No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (29 page)

Teresa, her sister-in-law, had once bought her some clothes from the new boutique in the mall outside Locri but she didn’t wear them – her mother would cluck with disapproval if she did. Annunziata had treated her as if she were an imbecile. Giulietta had denounced Annunziata, condemning her.

She threw away the cigarillo. Marcantonio would go back to Berlin. Word would seep from the Palace of Justice that a prosecutor’s investigation had run its course. They owned enough men in the Palace for the information to be reliable. Her father would emerge from his bunker, and Marcantonio would return from Germany. She would spend more time at the computer, offering advice, seeing it ignored, as age chased her.

A shipment was coming into Gioia Tauro in the rudder trunk of a cargo ship from Venezuela. An Englishman was installed at Brancaleone and would stay there until the family was prepared to meet him, hear his proposition and determine whether or not he was safe as a commercial partner. Her nephew would be in a bar and other boys would be around him, hanging on his stories. At the tables, girls hoped to be noticed and that a finger would beckon them over. Stefano would be by the door, in the City-Van, the rainwater sloshing dirt off the bodywork. No one called for Giulietta, or waited for her, or hoped she would notice them. She kicked a pebble, which ricocheted into the bushes. She had seen how her mother smiled only when Marcantonio was near her, and that the porcelain Madonna was positioned prominently on the window ledge. It was quiet and the dogs were alert. She would have sworn that nothing moved near the house, that no one was close, that there was no threat. She went inside.

Nine calls had been received at a bed-and-breakfast on the north side of the city. The same answer was given each time: the guests had not yet arrived. No message was left. The rain made a river of the street, and the hills – usually a fine sight – were buried in cloud.

Carlo said, ‘I wasn’t on the street here. I would have liked to be around when they took him. He was one of the men who controlled the whole of Reggio, and blood would have been dripping off his fingers. I saw him when the
carabinieri
took him past the cameras. I was there for a meeting, about stuff going into London. Anyway, they lifted the guy on this street.’

It was the Via Pio. Rain came off the roofs, and gutters over-flowed. No point in wearing their coats.

While the man had been in hiding he had needed someone he trusted to be his courier. His son-in-law was among thirty who ran messages, brought food and set up meetings. He had been using eleven different safe houses. All thirty had to be located, bugged and tracked, but the son-in-law – the most trusted – was the bad link in the chain and blew him out. It had taken four years to pinpoint where the guy was. He was armed when they went in, but didn’t try to use his weapon, went quietly. Four years for one man, with scores of people working on the case. Carlo told the story. It was important to him – the only time he had been there when the cameras flashed. The guy would have been worth hundreds of millions of euros. To go after a target for four years and believe that the investigation would be successful was dedication.

They were two old men, who stood on a pavement, had no protection against the rain and seemed not to notice. A German and a Briton . . . They might have been veterans of Cassino on the road to Rome, in opposite slit trenches, now meeting in a graveyard, or at Juno Beach and falling on each other’s necks, but instead, they had war stories of Rosarno and the Via Pio. It was important to demonstrate that they knew what the game was about.

Carlo said, ‘If, towards the end of that stake-out, a fly-by-night had screwed up what they had, the anger would have been indescribable. We’re not going to be anyone’s favourite visitors. We put all the money towards anti-terrorism now, but the real threat to our society is the corruption and criminality of the gangs. It’s a cancer. Does a young banker go to war in a grey suit with a neutral tie? I don’t know. I do know that he’s gone into acute personal danger. Do we cheer him on or call him fucking stupid?’

‘If only it were that simple. . .’

Carlo said, ‘You told me his boss spoke poorly of him. I can cap that. His own mother bad-mouthed him. A confusing picture. I believe you win some and lose some. Nothing’s personal. How do you see your future?’

The walls of the gaol were behind them and a little queue of women, black clothes and inadequate umbrellas, were waiting for visiting time.

‘I hope Carlo, to be on a naturist beach and feel freshness on my skin.’

‘I rate the boy. Are you going to strip off? I’ve never been driven by a bare-arsed chauffeur. It was good to come here, see the place.’

Fred said, ‘Nobody I’ve spoken to has had a good word for him. He has no friends, no champions. It makes him more interesting and less predictable. Do I sound like a profiler? I hate them. He’s independent – and not liked.’

‘Irrelevant. Who said, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? If he bloodies a nose or kicks a shin, that’s good enough. I don’t have to like him. You met him. How will he strike me?’

The pipe was out. Fred shielded the bowl as he tried to relight it. A cascade of failed matches fell to the pavement. ‘He is a banker, investment and sales. They are not impetuous. He will wait. It will be similar to the market performing as he wishes it. He will be patient. It will be in his time of choosing. I think he will be out there, in this weather, and it will not concern him. I think he has the talent to surprise us. Time to go.’

‘It can’t be put off.’

‘We face the music, and it’ll be an orchestra, full blown.’

They went to the car.

Jago set himself puzzles. They had started as mental arithmetic on the portfolios at the bank. The light dipped fast, and it was almost the time that the majority of the team would be leaving the building, heading for the bars or coffee shops, the gymnasium along the street and the launderette. None of that had any relevance to where he was and what he was doing.

He had found a good teaser. It had legs and ran.

The sheets on the line attracted him.

The rain fell on them and, though sodden and heavy, they flapped in the wind. Some of the pegs had been dislodged, but as day disappeared and grey dusk settled, those remaining seemed to do a job. They were good sheets, for king-sized beds, a rich blue that was similar to the sea. Four sheets, and they obscured a stretch of the route between the trellis and the wall short of the dilapidated shed. Trees blocked his view of most of the building, but the sheets . . . He turned the matter in his mind.

