o, it's nothing. There was a wolf howling all night and I couldn't get to sleep.'

'I didn't hear any wolf,' said the hotel landlady, who was also there buying bread.

'It's been months since any wolves were heard in the area,' confirmed another woman who made conserves to be sold in the hotel shop. 'The hunters must have killed them all, which is bad news for us because the wolves are the main reason the hunters come up here at all, to see who can kill the most elusive animal in the pack. It's a pretty pointless exercise, but they love it.'

'Don't say anything in front of the baker about there being no more wolves in the region,' muttered Chantal's boss. 'If word gets out, no one will come to Viscos at all.'

'But I heard a wolf.'

Then it must have been the rogue wolf,' said the mayor's wife, who didn't much like Chantal, but who was sufficiently Well-bred to hide her feelings.

The hotel landlady got annoyed. There was no rogue wolf. It was just an ordinary wolf, and it was probably dead by now anyway.

The mayor's wife, however, would not give up so easily.

'Regardless of whether or not it exists, we all know that there were no wolves howling last night. You work the poor girl too hard, up until all hours; she's so exhausted she's starting to get hallucinations.'

Chantal left the pair of them to their argument, picked up her bread and went on her way.

'A pointless exercise,' she repeated to herself, recalling the comment made by the woman who made the conserves. That was how they viewed life, as a pointless exercise. She nearly told them about the stranger's proposal there and then, just to see if those smug, narrow-minded people would be willing to take part in a genuinely purposeful exercise: ten gold bars in exchange for a simple murder, one that would guarantee the futures of their children and their grandchildren and return Viscos to its former glory, with or without wolves.

But she held back. She decided instead to tell the story that very night, in front of everyone, in the bar, so that no one could claim not to have heard or understood.

Perhaps they would fall on the stranger and march him straight to the police, leaving her free to take her gold bar as a reward for services rendered to the community. Perhaps they simply wouldn't believe her, and the stranger would depart believing that they were all good, which wasn't the case at all.

They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot.

They refused to believe anything that didn't fit in with what they were used to believing. They all lived in fear of God.

They were all - herself included - cowards when the moment comes to change their fate. But as far as true goodness was concerned, that didn't exist - not in the land of cowardly men, nor in the heaven of Almighty God who sows suffering everywhere, just so that we can spend our whole lives begging him to deliver us from Evil.

The temperature had dropped. Chantal hadn't slept for three nights, but once she was preparing her breakfast, she felt much better. She wasn't the only coward, though she was possibly the only one aware of her own cowardice, because the rest of them thought of life as a 'pointless exercise' and confused fear with generosity.

She remembered a man who used to work in a chemist's in a nearby village and who had been dismissed after twenty years' service. He hadn't asked for his redundancy money because - so he said - he considered his employers to be his friends and didn't want to hurt them, because he knew they had had to dismiss him because of financial difficulties. It was all a lie: the reason the man did not go to court was because he was a coward; he wanted at all costs to be liked; he thought his employers would then always think of him as a generous, friendly sort. Some time later, when he went back to tnem to ask for a loan, they slammed the door in his face, but by then it was too late, for he had signed a letter of resignation and could make no further demands of them.

Very clever. Playing the part of a charitable soul was only for those who were afraid of taking a stand in life. It is always far easier to have faith in your own goodness than to confront others and fight for your rights. It is always easier to hear an insult and not retaliate than have the courage to fight back against someone stronger than yourself; we can always say we're not hurt by the stones others throw at us, and it's only at night - when we're alone and our wife or our husband or our school friend is asleep - that we can silently grieve over our own cowardice.

Chantal drank her coffee and hoped the day would pass quickly. She would destroy the village, she would bring Viscos to its knees that very night. The village would die within a generation anyway because it was a village without children young people had their children elsewhere, in places where people went to parties, wore fine clothes, travelled and engaged in 'pointless exercises'.

The day, however, did not pass quickly. On the contrary, the grey weather and the low cloud made the hours drag. The mountains were obscured by mist, and the village seemed cut off from the world, turned in on itself, as if it were the only inhabited place on Earth. From her window, Chantal saw the stranger leave the hotel and, as usual, head for the mountains. She feared for her gold, but immediately calmed herself down - he was sure to come back because he had paid in advance for a week in the hotel, and rich men never waste a penny; only poor people do that.

She tried to read, but couldn't concentrate. She decided to go for a walk round Viscos, and the only person she saw was Berta the widow, who spent her days sitting outside her house, watching everything that went on.

'It looks like it's finally going to get cold,' said Berta.

Chantal asked herself why people with nothing else to talk about always think the weather is so important. She nodded her agreement.

Then she went on her way, since she had said all she had to say to Berta in the many years she had lived in that village. There was a time when she had considered Berta an interesting, courageous woman, who had managed to continue her life even after the death of her husband in one of the many hunting accidents that happened each year. She had sold some of her few possessions and invested the money together with the insurance money - in securities, and she now lived off the income.

