Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘You’ll get another chance,’ Simone said.

  Cangio didn’t go home that night.

  First, he switched off his mobile phone. Then he phoned Lori from a payphone at the airport and told her that his own phone was being repaired.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she said, and she sounded worried.

  He put a lot of effort into saying, ‘Fine, just fine.’

  They chatted for a couple of minutes, then he said, ‘I’ll be off the air for a couple of days,’ then he blew her a kiss and said goodbye.

  OK, he thought, he had a ski jacket in the car. He had money in his wallet, a credit card with a healthy balance. Most important of all, he had his passport in his breast pocket. He always carried it around with him. Ever since leaving Soverato. You never knew when you were going to need it. And those two clots from the RCS had taken him at his word, telling him to take it to Sustrico in Spoleto the following day instead.

  He climbed into the Fiat 500 and considered his next move.

  He stopped off in a service station on the SS75, ate dinner there, then drove to a rest area a few kilometres away and slept in his vehicle like the half-dozen lorry drivers from Croatia, France and Austria who chose to pass the night in their artics rather than spend their allowance on a hotel.

  The only problem was the Fiat 500.

  It was so small, you couldn’t stretch out, couldn’t get comfortable.

  Then again, the fact that the car was so small had one advantage. None of the tarts working the parking lot bothered to knock on his window that night. Turning tricks was one thing. But in a Fiat 500?

  Ettore was shaving next morning when his mobile phone rang.

  He glanced at his watch. It was way too early for anyone, even Candelora.

  ‘Yeah?’

  He listened for a bit without saying a word, then said, ‘What time?’

  Then he phoned Simone Candelora and told him what he had in mind.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The plane was three-quarters full.

  Most of the passengers looked like OAPs, while the rest of them were teachers and teenagers going on a school trip, maybe to see the Queen, Ettore thought.

  He was sitting at the tail end of the aircraft, keeping an eye on everything, wearing a scarf to hide the lizard tattoo, a tan-coloured raincoat over that because it always rained in England, they said.

  That was all he knew about London.

  He had never been there, and wouldn’t have been going today, except for the fact that the ranger was on the plane.

  Sebastiano Cangio was sitting near the front.

  Ettore wondered what the ranger was up to. It hardly seemed like a time to go on holiday, his partner’s head blown off, and the police investigation in full swing, hotting up probably, on account of the corpse that had turned up in Cerreto two days before – that witch, Maria Gatti, or whatever her name was.

  What had the cops made of that, he asked himself. According to the newspaper, the carabinieri were taking the spooky side of it seriously. And why not, Ettore thought, two dead, headless bodies in the national park in the space of ten days? Lopping off the medium’s head and planting that bread knife in her heart had been an act of genius.

  As the plane began to roll along the runway, Ettore gripped the seat and felt his stomach roll. The don would be pleased when Cangio was no longer around to trouble them. A third killing in the park, though, there would have been no end to it. The papers were already talking about a serial killer. But if Cangio were to simply disappear, they might decide he had run away because he’d done it …

  Was he doing the right thing?

  Going back to London had not been something he’d been planning on.

  Cangio remembered how relieved he’d been to get away from the city, the lousy job with the estate agency, the sense of alienation he had felt so far away from his friends, his home and Italy.

  Away from the wolves of the Apennine mountains.

  He had felt reborn in the national park, but then the ’Ndrangheta had come along and shattered the dream.

  But you couldn’t run away and hide.

  He had tried in London, and it hadn’t worked. He had tried again in Umbria, and had nearly lost his life to an ’Ndrangheta bullet. And now the mob was back in Valnerina, and the key to the puzzle seemed to lie in London’s Chinese quarter.

  If he could find out what connected a Chinese jaw, some cigarette ends from a Soho restaurant, and the truffle reserve of Antonio Marra, he might be able to convince Lucia Grossi and Jerry Esposito to point the accusing finger somewhere else. He owed it to Marzio.

  And to himself, of course.

