He was deeply absorbed, eyes once more scanning the room, when he heard voices outside in the garden.
He froze and held his breath.
It was two dark voices. Voices he knew all too well. A mix of English and Italian as only Pico and Romeo were capable of.
“Someone got here before us,” Pico whispered from outside. They had already noticed the broken window. This wasn’t good.
“Look at the glass, the way it’s all leaned up neat against the wall. And look, the door’s ajar, and the patio door’s wide-open.”
“Goddammit, you’re right, Pico.” It was Romeo now. How many times had the three of them done break-ins together? It made the next sentence inevitable:
“Marco’s been here.”
Marco retreated a single step up the stairs toward the ground floor. If they discovered he was still here, he would be trapped like a spider in its own web. Knowing Pico and Romeo, one of them would be slipping in through the basement door any second now, the other keeping watch by the patio door in the garden. And it seemed just as certain that a third clan member would be posted outside in the street. No doubt he was standing there now, leaning against a willow, pretending to look out over the marsh and lake. But he wasn’t positioned there to enjoy the scenery. The instant anything untoward occurred, a bird cry would go out, louder and shriller than the residents here were used to. And Pico and Romeo would be gone before anyone knew. They were fast, those two. Surely the only ones in the clan who could catch up with Marco. And in a moment, the hunt would be on.
Marco held his arms tight to his chest, breathing deeply to calm his pulse.
His only way out was through the front door, and he would have to run like the wind.
Silently, he backed up the stairs, conscious that they would know Marco’s preferred escape route was always a door that opened onto a garden, and therefore Pico would come from below while Romeo would be waiting at the door to the veranda. Had there been a second floor he would have sought refuge there immediately. A roof had on occasion likewise proved to be a good solution for a thief disturbed during a break-in, but there was no second floor and the roof was as flat as a pancake with no place to hide.
Maybe he could cry for help? Fling open the window facing the neighbor’s house and scream at the top of his lungs, as heartrendingly as he was able while clinging to the window frame, in the hope someone would appear and frighten the hell out of Pico, Romeo, and their man in the road.
He rocked on his heels for a moment, his brain churning in search of a solution.
It wouldn’t work. They would be inside any minute and find something hard to hit him on the head with. Pico wasn’t afraid to use violence, and if they knocked him unconscious he would never wake up again, or else wake up without legs.
What do they want here? he asked himself. The image of the slashed sofa and the tattered mattresses suddenly made more sense. They had been here before. They were the ones responsible, and now they were back. But why? What were they looking for?
They couldn’t have known beforehand that he was here now because they’d sounded surprised when they found the glass splinters. All they knew was that he had been here at some point. Which meant they had to be here for some other reason.
What could it be?
Come on, Marco, think! he urged himself.
He looked around him. The basement offered no hiding place, he knew that, and the ground floor contained no built-in wardrobe or cubbyhole. Just some shelves in the bedroom with a curtain in front.
If they had been here before, as he felt certain they had, then they had come for something they had failed to find last time, or else something they now needed on account of the situation Marco had imposed upon them.
A creaking noise came from the basement. Marco held his breath and listened. Someone was already inside. It was difficult to hear what was going on because the sounds were drowned out by Romeo’s voice from the back garden ordering the man in front of the house to keep a good eye on the main door.
Another exit strategy foiled.
Mind Romeo doesn’t see you through the window, Marco admonished himself, scuttling to the wall underneath the windows of the living room. There was nowhere to conceal himself here, no place they would fail to look. The dining room was the same. Only the bedrooms remained. Marco darted into the hall and stared into the small rooms one by one. It was hopeless. Beds and shelves, that was it. Nothing in which to vanish.
And then his eyes fixed on the safe in the little office, its door ajar.
It was his only chance, because if Zola’s crew were sure of anything, it was that the safe was empty, having undoubtedly checked it the first time they were here.
They’ll look everywhere but there, he tried to convince himself, crawling inside and pulling the door closer.
His eyes narrowed as he assessed the situation and its three possible outcomes. They might find him and beat the daylights out of him, or he might remain undiscovered and get away. But there was a third terrifying possibility: that they would find him and lock him inside the safe.
He noticed he’d begun breathing more deeply. If they shut the door on him he would suffocate and never be found until the house was again inhabited.
Marco pressed his lips together. And when that time came they would find him because of the smell. His smell.
They would find a dead boy no one knew. Suffocated and decomposed. A boy with no distinguishing marks and no identity papers.
His heart was beating so fast that his breathing could hardly keep up in his upright fetal position and he began to sweat. Even his fingers perspired, and the tenuous hold they kept on the thin edge of the safe door became increasingly hard to maintain.
Now came the sound of Romeo’s voice from the patio door by the living room, and the man at the front door responded. Only Pico was silent. Marco knew he was checking the basement.
The floorboards creaked as Pico climbed the stairs from the basement to the living room, and Marco felt the house to be alive, an organism whose rooms were thick bundles of nerve endings. A foot placed randomly on a floor sent electric impulses shooting into all corners of the house and into the safe where Marco strained to remain silent, though everything inside him screamed for help. The pounding of his heart, the explosive activity of his brain, the clothes on his skin, the tangle of his limbs, his fear, the enclosed space, all combined to thrust up his body temperature, his pores opening accordingly. And as Pico made the whole house tremble even by the very lightness of his step, sweat poured from Marco’s skin. Most perceptibly from his wrist to the index finger that kept hold on the door. And it was through this little digit, slippery with moisture, that he registered how close Pico was to finding him.
I’m not here, he repeated over and over in his mind, willing the words into Pico’s sensory apparatus. Marco’s not here, he left a while ago. Do whatever it is you’re here for, Pico, but do it quickly. The neighbors will soon suspect something’s wrong when they see your man at the front door. He squeezed his eyes tight shut as cupboards slammed and furniture was shoved aside.
Pico was nothing if not thorough. Which was why Marco was so petrified.
“Have you found anyone?” Romeo whispered from the patio door.
“Not here,” Pico replied, without bothering to speak softly. “There’s no one in the dining room either.”
And then he came closer, flinging back the doors of the bedrooms. Marco heard him kick at the beds and get down on his knees to peer underneath, then get up again to tear back the curtains.
“No one here either. The kitchen’s clear, too,” Pico practically shouted.
“Look in the shower, it would be just like him,” Romeo instructed.
Marco felt the tremble of the floor beneath him. Pico paused at the bathroom door in the hall, only three meters away. It was as if his gaze was drilling its way into the office toward Marco’s hiding place. As though the steel that enveloped Marco’s being only barely resisted Pico’s X-ray vision.