Over time, however, the widow had ceased to be of interest to her, and had become instead an example of everything she feared she might become: ending her life sitting in a chair on her own doorstep, all muffled up in winter, staring at the only landscape she had ever known, watching over what didn't need watching over, since nothing serious, important or valuable ever happened there.

She walked on, unconcerned at the possibility of getting lost in the misty forest, because she knew every track, tree and stone by heart. She imagined how exciting things would be at night and tried out various ways of putting the stranger's proposal - in some versions she simply told them what she had seen and heard, in others she spun a tale that might or might not be true, imitating the style of the man who had not let her sleep now for three nights.

'A highly dangerous man, worse than any hunter I've ever met.'

Walking through the woods, Chantal began to realise that she had discovered another person just as dangerous as the stranger: herself. Up until four days ago, she had been imperceptibly becoming used to who she was, to what she could realistically expect from life, to the fact that living in Viscos wasn't really so bad - after all, the whole area was swamped with tourists in the summer, everyone of whom referred to the place as a 'paradise'. ;

Now the monsters were emerging from their tombs, darkening her nights, making her feel discontented, put upon, abandoned by God and by fate. Worse than that, they forced her to acknowledge the bitterness she carried around inside her day and night, into the forest and to work, into those rare love affairs and during her many moments of solitude.

'Damn the man. And damn myself too, since I was the one who made him cross my path.'

As she made her way back to the village, she regretted every single minute of her life; she cursed her mother for dying so young, her grandmother for having taught her to be honest and kind, the friends who had abandoned her and the fate that was still with her.

Berta was still at her post.

'You're in a great hurry,' she said. 'Why not sit down beside me and relax a bit?'

Chantal did as she suggested. She would do anything to make the time pass more quickly.

'The village seems to be changing,' Berta said. 'There's something different in the air, and last night I heard the rogue wolf howling.'

The girl felt relieved. She didn't know whether it had been the rogue wolf or not, but she had definitely heard a wolf howling that night, and at least one other person apart from her had heard it too.

'This place never changes,' she replied. 'Only the seasons come and go, and now it's winter's turn.'

'No, it's because the stranger has come.'

Chantal checked herself. Could it be that he had talked to someone else as well?

'What has the arrival of the stranger got to do with Viscos?'

'I spend the whole day looking at nature. Some people think it's a waste of time, but it was the only way I could find to accept the loss of someone I loved very much. I see the seasons pass, see the trees lose their leaves and then grow new ones. But occasionally something unexpected in nature brings about enormous changes. I've been told, for example, that the mountains all around us are the result of an earthquake that happened thousands of years ago.'

Chantal nodded; she had learned the same thing at school.

'After that, nothing is ever the same. I'm afraid that is precisely what is going to happen now.'

Chantal was tempted to tell her the story of the gold, but, suspecting that the old woman might know something already, she said nothing.

'I keep thinking about Ahab, our great hero and reformer, the man who was blessed by St Savin.'

'Why Ahab?'

'Because he could see that even the most insignificant of actions, however well intentioned, can destroy everything. They say that after he had brought peace to the village, driven away the remaining outlaws and modernised agriculture and trade in Viscos, he invited his friends to supper and cooked a succulent piece of meat for them. Suddenly he realised there was no salt.

'So Ahab called to his son: “Go to the village and buy some salt, but pay a fair price for it: neither too much nor too little.”

'His son was surprised: “I can understand why I shouldn't pay too much for it, father, but if I can bargain them down, why not pay a bit less?”

'“That would be the sensible thing to do in a big city, but in a small village like ours it could spell the beginning of the end.”

'The boy left without asking any further questions. However, Ahab's guests, who had overheard their conversation, wanted to know why they should not buy the salt more cheaply if they could. Ahab replied:

"'The only reason anyone would sell salt more cheaply usually would be because he was desperate for money.

anyone who took advantage of that situation would be showing a lack of respect for the sweat and struggle of the man who laboured to produce it."

'“But such a small thing couldn't possibly destroy a village.”

'“In the beginning, there was only a small amount of injustice abroad in the world, but everyone who came afterwards added their portion, always thinking it was very small and unimportant, and look where we have ended up today.”'

'Like the stranger, for example,' Chantal said, hoping that Berta would confirm that she too had talked to him. But Berta said nothing.

'I don't know why Ahab was so keen to save Viscos,'

Chantal went on. 'It started out as a den of thieves and now it's a village of cowards.'

Chantal was sure the old woman knew something. She only had to find out whether it was the stranger himself who had told her.

'That's true. But I'm not sure that it's cowardice exactly.

I think everyone is afraid of change. They want Viscos to be as it always was: a place where you can till the soil and tend your livestock, a place that welcomes hunters and tourists, but where everyone knows exactly what is going to happen from one day to the next, and where the only unpredictable things are nature's storms. Perhaps it's a way of achieving Peace' but I agree with you on one point: they all think they have everything under control, when, in fact, they control nothing.'

'Absolutely,' said Chantal.

