Old Enemies

by Michael Dobbs

  It was a tradition called osmizze that dated back to the emperors, a period of a week or so when officialdom turned a blind eye and allowed the Slovene farmers of the plateau to serve up their own food and wine on their premises without the usual suffocating blanket of permits and price regulation, even without taxation. All that was required was for the farmer to hang a wine flask above the door as a sign he should be left alone. The tradition had been fiercely defended and had survived, flourished even, a mark that even in a world of universal edicts those who lived on the Carso ran their affairs by a different set of rules.

  D’Amato and Simona enjoyed the tradition to its full, nestled in a corner of the farmhouse beneath ancient smoke-stained beams, sampling the plates of ham and cheese and sauerkraut soup, followed by marinated pork covered in white flakes of the ubiquitous grated horseradish, and everything washed down with enough Terrano to put them both well over the limit. While he paid the bill in cash she tottered in the direction of his car, and after he had stuck his wallet away he ran after her, anxious not to be apart for even a moment, and marvelling yet again at his good fortune as the seat belt pulled her sweater tight against her body, leaving little to his overheated imagination.

  The darkness, as in most places up on the plateau, was profound. They left the hamlet with only the headlights to pick out the crumbling stonework and the twisted shadows of the passing trees. There were no other cars; they were alone. It didn’t take long for his eager hand to find her knee. As they began to swing down the narrow, winding road, his hand crept higher, ever more urgent, stroking, searching, until with a gasp of exhilaration from them both it found its place between her thighs. There it stayed as the car rolled gently through every corner, swinging back and forth, one way, then the other. While she moaned, D’Amato screamed inside, he hadn’t felt like this for twenty years, perhaps ever. This woman made him feel an entirely changed, more potent creature. Oh, he loved his wife and children but he lusted after this girl, which right here and now meant so much more. And she responded, with every slow twist of the wheel along this dark, secretive road that was leading them to a wonderful place. And soon, he knew, it would be his turn.

  At last, very gently, she removed his hand, whispering something in gratitude, he didn’t hear what, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t a moment for words. As the road emerged from the woods the view before them opened out and became spectacular – the dancing lights of Trieste, the ribbon of its seafront, and the gracious curve of the gulf marked out by varying degrees of shadow. He pulled over to a spot where they could spend a few moments more, lost in their private world. She lit them both a cigarette; as he took his from her lips, she kissed his fingers.

  ‘Are they still causing you trouble?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The two Englishmen.’

  D’Amato, even at a moment like this, didn’t require much prompting. Like most policemen his mind kept snagging on his work. ‘They still insist the local Romanians are involved.’ He took down another lungful of nicotine. ‘What do you think, my little bird?’

  ‘My opinion is nothing. But it doesn’t make much sense to me. The boy was kidnapped in Switzerland, no? If they were local, why bring all that trouble to their own doorstep?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But I’m worried. What will happen to you if the two Englishmen carry on like this?’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘The more noise they make, the more it will . . .’ she hesitated, stretching for the appropriate words – ‘remind people that you lost the boy. When he was at the farmhouse. It all went wrong. That isn’t good for you, is it?’

  He raised his cigarette to his lips, could still smell her on his fingers. He gazed out at an anonymous light that was blinking somewhere out to sea. He had to admit she had a point.

  ‘And if they keep making their accusations, it will do nothing but stir up trouble in the community. You know how sensitive we immigrants can be.’ She laughed, but he didn’t join in. Trieste had a reputation for welcoming immigrants, it was a long-established port, an international highway, had two official languages, Italian and Slovene, and a dozen different religions represented in its churches. It was a melting pot that had been formed slowly and been stirred successfully over many centuries. Yet that reputation was under strain. In recent years, too many immigrants had arrived too quickly, resentment was growing on both sides, the pot was beginning to boil and bubble, and God help whoever was on watch when it overflowed. Not him, not Francesco D’Amato, he wasn’t going to allow two bastard Englishmen to start a stampede that would trample across his reputation. If that happened, he would lose everything, including his little bird, and he did not want that, wouldn’t allow it. He reached for her hand.

  ‘An English boy, South Africans, strange Romanians – to hell with them all. Nothing to do with you and me, eh?’

