Looking up at the dark brick facade of the shelter, I was no longer so sure that coming here had been a good idea. What had I hoped to accomplish? It was the middle of the night, and the doors were long closed. Even if I had the courage to knock, nobody would answer, and certainly not the one I was hoping for.
But I simply had to come. After what I had found in my research...
A shiver went down my back. I simply had to come and see him. There was no other alternative. So I had snuck out to the shelter, where Giacomo had gone to stay after the police had come down on his secret hideout like a swarm of flies on a juicy piece of meat. He had taken his bedroll and clothes with him. I didn't know what he had done with the knives and machine guns. I hadn't dared to talk about that. I hadn't dared to talk about anything. There had been silence between us for days.
But now I had to talk with him. Yet how? Here I was, yet how would I get to Giacomo? Hidden from sight from everybody in the shelter behind a rusty old van that was parked in the street, I stood, and pondered.
And then, as if he had heard my thoughts, the door of the shelter opened and Giacomo stepped out. I slapped my hand over my mouth and wanted to run forward – but something held me back. Something wasn't right. He threw a furtive glance right, then left, then hurriedly set off down the street, towards the river. I noticed he had a backpack slung over his shoulder, his bedroll on top of it. He looked prepared for a long journey.
No. No, that couldn't be. He had promised!
Hurriedly, I set out after him, hidden behind the rows of parked cars that lined the streets. He walked slowly, deliberately, as if every stride cost him something. I had no trouble keeping up. Finally, we arrived at the beach, our beach, where we had danced, and from where we had set out towards towards the Gold Gate Bridge on that fateful night. When I saw the motor-boat, packed with weapons and supplies waiting on the shore, I knew I had been right, and it hurt.
He deposited his back-pack in the boat. If ever I had a chance, it was now.
"Giacomo, don't!"
I stepped out of the shadows. At the sound of my voice, he whirled around, metal glinting in his fist. It was too dark to see what he held, knife or gun, but as soon when he saw me, his mouth fell open, and he hurriedly dropped whatever he had been holding.
"Angela! What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"I might ask the same of you." Stomping towards him angrily, I pointed to the packed boat. "But the answer is rather obvious, isn't it? You're leaving!"
"Angela, I..."
"You swore you wouldn't do this! You swore you wouldn't leave."
"That was before!" The words were hard, cold, and yet anguished.
"Before what?"
"Before they found me."
He gestured towards the dark shape of the Golden Gate Bridge, just visible against the night sky, because of the lights of cars rushing over it. They illuminated its edges and made it look like some giant, black, glowing spiderweb across the heavens.
"Angela, don't you remember? The guns? The knives? You..." He seemed to struggle for words. Finally he managed to say: "You were almost killed." It sounded like an accusation – against himself.
"I know."
"So you see I have to go."
"No! The gangsters are gone. We got through this. We will get through everything together. But if you leave..."
"I have to."
"Stay," I pleaded, taking a step closer. "Don't go."
"Why?" His face was as dark as his voice. "Why would I stay when I am only a danger to you? I cannot put you in danger, Angela. I cannot. I... love you."
Shock washed through me. Not shock like from a car accident, or an earthquake, or anything like that. A sweet, wondrous, emotional shock which was no shock at all, for deep down, I had always known it, seen it in the way his eyes gleamed when he looked at me, in the way he held me, in the way he called me 'Mia Angela' – my Angel.
I took another step forward.
"I love you too, Giacomo! Why do you think I want you to stay? I love you too!"
"You wouldn't if you knew who I really am," he said, bitterly. "It's better that I leave."
I swallowed.
"Your secret? That's what you're talking about?"
"Yes."
"Come here, Giacomo."
"What for?"
"Just come here."
Hesitantly, he stepped closer. I stood up on my tiptoes, raised my face to his, and then he was no longer hesitant. We melted against each other as if we had been made for each other. Which, in a way, maybe we had been. My lips touched his in one silent, sincere, loving kiss. Kissing him was always something special for me. But this time, I tried to make it special for him, to show him the love I felt in every single moment.
When we finally broke apart, I held up my hand.
"Here. Take this."
"What is it?"
"Just take it."
He took the crumpled piece of paper out of my hand, smoothed it out, and held it into the moonlight. His face paled, as he studied the printed-out page of search results from my Dad's computer.
"You knew!" he whispered. His eyes, widened with incredulity, snapped to my face. "You knew! And still..."
"I love you," I said with absolute conviction. "And that's not going to change because of who you are. Or rather, who you were."
Something seemed to break in him then, break down and crumble – some wall he had kept up for a long, long time. Before, I had only glimpsed through its cracks. Now it was gone. His face looked serene, and yet sad. Slowly, he stepped over to the boat, and slumped on the edge, letting his face sink into his hands.
