No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (24 page)

8

He supposed it a house like any other, that of a peasant who had done well. How well? He couldn’t tell.

He could see a building of perhaps a half-dozen bedrooms, and a patio at the front with plant pots, but they were empty. There was a portico over the front door that looked like a recent addition, and an extension to the side facing him. The portico’s pillars were fresh and clean, but the side wall was still concrete blocks, short of the rendering needed to finish it. Cement was visible in the gaps round the windows on the ground floor and upstairs. Outside the kitchen door there was a row of boots and a heap of chopped wood, but his view was broken by the thickness of the vine stems on the trellis. He thought a path went up from the backyard, beyond the trellis and the washing line, but then there was a wall, solid bushes, perhaps laurel, and the shed.

Jago could see little behind him, and the views to either side of his position were restricted by rock outcrops and the trees that sprouted from sheer rock slopes. Music drifted up to him, and a murmur of voices. Marcantonio was playing football with the children at the front – it was landscaped and had been grassed but not watered so the ‘pitch’ was a dull ochre. There was no big car, just a Fiat van and Fiat saloon, the priest’s. The daughter and daughter-in-law were at the back – they might have been taking a break from washing the dishes after the Sunday meal. The daughter-in-law was a smart, stylish woman, but the daughter was drab. He saw the matriarch again, and a handyman who carried out a bucket of vegetable peelings for the chickens.

The shake in his hands was dying.

Watching the family after their Sunday meal calmed him. Little actions that reeked of the ordinary, the occasional shouts from the football game. He had noted that Marcantonio was never successfully tackled, never lost the ball, never missed a shot on the goal. The others had sight of it only when he decided they would. The boy never looked up. His gaze never raked the rock faces behind the house.

He thought the shaking would be back during the night. What he had seen in the cave would touch him. He had found it soon after she had left him. A few steps, a scramble, a roll across a bank of moss, then the old path, grass growing on it – he thought he was the first to use it for years – and the entrance to a cave. There was a patch in front of it where there was only dried mud and worn stone. He had hesitated and considered. He could hear sounds from below him, a radio, voices and a vehicle. Was there any virtue in exploring the cleft in the rock? It might have potential as a sort of refuge. He had switched on his small torch and crawled inside.

The beam had picked up one of those small orange boxes that used to hold Kodak film. He’d lifted it up and the date was stamped on it – 1987. He had gone further in. His feet had snagged on cloth, and the torch had shown him a child’s dress and small shoes with tarnished buckles, scuffed at the toe. There were blankets and two buckets, a plastic plate, several plastic cups and a candle-holder. In a recess he found a rotting mattress. He’d seen a chain – it had fine links but was strong enough to withstand the efforts of a kid to break it, and ended with an iron collar where a padlock was still fastened. The far end disappeared under the mattress. He was driven by a compulsion to know where the chain led. He pulled back the mattress and mice scampered out. He saw the staple buried in the stone – it would have been driven home with a sledgehammer. There were small socks, skimpy underwear and a pullover of fine-quality wool. He was in a den where a child, aged ten or twelve, had been chained.

He had gone back out into the light, which seemed heaven-sent after the depths of the cave. He imagined the child held there, wondered how long she had been there and how it had ended.

Jago watched the house, and the shaking ebbed. Impossible, but he tried to square a circle: a home where a sort of normality seemed unthreatening, and a cave where a child had been chained in darkness, with rats and mice, mosquitoes, cold – and fear.

He caught the movement. It was in the corner of his eye. He focused. A boy, seventeen or eighteen, slender, sallow-skinned, dark curly hair, walked along a track above and to the right of where Jago was, with three dogs. It was not a Sunday-afternoon stroll. The dogs were doing a job, scampering around him, over rocks and among trees. Often enough Jago lost them. Consolata had taken him into the water and made him wash off the smell of sweat. The dogs were thin. Their ribs and teeth showed. The boy controlled them with a thin whistle and shrill commands. He would have been a hundred feet above Jago and there were cliffs between them . . .

