They went to bed early. This time Bianchi woke, not to the sound of a door being smashed in, nor of heavy boots attempting to treat his ribs in the same way, but to the sensation of cold metal being nudged—oddly gently, considering—just under his nose. He opened his eyes slowly and saw the guns.
Beside him, Giovanna uttered a small squeak, but made no other sound. In the predawn light, he saw that there were many more men than there had been the previous time; enough that some had to crowd into the bedroom doorway and the kitchen beyond. They were large men, for the most part, looking generally like young businessmen whose ventures were not doing well. All of them were holding pistols, and two held kerosene cans—it was that smell that had begun to awaken him, even before the gun barrel in his face.
The only one unarmed was the monster, who stood close to the bed, smiling down at Bianchi. As immaculately dressed as ever, a Toscano between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he said, “Signor Bianchi. So sorry to disturb your well-earned slumber.”
Bianchi sat up, putting his arm around Giovanna’s trembling shoulders. Feeling her fear angered him—my Giobella is not to be afraid of this pig—and he demanded, “What do you want?”
The monster sighed, as though their dispute had already gone on too long. “What I wanted before, as I informed you then. What I have always wanted—a quiet little farm, with one or two unicorns on it, to spend my declining years in peace. Would you say that this was too much to ask, Signor Bianchi?”
“There are no unicorns here,” Bianchi said. “There were, yes, I admit that, but they are gone. Search as you like.” He yawned, and made as though to settle comfortably back in the bed.
The monster smiled benignly again, patting Bianchi’s cheek. “Oh, that will not be necessary.” He pointed to the window: a very small movement, no more than a flick of two fingers. “Come and see for yourself, if you will.”
La Signora and her black colt might have been posing against the dawn, so clearly they stood out in Bianchi’s vineyard, where he had seen her first. Raising her head, she looked toward the house, and he had no doubt that she saw, not only the black sedans parked directly before it, but everyone within, and what was being done there. And he knew equally well, and without any illusion of rescue, that it was all no concern of hers. She was a unicorn.
“You cannot capture them,” he said. “You can only kill them.”
The monster sighed again. “Do you know, once that would have been enough. The horn, the hide . . . the skull itself, either to mount on my wall or to sell for a price never imagined—what else could I have desired? But now that I have seen them, at this distance . . .”
Giovanna spoke for the first time. “You will never lay your smallest finger on them. They would never let anyone like you come near. Or your teppisti, either.” She jerked her head contemptuously toward the large, silent men who filled the room.
Bianchi gripped her shoulder hard, but the monster only nodded in mournful accord. “Entirely correct, signorina. We by ourselves could never approach such splendid creatures, not for a moment. But he can.” The finger-flick toward Bianchi was all but unnoticeable.
“Perhaps I could.” Bianchi’s voice was level and calm. “But you already know that I never will.”
The monster was nodding before Bianchi had finished speaking, simultaneously lighting another Toscano from the first, and grinding the original underfoot on the bedroom floor. “Bene, let us consider the two options before us. The possibility most to be wished is that you will cooperate fully with my associates and myself in capturing two genuine unicorns—one, really, for each will follow wherever the other is taken. You will be properly compensated for your assistance, and no harm will come to you and the Signorina Muscari—on that, you have my word.” He paused, and while his voice did not change, the depthless brown eyes did. “Then there is the far less pleasant option, which I truly do not like even to consider.” The two men with kerosene cans tilted them slightly, and liquid began slowly to splash onto the floor.
Giovanna gave a soft cry of horror; and though she bit back any other sound, Bianchi could see the color leave her face, even in the dimness of the bedroom. The monster gestured sharply, and the men brought the gas cans upright again. “I would not enjoy this. It would make a point, but otherwise it would do neither of us any good. But I will burn this hovel to the ground, with your good selves inside, if I have to, because making my point is just as important to me as any fottuto unicorns. Do you understand me?”
The obscenity, in the quiet, cultivated voice, was as shocking as the threat itself. Bianchi said, “Yes,” but hardly heard the reply himself. Beside him, without raising her own voice, Giovanna was giving vent to a rich round of Sicilian and Neapolitan curses that followed upon each other as steadily as the beads of a rosary. Bianchi had had no idea that she knew even half of those phrases, and kept her fluency firmly in mind from then on. The monster finally raised a hand, saying, “Impressive, but not an answer. Signor Bianchi?”
“I will go out to the unicorns,” Bianchi said. “If I can calm them while your people slink up on them, I will do so. But I will not help you capture them. That you cannot make me do.”