'Not one jot or one tittle shall be added to what is written,' the old woman said, quoting from the Gospels. 'But we like to live with that illusion because it makes us feel safe. Well, it's a choice like any other, even though it's stupid to believe we can control the world and to allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security that leaves us totally unprepared for life; because then, when you least expect it, an earthquake throws up a range of mountains, a bolt of lightning kills a tree that was preparing for its summer rebirth, or a hunting accident puts paid to the life of an honest man.'

For the hundredth time, Berta launched into the story of her husband's death. He had been one of the most respected guides in the region, a man who saw hunting not as a savage sport, but as a way of respecting local traditions. Thanks to him, Viscos had created a special nature reserve, the mayor had drawn up laws protecting certain near-extinct species, there was a tax per head of each animal killed, and the money collected was used for the good of the community.

Berta's husband tried to see the sport - considered cruel by some and traditional for others - as a way of teaching the hunters something about the art of living. Whenever someone with a lot of money but little hunting experience arrived in Viscos, he would take them out to a piece of waste ground. There, he would place a beer can on top of a stone.

Then he would stand about fifty yards from the can and, with a single shot, send it flying.

'I'm the best shot in the region,' he would say. 'And now you're going to learn how to become as good as me.'

He replaced the can on the same stone, walked back to where he had stood before, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and asked the newcomer to blindfold him. Then he aimed once more in the direction of the target and fired again.

'Did I hit it?' he would ask, removing the blindfold.

'Of course not,' the new arrival would say, pleased to see the proud guide humbled. 'You missed it by a mile. I don't think there's anything you can teach me.'

'I've just taught you the most important lesson in life,' Berta's husband would reply. 'Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.'

Then, one day, while he was replacing the can on the stone after his first shot, the would-be hunter thought it must be his turn to show how good his aim was. Without waiting for Berta's husband to rejoin him, he fired. He missed the target, but hit the guide in the neck. He did not have the chance to learn that important lesson in concentration and objectivity.

have to go,' Chantal said. 'There are a few things I need to do before I go to work.'

Berta said goodbye and watched her all the way until she disappeared down the alley beside the church. The years she had spent sitting outside her door, looking up at the mountains and the clouds, and holding conversations in her mind with her dead husband had taught her to 'see' people. Her vocabulary was limited, so she could find no other word to describe all the many sensations that other people aroused in her, but that was what happened: she 'saw through' other people, and could tell what their feelings were.

It had all started at the funeral for her one great love. She was weeping, and a child next to her - the son of an inhabitant of Viscos, who was now a grown man and lived thousands of miles away - asked her why she was sad.

Berta did not want to frighten the child by mentioning death and final farewells, so all she said was that her husband had gone away and might not come back to Viscos for a long time.

'I think he was having you on,' the boy replied. 'I've just seen him hiding behind a grave, all smiles, and with a soup spoon in his hand.'

The boy's mother heard what he said and scolded him for it. 'Children are always seeing things,' she said, apologising to Berta. But Berta immediately stopped crying and looked in the direction the child had indicated; her husband had always had the annoying habit of wanting to eat his soup with a special spoon, however much this irritated her because all spoons are the same and hold the same amount of soup - yet he had always insisted on using his special spoon. Berta had never told anyone this, for fear people would think him crazy.

the boy really had seen her husband; the spoon was the sign. Children could 'see' things. From then on, Berta decided proof-

he was going to learn to 'see' as well, because she wanted Ik to her husband, to have him back - if only as a ghost.

At first, she shut herself up at home, rarely going out, wait-

for him to appear to her. Then one day, something told her that she should go to the door of her house and start paying attention to other people, that her husband wanted her to have more joy in her life, for her to participate more in what was going on in the village.

She set up her chair outside her house and sat staring at the mountains; there were not many people out and about in the streets of Viscos, but on the very first day of her vigil, a neighbour returned from the next village, saying that they were selling quality cutlery very cheaply at the market there and, as proof, she produced a spoon from her bag.

Berta realised she would never see her husband again, but he was asking her to stay there, watching the village, and that was what she would do. As time went by, she began to perceive a presence beside her, to her left, and she was certain that he was there with her, keeping her company and protecting her from any danger, as well as teaching her to see things that others could not, such as the patterns made by the clouds, which always spelled out messages. She was rather sad that whenever she tried to look at him full on, the presence disappeared, but then she realised that she could talk to him using her intuition, and so they began having long conversations about all kinds of things.

Three years later, she was able to 'see' people's feelings, as well as receive some very useful practical advice from her husband. That was why she refused to be fobbed off with less compensation than she deserved, and why she withdrew her money from the bank just before it crashed, taking with it many local people's hard-earned savings.

One morning - and she could no longer remember exactly when this had happened - her husband told her that Viscos might be destroyed. Berta immediately thought of earthquakes creating whole new ranges of mountains, but he reassured her that nothing of that sort would happen there, at least not for the next few thousand years. He was worried about another sort of destruction, even though he himself was not exactly clear what form it would take. All the same, he asked her to be on her guard, because this was his village, the place he loved most in the whole world, even if he had left it rather sooner than he would have wished.

