No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Where are they? A man and a woman – she was hurt? Cut in the face. Didn’t you see? Was an ambulance called?’

  No answer from the teenagers, the kids who were skipping school, the dog-walkers or the postman. A mother told him that the man and the woman with the big facial wound had gone in a taxi to the hospital, the one on Spandauer Damm.

  ‘Has anyone rung the police at Bismarckstrasse?’

  He had lost his audience. He could see himself reflected in the glass. There was no blood on his face or his shirt. His hair was dishevelled and his right trouser leg torn. Jago thought he looked drunk rather than injured. He was alive and standing, asking questions, and the entertainment was over: they flowed around him.

  Jago Browne went in search of an investigator. Failure loomed large in his mind.

  4

  ‘You took your time.’

  ‘It’s a busy city.’

  ‘I’ve been here three-quarters of an hour.’ Jago Browne stood up, feet a little apart, hands on hips, chin jutting.

  ‘And in forty-five minutes you had ample opportunity to report a crime at the desk. You didn’t use it,’ the investigator countered.

  He had strode into the reception area of the police station on Bismarckstrasse and given the name of the man he wanted to see, had watched the woman behind the reinforced glass make the first phone call, then another. Nothing had happened. He had been asked if he wanted to see another officer because Seitz was engaged in a meeting. He had declined. Anger had built. Around him things had continued much as on the previous day – the same stereotypical victims and low-life, the same smell of urine, vomit, cleaning fluid and sweat.

  The investigator had come out of an inner corridor, joking with a colleague, then had spoken to the woman at the counter. She had gestured with her head towards Jago, and the man had nodded. He had shown no embarrassment at keeping him waiting, no frustration that a bad penny had returned, neither indifference nor pleasure at the renewed contact. Another day at the coal face. He had come out through the security door, and had indicated, with a finger, that they’d talk in the public area.

  ‘I wanted to see you because it’s about yesterday but further along than before.’

  ‘As I remember, Mr Browne, you were there then to visit a client. Did your client’s needs bring you across the city a second time?’

  ‘Actually, I was there to see whether extortion was alive and well in Savignyplatz, whether street violence could flourish in Charlottenburg. Do you want to know, or do you know already?’

  The investigator did not. ‘I am not in direct contact with the operations room.’

  ‘I did the good-citizen bit yesterday when I made a report to you.’

  ‘Which provoked an appropriate response.’

  ‘As I remember it, “Go home, forget the world outside, go to a disco, get laid, go to work.” Seems close to your response.’

  ‘The incident didn’t happen where you live or where you work. What’s your interest?’

  ‘I thought it important and . . .’

  The investigator peered at him. Perhaps, for close work, he wore spectacles.

  ‘Or was it because you were dumped on your backside yesterday – and apparently on your face this morning? A pity – that looks like an expensive suit and “invisible mending” won’t fix the tear in the knee. “Important” has already cost you at least five hundred euros. Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘You can check with your operations room for a report on a young woman so badly injured by a blow to the face that she’ll be scarred for the rest of her life. Try that for a start.’

  The investigator swivelled away and spoke into his mobile phone.

  For Jago, the girl’s face was clear. Blood oozed from the wound and there was shock in her eyes. He saw the man who had been behind her, cringing. He saw the money held out in a wad. It was a game of control.

  The phone was snapped off. ‘There is no report of any incident in the place you have described, not yesterday and not today.’

  He took the policeman’s arm. If he’d done that in Canning Town, he’d have had his fingers rapped, hard, with a collapsible baton. Not here. They walked back into the fresh air of the morning. On the way to the square, Jago explained what had happened to the girl, his intervention and failure. The policeman did not interrupt. At the end of his description of the events, he’d stumbled. He couldn’t answer the investigator’s final question: ‘What the hell were you doing there?’ Jago thought himself a victim – his chin was grazed, his knee was bruised and his clothes were torn and dirtied.

  They were at the square.

  Jago led the other man into the small garden with the benches. Across the street, the door to the pizzeria was shut and the closed sign hung at an angle. He could see the pavement – there should be bloodstains on it. He spotted a dark patch on the concrete, with a trickle line to the gutter – it was there that he had been tripped. The woman with the mismatched shoes was there, reading the Berliner Morgenpost. Jago had told the investigator about her and her shoes. He pointed her out, then hung back.

  The investigator went up to her, bent so that his head was level with hers and spoke to her with what seemed deference and respect. What had she seen? He was answered decisively. She looked up, saw Jago, seemed to peer through him, then turned to the policeman and shook her head decisively. She had seen nothing.

  Jago and the investigator walked away, into the heart of Charlottenburg and towards the hospital that had an Accident and Emergency department. Jago had to scurry to keep up with him. Left to himself he might have given up.

  Giulietta knelt in front of her father. Bernardo had rolled up his trouser leg and his wife watched as his daughter massaged the knee, more effective than if he took the powerful painkillers their doctor – always discreet, always well rewarded – would have prescribed. When the ache in his knee was relieved, his hip hurt less. He loved Giulietta as if she had been a son.