  She rested her head on his shoulders. ‘I would hate anything to come between us, Francesco.’

  He kissed her. ‘Don’t worry, my little bird, it won’t.’

  No, jumping into that particular cesspit was the last thing on his mind. Even if the Romanian gang was still here, he guessed it wouldn’t be hanging around for long, would move on and take its troubles with it. Sometimes, for the greater good, it was better to use a deaf ear.

  He started the car once more, driving away with considerably more impatience than they had arrived; it was his turn now, he wanted to get back to the hotel. As the lights of the city flashed past, so much more brilliant than anything she had ever known in her small town in Romania, Simona thanked the gods of good fortune that she had been brought to this place and to this man. They were the answer to her every dream. She had told her cousin, Nelu, that if he wanted any further help then he and the other members of his gang would have to pay for it. She had told him very bluntly; she wanted her cut.

  Nelu had begun by expressing gratitude but also marked reluctance, until she had reminded him that without her every member of the gang would have been caught and would be facing a lifetime in some scumbag prison, unless, of course, they’d already been shot. It was, he admitted, a strong point, and what remained of his reluctance vanished when she reminded him of what her cooperation would mean. It was nothing less than a guarantee that they would never be caught, not in Trieste, not on D’Amato’s patch. Not while she was at his side.

  Nelu was not an unreasonable man. As Simona set out her case, what she suggested began to seem an excellent idea to him. And after a brief but heated discussion it had also come to recommend itself to Cosmin and the others. So now they were six. The gang had just got larger, and far more powerful.

  J.J. returned to his home in Notting Hill. Unlike previous nights since his son’s kidnap, he didn’t go straight to the decanter, instead he sought out Terri, who was sitting, gazing listlessly at a book, with one eye fixed on her candle. He stood in the doorway; he didn’t need to say anything, she could see it in his tortured face, but he said it anyhow.

  ‘I’ve failed.’ The voice was no more than a whisper, like the rustling of scorched paper. ‘I can’t raise the money, not that quickly.’ On feet of lead he came to sit beside her, the closest they had been in days. She stared at him, knew he was breaking.

  ‘How far short are we?’

  ‘I don’t know – around two million.’

  ‘Your father . . .’

  He nodded. ‘But it’s not enough.’

  She hesitated, wondering whether the moment had come, whether he was desperate enough for what was coming next. But she had little choice, she had to take the gamble. ‘I had a call today. A man named Sopwith-Dane.’

  J.J.’s head came up. ‘Know the name – something in the City, I think.’

  ‘He said he had a client, a business colleague, who had heard about Ruari.’

  ‘But how? Who?’

  ‘He said his client would be ready to lend us as much as we needed, until we had things sorted.’

  �
�But who the hell—?’ Yet already J.J. had answered his own question, and his face twisted. ‘It’s Jones, I know it is. Your fucking friend.’

  ‘He wouldn’t say, J.J.’

  But they both knew.

  ‘Does it matter?’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course it does!’ His face was like a clown’s mask, struggling to hide what was inside, but too much pain and fear had been building up over recent days, and now it overflowed. ‘There was that film, wasn’t there? The one that posed the question, would a man let his wife screw another man for a million? What do you think the going rate is, Terri?’

  ‘Don’t, J.J.,’ she pleaded, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Damn him! Damn him!’ her husband sobbed as he buried his head in his hands.

  Harry lay alone on the soft, supportive contours of his bed, listening to the sounds of the city at night. He’d barely slept in seventy-two hours and knew he would get precious little sleep tonight while he struggled to calm his fears – not for himself, but for a kid he didn’t even know.

  Sounds of late-night revelry crept through his open window from a distant corner of the piazza, yet even as the young Triestines stumbled and caroused their way along, Harry reckoned that by most standards the disturbance was modest, subdued, like so much of this city. A poet had once written that when Trieste had lost its pre-eminence as a port its prostitutes had disappeared, and with them they had taken the city’s soul, yet the suspicion was growing inside Harry that the Triestines took their professed modesty altogether too seriously; this was still a port, after all, with its swirling mixture of races and humanities, a road to nowhere, perhaps, but also a road to everywhere, and if its solid citizens failed to see any sign of trouble it was only because they preferred to bury their heads in a plateful of cake rather than look out for it as it passed by the shutters.

