No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (20 page)

The moonlight was bright enough to prohibit modesty. She settled on a place where the sand was dry. She pulled off her coat, then her T-shirt, and bra. She undid her belt and took off her jeans and pants, then her wristwatch. The light played on her back and he saw the shape of her pelvis, the narrowness of the waist and the strong muscles at her shoulders. She turned. She had covered nothing and challenged him.

He took off his coat, sweater, shirt, vest, trainers, jeans and socks, then his watch. He hesitated.

She chuckled softly. ‘If you wear them, they’ll get wet and you will not be able to dry them.’

Jago dropped his pants. There was her untidy pile and his, neatly folded. Between them lay the towel.

She defined the moment, calculated, clever. She didn’t run into the water, dive, surface and lie on her back to wait for him. Instead she walked into the water and waded out until the ripples were against her chest. She never looked behind her. He walked where she had, sometimes over shingle or broken shells. He joined her where the water was deeper.

Consolata had begun to wash. Her hands went from her neck, scooping water there, to her armpits and then she dipped her head under. No gasps at the cold water, no squeals. She stood and watched him. He did the same. It was a funny way to come and fight a war. She incubated his certainty and brought it to life. She eyed him, didn’t turn away. A little piece of weed had snagged on her breast and she let it lie there. She was no more than a foot and a half from him. In the movie version the gap would have closed. Now she put up her arms, stretched to her full height and water dribbled off her skin. The weed was dislodged by a wave. He did the same. He couldn’t read her. So close and their arms high above their heads. He didn’t know whether he would make the move – as in the film – or she would. Neither did.

They hadn’t touched. He wondered at what stage of the night she had choreographed the situation. It would have been after he had retorted about winning, and before they had taken the taxi to her parents’ home. It would have been easy to believe she came here most weeks, with different guys, and skinny-dipped where, legend had it, Greek sailors of centuries before Christ’s birth had drowned. He didn’t think she had done it before. He reckoned it had been a fast decision, taken on the hoof.

She leaned forward, imperceptibly, then seemed to screw up her nose. The moonlight hit the water on her skin and hair, brighter than diamonds. She sniffed, then nodded as if she were satisfied. Jago Browne dropped his hands. It would have been so easy to touch her, but he didn’t.

‘Do you want to swim?’

‘I don’t think so. It is time to go to work.’

Jago grimaced. She began the tramp back to the beach. It was an idyllic place, and he felt a sense of renewal. He was thought to be bright and intelligent. He was paid to look into people’s faces and read their minds, whether or not they had small breasts, fine hips and skin without wrinkles. He thought he had read her now. His shyness was gone, his hesitation past. He had the certainty. It was about winning. Why had she gone to the trouble? She must have thought that the experience would challenge and harden him, take him further from what was familiar. Too bloody right. And that was important because, where he was going, nothing would be familiar.

She started to dry herself. He watched. Then, she threw him the towel and began to dress.

They turned their backs to the sea, the moonlight that dappled it, the castle high on the rock above the bay, the shuttered bars where the canopies flapped, and went to the car. They had not touched. There had been no discussion on why each needed the other in a relationship of convenience. It was recognised. No explanations, none needed. She drove up the hill towards the dark mass of the mountains where, soon, the dawn would come.

The team manager had phoned Magda. She’d left her boyfriend in the club and taken a taxi to Stresemannstrasse.

Wilhelmina knew something of her father’s background. The family was prosperous and had settled in west Berlin, with a fine house in the suburbs. The business had thrived, and Magda’s father’s past occupation had been erased, almost. He had served in the State Security Service, had risen to warrant officer in the political police and headed a small team responsible for the internal security of the Democratic Republic. On a frozen December morning in 1989, he had dumped his uniform, abandoned his flat, crossed the Wall with his family, then taken a train to the Tegel district on the other side of Berlin and had not looked back. Before he had gone into business, he had burgled and bugged his way the length and breadth of the former East Germany. The first time Magda had lost the key to her school locker, she had called home in a panic and been told what to do. Once, when a filing cabinet at the bank jammed, she had shown her talent.

