Medusa

XVIII

The first time the car passed by, Gabriele was heating up a packet of dried mushroom soup to which he’d added some fresh porcini from a long-remembered patch in a thicket near the river. In a minor miracle that seemed to collapse the intervening years, it had turned out still to be there. The second time, when the same car passed by in the opposite direction, he was eating the soup with some bread bought in the local town three days earlier. Dunked in the creamy brown broth, it was just about palatable.

Despite the indifferent light, he was also reading — in a very nice, tight seventh-edition copy (Hachette, 1893) — Hippolyte Taine’s Voyage en Italie. A memory popped into his mind of a friend who had noticed one of the annual postcards of Perseus holding the Medusa’s head, without of course understanding its significance, and had commented that if we could travel back to Cellini’s Florence and vice versa, we would be appalled by the smells and he by the noise.

Time travel, the only kind Gabriele was still interested in, was unfortunately not yet possible, but his days here in the country had retrofitted his sense of hearing, which had become as acute as a cat’s. At the cascina, the silence was intense, broken only by the murmur of an occasional aeroplane far above. The little strada comunale that passed the estate had finally been paved, but there was almost no one left with any interest in using it. So when the car drove past the first time, it was an unusual event. Gabriele tracked it, noting the specific characteristics of the engine sound. When it then returned, stopping about a hundred metres beyond the driveway, probably in that copse where the long-abandoned back entrance to a neighbouring property joined the road, he put his book and his bowl of soup aside and grabbed the pack of supplies he had prepared.

His plans had been made for a long time, and were based on a chance encounter with an elderly Chinese man in the Parco Sempione in Milan. In the midst of the usual crew of junkies, whores of both sexes and indigent homeless people, this tiny, wizened person had been tranquilly performing something that looked like art of some kind: a living statue modulating slowly but very surely between various ritualistic poses.

Gabriele had approached the man and asked what he was up to. When he replied that he was practising a form of self- defence called ‘t’ai chi’, Gabriele had almost laughed. He associated the oriental martial arts with savage kicks, bone-breaking hand blows and a lot of screaming.

‘Your silent ballet is very beautiful, but how could it help if someone tried to beat you up?’

‘It would be very difficult for anyone to attack me,’ the man said in a quiet, almost apologetic tone.

This time Gabriele did laugh.

‘But what on earth could you do if one of the scum who hang around here went for you with his fists, or even a knife?’

The Chinese man regarded him with a gaze so dignified that it seemed a reproach.

‘I would so arrange matters that I was not in the place where the blow struck.’

This was now Gabriele’s strategy. He had no way of knowing whether the solemn promises in his letter to Alberto about never revealing the truth about Leonardo’s death, still less Operation Medusa, had had any effect, but his last call to Fulvio had elicited the disquieting information that the win¬ dow of the shop had been smashed, and that a policeman had been there making enquiries regarding his whereabouts and those of his sister. He had almost been tempted to phone Paola for further details, but her line would almost certainly be tapped.

He had decided to wait another few days before making a further appeal to Alberto. In the meantime, if anyone had managed to track him down and came looking for him, it would be almost impossible for them to approach the farm complex without him seeing or hearing them, and once they had entered he would so arrange matters that he was not in the place where they struck.

The main gates of the cascina were closed and locked, but he had deliberately left the door inset into them slightly ajar. When pushed, it always squeaked on its hinges. It did so now. Gabriele ran quickly downstairs and out of the rear door of the casa padronale into the overgrown garden where the family had sometimes taken tea in the then-fashionable English manner, past the factor’s house, the laundry, the old stables and the porcilaie for the pigs and hens, then around the corner to the row of two-up, two-down houses formerly occupied by the workers on the estate. In through a rear window that he had left open and up to the first floor bedroom window.

‘Gabriele!’

He recognized the voice immediately, but he had also been counting the footsteps ringing out on the stones of the resonant courtyard. There was only one set, so Alberto had come alone. He might of course have back-up in reserve, but that was unlikely. In a matter of this delicacy, whom could he trust? Either way, it was time to find out. He opened the window, lit one of the fireworks he had bought earlier and tossed it out.

