No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  He went over the old files so that he could control an interview. The walk-ins were always the best. To turn a criminal, make him a pentito, was seldom satisfactory. But when a man came to the door, asked to come in, was willing to talk and lay his life on the line, he was a rare treasure.

  He demanded fresh coffee. The leader of his team would telephone his wife and make the excuses.

  They were out of their hide, with the canvas kitbags, the rucksacks and the plastic rubbish bag. It was dark and Fabio had the lenses over his eyes, which gave a watery image of what lay ahead. They were held by the sounds, wasted effort to fathom their source or what they meant.

  The dogs patrolled at the door restlessly, the kid sat on the hard chair, listening, and Mamma had come to the door every three or four minutes, looked up the path past the sheets, then turned away. They had gear for enhancing sound but that was packed away now and neither had the inclination to root in the bags for it. They were ready to go. For them Scorpion Fly was over, but they hesitated.

  Ciccio said it was the television. It was a muffled noise, faint, maybe distant shouting, or perhaps a poor soundtrack on whatever programme was on. They wanted out. It was always difficult to walk away from failure, but it wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. Both were more familiar with failure than success.

  Fabio slapped Ciccio’s arm. Enough. They had authorisation to quit. Ciccio nodded. He punched in the code and was poised to transmit. A message on the screen blocked his own. Maintain location. Observe and report.

  They went back to the entrance to their shallow hole, lay down and seethed.

  Carlo watched the maresciallo. A little fellow, unlike most of the unit. He lacked their physique, and his spectacles were high magnification. He was giving someone serious stick on the phone. Carlo had the impression that he was being fobbed off. They’d all experienced it: the greatest revelation ever in law enforcement came into a control room, but the bastards were all too busy, or hadn’t the sense, to react. He wasn’t winning.

  ‘I can tell you where the fugitive is lying up. Have I seen him? No, I have not. Have I a direct informant? No. What I have are my eyes and my instinct. Isn’t that good enough?’

  No. The phone was snapped off. The little guy came to them. They had new information at the Palace of Justice. An informant was coming in. The maresciallo was surplus to requirements.

  ‘Their privilege,’ Carlo said. ‘We’ll see what shows. That’s where the padrino is, don’t doubt it.’

  He had fallen over. His head had caught on the table where the TV sat. Blood ran from his nose. He hadn’t found the torch, the matches or the candles. The nightmare played out. When he had been with the other older men Bernardo had shown, he thought, composure and dignity in the face of disaster. The loss of his heir had weakened him, left him adrift. He had met their eyes as they observed him, searching for signs of a loss of willpower. Not now.

  He howled. He had found the door and tried to open it, but had failed. He was trapped, like a man laid in a coffin who recovers his senses and can hear the blows as the lid is nailed down but cannot move or make himself heard. He was on the floor, on thin carpet, and he screamed towards the ceiling. Nobody was listening and his voice was hoarse. Mamma wouldn’t come – she never did. Stefano would, but he’d gone to the place where the pigs were bred. Giulietta was tracking the priest, the bastard Demetrio, whom he had identified as a traitor. The kid, who was around the house, did not know the workings of the bunker. Marcantonio did, but he was cold in a box on trestles. His nose bled freely. The shouts had become a scream. An old man’s call, pathetic.

  No one came. He couldn’t see his hand. When he moved he hit himself. Each movement seemed to Bernardo to show his growing weakness.

  When the child had been in the cave, at the start, they had left a candle to burn during the night in a jar that had once held jam. They had come one morning and it had toppled over. The flame had scorched part of the bedding. If it had caught seriously alight, the child might have been burned alive. She could not have escaped from the flames because the chain secured her leg to the wall at the back of the cave. They had not lit it again. The child had been left in darkness. It would have been the same total darkness in the cave as it was now in the converted container. No glow from distant streetlights or car headlights. No light. The child would have cowered on the bedding they’d brought her. He was as frightened as the child would have been.

