No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (32 page)

The dogs were out. The men who came up the track shouted and waved torches. The daughter, Giulietta, was outside – he could hear her voice and the orders she gave.

The dogs quartered the ground, scattering gravel, bursting through the lower scrub, but the wind would have screwed up their sense of smell. He noted a thinner voice then, and thought the boy who patrolled with the dogs was there, and the man who drove the car. They were all milling around, confused.

Would he go back to Lamezia, ferried there by Consolata, and tell her he had done well? That he had confronted the family, taken a step against them? What had he done? she might ask, as she drove towards the airport. He had put the penknife she’d given him to good use. How good? He had scratched the side of a vehicle. A Maserati, a Ferrari, a top-of-the-range Porsche? No. A City-Van fit for the scrapyard. And he had punctured one of its tyres. He might give her back her penknife or keep it as a souvenir. Her head would shake and any admiration in her eyes would vanish.

He could return to Berlin, take the S-bahn across the city, go to the square and sit on a bench, then wait to see if the girl came out of the pizzeria. If she did, he could go to her, tell her that he had been to Calabria, had hidden above the home of her attacker and scratched the paintwork of a car. He might even show her the penknife. She would look at him with contempt.

Jago climbed on. The last of the moonlight guided him. He heard Marcantonio’s voice. He found the two boulders, twisted round and slid backwards inside.

Giulietta had a dressing-gown on, was bare-legged – she seemed to have lost interest. Marcantonio was beside the City-Van, Stefano showing him the scratches. Jago was just near enough to see his astonishment. Marcantonio wore boxer shorts, flip-flops and a T-shirt, his carefully spiked hair a wild mess. Only Marcantonio understood.

Jago lay very still. He saw that Marcantonio had a torch, a spotlight type, with a long, powerful beam. It was aimed up the slope, showing branches, tree trunks, and bounced off rock faces. Because of the torch he could no longer see Marcantonio’s face but imagined it creased with fury. It was still dark, but dawn was on the horizon. It would not be bright for hours. Marcantonio had time to brood on the City-Van’s scratches.

It was personal, between himself and the grandson of the family, who could strut about and not be confronted. Jago wondered how it would be to have come from a family of huge wealth and power, and be destined for vast authority. The torch beam played on the trees and found nothing. The others would have wondered when the vehicle had been damaged by vandals, wherever it had been. Not Marcantonio.

The torch was killed. The dogs were quiet. Marcantonio and Giulietta headed for the house, as did the driver. The kid, half dressed, called the dogs. The men went away down the track, and silence fell, but for the wind in the trees.

He thought he had done well. The rain had passed. Jago imagined the anger he had provoked. He wanted to see more. Today would be bright and hot. He hadn’t done enough but it was a start.

11

He had not seen it before the sun had risen high enough to clear the trees. An emptiness. There were heavy shadows behind the back door of the house, and beyond the line of the overgrown vine on the trellis, then darkness.

When the sun cleared the roof tiles, the warmth fell not only on Jago but also onto the washing line. The light was brilliant so he had a clear view of the path and the low retaining wall behind it. He could follow the broken stone paving to a halfway point where the slabs had slipped. The ground under them had slid down and the path went on to the pole from which the line was slung, then another wall and the roof of the derelict shed. Without the sun, Jago would not have registered the path and its emptiness.

The wind had dropped: the gale was now a blustery breeze. He studied the track, and the taut line.

The sheets had been a casualty. They were in the mud at the side of the path, trapped against the stones of the retaining wall. They were of good quality, he thought, better than those he had had in the attic studio on Stresemannstrasse, but had been left out to take their chance when the storm had hit. They lay in crumpled heaps. The emptiness was where they had been. Now they would need a double wash, with plenty of detergent – they were covered with mud.

Jago studied them. He was supposed to be capable of making good judgements. The bank paid him to be sharp.

Between the third and fourth sheets, where they had been dumped by the wind the path was deeper in the centre and shallower at the edges. The slip ran for some three metres, more than a third of the distance between the trellis and the wall that blocked the view of the near-ruined shed.

