Vango (35 page)

“I know you’re there. Come out. I know about everything else as well. It’s time to show yourself.”

Several minutes went by.

There was still some low-level noise in the cave. Scratching sounds on the floor, and sighs.

“I know what you did, Mazzetta!”

Vango decided to go in. He made it as far as the entrance, bent down, and peered into the gloom.

The first thing he saw was the donkey’s carcass on the floor. Its huge leather collar was blackened with blood. Then he saw Mazzetta with his arms outspread and his head on the beast’s rump. The old man was writhing about in the final throes of death. Vango threw himself down onto the floor next to him.

“Ma’az . . .” The dying man was trying to stammer something for Vango’s benefit.

“She . . . Ma’az . . . elle . . .”

Vango put his ear closer to the dying man.

“Ma’azelle.”

He rushed outside with his gun.

Mademoiselle.

He ran toward the house.

Thorns were tearing at his legs. But he didn’t feel a thing.

Vango approached from the west side, where there were two windows. The first gave onto the main living area. Without hesitating for a second, he loaded his gun and jumped headfirst through the glass pane. Inside, he rolled onto the blue floor, instantly got up again, and turned full circle, still pointing his gun.

The silence and emptiness were dreadful.

A night-light was about to go out near to the fire. That cup she always used, on the table, had been smashed to pieces, and all that was left was a tiny heap of snow.

Vango rushed into the bedroom. Nothing.

“Mademoiselle!” he called out.

He went outside onto the terrace, where everything was pitch-black.

“Mademoiselle!”

His voice came echoing back to him, all the way from the bottom of the crater. He quickly searched the neighboring deserted house, behind the olive tree, before setting off running again in the direction of Mazzetta, who was still breathing.

Vango put the gun to the dying man’s forehead.

“Where is she?”

“Or . . . men . . .”

Mazzetta moved his hand and tucked his thumb into his palm to indicate the number four.

“Four?” asked Vango. “Four men?”

Mazzetta’s eyes answered yes with all their might.

“Did they kill her?”

“No.”

“Carry her off?”

Mazzetta’s eyes acquiesced, and then his whole body was wracked by a convulsion. He was suffocating. He stretched out his arm to hold on to the donkey’s collar. Vango released the old man’s grip from the leather yoke.

“Where? Where did they take her?”

This time, Mazzetta could only move his lips. Vango pulled his gun away and put his ear to the fading man’s mouth. He made him repeat it three times.

My donkey. He had definitely said, “My donkey.”

A second later, Mazzetta died on Vango’s knees, and the boy began to weep.

A few hours earlier, while it was still light, Brother John Mulligan, who was about to remove his skullcap as Cardinal of the South, had seen the speedboat going past in the opposite direction. But this time, through his telescope, he could make out a woman standing at the stern, who kept turning to face Salina. From observing the woman’s face with her white hair stuck to it, and the weapons pointed at her, it was clear to Mulligan that something was afoot.

Before the night was over, Vango had dug two deep holes at the top of the cliff.

He buried Mazzetta in the first and the donkey in the second.

He couldn’t manage to undo the donkey’s collar, so he buried it with him.

He made two crosses on the ground with wild fennel flowers.

Vango lingered on the cliff top, in front of the mounds of fresh earth. He knew that Mazzetta had died defending Mademoiselle.

But this didn’t assuage the hatred raging inside Vango.

What he did feel, however, was an instinctive sense of respect before these two corpses, the strange respect that all civilizations show toward human beings once they have stopped breathing.

In the old days, in the Carmelite seminary, Father Jean used to remark to Vango how, in the history of humanity, if a land had existed, a single one, where the living were afforded the same respect as the dead, it would have been sweet to live in such a place!

At dawn, Vango passed by Mademoiselle’s house again.

Helped by the early light, he searched the premises for traces of the kidnappers. He couldn’t find any. Higher up, in Mazzetta’s lair, even the bullets that had killed the donkey and his master had vanished. It was a perfect job.

Vango closed up the house as if its owners were going away on vacation. The lock was a bit stiff. They’d never had any need of it. He hid the key in the hollow of the olive tree and thrust his hand into the foliage to feel how firm the olives were.

Suddenly, down on the ground against the roots, he caught sight of the little ball of blue silk. He picked it up. And the handkerchief of his childhood spread out between his fingers. The blue handkerchief that knew everything but said nothing, while hinting at tales of inscrutable kingdoms.

Vango noticed the star. It had been embroidered just above the sloping bar of the capital
V
. But it hadn’t been there the day before. The handiwork looked unfinished. The fifth point of the star hadn’t been completed. The saffron-colored thread was still hanging loose.

Mademoiselle had wanted to embroider the memory of Vango’s mother, Stella, in that silk.

She had been interrupted by the men arriving. The handkerchief had fallen to the ground, between the snaking roots.

Vango climbed the winding path and crossed over to the other side of the crater, where he was surrounded by Malfa’s oldest vines. He could see the black smoke of Stromboli on the horizon, as well as the island of Panarea, the outline of Filicudi and, even farther off, the top of a huge stone that marked the invisible presence of his monastery. He wasn’t ready to return there yet.

He reached the port at the hour when the fishermen return. He slipped through outstretched nets, onlookers, and sailors. He made straight for a small, rusty, corrugated-iron hut.

Vango knocked on a sheet of metal as if he were knocking at the door of a cottage.

A woman in rags was busy crushing an eggshell.

“It thickens up the grub, gives me something to chew on,” she said. “And that’s a start. It means you’ve got something between the teeth.”

“Are you Signora Giuseppina?”

“Signora Pippo Troisi,” she corrected him.

“I knew your husband a long time ago. He was a good man.”

“Yes,” she replied with great tenderness, before asking, “And do I know you?”

