No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (33 page)

Nothing had changed. It was as Carlo remembered it. They dealt in paper, made mountains of it, and the burden grew. In London, in Green Lanes, Peckham, Deptford or out on the Essex fringes, there might be a celebration in a bar if a big player was brought in. There was nothing as crude here as a rogues’ gallery of wanted men: there wasn’t room – it would have covered all of the walls and maybe the ceiling.

The prosecutor sat down. They were not offered chairs.

‘You came to tell me . . .’.

The German spoke up. He was good at taking blame and accepting shit. He talked about a bank worker and a pizzeria in Berlin’s smart Charlottenburg, the young man’s intervention, a girl’s face disfigured and . . .

‘Would you get to the point?’

Fred spoke good enough Italian. He told the prosecutor of an error made, a file left visible on a computer screen, a message calling him from the room. The bank worker’s disappearance, a vandalised car . . .

‘The car was the property of the grandson of Bernardo Cancello? And the vandalism was the act of a Briton, Jago Browne?’
The prosecutor spoke reasonable English. ‘What was the act of vandalism?’

Fred told him. A uniformed policeman from Bismarckstrasse had checked Marcantonio’s address. The vehicle had been parked outside and two parallel lines had been scraped on the bodywork: expensive to repair.

‘He’s there. Your man, Browne, has reached us. Last night, officers on surveillance duty witnessed an unidentified man scratch the sides of a City-Van outside the home of that
padrino
. The vehicle is an artisan’s transport, old and worthless. He is there for what purpose other than to scratch cars?’

Fred said he didn’t know what the Englishman, who had no military training, no police experience, no law-enforcement knowledge, intended. He was in the sales division of a bank specialising in attracting investors. It was unlikely he had either accomplices or a lethal weapon.

Carlo did not intervene. They had come to help in any way possible, to be present, demonstrate solidarity and liaise. He saw the cigarette ground out and another lit. He reckoned Fred had done well in the circumstances.

‘He is now in hiding. I think that soon they will find him. If they do, they will kill him. To me that is irrelevant. I am looking for Bernardo Cancello. I am coming towards the end of a lengthy investigation that depends on his capture. With a stranger close to him, he will have gone even further into those goddamn mountains where an army can disappear. Will I try to save him and thereby wreck the last hours of my mission? Or do I leave him to his fate? I don’t doubt its certainty. At the end of the week I lose my assets, my eyes on the ground, and start on another case. I shall have failed. Where I work there is danger in failure. Each time
I
fail, or
we
fail,
they
have won. They exploit all victories. Your man is helping me to fail. Have you anything else to say?’

Fred nodded in agreement with all that had been said – no medals in confrontation – and said that their bosses expected them to remain in Calabria until the bank worker could be located and brought home: repatriated, alive or dead. The prosecutor scribbled a name on a sheet of paper and a phone number in the
carabinieri
building on Via Aschenez. A file was opened and a meeting ended.

A final word: ‘And stay the fuck out of my way.’

They were outside.

‘You did well,’ Carlo told him.

Fred clasped the scrap of paper with the name and number. They’d get some paperwork done.

‘Just have to look on the bright side,’ Carlo said. ‘Achieve what’s possible . . . It’s what we do every day.’

Fred said, ‘Yes.’

‘Can’t do any more. Won’t be anything new.’

‘Because we’re just the little people. I said it’s “unlikely” that he had accomplices. But he can’t have got himself this far without help.’

‘In the time he had available, it would have been impossible.’

‘Don’t sell him short,’ Fred said. ‘I did – I won’t again.’

The sun shone as they emerged from the building.

‘Is this any business of ours?’

‘We should make it our business.’

Carlo paused on the pavement. ‘Tell me, he has no experience of the military, no training in covert warfare, has never fought hand to hand, except perhaps as a kid. Is he better off for knowing nothing? Or is he a lamb to the slaughter? I don’t know.’

