Marcantonio knew every corner, every bend in the road out of the village and up into the heights of the Aspromonte. It was to be an accident. Along the routes towards the summits, the church of the Madonna and the great bronze cross of Christ, there were stretches where the safety barriers had never been installed and cliffs plummeted towards old mountain streams. It could be done in daylight or darkness. There was never much traffic. He would use a HiLux, one from the village, and would easily tip aside Father Demetrio’s small car. He could not refuse.
His throat was dry and he had brought no water. Sometimes the dogs would slip away from him to drink from the bowl in the yard, then return and slobber on his trousers. He loved the dogs, believed they loved him. His grandfather had told him to do it, and Marcantonio could not refuse or argue. He was dead himself if he did so. Any number of men would come up from the village and hold him. Likely it would be Stefano’s hands on his throat. A killing such as this was always arranged with deceit. A phone call to the priest’s house. Someone was sick and slipping, or bedridden and needing confession; an address would be given for a location in the mountains, only reached on a particular road, and the rider would be that the padrino himself had said that Father Demetrio should be called, not his curate. Simple to execute.
Marcantonio had never had any quarrel with Father Demetrio. His grandmother almost worshipped the ground on which Father Demetrio walked.
He would gain nothing from the killing, but his grandfather believed it necessary for his own safety. It tossed in his mind and his concentration on the noises of the night slackened. He barely noticed that the dogs were restless, or cold. Instead he saw the smile on the priest’s face, the steepest cliff on a bend in the road towards the village of Molochio, beyond Plati. He saw the car bounce and jump, roll and disintegrate. It was impossible to refuse, and the burden of it distracted him.
‘It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself,’ his wife said, and sat up on her side of the bed.
The prosecutor was late home again. He slumped on to the bed and bent to take off his shoes. He had explained little to her but she was familiar with the script. She had been asleep, had woken up and now vented her feelings.
‘You put your work before yourself, your health and me. You ignore the children. The job is a monster.’
He stood up. He put the shoes neatly into the bottom of the wardrobe. He didn’t look at her. He slipped off his trousers and put them on a hanger. He padded towards the bathroom. He had come quietly into the house but the slamming of the car doors might have woken her. Usually she suppressed her feelings – not that night.
‘The work is killing you. You get no thanks – and you can’t win. God knows, we try to support you, but there’s a limit.’
She had left a plate for him on the kitchen table – cheese, an apple and some ham under cling-film. He had said to his escort that he had no appetite.
‘If we have any life at all it’s like a stray dog’s – shunned, fearful, desperate for love and not finding it.’
In the bathroom he dumped his underwear in the laundry basket, then brushed his teeth hard. He saw himself in the mirror, bags below his eyes, which had the haunted dullness of failure. He couldn’t have argued with a word she had said. What hurt most was that the boys in the escort would have heard it all. Normally he and his wife made a pretence of harmony. He and his team had come from an expensive restaurant, above the city. A dinner had been in progress, a family party to celebrate a birthday, and an officer of the Squadra Mobile had been a principal guest. He had sat in the back of the car, smoked half a packet of cigarettes, drunk two bottles of water, gone behind flowering oleanders to relieve himself and waited for the policeman to come and speak to him. The delay might have been because the officer had received a call from a carabinieri colonel.
The two men had paced in the car park. His own people had carried their machine pistols openly and had sanitised the perimeter. He was not refused help from the Squadra Mobile – a blunt denial would have been unthinkable. Anyone who dealt with the Palace of Justice had the attuned antennae that enabled them to recognise whose star climbed and whose was barely seen. Of course he could count on co-operation, but . . . The sort of mission that required a substantial search team, and another deployed for cordon security, couldn’t be plucked from the skies. The prosecutor had been promised that a planning team would be put together when the necessary officers were available. They would be tasked to draw up a comprehensive plan for the containment of, and hunt for, a fugitive. It would be – why not? – a priority. Music had spilled out through the restaurant doors. He had thanked the man brusquely and walked back towards his car. He had muttered, and his guards would have heard him, ‘A priority – for when? Christmas?’ The clock was ticking and time was running out. They had come home.