“No,” Vango answered hastily, because he didn’t want her to remember. “I’ve just got here and I’m leaving with the next boat.”

“In four minutes!” declared Giuseppina, who knew the timetables of all the boats that might bring her love back to her by heart.

When Vango greeted this information with silence, she updated it: “In three minutes and forty-five seconds.”

Around her neck she wore the handsome watch the doctor had given her.

“I want to talk to you about a very old story,” said Vango.

“You’ve landed on the right person.”

“Why?”

“I only like old stories.”

“Do you remember the beginning of the autumn of 1918?”

“Yes. There were a few big storms.”

“A man was killed back then.”

“Bartolomeo Viaggi, twenty-nine years old. Three daughters. Only one of them’s still with us. And his wife died too, very soon afterward.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yes. It’s sad when people leave.”

“People say you know something about Bartolomeo.”

“Who? Who told you that?”

Giuseppina’s eyes shone. She had never spoken about this to a single person.

“I want to know who killed him,” said Vango.

“Who told you about this?”

“Answer my question, please.”

She was staring at Vango very attentively.

“I can tell you about Bartolomeo. It wasn’t Mazzetta who killed him, even if he was involved in the business. It was the other one, the third one.”

“His name?”

“Who told you about me? I recognize you. I . . .”

“Tell me the name of the third man.”

“His name was Cafarello, Giovanni Cafarello. He left for America, for New York. He abandoned his father up there between the mountains. A father who died alone last spring, at the age of a hundred.”

Giovanni Cafarello. That name was now etched in Vango’s mind forever.

He looked at the woman leaning toward him. He thanked her.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Tell me who you are. Tell me you saw Pippo Troisi not long ago.”

Vango moved off. The boat was there. The crowd was squeezed along the dockside. Giuseppina had knelt down on the ground, like a woman from the deserts in front of her tent.

“Please,” she begged him. “Tell me. Is Pippo alive? I recognize you now. I know who you are. Vango!”

Vango stopped. He went back over to her and said softly, “He’s alive.”

There were tears of genuine joy on her cheeks.

Vango jumped into the boat.

A man helped the woman stand up again.

“Lean on me, Pina. Calm down. . . .”

He had just stepped off the same boat, having sailed from the island of Lipari.

He was smiling.

It was Monday. What bliss. The best day of the week. He had dressed up with his red tie. He was dancing.

Dr. Basilio was going to have lunch with Mademoiselle.

“Tell me . . . Is something wrong, Pina?”

“Pippo is alive,” she whispered.

The doctor smiled. This woman, Pina Troisi, was the only person he truly understood. Both of them had chosen an inaccessible love. She loved someone who had disappeared. He loved someone who was a mystery.

“Who told you that your husband is alive?”

“Vango, the wild boy of Pollara.”

“Where is he?” asked the doctor, suddenly standing up straight.

“He’s leaving.”

The good doctor Basilio ran across the black stone jetty. But the boat was already some distance from the dock. He saw Vango. And Vango spotted him.

Neither of them waved.

A little later, the doctor discovered the locked door at Mademoiselle’s house.

Hope had flown away.

Everland, Scotland, October 1935

The small plane flew by a second time, close to the tower. But this time, the pilot had a clear view of the man running toward the stables. A woman was chasing him. She was wearing a white nightshirt hitched up to her thighs.

“Tell me I’m dreaming,” muttered the pilot.

But he wasn’t dreaming. It was Mary the housekeeper, down below.

Paul increased the altitude and began a wider loop to make it look as if he was heading off.

The plane was a Sirius, the single-engine aircraft with which Lindbergh had broken records over the Pacific. Paul owned one of only fifteen models in existence.

Slowing down, he headed toward the waters of Loch Ness. He could see the edge of a forest already turning an autumnal yellow, as well as some remote sheepfolds in the hills.

Paul was both amused and perplexed.

“Mary! Mary!” He kept saying her name over and over again, his eyes as wide as saucers.

There were various explanations competing in his mind for the scene he had just stumbled on. He started to fantasize about a double, a triple, and even a quadruple life for Mary, who, for all that she looked like an elderly spinster straight out of a storybook, was perhaps the most brazen woman in the Highlands.

Mary had started working at the castle when Paul was born, twenty-six years earlier. He was finding it hard to imagine that she had hidden her libertine lifestyle for so long behind her blushing cheeks, behind her maternal tenderness and her thick woolen stockings.

“No . . . it’s just not possible.”

He swerved sharply, putting the wing of his little seaplane into the vertical position. He was heading for the castle once more. It only took him a few seconds to fly over fields crisscrossed with low stone walls and arrive above the main driveway.

Mary was now alone in front of the stables. Her arms were spread wide, and she was signaling crazily at the plane.

Just before he rose up to fly over the castle’s black roof, Paul saw the stable door burst open and a black horse gallop out of it. Its rider hadn’t taken the time to saddle it up. He was riding bareback, holding on to the halter strap and kicking his mount vigorously in the flanks.

The aviator and the horseman passed each other.

A few meters farther off, as he turned around, Paul saw the rider jumping over a first wall.

This man was unlikely to be one of Mary’s lovers. And, most pressingly, he had just stolen a horse.

Paul nosed his plane up over the castle. He had decided to give chase.

Overcome with admiration, Mary fell to her knees, which were somewhere in the midst of the folds of her nightshirt, and gazed on at her hero’s derring-do.

He began by climbing vertically, high in the sky. All that was visible was a black dot surrounded by smoke. The roar of the engine became inaudible. Continuing with his loop, Paul let his machine rest on its back before putting on a burst of speed as it headed for the ground, tracing a perfect circle. The plane slowly corrected its position as it approached land.