  He gripped the arms of the seat as the plane lifted off with a sudden upward lurch.

  If there was one thing he hated more than London, it was flying.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  London.

  Was he seeing things?

  Cangio stared at the small glass jars on the shelf.

  He might have put it down to jet lag, changing time zones, the constant thrum of engines, but the flight from Assisi had barely lasted two hours, and the plane had touched down with a fanfare of trumpets and minutes to spare. Just five and a half hours after leaving Italy, he had been walking down Gerrard Street, looking for a sign, and he had found it without any trouble.

  Next door to a large supermarket was the biggest restaurant on the block, and both premises sported the same bright ideogram, a word spelled out in English for tourists who didn’t speak Chinese: Butterfly.

  Butterfly was the major supplier of Chinese merchandise in London, according to Heng Lu, the owner of the Chinese restaurant in Foligno. The cigarette ends the Pastore brothers had found had come from there. But he needed to come up with something fast, or he would really be in trouble. Once Grossi and Esposito got wind of where he was, they would accuse him of murder and put out an international warrant for his arrest.

  For an instant, it crossed his mind to stay in London and never go back.

  He had enough money to survive for a few weeks, he had his passport, and it wouldn’t be difficult to find a job of some sort. He had hidden out in London once before, and he could do it again. Maybe he’d been a fool to go back to Italy the last time.

  There was only one thing he was sure of: an ’Ndrangheta bullet would be waiting for him in Umbria if the cops didn’t catch him first.

  The restaurant wasn’t open, so he went into the supermarket.

  A man behind the cash desk glanced his way as he walked through the door, muttered something that might have been a greeting, then turned back to the Chinese video he was watching on a large flat screen fixed to the wall.

  It was a bit like walking into an Aladdin’s cave of exotic foods.

  He walked up and down the aisles, stopping now and then to read the contents of the brightly coloured boxes, tins and packets on display. He was amazed by the variety of the genuine Chinese goods on offer, including a mysterious concoction labelled Bright Red Powder.

  Inspired by Mao, he wondered.

  The shelves went on and on. Shrimp paste, fish paste, lobster paste, crab broth cubes. Bottles and tubes galore. Packets of sweets and biscuits, the ingredients printed out in Chinese characters. It took him ten minutes to work his way around the supermarket, but it was only when he got to the final aisle that his heart skipped a beat.

  A shelf was packed with small glass jars, rows and rows of them, different brands and different names: Tuber indicium, Tuber himalayensis, Tuber sinensis. A placard marked Szechuan truffles showed a photo of the area where the tubers were grown. If not for the bent backs, wide straw hats and half-mast trousers of the labourers planting them, it might have been the valley of the River Nera where he was living in Italy. Szechuan was in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, the placard said. Cold in winter, hot in summer, rain in spring and autumn (the planting seasons), endless woods and chalky soil.

  Just like Umbria, but eight thousand kilometres away.

  Et
tore covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  The place was swarming with tipsy tourists taking pictures.

  ‘I’m in a street full of dragons,’ he said. ‘There’s this big wooden gate, and the place is steaming with Chinkies. Even the fucking bugs have got slit eyes. I thought this was London, Simò …’

  He looked the other way as a group of noisy Italian tourists wafted by.

  ‘You’re in Chinatown,’ Simone Candelora told him.

  Ettore glanced around, looking for a printed sign that might resemble the sound that Simone the Smart-arse had made. He hated it when someone played the know-all at his expense. Blood had been spilled, lives lost when someone took the piss out of him.

  ‘That’s where he dragged me,’ Ettore spat back.

  The flight had been a nightmare. Bumps and jolts from start to finish. He hated flying, all closed up in a long tube with a toilet tighter than a coffin, heading for disaster. He’d had to use the toilet twice: once to throw up, the other time to ease the cramp in his guts, caused by the growing panic as the flight stretched out. He’d started feeling better when they landed. Now, the vile cooking smells and the stringy roasted ducks hanging up in the restaurant windows were making him feel sick again.