  She talked of her day. She’d left home the previous morning, then driven, with Stefano at the wheel, to the airport. She’d taken the flight north, then the shuttle bus from Milan to Novara. Forty-five minutes with her brother, Domenico, the widower of Annunziata, not a minute more and not a minute less, because the restrictions on visits to prisoners held under Article 41bis were sacrosanct. She had spoken to him through a wall of reinforced glass, communicating via microphone and earpiece. His voice, she reported, was metallic and thin. He seemed to have lost his defiance.

  Bernardo thought that Giulietta, had she not been his daughter, might have gone to the university across the mountains, at Reggio. She could have become a poet. He couldn’t remember when he had last read a book. She had a way with words. There was a statue in Locri, close to the shoreline, dedicated to the memory of Nosside, the girl poet of the Greek settlers in the city, three centuries before the birth of Christ. It would have been pleasing if Giulietta had been able to utilise her talent with words . . . His daughter’s ability to master the family’s investments, though, was more important to him. And she was good at choosing the men who would carry out that work on their behalf. She was indispensable to him.

  She told him about her visit to Novara in graphic detail. It was rooted in the old tradition of the ’Ndrangheta: men should serve time in gaol and come out stronger, with greater authority; they should not weaken. It was easier when the gaol was down the road, across the peninsula, to the south of Reggio. In the gaol at San Pietro, a padrino could live well. Paulo de Stefano had had the ‘suite’ there and had lived almost in luxury, until Article 41bis had been introduced. The accursed Sicilians, with their campaigns of assassination and bombings, had provoked the state and Article 41bis – isolation and slow, rotting decline – had been the response. Giulietta answered the question without him asking it: their son had not asked after him or Mamma. Domenico had spoken of his children and his eyes had filled with tears when he had talked about his dead wife, disappeared. There had been mention of the fo
od and the exercise he was allowed. Giulietta would not have said that her brother had spoken well of them if he had not. She told no lies to please.

  He slept most nights in the bunker because of Article 41bis. A few, not many, could continue to control their family’s affairs from one of the gaols with segregated blocks; they used codes based on books, and the visitors would carry back a message of which book and which page, then describe how the words should be pulled out so that the instructions could be interpreted. Bernardo would have been among the many – as were Domenico, and Rocco. From the bunker, Bernardo could exercise a degree of power, but not from a prison cell. Soon, he would no longer have to sleep in the bunker. He had been told so. Mamma brought him some coffee. The clerk in the Palace of Justice had said that the prosecutor searching for him was under pressure to reduce the resources used in the investigation. Bernardo did not know what resources had been deployed, but it seemed they were nearly exhausted.

  He was quiet when Giulietta had finished.

  She had returned late from her journey. The round trip would have been in excess of 2,500 kilometres. She went once a month to see both of her brothers. In the summer, when it was warm, she could take Mamma with her, or Teresa. Otherwise she went on her own – it would have been too tiring for Mamma and too tedious for Teresa, who had the two sets of children to care for.

  Bernardo imagined himself in a cell: the hours became days, the days weeks, the weeks faded to months, and hope failed . . . It would have been like that for the child in the cave, with the chain on her ankle, in the dark, while they negotiated the ransom.

  Mamma was back in the kitchen. He coughed.

  Which of them would come to visit him? Each evening Stefano was given a plastic bag with the stubs of the cigars Bernardo had smoked during the day and the ash. He would take them to the incinerator. Windows were always open in the house, and Mamma usually had a cigarette burning in the kitchen. It was the care of small details that kept men free. Who would come?

  He clapped his hands, and the sound bounced off the walls. Marcantonio would be home late that night. He cleansed his mind of the image of the cell where Domenico was held, the image of the child and the sound of her frail voice. The picture in his mind of the prosecutor, from the Cronaca, had gone. He thought of his grandson and the pleasure the boy had given him.

  He might hear that day, or the next, that a turncoat had died from a bullet wound. He felt good, and would feel even better when the family was gathered, the investigation was scaled down and his own bed beckoned. He slapped the table and the coffee cup jumped. A little spilled but he felt safer. He clapped loudly again and the sound bounced off the walls. He was secure.

  Most people ignored them. They were on the Via Nazionale Pentimele, the main road cutting through Archi, satellite of Reggio Calabria. Consolata was on the pavement closest to the sea, and Massimo had the side that was near to the main railway line. They might not have been there for all the attention they attracted.

  A few took their fliers, glanced at them and discarded them. The majority sidestepped Massimo and Consolata, even crossed the road to avoid them. It was her home but she hated this place.

  She made a point of staring into the faces of the men and women, locking eyes and daring them to break the contact. Some, not many, would have benefited from the clans who ran the town, the families who exercised control over life and death – they would have taken a share each month of the profits from drugs trafficking, extortion and corruption of local government.

  Abruptly, her face lit.

  The man was of the ‘grey zone’. She was from the ‘white zone’ and so, after a fashion, were Massimo, her parents, the magistrates, some of the prosecutors and most, but not all, of the police and carabinieri. The ‘black zone’ was inhabited by the Men of Honour – she shuddered at the irony – from the de Stefano, Condello, Tegano and Imerti families. She despised the grey zone more than the organised-crime groups.

