The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  She stifled a very dramatic yawn.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘When I walked out of that he bought me a tiny villa in Capri. Out of the centre. Away from everything. To keep me out of trouble.’

  ‘It worked.’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. It worked. But now I’m back. For a while anyway. He needs me. You know Capri?’

  A distant memory, a weekend away with Emily. ‘I remember us paying a fortune for two warm beers in the Piazzetta.’

  She laughed but not for long. ‘Your wife died. She was murdered.’

  ‘I’m Tomasso Leoni from Guelph. Never married.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It sounded like a test. I didn’t mean it that way. Your real name’s Nic Costa. I know all about you. It’s OK. I can say that. It’s just you that can’t.’

  ‘No … offence taken. Capri—’

  ‘I never go to the Piazzetta. It’s for tourists and movie stars. My little house is near the Villa Jovis where a nasty emperor called Tiberius used to live. Across the road there’s a place called Salto di Tiberio. His leap. They say he used to have servants who pissed him off pushed over the cliff. Once a fisherman climbed all the way up with a lobster he’d caught. A gift for his beloved emperor. Tiberius was so frightened he had the shell and claws rubbed in the poor man’s face. Then a soldier pushed him over the edge.’ Her hand briefly touched his arm. ‘It’s not just the criminal peasants of Aspromonte who display a heartless streak at times.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  Again that self-deprecating shrug. ‘I try to paint. I try to write. I’m no good at either but I try and then I read. History mostly. I walk as well. Capri’s a little place but there’s a lot of it if you know where to look. Then when my family calls I come.’

  Something melancholy seemed to flit around her shoulders. At that moment, for the first time since he left Rosa in the hills, he did not feel alone.

  Eyes on the stark and desolate landscape she said very quietly, ‘When Tiberius was dying they say his adopted son was announced emperor prematurely. And when the old man recovered he went into his room and smothered him in his bed. Dynasties don’t always pass from one generation to the next in peace. I like history. The one thing it teaches us is we learn nothing at all. And yet we’re defined by everything that went before. Here especially. It’s like there’s ghosts all round you.’

  ‘Caligula,’ he said. ‘The adopted son.’

  ‘Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus to give him his proper name. They must have fine and well-stocked libraries in Canada.’

  She stood up, removed the clasp behind her head, shook her hair free and touched the old silver bracelet on her wrist, unconsciously he thought. A habit. A tic.

  ‘That book. You read the chapter about the Garduña? Spain. Apollinario. Where we, the Sicilians, the Neapolitans, all came from.’

  ‘A fairy story, surely.’

  She turned and stared at him and he felt he’d said the wrong thing once more. ‘If enough people believe a myth is it a myth at all? There’s a pope in Rome who might feel otherwise. He’s the master of a million places built on nothing more than stories and parables written by men long dead. Men who perhaps never existed. Yet walk into the places where they worship and you can feel the faith so many have left behind. Is that … real? Or not?’

  He was an atheist, he replied. Born and bred into him by his late father.

  ‘You must still believe something.’

  ‘Right now I believe I’m a man from a town called Guelph, somewhat bemused, with an interesting and charming stranger, waiting to know what happens next.’

  ‘Interesting,’ she repeated and squinted into the bright afternoon sun at the narrow rocky path ahead of them. It meandered through a bower of low bushes struggling to find purchase on the steep mountainside then vanished into shadow. ‘What happens next is you meet a fairy tale.’

  At that she set off up the track, walking briskly, not looking to see if he followed. Where else was there to go?

  Peroni went onto the terrace and lit a cigarette. He was back in that vile habit even though he hated it. Silvio came out and made soothing noises. They wouldn’t trace the call to his phone he said again. They surely couldn’t, not without going back to Rome and asking for details on the login. And that would take them straight back to Lombardi who’d doubtless log the transgression and throw it in Peroni’s direction should there be blame to apportion at some stage.

  ‘Thanks,’ Peroni told him. ‘They’re mad with me, aren’t they?’

  ‘Leo’s mad with everyone at the moment. Himself most of all. We need to start doing something.’

  ‘Except we can’t.’

