End games az-11

by Michael Dibdin

  ‘I never feel at home in a city where you can’t smell the sea,’ he replied. ‘I shall need to see you at the Questura tomorrow morning. How early can you be there?’

  After a brief discussion as to times, Tom introduced Martin Nguyen, who had been listening to this exchange with some interest.

  ‘Tell the signore that I wish to speak to him too,’ said the man, before leaving them with a curt nod.

  ‘Who was that guy?’ demanded Martin Nguyen.

  ‘The chief of police. He wants us both to meet with him tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. To discuss the latest developments in my dad’s kidnapping, maybe.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you ask him?’

  Tom bent forward with a slightly condescending look.

  ‘Mr Nguyen, this is not the States. The police here are more like Homeland Security than your friendly local sheriff who’s going to be running for re-election come the fall and needs your vote. If they want to tell you something, they will. If they don’t, there’s no point in asking.’

  Nguyen was unappeased.

  ‘But what have I got to do with it?’

  ‘I told him you were a business associate of my dad’s. I guess he thinks you have information about what he was doing here that might be significant.’

  Martin Nguyen nodded vaguely.

  ‘So you speak pretty good Italian, huh?’

  Tom shrugged.

  ‘My mom used to talk to me in Italian and it seems to be coming back. It’s not that hard of a language once you know the basic rules. All I really need is more vocabulary, and I’m picking that up pretty fast.’

  Nguyen digested this in silence for some moments.

  ‘Well, I can offer you a job right here and now,’ he finally said. ‘It’s only temporary, for as long as I have to stay here, but I’ll pay five hundred dollars a day in cash.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Act as my translator and general assistant.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘Pretty much the only thing I can think about right now is my dad, you know?’

  ‘Okay, how about five hundred euros? That’s over six hundred bucks at current exchange rates.’

  Tom thought about this proposition for at least a couple of seconds. After Dawn did a fugue back to her mother in Idaho, citing irreconcilable differences and environmental issues, he discovered that her rosy fingers had previously used his cash card, whose PIN Tom had given her when he was too slammed to go to the machine, to remove all the money in his bank account. He’d had to leverage his Visa credit limit just to get here, but that wouldn’t last for ever and there was no way of knowing how long he’d have to stay. He looked at Nguyen with what he hoped was the expression of a dutiful and disturbed son in a difficult situation.

  ‘Gee, I don’t know what to say! I could sure use the money, but it might look bad, you know? I mean, profiting from my father’s ordeal.’

  ‘Who’s to know? You’ll be paid in cash, either here or back in the States, whichever you prefer. And if someone does find out, so what? You were just helping out a family friend in a tough spot.’

  Tom sighed deeply.

  ‘Well, okay, I guess. Plus it might help take my mind off this nightmare.’

  ‘But for that kind of money I expect you to be on call twenty-four seven, okay? I can’t tell when something might come up where I need you. In fact, tomorrow you’d better move to the hotel where I’m staying. I’ll comp you the room and all meals.’

  He glanced at the tab and threw some money on the table.

  ‘Okay, I’ll be heading back. Don’t stay up too late eyeballing the brood mares. We’ve got to make an early start. I’ll pick you up around four-thirty, quarter to five.’

  For the first time, Tom felt genuinely dismayed by Nguyen’s job proposition.

  ‘Heck, it’ll hardly be light then!’

  ‘We’re headed for a facility where the shift starts at six, and I need to brief the personnel. Some of them speak English, some of them don’t.’

  He broke off and stared at Tom.

  ‘How much did your dad tell you about what we’re doing here?’

  ‘Practically nothing. He never talked about his work.’

  Or about anything else, he thought. My dad never talked to me. My dad never spoke Italian to me.

  ‘Okay, I’ll fill you in tomorrow,’ said Nguyen. ‘Be sure and get a good night’s rest. I want you on deck and ready to roll when my car pulls up at your hotel.’

  ‘Hell, you’re the one who should worry about that, Mr Nguyen! Getting in from the States today and all. That jet-lag can kill you.’

  From one of the many secret drawers artfully concealed in the lacquered cabinet of his skull, Martin Nguyen produced a lush smile of poisonous beauty.

  ‘I’ve given up sleeping. My doctor said it was bad for me.’

  Nicola Mantega was not a particularly stupid or careless man. His fatal weakness was that he was a creature of habit.

  The massive police raid that afternoon and evening on the town of Altomonte Nuova had been widely reported on the local news, but without any reason being given. When interviewed, some of the townsfolk mentioned repeated flights by police helicopters during the day to the abandoned town perched high above its successor, but claimed to have no idea what this was all about. The police themselves were saying nothing and all access to the area had been cordoned off.

  Superficially, none of this was of any obvious personal concern to Mantega himself. That was how a northerner would have argued, but Nicola knew better. The people of the south had been treated as a form of insect life for so long, he liked to argue, that they had evolved some of the faculties of insects. Almost powerless against the brute species that ruled the earth — although they could deliver a very nasty, even deadly, sting on occasion — they were hypersensitive to the most minute development in their immediate environment. And now Mantega’s antennae were twitching uncontrollably. He had no idea why, but he knew that further information about this incident was needed, and urgently.

