In the Wolf's Mouth

1

The Princess liked to outpace her guards, to kick up and canter as far from them as she could, making them chase, but here in the motor car there was nowhere to go. One guard sat beside her. He breathed through his nostrils as loudly as a farm animal and bit at the corner of his moustache as he stared out of the window, a pistol on his hip. When she was a little girl there were always more of them, men on the other side of the windows, crouching on the running boards with rifles across their backs. As a child she’d envied them: she wanted to ride on the outside of the car. Now the threat was much diminished but still her father wouldn’t let her travel without at least one to protect her.

In front, the driver in his cap paddled his feet, jerked his levers and turned the wheel. Outside the windows the landscape changed. The bricks and avenues of Palermo gave way to the countryside, the landscape hollowing, rising up into rigid, incessant hills. She was not sad to be leaving the city. It would be good to be out again on horseback with the wind striking her. For a while. This was the task of Luisa’s life: evading boredom in one of two places. She did this by moving arrhythmically between them, taking her friends by surprise in Palermo, going among the feathers and ballrooms and knowing eyes and then suddenly substituting them with the sun and emptiness, the peasants and her father’s travails. There she was free to ride within a certain range, as long as she was accompanied and kept away from the malevolent edge of the country that was always there, encircling. She sensed it looking out of the motor car. The landscape was vigilant. It knew things. It could see her.

In a walled garden in Palermo, by a pond in which large goldfish slowly twisted, rising and fading, a Fascist mayor had told Princess Luisa that there was absolutely nothing to be worried about, that the party had smashed those backward rural criminals. He had jutted out his chin in a ridiculous imitation of the Duce. All the Fascists these days strutted and posed like him even as a light sheen of panic appeared on their faces. At parties aristocrats from the old families caught each other’s eyes and shared this observation. They themselves felt confident, monumental, historically vindicated, while the Fascists struck attitudes and drank and spoke too much. The effect of events in North Africa on Luisa’s own pet Fascist, Mauro, a Tuscan of refined, not to say pretty, features, was to make him more ardent. He wanted to marry her.

Mauro Vecchio was the prefect of Sant’Attilio, a part of the island he confided in her that he found squalid and incomprehensible. The best of Sicily was the east, where the Greeks had been. The half-Arab peasants of the west could not be made political. It wouldn’t take, any more than you could teach pigs to speak Latin. You could move the feeding trough, make them trot in a different direction, and that was as far as it went. Luisa’s father disliked him for these opinions, the Prince having a peculiar, dimly Tolstoyan reverence for the tough local people that somehow survived his dealings with them. Mauro and her father liked to argue it out in the persons of The Future and The Old Wisdom. Now, it seemed her father had won the argument. Mauro had retreated to Palermo and Luisa suspected he would never return, although as he drove with her to the city in his official car, he had promised her that he would, no matter what happened.

The conversation on the bouncing back seat of the car was a long coda to the conversation in the garden. Sitting on the pedestal of one of the statues, Mauro had looked up squinting against the light and asked Luisa to marry him. The answer, of course, was no, although Luisa could not have said why the ‘of course’ was so immediate and definitive. She liked Mauro. He was always entertaining in his silk shirts and boots, declaring things. He was ardent, about her, about Italy. But there was something she was sure she should have felt that she didn’t. It was a kind of terror that she wanted to feel, her solitude broken open, a fiery golden tearing into the centre of her by the man who would then have the right to marry her, and that she had never felt.

In Palermo, Mauro had sent messages to the apartment in the palace where she stayed with her cousins (the Prince having long since rented out his Palermo residence to his nephews). She had replied only insincerely, with jokes and exhortations to courage. She had met the usual people and done the usual things in an atmosphere now effervescent with the closeness of war. Until, that is, being there had bored her and she’d left.

Arriving home, the driver got out, trotted around and opened the door for Luisa. The guard waited and walked behind. Luisa saw Angilù walking from the main door towards the wing of estate management rooms. He stopped where he was and lifted his hat, almost as though he was showing her his balding head, a little surprise he kept for her. Angilù wouldn’t have understood this comical thought, he was always so serious and hard-working. The Princess waved at him, allowing him to walk away.

Into the lion’s mouth, the echoing hallway where the dogs came out to greet her, claws scrabbling on the tiles. She rummaged briefly among their furry necks and sides, their warm, damp breath, before walking through to her father’s study. Presumably Angilù had just come from there. The image of him standing outside, subordinate, his hat uplifted, stuck in her mind for some reason. She found him a frustrating man. He’d been working with her father, around the house, for almost twenty years and he always kept such a pious distance from her. Only once, when she was a girl, she remembered, he’d treated her like one of his own children. Luisa used to follow him around, pursuing him at his work. She was playing outside with some kind of seeds that he needed, tossing them onto the ground, and he’d grabbed hold of her, handling her roughly, and scolded her. She had been so shocked and outraged at this unprecedented behaviour that she had wailed with scarlet anger. She could still see the fear that had appeared in his eyes, the desperate effort to placate her before anyone else saw. After that assertion of her will, Angilù had kept away. When she followed him, he ignored her respectfully. Luisa felt at odd moments abandoned by him still, his veneration of her a kind of denial. She would have liked to talk to him sometimes, she imagined he knew interesting things, but he was mute. She could have asked him questions and he would have been forced to answer, but it was not the same.

Her father was sitting in his red armchair with the wireless on, his gaze resting in midair, a slightly foolish look of cogitation on his face. Cigarette smoke was rising slowly along his arm and up from his head. It rolled with turbulence when he saw her and moved. ‘Ah, my dear.’ He stood up. ‘One moment.’ He went over to the wireless, a waist-high cabinet elaborate with honey-coloured grilles, and switched it off.

The Princess approached and kissed the Prince’s proffered cheek.

‘Well,’ he asked, sitting back down on his armchair, the leather cushions huffing and crackling. ‘What news on the Rialto?’

‘They’re scared, Father. They think Sicily is next and that the Germans are about to arrive in force. Rumours. I think Mauro might be making plans to escape.’

‘Doesn’t that rather suggest he won’t marry you?’

Luisa laughed quickly, dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t have married him.’ Mauro appeared to her mind’s eye the way he always did, his pretty features like an illustration in a children’s book, a simple, impertinent face.

‘That’s a relief. A few years ago I suppose you might have got away with it, when things were different for them. Now I would certainly forbid it.’

‘Yes, Father. But there’s no need. I’ve already forbidden it.’

‘Good.’

‘I’m going to change. I want to ride before dinner. Any news here?’

‘I just had Angilù in here.’

‘Yes, I saw him.’

‘There’s a lot of news coming back from cousins in America. Certain people who left a long time ago are apparently helping the Americans. Which suggests that the news in Palermo may be correct. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘Nobody does.’ The Princess thought her father looked very old in his chair, the way his long, narrow thighs jutted out and converged weakly at the knees, his bony hands on the armrests. He had worked very hard for the estate. Prince Adriano was a rare eccentric: a Sicilian landowner who liked the land.

2

Walking home, Angilù caught sight of the witch of Montebianco in the distance. Perhaps she’d been visiting someone in the house, the servant Graziana maybe. Short, dark, she moved with a rapid skimming walk, a small bag hanging from her right hand. Angilù wondered what she knew. For himself, he preferred the church now and again. He should go soon to get a blessing. He pictured the holy sparkle of it descending on him, protecting him.

He walked up through the whispering avenue of olive trees and into his home, into the blue shadows of his whitewashed hallway with its smooth, cool smell of plaster dust and paint. For two years, Albanese’s widow had remained in this place. After two years, she had moved back in with her mother in Sant’Attilio and later, when she’d married again, into Silvio’s house. The Prince had invited Angilù and Rosaria, then pregnant with their first daughter, to move in. The house frightened both of them at first. It was so large and quiet and still. And Albanese had lived there. His presence remained. The families in Sant’Attilio who were friends of the Albaneses, those of them who remained, watched Angilù as he passed in the street. Angilù had the house blessed. Holy water flashed into every corner. And then the baby was born, a new blossoming of loud life, and Angilù forgot; the place became their house.

He could hear Rosaria in the kitchen, the melody of her talk to Mariuzza, their youngest daughter. Walking in, he found Mariuzza sitting on the counter, kicking her soft legs. Rosaria was pouring olive oil into the bottom of a smoking pot. Beside her were heaps of sliced vegetables. Angilù put his hand on the back of her neck, a strong, thick neck, a mother’s neck. Always that distance he crossed in himself to reach out and touch her, still at heart a shepherd and far from everything. He kissed the ticklish damp hair on her nape as she picked up a handful of silvery onions and dropped them into the pan. ‘Hello, little bird,’ he said through the sudden noise of frying.

‘Yes, yes. You need to move.’

Angilù caught hold of one of Mariuzza’s swinging feet. He held it, straightening the girl’s leg, and bent to kiss the dimpled knee.

3

Graziana had unpacked Luisa’s things by the time she went upstairs. She put on a riding dress and stepped out to fetch a field guard from their office to accompany her. The first flames of evening were in the sky. Luisa chose to ride Ezio, sharp-boned and volatile, a horse that tended to fidget and sidestep and yank at the reins. The guard subdued him in the stables then bent down to offer his hands to Luisa. She stepped up into the saddle. The field guards were always so strong — the man’s knitted fingers felt like a stone step. In the courtyard, Ezio tried whirling on the spot. Luisa sat on the beast, imposing herself. She spoke at him and patted his neck. Ezio calmed, stalled finally under her, breathing and thinking. Luisa kicked. She rode out. The guard followed after.

Ezio didn’t like going downhill. He fended away at the slope with his forelegs, trying to tread back upright, but Luisa leaned in, persuaded him down. His hooves scraped. Small stones slithered after. And that was the last of Ezio’s resistance for the day. They rode together, a strong headwind cutting away at Luisa, cleansing and purifying. Ezio’s long eyelashes flickered against the onrushing air. Their wills fused — that was Luisa’s sensation. Ezio understood what Luisa intended and stretched his legs, gathering the ground behind them. Luisa was freed in the loosened movement. They walked for a while, Luisa resting her gaze in the distances, creases of shadows in the hills, clouds turning scarlet in the sky. At this pace she saw the birds hopping and people labouring among straight rows of vines. She turned in the saddle to see the guard trotting after. When she stopped, he did, keeping the distance she’d demanded. He sat waiting, his hands on the pommel, his thick legs stuck out. Luisa turned Ezio with a swipe of the reins and kicked. His head and shaking mane crested in front of her. They galloped down past the guard and back towards the house.

4

Connecting the swirling lines of the maps with the reality of the old country was difficult. Maps and memories were so different. Standing over them, the colonel patiently waiting, Cirò thoughtfully rubbed his nose between his thumb and his forefinger. His part of the island had many concentric rings of contour lines that looked like knots in wood. Those were the hills he remembered. He followed one road with his finger. If Portella Corvi was there and Sant’Attilio was there … then he knew where he was. That hill, he could see its surly shape again in his mind, the near side always shadowed. Now he could put himself there and see the whole place unfold around him. He could say to the colonel that this was all Prince Adriano’s land, that this belonged to the Santangelis, that there were wells here, here and here.

His route into that room was not one that Cirò would have chosen. It had been demeaning. Certain Italian and Sicilian men with influential American friends had been approached in a civilised manner, taken out to dinner, spoken to quietly in clubs and brothels. Or an unusually well-dressed stranger had appeared at their prison cells and led them out. Cirò, for all his American success, still belonged in a different category. Working his trade at the docks, he was no boss. He was collected in a mass arrest at a waterfront café. At least it had been a mass arrest. An individual arrest would really have worried him. Not that there was any evidence of the things he’d done. He hadn’t used a gun. Docks were dangerous places. A cargo hook swings. A walkway is slippery. And that had been some time ago when he was establishing himself. They arrested everyone in the café. The officers sifted through them letting Poles and Norwegians and others go. They held onto the Sicilians.

The dumb cops had clearly been told to lay it on thick. A fat little police captain who for a long time had received tributes of money from some of the men in the room and had been taken to girls by others, barked out that they were cleaning up. Everybody would be in for a long stretch. Unless, that is, they were interested in cooperating. Given the rumours that were circulating (and more than rumours, good, hard facts passed along the line), no one was surprised when blue gave way to green and into this little theatrical production walked an army officer. He told them that they were all off the hook if they would step up and serve their country. The army wanted their help.

Like any of this was necessary. They could just have asked. Everybody in that room, even the ones who wanted to stay in America, wanted the Fascists off the island. They wanted back what was theirs.

After this rigmarole, excitement glittered among the sombre, determined men of Cirò’s acquaintance. They met in cafés and bars, whorehouses and each other’s homes and discussed the possibilities that lay ahead. It was a grand prospect. They were sharper, now, harder and cleverer. They weren’t just stealing sheep and squeezing mill owners and collecting tributes and making sure they got certain leases. They were American businessmen who had kept up their interests against all kinds of competition, Poles, Italians, Jews, Chinese. They’d killed and they’d negotiated. They ran numbers and nightclubs and girls. They imported morphine and booze, Cirò’s special area of interest, and they received tributes from all sorts of people in all sorts of places. They’d negotiated with the authorities and got them on side. They’d become political. These conversations made them sentimental about all that America had given them and all the work they’d done, the people lost on the way. And now it was time to go home. Now it was time for revenge.

New York was home now, too, of course. Cirò loved taking his money up into the canyons of Manhattan, striding towards the narrow blade of sky that forever retreated up the avenues. He saw the millionaires with their tiny dogs and fur collars, the women with foxes looped around their necks. He saw the taxis and doormen. You couldn’t have invented the place. More meat than you ever dreamed of eating. A place that answered to his appetites.

Sicily was home, though. Sicily was mother. It was his olive trees and sunshine flavoured with herbs and the smell of hot earth. It was the hard-won property and Teresa.

And he would see Teresa again. In America, he’d had news of her, brought by new arrivals or people who had visited home, arriving in the hills in their suits and showering gifts on the shoeless children. Teresa had thought what she was supposed to think, that he had been taken, destroyed, a death that disappeared, his body never found. Or she had acted as though she thought he’d been shot with the white shotgun. Maybe she guessed otherwise, what with so many men of respect escaping away. And couldn’t she still feel him, the force of him alive, no matter that he was across an ocean? Whatever, she had become a widow. In those early days, the thought of Teresa alone in an empty bed, wearing black, had closed Albanese’s mind with pain. Years later, he’d heard the news of her remarriage to that peasant Silvio. He remembered exactly where he was when he heard. Ginu had been almost too frightened to tell him. Cirò was halfway through a meal, his mouth was grainy with ground beef and tomato sauce. He pushed away the plate. The food in his stomach turned instantly heavy and poisonous.

Now he would return to reclaim her.

In his own way, Cirò had been faithful to her, for twenty years consorting only with mistresses and whores. Apart, that is, from one woman.

Cathy was an Irish girl, a typist in a small glass-sided office inside one of the warehouses. He would glimpse her in there, her red hair, a bird in a cage. She took her lunch on a bench that looked out over the water. Cirò noticed this. Other men shouted and whistled at her as they went past. Cirò was silent. She looked so nice, sitting there. It was something about the shape of her shoulders inside her coat and her smart polished shoes side by side beneath her. Cirò had the café fill his thermos with coffee and took it and sat beside her. She was someone he wanted to be next to, delicate and contained, small and beautiful in the rough winds of the docks. He asked if she minded. She said she didn’t. They looked at the water together.

Each day he went back and found her there at the same time. She told him she liked the sea, had grown up seeing it. Later on, she accepted his invitation to go out somewhere fancy for dinner. He thought she guessed what kind of a man he was but decided not to know. The restaurant thrilled her, so smart and lively, and Cirò was greeted by all the staff. He ordered the best wine, a beautiful Barolo. When she tasted it, he saw her shoulders droop. She looked sad. He asked, ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t it good?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘It’s delicious.’ Cirò knew that she was uncertain now, that she was losing a clear sense of the limits of her world. ‘Why don’t you have a cocktail? Cocktails are more fun. We can save the wine for later.’ Cathy allowed him to order and drank, her face half eclipsed by the wide circle of the glass. Later they went home together and made love.

They lived like lovers. Cirò bought her gifts of jewellery that she never wore but put away in the bank. She didn’t know what to do with him. Part of her was frightened. Cirò was often telling her not to be silly. She clung to him. Whatever it was she’d left behind in Ireland meant she was alone here too, in her rented room. She was nervous and loved the size of Cirò, his bulk. She patted his belly, kneaded with her small fingers the meat of his shoulders.

Cirò going off to war felt like the end of everything but it also pleased her in some way; it conferred an average kind of nobility on him. It cleaned him morally. They were part of the crowd. Greedily, he ate what he could of her before he left. The rosy translucency of her stockings drying in front of the fire. The bead necklaces she wore hanging over a corner of her dressing-table mirror. The piles of picture magazines she kept. Her Christ on a cross on the wall, his small silver body as jointed and slim as a wasp. The dumpy old mattress that took on the warmth of their bodies. Cathy’s hair was gold at her temples and waved out to a faded red. Over her unbelievably fair skin, her face and forehead, her shoulders and the tops of her arms, was a strange scattering of colour, her freckles, multiple. They swirled like money.

She was so strange to him. She was not Sicilian. She was not his wife. He left a large roll of cash under her pillow when he left. He said he would be back before she knew it, like all the brave soldiers did, and left, he assumed, for ever.

Cirò Albanese was returning to Sicily with all the power of America, all the money and metal and giant scale. The invasion fleet was immense. You could look across the ocean on either side and see it stretching away. It was a city on water, Manhattan armed and loosed, grinding forward under a bright half-moon. Down avenues of green-black water raced corvettes and lighter craft. In the sky above the Allies roared towards home.

Later, hearing the guns, the bombs, every detonation was for him, was a visitation of his will upon his enemies. The light of dawn spread across the water. Aircraft raced back and forth. Cirò was being held, ready. He was important to the Americans. Imagine that. He would be part of the new order on the island. Dense smoke, full of the pollution of random burning, rolled back elegantly over the surface of the cold sea. Cirò inhaled.

5

Ray could feel it already, even before it started, the dryness in his throat. Out there, his mouth would be so dry that his inner cheeks, his tongue and gums would feel like rough external surfaces. His teeth would be grainy pegs of bone. He’d be unable to swallow. Ray was exempt from this battle but his body was returning him to it whether he would or not. His body was stiff with memory, muscles rigid while his bowels began to bubble and slide.

His boots were laced. He had his pack and gun, grenades and a helmet, none of which he should need. That was what he was told. Ray and his unit were arriving along with many reinforcements several days after the first landings. They were there to make peace, specially selected Italian-Americans who could speak with the natives. Meanwhile, they sat in the boat and listened to the chaos and killing. Hours later, he was once again splashing through heavy water. It was a long shallow approach. The sea sucked at his legs. The sand in strange sensations shrank and twisted under his boots. There was no need to be scared. The beach had been secured. They were just landing, just coming ashore. No one would fire on them from those pillboxes. The debris was harmless.

Hundreds of men were having their orders shouted at them. They were moving out. As the fighting men were marched or driven away, the Allied Military Government units gathered together. Someone slapped Ray on the back. It was Tony Geminiano, a boy from Queens who everyone called ‘Gem’ and who hadn’t been in battle before. He was joining the war here, now, at this point. He looked strangely exultant. Holding his gun in both hands, he inhaled sharply into his nose. ‘Ooh, mamma,’ he said. ‘We’re here. The boys are here.’ Ray slowly understood what he was saying and nodded.

The first problem the AMGOT teams faced was a lack of transportation. The fighting units had taken every vehicle and so they spent all morning on the beach watching the traffic moving out and the small waves shifting back and forth at the edge of the sand with a thin shine. The sun grew taller. The men’s voices quietened in the heat.

After some time, Ray’s legs relaxed and he sat down. They were told to eat and they all did, washing down bread, cheese and chocolate with tepid water from their cans. Political men, US brass and Sicilian advisers, kept apart, each one standing with the bearing of a general, occasionally looking presumptuously round at the troops. It reminded Ray of the way his brother and his friends sometimes stood about, surveying everything, assuming command, keeping their secrets. When they smiled it was for each other or themselves and it meant we’re better than you little people. They thought they were big men. But these were the big men, Ray realised. These were the boys grown up and they were in charge.

Eventually there were trucks and Ray was inside one looking out of the open back, staring at that bright changing screen. He thought of the men far away now in the fighting, each of them locked in the limited square of their perception. That was what it was like in battle: things happened very far away or lethally close. The only place you could move was a small cell, your hands, your weapons, the space of a few steps, people either side of you. In that cell you lived and died.

