He drove the VW slowly over the rutted lane until the gravel ran out at a small square of disintegrating concrete. A howling dog came and barked at him when he climbed out, then gave up when it reached the length of its chain. There was a chicken coop, the sound of gentle, alarmed clucking coming from inside. The sky had cleared to ragged strips of cloud. In the dim moonlight he could make out rows of low grey olive trees, ancient and crooked like an army of wizened crones stretching down the hillside. A rusty tractor stood outside a corrugated-iron barn that looked ready to collapse. Beside it was a rickety stack of wooden crates. The place smelled of rotting fruit, a nearby cesspit, and poverty.
Five years to tell the world not a drop of chemical had touched your precious bright-green oil on its way into the bottle. And still the stuff tasted like cheap crap. They were crazy. Except that wasn’t the whole story, and he knew it.
A hefty key from her ring worked with the front door. He turned on the lights and walked into a low living room, sparsely furnished and smelling of damp. A wood-burning stove close to death leaked weak smoke. He walked over and put some more fuel behind the doors, watching the flames rise. There were brightly coloured bean bags for chairs, an old hi-fi system, posters on the wall. Che Guevara and Trotsky, Jim Morrison and Hendrix. Bare bulbs dangling from wires. A kitchen with a gas ring and some pots and pans drying over the sink.
One plate, one knife, one fork, one mug. The rest were still in a bright orange cabinet by the window.
The woman was screaming and banging on the van walls outside. He didn’t mind. No one would hear.
An open staircase led to the first floor. He turned on more lights and walked up. One room full of boxes of bills, invoices and tax documents, books on olive growing and agriculture, old newspapers. A couple of albums of photos. Golden temples and smiling Buddhist monks in saffron. A postcard of a square in Marrakech labelled Jemaa el-Fna. Not many of the man, and all of them by the look of it in Italy.
He walked to the window and looked back outside. The van was there, not moving much. He’d kept the back door closed. She was quiet now, shuffling around, trying to get free, he guessed. Pointless. He’d bound her tight and the nearest lights were half a valley away, down towards Fiesole.
There was a small, black lacquered box beneath the ledge. It looked oriental, covered in exotic decorations. He opened the lid, stared at the plastic bags full of marijuana.
Beneath his feet the floorboards squeaked and moved as he walked across them. He bent down, got the large door key in the gap between the planks, lifted what looked like a loose one.
Small sacks of white powder, more grass, heavy lumps of resin. Dope was another of their sins. And weapons. Three handguns. A semi-automatic rifle of the kind he’d only seen in movies. A sawn-off shotgun and next to it boxes and boxes of shells. And, in plastic bags, a hard, dark substance he first thought to be a kind of drug. Then he picked it up, smelled it.
Chemicals, noxious and strong.
Explosive?
Things didn’t add up.
Like waiting five years for the poison to leach out of the land. They had to make money somehow. The husband came from Calabria. The crime organization there, the ’Ndrangheta, had been quietly making inroads into Tuscany. Or so he’d read in the papers. They’d need foot soldiers, a lowly advance guard. A couple posing as hippies pushing dope while they waited for the paperwork to come through for their oh-so-clean olives. The woman was American, from New Jersey. A place the Mafia liked. He’d read they had some Jewish gangs there; big men who thought of themselves as compari to the Sicilians.
Fallen. So many times, he guessed. Just like him. And the more you fell, the more you ached to go back home, to that green place without pain or death or sin. Whores and drug peddlers, thieves and usurers. Little people. Insects running in between the cobbled cracks of Florence, scuttling from one grubby corner to the next. They were always the first to be saved.
He walked into the other room and looked at the double bed. It was black cast iron, with an oversized mattress, crumpled sheets and a livid orange duvet. Even from this distance, he could hear Chavah Efron back to kicking hard and repeatedly at the walls of the van.
He walked outside, went to the van, threw open the doors. She lay in a crumpled heap among the boxes, glaring at him.
‘Why do you make this noise?’ he asked, shaking his head. ‘This is your home. You know no one’s here.’
He climbed in, crawled over on his knees, untied the gag. She didn’t try to kick him. That he found surprising. Her cheeks were wet with tears. He took out a handkerchief and wiped away the stains as best he could.
‘Answer me truthfully. When does your man come back?’
‘Any minute now, asshole. And when he does—’
‘Don’t lie!’
Chavah Efron fell quiet. But she didn’t weep. Just stared at him with those sharp and knowing eyes.
‘He’s coming,’ she whispered. ‘He’s a good man and he’ll kill you…’
‘A good man gives you dope? A good man makes you whore yourself for him? Sell his drugs and warm his bed?’
There was hatred in her face. No fear at all.
‘What do you want?’ she shrieked.
‘To be washed clean,’ he said, and it was close to a whisper. ‘Just the same as you.’
He picked her up in his arms, holding her so tightly she couldn’t struggle, though she kicked and fought as best she could, screaming all the while.
The dog barked and leapt against the chain. He heard the flapping of frightened wings in the chicken coops. From the grey, crippled shapes of the olive trees, he thought he heard the cry of a fox. He carried her up the stairs, placed her on the bed, then one by one undid her hands and tied each, outstretched, to the iron bars at the top. Not too tight. Room to move. No more.
After that he went back down the steps, walked outside, closed the van, locked the front door of the farmhouse behind him and turned off the ground-floor lights.
When he returned to the bedroom she didn’t try to kick out any more. He was a big man. She was small, unable to harm him. She lay there on the bed, tiny body on the orange duvet, legs apart. Looking at him in a way he didn’t like to see.
‘Do it then,’ she said.
‘Do what?’
‘What you want. You’re just like all the others, aren’t you? Just like…’
‘No, I’m not,’ he said, and sat on the bed.
‘Why would someone cut off the comb of a cockerel?’ Fratelli stirred his drink with a lurid red plastic straw. ‘Leave the head and neck but gut the thing? Take out its insides and leave the meat?’
Their destination turned out to be one street back from the river in the Via de’ Renai, a sloping cobbled lane with a handful of cafés and restaurants. The place Fratelli chose was a long narrow bar full of mirrors. The elegant woman behind the counter nodded in recognition as they entered and didn’t look at Julia for one moment. The room was full of cigarette smoke emanating from a handful of customers. She was pleased to see Fratelli try to wave it away with a scowl. He seemed to be one of the few Italian men who didn’t have a cigarette to his lips every minute of the day. There wasn’t an English voice around.
‘The comb?’ she asked, relieved that the story about his childhood now seemed to be behind them, as if it were a necessary hurdle he wanted her to cross before returning to more direct affairs.
Fratelli had ordered food and two glasses of the cocktail he’d mentioned. A Florentine speciality, invented in the city, he said. Red vermouth, gin and Campari. An odd combination, sweet and strong, yet somehow well suited to the chilly weather. He sat admiring his ruby-coloured tumbler full of drink and ice, lost in thought.