Wu Ming - 54

He will hear the sounds of his father in the next room, and go and stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

‘You can hardly complain about the weather and the landscape, dad. End of April and you’d think it was summer. At home I get up, I open the window, and every morning I see the footpath, two or three bicycles and some old woman with her shopping bag. You have the rocks, the sea, the islands. ’

‘Well, that’s true,’ Vittorio will reply with a half-smile. ‘But isn’t that exactly what’s wrong? Small pleasures rather than big dreams. A beautiful view, sun and the best ricotta cheese in the world.’

‘I was trying to look on the bright side.’

‘The bright side? There is one, I’m aware of that. You can live well here, if you want to. But I don’t. I want something else, can’t you see that?’

Pierre will shake his head and turn away in silence, resolving not to put himself in a bad mood. There is no more impregnable fortress than pessimism whatever the cost.

Better to forget the whole thing and hurry down to the beach.

President Tito’s private yacht crosses the waves at a steady rate. Cary, sitting at the prow, dangles a hand over the side and collects spray to wet his head, as empty of thoughts as the sky is empty of clouds.

The only annoyance: the three bodyguards, heedful of his every movement, always alert, always armed. Never a moment to relax.

Relax. Swim, read, sunbathe, stroll along the beach. The day’s schedule is all there, a cure-all before the exhaustions of a new, long journey. Before going back to Palm Springs and then meeting up with Hitch and Grace Kelly on the Côte d’Azur. Better than staying at home, a wealthy pensioner, yoga, Ayurvedic massages and David Niven’s wisecracks.

Until then, however, Cary has made up his mind not to think about it, and just wants to be left to his own devices.

He puts on his sunglasses, makes himself comfortable and opens the book at Chapter 23.

The lens of the spyglass frames the scene.

Zhulianov adjusts the focus and sees the yacht dropping anchor about a hundred metres from the beach. The dinghy lands in the water with three men on board. The bodyguards are in military uniform. Grant is wearing a blue polo-neck and a pair of swimming trunks the same colour. He has sunglasses on, and is holding something in his hand. Perhaps a book.

*

They are called the Elaphites, a group of about ten small islands between the eastern end of Mljet and the port of Dubrovnik. The name has something to do with deer, but it isn’t clear whether it is down to the presence of those animals, all of which have now disappeared, or the appearance of the archipelago as a whole, which recalls, as a constellation might, the features of a deer.

Sipan, Lopud and Kolocep are the only inhabited islands. On Sipan, the largest one, there are two settlements, Sipanska Luka and Sudurad, on the other side.

Halfway between the two villages, hidden between rocks and gorse bushes, a shabby house looks down upon a stretch of uninhabited and inhospitable coast.

Perhaps that is why Vittorio Capponi, who has been living there for about two months, has never seen anyone drop anchor around here. At most a passing fishing boat, early in the morning, or at night off the coast, fishing with a lamp for squid. But a yacht of those dimensions, never. So big it can carry, hoisted by two pulleys at the stern, a four-seater motor-powered sloop.

Tourists? Hardly. Do you think anyone with a boat like that would come and swim there, at the most deserted point of the whole island? The kind of thing really posh people get up to is being seen all over the place, in the most fashionable places, on famous beaches, not halfway between

Sipanska Luka and Sudurad, amidst the goats and the squid fishermen.

And yet. Vittorio narrows his eyes and puts a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. And yet they are, Radko, look. They’re lowering the sloop into the sea, heading for the beach.

Those aren’t military uniforms, are they?

Bloody hell! They’re coming to get me!

Pierre is enjoying the spring sunshine lying on the sand, bare to the waist and trousers rolled up to the knees. He is thinking about Angela, what she’s likely to be doing at that moment, the things he will tell her when he gets back to Italy. Her perfume, her hair and endless details of her body suddenly come flooding into his mind. A kind of shudder runs through him, all the way from his feet to his shoulders. He thinks of the things he would like to tell his father, the knot he would like to loosen once and for all.

He decides to get up before he fries. Legs left liquid by the heat, steam in his brain.

He shakes off the sand and stumbles unsteadily towards the shoreline.

He rests his bottom in the clear water and is sorry he never learned to swim. Aunt Iolanda had tried to persuade him loads of times, but he was having none of it. He couldn’t understand all that effort, just for the pleasure of crossing the river Santerno, from the little pond where he used to bathe in the summer. The water was cool even by the shore, and you had to sit down to get in up to your neck.

But the sea is something else. This one makes you want to swim, look at the beach from various different viewpoints, swim way out, towards the waves, towards the gulls.

When he hears the sound of the engine he gives a start. He creeps over to the rocks that separate him from the other beach, and peers over the edge. Three men are dragging a large boat ashore. The fourth is a loose-limbed man who looks around as though admiring the landscape, then sits down on the sand and opens a book.

A tourist would be fascinated by the rocky backdrop, covered with anemones and Neptune grass.

With a kick of his flippers he would follow a shoal of little scad on their sudden unanimous twists and turns.

Or he might plunge into the depths in search of a starfish, or to see the eye of a cuttlefish peeping out from the sand.

He would slip loose the knife tied to his thigh to pry limpets from the rocks.

A tourist would delight in the sight of the loggerhead turtles, rare in these waters.

But Ivo Radelek is not a tourist.

The only thing he’s interested in looking at is right in front of him: the white hull of President Tito’s private yacht. As it approaches he tries not to think of the months he spent in Goli Otok, the Cominform hell, where Tito locked him up so that he could forget all about him. Now he’s going to make him pay for it, and he is going to have to be clear-headed and efficient.

Gripping the raised gangway, he hoists himself gently up on to the stern. He calmly takes aim, and only when he is certain of hitting his target does he blow into the blowpipe.

The third guard brings his hand to the back of his neck and barely has time to gurgle before the drug reaches his brain, leaving him lying sprawled on the deck.

The scuba-diver takes off his wetsuit, undresses the guard and puts on his uniform. Finally he takes a walkie-talkie out of the waterproof bag.

‘The net has been cast. Repeat: the net has been cast. Proceed.’

‘Let’s go,’ Zhulianov whispers to the other two.

The journey has been carefully planned. They can swoop on the beach unseen.

The two bodyguards are keeping their distance from Grant. In the shade of the sun, in their uniforms, just below the escarpment.

Three lizard men creep silently along, under the cover of the bushes. They freeze.

Twenty metres from their goal.

He walked along the waterline on the hard golden sand until he was out of sight of the inn. Then he threw off his pyjama-coat and took a short run and a quick flat dive into the small waves. The beach shelved quickly and he kept underwater as long as he could.