White dust closed the view. It blew away to reveal a phalanx of marching men white with that dust sinking backwards into the distance. The truck swerved and more men could be seen, smaller, further away, moving across country. One of them jumped in a red cloud. As the sound of the explosion reached the truck, two other men could be seen lying on the ground and around them men cringed, stopping still. They all froze in a moment’s image that vanished as the truck turned again and they were out of sight. Ray felt himself covered in sweat. He panted. He tried not to but he couldn’t stop himself, he had to, he flung himself forward and vomited out of the back of the truck, his loose fluids whipping back and disappearing onto the speeding ground. When he was done he got up again. He was handed a canteen of water.

6

Will lingered over a sentence in the Invasion Handbook.

The women are sometimes charming, petulant, witty and gay, with more than a soupçon of orientalism, very feminine, rather helpless and appealing.

He saw dark eyes, smiling lips, a long neck, a cloud of crinolines. She was smiling as she gave way beneath him. In his imagination, he wasn’t in contact with her exactly. It was not so much physical as a dreamy enacting of the word ‘yielding’. She yielded before him, sinking backwards, smiling.

Will found this pleasant to consider. Nothing else to do with Sicily was particularly attractive. The Invasion Handbook warned of ‘the pushing business man, the more pushing middle-class loafer, all gloves and cane and collar and tie, a vulgarian if ever there was one. He is from every point of view appalling, and there are many of him.’ These did sound repellent but it struck Will that the same attitude might appraise him as a pushing, middle-class man and Will felt a stab of dislike for the anonymous author and his officer-class hauteur. The handbook went on to taxonomise the aristocracy and warned of city crime and rural vendettas.

The language had been easy enough to acquire. In the classes given to the AMGOT servicemen, Will found Italian to be Latin pronounced with the exaggerated swooping accent of an ice-cream seller.

Will had shared those classes with some Americans. They were all to work together to build peace on the island after the invasion. Will found the Americans slovenly and overconfident and horribly well fed. Also on some level he didn’t quite believe in them. Their accents sounded put on, as though they were pretending to be ‘Yanks’, imitating the people in the Hollywood pictures. He had the thought that on their own, speaking honestly, they would sound quite different. This seemed to be particularly true of the Italian-Americans among them. They were immigrants and their American-ness came and went. All Americans were immigrants, more or less. They were all pretending to be American.

Will lay back on his bunk with the Invasion Handbook on his chest, one finger keeping his place. The sea sank beneath the ship, tilting his feet up and his head down. Over the water the invasion was happening, the Americans unleashing their unbelievable masses of firepower. The ship floated upwards and dipped. Beneath him a Sicilian coquette smiled and yielded, again and again.

7

Cirò was not home. He didn’t know this place. He’d never seen this part of the island before, with sulphur mines, sore and yellow openings in the ground. There were foreign soldiers in large numbers. In New York he’d occasionally had nightmares in which he returned to Sicily. In them, he felt the motion of the boat urging forwards, the sun on the water, the breeze. Then he went through the door of his home, his heart beating in his chest like the wings of a dove. He ran to find Teresa. Her round back was turned to him. He spun her around. She looked at him with fear and without recognition. She was old. Sometimes she had the clouded eyes of a blind woman, sometimes a witch’s penetrating stare of judgement.

Along the coast he could hear the dull, crumpling sound of German shells. Cirò and his people were heading away from them, through areas the war had cleared days before. They passed a Fascist truck lying on its side, its tyres exploded. There were bodies not yet cleared away, blackening and bloating, some also exploded.

They drove that day though a world that outstripped his imagination and his urge for revenge. He forgot how much he wanted it, seeing those sights. He even pitied the bodies. It was the Fascists’ fault. These poor boys had been duped by the Fascists, tricked into death for nothing. The sun swung from side to side overhead as the road snaked. They passed bodies, smashed rocks, burned equipment. They drove up into mountains.

That night they requisitioned a house at the edge of the village, a large brick house that seemed to be stumbling up the slope. They made a fire in the hearth and cooked their rations, soldiers running around doing women’s work. Aircraft flew overhead on sorties, dragging sheets of sound.

Cirò elected to sleep downstairs on the shelf of the hearth, keen to show the military boys that he was as tough as they were — tougher, in fact, a native. He set his pistol down beside his head. Still the planes went over. It was like the air was a flat surface and they were grinding it, like the slow scrape of a millstone. He lay for a long time staring up at the ghostly shape of the ceiling, thinking about things. He thought about Cathy pale as milk in her bed, lonely again without him, the little bird in the glass-cage office. He thought about Teresa and what she might look like, and what he might do with the peasant Silvio. Muffled voices could be heard upstairs. Why would anyone still be up and talking? He listened, pushing himself up off the couch so both ears were unobstructed. The voices weren’t coming from above. And they were speaking Italian. As quietly as he could, he pulled out his gun, lowered his feet onto the floor and stood up. He went upstairs and knocked on Major Kelly’s door. The major’s expression didn’t change while Cirò explained that there were people hiding in the cellar. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go winkle them out.’ He gathered his spectacles from the bedside table and put them on, winding the steel arms behind his ears.

Two more soldiers were collected. With a flashlight, they found a small wooden door that seemed likely to be the way into the cellar. Against stifled protests, Cirò pressed his head to the wood. He could feel them in there, their shifting animal presence. He nodded.

Major Kelly was not a coward. He arranged himself in front of the door, lifted the latch and gently pulled it open. With the flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in the right, he stepped in and down. After a few steps, the others heard him say. ‘Okay, you two, get up and move or I shoot.’

Cirò shouted the phrase in Italian and heard them move. Some bumping and scraping and two men now climbed the steps ahead of Kelly. An old man held up his arms as though to ward off blows. One of the soldiers grabbed his collar and yanked him out. The other was a boy of fighting age. He grabbed the lapels of one of the soldiers and started pleading. The soldier pushed him off.

‘Please, please, please don’t. We’re innocent. We’re just peasants. We’re not …’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s saying they’re innocent.’

‘Yes, yes. Innocent.’

The old man bowed rapidly, affirming this. He reached out and put his hands on Cirò’s shoulder, large, dirty hands, the fingers knotted and kinked by years of labour. Cirò didn’t move. He looked the old man in the eye and said quietly, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The old man started backwards. He looked at Cirò then looked carefully away, his mouth open. Cirò smiled. He was a man of respect. They still knew. Cirò was home.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told the major. ‘They’re not going to be trouble. They live here.’

8

North Africa had been like a sports field for war, a baseball diamond for the movements of tanks and planes and eighty-eights. At night it was floodlit with flares. Sicily was terrible, so crowded. There were refugees on most of the roads. Having been dispossessed of their truck by an artillery unit, Ray’s group resorted to appropriating a couple of carts and mules from some fleeing peasants. Brightly painted with figures and scenes, the carts looked like something from the funfair. Their owners stood on the side of the road with their luggage round their feet and new packets of cigarettes and chewing gum in their hands. Ray and the AMGOT officers now pursued their course at the sway-backed, breathing, ancient pace of farm animals. Geminiano had taken the reins on Ray’s cart. He whipped them up and down, shouted ‘Giddeyup!’ and pretended to spit like a cowboy, ‘Hwit-ding!’ Ray shouted up at him, ‘Hey, this is Italy, remember. Don’t you know your own country?’

‘Not mine. This is Sicily. Come on, horsey.’

‘Not mine either.’

The whole place was ancient, just like his parents had said. Passing through the liberated towns, the doorways were full of hungry children who came out to beg for food and cheer them. Their clothes and faces — they looked exactly like the children in the family photographs in the dresser in the hall, stiff cardboard images of rigid Pugliese families, dark eyes, moustaches and oiled hair, heavy beaded dresses, hands immobile forever on knees and solemn children standing in knickerbockers, thick socks and polished boots. Most of these clothes, his mother explained, would have been hired for the occasion. Here these children were now, famished in the middle of a war. On the walls behind them, already defaced, were posters of Mussolini. They shouted at Ray in his parents’ language. Believe! Obey! Fight!

9

The peace was colliding with the war. AMGOT Civilian Affairs Officer William Walker had run into the thick of it. There was shellfire, minefields, wreckage, prisoners sitting on the side of the road with their hands on their heads. There were people and parts of people around stains of burning. The force of it was insane, the excess of it. It came out of nowhere, out of the air, out of the ground. It was what everybody here was supposed to do. People ran with stretchers.

They were stuck now, delayed. Ahead of them was a battle over a bridge, Germans on one side, Allies on the other, like a game you would play with lead soldiers or the war Will’s father fought in. The battle was stubborn and grinding. It had two jaws. It was eating men. Vehicles raced towards it. Samuels suggested playing cards while they waited.

They waited for two days. The sounds were terrible. Will was increasingly angry. The lassitude, he thought, was making him sensitive. He could feel his heart pumping in his chest, the sweat forming on his skin. He looked at his hands, the fingers in three parts, curling towards him. He heard the men being killed. Ambulances raced. It was horrifying, horrifying and boring. Maybe this was what produced his father’s heroism: boredom, all those hours in the dugout, in the mould and damp hearing the weapons and doing nothing, going out of your mind. In the end you were bound to break out. Will fancied that he could have done the same, rushed out and taken a machinegun nest on his own. He clenched his molars together hard, stifling a yawn.

Will walked around. He spoke to people. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, his pulse becoming light and fast.

The fighting changed in intensity. A spastic firing dropped away almost to silence, a quiet spattered with light gunfire followed by some bursting shells then quiet again. Will heard that on the third night they had stopped fighting and through some negotiation agreed to let each other come forward and collect their dead. He was told this by a soldier who couldn’t stand still. In the darkness his cigarette brightened and faded as he pulled on it. He thanked Samuels for the booze and swallowed it. He said that the men had walked past each other in silence, ignored each other, picked up the dead and the larger parts of the dead by torchlight and carried them away. They did this for a few hours. Afterwards, in the widening light of dawn, they began firing again.

Eventually, somehow, the Allies pushed through. The Germans were outkilled. The bridge was repaired by engineers and the weight of the stalled invasion rolled slowly forwards. Will didn’t look at the place as they drove through. He didn’t want to see it. It ought to be private in some way or concealed. It was obscene and degrading what had happened there. It felt possibly contagious. Will didn’t want to breathe in until they were through to the other side, in clearer air, picking up speed.

10

Luisa hurried through the house and out onto the terrace to see what it was she was hearing, matching the glinting aircraft with the throbbing sound. She saw their wings flash as they banked, saw them sprinkle tiny bombs that fell all the way down and sprouted as grey cabbages of smoke. A few instants later the noises of the explosions arrived one by one. The sound was like someone bumping down the servants’ wooden stairs.

The war was getting closer. The servants were all terrified. Prince Adriano pretended not to be, striding back and forth with his hands behind his back and the wireless on, proud and useless, like a chicken in a peasant’s yard.

Luisa watched as much as she could. It thrilled her. It filled her body. She came in breathless, with her teeth chattering. At night she could see the pulses of red tracer fire, she could see fires in the darkness.

Retreating Germans gathered near the palace for a while. Luisa could see them from one window at the top of the house. The Prince was terrified that they would requisition the place but they never did. A few of them came to ask for some water. Afterwards, Graziana was hysterical. When she’d opened the door, she said, she thought that there were ghosts standing there. Their hair was completely white. Their eyes were as pale as the sky, their skin cracked and falling off.

At dinner that night the fighting was very close. They sat down at the walnut table to the accompaniment of crackling guns. Luisa’s father’s fear was so great that he could not show any sign of it at all. If he once flinched or moaned, he would have crumpled to the floor and crawled away to the cellarage. As it was, he walked in like someone balancing a book on his head and sat with his eyes very wide and unseeing. Luisa found his face very funny. Graziana was also amusing her — her trembling, whimpering progress around the table with the soup tureen. When she started whispering prayers to herself as she ladled out stuttering quantities of soup, Luisa openly laughed.

‘I find it rather sinister,’ the Prince said once Graziana had withdrawn, ‘the way you seem to be enjoying this warfare so much.’

Luisa didn’t say anything.

‘Particularly,’ the Prince went on, ‘given how many friends you have among the Fascists.’

‘I have none. I know some Fascists. That’s a different thing. I’m pleased things are changing. I want the Germans gone.’

The Prince paused with his spoon halfway to his lips and closed his eyes at the sound of artillery shells. ‘But consider how they are changing. I’m not sure if you understand that this is quite real.’

‘That is precisely what I like about it.’

11

It had taken longer than expected but the British had taken the east of the island and were heading west. Cirò Albanese was with the Americans who were racing to get there first, led by General Patton. They did. In Palermo people came out and cheered. Children stood on piles of rubble shouting and waving. They ran up to the jeeps and trucks. Cirò smiled and waved at them. Like the others, he threw out cigarettes and coins and gum and the children dived for them.

12

Any fool would have realised that the Strait of Messina had to be cut off but no fool had and the Nazis simply poured north out of the top of the island and up into Italy. They’d be waiting for the next invasion coming after them.

So the fighting was done in Sicily. Ruins and corpses. An apparently grateful population in a state of chaos it was now Will’s duty to calm and clarify. The Allied Military Government was hastening into position and Will was with several others in the wrong place. Deploying the extraordinary powers of their identity cards, they got themselves transport to Palermo.

Having identified the headquarters, Will decided to delay a little longer and go for a stroll. He walked out among the American soldiers and the sunshine, the locals who were silent and stared and the beggars who approached. He looked around for the oriental beauty and the repellent pushing middle classes but he didn’t see them.

Palermo looked like a grand old opera set of a place. There were avenues interrupted with massive piles of rubble where bombs had fallen. Pigeons spluttered from one balcony to another. There was a huge bomb crater near the encrusted cathedral. Hundreds had died there apparently. People in Palermo were used to crowding together. Backstage, so to speak, behind the tall façades, Will discovered a sordid network of streets infested with people watching him go by or calling out to him. Voices shouted from windows overhead. People beckoned and begged. He turned a corner and a small boy ran out to him, fleeing his raging father, a thin man in an undershirt with muscles jumping in his arms as he gesticulated and swore. The boy clung to Will, hiding behind him, pulling at his hand, squirming, while the man shouted. Others were watching. Embarrassed, Will tried to calm the man with an authoritatively raised voice and good Italian but he was too wild. He lunged forwards, bumping Will as he tried to grab hold of the boy who now ran. Will saw him escape, his light bare feet striking the dirty ground. The man, giving up, walked away with his hands in his pockets. It was only later, back in the AMGOT building, that Will discovered his wallet was missing and pieced together what had happened. He was furious and could do nothing.

The thieves had better spend the money quickly. When the new temporary currency was issued, it wouldn’t be worth anything. A couple of Americans lent Will some cash. They went out together to drink and found a hot, wood-panelled place with sour red wine and, annoyingly, an accordionist. Afterwards, the two Americans, who had been in Palermo for a few days, led Will to a kind of courtyard which might partly have been a gap created by a bomb; certainly there was a heap of rubble on one side. The place was gloomy. Light came from the late evening sky and a few candles in glass jars. Little groups of glowing cigarettes hovered and circled together like flies. Women were standing by small piles of tinned foods. The smokers were soldiers. The atmosphere was quiet and serious, disrupted now and again by outbreaks of laughter or grunts and sighs. The Americans Will was with watched his face as he decoded the scene and noticed the figures on the ground. The soldiers were bringing food in exchange for sex. Some had the sex standing up, the soldiers crumpling into the women as though blown helplessly by a gale or bending the women over and shagging them from behind, some even swigging from bottles at the same time as they thrust back and forth. Some lay on the ground and struggled. There was a particularly large group waiting for one woman who proved to be an astonishingly beautiful girl of about eighteen, improbably beautiful, a freak of nature, rich hair around her shoulders, large, soft lips, long-lashed, suffering eyes. ‘Well, her family will be all right,’ Will commented as another soldier put a can on her pile and she wiped her mouth with her wrist then lifted her skirt. The Americans said nothing. They just watched.

No one was stopping this. Will felt himself alone among these animals, alone with his intellect and bitter thoughts. The drink in him made his inner monologue loud and polemical. He was excoriating this depravity to some senior ranking figure, and arrogating the responsibility for dealing with it. Meanwhile, he remembered for some reason the shipload of prosthetic limbs, pilfered from, in the wrong place. Battle was the same. No rules, no limits. Just acting. Just animals. And this was the whole thing. You killed people with guns and machines, smashed homes to bits, and in the ruins you fucked hungry survivors in exchange for tins of meat. Will’s anger and disgust made him drunk. Everything was floating, everything was sliding apart. Then, catching his breath, he dwindled back into himself and felt very bleak. Order would have to be imposed. He would have to do it.

‘I’m going,’ he announced suddenly and walked away. The night air sobered him, as did the concentration required to find his way back. He thought he saw rats running in the darkness. He felt a mawkish solidarity with a starved-looking cat he saw stepping carefully over rubbish.

Back in his room, his bedside table presented him with a choice between De Rerum Natura and The Wind in the Willows. Will had had enough of random collisions and thoughtless matter. He stretched the sheet over his knees and tucked it under his waist and as high up his chest as he could manage so that he was tightly cinched to the bed. He’d done this as a child. It made him feel neat and prepared. His copy of The Wind in the Willows was nice to handle, a humble edition with covers of stiff blue board that were rounded at the corners with use. The paper was soft, golden, mothy. The book smelled of wood. Will lit a cigarette and looked around for a section to read.

Late in the evening, tired and happy and miles from home, they drew up on a remote common far from habitations, turned the horse loose to graze, and ate their simple supper sitting on the grass by the side of the cart. Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come, while stars grew fuller and larger around them, and a yellow moon, appearing suddenly and silently from nowhere in particular, came to keep them company and listen to their talk. At last they turned into their little bunks in the cart; and Toad, kicking out his legs, sleepily said, ‘Well, good night, you fellows! This is the real life for a gentleman! Talk about your old river!’

Will’s eyes were heavy. The book was wilting towards him. He righted it again. The words began to slide and repeat tired and happy and miles from home suddenly and silently Talk about your old river!

13

Ray had said that he didn’t want to go looking for a girl. He didn’t want the feeling afterwards. A sweet girl to hold him and kiss: that was one thought, a persistent fantasy, astonishing and delighting, that flooded his chest until he wanted to cry. He remembered his story about the office girl on the bench, her wide hopeful eyes, the small turn of her head. That buzzing, swarming feeling. But that was not what he would find. Instead, the girls were sick and poor and hungry. Talking to some of the locals, he learned that their parents sent out these girls. They needed the money or gifts to survive.

Instead, Ray sat on his bed and looked at his old movie magazine. He looked at the face of Claire Trevor, the pale smooth skin of her cheek, and imagined the cool soapy smell of it. Or perhaps she wore perfume. You would get close and inhale flowers. Her face was perfectly still. Bam, just that one instant. Her hair and make-up and her face in that precise expression. Her small breasts pushed out the white fabric of her jersey. Ray looked closer, bringing the page to his face. Her breasts were defined by gradations in colour, the white turning to blue underneath and between them. The colours were made by the tiniest dots of ink. The white dots turned blue. Up higher, the dots were pink and yellow to make her neck, red for her lips. Tiny white dots were separated by narrow channels of blue and black dots and they made her teeth. Ray panicked suddenly. Claire Trevor wasn’t there any more. She was sinking away from him like water into sand, the way men died, just pouring away.

Ray crushed his eyes shut. He shook his head. This wasn’t good. His mind kept doing this. It was like missing a stair. He kept falling. He reached out for George. He said his name out loud, ‘George. George, if you’re alive or dead.’

14

Everything was the same and different. The streets were the same but the scale was wrong or more right than Cirò could remember. There was a slow, strenuous reconciling of his memories with the real world of Sant’Attilio that felt almost physical, his mind compressed here, released there. As soon as they had arrived, Cirò wanted to be rid of his Americans so as to concentrate on this process of arriving. He looked for people he recognised but the young boys on the streets were of a generation that would have heard of him, probably, but would never have seen him. They didn’t see him. He’d left in a coffin and come back invisible, a ghost returned to haunt them.

Finally he saw a familiar face, Jaconi Battista standing in the doorway of his little shop. It was definitely him although the intervening years had done what they could to disguise him, blurring his face, tearing his hair in handfuls from his head. And Cirò saw Jaconi seeing him. He saw him straighten up and step back a little. Cirò shouted to the driver to let him down. ‘I need to speak to someone.’

Major Kelly said to him, ‘You know where this town hall is?’

‘Sure I do. I’ll see you there.’

He stepped with his own feet onto the ground of Sant’Attilio.

Jaconi was gone. Cirò went after him through the door of the shop. Still the same. Sacks of rice and lentils, a few tins of food, some flaking dry vegetables. No meat. The trays were empty. Cirò couldn’t smell the cold metallic smell of puddled blood and flesh that he remembered. Jaconi stood behind the counter, biting a fingernail. Cirò asked him, ‘What’s the matter, no meat?’

‘Nothing. I have nothing.’

‘How can that be true? No animals on the hills? What’s going on here? Anyway, don’t worry. That’s going to change now.’

