He’ll be among us again as soon as possible. He is thinking of you. He embraces you with his fraternal love.”

  Marco fiddled with his cracked lenses as he uttered these words. They were misted up. He glanced at Vango. He wasn’t ready to break the news that their padre might not even remember their faces, that he had lost his mind, and that he was cast adrift somewhere in the big wide world.

  Afterward, Marco sought refuge in Zefiro’s cell and asked not to be disturbed. He leaned against the wall and slowly took off his glasses.

  Brother Marco couldn’t muster the strength to welcome this new assignment. He cast his eye around the room. Three books. A mattress. That was all that remained of Zefiro. How were they going to cope without him?

  Marco noticed the clapper for the big monastery bell hanging from a hook. The bell was set in a hollowed-out rock above the chapel, but its tongue, this lump of bronze in the shape of a water drop, stayed in the abbot’s cell. No one was allowed to touch it.

  Every day, from matins to compline, a silent bell was rung so as not to attract the attention of the neighboring islands.

  Marco pushed the bronze object, which had become the symbol of this silent and invisible monastery.

  Thirty-nine monks, thought the cook.

  He didn’t feel his shoulders were broad enough to cope with the weight of such a responsibility.

  He remembered a stormy night when Zefiro had entrusted him with the clapper for a few hours. That evening, Marco had just learned of the death of his little sister Giulia, whom he hadn’t seen in ten years. He couldn’t even go to the funeral. Back in Mantua, Marco’s family thought he had disappeared forever.

  And so Zefiro had deliberately paid him a visit in a storm. He had held out the instrument to Marco.

  “Go on. Ring the bells. Let them hear you all the way to your hometown.”

  All the monks had heard tell that this was what Padre Zefiro did if the storm was growling loud enough to cover the sound of the bells and one of the brothers was having a hard time of it.

  That night, Marco had hung up the clapper inside the enormous bell. And for two hours in the middle of all those flashes of lightning and the roaring of the wind, he had rung that bell fit to bring down the monastery. Hanging from the rope, he rose up two or three meters with every swing. The bell was crying for him.

  It was something he would never forget.

  Marco put his glasses back on. He missed Zefiro as he would a father, but he had to attempt the impossible: to play the part of the responsible family man at a time when he felt like an orphan himself. He exited the cell and headed toward the kitchens.

  Leaving the chapel after Marco’s announcement, Vango followed Pippo Troisi toward the hutches.

  Troisi was complaining about his lot.

  In Zefiro’s absence, he had been made responsible for the rabbits. This was too much of a cross to bear. He had always loathed them, and now he had to look after twenty-four wild rabbits. He was visibly losing weight. He even had nightmares about it. He was like an asthmatic who had been parachuted into a henhouse.

  “Wretched rodents,” he moaned, opening the first cage. “Now look — even more of them have been born! Why didn’t they entrust me with the hives instead? I’m not afraid of bees!”

  Vango helped him take out the newborn bunnies and put them all onto the grass.

  Two young rabbits tried to slide down Pippo’s trouser legs.

  “It looks like they’re very fond of you!” Vango smiled.

  Pippo growled something incomprehensible as he tried to unfasten the rabbit’s grip on his thigh.

  Vango was right. This was true love.

  The rabbits always sensed Pippo coming from a long way off. They threw themselves at him as soon as he got there. Large bucks could be seen fighting over who got to greet him first. Violent duels had taken place. The rabbits clustered around him. The little ones mistook him for their mothers and rubbed themselves passionately against his ankles.

  His kicks had no effect. They loved him!

  The two men closed the caging again. They headed down in search of the buckets of water that were leaning against a stone.

  Pippo started washing his hands.

  Vango was watching him. He sensed the time had come
.

  “Pippo, weren’t you there the day I was found on Scario beach, in Malfa, when I was three?” he asked, trying to sound as offhand as possible.

  Pippo drew himself up to his full height.

  “It’s not just that I was there, little one: I was the one who found you.”

  He thrust his chin boastfully and wiped his hands on his sleeves. He wasn’t thinking about the rabbits anymore.

  “Yes, me, Pippo Troisi!” he declared, beating his chest. “The first person I found was your nanny. I alerted the others. And we got you out from the rocks a bit later.”

