Fury

making myself seem even freakier.

I relax a little in my seat the further we get from the city. The streets are still crowded with vehicles and people, lights and blaring noise and signs in every language under the sun, but I can’t see that we’re being followed, or even monitored. And I wonder what it’s cost Michael and the others to keep Luc at bay in order that I might escape.

I know that I shouldn’t still be here, should already have left the face of this world far behind me. But as I glance across at Ryan sleeping, I know why I can’t leave.

As we hit the autostrada, passing under signage for Lake Como, I take Ryan’s hand in mine, overcome by the simple need to touch him. He awakens immediately.

‘What did I miss?’ he says quickly, looking around. ‘Why didn’t you wake me sooner?’

We approach a turn-off marked Malpensa and traffic suddenly slows to a crawl. It continues this way for over an hour, and the source of the hold-up becomes clear the closer we get to a massive police roadblock that’s been set up across the breadth of the motorway near signage that reads Como Monte Olimpino. Every car ahead of us is being rerouted to the west. Beyond the roadblock is a mess of police vans, cars and motorbikes, and beyond them, the motorway to the east stretches out emptily, like the kind of roadway you might glimpse in a dream.

I see our driver’s neck, his head, go rigid with tension. Though he’s speaking softly beneath his breath, I understand every word of the guttural, colourful Italian invective he uses. Of all the days, he’s thinking. Of all the places. Why me?

When it’s our turn, a single policeman steps forward from the large uniformed group that’s edgily talking and joking there, some great and secret fear on all their faces. Our driver slides down his window, explains in Italian that we are rich foreigners, friends of the St Alban family with urgent business in Moltrasio.

The young, clean-shaven, blue-eyed policeman in his dark peaked cap and handsome uniform — a fitted navy jacket with gold seals, knee-high black boots and tight-fitting breeches with a contrast band running up the side — replies coldly in the same tongue, ‘Residents only, no exceptions.’

‘They are expected,’ the driver wheedles, and I hear the deep unease in his voice. ‘They have a letter.’

‘I don’t care if it’s a letter from God,’ the policeman barks, ‘residents only. Move left.’

I release Ryan’s hand and lean across him to hook up the backpack before depressing the button set into the contoured armrest in my door.

‘I’ll take it from here,’ I tell the driver in fluent Italian as my window slides down.

The dark-tinted driver’s side window is smoothly re-engaged and our driver points his blunt and craggy face forward once more, but I can tell from his stillness that he’s listening.

The policeman takes a step back in surprise, placing one hand on the weapon on his hip, before recovering. He looks me over coolly, Ryan, too, and I don’t look away. To Ryan’s credit, neither does he. I open the backpack and take out the letter of introduction.

‘Your Italian is remarkably good for a “rich foreigner”,’ the policeman says sardonically. ‘So you will understand very well when I tell you again that only residents are permitted past this point.’

‘Read the letter,’ I plead, handing it to him. He takes it reluctantly. ‘It is signed by Signora Agnelli-Re herself on behalf of Atelier Re. We are expected at Villa Nicolin, by Bianca St Alban.’ I see the police officer’s eyes flicker as I name-drop shamelessly. I point out the two gowns lying across from me. ‘We are already late.’

The young man’s countenance wavers for a moment before his expression hardens again. ‘I’m sorry, signorina, but we have our orders. Some roads are impassable. The dead — they are still being recovered.’

‘Please,’ I say quietly. ‘Read the letter. Call the number you see there. It was Giovanni Re’s dying wish that Signorina St Alban have these gowns. I know that you know who he was, that he was a great man. A true Milanese, and a good person. I don’t have much time. It’s imperative that I deliver these gowns today.’

The police officer takes his time reading the letter before returning his gaze to me. Then he turns on his heel and walks back to the contingent of armed men and women strung out loosely along the barricade and I see him confer with several of them, each person scanning the letter, surprised.