Jaconi laughed. ‘Sicilians won’t be poor any more? You forget what it’s like here when you were in America?’

Cirò stared at him until the laughter had drained out of Jaconi’s face completely. He decided to play with him, demanding from him what he already knew. ‘Where’s Teresa?’ he asked.

‘Cirò, it’s been so many years.’

‘I know how many years it’s been. I counted every day.’

‘We all thought you were dead.’

‘Where is she?’

‘So much changed. It was so long.’

‘Where is she?’

Jaconi covered his face with both hands then dropped them, sighing. ‘You remember Silvio who lives up from the church?’

Cirò didn’t respond. He himself stood very still. He’d meant to frighten Jaconi, to torture him, but he was having trouble standing upright. Cirò hadn’t thought that hearing these words from someone who had been in Sant’Attilio all the time he was away would actually wound him so much. Jaconi couldn’t look at him. He hung his head and said at the floor, ‘After four years she …’

‘Shut up! Shut your filthy fucking mouth!’

‘Cirò, we thought you were dead.’

‘I’m not dead. I’m not the one who’s dead.’

Walking up to the square and past the church, Cirò saw that blind Tinu was still in the doorway. That was unbelievable. He’d been an old man when he’d left. His beard was pure white now, his cheeks sunken. Shimmying in their sockets, his upturned eyes were the same milky blue. Mother Mary must be caring for him. His open mouth mumbled as though talking with her. His limbs were withered as a thorn bush but he was still there.

Children were playing in the little street. One of the older boys, a lad of fifteen or so who wasn’t playing, stood watching with his arms folded. Surely he looked like Teresa. Over a faint first moustache, he had her sleepy, curled snail shell of a nose. And the flat hairline across his forehead. This was like a dream. Cirò walked up to him. The boy backed away but not quickly enough and Cirò grabbed his wrists.

‘Who’s your mother?’

‘What?’

Those were her eyelashes, fluttering with terror. ‘Her name. What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Teresa Santangeli. You’re hurting my arms.’ The boy was stronger than Cirò would admit, twisting and complicating his grasp.

‘And who’s your father?’

‘Silvio …’

‘No.’ Cirò interrupted him. ‘No. Wrong. He isn’t.’ Cirò pushed him away.

Out of the brightness of the street, Cirò shoved into the darkness of the little house. As he blinked he heard Teresa shout, ‘So, did they have any rice?’

‘I don’t know,’ he shouted back.

He heard footsteps. Teresa entered the room slowly, a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ. Sweet Jesus Christ and Mary. It’s you.’

She looked shorter than he remembered, perhaps because of the weight she had gained. She looked like a solid little Sicilian woman, a wife and mother.

‘Yes, it’s me.’

Teresa held the sides of her face.

‘I’m back.’

‘I see. I see that.’

‘I’m back now so things will go back to the way they were before.’

‘Cirò, I have children with this man. I have two children who are dead, even. It’s been a long time. I was a widow.’

‘How can you be a widow, Teresa, when your husband is still alive?’

‘But you weren’t alive, Cirò.’

‘I was always alive. Do you think I should stand for this, for the shame you’re bringing on me? People will know that I’m back now.’

‘After how long? Twenty years?’

‘And now I’m here and things are going to be how they were and you are still my wife.’

‘But … but … You can’t, Cirò. The children. He didn’t know.’

‘The children will have a father.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Teresa, you are my wife. You married me in a church with God looking at us. You know what that means.’ He walked over to her, caught hold of the back of her head as she swayed backwards and kissed her sweating forehead. ‘Make sure he’s here on Friday evening. That’s all.’

15

Will decided to linger another day. There was a reason for this but it couldn’t be admitted, even to himself. He kept the reason as deep and invisible as a river current, known only by the darkly streaming weed or turning froth. He walked out into the streets of Palermo.

He walked among buildings and ruins and intermittent churches. In places, sunshine reflected from liquid filth moving sluggishly in the drains. After his pickpocketing, Will was wary of the quick, skinny children and the watching adults. There was too much movement, too many people here. Much as he’d tried to convince himself otherwise, Will had never liked London for the same reason. He turned a corner and saw a man aiming a gun up at a window. Will started to intervene. ‘I say!’ The man fired and a pigeon tumbled down. It bounced then lay there, swatting its wings against the paving stones as it died. A man brushed past Will’s back on a bicycle.

Will took refuge in a café. On the small circular table in front of him, he placed his Lucretius to refresh his Italian. He opened the book to read of the strength in the frenzy of Venus which was not what he wanted to think about presently. Instead, he sat like a spy and observed. At a certain hour the place filled with Sicilians. Sicilian men: no women entered. Perhaps to be a woman in such a place was to put your reputation in as much jeopardy as a lone woman in a pub back home. The men were short and intimate. They touched and held each other. They clambered over each other like bees, collecting coffees from the bar, their voices overlapping. There was a repertoire of gestures that were foreign, flicks, pinchings of the air, touches to the face. Their facial expressions were proud, indifferent, righteous, resigned, intent, philosophical.

At the table next to him, several men were mingling their cigarette smoke over a game of cards. They slapped cards down and grabbed them and flipped them across to each other without speaking very much. Occasionally they commented with pure vowels, ‘ooo’ or ‘eee’. If they were playing for money, Will didn’t see it, and he didn’t know what game they were playing.

Hours to pass. Will smoked cigarettes. The thought occurred to him that he might have written in a journal if he’d had one. He should have been keeping a diary all this time, although in all likelihood he would have failed to do so. He’d never managed to before. Better to compose his narrative at some point in the future, when he could look back and see it all clearly and discern the significant shape. It would be easier then to strip away the tedium, the triviality and error, those endless hours guarding the port, Samuels such an uninteresting man.

Will needed to find a tin of food. He walked out into the afternoon and wandered. They needed to do something about rubbish collection. Heaps of filth could be seen everywhere. With a sickening start he saw that one was alive: a whiteness of moving maggots. So repulsive, that naked writhing, the pulsing and probing of their feeding bodies. Will’s digestive tract jerked. He spat into the gutter. For cleaner air, he walked down to the sea. There were barriers everywhere to keep people from the ships but his pass was effective and he walked through, beyond the boats and the men.

Violet water, sombre and low. The darkness of evening was gathering on it. Soothingly inhuman and ancient. The sea, the sea. A deep vista to a horizon, clear air above it. Lucretius argued that the universe had no limit or centre. A thought, a random thought from his reading with which Will did nothing. His mind uttered it as he looked at the sea. He turned around and into the business of the night. He needed to find a tin of food.

That beautiful girl was like something from a painting. It was the kind of beauty that enslaved poets — the lustrous hair, the vulnerable mouth and deep, sad eyes — and anyone with a can of food could possess her. Will had a tin now, tightly clasped in his right hand, a ridiculous emblem of the need that was driving him. He wanted to possess her. He wanted to be there first, to be the first to have her. As he found his way back to the place, into the narrow backstreets, young boys called out to him, offering to lead him to other women, but he ignored them as if disgusted, shaking his head.

Wrong turnings were frustrating. He felt he was being baffled and prevented. He was losing time. The story of his life. Always confusion and delay when he wanted to be swift in action. Several soldiers also carrying tins of food indicated that he was on the right road at last. He hurried ahead of them and found himself at the rubbled space. Already there were soldiers and women gathered but Will couldn’t see her. Perhaps she would come later. Meantime he had to stand and seem not to watch as the women received their payments and accepted what followed. Hotly ashamed at first, Will found that as he waited the clamouring self-disgust in him slowly quietened. Everyone was there willingly. No one was getting hurt. It was usual for soldiers in a war or for gentlemen at various times and places to avail themselves of the comfort of women. This was the getting of experience. This was being a man.

But still she did not appear. Perhaps she’d got all she needed the night before and would not return. Will gave her ten more minutes.

No. She would not appear. Or perhaps a little later she would. While he waited he might as well join the queue for the next best girl there. He shifted towards her as each of the men ahead of him had their turn and departed. Still she didn’t arrive. In exchange for a tin of mackerel, he lost his virginity to someone else. Afterwards she patted him on the back of his head. Will caught her hand by the wrist and pulled it away. He rushed back to his billet to wash himself thoroughly in case of disease.

16

Teresa had visited the Montebianco witch a little while into the dark time after Cirò’s disappearance. Alone, in her hot widow’s clothes, she had walked the miles to Montebianco and had arrived at the witch’s door just as Alvaro Zuffo stepped through it. He recognised Teresa and put a hand on her shoulder and said kind words. He reached into his breast pocket, feeling along the slope of his fat chest, and pulled out his wallet. He gave her several notes and tears came to her eyes. She kissed his hand and thanked him. Kinder than Cirò’s own brother, he was. Zuffo let her lean in and moan against him. He patted the top of her head and disengaged himself, stepping away to a motor car. ‘When we know what happened …’ he said, wagging a finger, his voice full of promises. He was driven away. Teresa dried her face on her shawl and knocked on the witch’s door.

The witch caught hold of Teresa’s hands and led her to a chair. She asked why she had come and listened in that way that nobody else had, so intent the air around her sparkled. She was alert, this woman, she saw things. Everything that Teresa had ever told her she seemed to know already. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ she interrupted. ‘Would you like coffee? Just a moment.’

She hurried over to the stove and set some coffee boiling. Teresa looked at the saints and symbols and objects on the walls. The saints had been Teresa’s first port of call. They always were. Teresa believed in the Church above all else but the saints never spoke back the way the witch did. The saints never gave you answers or, if they did, they gave them in hints and signs that you could easily get wrong. When you wanted to hear something, the witch was better. A good woman, she cured people of all sorts too. She knew how to drive out worms and cure the fevers caused by ticks and how to guarantee sons.

Today, the witch didn’t take out cards or a diagram or use any stones. She didn’t make a prayer. She said simply, ‘Your husband will be put in his coffin twice. I know this for sure. The first time he will not be dead. He will climb out of that coffin alive.’ She stopped, sitting back and pursing her lips in the way that indicated her revelation was over. Teresa said, ‘Thank you.’ Always such a tingling in the air in that room. You wouldn’t want the witch as an enemy. Teresa reached into her pocket, awkwardly holding her coffee cup, and, as she tried to pull out a coin, she dislodged one of Zuffo’s banknotes. It fell onto the dirt floor. She couldn’t pick it up and give the witch something smaller now, so she reached down and collected it and handed it over. The note had arrived and now it went. It had fallen out like that so it was obviously fated to happen.

17

Jaconi raised pleading hands. ‘Why me? Cirò, please.’

‘Because you saw me first. Friday night. I’ll be by old Luca’s place.’

‘But, Cirò, please.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Friday at nine o’clock.’

18

Silvio couldn’t understand why Teresa was so angry with him, finding fault in every little thing he did. He whistled at the table and he shouldn’t whistle. Why didn’t he ever wear his good shirt? Her movements were quick and stabbing and clumsy. She burned herself. A red mark on her wrist the size of a coin that would turn brown and then a wrinkled silver. She blinked tears onto her round cheeks and swiped them away with her apron.

There was a knock at the door. Teresa said, ‘Who would come knocking at this time?’ She opened the door to the shopowner, Jaconi, who said, ‘Silvio, come with me. They’re giving out cigarettes at the town hall.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Who knows why but they’re doing it. Look.’ He held up a new packet of Chesterfields. ‘I’ll show you.’

Mattia, the eldest boy, got up to go with them too but his mother stopped him. ‘Stay here. I don’t want you mixing with the foreigners.’

As Silvio walked out, he felt Teresa touch him on the shoulder. That was strange. He turned around, surprised, but the door was shutting.

‘Here, have one of these,’ Jaconi said. ‘I’ll get more.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

‘No, go on. Here.’ Jaconi took a cigarette out of the pack and handed it to Silvio who shrugged, put it betweens his lips, and waited while Jaconi lit a match. Silvio puffed the cigarette alight. Jaconi shook the match until the flame went out and tossed it away.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’

‘Sure.’ Silvio held the cigarette up and looked at it as he exhaled. ‘It’s good.’

They walked on. Before they got to the town hall, a voice called out to them. The man, who was leaning against a wall, pushed himself upright and said. ‘Good evening. I know you two. Jaconi, I saw you the other day. And … Silvio. Remember me?’

Jaconi shook the man’s hand. Silvio offered his. ‘You’re …’

‘I’m Cirò Albanese. Remember now?’

Cirò kept hold of his hand, wouldn’t let it go. ‘Thank you, Jaconi,’ he said.

Jaconi didn’t say anything. He dropped his head and walked quickly away, back the way they’d come.

‘Cirò, please …’ Silvio tried to pull his hand away.

‘Sshh. Quiet now, Silvio. You know what’s going to happen.’

‘Please.’

‘Come on. Let’s not waste time.’ Cirò still had hold of his hand. He pulled Silvio and turned so that Silvio was in front of him. ‘Just walk straight ahead. I’ll tell you where to go. Don’t whimper like that. I hate that sound. Pray if you want to but don’t moan like an old woman.’

Cirò directed Silvio down and out of the town, out into the fields.

‘The Germans were all around here,’ he told Silvio. ‘And the Fascists. We killed them all. I came back with the Americans.’

They crossed one field and carried on down a little way into the valley. ‘Here.’

Silvio swallowed twice and said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. It’ll be very quick.’

‘Tell my mother …’

‘I know. I’ll tell her. There are mines in front of you, about twenty yards away. Walk around and find one. Accidents happen. Go on. Walk in a straight line away and then back. I’ve got a gun so don’t run. It’ll be better than the other way, believe me. Quicker.’

‘Please, Cirò.’

‘Go on.’

Silvio started walking, his hands outspread on either side of him as if to catch hold of something for balance. ‘Please, God,’ he said. ‘Please, God.’

He walked for thirty metres. Cirò whistled and shouted, ‘Turn left.’ Silvio did as he was told. ‘Now walk back towards me.’

Nothing.

Cirò directed him again to the left and sent him away and then back. The walk seemed to take hours. Still nothing. He did it again. When Silvio reached him this time, Cirò was laughing. ‘You’re the luckiest man in the world. How are you not dead yet? We’ll have to do something else.’

Cirò walked up to Silvio and put his hands around Silvio’s throat. The man’s neck was slippery with sweat. Cirò could smell shit in his trousers. He started to squeeze. Silvio caught hold of his wrists, his eyes wide with surprise. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

‘I know. But it’s better this way. Ow. Stop pulling at my hands. It won’t help.’

Silvio stared at Cirò, his eyes thickening and fading. He stumbled, his legs giving way. Cirò kept up the pressure despite a cramp in his right hand. It was a good thing he was just strangling him until he passed out, not to death. Silvio became soft and heavy in his grip and Cirò let him drop to the ground. Silvio lay face down, one hand by his head, the other arm underneath his body. Cirò took a grenade from his jacket pocket. He pulled the pin, placed it gently on the back of Silvio’s neck, and started to run.

It seemed to take ages. He was a long way back up the hill before he saw light flash on the ground in front of him and his own thrown shadow and heard the explosion. He turned around as earth and small stones pattered back down. In the darkness he saw a hole. He couldn’t see Silvio.

19

The Civilian Affairs Office that Will, Samuels and others were now stationed at had charge of three towns, Montebianco, Portella Corvi and Sant’Attilio, in the mountains south-west of Palermo at the far western edge of British territory. There weren’t many villages or smaller settlements in the hills. The peasants didn’t seem to like them. Instead, those that worked walked long miles out to the fields and the vines and came back again each night, clustering in their stony habitations like bats in caves. Most didn’t work. The rest of the men and boys skulked in the towns. The women went unseen. When Will did spot them, they were receding into the front doors of their homes or they were between those doors and the sculpted fragrant darkness of the churches. One of the first things Will did, in Grand Tour fashion, was to enter the big church on the square in Sant’Attilio. Inside, headscarfed women were on their knees or hunched in the pews. Rosaries clicked, circling slowly in their fingers. Will looked at the building. After the spacious, mathematical elegance of the mosques, the church looked cluttered, superstitious, Hindu. There were dolls everywhere, in every recess. Doves and clouds, lambs, gold, and the executed Christ, starved and agonised, pouring down his blood. Dark and ugly, full of magic and death, a religion for the ignorant.

One of the first things they needed to do was to get the sappers in and the minefields cleared. Only yesterday one poor peasant had blown himself up just outside Sant’Attilio. But the whole island was mined. It might be days before they arrived.

AMGOT’s main task was what they were referring to as defascistification. The former rulers were rounded up and imprisoned, in part to prevent communication with the mainland, but many were disappearing into the crowds, burning their uniforms and becoming ordinary. Posters were put up calling for information and denunciations. Interviews with locals were arranged. Many denunciations arrived at the town hall handwritten and anonymous. Will and the others were told to find a certain individual who ‘has the eyes of a hypocrite’. Someone else could be identified because ‘he has a mortal fear of cats’. The local police forces were to remain in place, subserving the Allies, because there wasn’t time to replace them. They announced themselves loyal to the new government and thankful to be liberated from the Fascists — but who knew? They would have to be watched too. ‘The eyes of a hypocrite’ was a phrase that lodged itself in Will’s mind. He thought of it often, seeing them everywhere.

20

Cirò Albanese would not have recognised Alvaro Zuffo if he hadn’t been told it was him. Because he did know, however, he looked and slowly saw on the thin face of the old man the features of the person who had, enthroned in his heavy flesh, ruled over so much. Alvaro Zuffo had saved Cirò’s life but he himself had not left Sicily. He had refused to. Instead, he organised and exerted his power in any way he could. People were paid huge amounts of money. Others never woke up again. And all for nothing. The Fascists were not reasonable. They were fanatics with no business instinct. Alvaro Zuffo was arrested for nothing, for rumours and reputation, and he had spent years on a prison island. Cirò was not the only person who had told the Americans that he was one of the most important anti-Fascists they needed to release. Now Zuffo sat in an armchair in a suite in a Palermo hotel, smiling and shaking hands with old friends.

Cirò stared at him. Zuffo seemed surrounded by the ghost of his former flesh. Cirò’s memory kept adding it to the figure in front of him. Zuffo’s neck looked weak. His head trembled, his lips dark and loose. He kept them clamped together, a diagonal line across his face. He patted them with a handkerchief after he had spoken.

‘I never liked the sea,’ he said. ‘And I had to listen to it for years.’ He sipped from a small glass of red wine. ‘The things they did to me in there. Every day. Every day. They tie me to a box on the ground then one fits a gas mask over my head. It has a tube attached to a thing this other guy is holding full of sea water. He squeezes, the mask fills up. I’m drowning, I’m swallowing. I have to. Then they stop. One kicks me in the belly again and again and I puke up all the brine. I piss blood. I shit blood. When I find them …’

‘We’ll find them.’

‘And every night I could hear the fucking sea with it still stinking in my eyes and nose. Now I want to eat swordfish, I want to eat tuna. I want to eat every fucking fish and fuck the sea.’

Everybody laughed. Zuffo waved with his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

Zuffo was a rich man again. American money had arrived with these men. They all brought tributes and tomorrow he would be a fine figure again, beautifully dressed. Some of the men Cirò had known in New York and New Jersey. Others were fellow prisoners. A few had escaped from a prison the other week when it was hit by a bomb. They described kicking through cracked and buckling walls and just walking out into a heavy air raid. ‘To me it was like rain in springtime,’ one of them said. ‘I was so happy.’

For once these men lost all reserve and spoke not in the old arcane figures of speech, and in hints and ellipses. Instead they chattered like schoolgirls about the possibilities ahead. The new currency that was coming in. The prostitution boom. The morphine market. Food shipments, transportation, the threat of Communism among the peasants, what they were telling the Americans, where certain Fascists had been spotted. They established where they all would be and who would speak to whom. There was much that they would do together. That was the talk in the room. The feeling was something different. Strange and wild, there was a feeling like love between them.

21

Walking through Palermo the following morning, through shouts and sunlight and strangers towards the docks to do some business, Cirò reflected that those men were better than family. They gave you more. And you knew how much you couldn’t trust them.

Having dealt with Silvio, Cirò had walked to his brother’s house in Sant’Attilio. They were all there. Cirò endured the explosion of recognition, of surprise and delight, sensing something else in the silences of each person who stopped talking and stepped back to allow another to come forward and embrace him. Unknown children ran around him. Some bare-arsed babies were carried in the arms of his nephews’ wives, his nephews who were men now. All this that he didn’t have — another thing that had been stolen from him. The grief of this as bitter as sea water. A glass of red wine was put in his hand.

Cirò’s brother was old now. He was still lean, still agile, but he also still had the same muddled, anxious look in his eyes. There was a fog inside. He was stupid and to compensate he made sudden, clumsy moves. He was a man who made mistakes. He took Cirò outside to smoke and said, ‘My boys, they haven’t been brought up in the old ways.’

‘Probably they’re too old to start now. Maybe they should go to America.’

Cirò’s brother tutted. ‘They can’t leave their families.’

