A Death In Calabria

by Michele Giuttari

  In the meantime the house had been surrounded.

  Antonio Russo’s car was still parked in the same place. Beside it were two other cars, indicating that Russo’s guests must still be inside. But there was no light in the windows, not even a dim one.

  Suddenly there was a booming sound.

  A dull one.

  And a flash of light lit up part of the garden.

  The heavy, iron-studded wooden front door shattered into pieces.

  A matter of seconds.

  Fractions of seconds.

  And they were inside.

  Each of the teams moved according to the orders they had been given.

  The only sound was the crackling of portable radios. All the messages were the same: no one at home. Certainly they would not have expected to find Russo’s wife and two children. A DIA officer had seen them go out that morning and they had not yet come back.

  But why did the farmhouse seem uninhabited?

  A thousand thoughts were going through Trimarchi’s mind. He wasn’t the only one. The stillness worried everybody.

  ‘Keep looking,’ he ordered. ‘They must be somewhere.’

  Less than five minutes later, he heard Captain Foti’s somewhat altered voice coming through his earpiece. ‘Sir, come downstairs.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the cellar.’

  Trimarchi rushed down the stairs with his pistol in his hand, followed by Carracci and Armando Greco and some of his men.

  Captain Foti was standing in the doorway.

  ‘There’s something I think you should see, sir,’ he said immediately, in a voice tinged with excitement.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Follow me, I’ll show you.’

  Trimarchi followed him.

  They walked through the cellar. Large crates of wine and demijohns of olive oil stood against the rough stone walls. The air smelled damp and mildewed. Bulbs protected by metal cages hung from the ceiling. The floor was of beaten earth. They stopped in front of the furthest wall.

  ‘Look!’ With his right hand, Trimarchi pointed to racks of wine bottles and, next to them, an old cupboard pushed right up against the wall. ‘What’s in this thing?’

  ‘Tools, I’d guess.’ Foti opened one of the doors and pulled out a kind of briefcase. ‘Look, there’s a home-made satellite phone, sir.’

  Trimarchi nodded. It was identical to the one they’d found in the quarry at Mazara del Vallo.

  He remembered all too well the bunker where he had captured a dangerous Sicilian Mafioso a few years earlier.

  ‘That’s not all, look here!’ Foti continued, approaching the wine racks.

  ‘What is it?’ Trimarchi asked, dubiously: he couldn’t see anything unusual. ‘Is there wine in the bottles or something else?’

  ‘It’s not that, sir; I mean, it is wine, I think. But look!’ He reached out his hand and started to push the wall. ‘See? It moves . . .’

  The colonel peered at the wall. ‘It does seem strangely uneven,’ he said.

  ‘It moves when you push it, as if it’s about to turn,’ Foti murmured, still pressing. ‘You see?’ The wall did, in fact, appear to be moving.

  ‘Deputy Commissioner Greco,’ Trimarchi said, turning to the NOCS commander, ‘see if you and your men can do something. You may have to take the bottles away and demolish the wall. Use explosives if you have to.’ He stood aside to let them get on with it.

  It proved unnecessary to use explosives. After several racks of bottles had been pulled clear, the wall yielded to stronger pressure and gradually opened to reveal a small tunnel, so low that you had to bend down to enter it.

  ‘Police!’ they cried. ‘Hands up! No one move!’

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ an old-sounding voice replied.

  A light came on: a bulb fixed to the ceiling with a loose wire. A grim-faced Antonio Russo was sitting on a bamboo stool. Next to him, around a small table laid with bottles and glasses, sat four men. Ropes, hides, reins, whips and saddles hung on the walls, and other riding apparatus from the ceiling.

  A secret bunker.

  To one side, a shower and two bunk beds.

  A perfect shelter.

  By now, Trimarchi, Foti and Carracci had entered, one after the other. The last one in was Carracci, his face as white as a corpse.

  ‘The man to Russo’s right is Peppino Ferrante!’ Foti whispered in Trimarchi’s ear, rolling his eyes.

