No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (13 page)

‘Are you prepared to denounce the criminal profiteering of the ’Ndrangheta? Are you prepared to condemn the intimidation practised by the clans? Do you look forward to a day when our local government can be liberated from corruption? If so what are you prepared to do to bring it forward?’

Refuse clearance was at the dictate of the families. It was a matter of control: they decided who worked and when, who had a business and at what profit margin, whose son went to university and won good grades, who had access to corporation housing. He would step around the rubbish, cannon into her and apologise. A flier would be in his hand and her voice would be in his ear. He’d have to step into the filth to get past her.

Consolata did not see the boys. They came up behind the man, elbowed past him, and stood in front of her. They would have owed allegiance to the same family. The feud – the
faida
– that had divided the clans, let blood flow in the gutters, a hundred men dead in this town alone, had been patched up with marriages of convenience.

Their leader stood a half pace in front of them. He was smart, well turned-out, and might have come that morning from a hairdressing salon. The grey-zone man was behind her. The traffic was heavy and it was likely that Massimo was unaware that danger had surfaced. She felt threatened. Did they know her name? Probably not. It was too early in the day, perhaps, for them to be doing the rounds, collecting
pizzo
from shopkeepers and bar managers: they had identified her as potential amusement.

The one at the front was so polite. Could he, please, see a copy of what she was handing out?

She looked into the young face – he might already be a millionaire. If she had been a song bird they might have wanted to slice off her wings while she was alive. She couldn’t back away. If she did, she would betray every point she had made in the squat, about picket lines at the residences and confrontations with the principals of the families who controlled Archi. She hoped that her fingers were steady. He smiled at her.

She extracted one of the sheets. She remembered the crap that Piero and the others had cobbled together: she had thought it embarrassing and clichéd, and had said so. She passed it to him. He leaned forward and nodded, glanced at the page, then turned it upside-down, as if he could neither read nor write. Behind him there was laughter and two of his men sniggered.

It was the closest she had been, in all her years of protest, to a major family’s heir. He passed the sheet of paper to the kid who stood on his right and murmured to the one on his left. He loosened his belt, took back the sheet and made a play of wiping his arse with it. The one on the left flicked the top two buttons of her blouse, which opened easily. The leader had refastened his belt and was still smiling. He slipped the paper into the gap between her breasts.

Trying to keep her voice steady, Consolata said, ‘Go fuck your mother.’

He spat.

Consolata bit her lip. His saliva was on her trainers. For a moment longer they watched her, then were gone. She could barely stand. She felt faint and the paper tickled her skin. She wore no bra, which was supposed to be a statement. What shamed her most was the fear she had felt, and the effort she had had to make to keep it from them.

She pulled out the flier, smoothed it and put it back into the bag. Massimo was at her side. Was she all right? Of course she was. She was very pale, he said. Then he suggested they take a train into Reggio and work there – he needed to reach more people. Was she sure she was all right? She realised he had seen nothing. She buttoned her blouse. They didn’t know her name, and she had achieved nothing against them. It would be easier to give out fliers on the streets in Reggio. She strode towards the station, and Massimo followed.

It was not the way of Fred Seitz to justify himself, his time and how he used it. He gave explanations of what he had done, not done or what he intended to do. He went into the hospital on Spandauer Damm and flashed his warrant card. He walked to the head of a queue. A receptionist pointed. He scribbled on a piece of paper. The English boy would stay in his wake.

Down a corridor, past a bank of lifts, up a wide flight of stairs, two at a time. He had not told the boy that he had worked hard the previous evening, on his computer. He had a car registration from CCTV, and a named owner from the licensing authority, with an address and a nationality. He had contacts, former colleagues, from the sunshine days. He had rung the GICO people in the far south of Italy and they had pushed him towards the ROS. There was a family with that name. Friends had done him a favour over the phone. There was no electronic print. To have done it formally, it would been a month before authorisation had come for that information to be released, and old spats between German and Italian law-enforcers would have surfaced. He had pushed aside work that was more pressing. He had reached home late and had packed for the weekend. That afternoon he and his wife would  be heading north. He went down another corridor, past the bays of treatment cubicles, then checked a number.

It was empty, the bed crumpled. A nurse passed. Where should he look? She shrugged, offered a possibility. Down another flight of stairs. A pharmacy hatch. A plastic bag was passed across the counter. A man stood beside a girl and reached for it. They turned.

Seitz was an officer of old-school and old-fashioned methods. He thought himself hardened – he could do homicide and not throw up on the carpet. The wound on her face was almost from the ear to the mouth. Her eyes were blank, as if she were past weeping. The wound was dark, impossible to ignore. A little of him winced. He wondered how the kids who worked around him would have responded.

With a hand behind his back, he gestured for the English boy to stand aside. The girl ignored him. The man with her was a brother – his computer had thrown it up. A treasure trove loaned by parents, uncles and cousins would have gone into the rent and fittings of a pizzeria in that district, and they had moved east from Lübeck, which might have been at the extremity of ’Ndrangheta reach in Germany. They might have believed that the crime families didn’t operate in the capital. A bad mistake. She would have the scar until the day she died, and she wore no ring. The wound disfigured her.

He had his ID card in his hand, and showed it. He spoke softly and, he hoped, gently. Could he, please, interview her? Could he, please, take a statement from her? Could he, please . . . Her elbow went hard into his chest.

