No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (43 page)

Then Teresa was back, the children in her wake. She came running. Jago couldn’t understand why she wore smart clothes but lived in an out-of-the-way village. She might have had no life other than the visits he had seen her make to the house. But what did he know? The priest had backed away. Teresa was on the ground, holding her boy’s head and the world could hear her sobbing. Jago was a new man, unrecognisable to himself.

He did not regret having hurled the tyre iron. Neither was he triumphant. Other kids from school had supported West Ham, and in the City several of his colleagues had raved about Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur or Arsenal. When there was a ‘result’ the excitement was electric. It seemed to Jago that the death of a juvenile crime boss, groomed for high levels of violence, corruption and extortion, should have stacked higher than a goal scored on a September afternoon. He had felt no need to clench his fist and celebrate the moment. He felt very little. He had presided over a killing and now considered that what he had done was nothing special. That was why he was new and unrecognisable to himself.

He often walked from Stresemannstrasse towards the old Gestapo house, then along Niederkirchner-strasse. The pavement ran beside a wall behind which there had been the holding cells from which men and women were taken for interrogation or execution. He imagined that the men who inflicted pain or killed others would have gone home at the end of a day’s work and played with the kids, had a beer or shagged the wife. Similar men had tortured, then killed the remembered martyrs of St Bonaventure’s heritage – the Blessed Henry Heath, Arthur Bell and John Forest. He felt neither better nor worse for it.

Now Giulietta appeared, the handyman behind her. He took off his flat cap. She stood back and did not howl like the old woman’s or the boy’s mother. She stood tall and said a prayer – Jago saw her lips move – then crossed herself. He thought she wouldn’t have wanted to hold the shattered head under the tea-towel for fear it would stain her blouse.

Would the grandfather come, the old man? Had he been told? Plenty to watch, much to wait for.

The phone rang beside his bed. He reached for it, knocking away his spectacles. When he was younger there might have been a Beretta automatic pistol there, but his career had supposedly prospered and now he warranted a security detail. He had no personal firearm within arm’s reach.

The prosecutor answered it, and listened. He was told what was known.

The call came from the barracks at Locri. The duty officer had first referred the news of the death by gunshot – as relayed by a parish priest – to the operations centre in the region’s capital city, Reggio Calabria, but had been directed to call the prosecutor in person. He sat in his pyjamas on the side of the bed, his paunch hanging over the cord. His top was open and his wife massaged the knot of muscle at the back of his neck as he was briefed on what little information was available. Was an ambulance present, with paramedics? They had been refused entry by men blocking the track to the family’s residence, but the priest had confirmed death. No pulse, and half of the skull had been removed.

Were investigators present and had there yet been qualified examination of the location? Not yet. The priest had been told that the discharge of the shotgun was ‘accidental’. He considered, but took little time over it. A little sunlight came into the bedroom to play on the sheets and his wife’s hair. One of the children was at the door, woken by the phone, and he heard his car start outside, as his boys always did when there was a dawn call and they might be leaving in a hurry. He remembered the faces, expressions, sneers, of the families when a man was taken, the lingering hostility he could feel in the glares from the gallery when he appeared in court and worked towards a conviction. He recalled the arrogance of the men, who were punctilious in their politeness, and would have ordered his killing if it had suited them. And the loathing of the women, whose faces contorted with hatred for him.

‘Get there. Put a team in,’ he rasped into the phone. ‘Turn the place over. Look for the old man, any sign of him. It’s a gift from Heaven. Don’t waste it.’ The caller from Locri put in another request for guidance. The prosecutor barely considered the answer, agreed to it – an irrelevance.

There were men and women at the Brancaleone barracks whom Fred knew, and more at Locri. Old friendships did not easily die. They had driven between the two at fearsome speed, with a squad car clearing the way, blue light spinning and siren wailing. There were police from European forces who came to southern Italy and never seemed able to lose the appearance of contempt for their ‘colleagues’ wrestling with the differing brands of the Mafia, Italy’s ever-present, crushing cross. Not Fred. He had spoken his mind quietly when the law-and-order people of Calabria had eaten, drunk and swum with him. He had listened and had been accepted. A bigger point, which weighed well: Fred carried the most recent CCTV pictures of the grandson, Marcantonio, which offered the best hope of a formal identification that did not rely on the family and their associates. He was a friend and beside him was Carlo, who had a magic slip of paper, authorisation, in the breast pocket of his shirt. Things happened in times of confusion; doors were left ajar. Men like himself and Carlo were skilled at getting a foot into the gap and exploiting it. When chaos flooded in so did advantage. It was a rare chance to be marginally useful, and to be closer to where the banker boy was.

The radio played. Consolata stirred on the camp bed in the storeroom. She caught a news flash. The station had the name, the village in east Calabria, and the reporter said ‘First reports state that the shooting was accidental.’ She almost gasped.
Accidental?
She was surrounded by crude shelves on which were stacked packets of paper, pens, pencils, pamphlets, and booklets issued by the government that listed successes in the war against the ’Ndrangheta. Cardboard files held indexed newspaper cuttings going back to the founding of the group’s campaign. Her clothes were folded on a wooden chair. She knew . . .
Accidental
. . . She understood.

Consolata had slept poorly, but for some of the night she had dreamed of him. The openness of his face, the flatness of his belly, his quiet when the stress had built as they had approached the village, the way he had left her, not turning for a last glance. She had thought of him, and the dream had carried her towards a time when the winding road on the Aspromonte was behind them, the sunlit beach stretched away, and the castle at Scilla watched over them. She had played her part, and he would have known it. There was chemistry between them, no doubt about it. They would walk on the beach, arm in arm, hip to hip, and elsewhere – far away. Consolata was sure of it. She was off the bed and dressed hurriedly.