  ‘You’re right, so it is!’

  Peppino Ferrante was a boss, the head of the ’ndrina named after him. He had been on the run for more than ten years, and his name was on the Interior Ministry’s ‘thirty most wanted’ list. There were multiple arrest warrants out for him, for homicide, criminal conspiracy and other offences. To all intents and purposes, he was the Scarlet Pimpernel of the region. Lately it had even been rumoured that he had died of a serious illness. He looked quite dishevelled, with several days’ growth of beard, as white as his sparse hair. Seeing him in this place and these conditions, not much more than five feet tall, a thin old man in a pair of velvet trousers and a sweater, he looked inoffensive enough: he could have passed for a local farmer, back stooped with hard labour. But he wasn’t. He was a highly dangerous member of the ’Ndrangheta, both feared and respected - and not only on his own territory.

  The NOCS men handcuffed him. Both Peppino Ferrante and the man beside him had guns tucked in their waistbands, a Smith and Wesson .38 calibre special revolver and a Beretta 81 respectively, both with the serial numbers scratched out. Colonel Trimarchi radioed Ferrara and the Americans to join him. But the surprises weren’t over yet.

  A dull, almost rhythmic noise, reverberating about the walls, suddenly reached their ears. It seemed to be coming from the furthest corner.

  Some of the NOCS officers approached cautiously, holding their breath. In the floor under the bunk beds, they found an old wooden trapdoor. It came up easily enough. A fetid stench of wool, meat and manure rose from the darkness, catching them by the throat. The noise had grown louder. There could be no doubt. It was coming from down below. It sounded as if someone was beating an object against a wall.

  Two officers went down, one after the other, shining their torches in front of them. The floor of beaten earth sloped unevenly. The walls were of stone.

  As they advanced, the stench became more pronounced. At the far end of the space, they saw a shadowy figure. A man was sitting on the ground with his back to them and his face against the wall, on which he was pressing both his hands. In his right hand he held a metal object.

  ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

  No reply.

  Slowly they approached and saw that there was an iron chain wrapped around the unknown man’s ankles and fixed to a large hook in the ground.

  One of the two officers turned, walked back to the trapdoor and shouted up, ‘Fetch me a pair of wire cutters!’ In the meantime, his colleague had taken off the hood covering the man’s face and part of his neck and was now removing the strip of duct tape from his mouth.

  Pale and terrified, the man gradually began to breathe more easily. Gingerly raising his hands, he rubbed his reddened eyes and dried the tears that were rolling down his cheeks. Then, with his fingertips, he pushed back the sparse hair that had fallen over his forehead. He seemed to be having difficulty speaking. All that emerged from his mouth were moans.

  After a few minutes, another officer appeared with the wire cutters. They cut through the chain, took him under the arms, helped him to his feet, and lifted a flask full of water to his mouth.

  ‘Drink it, that’s it, drink some more,’ they encouraged him. And then, walking slowly, they carried him upstairs.

  In the meantime, Ferrara and the Americans had arrived.

  ‘But that’s Alfredo Prestipino!’ Detective Bernardi cried, astonished at how much older the man seemed compared with when he had met him in New York, only a few days earlier.

  They all looked at Prestipino.

  Only
Antonio Russo was looking away. His eyes, as sharp as the blade of a sword, were fixed on Ferrara. Ferrara, in his turn, was studying Russo with mounting curiosity. For a moment he saw a flash of something in his eyes. It was not fear. It was something else, something he didn’t like at all. Then he looked at the wall behind Russo and recognised the sacred image hanging there as the Madonna of Aspromonte, with a crown on her head and the Christ child in her arms.

  Antonio Russo was as still as a statue. He seemed to have lost the power of speech.

  ‘Take them to our offices in Reggio Calabria,’ Trimarchi ordered. ‘And you,’ he added, turning to some of his colleagues, ‘let forensics do their work, then conduct a thorough search. I want this place turned inside out. And don’t forget to look in all the other rooms.’

