‘No, but…’
‘Good. Let’s get Luca to take us for a drive. You need some country air, young lady. You’re looking terribly pale.’
The farm lay on a slope so steep the wizened olive trees clung to the rocky grass, rising at a diagonal from the dun earth. At the top of the hill lay a shallow indentation like a crater, full of thorny bushes and tangled weeds dying back for the winter. A narrow path led through the olives. She let the dog off the lead. The animal followed them there and back, a route it knew.
No words. No objections. He did what she said. Had no choice. So between them they spent the best part of two hours ferrying dope and guns, ammunition and explosives, boxes of fuses and things he didn’t understand, up into the crater, followed by the happy, yapping dog, as if this was all a game. When everything was moved they covered the crates and dumps of weapons with blue plastic crop-gathering sheets from the barn, then threw broken branches across the top.
It wouldn’t fool anyone if they looked hard. But there was so much. Enough for a small war. The last of the Red Brigades’ weapons from Tuscany, she said.
When they had finished, they stood together on the rim of the indentation, looking at the broken branches and the blue plastic peeking underneath.
‘What’s your real name?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer. He was staring at his wrist. The brambles had caught him along the way. Deep scratches, blood, a sharp wound turning scabby. She looked at him, took out a tissue, wiped the dirt away.
‘You need to wash that,’ she said. ‘You need a plaster on it. Come on…’
‘We could run,’ he said again.
She smiled at him, laughed. Not so unkindly this time.
‘We could run,’ he repeated. ‘Get in the van. Go somewhere. Anywhere.’
She shook her head, then went down the hill, back into the farmhouse. He followed her into the bedroom. Chavah Efron put a hand to his head. Two days now without shaving. The stubble was returning. On his face. On his scalp.
In a drawer she found a cheap electric razor.
‘Just your face,’ she said. ‘Not your head. I want you to look different. Why do that anyway?’
He didn’t answer.
‘For God’s sake, talk to me.’
She ran her fingers across his scalp. His body was shaking.
‘My name is Aldo Pontecorvo,’ he said in a low, calm voice. ‘I’m thirty-seven years old and I come from Oltrarno. No one left there any more.’
‘Someone must have really screwed you up.’
He glared at her and said, ‘Your excuse?’
Laughter again. ‘I don’t have one. I was born like this.’
Her fingers ran across his cheeks, his chin, working the razor.
‘There’s a man I read about,’ he said. ‘They hated him. Burned him in the Piazza della Signoria. Long time ago.’
‘They don’t burn the people they hate any more. They shoot them and leave them in ditches. Then shrug their shoulders and walk away. We want the same thing, Aldo. Don’t we?’
‘I shall spill flood waters upon the earth,’ he recited. ‘You shall drown in them, and in that torrent shall flow your blood.’
‘My blood?’
‘Everyone’s. In the end.’
She leaned against him, her hips against his thighs. Hands on his chest.
‘Then we should make the most of the time we’ve got left.’
Fingers reaching. Inside the black woollen sweater. Rising. Curling. Twisting. Tempting.
He didn’t move.
Then there was a sound outside. Tyres and a car door opening. A voice. Male. Crying her name.
The smile disappeared from her pretty dark face in an instant. ‘Damn,’ she said.
She looked around. Walked back on to the landing, reached up and pulled on the lanyard for an opening into the roof space. A ladder there. Steps.
‘Best I can do,’ she said, then walked back into the spare room, got a handgun they’d kept back, gave him the weapon and a box of shells. ‘Get up there. Stay silent as a mouse. If I need you, I’ll yell.’
‘What is this place?’ Fratelli asked, climbing out of the car. They came crammed into Cassini’s rusty white Fiat Cinquecento. The young officer was too junior to be allowed use of a Carabinieri vehicle.
A black mongrel ran to the length of its chain and barked at them wildly. Straight away Luca made cooing noises, walked over, pulled a packet of sweets from his pocket, calmed the animal with one.
‘You have unexpected talents, Luca,’ Fratelli observed.
‘My uncle Silvio’s got an olive farm. Big press, too. We go round picking up crops for other people. You’ve got to deal with dogs. Fact of life.’
Gingerly, he tried to pat the animal on its head, then thought better of the idea.
‘Now this is a place run by people who know nothing about farming,’ he said confidently, looking round the fields and the ramshackle, muddy yard.
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Dead right I am. You townies think farms are just shit and graft. But with olives, let me tell you: everything needs to be neat and spick and span. Specially when it comes to cropping.’
Cassini pointed at the ancient, rusty tractor. ‘Uncle Silvio reckons you can always tell a farmer by his machines. If you’re doing a good job you’ve got lots to harvest. Can’t do that with a load of old junk, can you? Proper tools pay for themselves.’
Fratelli nodded, pleased with the answer.
‘It’s just olives,’ Julia said, coming to join them. ‘Can you live on that?’
Cassini checked his notes. ‘Says they were doing this newfangled organic thing. Maybe what you save on pesticide you make up for on price. I dunno.’ He scratched his head. ‘Looks a dump to me. Just the sort of place a hippie would dream about. Nature don’t grow of its own accord, you know. It’s what we make of it. I mean…’
He stopped. A woman was marching towards them from the door of the two-storey house, little more than a tumbledown cottage with peeling white walls and a roof that looked as if it needed tending.
She was about thirty, attractive and gypsy-like, with wayward, curly black hair, fierce eyes and a lined, tanned face. In spite of the cold she wore a long maroon skirt and a green jumper and wellington boots as she tramped through the mire. A shotgun was broken over her right arm. She looked as if she knew how to use it.
‘Signora…’ Fratelli began. Then he waved at Cassini, who pulled out his Carabinieri ID card.
‘What do you want?’
‘About your husband…’
Her stare stopped Fratelli as he spoke. The woman was looking at Luca Cassini’s decrepit white Fiat.
‘Where’s your ID?’ she asked, then nodded at Julia Wellbeloved. ‘And hers?’
‘These are discreet inquiries,’ Fratelli said carefully. ‘We don’t want to make a fuss. Please. If we could go inside for a moment. And talk…’
He took a step towards her. She moved back and in a single, swift movement closed the shotgun, held it in her hands, barrel to the ground.
‘All this time you bastards have waited. You do nothing about Ari. And then you come to make…’ Her face creased with sour anger. ‘Discreet inquiries.’
‘We interviewed you in the stazione, didn’t we?’ Cassini objected. ‘You didn’t say much there. I mean… if we had something to go on.’
‘My husband goes out to work and then winds up dead in a ditch. You know more about this than I do.’
‘I doubt that,’ Fratelli intervened. ‘Perhaps something’s occurred to you since.’
‘Such as what?’
‘Such as did he know a man called Giovanni Tornabuoni?’ Julia asked.
‘Is he a farmer?’
‘Not exactly.’
She shook her head.
‘Ari never mentioned anyone like that. No. Who is he?’