by David Hewson
Costa didn’t know what to say. Mancuso was the Capo dei Capi. The head of the combined Sicilian mobs. Overlord of the Costa Nostra, on the run for almost two decades. Over the years both the police and the Carabinieri had been close to capturing him, only to be defeated by a whisper from a traitor in their own ranks.
‘You will have the ’Ndrangheta capi, the lord of Sicily and the names of all their tame politicians,’ the man said. ‘If that’s not enough we can take you both for a walk in the hills right now.’
‘Names,’ Rosa muttered.
‘For some,’ the woman replied. ‘Others in person. There’ll be a meeting soon. A summit if you like. We’ll tell you where and when. You’ll need many men to take them. Organisation. Discipline. All the same …’ She looked uncertain of herself for a moment. ‘There may be blood.’
The man joined them. He had a ready smile, a charming one, and his right hand gripped the barrel of his shotgun.
‘There’s always blood,’ he said to Costa. ‘Signore. Please. The women in this family … no sane man wishes to argue with them. Do as my sister and my aunt say. You ask a lot. Our father is willing to oblige with a generosity no man like him has ever shown you before. But we need a little in return.’ He smiled at Rosa. ‘Your phones. Your documents. Any weapons.’
‘We have no weapons,’ Rosa hissed, beginning to flail her arms. ‘I didn’t agree to this. Any of it. I won’t …’
The man called Rocco Bergamotti hitched the shotgun off his shoulder, snapped it shut and pointed the barrel straight in her face. He wasn’t smiling any more.
‘Rocco …’ his sister said quietly from behind.
The gun stayed straight and level. ‘If you do not agree then I kill both of you here and now. You know us. No cop I do not own has ever been this close and understood what I am. Please. What alternative do you leave me?’
Costa walked in front of the weapon and pushed the barrel to one side. ‘I will go with you. My name is—’
‘I know your name already,’ the man cut in. ‘Tomasso Leoni. If ever I find I’m mistaken I will not be responsible for the consequences. You understand, Tomasso?’
Costa hesitated. Flies were buzzing round the grubby little shack. The santina lit another cigarette.
‘Si,’ he said finally. ‘Tomasso Leoni.’
Gianni Peroni walked the length of the narrow alley that was the single street of old Cariddi, a cobbled lane separating the seafront houses from the terraces at the foot of the hill. He didn’t know what he was looking for. He didn’t know why he’d walked out on Falcone and Teresa. It wasn’t the memory of the Bonetti case, not entirely. In comparison to their current task that was almost routine. Everyone had known the true identity of the man they were seeking to protect. They had understood the names of his enemies as well. It should have been much easier to keep the two apart.
Here, without the benefit of conventional backup, with only a secret link to a handful of officials working covertly in Rome, everything was different. They were clutching at shadows, unable to control the pace of events, waiting until the moment the elusive, nameless figure they sought would make himself known.
Two young fishermen in blue denim shirts and jeans wandered past on their way to the horseshoe-shaped port set beneath the wrecked castle on the cliff above. The modest walled harbour was home to a handful of flat, sharp-bowed skiffs and two sword-fishing vessels – feluccas – with their towers and long ladder prows. One of the men carried a huge glass-bottomed bucket. Peroni had watched them use this the evening before. They sailed out as dusk fell, arranged the bucket beneath a bright light, then dipped it into the sea from the square stern of the skiff, peering beneath the waves looking for fish. It was almost an hour before Peroni saw them cast a modest net into the water and another before they returned with a catch so small it barely filled a single box. Enough to feed a few mouths in the village, not sell. Toni, the waiter, spoke the truth. No one hereabouts was greedy, not when it came to the ocean anyway.
The pair entered the shadow cast between the buildings on either side of the street, deep in conversation, their arms interlocked, their heads close in conversation. They possessed an open familiarity one would never have seen between two men back home.
Peroni thought of the equipment in the rented house. The computers. The high-speed encrypted links to the team in Rome. He barely knew Lombardi, their linkman running the liaison office. Their lives depended on strangers. Still, he had to assume the men and women behind him were intelligent, committed professionals.
