The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  ‘You can go and run somewhere. How about that?’

  He looked serious. They both did.

  ‘Who in God’s name are you?’ the Nigerian asked.

  ‘No one you need worry about,’ Falcone said. ‘Take the money. Get out of here. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t stop running till it’s safe to turn around and look behind you. Do we need to say this twice?’

  He stared into their eyes and wondered what he saw there. Nothing was what it seemed in Calabria. He was just a kind of slave in a theatre of nightmares. Unworthy of being told the truth.

  All the same his fingers fell around the smooth bundle of notes. Ten thousand euros. It felt as if he were touching something magical. His eyes strayed to their faces. ‘They’re coming already. You’re the ones who’d better run.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ the lean one said, stroking his silver goatee, seemingly unworried.

  Without another word the man in the heavy winter jacket, now more thick and uncomfortable than ever, turned and walked back into the bar then out of the door into the bright afternoon sun. The big one followed and didn’t look back. Emmanuel watched them go.

  Jackson the marmoset let out a muted squeak and rattled the bars once with its glass.

  The Nigerian waved the bundle of bills at him. ‘Not any more, little monkey,’ he said. Then, more quietly, ‘Not from me.’

  There was a way out at the back. A steel security door that led to the yard. He could be gone in minutes, hot-wire a car down by the docks, drive as carefully as possible to the ferry, cross to Sicily, the airport at Catania. Then the first flight to Bucharest, anywhere so long as it was outside Italy. With the kind of money he had he didn’t have to wait any longer. He’d be rich once he got home. If he could stay out of the hands of the men from the hills.

  Emmanuel Akindele raced upstairs, packed his small suitcase with what few belongings he had, picked up the pictures of his family from the cupboard by the bed, then let himself out into the narrow alley behind the Zanzibar. It stank of cats, bad drains and rotting rubbish.

  He’d just reached the perimeter of the building, and the lane that led to the warehouses by the docks, when he heard the noise of a vehicle drawing up in front of the club.

  ‘You know what I think?’ Santo Vottari said as the van pulled into the cul-de-sac by the Zanzibar.

  Two tall figures in heavy jackets were walking towards a Lancia parked in the shadows by the side of the industrial unit on the left. They didn’t look back as the ’Ndrangheta men arrived. They didn’t even seem to notice.

  ‘What?’ Maso asked.

  ‘Picking yourself up off the floor. That’s what counts. The way a man deals with that is what defines him. We all got it coming to us. Some day. You get knocked down. You climb back in the ring. Try again.’ He touched Maso’s arm. ‘Guess you know that. What with you getting kicked out of Canada and everything.’

  ‘I didn’t get kicked out. I left.’

  ‘Got a little push though, didn’t you?’

  Maso didn’t look him in the eye. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Picking yourself up. That’s good. If you get the opportunity.’

  He was aware they were both staring at him.

  ‘You understand what I’m saying?’ Santo added. ‘What we’re saying?’

  Maso glanced at Rocco Bergamotti in the back. His dark, intense eyes were on the two shapes heading into the darkness of the alley. ‘That I only get one chance?’

  ‘You only get one chance and that’s more than you’re worth,’ Rocco agreed. The men outside had stopped a few paces from their vehicle and were talking, one of them on the phone. ‘Your people in Canada done nothing for us for years. Nothing except send Christmas cards which does not merit us wet-nursing some punk who fouled up over there and now thinks he can come back home, not that it is home, and pick up where his old man left off thirty years ago.’

  ‘My father—’

  ‘—is dead,’ Rocco cut in. ‘What gratitude we had went in the coffin with him. We’ve fed you, told you what you’ve got to do. That’s enough. We owe you nothing. This isn’t college or some kind of charity. The ’ndrina looks after its own, that’s a given. This is a society. Give and take. You got to earn your living because that’s the only way we get to look after one another.’

  ‘You sound like my old man,’ Maso grumbled.

  ‘Shame you didn’t listen to him more. Who do you think we are? Some grubby little crime family living off the scraps they can steal from everyone else?’ Rocco banged the window. ‘This isn’t Sicily. Or Naples. The people out there are our people. If they toe the line, pay their dues, we look after them. It costs but what they get back—’ he took out a short cigar, tapped the end on the glass, then lit it – ‘is security. Not a kick in the teeth like they get from the government. From Rome.’