‘Lots do. And send money back. I did. I had to. I did.’

Cirò’s brother nodded while ignoring this comment, thinking of something else, thinking of himself. ‘You could at least start teaching them how it all works.’

‘How what works? There’s nothing. I’ve only just got back.’

Cirò had no intention of giving anything to them. With their families they would make larger and larger claims for things they hadn’t earned. Cirò just needed a son of his own. He had often imagined one: handsome, taciturn, fearless, reliable.

Cirò turned a corner and saw at the end of the street a dazzle of sea light. That sight, it meant different things now. When he had left it had looked terminal, alien, the end of what he knew. It was where his world collapsed and dissolved. Now it looked familiar. It looked like work and stirred with possibility, particularly if he could be the first to negotiate this area of interest with Zuffo. The business would pay more than enough to give Zuffo his tribute. It would be something for Cirò to get in on this Palermo action but he could do it. The waterfront was busy with naval troops and was guarded. Cirò had to show his papers at a sawhorse barrier — military eyes on him, the card, on him again and waving him through — before he could go on to find two particular men who knew which ships were delivering the medical supplies.

22

In the chaos of the invasion, as it split and fissured across the island, Ray and Gem had somehow ended up separated from the others a long way east, and now they were a couple of days late for their destination.

They had lost the others in a small town that had rushed out, cheering, to greet the Americans. Sicilian men slapped their chests and declared, ‘My cousin — Chicago!’ Or ‘America best! Is best!’ And if one of the soldiers spoke a word of Italian to them, they threw their hands in the air with delight.

Ray was walking with Gem. Gem had close-set brown eyes, a prominent knob to his chin. When he sweated, his hair separated into little black spikes. He was not very military in his bearing. His uniform hung off a skinny body. His helmet looked on him like something picked up from a fancy dress store. When he saw something he liked, he looked around to share it with someone, beckoning them over with a scoop of his whole hand. He did this now, calling out to Ray, ‘Hey, Ray! Ray! Come and look at this!’

Gem stood at the end of a narrow side street. He disappeared into it and Ray followed. He found Gem staring upwards, mouth open.

Ray looked up and saw a row of wrought-iron balconies, all with birdcages and little yellow birds hopping about in them.

There was a blazing stripe of brickwork and cornice above the shadow cast by the buildings on the other side of the street. Above that was blue sky, deep hyacinth blue. One of the birds starting to sing, trilling loudly. This set off another. Suddenly the whole alley was ringing with birdsong.

Ray smiled. He thought that this would be a memory, this would be victory in Sicily and how happy the people were.

When they went back to the main street, they’d lost the rest of the unit.

They hitched a lift from a man who drove a small, snarling three-wheeled truck. They mixed their Italian and Sicilian and thought they understood each other. It was only when Ray felt the mellow heat of the sunset on the back of his neck that he realised they were heading in the wrong direction. They were useless soldiers. It was comical. They climbed out of the truck in the next village and knocked on a door. They slept that night on the owner’s mattress, stuffed with what felt like straw and horsehair. However they positioned themselves, it poked and irritated. Fibrous tufts scratched at their faces and stuck into their bellies. They writhed and swore.

In the morning they looked around for a ride but couldn’t find one. They received a number of instructions about where to go and to wait for someone called Beppe who might appear. He did not appear. Ray watched the skulking cats, the men who sat with arms folded and muttered. After a couple of hours, they started walking west.

Gem stopped to pick up coloured stones. He ran to catch insects. He brought his closed hands up to Ray’s ear so he could hear the dry buzzing inside.

He was new, Gem. He’d hardly seen anything. He wanted to know about Africa. The questions made Ray feel sick. He couldn’t answer. The closest he came was saying that you sure made good friends in those situations. He tried telling Gem about George but found he couldn’t conjure up what was so good about him. He said, ‘He was just a great guy. The best, you know. A pal, for sure. I got his address from him. When we get back I’ll write. All the time we were invading I was thinking of him ahead of us, where he was, you know. I hope he’s doing okay. I’m sure he is. Sometimes when I’m down I fear the worst and it’s like he’s not there any more. Then, when I’m feeling okay, I know he is.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ Gem echoed. But you couldn’t say that and it didn’t help, pure corny sentiment. Ray wiped his sweating palms on his pants and kept walking.

‘That stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s better if you don’t ask.’

‘Okay. Whatever you say.’

‘I don’t want to crack up,’ Ray interrupted him. ‘You’ve seen those guys. How it gets.’

‘Yeah, no. Fuck that. That’s no good for anybody. Look, how far do you think I can throw this stone? You reckon I could hit that tree?’

That night they ate from the hospitality of one of the locals, a thin minestrone with hardly anything floating in its flavoured water.

Gem told the black-clad woman, ‘Just like my mamma makes.’

Ray said, ‘I think we should go to Palermo and start again from there. Otherwise we’ll be lost for ever.’

‘Could be worse.’

‘Or we don’t go back at all, how about that?’

‘Become deserters, you mean?’

‘That’s the way. Blend in. Disappear. Just watch it all happen.’

‘Become Sicilians. This old girl’s gotta have some daughters.’

The following day they were starting to get into the higher country. They passed between the flaking, bullet-pecked walls of a village and out into hills.

‘They look sorta soft, don’t they?’ Ray liked Gem enough now to share thoughts like this with him, odd, vulnerable thoughts that took some understanding. ‘The way they’re crumpled up, I mean.’

‘Yeah.’

Ray thought they looked like heaped cloths with long folds of shadow. ‘You could make a cowboy picture here. They’ve even got those cactuses.’

‘Prickly pears. And we got guns. Just need some Indians.’

‘Indians all ran away, thank Christ.’

‘Look up ahead. One of their trucks.’

‘Indians didn’t have no trucks.’

On the road about a hundred yards ahead of them was a burned-out truck, its green paint blistered by fire, its canvas gone but for charred shreds. As they approached it, Gem started to jog ahead to have a look. Always eager. Ray saw him jump up into the air and apart in pieces. That was a strange thing for him to do. Ray felt a powerful hot wave overwhelm him. He saw one of Gem’s lower legs, the boot and the shin, whirling towards him, right at his face.

23

Ray woke up and opened his eyes. The immense, painful light of the sky dropped onto him. His mouth was full. He wrenched himself over onto his stomach and coughed, hawking hard to dislodge a gritty paste at the back of his tongue. He stood up and started walking, falling forwards and catching himself with each stride. He walked past the small crater and the remains, the colours strong in the sunlight, and past the truck, its shreds of canvas flickering madly, rasping in the breeze. He walked straight into that area so that he too would jump and disappear. But he didn’t. The world wouldn’t take him. He had to carry on hobbling over its hard surface, over rocks and into the wind.

He walked for some time, well clear of the area. His feet kept hitting the ground and he didn’t fall over. There were little itchy patches on his face and body. When he touched them, they were wet, loose or sticky. He walked over a hill and down to the right. The apparition of a large building. He walked towards it.

The building grew. It had three sides. No one stopped him as he approached. He went in through the door into a hallway as big as a museum. Overhead the ceiling swarmed with clouds and angels. In front of him, stone steps, round at the edges. They poured towards him. He started walking up them. He wanted help, he supposed, but he didn’t call out for it. The silence was nicer. It was nice to be inside where it was quiet.

Corridors and furniture, gold-framed paintings leaning forwards off the walls like they wanted to look at him or tell him something. There were rooms to the sides of the corridor, widely spaced. The third of them had an open door. It was a lady’s bedroom. There was a dressing-table with a mirror and brushes and little bottles. Soft colours, patterns. So gentle and floral, he stepped inside. A bed. A chair, books. He reached out to touch a book and saw his fingers leave blood marks. He caught sight of his headless body in the dressing-table mirror. His uniform was stained. This made him want to cry.

The bed was extraordinary. An ornate silver frame had doves resting in curlicues of branches. The cover was of dark silver satin. He lifted it up, slippery between his fingers, and climbed in. The thick pillows slowly gave way under his head. He drew his knees up to his chest, pulled the cover over him and closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, a young woman was sitting on the end of the bed, staring at him.

He tried to speak but his voice cracked. He coughed and tried again. ‘Don’t make me go back. I’m not going back. Don’t make me.’

24

‘You are American,’ she said.

Who are you? What is this place? Don’t make me go back.’

The young woman was smiling. Her skin was pale yellow. Her eyes were dark and glittering. She was breathing intensely through her smile, through her teeth. He said again, ‘Don’t make me go back.’

‘You are American soldier.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You are young.’

Some kind of shock went through his body, tightening every muscle. His feet pushed down, his hands gripped the cover. When the spasm let go of him, he sank back down, soft and weak. ‘Don’t make me go back. I ain’t going back.’

‘There is a place,’ she said. ‘Do you speak French? French is better.’

‘I don’t speak no French. Are you French?’

‘You put blood everywhere,’ she said. ‘The servant will want to know. But it is fine.’ She stood up from the bed and went over to the dressing table.

‘What?’ His head, as he raised it from the pillow, felt heavy and unstable. She had a small pair of scissors in her hand. Its little silver beak was open.

‘It is fine,’ she said and dashed the scissors against her arm. She looked, unsatisfied, at the result. She did it again. ‘There,’ she said. ‘What an accident.’ She did it one last time and swore, throwing the scissors onto the floor. She held out her left arm and Ray could see blood tapering down to the ends of her fingers, hanging in red droplets. ‘See. Accident, look.’ She shook drops of blood onto the dressing table then walked over to the bed and wiped her hand on the covers and the pillow.

‘There is a place,’ she said in a whisper, leaning over him. ‘But you must make no sound. Why do you cry?’

‘Don’t,’ he said, holding the covers up to his chin. ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’

25

The Americans arrived from Palermo in a jeep. A message from their superiors in Messina had alerted the British in Sant’Attilio that they were coming.

Samuels led in three men, Major Kelly, his subordinate and the local contact. Kelly removed his hat to wipe his forehead and revealed dark red hair, the colour, Will thought, of a red setter’s. This made Will think of dogs and the black Lab, Teddy. How was he getting on back home? Major Kelly said, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen.’ He wore round spectacles. His skin was pale and blotched by the heat. Despite his American baritone, Major Kelly was clearly an Irishman, his parents or grandparents had been immigrants. Another American pretending to be an American. As an Englishman, Will could see what he was underneath. The underling was of the neat and healthy American type, square-headed with fair eyebrows and blue eyes watching the major to anticipate his needs. The third man was the local, a heavy, middle-aged man with large hands, slow and economical in his movements.

‘Shall we?’ Will said and led on to the room where a table was prepared with glasses, paper, ashtrays, and where the local police chief sat waiting with Sergeant Whelan of the Metropolitan Police Force.

The Sicilian absorbed his surroundings, raising his eyebrows. He reached out and touched the painted walls and felt the doorknob.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ said Major Kelly as he sat down. ‘Gentlemen.’ He nodded at the policemen. ‘I’m sure we’ve all got plenty to do getting Sicily back on her feet. I’m here to introduce you to Mr Albanese who is returning to Sant’Attilio after a long time. His anti-Fascist stance meant he had to flee to the land of freedom some twenty years ago.’

‘How do you do?’ said Will.

Major Kelly glanced up, surprised at the interruption. ‘Good, good. Get to know each other,’ he said and went on, ‘Mr Albanese has been of great aid to us, providing a good deal of useful information. He’s well connected here, of course, his family and so forth, and despite his long absence will be able to help you in the business of defascistification.’ Major Kelly whistled. ‘That’s a hell of a word. A man ought to be allowed a drink before he attempts it.’

‘Quite,’ Will said, thinking that of course Kelly, being an Irishman, would welcome that arrangement.

Albanese spoke suddenly. ‘Hey. You got a cigarette?’

‘Oh, surely.’ Will patted his pockets. ‘I’ve got some somewhere.’

‘Here.’ Samuels leaned across the table and offered his open packet, cigarettes steepled towards Albanese.

‘Thanks.’ The Sicilian then accepted a light offered by Kelly’s subordinate. ‘You Italian?’ Albanese asked.

‘Me?’ Samuels pointed at himself. ‘No. No, I’m from London.’

‘You look like you could be Italian.’

‘He’s a Jew,’ Will explained.

‘Is that right?’

Samuels nodded.

‘I knew Jews in New York. Smart guys. You got people there?’

‘Some, I think. My mother’s brother went there. We don’t hear very much from them.’

‘You should go over and find him. Family, you know. And maybe you’ll like it.’

‘Perhaps one day I will. The rest of them, who aren’t in England, are in Poland. I’d like to go and find them too.’

‘So,’ Will interrupted, ‘you live here? In Sant’Attilio?’ But Albanese hadn’t finished.

‘It was a Jewish guy made this suit.’

Will smirked at that. ‘It’s a beautiful suit.’

‘The best.’

‘So you live here in Sant’Attilio?’ Will repeated.

‘That’s right. My wife. My family.’

‘So, you’ll be on hand.’ Albanese said nothing. ‘You’ll be nearby.’

Albanese exhaled smoke and shaped the tip of his cigarette against the glass of the ashtray.

‘Whatever you need. A lot of these Fascists, they’ll act like they’ve done nothing. And you won’t know who they are, who’s innocent, who’s guilty. But I can help you. I can show you around, make friends for you, make you at home.’

‘Allow me to introduce you …’

‘I allow you. You’re allowed.’ Albanese interrupted and turned his smiling face around the company, looking for amusement at his joke.

‘This is Sergeant Whelan. He’s come from the Metropolitan Police in London to help with the re-establishment of law and order here.’

‘And this is Captain Michele Greco of the local police. Did you two ever meet?’

‘No. I don’t think we did.’

‘No, we haven’t met.’ Greco wriggled upright in his seat. Albanese said something to him in Italian and the two men exchanged words too rapidly for Will to understand. The up and down melody of the language threw up quick crenellations of sound. Afterwards, Albanese said in English. ‘We are going to work great together. Greco here understands me. He knows I am a man of respect.’ Albanese translated that phrase into Italian and Greco, frowning, confirmed this with an inclination of his head.

‘That sounds like what I wanted to hear,’ announced Major Kelly. ‘And with that, I shall return to Palermo. Gentlemen.’

Outside, Cirò detained the Americans with questions to which he already knew the answers, long enough for people to see them together. He wore his new hat. He shook their hands and gave them advice. He patted the younger one on the shoulder. On the other side of the road, three young boys sat with their arms folded.

While the jeep bounced away, Cirò beckoned the boys over. They sauntered across, loose and casual, not too interested, but Cirò could see the dissembled haste, the urgency: they were coming like cats at feeding time.

‘Here, ever seen these?’ Cirò pulled out of his pockets some American coins. ‘They’re from America, the US. You want them? You can have them. I’ve got plenty more.’

Cirò walked away, up to the square and past the church, past Tinu, and up the narrow street under lines of laundry hung in careful mirroring patterns — socks, underwear, vests, shirts, nightshirts, shirts again, vests, underwear and socks — to the house where he now lived.

He found Teresa and kissed her on the back of the neck. She sank heavily in his arms. ‘You can’t wear black for much longer. One more week. People will understand. It’s different because I’m back.’

Teresa didn’t say anything.

‘You remember our wedding day?’ he said.

‘Yes. Of course.’

He looked over the top of her head, remembering.

‘Where is the photograph? You still have it?’

‘I have it. It’s put away.’

‘Well, get it out. We’ll put it up. I’ll get a new frame. You don’t know what it means to me. You don’t know how happy I am to be back even if we’re only halfway there. Things are going to be like they were before.’

‘You look young when you’re happy,’ Teresa said. ‘You look like you used to.’

‘I feel like I used to. Where’s Mattia? I want to talk to him.’

‘I don’t know. In their room, maybe.’

Cirò climbed the narrow staircase and opened the door to the room with two mattresses on the floor and three half-naked children, forbidden to play outside so soon after the death of their father. They were fighting, tussling, a litter.

‘Where’s Mattia?’

The eldest, a boy of about nine, said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You do know.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Where is he?’ Cirò took one pace towards the boy.

‘He went out.’

‘So you do know. Go out and get him for me. Go on.’

The boy wriggled past him and pattered down the stairs on his bare feet.

Cirò looked at the two who were left. ‘Who wants a coin?’

‘Me!’

‘Me!’

Cirò produced one from his pocket and flipped it spinning into the air. He left them fighting for it.

A youth in the doorway of the house. Sullen, waiting, one arm up on the door frame.

‘Look at you,’ Cirò said. ‘You’re strong. Look at those arms. Like Jack Dempsey. Shall I call you Jack?’

‘Don’t care.’

‘What should I call you?’

‘Don’t call me anything. I don’t care.’

‘Really? What about Shit-the-bed? What about Little Dog? You don’t care, you don’t care. I’ll call you what I want.’

‘Doesn’t matter to me. What do you want me for?’

Cirò walked over to the boy and took hold of his shoulder. He gripped until Mattia looked up. Mattia said, ‘I know what you are.’

‘You don’t know anything, Jack. You’re a kid. I’m your mother’s husband. That’s who I am. I’m your father. I want to help you.’

Cirò let go and Mattia went and sat on the stool by the hearth.

‘I’m sorry about what happened to your father.’ Cirò received a flash of the boy’s dark eyes, fierce through their pretty lashes. ‘You know, even though he died in an accident, it’s like really he died in the war. That’s how you should think of it. He was killed by the bastard Fascists.’

‘I know what killed him.’

‘I know you do. He was a war hero. He died for Sicily. You should be very proud of him.’

Mattia sat hunched forwards, his hands under his thighs.

‘To die for Sicily. Things will be better now. That’s what we all want. My friends and me, we want better things for Sicily. You don’t know this yet. We weren’t allowed to be here for so long. It’s a life, Mattia, a way to make a living. You could have it. Actually, you know what you could have?’

‘What?’

‘Something I got for you in Palermo.’

‘For me?’

‘Sure.’

Cirò left the room. He returned with an object on his upturned palm: an unopened bar of American chocolate. The brown paper and silver foil were pristine. ‘Here.’

Mattia took it from him and looked down at it. ‘The whole thing?’

‘The whole thing. I can get plenty more.’

‘When?’

‘What do you mean, when? Whenever you want. If you want some, eat it.’

‘Now?’

‘Jesus, if you want it. What’s the matter with you?’

Mattia carefully opened the paper envelope, breaking the contact of its adhesive without tearing, then tore the foil wrapping and snapped off three squares and put them in his mouth. Lushness of sweet flavour, a slow melting into a thick fudge that coated his teeth and tongue. His eyes closed and opened again. He chewed, folding the wrapper tightly shut, keeping it all as neat as a pressed shirt.

‘Why don’t you give that to your mother? She can hide it from the little rats. Then come with me. There’s something you should see.’

Mattia nodded, swallowing like a bird, ducking his head and rising.

They stepped outside into early dusk, the walls of the buildings glowing, a drift of pink in the sky and swifts screaming in rapid circles over the church. Cirò led the boy down to the left, out of Sant’Attilio, past the others on the street. Albanese greeted an old uncle of the Battista family. The old man looked at him wonderingly, hopefully. Cirò passed on. The Battistas had been friends of the Albaneses. He must have been wondering if what he’d heard was right, that it was all coming back.

Mattia felt very awake after the chocolate. The evening breeze vibrated over his skin. He wanted to run but instead walked beside this inescapable man. They walked in the direction of the Prince’s house. When they got to Angilù Cassini’s house, Cirò said, ‘Wait.’

‘Yes?’

‘Sshh. You see this house?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know who lives here?’

‘Angilù Cassini.’

‘Angilù Cassini? Angilù? He was just a little shepherd when I left, out fucking his goats in the mountains. Angilù Cassini?’

‘Yes. He works for the Prince, on the estate. He does everything.’

‘Does he? You’re a good boy. You should work for me, you know. Work together. Two leaves of the artichoke. You want that?’

They were both quiet. Cirò looked up the avenue of olive trees to the front door. It was a strange feeling for Mattia, spying like this. It felt like something was going to happen. The quieter they got, the more it felt like that. Eventually, Albanese said, ‘He has children?’

‘Three daughters.’

‘No sons? Doesn’t surprise me. Probably none of them are his. You know the girls?’

‘Sure.’

‘Hey, you haven’t? Jack, don’t tell me you have … already? Those innocent girls.’ Cirò laughed, looking at Mattia’s pained frown. ‘I’m only kidding. You know who used to live here?’

‘Who?’

‘Me. Me and your mother. This is where we lived when we got married. I was the landlord of the estate. You didn’t know that? Big, isn’t it?’

‘It’s big.’

‘These trees. I used to make the oil from these olives. My house. My house until the Fascists. Our house. You want to live here? A room to yourself?’

‘It’s big.’

‘And when I’m gone meeting Jesus somewhere, it would be your house. You’re the oldest. You and your wife.’