  Silvio was the office innocent in some ways. A geeky guy of thirty more interested in science and technology than people. Everyone liked him.

  ‘No. Guess not.’

  ‘And Teresa …’

  Silvio had worked with her ever since he joined the force after university. They were close. In a way he idolized her because she was something he’d never be, a loose cannon in the Questura at times, always bright, always asking awkward questions others didn’t dare.

  ‘You’ve been spending a lot of time in that bar,’ was all he said. ‘She notices everything.’

  ‘Jesus … the woman there’s a widow twenty odd years younger than me or more. Come on. You know me. Teresa knows me.’

  ‘This isn’t Rome, is it? We’re different people somehow. Pretending to be. Like actors I guess.’

  It seemed an uncharacteristically perceptive comment for the man from Forensic.

  ‘Tell her—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Gianni, you tell her. You live with her. She needs to hear it from you.’

  He patted Silvio on the arm. A nice guy, always struggling with his own private life. Keeping a girlfriend was never that easy. He worked too much, didn’t care about his appearance, sometimes seemed the most pasty-faced geek in Rome.

  ‘Just so you know … I need to warn Lombardi,’ Silvio said, heading for the room where he kept his laptop. ‘If he doesn’t know already.’

  Peroni went to the edge of the terrace. The smell of the sea, all salt and freshness, rose to swamp him, make him feel giddy for a moment so strong and powerful was its presence. To his left the boats bobbed in Cariddi’s little harbour. A couple of feluccas, a dozen or more smaller craft. No one seemed to be fishing. As he watched, Teresa and Falcone ambled along the short stone pier, deep in conversation. He wondered what he could say to make things better. Words weren’t the problem. This place was.

  The two of them sat on a bench and watched a couple of men start to scramble across the boats. Soon they’d be putting to sea, perhaps chasing swordfish. He’d spotted the larger felucca out first thing that morning, a man atop the tower, another with a harpoon at the end of the long ladder extension to the front.

  He didn’t want to see this any more so walked to the other side of the terrace and looked back towards the Kiosco Paradiso.

  The black Fiat was there. The creep was out, leaning on the bonnet, shades on his greasy scalp, a cigarette in his narrow, thin-lipped mouth. He was talking to the fat cop who’d been at the door. These two knew one another, that much was clear.

  The punk laughed. The cop laughed. Then the punk briefly wound his arm through the man’s blue jacket and whispered something in his ear.

  A nod then and there was something in the way they two of them stood, looked, talked, laughed that made a little red fire light up at the back of Gianni Peroni’s head.

  Then the cop slapped the thug in the black suit on the shoulder and walked off towards his cheap little Fiat saloon parked up on the pavement at the end of Cariddi’s narrow waterfront lane.

  Sometimes things happen and you didn’t need to be clairvoyant to see them coming.

  The punk threw his cigarette in the water then strode over to the bar with obvious purpose. He barked something at Roberto who j
umped, shrank back and started to head off for the beach.

  ‘Get out of here, kid,’ Peroni whispered, thinking of his words. ‘I got business with your mother. And the fat jerk of a local cop just decided to look the other way.’

  The black suit watched Roberto slink off then went to the kiosco and vanished into the shadow of the door at the side.

  To hell with it, Peroni thought. To hell with Teresa if need be. Right was right and wrong was wrong. Forget that and you might as well never get out of bed.

  ‘And I got business with you,’ he murmured staring at the little shack of a bar along the way.

  The boy had vanished by the time Peroni reached the Paradiso. So had the shabby local cop. There was no one outside on the battered plastic chairs, no one on the beach, no one in the little lane that ran behind the terraced fishermen’s cottages. It was the middle of a scorching afternoon. The people of Cariddi were elsewhere, maybe at work, on the sea or just inside hiding from the heat.

  He knew this was a mistake. He’d fouled up already, making the illicit call into the local network, and got away with that. Not that it made much difference. Elena Sposato was still getting pestered by the creep in the black Fiat and probably would long after he and the rest of the team made their way back to Rome. Over the years hard experience had made him connect actions with their consequences. But sometimes you overthought things. Sometimes you needed to act in order to flush out what would happen next. They did that all the time in Rome, in real police work, a world they tried to make black and white as much as possible, not the messy shade of grey they’d fallen into in Cariddi, as wide as the sea in front of him and just as likely to drown them.

