The Piazza del Plebiscito was a celebration of sumptuous grace set above a city that had slumped into a pit of mean poverty. It was the widest open space in the whole of Naples, a bracket of relief from the dense press of humanity. The dawn shone off the sweeping expansive colonnades of the Church of San Francesco di Paola, its brilliant white stone flashing with the same august splendour the great Roman Pantheon; the sunset added texture to the mature depth of history found in Naples' Royal Palace. The very square itself was dedicated to the enjoining of the Neapolitan kingdom with a wide and completed Italian nation – no place could be more of a testament to triumph and freedom.
Hilshire watched Mario from inside the car. It had been a long time since Hilshire had been in the police, but there were some things which just never left you. The satisfying, secure clink of a pair of handcuffs against your belt. A certain degree of tolerance for bad coffee. The despair of a tottering mound of paperwork. The clipped, curt fulfilment of a sharply-tailored uniform.
An Amsterdam warehouse and its stench of piss and filth and terror that seeped into, and now rotted from, every pore of your body.
Hilshire also remembered prisons, and prisoners. The new fish, first time in the clink, whose bawling misery and tardy repentance rang off concrete, and who made a spasm at the sound of every clanking door as though it was a clamp crushing a limb. The brooder, silent, still - and sullen – sitting insular and imperturbable, as cold fury and black malice rebounded back off cell walls to accumulate within him. The usual suspects – repeat offenders, who treated each spell back as a hotel on a regular business trip, lazily reclining into the settled groove of routine (and racketeering).
Then, there were the lost; the beaten; the broken. Those whose vitality had leached into the concrete, whose soul had been crushed by being amongst a thousand fellows but still staying alone, and whose hope had been ground out under the wheels of Fortune. Faces as rumpled and creased as their overalls. Grey. Drawn. Small.
Rehabilitated.
Mario Bossi had been a canny lad in his youth, a wily operator as a man, and a penitent angel in his middle age, and consequently had danced around the edge of the pit of prison all his life. Now he had been lamed, and had fallen in.
The Piazza del Plebiscito was a broad round disc, a medallion proclaiming man's own will and victory to Heaven. Hunched on a bench in the shadow of the colonnades, Mario looked as though he was a man trapped in the ten feet of his cell – and terrified of the light streaming through the bars, and all that they represented of decades lost and forgotten from a world that had moved on without him.
He looked old.
"I don't notice any suspicious elements about. I think that the site may be clean. Ready?" Jean asked from the driver's seat.
"Be gentle with him, Jean," Hilshire pleaded as the two got out of their car, "you know that he's been through a lot lately."
Jean eyed Hilshire coldly across the roof of the car, before concealing himself with his sunglasses. "In case you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of a civil war. Mario – the Mafioso – can join the fucking club." The last words were spat with venom that almost burnt into the paving stones.
It was a long walk across the Piazza, but even though it was relatively quiet and largely free of people at this time of day Mario didn't notice them until the two had ascended the steps of the colonnade. "Afternoon, Mario." Hilshire proffered. Not much of a greeting, perhaps, but he had worried that opening with profuse condolences would only have twisted the knife in further.
Mario didn't raise his head. "Hartmann. Been a while. I didn't see you when Triela went off gallivanting back before Christmas, did I?" His voice grated with the broken hoarseness of a body being dragged along slate.
Hilshire opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by Jean, who took the more direct method to provoking some eye contact with Mario. "You stink of whiskey." He said, with a hammer's bluntness.
"My clothes do. My breath doesn't." Mario rolled his head up to confront Jean. He was unshaven, unkempt, and wrinkles of care and worry were scored into his face – but his eyes were not burning red with stinging tears, or bleary and yellow with drunken jaundice. All of the tears had been wrung out of him, leaving his eyes dry, and clear - like glass. Both Hilshire and Jean were taken aback at their coldness.
Mario glanced past the two agents, before grunting again. "Speaking of Triela, is she not with you?"