"You want to know?" he asked. "About me?"
I nodded. Then, when I realized he couldn't see me with his hands over his face, I said: "Yes."
There was a momentary silence.
"On my twelfth birthday," he finally said, his voice toneless, far-away, "my father said he had a special surprise for me. I thought, maybe it is a cake, or a sailing trip. We had a sailing yacht, you know. Instead, he took me out to a... I suppose you could call it a school, or maybe training facility would be the better word. He gave me a gun and showed me how to use it. He showed me how to shoot at targets. Then told me I'd be going to this school regularly now, where I'd learn to shoot. At targets and at... breathing targets."
Silence hung in the air for a few, heavy moments. It was clear that those breathing targets hadn't been ferrets or rats.
"I had always known that my family had money, of course," he continued, still not taking his face out of his hands. "You can hardly miss that sort of thing when you live in a mansion and drive to lessons with a private tutor in a Ferrari. But I never really thought about where the money came from. Not until the lessons started. Then I guessed quickly enough."
He took a deep breath.
"At first, I did what they said. I learned. I trained. Sometimes it was even fun. Diable, there were bikes, and guns, and there was action. Of course it was fun. But then... then I reached my eighteenth birthday. I was to become a man, a full member of the family. But in order to do that, I had to prove my worth."
"Um... I guess not by getting an A in your assignment, right?"
A choked laugh escaped him. "No. They took me to a room. Told me that to be a man, you had to be willing to get your hands dirty for the family. Told me that since it's my first time, they'd make it easy. In the room... In the room was a little girl. Danielle. The daughter of a rival clan."
Danielle. The name hit me like a hurricane. I remembered all too well his anguished screams in the park that night as he cried out that name.
"They wanted you to kill her," I said.
With bated breath, I waited for what came next.
He let his hands fall from his face, and there was a deep gentleness there, such as I had only seen sometimes when he looked at me. My heart clenched.
"She was only four years old," he whispered. "Four years old, and they wanted me to kill her."
My heart expanded, and I let out a sigh of such deep relief that I was surprised it didn't ripple the water of the bay in front of us. Four years old. A child! She was a child! Not someone he loved, but a child!
Well, so was I, maybe... but not to him.
"You couldn't do it," I said.
He gave me a quizzical look. "You sound so sure. How do you know?"
"Because I know you." My voice was soft. "I know you could never do something like that. Not in a million years."
"How do you know? I could be a brutal killer!"
"Are you?"
"Well... as it happens... no." He let his gaze dropped as if he were embarrassed or something. It made me want to laugh, and cry at the same time, because it made me think of what kind of world he had grown up in, to be embarrassed for a deed of goodness and mercy.
"What did you do?" I wanted to know.
"I was suddenly sick of it," he said. "Sick of the violence. Sick of the false glamor, the false pride in what we did! I grabbed the little girl, knocked the guard at the door on the head and took my father's car from the garage. It had his wallet inside, and inside his wallet were his bank account details. All the secret numbers. All I could think of was that I wanted to cripple them, to prevent them, as much as I could, from doing any more evil. There was only one way I could think of to rob them of power. I drove straight to the bank and emptied all the bank accounts. When I had dropped off the little girl at a safe place, with orders for her to be delivered back to her family, I made straight for the nearest private airfield. We had a plane there, fueled at all times, in case of emergencies. I was just able to get it out of the hangar and off the ground before they caught up with me. I could feel the tremors as bullets buried themselves in the back of the plane. I got away just in time, before they got out the heavy guns. I flew for hours. Somewhere over the border I put the plane on autopilot and jumped. I had a parachute. Landed safely somewhere in Switzerland. From Switzerland, I made my way to France, from France to America. And the rest you know."
"Not quite." I shook my head. "I mean... the way you've been living, as an outcast, homeless... with all that money, why did you do it? Or wasn't it enough money?"
He snorted. "My family is at the very top, Mia Angela. What I took was only part of their fortune and yet... I think it was over twenty billion dollars."
I guess I should have felt staggered, blown away even. Twenty billion? Heck, I thought twenty dollars was a lot of money! But twenty billion? How much was a billion, exactly? Had I even gotten that far in math?
No matter. It wasn't important how much money it was. All that was important was Giacomo, sitting in front of me, staring at the ground as if he wished to burn holes into it with his eyes.
"Then why?" I repeated my question. "Why do you live like this?"
"What do you think?" he growled. "I can't touch it! I won't! The money is dirty. Soaked with blood! How can I use money that was made murdering people, or smuggling drugs, or..."
"But what if you didn't use it for yourself?" I asked. "What if you used it to help others?"