Berta began to pay more attention to people, to the patterns made by the clouds, to the hunters who came and went, but nothing appeared to indicate that anyone was trying to destroy a village that had never harmed anyone. Yet still her husband insisted that she keep watch, and she had done as he asked.

Then three days ago, she had seen the stranger arrive with a devil by his side and she knew her wait was over. Today, she had noticed that Chantal was accompanied by both a devil and an angel. She immediately linked the two events and understood that something odd was happening in her village-

smiled to herself, glanced to her left and blew a discreet She was not a useless old woman; she had something important to do: to save the place where she had been born, even though she had no idea as yet what steps she should take.

Chantal left the old woman immersed in her thoughts, and went back to her room. It was whispered among the inhabitants of Viscos that Berta was a witch. It was said she had shut herself up in her house for almost a year and, during that time, had taught herself the magic arts. When Chantal had asked who could have taught them to Berta, some said it was the devil himself who appeared to her at night, while others swore that she invoked the spirit of a Celtic priest, using words her parents had taught her. But no one was overly concerned: Berta was harmless and she always had good stories to tell.

They were right, although they were always the same stories. Suddenly Chantal paused with her hand on the doorknob. Even though she had heard the story of how Berta's husband had died many times over, it was only now that she realised there was an important lesson in it for her too. She remembered her recent walk in the forest and the pent-up hatred she had felt inside her, a hatred that seemed to fly out all around her, threatening whoever was near, be it herself, the village, the people in it or their children.

But she had only one real target: the stranger. Concentrate, °of and kill your prey. To do that, she needed a plan - it could be foolish to speak out that night and let the situation run out of control. She decided to put off for another day telling the story of how she had met the stranger, if, that is, she ever did tell the other inhabitants of Viscos.

That night, when she went to collect the money for the round of drinks that the stranger usually bought, Chantal noticed that he had slipped her a note. She put it straight into her pocket, pretending that it was a matter of no importance, even though she was aware of the stranger's eyes occasionally seeking hers, as if silently questioning her. The roles seemed to have been reversed: it was she who was in control of the situation, she who could choose the battlefield and the hour of the fight. That was how all the most successful hunters behaved: they always arranged things so that the prey would come to them.

It was only when she returned to her room, this time confident that she would sleep soundly, that she looked at the note: the stranger was asking her to meet him in the place where they had first met.

He closed by saying that he would prefer to talk to her alone, but added that, if she wanted, they could also speak with everyone else present too.

The threat did not escape her, but she was, in fact, contented that he had made it. It was proof that he was losing control, because truly dangerous men and women never made threats. Ahab, the man who brought peace to Viscos, always used to say: 'There are two kinds of idiots - those who don't take action because they have received a threat and those who think they are taking action because they have issued a threat.'

She tore the note into shreds and flushed it down the toilet, then she took a scalding hot bath, slipped into bed and smiled. She had got exactly what she wanted: to meet the stranger again for a conversation alone. If she wanted to find out how to defeat him, she needed to get to know him better.

She fell asleep almost at once - a deep, refreshing, peaseful sleep. She had spent one night with Good, one with Good and Evil, and one with Evil. Not one of the three had produced any definite result, but they were all still alive in her soul, and now they were beginning to fight amongst themselves to see who was strongest.

the time the stranger armed, Chantal was drenched - the storm had recommenced.

'Let's not talk about the weather,' she said. 'As you can see, it's raining. I know a place where it'll be easier for us to talk.'

She got to her feet and picked up a long canvas bag.

'You've got a shotgun in there,' the stranger said.

'Yes.'

'And you want to kill me.'

'Yes, I do. I don't know if I'll succeed, but that's what I'd like to do. I brought the weapon here for another reason, though: I might meet the rogue wolf on the way, and if I could shoot him, I might win some respect in Viscos. No one believes me, but I heard him howling last night.'

'And what is this rogue wolf?'

At first she doubted whether to share anything more with this man who was her enemy. But then she remembered a bo°ok on Japanese martial arts - she always read any books left behind by hotel guests, no matter what the books were about, cause she didn't want to spend her own money buying them.

There was written that the best way to weaken one's enemy was to get him to believe that you were on his side.

As they trudged through the wind and the rain, she told him the story. Two years ago, a man from Viscos - the blacksmith, to be precise - was out for a walk when, all of a sudden, he came face to face with a wolf and its young. The man was terrified, but he tore off a branch and made to attack the animal. Normally, the wolf would have run away but as it was with its young, it counter-attacked and bit the man on the leg. The blacksmith, a man whose job requires enormous strength, managed to deal the wolf such a blow that it finally ran back into the forest with its cubs and was never seen again; all anyone knew was that it had a white mark on its left ear.

'But why is it called the rogue wolf?'

