Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Eight — The Torch

She dropped to the floor and switched off the torch.

The engine was low-geared, coming down the second bend. Then the light went off the wall and there was only rain and the sound of a car door.

A torch came on outside. It moved along the side of the building, over the brambles, up the track to the front.

Then it stopped.

She heard the chain rattle.

A voice said, in Sicilian, "Rosa?"

Giulia put her hand over her mouth.

She did not answer. She stayed where she was, on the floor behind the granite wheel, with the knife under her left forearm, and she thought about the window.

The chain rattled again. Then footsteps came round the side of the building, and the torch beam came through the window opening and went across the floor and stopped on her.

"Don't move," he said. Then: "It's me."

She knew the voice.

The beam went down to the floor. Matteo came through the window the way she had, one hand on the sill, and landed badly and swore.

He was in a jacket over a t-shirt and trousers tucked into boots, and he was soaked from the shoulders down.

He picked the torch up off the floor and shone it at his own face.

"Matteo," he said. "In case you were going to throw something."

Giulia stood up. It took her a while.

"What are you doing here," he said.

"I couldn't sleep."

"At midnight. In the mill."

"I walked."

"Four kilometers. In the rain."

She said nothing.

He moved the beam around the room, over the press, over the wheel, over the steel door with its number, and then back to her face.

"It's on my list to survey," he said. "I've been trying to get a key out of the comune for six weeks."

She said nothing.

"How did you get in."

"Through the window."

He nodded. "That's how I would have done it." He looked at the steel door again. "Did you open it."

"No."

He waited.

"You're lying," he said.

"Yes."

He let that sit. Then he said, "There are wild boar down here."

"I'm not afraid of pigs."

"You should be. They weigh ninety kilos, the males have tusks, and they come down out of the woods when it rains because the ground goes soft and the roots come up. There was one in the square last November. It went into the bar."

Giulia looked at him.

"Did it order a coffee."

"It ate a sack of onions. Peppe was in there. He got up on the counter with his wooden leg."

"Which leg."

"The one he has." He looked at her. "You've met Peppe."

"I've met everybody. It's a small village."

"It is," he said. "It's also a very loud one."

He moved the torch off her face. "Come on. You're going to fall over."

· · ·

They went back up the road with the rain coming down through the beam of the torch.

They had gone about two hundred metres when he said, "What were you looking for."

"Nothing."

"In the mill."

"Nothing."

"Rosa."

She looked at him.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what."

"Don't say it like that."

He was quiet for ten steps. Then: "Like what."

"Like it's a question you already know the answer to."

He did not answer that either.

He walked on the outside, toward the drop. He did not offer her his arm and she did not want it. Twice she slipped and twice she caught herself, and twice he said nothing at all, which she was grateful for and did not intend to say.

They had gone about four hundred metres when he stopped.

"There's a man in the village," he said.

Giulia stopped too.

"He was in the bar on Monday evening. He had a coffee and he did not drink it. He asked the woman behind the counter whether there was anyone new in the town. A woman on her own. Young, dark hair, keeps to herself."

The rain filled the space where the next sentence should have been.

"What did she say," Giulia said.

"She said no. Which is what she would say to anybody." He shifted the torch. "Then he asked whether she had anything wrong with her hands. He said it like that. Anything wrong with her hands."

Giulia did not move.

"What did you say."

"I said I didn't know anyone like that."

She looked at him. The torch was pointed at the road so she could see the wet gravel and the top of his shoulder and nothing of his face.

"Why," she said.

He thought about it. He was not going to make it into a performance, which she noticed, and which made it worse.

"Because if I had said yes," he said, "he would have gone and looked."

· · ·

They walked on.

After fifty metres she said, "You don't know me."

"No."

"You don't know my name. You don't know where I came from. You don't know why I'm here."

"No."

"So why."

He stopped.

"I know three things," he said. "One: you reach for things with your left hand first and then change to your right, every time, and you have never once changed back. Two: you don't take sugar, and you peel an orange in one piece, which nobody under seventy does any more."

He looked at her then, because the torch was on the ground between them and the light was coming up.

"Three: on your first day you stood in my study with your hand on the filing cabinet and then you took it off. Nobody puts their hand there unless they are looking. And nobody who is looking takes it off again unless they have decided that being caught is worse than not knowing."

Giulia's whole body went cold and very still.

"You've been watching me," she said.

"Yes."

"Since when."

"Since the first day."

She looked at him for a long moment. In the rain his hair was flat to his head and there was water running off his jaw.

"And you told a man in a grey jacket that you don't know me," she said.

"I told him I don't know anyone like that."

"Is there a difference."

"Yes."

He picked up the torch.

"Saturday," he said. "Nine o'clock."

And he went on up the road, and left her standing in the rain.

Giulia stood where she was until the beam had gone round the bend. Then she reached behind her with her right hand and touched the handle of the knife inside her belt, where she had put it before she left the house, found it, and left it there.

A man with a laptop and a weekly train ticket to Rome had lied to a stranger in a grey jacket about her, and she could not produce one reason why.