  He had watched on the television in the kitchen – many years before – a programme made by the RAI featuring the ‘kidnap industry’, as they had called it. The parents had been interviewed. The father had said a few words, tears streaming down his face, but the mother had cursed him: the money had been paid six months or more after the child had been buried on the hillside, higher than the cave. The mother had hurled abuse at them because the money had been paid and the child had not been returned. Then he had been unmoved by her voice. All had changed now.

  His voice was failing so his cries were weaker. No one came. He went unheard. The blood dribbled from his nose and he lay on the floor.

  It involved a man he had never met. Jago Browne thought he knew how it would play out. He felt strong.

  There had been shouting and Jago assumed there was a vent near to him, for fresh air, that the noises from inside the bunker were funnelled up to him. They had started as inconsistent, deep-pitched yells, part impatience and growing annoyance. Later they had become angry, aggressive, but with an element of self-control. Last, the breakdown: screams and what he thought might be whimpers. Jago had felt good. He had thought himself close to achieving his objective. Now there was no sound.

  He would stay long enough to see him.

  The climax would come when he looked into the eyes of the man, whose chin would shake. He did not think himself in danger, did not consider that he had been there too long, putting his life at risk.

  Jago had folded the coat and sat on it, making himself as comfortable as possible, hidden on the rock. He didn’t know how long he would have to wait, and didn’t particularly care. His mission was in its last hours. That he knew.

  19

  Something to watch, at last, other than the chickens.

  The lights were feeble in front of the house, but headlights approached and threw a fiercer beam. Jago saw it from his vantage point – it was a while now since he had last heard the distant sounds of yelling, then crying. The dogs bounded round the side of the house and the kid strolled after them, smoking. Jago noted that some of the men from down the track had moved closer to the house. The handyman parked the car and killed the engine. He called the kid and dismissed him.

  It was nearly over. Jago wanted to put a living face to the photograph he held in his mind. He wanted to see the man collapse, and be able to tell himself that his work had achieved it. He cut out the role of the girl in Charlottenburg and on the beach in the moonlight. He had done it.

  This was his territory. He didn’t know anywhere else as well as he knew the narrow panorama in front of him. Not the street in front of the one-parent family home in Canning Town, not the walk from the bus stop in Barking Road, or the stretch from St Paul’s Underground station to a tower block in the City. The hike to the bank in inner Berlin was already a faded glimpse. He knew everything about this place. He had absorbed each sprouted shrub in the apology for a garden, the trees and grass. He knew how many paving slabs made up the patio and how many struts held the hard chair’s legs in place. He knew the volume of the grapes on the trellis, the colours of the dogs’ coats and their pecking order. He could smell what they cooked in the kitchen. He could assess the old woman’s hip or pelvic problems. He knew the range of the sheets used on a bed in the house. He felt a sense of belonging to this place, was reluctant to leave it . . . and the time had run its course. Like a curtain coming down. People walked urban streets often enough to know where they could stand, see into a lit window, watch the life of a family with children and become a pa
rt of it in loneliness. Jago hated the thought of leaving. Here he viewed extreme power and excessive wealth.

  The kid came back with a steaming bucket and cloths. He had an extension lead, too, which ran from an outside power point, and a vacuum cleaner. Under the older man’s direction, he was to clean the City-Van. It might have been fifteen years old, Jago thought, and they worked hard. It was easy enough for the one-time banker to fathom. The vehicle was being cleansed of clues left by a passenger sitting in the front. A murder – not a wounding or an assault. The handyman had been the driver and Jago saw nothing different in his bearing from the other times he had seen him. It shouted at him that a killing was no big deal and was rounded off with a methodical car wash. He watched it all, and waited. He should have been on his way up to the road.

