Killing Pilgrim

by Alen Mattich

  Rebecca smiled. “I said they were very rough,” she said by way of apology.

  “Oh, never mind. You’re not a specialist. But I think a little more reading is in order before you start to build a thesis of any sort. And work on your Slovak. Very important for this. Not to mention Serbo-Croat.”

  “You speak Serbo-Croat?” della Torre asked. His father had long argued that it was spurious to claim that Serbian and Croatian were separate languages; they were no more separate than American and British English, albeit with different alphabets. The differences were trivial, a matter of accent and a handful of words and a deep-seated enmity of two peoples. His father’s views may have been correct for a philologist, but they didn’t win him many friends among nationalists on either side.

  “Not really. My background is in Russian, but I’ve taken an interest in western Slavic languages. That’s why I’m here. I invited myself a while ago, and your father’s just too kind to turn down a stranger.”

  The memory precipitated from a fog in a distant corner of his mind. His father had mentioned an American research student some time ago, but della Torre had been too preoccupied to give it much thought. He had been on the run. From hired killers, from the Zagreb cops, from the UDBA. He’d driven through Istria on his way to London, via Venice, moving as quickly and secretly as he could. But he’d felt a pang on his way past his father’s house, not knowing when he’d ever see his father or the house again. So he’d taken an enormous risk in calling the old man. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe some deep, longed-for . . . what? Whatever he’d been hoping for, he hadn’t gotten it. Instead, he’d spent worried moments listening to gossip, conversational filler — and, he now remembered, something about an American researcher.

  “I’ll find some references for you,” Piero said. “You’ll be able to look them up when you get back to Washington. But that’s for later; it’s a side issue to the work you’re doing.”

  “Time for a little break,” Rebecca said. “We got right down to it from the minute I showed up, and haven’t stopped since. Isn’t that right, Piero?” She lowered her head and looked up at the older man through her eyelashes.

  For a moment della Torre could have sworn he’d seen his father’s cheeks colour. The old man kept his eyes on the notes in front of him. His prominent widow’s peak was more apparent than ever; the hair was almost completely white, in marked contrast to his deeply tanned skin. No, della Torre decided, he’d been mistaken; it was probably just the afternoon heat.

  “You’ve been staying here?”

  “For a little more than a week now. It’s terrific. I love how you can really feel history in the place. You can almost taste it,” she said, running her bottom lip under her teeth in a way that sent an electric current up della Torre’s spine.

  History. She was right. Maybe there was too much of it. A history of armies and of destruction. The ruins of a Roman hamlet lay under his father’s wheat field. Bits of stone wall and the detritus of an ancient civilization pushed up through the soil now and again. And his family history was tied to it.

  His father had bought the house as a ruin, a project for the two of them, when they’d come back from the U.S. after della Torre’s mother died. They’d rebuilt it, at a time when these old stone houses were being abandoned in favour of new, concrete structures, the local architecture replaced with anodyne modern Mediterranean villas that wouldn’t have been out of place in Spanish or Greek resorts.

  But when they’d finished, people came from all over Istria to marvel at their work. No doubt some laughed up their sleeves that these Yugo-Americans had spent so much time and money on an old house when a new one would have been so much cheaper and easier to build. But even they had admired the quality of the restoration and the household conveniences they’d only ever seen on television: a machine to wash dishes, a big shower that never ran out of hot water, air conditioning in almost every room.

  The house had been state of the art a quarter of a century before. But, like his father, it had grown tired in the intervening years.

  Rebecca pulled her head closer to the old man’s so that they were reading the papers together. It gave della Torre another chance to look at her closely. The pale skin, marked by small freckles; the curve of her breasts. He felt a pang. Could it be he was jealous?

  She looked up suddenly, catching the younger della Torre scrutinizing her. Again that smile.

  “So how long are you here?” she asked.

  “Just the weekend. I’m due back in Zagreb on Monday.”

  “What a coincidence. I need to get to Zagreb next week too. I’d like to do a bit of research in the library there. Maybe we can make the trip together,” she said.

  Della Torre senior looked up sharply, his head drawing back as if in reproach. “I didn’t realize you’d be leaving so soon.”

  “You’ve been so kind, Piero, but I really can’t encroach any further on your hospitality. I’ve been here too long already. I’d only intended to spend a few days. Besides, there are a couple of people I promised to look up in Zagreb,” she said.

  Della Torre thought he could read hurt in his father’s expression.

  “I need to be in Poreč tomorrow, might make a day of it. So I’ll stay out of your hair while I’m here,” della Torre said. “Right now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have a shower. It was a hot drive.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll join you,” she said. Della Torre’s look of panic made her laugh. “I mean on the drive down to Poreč. I need to pick up one or two things and it’ll make a nice change from the brain work.”

  “I can drive you,” della Torre’s father said, hurriedly. “We can all go to Poreč tomorrow.”

  Della Torre shrugged. “Like I said, I’ll probably be making a day of it, so I’ll take my own car. Anyway, it’s nice to meet you,” he said to Rebecca.

