Martin started yapping again, so Jake turned the speakers off. Be great to have a set of those when Madrona started getting ballsy about babies. The helicopter flew over the wooded range of mountains that ran parallel to the coast, then out over the ocean, whatever the fuck they called it here. Who cared what they called it? It was all one big Pacific. At this point Jake realised that the pilot might need to rap with him about suitable locations for the next phase of the operation, so he turned his headset back on and guess what? In a total validation of everything Jake believed in — no, knew! — the pilot came on a moment later and said, ‘Is good?’ And it was. The helicopter circled round, dipped down and started running back the way they’d come. Jake slid back the cargo door and clipped it open. A hundred feet below, the water lay as crisply rumpled as a length of silk pulled off the bolt for the buyer’s approval.
‘Let’s go!’ he shouted to Martin.
It took maybe five minutes to get the crate positioned correctly and partially out of the doorway. Way before then Martin had started yapping again, so Jake switched him off and started just pointing and pushing. After another few minutes of slewing and shoving they succeeded in manoeuvring the crate’s centre of gravity over the sill of the helicopter’s deck, after which everything happened of its own accord. The inner end of the laden box shot violently into the air, slapping Martin upside the head, then the whole thing flipped out and fell away — splosh! Jake watched it sink, unlatched the door, slammed it shut and told the pilot to drive home. He ripped off his safety harness and pranced around the cargo space, slipping on the metal rollers and falling hard, then holding up his hand and flipping a finger at the roof.
‘End times, my fucking ass!’
You couldn’t win the God game, but he had just stalled the inevitable outcome for a century or two. Life felt good and Jake aimed to enjoy it and Madrona and maybe even their goddamn kids, but it had sure been fun playing.
It wasn’t till they were back over the coast that he noticed Martin Nguyen was still lying splayed out on the floor where he’d fallen, his head wrenched round at an angle you just knew had to be impossible except maybe for owls. As Jake gradually figured out what must have happened, all of his feelings for this man — who he’d known for like a while, and was pretty sure had screwed him over the purchase price for the menorah — came together in an impassioned outburst of raw, primal whatever.
‘Dude!’ he cried.
Tom lay on the bed staring up at an intricate pattern of cracks on the ceiling. They resembled a river delta seen from space, a satellite photograph of somewhere he’d never been, some remote place where the people had retained their traditional customs and cuisine, a lost heartland where life made sense the way it was supposed to.
The room to which he was confined was slightly larger than Rocco Battista’s cell, but not much cheerier or better furnished. There was a narrow bed, a chest of drawers and some bare shelving. The window was locked, the shutters closed and the conditioned air chilly and synthetic-smelling. Outside the door, which was also locked, stood an armed policeman who admitted nurses and doctors as necessary, gave Tom his meals, accompanied him to the toilet and then locked him up again. He responded to the patient’s Italian as though it were Japanese, occasionally shaking his head or shrugging his shoulders, but never uttered a word.
The exact time of day or night has little significance in a hospital, and it was not until a doctor came, examined the wound, checked Tom’s pulse and blood pressure, gave him a tub of painkillers and pronounced him fit to depart that he discovered that it was in fact four o’clock in the afternoon. His clothing was returned and the taciturn policeman escorted him to a car parked in a quiet courtyard within the hospital complex. They drove north to an apartment block between Piazza Loreto and Piazza Europa, in the unprepossessing modern suburbs of the city. Tom asked several times where they were going, but the policeman either ignored him or just shook his head in the contemptuous and utterly final Calabrian manner.
They parked outside a charmless structure dating from the 1970s or 1980s and remained in the car for at least five minutes while Tom’s escort scrutinised the comings and goings on the street. When he was finally satisfied, he got out, flung open Tom’s door and scurried him inside the apartment block like a movie star’s minder dodging the paparazzi. The scene within, however, was not a luxurious night-club or glittering awards ceremony but a dingy foyer with bad lighting, bad paint and seriously bad smells. The policeman spent another nervous minute while the lift trundled lethargically back to the ground floor and then conveyed them, equally lethargically, to the seventh. By the time his escort unlocked one of the doors in the corridor, Tom’s wound had started to ache quite painfully.
Behind the door was a narrow passage lined with coats and books and umbrellas. The policeman looked inside one of the rooms to the left and gestured sharply to Tom that he should enter it. It was almost a replica of the one he had just left at the hospital, only with more dust and lots of cardboard boxes filled with files and papers scattered all over the floor. The only decoration was a large rectangular photograph of uniformed men and women standing in three neatly aligned ranks in ascending levels. Some graduation ceremony, it looked like. He had to move some of the boxes aside to get to the bed, and on top of the pile of documents in one of them he noticed a certificate from a police academy stating that Mirella Kodra had excelled in the firearms training course she had taken two years previously.
So this must be the spare bedroom in her apartment. No unmarried Calabrian woman would dream of letting it be known that she had allowed a man to spend the night in her home. Therefore Tom was not categorised as a man by Mirella. He was a problem, a job, a parcel that had to be passed around like in that kid’s game. He was not a guest, still less a potential lover, just a displaced person who must grudgingly be housed and fed until he got well enough to do everyone a favour by pissing off back to where he came from. He slumped down on the bed, feeling utterly lonely and exhausted and bereft. What a fool he’d been, with his big ideas of rediscovering his Calabrian roots and opening una vera trattoria americana autentica! It wasn’t so much what he didn’t know. Given time, he could learn that. It was about what he did know and would never be able to forget, stuff that was inappropriate here, behaviour and habits and ideas that were alien, maybe even offensive. But how could he pretend to be ignorant of those things? How could a person ever unknow anything? He swallowed two of the capsules he’d been given — without water, to avoid appealing to his swinish guard — then lay down again, gasping at the pain, drew his knees up into a foetal crouch and went to sleep.
He was awoken by voices he couldn’t recognise or understand, a man and a woman, perhaps arguing. The room was in complete darkness. At length the voices fell silent and a door slammed somewhere. Footsteps came and went gently for some time, and then the door to his room opened and a figure in silhouette broke the rectangular panel of light. Mirella.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m feeling fine. You know why? Because I’m homeward bound, homeward bound. Do you know that song?’
‘You told me the other evening that this was your home.’
‘I was misinformed.’
‘Not by me.’
Tom shifted position on the bed. Those painkillers really mellowed you out. Once his eyes had adjusted, he could just about make out Mirella’s face.
‘And how are you, signorina?’ he asked with some asperity and using the third person mode of address.
‘Tired. There’s a big operation in progress. They’re hoping to arrest the man who killed your father. They needed help with setting it up but don’t want me there when it happens. That’s why I’m late, and tired. When it comes to the crunch, it’s pretty much boys only. That tires you, after a while.’
Silence fell.
‘Why are you addressing me formally?’ she said.
‘Just trying to be polite. I know almost nothing about you, and most of what I thought I knew turns out to be false. You told me you were a pen-pusher and call-catcher for the local government, but apparently you work for the police.’
Mirella sighed.
‘I’m sorry, Tommaso.’
He didn’t reply.
‘I’ll make us something to eat,’ she said.
‘I’m not hungry.’