  They were thorough. The bag from the vacuum cleaner went into the incinerator at the back, and sparks flared up. The interior surfaces were washed carefully, the cloths frequently rinsed. The water went down a drain. Then, the kid was sent for a hosepipe, which was plugged into a tap on the patio. The wheels were jet-sprayed. There would have been evidence on them of where the City-Van had been driven to and from. Jago wondered how often they needed to clean the vehicle, and why a man with the affluence of the padrino, and the authority, denied himself a better set of wheels. He had much to learn, but the course was nearly run.

  He thought, when the work was done, that the handyman might be sent to bring the family leader out from his hole. He wanted to see it and would hold his position until he did.

  He’d have to wait longer. The old woman had come out of the front door with a scrap of paper. The kid had gone to feed the dogs.

  There was a moment when the handyman and the old woman were together. Jago saw it. A little gesture – fingers on an arm. He hadn’t seen it before. A girl from Sales might have stayed in the pub with a guy from Investments after the others had left. The next morning the gestures and the eye contact would tell the story: his place or hers. Everyone knew. He’d learned more about the family and their home – the handyman and the wife of the padrino. They’d taken a massive risk.

  He thought she had given the handyman a short shopping list. Now he drove away to fetch what was wanted, which meant he would not go into the bunker yet. Jago had to wait, but could revel in imagining the degree of torture he had inflicted.

  He had given up.

  His father never had. He had fought right up to the moment when they had taken his life in the open-air market. His uncles had been fighters, too, and his brothers – one knifed in gaol, the other bound and thrown into a ravine – would have struggled until they had drawn their last breath. In their own ways, his sons in their northern gaols would fight to maintain their pride. They would never capitulate. Bernardo almost did.

  No one saw it. When men looked at him they assessed his strength by his posture, whether his hands shook as tension mounted, if he blinked too much. The men with him at the vigil beside his grandson’s coffin would have watched him to see if he had a grip on his future.

  Now he was not watched. He was not seen or heard. Bernardo didn’t know if anyone would come soon or whether they would leave him until morning.

  He was on the floor. Each time he moved he hurt himself. He had found a chair and lifted himself up but the chair had turned over under his weight and he had cracked his head. He had groped to the side of the container, close to the sink. He had taken hold of it and was dragging himself up, but his hands had shifted and one had landed on the soap – scented stuff that Teresa had bought. He had toppled, twisting his knee.

  He could make no sound other than a croak. His sense of combat was gone because he couldn’t imagine which enemy faced him. He felt abandoned. He did not know where Mamma, Stefano and Giulietta were. He wallowed in self-pity and the darkness wrapped around him. He hurt himself each time he tried to move. He lay still, his strength dribbling away. He waited, as the child in the cave had waited. Everything that Bernardo was, all that he had achieved in power and wealth, was off the back of that child who had been in darkness.

  No one came.

  The Palace of Justice was lit. Floodlights bathed the high walls. More shone over the wide car park. But it was evening and the majority of those who worked in the justice system had gone home or to restaurants. Two SUVs in army camouflage stood in one corner and a knot of troops huddled close to them, automatic weapons slung on their chests or handguns in holsters.

  Walking forward briskly, Giulietta held the Beretta close to her thigh. She hadn’t fired at a man before. She was accurate in target practice – against bottles, cans or a ripe melon – which would explode dramatically. She had followed the car into the parking area and it suited her that he had stopped in shadow. There were trees among the marked parking spaces that provided good cover. She had seen him get out of the car, not bothering to flash his keys at it. Then he had wavered and lit a cigarette. That he had brought her there confirmed her father’s suspicion. Beyond him men lounged at the main doors. She sensed they had been alerted and were there to meet a new prize. He would soon, a few more paces, be within their orbit. She closed on him.

  She had left her keys in the HiLux and the engine idled softly behind her.

  He was under trees, about to enter a row of empty bays where the light fell brightly. Giulietta did not dither: a job to be done. She lifted her headscarf to cover her nose, mouth and chin. She called his name softly. ‘Father Demetrio, a moment, please.’