  A bare concrete platform, badly laid, covered in ridges and cracks, formed the Paradiso’s front terrace over the rocks. He walked to the front and scanned the pebble beach. Roberto was nowhere to be seen and that bothered him.

  Then there was a gentle, frightened noise from the side of the ramshackle building, where they kept the bins and the empty crates for beer and soft drinks. Peroni walked over, trying to trace the source. He could just make out a timid shape buried behind the mound of giant watermelons lined up by the counter. A sign, two for three euros, almost hid the boy.

  ‘Roberto,’ Peroni said in a quiet, authoritative voice, and held out his hand. ‘Come on. Come out. You’re safe with me.’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  The kid’s eyes flicked to the left and behind him.

  ‘You’re safe, son.’ He heard his own voice and thought: there was a strain of anger in that already so it was hardly surprising the boy stayed where he was. ‘Stay there then if you like.’

  There was no way of stopping this. Nor should there have been. He knew what was happening behind the rusting garage door. Knew too he couldn’t ignore it. Whatever anyone – Teresa, Falcone – felt. Whatever the consequences.

  He had to edge past a couple of empty barrels of used vegetable oil waiting for the pickup truck. As he did so he heard her. Heard them. She was crying, hurt, furious, somewhere inside the grubby garage. Her sobs mingled with his rhythmic moans.

  ‘Bastard,’ Peroni grunted and lifted up the garage door. Light flooded in as the thing squeaked on rusty hinges. Two shapes in the corner, against a pile of sheets and rags, that spasmodic movement he was expecting. Elena Sposato shrieked louder as the bright summer sun fell on her spread-eagle legs and flailing arms. The man was on her and so engaged he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Bastard,’ Peroni said again and told himself, as he went to pull them apart, there would be a point at which he’d stop. A moment where he could go no further. Though in truth the best thing for them all would be if he followed his instincts, beat the moron till he breathed no more, then dumped his sorry corpse in the bright blue waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  His left hand went out to grab the mop of black and greasy hair beneath him. His right balled into a terrible fist, one drawn so the hard white bone of his knuckles showed through pale and fleshy fingers.

  He didn’t say another word. It seemed unnecessary.

  A narrow rocky corridor snaked between two high and craggy ridges ahead. All around the plants and shrubs and trees were sparse, scrubby, almost alpine, clinging on for life among the few brown-grey patches of earth around. The path through the rugged hillside blocked all views back to Manodiavolo and the coast so he couldn’t guess how high they were or how far from the nearest road. The air was fresh and cool. The heat of the lowlands seemed far distant.

  The only sign of visitors along the way was the odd mule dropping and, once, a spent sweet wrapper by the stub of a cigar. Then they rounded a towering spike of weather-beaten rock and he saw ahead the opening to a cavern, so small it seemed impossible to believe the place could be of any importance. As they got closer there were signs of activity: scrawls on rock, paintings of eyes and crosses and, on a flat, stone face a good metre tall, what was clearly a dagger drawn, blood dripping from the blade in scarlet paint, poised over a torn and ragged heart.

  The entrance was little more than an inverted vertical slash in the massive slab of granite that rose to a stark point above them, the summit of this particular peak on Aspromonte.

  ‘You need to duck,’ she said, taking a small LED torch from her belt. ‘Stay close.’

  A chilly darkness swallowed them up the moment they crouched and stepped inside, a fresh draft of mountain air seeming to rise from ahead of them, like breath from a sleeping giant’s throat.

  ‘Here,’ she said, and in the shade passed him a torch. ‘Our secret place. The Chapel of the Holy Clasp.’

  It had a dank and mouldy smell, tinged with incense, like the interior breath of the mountain itself. Ahead the stony track widened, the roof grew taller. Within the space of twenty or thirty metres he was able to stand freely. Then she stopped, found some larger form of lighting installation by the wall, turned it on and his breath briefly stilled inside him.

