by Brian Lumley
Luigi Castellano’s villa, on Sicily’s Tyrrhennian coast in the district of Bagheria—one of his several Mediterranean villas, or, more properly, bases of operation—was a two-storey affair of numerous externally louvered windows (all of them closed), a walled balcony that enclosed the upper structure, and variously angled, steeply sloping roofs of fish-scale tiles in a dark red terra cotta. A gravel drive wound from ornate iron gates set in high stone walls, through an ancient olive grove of grotesquely twisted trees, to a dusty parking area in front of the villa.
Once the seat of an olive-oil empire, the place had always been sumptuously appointed—but never more so than now. During the more than thirty years since the deaths or disappearances of Castellano’s “uncles” (at which time he’d bought the villa out of what was rumoured to have been an enormous inheritance), not one of the many “business associates,” the handful of visitors, and even fewer guests who had entered the place past the cordon of armed “soldiers” on the gates and in the grounds, had failed to be impressed by Castellano’s ever-expanding, magpie collection of objets d’art.
In one of the ground-floor rooms, a large, gloomy, heavily draped, yet fabulously rich room (in fact Castellano’s study in this, his principal dwelling), the walls with their old masters and antique tapestries, the shelved alcoves with rank upon rank of gilded statuettes and ivory miniatures, the display-cabinets and -tables strewn with every conceivable kind of jewelled bric-a-brac—every-thing offered mute testimony to the obsession of a dedicated collector.
But on a more businesslike desk in that same room—a desk free of priceless “clutter”—the repetitive, softly insistent purr of a telephone had been sounding for several long seconds before Castellano’s right-hand man, a lieutenant of very long standing, hurried in through an arched doorway to answer it.
At the same time, coming from his bedroom behind an iron-banded second door, Luigi Castellano himself queried, “Who the hell is it, and why did you let it go on ringing for so long?” He voiced his question in an angry, rumbling growl, but yet in an accent that affected a cultured tone. “Damn it all, Garzia! You’ve let it wake me up!”
Fastening the belt of his flame-red dressing gown, he came to a halt in the central area of the room and stood glaring at his lieutenant where he in turn stood by the desk.
Castellano was tall, slim, and forward-leaning … but at such an odd angle that he gave the impression of being about to reach out for something with his spindly arms and long-fingered hands. Judging by his looks, he would be aged somewhere between his mid-thirties and early forties, while in fact he was almost ninety. His shining, night-black hair was brushed back to cover the tips of long ears where they lay flat to his head; his nose was broad and flat in a face that was long and slender to match his frame. Yet with his dark, sunken eyes—which at a certain angle flared a luminous, almost feral yellow—and despite his pallor and the weirdly alien design of his form and features in general, still he was possessed of a strange attraction.
“I was in the grounds,” Garzia answered reasonably. “I was reminding the men that we’re expecting a visitor—our Russian contact—and warning them to treat him with respect … well, for now, at least.” Having acquitted himself, he spoke into the telephone, inquiring, “Yes?” And, in the next moment, “It’s for you, Luigi. Alfonso Lefranc, calling you from London.”
“Alfonso?” Castellano grunted. “Huh! Not before time—and yet at the wrong time, too! Doesn’t that idiot Lefranc know any better than to disturb me at this time of day?”
At the desk he seated himself in an armchair before accepting and speaking into the telephone. “Alfonso? I’d almost given up on you. This has to be very important, that you’d call me at this time of day. I take it you have what I wanted? But please, be very careful how you answer.”
That last wasn’t any kind of threat (although in different circumstances it might have been: if, for instance, Lefranc had not got what Castellano wanted), but simply a reminder: that in the technologically advanced twenty-first century, no man could ever be sure that his telephone conversations were 100 percent secure. And Luigi Castellano, as the head of a small but expanding international illicit drugs empire, just couldn’t afford to take that kind of chance.
In London it was 2:45 P.M. Alfonso Lefranc was in a hooded booth on Victoria railway station. About five-foot-five, thin and shifty-eyed, with badly pockmarked features and a twitchily nervous disposition, he had a certain animal aura about him … that of a small, bad-tempered, and generally unpleasant rodent. A human rat, yes, or—if not for his awkward, seemingly uncoordinated movements—perhaps a weasel.