Fred frowned. ‘Might be better off. He’s not dependent on support, back-up, no rule book in his pocket, no commander bleating in his ear. And he’s a true volunteer. I think he’s better off. But he is not quite alone because he has a helper. God, what do I know?’

She had done her shopping early at the mini-mart, put fuel in her parents’ car and was on the road. Nothing on the radio that involved her, except reports of flooding in the north and landslips on a railtrack south of Naples, the usual shit about a month’s rain falling in a day. Consolata had gone through his rucksack again and taken out dry clothing.

She drove north of Archi, then turned off the main road at Gallico towards the mountains and began the climb. Had anyone been with her, she would have said that you left civilisation at Santo Stefano in Aspromonte. There were few road signs but she was comfortable enough with the route. Boys herding goats, women collecting mushrooms, hikers in columns, cars travelling fast and lorries hugging cliff edges. The sun was higher and the road gleamed in her face. She had the window down and let the wind ripple the skin of her arms and throat. She was east of Varapodio, making good time, while the radio played soft music between news bulletins and weather reports and— She hit the brake.

The tyres screamed, burned. If she hadn’t stamped on the pedal, she would have hit the car in front of her. In front of it, a tractor was towing a trailer and in front of the tractor there was a roadblock.

She didn’t know what had happened on the hill above the house. Didn’t know what he had done. Didn’t know if they had her name. Didn’t know whether he was alive, dead or hunted. She had food for him. His rucksack was in the back of her car, with travel documents in his name; she had fuel for the vehicle in a plastic litre bottle. The roadblock was mounted by
carabinieri
, but not the ones with the fancy uniforms. These men wore military combat clothing, with sub-machine guns. Their protective vests were weighed down with reserve ammunition magazines and they carried gas, pistols and handcuffs on their belts. She thought she was about five kilometres from the point above the village where she had parked and left him.

What to do? The tractor driver was being interrogated. He was not handed back his papers and waved through. This was planned and thorough. If they had his and her names, she would go into a cage.

Consolata swung the wheel – she did the equivalent of tiptoeing away. A discreet three-point turn, and then she hit the zigzags. So, he had no food, no water and wet clothing – if he was still there. She shrugged. She’d come back when the roadblock had gone. She didn’t know him and the radio had said nothing about him. She retraced her route. She barely understood him and he hadn’t helped. She resented that – she wanted to know him . . .

He watched Giulietta.

The confirmations came in a line . . .

Jago knew the bus route to school that went along Barking Road. The shelter was inadequate if it rained, but he’d have to wait ages – then three would come at once. Old rule. Predictable. Three confirmations in a line, like London buses.

There was Giulietta and the washing for the line. The handyman was following with a spade. The chickens and the dogs were with them.

He could see enough.

Giulietta would have been barely older than the girls at the bank, but Renate, Elke and Hannelore wouldn’t have been seen dead in clothing like hers or have left their hair to its own devices, as Giulietta did. She had a plastic basket tucked under one arm, which she put on the ground. She shook out the folded sheets, then started to peg them to the line. Each time a sheet was placed in position, it denied Jago a view of that section of the path. The sheets made a screen. To a casual observer, they were there to dry. The second fell off at one end and she had to go back to refasten it.

The handyman was in front of her with the spade and dug a trench, then toed the cable into it and patted the earth back into place, stamped on the loose soil, and manoeuvred the slabs so that the walkway was smoother. He worked where earth had subsided and Jago had seen the join in the cable. Giulietta jabbed her finger at him, issued instructions and flounced about in annoyance at the time he took. The chickens squawked and bustled at her feet. Twice she aimed a kick at them. When all the sheets were hung, and the path had been levelled, Jago could no longer see the cable.

The join in it had been a yard left of where the third and fourth sheets overlapped. Jago took two small twigs, fallen in the night and scratched a line with his penknife on a rock; beyond it he worked the twigs into the ground. He had a pointer to the overlap of the sheets and the join in the cable.