Somewhere behind us, an unwise driver lets loose a few impatient blasts on his car horn, which sets off a bunch of other drivers. Through my open window, I see several of the officers peel away from the roadblock, wending through the gridlocked traffic on foot in search of the jokers responsible.

‘We’re holding everyone up,’ Ryan murmurs, frowning. ‘What’s happening out there?’

The young policeman is nowhere to be seen.

‘Maybe he’s calling that number,’ I reply, more confidently than I’m feeling. ‘Gia had it all worked out, they’ve got to let us through.’

We wait, silently and on edge, the smell of smoke and ashes drifting in through my open window, slowly poisoning the air inside the car.

A flurry of activity at one end of the roadblock draws my gaze. I see cars and vans being shifted around to allow a helmeted police officer on a motorbike to roar through the gap that’s been created. He executes a tight loop around our limo, before pulling up to my open window, engine growling, the front wheel of the bike facing the gap in the barricade. He pushes up the visor of his helmet with one black-gloved hand and I recognise the young officer’s cool, blue-eyed gaze immediately.

‘I’ll escort you to the Villa Nicolin personally,’ he says curtly. ‘Look neither right nor left or you will have cause to regret your curiosity.’

He snaps his visor down and accelerates away from us, and a few seconds later our driver is sliding the car past the hard-eyed policemen and women, past the jumble of blue and white police vehicles.

My hand finds its way into Ryan’s automatically, gripping it tight.

The road rises, winding gently, and Ryan and I take in the tiers of low-rise buildings with terracotta-coloured roofs nestled into the foothills all around us, the late-afternoon sun giving them an almost rosy cast. It’s so incredibly beautiful when we see the lake for the first time, ringed by tall pines and graceful dwellings, the snow- capped peaks of distant mountains rising behind.

‘What do you think he could have meant about not looking around?’ Ryan says wonderingly as we follow the shore of the lake, the road strangely deserted. ‘I’ve never seen a place as beautiful as this, ever.’

But that pervasive smell — of smoke, of ashes — is growing stronger. And I begin to discern patches of darkness in the distant canopy; a strange, dark blot upon the handsome facade of a dusky rose-coloured villa built right up against a curve in the shoreline, far across the lake. As we enter the main street of Moltrasio — a narrow canyon of shopfronts built shoulder to shoulder in cheerful colours — the first thing that hits me is the utter desolation, followed by the realisation that it’s filled with people.

There’s a fire crew still hosing down the smoking ruins of what must once have been a wine shop, because a river of melted glass seems to flow out of it, into a car park filled with the remains of vehicles, similarly rendered down into a kind of metallic tallow. We drive without stopping past the shattered front windows of a burnt-out delicatessen; a photographer’s studio hollowed out by fire that’s missing most of its front facade; a shoe store that retains a front door but is now open to the sky. Our driver has to slow several times to navigate over or past jumbles of semi-liquefied stone and concrete, brick, steel grillework and tile; around dangerous cracks and potholes that have opened in the road.

Through the ruins move ash-covered figures, drifting as if dazed, bending to scrabble through the rubble on the ground as if they’ve misplaced something, or raising their hands to the sky, faces twisted in agony. None of them seem to engage with the uniformed emergency personnel who are struggling to shore up structures on the brink of collapse, their desperate shouts piercing the hazy air.

Moltrasio was only partially destroyed, Juliana said. This scene must be amplified in town after town all along the lake from here to Domaso. I clench my left fist, feeling that old agony rising in me.

‘What is that?’ Ryan’s voice cuts across my thoughts.

He draws my attention to a shadowy stencil on a honey-coloured shopfront wall just ahead. It’s a weird kind of graffiti — like the rough outline of a man drawn freehand in a faint, powdery, black substance, like charcoal.

Beside the strange image stands a tall man, bald-headed, slack-faced, his suit, skin, eyes and hair covered in a thick grey dust, no hint of colour about him, not even a rim of pink around the eyes. He might be made from ash — even the whites of his eyes seem ashy. He raises both arms towards me, palms upward, as we pass him in