The Namesake cab-3

by Conor Fitzgerald

  Salvatore did as he was told, removing his white hat and flinging it onto the counter as he left the kitchen. He dripped the tray into the slot, and picked up a star-shaped sign on the end of a short spike, and sunk it into the green mass, muttering to himself, ‘Sickly

  … sits in the stomach like a brick, tastes of…’

  ‘Did you just stick the mint sign into my pistachio ice cream?’ said Basile, his voice coming from directly behind Salvatore’s head.

  Salvatore kept his head bent down and his voice casual. ‘Silly mistake, Capo. I must be preoccupied with other things.’ He stuck in the right sign, and turned to face his boss.

  ‘I want the children to taste my latest ice cream,’ said Basile. ‘Have a group of them brought here after football practice tomorrow morning. Remove their phones, and we shall keep them out of circulation for a few hours. Agazio’s son Ruggiero and Tony’s son Enrico must be among them. They are best friends anyhow, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘Good. They can stay here all afternoon.’

  ‘You know Enrico’s aunt will panic immediately if Enrico misses his lunch. You know what Rosa is like.’

  ‘I know about Zia Rosa. She has overfed and coddled that child. It is hard to imagine he is really Tony Megale’s son. Old Megale could at least disown him as not his flesh and blood, but Tony must claim him as his own. That child needs some toughening up. Ruggiero, on the other hand, is like a reincarnation of his father. I see something in him.’

  ‘I agree that Enrico is hardly a worthy successor, but he’s young yet.’

  ‘Not so young he can’t start acting like a man. Perhaps it is time to give him some lessons in courage.’

  ‘As I say, Zia Rosa will certainly panic when Enrico vanishes for a few hours. That could be misconstrued.’

  ‘I told you, I know. We shall consider how the families react and draw conclusions later,’ said Basile. ‘If Maria Itria, who keeps her neighbours at a distance, were to start phoning and visiting them inquiring in worried tones about Ruggiero, that, too, might signal a bad conscience. Do not forewarn the Megales or any other family, Salvatore. Make sure the sons of several families are here tomorrow. We must be seen to be just.’

  16

  Milan

  ‘I’ll have the sea bass,’ said Magistrate Bazza. ‘And you?’

  Magistrate Fossati shook his head. ‘I can never get used to the idea of fish in Milan…’ He looked at the menu without enthusiasm. ‘I’ll have the mix of cold cuts,’ he told the waiter. ‘Just water to drink.’

  The waiter collected the menus and left.

  ‘You should try the fish.’

  ‘You know I’m from Livorno, Ezio. When I visit my parents’ graves, I eat fresh local fish. My mother used to make a fantastic cacciucco. Actually, I don’t usually eat at lunchtime. I’d have preferred to meet for dinner in the usual place.’

  ‘I wanted to meet as soon as possible,’ said Magistrate Bazza. ‘Have you got the file on the missing girl?’

  ‘Teresa Resca. Yes.’ Fossati glanced around the room, then handed the file to his friend.

  Bazza ate breadsticks as he glanced through the pages, then handed them back.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t help.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Definitely not organized crime. But that I can’t help is in itself an important pointer. For one, the modus operandi is needlessly complicated. From what I can see here there was a long stakeout in broad daylight, they depended on public transport and relied on a certain amount of luck. But I had my mind made up before I even looked at your file. This is not a Mafia abduction.’

  ‘Are you supposed to make up your mind like that before you even see the file?’ said Fossati.

  ‘There’s not much in that file that isn’t already in the public domain. Nothing to make me change my mind. This has nothing to do with the Ndrangheta or any other Mafia.’

  ‘Don’t the bastards you deal with ever reserve unpleasant surprises for you? Don’t they ever act out of character? I mean if you really knew everything about how they operate…’

  ‘You know how it works, Francesco. Intelligence gets you only so far. We know a hell of a lot but can’t act upon it. The Northern League and Berlusconi have cut our funding. Did you know that my colleagues in Calabria have to wash their own cars? And they can get fined for insubordination if they don’t. Then that creep Maroni with his pervert’s moustache and red glasses comes on TV and says his Ministry has done more to combat…’

  ‘Aw, don’t start that conversation again, Ezio,’ said Fossati. ‘I’m here about the girl.’

