Cesco was through with Calabria. Through, indeed, with the entire Italian south. All he wanted right now was to point the Harley north and not stop until he found himself some obscure small town in which to rest awhile, bedding in his new identity while making plans for the future.
The coast road passed too close to Cosenza for comfort, so he cut across Calabria’s mountainous spine at Catanzaro, passing through Crotone and Cariati to the Pollino National Park, where a lane closure for a bad accident so hampered his progress that by nine thirty he’d only just reached Campotenese. He was so saddle sore, hungry and weary by now that, when he needed to refuel, he chose a petrol station with a cafe attached, in which to shut his eyes for half an hour before jolting himself awake again with a large espresso.
There was a young Austrian family in the station shop when he went to pay for his fuel. The husband was at the till, holding back the years with an unconvincing comb-over and teenage jeans. But it was the wife who caught Cesco’s eye, with her tousled short fair hair and freckled pale skin save for the reddened armbands where the sun had exploited the gap between sleeves and lotion. She was dressed in a loose peach halter top and lemon slacks of unusual cut, so that Cesco couldn’t quite decide whether she was wearing her trousers short or her culottes long. She was looking after their two kids, a rascally boy and a giggly young girl who both kept pillaging sweets and toys from the shelves, while she pleaded with fond exasperation for them to stop, too helplessly in love with them both to be able quite to lose her temper, hard though she tried.
They left before him. He watched through the window as they climbed into a white people carrier and then set off. Bittersweet memories overwhelmed him as he went out to his bike, of his childhood here in Italy and then in England too, with Emilia and Richard, Arthur and Lizzie.
Family. That was what he was missing. A family of his own.
Carmen came to his mind then, the possibility of happiness he’d thrown away. He swore loudly. Then again, even louder. Self-conscious suddenly, he looked around. A bearded trucker in baggy blue jeans and an unzipped tan jacket was leaning against the side of his cab, watching with sympathetic amusement. Cesco nodded at him. Then he climbed back on his bike, started it up and roared away.
The sketch artist was a thinly bearded thirty-something called Pietro, of such extreme earnestness and eagerness to please that Carmen had to fight the urge to laugh. He’d studied in London, he told her, in fluent if accented English as he led her to an interview room, where they sat either side of a plain pine table with a jug of water already on it, two glasses, and a plate of sugared biscuits so stale that she took one nibble and then threw the rest in the bin. He was a cartoonist by profession. His work had been published in all the region’s papers, and once or twice in the nationals. Police sketches were only a sideline, but an enjoyable and rewarding one. He’d helped capture at least a dozen suspects, including several very dangerous men. He knew how to get the best out of witnesses, too, so she was to trust him and follow his instructions as closely as she could. They had two portraits to draw, he understood, but for the moment he wanted her to concentrate on just one of them, whichever she preferred.
Carmen closed her eyes and thought back to yesterday morning, with Cesco speeding off down the road in his van and the black SUV screeching again to a halt beside her. Its window buzzing down as she stooped to talk, enabling her to recognise the two men in the front as Famine Eyes and Cemetery Teeth. Famine Eyes had been the boss, but it was Cemetery Teeth who’d had the more distinctive features. She brought him to her mind now, only to discover a kind of uncertainty principle at work; for as soon as she began trying to describe him, her mental portrait of him simply vanished. She kept her eyes closed and remained completely still, therefore, letting his image settle upon her mind like a butterfly upon her finger, not even looking directly at it lest she scare it away. She let herself absorb the details instead. His fat lower lip and open, hanging mouth. His teeth – spaced, pitted and grey. His nose, bulbous and misshapen, like a lump of putty shaped crudely by a thumb. His protruding small ears and receding hairline, his dull eyes beneath his hooded lids and prominent brow ridge, his dyed black hair revealed by the grey threads in his eyebrows and stubble, and his throat so deeply pitted by childhood pox that it looked to have been stippled with a matchstick.
She waited patiently until she had it all. Then she began to talk.