  The DIA men sprang into action.

  ‘No, not Prestipino,’ Trimarchi said, as one of his men was about to take him away. ‘He stays here. He’ll come with us.’

  Antonio Russo seemed to snap out of his trance. ‘You can’t—’

  ‘Here’s the search warrant,’ Trimarchi said, taking it from his pocket and waving it in front of Russo’s eyes. ‘It’s signed by the chief prosecutor and one of his deputies.’

  Russo gave a dismissive toss of his head.

  ‘In any case, we’ve caught you red-handed in the commission of a crime. Or rather, several crimes. Criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, aiding and abetting a fugitive, illegal possession of firearms, and that’s not all . . . You’ll also have to explain what you’re doing with that gadget in the briefcase. Given such a long list of offences, we wouldn’t even need a search warrant.’

  ‘I want my lawyer,’ Russo said.

  ‘We can’t wait for him. We’ll inform him, but we’ll start the search anyway. The operation is already under way. What’s your lawyer’s name?’

  When Russo told Trimarchi the name, he smiled. He should have guessed it: she was a young woman from a nearby village, who, in spite of her youth, had been making a name for herself by defending important local Mafiosi.

  ‘You’re biting off more than you can chew!’ Antonio Russo hissed threateningly. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ Trimarchi replied, giving him an eloquent look that brooked no objection.

  Russo fell silent. He was starting to feel like a lion in a cage. The colonel, Ferrara and the Americans left the bunker, while Carracci elected to stay with Bruni. He would follow the whole operation. When he was alone, he took possession of the briefcase. Perhaps it was only curiosity.

  Out in the open air again, Ferrara took a deep breath. He had felt suffocated inside the bunker. Before getting into his car, he savoured the intense scent of bergamot in the air, a scent that reawakened old memories. The first phase of Operation Orange Blossom had been brought to a successful conclusion. He felt proud and even moved. That was something that had not happened to him since he had left the Squadra Mobile in Florence.

  Some of the officers, walking the arrested men to the cars, were suddenly hit by a violent gust of wind. Their voices, whether thin or robust, were immediately wiped out, blown away like leaves, like talcum powder, like confetti.

  They were in a hurry now to get back home.

  PART FOUR

  THE HEART OF ASPROMONTE

  26

  The autostrada was almost deserted at this hour.

  It was four o’clock on Sunday morning.

  The police cars, speeding along through tunnels and over viaducts, reached the DIA centre in just over an hour. The arrested men were immediately led into separate rooms and each man was handcuffed by the wrist to a chair. A couple of officers remained in each room to guard them. Other officers began cataloguing the material confiscated so far and writing up their reports. They were all on a high; going home to rest was out of the question. In the meantime, in the monitoring room, other staff were waiting for the phones to ring, hoping they would catch a comment on the police operation in conversations between relatives of the arrested men. Colonel Trimarchi remembered that Prosecutor Romeo, when granting the search warrant, had asked that he be informed how things had gone, at whatever hour, so he had no qualms about phoning him now.

  ‘I’ll drop by and see you later,’ Romeo said, quite unfazed by the early-morning call. ‘And congratulations, Colonel! To you and your men! It was a fine operation. We’ve been looking for Ferrante for years. He has quite a few murders to answer for.’

  ‘We were lucky,’ Trimarchi replied.

  ‘Sometimes we have to make our luck. As you did.’

  The colonel had just put down the phone when an officer burst into the room, his face beaming.

  ‘Sir, Alfredo Prestipino wants to talk to you,’ the officer said, standing to attention in front of the desk.

  ‘I’ll see him as soon as I can. Has the police doctor checked him over?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How did he find him?’

  ‘In reasonable condition. His eyesight’s a little affected, but that’s understandable. The doctor’s assured us he doesn’t need to be hospitalised.’

  ‘It’s better that way.’ The colonel exchanged knowing glances with Ferrara and the Americans, then said, ‘Tell him I’ll be able to see him soon. In the meantime, don’t leave him alone. Not even for a moment.’