"What?" He seemed as startled as if I had just suggested to go on a hike to the moon and back again.
"Well," I said, gesturing to his backpack and bedroll, "you've been at St Christopher's, haven't you? You know that there are plenty of people who could use help. Take the money, and do something good with it. That's the only way to wash the blood off, and the bad memories away."
He stared into space for a few moments, stunned. Then he turned to me. When his gaze fell on me, there was something in his eyes close to reverence.
"Mia Angela," he said, the words like velvet. "You are truly an angel."
For telling him that money could be spent on nice things? Hardly. I was about to tell him so, when his eyes darkened.
"But that doesn't change the fact I have to go," he continued. "That bastardo Neil has probably told his boss about me. They will find out that he is dead soon enough, if they haven't already. Then, they'll know he was on to something, and they'll go through this city with a fine tooth-comb. No matter how well I hide, they will find me if I stay. And if they find me, they find you. I won't let that happen."
Raising a hand to my face, he let it slowly glide down my cheek, sending shivers down my spine.
"I will do what you said," he whispered. "I will use the money for good. But I can't remain here. I have to go."
Slowly, with an effort that I thought would be beyond the muscles in my arm, I reached up and detached his hand from my face. It fell down, limply.
"You're right," I told him. "You have to leave."
Hurt flashed across his face, and I could see in his eyes that in spite of what he had said, he had still hoped for me to argue the contrary, to plead with him to stay. Well, he would be disappointed there.
"You must leave," I repeated, "which means, so must I."
"Scusi?"
The expression on his face was priceless. It made me want to burst out laughing. Instead I simply grinned, and, striding past him, climbed into the boat, settling down on one of the crates he stashed there and hoping it didn't contain a delicate explosive.
"Well, you didn't think I was going to let you go on your own, did you?"
"Angela," he said in a voice that brooked no refusal, slowly turning towards me. "Get out of the boat."
My grin widened.
"No."
"This is not a time to joke with me!"
"Who says I'm joking?"
"What else can you be doing? You can't... You can't seriously..." helplessly, he gestured towards me, then to the city lights behind him. "You can't seriously want to go with me! To want to leave your parents, your friends..."
"I'll write them a postcard."
"...to leave your sister behind, your school..."
"Now are you trying to encourage me to run away with you? If so, it's working."
"Be serious!" He swung himself into the boat and advanced on me, grasping my shoulders hard.
"I am being serious," I said, looking up into his warm, brown eyes. "I'll miss my friends. I'll miss my parents. I might even miss my sister on a day when I wish there was someone close by to murder. But you, Giacomo..." I swallowed. "You are the love of my life. If I leave you behind, my life won't just be miserable. I won't have a life to go on with anymore."
The expression in his eyes softened, and yet, his grip didn't relax.
"I love you," he said.
"I know."
"Heaven knows why! You're too stubborn to be legal!"
"Well, I'm not legal yet. And neither are you, to judge from all those guns." I pointed to a dark heap in the corner of the boat.
"I should tie you up and drag you back to your parents' house!"
I didn't say anything, just waited, and looked up at him. He didn't move.
"I should!" He repeated. "I really should!"
Again, he didn't move an inch. Finally, I gathered the courage to speak.
"Then why don't you?" I asked.
And he bent down towards me, his lips crushing mine.
"I love you!"
That was answer enough for me. Giacomo continued to kiss me, and while he did, one of his hands slid off my shoulder, fumbling for the knot which tied the boat to the shore. The shore of all I knew. The shore of my home. Using only one hand, his eyes still fixed on me, he took a long time to unfasten the knot, enough time for me to protest, to jump out of the boat, to say I didn't want to go.
I didn't move a muscle. The knot fell apart, and slowly, the boat began to drift away from the shore.
Squeezing my shoulder tightly, Giacomo shoved me backwards, until we stood at the bow of the boat, besides the steering wheel. With half an ear I heard the engine start and realized that Giacomo must have turned the key. I didn't see him do it. I only had eyes for his eyes.
"Yes?" he whispered. There was a whole world contained in this single, questioning word.
I nodded. "Yes."
A shudder went through the boat as the engine roared up and we rushed forward, across the Golden Gate, and out into the Ocean. And even if there wasn't a romantic sunset at the horizon, the moon stood high up in the sky, and the stars shone brightly. And Giacomo's eyes were the brightest stars of all.
THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITE FINAL END
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Hi!
How do you like my new, improved Ending for 'WANTED'? I have taken your advice and tried my skill at a romantic happy end. I hope you enjoyed it :)
Cheers
Rob
P.S: THERE WILL BE NO SEQUEL FOR THIS BOOK. I'm sorry, but this was always inteded as a astandalone book, and I'm concentrating on other works now.