'Usually even the fiercest of animals will only attack in exceptional circumstances, in order, for example, to protect its young. However, if an animal does attack and tastes human blood, then it becomes dangerous; it will always want more; it will cease being a wild animal and become a killer. Everyone believes that one day the wolf will attack again.'

'That's my story too,' the stranger thought.

Chantal was walking as fast as she could because she was younger and fitter than him and wanted to gain a psychological advantage over her companion by tiring him out and humiliating him, and yet he managed to keep up with her. He was out of breath, but he never once asked her to slow down.

They reached a small, well-camouflaged, green plastic tent, used by hunters as a hide. They sat inside, rubbing their frozen hands and blowing on them.

'What do you want?' she asked him. 'Why did you give me that note?'

'I'm going to ask you a riddle: of all the days in our life, which is the one that never comes?'

There was no reply.

'Tomorrow,' the stranger said. 'But you seem to believe that tomorrow will come and keep putting off what I asked you to do. We're getting towards the end of the week, and if you don't say something, I'll have to do it myself.'

Chantal left the refuge, stood a safe distance from it, undid the canvas bag, and took out the shotgun. The stranger didn't seem to attach any importance to this.

'You dug up the gold again,' he went on. 'If you had to write a book about your experiences, how do you think most of your readers would react - given all the difficulties they have to face, the injustices dealt to them by life and other people, the struggle they have in order to pay for their children's schooling and to put food on the table - don't you think that those people would be urging you to take the gold and run?'

'I don't know,' she said, loading a cartridge into the gun.

'Nor do I. But that's the answer I'm looking for.'

She inserted the second cartridge.

'You're willing to kill me, despite that reassuring little tale about finding a wolf. But that's all right, because that too provides me with an answer to my question: human beings are essentially evil, even a young woman from a remote village is capable of committing murder for money. I'm going to leave but now I have my answer, so I can die happy.'

'Here, take it,' she said, handing him the gun. 'No one knows that I know you. All the details you gave in the hotel are false. You can leave when you want and, as I understand it, you can go anywhere you want to in the world. You don't need to have a good aim: all you have to do is point the shotgun in my direction and squeeze the trigger. Each cartridge is full of tiny bits of lead; as soon as they leave the barrel, they spread out into a cone shape. They can kill birds or human beings. You can even look the other way if you don't want to see my body being blown apart.'

The man curled his finger round the trigger, and Chantal was surprised to see that he was holding the gun correctly, like a professional. They stood like that for a long while, and she was aware that he had only to slip or be startled by an animal coming on them unexpectedly and his finger could move and the gun go off. She suddenly realised how childish her gesture had been, trying to defy someone merely for the pleasure of provoking him, saying that he was incapable of doing what he was asking others to do.

The stranger was still pointing the gun at her, staring at her unblinking, his hands steady. It was too late now - maybe deep down he thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to end the life of this young woman who had dared to challenge him. Chantal was on the point of asking him to forgive her, but the stranger lowered the gun before she could say a word.

'I can almost touch your fear,' he said, handing her back the gun. 'I can smell the sweat pouring off you, despite the rain, and even though the wind is shaking the treetops and king an infernal racket, I can hear your heart thumping in your throat.'

'I'm going to do what you asked me to do this evening,' he said, pretending she hadn't heard the truths he was lline her. 'After all, you came to Viscos to learn about your own nature, to find out if you were good or evil. There's one thing I've just shown you: regardless of what I may have felt or stopped feeling just now, you could have pulled the trigger, but you didn't. Do you know why? Because you're a coward. You use others to resolve your own conflicts, but you are incapable of taking certain decisions.'

'A German philosopher once said: “Even God has a hell: his love of mankind”. No, I'm not a coward. I've pressed many worse triggers than this one, or, rather, I have made far better guns than this and distributed them around the world. I did it all perfectly legally, got the transactions approved by the government, the export licences, paid all the necessary taxes. I married a woman who loved me, I had two beautiful daughters, I never stole a penny from my company, and always succeeded in recovering any money owed to me.

'Unlike you, who feel persecuted by destiny, I was always a man of action, someone who struggled with the many difficulties in my way, who lost some battles and won others, but always understood that victories and defeats form part of everyone's life - everyone, that is, except cowards, as you call them, because they never lose or win.

'I read a lot. I was a regular churchgoer. I feared God and respected His commandments. I was a highly paid director of " a huge firm. Since I was paid commission on every deal we made, I earned more than enough to support my wife my daughters, and even my grandchildren and my greatgrandchildren; because the arms trade is the most profitable business in the world. I knew the value of every item I sold so I personally checked all our transactions; that way I uncovered several cases of corruption and dismissed those involved and halted the sales. My weapons were made to help defend order, which is the only way to ensure progress and development in this world, or so I thought.'

The stranger came up to Chantal and took her by the shoulders; he wanted her to look him in the eyes and know that he was telling the truth.

'You may consider arms manufacturers to be the lowest of the low. Perhaps you're right, but the fact is that man has used weapons ever since he lived in caves - first to kill animals, then to win power over others. The world has existed without agriculture, without domesticated animals, without religion, without music, but never without weapons.'