  ‘Of course, sir. We’ve been with him all the time. Even when the doctor came.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He seems very down,’ the officer said. ‘For a moment I think I even saw tears in his eyes.’

  ‘Tell him we’ll be calling him in a while,’ the colonel repeated.

  He was about to turn to his American colleagues when the phone rang. He picked it up. It was Russo’s lawyer. Here it comes, Trimarchi thought. He’d been expecting this call.

  ‘I’d like to know if my client, Antonio Russo, is there with you. And if he is, I’d like to know the reason why.’

  ‘Yes, he’s here,’ Trimarchi replied brusquely. ‘And he’s under arrest.’

  ‘May I know the reason?’

  ‘Criminal conspiracy, among other things.’

  ‘Other things? What other things?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that at the moment. The operation is still in progress.’

  ‘But my client is unwell. I’d like to see him to make sure that he’s all right.’

  Trimarchi did not even wonder how the lawyer had found out about the arrest: he knew these people always found ways of sending messages.

  ‘I’m afraid you can’t see him now. But your client is well. If he needs to be taken care of, we’ll see to it. Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Can I at least see him for a moment?’

  ‘No. Any interviews need authorisation from the prosecutor. You know the law! I’ll be in touch when the time comes.’ He slammed down the receiver angrily, then picked it up again and ordered the switchboard operator, ‘Please don’t put through any more phone calls from lawyers. Tell them there’s no one in the office.’

  He entered.

  There was a sad, pained expression in his hollow eyes as they stared straight ahead, and deep furrows lined his cheeks. He was stooped, as if carrying the whole world on his shoulders, and so restless that he could not stay still for one moment. He was even biting his lips.

  ‘Do you feel ill, Signor Prestipino?’ Trimarchi asked. ‘Don’t worry about a thing. Please, just sit down.’

  Prestipino slowly lowered himself on to one of the two chairs facing the desk. He rested his hands in his lap and peered at the man sitting on the other chair.

  Trimarchi introduced himself. ‘I’m the director of this operations centre. You already saw me at the farmhouse. And that gentleman sitting next to you is Chief Superintendent Michele Ferrara, who’s come here from Rome. Now, you asked to speak to me?’

  Prestipino looked at both of them in silence for a moment or two, moving his eyes from one to the other. Then he started drumming his fingers on his t
rouser legs. He appeared confused, unsure how to react to a difficult situation. He moved his head slightly, as if his mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Yes, Colonel,’ he said at last, in a weak voice. He seemed to be trying to focus. Beneath his raised eyebrows, a gleam came into his eyes.

  There was a moment’s pause.

  ‘We’re listening,’ Trimarchi resumed. ‘Just go ahead.’

  ‘I recognised the detective from New York. He’s from the 17th precinct in Manhattan.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Silence fell in the room.

  ‘I’ve decided . . .’ Prestipino said, but immediately broke off. He sat there motionless. In the strip lighting, his face appeared haggard and irresolute.

  ‘Go on. What have you decided?’

  ‘Is this interview being recorded?’ he asked, controlling his voice with difficulty.

  ‘No.’

  Another pause.

  ‘The thing is, Colonel, I have something to tell you . . .’

  ‘Go ahead then. We’re listening . . .’

  ‘First, though . . .’ He broke off again, looked down at his legs and sneezed so hard that he bent double, almost touching his knees with his chest.

  ‘Yes? First . . .? Come on now, Prestipino. Speak up!’

  ‘First I’d like some assurances.’

  ‘What kind of assurances?’

  Now he was looking Trimarchi straight in the eye. He opened his arms wide and said in a changed tone, ‘I want you to do something for me and my family, especially for my daughter.’

  ‘Do you think the information you have is so important?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s just your opinion.’

  ‘Yes, it’s my opinion, Colonel, but that’s how it is. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be able to judge it for yourself. You have ways of checking. You saw the state I was in, and where they were keeping me, didn’t you?’ There was a mixture of pain and anger in his eyes.