No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (17 page)

He said, ‘Good one, Trace. Fine for me, like it always is.’

The party was finishing. The magician had performed well. The bell was ringing as parents came to collect their children. Wilhelmina was on the phone and the noise swelled around her. The junior in the analysis section was adamant. Jago Browne wasn’t answering his landline or returning mobile calls. He hadn’t responded to emails or texts.

Wilhelmina spluttered indignation and wiped a child’s chocolaty face. There was lemonade on the cheque for the caterers. It was about discipline. She had no quarrel with his work, his attitude towards clients or his behaviour in the office – but he was foreign. Also, he was aloof, and not a team player. With discipline went the requirement that he should be on call one Saturday in three and one Sunday in five. He could be in the middle of an ice-rink, or with a girl in the Tiergarten, playing tennis or at the cinema, but on those few days he was required to answer his phone – and had not.

Peculiar. Three parents waved and left. The birthday party was, for her, a major social opportunity and a chance to identify possible clients. It was more than peculiar. Wilhelmina, annoyed, was unforgiving and formidable.

She said, ‘Leave it to me. I’ll speak to the client. Thank you. And I’ll deal with the young man who is on call.’

‘It’s a murderous place. They slaughter them and enjoy it. Barbarians . . .’

The man was two rows behind Jago Browne and he spoke with a thick Yorkshire accent. The coach was taking them from Lamezia Terme airport to Reggio, and tempers had frayed. Jago hadn’t noticed his fellow travellers in Rome or on the flight.

‘They butcher them. It’s a mark of manhood, down here, to kill.”

There were eight of them and they belonged, he’d gathered, to a conservation group. Their speciality was watching birds’ migration routes, and a hot-spot was the straits between Sicily and Calabria, which was less than three miles wide at the narrowest point.

‘They’re not choosy, a vulture or an eagle, a harrier or a falcon – but they love to massacre the buzzards. It’s a sort of choke point for the birds, and the bastards are waiting for them. It must be like flying in a Wellington through concentrated flak, if you’re a raptor.’

A woman said, ‘For God’s sake, Duncan, leave it.’

‘Top of the list is the honey buzzard. If any make it over the strait, going south now or north in the spring, it’s a miracle. Tells you what the people are like. If your top thrill is bringing down something as beautiful as one of those, it shows what you’re made of.’

‘People are on holiday, Duncan, looking for a break. They haven’t asked for your opinions.’

He’d seen them board the coach, lugging rucksacks and tripods. Their spotter scopes were in canvas lagging. Jago had never done any birdwatching, but there had been people in Lancashire, at the university, who had gone out onto the sands of Morecambe Bay. He’d never seen the point. But the relevance of the story was forced down his throat.

‘Why shed a tear, if you’re Calabrian, for a honey buzzard, or a lammergeier, or an imperial eagle? Life’s cheap down there. Murders are two a penny. No bigger deal to take a human life than to blast a kite or a sparrow hawk to kingdom come.’

Another voice: ‘The killing of raptors at migration is well documented, but we hope to show by the example of our international interest that all wildlife matters. We don’t want only to look on the dark side.’

The Doomsday merchant came back strongly: ‘And this road we’re on. It’s wonderful – and so it should be for what it’s cost over the last thirty years. It’s a Mafia road, courtesy of European taxpayers. Billions paid, and most of it into gangster pockets . . . I bet there’s a fair few in the concrete. This lot down here, they make ours look like choristers.’

‘Shut up, Duncan.’

Now there was quiet behind him. They went along a wide, fast road, through massive tunnels that lanced big spurs of rock, over steepling viaducts and could see tiny lights, isolated, in the deep gorge valleys below. There were lines of cones and stretches where the work had been left unfinished. It was fifteen hours, close enough, since he had left Berlin.

The talk behind him changed, and the gloom lifted. He wavered. Jago’s bag was in the overhead rack. He didn’t know whether he would dump it in Reggio later that evening, or in the airport at Lamezia Terme. They compared makes of spotter scopes to the Swarovski range. Jago had no interest in that, but had heard about the killing of people, rip-offs on construction projects and the slaughter of birds. He sat upright, rigid, and could not recapture his earlier certainty.

There were banks of lights ahead, but to his right a dark strip, a gulf, then more streetlights and homes. He checked his phone screen and realised they were close to the strait and Sicily. He sought to grip the talisman images and sounds: a facial scar and twin scratches in metallic paint, a shout of shock and a yell of venom. He had no plan, he was hungry, and someone behind him was snoring softly. He would look into the man’s face, into the eyes, see confusion and fear . . . They came into the city, and he was beyond the limits of his experience.

Consolata could have taken his eyes out with her fingers, but kept them clamped tight on her bag. It was the end of their wasted day.

Massimo had said, ‘I’m entitled to criticise you. Your bag is almost full and mine is almost empty because I have given out our fliers and you have not. You glare at people and you’re rude to them. Your problem is that you don’t believe in non-violent action.’

He had gone back to his mother with his empty bag. He would eat with her, then take a bus to Archi. In the squat he would tell them about Consolata’s heresies. The air would be thick with cigarette smoke and she would be denounced.

She sat on a bench. Consolata could recall each word that had been said and fancied her link with the group had been cut. ‘You seem to threaten people when you want to show an alternative to the aggression of ’Ndrangheta. I wouldn’t stop to talk to you. You saw for yourself where your attitude takes you – they hurry past you. They don’t want a lecture. Consolata, ’Ndrangheta is a criminal conspiracy that depends upon fear, terror and suspicion. If you hector those you seek to influence, you show no alternative to the gangsters. It’s about turning the other cheek and demonstrating the supreme example of non-violence. I don’t think you’re capable of that. You want to fight, fight, fight.’

