The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  ‘It’s hardly wide,’ Teresa cut in. ‘Is it? There are five of us here. In the front line.’

  Lombardi hesitated for a moment. ‘We were approached through channels.’

  ‘Channels?’ Peroni asked.

  ‘Channels. We have all manner of channels open. With criminals. With foreign organisations—’

  ‘Terrorists, you mean.’

  ‘As a general rule we achieve more through talk than force. For that to continue it must remain discreet—’

  ‘Nic’s in there with these bastards,’ Rosa cried. She’d been quiet, sullen, weeping sometimes, ever since he vanished in the hills. Guilty too that she’d been allowed to escape. ‘He’s in there—’

  ‘Let the man finish,’ Falcone ordered.

  ‘Thank you. We had a message that the capo of the Bergamotti ’ndrina was willing to give himself up and turn pentito under certain conditions,’ Lombardi went on. ‘Those conditions are to be communicated to you here. Once met he will surrender to you. That’s as much as I can say.’

  Peroni waited. To his astonishment that was it. ‘Mancuso? The other mob capi he’s promising us?’

  Lombardi wriggled on the blue chair. The table shook as he did so. Nothing in this place was built to last.

  ‘We need to know where we stand,’ Peroni added.

  ‘What are you accusing me of?’ the man snapped back.

  ‘Nothing. I’m merely trying to understand a complex situation. Did you have any idea he was going to offer you the most wanted man in Italy? Someone who, if he talked in court, could bring down a government maybe if he wanted. Simple question.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Thank you. Mancuso and the ’Ndrangheta are, it seems to me, at best friendly enemies. Do you have any idea why he might come to Calabria in the first place—’

  ‘None.’

  ‘So it might be a pack of lies,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Our whole reason for being in Calabria … Nic lost in the hills … all based on nothing?’

  Lombardi closed his portfolio case without writing a line on the pad. ‘He summoned us here for a reason. It would appear that’s more complex than we appreciated. It doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity. Or that he doesn’t want to turn pentito—’

  ‘Do you even have a name for him?’ Peroni demanded.

  It was the first time he’d seen the man from the ministry blush and that didn’t last long. ‘As I said … they call themselves the Bergamotti—’

  ‘It’s an alias.’ Peroni realized his voice was too loud. There was nothing he could do about it. This didn’t seem a place for self-control. ‘Bergamotti’s a name they use to hide behind.’ Lombardi stayed silent. ‘But then you know that and never saw fit to tell us. A name—’

  ‘South of Lamezia our sources of intelligence are slender and rarely reliable.’

  All of them waited for more. It didn’t come.

  ‘If you don’t have even a real name,’ Teresa said to break the silence, ‘how do you know any of this is what it seems?’

  Again nothing, then Lombardi shrugged. ‘You think we should just ignore an opportunity to take the capo of the biggest ’ndrina in Calabria? The boss across the water as well? We have to determine what the offer is. How to respond. What the gains might be, what the cost.’

  Falcone was watching him intently. If Mancuso and some of the other capi gathered for a summit they wouldn’t come alone, he pointed out. There’d be guards, a small army of men with weapons. The couple who took Nic Costa spoke of the potential for violence.

  ‘We can’t deal with that. Just the few of us.’

  ‘You won’t have to,’ Lombardi replied. ‘We’ll bring in the necessary forces once we know a time and place. Best we keep the locals out of it if possible—’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Peroni cried. ‘You’re talking about a pitched battle. God knows where. With one of our men inside it. Supposedly pretending to be one of them …’

  ‘We always understood there was a risk,’ Lombardi replied, almost in a whisper. ‘We are prepared.’

  He saw it then. The briefest of glances exchanged between Falcone and the man from the Justice Ministry, and at that moment Peroni understood.

  ‘Prepared?’ He shook his head. He wanted to scream in Leo Falcone’s face. ‘Prepared? You knew they were going to take one of ours. You sent Nic and Rosa out there knowing one of them wouldn’t come back. You bastard!’

  He was halfway across the table, trying to grab him by the jacket, when Teresa leapt in, yelling, batting at him with her flapping hands and arms.