Hilshire harrumphed. He'd rehearsed this conversation multiple times as soon as Mario's request for a meeting had filtered down to him, but now that he was here, confronted by the reality of the situation, he didn't quite know what to say. He was grateful for the opportunity to latch onto something specific. "No, I couldn't get her out of her room. She had a bad hair day recently and is mortified at the prospect of being seen in public. Girls, eh?"
Jean flicked his gaze to Hilshire, appalled at his stupid, nervous smile and his lame attempt at levity. The… the imbecile! Jean himself couldn't care less, but if Hilshire wanted to soothe Mario then allusions to girlish giddiness like that were a damn catastrophic way of going about it. He spoke loudly, intending to distract Mario's attention before he could focus on Hilshire's badly-fumbled attempt at ingratiation and take offence from it. "We've instructed our cyborgs to remain at base to save you the indignity. You're not presentable – you wouldn't want them gawping. Bad enough that we have to put up with it as it is."
Hilshire fixed Jean with a withering glare. Jean glanced back at the other man from behind his sunglasses. Huh. There was gratitude for you. He'd remember that the next time Hilshire needed a favour.
"You're not wrong." Mario growled, the resentment obvious. His world had been rocked to its foundations, but it hadn't fallen, and he despised Jean for treating him as though he was some scrappy guttersnipe picking through the tubi of an earthquake ruin – and he despised himself for ever creating the situation where he could be abused in such a way.
"This whole scenario has been good for something", Jean muttered. "After the bombing, pretty much every faction of Padania flooded everything from local rags to the Euronews channel with denials of responsibility. They've been muzzled for the past fortnight: not a hint of action anywhere, no suggestion of even so much as terrorist movement. They don't want to touch this one with a barge-pole. There was no ardent struggle of oppressed peoples, no powerful profession of high-minded idealism. One girl, targeted deliberately – it was pure sadism." And I should know, he thought silently.
"And that evil spirit hasn't gone unpunished." Hilshire added hurriedly, wondering if Jean was trying to deliberately sabotage this meeting with his lashing remarks - he'd deal with Jean's surly demeanour afterwards. He stepped forward past Jean and leant down to his old friend, and measured out his words, trying to be kind. "Mario, I want you to know that Adriano Lippi, the Camorra man who… who wounded Maria, is dead. Triela killed him two days ago. It won't turn the clock back on this tragedy, I know – but I hope that it provides you some consolation, and Maria some comfort."
"Nothing to link him to Don Ambrogio, though?" Mario said, a little too quickly, trying to push through the fluid beading at his eyes.
"Section One is still inspecting the evidence – but it seems unlikely, no. Code of Silence, no grassing, you know how they operate."
Mario was silent for a while, only sniffing once or twice. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." He declared suddenly.
Hilshire blinked. "Sorry?"
"I'm just saying," Mario emitted a long, tired, stuttering sigh, "I can wait."
Hilshire gnawed the inside of his cheek as he considered what to say next. Section Two hadn't arranged the day – there was no objective to be met, no agenda to fulfil, no brief to follow. Mario had been the one who called this meeting, but for all of his recent misery, Mario didn't want to have a shoulder to cry on – he was a man and so still had pride, and in any case he hadn't done so in the fortnight since the outrage perpetrated on Maria; he was also sensible enough to know that he'd be unlikely to find much sympathy amongst the hard beds of spies and soldiers. Hilshire worried as to the purpose Mario had brought them here for.
He worried that he'd guessed right on the way to the Piazza.
"How is Maria doing?"
"It's... it's a joke. It's some... some fucking joke." Hilshire's eyes opened wide in surprise. Mario had rarely sworn, even in his Camorra days - he didn't want to demean Italianate culture before muddy and rank north-Europe barbarians, he had said at the time, and he'd only been half-joking. It wasn't a casual enunciation to his speech but a real, foul obscenity that you could almost see polluting the air as he spat it out. Up to now Mario had tried to maintain something of his gruff and flinty old mafia swagger, but as it began to slip away it could be readily seen to be a very thin sheen of composure indeed – the wounds were still red-raw.
