Think Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Of course,’ Cangio said, drawing back into the crowd.

  He waited a minute, then vaulted the metal barrier again, and took the tunnel heading for the Tube station and the taxi rank.

  There was no one else waiting.

  ‘The Butterfly restaurant, Gerrard Street,’ he said as he boarded a cab.

  If his luck held, he wouldn’t need to spend much time with Mister Butterfly. Just a quick apology and a brief conversation, that’s if his luck held out. With a bit more luck, he might even catch the evening flight back to Italy.

  So far, he had been very, very lucky.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Candelora closed the garage door, then switched on the light.

  The loading bay was empty; there was no sign of the Porsche 911. Not that he had been expecting to find it parked there anyway. If Marra was trying to avoid him, he would have left the car out in the woods, on the truffle reserve most likely, then made his way to the factory on foot.

  If that was where he was hiding.

  Had Rosanna been telling the truth over the phone when she said that Marra had gone home, or had the secretary been covering for him? Marra’s house had been empty, that was for sure. The imbecile might be anywhere by now. In Perugia, even, talking to the carabinieri.

  Unless he’d decided to grab the cash and make a run for it.

  Talk about a fly gumming up the works.

  Thank God he’d blocked the evening’s delivery. He had made a phone call, told the lads who were driving the vans to sleep over in the motel outside Frosinone, south of Rome. ‘There are too many bluebottles on the road up here tonight. Same time, same place tomorrow, OK?’

  By tomorrow, he hoped to have things straightened out.

  Three minutes later, Don Michele had called, which came as no surprise.

  Simone had known that one of the drivers would pass it on.

  ‘What’s going on, Simò?’

  No preliminaries – ‘how are things’, ‘how’s life’, ‘everything all right, Simò?’ – straight to the point.

  He knew he’d have to play this right, make sure the don didn’t call up Ettore to double-check. If Dick Brain didn’t tell him straight away, he’d have let it slip out sooner or later that he was in London.

  ‘Nothing much, Don Michè. Just being cautious.’

  ‘Don’t play the saint with me, Simò. The vans, the loads. You’ve got them stopped off south of Rome. Why’s that?’

  ‘I told the drivers, didn’t I? Too much action in the area, flashing blue lights, know what I mean? What difference does a day make? Tomorrow it will have all blown over.’

  There had been silence at the other end of the line.

  The boss hadn’t fallen for it.

  ‘They’re still pretty busy, tidying up loose ends, Don Michè.’

  ‘Over that fucking witch? Still hanging onto the Devil’s tail, are they?’

  Simone had laughed, letting the don know he’d hit the bull’s eye.

  ‘The Prince of Darkness is still number one on the wanted list,’ Simone had reassured him, ‘though there’s been a bit of fuss over some bones a farmer found when a pack of wolves had a go at his sheep. Turns out they’re human. The bones, mind, not the sheep.’

  It was always best to throw in a healthy dollop of truth when talking with Don Michele. He’d be sitting at his desk down in Calabria with copies of the Umbrian newspapers spread out in front of him.

  ‘They’re from years back, probably Asian,’ Simone had added. ‘That’s what the cops are saying. Didn’t you spot it in the papers, Don Michè?’

  He must have read about it, because he didn’t say a word.

  ‘Are things going to the dogs up there, Simò?’ Don Michele had said at last.

  It had taken Simone a bit to sort his voice out, find the right bounce, the right tone. ‘It’s full steam ahead in Umbria, Don Michè. Nothing here to worry about. One night won’t change a thing, will it?’

  ‘Make sure it doesn’t.’

  As the phone went dead, Simone Candelora had reached for the plastic bottle of water on the bedside table. He’d emptied it in three or four gulps, his throat as scorched as a baker’s oven. It was never easy talking to Don Michele. And when he had to lie to him, it brought on an acid heartburn that ravaged his guts. There was only one way to cure it.

  He had to find Marra.