“No, I would not have imagined so,” the monster replied graciously. “Good. You will go as close as you can to the unicorns, and my men and I will follow at a respectful distance.” He smiled widely at Giovanna with something that might even have been real amusement. “The well-spoken and valiant Signorina Muscari will remain here with my friend Paolo.” He indicated a man with a bald bullet head and a recently-broken nose—did I do that? “Who is quite aware that he will lose any hand—any finger—that he lays on her. I keep my word.”
Bianchi got out of bed and groped for his clothes—grateful, in the single glance that passed between him and Giovanna, that she had indeed bought him a pair of well-cut blue pajamas, which he wore even when she was not with him, for the smell of her. The monster courteously turned his back while Bianchi dressed, nodding him toward the door. “All that is required of you is to keep the unicorns’ attention as long as you can, and we will do the rest.” Bianchi focused more selectively on the guns then, realizing that several of them were oddly and ominously shaped. He shook his head, trying to look more serenely amused than he felt.
“Your tranquilizers will be useless,” he said. “It will not matter what I do. Giovanna has already told you this. I am telling you the same thing now, so that you will not blame us afterward.”
The monster had turned back to the window, and his voice had abruptly become as cold and pitiless as the tramontane. “Quickly, Signor Bianchi. If they decide to disappear again while you are putting on your shoes, I will be greatly displeased.”
Bianchi struggled into his old leather coat that no longer seemed to welcome him, as always, but almost to fight with his fear-stiffened arms and shoulders. He looked once more at Giovanna, then to Paolo, who grinned at him with stubby gray teeth. Then he walked out of the house, and the ’Ndrangheta followed, but he did not look back.
The sun had not yet risen, and the chill air made him wish that he had first emptied his bladder, but I didn’t want them to think that I was pissing myself for fear of them. His animals, even Cherubino, were nowhere to be seen, God, did they pour kerosene in the barn, too? La Signora and her colt were still in his vineyard, not grazing, watching him. He walked toward them, thinking dangerdangerdanger as loudly as he could, trying to broadcast fear and warning with nothing but his eyes. The ’Ndrangheta stayed well back, as the monster had ordered them to do, but Bianchi heard their footsteps, the soft insect clicking of the tranquilizer guns being loaded and cocked, and the nervous rustling of ropes in the hands of those who held them. Standing well to the side, the girl Silvana, head low, hands twisting together, shamed eyes looking away as he passed. The ’Ndrangheta are family, always, nothing can be trusted but the blood. I should have thought about Silvana.
La Signora, watching his approach, studying the men following him, nudged the black colt behind her; otherwise she showed no alarm and made no sound. The monster was moving up ahead of his men, disobeying his own commands. Bianchi never turned his head, but knew whose hunger chilled the back of his neck. The unicorns waited, unmoving.
Coming within reach of La Signora, he bowed his head, on an impulse, as he would have been less likely to do before a queen. The unicorn put her head against his, her breath whuffling lightly in his hair. She smells like autumn, the first morning. He could hear the whisper of the ropes being shaken out into nooses, and for a single moment he tangled his fingers deep in her mane.
Then he was on her back.
For all that his head slightly topped her shoulder, it felt as though he were clawing his way up the face of a glacier. A cold mist closed on him from the first moment, and sound thinned to indistinguishable chitterings, and to a few somewhat louder noises which might have been either shouts or gunshots. La Signora surged under him as he straddled her: not as a single creature, not even as a unicorn, but as something that did not know him, a white vastness that wished him neither evil nor any recognizable good, but only its own immortal freedom and power. He clung with all his strength to the dark-gold mane he could not see, knowing beyond thought that if he fell he would be trampled and gored to dust for his equally vast audacity before ever the ’Ndrangheta laid hands on him. He tried to see Giovanna’s face behind his tight-shut eyelids, but the sole image that came to him was the somber devil-face of the old goat Cherubino; and in that never-to-beconfessed moment, he yearned for the slit-pupiled yellow eyes just as deeply and hungrily as for the loving, amused green ones.
Well, you will never see her again, Bianchi, so she will never know.
The unicorn did not rear or buck like a horse, nor whirl in neck-snapping circles to throw him off; rather, she had become the spinning center of a spinning, melting universe, so that he could neither feel the jar of her hooves on the ground, nor be certain where any ground might truly be. Dazed and disoriented, he flattened himself along her neck; and somewhere as far away as Giovanna’s eyes, she screamed, and her son echoed her call. And Bianchi heard a third cry—a thin night-bird wail of hopeless terror and loss—and knew it for his own, and despaired. And still he hung on, insane and unyielding, with the unicorn’s mane whipping his eyes blind.