Mario hauled in a ragged breath before continuing. "It... it just has to be. No-one on God's earth could have that much... that much heaped upon her."
Jean scuffed a piece of lint from the sleeve of his jacket, not making any show of sympathy for a lifetime criminal who had only recently played his way out of gaol - and consciously ignoring Hilshire's reproachful glare. "But it has been, hasn't it, Don Bossi?"
Mario was so sunken in his woe that he didn't feel Jean's barb. "The blast... destroyed her legs. Her right arm... was..." he swallowed the next word back down noisily, and continued, "...they had to amputate it. Shrapnel-- shrapnel in her gut, her lung, her spine, her eyes... her sweet, bright eyes... just like her mother's..."
Mario's hands began to curl into fists, but froze, quivered, and set into claws. With a sudden strangled howl, he dashed them against his face.
Crying out in alarm, Jean and Hilshire both surged forward and grappled Mario's arms before he could harm himself. Mario was strong, though, and he heaved and surged and fought and pushed and the three tumbled to the ground in a wrestling tangle. Still Mario squirmed and struggled, threatening to send the three down the stairs of the colonnade, but the military strength of the two Section Two agents eventually told and Mario was pushed and pressed against a column before the struggle drew too many curious glances from the pedestrians down in the Piazza.
Mario was gasping and panting from the sudden exertion, and turned his head to Hilshire. It had been the last sputter of Mario's fire, and his eyes formed two black pits of utter desolation.
Hilshire held his breath.
"You… you know what I'm going to say, what I'm here to ask for. Don't you?" Mario said, quietly.
"Maybe."
Hilshire's voice had changed. Disappointment bleached his expression.
"But you have to be the one who says it."
The warming light of spring had waxed into the full blaze of summer. Even with the sea breeze snapping through the ensigns and burgees of the yachts filling the marina of the Borgo Mariano, it was still feverishly hot weather.
Mario watched them from about forty yards down the street. The man had noticed him already, adjusting his sunglasses meaningfully, but the girl hadn't – presumably her own sunglasses shaded her sight as much as they concealed her eyes.
The two of them sat at a small table outside the Bersagliera (oh, very swish – was this what taxpayers stumped up for?), with three chairs. The girl wore a light, loose blouse and a short dark skirt (matching her hair), ideal to remain cool and ventilated in the beating weather, and lounged in her wicker chair comfortably, swinging her bare athletic legs around under the table in the sheer pleasure of movement. The man, however, was contrastingly clad in a full pinstripe suit despite the sweltering heat, and sat erect in his chair even though its broad, curved back had been designed for slouching. Former soldier, Mario decided, freshly transferred out from the army. Probably still brushes his teeth to a regimental pause of two-three. Marco wasn't sure if he liked that or not.
There were two espressos on the table.
Maria had never drunk espresso - she always thought that it was a rip-off paying through the nose for such a tiny cup. She preferred dark, heavy Moccona in a big, thick, wide mug that she could slide her hands around and snuggle up on the settee with while she watched a movie.
Mario swallowed, and walked down the esplanade.
"Hello," he said, affecting a cheery demeanour as he approached the table, "mind if I sit down? It's hard to get a seat."
The girl looked confused. "But the café's only half-full. There's loads of empty tables…"
The man laid a hand on the girl's arm, and she was shushed immediately. "By all means, friend, we can always do with company." As Marco slipped into the third chair, the man proffered his hand. "Avise Mancini. How do you do?" The girl abruptly turned her head at the mention of the name, her mouth agape in surprise. His real name, then, Mario thought as he shook with Avise. He was being taken into some confidence.
"Not too shabbily. Can't say that it's an exciting life, but I'm getting to the age where you can appreciate the peace and quiet." Mario replied. He tapped the table idly, before cocking a thumb back at the clanking masts and jackstays clustered in the marina. "Do you sail, at all?"
