That was what bothered him.
There was an aspect to the ‘investigation’ – he used the inverted commas mentally – that he hadn’t been able to put his finger on from the start. He had been watching them for three weeks now and the tapes and photographs were piling up. There was bound to be fingerprint evidence, too. If the surveillance team was putting together a dossier against the boys, they had more than enough to bring charges.
But what ‘charges’?
He had spoken with his supervisor that morning, telling him about the material he had recorded the night before. You could hear them, he’d said, calling each other by name as they smashed their way into the building site, laughing as they chucked bricks and broke glass, joking as they smashed things up. But what did it amount to? Acts of vandalism, a heavy fine, a tiny blot on their record sheets, a statutory conditional sentence as first-time offenders? They were just a gang of kids letting off steam in a tiny town where nothing exciting ever happened.
Kids.
A burly copper on the doorstep would frighten the life out them and their parents. A quiet word, a serious warning, and that would be the end of the story.
‘I feel like a babysitter,’ he had said to his supervisor.
‘And that’s what you are,’ the supervisor had replied. ‘So shut up, sit tight and watch the fucking baby.’
He had said a lot more, too. The Legend was running things. The Legend knew what was behind it all. The Legend was never wrong. Et cetera.
The Watcher watched the babies pop their cans, guzzle beer, smoke cigarettes.
What the hell was dangerous about them?
TWENTY-TWO
The same day, Perugia
Calisto Catapanni had only been there once before.
It had been at the very start of his career, one of the first cases he had handled as a junior magistrate when he was appointed to the court. It hadn’t been necessary for him to go there on that occasion either, but he had gone all the same.
‘Just for the experience,’ as he had said at the time.
It had turned out to be a very unpleasant experience.
He hadn’t been able to imagine what would happen to a body when it hit the ground after falling three hundred feet from the medieval bridge that spanned a gorge outside the town.
Still, this one was a body that he had to see.
He hadn’t been called to San Bartolomeo sul Monte. The carabinieri had brought in the Regional Crime Squad, which meant that there would be no official inquest until after the post-mortem had been performed. But Sustrico’s telephone call had worried him. If that corpse belonged to Andrea Bonanni, the informer he had had released from prison then lost track of, his own future as an investigating magistrate would be at risk. At risk? His career would be finished.
He had driven to Perugia to attend the autopsy.
Doctor Petrillo would be doing the post-mortem examination at eleven o’clock, he had been told by the receptionist. It was almost half past eleven now, and Doctor Petrillo had still not arrived.
‘Is he always late?’ he asked the woman behind the reception desk.
He was scheduled to be in court that afternoon, and he was cutting things close.
‘It depends,’ she said, though she didn’t say what it depended on.
Twenty minutes later, a man in a white medical overall arrived, spoke for some moments to the receptionist then came over to where the magistrate was sitting.
‘Giovanni Petrillo,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Magistrate Catapanni, thank you for coming. Is this case yours?’
There was an air of playful levity about the doctor.
Calisto Catapanni stood up and shook the man’s hand with a degree of embarrassment. ‘Not exactly,’ he said, ‘but I am interested in trying to find out who this man might be.’
‘Do you have somebody in mind?’ Doctor Petrillo asked.
Catapanni nodded. ‘A criminal who was recently released from prison,’ he said. ‘An informer who was working with me.’
‘And you think that this may be your man?’
Catapanni asked himself how far he might be able to help the doctor come to the right conclusion.
‘I don’t believe so. It’s just … Well, it’s a shot in the dark. The news that I have suggests … that is, it seems to suggest, that he may have disappeared abroad.’
Doctor Petrillo waved his hand towards the swinging doors as though he might be inviting the magistrate to have a coffee in a bar. ‘Let’s get started then. Just give me a couple of minutes to change, will you?’
Five minutes later, dressed in a dark green smock and a white face mask, the pathologist pulled away the rubber sheet and exposed what Calisto Catapanni had driven to Perugia to see. What remained of the corpse was naked now, a collection of body parts on a metal table. The skull was detached from the sagging mass of the blackened skin and dirt-stained bones. One of the legs was a withered black branch. The other one was a chocolate-brown skeleton. But the first thing the magistrate noted was a large blue stain on the upper right arm of the man that he had seen one day in prison wearing a sleeveless vest. He couldn’t be certain, but it was very similar to the tattoo on Andrea Bonanni’s right arm. If nothing else, it was in the right place.
‘Do you recognize anything?’ the doctor said, pulling the mask up over his face.
Catapanni shook his head and wished that he’d been wearing a mask, but Doctor Petrillo was already at work and gave no sign of noticing his uneasiness.
‘In such a state,’ Catapanni said, ‘I really couldn’t say. I wonder how you hope to go about it. There’s … well, there’s so little on which to work, I mean.’
The pathologist picked up the skull and held it in his rubber-gloved hands.
‘The cause of death is unequivocal. A single bullet to the brain. How old was your man?’
Catapanni hesitated. ‘I’m not too sure,’ he said. ‘Late thirties, early forties?’
