It was early afternoon. Lupi had been driving all night. Important things happen in cars, he thought--people are conceived, people born, people die. The kidnapping (important, considering their prey) had taken place in Calabria, and the former ambassador was to be delivered to an address in Bologna. Lupi had no thoughts regarding what it was Le Brigate Rosso, perpetrators of the crime, intended to do with poor Milo, whether he would be put up for ransom, tortured, teeth pulled, ears removed, an icepick run up his anus, made to confess secrets against the state in a kangaroo trial, or be butchered and left at the end of a blind alley with a note--all power to the people--pinned to his chest. He could think about it. His contact with the man had been confined to an unhappy registration of dull, muffled thuddings six or seven feet behind his head as the automobile tore around an icy curve.

      When the car was first placed in his custody, he was given a map marking the route he was supposed to take up the peninsula, but Lupi, after following its directions through the provinces of Campania and Lazio, had decided around midnight to bear ahead through Tuscany rather than veer east into Umbria as he was instructed. It was not that he mistrusted the contact man from whom he had received Milo, the map, and the keys to the car, but the roads through Tuscany would save time.

      Dilapidated trellises, rusty wires attached to roles of poles, litter the winter-fallow fields, running in loose parallels over the white asymmetric land. Vineyards. Frayed traces of blue smoke out over the sparse chill. A magpie, maimed possibly, limps ahead on the road shoulder. A sluggish bus halts to deposit an old woman in chartreuse boots and yellow slicker in a town that immediately falls astride the speeding car and as quickly becomes a rectangular fragment reflected in the mirror. A crow whips, dives through the frost out before the hood, lifting on its wide wings just in time so not to be blown into an explosion of feathers.

      Were those boots really chartreuse? wonders Lupi.

      Lupi now imagines he can hear Milo coughing, or is it laughing? It occurs to him that no one would be the wiser if he stopped and offered his captive something to eat, or drink. It must be very cold back there, he thinks. It is, after all, Christmas morning.

      He comes up with the idea of dropping in on his parents. He has not contacted them for four years. By driving through Tuscany, and on through Florence to Bologna, rather than following the Adriatic coast as the map proposed, he would have a few extra hours. He has no idea why he would want to pursue this whim, nor is he sure his parents will even allow him in their house. He's not sure of much of anything, is he? Not sure whether his grandmothers are still alive. Whether the family is together for the holiday. What has become of his younger sister. Perhaps he might find out something about his old girlfriend Nini, whether she ever married Claudio, who talked her into running off with him and leaving Lupi behind.

      He believes that he could turn himself in, present Milo to the authorities. Only in the precincts of Florence could he hope to do this and emerge, through the influence of his powerful father, with a moderate, even commuted sentence. He has years of secret information from the underground to trade on. Too: he's tried. All the time tired.

      The road is quiet. Christmas and the dead cold have banished all traffic. Holm oaks, towering naked chestnut trees, and firs, zip by. Arranged in columns to rove over rounded bluffs are tidily pruned olive groves. This familiar landscape makes Lupi feel unwontedly warm inside. His mood brightens as he passes the town of Greve, its river clotted along the banks with black ice, and l'Ugolineo, in the undulant hills lined with cypress. The snow is beginning to pick up as the Peugeot crosses the Arno river.

      It is as if this decision is being made for him, not by him, as if the hands at the wheel inform the car by instinct to follow the Arno past the Ponte alle Grazie and San Nicolo, by the spectral high-wise apartment buildings huddled like a dozy mirage around Campo di Marte, and up the hill toward home.

      The Peugeot comes to rest alongside a stone wall covered in denuded branches of vines and rosemary bushes that topple over its edge. Lupi's fingers locate the key, turn it, and suddenly the enveloping whine of the engine, his constant companion these past hours fallen into the night, coughs into muteness. He sits for a moment. Twenty feet ahead, up to the right, gates open to the gravel drive. The snowfall accompanied by a frozen sleet is crystalline and makes a series of pings on the roof of the car. He pushes against the door and climbs out into another world, and his exhaustion, a hazy confusion unto nervous delerium, folds over him. An indistinct recollection of his own extinct childhood is conveyed by the simple smell of this snow on the rosemary bushes. Florence burns like so many cats' eyes below. It comes as a pleasurable shock to the homecomer, all this tranquility.