The Englishman, Jago Browne, had long intrigued and attracted her, but he had always declined her invitations. She had sensed crisis in the air, and she was the last resort before the police were called. If a bank employee was ‘missing’ and worked in a department with knowledge of wealthy investors’ affairs, the situation was serious. She’d heard the edge in Wilhelmina’s voice: no panic yet, but it wasn’t far away. The outer door was a challenge, but she’d managed it. The inner door, leading into the apartment, was easier.

So neat, so tidy, so soulless. The two rooms, the bathroom and kitchen, she thought, had been cleaned specifically, and the occupant would not be back in the morning.

It was child’s play to Magda, no need to call her father. A notepad beside the telephone. A clean sheet uppermost.

She did not need to scatter black powder from a printer toner on the top sheet of the pad. She crouched, tilted her head, let her auburn hair flop over her face and read. She phoned, even though it was past three in the morning. ‘Wilhelmina? He was in touch with a travel agent by phone, one on Friedrichstrasse. He bought an economy ticket, via Rome, to Lamezia Terme, which is in Calabria, southern Italy. Lamezia is the final destination. It was a one-way ticket. There is no indication of a hotel booking, or that he called ahead to arrange to be met by friends. Didn’t he intervene in a fight among Italians? You have enough, Wilhelmina?’

‘I think so.’

‘May I suggest . . .’

‘You may.’

‘I apologise, but it is a police matter. The client list, the portfolios, the one-way ticket, the brawl in the street . . . it is for the police.’ Magda owed Jago Browne nothing: he had deflected her. He could sink or swim: it wasn’t her problem. The bank’s client security was paramount.

She drove and she collected. Between stops, where she picked up what she wanted, Consolata talked. She told him the history of the ’Ndrangheta movement – the word came from the old Greek dialect of the peninsula – of the great military drives of the nineteenth century to eradicate the brigands, the ferocity of the Napoleonic generals, the brutality of executions, and the survival of hard, ruthless men in the mountains. She explained it all, Mussolini’s failed attempts to combat the threat, then the indifference of the American occupiers. Even Rome had tried at the end of the last century. Too late, and now it was endemic. They climbed high, leaving the coast behind.

A collection of small homes were built into a rock face, and the headlights of the Fiat 500 captured a line of washing, perhaps done that evening. It was a clear night and there would be no frost. He would not have seen the heavy bottle-green trousers pegged to a line in front of one house. She was gone only moments from the car, and whacked them into his lap. After history came geography. The great families of Reggio Calabria, Archi, Gioia Tauro and Rosarno lived on the Tyrrhenian Sea; family groups from San Luca, Plati and Locri were on the Ionian. The Aspromonte mountains – from which the ‘second coming’ of the ’Ndrangheta had appeared, then the wisdom of investing in the cocaine market – separated them.

Higher, where the air was cold and mist had gathered between the trees, there was a woodman’s hut with a decent padlock. She stopped, rummaged under the back seat for a toolbox, took a tyre lever and broke the lock. She found a camouflage coat, a forestry warden’s, and a pair of heavy boots.

After geography came economics, the science of money-laundering and clean investment with washed funds, the creation of legitimate business where taxes were paid and respectability purchased.

She drove through the dark and hammered the detail at him. Politics was about making contact with men of political ambition, national and regional, and insinuation into the secretive world of freemasonry, from which came influence and contracts for infrastructure development. After politics, there was law – or its violation. Discipline was enforced with extreme violence and rumour, which ruined a man’s marriage and estranged his children. Then, a sort of anthropology: the development of the family and alliances with relatives. His head reeled, but his certainty was solid.

Silence. There was a camp site. Jago recognised the pennants on poles driven into the ground. The kids would be Scouts. Their fire had almost died, but the ground sheets had been hung on a line to freshen. She took only one.

