In the Wolf's Mouth (15 page)

2

Walking home, Angilù caught sight of the witch of Montebianco in the distance. Perhaps she’d been visiting someone in the house, the servant Graziana maybe. Short, dark, she moved with a rapid skimming walk, a small bag hanging from her right hand. Angilù wondered what she knew. For himself, he preferred the church now and again. He should go soon to get a blessing. He pictured the holy sparkle of it descending on him, protecting him.

He walked up through the whispering avenue of olive trees and into his home, into the blue shadows of his whitewashed hallway with its smooth, cool smell of plaster dust and paint. For two years, Albanese’s widow had remained in this place. After two years, she had moved back in with her mother in Sant’Attilio and later, when she’d married again, into Silvio’s house. The Prince had invited Angilù and Rosaria, then pregnant with their first daughter, to move in. The house frightened both of them at first. It was so large and quiet and still. And Albanese had lived there. His presence remained. The families in Sant’Attilio who were friends of the Albaneses, those of them who remained, watched Angilù as he passed in the street. Angilù had the house blessed. Holy water flashed into every corner. And then the baby was born, a new
blossoming of loud life, and Angilù forgot; the place became their house.

He could hear Rosaria in the kitchen, the melody of her talk to Mariuzza, their youngest daughter. Walking in, he found Mariuzza sitting on the counter, kicking her soft legs. Rosaria was pouring olive oil into the bottom of a smoking pot. Beside her were heaps of sliced vegetables. Angilù put his hand on the back of her neck, a strong, thick neck, a mother’s neck. Always that distance he crossed in himself to reach out and touch her, still at heart a shepherd and far from everything. He kissed the ticklish damp hair on her nape as she picked up a handful of silvery onions and dropped them into the pan. ‘Hello, little bird,’ he said through the sudden noise of frying.

‘Yes, yes. You need to move.’

Angilù caught hold of one of Mariuzza’s swinging feet. He held it, straightening the girl’s leg, and bent to kiss the dimpled knee.

3

Graziana had unpacked Luisa’s things by the time she went upstairs. She put on a riding dress and stepped out to fetch a field guard from their office to accompany her. The first flames of evening were in the sky. Luisa chose to ride Ezio, sharp-boned and volatile, a horse that tended to fidget and sidestep and yank at the reins. The guard subdued him in the stables then bent down to offer his hands to Luisa. She stepped up into the saddle. The field guards were always so strong – the man’s knitted fingers felt like a stone step. In the courtyard, Ezio tried whirling on the spot. Luisa sat on the beast, imposing herself. She spoke at him and patted his neck. Ezio calmed, stalled finally under her, breathing and thinking. Luisa kicked. She rode out. The guard followed after.

Ezio didn’t like going downhill. He fended away at the slope with his forelegs, trying to tread back upright, but Luisa leaned in, persuaded him down. His hooves scraped. Small stones slithered after. And that was the last of Ezio’s resistance for the day. They rode together, a strong headwind cutting away at Luisa, cleansing and purifying. Ezio’s long eyelashes flickered against the onrushing air. Their wills fused – that was Luisa’s sensation. Ezio understood what Luisa intended and stretched his legs, gathering the ground behind them.
Luisa was freed in the loosened movement. They walked for a while, Luisa resting her gaze in the distances, creases of shadows in the hills, clouds turning scarlet in the sky. At this pace she saw the birds hopping and people labouring among straight rows of vines. She turned in the saddle to see the guard trotting after. When she stopped, he did, keeping the distance she’d demanded. He sat waiting, his hands on the pommel, his thick legs stuck out. Luisa turned Ezio with a swipe of the reins and kicked. His head and shaking mane crested in front of her. They galloped down past the guard and back towards the house.

4

Connecting the swirling lines of the maps with the reality of the old country was difficult. Maps and memories were so different. Standing over them, the colonel patiently waiting, Cirò thoughtfully rubbed his nose between his thumb and his forefinger. His part of the island had many concentric rings of contour lines that looked like knots in wood. Those were the hills he remembered. He followed one road with his finger. If Portella Corvi was there and Sant’Attilio was there … then he knew where he was. That hill, he could see its surly shape again in his mind, the near side always shadowed. Now he could put himself there and see the whole place unfold around him. He could say to the colonel that this was all Prince Adriano’s land, that this belonged to the Santangelis, that there were wells here, here and here.