26

Something outside made the dog bark. Cesare always barked in threes with short, absolute silences between. Cesare set off Sal’s dog two hundred yards away. It answered with its hoarse single responses, like frightened coughs. Together they roused several other dogs at different distances, a cacophony of paranoia and display that went on until they tired and relaxed slowly back into silence. Angilù didn’t like to hear it. It brought the night to bear, made him feel the space outside, when he just wanted to sit with his family and eat his soup, all of them in the single circle of lamplight. Angilù had too much to think about.

The end of the war was worse than the fighting had been. You could hide from that and you knew it would end. Now, Cirò Albanese was back. This was definite. Everybody knew. And if Albanese was back, Angilù could lose everything. Life on the estate was threatened. Angilù and the Prince had right on their side, they had goodness, good sense at least, but what was that against Albanese and his friends and the old, broken law? What he should do was to speak to the English as soon as possible and explain that he’d been living there for twenty years, that the Prince owned the property and he wanted Angilù there. It had taken Angilù some time to feel that he belonged there. At first the house was too big for him and his wife. They lodged in its corners. They huddled together. It was only when they had children, after long years of thinking they never would, that they began to inhabit the place. Anna was born and her yells filled the whole house and she survived and the place was theirs. It always had been theirs of course. The Prince had given it to them.

The English needed to understand how the whole system worked. He had to get to the Allies before the peasants also. No doubt some imaginative land claims would be made. The Santangelis were terrible for that.

In the morning, Angilù rode on a horse into Sant’Attilio, arriving at that prestigious height and dignity. When he was a boy, the only horses he saw were ridden by the Prince and his field guards. Those looming men in their liveries were the tallest beings in the world. Everyone else rode by on mules or jogged uncomfortably on donkeys, tensing their legs to keep their feet from touching the ground.

In Sant’Attilio, Angilù was recognised. Lifting his hat, looking down at people, he thought he saw a look in their eyes. Something they wanted to say but couldn’t, some knowledge molesting them. That’s what he thought he saw, but he was very agitated, jerking around in his saddle to look at everybody. He caught sight of Luca Battista and asked him where the Allies were. Luca told him they were in the town hall, of course.

At the town hall, Angilù dismounted, shooting down onto both feet. That hurt a little. He was getting older. Also, in his hurry, he hadn’t placed his feet quite right and stumbled a couple of paces forward. He tied his horse to a railing and walked in.

A man in uniform seated at a desk looked up. Angilù took in his shiny, combed hair and, disconnected beneath the desk as though belonging to someone else, his bare pink knees. Like a child, the Englishman was wearing short trousers.

‘Good morning, can I help you at all? If it’s the medical officers you’re after I’m afraid they won’t be here for a day or two.’

Angilù answered in Italian. ‘Do you not speak Italian? I don’t speak English and I’m not going to be able to make you understand anything if you can’t speak Italian.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to speak a good deal slower than that if I’m going to understand you.’

‘I said, do you speak Italian? I need to talk about my house and the old landlord. I should have got the Prince to come with me.’

‘Did you say “Prince”? There is a local prince, isn’t there? Look, stay here, and I’ll get someone who can help. I can read a newspaper perfectly well but you don’t sound like what I’m reading. Stay here.’

Angilù watched the man get up and walk out on legs as red and bare as a hen’s. When he came back, there was another man with him. When Angilù had repeated what he had to say, they led him into a room with a table. Their names were Treviss and Worka. Slowly, Angilù explained to them his situation. Each time they definitely understood, he said ‘yes’ and stamped the side of his fist on the table.

They asked him questions about Prince Adriano and wrote down some of the things they said, pens circling on paper, small whirlpools of Angilù’s thoughts now lost to him. He could understand numbers and recognised the shapes of some names but he couldn’t read. When they were finished, they stood up and shook Angilù’s hand and showed him to the door. They were interested in his horse and came out and patted its neck while he mounted. They waved at him as he rode away.

Will said to Travis, ‘That was a little distasteful, didn’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure I trust anyone round here.’

‘I mean, if he got his house when the former occupant was driven away by the Fascists, then isn’t he the expropriator trying to hang onto his property? I mean, in a sense, he’s just come in here and declared himself a Fascist.’

‘Maybe. Though that’s going a bit far.’

‘Could be Albanese, of course. The person who was driven away.’

‘Nice horse, though. Handsome animal.’

‘Has this Cassini been mentioned in any of the denunciations? I’ll ask Albanese and talk to the police. And I suppose I should go and visit this prince.’

27

Ray checked every inch of the attic on his hands and knees, peering down into the cracks between floorboards for any signs of wires or devices. The place was huge, the size of the whole floor of an apartment building, only with no interrupting walls. It was an enormous container of empty space. He felt the terror of that space around him. Always some part of it was so far away he wouldn’t know. The search took him hours. Against one wall were a few boxes, some old paintings, a table and a rocking horse. He checked these first of all. They were the most frightening. Mouth hanging open as he crawled around them, sweat stinging his eyes. He reached his trembling hands inside the boxes and found only fabrics. The paintings were of old saints and landscapes. At one moment, he moaned, thinking it was all about to end but he realised that the wires in his hand were to hang the picture from.

Walls next. Shuffling around on his knees, he felt the plaster with his fingertips. There were cracks here and there. They didn’t look deliberate. Along one side, Ray could feel the sun’s warmth coming through, a slow pulse of heat transmitted through masonry and wood. At one spot along that side, something was happening. He heard scratching and leaned close. Silence. Then a snapping sound and a dry screaming started up. It was a bird’s nest. He remembered that sound from home. Sometimes walking under a subway bridge, up in the grimy iron darkness, you heard the baby pigeons screaming for food. The adult bird flew away again and the screaming stopped.

There were two small windows. He was lying down, looking out of one at a geometric garden with spooky white statues standing in their postures, pointing upwards or lazily leaning, when he heard someone coming up the steps to the little door. He got up and ran to stand beside it. As the door opened, he reached through and caught hold of the person and threw them down. He got his forearm over their throat and shouted, ‘Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck are you?’ He saw beneath him a terrified woman, the same woman who’d cut herself in front of him and taken him to this place. She was twisting and jerking, trying to lift her head. When he let her go, she scooted backwards away from him on her heels and her hands.

‘You are mad,’ she said. ‘Be quiet.’ She laughed and winced and touched her mouth to see if it was bleeding. Her head was ringing. So shocking, the attack and contact of his body, the force of it. What it told her: he wanted to live.

Ray cursed like his father, calling on the saints to help him. Her eyes widened.

‘You speak Italian. Are you American or Italian? If you are a hiding Fascist there will be a problem.’

‘I’m not a Fascist. Jesus fucking Christ. That’s the last thing I am. I’m an American.’

‘You have to be quiet. It’s a big house. But you have to stay here so no one hears you. You cannot go near the windows.’

‘I have to check if it’s safe.’

‘Of course it’s safe.’

‘And don’t come in without warning me.’

‘How can I warn you? And why do you speak Italian?’

‘I am Italian. I mean, my parents are Italian, from the south. I’m from Little Italy not big Italy.’

‘I see.’

‘Raimundo Marfione. But I’m Ray. Everybody calls me Ray.’

‘Okay, Ray. Is it all right if I speak English and Italian also when I can’t remember words?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. Please will you stay on that side, where those boxes are? I’m going to go out for a while.’

She got up and smoothed her hair with trembling hands. She brushed the back of her dress. ‘You’ve got me all dusty. If my father had seen you touch me like that, he’d have had you whipped.’

‘What’s that?’

She said in English, ‘You know, hit. Like for a horse.’

‘Oh, whipped. I’m sorry.’

‘Just be quiet.’

She went out through the little wooden door and Ray fell back down where he sat. He could still feel her there, how she’d stirred the air around. He looked up and saw timber rafters. How had he not thought of those? He needed to check all of them.

28

Descending back into the house, wondering about the secret violence and desperation she now had stored in the attic, Luisa turned into the corridor and saw Graziana. The old woman looked down.

‘What do you know?’ Luisa asked her.

‘Beg pardon, miss?’

‘What do you know?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do.’

‘I’m sorry, miss, I don’t. There’s lots I don’t know, God help me.’

‘That’s good.’

‘And I don’t want to know it, either.’

‘Even better.’

Luisa walked on past her. As a child, Luisa had thought of the large atrium with the marble staircase as a kind of huge mouth, like the jaws of a lion. When she went out, it spat her out. When she came in, it swallowed her. The lion was sneaky: it would pretend it wasn’t there, that everything was normal, just a room and some stairs and a high, painted ceiling, but she knew it was there. She could feel it forming in the air around her.

She hadn’t thought of the lion for a long time or perhaps unconsciously she always did and it was something she took for granted in the nature of the house. Today as she hurried out she noticed and remembered. Across the courtyard, her father leaned on his stick. He was smoking his pipe, his preferred form of outdoor smoking, and was deep in conversation with Angilù. She waved at them and whispered to herself, ‘Just stay over there, don’t ask me anything.’ Her father raised his hand in lofty salute and rose to his full height as he saw her hurrying away.

In the stables, Luisa approached Ezio, soothing him with the palm of her hand and murmuring to him, carefully informing him of her presence. Ezio shifted sideways over his urinous straw. She fitted the saddle. From the bridle, Ezio reared and snickered, again and again. His neck was one long surge of muscle. He held his head high and disdainful. Minutes passed with Luisa attempting to ensnare him, her arms aching from being held up, her fingers losing their dexterity. But she would not give up and on one pass she caught the stupid horse and he knew he was beaten. Ezio allowed the bit between his long yellow teeth and jumping dark lips.

She led him out without a guard, without telling anyone. Unused to getting into the saddle without a guard’s hands to step on, Luisa struggled for a while, cursing and flinging herself upward, pulling Ezio’s head uncomfortably down to the side. Once she was up and had found both stirrups, she rode quickly away from this undignified tussle.

Her father met her at the door of the house.

‘I know, I know,’ she said pre-emptively. ‘I was in a hurry. I needed to get out.’

‘If you know then it won’t happen again. Who knows who or what’s out there at the moment. Do you understand? Luisa, I’m not often strict with you.’

Luisa pouted, looking at the ground.

‘There’s something else I wanted to ask. Do you know anything about an American soldier coming here? The gardener said he thought he’d seen one come to the house the other day.’

‘No. I haven’t seen anyone. Maybe he was lost. He must have wandered off again.’

Despite the convulsions of her heart, Luisa was pleased her father had asked this question. Now he had an answer and once people had a story they believed, they stopped looking for alternatives. The incredible reality was now the last thing her father would suspect. Just as he’d believed her about the accident with her scissors. She looked down at her hand and flexed her fingers. The bandaged wound was mute.

29

He slept in snatches, trying not to. The trench of Germans filled with blood. The blood overbrimmed and rolled along the ground towards him. If it touched him, he would die too. There were sudden explosions that blew him awake, threw him out of death there onto the floorboards checking around to see if he really was alive, if his body was still whole.

The dark was almost total. The two small windows could just about be discerned from their surroundings, a smoother, more liquid black. If he crawled to one of them maybe he would see stars or lights.

He didn’t move. He lay there thinking about his mother and father, his brother and sister in the little apartment, not knowing about him. So far away. Like they were all in a tiny dark box in vast space. And there was George out there still. His brain went blank and switched on again. He listened for sounds of possible war.

Eventually, the dawn light hung blue in the big emptiness of the attic. Ray found himself staring at the rocking horse. It was made of carved wood. Its four carved hooves stood on two curved runners so that it rocked, so that a child could play on it. It was made to look like a real horse. Nostrils had been carved, and goofy teeth, and eyes and the shapes of some of the horse’s muscles. The legs were realistic, particularly at the back: that big rounded section like a chicken’s thigh. There was a saddle on it. Hours of work had gone into it. He could see that. Hands had worked for hours on that shape, scraping away with chisels and whatever they used to get that shape out of raw wood, a clear horse shape that stood in just the right place on its little runners so that it would rock back and forth and not tip over. Amazing effort had gone into it. A pattern of fur or hair or whatever the fuck you called it on a horse had been painted. The teeth were painted a different colour. So were the insides of the nostrils. All this effort to make this one pretend horse for a child to sit on and swoosh back and forth. A rocking horse. The name told you what it was. Nobody really needed it, but there it was for a child to pretend to be on a horse. Because horses were things children should know about. Children had to know about lots of things. They didn’t know anything. They had to learn them one by one, one after the other, and horses were one of those things. Also, it was nice to rock back and forth, that movement was nice. It was a ride, a game. It felt good for the child to rock back and forth and so all those hours of carving and painting to make a little horse to ride. Ray felt himself on the horse as a child, tilting forward and back, falling forwards, sliding back, the weight of his dangling feet in laced shoes swinging his legs. It was wonderful. The rocking horse was made for this.

Ray closed his eyes, thinking about it, and lay back down. And the floorboards under his head were wood that had been cut. And the ceiling and the door. The whole world was made. People made it.

30

Two men had been killed in the square of Portella Corvi. They had died of shotgun wounds which were large and ragged. Shot, then, at close range. The presumption would be that they were ex-Fascists shot in reprisal. Nevertheless, this was very much the kind of chaos that could not be allowed to take hold. The local police were investigating under the newly arrived supervision of officers from the London Metropolitan Police, but, as a Civil Affairs Officer, Will took it upon himself to visit and ask a few questions.

An exhilarating, swooping motorcycle ride through the mountains left Will’s body vibrating as he stood over the blood-stained paving stones and asked Sergeant Whelan what they’d found out. Apparently this was nothing. There were no witnesses.

‘Isn’t that a bit, you know, implausible, given that we’re in the town square?’

‘That had crossed my mind. I don’t believe a word of it. Blank face after blank wop face. Their mother was taken ill. They were in church. They heard a noise but when they looked the assailants had scarpered.’

‘The murderers.’

‘The murderers.’

‘Maybe it’s true. How many people are there in this town? Not everywhere will be seen by someone at all times.’

‘Maybe so but you get an instinct. They don’t want to talk. Have you not noticed that generally? These people aren’t at all how I’d imagined Italians, all mamma mia mamma mia and waving their arms about. They’re surly bastards round here.’

‘They are.’ Will sighed through his nose, looking down at the blood dried in the sun. ‘Will I get a report on this?’

‘I think so. I can get it to you, if you like, try and expedite it to you.’

‘Do. And the two men, Fascists?’

‘No clear indication of that. I’ve sent a request to ask some of the prisoners about them. People I’ve spoken to here, some said yes, others devoutly of the other opinion.’

‘I see. Well, I want someone banged up for this. We can’t have this sort of thing going on under our noses. We’re the authority here. The war is over.’

‘I agree with all of that,’ Whelan said. ‘Can’t have vendettas breaking out all over. In the end it’s not England, though, and you have to take that into account.’

‘We rule over a vast empire, sergeant. I think it’s realistic for us to do so here as well.’

‘Very good. Well, I’ll keep you informed.’

Wheeling his motorcycle out of the square, Will saw a familiar face in the shadow of an awning. Albanese was sitting at a café table with an old, beaky-faced man, another man and a youth. They had in front of them the tiny cups from which they drank their fierce little coffees. Each was smoking a cigarette.

‘Oh, hello,’ Will said.

‘Good afternoon, officer,’ Albanese replied in his New York accent, sounding exactly like a gangster in an American film. ‘You here because of what happened to those two men? It’s terrible. I don’t like to see it. The war is finished. I want justice not dirty business.’

‘Couldn’t agree more.’

‘You know who this is, officer?’ Cirò jerked a thumb at the old man. ‘This is the new mayor of Montebianco. You get the message from Palermo yet?’

‘No.’ Will blinked. ‘No. But it’s probably waiting for me when I get back. So no doubt we will be meeting very soon.’

The old man didn’t appear to understand. He leaned to Albanese who whispered in his ear. Then the old man raised a hand in greeting. He wore a quite enviably beautiful suit of brown pinstriped cloth and sharply sculpted shoes with a swirl and gleam in the leather that made them resemble polished wood. Glancing down at them, Will saw also his thin, knobby ankles filmed by fine yellow silk socks.

‘And this is my son, Mattia.’

‘Your son? From America?’ Will didn’t know that Albanese had brought a son with him.

Albanese smiled, saying nothing. He stayed that way long enough for it to be incumbent upon Will to speak again. Albanese did not introduce the third man and he did not look up. He kept his chin tucked down into his neck, a hand raised with his cigarette in front of his face, his fingertips resting on his temple. Will was left to guess who he was.

Finally, Will said, ‘So, I’ll see you back in Sant’Attilio.’ He climbed, self-consciously, onto his motorcycle and kicked it awake. The engine hacked and rattled, blue smoke stuttered behind, and Will pushed himself away, lifting his feet.

Mattia envied the machine. When he was older he would have one of his own. He liked particularly the shape of the fuel tank at the front, a glinting teardrop or the thorax of a wasp. The machine had a look of agile power. He pictured himself with one that was black and highly polished. He would ride it wearing sunglasses and a wristwatch. People would hear him coming.

Alvaro Zuffo was telling them about seeing his witch for the first time in years. She had shown no surprise when he walked through the door. She said, ‘I knew it would be today. You’ve been buried at the bottom of the sea all this time. Now you will breathe air again.’

‘Mattia.’

‘What?’

‘Listen to what Mr Zuffo is saying. You know who this man is?’

‘Cirò, it’s okay.’

‘He has to know. Mattia, you understand? You pay him respect.’

‘I will. I do. I’m listening.’

‘The boy understands, Cirò. He’s learning. He’s learned from the events here this morning, haven’t you, boy? You understand.’

‘Yes I do. I do. I understand.’

31

Ray awoke from a deep, black sleep that had been devoid of dreams. Every muscle in his body was completely relaxed. He was a dead weight pressing onto the floor, heavy as a rock. For this moment, Ray was free, completely hidden. A moment later, when he noticed this unusual state, he uncovered himself. He remembered all that he had forgotten. His thoughts began their marauding. His heart started up.

His body was too tired to jerk upright so he rolled onto his side to look around. Nothing had changed so he was probably still safe. From one of the windows, burning towards him across the floorboards, was the light of the sun. He looked into it, blinding himself, and crushed his eyes shut, a shape of hot molten metal floating inside.

Ray sat up, blinking. Still in this place. It was so large and a whole night had passed. Anything could have happened. He pulled off the blanket and got on all fours, crawling one way to check for signs. There was something in here, he remembered. Where was it? Oh, that. The rocking horse, poised, perfectly still on its painted hooves. He started towards it because he wanted to touch the choppy carving of its mane and the smooth swell of its flank. His long shadow stretched towards it. Every time he lifted his hand, the shadow fled up the wall. Every time he set it down, his hand and its shadow connected. But what was he thinking? He hadn’t checked the place yet. He looked along the crack between the floorboards in front of him for any triggering devices.

There was a noise at the door. He kept his eyes shut and waited. Three. Two. One. Nothing. Three. Two.

‘Good morning.’ A woman’s voice. ‘What are you doing?’

It was the woman, the same one. Of course it was.

‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m okay. No one’s been up here, right?’

‘No one’s been up here. If someone came up here, you would know. There would be a big problem.’

Ray, still on all fours, hanging his head, looked at the woman through the gap of his armpit. Her feet were in the shooting sunlight: small shoes with shiny buckles.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

‘Did you sleep well?’ Luisa shook her head after that question, at the absurdity of inquiring after this man like a guest at a house party.

‘I slept okay. I woke up.’

‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘Okay. Okay, I will.’ Ray instructed his muscles to move, to let go. They wouldn’t until suddenly, like an avalanche, they did. He arranged himself against the wall by the spot with the bird’s nest, his knees drawn up. He rubbed his face with his hands, groaned, opened his eyes wide. ‘So who are you?’

‘Who am I? My name is Luisa.’

‘Luisa. Luisa.’ Ray mused on this for a moment. ‘Okay, but that’s just a name. I mean, who are you? I mean, where am I?’

‘You’re in my house, in my father’s house, Prince Adriano.’

‘Prince Adriano?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like, he’s a prince?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what are you?’

‘I’m a princess.’

‘You’re fucking with me. You’re not serious.’

‘No. I am serious. There are plenty of us in Sicily. Don’t be too impressed.’

‘It is a big house.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘And only you two?’

‘And servants and sometimes people who work on the land. It’s a sad story. The house is very big. We get lonely. But my father prefers it to the city.’

‘Cities aren’t always nice.’

‘You are from a city?’

‘From New York.’

‘The big city.’

‘Yep, it’s big.’

‘My father will go out later. I can bring you down into the house and give you more food.’

‘Okay. That would be good.’

‘Did you use the pot?’

‘What? Oh sure. Over there.’

‘Okay, I will take it.’ Luisa walked over and picked up the chamber pot that Ray had covered with the napkin she had provided. Its weight slewed from side to side as she walked. ‘I go now,’ she said. As she descended the stairs, she caught the strong animal aroma of Ray’s urine. Luisa never carried her own chamber pot. The sensation of holding a strange man’s was extraordinary. She felt a calming abasement in her soul. She was a servant. She was performing one of the acts of the saints.