  Still, he had Cangio boxed up inside the supermarket.

  The ranger had been easy to follow; first a train, then a taxi.

  Cangio had flown to London, then ‘disappeared without a trace’. That was how the papers in Italy would spell it out. That was how Don Michele would hear it. He wouldn’t bother asking who had done them all a favour.

  ‘He’s in a Chinese shop,’ Ettore said.

  ‘Has he spotted you?’

  ‘Nah. He’s too friggin’ busy.’

  ‘So what he doing in there?’

  Ettore didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t figure out why Cangio was in London, though the ranger seemed to know what he was up to, moving about from place to place like a man with a purpose.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  Ettore kept his eyes on the supermarket windows, watching Cangio wander up and down the aisles, fingering stuff here and there, reading labels, buying nothing.

  There was no way of knowing what was going on in his head.

  ‘He’s been in there fifteen minutes,’ Ettore reported.

  ‘Jesus Maria santa! You wanted to follow him to London? Fucking follow him, then! Find out what he’s up to, then call me back. This isn’t a tourist jaunt, remember!’

  The phone went dead in Ettore’s hand.

  ‘What d’you think I’m doing?’ he said, and cursed the phone as if it were the face of Simone Candelora himself.

  Cangio was on the other side of the plate glass window.

  The ranger hadn’t moved an inch. He was holding something in his hand, staring out of the window, talking into his own mobile phone. Not staring at him, mind, just staring like he was concentrating, listening hard, or something.

  ‘Who the fuck are you calling?’ Ettore hissed through his teeth.

  The voice came over loud and clear.

  It might have been coming from the other side of the street, the signal was so strong.

  ‘It’d be like an alien invasion, Cangio. Worse! They’re … what do you call it, camouflaged? They look right, feel right, but they ain’t right. They ain’t right at all. They’re aliens, like I told you. OK, they look like ours, but they’re a load of rubbish. They’re stronger than ours, though, more ferocious. If they get a hold, and that’s what they’ll do, they’ll wipe us out in less than no time!’

  Manlio Pastore might have been talking about War of the Worlds.

  ‘Manlio, have you been watching sci-fi films?’

  ‘I’m talking about the Tuber indicium,’ Manlio Pastore snapped. ‘Those are monsters you’ve got locked up in that jar.’

  ‘They look just like the ones that you find. A black blob in a small glass jar. Same size, same shape …’

  Manlio snorted. ‘They’re poison, they are. Big, black poisonous spiders! They multiply like horseflies. Plant twenty of them in Umbria, and you’d wipe out the whole autochthonous population.’

  Autochthonous?

  Cangio began to take the man seriously.

  ‘Every local truffle would die,’ Manlio ranted on. ‘Not die, but change. That’s the danger. Once the spores start to spread, once the fungivores get started, the foxes, squirrels and wild boar start carrying the disease around on their fur, that would be it. Our truffles would lose their taste and perfume. It would be the end, I tell you.’

  Cangio turned the jar in his fingers, examining it the way a gem merchant might have studied a diamond to see if it was real or synthetic.

  ‘They look as good as anything you’ll find in Umbria.’

  ‘Leave them fucking things where they are!’ Manlio shouted. ‘I’m warning you, Cangio. If you come back to Italy with those, I’ll have you locked up good, I will. There’s a law, you know, decree 752, 1985, article 18. Do you hear me? Oi, Cangio, can you hear—’

  Cangio pressed the button and cut off the voice.

  The line began to buzz as though it was an insect closed inside the small glass jar he was holding in his other hand.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The street was like a river in flood.

  A fat woman marched past like a sergeant major, holding up a flag of parallel red-and-yellow stripes. Her group came trundling after her. They were Spaniards, by the sound of them. They kept on saying mucho, mucho. Oh yeah, and gracias, too, swarming all around him like a rock that wouldn’t shift.