‘Why are you spending so much time on this case? Can’t you make a start on another? Is it the only fish in the sea? Calabria is awash with corrupt, evil men.’
She was crying. He was in his pyjamas. He crawled into bed and switched off the light. She shivered. He thought they shared the pain. He was loath to move on and let the investigation slide. He would suffer if he did, and no colleague would share the pain. And there was the Englishman . . . A pleasant-looking lad, from the employee identification-card picture . . . No, he was irrelevant, as were the men who had come to apologise. He might sleep, might not.
‘Would you work here? If you had the choice, would you want to transfer to Calabria? Tell me, Carlo.’ Old friends and new had gathered. They drank Dutch beer. It was a back bar, far up the Via del Torrione, distant enough from the barracks and their senior officers. They’d eaten but the business of the evening was in the bar. There were old friends for Carlo and new friends for Fred. ‘I ask you, Fred, are we all crazy to stay in this city in a shit region?’
There was no need to answer. They could have talked about the Turks of Green Lanes in Haringey, or opened a second front on the Albanian quarter of Berlin, or the Russians, who had a presence in Hamburg, or the Vietnamese . . . It was best just to fight a fast path to the bar and put beers on the tables. There was gossip: who was sailing well, who was shipping water, who was holed in the hull and sinking. There was talk, some proud, of successes, and of the women who had been in the squads in Carlo’s time, who they had been with then and who partnered them now. They had the slip of paper that would smooth introductions. Over on the east coast there would be carabinieri Fred knew from his time there after the Duisburg massacre. Each had sent a message to his office, in London and Berlin, that they could be useful for another forty-eight hours, and had added that the apology to the prosecutor might require reaffirmation. They had moved on to a vexed subject: the merits of the Glock, the qualities of the PPK, the superiority of the Beretta, and—
A voice behind Carlo: ‘Carlo, do you know anything about a man named Horrocks?’
He turned expansively. ‘Horrocks? Bent by name and bent by nature. Bentley Horrocks. That who you mean?’
‘You know him?’ The questioner was young, fresh-faced and pale enough to work in a communications room. He had no beer gut and was ornamented with big spectacles. Probably from the computer world, in which Carlo had few skills and enough sense to offer respect.
‘I know of him but he won’t have heard of me. He’s a bad bastard, south London. Make my day, tell me he’s fallen under a bus.’
‘A big man, Carlo?’
Serious questions. The young officer, already with the rank of maresciallo, had sought him out. That was clear. He would have heard which bar the Englishman from Customs, trusted by colleagues, had decamped to. He would have come off duty at ten that evening and walked up. He was nursing an orange juice in a fragile fist. The questions were serious enough for Carlo to sober up fast.
‘He’s about as much of a big man as we have in London.’
‘His speciality is what?’
‘This is a long way ahead of what I do. He’s a principal targe
t, a major player. Sorry, I must correct myself. He should be a principal target – what we call a high-value target – but he’s protected. He has a reputation as an ‘untouchable’. We’re too yellow bellied to admit it. At my level that’s what he is because otherwise he’d be banged up for twenty-five years in high security. What’s he into? Extortion, protection, corruption of officials, smuggling Class-A drugs, fags and kids. Or that’s what the gossip says.’
‘What is “untouchable”?’
‘He has police on his payroll, those in the specialist agencies that are supposed to hunt him down, but they take his money, screw up investigations and tell him where potential witnesses are holed up so he can beat hell out of them and they don’t testify. It’s about buying some people and intimidating others. Why?’
‘I was merely clarifying who Horrocks is.’
Carlo gazed at him. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Why’s he on your radar?’
‘Because of where he is.’ The officer grinned, as if he was trailing a plastic mouse, on a length of string, in front of a lively kitten.
‘Which is where?’