  Marra hadn’t learnt from the bungee jump. He hadn’t learnt from the death of the witch. Even Ettore kicking the shit out of him had done no good. It was time to get serious. Antonio Marra was going to scream tonight until his voice ran out.

  Punishment wasn’t the word for what he was going to get, the trouble he was causing.

  Simone climbed the stairs from the underground garage to the ground floor, fingering his keys in the dark to find the one that opened the reinforced door. He’d taken the decision to change the locks when Marra started harping on about wanting to drop out of the business. If the bastard ever did decide to run with a bit of dodgy paperwork in his briefcase, he’d have to break into his own factory and crack his own safe first.

  Marra knew what they were doing, but he wouldn’t be able to prove a thing without evidence. He’d have made a piss poor eyewitness in any case, hiding away in his office whenever a consignment turned up, just signing his name on the dotted line, then charging off home.

  What was that big bird called, the one that buried its head in the sand?

  Marra’s head was in so deep, all you could see was his arse.

  He felt his anger building as he crossed the hall, the night-lights dim and gloomy.

  It was clear now, wasn’t it? Marra had known what was going on when those bones had been dug up. That was the day he’d turned up at the bungee jumping park in Ferentillo, telling them he wanted to pull out of the partnership.

  Merda!

  He blamed himself. He should have realised there was something behind it. Instead of shaking the truth out of him there and then, he’d played with him. He’d put Marra’s fright down to the fact that he was new to the game, worried about the heavy police presence in the area, the idea that one of their vans might get stopped.

  Marra had made a fool of him. And he still didn’t know what secret the joker was hiding.

  That truly put the wind up him.

  Had he made an error choosing Marra Truffles for the drug-refining operation in Umbria?

  A fatal error?

  Tonight he was going to find out, then fix it.

  Don Michele would never need to know.

  First, he had a look in Marra’s office.

  The door was locked, but that was no problem for a man with all the keys.

  He switched the light on, checked the safe: the stacks of cash and company papers were still intact. Marra hadn’t managed to open it, even if he had tried. Next, the en suite toilet. He wasn’t hiding there, and the window was locked from the inside. He checked the desk in case Marra had left some clue to where he might be going, what he was up to.

  Nothing.

  The big padded chair was pushed back from the desk, as if someone had been sitting there, but it could have been like that since the day before. The pens and papers on the desk were all in order. Rosanna’s doing, no doubt. There were a couple of bills, some receipts, a statement from the local bank showing a nice healthy surplus, a hefty deposit to a bank down in Catanzaro that Don Michele often used.

  Payment for a consignment of truffles.

  He almost laughed out loud as he read it.

  They’d really set this little fucker back in saddle. Just look at the cheques Don Michele’s frontmen had sent him. When had Antonio Marra ever been so rich? Marra had known from the start that they were into more than fucking truffles. Who did he think he was working with, the holy nuns? Driven by greed and ambition, Marra had always wanted to be bigger than Luxuria Truffles, the major player in Valnerina. Instead, the loser had been dogged by bad luck and incapacity for years. Until Simone and the don had come
along, Antonio Marra had never sold a truffle outside Italy.

  Now, it was time for Marra to clear up all the mystery, and bow out of the business for good.

  Candelora stopped his searching and listened.

  He’d heard the muffled rasp of metal on concrete, something being dragged. If it wasn’t in the loading bay, it could only be coming from the production department down in the basement where the truffles were cleaned and dried by day, and where the coke and truffle sauce was fed into the empty glass jars once the workers had gone home.

  He switched off the office lights, went out into the hall.

  He stood in the gloom for a moment, waiting to hear the noise again.

  Instead, he heard a different sound, like a groan or a stifled cough.

  The carabinieri?

  His blood ran cold at the idea.

  Then he thought of Maria Gatti.

  She’d called up the spirits of the dead, Marra had told him. He’d sworn that he had heard them himself, even after Maria had gone home and left him on his own in the factory.

  Simone forced himself to think of Don Michele.