      He walks around to the trunk of the car, having decided he will release his captive long enough for him to walk a hundred paces, stretch his legs. It was not stipulated, after all, that he had to act inhumanely toward old Milo; he was entrusted to communicate the victim from one point to another; no more, no less. He opens the trunk and sees that the man is still there, motionless, silent, but then hears the sudden deep grind of a camion rounding the fork in the road nearby. He slams the trunk shut and ducks behind the Peugeot as the camion, its open bed filled with children, singing carols and shouting with glee, lurches by. Lupi peers from his hiding place at this strange vision of the truck with its load of children, merrily bundled in coats and wrapped in scarves, bright smears of color against the bowing sky.

      He decides to leave Milo where he is. Too dangerous to let him out of the trunk. Someone might spot them, might identify them. The police are looking for him throughout central and southern regions of the country by now, and the evening newspapers have christened him the Christmas Kidnapper. He locks the car door, shoves the key into his jacket pocket, walks up the road to the front gate of his parents' mansion. There is a brass placard, eaten green at its edges, beside the buzzer at the gate, beautifully incised with serif lettering: Andrea Gabriele Battista Lupi.

      Turning up the drive, hands pushed low in his trouser pockets, the familiarity of the scape deepens. Pace quickening, he walks up into the grove of pines where he would be enshrouded in evergreen branches and bushes heavy with berries as he approached the house. Lights that shine in the windows of the villa spill out across the bluewhite lawn. There are cars--heavy, new, expensive cars--parked in the drive. The front door is decorated with a sprig of holly tied with a red ribbon. Through the windows along the north wing of the villa, behind wrought-iron grillwork and framed by shutters, Lupi can see a group of festive people seated around the dining-room table, and he begins to think, Questo non va...this is not going to work.

      Christmas dinner is underway inside. A fire burns in the hearth. Bottles of champagne stand in ice buckets, white linen tied at their necks-- things tied, he begins to imagine them, strangled, everything being choked. He sees his mother, grayer, heavier than he remembered her, more brightly dressed, perhaps to make up for it in some way. She engages a man seated at her left, diminutive, whose dark head seems outsize for the paltry shoulders beneath it. Lupi does not recognize him; most likely he's a barrister, a judge, a local administrator--he and the others, powerbrokers in the so-called legit world, seated at their Christmas feast beneath the chandelier. And there is his father, Gabriele Battista. Not an atom in his body seems to have changed in the years that have intervened since Lupi ran away. He appears inexorable, ineradicable. All at once, as son observes father lift a forkful of lamb to his mouth, it becomes evident that the shrewdest, most violent, most sophisticated and committed collective of radicals could never hope to arrogate from this man a single fleck of his power. You could murder him, slay the whole smug group of them where they sit eating their magnificent dinner, burn the fucking villa to the ground. Nothing would be accomplished by it.

      Lupi's face exhibits recognition. A mixture of pain has cropped up out of what he stares at through the window there, and a new idea takes shape. One thing is evident: he cannot change the course he is on. Cannot confess. Cannot come home this Sunday.

      He slouches across an octangonal stone piazza and enters the mansion by the servant's porch. He's made up his mind what to do. In three steps he's down the short hall, and reaches a door. He ascends by way of back stairs to the second floor, where, in his mother's dressing room, he proceeds to fill his pockets with brooches, earrings, bracelets, pendants, valuables of all kinds. Merry Christmas, he thinks. Hidden behind an ornately framed painting is the wall safe. There is no alarm, as he opens it. Down the front of his shirt he stows hundreds of thousands of lire, in paper bundles. A gold fob watch, lapis and gold cufflinks, rings, an antique cloisonne snuffbox. He takes everything that will fit in his pockets and down his shirt. On the wall is an eighteenth century pencil study for an expulsion from Eden which the thief thinks too appropriate to the circumstances to leave behind. He breaks the frame, removes the drawing, rolls it up, pushes it into his coat pocket. The bastards, he thinks, as he plunges out into the sinking afternoon.

      The storm has let up again, a little, though the temperature has fallen. The engine must be turned over three times before it finally catches. Lupi is halfway to Bologna before he remembers the man, poor Milo, his grim charge fetal in the trunk. For the first time it occurs to Lupi that the ambassador might have frozen to death. He will not, however, stop the car to look.

      In a trattoria at the outskirts of Bologna, Lupi has a warm meal. Proscuitto, toasted red peppers, polenta, chicken, sauteed spinach, coffee, grappa. A good meal, and he feels well satisfied, sitting alone in the chair next to the window, facing out on passersby in the street bundled up in their winter coats, stepping quickly along their way no doubt to somewhere comfortable, their homes, the houses of friends or relatives.

      He asks the waiter for his bill, and goes out to join the others in the cold streets. He's brought with him a chicken wing and a half bottle of red wine for poor ambassador Milo, just in case he's still breathing in the trunk of that Peugeot. It is, after all, a holy day.

