that passed the estate had finally been paved, but there was almost no one left with any interest in using it. So when the car drove past the first time, it was an unusual event. Gabriele tracked it, noting the specific characteristics of the engine sound. When it then returned, stopping about a hundred metres beyond the driveway, probably in that copse where the long-abandoned back entrance to a neighbouring property joined the road, he put his book and his bowl of soup aside and grabbed the pack of supplies he had prepared.
His plans had been made for a long time, and were based on a chance encounter with an elderly Chinese man in the Parco Sempione in Milan. In the midst of the usual crew of junkies, whores of both sexes and indigent homeless people, this tiny, wizened person had been tranquilly performing something that looked like art of some kind: a living statue modulating slowly but very surely between various ritualistic poses.
Gabriele had approached the man and asked what he was up to. When he replied that he was practising a form of self- defence called ‘t’ai chi’, Gabriele had almost laughed. He associated the oriental martial arts with savage kicks, bone-breaking hand blows and a lot of screaming.
‘Your silent ballet is very beautiful, but how could it help if someone tried to beat you up?’
‘It would be very difficult for anyone to attack me,’ the man said in a quiet, almost apologetic tone.
This time Gabriele did laugh.
‘But what on earth could you do if one of the scum who hang around here went for you with his fists, or even a knife?’
The Chinese man regarded him with a gaze so dignified that it seemed a reproach.
‘I would so arrange matters that I was not in the place where the blow struck.’
This was now Gabriele’s strategy. He had no way of knowing whether the solemn promises in his letter to Alberto about never revealing the truth about Leonardo’s death, still less Operation Medusa, had had any effect, but his last call to Fulvio had elicited the disquieting information that the win¬ dow of the shop had been smashed, and that a policeman had been there making enquiries regarding his whereabouts and those of his sister. He had almost been tempted to phone Paola for further details, but her line would almost certainly be tapped.
He had decided to wait another few days before making a further appeal to Alberto. In the meantime, if anyone had managed to track him down and came looking for him, it would be almost impossible for them to approach the farm complex without him seeing or hearing them, and once they had entered he would so arrange matters that he was not in the place where they struck.
The main gates of the cascina were closed and locked, but he had deliberately left the door inset into them slightly ajar. When pushed, it always squeaked on its hinges. It did so now. Gabriele ran quickly downstairs and out of the rear door of the casa padronale into the overgrown garden where the family had sometimes taken tea in the then-fashionable English manner, past the factor’s house, the laundry, the old stables and the porcilaie for the pigs and hens, then around the corner to the row of two-up, two-down houses formerly occupied by the workers on the estate. In through a rear window that he had left open and up to the first floor bedroom window.
‘Gabriele!’
He recognized the voice immediately, but he had also been counting the footsteps ringing out on the stones of the resonant courtyard. There was only one set, so Alberto had come alone. He might of course have back-up in reserve, but that was unlikely. In a matter of this delicacy, whom could he trust? Either way, it was time to find out. He opened the window, lit one of the fireworks he had bought earlier and tossed it out.
The answer was a gunshot. The bullet came nowhere near Gabriele, but the response had been immediate and without the slightest hesitation. Alberto must already have had a pistol in his hand. In a way, this came as a relief. The terms of engagement had been established. Now he had to keep moving, rapidly, and always in the same direction. This aspect of the business he had gleaned from further explanations provided by the t’ai chi performer. The art of the thing was to hypnotize your opponent with a seemingly ineluctable pattern of movement, a process with its own rhythm and dynamics, and then, at the last moment, disappear from it.
But to do that, he first had to appear. This would inevitably be dangerous, but Gabriele’s army experiences had proved that despite his seemingly infinite capacity for irrational anxieties of all kinds, he was virtually insusceptible when it came to real, solid, substantial threats. Indeed, he almost welcomed them. They took his mind off the other stuff. Nevertheless, his army experience had also amply demonstrated that his fearlessness far exceeded his competence. ‘If this had been real, you’d be dead,’ he’d been told more than once in the course of a training exercise. Now it was real. This still didn’t scare him — as the child his imaginary fears revealed him to be, he still believed himself to be immortal — but it made him wary. He wasn’t afraid to risk his life, but he would have hated to give these bastards the satisfaction of killing him.
