Home Before Dark by Charles Maclean Page A

was
home.
    He’d been in the house behind Piazza Antinori for almost an
hour before he opened the door to the fridge, hoping he
might find a cold beer, or maybe something to eat.
The job had only taken five minutes. He’d gone straight
up to the bedroom and removed the small painting in the
ebony frame from the wall above the bed. Then wrapped it
in newspaper and put it inside the plastic shopping bag he’d
brought with him. Bad Feng Shui, he remembered the old
fart saying, to hang a picture over a bed.
There was some other stuff, watches, gold cufflinks, a
Moroccan dagger he fancied, but Guido had warned him to
touch nothing.
He knew the house well enough not to have to turn on
lights. He sat in the gloom, dreaming about the new life that
lay ahead.
Until a couple of weeks ago he’d worked as a waiter at a
restaurant near Santa Croce, where he’d been eyed up by the
Englishman he knew as Daniel, the owner of the house. He’d
come to two parties here and after the last one his host had
invited him to spend the night. He’d taken the three hundred
Euros Daniel had paid him for his services and, while the
older man slept, an impression of his house keys.
Before they had sex, Daniel had told him he wanted to
see more of him when he returned from a business trip to
Phuket. He’d weighed the earning potential of an arrangement
with the portly old queen against his cut for stealing
the painting, which Guido had assured him was worth at
least a million.
Gianni Arcangeli was seventeen and wanted a Porsche.
He’d arrived at the house around six thirty, which was
about the time Daniel’s American friend, Jimmy, came every
second day to water the plants and feed the cat. He knew
he’d been there yesterday – he’d watched from the alley as
he’d entered the house with another man, but hadn’t bothered
waiting to see them leave. There was little risk of his returning
this evening.
If anybody asked, he was doing Jimmy a favour. He’d even
put out some food for Cesar, before settling down to wait
upstairs in the sumptuous all-white salone that smelt of dried
flowers. His instructions were to stay until after dark, when
there’d be fewer people around in the courtyard. He soon
grew bored, then hungry.
The kitchen was on the ground floor. Its bare stone walls
and high ceiling with exposed beams reminded Gianni of
his uncle’s farmhouse in the Val d’Elsa, only this place had
been given the designer treatment. The fridge was an
American import, a side-by-side stainless steel Sub-Zero
600 Series, the best money can buy. It stood almost seven feet tall. He remembered it being well stocked.
Winding a dishtowel around his hand to avoid leaving
prints, he reached for the handle, noticing only now that the
trays and shelves from the fridge were piled up on a nearby
worktop. It crossed Gianni’s mind he was about to be disappointed.
He
pulled open the door to the Sub-Zero. A lurid light
sprang into the room and instinctively he reared back. Folded
into the space normally occupied by provisions was the fully
clothed body of a man, one bent knee pulled upwards like a
dancer’s against his blackened windpipe. He barely had time
to take in Jimmy’s blond curls, the striped shirt, the shades
hanging askew, before the corpse which had been held in
place by the fridge door lurched forward onto his shoulder.
The boy screamed as the ice-cold face, a mottled orange
and blue colour, brushed his cheek in a grotesque parody of
a social kiss. His breath came in short panicky gusts, as he
tried to wrestle Jimmy back into the fridge. When he’d got
all the stray limbs tucked inside, he slammed the beautifully
engineered door shut and leant against it like someone battling
to keep out a wintry blast.
For a minute or two he couldn’t move. Tears ran down his
face. All he could see in the shadows were Jimmy’s bulging
eyes and obscenely poking tongue. Then he heard something
scrunch under his foot and, still sobbing, knelt to pick up
Jimmy’s