  Vango nodded. Ever since his return to Arkudah, he’d been wanting to question Pippo Troisi.

  He needed to find out more before going back to Mademoiselle.

  “I never did find out where you appeared from,” Pippo added softly. “But since we’ve been here, I’ve got this feeling you came to me from above: before I even knew how to say Arkudah! I swear that’s all I know.”

  “Didn’t anything happen on the island just before or after?” asked Vango, refusing to give up. “You didn’t notice anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Try to remember, please.”

  “What kind of thing do you have in mind?”

  “Something, I don’t know . . .”

  “But what?’

  “A change . . . an accident . . .”

  “An invasion of rabbits?” joked Pippo.

  “I was wondering . . .”

  “Nothing, I’m telling you. I don’t know anything. Do you understand?”

  His tone was too curt to be honest. They returned to the enclosure.

  Pippo got back to work, emptying one of the buckets of water in order to sluice down a rabbit hutch.

  “Back then, nothing ever happened in my life,” he added, by way of an apology.

  He gave the bunny rabbits back to their mother. Pippo insulted one poor animal that was licking his fingers, and another that wanted to be left in his pocket. In a corner, he piled up the peelings that had come from the kitchen. When it was time to leave, Pippo froze and said, as if for his own benefit, “One thing, perhaps. I think it was the same autumn that Bartolomeo died.”

  “Sorry?”

  “When you arrived . . .”

  “Who died?”

  “Bartolomeo. He was a lad with a very pretty wife and three little girls in Santa Maria. He died from a gunshot wound at home. My wife used to have a thing or two to say about that.”

  The exact phrase escaped him. He made the sign of the cross as if he were talking about Beelzebub himself. He became very superstitious whenever he mentioned his wife.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said things.”

  He made the sign again.

  “She had something to say about everybody.”

  Pippo headed off toward the monastery.

  “But about Bartolomeo, what did she have to say about him?”

  “She said that he’d played a dirty trick.”

  He was reluctant to dig up his wife’s old gossip. It might bring bad luck.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Pippo sighed.

  “A dirty trick with a gang. She maintained that one of his accomplices attacked him to steal his share.”

  Vango shaded his eyes with his hand so that he could see his friend against the sun.

  “A gang?”

  “Yes, a gang. Three fellows. I’m not sure about their names now. They wanted to emigrate but didn’t have the means to. Perhaps they staged a holdup in a grocer’s shop on the mainland. It wasn’t a fortune, in any case. . . .”

  “Did they leave the island?”

  “Bartolomeo died, poor man. But at least one of them set off for America, before the others could so much as say Arkudah! I don’t know what he was called. And the last one stayed, that tall one you know.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who’s like an animal, tall, you know who I mean. . . .”

  “Who?”

  “The big fellow who gave up his house.”

  “Who?” insisted Vango, unable to believe his ears.

  “The big chap with the donkey.”

  “Mazzetta?”

  “Yes, that’s it, Mazzetta.”

  Vango stopped. Pippo Troisi was watching him.

  “I need your gun” was all that Vango could say.

  The crater of Pollara, Salina, the next night

  Vango was hiding in a scrubby bush with the gun pressed tightly to his chest. Mazzetta’s lair was fifty meters away. Not even the donkey had noticed him approaching. It was a dark night. No clouds, no wind, no moon.

  Time had come to a standstill on this last night of summer.

  Vango didn’t want to pay Mademoiselle a visit beforehand, just to hear her confirming what Pippo Troisi had already told him. He would see her later on.

  She had known everything from the very beginning. She had never revealed a single name. She wasn’t responsible for what he was about to do.

  This was his story. His revenge.

  He had been taught to show the left cheek if the right one was hit. But this wasn’t a case of a slapped cheek. Two innocent hearts had been riddled with bullets.

  This was a matter of life and death. It boiled down to the law of mechanics: To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Vango believed that by acting in this way, he would breathe life back into his parents.

  Afterward, his final task would be to track down the last remaining guilty man.

  But for now it was all about Mazzetta. The man who had been present in Vango’s most distant childhood memories.