  The don would turn him into a fucking spirit if he didn’t get things sorted fast.

  He went charging downstairs, making no effort to be silent. Carabinieri, ghosts, or Antonio Marra, he would deal with each one as the opportunity presented itself.

  He pushed the sliding doors aside, stepped into the room, and his heart stopped.

  The figure silhouetted against the window had very little that was human about it. A vast body, a tiny head, one arm reaching up towards the latch, like some sort of movie alien, a thin desperate hiss of a voice.

  ‘Fucking hell, fucking hell, open, for the love of Christ!’

  He flicked the light switch and the neon came to life in a blinding flash.

  Antonio Marra was crouching on the conveyor belt, half hidden by the truffle feeder, trying desperately to open the window and make his escape.

  ‘What’s the rush, Antò? All you had to do was use the door.’

  Marra turned and looked at him, eyes wild and startled, then he turned back to the window, rattling the latch again, beating his fist against the glass, getting nowhere. There was a stink of truffles in the place, and something else, too, as if he’d done it in his pants.

  ‘I’m off, Simone. You gotta let me go. I’m getting out. It’s yours, all yours.’

  Then he was back at the window, hammering on the glass as if some friendly soul on the other side might open it for him.

  ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, you prick! What’s all this about sheep and bones?’

  Marra didn’t answer the question.

  ‘I’m away, Simò. Just let me go. You’ll never hear of me again. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. That day in Ferentillo, the bungee jumping—’

  ‘What the fuck have you done?’

  Simone moved in on him. Marra raised his hands to protect his face, then he tripped and fell off the conveyor belt. He didn’t make a sound as he hit his shoulder with a crunch on the concrete floor. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘It’s better for you. You can’t tell the coppers what you don’t know—’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  Marra’s voice was a whining sing-song. When he wasn’t speaking, he was mumbling, saying the same things over and over. He had to go. It was better for them. He was really sorry. He had to go.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Simone shouted, standing over him, towering above him.

  ‘They won’t come looking for you or Ettore. It’s me they’re after. Me.’

  Simone’s foot shot out and caught the side of Marra’s face.

  Marra moaned and spat out blood, but he wouldn’t shut up.

  ‘I gotta run, Simò. I’m telling you. I’m just a dead weight.’

  ‘Let me decide. Maybe I can help you. What’s it all about?’

  Marra’s shoulders were jiving, jerking up and down, as if he was crying, as if he couldn’t breathe, though it didn’t stop him yapping on. ‘Let me out, Simò, I gotta run.’

  Simone grabbed his hair and heaved him to his feet. There was blood on his face, one eye leaking, and something white that might have been a bit of tooth sticking out of his bottom lip.

  ‘You can keep the lot,’ Marra wailed. ‘I haven’t taken anything. Papers, money, nothing. I swear to you. I’m begging you, Simò, just let me go …’

  Like a broken record, over and over.

  Simone almost admired his nerve, the stubborn way he stuck to his guns.

  Who would have thought the worm had it in him? Whatever he might have done, he’d kept quiet about it. He’d never let on, or given a hint that anything was wrong.

  ‘Stop fucking whining! I want answers.’

  Wanted them? Needed them, that was the truth.

  If the cops caught Marra, and he started this routine, they’d stick him in a cell and grill him for as long as it took. He’d tell them the lot. The bones, the sheep, Marra Truffles, his new partners from Calabria, his recent developments in the international truffle trade.

  Don Michele would not be pleased.

  He would not be pleased at all.

  FORTY-FIVE

  He made it by a whisker.

  Seb Cangio was the last passenger to board the 20.20 flight to Perugia.

  As the plane lifted off, tilting upwards into the sky, he relaxed for the first time since leaving London. He was going home sooner than planned, but now he had the answer he’d been looking for.