The answer was a gunshot. The bullet came nowhere near Gabriele, but the response had been immediate and without the slightest hesitation. Alberto must already have had a pistol in his hand. In a way, this came as a relief. The terms of engagement had been established. Now he had to keep moving, rapidly, and always in the same direction. This aspect of the business he had gleaned from further explanations provided by the t’ai chi performer. The art of the thing was to hypnotize your opponent with a seemingly ineluctable pattern of movement, a process with its own rhythm and dynamics, and then, at the last moment, disappear from it.

But to do that, he first had to appear. This would inevitably be dangerous, but Gabriele’s army experiences had proved that despite his seemingly infinite capacity for irrational anxieties of all kinds, he was virtually insusceptible when it came to real, solid, substantial threats. Indeed, he almost welcomed them. They took his mind off the other stuff. Nevertheless, his army experience had also amply demonstrated that his fearlessness far exceeded his competence. ‘If this had been real, you’d be dead,’ he’d been told more than once in the course of a training exercise. Now it was real. This still didn’t scare him — as the child his imaginary fears revealed him to be, he still believed himself to be immortal — but it made him wary. He wasn’t afraid to risk his life, but he would have hated to give these bastards the satisfaction of killing him.

Downstairs to the communal kitchen at the front of the house. A glance outside showed a figure prowling aimlessly about the aia in the rising mist, seemingly at a loss how to proceed. Now for the tricky part. Gabriele had eased the catch and hinges of the front door with olive oil, as he had those of the window upstairs, but there were no guarantees. It was strange to recall that one of the specialist courses the four of them had taken together all those years ago had been in close-quarter house-to-house combat. Nestore and Leonardo had been by far the best.

He opened the door gradually, then slipped through the gap and ran as fast as he could to his left, weaving and ducking as they’d been trained to do. Two shots in rapid succession, sounding like thunder in the well of the yard. One bullet struck the brickwork to his right. Gabriele raced up the steps of the porcilaie and through the trapdoor at the top, bolting it behind him. Then it was out through the ventilation aperture — barred in the traditional chequered wrought-iron fashion, but he and his brother Primo had cut down the screws, leaving only the heads in place, to create another secret exit — and on to a branch of the huge poplar just outside. By now he was ten years old again. Up the steeply curving limb to the point where it overhung the roof, from which it was an easy drop on to the terracotta tiles.

Reaching the crest of the roof, he produced another banger from his bag and launched it down into the courtyard. The explosion was satisfyingly loud, but this time there was no return shot. He worked his way along the rooftop to the slightly higher eaves of the factor’s house, and then went flying as a loose tile slipped free under his weight.

By stripping his fingers on the remaining tiles he managed to save himself from going over the edge, but the net result was a twisted ankle which all but put paid to his original strategy. Grunting from the pain, he worked his way along the roof to the small stone tower housing the bell whose peals, audible for kilometres over the flatlands all around, had once governed every stage of the working day of everyone on the estate.

Footsteps sounded out in the courtyard. Alberto had evidently either failed to open the trapdoor, or given up trying to find his way in the maze of buildings, a palimpsest dating from between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries. In one of his few lighter moments, his father had once joked that even the rats must get lost sometimes.

‘Stop playing these stupid games, Gabriele! We need to talk! I mean you no harm, I swear it. You startled me with that firework. Come out in the open. We just need to discuss what’s happened and agree on a strategy. You must know that that’s inevitable sooner or later. Let’s get it over and done with now. Then you can go back to Milan and get on with your life.’

Gabriele’s plan at this stage of the performance had been to drop down through the hatch at the base of the belfry, go downstairs through the factor’s house, then dash across the remaining open side of the courtyard to the safety of the barchessale. Once there he would show himself briefly at intervals, always moving to his left. Alberto would intuitively assume that he would then proceed to the one remaining side of the rectangular structure, and would head for that to cut him off. Meanwhile Gabriele would pick up his bicycle from the niche where he had stored it and slip away through the gateway at the south-eastern corner of the cascina, through which the farm wagons used to enter and leave without disturbing the gentry, for whom the main entrance was reserved. While Alberto was fruitlessly searching the hayloft and byre, he could be off and away without anyone inside being any the wiser. He had done it often enough in the past.

