Then the Chinese arrive.
The shit hits the fan. Predictable, right? There's a major shootout, and at the end the only two people left standing are Guo and me. Zhang Wen is also still alive, but he's on his knees, tied to a fence.
How did it end? Well, you’ll see when you get there.
Guo, well, I left him in a bad way.
Zhang should still be tied up. You'll notice that his hands are missing, and I imagine that the stumps might have turned gangrenous despite being cauterised. Most likely he'll have died of blood loss, though.
So, that's a short summary of events.
In the envelope that Mr Carraro, the lawyer, will hand to you, you'll also find, along with my journal, a key for a locker which you'll find in Marco Polo airport, terminal 2. It's number 136. There you'll find a Nike tennis bag, and inside the bag is the money. Well, some of it. I kept a bit. Expenses, you know.
I think that's all. Pretty much. You can find out the rest yourself. Let's face it, you get paid a silly amount, don’t you? Time you earned it. I read somewhere that someone had taken to calling you magistrates an “uber-clique”. I don’t know if it's true, but I don’t think it was entirely made up by an over-imaginative journalist.
Ah, one last thing: don’t bother trying to find me. First of all, you won’t. Second, you have all the details you need to put the entire case to bed. Third: believe it or not, you and I are on the same side.
OK, so I'm a little meaner than you. Anyway, don’t worry, you’ll see: if I need to get in touch with you I’ll manage.
Ah, and – don’t forget – go to Hodegart and watch the Asiago Lions. Promise me that. And when you get there buy a red and yellow scarf and drink a warm VOV and brandy cocktail. You're from Vicenza, aren’t you? You can’t miss such a fine spectacle. You never know, we might even bump into one another.
Anyway, now I have to say goodbye. Thanks for everything. And don’t be too mad at me.
Lots of love,
Mila
20.
Like a stone sentry on a buttress, Schloss Eisturm dominated the valley. A medieval castle, its battlements outlined against the sky. Under the stronghold, a narrow road left the main pass through the valley and climbed to the summit of a peaked hill.
Plinths of ice embellished the view. A white quilt of snow covered the valley, blanketing all sound and creating a fairytale atmosphere. The branches of the spruce trees were so heavy with snow that they seemed close to breaking point. A surreal silence hovered over the scene.
The streams were veins, hardened by the cold. They crisscrossed the land's white skin and threaded the slopes in dark bands of motionless water.
Oberammergau, the Alpine Road, the German Alps.
The chimneys of the castle blew gentle smoke that curled in white swirls filling the air with candyfloss clouds. The huge glass windows of the barbican contrasted with the dark stone of the stronghold. They reflected the light of the big chandeliers and shone like evil eyes spying on any travellers who might walk through the narrow, desolate valley.
Inside one of the rooms in the barbican, a man.
Joch Unterberger couldn’t shift his gaze from the screen.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
The girl had tons of talent. Technically perfect, savage, bloodthirsty: she had the potential to become the best bounty hunter in the Guild. The perfect professional to cover the area comprising the north east of Italy, Tirol and Austria. Then, maybe after she'd gained some experience tackling those maniacs from the Schwarzer Adler – a gang of madmen whose headquarters the Guild had been unable to locate; they were systematically disseminating their unique brand of Nazi-Fascism – she might slowly mature into one of their global agents, one of those who could tackle the most dangerous of missions anywhere in Europe.
The video clips she'd just sent him – virtually a snuff movie -- were really, really enthralling. Breathtaking.
The girl had style. Damn right she did. She was fast, those red dreadlocks whipping the air. She didn’t so much kill her victims as grind them to a pulp. The Guild needed agents like her. Joch was watching a clip where she confronted three Chinese in a confined space. She moved like a wild cat, slicing through arms and legs with her katana in a deadly dance that gave him the shivers. What elegance! What fluidity!
Unterberger was already eating his third slice of Black Forest gateau: chocolate and cherries. And he couldn’t stop. He was forgetting all about his body, the slim, toned physique he'd counted on for years and years while he busted his balls to gather experience, money and contacts to make his dream come true: a private guild at the service of – and sponsored by – the most important entrepreneurs in Europe aimed at totally wiping organised crime from the face of the map.
Lacking any effective organisation, both at a national and international level, many voices speculated that maybe it was time to go back to the old ways. The European Union was, after all, proof positive of how member countries were failing to cooperate on the justice front. Too many problems associated with differences in judicial systems, too many power plays, too much red tape.
However, security was and remained vital. So vital that politicians weren’t going to get in the way. Through a series of hidden funds, several professional associations and groups of economic and financial players had helped create an EC-wide security organisation. Private. Nothing official, of course: that wouldn’t be sufficiently politically correct.
From the diamond producers in Antwerp to the big multinational companies, everyone had agreed that Europe needed some kind of private security association. Thus, the BHEG was born. The BHEG – the Bounty Hunters European Guild – had been active for some time now. Following the American example.