Some might say it went with his job—the dirty work that Lefranc had used to do for the Surete and Belgian drug squads—as a nark, and informer on the gangland activities of his former underworld friends; work at which he’d excelled—until they’d asked him to look into the affairs of one Luigi Castellano. But where a majority of the European law enforcers were straight, a handful were on the take, in Castellano’s pocket, and he always paid well for inside information.
The informer had been informed upon, and word of Lefranc’s snooping had found its way back to Castellano …
They had picked him up in Marseilles, which would have been the end of him if Castellano hadn’t recognized his talent. What Alfonso Lefranc had done for the police he could now do for his new boss, Castellano himself.
The pay would be good—better by far than the piddling handouts he’d seen from any of his former “employers”—and the side benefits would be even better: Life on the French and Italian Rivieras, in the casinos, and on the yachts. Quality clothing, the best booze, good food, and bad women. Castellano made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: work for him and live the good life, or stop living, stop dead … period.
They had been on one of the mob’s yachts at the time, and Lefranc had been shown what could happen to anyone who crossed the Sicilian dealer. The trip had taken the form of a party—a really wild ride with plenty of Bollinger in buckets of ice, designer drugs on silver trays, and young girls strewn like so much confetti all over the place—to celebrate a declaration of peace between Castellano and a notorious French competitor. Frenchie Fontaine had a couple of minders with him, as always, but the atmosphere on deck was so friendly that it wasn’t long before the hard men succumbed to the wine and to a trio of sirens both, retiring with the latter to a stateroom.
Their wine was drugged; they never fully recovered; they had to be halfcarried back on deck after all the other guests except Frenchie had been sent below. But Lefranc had been told to stay and watch as Castellano cut the throats of the minders and his men wrapped their bodies in lead weights before pushing them overboard. By that time Frenchie, restrained by the Sicilian’s men, had been complaining fairly volubly; so they’d taken turns at coshing him in the mouth to shut him up.
And finally it had been time to say a fond farewell, when Castellano had thrown back a tarpaulin to display a heavy steel locker. Frenchie—all bloodied in his face and spitting teeth—hadn’t looked as if he really believed it, but he’d believed it enough to start fighting again when Castellano’s men went to cram him in the locker!
This time, apparently pissed at Frenchie’s very determined efforts to stay alive, they’d worked on his elbows, knees, ribs and spine, literally immobilizing him until all he could do for the moment was writhe about on the deck like a crippled snake.
Then into the locker, his metal coffin; and all the while the drugs boss Luigi Castellano talking to Frenchie, explaining things to him even as he slammed the door shut (with two of his men standing on it to get it to stay shut) against the frenzied kicking and hammering and cursing from within. And the Sicilian tut-tutting to himself as he attached a padlock, before continuing to explain that this wasn’t personal but business pure and simple; that there wasn’t room enough for both men on the drugs scene, but that there was plenty of room for Frenchie—lots of it—at the bottom of the ocean maybe two h
undred metres down, midway between Marseilles and Perpignan!
Then the splash as the locker landed flat on the dead calm sea, bobbing there a while and settling before slowly turning upright like a wetly lolling tombstone half out of the water, and gradually sinking as the sea found a way in. By then all the kicking, hammering and head-butting had quietened to a dull thumping—an invisible squirming and heaving, and a muted shrieking that was sensed or imagined rather than heard—that only served to set the locker bobbing to and fro, sinking that much faster as Frenchie’s weight shifted with his spasms.
And standing at the rail in the shade of the deck’s black- and gold-striped canopy where they rode at anchor—shielding his head from the Mediterranean sun under a broad-brimmed hat, and his eager eyes behind the dark glasses that had become his trademark whenever he went out in daylight—Luigi Castellano had adopted that familiar, avid, forwards-leaning stance, with his knuckles white and his hands like claws where they gripped the rail.
