The Lion Tamer’s Daughter (13 page)

“So why isn't he going to come up with a ransom, if he's like that with me? Because nobody gets to put one over on Dad. Nobody takes him for a ride or shakes him down. No way. He's a funny guy. You'd think if he loved me … Well, maybe he does, or maybe he just likes having a son. Apart from me he's got just a couple of daughters. A real American guy has got to have a son. It's part of the deal. I'm not saying he won't mind if I get hurt, but he'll mind a lot more if he just knuckles under. He'd sooner shell out five million dollars hiring a private army to get me out of here than he would pay a couple of million to buy me free. At any rate you can be pretty sure he's going to dig his heels in, and these men aren't going to like it. They're pros. They know what they're doing. No need to tell you that, I suppose.”

He took himself by surprise. He hadn't been aware of the thought coming into his mind before he spoke the words. He twisted onto his elbow and looked round the empty cell. Perhaps madness was like this, telling you things you didn't know you knew, giving you reasons as if you'd thought of them long ago. This place had been built to hold prisoners. He wasn't the first. If he was going to have an imaginary sigher it would have to be some kind of ghost, so it would be someone who'd never got out. Nobody had come up with the ransom. It made sense. Of course madness makes sense, if you're the one being mad.

“Look,” he said, still comforted by the sound of his own voice, “no offense, but I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. Actually I don't believe in any of that sort of stuff, not just UFOs and poltergeists and all that. I'm supposed to be a Catholic. Mum promised Dad when they were splitting up she'd bring me up a Catholic, so I go to Mass a couple of times a year but that's about all. It's not my scene, and I'm giving it up soon as I can without causing a lot of grief between Mum and Dad. Sorry about this … Look, I'd better have a name for you. Mind if I call you Giovanni? Sorry about this, Giovanni, but it means I don't believe in you either. I'm imagining you, but I'm making a pretty good job of it because I'm going a bit crazy. Hell, I've got to have someone in here with me, otherwise I'll be going all-out crazy. Hope you don't mind.”

He lay for a while and thought about it. The silence waited. He realized that for the first time since the ambush at the picnic there was something between him and the naked fear of what was happening to him. The fear was still there, still the main thing in his life, but it no longer clutched him round and enclosed and smothered him. He had moved a little apart from it. He could breathe. He'd done it by inventing Giovanni and talking to him in an ordinary voice, not just pretending he was there but actually persuading himself he was. Because, honestly, he
felt
there. That was the madness. The trick was going to be to stay just mad enough to keep him there, and not go any further over the edge.

“Like to hear a bit more about my dad, Giovanni? If I get going on him, I can keep it up for hours. Look, most of what I'm going to tell you will make you think I'm against him, and I just go along with him because he's loaded and he gives me a good time, but it's not like that. For some reason, I actually like the guy. He thinks the rest of the world is out to get the United States, and everyone in the United States is out to get Dick Doggony—that's his name, Richard Doggony II—but there's something about him, a kind of bounce and go you don't get from most people …”

Dave talked on to the patient silence until his voice ran out. Listening to the cicadas, smelling the faint herby dry smell that came through the airholes, he guessed that the sun must be almost overhead, beating down onto the parched hillside. He got up and walked to and fro, corner to corner across the cell until the need came on him to use the bucket. He wiped himself with pieces of newspaper and covered the bucket with the sacking, then returned to pacing the cell until he had made another hundred crossings. Next he scuffled the straw into a steeper mound so that he could sit rather than lie. There was no movement or sound in the cell, other than those he made himself, but that did not prevent him from continuing to believe that Giovanni was there, watching.

“OK, we've got to have something to do,” he said. “Tell you what. Ever played tic-tac-toe? Noughts-and-crosses we call it in England, but I played it with my dad first time he took me camping, so I call it tic-tac-toe, like the Americans. It's a pretty stupid game, actually, because if you start you can always win, so after that we took checkers along, but I wonder if there isn't something you could do to gear it up a bit. Suppose you tried on a bigger board, for instance …”

He rose and scuffed at the dirt with his sneakers to loosen it. Something tinkled faintly. Feeling around, he found a rusty nail, with its head bent over.