  He stopped. Turned. She saw his ravaged features. He might have forgotten himself and noted that, at a Calvary moment, he could see a familiar face, which smiled warmth at him. He gave her enough time. A full second, two seconds, no more. Realisation was coming but his brain worked faster than his limbs. She had the pistol up. He had two options: he could spin and run for his life or charge her, arms swinging, and try to knock the pistol aside. She saw only something craven. It was just a few days since he had been an honoured guest at her mother’s birthday celebration, the lone outsider. She loved her father, mourned his ageing, but believed in his judgement. The man before her had headed from the cathedral to the Palace of Justice, and was expected. He was statue still, and seemed to plead with his eyes.

  As Stefano had taught her, Giulietta did the Isosceles stance. She knew the Weaver stance and the Chapman, but had always preferred Isosceles. Feet apart, knees fractionally bent, weight forward, her arms were outstretched, her right hand held the butt and her index finger was beside the trigger’s guard. Her left fist was locked across the right and held it steady. One in the breach and safety off.

  She had known Father Demetrio all of her life. He had lectured her on the Church’s teachings, had heard her teenage confessions, and she had walked behind him in saints’ days’ processions through the village. It was thought he favoured her because of his friendship with her father. Old friendships, past kindnesses were of little value. Her finger groped for, then found, the trigger.

  She thought, in the last moment of his life, that he still did not believe what confronted him. His chin shook and his throat wobbled, as if words were blocked there. The men behind him at the door had looked around but not seen him. They were beside the main entrance to the parking area.

  She fired.

  Better, of course, if the weapon had been fitted with a silencer, but it was not. The second shot was immediate. Not chest shots, when a man might be saved by the immediate skill of a surgeon practised in dealing with bullet wounds, but the head. There would be several medics at the Ospedale Riuniti in the city who were used to handling gunshot injuries. Two shots to the head, so fast that it barely had time to sag and she had not needed to adjust her aim. The recoil was hard on her rigid arms and spent itself in her shoulders. The smell was in her nostrils. He slumped.

  She crouched, looked for and found the shiny cartridge cases ejected from the Beretta, picked them up and dropped them into her pocket. A plastic bag would have been better: her good suit trousers, from the n
ew mall outside Locri on the Siderno road, were contaminated now, as was her top. She noted that blood trickled from his head, and that there were no convulsions nor gasped breathing.

  She thought it had been easy, but she did not feel elated or excited. A job had been satisfactorily completed. She had to step over him – a wide stride because of his size and she had to avoid the blood.

  Rifles and handguns were armed. She heard shouts. Inside the HiLux, she jammed it into gear, then swung into the oleanders, planted to separate the rows of bays, bumped over them and reached the far side of the parking area. She used an emergency entrance, designed for fast access to ambulances or police vehicles, and was gone.

  Giulietta might have congratulated herself, but did not. She went into the city and cut down onto Corso Vittorio Emanuele. She thought she had left chaos behind her, which was good, and with it stark confusion, which was better. She wanted to get home and tell her father what she had achieved. She wanted to see his smile spread, feel his hand on her shoulder or cheek. He never looked at her nose or spoke of it. She heard sirens but they were far away. She felt confident because the Blocker spray, purchased in Locri, would reflect off the registration plates and disable any cameras efforts. Giulietta accelerated. She thought her father would be proud of her and praise her.

  Pandemonium spread clumsily at the Palace of Justice. The police, carabinieri, soldiers and the prosecutor’s escorts, who had waited at the door, were hit by the depth of the failure.

  The medical team came, and the blame game began before the body was cold. Whose fault was it? Everyone’s, except each accuser’s. Some claimed to have seen the taillights disappearing and there were CCTV cameras. How many were working? Some. There would be a few images. They would show a woman with a face mask and a handgun, a HiLux but the registration would have been tampered with to prevent the number being read. There had been hopeless efforts to revive the victim. It was agreed that the assassin had been trained, expert and was formidable. The priest was identified from his wallet. One of the escorts made the call on his mobile to the office high in the Palace.