Downstairs to the communal kitchen at the front of the house. A glance outside showed a figure prowling aimlessly about the aia in the rising mist, seemingly at a loss how to proceed. Now for the tricky part. Gabriele had eased the catch and hinges of the front door with olive oil, as he had those of the window upstairs, but there were no guarantees. It was strange to recall that one of the specialist courses the four of them had taken together all those years ago had been in close-quarter house-to-house combat. Nestore and Leonardo had been by far the best.
He opened the door gradually, then slipped through the gap and ran as fast as he could to his left, weaving and ducking as they’d been trained to do. Two shots in rapid succession, sounding like thunder in the well of the yard. One bullet struck the brickwork to his right. Gabriele raced up the steps of the porcilaie and through the trapdoor at the top, bolting it behind him. Then it was out through the ventilation aperture — barred in the traditional chequered wrought-iron fashion, but he and his brother Primo had cut down the screws, leaving only the heads in place, to create another secret exit — and on to a branch of the huge poplar just outside. By now he was ten years old again. Up the steeply curving limb to the point where it overhung the roof, from which it was an easy drop on to the terracotta tiles.
Reaching the crest of the roof, he produced another banger from his bag and launched it down into the courtyard. The explosion was satisfyingly loud, but this time there was no return shot. He worked his way along the rooftop to the slightly higher eaves of the factor’s house, and then went flying as a loose tile slipped free under his weight.
By stripping his fingers on the remaining tiles he managed to save himself from going over the edge, but the net result was a twisted ankle which all but put paid to his original strategy. Grunting from the pain, he worked his way along the roof to the small stone tower housing the bell whose peals, audible for kilometres over the flatlands all around, had once governed every stage of the working day of everyone on the estate.
Footsteps sounded out in the courtyard. Alberto had evidently either failed to open the trapdoor, or given up trying to find his way in the maze of buildings, a palimpsest dating from between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries. In one of his few lighter moments, his father had once joked that even the rats must get lost sometimes.
‘Stop playing these stupid games, Gabriele! We need to talk! I mean you no harm, I swear it. You startled me with that firework. Come out in the open. We just need to discuss what’s happened and agree on a strategy. You must know that that’s inevitable sooner or later. Let’s get it over and done with now. Then you can go back to Milan and get on with your life.’
Gabriele’s plan at this stage of the performance had been to drop down through the hatch at the base of the belfry, go downstairs through the factor’s house, then dash across the remaining open side of the courtyard to the safety of the barchessale. Once there he would show himself briefly at intervals, always moving to his left. Alberto would intuitively assume that he would then proceed to the one remaining side of the rectangular structure, and would head for that to cut him off. Meanwhile Gabriele would pick up his bicycle from the niche where he had stored it and slip away through the gateway at the south-eastern corner of the cascina, through which the farm wagons used to enter and leave without disturbing the gentry, for whom the main entrance was reserved. While Alberto was fruitlessly searching the hayloft and byre, he could be off and away without anyone inside being any the wiser. He had done it often enough in the past.
In those days he had simply sauntered over to the open- sided sheds and spent some time chatting with old Giorgio, who was responsible for the upkeep and repair of the wagons and farm equipment stored there, before slipping out of the porta dei carri, but now he needed to sprint rather than saunter, and with his ankle in the state it was, that was out of the question. In short, his concept had been perfect but his performance, as so often before, had let him down. Real t’ai chi masters didn’t twist their ankles.
And the stakes were high. Despite the weasel words that continued to echo around the courtyard below, Alberto’s three shots had left no doubt in Gabriele’s mind about his intentions, and at ground level, in his present