  ‘It’s not organized crime. That’s not where you should be looking. I would have heard a whisper. I spent the morning with a team of excellent Carabinieri analysing intercepted communications over the past six months, focusing on any reference to the girl and her father. The father got mentioned twice. It’s not enough. He hasn’t written any exposes in months anyhow. It makes no sense for them to decide to silence him when he is already silent.’

  The waiter arrived with Fossati’s platter of cold salamis and hams. Fossati lifted a length of speck. ‘Help yourself,’ he told Bazza.

  ‘No. I’ll wait for my fish. So tell me about the rumour mill on your side of the building.’

  ‘Everyone’s interested in the murder of that insurance broker. The poor bastard with the same name as Magistrate Arconti.’

  ‘Interested, as in displeased the case went down to Rome and got bounced up to us in the anti-Mafia wing without anyone else getting a look-in?’

  ‘No. Just interested. Or not interested, as the case may be. There isn’t even enough belief or passion for magistrates to feel strongly about jurisdiction rights nowadays.’

  ‘They’re right to feel disheartened,’ said Bazza. ‘Almost everyone you and I investigated in the ’90s is in political office now. All we did was raise the cost of bribes. I don’t understand how you managed to stay on there.’

  ‘An ordinary magistrate manages to solve a lot of cases, put away people who have done real harm. I don’t know how you bear it in the anti-Mafia. Huge rolling investigations that never come to an end, the constant reminders of the extent of the infiltration of organized crime, the cowardice of politicians.’

  ‘When we manage to break a case, we order arrests in the hundreds. That’s always gratifying. We shut down entire systems, even if only temporarily. Ah, here’s my sea bass.’

  Bazza smiled happily as he slipped off the shining skin, peeled away a layer of brown flesh and unpacked the fluffy white meat beneath, sucking his fingers as he did so. He fell silent until he was halfway through it, then said, ‘You had a strange run-in with that magistrate in Rome once, didn’t you?’

  ‘Arconti? Yes,’ said Fossati. ‘It was some time ago. I think it’s safe to say he won the bout.’

  ‘But you became friends afterwards?’

  ‘Friends… no. We wear different political colours. Magistratura Democratica versus Magistratura Indipendente and all that, though of course those allegiances were more important then than now. Arconti’s a Catholic conservative, but one of the better ones. At the time, I thought he was a pawn of the Christian Democrats, but I was wrong there. He’s not beholden to anyone, though I resented the way he assumed I was acting out of left-wing prejudice.’

  ‘He was right about you. At the time, you were highly politicized.’

  ‘And so were you.’

  ‘Those were the days,’ said Bazza. ‘Remind me how Arconti outsmarted you.’

  ‘I was investigating illegal party political funding, and Arconti’s name came up,’ said Fossati. ‘It looked to me like he had deliberately mishandled an inquiry into donations, and then intervened to persuade the preliminary judge to throw out the case for lack of evidence. Everything magistrates in Rome did back then was suspect.’

  ‘Such was the mood of the day. Turns out, we were no better here in Milan.’

  ‘I would
contest that. But I was wrong about Arconti. I assumed he was obeying a political master, and I ordered a wiretap on him. It was easy to do that in the ’90s, remember? I had a go-to guy in the Finance Police, and he set it up, then reported back to me. By then, I was already beginning to guess that Arconti was clean. Remarkably clean, as a matter of fact. But being clean didn’t stop him from being a sly southerner. Somehow, he found out what I was doing. He took elements from several investigations and combined them in a way that dumped a lot of suspicion on the guy from the Finance Police I was using. He then applied for a wiretap on the policeman. So every time my man reported back to me on what he had heard Arconti say, Arconti was sitting there in Rome listening in. And the clever thing was, if he had tried to wiretap me directly, I would have probably found out. We were listening into one another for four months, and then one day he called me up himself, invited me down to Rome, and we spoke. He said he could see I was doing my best in difficult circumstances, and hoped I could see the same was true for him. The Finance policeman, by the way, got caught accepting bribes two years later.’