  Harry desperately needed to rest. He had to be sharp and alert in the morning, a danger to others rather than to himself, so he settled back, determined to find sleep, and he thought he was winning the battle until his iPhone came to life yet again. A text message. Even as he opened it, a shard of despair drove itself through the centre of his forehead.

  ‘Where were you? Your appointment with PM at nine this evening?’

  From Mary. Oh, sweet Jesus, what day was it? All he could remember was that it was five days to Christmas, five days before the kidnappers’ deadline ran out. That’s how he measured time now, not in dates and diaries. Too many demands, too much pain, too little time. Five days. And still he had nothing more than guesswork and gut instinct to say that Ruari was anywhere near Trieste.

  Sleep. Sleep! He forced his head back onto the pillows, but he couldn’t find it. Wherever he tried to lead his thoughts they ended up in the same place, with Ruari.

  As he lay back on the cotton-softest bed in the most indulgent hotel in town, searching desperately for answers, he had no inkling that Ruari and his kidnappers were less than a two-minute walk away.

  Chombo snorted, trying to clear his nostrils and his mind, his barrel chest heaving up and down as he massaged his thoughts. He had come once more to his home in the Eastern Highlands with its well-stocked garden of fuchsias and pine trees and reluctant ceiling fans. There was too much bustle in Harare to get his thoughts into line. His Mercedes SUV stood outside, its sides stained with the red, oily mud of the climbing road that had tossed him about, no matter how carefully the driver had negotiated the broken tarmac. But that would soon change. Everything would change.

  Yet still Chombo felt uneasy. Even on the verge of victory, his life was in the hands of others, and in particular the Englishman who controlled the diaries. Would he stick to the deal? He wondered, and he worried. It wasn’t his fault that the boy hadn’t been released, Chombo had stuck to his side of the bargain, but would others? He hated the uncertainty, and blamed those who had brought it, whom he held responsible. Takere. It was his fault.

  Just a few weeks into the New Year, Chombo would no longer be acting head of state but would be confirmed in his rightful position, and in his mind he was already there, getting on with the glorious task, no longer needing to hesitate or to be patient. He was the President, as good as, and he expected others to respond in the appropriate way, to be respectful, subservient. But Takere wouldn’t. The man had been useful, no denying that, but he had one fatal flaw. He had too much power, power that should be the President’s. And this flaw showed in the way Takere talked, in the way he held himself while in the Presence, almost as though he thought himself an equal, and there was no equal any longer to Moses Chombo.

  As he gazed into the darkness outside his window, Chombo saw everything. Takere was not only disrespectful, he was slow. He would not learn. He had made too many mistakes. He was the one who had brought him the two worthless South African thugs, who had stood in this very room, showing all the arrogance of their kind, and who had stolen from him so much money. They had paid for their failure with their lives, as Chombo had paid for it with his money, and Chombo was sure Takere was sitting on a fat slice of that himself. Yes, this monumental fuck-up was all Takere’s fault.

  There came a point when a leader had to grow beyond others in order to fulfil his destiny, and that sometimes required things to be done which were unpalatable. Power in Africa was maintained not by reason but by enforcing respect, and nothing squeezes more respect out of a man than fear. You cannot cross the river without getting your feet wet. Yet Takere neither respected nor feared him.

  Ah, the river. Chombo’s mind went back to the great Limpopo and the fate of the South African journalist. There had been no point in the wretch simply disappearing, leaving no trace and no story behind. It was important that a message be passed on to any who might be tempted to follow, some picture that would discourage them, like a face that could be identified, washed up on the southern bank of the great, grey, winding river while the rest of what remained of him was sufficiently dismembered and unrecognizable to put fear into everyone who saw. The crocodiles that swept along the banks of the Limpopo, as helpful as they so often were, couldn’t be trusted to perform such delicate work, and Takere had got his hands particularly dirty that night. He had seemed even to enjoy it. And that was the difference between them; Takere took delight in blood while he, Chombo, shed it only with reluctance. It hurt him, deep inside, truly it did – but what was it that Takere himself had said? To be a successful leader, you must learn to be a butcher.