  That, and that alone, stopped him picking Falcone up by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘You knew?’ Rosa gasped.

  ‘Men like these require reassurance,’ Lombardi answered. ‘There’s only one way they know to receive it. A … guest. Given to a manutengolo—’

  ‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about them,’ Peroni barked.

  ‘It’s my job. It’s what I do. Intelligence. Organized crime.’ He pointed at his chest with a pale and clerical finger. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘He isn’t a guest.’ It was Teresa. ‘They want him to make out he’s one of theirs.’

  Lombardi laughed and that made Peroni even madder. ‘If they knew he was a police officer how long do you think he’d last?’

  There was a packet of cigarettes on the table. Something else that Peroni had bought from Elena Sposato that he didn’t need. He grabbed them, got up and headed for the terrace, lit one, looked along the coastline. It was rough and rocky, savagely beautiful. A place they should only visit since they could never belong. A place that could tear them apart. Perhaps was doing that already.

  Someone came to his side. Falcone and it was all Peroni could do to hold back his fiery temper at that moment and distil his anger into a simple statement. ‘You knew, Leo. You knew all along.’

  The silver goatee looked thinner than it used to. There were age spots on his shiny bald scalp. We’re all getting old, Peroni thought. Past it. Beyond this crap.

  Falcone grabbed a cigarette from the packet then the matches Peroni had snatched from the table. With Teresa that made three of them smoking again, out in the clear, fresh sea of Cariddi, a place that deserved something better.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I felt sure they’d pick her. They wouldn’t harm a woman easily.’

  Peroni took a deep breath. ‘I’ve never punched you, have I? Not once. Much as I’ve been tempted.’

  A frown and then: ‘I think I’d remember that. If it would help … feel free.’

  ‘So this is why you’ve been so cold and distant? Even for you.’

  ‘It’s not easy, Gianni.’

  ‘It isn’t for any of us. We’re not going to be the same after this. You know that, don’t you?’

  Falcone took his arm. He had grey, emotionless eyes but there was something in them at that moment. Fear perhaps, or even concern. ‘We keep our heads. We look after one another. We do what they say.’ A pause and then: ‘We get him out of there in one piece. What happens to the rest … I don’t give a damn. Lombardi can bring in the army for all I care. We’re just here to deliver an invitation and wait for them to come back with a time and place.’

  Peroni wanted to laugh. ‘You really think it’s that simple?’

  ‘If we make it.’

  ‘And Rosa?’

  The scowl again, a judgmental frown of disappointment. ‘She can go back to Rome with Lombardi and book a vacation somewhere. A real one. I don’t want her round the Questura in this state. She might say something. We don’t need her here anymore. Not now.’

  ‘All heart,’ Peroni said and removed Falcone’s fingers from his arm. ‘You really are.’

  Thirty years they’d known each other and he wondered what that was worth.

  ‘Heart won’t get us through this,’ Falcone retorted.

  ‘Gentlemen …’ Lombardi had stuck his head outside the door and was blinking against the harsh afternoon sunlight. The temp
erature had picked up. Even with a sea breeze the heat felt searing. ‘I must return to Rome.’

  ‘She’ll be packed and ready in a minute,’ Falcone told him, nodding at Rosa.

  He stayed on the terrace and saw them as they left. She was weeping as she walked down the narrow lane to the small car park at the end, tugging her little case. Lombardi saw fit not to help her. Peroni and Teresa watched. Falcone couldn’t bring himself to do that so he bustled through some messages on his phone. Aspromonte loomed over them all, a rocky giant casting its long shadow over the coast.

  ‘Where the hell did you go, Nic?’ Gianni Peroni whispered to no one at all.

  Manodiavolo was a desolate place, quite unlike anywhere he’d ever seen, a two-hour drive away through the back lanes of Aspromonte. The ghost village deserved its name Hand of the Devil, sitting beneath four rugged finger outcrops and a flat, plateau thumb. It was as if a dead god of old lay buried beneath a fractured landscape, one desperate hand emerging from the grave. Ten or fifteen kilometres away – it was difficult to tell on the journey – lay the coast, a thin line of ribbon development running along the strand beyond Reggio. Even Rocco slowed for the single winding, rough track that took them there, all four wheels of the Alfa struggling to keep a grip.