  The grey-zone man approaching her had the bearing of one who had sold out, a lawyer, banker or accountant. The criminals flourished through the professional help of such scum. Such a man danced to the families’ music, and might not be trusted but received fat fees. He would have a large villa facing the beach and would dread the arrival of the police at dawn or news that the shares bought with laundered money had collapsed. Perhaps, inhabiting the grey zone, they feared less the police coming at first light to arrest them than losing the families’ money. Perhaps the greater terror would come from trying to explain that a share price could go down as easily as up, that what had seemed a good investment was based on shifting sand. She watched the man. Tall, heavy, well-dressed in a three-piece suit, a phone at his ear. He had to come close to her because part of the pavement was blocked with uncollected bursting rubbish bags. Other people passed him and ignored her, as she now ignored them, but she could play a little with him.

  ‘Are you prepared to denounce the criminal profiteering of the ’Ndrangheta? Are you prepared to condemn the intimidation practised by the clans? Do you look forward to a day when our local government can be liberated from corruption? If so what are you prepared to do to bring it forward?’

  Refuse clearance was at the dictate of the families. It was a matter of control: they decided who worked and when, who had a business and at what profit margin, whose son went to university and won good grades, who had access to corporation housing. He would step around the rubbish, cannon into her and apologise. A flier would be in his hand and her voice would be in his ear. He’d have to step into the filth to get past her.

  Consolata did not see the boys. They came up behind the man, elbowed past him, and stood in front of her. They would have owed allegiance to the same family. The feud – the faida – that had divided the clans, let blood flow in the gutters, a hundred men dead in this town alone, had been patched up with marriages of convenience.

  Their leader stood a half pace in front of them. He was smart, well turned-out, and might have come that morning from a hairdressing salon. The grey-zone man was behind her. The traffic was heavy and it was likely that Massimo was unaware that danger had surfaced. She felt threatened. Did they know her name? Probably not. It was too early in the day, perhaps, for them to be doing the rounds, collecting pizzo from shopkeepers and bar managers: they had identified her as potential amusement.

  The one at the front was so polite. Could he, please, see a copy of what she was handing out?

  She looked into the young face – he might already be a millionaire. If she had been a song bird they might have wanted to slice off her wings while she was alive. She couldn’t back away. If she did, she would betray every point she had made in the squat, about picket lines at the residences and confrontations with the principals of the families who controlled Archi. She hoped that her fingers were steady. He smiled at her.

  She extracted one of the sheets. She remembered the crap that Piero and the others had cobbled together: she had thought it embarrassing and clichéd, and had said so. She passed it to him. He leaned forward and nodded, glanced at the page, then turned it upside-down, as if he could neither read nor write. Behind him there was laughter and two of his men sniggered.

  It was the closest she had been, in all her years of protest, to a major family’s heir. He passed the sheet of paper to the kid who stood on his right and murmured to the one on his left. He loosened his belt, took back the sheet and made a play of wiping his arse with it. The one on the left flicked the top two buttons of her blouse, which opened easily. The leader had refastened his belt and was still smiling. He slipped the paper into the gap between her breasts.

  Trying to keep her voice steady, Consolata said, ‘Go fuck your mother.’

  He spat.

  Consolata bit her lip. His saliva was on her trainers. For a moment longer they watched her, then were gone. She could barely stand. She felt faint and the paper tickled her skin. She wore no bra, which was supposed to be a statement. What shamed her most was the fear
she had felt, and the effort she had had to make to keep it from them.

  She pulled out the flier, smoothed it and put it back into the bag. Massimo was at her side. Was she all right? Of course she was. She was very pale, he said. Then he suggested they take a train into Reggio and work there – he needed to reach more people. Was she sure she was all right? She realised he had seen nothing. She buttoned her blouse. They didn’t know her name, and she had achieved nothing against them. It would be easier to give out fliers on the streets in Reggio. She strode towards the station, and Massimo followed.

  It was not the way of Fred Seitz to justify himself, his time and how he used it. He gave explanations of what he had done, not done or what he intended to do. He went into the hospital on Spandauer Damm and flashed his warrant card. He walked to the head of a queue. A receptionist pointed. He scribbled on a piece of paper. The English boy would stay in his wake.

  Down a corridor, past a bank of lifts, up a wide flight of stairs, two at a time. He had not told the boy that he had worked hard the previous evening, on his computer. He had a car registration from CCTV, and a named owner from the licensing authority, with an address and a nationality. He had contacts, former colleagues, from the sunshine days. He had rung the GICO people in the far south of Italy and they had pushed him towards the ROS. There was a family with that name. Friends had done him a favour over the phone. There was no electronic print. To have done it formally, it would been a month before authorisation had come for that information to be released, and old spats between German and Italian law-enforcers would have surfaced. He had pushed aside work that was more pressing. He had reached home late and had packed for the weekend. That afternoon he and his wife would be heading north. He went down another corridor, past the bays of treatment cubicles, then checked a number.