In the Wolf's Mouth (28 page)
Read In the Wolf's Mouth Online
Authors: Adam Foulds
The gun was wedged in his waistband and he sat so that no one could see. The church had sucked in its widows for Mass and exhaled them out again and still no sign. Angilù couldn’t wait for ever. He’d left his wife and children alone. He might be in the wrong place. He might be too late.
He gave it one more hour.
Angilù got up and walked across the square and up the steep road, past the church and mindless Tinu to the house where Silvio had lived until he’d been killed. He cleared his throat at the door and knocked then put his hand to the handle of the pistol.
The door was opened by a child. Albanese sat smoking in the middle of the whitewashed space. His eyes focused sharply when he saw Angilù. Albanese knew immediately. But he exhaled smoke slowly before he said, ‘What do you want?’
Angilù wanted to say something frightening like ‘Those are beautiful children’ but he couldn’t think of a whole sentence and his throat was too dry. Instead, he stared, his hand on the gun.
Albanese ordered the children out of the room. To Angilù, this preparation made it seem as though Albanese wanted it to happen too, as though there was an agreement between the two men. The children were hurried out by the oldest boy. He pushed them out with his feet but he didn’t leave. Angilù turned to look at him. Albanese said, ‘You’re doing this all wrong. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ Then Albanese started to move in his seat so Angilù pulled
out the gun and shot him. A red circle smacked over one eye and the top of his nose. His mouth fell open as his head lolled back. Angilù shot him twice more in the chest, the shots making a huge din in the closed room. He’d done this before. This had happened before. Firing into the dark up in the mountains. Albanese went over backwards on the wooden chair. His feet bounced as he landed. Angilù moved the gun across to point at the boy, not to kill him but to keep him still. The boy was panting. After the pistol smoke had cleared there was still smoke coming from Albanese. Angilù thought his shirt might have caught fire and glanced across and saw a cigarette still alight between his fingers. A spreading puddle was reaching his wrist. Angilù nodded at the cigarette and said to the boy, ‘It will burn him.’ The boy, holding the door frame, looked confused. Angilù turned and walked out.
He walked down the little street. He turned left at the bottom and headed out of Sant’Attilio, back to his house and family. He realised that he was lost but he wasn’t worried for his family yet. He was full of his accomplishment, very calm and fulfilled, relieved, although it occurred to him that he hadn’t got round to telling his wife where he’d buried some money, wrapped up in a bag with the gold ring the Prince had given him years and years ago. They could make use of that. Angilù walked the familiar road. He was unsurprised to hear footsteps running up behind him and to feel the boy on his back. He got his hand up quickly enough that the knife sliced his fingers instead of his throat.
Swerving around, bucking like a goat trying to leap
out of a pen, Angilù got free of the boy’s grasp. He went for the gun in his pocket but had to use the wrong hand. The boy rushed at him and stabbed him a few times. Angilù didn’t feel the blade going in, just thumps to his body like punches. He threw his arms around the boy’s neck to slow him and felt stripes of narrow itchiness appear across his back. The boy shook Angilù off and he fell to the ground. The boy thumped him a few more times. Angilù felt tired and irritable. The boy didn’t need to keep going on like that. It was unnecessary. He stopped. Angilù was wet and cold. There were stones under his face. He was where he’d always been, lying on the ground. He couldn’t move at all.
Mattia stood over the body, swearing. He was stained with Cassini’s blood and angered by the humiliation of discovering that some of the wetness on his trousers was his own urine. He bent down and took the man’s gun out of his pocket. There’d still be three bullets in that. He prodded the body with his foot. Nothing. Mattia didn’t know what to do now except go home and wash. After he could go to the police and show them Albanese’s body like he’d just run from the house. Later, he would seek out Alvaro Zuffo. Zuffo would look after him. He would know what to do.
The razor tugged at the long hairs of his beard, cutting squares and rectangles into the foam. His full face inched back into view in the spotted mirror above the sink.
The new uniform was loose on him but still Ray felt decent, fresh and ordinary. He was one of the men. He walked the corridors, perfectly upright, trying not to think or remember.
But before he could do anything else, he needed to explain the course of events, to excuse himself. Opposite him, a man sat at a typewriter. The man hunched forwards and produced a burst of preliminary typing. He said, ‘If you want to smoke, go right ahead.’
‘That’s okay.’ Ray wondered what sort of person this man was, where he came from. There wasn’t anything that gave him away.
‘So, start at the beginning. You were with Anthony Geminiano.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And then what?’
‘Well, ah. Ah. It was … Jesus, what happened?’
‘Look, don’t worry.’ The man sat back from the typewriter, his hands in his lap. ‘I don’t think there’ll be trouble. You were gone awhile but you’re back.
Happened to a lot of guys. Coming back is not desertion, is it?’
‘No, it isn’t. I didn’t.’
‘Like I said. Now, you said there was a blast?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So. Amnesia. And now you’re back.’
‘I’m back. I see. That is what happened. It is. That’s what happened.’
‘Fine. Tell me from the beginning.’
‘We came through the fighting. We got lost. We were really lost.’
‘Okay. Go on.’
I’d like to express my gratitude to Gea Schirò, Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, the Planeta family, Prof. Salvatore Lupo, Robin Robertson, Mitzi Angel, Anna Webber and Sarah Chalfant. These generous people tried to educate me and to improve this book, the failings of which are all mine.
ADAM FOULDS
is a British novelist and poet. His most recent books are
The Quickening Maze
, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and
The Broken Word
, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He has recently been awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named one of
Granta’s
Best Young British Novelists.
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“Every great novel of history is a triumph of human understanding and empathy—even love—over the pieties and myths we’ve all been fed.
In the Wolf’s Mouth
is such a triumph. It made me see the modern world in a new light.”
—
JOHN WRAY
, author of
Lowboy
“Adam Foulds writes like an angel about devilish things…. He is fearsomely unafraid of the darkness within humans and the darkness they are capable of creating around them. The supple, sensuous beauty of his prose is bewitching: like the helpless children of Hamelin we follow wherever he chooses to lead, however horrifying the terrain, enchanted by the unstoppable flow of rich, unforgettable images.”
—
REBECCA ABRAMS
,
Financial Times
“Foulds’s acknowledged narrative mastery as a novelist and as a poet is often apparent in this book: in the ambiguous dialogues between strangers revealing unspoken intimacies, in the delicately clipped snippets of everyday life recalled in the confusion of war, in the lyrical broken-up sentences that mirror the physical and mental shattering of the ongoing slaughter.”
—
ALBERTO MANGUEL
,
The Guardian
“Adam Foulds is a young British novelist of striking talent and eclectism. His style is first-rate, combining precision with a rich poetic imagination. He is able to do more with language, and at greater depth, than most other British novelists of his generation.”
—
ANDREW HOLGATE
,
The Sunday Times
(London)
FICTION
The Truth About These Strange Times The Quickening Maze
POETRY
The Broken Word
Cover design by Jennifer Carrow
Cover photograph by Antonio Zanghì / Getty Images
In the Wolf’s Mouth
Copyright © 2014 by Adam Foulds
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EPUB Edition May 2014 ISBN 9781443431002
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
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