His route into that room was not one that Cirò would have chosen. It had been demeaning. Certain Italian and Sicilian men with influential American friends had been approached in a civilised manner, taken out to dinner, spoken to quietly in clubs and brothels. Or an unusually well-dressed stranger had appeared at their prison cells and led them out. Cirò, for all his American success, still belonged in a different category. Working his trade at the docks, he was no
boss. He was collected in a mass arrest at a waterfront café. At least it had been a mass arrest. An individual arrest would really have worried him. Not that there was any evidence of the things he’d done. He hadn’t used a gun. Docks were dangerous places. A cargo hook swings. A walkway is slippery. And that had been some time ago when he was establishing himself. They arrested everyone in the café. The officers sifted through them letting Poles and Norwegians and others go. They held onto the Sicilians.

The dumb cops had clearly been told to lay it on thick. A fat little police captain who for a long time had received tributes of money from some of the men in the room and had been taken to girls by others, barked out that they were cleaning up. Everybody would be in for a long stretch. Unless, that is, they were interested in cooperating. Given the rumours that were circulating (and more than rumours, good, hard facts passed along the line), no one was surprised when blue gave way to green and into this little theatrical production walked an army officer. He told them that they were all off the hook if they would step up and serve their country. The army wanted their help.

Like any of this was necessary. They could just have asked. Everybody in that room, even the ones who wanted to stay in America, wanted the Fascists off the island. They wanted back what was theirs.

After this rigmarole, excitement glittered among the sombre, determined men of Cirò’s acquaintance. They met in cafés and bars, whorehouses and each other’s homes and discussed the possibilities that lay ahead. It was a grand prospect. They were sharper, now, harder
and cleverer. They weren’t just stealing sheep and squeezing mill owners and collecting tributes and making sure they got certain leases. They were American businessmen who had kept up their interests against all kinds of competition, Poles, Italians, Jews, Chinese. They’d killed and they’d negotiated. They ran numbers and nightclubs and girls. They imported morphine and booze, Cirò’s special area of interest, and they received tributes from all sorts of people in all sorts of places. They’d negotiated with the authorities and got them on side. They’d become political. These conversations made them sentimental about all that America had given them and all the work they’d done, the people lost on the way. And now it was time to go home. Now it was time for revenge.

New York was home now, too, of course. Cirò loved taking his money up into the canyons of Manhattan, striding towards the narrow blade of sky that forever retreated up the avenues. He saw the millionaires with their tiny dogs and fur collars, the women with foxes looped around their necks. He saw the taxis and doormen. You couldn’t have invented the place. More meat than you ever dreamed of eating. A place that answered to his appetites.

Sicily was home, though. Sicily was mother. It was his olive trees and sunshine flavoured with herbs and the smell of hot earth. It was the hard-won property and Teresa.

And he would see Teresa again. In America, he’d had news of her, brought by new arrivals or people who had visited home, arriving in the hills in their suits and showering gifts on the shoeless children.
Teresa had thought what she was supposed to think, that he had been taken, destroyed, a death that disappeared, his body never found. Or she had acted as though she thought he’d been shot with the white shotgun. Maybe she guessed otherwise, what with so many men of respect escaping away. And couldn’t she still feel him, the force of him alive, no matter that he was across an ocean? Whatever, she had become a widow. In those early days, the thought of Teresa alone in an empty bed, wearing black, had closed Albanese’s mind with pain. Years later, he’d heard the news of her remarriage to that peasant Silvio. He remembered exactly where he was when he heard. Ginu had been almost too frightened to tell him. Cirò was halfway through a meal, his mouth was grainy with ground beef and tomato sauce. He pushed away the plate. The food in his stomach turned instantly heavy and poisonous.

Now he would return to reclaim her.

In his own way, Cirò had been faithful to her, for twenty years consorting only with mistresses and whores. Apart, that is, from one woman.

