Day 90 - Darwin's Game - Chapter 39 (2828 words)

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DARWIN'S GAME

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 39

Leon Cavalli was an old man and he spent a large amount of his days waiting, waiting for his family, his meals, his next drink, his friends and eventually of course death. He was a young boy, barely even seven years old when the second world war took over life in his village and made him a man ahead of his time. He was never a soldier, he was far too young for that, but of course it meant that most of the men who lived locally, his father and his uncles in particular as they had a daily impact in his life, were taken away to be soldiers, something that the boys all aspired to do in their footsteps. The war ended and he was not even fifteen years old, still looking and thinking too young to get into service, and then it was all over and he had missed it.

Both of his father's brothers had died in the war, unsure about and unwilling to learn the details of their deaths, they were simply never seen again, except in the reflective black dresses of his aunts who never wore any other colour every again that he could recall. They wore grief like a cloak thrown around all their clothes for the rest of their lives it defined them, recoloured them. His father on the other hand was listed as missing in action, and never came home, never was declared dead and made no pension forthcoming from the government, even as he had disappeared barely two years into the war.

There were so many less men around, less of the usual back and forth that made a village life work well. It was no worse than it was in any community affected by war or other absentee parent issues, but in this one it created a vacuum that one or two children thrived in and one or two children suffered in. His father, Signor Cavalli was a mythical creature in his mind, no longer connecting to the reality of life before the war, but making a new mythology based on what he did not get afterwards.

He went to work when he was barely twelve years old, school days suddenly looked like paradise compared to the prison sentence of having to work long hours far from home in the paper mills, bringing home money that his mother would then take in full, feed and clothe him and his sisters. She took in what she could from families in the larger towns, but with a family of four children of which Leon was oldest, it fell to him more often than not to make sure that the family had an income. He worked hard but saw no results personally, his earnings were defrayed immediately between five mouths, their grand mother had passed away from heartbreak, rapidly considering there was no physical problem but the emotional burden of having a dead son, who was also not considered dead.

He was a man in age, but not in mind before he knew what was going on around him. He had girlfriends but they could not compete with the mouths he had to feed, his sisters still in school or going on toe better themselves and find husbands. Once out of the family home they were no longer his problem, but they also made no difference to the length of his servitude of responsibility. It was too late to learn, to late to serve and in some cases too late to live.

His youngest sister left home and married a man, a nice man from the Amalfi Coast to all accounts, and he was in his mid twenties and now only had a mother to care for and a family home that was his as his fathers eldest heir when finally declared dead by the Italian authorities, a decade or more after the end of the war. The house may have been his, but there was nothing he could do with it, his mother still lived with him, her mind starting to feel the effects of a degenerative mental incapacity that made her less of a woman and more of a child.

Leon left the Paper Mill finally and took a job working for a local butcher where he learned to be very handy with a knife and built a strong back bone for working the hard, physically demanding tasks. The Butcher was not the surrogate father he was looking for, he was a man who was connected and got things done locally. He taught Leon to have a strong stomach, to be hard and to think for himself, find the way to get things done. When it eventually transpired that the Butcher had gone too far, taken too many liberties with too many peoples wives along the way it fell to Leon to clean up the mess, or to join him.

The Butcher's shop went to the local man in charge, at least the man that had the weight and power, and he gave the business to his son who had no interest in keeping Leon on as a worker of no meat preparation skill but considerable talent with a blade. He went to service of the new owner, paid from the salary funnelled through the shop but doing jobs, leaning on people and collecting on debts owed in the community.

It was never enough, he always wanted more than life was willing to let him have. One day he was now in his thirties and he came home to find a strange man in his living room, in his house standing over his mother who was crying and scared on the floor in front of him. He saw red, he never let the man say a word, he was dead, the last breath slipping from him before letting him fall to the floor next to his confused mother who had fainted at the sight of the attack. When she awoke the body was gone, the floor cleaned and she was lying on the couch covered in blankets, the radio on as if she had fallen asleep there.

For days it was like nothing had happened, she asked where her husband was, which was something she had been doing since he mind started slipping and the occasional fit would leave her gasping for air and wondering why her body was so old and where her school uniform was, as she was late for classes. This became her new routine, asking every day where he husband was, taking another turn and becoming a five year old girl again, at least for a few minutes every day.

A few weeks later he found another man in his living room, he had been out all day driving his employer from farm to farm that owed him money, standing menacingly while his boss made polite chit chat, peppered with sweetly smiled threats in between them. He had know he would never rise above the level he was at now, and planned to take action to secure some financial stability and longevity if not having a plan for a life of influence and power, or meaning and place in the world that did not come at the end of a fist.

The man in his living room had bad news, his father was dead. This was not news to Leon and he laughed mirthlessly as the man wore on with his explaining, it stifled the laughter to replace it with a creeping horror. Though listed as missing, his father had not died in the war, he had been injured in an explosion and buried alive with a group of enemy soldiers in a building that collapsed, near the French border. When the bodies were cleared later his clothes were torn off and he was revived, and it was a clerical error that put the Italian uniform with the body of an enemy soldier and that left his father aligned with the Frenchmen, and not his unit who had not been caught or had not survived. When he awoke he had no memory and a terrible throat injury which made it impossible to speak.