A cable . . .

. . . He could see a join in the centre of a length of cable – electrician’s tape had been used to join two lengths, then wrapped in transparent plastic. The cable had been buried along the part of the path that was hidden by the sheets. Not now.

At Canary Wharf, they’d rated him as intelligent. They’d thought the same of him at the university, where he’d done a business course, and in the City, where he had been recruited by the bank and reckoned worthy of the transfer to Berlin. They had rated him sharp and bright enough to go after prospective clients and meet those who had already signed up. The sun was on the cable. In Jago’s estimation, it had been laid recently – the plastic coating was not yet stained with damp or deterioration. It ran from the back of the house, below the path and towards the derelict shed. Then it continued alongside the building to a slope where rubble and earth were heaped high. Thorn and broom bushes grew there, but no trees.

It was as if his lottery numbers had come up. A special moment. A new challenge screamed at him that good times lay ahead. Jago was always at his best when he was challenged – and that was why he hadn’t run when he’d done the car.

The back door opened.

He felt elation. It wasn’t a moment for punching the air – as some in the City did when news of bonuses came through – but more as if he’d sipped a good whisky in front of a blazing log fire. He felt contented, as he had that Christmas when he he’d stayed in the country-house hotel. Answers tumbled towards him.

The old woman came out of the back door, the dogs close to her, and saw her sheets on the ground. In her black cardigan and skirt, black socks and black shoes, with the black scarf knotted over her head, it was clear she had no truck with sunshine. She would despise ‘luxury’, he thought. No silk underwear for her, no stylists queuing to do her hair. A stupid thought: he’d bet what little money he had in his wallet that she’d have cooked him an amazing pasta dish, and would have dried his clothes, then ironed them expertly. Nothing about her was attractive. Her photograph had been on the policeman’s file in the station on Bismarckstrasse so she had flitted into Berlin and was linked, therefore, to a slashed face. He was there, in part, because of her and what she would have taught her grandson.

A second stupid thought: she would fight to her last breath to protect her family.

She smacked her hands together, then spread her feet so that she could bend down to collect the sheets. She moved along the path and stopped short of where the ground had slipped. The hole was in front of her and one more sheet lay on the far side. She whistled, a note he recognised: it was the one the kid used when he had the dogs on the hills. The dog closest to her knee was brindled, a crossbreed. The command – from between her teeth – was faint but clear. It bounded forward, reached the last sheet, scratched it into a tighter ball, then clamped its jaws on it and dragged it to the woman. Jago looked for a sign of appreciation shared between the dog and its mistress. He saw no love, no gratitude. She looked towards the end of the path, stared at the honeysuckle that grew up the building’s wall, still in flower. Her mouth twitched. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her nose and went back to the house.

The sun rose. The cable was now in dense shadow.

Jago understood. What to do with his knowledge would exercise him. What to do that was more than scratching vehicles. He thought her magnificent, uncompromising.

Jago checked his watch, worked out when he could make the rendezvous with Consolata and have water, food and clothing. He wondered briefly what she would bring, but was more concerned with the exposed cable.

‘What could you see?’

Fabio answered, ‘I can’t see from here where the sheets were – that rock blocks it – but she’s picked them up, the four sheets.’

Ciccio tapped the newest message into the keypad.

‘And what do they make of what happened last night?’

‘Not my problem.’

They lapsed into silence and the message was sent. Ciccio had one certainty: it was someone else’s problem. He didn’t know who that someone was, had seen only a shadow moving, and the image-intensifier glasses had not shown him a face. The shadow had crawled out of the night and attacked the home of a noted player, the head of a medium-ranking family. He had not dynamited the place or splashed petrol on the door and tossed a match or sprayed the upper windows with automatic fire from an AK. He had scratched a car. Why? And the consequences?

