In the Wolf's Mouth (3 page)

‘Come with you? In that?’ Angilù nodded towards the motor car.

‘Yes, yes. In this. Albanese’s not here. Probably a good thing. Come on, then. Let’s go.’

Prince Adriano held open the door for him and
Angilù sat down on the chair inside, awkwardly gathering his gun and bag between his knees. The Prince shut the door, walked briskly round the front of the car and fired its motor with a violent twist of a metal handle. Angilù was surprised to see a prince bend down and use inelegant physical force. The Prince then got in and sat in the driving position beside him. He moved some levers and then, without any effort of man or animal, not even the visible pistoning of the train, they moved along the road, bouncing over its rough surface on soft leather chairs, all the way to the Prince’s palace.

The palace was the largest building Angilù had been inside, larger even than any church. He’d seen it countless times, of course, from nearby or up above. He knew the shape of the plain, extensive roofs edged with gutters, the two sides that thrust forwards like a crab’s claws, the patterned garden at the back with statues in it, but he’d never properly considered that its outward size must be matched by a vastness inside. As the Prince led him through, ceilings flew high overhead, some with paintings on them, false skies and angels, and he saw rooms on either side big enough for whole families.

A dog loped out to meet them, huge and rough-coated. Petted by the Prince, it trotted ahead on high, narrow legs. It turned, mouth open, to check that they were following. The beast was at home here. It lived in this place.

The Prince showed Angilù into a room, indicated a chair for him to sit on, and stood himself in front of a mirror the size of a dining table so that Angilù
could see the back of his cleanly groomed head also. The mirror was surrounded by a thick, ornate golden frame at the corners of which fat little angels were stuck like flies in honey. The dog settled itself on a rug, looped around nose to tail and seemed, by the twitching of its eyebrows, to be listening to its master. Angilù’s seat felt treacherously soft beneath him, as though there were nothing there. He had the strange feeling that some of his sensations were disappearing. The heat and wind in which he always lived were gone, shut outside this airy, airtight place. He looked around him at the polished furniture and patterns and realised that the Prince had been talking for some time. It turned out that the tall man’s elegant beard was wagging to a great hymn of praise to Angilù himself and not only to Angilù: all shepherds were great, the true and ancient Sicily, classical Sicily. Someone had described Sicilian shepherds in a poem a long time ago. Angilù had shown great courage defending his flock against the bandits and it was the Prince’s turn to do the same, to return from Palermo to protect his flock. Now that the Fascists were in power things would be different. There would be no room for people like Albanese who came between the Prince and his people, exploiting them both. The Prince gave Angilù a cigarette of soft French tobacco. Another vanishing sensation: the smoke passed down Angilù’s throat in such a light, cool, unabrasive stream that he hardly felt he was smoking at all.

‘Here,’ the Prince said. ‘I’m going to give you a gift, a pledge if you like. Wait a moment.’

He left the room. Angilù and the dog were alone,
silent together. The dog lay on the rug, wet-eyed, its long muzzle resting along its forepaws. Angilù wondered what the dog could smell on him. Sheep, snails, gunpowder, blood, the mule, herbs, sweat.

Quick stuttering footsteps. The dog raised its head. Angilù looked round. A small child stood in the doorway, a girl with big dark eyes set in skin that was pale and yellow. A child who was kept out of the sun, who was never hungry. She wore a dress that stuck out around her legs in stiff rustling layers and pleats. She held the door frame and opened her mouth slowly with a slight popping sound as though to say something, staring with frank curiosity at the stranger. A servant rushed up behind to collect her, a woman with a watch on a short chain that hung on the breast of her dark dress. Everyone here knew the exact time. She caught sight of Angilù and nodded in acknowledgement, a quick tuck of her chin that was more to conceal her flinching in shock than to greet the dirty stranger in the Prince’s drawing room. She took hold of the child’s hand and led her away.

The Prince returned holding something small high up in front of him like a lantern. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Open your hand.’

Angilù did as he was told. The Prince dropped onto Angilù’s palm a heavy gold ring, a small thing but as heavy as a pigeon. The gold looked soft, buttery, as though Angilù would be able to cut through it with his knife.