“Just the job,” he said, and went on scuffing the dirt until he had loosened a good patch. He gathered it into a pile, smoothed it flat, and drew three parallel lines with the nail, crossing them with another three.

“Right,” he said. “That gives us one square extra each way. When I tried this with Dad we couldn't make it work, because it's too easy to get three in a row and you can always stop the other guy getting four. But suppose we blank out a couple of squares …”

Systematically he tried different variations. Some worked better than others, but in the end they all seemed to fail one way or the other. Either whoever started was almost bound to win, or the game couldn't be won at all. Still he kept at it, chatting to Giovanni about what he was doing, easing the slow minutes by. He was smoothing the dirt out for yet another try when he realized that the silence was no longer listening. Giovanni had left. A few moments later he heard a shoe click on stone. Fear closed round him. Rapidly he scuffed out the tic-tac-toe diagram, put the nail in his pocket, went to the wall, and was ready when the man called. Again he said nothing at all, but from a light clanking and his movements across the cell Dave realized that he had brought another bucket and was taking the used one away. Like mucking out a stable, he thought. A cow byre. Yes, that's spot on. All I am to them is an animal they're going to make money out of. They'll keep me alive as long as it suits them, but that's all. But I'm not going to be their animal. I'm going to be me. I'm going to stay human, and Giovanni's going to help me. I mustn't let them know about Giovanni. He's mine.

The man had left more food, the same as that morning. Dave ate as quickly as he could. He was hungry and wanted to finish before it was taken away, but this time the man didn't come back. Giovanni didn't seem to show up either, but Dave wasn't sure. Perhaps just eating was enough to make him feel himself, human. Nobody else can eat for you. He didn't need Giovanni.

He didn't feel like returning to tic-tac-toe, so he spread some of the squares of torn paper out on the floor and tried piecing them together. Most of it seemed to be stuff about Italian football, but he found a
Peanuts
strip. That hurt.

Before long the light began to fade, so Dave rearranged the bed while he could still see, took off his sneakers and socks and jeans, and lay down in his T-shirt and underpants. He wasn't sure that he was going to sleep but he closed his eyes.

“OK, Giovanni,” he whispered. “Thanks for showing up. Bedtime now. Sleep well. And no sighing, please.”

It turned out that after yesterday he was still tired enough to sleep fairly well, but when he finally woke fear and worry rushed in on him. He dressed and lay down again, gazing at the ceiling and trying to concentrate on how he was going to get through the day. He'd had enough of tic-tac-toe. Checkers was a much better game. The board was easy. The problem was how to make the checkers. Twelve of each kind.

He was still thinking about this when the men came, more than just the one, because he heard a low voice speaking somewhere on the hillside close by. Then shoes on the stairs, as usual. He rose and went to the wall. This time the man walked straight over to him and fastened the drawstring round his neck.

“Come,” said the voice.

With his heart thudding, Dave allowed himself to be led to the door. On hands and knees he felt his way up the stairs and onto the sharp slope of the hill.

“Stop down,” said the voice behind him, so he halted, but the voice said, “On.
Avanti,
” and a hand gave him a shove in the buttocks. Feeling his way, he crawled forward under bushes until he was lifted to his feet by the men waiting there. Dad's paid up, he thought, but he didn't believe it and didn't bother to hope. They're going to kill me, he thought, but he didn't believe that either. It was too soon.

They took him a short distance and made him sit on a lump of rock. He heard them moving about close by. Again there seemed to be three of them. The sun warmed deliciously on his shoulders. Something—a newspaper—was put into his grasp and his hands were positioned to hold it across his chest.

“Shut eyes,” said the voice.

He did so and the bag was untied and removed from his head.

“Open eyes,” said the voice. “Stay.”