The problem was they didn’t appreciate what Calabria was like. No one could without being there and this worried him. He’d read every file on the ’Ndrangheta he could lay his hands on and even, for once, a little history. It was still insufficient, like trying to comprehend a foreign country described in an unfamiliar language. He appreciated how easy it would be for Nic and Rosa to disappear forever into the vast, green emptiness of Aspromonte should they set a foot wrong. Men and women had been vanishing in that bleak wilderness for centuries. It seemed to have been the land of brigands since time began. The imperial Romans struggled to control the region. Spartacus had been cornered by Crassus as his slave revolt began to wane, only to escape and die elsewhere. The warring states of the Renaissance viewed the region as untameable. Even Garibaldi had to beg permission and support from the bandits in the mountains when he invaded from Sicily in 1862, promising to enter Rome victorious or perish beneath its walls, and managing neither. Peroni could find no reason to believe that computers and intelligence systems would be any more useful against a cunning and knowledgeable outlaw army than the regiments and generals of previous generations.
There was too much staring at blinking screens, too little staring into people’s faces. He was a practical man. His career had hit its peak some years earlier and then he had fallen spectacularly through one stupid personal mistake. His own talents and weaknesses were as familiar to him as the damaged lines on his battered features. He had no great grasp for technical matters, no thirst for dry, impersonal knowledge. One recent history book on southern Italy apart, he’d barely read anything outside a case file in years. It was hard enough wading through the dreary, jargon-laden and often illiterate material that counted as evidence these days. Increasingly of late he’d contemplated taking retirement. He was fifty-seven. His cautious and frugal nature had left him with close to fifty thousand euros in the bank and enough service to generate a pension that would suffice, even with the support he still had to provide for his children and ex-wife in Tuscany.
What stopped him wandering into Personnel and filling in the forms? He knew exactly. There were still times when he loved the work, most of all being near Teresa, admiring her bright intelligence and the way it could close a desperate case just as everyone else was giving up. He adored those rare occasions when they finished at the Questura on the same shift and could walk home together, arm in arm, just like the Cariddi fishermen, through the busy, cobbled streets of Rome to her little apartment in the Via del Tritone, picking up a pizza or something simple along the way.
This was the most magical part of his life, the best he’d ever known, and he couldn’t imagine being without it. Even if such a belief in the permanence of things was an illusion, like the curious mirage that distorted the coastline of Sicily across the Strait of Messina, turning it into a fantasy land of rocky castles and unreal mountains.
Something else kept him chained to the Questura. Over the last few years he’d watched Nic Costa turn from a quiet, introverted young man into a decent, close friend, a good man, one full of integrity and hope, even when fate dealt the cruellest blow and stole away the woman he’d loved. Nic had a burning inner fire of decency that was both infectious and necessary since it reminded those around him, awkwardly at times, of the reason they picked up the badge in the first place. He could even chase the weary cynicism out of Leo Falcone, mostly anyway. Watching him at work filled Peroni with the enthusiasm that came from seeing an inve
stigation conclude with some measure of success, at a private cost perhaps, but always with an absolute sense of dedication to the wronged and the innocent. That was important, and their young, occasionally naïve colleague would never let them forget it.
‘How the hell can we do that here?’ Peroni muttered to himself.
At best they would take a bloodthirsty criminal into custody, keep him alive, provide him with a new identity for the rest of his days which he would spend as a free man elsewhere, doubtless in comfort. Perhaps a few crooks and bent politicians would go to jail. Others would soon take their place. It was justice of a sort. A very modern and Italian kind it seemed to him.
Peroni was surprised to discover this pessimism within himself. It was not typical, familiar or welcome.
He needed a coffee. He needed someone to talk to, someone new.