He had walked away, tall and haughty. By now he would be regaling his mother with Consolata’s shortcomings. He would have rated it a thoroughly satisfactory day, in which he had spread the word of opposition to criminality and corruption. He believed in the group’s solidarity and that radical opinions should not be tolerated. No quick fix but the importance of holding the high moral ground.

He had left her on the street in the gathering darkness. The Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi was the nearest Reggio Calabria had to a main shopping street. There were good brand names on display, but many were fakes, and the premier banks that did well out of the region’s criminality: the families needed banks, accountants and lawyers, and paid them well.

She had tried. She had stood in the middle of the street, pedestrianised, and had handed out fliers that called for non-payment of the
pizzo
, a boycott of any business that bowed to extortion and contributed. She had been ostracised. She accepted that
perhaps
her voice had become more shrill, as the evening crowds of window-shoppers and promenaders flowed around her. Most had looked at her with contempt. Some had brushed aside her outstretched arm. Others had glanced at what she held, then shaken their heads. The bag had stayed full. Then the shutters had begun to come down, and the lights behind the window displays had gone off, doors were locked and the street was emptied. She had finally turned away when the accordionist ceased playing.

The bench was in a small piazza. There was an obligatory monument to the writer Corrado Alvaro: celebrated, revered and taught in schools. At the bottom end of the piazza was the museum, but she had never been inside it. The foliage on the trees was thick and in daylight threw shade. At night it blocked out the light from the streetlamps. It was, she supposed, a pivotal moment. The wind was gathering off the sea, funnelled up the strait to enter the chokepoints between the buildings, and leaves blustered around her ankles. The bag was on the seat beside her. Her anger soared, its target the group. It wouldn’t last – after a couple more years its members would be applying for college places or town-hall jobs – all those places of employment where the introduction of a ‘friend’ was essential. Perhaps handing out leaflets was a rite of passage for the young before the serious business of adulthood and collaboration or the blind eye. If she dumped them, there would be no turning back, no crawling late at night to the squat in Archi and begging forgiveness: she would get her clothing and be regarded as a leper. To throw the fliers into the overflowing bin would result in an appearance before the Inquisition: no crime could be greater.

But she did it. She didn’t know how to escalate to a different level of protest, strike at ’Ndrangheta families, their corruption and complacency. She felt defeated, worthless.

She took the fliers from the bag and flung them in the general direction of the bin. The wind caught them and they scattered across the paving slabs. The wind was brisk enough to carry some to the darker shadows where other benches were. Dropping litter was an offence. She bent, snatched up some fliers and took them to the bin, then went for more.

Jago couldn’t read what was printed on the flier. He had stepped off at the small bus station on the sea front and approached some men to ask for a connection to the far side of the Calabria peninsula. They had pulled faces, made gestures of ignorance and turned their backs. He had walked past two four-star hotels and it was after eleven. There was a bench in a park, and the wind was strong but warm, with none of the cutting cold he had experienced in Berlin. He had sat on the bench.

The papers blew towards him and the girl followed them. He watched. He didn’t have the language to understand what was printed on them. She scooped them up and flounced to the bin, then went for more. She was, he thought, at the end of her tether.

She reached him – she was slight, muscular, nothing smart about her. A flicker of light showed she wore no makeup. Studs in her ears, nothing else. And there was no scar on her cheek. He’d almost looked for it. The face was the same as the girl’s in Berlin, with defiance written on it. He thought she was angry. Now she was on her knees, close to his legs, rooting beside his trainers and under the bench for more of the fliers. She snatched one in his hand.

‘What does it say?’ He had no Italian so asked in English. She looked up at him. Her eyes pierced him, and her lip curled. Jago persisted, ‘Please, would you tell me what it is?’

On the sheet of paper there were close-printed lines of text. In the first two or three, just below the headline, he saw a word he knew –
pizzo
. Then a frown cut her forehead. He thought she had been about to stand, take the last sheet from him and stride towards the bin.

She was someone to talk to – he groped towards the contact. ‘What does it say?’

She sucked in a long breath. ‘You are English?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have been many times to Reggio Calabria?’

‘It’s my first time.’

‘You sit on a bench at night, and the city is about to sleep. Why?’

‘I have nowhere to go to.’

‘There are hotels, plenty, all prices. Why not go to one?’

‘Confusion. Lack of certainty.’

‘What is confused? What is uncertain?’

It was a staccato interrogation and the frown had deepened. At any meeting with a client, in London or Berlin, he would have covered his true aims and intentions. There was honesty in her face, though, which trapped him. He wouldn’t dare lie to her. The night was around him and nothing intruded.

‘I’m confused about why I came here and uncertain about what I’ll do. What is the flier about?’

‘If you haven’t been here before, it will mean nothing to you.’

‘Try me. I know what
pizzo
is.’

She rapped out the translation. The fight against corruption. The demand for civil courage. The call for honesty in the judiciary and among politicians. The announcement of a march for peace and justice next week. There was no animation in her voice – she might have been a child parroting a Bible text. She finished. ‘For what reason have you come to Reggio?’

Jago said, ‘Why does an activist take a bag of fliers and dump them? Why aren’t they stuck to shop windows, under windscreen wipers?’

She stood up. He caught at her arm. She shrugged him off.

‘Because we lose. Too often we lose. More exact, every time we lose. You fight a force that has incredible strength, and you look for reaction and for small victories. I see none. Against ’Ndrangheta we do not win. Today I know it. We have forgotten what is winning.’

She had the empty bag on her shoulder. The last papers were in her hand and she was at the bin. She dumped them, rubbed her hands together and took the first step towards the piazza’s exit.

He called into the night, ‘I think I know what winning is, against them. I did it yesterday. It was only small but I won.’