No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (28 page)

Bernardo was in the container, left to himself, because Giulietta thought – as the hours ticked away and the prosecutor’s resources approached their limit – that a raid might be made. Especially in that weather. Better to stay where he was. Neither Marcantonio nor Stefano had visited him. He existed, wiled away time, had no interest in the television . . . He thought of the pigs at the farm high in the foothills, and what instruction he must give: it was because he had remembered the child, resurrected her memory, that he must give an order about the pigs. As long as the lights were on, and the heater, he felt secure, safe.

The rain sheeted and water sluiced around him. Jago watched and learned.

In the ferocity of the wind, the handyman held an umbrella. It was one of those issued by construction companies or possibly by a bank after a session for investors. The man by the main door into the house, with the City-Van parked close to the step, clung to it in the gale. It was what a driver did – a lesser person: the vehicle was brought to the front door, a man shivered and got soaked but held an umbrella ready and no one came. Maybe he or she had gone for a last pee, to change a shirt or put on eyeliner. It was an ordinary house, not a palace. But the girl, Consolata, had told him in broad brushstrokes what the family was worth. They could have afforded a gated place, behind high walls and a barricaded entrance, like the ones in west Berlin, where the fat cats lived. The man tried to light a cigarette. Not easy: he had the wind and rain to fight while one fist clung to the umbrella handle and the other had the lighter – the cigarette would be wet so maybe the flame wouldn’t take, despite the efforts he was making to shelter it. Smoke billowed.

Jago learned about power. He had ceased to care about the cold, the wet and his hunger. He had no plan, and that nagged. The lesson continued. A master class in power: a man stood in the rain with an umbrella that the storm tossed aside.

Marcantonio came out.

The family had begun to take shape. The mother, the daughter-in-law, the grandchildren, the daughter and Marcantonio. Jago assumed he had had his own car when he lived here, but this was a brief visit. He was to be driven. The hair was spiky. The boy wore a scarlet shirt, a leather black jacket and jeans. From that distance, they looked stylish and expensive. He nodded to the guy with the umbrella. The guy let the rain cascade on his own head and reached forward to open the passenger door – not the Audi that had tramlines etched onto the paintwork, which would be hard to fix. Marcantonio slid inside. Jago waited for a nod of gratitude. None came. The guy went round the van, tossed the sopping umbrella into the back and shook water off an old, weathered face. His coat was dark with damp.

The engine started. The City-Van was driven away.

He had watched the coming power of the family. The destination, Jago reckoned, would be a bar where other local bucks gathered. What story might he tell an audience? About a girl, may be, or a young man who had intervened, an arsehole, or about blood and a kicking. It wouldn’t be about damage done to a car. He saw the City-Van disappear, a shield of spray chasing it. That was the vehicle the big man, unseen, had chosen; the house was unattractive, unfinished; the clothes of the women were unremarkable; the family reeked of money. They had the cash to own a football club or racehorses, to live in a spread with a view of the sea and a private beach, and did not. It was a lesson of critical importance Jago reckoned: money was secondary, and power supreme.

He did not yet know what he could do, what would jolt the power.

In Canning Town Jago had not known power other than in the boxing ring. In the City he had not known power, except on hearing one girl say to another, ‘He just walked in here, a chance many would kill for, on the say-so of a chap wanting to salve his conscience.’ In Berlin, at the bank, he had known power when he had cleared his desk, wiped his computer and gone out through the door without a backward glance. Here, on the hillside, he felt a degree of power because he could watch them.

The message came up on the prosecutor’s screen.

He read it, a cigarette in his hand.

A young man from Berlin . . . British nationality . . . witness to an assault outside a pizzeria . . . protection and extortion . . . a subsequent, more serious assault, the girl scarred for life . . . two interventions by the Briton, beaten up both times, no hospitalisation . . . a one-way ticket to Reggio Calabria . . . an idiot who targeted Marcantonio, grandson of Bernardo, and . . .

He stubbed out the cigarette. It was a good ashtray, heavy, cut-glass, a present to his father a half-century before.

Men were coming from Berlin and London to liaise, and it was hoped that the unfortunate presence of Jago Browne, merchant banker, would not jeopardise his investigations into that particular family. Two words lingered:
unfortunate
and
jeopardise
. He had the ashtray in his hand and hurled it at the window. It hit bulletproof glass and shattered. A column of ash and embers made a glowing cloud around the impact point. It would have sounded like a pistol shot. Two of his men were in the room, weapons drawn.

He held his head in his hands, then loosed one to wave them away. He had once been told by an old fighter against an earlier generation of the ’Ndrangheta that it was always necessary to employ extreme care: ‘A small mistake in any investigation can cause infinite damage’. An amateur, on a crusade, was blundering towards a target and would – as night follows day – alert him or her. The clock moved towards countdown, and the hours still available to him were fucked. Months of work, in their final hours, were jeopardised, which was unfortunate. Had there been another ashtray on his desk he would have thrown that after the first.

‘You want a confession?’

‘Always good for the guts.’

The only movements they made were to tilt their heads fractionally when they spoke so that a mouth was against an ear, then to reverse the movement.

‘The sneeze,’ Fabio whispered. ‘My sneeze.’

‘Does a priest need to hear about a sneeze?’ Ciccio asked.

‘What did we say about my sneeze?’

‘That didn’t matter, the noise, because no one would be out in the storm.’

They lay close for warmth. They often had long conversations to pass the time. They were there as a last resort. There was no bug in the house, or hidden outside the back door, and most mornings the old man, Stefano, swept the vehicle for a tracker. They did not use mobile phones or computers for deals or planning, but relied on written text and couriers. The daughter organised communications. The last resort was having two men in a cleft, almost a cave, and hoping they had the staying power to notice any small but important ‘mistake’. The families always made a ‘mistake’, but it had to be seen, noted and evaluated. They were looking for the old man but hadn’t found him.