‘It’s Roman, less ancient than your craft but there you are. I had it just the other day from a dealer from Smyrna.’

‘I don’t know …’

‘You can show it to other people in the village, tell them that it’s a gift from me, that I’ve returned. There’ll be no more landlords coming between me and them, no more leases bought in crooked auctions with violence and intimidation and the profits from the land going to the landlord and his friends.’

Angilù nodded, knowing that he would never show the ring to anyone ever. It would have to be hidden. One day, when he knew how, he could sell it.

‘And you and I will meet now and again,’ the Prince said. ‘And you can help me get to know the land. You see, I’d like to know what you know.’

Cirò Albanese walked through his house with one hand outstretched, his fingertips touching the wall, feeling the silky whitewash as he moved. Three generations to get into this house. He knew its forms, its sounds, where it was cool, where the warmth collected in winter. His children should grow up here. He should have had them already, a check to his brother’s sons. He was heading for a little storeroom in which he picked up a bottle of his olive oil. He looked at it, holding it towards the window to see its colour. He opened it and swigged. A flash of green-gold light above his eyes. The smoothness as he swallowed, the peppery flavour in the after-gasp. He licked his slippery lips, savoured the hours that had gone into its making, sunlight and labour, the possession of the trees.

In his bedroom he went to a particular drawer and collected money which he put in two different pockets and more still in the lining of his jacket. He folded a
handkerchief and fixed its neat peak in his breast pocket. He looked at himself in the smoky reflection of the old dressing-table mirror and smoothed his hair back at the sides, straightened his lapels, plucked his cuffs.

Take nothing. Say nothing to anyone. Go.

People were disappearing. This was true enough. Life was becoming impossible. People knew his name. That’s why he had to go this way. And better to do it, better to act for yourself, be the captain of your own fate. This was about staying alive.

He found his wife busy at the kitchen table, her hair pinned up out of the way, an ordinary day six months into their marriage. Teresa was small and voluptuous, as though she had been assembled quickly and greedily. This on top of that on top of that. Breasts, belly and behind. He took her waist in his hands and laid his face against the warm skin of her bare neck.

‘Baby, I can’t really …’ She raised floured hands, adjusted her fringe with her wrists as she turned inside his grip. ‘You’re dressed up.’ He kissed her hard on the mouth. She squeaked complaint then acquiesced, softening under the force of him. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, pressed it up against her front teeth so that they raked the surface as he withdrew.

‘I’ve got business,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you later. What are we having?’ he asked, peering over her shoulder.

‘You’ll find out,’ she said.

Hours later Cirò had found the coffin maker’s down in the city harbour. He stopped outside to smoke a cigarette and think for a moment and look at the water. This wasn’t nothing he was doing. He was even
afraid. Big boats standing there. Big white seabirds flying athletically overhead. The stevedores’ voices bounced with a prompt, echoless lightness over the surface of the water. Cirò was an inland Sicilian. For him the sea was strange, dangerous, dazzling and beyond his calculations. It meant travel to invisible places. It meant the edge of his world, the end of it.

He threw down his cigarette then knocked on the door. He gave the name of the mutual friend who had sent him. They nodded. A boy made him coffee while they waited for a weeping widow to finish her order and leave. She pressed the tears from her cheeks with a black-bordered handkerchief and argued them down to a good price in dignified whispers. Cirò smiled at her sharpness. When she was gone they locked the door and showed Cirò his coffin and how it worked, the latches and hinges inside, the sliding panels to open the vents. They made out documents with the name and address of a family. He would be their uncle. They told him to urinate and then climb in. Standing over the drain at the back he found he couldn’t pee. He came back and stepped up on a chair then into the coffin. It was a little tight at the shoulders of his strong, short-levered body but otherwise fine. He lay there and looked up at the wooden planks of the ceiling and their faces bending over him. ‘Don’t open the latch,’ they said, ‘until five hours after you feel the motion of the sea. Then you just climb out and mingle in the crowd. You’re just another passenger.’