‘We can determine certain aspects of age by examining the cranial platelets,’ the pathologist went on, turning the head in his hands as if it were a basketball, ‘where the separate elements of the skull have conjoined. Here, as you can see, the joints are almost invisible, which means that he – we’re talking about a male – is at least twenty-five or twenty-six years old.’
Catapanni shrank back as the doctor held the skull out. It’s Andrea Bonanni, he thought with a sinking feeling.
‘Physical examination does not provide conclusive evidence. We know that he is no younger than twenty-five, though he could be sixty, seventy, or even older.’
Catapanni breathed more easily. ‘Can science be no more precise?’
‘Well, there’s always the tongue test,’ Doctor Petrillo said. ‘But I won’t be doing that!’
‘Why not?’
‘You have to lick the bone.’ The doctor laughed. ‘If your tongue sticks to it, you send for a forensic anthropologist. A bone historian, let’s call him. Otherwise, it all comes down to chemistry. The labora-tory tests will take at least three weeks.’
He looked at Catapanni as if to say, what’s next?
‘The man I took under my wing almost certainly had a drug habit; cocaine, perhaps. I wonder whether that might help?’
‘Again, it all ends up in the laboratory, I’m afraid. They’ll need to cut his hair into short sections then analyse each piece to identify which drug or drugs he was using, and to estimate over how long a period he was using them. Hair grows at about half an inch per month, so we have quite a wide spectrum to work on.’
‘What about colour? Of the hair, I mean.’
‘It will need to be washed, leached and dried before we can establish that, Doctor Catapanni. What remains of the hair is filthy, as you can see …’
‘Surely the teeth will tell you something?’
Petrillo pursed his lips, then smiled. ‘If we had his medical records, his dental profile, we’d know already who he is. I’m sorry I can’t be any mor
e helpful at the moment. You’ll have to wait for the results of the tests, I’m afraid.’
‘Whoever killed him didn’t want him to be recognized, I suppose,’ Calisto Catapanni concluded.
‘So it would seem,’ Doctor Petrillo agreed. ‘I’ll probably end up writing something along those lines in my report.’
The trip had been worthwhile, then, Catapanni considered.
There was no immediate need to alter what he had written in his most recent request for promotion and a transfer to the north: he was still working with an important member of an ’Ndrangheta clan regarding drug trafficking in Milan and Lombardy.
At least, until the test results came through.
TWENTY-THREE
A few days later
Corrado Formisano placed the gun on the table next to the bottle of fizzy wine.
The Force 99 was a work of art. So was the bottle of Sassicaia that Zì Luigi always sent him when he blasted someone.
But this time Raniero had given him a bottle of piss, and a different job to do.
Things were sliding downhill fast.
Gravedigger first, then messenger boy,
Was he the fucking postman now?
Raniero wanted to humiliate him, take him down. And that was how Corrado felt: humiliated.
The fury was building up inside him.
Raniero had stepped into Zì Luigi’s snakeskin shoes. He was making all the moves in Umbria, calling all the shots. A star like Raniero moving up wouldn’t let Zì Luigi stand in his way.
And if the Zì was up for the chop, Corrado knew that he was next in line.
Unless Raniero got the chop first …
He’d been expecting a bottle of Sassicaia when he blasted Bonanni. Zì Luigì had told him to shut Bonanni up, and that was what he’d done. That was what he always did, and Zì Luigi should have known it. Instead, the boss had lost his rag and put the blame on him, telling him he’d put the business in Umbria at risk. Now he was reduced to this.
A five-year-old kid could post a fucking envelope!
He recognized the address. He had been there a few weeks back and left a dead cat on the doorstep, the way Raniero had told him. The woman hadn’t taken the warning, hadn’t done what she was supposed to do. Not if Raniero needed to send her a reminder.
Corrado knew what he would have done.
He’d have told her to kiss the hot end of the Force 99. She’d have got the message, and so would anyone who stepped into her shoes.
But Don Michele wasn’t having it. No more shooting, Raniero had said. The fuckers knew what needed doing, but they lacked the imagination. If you wanted someone to do something, you had to send the right message to the right place.
And that was what Corrado had done.
He weighed the pistol in his hand, sighted down the barrel. The Force 99 corto was the latest version of a pistol he had always loved. It fired .38s but it took other calibres, too. You could make as much or as little damage as you wanted to make. A condition 1 gun, ‘cocked and locked’, you could carry it around with a slug already in the chamber, the hammer drawn back. All you had to do was flick off the safety, then squeeze.
He flicked off the safety, squeezed the trigger.
Click …
Instant death, and no fuck-ups.
He ought to have dumped it after doing Bonanni, but he couldn’t chuck the Force 99 into a river. It sat so sweet in the palm of his hand. It was chunky, but light as a feather with a polymer frame. Matt black, no silvery bits to flash in the dark. Lisa had brought it up the day they let him out of jail. She had known what would make her baby brother happy after twelve years without one. The gun was what he had missed the most in prison.
The gun, the job, and Zì Luigi.