  “The pleasure is all mine.”

  • • •

  The house was considerably tidier than when della Torre had seen it last. Papers still covered the dining-room table, but now they were in ordered stacks. Surfaces looked like they’d been dusted. The kitchen had been scrubbed and the perennially dripping faucet had been mended. Books were back on their shelves and shutters had been opened for the first time since he and his father had hung them, despite the heat of the day.

  He went to put his overnight bag in his room but stopped short. Rebecca’s clothes were folded on a chair, and her suitcase was at the end of the double bed, the one he and Irena had bought.

  He carried on through to a small interconnected room. It had been his study and model-making room when he’d been a teenager, and it had a single bed that he’d used as a sofa. The room wasn’t air-conditioned, but enough cool air flowed through the louvred door from his bedroom. He’d be comfortable for the three nights he was there.

  Della Torre dropped his bag on the bed and went through another door to the hall that led to the bathroom. Rebecca’s toiletries were on the shelf. Nothing elaborate, but feminine enough for della Torre to feel Irena’s absence. He’d call her when he got back to Zagreb.

  He took a long, cool shower and then headed back to his room with a towel wrapped around his waist. Rebecca was in the hall.

  “Sorry. Have you been waiting for me to get out?” he asked.

  “Nope. Besides, I’m the one who should be apologizing for taking your room. You can have it back if you like,” she said, running her gaze up and down his damp torso.

  “That’s fine. It’ll seem like old times sleeping in my little bed,” he said. “If you don’t mind me parking myself next door. Sound travels between the rooms and I’m told I sometimes snore.”

  “Just as long as you don’t smoke. Then again, maybe I won’t mind if you do.” She paused. “Well, if you have all your things, I was going to take a little siesta. I’ve grown used to them. A cool shower and a
lie-down these hot afternoons.”

  The sarong she’d tied around her waist slipped lower still. His eyes traced an invisible line that arrowed down her belly from her navel.

  “Don’t let me stop you,” he said, shutting the door behind him.

  His hand rested on the doorknob for a long time before he pulled on some shorts. He lay on his bed, thinking, while she showered. But the heat of the day, the journey, and the wine at lunch lulled him to sleep before she finished.

  It was late in the afternoon when he woke. He pulled on an old T-shirt that fit better than it had in years. He must have lost weight since getting shot.

  He made his way downstairs barefoot and found a pair of his father’s plastic sandals by the front door — they wore the same size shoes. There was no sign of life in the house. Della Torre guessed his father would be in his study, reading and drinking watered-down wine or cold beer, as he did most afternoons. In the evenings he moved on to grappa or slivovitz, the fierce local plum brandy, while watching Italian television or listening to the World Service or sometimes American or German shortwave broadcasts.

  As it was, the old man drank too much. Della Torre wondered how much worse it would be if his father didn’t have his writing to keep him focused and sober at least part of the time. Maybe with Rebecca around he’d been drinking less.

  Della Torre stepped out onto the terrace and wandered down into the courtyard and through an arched wooden door in the garden wall, into the well-tended vineyards. This was another thing that kept his father going — the vines. He still sprayed them by hand, finishing the day coated in the harsh blue-green mixture of copper sulphate and lime used to kill the fungus that rotted grapes.

  The grapes were already ripening; they’d need harvesting early this year. Della Torre wondered if there’d be a market for the wine. It wouldn’t matter much for his father, who sold only a little to the cooperative. But the farmers would suffer.

  He’d hung a Lucky off his lower lip, stopping to strike a match, when he heard footsteps. Light ones, barely brushing the ground. He turned.

  “I saw you going for a walk. Thought I might join you. Hope you don’t mind,” she said, though something in her voice suggested she was indifferent to what he wanted. She stood in the next row of vines, mostly hidden by the broad leaves.

  “By all means,” he said, shrugging. He reached for the cigarettes and offered one to her through the wire that held up the plant’s tendrils. She smiled and shook her head.

  “I don’t think you said whether you were doing a doctorate or post-doc work,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No, I didn’t say.” That smile again. “Your father tells me you’re a lawyer. Any special sort of law or just the usual accidents and contracts?” she said with what he thought might be irony. He couldn’t be sure; she was almost invisible behind the foliage. What exactly had his father told her?

  “I work for the prosecutor’s office. I investigate suspected cases of fraud in our legal system, where corruption may have caused innocent people to be, um, jailed.” It was the standard shorthand he used to get around the fact that he worked for the UDBA. But the essence of what he’d told her was close to the truth. “Or I used to. Now it looks like I’ve been drafted into the Croatian army.”

  They’d reached the end of the row and could see each other clearly. Della Torre turned right so that they walked side by side between blocks of vines.

  “Accidents of justice. Contracts taken out wrongly,” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  “So how does an American end up working for the —” She paused for a long beat. “— for the prosecutor’s office and then joining the Croatian army? I didn’t know Croatia had an army.”

  “Dad told you I was American?” he said.