‘What does a priest need to hear?’

‘We didn’t flag a message through. A man came past us. We couldn’t identify or place him. Where’s he gone?’ Ciccio’s voice was lower than the moan of the wind. ‘No name, no description, no reason for him to be on the slope. The significance of this? He didn’t emerge.’

‘Shit.’

‘We haven’t seen him come out at the bottom – and his route would have taken him below the track where they come with the dogs. He hasn’t shown himself.’

‘Shit again.’ Fabio’s teeth ground. It was the work of survivors not intellectuals, for those without imagination but strong on discipline and able to analyse what they saw.

‘He’s still there.’

‘And any man on the slope would have heard that sneeze. We’ve shown out.’

‘First time ever.’ Ciccio gave a little sigh.

‘Who should know?’

‘Nobody.’

‘That’s the greater sin, worse than showing out.’

‘I can live with it,’ Ciccio told him.

‘Because the mission and the investigation are fucked. We’re in the final hours.’ Fabio gave a minute shrug. ‘Not worth confessing. Think . . . No winners.’

‘Wrong. The winner is the entomologist. He has our collection of carcasses and will make a unique study of the scorpion fly. Be positive.’

‘Our friend is still out there, so we’re sharing our space with him. I say he’s no threat to us. Why should he be? Relax, enjoy your work. If they lay hands on him they’ll take the skin off his back before they kill him. Tonight, we’ll be eating
tacchino in gelatina
. . . We have a grandstand seat – no priests, no confessions. I didn’t sneeze. And, I tell you,
he
is there, the target. He’s there.’

His voice trailed away. They watched the rain fall and heard the wind.

Fred said, ‘Here, my friend, a mouse doesn’t break wind unless it has permission.’

Carlo looked around. They had no umbrella between them but had hired a car at Lamezia, bickered as to whether KrimPol or HMRC should pay. The Solomon solution was that they would split general costs and HMRC would do meals. On the drive south they had barely talked because the wipers had trouble clearing the windscreen and the lorries threw up spray. Fred drove. Now he’d come off the big highway and driven into the town of Rosarno. He had parked and they had both climbed out. Why? Carlo was unsure.

They stood in the centre of the Piazza Duomo. It was wide and open, and the rain lashed them. Why? Carlo had known of Rosarno but had never investigated the resident families. On one side of the square he could see the Speedy Market Alimentari and opposite, the magnificent church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista. He had read the carving over the main doorway: ‘Come, King of Peace, end hatred and turn it to love, revenge into forgiveness.’ A tall order.

The town was closed. The doors of the restaurants and bars were shut and the lights off. The parked cars were Mercedes, Audis and BMWs, and the streets were clean – well-paid discipline ruled. On the Via Roma, coming up the hill and into the square, there had been decent small houses, the window boxes alive with geraniums. It was Pesche country. The family had an overview of the docks at Gioia Tauro, with control of the workforce and the routes away from the wharves and containers. Fred had talked about a leader who had buried himself in a bunker but had needed a woman. There was a mistress under surveillance, who came to the safe house close to the bunker and brought her toy dog. She was his weakness and the opportunity for the
cacciatore
. Fred and Carlo were drenched.

‘I was there when he was taken,’ Fred said. ‘It was a mark of the trust they had in me that I was allowed to witness a significant arrest. He had assets in Germany, which was why I was permitted access. He lived in a hole in the ground, but he had champagne and caviar. It was an important arrest but nothing changed. He was in a cell, but the power of the family was as great as before. In the town there are good churches, and there was affluence, but no one seemed to have a job and there was no industry, except the port. I found it depressing – beautiful but an example of a broken state. And this is Europe. It makes me sad if I think too hard about it. I reckon I understand your English boy.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I think he was disrespected. He is a banker, has a good job, is a subject of envy and would regard himself as a member of an elite. He is different from many other young men. An incident plays out in front of him, and he responds, expecting the bad boys to back off. He is dumped on the pavement. I think he yearns for respect and needs to earn it. He’s no Knight Templar riding to the rescue of holy sites in Jerusalem, but an arrogant boy whose pride was hurt.’

They started to walk back towards the car. The rain was irrelevant. Carlo thought the assessment sounded fair. They would not hurry to fulfil the purpose of the journey – to make their apologies at the Palace of Justice. He thought two old men had been dragged from the comfort of their jobs because they were pawns of diminished status, suitable for work that no ambitious officer would want.

‘Where to?’ Fred asked.

Carlo told him.

The rainwater pooled in their seats and under their feet. They drove towards Reggio and the skies stayed ashen.

It was a little lighter over the sea. Giulietta was at her computer; the screen showed the returns on investments in hotel resorts on the Brazilian coast, made comparisons with Florida, and threw up launch costs and profit margins. She shut it down. Nothing illegal there. Nothing that could justify a charge of ‘Mafia association’ if the house was raided and the hard drive taken. She shrugged on a coat, went out into the rain and lit a cigarillo, stronger than a cigarette. It was her problem that she had not been born a boy. What power she had would soon be stripped away from her when Marcantonio came home for good.

She felt contempt for her nephew. Had she been born a boy she would by now have been undisputed head of the family and her father would have been an old man with memories and little else. He had left her with a twisted nose: when she was fourteen months old, he had dropped her on a stone floor. Her nose had been broken and allowed to knit by itself. She had no lover because of her status. A young man in the village could not have considered walking out with her. A young man from another family, equal in importance to her own, would have raged if his father had told him that Giulietta Cancello was his chosen bride. She had no girlfriends with whom she could go to a disco at a hotel in Locri, Brancaleone or Siderno. Love was beyond her reach.