Avise shrugged. "Tried to, years back. I had to organise adventure training for my platoon – a week's dinghy sailing." He touched the back of his head tenderly, "A boom swung over and clopped me a concussion, and that was that." The girl didn't speak.
Mario waited a few seconds, considering another approach. "I… I have an odd relationship with the sea. I like the look of it in photos and paintings – who doesn't? – but when you're actually there, the smell of old seaweed, the battering of the waves, seagulls croaking… it gets on your nerves when it's been going on for hours."
"Bad luck for you to be born on the coast, eh?" Avise chuckled.
"Yeah, that's why I like this place," Mario glanced towards the girl, trying to catch her attention as she sipped at her espresso, the very model of indifference. "You can be near the sea, but the sea wall out there keeps the noise down. We come down quite frequently. You, ah, you remember?"
Again, no comment was elicted from the girl. Damnit, why? She'd spoken before, why did she have to button herself up now? He wanted to hear her! Mario was frustrated with trying to tease a response out of the uncommunicative girl, and tried to be direct. "Oh, I'm sorry, I forget my manners. We haven't been introduced. I'm Mario Bossi. And you--?"
The girl answered in same voice of his daughter, "Colombina de—"
"It's okay, we're with a friend here." Avise gave Mario an embarrassed smile.
The girl gnawed her lip before finally speaking, uncomfortable with exposing herself but beholden to the order, "A… Agapita."
"Agapita…" Mario repeated. "Agapita. Agapita. That's…" He clutched his eyes shut as though they stung. "… that's lovely."
Agapita seemed to appreciate this, nodding. "Signor Avise gave it to me." She said, a reverential flutter in her voice.
"Do they, um… do they look after you? At the Agency?" Mario knew that it was a lame thing to ask, but he wanted… he didn't know what he wanted, except to speak to her.
Agapita seemed taken aback. "Of course. Signor Avise is a bit of a hard taskmaster though. Why he puts me through an hour's PT every day when I have artificial muscles that won't run to fat I'll never know." She playfully punched her master's arm.
The voice – that voice – resounded in Mario's ears like the fading echo of a bomb blast. It was maddening. Intolerable. "Please… just one thing… for me… take off your sunglasses." Mario pleaded, his hands clasped in entreaty.
Agapita looked to Avise, but he didn't speak – this was something for her own initiative. Cautiously, guardedly, and slowly, she reached a hand to her face and pulled off her sunglasses. Grey eyes blinked in the sun.
They were not her mother's.
With a strangled, pain-wracked sob, Mario launched himself out of his seat, went around the table and gripped Agapita in a fierce, tight embrace.
Agapita convulsed. Power surged through her limbs. She thrust herself to her feet, sending her chair flying back to collide with and upset another table, and ripped herself out of Mario's arms. Mario barely had the time for his face to adjust into blank incomprehension before she clamped her hands around the bewildered man's arm and with one flick of her wrists and a clattering crash of smashed crockery flung him over the table for a winding and bone-jarring impact on the paving stones.
"Agapita, primary command all-stop!" Avise yelled, as the cyborg scrabbled around the floor to grab some cutlery. Immediately she froze, wavering as though she was stunned from a fierce blow, her face falling slack and her eyes unfocusing and filming over in vacant suspension. Avise glanced around him, biting back an obscenity as all of the other diners gawped at the entire messy scene. At least the place wasn't heaving with people, it would make corralling them easier.
"My God! You dirty old man!" He shouted loudly and publicly. "And in broad daylight as well! Shameless! Disgusting! Get out of our sight before I call the police!" Avise knelt down to grab Mario and shove him rudely and brusquely out into the esplanade. As he did, he growled into the Mario's ear "We'll try again. The alley around the back of the building in fifteen minutes. Go now, I'll clear up here."
Still barely coherent from the wave of shock that had picked him up and cast him down, Mario staggered off, with a bruised body, bruised dignity, and a bruised heart.
The master and cyborg were standing waiting for him as he entered the alleyway. The bright light of the day was immediately replaced by a more sombre shade in the shadow of the buildings.