It was done, finished. She would extract him.

She slipped out of sight.

It was cold, calculating, and was done. In her room, Giulietta shrugged off her suit, then put on old jeans and a lightweight cardigan. She transferred her cigarillos to her hip pocket.

It was easy for her to go from the kitchen door, unseen, and bypass the gathering on the patio where the corpse still lay: her mother remained in her chair, her sister-in-law was still on her knees, and Annunziata’s children hugged the legs of a village woman, a cousin. The men talked quietly, and the priest was on his phone, calling the undertaker in Locri. She went behind them. The wolf’s carcass had been kicked aside, and she had to step over it. She had heard already that an ambulance crew was blocked further down the road, near to Teresa’s villa, but she assumed the
carabinieri
would soon be there, would demand access, which could not be refused.

She went behind the trellis where the ripe grapes brushed against her hair, and past a child’s plastic pedal car. There were small beds where tomatoes grew well, and also chillis. She was behind the sheets. Her head was down so she would not be seen.

To Giulietta, it was a disgrace that her father – past the average age of death in the Aspromonte communities – had to live out his last years in such degrading conditions: a hole in the ground.

There was a switch behind a stone in a wall. The stone was always removed carefully – lichen grew around it and it was kept sprinkled with soil. She pressed it, then replaced the stone. She rarely went into her father’s bunker – she detested it. More of the stones were mounted on a vertical slab, concreted and pinned to it; they slid away to expose the tunnel. Stefano oiled the mechanism. She took a deep breath and crawled inside. A concrete sewer pipe stretched ahead of her with low lights to guide her. She pressed another switch and the outer door was sealed. She crawled forward on her hands and her knees. There was another door ahead. Among the families there were many such bunkers. The most significant and luxurious belonged to the Plati clan, but the Pesche clan in Rosarno was similar. Both had refinements that her father had not wanted, that of champagne in the fridge, the internet and . . . She went on down the tunnel, scuffing her jeans. When she reached the door, she paused to collect herself. Was she stricken with grief? Hardly. She had had no love for her nephew, little respect. Was she angry? Consumed by it. More important to her than making an exhibition of grief beside the body was the image in her mind of a foreign client, coming to do business with her, staying at a hotel the family owned and being seen in the car park with two men who were quite obviously from European police agencies. She had seen them only because it was her practice to attend meetings early, scout and watch.

She went inside.

‘What in God’s name has happened this morning? Where’s Stefano? Have you brought my breakfast?’

She brushed the dust from her clothing. Sharply, she told her father to sit down. He did so.

They were given the white paper suits, over-boots and face masks. They were told not to speak. They sat in the back of an armoured jeep.

Carlo said, ‘We’ve fallen on our feet, mate. This beats sitting in an office.’

Fred was grinning. ‘We have been lucky, but I like to think that luck only goes to those who deserve it.’

The seats in front of them filled. Some of the men and women wore camouflage gear and others were kitted as they were. They lurched away, heading towards the narrow roads that led into the mountain foothills.

Bernardo listened.

He knew it was said of him, in the village and by other clans, that he had never shed a tear in his life. She spoke briskly, telling him what she knew, the facts. She omitted speculation. He had not wept when his mother had died, when he heard that his father had been killed by people from Siderno, or when his elder brother had died by the knife in a Roman gaol, or when his younger brother had been taken, trussed then thrown to his death in a gorge close to Plati. There had been no tears when news was brought from the
aula bunker
in Reggio that, on the word of a
pentito
, his two sons had been sentenced to the living death of Article 41
bis
. He heard what she said, and reflected. He was told it had been an accident, that a tyre iron, unexplained, had been near the body. She mentioned the wolf and its injury before Marcantonio had shot it at maximum range. He remembered what his grandson had told him – casual, expecting forgiveness, unrepentant – about a girl in a northern sector of inner Berlin who had an injured face, and a young man who had confronted him twice. About a
pizzo
. . . And he remembered what he had been told about an Audi sports car scratched in Berlin along its side, and back again, and the scrape on the City-Van, done during the night. He kept his counsel. If Marcantonio had had half of his aunt’s brains, if Giulietta had been a man . . . He could think it but not say it.

She said nothing that indicated any sorrow. He admired her honesty.

She made him coffee. She began to wash up the plates from his dinner. She allowed him to reflect. She went behind him and made the bed. He thought her nose, still bent from when he had dropped her, wrinkled as if the air in the bunker smelt stale. If he had not let her fall, she would have been a fine-looking woman, but he had, and she was not.

She told him about the Englishman.

Bernardo let rip his feelings. He swore, flooding the small area with obscenities. Her eyes seemed to say that he belittled himself. The man, meeting overseas policemen in the place where she had been to visit him, had insulted him grievously. He had never met him, had never seen a photograph of him. He had only the recommendation of an English lawyer living in a housing development up the coast from Brancaleone. He condemned the man. It was to pass sentence on an individual he didn’t know. She told him that the matter was safe in her hands. He raised the question of the priest. She would think about it. He sensed the passing of power: the shift from nephew to aunt. All his life he had never been dependent on any one person, not his father, his uncles, his brothers or Mamma. She should think urgently about the priest. And how much longer was he to be shut away under the earth, recycled air to breathe, a proper wash every two days? How much longer? She told him what the clerk had said. Another twenty-four hours maximum, and the pressure of close investigation would be lifted, resources moved and he would have something of his freedom. He asked her opinion: had Marcantonio brought the possibility of ruin on them, the scratched vehicles, or was it his imagination? Was there danger? Were they threatened, or safe?