III
The kick-turn perfectly executed, he emerged from the depths and gasped in air, then powered forward again, cleaving the wavelets set up by his previous passage. Three, four, five, six… The powerful arms thrashed the water that streamed down his hairy shoulders and back, ending in a dense twist like the tail of some small parasite seeking refuge down the crack in the man’s buttocks.
Eight, nine, ten… Sighting the wall ahead, he swivelled and kicked off again, torpedoing a good two metres underwater before breaking surface again. Forty-eight lengths already, and he was feeling fine. In fact he was feeling great. His arms and legs were still solid, enjoying their work, and even the edgy warming pain from the lactic acid build-up merely served as a stimulant. But above all his voglia was back, his will to win. The idea had been to break fifty laps for the first time, to celebrate his birthday, and now he knew that he could.
Seen from the road running up the hillside above, had there been an observer there, the house, the swimming pool and the surrounding terraces resembled a section of tessera unearthed from a once larger antique inlaid floor: an azure rectangle contrasting with the russet dash of the roof tiles, both keyed to the blocks and wedges of ochre paving and the surrounding array of silvery olive trees. As for the shadows cast by the potted shrubs lining the driveway leading up to the house, they might have been explained away as ancient stains; wine, perhaps, or blood.
Eight, nine, ten… Another perfect flip-over and once again he was caroming up through the depths and hitting his stride for the final length. It was as he rose to breathe after the initial battery of strokes that he heard the sound for the first time. At first he ignored it as an aural aberration, some tinnitus brought on by a combination of water in the ear canals and his extraordinary exertions. The second time he spouted, he knew the sound was real, but it was only after the third that he realized what it was. Well, they could wait, whoever they were.
His fingers touched the tiled wall. He rose triumphantly to his feet and surveyed the scene. A large white cloud was sliding over the tremulous sun. Beneath the veranda of the house, a heavy white plastic table with its yellow parasol supported a newspaper, a glossy news magazine, a bottle of mineral water, a glass with a slice of lemon and a mobile phone.
Nestore felt a crawling sensation on his right arm, and looked down to see a butterfly exploring the undergrowth of wet hairs just above the small black tattoo of a woman’s head. Its huge wings were a miraculous pattern of rusty orange and cobalt blue dots and dashes on an ochre ground while its head was festooned with delicate antennae like a radio aerial. With a careless swipe of his hand he crushed the creature, which fell like limp ashen paper into the chlorinated water of the pool.
The sound which had interrupted him continued without interruption, a series of high nagging whines. He strode over to the side of the pool, thrusting the water aside with his powerful thighs, placed his hands in the trough at the edge, then leapt up on to the tiles and strode briskly over to pick up the phone.
No sooner had he grasped it than it stopped ringing. He was about to close the cover again when he noticed the text message light blinking. It must have been Irene. Damn. If he’d told her once, he’d told her a hundred times never to contact him at the weekend. Presumably the temptation to send him birthday greetings had proved too strong. ‘We’ll celebrate my twentieth on Monday,’ he’d said when they parted. She’d frowned. ‘Your twentieth?’ ‘ Certo, amore. Whenever I’m with you I feel thirty years younger.’ Which was true. Dark, short and skinny, Irene was no one’s idea of a pin-up, but she had a dirty, driven quality that he found extremely sexy. Just the same, that wouldn’t stop him doubling the usual ration of precoital welts to her buttocks as punishment for this indiscretion. Gli ordini vanno rispettati. Rules were rules. Andreina’s astounding inability to learn Italian had got him off the hook on several occasions, but if she had happened to see this particular message, he’d have had the hell of a time trying to talk his way out of it.
But the message wasn’t from Irene. Water crawled coldly down the man’s back as he read it. 348 393 9028: MEDUSA. After the heated pool, the air was distinctly cool, even down here in the sheltered terraces above Lake Lugano. He keyed in the number, then turned to face the hillside behind the villa. The land rose precipitously, the contours marked by the looping line of Via Totone and its accompanying homes and gardens. There was no one in sight.
The distant phone answered. Nestore remembered those curt, peremptory tones all too well.
‘We need to talk. Drive to Capolago and take the little train up Monte Generoso. Get off at Bellavista. Tell no one. Come immediately and alone.’
He was suddenly furious.
‘Don’t give me orders, Alberto! I’m not in the army any more.’
‘You still are when it comes to this. We all are, all three of us.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘They’ve found Leonardo.’
The only upside to the whole business was that Andreina was predictably furious. ‘But what about lunch? I’ve got a table for fifteen booked at Da Candida! Everyone’s coming! You can’t just change your plans at the last moment like this!’
In his wife’s domestic theology, changing one’s plans at the last moment was a mortal sin on a par with not noticing when she’d had her hair done or forgetting their wedding anniversary. Nestore used his invariable formula for dealing with these outbursts.
‘It’s a matter of business, cara.’
The none-too-subtle implication being, ‘Where the hell do you think the money for all this comes from?’
Once dressed, he went to his study. It was a blatantly masculine room, the tone immediately given by the odour of leather and cigar smoke, the rosewood cabinet filled with shotguns and the two mounted ibex heads on the wall above the fireplace. He removed the one to the left and tapped an eight-digit code into the keypad of the metal door inside. From the recess behind he removed a Glock 32 pistol, checked it carefully, then placed it in his coat pocket.
‘I only have to go to Capolago,’ he told Andreina after pecking her on the cheek. ‘I should be back in plenty of time, but if for some reason I’m delayed just go on down without me and I’ll meet you and the others there. Tell Bernard I’m having the controfiletto di cervo and let him pick the wine.’
He climbed into his new BMW Mini Cooper S — 163 hp at 6000 rpm, 0-100 kph in 7.4 seconds, top speed 220 kph, alloy wheels with run-flat tyres, and the Getrag 6-speed manual box — and drove down the steep twisting street, past the old casino and the construction area for the new one, down into the original town square on the shore of the lake, when the place had been a fishing village. A pair of huge birds were circling on the thermals high above the glassy waters of the lake. Nestore had often observed them from the patio of the villa, but had never been able to identify them. They were obviously raptors of some kind, yet they never seemed to stoop to prey.
He drove round the tight bends by the old church, then out along the suburban street leading to the elegant Fascist-era boxed arch of black and white stone marking the confines of this tiny Italian enclave in the Ticino; ‘a tiny bubble of Italian air trapped in the thick Swiss ice’, as Nestore thought of it.