  Santo was laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Rocco asked.

  ‘That black guy we put in there. Emmanuel. I’m the one that gets to run him, remember?’

  ‘Right,’ Rocco muttered.

  ‘He’s the scaredest little slave we ever had. Christ this will freak him out.’

  Maso let the handgun rest in his lap. He looked out of the window. The two men walked past their Lancia then disappeared into a shadowy corner. One of them was taking some cash out of his jacket as they vanished. It looked as if they were about to divide up the money.

  ‘Go deal with them,’ Rocco said. ‘We won’t help. We won’t even watch.’

  ‘We won’t?’ Santo asked, surprised. ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘No. He’s on his own. Go on, Maso. If it all works out, tonight we give you your due. You get to make the grade. One step on the bottom of the ladder.’

  ‘That’s if those two don’t kill you first,’ Santo added. ‘They look pretty serious to me.’

  Rocco pointed at the alley ahead and clicked his fingers.

  Maso got out of the car, stuck the gun in his waistband and walked towards the shadows.

  When he turned the corner he saw them. They weren’t on the phone any more. They stood there, as if waiting for him. The big one was smiling. The other had an expression that was harder to read. A gun hung loose by his side in his right hand.

  ‘Ciao,’ Peroni said, still grinning. He lifted up his right hand. It was full of clean, new hundred-euro notes. ‘You come for some money?’

  ‘You’re alone?’ the other asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  The two looked at each other then the lean one with the gun brought up the weapon and said, ‘Well …’

  Maso fired. Six shots, the whole magazine. Carefully, deliberately. He couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  When it was over, when the noise and the smell of powder was beginning to dissipate in the thin, polluted city air, they were on the ground stretched out in the crazed position he associated with corpses, arms and legs akimbo, their thick winter jackets ripped and torn, thick with blood.

  He didn’t want to look at their faces. Instead he pocketed the gun, bent down, opened up the coat of the one with the silver goatee, found some money and ripped it out from the pockets.

  The notes were in his fingers when Santo Vottari and Rocco Bergamotti rounded the corner.

  ‘See. I knew you could do it,’ Santo said, scooping up some of the one-hundred euro bills flapping around the rubbish on the dry and grubby ground. ‘Next time you might want to pop them in the head. Do things easy. Particularly when there’s two of them. If these morons knew what they were up to you’d be the one who was dead.’

  ‘If they knew what they were up to they wouldn’t be stealing from us,’ Maso told him, and waved the cash in his face.

  ‘True,’ Rocco agreed.

  They watched him. He was the boss.

  ‘Santo,’ he said after a moment, ‘go buy some food and drink. Something nice. Special. Take it back to Manodiavolo. You’re done for today.’

  ‘You got two bodie
s? And you want me to go shopping?’

  Rocco hesitated for a moment then asked, ‘Was I unclear in some way?’

  Santo shook his head immediately and said, ‘No, no.’

  ‘Good. We’ll deal with these two. We got the van. They can go in the hills. I don’t want bodies around this place. Makes work for everyone.’ He scanned the grim industrial area around them, sniffing the air. ‘No one here’s going to say a word. We’ll deal with the African. Maybe move him along somewhere. The guy doesn’t look right behind a bar anyway. Put him back on the beach pushing bags. He can hassle the tourists there. More his kind of thing.’

  ‘Sure,’ Santo said. He turned on his heels, ambling back towards the waterfront, walking with the punk-roll gait the ’ndrina men liked, whistling all the time.

  Maso looked at Rocco Bergamotti.

  ‘Is that enough?’ he asked.

  Rocco moved close, took his arm, clasped his hand. His breath smelled sweet. His eyes were sharp and dark, intelligent, dangerous.

  ‘We’re honourable men. Don’t you understand that yet? You should. I like you. We all do. You fit in here. You’ll make a good soldier. Now …’ He stared at the two still shapes on the ground and grimaced for a moment. ‘Let’s finish this.’