32

Mattia ran back with the news: the Prince’s car had just pulled up at the town hall. Cirò left the house on the hunt for Angilù. Today the new currency was going to be distributed and Angilù would surely be coming on the Prince’s behalf. The car was there but Angilù wasn’t; he must have gone inside. Cirò couldn’t see him in the small crowd. The place was busy. Stupidly, some of the people had brought things they hoped to sell in exchange for more currency. A man was being told at the door that his two chairs weren’t wanted. A woman stood with a hen under her arm, its long red legs reaching out to steady itself on something, its talons closing around air. There were guards standing by the car, two of them, looking around with more of a display of vigilance than the action itself. A pair of pea-brained peacocks, twitching their heads from side to side. In America, those two would not have had those jobs. So stupid they were. It wouldn’t take long to get them on side.

Cirò threw down his cigarette butt and walked over. He thought he’d play with the guards while he waited, ostentatiously admiring the car, tracing the swells of its bodywork with his fingertips, persisting until one of them complained.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Cirò said. ‘You’re the chauffeur, yes? You’re the chauffeur for a shepherd?’

When Angilù emerged and saw Cirò, the expression fell from his face. He had a child with him, one of his daughters. Cirò saw his hand tightening around hers. Angilù’s other hand travelled to his breast pocket.

‘Your wallet?’ Cirò asked. ‘You’re worried about thieves? About people taking things that don’t belong to you?’

Angilù said nothing for a moment. He dropped his hand and pointed to the car. ‘I’m well protected.’ Cirò smiled. ‘Is that your daughter? I hear you have three daughters, is that right?’ He stepped forwards until he was close enough to drop his hand onto the hot, silky hair of the little girl. He felt her hair and skin shift as her skull tilted back and she looked up at her father. Her face full in the light, she narrowed her eyes. Long trembling lashes and glittering brown eyes with drops of sunlight in them.

‘She’s so beautiful,’ Cirò said. ‘She looks almost alive.’

33

The arrival of the new currency made this a good time to start visiting people. Fresh water and the bird will dip its beak. Neat and quick. He took Mattia with him, part of his education. Let him see what respect meant and how life could be for him.

Cirò started with Jaconi, poor Jaconi, arriving in the man’s shop and waiting for the other customers to leave.

All Cirò had to do was glare at the little steel box he kept the money in and Jaconi understood.

Mattia was watching this silent exchange, not really understanding. Things were no clearer when Jaconi said, ‘Oh no, I don’t owe you anything. Not after what I did.’

Cirò said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Jaconi was wiping his hands with a cloth. He looked at Mattia, hesitating.

Cirò shifted on his feet. Mattia watched him. He breathed in, widening his shoulders a little, and he lifted his chin. A mute display. Albanese just sent out the force of himself, his presence. He made visible his will and whatever decision the old shopkeeper was about to make, he changed. Jaconi’s unformed words were reversed back down his throat. His shoulders drooped. His thick hands, trembling slightly, opened the cash box and pulled out one of the clean new notes. He held it out to Albanese who took it and put it in his pocket. Jaconi said, ‘Here, Cirò. I’d like you to look out for my business, to make sure everything’s okay.’

Albanese said, ‘Whatever I can do.’

Turning his back to Jaconi, Albanese winked at Mattia. This sudden secret liveliness in the slow-moving Albanese made Mattia feel strange. The whole thing had been strange.

As they left, Jaconi called out after the boy, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to your father.’

Mattia didn’t know what to say. He looked up at Albanese for guidance but the man’s face was set. Mattia waved at Jaconi in helpless acknowledgement.

Outside, in the vertical heat of the sunshine, Albanese said to Mattia, ‘You’re learning. Soon you’ll know so much it’ll be too late. Don’t worry. It’s good. Everything will be good.’

34

Ray refused to leave the attic. He didn’t think it was safe. Luisa sat on the floor, cross-legged, her hands fidgeting in the sling her skirt made between her thighs.

‘What is New York like?’

‘Busy. Dirty. Lots of people.’ Ray pulled thoughtfully on one of the cigarettes she’d brought him. ‘Here, apart from the war, everything’s Italian, right?’

‘Sicilian.’

‘Sure, Sicilian. In New York, Italian is like a few streets. Sicilian is one street. And then it’s something else. Jews over here. Chinese over there.’

‘It sounds very interesting.’

‘Sure it is. It’s … everybody’s there. It’s crowded, crazy. I don’t go too far, to be honest. You don’t know what trouble you could get in. I mean my life is the Italian streets but I can see the other things. I go to the movies. I like the movies.’

‘Oh, yes? I do not get to see them. In Palermo, the cinema is not a place a princess could go. Maybe in Palermo now it’s different.’

Ray wasn’t really listening. He asked, ‘Is that rocking horse yours?’

‘That what?’

‘The horse. The wooden horse.’

‘Oh, yes. From when I was a child, yes.’

‘I thought so.’

‘Now, I ride real horses.’

‘You do? Like a cowboy.’

Luisa laughed. ‘I don’t think so. I like to ride, I like to be outside in the sun, and riding, moving.’

‘But you can’t do that now, right?’

‘What?’

‘It’s dangerous out there, very dangerous. Lots of bombs. Don’t go riding about on a big dumb horse for chrissake.’

‘I am careful.’

‘You have to be. It’s very dangerous.’

Luisa paused. ‘You didn’t tell me, you didn’t tell me what happened to you.’

Luisa’s father caught her leaving this time so she was forced to take a guard with her. They rode out in the direction that Ray must have come from if he’d seen the house on his right as he approached. Wind. A hawk swinging overhead. Away to the left, a half-dozen goats on their hind legs stripped growth from a shrub with tough tearing sounds, their necks upstretched into the branches as though they were suckling.

When they met the road, they headed west and found the burned-out truck. Luisa rode up close and looked at the bubbled paint and exploded tyres. It was such a quiet thing it made a silence inside the noise of the wind. It was like something at the bottom of the sea. The crisis of gusting flames and fleeing men, the truck blown up and over, might have happened centuries ago when the Romans were fighting here or the Arabs or the Phoenicians. Ezio jerked his head away from the smell of the metal.

She struck him with her heels and he stepped forwards. A small crater twenty yards away. There were scattered things that she slowly understood, parts of a man spread out. A body full of incomprehensible space. There were long flutes of exposed bone and a torso with a small, burned, peevish head. Its eyes were empty. The noise of flies was the noise of the chaos in her head. Luisa’s lungs couldn’t take in air. She yanked the reins over and Ezio plunged around. She kicked and kicked.

Back home, she ran up to her room and emptied the pitcher of water on her washstand over her head, a crash of coldness on her crown that fell down her neck and around her forehead. She stared into the ewer and breathed. She caught sight of her own mouth wide open in the mirror. Her skin was tight and yellow. Her eyes were flat. She wouldn’t meet them, wouldn’t look into them. She smoothed her hair to her head and went up to the attic, checking for sounds of anyone else. She opened the door and found the American again on his hands and knees.

35

‘God help us. It’s like a wet weekend in Margate.’ Swatting his book against his thigh, Will stepped outside to where Samuels and Travis were playing cards at a rusty table. In the twilight, the little scratchy garden was violet and lemon-grey but it wouldn’t be for long. The colours were changing, flaring and sinking.

‘We can deal you in, if you like.’

‘No, thank you.’

Will sat on a small stone bench by the wall. Behind him, the bricks released the stored heat of the day, a very comfortable fading of the sun into his neck and shoulders. He closed his eyes and relaxed.

The thrip of playing cards. Travis’s voice. ‘Ha-ha! Come to mother, little coins.’

The breeze was the perfect temperature and speed over Will’s skin. He opened his eyes to see the glowing garden, a white butterfly tumbling around some purple flowers. A wonderful ease filled him. Something was happening, the heat, the light, the sound of voices. Everything was exquisite. Everything blended. And from this harmony something else seemed to emerge, to arrive. There was a completeness to the moment that felt like a presence. It was … what was it? It was kind, reassuring. It felt enduring. It felt like a refutation of Lucretius and his granulated universe crashing against itself. Will couldn’t explain it. He was for that moment at ease and perfectly happy. He was cared for.

Too strange, though. He didn’t have time for it. Will took out and lit a cigarette. ‘It’s nice out here,’ he said.

‘Then leave it out.’

‘Very droll. We haven’t met this prince yet, have we?’

‘The big landowner.’

‘No. His chap changed a lot of money, though. Same chap who came in ranting about his house.’

‘Did you ask Albanese about that?’

‘Not yet. Another denunciation of him came in today. Anonymous. He’s a thief apparently.’

‘But he’s not a Fascist.’

‘Fascists wouldn’t have him.’

‘Oh, that’s useful.’

‘What is?’

‘The eight of clubs Travis just threw out.’

‘I think I should go and talk to this prince.’

‘Probably you should.’

Will blew smoke upwards into the sky. It was starting to darken. Travis said, ‘What time is it?’

Samuels said to Will, ‘He’s got a woman in town, you know. They meet at night. I believe they discuss the progress of the war and read their favourite passages from the Bible to each other.’

‘Have you been following us?’

‘Just another poor girl who likes a soldier.’

‘Excuse me, an intelligence officer,’ Travis objected.

‘My pass is access all areas. All areas.’

Will flicked away his cigarette end, a zooming light into the grey of the garden. ‘Edifying as this is, I think I’m going to go and read.’

36

The attic was a tent of shadows suspended from the light of a single candle. When a draught pulled at the flame, all the shadows swayed. Outside was nothing, was night-time. Inside, their voices were small and secret and careful, crossing the air between them. Their faces were a golden blur.

‘It shouldn’t have still been there,’ Luisa said. ‘People here … someone must have seen it and yet no one did anything, no one ever does anything.’

‘Him.’

‘What?’

‘Not “it”. Him.’

Luisa clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Him. I’m sorry.’

‘Or “it”,’ Ray said. ‘It’s an it now.’

Luisa didn’t know what to say. She looked down at her fingers tangling together. A question occurred to her. ‘Did you see …’ but she stopped herself. There was something wrong in wanting to know, something greedy and obscene. But she did want to know, she wanted to touch the life that he had lived. ‘Did you see many people killed?’

A breeze caught the candle flame. Ray stared as it streamed sideways with a bubbling sound then fluttered upright again.

‘There is nothing after that I can see. I never saw any sign of it, no reason to believe it. It all stops. Just stops.’

Luisa nodded, waiting. Into the silence she said, ‘People here are always killed but I never see it. Once when I was very small one of the peasants died outside in the courtyard. I have a memory, I don’t know if I saw it or imagined it, this old man lying down like he’s asleep. That’s all.’

‘It’s not like sleep.’

‘No.’

Luisa looked at the young American, at his soft inward eyes. His neck was so tense that his head trembled sometimes. Luisa could see the arcs of sinew inside rising out of his shoulders.

‘You’ve seen some terrible things.’

Ray was tracing a pattern on the floor with his fingertip. His face opened in a laugh but he didn’t look up. ‘I’ve seen some terrible things. Yes, I have.’ The smile went from his face again. He frowned down at his moving hand. ‘Not a lot I can do about it. And you have too, now.’ He looked up at her, his mouth hanging open in sorrow.

Luisa smiled at him, a new thought amusing her. ‘I like you so much,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why. I don’t know you really. People I know very well I don’t like the way I like you.’

It was the darkness that made these words possible, the night and their clandestine solitude. There was nothing familiar or ordinary there. They were alone. Luisa could have such thoughts and there was nothing to prevent her from saying them out loud. She was free.

‘That’s nice,’ Ray said. ‘You’re very kind to me.’

‘It’s because I like you,’ Luisa insisted. Mauro Vecchio, with all his power and position, saluted by people as he passed, didn’t have what this American boy had. It was suffering, the authority of pain. His pain was the dark beautiful flower of the deepest experience.

‘I like you so much,’ Luisa went on, ‘that if you wanted to I would let you kiss me.’

Ray looked up. ‘You what?’

‘I’d let you kiss me.’

Ray felt his heart sink down inside his chest. He looked at the Princess. She was smiling at him. She was glittering and fragile as new ice. The flaw was in her eyes, their gaze slightly fractured with fear. The moment was breakable. It was his responsibility to handle it with care. Ray said, ‘I can’t stay here for ever.’

The Princess was sitting very straight. Evidently she was waiting.

‘Now?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Why not? Why shouldn’t he? Only for some reason he hesitated. It was too much. But she was waiting. Ray moved onto his hands and knees and started crawling towards her.

Luisa watched him coming, prowling closer. His mouth was open. His eyebrows were knitted together in concentration. He looked passionate.

Ray reached her. Her face, gold-coloured in the candlelight, was in front of his, separating into its details: the light swimming in her eyes, her starry eyelashes, her lips and teeth and nostrils. She closed her eyes, composed herself for the event. Ray leaned forwards and pressed his mouth against hers. He felt the warm blasting exhalation from her nose against his cheek. He felt her teeth beyond the soft barrier of her lips. He felt nothing, emptiness, the collision of two bodies. He felt very alone.

37

Mattia didn’t wake his little brothers. Two of them lay side by side, one with his arm around the other’s shoulder like old men consoling each other.

Downstairs, Mattia found Albanese filling a bag in the darkness. He looked up sharply and the glimpse Mattia had of a man alone, absorbed in a task, vanished. Albanese had looked very different in that instant. He had looked relaxed and it made Mattia realise how vigilant the man was the rest of the time.

‘What do you want?’ Albanese asked.

‘I heard a noise.’

‘Huh.’

To Albanese, the boy looked soft and childish in his fatigue, his long feet inturned.

‘Do you want something?’

‘I just heard a noise.’

‘Do you want to do something?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good. There’s some coffee there. Drink it then put on some clothes. We’re going out.’

Outside the stars were bright and rigid over the houses. The night wind, cold and direct, blew into Mattia’s eyes. From the direction they turned, Mattia immediately knew where they were going. He thought perhaps he was wrong when Albanese turned another corner and headed towards the town hall. He stopped at a building beside it, opened it with a key and disappeared. When he returned, he had a jerrycan in his hand. ‘Carry this,’ he said.

Mattia took it. The fuel sloshing inside made it awkward to handle. It banged against his knees as they walked out of Sant’Attilio.

They stopped fifty yards from Angilù Cassini’s house. Mattia set the can down and shook feeling back into his arms. ‘We’re not …’ he whispered. ‘While they’re all asleep.’

‘No, we’re not. Be quiet.’ Cirò put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Mattia couldn’t really see his face. Cirò said, ‘This is just a warning. People don’t give you justice in this life, you know that? You have to go out and take it. Those are my trees. That oil, I had its taste in my mouth for twenty years knowing that someone else was stealing it. Now he won’t have it. First thing, though: the dog.’ Albanese produced a knife from the bag. It was a knife Mattia recognised from his mother’s kitchen. It was a knife he’d fantasised about taking out into the street and using, a boy’s violent fantasies, and now here it was outside in the night, the blade naked under the stars. Albanese handed it to him. Mattia gripped the handle. The weapon felt clever and agile in his hand. Albanese reached into his bag again and pulled out something white. Mattia could see its glow. Again Albanese handed it to him. ‘It’s meat, in the handkerchief. You remember where the dog is? On the left side of the garden. First thing is go in and cut its throat. It should be asleep. If it is awake, give it the meat and then cut its throat. Then put it on their doorstep. After that, we burn the trees. Will you be quieter with your sandals on or off?’

‘On.’

‘Okay. Go on then.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now. Go on. Be quick.’

‘Okay.’

Mattia walked down the hill with the knife and the meat in his hands. As he reached the gate, he lifted his feet carefully, trying not to make the loose stones squeak beneath him. The house was in front of him, set back behind the trees, dark and sleeping. He went in. For long moments as he crept about, Mattia worried that he wouldn’t even be able to see the dog in the darkness but then he perceived its round shape, curled on the ground. His sweat was cold in the wind. He stepped towards it, closer and closer, until he was near enough to drop onto it. He had his knees on its ribcage, one hand grabbing the muzzle that came awake, wet and sharp with teeth. He got his hand around it and crushed it shut. He reached under with the knife and pulled it up with a short tugging action, the way he’d seen men despatch sheep, and sure enough loose blood started pumping onto the ground while the animal whimpered and hissed, the air going out of it. Its body jerked in a seizure and lay still. He’d done it. He wiped his brow and caught the tang of the dog’s blood on his hands. He cut the rope it was tethered with. That was hard work. It took minutes to saw through. The dog was heavy as earth when he picked it up, its spine pouring over his hands, hard to gather and control. To get it to the doorstep he had to adopt a bandy-legged, shuffling run. He laid it down. Here you go, you thief. You see what happens? When you live in my house.

When he got back to Albanese, the man was delighted. He put both his hands on Mattia’s shoulders and shook him. ‘Good boy. Good boy. Okay, now the next thing.’

Albanese led the way this time. Mattia followed him as he dashed kerosene around and up into the olive trees, starting with those nearest to the gate. When he reached the end, he flipped open a cigarette lighter and lit two sticks. He gave one to Mattia and side by side they walked down the avenue touching flames to the trees, watching fire appear in patches of beautiful liquid blue. It raced up into the oily leaves which started to crackle and burn with flames as sumptuously golden as church decoration. At the gate they dropped the sticks and walked quickly back up the hill.

Albanese was ecstatic. He put his arm around the boy and kissed his head. Mattia felt the man’s strong lips push against his temple and the corner of his eye. Behind them, voices of panic could be heard.

Back at the house, Mattia washed the blood from his arms. Cirò gave him a glass of grappa which felt to Mattia like swallowing the same fire.

Upstairs, the drink, the smell of fire on his skin, the golden burning they’d made in the darkness, for some reason all filled Mattia with intense lust. In bed, he lay amorously on his front, his head full of images of women’s stocking tops and the neat plump shape of cloth where their underwear fitted tight around their figs. He fell asleep pressing a fierce erection down into the bed.

38

There were footprints of blood in the hallway. Angilù had stumbled over the dog’s soft body, kicked it away and then run back and forth through the puddle that shone black in the firelight.

He’d given up soon anyway. The trees hadn’t properly caught from the hasty splashes of fuel so in the grey dawn light he saw only ugly and stupid damage, scabs of burned twists of shrivelled leaves. Olive trees were tough, used to fierce heat, and there would still be a harvest but that wasn’t the point. This was bad. The dog was very bad. He remembered what it meant like something from his childhood, like a snatch of a song he hadn’t heard for years. Angilù might have only days to live. Every step now was along a precipice.

Angilù dug a hole. It took effort. He felt up his arms every pang of his spade hitting a stone. He took Cesare, whose fur was matted and dull, whose lips were retracted in a snarl, whose tongue hung out, and dropped him in and shovelled over. Earth covering the fur, covering the face. He had to decide what to do. With the Allies here, even if Albanese was whispering into their ignorant ears, there was just a chance of justice. After they’d gone, there was no telling.

39

At breakfast, Albanese sat silent and ignorant. When Mattia tried to smile at him, he registered nothing. His face was heavy and soft, his eyes vague, his grey hair crinkled from the pillow. He fumbled with his coffee and cigarette.

Mattia tore at the dry bread with the teeth in the side of his mouth. Albanese leaned back in his chair, his lips pushed forward, his eyes half closed, somnolent and regal. Mattia asked, ‘What’s America like?’ Across the kitchen he could see his mother’s rounded back tense with attention, listening. Albanese brought his hand to his chin. He thought of the wintry docks and huge iron ships, running men, signals and operations, morphine arriving in olive oil barrels marked with a particular number. That particular line of business had been blessed. The city just wanted more and more and he was the obscure channel by which it flowed into dirty tenements, to clubs and high-class parties. Meanwhile, he himself was clean, a working man. He thought of himself in a thick coat and tweed cap, his breath steaming. He thought of thick meat sandwiches arriving in greasy paper. Around the work there was a dark penumbra of bosses and friends, number running, whores and horses, the nights, the necessary killings. And outside all of it was Cathy, her white skin and myriad freckles, her rosy nipples, humming as she brushed her hair.

‘America was good,’ he said, ‘very good business. We learned a lot. Maybe I’ll take you there one day. It’s rich, America. You can do well. And I tell you there’s better Sicilian food in New York than there is in Sicily. They have better meat there and good tomatoes from California. Olive oil you have to import. That was one thing I did. I was an importer. I’ll be doing that here too.’

40

Will was pleased to get out onto his motorcycle. The morning with the medical officers had made him gloomy. There was something claustrophobic and hopeless about hearing about the diseases of poverty that they were seeing. It brought into focus what Will had only sensed, made it real and enclosing. Nutritional deficiencies, parasites, diseases and deformities going untreated. At least this part of the island wasn’t malarial, nor were there the poisonings that happened round the sulphur mines. Ripping into the wind, downhill, released Will from this encounter. Probably it had not put him in the right frame of mind to meet a prince. Will was no socialist but the decaying feudalism of this part of the world was distasteful. Surely life could be better organised than princes and peasants? For all their rhetoric of machines and progress, the Fascists seemed to have left Sicily unchanged in this respect.