He picked up a stone from the ground.

'Here's the first of them, generously donated by Mother Nature to those who had to confront prehistoric animals. A stone like this doubtless saved the life of a man, and that man, after countless generations, led to you and me being born. If he hadn't had that stone, the murderous carnivore would have devoured him, and hundreds of millions of people would not have been born.'

The wind was blowing harder, and the rain was battering but neither of them looked away, them? People criticise hunters, but Viscos welcomes them with open arms because it lives off them; some people hate . a hull in a bullring, but go and buy the meat from the, jeer's claiming that the animal had an “honourable” death a lot of people are critical of arms manufacturers, but they will continue to exist until there's not a single weapon left on the face of the earth. Because as long as one weapon remains, there will always have to be another, to preserve the fragile balance.'

'What has all this got to do with my village?' Chantal demanded. 'What has it got to do with breaking the commandments, with murder, stealing, with the essence of human nature, with Good and Evil?'

At this, the stranger's eyes changed, as if overwhelmed by a deep sadness.

'Remember what I told you at the beginning. I always tried to do my business according to the law; I considered myself what people usually term a “good man”. Then one evening I received a phone call in my office: it was a woman's voice, soft but devoid of emotion. She said her terrorist group had kidnapped my wife and daughters. They wanted a large quantity of what they knew I could give them - weapons. They told me to keep quiet about it, they told me that nothing would happen to my family if I followed their instructions.

'The woman rang off saying that she would call again in "alf an hour and told me to wait for her call in a phone box <vs at the train station. She said not to worry; my family was being well treated and would be freed within a few hours because all I had to do was send an electronic message to one of our subsidiaries in a certain country. It wasn't even real theft, more like an illegal sale that would go completely unnoticed in the company I worked for.

'Since I was a good citizen, brought up to respect the law and to feel protected by it, the first thing I did was to ring the police. A minute later, I was no longer the master of my own decisions, I was transformed into someone incapable of protecting his own family; my universe was suddenly filled with anonymous voices and frantic phone calls. When I went to the designated phone box, an army of technicians had already hooked up the underground telephone cable to the most modern equipment available, so that they could instantaneously trace exactly where the call was coming from. There were helicopters ready to take off, police cars strategically positioned to block the traffic, trained men, armed to the teeth, on full alert.

'Two different governments, in distant continents, already knew what was going on and they forbade any negotiations; all I had to do was to follow orders, repeat what they told me to say and behave exactly as instructed by the experts.

'Before the day was out, the hiding place where they were keeping the hostages had been discovered, and the kidnappers - two young men and a woman, all apparently inexperienced, simply disposable elements in a powerful political organisation - lay dead, riddled with bullets. Before died, however, they had time to execute my wife and children. If even God has a hell, which is his love for nkind, then any man has his hell within easy reach, and that's his love for his family.'

The stranger fell silent; he was afraid of losing control of his voice and betraying an emotion he preferred to keep hidden. As soon as he had recovered, he went on:

'Both the police and the kidnappers used weapons made by my company. No one knows how the terrorists came to be in possession of them, and that's of no importance: they had them. Despite all my efforts, my struggle to ensure that everything was carried out according to the strictest regulations for their manufacture and sale, my family had been killed by something which I, at some point, had sold perhaps over a meal at an expensive restaurant, while I chatted about the weather or world politics.'

Another pause. When he spoke again, it was as if he were another person, as if nothing he was saying had anything to do with him.

'I know the weapon and the ammunition used to kill my family well. I know which part of the body they aimed at: the chest. The bullet makes only a small hole on entering - about the size of your little finger. When it hits the first bone, though, it splits into four, and each of the fragments continues in a different direction, brutally destroying everything in its Path: kidneys, heart, liver, lungs. Every time it comes up against something solid, like a vertebra, it changes direction again, usually carrying with it sharp bone fragments and bits of torn muscle, until at last it finds a way out. Each of the four exit wounds is almost as big as a fist, and the bullet stil has enough force to spatter round the room the bits of tissue flesh and bone that clung to it during its journey through the body.

'All of this takes less than two seconds; two seconds to die might not seem very long, but time isn't measured like that. You understand, I hope.'

Chantal nodded.

'At the end of that year, I left my job. I travelled to the four corners of the earth, alone with my grief, asking myself how human beings can be capable of such evil. I lost the most precious thing a man can have: my faith in my fellow man. I laughed and I wept at God's irony, at the absurd way he had chosen to demonstrate to me that I was an instrument of Good and Evil.

'All my sense of compassion gradually vanished, and now my heart has entirely shrivelled up; I don't care whether I live or die. But first, for the sake of my wife and daughters, I need to grasp what happened in that hiding place. I can understand how people can kill out of hate or love, but why do it for no particular reason, simply over some business transaction?