UNDER THE AEGIS of a darkened cloud the tornado churns like an inverted serpent in sly summer. Winding, wind draws down into an orderly coned funnel blocking off the brightness of the sun. The chicken hawk and the crow are pulled like helpless rags out of flight into the swirling snake of air. The dun cloud is dense as a wandering island floating over the rolling geometrical fields. The twister drops from the cloud like a chain that seeks mooring in the unexpectant earth. Grasshoppers along the set rows of wheat and rye desist from their songs. The voice on the shortband radio has interrupted music to establish the cyclone watch. The dragon of dark wind drops its stinging tail lightly into the loam. Asphalt is eased from its flat soft base running straight for miles across the great plains. Sunlight is shielded from that swath of land where the tornado begins its hellish harvest. Planks, shingles, frames, tarpaulin, shutters, grates, brick, tarpaper, rain gutters, glass, stones are rearranged within the circling wind one hundred feet over the earth, above where a yawning rectangular hole shows the dimensions of a structure that once stood. A shaft of dried hay is driven at such speed that it lodges headfirst in the rocksolid trunk of an elm. A tractor and its plow are lifted far above the ground and deposited gently intact and operable upon the mansard roof of the grange hall. Within the blast's bowels a roan pony is impressed against the side of a washtub inside which a bantam rooster roils and riots until the pony bursts like the bag of blood it is, dying the day red. The crooked and ambiguous air, running scales on the metal tines of a springtoothed harrow, mimes a folksong sung by frightened children who are hidden in a storm cellar tunneled beneath the barley shoots. Alfalfa, bromegrass, bird's-foot trefoil, soy, timothy, and clover are pulled from broadcast and banded fields alike. Barbed wire and tumbleweeds dance flibbertigibbet like greased lightning now. Spittlebug flies with wheatstalk, sweet clover, and hourglass fagots. Leafhopper twirls like screwy zozzlestick in the sorghum. Aphids and guidoing crickets cling to the peeled ground in flight. Even the two-rooted white clover is yanked aloft from its insistent lime-struck pod of turf behind the rickety century-old farmhouse, oddly left unrazed by the growing gale.

      Turn and turn about the tornado weaves across the rolling yards and dells northeast toward the sprawling clutter of a town where men and women and their children crouch against the oncoming whirlwind. Like a clotted dervish it marks a course toward the dust-paved streets of this town. The minimal contents of a trickling stream named after a forgotten settler are partly sucked and ascend in gyres around the central core of the glutted monster. Suddenly in a wrenching single monumental twist the roaring spiral veers away from its northeastern ray simultaneously disgorging itself of countless unnamble bits and fragments of what lay in its three mile path. The ascendant walls of the turning column hard as iron now gain new velocity as the snake dances quickly over a petroleum depot and slaughterhouse and three rural grain silos west of the huddling clapboards saved from demolition by the whimsical change of course of the storm. To the accompaniment of voluminous groans the beamed sheet-metal roof of the howling slaughterhouse is ripped like onionskin off the top of its walls. Halved carcasses of swine and cattle and sheep sail as massive forklifts tumble easily into the upchurning twirl. In instants the arrangement of men, machinery, and beasts is tossed into wild shambles by the rocky air. At the end of the central chamber in this now roofless building a bandsaw is toppled upon a shouting man whose head is lightly blown against the concrete floor, concussing him. The woman who was standing at his side is miraculously elevated fifteen feet above the man lying beneath his bandsaw on the floor. Her arms are raised tenderly by the rushing fingers of invisibility and her pink dress and slip are lifted as if by the ginger touch of a lover anxious to run his hands over her naked and motionless body. These clothes are sent high into the sky before the hindmost swift-flown edge of the funnel snags the sparking end of a powerline and introduces it to a thousand gallons of petroleum that send a percussive flash exploding low across the horizon. Hung thus in the storm the woman's substance is drawn up in microscopic particles and sent to the topmost mass of jetblack thunderclouds rocking overhead. Just before retracting its tongue off the shocked sod the tornado throws three grain silos together momentarily into a curious tripod and then tosses two of them out into cornfields. The third is carried up with the receding cone to the thunderhead but after it reaches the apex where it might have served on any other wind-king's head as a fine crown is instead cast casually a quarter mile east to collide with a turnstile on a grassy knoll where some Guernseys and a little black Angus graze.

[Reprinted in this revised, edited Net-version, with permission
of Penguin Books copyright 1988, 1996 by Bradford Morrow.]