At the very end of the lane, a couple of hundred metres along from the house they had rented, on a rock and cement plateau overlooking the sea, stood a lone fisherman’s cottage with tables and beach toys outside. At the front a woman and a young boy were carefully stacking a huge supply of gigantic green water melons next to a large sign indicating a price that seemed to Peroni, familiar with Roman shopping, ludicrously cheap. The restaurant where he’d walked out on Teresa and Falcone apart, this seemed to be the only place in the whole of old Cariddi where a stranger could buy a drink.
He ambled over and asked for a caffè. The tables and chairs had seen better days. The tall, slender woman behind the counter was extraordinarily handsome, with piercing eyes and the chiselled, tanned features of the wife of a fisherman or farmer. She wore a simple black dress, the kind the peasant women wore in the hills. Her long dark hair was tied back simply with nothing more than a blue elastic band. She waved at him to sit down. This was meant to be more than a simple drinks stop. There was everything in the shack: meat and cheese and bread for panini, postcards and maps, swimming gear, beach balls and toys. A little home business that provided all the seaside visitor needed. Not that there were any tourists about except him, and the way the young boy was carefully brushing dust from some buckets and spades it seemed they had been absent for some time. The lad was her son, surely, eight or nine, no more. He had the same engaging dark eyes and angular face. A fetching kid with a shy and nervous smile when he noticed he was being watched.
He doesn’t have a father, Peroni thought immediately, and wondered why that seemed so obvious, whether it could really be true. These thoughts came to him sometimes, and he knew their source. They came from memories of his own children, now in their late teens, fast becoming adults, their younger, more carefree selves lost forever.
A good, strong, generous cup of coffee arrived, and with it a slice of watermelon for free, both brought by the boy, still sporting a diffident grin. Peroni sat back and watched the interplay between him and the woman who was fussing behind the counter of the little cabin, cleaning things, checking the very old yet shiny coffee machine. They shared something familiar and loving, though there was a distinct nervous awkwardness to them too, as if a storm was lurking beyond the brilliant blue sky, waiting on the other side of the vast mountain above them.
The child came back with the bill: one euro.
‘This coffee is so good I think I’m back in Rome,’ Peroni said, planting a two euro coin in the kid’s fingers and closing them with a gentle grip to say: no change.
‘Rome?’ The child’s eyes grew wide with wonder. ‘Rome?’
‘You’ve been?’
‘Never,’ his mother said, and then looked a little guilty, as if shocked by the cold tone in her own voice. ‘One day maybe.’
‘I went to L-L-Lamezie …’ the child stuttered.
Peroni had passed through the place driving south. A provincial little town a hundred kilometres away. There was a regional airport there. It didn’t look anywhere to remember.
‘Was it good?’
The kid looked at his mother and said, hesitantly, ‘Yes.’
The old cop stuck out his massive hand. ‘My name’s Gianni.’
‘R-R-Roberto.’
His tiny hand felt soft and warm. It brought back memories of Peroni’s kids when they were tiny.
‘He has a problem with speaking,’ his mother said.
Peroni nodded. ‘Me too. At that age. I stuttered all the time. Much worse than you, Roberto. People couldn’t understand me. The kids at school. They were horrible.’ He made an exaggerated comic expression of disgust, like a clown. The boy laughed. ‘You don’t worry about it. One day you’ll wake up and it’s gone for good. You just have to be patient and do what your mamma and the doctors tell you.’
‘Doctors …’ the woman said quietly and shook her head, staring at him.
From the expression in her face, both dubious and a little grateful, she knew Peroni had never stuttered and wanted him to see that.
A battered black Fiat drew to a halt in the adjoining road. The driver, a lean man in shades, hooted the horn and got out. The boy’s eyes fell to the ground and stayed there. The woman looked nervous. Her hands went immediately to the till.
‘Roberto,’ Peroni said, turning his chair to the ocean. ‘You stay and talk to me. I’m new here. I know nothing about Cariddi. You tell me.’ He pointed at the gentle blue waves, and a large rock that rose from the water like a prehistoric arrowhead wreathed in seaweed. ‘My friend and I have a bet. I say there must be a story behind a rock like that because little fishing villages always have stories about rocks. Always. My friend’s a good guy but he’s a smart-ass from the city. He says no. It’s just a stupid lump of rock. If I win, he pays me ten euros.’