For years he had convalesced at a hospital, taking work as an orderly never speaking much at all and not realising that he was not a French man at all. He had spoken both languages very well from his youth and switching between the two left him able to fool even himself as to his background. Over time though, pieces came back to him and years after the war he croaked his way through a number of departments of veterans affairs to declare himself as Corporal Cavelli, from the Lucca province, he was changed from missing to located and he was given a small stipend and sent home to his wife and children as soon as possible with all the best wishes in the world.

Leon sat stunned and horrified at what had happened, it was like an opera plot laid out before him. Jealousy, rage and a life not led well at all swelled in a crescendo of violence and emotion that left the viewer bereft of hope and filled them with the sweet despair of tragic entertainments on the stage. There was no overture, no encore and no curtain call at the end.

The man from the government coughed and offered his condolences, and regretted to inform Leon that his father Corporal Roberto Cavelli had washed ashore in a mountain lake in the country a few miles away, stabbed and relieved of any money that he had on him, and was now unfortunately, officially dead. The police a few towns away where the body had washed ashore, were looking into the crime, but it had taken them a few weeks to identify the body, more by luck than much else.

The man thanked him for his time and gain offered his condolences and he held the widows hands and she smiled as if meeting him for the first time. Death Benefits would be fast tracked in their tragic case, it would not be much but it would allow for a proper burial and maybe a tombstone, as the body was buried in an unmarked grave in the lake town where they still looked for a killer they would never find.

That was when Leon started drinking, started paying more attention to the world around him and slowed himself right down to make sure he saw everything. He went to work for himself, took what money he had and set up an Enoteca in his home town, paid no protection, had no debts with some persuasive deals and made himself a part of the landscape. He sat, acquired friends, which rounded out his knowledge and experience of the world. He would listen to them talk, the older they were the better it was for him, they had nothing left to do but talk.

Over the years he became an institution, he saw all and he knew all that went on in the area, things that passed him by were allowed to pass, but not without going under the watchful eye. The older companions passed away, men his own age soon supplanted them, only to be replaced or augmented with men younger than him until eventually he was the oldest man on the street, sitting at the tables he owned and drank at a business that was now run by his nephews and then his nephew's children as he reached his seventies and waited his life out, taking nothing for granted and waiting for the world and it's secrets to reveal itself to him, not to have to try and carve that out at the end of a knife any longer.

The man that came and asked him some questions was much younger than he was now, no one was his age that came to see him anymore, that was the way of the world. He knew that the trucks over the years were taking more into those hills than was making its way out again. It had taken a while for that to become apparent, that it was not just the bilking of an arrogant Barone and his thirst for grandeur that was driving it all over the years.

The man asked him many questions, narrowed in on the details that he himself knew were like keystones in the arch that hid the secret project that was up in the forest. They spoke at length about the caves and about the work that was being done, the man was holding something back and Leon could see this, after five decades of being patient and waiting for the revelation he learned to be patient, all would be uncovered, it always was eventually.

The man gave him money, more than he expected and more than he needed, but he took it none the less, it would go into his will or inject into his nephews son's business plan to attract more tourist traffic to the Enoteca, not too much that it would make it less attractive to locals but enough that it would do more than recycle cash in the village economy only. The money came with a catch though, the man wanted something from him as well, they had to take a drive to the hills and see this place, Leon was sure he knew where it was and how to get there, so they set off in a car that was not really designed for the terrain, but it suited the man and his companion.

They arrived at the site, and none of the things he could see made any sense to Leon at all, but then again he was patient and it would all become clear eventually. The man seemed satisfied with what Leon had shown him and what information they had shared. More money exchanged hands, again it was unnecessary but it felt to Leon that the man needed to give to feel secure in the transaction and to keep the balance secret.

He knew that it would all come to him if he was patient, he could not rush it and he could not force it on anyone, this was the way of tragedy, a price he reminded himself of every day, long after his fathers second death and his mothers final slipping away years later on. So he took the charge and accepted the half knowledge the man offered, knowing the rest was on the way.

There was a last request, that he was to share the information but only with a certain man, he would come looking for it in the future, in weeks or months, maybe up to a year away, but he would ensure it was not too long, after all he would want to be alive long enough to deliver the message on his behalf. The man then gave him two photographs, and two names to go with them and that one or both of these men would be looking for the very site they had visited. That they needed to find it on their own, which is how they would make it here, but that if stuck Leon could nudge them, subtly if possible, in the right direction to find what they needed to find.

Leon was not surprised to see Jacob in his Enoteca that day, the man with him was not the other man in the photo, a man named Blake, but he had not predicted that it would be both, it cold be an either or. So he got his nephews son to drop some hints, without knowing what it was he was hinting at, getting the man, an Italian with a Florentine accent to bite and draw in the bigger fish.

Then things had happened as they had, and they stood at the doorway in the cliff, the entrance to a tunnel that had been filled in and contained a corridor into what looked like a small town inside the hill itself. Now less than a year later there was the same town, he recognised the door, albeit from the other side, as the same one. He knew the context of what it all meant and that he had some how come across the Darwin Affair, and that it secrets were unfolding as the universe was likely to do with secrets held so closely. It was not being revealed to him, not today and maybe not in his lifetime as he stared at the concrete filled in doorway that posed more questions than it answered for him anyway.

He had asked the man, in confidence as he could be trusted not to divulge the secrets that he was not entitled to, what his name was.

“My name? Call me Charles.” The mystery man had spoken to Leon all day in flawless Italian, with a formal, classroom accent.