The glare of sunlight blinded him and made him blink and screw his eyes up. When he could begin to see he made out that a man was standing in front of him and looking at him through the viewfinder of a camera. The man was wearing a hood with eye and mouth slits, a blue denim shirt buttoned at the wrists, blue jeans, and dirty sneakers. Behind him rose a steep hillside covered with wiry scrub. There must have been a hundred hillsides like that on the island.

The man took several pictures with the camera. It was an instant one, and Dave looked steadfastly at it while the man waited for each picture to develop. From the movements behind him he guessed that the other two men were holding up some kind of sheet as a backdrop, so that all that would show was Dave sitting on a boulder and holding that day's newspaper.

When they had finished they put the bag on his head and took him back to the cell. Apart from the voice instructing him when to crawl under the bushes and stand again and feel his way down the stairs, they said nothing to him at all. They left him food and water and a fresh bucket, and did not come back till the evening.

He went back to the bed and lay there, shuddering. He was their animal. If they'd wanted to shoot him instead of photographing him they'd have done it just as efficiently, and with just as little feeling. If they decided to cut off bits of him to send to Dad to put pressure on him, it would mean no more to them than docking a puppy's tail. Every time they came, day after day after day, he was going to be smothered by the same numbing, shriveling dread.

He must count the days. He must do it so that they didn't know he was doing it. An animal can't count. It would be something else human. Marks in the dirt, like the tic-tac-toe board? They would see them and scuff them out and take his food away to punish him for trying to be human. Scratches on the wall, which only he could see? Yes.

He rose, picked up the bowl of food, and knelt by the shaped stone in the wall opposite the door. Chewing while he worked, with the rusty nail he scratched three short vertical lines, starting in the top left-hand corner. Three days. Standing back to see how they looked, he discovered that they were much more noticeable from a distance than they had seemed from close up, so he rubbed dirt into them until they had almost vanished.

How many days in a row? Using his forefinger, he started to count off the imaginary days. Halfway across the stone he discovered they were already there, seven of them, more slanting than his and more widely spaced. Moving to a different angle, he began to see more, all very faint, but once he'd found them unmistakable, almost three full lines …

At his elbow somebody sighed.

He spun, but there was no one there. He was certain the sigh had not come from his own lips. It must have been in his mind.

He swallowed, his heart pounding, and took hold of himself.

“Hi,” he said. “These yours? This how long you were in here? Let's see …”

He counted the second row—forty-eight days. Ninety-six, and call it another forty. Four months, plus. Jesus!

“Don't let's think about it,” he said. “Listen, I had an idea in the night. Ever played checkers? It's draughts in England, but I call it checkers because Dad's the only one I ever play it with. I thought we might give it a go. OK?”

It took him a good long while to set up, but long whiles were what he needed, so he didn't lose patience. He began by scuffing around in the dirt for chips of stone and mortar, and feeling along the walls for bits he could ease out without making the man think he was doing anything to try and escape. He found about twenty, but some of them weren't much good so he picked out the best twelve. Next he chose straws from the bed, moistened them with water from the bottle to make them less brittle, and wound them one by one round his finger and tucked the loose ends several times through to hold the circle in shape. Some broke and some wouldn't stay put, but he carried on until he had a dozen little hoops of straw.

Finally he smoothed the area which he had used for tic-tac-toe, measured the distances with the nail, and carefully drew out the sixty-four squares of a checkerboard. To tell the black squares from the white he put a cross into alternate squares. All the while he chattered to Giovanni about what he was doing.

“Not bad,” he said as he started to lay the pieces out. “I'm using the black squares instead of the white because it won't matter so much if I smudge them. Right. Toss for start?”

He balanced one of the spare chips on his thumb.

“Flat side up, you start, bump side, I do.”

He flipped the chip.

“You start,” he said. “That means you have the straws. Dad says this is the best move. OK?”

He made the first few moves of one of the openings Dad had taught him.