Cooking With Fernet Branca (27 page)

Score one for Voynovia. Filippo is clearly beyond speech and I deduce that the handsome saturnine ruffian next to Marta must be Voynovian since he is smacking his lips judiciously as though he’d just taken a mouthful of Château Yquem. The
maresciallo
’s sidekick, I notice, is looking thoughtfully at his empty glass and shaking his head with an incredulous smile. A serious drinker. When his commanding officer has recovered enough to walk, the two men take their leave. Hands are shaken all round. I notice the
maresciallo
pause by Marta’s mysterious companion and croak something like ‘I shouldn’t delay too long,
signore
,’ before they go out, replacing their caps. Watching through the window I’m touched to see the second carabiniere solicitously take his senior comrade’s elbow well before he finishes his totter to the car. All very mystifying, but the interlude has taught me one thing: that in a world containing
galasiya
the brothers Branca must look to their laurels.

Yet now the police have gone the atmosphere in the room scarcely lightens. Marta and her young visitor still look strained, while Filippo has recovered enough to be contemptuous.

‘It’s disgraceful, the way these
vagabondi
harass law-abiding citizens,’ he fumes, suddenly sounding elderly. The experience of
galasiya
is curiously ageing. ‘I’m mortified you should have been put through this, Marta. Also you, Gerry. A frivolous misunderstanding that could have been cleared up with a phone call. It’s no way for artists from other countries to be treated. I’ll have my father lodge a formal complaint. We’ll get that
maresciallo
busted down a rank or two before we finish.’

‘Oh no, Filippo, don’t do that,’ Marta urges with what I assume is a mixture of relief and tender-heartedness brought on by
galasiya
. ‘Far better not. No, really, I shall be most upset. No harm’s been done and they’ve gone away. Please do
nothing.’ But underneath I detect something like genuine fear. I suppose if you’re an immigrant from one of those vague ex-Soviet countries the last thing you need is police attention.

Filippo is shaking his head dubiously. ‘If you insist,’ he says. ‘But I still think it would be better. Anyway, Dad sent me up here to ask if you and Gerry would like to come down to the set today and watch the shooting. He didn’t actually say he needs you urgently, Marta; that was for the benefit of the police. But if you’d like to come?’ He glances awkwardly at the dark young man beside her.

‘I’m sorry, how very rude of me,’ Marta says. ‘I’d forgotten you’d not been introduced. This is my brother Ljuka.’ We all shake hands. ‘I believe, Gerry, it was your pop-music friend who mistook Ljuka for an alien some weeks ago.’

Ah,
that’s
why he looks vaguely familiar. When I picture him in flying kit as Barbie’s better half, Ken, I can see it exactly. Well, well. The unwitting cause of a boy band’s re-branding. He looks as though he could be deliriously mean but at the moment he seems more uneasy. Marta and he launch into urgent conversation in a language that sounds like sand being poured onto a kettledrum. Filippo and I gravitate together as sole representatives of the known world.

‘Speaking personally,’ I say, ‘I’d be delighted to come. Would that really be all right?’

‘Sure it would. We can go at once.’

‘And I can tell your father that Brill and the boys will be happy to do a gig for the film. In fact, they’re dead keen.’

‘That’s great news. Dad’ll be pleased about that. Me, too. To tell you the truth, that part of the film probably could do with a bit of a lift.’

From outside at that moment there comes the sound of airhorns and a wheeze of hydraulics. An enormous lorry has arrived full of timber and men. At long last they have come to put the fence back up. Marta already seems to know the foreman so she and Filippo make arrangements until the foreman sensibly remembers to ask where it should go. Having spent
so long putting up the original masterpiece I know exactly where the boundary runs and the line is quickly marked again with orange tape. Meanwhile the men have begun to unload the truck.

‘I think we might get away now,’ Filippo says as Marta joins us. She and her brother have been deep in discussion while I was re-establishing our boundary.

‘I hope you don’t mind, Filippo, but Ljuka and I have decided we should stay here. Our kid sister’s on her way from Venice and we’re waiting for her either to call or to arrive. Will your father mind if I don’t come down today?’

‘Of course not, Marta.’

‘Then please offer him my thanks and apologies. Family matters, you know.’

‘Perfectly understood.’