It would have collided with the butt of his PPK, carried in the leather shoulder-holster beneath his jacket. The weapon was a further symbol of his authority. He thought that, behind him, the English boy might have reached out to slow her. She didn’t stop. The brother swore at Fred quietly, but the word was clear enough to anyone with a knowledge of the Italian vernacular – similar to what a referee might have been called in the Stadio Olimpico or the Stadio San Paolo where the Naples
tifosi
had earned a reputation for quality abuse. They went past him and disappeared round a corner. A lesson learned, no surprise to him, but he doubted he would gain the thanks of his pupil, Jago Browne, who was an innocent abroad.

He thought of fear as a virus and was grateful that he was rarely exposed to it.

He was a student of military history. The prosecutor, when left at home by his personal protection officers, found relaxation in reading of defeats or hollow victories in the six years of the Second World War. His father had served in North Africa, had gone into the cage, and had always said he thanked God for his capture. Now he was in the courtyard at the
carabinieri
headquarters in the north of the city, an austere building.

To the prosecutor, the fate of the seamen on the USS
Indianapolis
seemed appropriate. He had read of it many times. More than a thousand men had gone into the Pacific from the torpedoed battleship and were not rescued for days. Sharks had circled them, picking the weakest off. Less than a third had survived. It was the circling sharks he thought of, going round and round the diminishing clusters of men who hung on to debris. The image of the sharks was in his mind now. He was at the building for a routine meeting.

A theatrical scene played out as he emerged from his armour-plated Lancia. Photographers were there. Cars and jeeps of the ROS group waited, their exhausts billowing fumes. Had he wished to, he would not have been able to get through the door ahead, which was filled with uniforms. In the pale light of the inner courtyard the camera flashes were bright. Prisoners were escorted forward, pullovers or windcheaters covering their wrists because it would impugn their dignity to be seen handcuffed. Some of the escorts wore paramilitary combat tunics, and others wore gilets with the name of their force emblazoned on them, but their features were guarded from the lenses by balaclavas. A few wore their best uniforms. The images would go into the
Cronaca
,
Messag’ero
in the capital, to
Corriere
in the north, and round the world from ANSA, Reuters and Associated Press. A minister would speak of a ‘heavy blow’ delivered at the core leadership of the ’Ndrangheta, and dignitaries would stand in front of microphones. He hated the spectacle because they were not his captives. It was too long since a minister had pirouetted before the cameras and claimed, because of the prosecutor’s diligence, that a ‘significant strike’ had been dealt against the tentacles of organised crime. He watched. His protection team would have understood how he felt and hung back. It wasn’t their job to bolster his sagging morale.

The vehicles had gone. The sole reason for bringing the prisoners to the headquarters building was for photographs. It was a competitive world in which the prosecutor existed. Resources were the key: the more resources, the more arrests; the more arrests, the more advancement. Glittering prizes awaited the most successful in their ranks: the rewards could be political sinecures, appointments to Rome and big-budget departments. For those who failed to gather the headlines that ministers craved, the future offered more years at the grindstone of Calabrian law enforcement. They had never won, would never win.

He swore.

The sharks circled. They would be at the meeting. He appreciated that he could justify keeping his surveillance team in place for only a limited period, days not weeks. There was also the amount of time
he
was spending on his investigation into Bernardo Cancello. He would try to defend himself. The men of USS
Indianapolis
had screamed each time the sharks had come under them to snatch at the legs of one of their number. His fight would be conducted with propriety, but the knives would be as sharp as sharks’ incisors. He could plead for another week, no longer.

He congratulated the colleague who had brought in the prisoners. It hurt the prosecutor to abandon an investigation, to dump the case notes and the surveillance reports – paper always a useful second behind the electronic library – in the cupboard in his office.

He depended on the surveillance team – he had no other weapon to fight with. He could hope to win another week.

They had talked about socks. Later they would talk about belts. Further down the agenda was the preference for the Beretta 92, fifteen-shot magazine, against the Glock 17, seventeen-shot magazine, which the Gruppo Intervento Speciale favoured. Neither Fabio nor Ciccio had applied to join that section of the
carabinieri
, which was thought to be the best.

In time they could move onto the question of food, what sort of assignment they’d want after this one had run its course, then, as a last resort, their wives. They were almost at the end of the road. Nothing was happening. The daughter, the grandchildren, the daughter-in-law, the matriarch, Stefano, the handyman, the youngster who hung around the back door and the dogs were always on the move, taking grain for the chickens and bringing a bowl of eggs back. They’d have to be desperate to talk about their wives: Fabio’s was Chiara, and Ciccio’s was Neomi. The women knew and confided in each other. Ciccio knew that Chiara had issued an ultimatum: she would leave him if he didn’t cut his hours and was away less often; Fabio knew that Neomi had been diagnosed with a degenerative hip condition. Each had heard about the women the other had been with before his marriage. Pistols were more interesting to talk about than the wives.

Fabio said, ‘I can feel it. He’s here, Bravo Charlie is. Has to be.’

Good to believe. Shit to do surveillance and not believe.

Ciccio said, ‘He has to show himself. We have to see him before the place can be hit. Seen, photographed, identified. We’ve got none of that. I’m saying this’ll be our last shift here.’

‘You crying?’

‘If he’s here, we’ve missed him. The
capo
will get hurt bad.’

Fabio said, ‘I “believe” in
tacchino in gelatina
. Nothing better.’

‘I don’t want to quit.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I hate to lose.’

‘He’s here. I’m certain of it. It’s how they are – never far from base. Maybe it’s us – wrong location, too far back . . .’

‘That’s crazy,’ Ciccio murmured. ‘We looked. We had the aerials. We couldn’t be closer or the dogs would have us. Then we’d be off the face of the planet, fed to the pigs or buried at the back of a cave. Take your own advice and shut up.’