And remembered.

A shower in Canning Town, washing out on the lines in the little back gardens or slung along the balconies of the blocks, and the women were straight out quick with white plastic baskets to scoop the clothes and bedding off the lines. They did it at speed. Nobody in Canning Town left the washing on the line when it rained. The mother could have taken it in, or the daughter, or even the driver while he waited for Marcantonio, slasher of a girl’s face, to come out. Even Marcantonio might have done it. But the bedding had been abandoned on the line through a storm, as dusk merged with night.

The rain had eased but not stopped. The skies melded with the ground and distant lights brightened. Through the kitchen window he saw the mother and thought she was preparing vegetables. The cold had set in. Had it not been for the teaser – why was the washing still on the line? – he might have frozen solid. He had to keep on his clothing because to take it off would expose him to the water and the wind.

He knew that behind him, higher, there was another vantage point, and at least one more watcher. The kid came up the track to the house and Jago saw a torch shone in his face and the outlines of two men, broader and taller than the kid. Cigarettes were exchanged, a lighter flashed, and he heard a low cackle.

The kid went to the back door, knocked and waited. When it was opened, the dogs bounded out. Jago realised they had been brought in during the storm, but not the washing. The kid left and the door was closed after him. He used no torch. Jago assumed he knew each stone, each trail; none was visible now.

The kid had gone up the slope behind the derelict shed, climbed higher than where Jago was hidden, then looped behind him. Jago’s scent had been washed away by the sea, and now the route he had taken through the trees and over the rocks that had been cleansed by the rain, all trace of him gone. The dogs moved behind and above him. He wondered how close they were to the point where a man had sneezed twice.

They would kill him if they found him. Well, he knew that.

He had never been so cold. He had never before lost the free movement of his limbs. He had never been so hungry.

He heard the dogs and the whistled commands. They said, at the money-laundering lectures he had attended, that the art of investigation was ‘follow the cash’. Jago had survived the storm and clung to a talisman. Follow the sheets. The dogs had gone, the wind was dropping and the rain had turned to drizzle. He could hear, if he strained to listen, the flap of the sheets as the pegs loosened.

He had endured, which might have been a triumph but was not: he had done nothing. The night closed in and an owl screamed. The washing line was locked in his mind.

10

The rain had stopped but the wind was stronger. Jago saw home: his mother, brother and sister, Christmas, a few presents under a plastic tree. He had not wanted to play the games she’d bought after they’d had the turkey and hadn’t wanted to wear a paper hat. He saw the big office in the big building and the man who had greeted him as if he was going to be a satisfying ‘work in progress’. A girl in Lancaster had laughed in his face when he’d suggested they go out to the pub, and so had another, who had been with him on the dunes near to Carnforth – they’d watched the cockle pickers far out on the sands.

The people in adjacent seats to his in the City were around him, as were those who sat near him in the Berlin office. He came back to the girl on the beach, to being in the sea and looking across the Strait. All was calm and peaceful – but those people were edging away from him now, and he wanted to call them back.

Eventually he saw the monochrome face – as from a photograph – of Bernardo in the old picture, which showed a man of middle age, smiling and confident . . . and, last, there was another girl, the wound on her face open and oozing.

Each time the madness unhinged him and the shout welled in his throat, he put his clenched fist into his mouth and clamped down his teeth until the blood ran. The pain brought respite from the dreams, but then he would slide back. When he was capable of rational thought he assumed he was subject to delirium, brought on by cold, hunger and lack of movement.

First he saw stars. Then he saw the edge of a cloud wall. At its rim, it glowed silver.

The daughter had come out to smoke again. Men had had torches and shown their faces when cigarettes were lit on the track.

The kid had been out again with the dogs, no light, and had gone behind Jago, then joined the men on the track to the house. The wind was fiercer and branches cracked. Water tumbled to his right. The cloud was pushed on fast.

The moon broke free of the cloud. The puddles under his body seeped away each time he wriggled. Jago thought, with the moon’s appearance, that the delirium might wane. The blood on his hand had dried. There were lights on in the house, more down the track, and a concentration of them in two towns, then the darkness of the sea. He thought he knew the family now and was almost a part of them. He knew the girl who smoked and the mother who ruled the kitchen. He knew the old man, the head of the family, whom he had never seen, and the handyman who drove the car. He knew Marcantonio.

He crawled from the hole in which he had been hidden, and the madness left him. He pushed himself up into a crouch, then stretched. The bones in his back cracked as he straightened. The wind blew against him. He picked up the groundsheet and shook off the water. He laid it in front of him, then started to strip.

He took off each garment, wrung it out and found a little point of rock where he could lodge it. He had satisfied himself that it could not be seen, that the undergrowth and the sight line hid it. The overhang behind him would prevent it being visible to the upper point from which he estimated the sneeze had come. He guessed the man who had sneezed was on surveillance and would have the best gear. He would be dry and snug. The wind swirled around him, and he held his arms across the front of his body. He tipped the water out of his trainers. His body was dry now, but the wind was cold.

A matter of time: how long before the clothes dried in the wind? Another matter: how long before he froze to death, naked? And another: how long before the moon had climbed high enough to light the ledge where he stood? He didn’t think he could be seen from behind, where the sneezes had come from, or by the men down the track or the kid with the dogs.

His vest went.

It was white, had been washed at the laundry off Stresemann-strasse. Something, a twig or a leaf, had caught between the toes of his left foot. He had kicked out and the movement had dislodged the vest. It had been laid neatly. The wind had lifted it as if it was a crisps packet at a school gate. He lurched to catch it.

And failed.

He trod on sharp rock and recoiled.