The officer named a hotel, its ownership and location, then offered a confession. The usual – it might have been in English, German, French or Italian: lack of resources; a difficult week. Perhaps the following week would be easier for resources, but there might not be a target to direct them against. A shrug. The maresciallo was on the move. He went to another table where others greeted him. Always cocky, the guys who trawled the computers in the warm and dry, had good meal breaks and delivered gold dust.
Carlo said to Fred, ‘Did you get that?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you have a word for men like Horrocks?’
‘It is Unbestechlicher, but we do not use it for a gangster. In Hamburg it would be employed for a big businessman living in the “bacon belt” and using bribery to get contracts. In Frankfurt, it would be used for a senior banker who is corrupt, fraudulent and evades tax but is too powerful to bring down, and protected. It’s not only Italy.’
‘Makes me want to throw up,’ Carlo spat. ‘Little bastards like me get nowhere because they block us, the detectives and investigators.’
‘What might you do, Carlo, while we take our vacation? I have an opportunity, I believe, to assuage my sense of responsibility for this entire affair – for what I did.’
‘Not called for.’
‘And it would be good to create some collateral. Satisfying.’
‘If we get on the road early, we might screw him up.’
They made their excuses. They were the first to leave the party, and their departure was barely noticed. The source had his back to them and was on a second orange juice. They went out into the night.
Fred said, ‘I would like to wreck him – far from home and regulation. It would be good to wreck your Bentley Horrocks. I am in that mood.’
It was an hour before dawn. Marcantonio had come inside to make coffee. He might have slept for a while in the chair. The dogs would have growled if they’d been disturbed, but they hadn’t.
He put the shotgun on the table. Tiredness wracked him, but it would be simple to have the call made to the priest, then to estimate when Father Demetrio would be on the road. Marcantonio would use the heavy vehicle with the bars on the front. Easy for him, and he didn’t need to have slept for that. There was a coffee machine in the kitchen. His grandmother detested it, but it was used. It was the sole relic of Annunziata in the house. Giulietta liked it, and Marcantonio didn’t mind it. Four months before she had gone into the acid, Annunziata had bought it for them on a trip to see her husband in gaol in the north. His grandmother hated what was new and mechanical, but there was another in the bunker where his grandfather slept.
The light blazed over him. He heard the door handle turning, then saw Giulietta. No love was lost between nephew and aunt. She gave him a withering glance and her lip curled: her eyes had settled on the shotgun. He had not broken it so she did. She was dressed formally in a dark trouser suit and white blouse. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail. She wore no jewellery or makeup. He glanced at her nose – twisted from the break. That morning she would play the professional, who could put together an agreement, carrying detail in her head – all that he did not. She would tie together the ends left loose from his meeting with the Englishman, an arrogant shit, and she would do it over breakfast, as if she were a Berlin businesswoman. She looked at him as she peeled a banana, then started to eat it.
She spoke through a mouthful: ‘I hear that my father met other men recently to discuss whom you should marry – what alliances we can make with you. A piece of horsemeat for trading.’
Marcantonio couldn’t tell her – yet – to go shag herself. One day, not far away, she could go out through the door with her bag and the family would belong to him. His word would rule. Soon. Not yet.
‘When, Aunt, will you consider marriage?’ It was said with exaggerated politeness that would not have fooled her.
‘When I find the right man, and he will be my choice, not arranged as a matter of political gain.’ The banana was finished, the skin thrown into the bin. She drank from a water bottle, then rounded on him. ‘Is he there, the man who followed you from Germany? You brought this down on us. You sit all night with a gun on your knee because you need to make a few euros. You are responsible for this inconvenience to us. Are you stupid?’
He went out into the night with his gun and the dogs, slipped back across the yard, then behind the trellis, and went to his chair.
He had seen the light come on in the kitchen.