  ‘Arconti is in hospital. He was taken ill after the murder of his namesake.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said Fossati.

  ‘This is confidential, Francesco, but we like a guy named Agazio Curmaci for the crime. He’s Ndrangheta.’

  ‘If it’s confidential, why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because we’ve been friends for twenty-five years, and I trust you and I thought you might like to know.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, it’s been only twenty-three years.’

  ‘Just after Mani Pulite ran completely out of steam and I jumped ship to the DDA, Curmaci was a young camorrista, freshly inducted into the “Honoured Society”, he killed five people.’

  ‘At one go?’

  Bazza neatly peeled the skeleton from his fish and put it on the side of his plate. ‘All at one go. It was the detail of the killings that got my attention. He shot four, stabbed one to death. The one he stabbed was nineteen years old. Here’s the thing though, he had been told to kill one person only, a guy called Cava… Gra… I forget the name. Instead, he killed the guy’s parents, sister and brother. That was the one he stabbed. The only person he did not kill was the target. Transversal revenge, as they say.’

  ‘What happened to the target?’

  ‘He was so enraged and terrified, he tried to turn to the authorities for help, but his evidence was not seen as reliable, and he lost his right to protection. So that was the end of him. Vanished without trace. Shortly afterwards, Curmaci went to Germany. Within one year he was reporting directly to Domenico Megale, also known as Megale Senior, Megale u Vecchiu, or the Prefect of Westphalia.’

  ‘Prefect of Westphalia. The arrogance of these people.’

  ‘It didn’t stop him from ending up in jail. He got put away by the BKA, one of their first successful operations against an Italian boss, thanks to an investigation into a tax scam involving VAT, but I don’t think prison made much difference to him. He’s out now, by the way. Just got released two days ago. His son, a killer called Tony, held a homecoming party. I don’t know if Curmaci was there or not.’

  ‘You’ve been looking into the Megales and Curmaci for a while, then. This is not something you picked up just the other day,’ said Fossati.

  ‘You’re right. And one of the people who has been helping me is Magistrate Arconti. That’s why I was interested in your opinion of him.’

  ‘Favourable, I suppose. I have finished my salami, Ezio, so can you say why you want me to know all this?’

  ‘I told you, because you know Arconti.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Actually, there is something else. Arconti became involved in this case when he was called in to investigate the suspicious suicide of a doctor who was prescribing one of the admixtures they use to cut cocaine. He and a Roman commissioner, Alec Blume, quickly moved from that to an operation that led to the arrest of two low-ranking members of the Ndrangheta. Arconti should have passed the case on to the anti-Mafia before he got that far, but he didn’t.’

  ‘Understandable.’

  ‘I disagree, but never mind. He and this commissioner arrested two brothers who were cousins of Curmaci’s wife. Arconti then started looking into Curmaci, which even you will admit is beyond his scope of competence. But I know the reason he did this. Arconti is from Gerace in Calabria, the same town as Curmaci, though a generation separates them. It’s personal for him. In the meantime we have another case, or perhaps a development of this one.’

  ‘Those bodies discovered in the Falck steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni? I got the impression it was low-level stuff, Albanians murdering each other or something,’ said Fossati.

  ‘Romanians. Thanks to some decent and rapid work by the commissioner and an inspector, a woman, Mattiola, a direct link has been made between the bodies found there and the Arconti murder. For the time being, we have decided not to let the investigators in Rome know about this.’

  ‘That’s a shame for the police. They do their job well, and their reward is to be excluded.’

  ‘I will put them back in the picture when the time comes. The point is, we might be seeing the start of an upset in the balance of power.’

  ‘You know I am in the middle of this kidnapping of a girl, which you yourself just told me is unconnected with the Ndrangheta?’

  ‘I know. I’ll let you go now. But just one more thing.’

  ‘You said “just one more thing” five minutes ago, Ezio. I’m going now. You get the bill, I’ll get it next time.’ Fossati stood up.