That was easier to answer. Ciccio had seen the results of ’Ndrangheta killings, those who had been strangled, starved to death in makeshift gaols and shot in the street. Once, part of a corpse had not quite dissolved because the acid in the vat had been used too often. As a consequence there would be a body. They had done their job, had observed and reported, and it was for others to pick over the information they had provided. It seemed to have no relevance to the Scorpion Fly surveillance operation. The clock ticked, and time slipped by.

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘What?’

‘The scorpion flies we collected are dead and useless. We tried. Is that good enough?’

‘Always. We tried and there’s a reward.’

It diverted them to talk about the insect that looked like a killer and was harmless. The fate of the scorpion fly collection mattered almost as much as sighting the target. The wretched little creatures gave them a degree of sanity. They treated themselves to a dawn lunch,
wurstel
and a can of fruit cocktail. The combination would play havoc with their digestion, but they reckoned they deserved it. To Ciccio, the consequence for the shadowy figure was inevitable – as night follows day.

‘You’ve been here before?’ Carlo snapped, from the side of his mouth.

They were escorted up wide stairs – it hadn’t seemed worth waiting for the lift. A uniformed man was ahead. They had been through a metal detector – they had dumped their change and phones in a tray for X-ray, and their ID cards and passports had been photocopied. ‘Yes. Nothing’s different,’ Fred answered him.

‘We have an agenda?’

‘Bend the knee, apologise, be helpful. Say as little as possible.’

It was a best-clothing occasion, trousers, jackets, ties. The walls had been recently painted but institutional grime seemed to cling to them. There were no works of art, and the paintwork was a dull cream. On the landing there were ranks of closed doors, numbered, the occupants’ names not displayed. They walked the length of a corridor. Ahead they could see an open lobby area.

Men pushed up from the sofas and hard chairs where they smoked, read magazines or watched their phones’ screens. They were not those who had entertained them in the Ciroma bar the previous night. Carlo had drunk too much and Fred had matched him beer for beer. It was the story of his life that, too often, he was half-cut when he needed to be stone-cold sober, his antennae alert. He felt flushed and sweaty. The German looked better, which was a bitter pill for Carlo to swallow: Fred could hold his beer better than himself.

The men were the protection team. Some carped that they were superfluous, and, he’d heard, when he’d done the liaison from Rome, that they provided a visual symbol of ego. He knew enough of the differing Mafia groups to believe they sensed weakness and exploited it. They would kill their enemies, if it suited them.

He had been told a story about the killing of Paolo Borsellino, in Palermo, when that prosecutor had been a ‘walking cadaver’ and it was known he had been condemned. He’d had a team of five guards, always with him, in as much danger as he was. It was said that Borsellino used to evade the team and go out, when he needed cigarettes, that he hoped he would be shot then, alone, so that their lives would be spared. They had all died with him, four policemen and a policewoman.

These men would be the prosecutor’s family. Their anoraks and denim jackets were on the arms of the sofa and they wore their shoulder holsters. They would know that their man was facing ever-increasing isolation, and that an investigation was close to failure – all in the ‘briefing’ at the bar. He and Fred added to the burden on the man’s shoulders. The Mafia sent out their gunmen and their bombmakers when a target was isolated. Now he and Fred faced cold stares. He would have expected nothing else. One checked their names, their ID, went to an unmarked door and spoke into a microphone. They were waved inside. He doubted a single prosecutor in London or Berlin grasped this man’s lifestyle.

A cigarette burned in a cheap tourist ashtray, already half filled with butts, and the day had barely started. He wore braces, his shirt was unbuttoned low on his chest – a crucifix hung from a chain round his neck – and his fingers were stained mahogany with nicotine. The shirt cuffs were open, the links undone. He had three or four days’ stubble on his cheeks and his spectacles were balanced high on the crown of his head. The wall, predictably, was covered with the shields of other forces: German, French, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Spain, Greece and an elaborate one from Colombia. A
carabinieri
cap lay on a shelf, with a child’s model of a helicopter in
carabinieri
livery. In Carlo’s experience, some men carried the burden of their work easily and could muster a smile of welcome. In a few, hope had died. The other shelves groaned under the weight of the files stacked on them.