He heard the wind, soft, and the hushed whimpers of the wolf. Jago thought it near the time. He would linger a little longer, to be certain, then move. He thought it enough that the leader of the family should be trapped in his bunker in darkness, panic surging. Then he could climb back up the hillside, find the guys in the camouflage suits, wish them well and thank them for their kindness. He thought again of the huge wealth of the old man in the bunker, the power he wielded over life and death, saw him groping for a hand torch or a candle and matches, the air around him getting damper and colder. He would wait a few more minutes, then move. He was calm and the birds above him were still and quiet. He shared the night with the wolf but could do nothing to salve its wound.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded.
It had been Fred’s idea. He had taken the lead and rung a bell, then beaten his fist on the door. The camera above had swivelled to gain better focus on them. Three hours’ sleep. Through the wall Fred had heard Carlo snoring. The door opened and he’d asked for her.
When they had driven into Archi, a sprawled suburb to the north of Reggio, Carlo had told Fred that he’d have preferred to be snug in the belly of a main battle tank, not in the small airport hire car. It was still night-time and there were watchers on the street: men leaning against lampposts and smoking, men with skinny dogs on leashes, men sitting on benches . . . No one seemed to have anything to do – they weren’t hurrying to work or sweeping a pavement before opening a business. They were just watching and keeping track of visitors. Fred had said it was the ‘alternative state’, demonstrating that strangers were logged in, monitored. He thought it important to be there.
She was smaller than when he’d met her on the street. Then she had been dressed warmly for the late evening: now she had on just a thin cotton nightdress. ‘What do you want? Why have you come here?’
She was in the doorway, a man in a dressing-gown hovering behind her.
Fred said, ‘It’s about Jago Browne, where you took him and—’
‘What do you know of him? And what do you know about Calabria and survival in this city?’
Fred stayed calm. The police in Berlin did courses on anger management, how to confront verbal assault. He was the voice of reason. ‘He should not be here. Certain matters should be left to law-enforcement officers to deal with.’
‘You know nothing.’
‘What I do know is that if he is taken he will be cut into small pieces. Without mercy.’
‘He’s too old to need a nanny.’
Carlo spoke, ‘What part of yourself did you wave at him?’
She flared, ‘Were you ever on your knees fighting because you believed in something? I think you just took the work benefits and the overtime payments.’
They turned away. Fred thought it a ‘clusterfuck’ moment. The door slammed behind them.
Fred said, through gritted teeth, ‘I don’t know why we bother.’
He sensed Carlo’s grin. ‘Because we get better pensions.’
‘God protect us from crusaders, bigots, her and her crowd. You know what we had in Germany in the Middle Ages? We had feudal warrior barons, each with a fortress, and they ran their territories ruthlessly. Their word was law. Nothing changed. It just transferred here from Saxony, Thuringia and Mecklenburg. The Englishman came here with stupidity. She waved God knows what at him . . . She laughs at us because we are the little people.’
‘If I was asked, “What did you do, Dad, in the great war against organised crime?” I’d say I ticked off the days till my ID was shredded, put in the expenses, then enjoyed the pension scheme. Anything else?’
Fred felt Carlo’s heavy hand settle on his shoulder. Good expenses? Yes, why not? Knowing their place? Absolutely . . . But every once in a while, the ‘little people’ – he and Carlo – had a special moment: the dawn raid, the ram hitting the door at first light, the dog inside barking, the woman at the top of the stairs with her dressing-gown not properly fastened, the kids howling, and the ‘fat cat’ stumbling from his bed, muttering to his wife about calling the lawyer, dressing at gunpoint and the cuffs going on. Might be worth ten million or a hundred million. The shock on their faces, and the sense of outrage at an invasion of their world. It happened once in a while.
They would screw Bentley Horrocks in a good cause because he was staying at a hotel that intelligence stated was part of the investment portfolio of Bernardo Cancello and his family. Also, Fred knew Brancaleone and fancied he might get to swim there. He and Carlo were growing closer, near enough now to josh with each other, but Fred could show fierce determination, and he was confident that Carlo would match him.
No Mortal Thing: A Thriller Page 29