They put on the lid with its false screw heads. He latched it inside and opened the vents. It worked: he could breathe. After a minute or two he felt himself
lifted up and processing out on a trolley. He began to feel very calm in an enclosing darkness that was safe and simple. He felt more protected than he had for many years. After days of much agitation arranging everything for this moment, hiding things, instructing people, he relaxed. The motion lulled him. Cirò Albanese was almost asleep when they loaded him onto a ship bound for America.

Part One
North Africa
1942

1

And here was a world intact, like a dream of his childhood. After years of war, not a sign except the intriguing sight from the train of numerous unfamiliar young women in the fields, land girls brought in presumably from Birmingham and Coventry, too distant to be seen properly, labouring silently. In London there were shelters, sandbags, militarised parks, blacked-out windows and gun emplacements. Here, nothing, trees washed through with sunshine and birdsong, the smell of the ground breathing upwards through the thick moist heat. As Will started out, his feet remembered the exact rise and fall of the walk home from the station. How perfectly his senses interlocked with the place. He knew that when he rounded this corner, yes, here it was, the peppery smell of the river before he could see it. He could picture the dim bed of round stones, the swaying weeds, its surface braided with currents.
A full-fed river
. Behind his left shoulder, away up for a couple of miles, was the rippled shape of an Iron Age hill fort where he’d played as a child, battling his brother down from the top. Everything here was still clean and fresh and in place, the countryside sincere and vigorous. It was as though he were walking through the first chapter of a future biography, with his kitbag on his shoulder.

Will decided to avoid the village and headed down through the wood. According to his father this was a recent planting, maybe only a hundred years old. It was still coppiced in this section, which had a peculiar regularity. The evenly spaced, slender trees always made him think of stage scenery. When the wind died the coppice had an indoor quiet, the quiet of an empty room.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’

Startled, Will turned to see his younger brother, Ed, wearing his hunting waistcoat, his open shotgun hooked over his shoulder. ‘For God’s sake, Ed.’

Ed smiled. They shook hands.

‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’

‘Can’t say I did.’

‘Makes a fellow wonder who’s been in training and who hasn’t.’

Ed was much given to stealth. He loved hunting and had a straightforward aptitude for it that Will sometimes envied, often mocked. Ed would appear suddenly in a room, quiet in his body, his senses splayed around him, then smile and go out again without saying anything. Father had been in a way similar, although sharply clever, a quiet grammarian indoors but a sportsman outside, hard-riding, red-faced, breathing great volumes of air, his hair sweated to his head. A mere schoolmaster, he’d been invited to join the hunt after the last war when he’d returned with a medal, with
the
medal. It was outdoors that Will was allowed glimpses of what he took to be his father’s mysterious heroism, that undiscussable subject. There was a kind of calculated rampaging, his movements
very hard and linear. Ed had a different quality. He was less reflective, less troubled by thought, simply a live moving part of the world of trees and creatures and water. Will wasn’t sure how he himself would be described. He wasn’t a natural sportsman although he was efficient and strong enough. He always noticed the moment of commitment, the threshold he had to cross between thought and action, his mind instigating his body. He didn’t think he should notice; it made him feel slightly fraudulent. His movements were effective but too invented. He was playing a part.

‘Why aren’t you fishing?’ Will asked. ‘I can’t imagine there’s anything left to shoot. I thought the woods would be stripped bare with rationing having everyone setting snares and popping their shotguns.’

‘Ah, but for them wot knows the old woods like I does.’ He opened his waistcoat to show hanging inside its left panel a rabbit, teeth bared and eyes half closed. ‘And,’ he said, reaching into his front pocket and carefully lifting out a bird, ‘… there’s this.’

‘You little tinker. A woodcock. When everyone else is working on the nth permutation of bully beef.’

Will took the bird from him. Its head, weighted by its long bill, hung over Will’s fingers on the loose cord of its neck. The small body was still warm, the plumage shining with the airy burnish of a living bird. Will’s senses were lighting up, home again after weeks of training grounds, weapons drills, diagrams, distempered huts and dismal food. ‘That’s a very kind homecoming gift,’ Will said.