'This may seem naive to you - after all, people kill each other every day for money - but that doesn't interest me, I'm only concerned with my wife and daughters. I want to know what was going on in the minds of those terrorists. I want to know whether, at any point, they might have taken pity on The Devil and Miss Prym j iet them leave, because their war had nothing to do them a»u i „ familv I want to know if, when Good and Evil are with my iani«j i aeainst each other, there is a fraction of a second when Good might prevail.'

'Why Viscos? Why my village?'

'Why the weapons from my factory, when there are so many armaments factories in the world, some of them with no government controls? The answer is simple: chance. I needed a small place where everyone knew each other and eot on together. The moment they learned about the reward, Good and Evil would once again be pitted against each other, and what had happened in that hiding place would happen in your village.

'The terrorists were already surrounded and defeated; nevertheless, they killed my family merely in order to carry out a useless, empty ritual. Your village has what I did not have: it has the possibility to choose. They will be tempted by the desire for money and perhaps believe they have a mission to protect and save their village, but even so, they still retain the ability to decide whether or not to execute the hostage. That's all. I want to see whether other people might have acted differently to those poor, bloodthirsty youngsters.

'As I told you when we first met, the story of one man is the story of all men. If compassion exists, I will accept that rate was harsh with me, but that sometimes it can be gentle with others. That won't change the way I feel in the slightest, It won't bring my family back, but at least it will drive away the devil that's always with me and give me some hope.'

'And why do you want to know whether I am capable of stealing the gold?'

'For the same reason. You may divide the world into trivial crimes and serious ones, but it isn't like that. I think the terrorists did the same. They thought they were killing for a cause, not just for pleasure, love, hate or money. If you took the gold bar, you would have to justify the crime to yourself and to me, and then I would understand how the murderers justified to themselves the killing of my loved ones. As you have seen, I have spent all these years trying to understand what happened. I don't know whether this will bring me peace, but I can't see any alternative.'

'If I did steal the gold, you would never see me again.'

For the first time during the almost thirty minutes they had been talking, the stranger smiled faintly.

'I worked in the arms industry, don't forget. And that included work for the secret service.'

The man asked her to lead him to the river - he was lost, and did not know how to get back. Chantal took the shotgun - she had borrowed it from a friend on the pretext that she was very tense and needed to do a bit of hunting to try and relax - put it back in its bag, and the two of them set off down the hill.

They said nothing to each other on the way down. When they reached the river, the stranger said goodbye.

'I understand why you're delaying, but I can't wait any longer. I can also understand that, in order to struggle with yourself, you needed to get to know me better: now you do.

'I am a man who walks the earth with a devil at his side; in order to drive him away or to accept him once and for all, I need to know the answers to certain questions.'

'And why do you want to know whether I am capable of stealing the gold?'

'For the same reason. You may divide the world into trivial crimes and serious ones, but it isn't like that. I think the terrorists did the same. They thought they were killing for a cause, not just for pleasure, love, hate or money. If you took the gold bar, you would have to justify the crime to yourself and to me, and then I would understand how the murderers justified to themselves the killing of my loved ones. As you have seen, I have spent all these years trying to understand what happened. I don't know whether this will bring me peace, but I can't see any alternative.'

'If I did steal the gold, you would never see me again.'

For the first time during the almost thirty minutes they had been talking, the stranger smiled faintly.

'I worked in the arms industry, don't forget. And that included work for the secret service.'

The man asked her to lead him to the river - he was lost, and did not know how to get back. Chantal took the shotgun - she had borrowed it from a friend on the pretext that she was very tense and needed to do a bit of hunting to try and relax - put it back in its bag, and the two of them set off down the hill.

They said nothing to each other on the way down. When they reached the river, the. stranger said goodbye.

'I understand why you're delaying, but I can't wait any longer. I can also understand that, in order to struggle with yourself, you needed to get to know me better: now you do.

The fork banged repeatedly against the wineglass. Everyone in the bar which was packed on that Friday night, turned towards the sound: it was Miss Prym calling for them to be silent.

The effect was immediate: never in all the history of the village had a young woman whose sole duty was to serve the customers acted in such a manner.

'She had better have something important to say,' thought the hotel landlady. 'If not, I'll get rid of her tonight, despite the promise I made to her grandmother never to abandon her.'

'I'd like you all to listen,' Chantal said. 'I'm going to tell you a story that everyone here, apart from our visitor, will know,' she said, pointing to the stranger. 'After that, I'll tell you another story that no one here, apart from our visitor, will know. When I've finished, it will be up to you to judge whether or not it was wrong of me to interrupt your wellearned Friday evening rest, after an exhausting week's work.'

'She's taking a terrible risk,' the priest thought. 'She doesn't know anything we don't know. She may be a poor orphan with few possibilities in life, but it's going to be difficult to persuade the hotel landlady to keep her on after this.'

'When the ceremony was over, people gathered together in various groups. Most of them believed that Ahab had been duped by the saint, that he had lost his nerve, and that he should be killed. During the days that followed, many plans were made with that objective in mind. But the plotters could not avoid the sight of the gallows in the middle of the square and they thought: What is that doing there? Was it erected in order to deal with anyone who goes against the new laws? Who is on Ahab's side and who isn't? Are there spies in our midst?