  So there it was. It would be his first New Year’s resolution. Chombo would be responsible to Chombo, and to no one else. Takere had to go, his job done, his historic task fulfilled. He would die, as all things must, with his President’s gratitude ringing in his ears.

  The Old City. A medieval muddle built upon the ruins of a Roman fishing port, a disorderly quarter so different from the rest of Trieste with its well-ordered outpouring of Austrian pride. It was a place of small squares and claustrophobic alleyways, the haunt of troubadours instead of policemen. Some still called it the Ghetto, where the Jews used to live, which they had done for much of their time in harmony with the rest, until Mussolini, yet it stood only a few paces from Piazza dell’Unità with its Habsburg grandeur and Christmas lights. There could be no greater contrast, stiff civic pride versus the ways of the ghetto. On dark evenings when the piazza was windswept and bleak, with respectable citizens scurrying home pursued by their Christmas muzak, inside the Old City the huddled, youthful masses still gathered, eating pizza and getting drunk. The civic authorities had tried hard to reform and rebuild it; fifteen years earlier the place was a rat run, so large amounts of European money had been poured into its concrete and glass frontages, but all those sackfuls of credit still hadn’t solved the problem. There was no plan, everything was haphazard, very Italian. The rich wouldn’t move in, there weren’t enough young people to fill it, so much of it still stood empty, waiting, with faltering plasterwork and boarded windows, hoping for better things tomorrow.

  And this was where t
he Romanians had brought Ruari.

  When Nelu had received Simona’s message warning that the police were about to raid the farmhouse, for a while he and the other kidnappers panicked. De Vries and Grobelaar were already dead, their throats slit by Cosmin’s knife and their bodies dumped in the cellar, for no better reason than to get them out of the way while the Romanians got drunk. Simona’s text had sobered them up remarkably quickly. They had to get out, in a chair-crashing hurry.

  That was when the Old City came into its own. The fifth member of the gang, a shy man in his forties with bandy legs and extraordinarily large hands, was named Puiu. Like the others, he had been a conscript but since his discharge he had made his living as an electrician, and until he’d been offered the more lucrative employment of kidnapper he’d been working on the refurbishment of a pair of old town houses at the heart of the Old City, converting them into apartments with the aid of a grant from the city authorities. But the money had run out, the work had come to a halt, the building had been boarded up. So now it stood waiting for Puiu and Cosmin and the others, complete with running water and a temporary electricity supply, and it was even within the footprint of a wi-fi hot spot, as much of the Old City was, which made sending messages so much easier. It also had access to crowded, cosmopolitan streets where their presence would cause no one to lift their heads in curiosity. And Puiu knew how to get access, past the padlocks and flimsy mesh security. Only one drawback, the money tap was about to be turned on once again and the site reopened after Christmas. So they had a new hideout, but they also had a new deadline.

  Even as D’Amato had been making his way up the winding road to the Carso, the Romanians had thrown a hood over Ruari’s head and dragged him up the rickety cellar stairs. He’d been terrified, thinking they were going to cut his throat, too, just as they had done to de Vries and Grobelaar, whose bodies had been staring at him from the corner of the cellar for the best part of a day. It was as close as Ruari had come to breaking; he couldn’t stand the thought that his friends the rats might end up doing to him what they had been inflicting these past hours upon the South Africans. So when the gang had thrown him into the boot of a car and he realized they weren’t going to kill him straight away, he remained quiet as they sped along back roads then down, always down, until he could hear the sounds of a different world outside the car. Trieste, although he had no way of knowing it. And there was no disguising the anxiety of his captors as they dragged him back out of the boot and into a new hiding place – a building which, judging by the noise, stood in the heart of the city. They dragged him roughly upstairs, his body scraping over every step, raking his back as he tried to curl and protect his mutilated and still inflamed hand. As dawn broke he found himself high up in an attic room, shackled to a floor joist, with the pale light of a new day creeping through a window that looked out over rooftops to the blue-tiled campanile of a distant church. He could hear the city waking, with traffic, bells, even footsteps. And voices.