  At some invisible point in the grey-blue waves the Tyrrhenian Sea of the west met the Ionian of the east and succumbed to its strength and exotic power. Turning the corner between the two was marked in curious ways. The vegetation turned harder, sparser, perhaps because the rain was less frequent. The air felt and tasted entirely different to the sea breeze of Cariddi. This mountain atmosphere was perfumed with wild herbs and scorched grass from flash fires, rent by the cries of crows and eagles circling in the whirling eddies.

  Their eventual destination lay in a secluded plateau beneath the bare outcrop of the mountain, perhaps sixty or seventy houses in all, most now reduced to rubble, homes for peasants and labourers long vanished to the city or exile in other lands. A few were larger, some attached to shops. An old grocery store with a rusting sign collapsed over the door. A bakery, the oven visible through the walls, a long-handled peel still resting by its side and what looked like a burnt batch of loaves black as charcoal by the charred logs behind.

  The one inhabited building was on the tiny village square next to a dead fountain of toothy dolphins and crumbling putti in front of the half-collapsed church, its broken, crooked spire snag-toothed against the rocky thumb. A shield on the front wall bore a heraldic device of three dragons, rampant, beneath, in ornate stone lettering, ‘Palazzo Abenavoli’. It was a four-square building, grand and once, surely, the home of the rulers of this little community hidden away on Aspromonte. Two storeys high, built from pink tufa that must have been imported, so different was it from the grey stone all around. The style was late baroque and reminded him of Noto, a place in Sicily he’d once visited on holiday: all ornate curves and cornices, balconies and crumbling masks and gargoyles. Anywhere else the architectural authorities would be busy with their reconstruction plans and notices banning all unauthorized work. But Manodiavolo, like so much of Aspromonte, was either forgotten by Rome or judged not worthy of attention. So here there were no such restrictions, not that the place seemed greatly neglected.

  They got out and Rocco and Lucia introduced him to the lone resident of the Palazzo Abenavoli, his manutengolo of a kind. A more genial sort it was hard to imagine. Uncle Vanni they called him, a portly, smiling man of sixty or so, completely bald with the round and pleasant face of a country monk and a belly that spread over the waist of his canvas country trousers. He was, he said, the guardian of Manodiavolo, a kind of caretaker-cum-peasant farmer who kept the ghost village in some kind of order. A look in Lucia’s face said as they first met: indulge this old man, we love him. And there was a country simplicity about him, obvious in the way he bustled round, excited, embarrassed almost, by the arrival of a visitor from afar, a rare event and one, it seemed, that needed to be greeted with an old-fashioned warmth and generosity.

  ‘He’s from Canada,’ Rocco said.

  ‘Canada?’ Vanni asked in a deep, slow voice that seemed to say: where’s that?

  ‘His name is Maso Leoni,’ Lucia added. ‘Our guest. He’ll be here for a while. Let’s make him welcome.’

  Vanni nodded to say he understood.

  ‘A guest is always welcome in the palace of the Abenavoli. Come Maso. Come.’

  And with that the Bergamotti climbed into their scarlet Alfa and began the slow and snaking journey down the rocky track back to the coast.

  ‘We will make a mountain man of you,’ Vanni declared that first day after they’d gone.

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘Which means you learn our ways. Our history. How … how we do things on Aspromonte. Come. Let me introduce you to your new home. Can you read?’

  ‘I can read,’ he said as they walked through the open palazzo doors.

  ‘Don’t be offended. Not everyone can. I do my best but …’ Vanni grimaced. ‘I’m just the dumb peasant uncle. My eyes are a little slow. But I don’t need to read. So who cares?’

  The place was vast and dusty in all those parts Vanni didn’t use. But upstairs there was a tidy room waiting for him with a four-poster bed covered in a scarlet velvet spread. A desk stood by the double windows from which there were breathtaking views to the coast.