  It was a refuge for secret worship and devotion hidden deep inside this solitary peak of Aspromonte. Rows of low wooden chairs ran from side to curving side with a narrow gap between. The walls were lined with paintings, mostly representing martyrdoms: Saint Lorenzo on his gridiron fire, stabbed by soldiers as he was burned alive; Catherine with her wheel of torture; Sebastiano bound to a tree and pierced by arrows.

  ‘Sacrifice,’ Lucia said in a hushed and cautious tone. ‘We’re fond of that idea.’

  But the light drew them to the altar and as he approached he saw why. A cleft ran through the rock above the raised rostrum, out to the open air. Glass covered the vent as it reached the chapel but the light, bright now from the clear summer day, fell through, caught the silver and gilt crucifix on the plain stone table and flooded onto something that lay on a wooden stand in front. A bracelet, he saw, remembering the chapter he’d read in Vanni’s book.

  ‘Apollinario’s?’ he asked.

  ‘Mary’s or so they claim,’ she replied with a dubious nod. Lucia raised her wrist and showed him the bracelet there. ‘Look. I have a copy. My father had it made.’

  He came and stood in front of the crucifix. The silver clasp was without ornament and the metal had lost a little of its sheen over the centuries. He wanted to touch it and she saw that and her look said, Why not?

  ‘It seems wrong. Anyone could come in here and steal this thing …’

  She laughed. ‘And how far do you think they’d get? Touch it. They say it brings … knowledge.’

  ‘Not luck?’

  ‘No. We don’t believe much in luck. Only the fortune we make ourselves. Touch it.’

  The metal was soft and warm somehow and he didn’t want it in his fingers long. ‘I don’t feel right here.’

  ‘No. You’re a foreigner. But I doubt the Holy Mother will mind. That fairy story you read? The Garduña? The three brothers from Catalonia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Meet one of them.’ She pointed to a pale block of
stone half-hidden in the darkness. ‘Carcagnosso. The brother who brought us here.’

  It was a grave, he realized. A rock sarcophagus, so old it looked as if it belonged in a museum. There was no inscription, only a neat line of three black holes, each big enough to take a couple of fingers, drilled into the upper third.

  ‘They loved him so much from the start, the Greeks here, they buried him in the old way,’ she explained. ‘With those holes through his tombstone and copper pipes into his mouth. To feed him until he rises again in the afterlife.’

  She leaned against the altar so the light from the cleft above caught her face. ‘The church banned that centuries ago. It came from the old religion, the pagans, you see. Still, this is Aspromonte. Once in a while the men who followed gather here, pay homage. They feed Carcagnosso wine and milk and honey through those holes, like our ancestors did when he was first buried. And afterwards they get down to business. No one outside the ’ndrina and the clans has witnessed this and lived. You must be the first—’

  ‘When?’

  She seemed disappointed by the question. ‘That’s for my father to say. A group of the masters of the three clans who started life as the Garduña … they will gather to say thanks in front of Mary’s bracelet and feed their long-dead saint. Then a summit. Alliances to be forged. Vendettas to be ended one way or another. Business opportunities. Threats from outside. Some of these men – they will all be men – your people will know. Finding them here will be of no use. They’ve escaped prosecution in the past and will in the future. But some … will be those you’ve been searching for year after year. And some you will know only by reputation. Andrea Mancuso for one. The Butcher of Palermo. And my father … They will all be here. It will be quite unlike any summons to the Chapel of the Holy Clasp they’ve ever witnessed.’

  She faltered for a moment then took his arm and led him back the way they came, until they emerged blinking in the bright sun by the entrance.

  ‘There are two paths to this place only,’ she said, pointing to the route they’d come, then a side track leading off to the east where the Ionian was just visible between two distant crags. ‘Our people will go back to Manodiavolo this way, my father among them. There he will go into your custody provided you meet conditions he will soon outline to you himself. The rest, the Sicilians, the men from Naples …’ She indicated the eastern path. ‘There’s a space near a mountain road about a kilometre down. They’ll park there. They won’t want to linger. Everyone knows it’s dangerous to gather like this, especially for no other reason than sentiment and tradition.’