She didn’t smile, didn’t seem either to congratulate herself on her acquisitions or feel the need to apologise for her thefts. Jago’s English master had read aloud
The Jackdaw of Rheims
, about a bird that had stolen a cleric’s ring. There was no traffic, no police or
carabinieri
roadblocks, but once a deer broke cover and bounded across in front of them. He thought she was bored with talking about organised crime.

‘Jago, I give you a final opportunity.’

‘To do what?’

‘I can turn round, leave you at a bus station and in a few hours there will be a connection to Lamezia. No one will know where you have been, what you have walked away from. Where you are going and what you try to do – if you fail, if they catch you . . .’

‘Consolata . . .’

‘. . . they will kill you, strangle you, bury you. Jago, you understand that?’

He nodded. They climbed higher. The moon was behind them and the beach forgotten. He was there because he had stayed to watch a spider trap and kill a fly. He shivered. If he had turned round, been at the bank late but before lunch, he couldn’t have lived with himself. A simple question floated in his mind: why had she not taken the lead on the beach? He knew the answer: she was a camp follower. She had never crossed a street to intervene, stumbling, outside a pizzeria. Useful, though? Yes.

7

Dawn broke: a tinge of grey in the skies that hovered over the tips of the pines. They were on steep roads that zigzagged around rock bluffs.

She talked, gave staccato information. There had been smallholdings, in village clusters, behind them. She’d pointed out the olive groves, where the harvest was almost ready, goats grazed, and sheep, cows and pigs were corralled. It was the world of peasants, Jago thought. He had seen nothing like it in England or in the few parts of Germany he knew, or on his brief trips to Spain. Dim lights burned in the houses. The work would have broken backs when the terrace fields were made and the retaining walls built to hold the soil, all done with muscle and sweat.

She wrestled with the wheel of the little car to get round the hairpins, and he reckoned she talked on so that he wouldn’t chicken out. It would have been easy to do so – ‘Excuse me, thanks for everything but I should be getting to the airport. This seemed a good idea twenty-four hours ago, not now. Somebody told me to get a life, move on and forget an everyday story of pizza-bar folk. You’ve been good company, but I have to get back to the real world of clients, their portfolios, and my bonus at the end of the year.’ She kept talking – her way of focusing him on what lay ahead.

She stopped by a rough concrete shrine two or three feet across and the same in height, with a roof of clay tiles to keep the weather off the interior. There was no figure of the Virgin, but a sealed photograph of a serious young man, called Romeo, who had a sharp haircut and wore a dark jacket, white shirt and neutral tie. His widow and his family had built the shrine. There were plastic flowers with the picture. It was here that he had been shot dead. She said that he was part of one family and had been killed by ‘men of honour’ of another family in one of the feuds that had split the ’Ndrangheta. Jago thought Consolata needed him as much as he needed her. She was dedicated to her work behind the combat lines, while he was governed by impulse. He was not allowed to brood or weaken. She spoke good enough English, had a dry sense of humour, and tried to interest him.

The second stop, higher up the road, was at a German-built machine-gun bunker. It had been constructed with expertise, reinforced concrete slit trenches leading down from a command post to the forward position where some poor bastard would have been holed up to await the arrival of UK or Canadian troops. The defenders had withdrawn and gone north. The car strained against the steepness of the road, and the light grew steadily.

One more stop. If he had complained she would have listened. A high plateau, a flattened chain-link fence, a concrete building – the place had been systematically wrecked. There were deep bunkers, concrete foundations and heaps of rubble. It had been a Cold War listening point, she said. There might also have been long-range missiles there, with targets beyond the Iron Curtain; they might have had nuclear warheads. Jago wondered how it would have been for the military there. He didn’t know many Americans, but he imagined them marooned in these mountains, with a cinema and a PX shop to keep them sane, the quiet broken by their radios and Elvis Presley belting out over the emptiness. Lonely, maybe nervous, and isolated.