Cathy was an Irish girl, a typist in a small glass-sided office inside one of the warehouses. He would glimpse her in there, her red hair, a bird in a cage. She took her lunch on a bench that looked out over the water. Cirò noticed this. Other men shouted and whistled at her as they went past. Cirò was silent. She looked so nice, sitting there. It was something about the shape of her shoulders inside her coat and her smart polished shoes side by side beneath her. Cirò had the café fill his thermos with coffee and took it and sat beside
her. She was someone he wanted to be next to, delicate and contained, small and beautiful in the rough winds of the docks. He asked if she minded. She said she didn’t. They looked at the water together.

Each day he went back and found her there at the same time. She told him she liked the sea, had grown up seeing it. Later on, she accepted his invitation to go out somewhere fancy for dinner. He thought she guessed what kind of a man he was but decided not to know. The restaurant thrilled her, so smart and lively, and Cirò was greeted by all the staff. He ordered the best wine, a beautiful Barolo. When she tasted it, he saw her shoulders droop. She looked sad. He asked, ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t it good?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘It’s delicious.’ Cirò knew that she was uncertain now, that she was losing a clear sense of the limits of her world. ‘Why don’t you have a cocktail? Cocktails are more fun. We can save the wine for later.’ Cathy allowed him to order and drank, her face half eclipsed by the wide circle of the glass. Later they went home together and made love.

They lived like lovers. Cirò bought her gifts of jewellery that she never wore but put away in the bank. She didn’t know what to do with him. Part of her was frightened. Cirò was often telling her not to be silly. She clung to him. Whatever it was she’d left behind in Ireland meant she was alone here too, in her rented room. She was nervous and loved the size of Cirò, his bulk. She patted his belly, kneaded with her small fingers the meat of his shoulders.

Cirò going off to war felt like the end of everything but it also pleased her in some way; it conferred an
average kind of nobility on him. It cleaned him morally. They were part of the crowd. Greedily, he ate what he could of her before he left. The rosy translucency of her stockings drying in front of the fire. The bead necklaces she wore hanging over a corner of her dressing-table mirror. The piles of picture magazines she kept. Her Christ on a cross on the wall, his small silver body as jointed and slim as a wasp. The dumpy old mattress that took on the warmth of their bodies. Cathy’s hair was gold at her temples and waved out to a faded red. Over her unbelievably fair skin, her face and forehead, her shoulders and the tops of her arms, was a strange scattering of colour, her freckles, multiple. They swirled like money.

She was so strange to him. She was not Sicilian. She was not his wife. He left a large roll of cash under her pillow when he left. He said he would be back before she knew it, like all the brave soldiers did, and left, he assumed, for ever.

Cirò Albanese was returning to Sicily with all the power of America, all the money and metal and giant scale. The invasion fleet was immense. You could look across the ocean on either side and see it stretching away. It was a city on water, Manhattan armed and loosed, grinding forward under a bright half-moon. Down avenues of green-black water raced corvettes and lighter craft. In the sky above the Allies roared towards home.

Later, hearing the guns, the bombs, every detonation was for him, was a visitation of his will upon his enemies. The light of dawn spread across the water. Aircraft raced
back and forth. Cirò was being held, ready. He was important to the Americans. Imagine that. He would be part of the new order on the island. Dense smoke, full of the pollution of random burning, rolled back elegantly over the surface of the cold sea. Cirò inhaled.

5

Ray could feel it already, even before it started, the dryness in his throat. Out there, his mouth would be so dry that his inner cheeks, his tongue and gums would feel like rough external surfaces. His teeth would be grainy pegs of bone. He’d be unable to swallow. Ray was exempt from this battle but his body was returning him to it whether he would or not. His body was stiff with memory, muscles rigid while his bowels began to bubble and slide.

His boots were laced. He had his pack and gun, grenades and a helmet, none of which he should need. That was what he was told. Ray and his unit were arriving along with many reinforcements several days after the first landings. They were there to make peace, specially selected Italian-Americans who could speak with the natives. Meanwhile, they sat in the boat and listened to the chaos and killing. Hours later, he was once again splashing through heavy water. It was a long shallow approach. The sea sucked at his legs. The sand in strange sensations shrank and twisted under his boots. There was no need to be scared. The beach had been secured. They were just landing, just coming ashore. No one would fire on them from those pillboxes. The debris was harmless.