فصل 40

Chapter 40

THE PILOT Of the air ambulance would not go into the short, uncontrolled airfield at Arbatax in darkness. They landed at Cagliari, refueled and waited until daylight, and flew up the coast in a spectacular sunrise that gave a false pink cast to Matteo’s dead face.

A truck with a coffin was waiting at the Arbatax airstrip. The pilot argued about money and Tommaso stepped in before Carlo slapped his face.

Three hours into the mountains and they were home.

Carlo wandered alone to the rough timber shed he had built with Matteo. All was ready there, the cameras in place to film Lecter’s death. Carlo stood beneath the work of Matteo’s hands and looked at himself in the great rococo mirror above the animal pen. He looked around at the timbers they had sawn together, he thought of Matteo’s great square hands on the saw and a great cry escaped him, a cry from his anguished heart loud enough to ring off the trees. Tusked faces appeared from the brush of the mountain pasture.

Piero and Tommaso, brothers themselves, left him alone.

Birds sang in the mountain pasture.

Came Oreste Pini from the house buttoning his fly with one hand and waving his cell phone with the other. “So you missed Lecter. Bad luck.”

Carlo appeared not to hear him.

“Listen, everything is not lost. This can still work out,” Oreste Pini said. “I have Mason here. He’ll take a simulado. Something he can show Lecter when he does catch him. Since we’re all set up. We’ve got a body. Mason says it was just a thug you hired. Mason says we could just, ah, just jerk it around under the fence when the pigs come and just play the canned sound. Here, talk to Mason.”

Carlo turned and looked at Oreste as though he had arrived from the moon.

Finally he took the cell phone. As he spoke with Mason, his face cleared and a certain peace seemed to settle on him.

Carlo snapped the cell phone shut. “Get ready,” he said.

Carlo spoke with Piero and Tommaso, and with the cameraman’s help they carried the coffin to the shed.

“You don’t want that close enough to get in the frame,” Oreste said. “Let’s get some footage of the animals milling and then we’ll go from there.”

Seeing the activity in the shed, the first pigs broke cover.

“Giriamo!” Oreste called.

They came running, the wild swine, brown and silver, tall, hip-high to a man, deep in the chest, long-bristled, moving with the speed of a wolf on their little hooves, intelligent little eyes in their hellish faces, massive neck muscles beneath the ridge of standing bristles on their backs capable of lifting a man on their great ripping tusks.

“Pronti!” the cameraman called.

They had not eaten in three days, others coming now in an advancing line unfazed by the men behind the fence.

“Motore!” Oreste called.

“Partito!” the cameraman yelled.

The pigs stopped ten yards short of the shed in a milling, pawing line, a thicket of hooves and tusks, the pregnant sow in the center. They surged forward and back like linemen, and Oreste framed them with his hands.

“Azione!” he yelled at the Sards, and Carlo coming up behind him cut him up the crease of his buttocks and made him scream, gripped him around the hips and hoisted him headfirst into the pen, and the pigs charged. Oreste tried to get to his feet, got to one knee and the sow hit him in the ribs and knocked him sprawling. And they were on him, snarling and squealing, two boars pulling at his face got his jaw off and divided it like a wishbone. And still Oreste nearly made his feet and then he was on his back again with his belly exposed and open, his arms and legs waving above the milling backs, Oreste screaming with his jaw gone, not able to make any words.

Carlo heard a shot and turned. The cameraman had deserted his running camera and tried to flee, but not fast enough to escape Piero’s shotgun.

The pigs were settling in now, dragging things away.

“Azione my ass,” Carlo said, and spit on the ground.

III - TO THE NEW WORLD