  Emmanuel stayed in the shadows by the back wall of the Zanzibar, trembling, trying not to breathe, scared and silent as a mouse. In his left hand he was carrying a cheap fabric holdall with his few belongings.

  The wad of money the two men had given him was safe for the moment, buttoned into the inner pocket of his shiny black jacket, pressing against his chest like some cancerous lump.

  He wanted to scream at the motionless shapes on the ground a few short steps away, to say, ‘Didn’t I tell you? Weren’t you warned?’

  There was no way he could run to the waterfront. Santo Vottari might see him there, and if he did he’d know something was wrong. The whole of Reggio was his enemy. The Bergamotti ’ndrina ruled over this land like brigands, warlords. It was their territory and everyone within it answered to their power. There was no one he could trust, no place he could go.

  The only answer was to hot-wire a car, find an airport – Catania, Reggio, even Lamezia or Crotone in the north – and flee Italy for good somehow.

  Or walk back into the Zanzibar, pour two large drinks, one for Jackson the marmoset, a second for himself. Place the money he had back in the safe, crack his head against a door to make it seem like they’d hit him, then make out the Romans somehow overlooked a little of the money as they fled.

  He didn’t like lying but it was a talent he’d had to learn.

  The window at the back of the bar was open. Rocco and his murderous hood were still talking. They didn’t seem remotely interested in what might have happened to him or the Zanzibar. There was, perhaps, time to creep round, crawl back through the escape route he had taken only a minute or two before, and try to work on some story to convince them he was still theirs after all.

  Selling fake Gucci to gullible foreigners wasn’t so bad compared to this. He didn’t, in truth, have much choice.

  Emmanuel Akindele had convinced himself, was ready to turn and scramble back inside the little prison that was his home, when he found himself watching them again.

  He froze, cold as ice on this hot afternoon. Struggling to believe what he was seeing.

  In the black shadows of the industrial park on the edge of the city at the toe of Italy he tried to understand, and failed. There was only one thing he could hold onto with any conviction, and that was the certain knowledge he had to run.

  PART TWO

  The Wine-Dark Sea

  Calabrian Tales

  Chapter VIII: Scylla and Charybdis. Sleeping Monsters

  On a warm summer’s day at the coast it is difficult to believe that two of the most fearful sea monsters in mythical history once inhabited the waters of the Strait of Messina.

  Scylla and Charybdis lived on opposing sides of the strip of sea separating Sicily from the Italian mainland, a channel so narrow, said Homer, that a soldier could fire an arrow from one bank to the other. Fable would have us believe Scylla possessed six necks, each topped by a vicious, snarling wolf’s head with a triple row of sharp teeth. The beast had an insatiable hunger for passing flesh and was, accordingly, able to snatch six rowers at a time from any vessel within reach. She was characterized by the ancients as a hazardous promontory of jagged rock jutting into the sea, able to pierce the hull of a battleship as easily as that of a fisherman’s rowed felucca.

  Charybdis was the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, a covetous sea-nymph punished for stealing the oxen of Heracles. Zeus threw her into the ocean, turning the unfortunate creature into a monstrous mouth that would swallow the waters thrice daily, devouring anything within reach, be it ship or sailor. A whirlpool in other words.

  In modern Italian these two venerable deities translate as Scilla and Cariddi. The first is now the name of a tall, snag-toothed cliff rising from the Sicilian coast near Messina and stabbing into the sea channel at its narrowest point, a feature that can still easily be imagined as a threat to a careless captain. For local mariners today Cariddi represents an unpredictable confluence of powerful currents sweeping from the opposing Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas as they meet in the funnel-like straits and battle one another like maritime wrestlers.

  This is most noticeable, and most dangerous, in the narrow stretch of water opposite the rock that was once Scylla. The effect is deemed to be more benign than it was in ancient times but the whirling waters may still engulf a small sailing vessel if the master is unwary. Cariddi also lends its name to the charming fishing hamlet on the coast at the foot of Aspromonte.

  One other legacy these mythical creatures have left us: the local saying which speaks of finding oneself ‘tra Scilla e Cariddi’, betwixt a rock and a whirlpool. In other words, to be faced with the choice of two unwelcome alternatives, both perilous, both unavoidable. Those of us who inhabit this reclusive little corner of Italy have endured poverty, repression, earthquakes, war and famine over the centuries. ‘Tra Scilla e Cariddi’ is a place we know all too well.