  ‘This was for the lady of the house if she didn’t wish to be with the lord. Which happened often with the Abenavoli, one reason they died.’ He patted Maso’s arm. ‘Don’t worry. None got killed in here. They decapitated them outside by the fountain. Sometimes I hear their screams.’

  He waited for a reaction then winked. ‘Just kidding. There’s nothing to fear from ghosts round here. The only ones that remain are harmless. Here.’

  From a drawer in the desk he retrieved an old hardback book with a grey linen cover.

  ‘Calabrian Tales. Constantino Bergamotti,’ Maso said. ‘A relative?’

  ‘My late father. A good book. A true book. Or as true as any of us can manage. I lend that copy to every guest I have. Perhaps you’ll understand us. If you do please let us know for we understand ourselves very little these days.’

  There was a photo on the desk too. The same good-natured old man in a shepherd’s hat he’d seen in the santina’s cottage.

  ‘This is him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He looks like you.’

  Vanni laughed and stroked his head. ‘That’s my brother. He has that wonderful head of hair. I take after my mother’s side. He’s different. Lucky man. Older but he’s not as bald as a rock like me.’ He tapped the grey cover. ‘It’s an entertaining book. You’ll have time to read it between your work.’

  ‘How much time?’

  Vanni shrugged. ‘If my nephew and niece knew they didn’t tell their idiot uncle. But then they tell me little. I’m a fool who keeps this place alive for when they have guests.’

  An answer he’d expected.

  ‘Then … how much work?’

  The old man slapped his shoulder, hard. ‘I like you, Maso Leoni. You ask good questions. Lots of work because work makes a man round here. Idleness is a sin. You agree?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Good,’ Vanni declared. ‘We have a little electricity from some panels on the roof. Enough to light a couple of bulbs. The water must come from the well. When you wish to bathe you fetch it yourself. I’m your host. Not your servant. Now make yourself comfortable. In an hour we dine.’

  He seemed to know about the meat and fish already. Wild mushrooms from the mountains, fresh tomatoes and rocket, grilled aubergine, a pungent cheese, all local, were on the table when Maso Leoni came down to the dining room. They ate beneath dusty paintings of old nobles, then Vanni showed him around the village, told him the names of most of the people who’d lived in the ruined houses, the habits of the innkeeper who drank more than his customers, the love life of the baker’s wife whose adventures beyond t
he oven would have served as another tale in the Decameron.

  There were two donkeys tethered behind the palace, Silvio, dark, almost black, and Benito, silvery grey, named after the two politicians Vanni said he loathed the most.

  ‘Though unlike those vile creatures these are benign fellows and sometimes a great necessity.’

  He showed him how to feed and water them, how to avoid their hard hooves should they decide to kick, then watched as Maso mucked out the stable and took the manure to a heap composting for the vegetable garden at the back.

  In the evening they ate much the same food again, this time from a brazier set up by the fountain in the piazza. Vanni brought out a pitcher of rough country wine that was so golden in colour it seemed wrong to label it white.

  ‘You must be tired,’ he said as they finished. ‘I will clear the table and wash up. Your turn tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve many questions.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. But I told you. I am their simple country uncle. I keep house. I keep my peace. They tell me nothing except someone is coming and will be here a little while.’

  He poured his guest another glass of the wine. It tasted good once the first shock was over.

  ‘Perhaps a week I think. There’s an event coming, or so I gather. A meeting of some kind. I am instructed that we’ll need food and wood to cook it. Charcoal. Have you ever made charcoal?’

  ‘No. If—’

  ‘I’ll make a good man of Aspromonte out of you. Lots of work to be done in that respect but it will happen. Now. Go read that book I gave you. Please.’

  The night was warm and he was glad of the mosquito net around the bed since the hot, dark air seemed alive with insects. An owl or some predator seemed to live in the roof space above his room. He heard it moving, squawking and at some point in the early hours arrive back with living prey, a mouse or a young rabbit, which it tore to pieces as the thing shrieked and howled above him.

  After which, exhausted, Maso Leoni slept.

  On the second day they walked downhill to the orchards where line upon line of bergamot trees stretched for a kilometre or more down the craggy slopes. The fruit looked like green oranges and would not be harvested until November, Vanni said.