Zì Luigi told you what he wanted, then he left you to work out the details: how to do it, when to do it, where to do it. A name became a face. You hunted it down, closed in for the kill, showed the mark the gun, then you let him have it. You saw the fear in his eyes, felt the kickback in your hand, the smell of his shit, the rush of pride, then the taste of the Sassicaia afterwards.
That life was finished.
Chin! Chin! Salute!
He took a slug of wine from the bottle, then spat it out.
He pushed the loaded clip into the Force 99.
Out through the door, a rabbit was nibbling grass in the backyard. He fixed the rabbit in his sights and his shirt button scuffed the table. The rabbit pulled back and disappeared from view, but Corrado didn’t move. It would soon come back. The victim always did. Frightened once, they stepped into the firing line more boldly the second time, thinking it was safe.
He saw the wet black nose come peeping around the doorframe.
He aimed the Force 99 at the gap between its ears and flicked the safety off.
Did a rabbit have a brain? he wondered, gently squeezing the trigger. The rabbit dropped on the doorstep. The slug had gone in through its left eye and out behind the right ear, the rear sight a millimetre off. He set it a fraction to the left, then stood up, crossed the room and stepped over the tiny corpse, his heart pumping steady now.
It was the sight of blood that did it.
He stood in the yard and closed his eyes, feeling the breeze on his face.
The dull thud of the Force 99 always did that to him. It gave him a new lease of life while it took some other fucker’s life away. He stood there without moving for some time. Night was the time that he liked the best. In or out of prison, lights out, a creature of the night.
Like that kid who drove by every night in his noisy old Land Rover, the park ranger, the one from Calabria who was watching the wolves up on the ridge. Night after night.
Corrado felt the bulk of the Force 99 in his hand. He pulled the hammer back and a .38 clicked into the breach.
TWENTY-FOUR
That night, in the national park
Cangio watched the kids through the night-scope binoculars.
The male had gone hunting as soon as the noise started up, while the she-wolf had retreated into the den, pushing the four cubs inside with her muzzle. There was something almost human about it: the male goes out on the prowl, the female puts the kids to bed, then watches over them.
It was the same group of kids he had seen there three nights before. They were doing the same things, too, dancing around a bonfire on the other side of the valley, letting out whoops and howls like kids on a school vacation without a teacher to keep them in line.
He could smell the weed across the half mile that separated them. He could hear the music, too.
They had parked their cars on the edge of a clearing. The doors of one car were wide open, the stereo on full blast, churning out grunge or techno, or whatever they called music these days with a heavy churning bass and not much else. That car was pale fluorescent green seen through the night glasses, though he knew that it was old and white, the bodywork spotted with rust.
The last time, they’d been partying, too. There were four boys and three girls tonight, so someone would be going home empty-handed. Not that they seemed to be bothered by the maths. They’d been roasting sausages over the fire, emptying bottles of wine and beer before the dope came out. Shortly afterwards they had started acting funny.
He wasn’t sure what the excitement was all about, but he had to laugh when they all dropped down on their stomachs, ears to the ground like a tribe of Apaches listening for the hoof-beats of the Fifth Cavalry.
‘The cavalry’s already here,’ he murmured to himself. ‘One false move and I’ll encircle the lot of you.’
He had been there half an hour, keeping an eye on the wolves.
Whatever the kids were doing flat on their stomachs, it didn’t last long. They gathered around the campfire again, reefers burning, beer bottles clinking, music blasting the night apart. If there’d been any more of them you’d have called it a rave party, like some of the ones he’d been to in London. The flames of the fire were white in the night-scope, and he f
elt the nip in the air. At least they had that in common, him and them. They liked the outdoors, the scent of the trees and grass, the perfume of wood smoke and sausages rather than being cooped up in a bar or a disco somewhere. He wouldn’t have swapped a single night on the mountains for all the nights he had wasted in London pubs, where stale beer and stale piss were the order of the night.
He smiled to himself, remembering how the evening had started out: a pizza with Loredana, then she had suggested a night in a disco which had opened recently in Perugia. ‘Why don’t we go for a drive in the woods?’ he’d suggested. They had tossed a coin, and he had won. Cheating, obviously. He wanted to keep an eye on the wolves. The first weeks were crucial. Loredana may have guessed what he was thinking, but she hadn’t objected. Her plan that night had been to let him see the brand-new flesh-coloured bra and panties she had on – eagerly expecting him to peel them off at the first opportunity.
He had run his hands over the Chinese silk that gave off static, then said, ‘I prefer the real thing,’ unhooking the bra clip and helping her out of the frilly knickers while they lay on a blanket together beneath the stars in a spot that he knew well.
She was down-to-earth and had a sense of humour. He hadn’t complained when she asked him to take her home. She was on the first shift starting at 6 a.m., she’d said, supervising the cleaners, chivvying the warehousemen and the staff that came in early to stock the shelves.
He had left her at her door, then headed for the hills again. A perfect evening, all in all: Loredana from eight to eleven, then a couple of hours with the wolves and their cubs.
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