'She's not your responsibility, she's mine. It's me that has to stay,' Harry Compton said.
'You just joined the game late. It's our show. I stay.'
'No way I move out, not while she's here.'
'Then he goes alone on the flight.'
'He doesn't go with me.'
'Vanni Crespo refilled the glasses.
Axel slept as if he had found peace. His breathing was monotonous, regular. He slept still, like he did not dream, like the weight was shed. There was youth again on his face…
Dwight Smythe said, soft, 'You'd be kind of frightened to wake him.'
Harry Compton said, 'When I saw the tail on him, and saw him try to wriggle off the tail, then I bled for him.'
'But he's a dinosaur, his time's gone. These things should be done with computers.'
'Shouldn't be done with people, not real people like that girl.'
'It got out of hand.'
'It was your crowd-'
'Vanni snapped. 'It is not the time to argue. In the Via delle Croci they are searching for pieces. They look for pieces of bodies. It is necessary to have pieces of bodies to put into coffins. But then they are only Italian bodies. No other foreigner that I have known has tried harder to help us. No other foreigner has realized more the need for co-operation. But you come and you argue and you criticize. You interfere. Now you are frightened because now you understand the responsibility you have prized from Axel Moen.'
Axel slept.
'She doesn't come.'
'If she doesn't come, then I don't.'
The argument hissed through the villa.
'It is for the family. You have to come.'
'She comes or I don't.'
Charley sat in the living room and she watched the television. It was live from the Via delle Croci, shaking images. The argument was on the patio and in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Angela would walk away, from the patio or from the kitchen or from the bedroom, and cross the living room, and then Peppino would follow her, and the argument would resume when they believed they were beyond her hearing. She listened to the argument, merged with the frantic commentary of the television.
'She cannot come – you know she cannot come.'
'Then the children don't come.'
'The children have to come, it is the family.'
'I don't and the children don't.'
There was no weeping from Angela. Angela had been sitting in front of the television with Peppino when Charley had come back from the town with the shopping.
Charley had first, before she had understood, tried to tell Angela what she had bought, but Angela had waved at the screen… She remembered the afternoon they had sat, in shock, in front of the screen in the apartment in Rome, the death of the magistrate Borsellino… Then Peppino had come into the living room and made a remark about what clothes the children should wear that evening, and the argument was born. Angela was cold, in control, brittle-voiced. When she walked away from him, back to the patio, to the kitchen, to their bedroom, Peppino followed. Charley thought that Angela had chosen the ground for war with care.
'You will go yourself. Alone, you will go to your family.'
'You have to be there, the children have to be there.'
'And what would he say? If I am not there, and my children are not there, what would he say?'
'It is a gathering of the whole family.'
'Are you afraid of him? Are you afraid of what he would say?'
She sat in front of the television. Piccolo Mario knelt on the floor and, a miracle of God, the battery-powered car still worked. Francesca, on her lap, made a family of her dolls. The images of the television were sometimes soft-focus, sometimes zooming to close-up scenes, sometimes in wild and uncontrolled panning. There was nothing new for the television cameras. The scene was the same. There was the broken car, upside down, there was the following car stopped in the centre of the street, there was the wreckage of cars parked at the side of the street, and there was the milling mass of uniformed men. .. She thought Angela must hate her husband, sincere hatred, to taunt him so to his face.
'It is not her place to be with my family.'
'Then I don't go, and the children don't go, and you have to find the courage to tell him that you cannot discipline your wife… and what will he tell you? Knock her about a bit, Peppino. Give her your hand, Peppino, across her face. Are you frightened of her, Peppino? She comes, I come, my children come, and then that creature can touch our son.'
'Why?'
'It is a normal family party, Peppino, yes? Just an ordinary family party?' Her voice was rising. The sarcasm was rampant, as if she knew that she was heard. 'Of course, in respect of Rocco Tardelli, many normal and ordinary family parties tonight would be postponed. It is natural that a bambinaia should accompany the children to a normal and ordinary family party… and it would give me someone to talk with so that I do not vomit at the table.'
He came to the door.
Charley watched the television.
Peppino said, 'Charley, Angela would like you to accompany us this evening to a family gathering. Please, you will come?'
'You sure?'
'Quite sure.'
'I'd be delighted.' She did not, at that moment, know why Angela Ruggerio had chosen to make her part of a battleground in war. Her fingers brushed against the watch on her wrist. She wondered if he had gone yet, if he had quit. She wondered who would listen to her call.
'Thank you.'
Chapter Eighteen
They had shaken him.
He had been far away. He had been with his grandfather. He had been with his grandfather to pick cherries, and there was the warmth of summer on him, and he had taken the cherries to his grandmother. He had sat on the broad, scrubbed kitchen table, and his grandmother had put the cherries, two fistfuls for each, into a row of big bottles, with a half-cup of sugar that he measured out for each, and a fifth of vodka for each.
The Norse people of the Door Peninsula called it Cherry Bounce, and when Christmas came he would be allowed a small drink. They had shaken him to wake him. He was a child, he would be allowed only enough of the brew to cover the bottom of the glass. In the kitchen, on the range, was the 'boil'. The smell of the 'boil' was in his nose. The 'boil' was white fish with potatoes, with carrots and onions, sometimes with cabbage.
He woke, but his eyes stayed closed, and there was the murmur of the voices around him, and it was ' Vanni's voice that led.
'To understand his commitment you have to know what drives him. He doesn't drink, God help him, so it wasn't alcohol talk, what he told me once… He was dumped as a kid, when his mother died, when her parents found him impossible and his father was travelling for work. He was dumped on his father's parents. It would have been a trauma, and they had to become the rock that he could hang to, they were God and they were safety to him. They took him to Sicily when he was seventeen years old. They brought him here. His grandfather had been in the Allied Military Government. His grandfather had gone home in 1945 and brought a Sicilian peasant girl with him for his new wife. I use a word that's often spoken in Sicily, isolato. His step-grandmother was isolated in that close little Norwegian community. It would have been a fiercely lonely childhood. They came back here to see relations,
