Marco held his breath and saw Miryam’s hobbling figure in his mind’s eye. He fought back the tears. Was that how it happened? They had turned her into a cripple.
Say something, Father!, he urged again. But from behind the door came the sound of one voice only. The wrong one.
“Accident, disfigurement, insurance payout. So it will proceed,” Zola continued. “And as a permanently beneficial side effect, we will have created for ourselves a thoroughbred beggar who is unable to run anywhere.”
A faint draught in the passage made Marco turn, but too late. The kitchen door had opened and the figure that stepped out had seen him.
“What are you up to, boy?” Chris’s voice slashed through the dimness.
In an instant Marco sprang free of the wall and made a dash as Chris leaped after him, and the door of the living room was flung open.
Many times before he had told himself that if ever such a situation should occur he would seek refuge in one of the neighbor’s houses. But now everything around him seemed dead. The wind was whistling through the many trees between which the houses lay, quiet as mausoleums: dark, lifeless, deceased. All the windows around him were unlit. Only the faint glare of a single television screen was visible farther down the road.
And that was the house he ran toward, filled with dread.
“I won’t make it,” he kept telling himself as a cold rain began to wet his face. He would be caught before he ever roused the residents from their armchairs. He had to find another way.
Marco twisted round and glanced behind him as he ran, trying not to stumble over the curbs with his bare feet. Now he could see that two of his older cousins were on his heels, too, and they were fast. He hurled himself into the gravel on his stomach and squirmed through a hole in a hedge too small for the others to negotiate.
If he could cut through this garden and get to the main road, he might have a chance.
An automatic floodlight mounted on the house’s gable end tripped, painting the garden bright white. He saw the people inside come to the picture window of the living room, but he was already on his way through the next hedge, from where he rolled down into the ditch at the side of the main road.
Behind him came shouts for him to stop, but Marco’s attention was fixed on the passing cars and the thicket of trees halfway up the hill a few hundred meters beyond. That was where he needed to go. Any moment now they would have run down the residential street and emerge onto the road farther on. If he didn’t get away now, he would be done for.
A blue beam of halogen headlights tipped over the ridge, revealing the rainy tarmac to be a glittering bridge to freedom. If he ran into the middle of the road and stopped the car it might save him. And if it refused to stop, he would throw himself into its path and put an end to his trials. Rather that than spend the rest of his life a crippled beggar like Miryam.
“Stop!” he cried out as the car came toward him, his arms waving. Then he made directly for the headlight beams, like a moth to a flame.
Over his shoulder he could see his pursuers coming round the houses and spilling out onto the road. From that distance he was unable to see who they were, but it had to be his cousins and some of the other kids because they were so quick. He would have only seconds to stop the car and convince the driver to help him before they caught up.
The car flashed its lights, but the driver did not slow down. For a moment he was certain it wouldn’t stop and prepared to meet his fate when suddenly he heard the squeal of brakes and saw the vehicle begin to veer from side to side like a man inebriated.
Don’t move, or else he’ll just zoom on by, he told himself, trying to predict the direction in which the driver would next yank the wheel. He wasn’t going to let him past.
For a split second Marco saw the front of the car loom toward him like an executioner’s ax, and then with a whoosh of tires against the wet asphalt it came to a sudden halt, with Marco’s knee against the front bumper, as an extremely agitated man hurled abuse at him from the other side of the thrashing wipers.
Marco sprang to the passenger side and flung open the door before the man could react.
“What the hell are you playing at, you little brat?” the driver yelled, his face white as chalk from the shock.
“You’ve got to take me with you or those men there are going to get me,” Marco begged, pointing down into the dip in the road from where his pursuers were now approaching.
The man’s expression changed from shock to rage in a second.
“What the fuck? Are you a Paki?” he screamed, leaning over to the passenger seat and without warning lashing a fist at Marco’s head.
The punch caught him awkwardly, but hard enough to send him backward onto the road as the man slammed the door shut with a hail of invective to the effect that apes like him could damn well fend for themselves.
Marco felt the asphalt eating its way through his pajamas. It hurt but wasn’t nearly as painful as lying flat in the middle of the road in darkness and seeing the car accelerate off with the beam of its headlights aimed straight at those who were after him.
“Stop the car!” one of them shouted. Then came the dull thud of gunshots, but the vehicle hurtled on, picking up speed and heading directly toward the flock, forcing them to leap for their lives. And then it was gone.
He heard the confusion among them as he rolled over into the ditch and crawled under a bush. They must have thought he’d managed to throw himself into the car before it sped away. He crawled on all fours deeper into the underbrush at the edge of the woods that bordered the road as he strained his ears to hear what his pursuers were up to.
Peering through the vegetation, he saw that some men had now joined his young pursuers. From their silhouettes he took them to be Zola, Chris, and his father.
The young ones pointed up the road to where Marco had stopped the car, then turned in the direction in which it had disappeared. Suddenly a fist flew through the air and a figure slumped to the ground. Punishment for failing to capture the fugitive came promptly. What else did they expect?
He heard a barked order to search the area, and the group consolidated and began jogging toward the place where he lay concealed. He needed to get into the woods or somewhere else they wouldn’t look. He raised himself warily toward the dark, expansive landscape of tree trunks, shivering from the rapid cooling of his skin and the adrenaline pumping through his body. The rain had soaked his pajamas, making them feel like they were made of sponge as the icy cold bit through his skin and feet. He realized at the first step that he wouldn’t get far without shoes, and now his pursuers were so close he could tell the voices apart.
It sounded like they were all there: Hector, Pico, Romeo, Zola, Samuel, his father, and the others. Even a pair of female voices vibrated above the trees.
Only then did Marco truly sense fear.
“I didn’t see him in the car,” Samuel shouted in Italian, another answering in English that they wouldn’t have seen him even if he had been inside.
Again, Samuel had betrayed him.
And now Zola’s fury rose up above this chaos of voices. Fury at their having allowed the boy to run, fury at their not having checked well enough to know for sure whether he’d been in the car, fury at shots having been fired. Now they would have to suspend all activities for a long time, he yelled at them, his voice trembling. It was going to cost them, and those who had fired the shots would be made to pay. The younger members of the clan would need to make themselves scarce in the days that followed, until the dust had settled. More than likely, the man in the car would go to the police, and when he did, the kids would have to be nowhere near the neighborhood if searches were carried out and questions asked.