With the war pounding its way up into Italy, the liberation of mainland Europe underway, Will had started to think of what he might do when it was all over and, somewhat to his surprise, his thoughts had been turning to politics. With his experience, the diplomatic service would obviously have been the ideal fit but he strongly suspected that brown eyes and a middling stature would count against him there as much as in the army. The foreign service required a particular bearing born of a particular parentage, particular schools. Politics, though, was distinctly possible. He relished the slightly sordid associations of the word. He liked the verb form, also: politicking. Complexity, machination, agility, persuasion.

Finding the Prince’s house did nothing to diminish Will’s sense of the injustices of the place. The house was huge and, as the Prince soon explained, it was inhabited only by himself and his daughter. The other people Will could see were servants and estate workers. The house, then, with its many rooms, its decorated ceilings, ancient portraits and skulking dogs, was a vast store of empty privilege. The thought of a daughter, a single daughter, was intriguing. Will didn’t meet her until later. First, he met the Prince.

Prince Adriano was relatively tall for a Sicilian and he spoke with a kind of delighted gaiety that Will had noticed in some educated foreigners when they were addressing Englishmen. They thrilled to converse with a representative of the Empire, Dickens, Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Part of the pleasure seemed to lie in their acting English also, adapting their mannerisms, being clipped and reserved, and dissembling their enjoyment of the whole thing. The pleasure appeared in compacted smiles; it shone in their eyes.

The Prince was affable, meeting Will in a large vestibule. Behind him a large staircase climbed towards the light of a window. ‘I’m very pleased we got the English,’ he said. ‘This is the last outpost, no? Everything west is American.’

‘Even here too in some ways.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘We work very closely with our allies and with our allies’ allies.’

The Prince led Will into a large room where the light from the windows was doubled in an ornate, gold-framed mirror and a table and chairs were set on a rug in the middle of the tiled floor as though floating on a raft.

A servant bustled in with a tray. ‘In your honour,’ the Prince announced, ‘I thought we’d have tea. Thank you, Graziana.’

The servant, a typical peasant woman, short with thick, strong arms, seemed alarmed at hearing her name among the English words. She set down the tray and hurried out.

‘I shall be mother,’ the Prince said, quietly smiling. He poured two cups of what turned out to be flavoured yellow water and dropped half-moons of lemon into them with silver tongs. Will thought he would have preferred Italian coffee.

The Prince sat back, nursing his cup and saucer at his chest. ‘Well, let me tell you a little bit about this place,’ he began. ‘It has been in my family for a long time, since the Normans, although the building is newer than that, as you can tell. Mostly the princes have not been very interested in the estate, finding life to be more gay in Palermo or various other watering holes on the Continent. But I have always been interested in the land, the farming, and I’ve lived here for a long time. That is why I think the British will be far more sympathetic for us here. You understand the land very well, I think. Your relation with it is as long as ours. In America it all belonged to Red Indians until the day before yesterday and all they do is farm beef on those monstrous ranches or tend their crops, I am told, by aeroplane.’

Will obligingly smiled.

‘Are you from the country?’ the Prince asked. ‘Or are you more of a man about town, Piccadilly and so forth?’

‘No, I’m from the countryside. Very green and pleasant land where I’m from. I’m from the Midlands, Shakespeare’s country.’

‘Oh, wonderful. And do you farm?’

‘Not really. My father was a schoolmaster.’

‘I see. Very good.’

Will saw the wave of the Prince’s interest break. The older man relaxed back in his chair. Will felt rejected. He pursued. ‘We used to hunt.’

‘Oh, very good. I’ve never been much of a huntsman myself. This isn’t really the country for it.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘Possibly. Now then, what is it I can do for you?’

Will sipped his sour tea. ‘I wanted to introduce myself and to meet you. You are plainly a significant personage in this area. And as you’ve been here, as you’ve said, for so long, you must be well acquainted with pretty much everyone. The process of identifying Fascists is rather tricky for us, trickier for us than it might be for you.’

‘Yes. Well. That’s a very complicated matter in some ways. Everyone had to deal with them. Sicily was Fascist.’

‘But not everybody had to become one.’

The Prince gazed past Will’s head, considering that formulation. ‘Yes and no,’ he said eventually. ‘They were dangerous people, also they did bring some good changes.’ He laughed. ‘One of them wanted to marry my daughter. Can you imagine? That would have been going a bit far.’

‘So, your daughter remains unmarried?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And you were never a Fascist?’

‘Certainly not. None of the old Sicilian families were. A little enthusiasm here and there but no more than that. The Fascists came from the north. They were invaders, “polenta eaters” as we Sicilians call them. Some Sicilians joined them for advantage.’

‘Not out of conviction, because they believed in it?’

‘Oh, that. My dear fellow, you never know what a Sicilian believes other than that nothing can be done.’ Will disliked this glib, unhelpful remark delivered in such a relaxed tone. The urge came to him, the old mental tic, to hurl his tea into the Prince’s face. Will cleared his throat.

‘This makes it rather difficult for us. We’re trying to establish leaders here, to create a new political class. It’s our job, now the war is over, to make the peace. And it would be nice to know that the people getting involved were not … tainted. We have Cirò Albanese working with us and we know he was not.’

‘Yes, I’d heard he was back.’

‘And Alvaro Zuffo. Heard of him?’

‘Just out of prison, I believe.’

‘That’s correct. What about you? Do you have any interest in politics?’

‘Me? No. The less politics the better. It’s when the peasants get hold of useless political ideas that I have problems. You should be on guard for Communism in this area.’

‘Oh, we are. And would you have any idea who would be sending us denunciations of Cirò Albanese?’

The Prince shifted in his chair. ‘Perhaps you’d like to stay for supper. My daughter will join us. She’s forever disappearing these days. She loves to ride, that one. Do you ride?’

41

Luisa had become stealthy in her own house, a thief in the kitchen at night, returning to her room with food in her pockets and sleeves. She flitted between the movements of the servants. She breathed quietly, full of secrets. The American lived inside her just as he lived, unguessed at, unimagined, in the attic of the house.

She opened the door and saw him again on his hands and knees, peering into the cracks between the floorboards. Lost to her, he was barely a man at all in these moments. His mind was gone and his body had taken over. It was his body, overruling his thoughts, that was determined to survive. It used him indifferently so as to stay alive. He wouldn’t even remember now that he had once kissed her. Perhaps that was better. A different madness of the night. Luisa couldn’t imagine where that might have led, what the future with this man might be.

‘Ray,’ she said.

Ray’s thin head swung around. A face patched with shadows, his beard darkening his cheeks.

‘You look like Saint Onofrio.’

‘What’s that? Who?’

‘Saint Onofrio.’

‘No, you?’

‘Ray, it’s me.’

Ray reached one hand up and swiped across his forehead and eyes. ‘Yes, it’s you. I remember. I do.’ He shivered. ‘I’m gonna sit down,’ he said.

‘Yes. Sit.’

‘Yes, I haven’t finished but …’

‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Yes.’ Ray detached his hands from the floorboards and sat back. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘You have to remember that. There’s nothing here.’

‘I do. I will. I’ll remember.’

42

A young woman entered and Will rose to his feet.

‘Ah,’ the Prince said. ‘Here she is. This is my daughter, the Princess Luisa.’

Will bowed. The young woman seemed startled, breathless even.

‘Excuse me. I did not know we had a guest.’

She touched her hair, pulled at her sleeves. She was fine-looking with a dignified strictness about the nose and mouth, but she wasn’t lovely. Not like the girl in the dark in Palermo. The thought made Will twitch with shame. It was wrong to think of that in this place, wrong but exciting in its way. It made Will think of the warm blood in the Princess’s body also. The Princess had dark, oriental eyes. Perhaps this was her, the Sicilian woman promised by the Invasion Handbook, complaisant and yielding.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes, yes. Everything is quite all right. I’m just here to talk with the Prince. To make your acquaintance.’

‘I see.’ The Princess waited.

‘Excuse me. I should introduce myself. My name is William Walker. I’m …’

‘Walker. Please sit. And has father told you what things are like round here?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why I am never allowed to ride my horse on my own?’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because of bandits, kidnaps.’

‘Luisa, please. Do not exaggerate.’

‘I’m not exaggerating at all.’ She turned to Will. ‘Do not talk is what he means.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

The Prince attempted to explain. ‘The war has been very difficult for us. It was very frightening. So the Princess has become agitated.’

‘Ask Angilù,’ Luisa said. ‘Ask anyone. If they will tell you.’

‘There was a problem here with criminals,’ the Prince said. ‘Very Sicilian. And now people are worried they will come back.’

Will looked at them both. ‘I’ve met Angilù, I think. His name, it’s like “casino”.’

‘Cassini, yes.’

‘He came to me a little while ago. About his house, about owning his house, or rather that you owned it. And about how one of the returnees, Albanese, would claim it as his own.’

‘He is very frightened,’ the Princess said.

‘He works for me for many years. A very good man, very decent. He was a simple shepherd boy when I met him.’

‘Sounds like something out of a poem.’

‘Yes, perhaps. In a way it is.’ The Prince knitted his eyebrows. ‘But it is also normal here. Where there are sheep, someone must be a shepherd.’

‘Of course.’

‘For twenty years we have run the estate together. In a way, he is like a son. He is a peasant, of course, but …’

‘Earlier, you didn’t answer me about Albanese. Angilù isn’t the only one, I don’t think, to have things to say about him.’

The Prince frowned, looking down into his lap. He fiddled with his cigarette lighter. He looked up again. ‘Perhaps you would like to listen to the gramophone?’

‘Possibly. But to stick to the subject.’

‘You like opera? I can find out what we have.’

‘You see, Mr Walker,’ the Princess said. ‘You see what I am saying.’

Prince Adriano twisted around in his chair to look at a clock. He said, ‘Look, Angilù will be here in a little while. Perhaps it would be better to talk to him yourself.’

‘That seems like a good idea.’

‘Perhaps you would like to stay for dinner?’ the Princess asked.

‘That’s very kind. I accept.’

‘I’ll let the cook know,’ the Princess said. And then, compounding this peculiar atmosphere of languor and fear, of ease and morbidity, she said, ‘An American was killed on the Montebianco road. By a mine or an unexploded shell. It happened some time ago but his body is still out there in pieces. It is disgusting. I found it when I was out riding.’

Beginning to describe his evening to Samuels, Will said, ‘It was all rather strange.’

Samuels, in his pyjamas, joining Will for a nightcap, said, ‘Go on.’

‘It was difficult to make them talk. They didn’t want to. Or they did and didn’t. Other than the Princess, fiery little thing. She wanted to talk.’

‘The Princess,’ Samuels laughed. ‘It’s absurd.’ He put on his thickest Cockney accent. ‘Wait till I tells ’em back ‘ome. What was she like?’

‘Quite a pet. Very Mediterranean. Slender. Dark-eyed.’ Will immediately felt that he was misdescribing Princess Luisa. There was a pang of shame at reducing her to this type. He could not find the words to convey her dry, dignified anger, so self-possessed and righteous that at times when she spoke she seemed to rise a few inches off the ground. And there was the quality of her silences too. When she wasn’t speaking, the silence around her was very composed, full of what she was thinking and not saying. Will thought she had recognised his intelligence, saw him as an equal, and that a wordless acknowledgement had passed between them. Perhaps it was she, at last, the one he’d been imagining. ‘Highly intelligent, though, I think.’

‘And what about Cassini? Did he seem plausible?’

‘He too was … circumspect at first. He’s quite a big man, around the shoulders, but he looked small. He looked like he’s not used to speaking to strangers. And his dialect is so thick I had to have bits translated. What he did say was pretty extraordinary. He said that Albanese had threatened his daughter, that he tried to burn down his olive trees and had killed his dog. Cut its throat and left it on his doorstep. Grotesque, isn’t it? Can you imagine the savagery, to slit the throat of an innocent dog like that?’

‘I’m sure the dog’s the least of it.’

Will looked up. ‘Not for the dog. And it’s indicative. The things Cassini was saying. I think the man’s paranoid. He was talking about a big conspiracy of criminals growing now in Sicily. And all this while we were eating this delicious dessert with flowers in it, actual fragrant flowers. I was eating flowers that had been collected from this enormous garden with paths and statuary.’

‘Can we confront Albanese at this point?’

‘I’m not sure what to do. I mean, if it’s true, then this is very big news. The whole reconstruction effort, all of AMGOT, if it’s being used … I mean the implication was very much that he’s not the only one.’

‘Hang on. If it was Albanese’s property before the Fascists — which it was, wasn’t it? — then hasn’t he got a point? A valid claim?’

‘I suppose it depends how he came by it but it is ambiguous.’

‘Didn’t he lease it from the Prince if it belongs to him? How do you get a lease against the owner’s will?’

‘How do you? Threats? Vandalism? We need to corroborate this stuff. I think I need to take action of some kind. Perhaps pre-emptively arrest Albanese and get some answers out of him.’

‘Really? You should contact Messina, no?’

‘That’s a very feeble attitude.’

‘No it isn’t. That would be procedure, wouldn’t it?’

‘It might be but …’

‘So you should. You don’t want them coming back at you, or the Americans.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

Samuels was so infuriating. Compact and logical, in his pragmatism (a man who liked electrical machines), he presented hard impervious surfaces. Will wanted to kick him and break him open. And just as Will was starting to think he wasn’t so bad.

‘You don’t know the first of it, Samuels. You don’t know how volatile and just barmy this place is. The weirdest thing Cassini said this evening was that there was a witch Albanese and his associates consulted and that she’d know everything.’

‘A witch?’

‘Precisely. Mad, isn’t it? Should I try interrogating a witch?’

‘If you’re happy to take the risk of being turned into a frog.’

‘I know. A witch! Where are we? They go to her for cures as well, apparently. I mean, everybody does. Perhaps I will try and track her down. Bound to be a diverting afternoon.’

‘Meanwhile, in the real world, Messina.’

‘But this is the real world. Frightened princes, criminal conspiracies, people slitting the throats of dogs, witches.’

‘It’s not my real world.’

‘It is for now. We have to make sense of it.’

‘We have to control it.’

‘Precisely.’

43

To Angilù, his own family was so beautiful and strange. You live as a shepherd and you might as well be living on the surface of the moon. You sing songs, you make fires and keep yourself warm, but you’re always alone. You live in the distance. You know that you are a fly on a wall, a tiny figure moving up the hillside surrounded by the coloured points of your animals, flowing and halting. You know that their bells can be heard from far away. To the person in town they’d be quieter than stones clicking underfoot or the noise of a grasshopper. There’s so much space you can’t come back from it, even after years, years of people.

Sometimes from across the table Angilù felt himself looking at his wife and daughters as if he were looking at Sant’Attilio from the hills. Staring at them now he felt that there was nothing he could do, that the empty air around their heads would be there after his death, offering no protection. There had to be something he could do.

He looked and couldn’t think of anything. He wanted to escape. He had the urge to get up into the hills, to be in that place again. Maybe it would help.

There was a mule on the estate, a good one, four years old, that Angilù decided he would take.

The mule was a good mule, strong and intelligent. He sat on it with his shotgun on his shoulder and started uphill, the reins pulling at his hands, the sun strong on his arms and shoulders, heating the air caught inside his hat.

In front of him the ground flinched now and again with jumping crickets. Around him they made their dense, wiry sound, the sound of heat and stones and dry plants.

He crossed into an area where the battle had been. This was new to him. The familiar land was altered, ulcerated with small craters. Something had happened here that didn’t care about the land. It had been used. The atmosphere was strange. There was a large burned-out gun still standing. It looked like a humiliated and foolish creature, its long nose blackened by flames. Angilù wondered at it. A place of fury, where men had run for their lives. A tinkling below him: the mule had dislodged rifle bullet casings and they rolled along the ground. Glinting gold pellets. As he moved, the light caught others and he saw them scattered around.

Angilù didn’t know where he was going particularly. Up was his only thought as he followed a route he remembered, a path that was like travelling into his memories. Going hard uphill, the mule snorted and snaked its neck. Angilù saw a tuft of a particular kind of plant growing along a crack in a rock and stopped the animal. Swinging one foot over its skull he got down to strip a few leaves from the fibrous stalks and chew. Sharp lemon and a young green astringency, slightly dusty. It was just as he remembered. A flavour in the hills. Something waiting to happen inside him or whoever passed. Angilù felt sweat as a coolness trickling in his beard. He ran a hand around his chin, flapped the hot air into his face with his hat and then, groaning, remounted.

Riding on he saw that someone had been along there not too long before. Outside a little rock-shelf cave someone had left two snares for foxes. Nothing in them, they lay ready. A fox could be eaten if you really had to and killing them meant that it was more likely you would get to the rabbits or partridges before they did. He hadn’t been up here for so long but it was all coming back to him. It returned him to an old unhappiness that was soothing in its simplicity.

He remembered that around the next height he would be able to look down at Sant’Attilio. And there it was. He dismounted by some low, woody bushes that would keep the mule there browsing. Angilù walked towards the view, his back hurting a little from the ride. Sitting down on the ground, he stared at the huddle of terracotta roofs, the stripe of road, the church tower, the little streets that seemed turned away from the main road for privacy, the houses whisperingly close to each other. Always interesting: to look down at Sant’Attilio and work out what was where, who was here and there. This distracted Angilù for a moment and he felt calm until his fears returned. They swarmed around him, getting closer, tighter.

The Englishman seemed like he would be no help. Angilù hadn’t trusted the look on his face while he listened to him. And what had he said in reaction? The Princess had translated for Angilù. ‘It sounds like you’re in a bit of trouble.’ Something like that. A bit. He had no understanding at all.

And Angilù’s fears were immediate and real and he had to do something, but what? In his pain he cried out loud. He dug his hands into the earth either side of him and pulled. He wouldn’t go back down again until he knew what to do.

44

Teresa thought that the only thing you could trust was God, only the saints on the wall staring out of their gold, suffering and shedding light. The saints stared into a filthy world, where a husband vanishes, leaving a young wife alone with nothing, not even a child. The rites of mourning were terrible and weightless with no body to bury, with nothing to hold Teresa to the earth. Only God above. From that time on, Teresa’s feelings, her pain or alarm, climbed upwards into the sky. Whenever she panicked, her eyes rolled upwards. She clasped her hands to her bosom and her soul called into the blue.

A strange mourning. There were those who didn’t care about her grief and didn’t try to hide it. She felt the curses active in their silences like cockroaches in the darkness when the lamps are out. Even Cirò’s family were difficult with her, thinking she knew something they didn’t. If only she had.

Years later a man without fear emerged and that was Silvio, of all people. And then life. Children.

Then a war comes that kills many in other places, that starves people, and brings the resurrection of Cirò Albanese. A miracle is hard to bear. It is terrifying. It changes everything. She knew how they felt, those women in the Bible, Samson’s mother, the mother of our Lord, or the friends of Lazarus.

And then the end of Silvio. What can you do? Nothing. Claw at your own skin. You can’t do anything. You live.

Teresa was not from one of those families, the Albaneses, the Zuffos, the Battistas, but when she married Cirò she knew what she was doing. She was joining the strong. She would eat. If you’d been hungry as a child you’d understand.

Mattia would not now be hungry. For as long as he lived, however long that was. Her heart raced up into the silence where there was stillness but no answers. When she was dead, finally the saints and angels would appear and speak.

45

‘By it and with it and on it and in it,’ said the Rat. ‘It’s brother and sister to me.’

The book always fell open there at the beginning, flat as a table, the spine cracked, the white stitches of the binding loose and stretched. Will flipped on.

The Mole had long wanted to make the acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt …

And again.

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air.

That was the note he was after — warm parlour, those plush and modest and comfortable English words. Will wanted to climb into the book, to cover his mind with it. His day had been extremely annoying.

Will had sent a scrupulously composed message to Messina commissioning himself for action against Albanese. Neat. Decisive. Reasonable. Will was pleased with it and mentally was preparing himself for the next step and what he would say to Albanese when he apprehended him when the reply came. It was signed by Captain Draycott, of all people, and urged him to inaction, to avoid fuss or trouble. He was to remain a quiet and dutiful servant. Permission was not granted. For Will, this was intolerable. He wouldn’t have Africa repeated. Showing no sign of it except a light sweat appearing on his forehead and a jiggling knee, Will was filled with rage.

He would do it. He would find a way.