There was a shout from far below. A hoarse old voice. The boy called the dogs to him and started to retrace his steps, the dogs bustling around his legs. Jago reckoned that if the kid had kept going, and continued around the hillside he would have crossed, with his dogs, the line of his own descent.

He breathed hard and forgot the cave. He had a good view of the house. Jago felt calm, as if his earlier confusions were settled, as if he had signed a last will and testament. Why was he there? He knew the answer to that. What would he do? Take time to learn. He would not stampede down the hill. They would know he had been there, he promised them that. Specific action? He needed time to decide and would not be hustled: that preconceived ideas were usually rubbish was a lesson he had learned at the Bank. Learn and assimilate, they preached. Then act.

The dogs milled around the back door, and the old man who had called was gunning his van. Marcantonio’s football game was over and he had slipped into the passenger seat. The boy with the dogs, recognisable by his shirt, had a crash helmet on his head now, the visor over his face. He drove away on a scooter, the van following.

Jago lay on his stomach. The shadows were longer, and the day died.

The investigator called from his apartment in the Moabit district and spoke to a friend who was also at home, an apartment overlooking the Ionian Sea, at the Catanzaro marina. From his time with the ROS, the GICO and the Squadra Mobile, Fred Seitz had learned that bureaucratic labyrinths were best avoided by personal and discreet contacts. He did not explain why he needed help, and would return the favour in the future. He was told the implications of a failed inquiry.

‘This is the situation, Fred. For this prosecutor much rests on it, not least his prestige. The operation is called Scorpion Fly and the target is Bernardo Cancello, from the hills above Locri. He’s not in the first flight but is still considered a high-value target. His two sons are in gaol – they’ll be old men when they’re freed. He has a grandson, Marcantonio, who will succeed him. The aim of the investigation was to arrest the target – Bravo Charlie to us – and cut down the family. I don’t know how much evidence can be laid against him, but the immediate problem is that the old man has gone to ground so cannot be arrested. Normally, Fred, as you know, we rely on phone intercepts for nailing locations. This family doesn’t use electronic communication so we have to deploy human surveillance. I can get the air force up, with heat-seeking gadgets, more easily than a skilled surveillance team. The prosecutor’s running out of time – he has only a few days left. Anything that interferes with his remaining time would be a serious blow to him. The competition among the prosecutors and magistrates for surveillance teams is intense. No result, the team is withdrawn. I think this investigation is floundering. That’s a black mark against the prosecutor. These people fight like feral cats. Sometimes I watch those wildlife films from the Serengeti. There’s an old wildebeest, legs going, unable to graze because its teeth are rotten, can’t keep up with the herd. High in the sky, there’s a speck. The old wildebeest knows it’s there, and that there’ll be another, and another. Vultures sense weakness. They’ll drop, circle and land. Whether the animal is dead or still alive, they’ll start to feast. Understand what I’m saying, Fred?’

He went back to his packing.

‘What does he think it’ll be like, going after those people? Does he think it’s some sort of squirrel shoot – out with an air rifle? Is he dumb, ignorant or both?’

Bagsy said, ‘Not too sure, Carlo. But the people down in Reggio are going to blow a gasket when they hear a freelancer, our national, is plodding about close to a prime investigation target.’

‘Why me?’

‘Good question, Carlo.’

The building had the echoing quiet of any government institution at a weekend. A file had been flipped in Carlo’s direction: Jago Browne, copies of a confirmed air ticket, a decent-quality picture of him going onto a pier at Rome. All that was in the file would be backed up on the phone, and there was a contact address. Carlo could play gruff but in fact he appreciated being dragged out of his home, and had driven fast to get there. Bagsy would have skipped a pub session to field him. They went back a long way.