And there he’d stayed as the locker slid from view, until the last few bubbles had risen to the surface …
By then Castellano’s men had been swabbing down the deck, and one of them—the torpedo Francesco “Frankie” Reggio—had even popped a champagne cork and was sluicing telltale crimson slop overboard with fifty-francs-a-flute bubbly. That was when their boss had straightened up, backing away from the rail, as a fickle current began to drift the yacht more surely into the sunlight.
And as if noticing Lefranc for the first time, Castellano had said: “So there you have it, Alfonso. It’s as easy as that. I can use you, but I certainly wouldn’t miss you if you turned me down. So you’ll either work for me … or you won’t. What’s it to be?”
At which Lefranc had asked him how soon he could start …
“Well?” Castellano’s growing impatience was clearly evident in his sharp tone of voice, which brought Lefranc back to earth—and to the present, the here and now—with a jolt. “Have you got something for me, or haven’t you? You got me out of my bed, Alfonso, and I’m sure there must be a very good reason why I’m standing here in my dressing gown talking to a fucking idiot—other than that you like the sound of my voice, that is!”
“I’ve got something for you, yes!” the other gasped. “I’ve got it, but—you’re not going to like it, Luigi. Not at all.”
“Where are you?” Having noted the fear in his man’s voice, the drugs boss sat up straighter. It could only be that Lefranc really was afraid to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. But since that was his job he had no choice.
“I’m in London,” Lefranc answered. “The railway station at Victoria, which has to be the next best thing to a secure line. No one’s ever likely to eavesdrop a telephone conversation from a railway station! Like, you know, all those calls from guys to their women, telling them their train’s been delayed so they’ll be late getting in? I mean, who’s going to give a shit? Anyway, I always call in from this kind of place: public telephones in airports and railway stations, and like that. But hey, you know I wouldn’t take any chances, Luigi! Not with security. Not with your security!”
“And if you’re being watched, followed?”
“But I’m not.” And despite that his boss couldn’t see him, Lefranc gave a nervous shake of his head. “And even if I was—even if some guy had an am-plifier on me—what could he hear in a place like this?” To illustrate his point, he held the phone outside the shielding hood, where an intercity diesel was roaring and jetting gasses, making the air shimmer and the platform vibrate as the driver checked out his huge engines.
“Very well,” said Castellano grudgingly, after the racket in his receiver had subsided. “So what is it you’ve found out? Do you know who those people were, what they were doing in Australia, and why Jake Cutter was with them?”
“Er, all of that stuff?” Lefranc answered apprehensively. “Well no—not everything, not really. But other stuff—hell, yes! And this is … I mean, it’s something really big, Luigi! It’s just that I’m trying to find the best place to start.”
“How about starting at the beginning?” Castellano growled. “In Brisbane, maybe?”
“Right,” said Lefranc. “Brisbane, sure—after you said I should follow them and find out about them. No problem—I was on the next plane out …
“ … I’d managed to get their names off their luggage tags at Brisbane airport, but I had to be careful because that Jake Cutter guy might have recognized me. And like—you know what I mean—me and you, we’re the only ones left, right?”
Lefranc was talking about Cutter’s vendetta, and the fact that of the five people who had been involved with the Russian girl that night, only he himself and his boss remained alive. But when Castellano made no reply, he continued with his story:
“Anyway, when I got into Heathrow, I asked at the Quantas desk about these people I was supposed to be meeting: this guy called Trask, a Chinese guy called Chung, and a girl called Liz Merrick. Naturally they told me these people had come in on the earlier flight, which of course I already knew. But when I said no way—that wasn’t right—and after I’d made out like I was pissed about it, they showed me the printout from the Skyskip’s passenger list. Their names were there, of course, and I took a good long look and committed this Chung’s address to memory. It was easy. Then all I had to do was explain to the people on the desk that I’d obviously made a bad mistake, apologize, and get the hell out of there …
“Pretty smart, eh?”
“Get on with it,” said Castellano.
“Anyway,” Lefranc quickly went on, “this Chung has a place in central London, so I went after him.