He took a five-euro note from his pocket and placed it on the table. ‘Maybe he’s right. Maybe not. But if you know a story about the rock I win, see? We share. Five euros for you. Five for me. A deal?’
The child’s face lit up again and he said, ‘The r-r-rock of Odysseus.’
‘Who?’
The boy gripped his arms around an imaginary object. ‘Odysseus. He sailed by there. When the monsters wanted him, Scylla and Charybdis.’
‘Best thing to do around monsters,’ Peroni agreed. ‘Keep going. See. You spoke well.’
Roberto giggled and placed a skinny finger to his lips.
Peroni picked up the money, bent down, stuffed the note in the pocket of Roberto’s short trousers then whispered in his ear, ‘The secret is never think before you speak. Just say what’s in your head. If you’ve a good heart, and I can see you have, what harm can come of it? That’s what I did anyway. Worked for me.’
He took out his phone and switched it off, patted the child on his young head and said, ‘Sit in front of me, there, and tell me some more stories. But quietly. Let’s not disturb your mamma.’
He did listen, but not so much to the boy’s slow and stumbling recounting of the landmarks of the horizon: the cliffs and bays, the further rocks, and the unseen volcano of Stromboli, a bright beacon of fire only visible in the sky on a clear night across the dark and gleaming sea.
It was a strange place to eavesdrop on a cold, hard hood shaking down a woman for money. Peroni was determined not to look but for one moment his resolve failed him and he glimpsed the two of them at the counter, the woman distressed, the sour-faced man in black leaning forward, touching her breast suggestively, laughing as she brushed away his hand, looking at her as if to say, ‘Maybe not today. But one day, huh? You’ll have no choice.’
Peroni found it so hard to stop himself getting up and intervening directly, physically if necessary, to stop what was going on in the humble little cabin.
Instead he made sure little Roberto kept looking at the sea, telling stories about mythical people and monsters and a time when the world didn’t hurt quite so much. He couldn’t get involved. He had no power, no authority. No identity he could reveal either. Besides … this was Calabria. What would happen to her and the boy once he was gone? He’d read the files on the ’Ndrangheta. He knew the consequences, and
so would she.
So he took in the boy’s tales, told in a voice that faltered very little after a while. When the business at the cabin was done Peroni waited a few minutes, pretending to sip at his coffee, engaging Roberto in another conversation, and one more imaginary bet that won the kid ten euros this time.
Then he got up, went to the counter and paid. There were tears in the woman’s eyes, and fear too.
‘I need some things for my vacation, signora.’
‘What sort of things?’ she asked wearily, wiping at her face with her sleeve.
He ambled into the cabin and looked at the dusty items on the shelves. Walking methodically around the cramped space he picked up a pair of fake designer brand sunglasses and some swimming trunks that were far too small, ten postcards, a couple of bottles of wine, some water and two bottles of suntan oil that were years past their use by date, so old the print was fading on the labels.
‘I want to get to know this place,’ he said, scratching his grizzled grey head. ‘What I’d like more than anything is a history. A proper one …’
She went to the back and pulled out a leaflet for a book with a fading watercolour cover and the title, Calabrian Tales, by Constantino Bergamotti.
‘It’s old,’ she said. ‘And expensive. And I have to order it in. Not many people write history here. Even fewer read it.’
‘Same in Rome and we’ve lots.’ The cover was blue with a black pencil line drawing of Cariddi.
‘Bergamotti,’ he said. ‘Funny name.’
The way she smiled at that, the first smile he’d seen, made her look very pretty.
‘It’s not real,’ she said. ‘A little joke here. Whenever anyone wishes to hide who did something they say, “It was the Bergamotti”. Bergamotto is the fruit we grow. One of the few things we have that is ours alone, unique. Look.’
She picked up a couple of jars and some bottles and packets. There was jam made from the fruit, liqueur, soap, bath oils. Most of them had a picture on the label of something a little like a misshapen lemon.