The Thing Itself

NINETEEN

Jimmy Tingley drove south in a thunderstorm. Lightning leaped between wooded hills, thunder rumbled along the valleys, rain fell in sheaves across wheat fields and olive groves. He drove slowly for the road was treacherous. Twice his car slithered on steep bends.

He dawdled through the soft Tuscan countryside, then observed it become harsher south-east of Siena. The road through San Quirico passed between crumbling chalky cliffs and on either side of him the rocky ridges that separated the river valleys were without the familiar blanket of trees.

He ate a melancholy lunch in the sullen perfection of Pienza’s renaissance square. In the late afternoon he stopped at the village of Montepulcello, high on a promontory. He stood in the rain at the medieval gateway, gazing blankly at the seashells embedded in the yellow stone.

Around six, he came to Orvieto, a beached galleon stranded on a rocky plateau, wreathed in mist. He entered through the west gate and the bleak buildings that lined each narrow street swallowed up the sprawling hills beyond.

Lost in the one-way system, he parked carelessly in a large, deserted square, then sat for a moment, squinting through the fast beat of the windscreen wipers. Old palaces with stained walls and blank windows on every side. The rain drubbing the car roof.

Jimmy Tingley, ex-SAS tough guy, marooned in the rain. So overcome with exhaustion he did not even want to leave the car. Jimmy Tingley, killer, trying to hold himself together.

He knew he was fragmenting. He’d known it was inevitable for years. Years of not allowing himself to show that he cared. Years of the serpent in his belly.

A quote from Thomas Wolfe, the Yank writer, constantly ran through his head. Read years ago in an essay entitled God’s Lonely Man and memorized.

He whispered it: ‘The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.’

Tingley was a Barnardo’s boy. An orphan. No, not correct, he reminded himself. Abandoned. When he was in the intelligence community, he’d easily tracked down his mother. Well, if you can’t take advantage of the resources at your disposal for you own purposes, what was the point?

She was dead and she’d been a prostitute, and, understandably, couldn’t deal with a little kid. Understandable, but it meant that all he’d ever known was the orphanage and foster homes.

He didn’t think about his childhood. Daren’t.

The army saved him. He had a sense for righting wrongs. He didn’t go so far as to think himself a good man but he had a belief in wrong and right. He watched out for the underdog. In the army it was given a context.

Except that he didn’t really like being part of a gang. He’d long been a man who loved solitude, drawn to remote places. Not that he was one of those desert-loving Englishmen like Thesiger or T. E. Lawrence.

He had done his share of desert work but he’d thought it would be the sea for him. However, many oceans crossed had left a lack in him. In his best moments, he thought himself a romantic loner. In his worst, he thought himself something else.

He was thinking about the last time he had seen the Albanian assassin, Drago Kadire. Not so long ago the long-range sniper had been tied to a chair in John Hathaway’s Brighton house, bloodied and beaten. Kadire had given Tingley the information he’d needed. Tingley had gone on to kill several of Kadire’s associates but he had spared the sniper. He’d handed him over to the police, knowing he wouldn’t be in custody long.

There came a night on the Brighton seafront. Hathaway was dead and Tingley was standing beside the gangster’s one-time mistress, Barbara, discussing taking revenge on the last king of Brighton’s killer.

Tingley liked Barbara. He was sorry for the life of prostitution that had been thrust upon her by others. His mother had been in the same line of work. He mourned her still.

He remembered the distant crack a moment after Barbara’s head exploded. Tingley ducking, turning, scanning the near and the distant horizons. A glint of light reflected somewhere high, then gone.

A sniper. It had to be Kadire.

There was no reason for him to kill Barbara. But then Tingley didn’t think he intended to. With a damaged eye from the beating he’d sustained, Kadire would not have been at his best. Tingley had been the target. He’d given the man a break and Kadire had repaid the gesture by trying to kill him.

There was only one way to respond to that.

Tingley roused himself, took a small case from the back seat and walked towards an illuminated hotel sign outside one of the larger palaces. The glass door shuddered as it caught in the wind and slammed behind him. He stood in the high, arched entrance hall for a moment. He thought he heard a baby cry; it might have been a cat.

He walked to the foot of a broad, marble staircase. It was unlit. He hesitated, drawn by the shabby grandeur, made cautious by the gloom. A soft voice, so close Tingley could feel the warm breath on his ear.

‘There is someone to meet you on the first floor.’

A tall young man, in a black suit and a white shirt, was standing beside him. He could have stepped from the sixties, a period now fashionable again in Italy. His hair was long over his ears and a large black moustache emphasized the paleness of his cheeks. Rather than a member of the Italian Mafia, he looked every inch the romantic hero.

Tingley stifled his surprise. He nodded his thanks and, conscious of his tired legs, started slowly up the steps into the shadows. He entered a spacious reception room and raised an eyebrow when he saw the same young man awaiting him there.

The young man glanced carelessly at the passport and car keys Tingley thrust into his hand.

‘Federico di Bocci. You have met my twin brother, Guiseppe, downstairs. My sister Maria will show you to your room.’

A young woman detached herself from the gloom and stepped across to the doorway.

‘Please,’ she said, in a voice even softer than her brother’s. She smiled and inclined her head slightly to indicate that he should follow.

She led him to a tiny lift. She walked gracefully, lightly. There was scarcely room for the two of them in the lift. He was conscious of her physical presence as they made their shaky progress up to the next floor. She was a shapely woman and her black woollen dress emphasized her breasts and hips. Her heavy perfume filled the chamber.

She had her brother’s melancholy eyes and thick black hair but her lips were fuller, her face less pale. Tingley found it hard to assess her age. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five perhaps.

When the lift jolted to a halt, she squeezed past him into the blackness. She reached for a switch on the wall and a dim overhead light illuminated about ten yards of a corridor. He followed her as she walked ahead and pressed another switch. As the light ahead came on, the one behind went out. And so they progressed, from darkness into light.

She stopped before a broad, carved door and he heard the rasp of a key in its lock. The room was long, with an ornate four-poster bed at its far end. On the left-hand wall were two long double windows. He went to one of them. It looked down into an interior courtyard strewn with broken marble and fragments of stone. Across the yard, identical windows, shuttered.

‘The Di Bocci family lives here long?’ Tingley attempted in his feeble Italian. He only knew the present tense, as she only seemed to know the present in English.

‘For three centuries. We are the last.’ She gazed at him until he turned his face away. ‘My father will be here in the morning,’ she added.

‘Good,’ he said.

He slept on top of his bed through the rest of the afternoon then went back into the rain. He found a trattoria and ate and drank hungrily, thinking about the task he had set himself. Thinking about the futility of revenge. Determined to have it anyway.