  Mantega had spent the evening closeted in his office with one of those clients it was better that he should not be seen consorting with publicly. The subject under discussion was a tender submitted by the client in question for the contract to upgrade a thirty-kilometre section of the toll-free regional A3 motorway to the standard of the rest of the national network, with a view to charging the same kind of money for using it. Recent political changes both in Rome and at local level had made these kinds of negotiation more difficult than formerly, and potentially much more dangerous. This was all very tiresome, and the worst part of it for Mantega was persuading his client that such a change had in fact taken place, that tact and patience were now required to resolve any ensuing problems, and that neither he nor anyone else could smooth everything over by making a couple of phone calls, like in the good old days.

  Mantega had done his best, but his mind had been occupied with other matters. His client must have noticed, because he had made a few very pointed comments about possibly ‘needing to seek counsel elsewhere’ before leaving via the fire exit at the rear of the building. Had the circumstances been different, Mantega would have been very concerned by this veiled threat, given the power base and range of contacts of the client in question. As it was, he really didn’t give a damn. His meeting with Giorgio the day before, and now the news of the police raid on Altomonte, made such issues seem relatively trivial. Estimates of the number of officers involved in the raid varied wildly, but the gist was that an operation on such a scale had not been seen in the region for years. And that was only its public face. If a hundred or more officers had been committed to the task of publicly putting the frighteners on the population of an isolated town, there would be an equal or even greater number working covertly behind the scenes. Something big was under way, t
hat was for sure.

  All of which brought Mantega’s thoughts back to his relationship with Giorgio. They had attended the same school back in San Giovanni in Fiore, but Mantega had subsequently forgotten about Giorgio’s existence until one day, years later, he popped up seeking help after being fired from his job as a security guard. As a gesture of friendship to an old classmate who had fallen on hard times, Mantega had arranged an introduction to a small-time gang in the city that did armed robberies, lorry hijacks, some drug imports and the odd minor kidnapping. All had gone well for a year or two, but in the end the gang had dumped Giorgio because, as their capo had put it, ‘This guy’s round the fucking twist.’

  Giorgio had then started up in business on his own, exploiting the mainly barren and unclaimed territory between Cosenza and Crotone, but occasionally making forays into the outskirts of either city. Mantega’s fable about Aspromonte to Tom Newman the other evening had of course been disinformational nonsense. Giorgio wouldn’t dare show his face on Aspromonte. But the n’drangheta was extremely territorial, and the clans took little or no interest in affairs outside their own borders. Giorgio had therefore been able to build up a modest but thriving trade on his home turf, to which Mantega acted as a general consigliere and fixer. So when an American named Peter Newman had hired him as a go-between with the local authorities over a film deal, Mantega immediately recognised the irresistible chance to at least quadruple the money on offer by suggesting to Giorgio that he would make an excellent kidnapping prospect.

  It had all seemed to make sense at the time, but ever since that meeting in the abandoned barn Mantega had been deeply disturbed. Giorgio was by nature moody and violent, but Mantega had never felt himself personally threatened before. The manner in which the bundle of banknotes had been presented as a final, non-negotiable payment, coupled with the warning about reprisals in the event of his talking and the bald announcement that Newman was dead, had terrified him. The construction magnate he had dealt with that evening simply wanted to make a killing, but Giorgio was a killer.

  Mantega placed various incriminating documents that had been lying on his desk into the safe, switched off the lights, locked the door and walked slowly downstairs, mulling over the problem which had preoccupied him all evening. As he reached the front door of the office block, the solution popped up. For all Mantega knew, he could be arrested the moment he left the office and interrogated by that hard-nosed bastard that they’d brought in to cover for Gaetano Monaco. It was all very well for Giorgio to say that he should say nothing even under duress, but that was a damn sight easier to do if you knew exactly what it was that you weren’t supposed to say. Given today’s developments, Mantega didn’t have a clue, so the situation was sufficiently serious to justify his calling Giorgio.

  He walked around the corner towards the phone booth that he had used the night before. Mantega was inclined to dismiss Giorgio’s warning that he was being followed as a mere bluff, but nevertheless he paid extra attention to the action on the street before proceeding any further. A couple of vehicles passed, but the occupants paid him not the slightest attention. The only sign of life was from a young couple whose romantic evening had evidently turned out badly and were now having a vociferous row as they walked home along the other side of the street, the woman loudly proclaiming that if she was to be insulted like that then she would rather kill herself here and now and have done with it — and with you, you cold, heartless bastard!

  Even if Mantega had been more alert, it was unlikely that he would have recognised the woman as the same one who had apparently been meeting someone off the flight that Tom Newman had arrived on two days earlier, or her partner as the driver of the delivery truck that had been involved in an accident at that very junction near the phone box the previous night. As it was, he barely noticed them. The last thing undercover agents did was to draw attention to themselves, while this couple were screaming their heads off and the centre of attention until a flash of stark, neutered light fixed the scene on the retina. A moment later the heavens resounded as though all the gods had farted at the same moment and hailstones the size of chickpeas started hitting the street, bouncing high in the air and battering Mantega’s skull.

