The Moon Tunnel

Azeglio had done everything his captor had asked but he knew now that he was still going to die, and that it would be here, in the trench, beside the moon tunnel. When he’d asked, long after he was capable of saving his life, she’d told him what had been in the wine: scopolamine and morphine, a mixture she’d no doubt given many of her patients. He’d felt the rapid heartbeat first, and then the bloom in his cheeks as the blood rushed to the surface, but, stupidly, had assumed it was his excitement, the possibility that she would be his again that night, as she had once been long before.

He looked around now, as though he saw the trench for the first time. He smiled with lips lopsided from the drugs, and ran his tongue, excruciatingly dry, along his immaculate teeth, tasting the blood from the gash. It had taken just two hours to remake his life, re-centre it around those few seconds in the tunnel more than twenty years before, when he’d lain in wait for his brother, killed him for love, not for money, shot away the face that so resembled his own, then reached forward through the earth to reclaim the ring she’d given him.

March 30, 1984. The day of his father’s funeral. They’d met in the old woodstore behind Il Giardino, agreed then that Jerome would go down to check what was left in the tunnel, swearing never to tell the story, so that the knowledge would die with Marco. And then Jerome would go to Italy, as he had always wanted, and try to raise cash from the family. He would go quickly, telling no one, especially Mamma, who would tell him not to beg. That they had promised, and that was where Azeglio had been deceived. Jerome had told someone: his first and only love.

Azeglio stood now before her, confused by the drugs, feeling a childlike acquiescence, the result of the scopolamine, but feeling no pain because of the morphine. He’d laughed when she accused him, and so she struck him with the butt of the pistol. His pistol, the one that Marco had left. So he said it out loud then, to hurt her, really hurt her, as she was hurting him.

‘I killed him. Right here. I loved you, so I killed him.’

The trap had been exquisite. She’d told him over the wine that she would return with him to the site, sleep with him in the makeshift office. She’d touched his face, a moment of exquisite happiness after the years of cold denial, years in which he had only to touch her to know that he had failed: failed to be who she really wanted – his brother. He’d let her drive, tossing the keys to her as they left the flat. She’d reminisced as they made their way to California, scenes from the life they once had in the handful of years after their marriage. Years in which they’d tried for the child which had been denied them. But now, perhaps, a new beginning.

Until she asked the question: ‘Why did you kill him?’

He sank to his knees, finally unable to keep the muscles taut. She watched his pupils dilate, and his speech began to weave between the octaves, searching for a note. The scopolamine, unstitching his inhibitions, inflated his sense of security, and he let the ghost of a smile cross his lips. So she hit him hard with the pistol again, and he went down and lay there crying. She led him to the end of the trench, to the moon tunnel, to a place of execution, his knees collapsing at every other step, until she could go no further. There was little light, but the halogen blue just touched his hair, like a halo.

‘So why kill him?’ she asked again.

He looked up and into the gun. ‘Because he loved you. Because even if he went to Italy he’d come back. Because you loved him, and I’d seen you together, and I couldn’t live after that.’ He cried, humiliated by confession.

There was a jigsaw now, and she knew the picture. The telephone calls to Gina were such a simple lie, for Azeglio’s voice had so many times made her feel she was holding Jerome. She could admit that now: that she’d married him to remind her of the past she’d lost, the future she’d lost. And the ring: returned by post with the flowers – no note, not a word.

‘You planted the ID disc,’ she said, and he smiled, pleased with the deception.

That made her angry enough, so she lifted the gun. And he stood, briefly, waiting for what would happen to him next.

‘I’m going to kill you for this, for robbing us of the life we had, and for sentencing me to the one I had with you.’

His eyes sharpened feebly with fear, then swam again. He begged for his life, knowing that it would provoke her to end it. He never heard the shot, the force of it breaking his neck as it ripped through his cheekbone and skull. But as his head lolled forward, and the last second of his life congealed, he thought of the twenty-five years he had stolen from them, and it thrilled him.