In those days he had simply sauntered over to the open- sided sheds and spent some time chatting with old Giorgio, who was responsible for the upkeep and repair of the wagons and farm equipment stored there, before slipping out of the porta dei carri, but now he needed to sprint rather than saunter, and with his ankle in the state it was, that was out of the question. In short, his concept had been perfect but his performance, as so often before, had let him down. Real t’ai chi masters didn’t twist their ankles.

And the stakes were high. Despite the weasel words that continued to echo around the courtyard below, Alberto’s three shots had left no doubt in Gabriele’s mind about his intentions, and at ground level, in his present condition, he would be an easy target. As for the rear of the property, it was now overgrown with brambles at the north-east corner. That left only the roofs.

The gently sloping ridges and troughs of terracotta tiles had been familiar territory to him in his teens, but even then he had never ventured there after sunset, in misty late autumn, with a throbbing ankle and a killer ready to shoot him down the moment he presented a silhouette against the dying light. The tiles were slippery with moss and dead leaves, many were missing and all were loose. In one spot, the roof of the wagon shed had collapsed entirely, leaving a gaping hole. It took more time than he had ever imagined to crawl and hobble round to the hay loft on the southern side of the complex. If his memory served, there was an elm somewhere about there which jutted out over the roof. He wasn’t looking forward to shinning down it, but there was no alternative, and at least he would be in complete cover the whole time.

By now the light had almost completely gone, and he was still searching in vain for the remembered overhanging bough when the roof gave way beneath him. It was a gradual process lasting perhaps ten seconds: a gentle crack, a slow subsidence like sinking into a pile of pillows, then a deafening series of detonations and a terrifyingly quick descent.

‘Gabriele!’

Alberto’s booming tones recalled him to the realities of the situation. He was aching, but otherwise uninjured. The fall had been short, ending on a mound of festering hay. He was inside the raised and open loft, lying on top of the section of collapsed roof. The only exit was over the side giving on to the courtyard. Then he heard the scrape of a ladder being lift¬ ed off its metal hook and placed against the wall.

So prone to lethargy and despair in his everyday life, Gabriele showed no symptom of either now. His first thought was to fling one of the fallen tiles at his enemy the moment his head cleared the edge of the floor. Then he had an even better idea.

Alberto’s torch and gun appeared before he did, the former’s cold barrel of compressed light scouting out the space before coming to rest on the freshly-fallen tiles and timbers lying on the hay. Its owner climbed up the remaining rungs of the ladder and stepped out on to the brickwork paving.

‘Gabriele?’

There was no sound at all. Alberto walked over to the debris and inspected it with his torch, then turned and shone the powerful beam all around the floor of the loft. Then he started to search the space more carefully, pistol at the ready, obviously suspecting that his quarry was hiding under or behind one of the many pieces of agricultural detritus that littered the barn.

Perched on the main roof-beam above, Gabriele awaited his moment, gripped the knotted climbing rope as he had so many times in the past while playing the game that he and his brother had called ‘flying skittles’. As Alberto returned towards the centre of the floor after overturning two casks and a wooden wheelbarrow, Gabriele launched himself into space, hurtling down and then twisting at the last moment on the rope to ram his uninjured foot into Alberto’s back.

It was then that everything went out of control. Gabriele’s intention had simply been to disarm and subdue his opponent, but Alberto rolled over and slipped into the botola, the aperture designed for pushing hay down to the cattle in the byre below. For a moment his fingers clung desperately to the slimy brickwork, but there was not sufficient purchase and Gabriele could not reach him in time. There was a dull thump from below, then a scream that went on and on.

A moment later, Gabriele heard another voice in the courtyard. So Alberto had brought back-up after all. He picked up the pistol and torch, but privately he acknowledged defeat. He would go down fighting, but he had exhausted his stock of feints and dodges and had no illusions about the final outcome.