There was a whistle and a shout. Marcantonio was at the back door, dressed. The sunlight caught the muscles in his arms and his hair. The dogs came to the whistle, and the kid to the shout.

Jago couldn’t see either Giulietta or the handyman on the path because they were on the far side of the sheets. He breathed an oath. The young man, Marcantonio, had called the dogs and the kid, then had gone back into the kitchen and retrieved a shotgun. The barrels were sawn off a little more than halfway down.

Jago had time now to break and run.

Marcantonio gazed up and around, his eyes raking across the trees, slopes and sheer rock faces, as if he knew. It stood to reason: a man who had scratched his car in Berlin wouldn’t come all this way to do the same to another a vehicle then quit. The scratches symbolised a challenge to fight. Had Jago meant that? His difficulty now was to get clear. He had to come out of the hole under the two boulders, then scramble up a rock face where he would be silhouetted against light grey rock and soft lichen. He didn’t know if he was within range of the shotgun, but the dogs would have him. He lay still, barely breathing, head down. In his mind he saw Marcantonio’s face: cold, brutal and angry – the latter a victory of sorts.

He heard whistles and shouts. He thought Marcantonio and the kid had taken different routes but the dogs ran between them. How would it be if feet or paws appeared before his eyes? The penknife was in his hand, the short blade exposed.

‘What did the woman do, Fabio?’

‘Hung out the washing, of course.’

‘I saw that – but what did he do with the spade?’

‘I don’t know. But the grandson’s out with a firearm and the fucking dogs.’

‘What’s the engagement regulation again?’

‘You know that as well as I do, Fabio. If our lives are threatened we can shoot.’

‘Ciccio, if we shoot, we can’t expect support in high places. But those bastards won’t take me . . . Do we just get the hell out?’

There was no answer. Both men had eased their Berettas clear of the holsters, armed them and checked the safety. Both hardly dared to breathe. It was the body smells they feared, the food wrappers in their bag, the excrement in the tinfoil . . . Fabio watched as Ciccio sent a message of the danger closing in on them. They heard whistles, shouts and dogs barking.

The boy went directly behind the house and climbed a scree slope. Marcantonio was to his left, and the dogs roved between them.

Below, Stefano had the City-Van jacked up and the spare wheel ready on the ground.

Marcantonio came warily. He had explained little to the kid of why they were searching the wooded, rocky slope or what they expected to find. The kid was the son of a cousin and would never be within the family’s inner loop. He would be a foot-soldier, a
picciotto
, and would grow old in a junior rank. He might go to gaol for years, and would never be able to break free of the family’s control. Now, and in the future, the kid would do as he was told, and receive explanations only if it suited. He didn’t know where the City-Van had been when scratched, or when the tyre had been cut.

Marcantonio couldn’t control the dogs the way the kid did – the kid guided them with shrill whistles, but Marcantonio had to shout at them. He stumbled twice. His trainers had lightly ribbed soles, good for walking in Locri or Siderno, but not suitable for the hills. He had been a child when his father was taken, but his father had rarely been in the valleys or on the mountains. He had spent time in Reggio and Milan. Marcantonio wasn’t used to covering almost vertical ground where the rock could be razor sharp or slid away under his weight. The kid was like a goat, and climbed fast. The dogs wanted to be with him, not with Marcantonio.

It was years since he had fired a shotgun, and then it had been at a cardboard box, at a range of twenty metres. The spread would have brought down a running man or crippled a deer, but that was the limit. He was poor with a pistol, had seldom been out with other teenagers to fire at cans – for fear of failing. It was not in the nature of the ’Ndrangheta to kill at random. His grandfather had always said that killing was done to exert extreme pressure on enemies and remove obstacles to a quiet life. He had enough reason to carry the shotgun, which was loaded, and it would have been the work of three or four seconds to lock it, draw back the hammer, squeeze and fire.