Avise looked embarrassed enough for the pair of them. "Ah, good to see you again. Agapita here has something that she wants to say."
Agapita stepped forward, her hands clasped at her waist and head bowed, looking for all the world like the red little schoolgirl who he'd stood behind and made to apologise to her teacher for leaving a thumbtack on his seat.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir," Agapita mumbled in meek and humbled contrition. "I recognise that you didn't intend any harm, and that my response was excessive and unwarranted. Everything is my own fault, and I hope that you haven't suffered from it."
She emitted a gasp of surprise as Mario placed his hands on her shoulders, and raised her head questioningly. Their eyes met – and held. "There's one thing that you can do to make it up to me… Agapita.
"Cherish your life. Every breath, every blink, every beat of your heart. Every bead of sweat… and every drop of blood. Never resist a new sensation, and leap into every new land to explore. You've been given a great gift, a brilliant opportunity, and to hold back would be to waste it. For all you time, keep… running."
Mario traced his hands down Agapita's arms to clasp her hands. "And if the Agency ever captures a Camorra boss called Ambrogio, be a good girl and do what an old washed-up man can't – and sock him in the kisser for me."
"I, um… I'll try?" Agapita looked confused.
Mario released Agapita, who stepped back, visibly relieved at the passing of an intense beat. He then turned towards Avise. "I think that that's about everything."
Avise nodded. "Very well. You understand that the Agency will henceforth break off all contact with you – I'm sure that you know the reasons." He inclined his head towards Agapita. "Your emergency number will remain active, but it's only to be employed in matters of direct threat to your life – any unnecessary use will result in its withdrawal, and you will be on your own."
Mario nodded, and spared one last look at Agapita, who was idly balancing on one leg while studying the buildings rising up around them.
Mario moved his gaze back to Avise, and stabbed a finger, very deliberately, at the other man's heart. He then walked past the agent, speaking softly but surely,
"You look after my baby girl."
They both stood watching Mario's retreating back before he was finally lost in the bustle of the street, and all that was left with them was the subdued hum of the empty alleyway.
Agapita was quiet for a while, although Avise could see her eyes flickering as thoughts spun and whirred inside her head. She continued to look towards the street which Mario had dissolved into.
"Signor Avise, sir…" A tremulous note quavered in her voice, but the sense was immediately lost as it became taut and confident again. "Just what was that all about? Weird man."
Avise turned to his cyborg, with a face of almost mournful compassion, before he cleared his throat and adopted a more businesslike tone. "That, Agapita, was a test in your reconnaissance skills – maintaining public cover. And while I'm glad to see that you've been keeping up your CQC regime, using a table as a trampoline is far from inconspicuous. I hadn't finished my espresso, either! I'm afraid that you a big fat F. You will do range relays when you get back – and don't stop until you score over ninety."
Agapita's mouth dropped open in dismay. "Aw, man!"
It took them a couple of hours to drive back to Rome and the Social Welfare Agency's compound, so it was sunset before Agapita finished the task that Avise had assigned her. Some of the girls viewed weapons training as the fun part of the job, but after five strenuous hours of lugging forty pounds of weapons and ammunition, up and down, back and forward, left and right sprinting to different ranges, rolling into different stances stinging from hot casings, scraping along gravel, sliding through mud, knowing that anything even slightly erring from a bull's-eye with every round in a full magazine would only have her do it all over again, and as arms and legs became weighted with the lead of fatigue the prospect of completion only spiralled ever downwards, while her comrades were happy unwinding… well, you could have too much of a good thing.
Eventually Avise sounded the halting klaxon, and Agapita wearily and gratefully shuffled off the rifle range, hauling a soot-clogged weapon (what had possessed her to pick an SA80?) plastered with dust and dirt, damp with sweat, and reeking of gunpowder – altogether, far from ladylike.
"I hope that you're not tired, Agapita," Avise met her outside the gate, "they've spent millions upon millions to make you superhuman, and you're not giving them that much value for money." There was no malice in his voice, though, and it was only gentle joshing. "I'll wait for you here - take your SA80 straight back to the armoury. I have some work to do there tonight so I'll clean your weapon for you while I'm there."
