You don’t even know the locum. Can you trust people through an intermediary?
Fine. Then Fefe must have made a mistake. What do you expect, he’s ‘handicapped’. He thinks monsters are coming out of the plughole, how do you expect him to remember what medications he has taken. You’re right, Odoacre, how stupid I am, to pay any attention to that fool of a brother of mine.
The usual reply: no one said your brother was a fool. But he isn’t a doctor either. Put facts and instincts together: the bad breath and the medicine. But there’s nothing in his therapy to give him halitosis. Unless it was in combination with something else. What do I know: coffee. Marco is a really good person, but he always allows Fefe a drop of coffee and he shouldn’t. So the correct sequence is: no Marco, no coffee, no bad breath. Fefe couldn’t know that. He only looks at what pills they’re giving him. He swallows them down and that’s it. Believe me. That’s exactly how it was. I’ll check tomorrow.
Reassuring.
Convincing.
So why are you uneasy? Don’t you trust Dr Montroni? Don’t you trust your husband? Of course I do, of course he’s right. But Fefe is my brother. When he’s ill, they tell Odoacre. One week I take him to the sea, and Odoacre is responsible. He says something strange, and Odoacre explains it to me.
That’s exactly how it was. I’ll check tomorrow.
Angela takes her eyes off the receiver.
No medication.
Chapter 13
Bologna, 21 May
Waiting made him nervous.
Since he was a child. He never did anything without asking what came next.
You need patience in life, aunt Iolanda repeated. Learn to wait.
Patience or not, he had learned.
Ritual cigarette, dark corner of an internal courtyard, glance into the street through the open gate.
Perfect ceremonial. All that was missing was the watch. The gesture remained. Dart of the wrist, fingers on the sleeve, eyes low. Four thousand lire for a Lorenz. A gift, if you listened to Sticleina.
Wait.
Filuzzi sweat, spring heat and a lot of ground covered at a fast walking pace. No bicycle, that’d been sold too.
He stubbed out the cigarette-end in the dust, reached the gate, turned around. Clear night. Stars everywhere and the cries of cats in heat.
Almost running, from the Florida to the Bar Aurora. They had said two o’clock, on the dot. Half an hour had passed, and there was no one to be seen. The flame of the lighter lit the bunch of keys. He tried the lock for luck. The one time you let your attention lapse you’ll get nicked. He had to pull it back a little but it opened.
Another glance into the street, another cigarette. The last one. His change that morning had been just enough to buy six.
Wait. He had been forced to learn.
He had done nothing else.
His father, the letters, Angela. And what about that Redhead? The same. The revolution? Hey, my boy, you’ll have to wait, this isn’t the time, it’s going to end up as it did in Greece. He knew the lines by heart. He had no idea about half of the lines they came out with, no idea what had happened in Greece, but he knew it was something big, ask Benfenati, if you don’t believe me.
When comrade Benfenati talked about fighting within institutions, Garibaldi was the only one to have his say. As in 1921, when the bosses said they wouldn’t respond to provocation, they wouldn’t yield to violence, and meanwhile the fascist squads were out there beating people up, and not just that, and in the end it had taken twenty years to send them home. ‘We were fighting within institutions,’ he replied, ‘and meanwhile they were going their own way.’
The cat miaowed more loudly. The sound was melancholy, but it still sounded as if it was enjoying itself. No doubt about that. No alternative. Just the right instinct. Fanti said that man’s intelligence is in opposition to his instinct. But if no one convinces you, or you don’t see the whole picture, why pretend that waiting is a strategy. Bollocks, it’s just an excuse to stop looking. A clever boxer can think himself a clever strategist, but he’ll still end up on the floor. And when you hear on the radio that Mitri is waiting for his adversary, you imagine him not with his eyes lowered, thinking about sex, but concentrating on the slightest distraction, ready to explode.
Glancing around for the umpteenth time, Pierre noticed the light on the other side of the road. Bloody hell, the baker. A big problem. The baker wasn’t the kind of person to mind his own business, he was always in his doorway, keeping an eye on everyone, always wellinformed, always asking questions of the people passing, pretending to be cordial.
All of a sudden the cat fell silent.
The sounds of a car filled the silence.
Three headlamps. Pierre gripped the gate. The truck passed him as it reversed into the courtyard. The baker’s door was shut.
Palmo switched off the engine and jumped out.
‘You’re late,’ said Pierre.
‘You’re here, that’s the important thing,’ Palmo replied calmly. ‘Come on, hurry up.’
There were six boxes. Palmo picked up three. He nearly lost his balance on the stairs, while Pierre lit the steps with the candle. He had cleared a space behind the sacks of coal. No one would touch them until the following winter.
The boxes would arrive once a month. No more than five or six, twenty sticks each. Most of the load would be sold in a few days, they’d all been pre-ordered, but there was always something left over, and it wasn’t wise to keep it in the shed. Some people used the trick of sending them around the place, by post, like parcels. But then you had to keep your eye on the address, and ten minutes after the package had arrived, you would turn up as a postal worker, apologising for the error and asking to have the box back. Too risky, they’d already got burned a few times using that method.
Palmo put down the second load, and wanted to check the hiding place. Ettore must have recommended it. The coal sacks seemed to convince him.
All was quiet in the bakery. Anyway, weren’t the old ladies of the district forever complaining that the bread wasn’t the same since Gino had stopped getting up in the night and passed the baton to his sons? Gualtiero and Lorenzo weren’t a problem.
Pierre waved and went up stairs. He tried not to make a sound, as always, so as not to wake Nicola. The engine of the truck made more noise than his shoes.
‘Who brought you home?’ asked his brother, turning around under the covers.
‘Eh? No one, who was supposed to?’
‘Didn’t you come back by car?’
‘No.’
‘I heard a car —’
‘I came back on foot.’
‘Oh come on, you’d never get here without a bike. But you did insist on selling it, and now you’re cadging lifts off everyone with a car, and look where you’ve ended up.’
Pierre bit his tongue and didn’t say a word. The phrase ‘go fuck yourself’ exploded in his brain. He folded up his clothes on the chair, grabbed a length of sheet and thought of Angela without too much conviction.
Chapter 14
Evian, French shore of Lac Leman, 21 May
The park was pullulating with grandmothers and nannies pushing tinies from nought to eight around in pushchairs and prams.
Ducks and swans carefully cleaned their feathers on the edge of the artificial lake.
The man opened the paper bag and threw a handful of maize over the fence.
A confused throng of webbed feet. Even a few abusive pigeons.
A few old men on their own, or perhaps with a dog, out to see a bit of the world and renew their interest in the meteorological conditions of the afternoon.