Better and better. I shall have Filippo Pacini all to myself while Marta and her dangerous brother can slump in a huddle of Slavic gloom and
galasiya
. I hardly expect much in the way of gratitude but it may eventually occur to Marta that it was Samper who just saved her from a future of treadmills, mailbag-sewing and assisted showers with lesbian skinheads. After a few more minutes’ delay to allow me to nip home, slip into my Homo Erectus jeans and shut the front door, I find myself sitting beside Filippo in his pretty blue and white helicopter. He presses a button, the turbine at our backs whines into life and the rotor blades overhead cast shadows across the canopy that slowly chase each other, scamper, flicker and finally blur out of existence. Best move I ever made, coming to live up here at Le Roccie, I think happily as the ground tilts and we hang nose down over an abyss of air.

The silence that falls after Filippo and Gerry’s departure only intensifies my anxiety. So long as there was a Pacini in the room I felt nothing too terrible could happen, not even if Gerry was also there with his brainless capacity for putting his foot in it. Ironic how little they know about me and the sour forces that really shape my life. Now I’m left with Ljuka, quite alone and with the urgent sense that the world beyond these mountains is plotting our downfall. The carabinieri’s visit was a horrid near miss – at least, I think it was. It rather depends on the force of that
maresciallo’s
parting shot to Ljuka.

‘That was close,’ he now says. ‘I didn’t like that a bit. I’m afraid they’re on to us, Matti.’

‘Us?’
I hear myself say, somewhat bitterly. ‘I’m just a composer, Uki. All I’ve done these last few months is write music, hardly a reason to call the police out. If it hadn’t been for that muttonheaded
dudi
gossip Gerry they wouldn’t have come to see me at all. Thank God Filippo happened to drop in when he did. No, Uki, there’s no
us
about it. What do you think was behind what the
maresciallo
said to you about not hanging around?’

‘Maybe his colleagues heard something when they radioed in. They’ll have matched the chopper’s registration to our company in Trieste. Whether that name has become part of a Europe-wide alert yet I doubt, but it’s safer to assume it has. I think those carabinieri are dozy locals, while the
maresciallo
is an old jerk so terrified of this Pacini big cheese he’d do anything to avoid confrontation. I know the type: fawning, indolent and nearing retirement. I think they really did come up here to question you but unexpectedly found hints
that they might be on the edge of something much bigger which the
maresciallo
can pretend not to know about, so he went away. He doesn’t want paperwork, he doesn’t want enquiries, which is what would happen if they’d been proper cops. He just wants us to vanish and leave him in peace. That’s why he as good as told me to go away fast, because the next lot they send up will be for real.’

‘You keep saying “we”, Uki.’ A surge of very un-familial resentment heaves itself into my words, a sense of injustice that all my efforts to make my own way are about to be tainted with my brother’s asinine behaviour, his pig-headed refusal to break with a sordid career all too obviously doomed to a violent end. The recalcitrant
stupidity
of Voyde males with their primitive notions of masculinity brings tears helplessly to my eyes. ‘Let’s be plain about this. Our father is a racketeer and you’re involved up to the hilt. People-smuggling, prostitutes, drugs, who knows? In Gerry’s own words, what do I care? But you’re in it up to your neck, you stupid idiot. Everything I was trying to warn you about last time you were here. And did you take a blind bit of notice? Of course you didn’t. You’re a Voyde: balls galore but not a bit of brain and less moral sense than an earwig.’

Ljuka is white with anger and I imagine I have gone too far – far enough, in fact, for him to overcome his equally fatuous n code of chivalry and strike his elder sister. But he manages not to. Instead he says:

‘Well, listen to Miss Goody Two Shoes. I stand here being accused of involvement in organized crime by someone engaged in making porno movies. Terrific. This must be a definition of hypocrisy I missed in the dictionary.’

This time I can’t help it and am overwhelmed by tears. A long moment passes, frozen by these angry words, before the air between us melts and my brother comes over, sits beside me on the sofa and puts his arm around me.

‘Oh Uki,’ I say when my sobs ease, ‘I didn’t know. Not really.’

‘Sure you knew,’ he says, but quite gently. ‘You knew Pacini’s reputation. When Father found out he went ballistic. And maybe my Italian’s not up to much but it’s good enough to discover for myself what
Arrazzato
means. I’m not blaming you, Matti. You saw Pacini’s name as a passport to better things. In your position I’d have done exactly the same. Get established and move on. Of course – why not? But for the purposes of this conversation we’d probably best skip the moral judgements. Right now we ought to be making plans. We really do have to get out of here.’

I look around at my house, at the kitchen, at my beloved Petrof piano. Through the window come the confused, sporadic shouts and banging and grunts associated with men putting up a fence. It sounds purposeful and domestic. For the first time I notice the leaves on some of the trees are just beginning to turn. Autumn. I sigh. ‘You go, Uki. I’ll stay.’

