‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’
‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’
Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’
Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’
The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver strands tumbled down onto the shoulders of her blouse.
‘This is my wife Mirella,’ Boonzie said, gazing lovingly down at her.
Ben put out his hand. ‘
‘I am pleased to meet you too,’ Mirella replied in hesitant English. ‘Please call me Mirella. And I must practise my English, as Archibald only speaks Italian to me now that he has learned.’
Archibald! In all the years in the army together, Ben had never asked what his real name was. Ben shot a glance at Boonzie, who was staring in horror at his wife, and couldn’t resist breaking out into a grin that quickly threatened to spill over into a laugh. ‘You and Archibald have a beautiful home,’ he said.
Boonzie soon got over it. While Mirella returned to the kitchen, strictly forbidding any male to enter until dinner was prepared, Ben had a cold bottle of Peroni beer pressed into his hand and was given the tour of the smallholding.
‘Nine acres,’ Boonzie said grandly, sweeping an arm across his land. ‘Place was just a rocky wasteland when I found it. Not what you’d call a farm, but it keeps us going. The greenhouses are for basil, the rest of it is my tomato crop.’
Ben was no farmer. He shrugged and looked blank. ‘Just basil and tomato?’
‘That’s our wee business,’ Boonzie explained. ‘Mirella’s one hell of a cook. Her secret recipes for basil pesto and tomato sauce are like you wouldn’t believe, old son. I grow the stuff, she cooks it all up and we bottle it. Once a week I go out in the van and do the rounds of the local restaurant trade. Campo Basso, the whole area. It’ll never make us millionaires, but look at this place. It’s heaven, man.’
Ben gazed around him and found it hard to disagree. Running his eye across the neat rows of greenhouses, he noticed a gap between them that was just a rectangle of freshly-dug earth marked out with string. A shovel stood propped against a wheelbarrow, beside it a pile of aluminium framing and glass panels wrapped in plastic, some bags of ready-mix cement and a mixer.
‘New greenhouse,’ Boonzie explained, slurping beer. ‘Can’t build enough of the damn things. Need to finish putting it up.’
‘How about I give you a hand right now?’
It took a lot of persuading, but Boonzie finally relented and ran back to the house to fetch another shovel and more beer to keep them cool while they worked. Ben didn’t wait for him. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the shovel and dug in.
As the sun rolled by overhead, the greenhouse gradually took shape and Boonzie reminisced about the old days. ‘Remember that time Cole almost shat himself in the boat?’ he smiled as he bolted together a section of frame.
The legendary episode, retold countless times since, had happened during winter training up in Scotland, not long after Ben had joined 22 SAS. He, Boonzie, and two other guys named Cole and Rowson had found themselves stranded in the middle of a misty Highland loch when the outboard motor on their dinghy had cut out. Drifting through impenetrable curtains of fog, Boonzie in his mischievous way had begun working on unnerving the lads with ripping yarns of the strange, terrible creatures that lurked in the depths. As Cole bent over the motor trying to get it started and muttering irritably at Boonzie to shut up, a black shape had suddenly exploded out of the water right in his face, sending Cole into a screaming panic that almost made him fall overboard. The ‘monster’ had turned out to be a seal.
Ben, Boonzie and Rowson, SAS hard guys draped in weapons, trained to kill, had been so weak with laughter that they’d hardly been able to paddle the damn dinghy back to shore.
Those were the stories you carried in your heart. Not like the darker memories, the tales of dead friends, ravaged battle zones, the horror and futility of war. The things nobody reminisced over.
‘So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ Boonzie asked as Ben poured a fresh load of cement into the barrow. ‘You didn’t come all the way here to shovel shite.’
‘Mirella seems like a lovely lady,’ Ben replied, avoiding the question.
‘Love at first sight, Ben, if ye could believe in such a thing. There I was in Naples. It was only meant to be a weekend away from getting soaked to the bollocks on some fucking God-forsaken hillside somewhere training a bunch of ignor ant squaddies. I’m sitting in this wee restaurant sucking up spaghetti like there’s no tomorrow and wondering how the fuck I’d got by on pot noodles and ketchup for all those years, when I hear screams from the kitchen and this guy comes running out like the hounds of hell’re tearing at his arse. Then next thing a saucepan flies out the door after him and almost takes my ear off.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ Ben chuckled.
‘I look up,’ Boonzie went on tenderly, ‘and there’s this fuckin’ apparition standing there in the kitchen doorway, still in her apron. Never seen a woman so wild. And I thought, Boonzie,
‘I can see that. You picked a perfect spot, Boonzie.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘How did Mirella take to country life after Naples? She doesn’t feel too isolated out here?’
Boonzie used the back of his shovel to spread wet cement over the footings of the greenhouse. ‘When she first saw the place she was a wee bit worried about intruders and the like. Some friends of hers got burgled down in Riccia.’ He grinned up at Ben, and his eye sparkled. ‘But she’s got no worries with me, Ben. I have my peace of mind, if you know what I mean.’
Ben did. He didn’t need to ask.
‘What about you?’ Boonzie said.
‘Me?’
‘Aye, did you ever settle down?’
‘I lived in Ireland for a while. Live in France now.’
‘What about a woman?’
Ben hesitated. The face that instantly flashed up in his mind’s eye belonged to a woman called Brooke. He held the image there for a long moment, seeing her warm smile, the auburn curls falling across her eyes as she laughed. He could almost smell her perfume, almost feel his hands stroking her skin. ‘Yeah, there’s someone,’ he said, and then went quiet.
Silence for a beat, and then Boonzie asked, ‘So are you going to tell me what you’ve come all this way for?’
‘It’s not important now.’
‘Ben, you’re like a son to me. Don’t force me to beat it out of you with this shovel.’
Ben gave a shrug. ‘OK. I came here to offer you a job.’
Grigori Shikov’s private study was a place few people were allowed to visit. For some it was a privilege; for
