Adam Foulds - In the Wolf's Mouth

Like any of this was necessary. They could just have asked. Everybody in that room, even the ones who wanted to stay in America, wanted the Fascists off the island. They wanted back what was theirs.

After this rigmarole, excitement glittered among the sombre, determined men of Cirò’s acquaintance. They met in cafés and bars, whorehouses and each other’s homes and discussed the possibilities that lay ahead. It was a grand prospect. They were sharper, now, harder and cleverer. They weren’t just stealing sheep and squeezing mill owners and collecting tributes and making sure they got certain leases. They were American businessmen who had kept up their interests against all kinds of competition, Poles, Italians, Jews, Chinese. They’d killed and they’d negotiated. They ran numbers and nightclubs and girls. They imported morphine and booze, Cirò’s special area of interest, and they received tributes from all sorts of people in all sorts of places. They’d negotiated with the authorities and got them on side. They’d become political. These conversations made them sentimental about all that America had given them and all the work they’d done, the people lost on the way. And now it was time to go home. Now it was time for revenge.

New York was home now, too, of course. Cirò loved taking his money up into the canyons of Manhattan, striding towards the narrow blade of sky that forever retreated up the avenues. He saw the millionaires with their tiny dogs and fur collars, the women with foxes looped around their necks. He saw the taxis and doormen. You couldn’t have invented the place. More meat than you ever dreamed of eating. A place that answered to his appetites.

Sicily was home, though. Sicily was mother. It was his olive trees and sunshine flavoured with herbs and the smell of hot earth. It was the hard-won property and Teresa.

And he would see Teresa again. In America, he’d had news of her, brought by new arrivals or people who had visited home, arriving in the hills in their suits and showering gifts on the shoeless children. Teresa had thought what she was supposed to think, that he had been taken, destroyed, a death that disappeared, his body never found. Or she had acted as though she thought he’d been shot with the white shotgun. Maybe she guessed otherwise, what with so many men of respect escaping away. And couldn’t she still feel him, the force of him alive, no matter that he was across an ocean? Whatever, she had become a widow. In those early days, the thought of Teresa alone in an empty bed, wearing black, had closed Albanese’s mind with pain. Years later, he’d heard the news of her remarriage to that peasant Silvio. He remembered exactly where he was when he heard. Ginu had been almost too frightened to tell him. Cirò was halfway through a meal, his mouth was grainy with ground beef and tomato sauce. He pushed away the plate. The food in his stomach turned instantly heavy and poisonous.

Now he would return to reclaim her.

In his own way, Cirò had been faithful to her, for twenty years consorting only with mistresses and whores. Apart, that is, from one woman.

Cathy was an Irish girl, a typist in a small glass-sided office inside one of the warehouses. He would glimpse her in there, her red hair, a bird in a cage. She took her lunch on a bench that looked out over the water. Cirò noticed this. Other men shouted and whistled at her as they went past. Cirò was silent. She looked so nice, sitting there. It was something about the shape of her shoulders inside her coat and her smart polished shoes side by side beneath her. Cirò had the café fill his thermos with coffee and took it and sat beside her. She was someone he wanted to be next to, delicate and contained, small and beautiful in the rough winds of the docks. He asked if she minded. She said she didn’t. They looked at the water together.

Each day he went back and found her there at the same time. She told him she liked the sea, had grown up seeing it. Later on, she accepted his invitation to go out somewhere fancy for dinner. He thought she guessed what kind of a man he was but decided not to know. The restaurant thrilled her, so smart and lively, and Cirò was greeted by all the staff. He ordered the best wine, a beautiful Barolo. When she tasted it, he saw her shoulders droop. She looked sad. He asked, ‘What’s the matter? Isn’t it good?’ ‘No,’ she answered. ‘It’s delicious.’ Cirò knew that she was uncertain now, that she was losing a clear sense of the limits of her world. ‘Why don’t you have a cocktail? Cocktails are more fun. We can save the wine for later.’ Cathy allowed him to order and drank, her face half eclipsed by the wide circle of the glass. Later they went home together and made love.

They lived like lovers. Cirò bought her gifts of jewellery that she never wore but put away in the bank. She didn’t know what to do with him. Part of her was frightened. Cirò was often telling her not to be silly. She clung to him. Whatever it was she’d left behind in Ireland meant she was alone here too, in her rented room. She was nervous and loved the size of Cirò, his bulk. She patted his belly, kneaded with her small fingers the meat of his shoulders.

Cirò going off to war felt like the end of everything but it also pleased her in some way; it conferred an average kind of nobility on him. It cleaned him morally. They were part of the crowd. Greedily, he ate what he could of her before he left. The rosy translucency of her stockings drying in front of the fire. The bead necklaces she wore hanging over a corner of her dressing-table mirror. The piles of picture magazines she kept. Her Christ on a cross on the wall, his small silver body as jointed and slim as a wasp. The dumpy old mattress that took on the warmth of their bodies. Cathy’s hair was gold at her temples and waved out to a faded red. Over her unbelievably fair skin, her face and forehead, her shoulders and the tops of her arms, was a strange scattering of colour, her freckles, multiple. They swirled like money.

She was so strange to him. She was not Sicilian. She was not his wife. He left a large roll of cash under her pillow when he left. He said he would be back before she knew it, like all the brave soldiers did, and left, he assumed, for ever.

Cirò Albanese was returning to Sicily with all the power of America, all the money and metal and giant scale. The invasion fleet was immense. You could look across the ocean on either side and see it stretching away. It was a city on water, Manhattan armed and loosed, grinding forward under a bright half-moon. Down avenues of green-black water raced corvettes and lighter craft. In the sky above the Allies roared towards home.

Later, hearing the guns, the bombs, every detonation was for him, was a visitation of his will upon his enemies. The light of dawn spread across the water. Aircraft raced back and forth. Cirò was being held, ready. He was important to the Americans. Imagine that. He would be part of the new order on the island. Dense smoke, full of the pollution of random burning, rolled back elegantly over the surface of the cold sea. Cirò inhaled.

Ray could feel it already, even before it started, the dryness in his throat. Out there, his mouth would be so dry that his inner cheeks, his tongue and gums would feel like rough external surfaces. His teeth would be grainy pegs of bone. He’d be unable to swallow. Ray was exempt from this battle but his body was returning him to it whether he would or not. His body was stiff with memory, muscles rigid while his bowels began to bubble and slide.

His boots were laced. He had his pack and gun, grenades and a helmet, none of which he should need. That was what he was told. Ray and his unit were arriving along with many reinforcements several days after the first landings. They were there to make peace, specially selected Italian-Americans who could speak with the natives. Meanwhile, they sat in the boat and listened to the chaos and killing. Hours later, he was once again splashing through heavy water. It was a long shallow approach. The sea sucked at his legs. The sand in strange sensations shrank and twisted under his boots. There was no need to be scared. The beach had been secured. They were just landing, just coming ashore. No one would fire on them from those pillboxes. The debris was harmless.