‘Don’t be silly, Matti. The next time they come they’ll take you in regardless. You’re my sister; you have the family name. They’ll be rounding us all up.’

‘Maybe. But anyway, someone’s got to stay here and wait for Marja. What happens when she arrives?’

‘God almighty, I keep forgetting she’s not at home. Damn her – why did she have to do this schoolgirl eloping lark at exactly the wrong moment?’

‘It’s not her fault it’s the wrong moment,’ I say hotly. ‘She, too, has a life to lead. I agree, though, it’s hardly conven –’

But at this instant the telephone rings and, blessed relief, it’s Marja herself cheerfully announcing that she and Mekmek are at Viareggio station. I glance up and see Ljuka urgently mouthing ‘Taxi’. I nod and tell her to get a taxi here. Although she has the postal address of the house I give her some simple instructions to relay to the driver, tell her to hurry, and ring off without mentioning her brother’s presence. I’m becoming paranoid about telephones, evdently. While we’re waiting for them to arrive I ask: ‘And what then?’

‘We all go,’ Ljuka says decisively. Now he’s out of the messy emotional stuff and back into Action Man mode he sounds self-assured again. ‘Thank God we had big tanks fitted. Four of us –’ he looks into the middle distance while calculating and murmurs, ‘just about. Yes, what we’ll do is use the mountains to get good and low before we cross the coast north of Viareggio. With any luck we won’t be noticed because I doubt they’re co-ordinated enough to bother. I mean, there’s no war on and we’re not suspected terrorists. We’re just ordinary civilians they might like to question in connection with some arrests made by the police a thousand kilometres away in Voynovia. Hey, this is Italy. They’re laid-back, these guys. So we fly across the Gulf of Genova and, depending on fuel, hit the other side as close to the French border as we can get. We ditch the chopper somewhere not too inhabited up in the hills and get ourselves to Menton where we rent a car using my US passport and drive to Marseilles. Once we’re there, we’re safe, as I told you. I’ve got friends.’

‘It sounds hare-brained, Uki. Like a James Bond film. And what about this boyfriend of Marja’s, Mekmek?’

‘He comes too. At least, as far as the French border. After that it’s up to him. Don’t worry, Matti, it’s not at all like James Bond. We’re in the EU so frontiers aren’t what they were. Things are fabulously lax. We’ll just drift over to France to avoid getting picked up by officious Italians, that’s all. God, I could very easily murder that
dudi
of yours. But for him …’ Ljuka lets the thought trail bitterly away.

‘Gerry didn’t mean it. He was just cross with me for the disturbances, a large part of which was you flying right over his house at midnight, let’s not forget. He wasn’t to know that Benedetti would run to some police chief he wanted to butter up and spread imaginary rumours about me. And remember, it was Gerry owning up that made the carabinieri go away again.’

‘Rubbish. It was that obsequious old
maresciallo’s
fear of pissing off your famous director. Anyway, he’s still a little
dudi
and I’d still like to break his neck.’

‘Well, you’ll never have to see him again.’

Shortly after this Marja and Mekmek arrive. A good deal of embracing goes on, none of which includes Mekmek, who stands on the outskirts of this family reunion looking on with a bewildered smile. I confess he’s hardly my idea of yummy. From the ecstatic description in her letter Marja had prepared me for something eager and boyish and her own age. Instead Mekmek is a bland, blobbish, thirtyish sort of creature with slightly receding sandy hair. His pale eyes somehow betray that they have never gazed on a horizon wider than that framed by a computer monitor. He must either be phenomenally kind or else a really demon lover. Still, I’ve long given up trying to match people I know with the partners they wind up with. I’m so naïve I very often don’t even get the gender right.

Then in a surreal flurry in which I feel scarcely present I have to run upstairs, grab a few precious things and stuff them into a bag. Ljuka shouts up, ‘Keep it light! Make it quick!’ in a brittle, commanding voice which only makes me panic and scurry about in indecision, grabbing pointless things at random. What am I doing? Why am I allowing myself to be bullied into abandoning my own home? I can’t quite believe I shan’t return so when it’s time to go I deliberately don’t lock the house. Pacini’s workmen are still busy, making swift progress with the fence. We go out of the back, climb into the helicopter and take off. It is the least real thing I have ever done. Yet again I am in stupid tears. Below, my little house rears as though suddenly mounted on a wall: its lovely grey stone roof shines and so does the bright line of fresh wooden fence posts dotted beyond through the trees. This whole thing is absurd,
disloyal
And one disloyalty prompts another: Damn my bloody father.