  Ettore took a breath and waded into the stream, a man with a mission, pushing his way across to the other bank, ignoring the complaints, taking a tap or two on the ankles, pressing on until he got there. He wasn’t going to lose the ranger because of a bunch of lousy Spanish gits.

  He emerged from the ruck, and Cangio had disappeared.

  ‘Where are you?’ he cursed. ‘Where the fuck?’

  Cangio backtracked through the aisles.

  He was looking for a girl he’d seen stocking shelves.

  He found her working in the noodles section, putting out plastic packs of something called Cat’s Ears.

  ‘I’d like to speak to the manager,’ he said.

  The girl was wearing a black nylon uniform with a bright yellow Butterfly symbol on the collar. Lank and pale-faced, her black her cut short, she could have been twelve years old. She closed her eyes, shook her head at him, and said, ‘No English.’

  He tried again, miming someone big, fat and important. ‘The boss?’

  She cocked her head, then pointed back towards the entrance door. He recalled his reception as he had walked into the supermarket. The man behind the check-out watching a Chinese video.

  Ettore was frantic.

  He bustled into the supermarket, looked down all of the aisles.

  Cangio had disappeared. If he hadn’t come out, he could only be in there somewhere.

  Maybe he’d gone to the toilet, or something?

  In the last aisle, he checked the shelf that Cangio had been interested in, and let out a whistle. He left the shop, retreated to a doorway on the other side of the street. He’d smoke a cigarette, see what happened. He couldn’t wait to tell Candelora what that piece of shit had been doing in the shop.

  First, he lit his cigarette, then he pulled out his mobile.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  He’d sometimes heard it said that the Chinese show no emotion.

  It might be true in China, but it wasn’t true in the West.

  Not always, Cangio thought.

  Still, Heng Lu, the Chinese man from Foligno, was an open book compared to the stone-faced man behind the supermarket check-out. He listened, nodded, hissed a few sibilant words in Chinese into a phone, and then pointed Cangio to a bare wooden staircase. All without a single word in English.

  At the top of the stairs was a door.

  He knocked and a voice said, ‘Come in.’

/>   A tiny Chinese man was sitting behind a large black lacquered desk.

  There was nothing big, or fat, or important-looking about him.

  There was nothing on his desk, except for a big red button and a black plastic telephone that must have been fifty years old. A battery of six TV monitors was mounted on the wall in front of him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the man asked.

  ‘I’m looking for Mister … Butterfly,’ Cangio said.

  The little man smiled, showing large front teeth. ‘Mister Butterfly?’ he said. ‘I like that. You got lucky, mister. I am Mister Butterfly.’

  He let out a chuckle, then pressed the red button.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said as Cangio baulked. ‘It’s no atomic bomb. In my business, we look after the customers very good. My name is Li Liü Gong, though maybe, yes, Mister Butterfly is easier.’

  He seemed to like the idea.

  The Chinese nodded at the monitors. ‘I thought we’d get to talk,’ he said. ‘You spent a lot of time examining my shelves, and then you didn’t buy anything.’

  ‘I was looking at the truffles,’ Cangio said, unsure how to play it. ‘You’ve got an amazing selection on display.’

  ‘We call them tubers,’ the man corrected him. ‘It’s more scientific, less problematical, too. European laws, you know, are so protective. We favour unrestricted trade in China. We let the customer choose, as he or she has every right to do. So, now, Mister …’

  ‘Cangio. Sebastiano Cangio.’

  ‘What precisely interests you about the tubers?’

  Cangio turned in his seat as the door opened, and a boy came in.

  ‘Mòlìhuā chá,’ he said with a bow, as he set a tray down on the desk.

  ‘Jasmine tea,’ Mister Butterfly translated, as the boy left them alone.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ Cangio said, wondering if everyone admitted to the presence of the great man immediately required a restorative cup of tea.

  On the wall behind the desk was a calendar in Chinese characters showing Butterfly restaurants in Islington, Ealing, and others parts of London, plus a larger photo of the flagship Soho eating house next door to where they were sitting.