46

The saddle and bridle were made from dark red leather. The stitching was strong yellow thread diving down and up through the material. Ray ran his finger over the taut stitches. He could see where the straps down to the stirrups had been folded around and sewn to the right width. He could imagine the pieces before they were sewn together, laid out on a table. They would be different shapes, flat and so much larger than the finished product. You wouldn’t necessarily be able to guess what they would turn into. Ray’s own father worked in leather. Ray remembered the shocking reek of his workshop, the bare lightbulb and dim walls with clock and calendar and cross. The piled leather had an acid tang. His pa sat there bent over the work. His hands were strong and skilful. They had to be to drive the thread through the tough skins. The spectacles on his nose caught the light in two half-moons. They were a concentration of focus. Sometimes he sang to himself. Ray would visit him occasionally to wheedle out of him small change to go to the movies. Afterwards, he would shut the door and leave him there, making things to sell, sewing skins into useful shapes, making a life for his family, alone in that room.

Ray heard the Princess’s footsteps. He turned around and waited for the door to open. She came in, lit up with the secret urgency that surrounded her every time. She said, ‘There are people now clearing away the mines. One of the peasants told me. Your friend. I’m so sorry.’

‘Please don’t. You don’t have to say anything. Thank you.’ He stroked his chin and felt his growing beard, the swarm of smooth fibres under his hand. Unsoldierly now. His body softening.

‘I brought you water.’

The Princess had a bottle in her hand. Not a bottle. What was it called? One of those glass bottles that widened at the top. Some people he knew who worked in restaurants had them at home. A carafe.

‘Thanks.’

Ray watched her walk over to him. She leaned down and he took the bottle from her. He glanced across at where his cup was sitting and she went over to fetch it for him.

She set the cup down and retreated a little way and sat. ‘You like that little horse.’

‘I guess. I like looking at it. It’s a beautiful piece of work. Look at the painting on it.’

She smiled at him fondly, her head on one side. ‘So strange. To meet a stranger. This is something that never happens. There are no strangers here. Usually I only meet the peasants, the aristocrats in Paler mo. We play cards in the same rooms. There are balls, with dancing, all the floors polished. I could go away to see new things but for a woman … It means the end of certain things. A reputation.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘You know, in America the wild west always was interesting to me. Since I was a little girl I always imagine it.’

‘Yeah? Me too, I guess. The pictures anyways. I like those.’

‘For me, what I read. Such a big place, big plains. And horses.’

Ray looked at her. She was smiling quietly, inwardly. She inhaled and Ray saw her taking in that imagined space and freedom. She was picturing it. ‘Would you like to go to those places?’ she asked him

‘I don’t know. I never thought about it, really. I just know those places in movies. I’ve only ever thought of them like that, in black and white. The whole of the country didn’t really exist for me until the army when I met people from places other than New York or Italy. In the army you meet people from all over. I had a friend, George. I have a friend, George. I have his address.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Just this guy. A guy I knew in the army. He came from the Midwest not the far west.’

‘I see. But you could go to those places. They’re in your country and you are a man. You could go there.’

‘I guess.’

‘You seem better today.’

47

Angilù didn’t often carry a shotgun any more and he’d never owned a pistol. He still had a shotgun in his house, its wooden stock worn gaunt over the years, a farmer’s tool. But for this Angilù wanted a pistol. A shotgun could be misinterpreted. People would blame one of Albanese’s natural enemies. A pistol: that might suggest something else had happened. There was a phrase Prince Adriano liked to say in French, a saying from one of the old wars — to encourage the others.

Angilù had a key to the field guards’ room and went there early enough not to be disturbed, stars still bristling in the thick blue western sky, the east thinning out with streaky red. The bloom of lamplight revealed the room much as Angilù remembered it. A particular atmosphere of menace and relaxation and self-regard. Hair oil and clothes brushes and boot polish and oil for leather, hats, boots, a mirror, a Christ, a Saint Rosaria, chairs and ashtrays. Weapons were not visible. They were in a cupboard that the Prince called the armoury. (His own English shotguns were kept in an armoury in the house.) Angilù opened the door. Holsters and harnesses hung like bridles for horses. Long barrels of rifles pointed upwards. In a drawer Angilù found two pistols, holsters and bullets. He picked up a gun and weighed it in his palm. He spun the barrel and listened to its clicks. He pocketed it. No need for a holster.

The door opened. One of the guards, a tall, thick-featured man named Giuseppe with violet marks of sleeplessness under his eyes. Angilù saw them as their eyes met. Giuseppe hesitated, his mouth shaping to say something. After all, he knew about the burned trees, the dead dog. Everybody did. But all he said was ‘Good morning’. And there it was, the silence that filled Angilù with rage. People in a trance, in a dream, blind with fear, silent even though they knew. Angilù would blow it all up but for now he said nothing. He picked up a cardboard packet and poured some bullets into his left hand. Golden and heavy, fat as bees. He dropped them into his other pocket, replaced the box, closed the cupboard and walked out of the room, out into the brightening day.

48

He was back at the coppiced wood. Beyond the straight trucks, out of reach, could be seen the slow, green glinting of the river. Will was trying to work out what he had to do. He could feel his father at a distance, a ferment of anger in the house. Will’s father was dead, of course. Remembering that transferred Will into his father’s presence. His father was at his desk in his study, turned away in his swivel chair. Paper and an open book were outspread before him. Will’s father was dead. He turned around in the chair to speak to his son but he was too tired. He was pale, terribly weak, after the awful effort of dying. He had that ugly scratch by his nose.

Back in the wood, The Wind in the Willows was somehow involved. The animals weren’t like they were in the book. They were disgusting, low to the ground, coarse-haired, fidgeting and shaking and suddenly scurrying away out of sight. Will needed to chase them. That part of the dream didn’t last long. It gave way to a new task. The trees were information of some kind. Their pattern was like Morse code. In the wood somewhere was his younger brother who knew already, who understood. Will turned around looking for him and was blinded by sunlight, hot on his face. That was what woke him up. He was sweating.

The Wind in the Willows appearing in his dream was particularly ridiculous and shaming. He regretted having the book by his bedside. His thoughts would have been sharper, less confused had he been reading his father’s Lucretius. Will felt smeared with shame at the dream, shame which intensified as he remembered another part: he was back at the fish pond. The cover was off. With a kind of tingling pleasure he was dropping tins of food down to the shivering prisoners below, naked in their filth. Anonymous soldiers waited and watched.

Through the shutters came blades of white light and the dry racket of insects and birds. Will kicked off his sheet and got up.

Water to wash his face and to organise his hair. Uniform on.

Samuels had some bad news. ‘Just had one of the local police in. There’s someone else been shot, in Montebianco this time. Funnily enough, no one saw anything. Shotgun wound. Close-range. Not a Fascist, though. Seemed sure about that. A Communist. But, you know, yesterday’s Fascist …’

‘If nobody saw it then nothing happened. It’s the bloody tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. Bury the man and carry on.’

‘Are you losing faith in the powers of justice?’

‘I’ll see. I’m off to Palermo to meet Major Kelly about the Albanese thing.’

‘Had a message from Albanese yesterday. Said he was aware of some black market activity that we should look into.’

‘I’m sure he is.’

49

Palermo had an air of Miss Havisham’s madness about it, grandly baroque and broken up with sudden sky and heaps of rubble. The streets were sordid with people, untrustworthy people, lounging against walls, talking together, watching him pass. Markets seemed to have reopened and fishermen were clearly going out again. Will had to pilot his motorcycle on tiptoe through people ambling around trays of fish, bartering with sheets of the AMGOT money that was already smeared and stained. Revving his engine did nothing to hurry them. There were small red fish with large, simple eyes. There were normal-looking grey fish and on its own, upright on a table, the extraordinary head of a swordfish, like something from a natural history museum. Its long, lordly blade angled up into the air. Behind, its body was sliced, missing sections that had already been sold, gaps of absence.

Will kept twisting in his saddle, alert to every stranger. He was not going to let himself be pickpocketed again. It was a relief to be out of this crowd and riding away.

Will had forgotten how glorious the building was in which AMGOT was headquartered. Stucco and gilt, marble and mosaics. Footsteps were repeated in quick echoes.

Will was shown in to see Major Kelly. He was seated at a large, lion-foot desk. Behind him on the wall, surrounded by an ornate frame, Saint Jerome contemplated his work of translation in rich oil paint. Major Kelly rose to shake Will’s hand. He asked the man who had shown Will in to return with some coffee.

Will sat down and began explaining his concerns about Albanese, the anonymous denunciations and the testimony of Angilù Cassini and Prince Adriano. Will did so quickly and precisely. Major Kelly listened sitting back in his chair, so still that the reflections in his spectacles didn’t move. When Will had finished, he leaned forwards and said that it was good Will had come to him with these anxieties.

The coffee arrived.

‘“Anxieties” might not be quite the word,’ Will said.

‘Whatever you want to call it. Look, I know we picked up some pretty interesting characters to help us out with Operation Husky. Our Italian friends in America are a — what shall I say? — an enterprising group of people. I was always assured we were vetting them thoroughly. I don’t know anything about Albanese in particular. He wasn’t in gaol. Some of the guys came out of prison here. I guess you knew that.’

Kelly lifted a hand and plucked his spectacles from his face. The effect for Will was strangely disconcerting. He saw that Kelly looked quite different to how Will had thought he looked. Beneath his spectacles, his eyes were bigger. There was a greater distance between his nose and upper lip. His nude head, with large pink eyelids and smooth cheeks, was uncanny to look at. Will realised that the spectacles somehow summarised and finished Kelly’s face, fronted for it. After he replaced his spectacles, hooking them around his ears again, Will was left to fit his appearance back together.

‘I guess what I could do is get some questions asked and let you know. Is that the sort of thing you’re after?’

‘At least. I want more. I think I should step in and relieve Albanese of his powers until we know, frankly, who the hell he is.’

A smile lit up Kelly’s face. ‘I see. Action. Command. Good for you, kid. It’s what this island needs if we’re going to make a peace that will last. There’s politics brewing in Palermo, I’m telling you. Separatists. Communists. It’s all going to get messier before it gets clean.’

Will flew back on his motorcycle. You see, he thought to himself, you see, it’s possible. The Allies were virtuous in their bringing of peace. There was suffering that didn’t need to happen, violence that they could prevent. But it took someone of Will’s acuity and daring to bring it about, to align insight and action and bloody well do something. He sped through the burning air rehearsing in his mind the words he would use when he apprehended Albanese. They were coolly understated and commanding. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to have a word or two … I’m sorry, Mr Albanese, but I’m going to have to … I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr Albanese.

50

The door was unpainted, the wood raw and dry. It looked like he could pick splinters out of it with his thumbnail. The surface of the door was subdivided into four sections, four rectangles separated by narrow raised sections. Ray wasn’t sure why that was, maybe for reinforcement. He stood close enough to the door to listen beyond it.

The handle was high up on the left side. It was made of slender brass, notched along the edges, and curved in a rapid flourish like a line in someone’s signature. The notches gave it a texture you would feel.

I won’t die if I open the door. If I open the door I will not die.

Ray saw his hand reach out and hold the handle, four fingers and a thumb, the lines of bones under the skin, the frill of dark hairs at his wrist. He opened the door and on the other side the narrow staircase plunged down. It was as steep as a ladder. Ray stepped through, holding his breath, out onto the first stair and then the next, carefully clambering down into the rest of the world.

In the main house, perspectives travelled into depth through arches of doorways. No telling where Princess Luisa was in all that. He might miss her entirely.

Ray walked among paintings and curved, decorated furniture that stood up on the balls of its feet. Unharmed, unhindered, he found the large staircase and descended. In the large vestibule, under silent painted clouds, he looked right and left. He turned right and walked into a set of sunlit rooms.

In the third large room he came upon Luisa at a large table eating breakfast with an old man, presumably her father. There was a woman servant who looked at Ray then dropped her head, reddening. Luisa’s eyes were wide and tried to communicate something — fear, a plea, a warning. Ray realised that he would not be able to say goodbye in the way he’d intended. Now the old man was standing up and addressing him. Ray interrupted him.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. I got separated from my unit a while back in the fighting. I’ve been lost.’

‘You’ve been lost a long time.’

‘I’ve been lost a long time. Can you tell me the road for Palermo?’

‘And how did you get in?’

He could feel Luisa’s gaze pressing against him.

‘I came in. I walked in. I’m sorry to disturb you. I didn’t realise it was still early.’

‘You should walk out the same way you came in then turn right on the road and keep going for a day or so.’

Luisa said something to the old man in Italian, under her breath. The old man sighed and said, ‘The first town you go through, the town not the few separate houses, there are people there who can help you.’

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you.’ Ray looked at Luisa who looked down at her plate. She seemed angry. There was nothing he could say.

As he walked out of the room, Luisa looked up again to see his back retreating. He had tried to make his uniform as neat as possible. The beard on his face had looked so thick in the light, black as beetles. She was stuck to her chair, losing him. Nothing she could do, no power. And even if she could run after him, what would she be able to say? If she moved to Paris she might have a life, or Rome. Here in this life there was nothing. She had on her plate two peaches from the garden. She picked up her knife, trembling.

51

The world blazed into Ray’s eyes full of a million things. Light poured down. The sound of insects pulsed out of trees and bushes. He tried to whistle with his dry mouth, tried to remember how soldiers walked. His legs were shaking. After the gloom of the attic, the light was blinding. It hurt like diamonds crushed into his eyes. He hung his head and walked, the road around him leaping up in explosions that didn’t happen. If you’re not dead you carry on. He said, George, I’m coming. Wind raced against his skin. He kept walking.

A noise getting louder behind him: the crunch of footsteps. Ray assumed the final end. He closed his eyes. His shoulders stiffened. His hands closed. He heard his name. ‘Ray. Ray.’ It was her voice.

It was strange to see the Princess outside, in the real light of day. She stood in front of him, small and blinking. Her hair moved in the wind. She seemed very clear and separate. Her skin was paler than indoors. She raised a hand of delicate fingers to her forehead to make a visor against the sun.

‘Where are you going? You should say goodbye. You shouldn’t just go like that.’

‘I’m sorry. I did. I wanted to.’

‘It’s not nice just to go like this.’

Her voice sounded different. She stood there detached from the long dream of his days in hiding.

‘I wanted to say thank you to you.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I said. I have to go to Palermo. I have to go back. I’m sorry.’

The Princess was looking down, her eyes in her hand’s shadow. The soft flesh of her lower lip was caught between her teeth.

‘But …’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve been so kind to me.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You have to go. I don’t know what I’m doing following you. I don’t know what I’m doing.’

‘I’m really grateful.’

‘Are you? Wait. Will you wait? I’ve had an idea. I can drive you to Palermo. I can get the car and a driver. I can take you all the way.’

‘You don’t have to …’

‘I know I don’t but I want to. Will you wait? Will you stay here?’

‘Sure.’

‘Stay here.’

The Princess turned and hurried away. Ray watched her go. She went with rapid steps that lifted and broke into a run that was awkward to maintain against her long skirt. In that effort and urgency, Ray saw something. Maybe he was wrong, but it looked like love. For him. For another person. For no reason, just given, just happening. It was love that made her hurry. He couldn’t keep it; it wouldn’t last. He had to get back to Palermo and do whatever came next but there it was. It would keep him safe a little while longer, for this journey in her car.

52

Everything was very clear.

Angilù sat opposite the church and waited. A lizard flickered onto the wall beside him, quick on its tiny fingers, its small tail lashing. It froze, picked up its head, the flat mouth fixed in a smile. Angilù saw its throat pulse. It darted away. Making the decision had been difficult, like stepping through a flaming doorway and out through an avenue of burning trees. But now he was beyond, he was calm. He could see everything.

Blind Tinu was folded in the shadows of the church doorway. Always there, empty as a clock, feeling the passing of the hours, hearing the clatter of the bell. Tinu was never a witness. He never said anything, never made sense. You gave him a coin or a piece of bread and it was like tossing it into a well, his reaction just splash and echoes and silence again.

Angilù had to be careful about other people seeing him. He was not one of them. He would not be treated as invisible. The others did not fear him enough to erase him from their sight. Nevertheless, he felt peaceful and secure in his purpose. The decision was like a final acquiescence. Angilù had given in and become part of the place. Resisting it with other methods had been exhausting and useless. Now he had recognised his fate, embraced it, married it. He was pleased and placid as a bridegroom.

The gun was wedged in his waistband and he sat so that no one could see. The church had sucked in its widows for Mass and exhaled them out again and still no sign. Angilù couldn’t wait for ever. He’d left his wife and children alone. He might be in the wrong place. He might be too late.

He gave it one more hour.

Angilù got up and walked across the square and up the steep road, past the church and mindless Tinu to the house where Silvio had lived until he’d been killed. He cleared his throat at the door and knocked then put his hand to the handle of the pistol.

The door was opened by a child. Albanese sat smoking in the middle of the whitewashed space. His eyes focused sharply when he saw Angilù. Albanese knew immediately. But he exhaled smoke slowly before he said, ‘What do you want?’

Angilù wanted to say something frightening like ‘Those are beautiful children’ but he couldn’t think of a whole sentence and his throat was too dry. Instead, he stared, his hand on the gun.

Albanese ordered the children out of the room. To Angilù, this preparation made it seem as though Albanese wanted it to happen too, as though there was an agreement between the two men. The children were hurried out by the oldest boy. He pushed them out with his feet but he didn’t leave. Angilù turned to look at him. Albanese said, ‘You’re doing this all wrong. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ Then Albanese started to move in his seat so Angilù pulled out the gun and shot him. A red circle smacked over one eye and the top of his nose. His mouth fell open as his head lolled back. Angilù shot him twice more in the chest, the shots making a huge din in the closed room. He’d done this before. This had happened before. Firing into the dark up in the mountains. Albanese went over backwards on the wooden chair. His feet bounced as he landed. Angilù moved the gun across to point at the boy, not to kill him but to keep him still. The boy was panting. After the pistol smoke had cleared there was still smoke coming from Albanese. Angilù thought his shirt might have caught fire and glanced across and saw a cigarette still alight between his fingers. A spreading puddle was reaching his wrist. Angilù nodded at the cigarette and said to the boy, ‘It will burn him.’ The boy, holding the door frame, looked confused. Angilù turned and walked out.

He walked down the little street. He turned left at the bottom and headed out of Sant’Attilio, back to his house and family. He realised that he was lost but he wasn’t worried for his family yet. He was full of his accomplishment, very calm and fulfilled, relieved, although it occurred to him that he hadn’t got round to telling his wife where he’d buried some money, wrapped up in a bag with the gold ring the Prince had given him years and years ago. They could make use of that. Angilù walked the familiar road. He was unsurprised to hear footsteps running up behind him and to feel the boy on his back. He got his hand up quickly enough that the knife sliced his fingers instead of his throat.

Swerving around, bucking like a goat trying to leap out of a pen, Angilù got free of the boy’s grasp. He went for the gun in his pocket but had to use the wrong hand. The boy rushed at him and stabbed him a few times. Angilù didn’t feel the blade going in, just thumps to his body like punches. He threw his arms around the boy’s neck to slow him and felt stripes of narrow itchiness appear across his back. The boy shook Angilù off and he fell to the ground. The boy thumped him a few more times. Angilù felt tired and irritable. The boy didn’t need to keep going on like that. It was unnecessary. He stopped. Angilù was wet and cold. There were stones under his face. He was where he’d always been, lying on the ground. He couldn’t move at all.

Mattia stood over the body, swearing. He was stained with Cassini’s blood and angered by the humiliation of discovering that some of the wetness on his trousers was his own urine. He bent down and took the man’s gun out of his pocket. There’d still be three bullets in that. He prodded the body with his foot. Nothing. Mattia didn’t know what to do now except go home and wash. After he could go to the police and show them Albanese’s body like he’d just run from the house. Later, he would seek out Alvaro Zuffo. Zuffo would look after him. He would know what to do.

53

The razor tugged at the long hairs of his beard, cutting squares and rectangles into the foam. His full face inched back into view in the spotted mirror above the sink.

The new uniform was loose on him but still Ray felt decent, fresh and ordinary. He was one of the men. He walked the corridors, perfectly upright, trying not to think or remember.

But before he could do anything else, he needed to explain the course of events, to excuse himself. Opposite him, a man sat at a typewriter. The man hunched forwards and produced a burst of preliminary typing. He said, ‘If you want to smoke, go right ahead.’

‘That’s okay.’ Ray wondered what sort of person this man was, where he came from. There wasn’t anything that gave him away.

‘So, start at the beginning. You were with Anthony Geminiano.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And then what?’

‘Well, ah. Ah. It was … Jesus, what happened?’

‘Look, don’t worry.’ The man sat back from the typewriter, his hands in his lap. ‘I don’t think there’ll be trouble. You were gone awhile but you’re back. Happened to a lot of guys. Coming back is not desertion, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. I didn’t.’

‘Like I said. Now, you said there was a blast?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So. Amnesia. And now you’re back.’

‘I’m back. I see. That is what happened. It is. That’s what happened.’

‘Fine. Tell me from the beginning.’

‘We came through the fighting. We got lost. We were really lost.’

‘Okay. Go on.’