  ‘Wait. Domenico Megale — the boss in Germany?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He has two main points of reference. One is Agazio Curmaci, who is the Mastro di giornata of the German locale. The other is his son, Antonio, who’s always been known as Tony. Tony is the crimine. Tony was once married, but his wife died, leaving him a son, who’s in Calabria. His wife’s surname was Mancuso.’

  Fossati sat down again. ‘For God’s sake, Ezio, you could have told me this at the beginning.’

  ‘No, first I needed to tell you the girl’s kidnapping is not Mafia related.’

  ‘And now you’re telling me the opposite. Giovanni Resca, her father, wrote article after article detailing the investments made by the Mancusos in Milan. His article specifically names that family, time and time again. They made threats against him.’

  ‘So are you going to investigate the Mancuso family?’

  ‘I already am, to the best of my ability with the resources I have.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not Mafia related. It’s not them.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘Like I said, the modus operandi isn’t right, but mainly because we’ve been monitoring the Mancusos closely for some time now. We recently picked up a lot of chat between one of them and someone in Germany. We can’t identify who, but it could be Curmaci and it could be Tony Megale or even Old Megale. But my point is, there is no indication that they are really concerned by Giovanni Resca and his anti-Mafia blogs and articles. I’m telling you this because I think you’ll be wasting your time if you pursue that path while looking for the girl.’

  ‘Duly noted. It’s not the only line of inquiry I am following.’

  ‘My advice is don’t concentrate on the Mancusos, OK? It’s not them.’

  ‘I’ll take that into account,’ said Fossati.

  ‘But you’re still going to look into them?’

  ‘Of course I am. How can I not?’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t drop that line of inquiry just on my say-so. That’s another reason I wanted to talk to you. Seeing as you, despite my advice to the contrary, will be looking into the Mancusos and their properties, will you let me know if you find anything interesting?’

  ‘Anything in particular?’

  ‘Anything at all. Specifically, anything that might be connected to Curmaci, East European criminals,
or the murder of the insurance actuary Matteo Arconti.’

  ‘So while I hunt for a stolen child, I carry out a covert check for you guys in the anti-Mafia?’

  ‘Only if you are going to waste your time looking where you won’t find the poor child. Don’t get me wrong, Francesco, I would prefer you to find the missing girl, and I wish you would take my advice and follow any other leads.’

  ‘I will follow other leads, and I see why you think this was not organized crime. But I need to follow this one, too.’

  ‘Let’s hope you find her, even if…’ Bazza looked down at the discarded skin and bones of his fish.

  ‘I know,’ said Fossati. ‘Too much time has already passed.’

  17

  Sunday, 30 August

  Locri

  ‘Pepe, Luca, Giovanni, Enrico, Ruggiero, Rocco. All of you, get over here.’

  Pepe rolled his freshly lit cigarette between his fingers, then let it drop lightly to the ground. Luca, Giovanni and Rocco stopped aiming karate kicks at each other, Enrico received a pass from Ruggiero and flicked the ball up and into his hands. They all started walking towards their football coach.

  Enrico cast Ruggiero a questioning glance. Ruggiero ignored him. He felt the others picking up on Enrico’s uncertainty and storing it away for future use. Almost certainly none of them knew what the coach wanted, but they knew it was important to look as if they did. Pepe was even nodding, as if he had been expecting this.

  ‘What is it, coach?’ said Enrico.

  ‘A little discussion of tactics, down at Mr Basile’s place,’ said the coach. ‘Now.’

  ‘Not on the pitch?’ asked Enrico, his voice a squeak of protest and surprise.

  Luca spat on the ground, just behind Enrico’s heel. ‘You heard him, Enrico.’

  ‘Are you coming, coach?’ asked Enrico.

  ‘Maybe later.’ Their coach pulled a clear plastic bag from inside his Adidas tracksuit, and held it open in front of Enrico.

  ‘What’s that for?’ asked the boy.

  ‘It’s for putting things into, Enrico. Let’s start with your mobile.’