  That silhouette on the crater, that shadow in his den, that cold lava creature who lived a few paces from their home. Never a word exchanged in all those years. But Vango knew that Mazzetta had watched over them every day of their life in Pollara.

  Each new moon, the small silver coin they lived off appearing on their doorstep — that was him. The vine arbor miraculously re-erected after the storm — that was him. The scorpion killed ten centimeters from Vango’s face when he was five years old and having a siesta under a prickly-pear tree — that was him. The only vines on the island not to fall prey to disease — that was him. Even the straw in Mademoiselle’s hat that always came back as good as new when she left it outside of an evening. Mazzetta never owned up to these acts. The coin, the scorpion, the vine arbor, the rejuvenated hat, and everything else. Guardian angels leave no traces.

  But Vango had always recognized Mazzetta’s shadow.

  And, in three minutes, he would stand before him with his gun.

  Crouched down, Vango made his way over to the stone wall blocking off the cave where Mazzetta had lived for nearly twenty years. A lamp was on. The old man must have led his donkey inside, just like he did in winter.

  “Come out, Mazzetta.”

  Vango didn’t want to take him by surprise.

  “It’s me, Vango. Come out, Mazzetta!”

  He heard something move in the shadows.

  “I know you’re there. Come out. I know about everything else as well. It’s time to show yourself.”

  Several minutes went by.

  There was still some low-level noise in the cave. Scratching sounds on the floor, and sighs.

  “I know what you did, Mazzetta!”

  Vango decided to go in. He made it as far as the entrance, bent down, and peered into the gloom.

  The first thing he saw was the donkey’s carcass on the floor. Its huge leather collar was blackened with blood. Then he saw Mazzetta with his arms outspread and his head on the beast’s rump. The old man was writhing about in the final throes of death. Vango threw himself down onto the floor next to him.

  “Ma’az . . .” The dying man was trying to stammer something for Vango’s benefit.

  “She . . . Ma’az . . . elle . . .”

  Vango put his ear closer to the dying man.

  “Ma’azelle.”

  He rushed out
side with his gun.

  Mademoiselle.

  He ran toward the house.

  Thorns were tearing at his legs. But he didn’t feel a thing.

  Vango approached from the west side, where there were two windows. The first gave onto the main living area. Without hesitating for a second, he loaded his gun and jumped headfirst through the glass pane. Inside, he rolled onto the blue floor, instantly got up again, and turned full circle, still pointing his gun.

  The silence and emptiness were dreadful.

  A night-light was about to go out near to the fire. That cup she always used, on the table, had been smashed to pieces, and all that was left was a tiny heap of snow.

  Vango rushed into the bedroom. Nothing.

  “Mademoiselle!” he called out.

  He went outside onto the terrace, where everything was pitch-black.

  “Mademoiselle!”

  His voice came echoing back to him, all the way from the bottom of the crater. He quickly searched the neighboring deserted house, behind the olive tree, before setting off running again in the direction of Mazzetta, who was still breathing.

  Vango put the gun to the dying man’s forehead.

  “Where is she?”

  “Or . . . men . . .”

  Mazzetta moved his hand and tucked his thumb into his palm to indicate the number four.

  “Four?” asked Vango. “Four men?”

  Mazzetta’s eyes answered yes with all their might.

  “Did they kill her?”

  “No.”

  “Carry her off?”

  Mazzetta’s eyes acquiesced, and then his whole body was wracked by a convulsion. He was suffocating. He stretched out his arm to hold on to the donkey’s collar. Vango released the old man’s grip from the leather yoke.

  “Where? Where did they take her?”

  This time, Mazzetta could only move his lips. Vango pulled his gun away and put his ear to the fading man’s mouth. He made him repeat it three times.

  My donkey. He had definitely said, “My donkey.”

  A second later, Mazzetta died on Vango’s knees, and the boy began to weep.

  A few hours earlier, while it was still light, Brother John Mulligan, who was about to remove his skullcap as Cardinal of the South, had seen the speedboat going past in the opposite direction. But this time, through his telescope, he could make out a woman standing at the stern, who kept turning to face Salina. From observing the woman’s face with her white hair stuck to it, and the weapons pointed at her, it was clear to Mulligan that something was afoot.