Which was perhaps the only way that he could ever have seen La Signora’s mate coming to her.
Bianchi always remembered the black unicorn as far huger than it could have been, as though somehow magnified a hundred or a thousand times by the mist through which it strode. Its blackness made both the word and the color meaningless: it appeared to him like night folded in midnight and hammered into something resembling a great animal, magnificently grotesque. There was no way that he could have realized it fully: if La Signora’s beauty was barely comprehensible to human vision, her mate could exist for such vision only as fury. The horn blazed and rippled, pointing across the freezing wind straight at his heart. The eyes beneath were the color of lightning.
“No,” Bianchi whispered into the blackness. “No, Signor . . .”
He closed his eyes, because the eyes of the black unicorn were too terrible to meet, and flailed his legs as wildly as an infant, struggling to dismount with no assurance that he would not plummet through immortality to shatter like a cheap watch on an earth centuries below. But instead he tumbled no more than two feet, landing erect, though the unexpected impact juddered through all his bones, snapped his teeth on his tongue, and promptly gave him a grinding headache behind his eyes. He lurched forward, but somehow kept his balance and stood swaying, arms out as though he were either trying to keep from falling or yearning after something wonderful and gone. And for the life of him, at that moment Claudio Bianchi could not himself have said which was so.
Nor could he have told where or when he was—or, really, if he was—for he seemed completely uncentered, derailed, at right angles to everything he assumed. He was certainly standing in what looked quite a bit like his own vineyard, except that, like all else he saw—his fields, his cow barn, his ancient Studebaker—it had turned a pale, almost colorless gray-green; nor would it stay quite still, but kept shivering faintly in and out of focus . . . unless he were the one shifting, blurring, unable to take hold on the world. Is this what La Signora came to tell me, after all? Is this what living looks like to the dead?
There was no sign of any unicorn. There was no sound to be heard at all, though he saw men of the ’Ndrangheta seemingly attempting to speak to one another, their movements as impossibly tedious and jerky and wrong as even the lines of his own house. Almost all of them kneeling, they huddled in near-transparent gray-green clumps, looking past him, plainly not seeing him at all, but just as definitely staring after something . . .
And then he actually felt himself going mad, felt his mind slipping from him like a physical thing, because he saw slaughtered Third Cat, as whole as himself, picking its way delicately toward him, unquestionably recognizing him, ghost to ghost, a fellow gone-away. He said, “No, cat. Pass me by, cat,” but could not hear his own voice, nor feel the words in his mouth. “Cat, cat, please . . . pass me by.”
The monster lay on his face only a few feet from him, but the space between them seemed as vast to Bianchi’s imagining as the desert that the sirocco brought to his doorstep every spring. He never knew how long it took him to cross to the dead man’s side, to take trembling hold of the elegant topcoat, now splotched and sticky with drying blood, and turn the monster over. I can touch him, move him, so that must mean that I am not dead, surely? The broad chest had been split open to the breastbone—like Third Cat, exactly like my poor Third Cat—clearly by some immense force, as though some god had been furiously hammering down a railroad spike. The monster’s face, however, was unmarked, except by damp earth, and his eyes were wide: not at all with fear, as Bianchi read his expression, but with an almost childlike curiosity. Bianchi closed them.
He began to mumble the few Latin phrases he always spoke at the burial of a farm animal—there, a ghost could never do that—but he never finished them. Staring down at the dead face, no Toscano now between the strong white teeth and the courteously contemptuous lips, a rage such as he had never known took hold of him, shaking him between merciless jaws as he had seen a younger Garibaldi shake a poor mouse or blind, helpless mole. He kicked the corpse savagely, trampled it, kicked dirt over it. Every blood vessel in his body, from the least capillary to the great, rolling arteries of the heart, seemed to be swollen with storm beyond his understanding, so that when he cried out it was as much with vast, impossible bewilderment as with pain and fury. He could not hear what he was screaming.
Now he became aware that he was moving forward, toward the gray-green, half-transparent men who were all backing away. Some were pointing at him, or perhaps at Third Cat, who, more sociable than he had ever been in life, stalkedbeside him, purring silently. “They are afraid of you,” Bianchi said. “They should be.”