  The Lizard Man’s mobile phone had been a goldmine of information, and he had made good use of it on the train to Stansted airport. The dead man’s name was Ettore Pallucchi. He was from Pentone, a small town in Calabria that Cangio remembered from his student days. He had sometimes stopped there for coffee and a sandwich while monitoring the wolf population in the nearby Sila mountains. There were more ’Ndrangheta clans in the Sila foothills, they said, than midges in a stagnant summer pond.

  Ettore talked on a daily basis with Simone Candelora, the man who had phoned while he had been kneeling beside Ettore’s lifeless body after the accident at the Elephant and Castle. The two men spoke to each other a dozen times a day, and they often swapped phone messages, most of them concerning Marra Truffles. The truffle processing plant played a major part in what they were doing, and they often arranged to meet there. The odd thing about these meetings was that they usually took place when the factory was closed.

  What the hell did they do there at three o’clock in the morning?

  He had himself seen lorries driving into the plant at night. Marra Truffles was expanding, people said.

  Well, now he could guess what Marra had been expanding into.

  As he shuffled forward at the boarding gate, he’d sent a message from Ettore’s phone to Simone Candelora, using a phrase he had poached from a gangster film: The ranger’s sleeping with the fishes. See you at MT after midnight.

  At that point, he had switched off Ettore’s phone.

  Then he had sent a similar message to another recipient from his own mobile: Be at Marra Truffles at midnight tonight. I’ll be waiting there. He signed it Cangio before he pressed the send button. As he presented his ticket and prepared to board the plane, he had disconnected his own phone, too, as flight regulations requested.

  He closed his eyes, settled back against the head-rest.

  Mister Butterfly had been surprised to see him.

  ‘I’ll call the police again,’ he had said.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ Cangio had reassured him. ‘I wasn’t drunk before.’

  He’d apologised and told Li Liü Gong that a man had been trying to kill him.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ the Chinese man had said.

  Then Li Liü Gong had told him what he had meant earlier that evening, when he had spoken of ‘an experience’ he wouldn’t wish to repeat with a customer from Umbria.

  ‘I have no proof,’ Li Liü Gong said, ‘but I have no dou
bt of it.’

  Cangio had no doubt of it either, and now he had the proof in his pocket.

  He opened his eyes as the hostess passed along the aisle with a trolley selling refreshments. He bought a beer and a ham sandwich.

  His thoughts turned to Sibillines National Park where he worked. The landscape was breathtaking. The medieval towns and villages enshrined a way of life that had changed very little through the centuries. People raised sheep, planted orchards, searched the woods for truffles and mushrooms. The forests and mountains provided refuge for an incredible range of animals, birds and plants.

  It was no exaggeration to call it paradise, though a dark pall of fear and death had been cast over everything. And it had all started with Marzio’s ‘strange sightings’ in the forest near Vallo di Nera two years before.

  He swallowed the remains of his sandwich and washed it down with beer.

  The plane would be landing within an hour.

  The hunt for the truth wasn’t over.

  Not yet.

  FORTY-SIX

  He couldn’t move.

  His hands were free, but his wrists and ankles were tied fast.

  He could shift his eyes, but he couldn’t move his head. A rubber strap was crushing down against his forehead, holding him fixed and immobile, stretched out on his back.

  He had had a cancer scare a couple of years back, the full works, CAT scans, biopsies. He was reminded of that experience, getting ready to go into the scanning machine like a man laid out on a rack before the torture started. He mustn’t move a fraction, they had told him before the scanner started making grinding noises, or they’d need to do it all again.

  The only difference was the dangling rubber tube in his mouth.

  The tube didn’t hurt, but he couldn’t get rid of it, couldn’t spit it out.

  He felt the urge to gag, sure he was going to choke on it, as the panic built up in blinding waves.

  ‘Comfortable?’ a voice said, and a head moved into focus.

  Simone Candelora. It all came back.

  Simone had found him hiding in the processing room. Simone was out of his mind with anger, asking questions, punching him when he didn’t answer. He must have blacked out, and Candelora had bound him to the conveyor belt with packing tape while he was unconscious.