  He sprinted for the shelter of the phone box and rang Giorgio’s mobile. There was no reply, so he dialled the other number. Mantega didn’t know which phone this rang. Giorgio told him never to use it except in a case of extreme emergency, and he never had.

  ‘ Pronto?’

  Mantega didn’t recognise the surly male voice, but it was hard to hear anything at all with the hail drumming on the metal roof.

  ‘Giorgio?’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ the male voice said in the abrupt, no-nonsense tones of the dialect Mantega had grown up with, and which he had heard from the lips of that lawyer from San Francisco named Peter Newman. Giorgio had told him that Newman had died. What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  ‘My name is Nicola Mantega. I’m a business contact of Giorgio’s. I need to speak to him urgently.’

  ‘Never heard of you either,’ said the voice. ‘You must have a wrong number.’

  Mantega put down the phone in a state of profound anxiety. The number he had called was right there on the lighted display on the phone, and was identical with the one he had written down in his Filofax disguised with a string of random numerals. He looked out at the barren street, where the young couple were now engaged in a passionate clinch beneath the portico of a building opposite. There were no two ways around it, Giorgio had cut him off. He had been paid and dismissed, and would have to sort out any personal repercussions from the kidnapping he had arranged. In short, Nicola Mantega was in the most desperate situation in which any Italian can ever find himself. He was on his own.

  The four men came to the Nicastro house just before three o’clock in the morning. A black Jeep Grand Cherokee, its numberplates removed, freewheeled silently down the main street, barely visible in the dim light of the sparse streetlamps hanging out on their brackets. Engine off and lights out, the vehicle came to a halt opposite the squat dwelling of concrete and terracotta brick infill faced with unpainted grout. It was a warm, windless night, the air fresh with scents awakened by the recent downpour, utterly quiet apart from the barking of a dog somewhere near by and the occasional rumble of thunder far away to the north over Monte Pollino.

  One man remained with the vehicle. The other three, faceless in black ski masks, walked unhurriedly back to their destination. While one of them disabled the electricity and telephone connections running down the wall of the house, another picked the lock in the front door. In the event the door proved to be bolted as well, which annoyed the third man so much that he raised his voice to the others, telling them to get on with it and quickly. Then the creak of an opened shutter directed one of the men’s attention to a top-floor window across the street, where an old woman was looking down at them.

  ‘Back to bed, nonna!’ he shouted.

  Since the element of surprise had now been lost, the man who had cut the power and phone lines fixed three small charges of plastic explosive to the top, middle and bottom edge of the door on the side where the hinges were and wired them together to a fuse before joining his companions a short distance away. When the blast went off all three ran back, kicked the door open in reverse and rushed inside, wielding powerful torch beams that cut the darkness like scalpels.

  In less than two minutes, they had searched every room in the house. The only inhabitant who tried to put up a fight was Antonio, the fifty-year-old head of the family. He was subdued by a pistol shot to his left kneecap and beaten unconscious. The operation then proceeded as planned and without further interruption. The mother and her eldest son and two daughters were locked up in one of the bedrooms, after which the intruders turned their attention to Francesco Nicastro. He had not made any attempt to protest or resist. Indeed, he still looked dozy and lost in his dreams. The man who had spoken angrily earlier felled him wi
th a massive blow to the face, then picked him up like a sack of barley and threw him on to the bed. He prised his jaws open and wedged the teeth on either side with chunks of rubber cut from an old tractor tyre. One of the other men gripped the boy’s tongue firmly with a pair of pliers while the leader sliced off a chunk of it with a razor blade. All three then clattered back down the stairs, got into the Jeep and drove away.

  Across the street, Maria tried to block out the cacophony of screams emanating from the Nicastro house. The knowledge that her predictions had been validated brought no comfort. Her prayers had been powerless, she was powerless, they were all powerless. She walked in slow, painful steps down the stairs to the living room and the only phone in the house.

  ‘Send an ambulance at once,’ Maria told the emergency operator. ‘There’s been a terrible accident.’

  Martin Nguyen’s driver had been unbeatable when it came to getting maximum respect on the autostrada down from Rome, but faced with the task of finding his way around Cosenza it rapidly became clear that he didn’t have a clue. The limo was much too good to give up — leather seats, tinted windows and a/c that really worked — but under the terms of the leasing agreement no one else was allowed to drive it. Martin’s solution had been to call a cab to the Rende International Residence, then slip the guy enough cash to have him park his vehicle and act as navigator for the clueless romano.

  They reached the Hotel Centrale at twenty to five. The air was mild and welcoming, but it was still dark. Tom Newman was waiting outside, and he and Martin proceeded to Aeroscan Surveying’s base in the outlying southern suburbs of the city. Neither of the Americans had been able to get breakfast at their respective hotels before leaving, so Phil Larson instantly went up a notch in Martin’s estimation by having brewed up a pot of coffee and bought some pastries from a bakery that opened early. Once Phil had got through giving them a long story about some break-in the previous night — ‘Nothing missing, it looks like, but you know how you feel kind of violated?’ — Martin opened his aluminium briefcase and passed a thick sheaf of printed matter across the desk.