‘I tried your successor out there. Can’t do much arm-twisting at a range of fifteen hundred miles. He refused – pretty much made an issue of it. He wasn’t going to traipse down to Calabria and tell them that a loose-cannon Brit was about to screw them up big-time – and I don’t blame him. He has to work there. It’s liaison, as you know, and that’s a two-way trade. He’s better off out of the bad-news zone. You speak the language.’

‘What’s our line?’

‘Grovel?’

‘And I’m with a Hun?’

‘Organised-crime officer in Berlin, did an exchange after Duisburg. They’re shitting themselves that this boy is about to trample over a sensitive investigation at a critical time. I’m not briefed up on the connection between the policeman and our banker boy but it exists. You suggested, Carlo, that the boy is either dumb, ignorant or both. Could be both. What’s his motive? Fuck knows. Maybe
he
doesn’t know. It used to be your territory – and it’s not a nice place. Right?’

‘You could say that.’

Bernardo had regarded Father Demetrio as a friend, for many years.

Friendship could be temporary or everlasting.

Two old men, in the twilight of their working lives, sipping brandy with water: the friendship was sealed because each knew enough of the other for a prison sentence stretching to a distant future, a bullet and a body in a ditch, or a disappearance.

The priest had a history of collaboration and association with Bernardo’s family. Bernardo had committed the grievous crime of child murder and the priest had played a peripheral part in the disposal of a body. Neither was free of the other. Priests had been shot dead, had found severed pigs’ heads on the sacristy steps, had been denounced for the abuse of children to the bishop and forced into premature retirement and poverty. Bernardo worried about his friend Father Demetrio.

It was in Bernardo’s nature to identify a cause of worry and take action to staunch it.

They talked about men they had known who had died in their beds, women who were eccentric, younger men who languished in the prisons of the north, the weather forecast for the coming month, and the quality that year – good – of the projected olive harvest. They smoked and talked of plans for a new football pitch in the village that would need heavy plant to level a playing area, a project likely to warrant plaudits to the priest from his bishop, and credit to Bernardo, who would bankroll it. It would bring enhanced respectability to both men. They discussed the price of diesel – and, briefly, the increasingly intrusive investigations by the
carabinieri
and the Squadra Mobile. They did not mention the death of an informer, or a family in the village who now mourned a murdered but disowned man.

Bernardo’s anxieties stemmed from being alone in the bunker, from hearing and seeing the child. Her open eyes had caught the light of the flash and the newspaper had been laid on her chest. The photograph had told the lie. His age and his loneliness in the bunker made him think most nights of the cave and their prisoner. Mamma had insisted that Father Demetrio should come to the place in the woods. In the years of his married life, Bernardo had listened to her only rarely on a matter of conscience or tactics. He had then.

He let the priest shuffle the deck. They would play cards for an hour and talk a little more, though silences between them were not awkward. There was an old cellar underneath the kitchen of the presbytery where the priest lived. Once, both of Bernardo’s sons had hidden there when the
carabinieri
had come for them – the steps down were well disguised in a pantry cupboard. The church roof had been a good enough reward, new timbers and tiles; the school had needed new toilets and the bureaucracy in Reggio had backed away at the cost.

The cards were dealt. Father Demetrio’s hands were unlike Bernardo’s: no callouses, few wrinkles and no old blisters from hard work with tools. They were smooth-skinned and narrow, the nails clipped like a woman’s. There might have been truth in the rumours of where those hands had strayed but Bernardo had scotched them. He lifted his cards and scanned them.

It was about his age, the faint weakening of his resolve, and his inability to wipe away the image of the child. He worried that Father Demetrio might harbour similar feelings. The papers had said police were searching for a child, and later reported that a photograph of her, living, had been sent to her family, then that a ransom had been paid, but the parents had not been reunited with their child. That money, a million American dollars, had paid for the first investment, a deal done in Medellin in distant Colombia. The priest had been called and escorted to the place. He had knelt on a plastic bag beside the grave, a mound of earth. He would have realised a child lay in it, from its length, and had said a prayer.