“It took a little time, but eventually I tracked him down, followed him to a hotel in the middle of the city. And the rest of that crowd were there. Again it took a while, but if I stood around long enough—which I was obliged to do—they were in and out of there regular as bees at a hive. Which includes this Jake Cutter, who is supposed to be on all the most-wanted lists right across Europe!
“But this was—I don’t know—a very weird scene, Luigi. Weird as shit. They were using the hotel’s back entrance, these people, but they were the only ones who used it! Like, you know, maybe it belonged to them? And that wasn’t all, ’cause while they seemed to have the run of the place, this big, expensive hotel, none of them was registered there! I know because I phoned the desk and checked it out. This Cutter, Trask, Chung, and all the others: they don’t have rooms in that hotel. Like weird, right? I mean, how do you figure it, Luigi?”
Lefranc’s pause was deliberate, so that it might even seem he was playing some kind of guessing game with his boss; but in fact he only desired to break the other’s silence, to know that he was being heard, to be told that he was doing okay, and just to be able to converse with this fucking Sicilian like … like another human being and not as if he were a piece of shit!
But while Alfonso Lefranc was human (or perhaps subhuman), Castellano wasn’t like any other man he’d ever known, and sometimes he seemed anything but human! Like the time on that yacht for instance—which Lefranc still nightmared about—and like right now, as the silence between the two lengthened, extending itself and growing ever more deafening.
So that Lefranc gave a massive start, when at last Castellano’s warning growl sounded from the phone: “Alfonsoooo …!”
“I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it!” Lefranc babbled, as he suddenly realized that in the other’s eyes he was indeed just such a piece of shit and nothing more. But his nerves were really jumping now; it was always the same when he had to speak to Castellano; there was no pleasing the guy, who simply didn’t appreciate all the hours of hard work that people put in on his behalf. But Christ, it had been a mistake to task the bastard’s patience like that! And an even bigger one to keep on doing it! So that finally, with a deal of twitching and jerking, Lefranc continued with his report.
“Luigi, this hotel has seven floors. Stand outside and you can count �
�em. But the room numbers only go up to six-four-two. As for the rear entrance and the elevator in back of the place: that really does belong to them! So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where they are, right? The only place where they can be? They’re up there on the top floor, sure!
“Okay, so that’s where they are, but it still doesn’t tell us who they are or what they’re doing, and obviously I couldn’t just phone the place and ask what was going on up there. And I certainly wasn’t about to go barging in there myself and, like, make a target of myself for this Jake Cutter. Which meant I had to get a man inside.
“Well, I’ll cut a long story short—”
“Thank goodness for that!” said Castellano sneeringly.
“—And get right to it,” Lefranc went on. “I paid a guy to go in, spend a couple of nights at my expense, do some cautious snooping and find out what he could. This is how it turns out:
“The top floor isn’t a part of the hotel as such; it’s the HQ or offices of a bunch of international entrepreneurs—what-the-hell-ever that’s supposed to mean! Also, my snoop found out that they sometimes eat in the restaurant on the third floor.
“So a couple of days ago, I finally had to move in. I mean I had to—you’ll see why in a minute—but ! I was careful and got a room on the first floor. And before I let my snoop go, I had him plant a bug where these people eat in the restaurant.
“That was why I had to be in the hotel. See, I was obliged to use whatever equipment I could get hold of; I didn’t want to buy expensive, quality stuff in case somebody got curious about what I was doing. But like, with the cheap stuff … hey, I was just a guy checking out his two-timing wife, right? But because it was cheap stuff, it didn’t have too much range. So that’s me in the hotel …
“And talk about after-dinner speakers: Luigi, I heard some weird shit coming out of that restaurant!
“This outfit, these, er, international entrepreneurs: they call themselves E-Branch—and are they connected! I heard some talk about a ‘Minister Responsible’—like, maybe a government minister? And the way they speak is really something else; it’s almost a foreign language. English, but coded. So okay, foreign languages are a hobby of mine. Italian, Russian, English—you name it—these are things I’m good at. But codes are something else. And these people … sometimes it’s like they’re speaking in some kind of fucking cipher!