Agapita didn't disguise her glee, and almost pranced away.
On her way back, she noticed a soccer ball lying on the grass by the path. She wondered where it had come from – maybe the younger girls had been playing with it, but they always struck her as very prim sorts not interested in that sort of thing. Curiously, Agapita gave the ball a kick, bouncing it back off of the wall of a neighbouring building. Catching it nimbly with her foot, she kicked it again, jogging to intercept it as it bounced away at an unexpected angle.
She rolled the ball underneath the sole of her foot thoughtfully for a few moments, before tapping it away to roll across the tarmac and rest in the lee of the building and its lengthening shadow. It seemed fun, but she could well imagine chasing after a ball getting tiresome after a while.
Anyway, soccer was a game for boys.
"…be sure to say your prayers once you're back from ablutions! It's the blessed Assumption tomorrow, don't forget. You're scheduled for a route march with Petrushka, Silvia, and Piera, but you can tell the warden that I gave you permission to link up with them after Mass."
Agapita gnawed her lip in consternation. "They won't like that. It'll look as though I'm shirking."
Avise laughed. It was a happy jangle of sound, pleasant to listen to, and it immediately melted Agapita's face back into a smile. "We might get some of those godless heathens to see the inside of a church once in a while if they thought that they'd get time off, mightn't we?" He grinned.
Agapita nodded contentedly, but as they walked the smiles and laughter reminded her of the rather stark contrast of the events earlier in the day. "Sir," she ventured cautiously, not wishing to prod a sensitive area, "that man we met. He seemed to be… affected by something. Before I flipped him over the table, I mean." She smiled nervously, wincing inwardly at the admission.
Avise didn't check his pace, but he dropped his head so that a hooded expression fell over his face. "Alright, Agapita, Big Book of Spying, Observation 101. What do you think affected him?"
"Well, he seemed uncomfortable… no," Agapita checked herself, "that's not the word. Clumsy - he wanted to be there, but he wasn't sure what to do when he got there. He needed a lead to follow, but it was only when you mentioned my name, sir, that he seemed to… well, wake up." Genuine confusion flickered across her eyes. "Why was that, sir? It must have reminded him of something to provoke so strong a reaction, but I can't think what's so special about a simple name."
Avise stopped abruptly, almost causing Agapita to stumble. He placed a hand on her shoulder and turned her round to face him.
He held her gaze for several long, laden seconds.
Agapita began to feel uncomfortable herself – her enhanced eyesight meant that the lengthening shadows didn't obscure anything, but even so she found it impossible to discern whether her master was accusing her of something, or the intensity of his gaze was trying to reach out to (or pierce?) her soul. She eventually blinked to break the contact; while being inspected was nothing new – she was well aware of what had been necessary to transform her into a cyborg – the unknown quality in Stefano's eyes made it not a clinical survey but something deep and searching, and the private nubs far at the back of her mind recoiled from that touch. The rouge sunset light dusting her face disguised her blushes.
Avise moved his hand up from Agapita's shoulder and pressed his thumb against her forehead, printing the impression of a Cross on her skin while he moved his lips with the breath of a prayer that even her keen ears couldn't pick up. "Everything has meaning." He said aloud, with a suddenly sad tone to his voice. "Everything from the blade of grass in the wind to the war we fight now is shaped by an essence and driven by a will. Everyone has their secrets – perhaps that's mankind's folly, because there's always one person who you can never keep it from. As you start your life here with me, and with us, you'll have a glimpse of the undercurrent that we all float on: the privilege of seeing people as they really are – or at least how consistently they lie to themselves. It takes exhaustion and anguish to knock down those walls, and penetrate that armour, and it will be a hard life. But here's one thing for free.
"Agapita," Avise sighed, turning his head away as he went back up the path towards the men's block. He'd already moved off some way before he called back to his watching girl,
"Beloved."
THE END.