Zollo stood there with Ian Fleming’s book in his hand, and instinctively started flicking through it.
‘Unfortunately,’ Pierre went on, coming to stand beside him, ‘there’s nothing to show that it’s really his. The underlinings in pencil are all mine, words I’ve got to check in the dictionary, you see?’
‘Shut the fuck up!’ Zollo exploded. ‘Just pray that the cops don’t come looking for you, or you’ve had it. But if they see you wandering about the ship, if you get into trouble, I’ll chuck you overboard with an anchor around your feet.’
‘Fine,’ Pierre gulped. ‘I won’t give you any problems.’
Zollo stared at him for a long time, then turned on his heels and clambered over the goods loader, and when he turned around to ask what the hell that pigeon was all about, the boy and the cage had disappeared.
He went back up on the upper deck. He liked the cool evening air. The boy with the cage was just some poor bastard, probably crazy. What was all that crap about Cary Grant? You end up meeting the strangest people. Nothing to get worked up about, though. Not now that things were going his way. He’d creamed three kilos off the last cargo. Along with what he had already set aside, that meant a decent pension for Steve ‘Son-of-a-Bitch’ Cement. Once he was in Naples, he’d put the three kilos in safe keeping along with the rest, as he waited to arrange his appointment with Lyonnese Toni. He had to be careful. Luciano would send him to Marseilles to take care of the bulk of it. No nonsense. Steve ‘Careful’ Cement in action. Meeting the buyers for his drugs. The trip to France on Luciano’s behalf was the best cover in the world. Loyal Steve sells the snake’s heroin, and without anyone noticing, he sells his own as well. All nice and clean. All sorted. All he had to do was decide where he was going to disappear to.
Zollo saw the glowing cigarette-end roll overboard, perform a perfect parabola and extinguish itself among the waves. From his pocket he took the little flask and allowed himself a consoling swig.
Chapter 56
Naples, 2 May
He turned up, jolted about in a nameless truck, after a journey that was anything but peaceful. Blows and shakes must have damaged him, but he couldn’t expect the care he needed from yokels like these. The guy with the big hands and the beret over his eyes loaded him on to his shoulder with a jerk of his elbow. The door opened in front of them: they could barely get through it.
A fat, dark man with a toothpick sticking out of his mouth pointed to the niche in a chest of drawers, suitable at best for the basic model. Who the hell did these troglodytes think they were dealing with? A McGuffin Electric Deluxe isn’t just an accessory, he’s an essential part of the furniture of a modern house: a beauty, twenty-eight inches by twenty-four high, with a seventeen-inch rectangular tube, available in various colours to adapt to the shade of your furniture. Shovel-Hands, with Toothpick behind him, pushed with all his might, but there was nothing to be done, that much was clear, and fortunately he noticed, a stream of invective later, before scratching the woodeffect cover, ideally matched to a walnut buffet table, and entirely out of place on blue formica.
In the end, they laid him on two chairs placed side by side. Toothpick took three steps back and studied him with his head on one side, like Michelangelo contemplating one final touch to his statue of Moses, then walked over again to put in the plug and shouted a name, something like Concetta, two or three times, until a fat, aproned woman appeared and launched into an interminable series of condemnations of the size of the new arrival. God, what ignorance!
Toothpick stared obliquely at the floor, in a desperate attempt to restrain himself, a titanic effort that proved to be unsuccessful. ‘Shut up,’ he exploded a few minutes later. ‘Bloody hell, woman, shut up!’
When silence had been accomplished, the man rubbed his hands a few times, as though to charge them with miracle-making power. He stepped forward ceremoniously, pointed a finger at the various switches and selected one. He returned to his wife, almost running, clutched his chin, tilted his head on one side and waited. McGuffin gave no sign of reacting. He repeated the manoeuvre from the beginning, including the rubbing of his hands. He chose the switch next to the previous one, but as the result of some kind of electrical confusion, it was his wife who sprang to life.
‘That’s some crock they’ve dumped on you,’ croaked the shrew.
Toothpick didn’t lose heart. He tried every solution, including slapping the poor McGuffin like a disobedient child. As her husband waved his fist at the screen, uttering menacing words, the woman approached the precious machine, convinced that she could make an essential contribution.
But sadly there was nothing to be done. He had been damaged, that much was plain. Rattled from side to side in a van, without even a blanket around him, along the twists and turns of a potholed road, what else did they expect? He was solid, but not indestructible. And repairs would cost a pretty penny.
The witch’s nose brushed against the speaker grille. She had noticed something.
‘There it is,’ she said, beaming. ‘That explains everything!’
‘What’s that?’ asked Toothpick, stuck between the television and the wall.
‘Look over here for a moment: you see this writing? It’s American, you see?’
‘Yeah, so? What difference does that make?’
‘So? So it’s obvious, isn’t it? This machine can only pick up American programmes, and we don’t have them yet. And don’t you remember Maria, when she was sold that American fridge that didn’t work with the electricity we have here? It’s the same thing. We’re in Italy, you need an Italian machine.’
Toothpick’s perplexed eyes shuttled two or three times between his wife’s face and McGuffin’s lifeless screen. He read and reread the writing, took out the plug and put it back in again, clutched at various straws in response to her objections, tried out the remaining switches and finally had to yield to the idea that perhaps you should involve your fellow villagers when you’re choosing your television, the same way as you do with wives and cattle.
She was a beautiful woman, Marisa. Wasted on a guy like that, who never spat out his toothpick even when kissing. She must have had a good reason for cuckolding her husband with such a squalid individual. Certainly, gifts like a McGuffin Electric Deluxe, with a commercial value of 250,000 lire, for those in the know, were sufficient reason in themselves. But if you looked carefully, there seemed to be something else as well.
Marisa bent to straighten the sofa, her generous cleavage mirrored in the screen. Then she turned around and did the same with her bottom. Her thighs might have been a little fat, but apart from that they were in no way inferior to the athletic physique of some American women. Hard to say what age she was, perhaps about thirty, and she’d clearly looked after herself.
When her husband came home, she ran to the door to greet him, deafening him with some nonsense about some new thing waiting for him in the sitting room.
‘You know that raffle at the butcher’s, the one with a television as a prize? You remember you bit my head off because you said that ten tickets was money thrown away? Well, come on, look what I’ve won, when you were going to spend a 160,000 on that trash we saw the other day!’
Her husband came into the sitting room and opened his eyes and mouth wide at the sight of the McGuffin. Seeing him like that, a complete jerk with a dazed expression, his narrow sloping shoulders in his grey jacket and a fake leather bag in his hand, it was not hard to find another reason for Marisa’s adultery, given that Toothpick, coarse though he was, had at least a shred of manly fascination.