  His father had always been circumspect about his son’s other nationality. It was no secret that they’d lived in America for much of della Torre’s childhood, but no one in Yugoslavia, apart from his father and his wife, knew he was an American citizen. Nobody in the UDBA. He was certain of it. He kept his passport updated by travelling to Rome and applying to the American embassy there. Only della Torre and his mother had taken citizenship. His father had decided he’d be best off sticking to a green card. As a young academic he’d had to join the Communist Party, and he’d never officially renounced it. Americans didn’t look favourably on citizens who were Communists.

  Rebecca didn’t answer but merely smiled at him. “I take it you’re a member of the Communist Party. You’d have to be to hold a senior position. Wouldn’t you?” There was something in the way she said “Communist,” the crisp, sharp, legal tone that made his muscles tighten and his head pull back.

  “What else did my father tell you about me?”

  “Not much. That you’re married but live apart from your wife. That you don’t have any children and this might have something to do with why your wife no longer wants to live with you. That you’ve never wanted to go back with him to visit the States since you moved here as a kid. Not even to visit your mother’s grave. Speaking of which, he didn’t talk much about your mother. What happened to her?”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask,” della Torre said abruptly.

  “Sorry. I understand,” she said.

  He was starting to realize what disturbed him about her smile. It wasn’t reflected in her eyes.

  “I think he doesn’t quite understand why you don’t leave, now that the war’s coming,” she said.

  “No. Neither do I,” said della Torre. He’d tried. Earlier that year, he’d run away to London, escaping the hired Bosnian killers. For a short while he thought he’d be able to make a new life for himself there with Harry Martingale. But he’d failed. And got shot along the way.

  “He didn’t tell me what you did to your arm,” she said.

  He looked down at the pink wound. His arm wouldn’t quite straighten, but it was throbbing less than it had since he’d got shot.

  “An accident,” he said.

  “Like the ones you investigate?” she asked.

  “Not quite as . . .” He let his thought trail off.

  “As final?” she asked.

  He shrugged. They’d walked into his father’s orchard, at the end of which was a small wheat field. Della Torre helped himself to a peach. It hung heavy, ripe, so that he took it gently, not wanting to bruise the flesh. The hot, still air was luscious with its sweet scent. He offered the peach to Rebecca, but she shook her head. He bit into it and the juice ran down his chin; he leaned forward to keep it from dripping on his shirt.

  In the distance, his father’s farmhouse hung above a sea of green vines, an island of white stone turned pink in the evening light. Now in shadow, the earth under their feet was a deep blood red. Above, a high mare’s tail streaked the sky. A storm was coming.

  Della Torre sat in the back seat of the Renault 4. The complete lack of sound insulation meant having to shout over the rattling engine, so they stayed quiet after the first feeble attempts at conversation.

  His father had insisted on driving them to Poreč. They’d have a great time in town, he said at dinner the night before. He’d already shown Rebecca the sights on an earlier trip: the Byzantine basilica, some Roman ruins, and the graceful Venetian palazzos. They could go to the beach while della Torre did his business at the police station. And then they could meet up for lunch at a favourite fish restaurant on the quayside, overlooking the harbour and the island of St Nikola beyond.

  Della Torre would rather have gone alone, left the two to their own devices. But he saw that his father had become set on his plan, and so he dutifully gave in.

  His father drove the car with intense concentration, hunched over the wheel, which he gripped hard with both hands when he wasn’t shifting gears. And he aimed to shift as little as possi
ble. The senior della Torre had discovered long ago that the car functioned well at exactly 35 kilometres an hour, a speed that required little braking or slowing for corners. Fortunately for other drivers, he used only small country lanes unless he absolutely couldn’t avoid the bigger roads. And fortunately for his passengers, it was only 15 kilometres to Poreč.

  The road through the fields from the house was newly paved — a blessing, given the Renault’s almost complete lack of suspension. Only a few years back it had still been a rutted dirt track. Coming into a long corner, they disturbed a flock of starlings warming themselves on the asphalt. As the car approached, the birds lifted off and flew at waist height in the direction of Poreč, hovering directly in front of the car like a black cloud, following the road through every curve.

  His father didn’t waver, even as the distance between the birds and the car narrowed. And then, as if in slow motion, the birds were scooped along the bonnet. Still beating their wings, they slid the length of the car until they reached the windscreen. Then, tail feathers up, their orifices pressed flat against the glass, they slid up and over the roof. Della Torre looked behind him. The birds did little cartwheels as they fell off the top of the car and into its slipstream. As soon as they were in still air again, they fell back into formation. And so the Renault passed through the whole flock, bird by astonished bird.

  The absurdity hit della Torre, and he laughed out loud. His father didn’t seem to have noticed the strange occurrence, and Rebecca stared straight ahead as if she wasn’t sure what she’d just experienced.

  Della Torre looked into the rear-view mirror, catching his father’s eyes. There was a humour in them. More like the person della Torre remembered from before his mother had died. The spirit of joy had crept back into the old man. Years spooled back and happy memories resurfaced. And then, with a jolt, he realized his mistake. He hadn’t been looking into his father’s eyes. He’d been looking into his own.