'The gallows looked at the villagers, and the villagers looked at the gallows. Gradually, the rebels' initial defiance gave way to fear; they all knew Ahab's reputation and they knew he never went back on a decision. Some of them left the village, others decided to try the new jobs that had been suggested, simply because they had nowhere else to go or because they were conscious of the shadow cast by that instrument of death in the middle of the square. Before long, Viscos had been pacified and it became a large trading centre near the frontier, exporting the finest wool and producing top-quality wheat.

'The gallows remained in place for ten years. The wood withstood the weather well, but the rope occasionally had to be replaced with a new one. The gallows was never used. Ahab never once mentioned it. The mere sight of the gallows was enough to turn courage into fear, trust into suspicion, bravado into whispers of submission. When ten years had passed and the rule of law had finally been established in Ahab had the gallows dismantled and used the wood Viscos, had to build a cross instead.'

Shantal paused. The bar was completely silent apart from the sound of the stranger clapping.

'That's an excellent story,' he said. 'Ahab really underrate human nature: it isn't the desire to abide by the law hate makes everyone behave as society requires, but the fear of punishment. Each one of us carries a gallows inside us.'

'Today, at the stranger's request, I am pulling down the cross and erecting another gallows in the middle of the square,'

Chantal went on.

'Carlos,' someone said, 'his name is Carlos, and it would be more polite to call him by his name than to keep referring to him as “the stranger”.'

'I don't know his real name. All the details he gave on the hotel form are false. He's never paid for anything with a credit card. We have no idea where he came from or where he's going to; even the phone call to the airport could be a lie.'

They all turned to look at the man, who kept his eyes fixed on Chantal.

'Yet, when he did tell you the truth, none of you believed him. He really did work for an armaments factory, he really "as had all kinds of adventures and been all kinds of different People, from loving father to ruthless businessman. But because you live here in Viscos, you cannot comprehend how much richer and more complex life can be.'

'That girl had better explain herself,' thought the hotel landlady. And that's just what Chantal did:

'Four days ago, he showed me ten large gold bars. They are worth enough to guarantee the future of all the inhabitants of Viscos for the next thirty years, to provide for major improvements to the village, a children's playground, for example, in the hope that one day children will live here again. He then immediately hid them in the forest, and I don't know where they are.'

Everyone again turned towards the stranger, who, this time, looked back at them and nodded his head.

'That gold will belong to Viscos if, in the next three days, someone in the village is murdered. If no one dies, the stranger will leave, taking his gold with him.

'And that's it. I've said all I had to say, and I've re-erected the gallows in the square. Except that this time, it is not there to prevent a crime, but so that an innocent person can be hanged, so that the sacrifice of that innocent person will bring prosperity to the village.'

For the third time, all the people in the bar turned towards the stranger. Once again, he nodded.

'The girl tells a good story,' he said, switching off the recorder and putting it back in his pocket.

Chantal turned away and began washing glasses in the sink. It was as if time had stopped in Viscos; no one said a word. The only sound that could be heard was that of running water, of a glass being put down on a marble surface, of the distant wind shaking the branches of leafless trees.

The mayor broke the silence:

'Let's call the police.'

'Go ahead,' the stranger said. 'I've got a recording here, and my only comment was: “The girl tells a good story.”'

'Please, go up to your room, pack your things, and leave here at once,' said the hotel landlady.

'I've paid for a week and I'm going to stay a week. Even if you have to call the police.'

'Has it occurred to you that you might be the person to be murdered?'

'Of course. And it really doesn't matter to me. But if you did murder me, then you would have committed the crime, but you would never receive the promised reward.'

One by one, the regulars in the bar filed out, the younger ones first and the older people last. Soon only Chantal and the stranger were left.

She picked up her bag, put on her coat, went to the door and then turned to him.

'You're a man who has suffered and wants revenge,' she said. 'Your heart is dead, your soul is in darkness. The devil by your side is smiling because you are playing the game he invented.'

'Thank you for doing as I asked. And for telling me the true and very interesting story of the gallows.'

'In the forest, you told me that you wanted answers to Certain questions, but from the way you have constructed your plan, only Evil will be rewarded; if no one is murdered, Good will earn nothing but praise. And as you know, praise cannot feed hungry mouths or help to restore dying villages You're not trying to find the answer to a question, you're simply trying to confirm something you desperately want to believe: that everyone is evil.'

A change came over the stranger's face, and Chantal noticed it.

'If the whole world is evil, then the tragedy that befell you is justified,' she went on. 'That would make it easier for you to accept the deaths of your wife and daughters. But if good people do exist, then, however much you deny it, your life will be unbearable; because fate set a trap for you, and you know you didn't deserve it. It isn't the light you want to recover, it's the certainty that there is only darkness.'

'What exactly are you driving at?' he said, a slight tremor in his voice.