  Ten days earlier …

  There was good food on the table and the limpid blue of the Tyrrhenian murmuring beneath their feet. Sicily swam in the distance, distorted by the visual phenomenon the waiter called the ‘Fata Morgana’.

  Teresa Lupo made a note of the term in her little black Moleskine book. Calabria felt like a new country, a new world almost. She’d heard there was an optical illusion of this nature, one that distorted the horizon of the island opposite until the rocky promontory there seemed extended, duplicated in places, like a fantastic tangle of fairy-tale castles. But she’d never expected to witness it in person.

  Silvio Di Capua, her young deputy from the Rome state police forensic department, had squinted at the dreamy landscape through his thick round spectacles and muttered something about temperature inversions. There would be a scientific explanation, she knew, but that didn’t take away the magic. They had been in the small coastal town of Cariddi for four days now. Rome, with its cares and chaos, seemed almost distant, unreal.

  In different circumstances this would have been an interesting holiday. Gianni Peroni, colleague and lover, at fifty-seven some fifteen years her senior, sat silent, distracted, his chair turned to the water that lapped at the feet of their platform over the sea, his disfigured yet kindly face wreathed in thought and perhaps doubt. Leo Falcone, his inspector, a cultured, diffident man, lean and elegant, of the same age though a more introverted nature, was running his fingers over the menu wondering, as he so often did, whether he’d chosen as wisely as he should. In a pale pink polo shirt and perfectly-ironed white slacks he easily passed for a playboy on holiday.

  Even Di Capua looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world, leaning back in his wicker chair at their lone table on the pedana, a wooden platform for ten or twelve customers, no more, built above the gentle waves, chubby arms folded over
a plain black T-shirt, alternately scanning the still blue sea then checking the web and his email on his phone.

  They were all part of the act, here illicitly, pretending to be successful Roman business executives celebrating a lucrative deal and planning the next. It was important no one except a handful of civil servants and senior officers in the Rome Questura knew the truth. One day soon, they hoped, they would reel in the biggest prize the state police had seen in years. A mysterious figure in the hierarchy of the ’Ndrangheta, one who would turn pentito, state witness, and take down any number of crooks and fellow travellers. A man the authorities had heard much about over the years, appreciating the power he wielded, bloodily at times. But known to them only by his nickname: Lo Spettro, the ghost.

  It was an odd mission to be pursuing on the outside deck of a fish restaurant. On this hot, clear afternoon they seemed to be the only visitors about. From behind the restaurant they heard the occasional buzz of a moped navigating the single lane, too narrow for cars, that was the main street of the fishing quarter. Gulls soared lazily in the clear air scouring the gentle blue waves for food. The town itself stood above them, clinging to the steep hillside rising from the sea to Aspromonte, growing progressively more modern as it approached the busy autostrada from the north to the ferries for Sicily at Villa San Giovanni. They had fetched up in the fisherman’s quarter, a quiet, exquisitely pretty part of Calabria, a kind of paradise set behind a single line of tall, narrow waterfront homes, some still with boats in the footings, ready to brave the Strait of Messina, searching for a living the way men must have done here for a couple of millennia. One old and elegant house, the furthest north in the street, set apart from the rest on its own stump of rock, was theirs for the duration, a six-bedroom holiday let with a terrace over the water that was to be the local control centre, connected by encrypted data links with their colleagues in the Centro Storico Questura back in Rome.

  An extraordinary vessel moved slowly across the shining sea no more than four hundred metres ahead of them. It was long and slender, with an extended metal prow running to twenty-five metres or more, like a long ladder, and a tower half the height towards the stern. There was a man at the top, scanning the calm waters that sat like slowly-moving glass beneath him. At the end of the long ladder on the prow stood another figure, erect, eyes fast on the gentle waves. In his hands was a long five-pronged spear, the kind she associated with images of ancient Greeks painted on the side of jars in a museum. Much like the emblem painted on the bows: a dark, wide-open eye surrounded by cerulean blue, something that would not have looked out of place in the Phoenician cabinet in a museum.