It was impossible to find the Guild, but the Guild could find anyone it wanted to. A group of veterans and mercenaries from the Grenzschutzgruppe 9, the Spetsnaz, the Alpini, the ROS, the Korps Commandotroepen and Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Hand-picked personnel who received six months training in the snow-clad Urals and German Alpine Road.
Due to his impressive CV, Joch Unterberger had naturally become the leader of that secret army.
He was staring at his computer screen, eyes open wide like a chameleon on acid, admiring what his old Italian friend Gastone Zago had created.
The perfect warrior.
The perfect warrior was a woman called Mila Zago.
Frank van Eick silently entered Unterberger’s office. It was small but comfortable, sparsely furnished: some oak bookshelves, a mahogany coffee-table, a couple of comfortable leather armchairs in front of a fireplace piled high with burning logs. In front of it, the desk on which Joch had placed a twenty-two-inch flatscreen monitor.
“On you go!” he shouted.
“I can’t fail to notice a certain degree of enthusiasm, Joch. What's happened?” asked van Eick, relaxed and composed as ever.
“Ah, it’s you, my old friend,” replied Unterberger getting close to the screen, as if he was planning on eating it.
“What are you watching?”
“The most beautiful, lethal fighting machine you've ever seen. Come closer. Take a look at her in action.”
Van Eick followed his suggestion and approached the screen.
He saw a redhead in a latex suit leaping around wielding a curved Japanese sword. She landed behind someone who looked like an Asian assassin, flexed her knees and hit the Asian’s leg with a roundhouse kick that brought him down. Impressive. Her speed of reaction and the precision of her moves were close to perfection.
And it wasn't over: as the killer’s face was falling towards the tiles, she lowered the katana and sliced upwards, left to right.
The head of the Asian came clean off his torso and flew through the air in a bright red geyser, coming to rest next to another corpse lying on the floor.
“My God!” said van Eick. “Is this real?”
Unterberger looked at his colleague with satisfaction.
“Isn't she
something?” he said with a broad smile.
“She's a psychopath! I mean, don’t you think she's just a bit… over the top?”
“Well, yes, she's playing to the camera. But she's very good.”
“Where's she from?”
“Italy.”
“Hm. A race of useless scum. Nothing but thieves and beggars.”
“And traitors.”
“Right.”
“Still, she could be Turkish or Greek, wouldn’t change a thing. I was thinking of letting her loose in the area between the north east of Italy and Austria. Ever since they killed Blue Eyes, we've had no presence there.”
“You're hiring her?”
“I’ll give her a test first. She's not a run-of-the-mill mercenary joining us from some special corps. She's pure talent. A wild horse. And self-taught, too. Well, not really...”
“What do you mean ‘not really’?”
“She was brought up by an old friend of mine from World War II.”
“I concede, the girl's impressive. If this is real. Sure it's not from a computer game?”
“It's all original, live footage.”
“And who recorded it?”
“She did. You know how youngsters are. They film everything.”
“She's definitely a psycho.”
“I've made my decision. We'll give her a test. I already have a codename for her.”
“Really? What?”
“Something poetic, yet threatening. Something fierce and deadly.”
“Cut the crap and spit it out.”
“Red Dread.”
“Red Dread?”
“Yes, Red Dread.”
“Well, to be fair, it fits.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Now calm down.”
“Right, I'll calm down, but you call her. And make sure you use an untraceable mobile.”
“Joch, I'm not a schoolboy.”
“Tell her to be at the Slaughtered Roe Inn at noon on Saturday”
“She looks like a monumental dose of trouble.”
“So what? We’re not looking for someone to bake us cupcakes. Just call her.”
“OK.”
Joch Unterberger smiled. After an awful day, the evening looked much more promising. That girl was a godsend. She would produce results in the badlands of the north east of Italy, Tirol and Austria. Under siege from immigrants, ravaged by racial clashes, the denizens of that area were among the main contributors to the Guild. Ever since Blue Eyes had been branded with a swastika and killed, the area was getting less and less safe. They needed to get on top of the situation as soon as possible.
Mila Zago was the right person for the job.
The days of the Schwarzer Adler were numbered. Of that, he was certain.
He cut one more slice of the gateau and carried it from the tray to the small Bavarian porcelain plate. The chocolate was wonderful, and the cream – made from fresh, frothy milk from German cows – was delicious. Soft, smooth, irresistible.
Oral sex for the taste buds.
21.
Chiara Berton stared at the stiff canvas cover of the notebook she was holding in her hands. She leaned against the back of her leather chair, stretched her shapely legs under her desk and sighed.
Towers of files and briefs covered the entire surface of her work desk, and the sprawl continued onto the floor. Folder after folder, one after another, on top of one another, in no order whatsoever.
Amidst that ocean of documentation, the lawyer – Carraro – had brought her the diary. He told her he wanted to make sure nobody else would see it. Then he added that he didn’t know what was in it.
Along with the diary there was also a small key, probably for a locker.
She yawned.
She was half-asleep. She sometimes asked herself why she found her job so special. But she knew the answer, and it had nothing to do with anything that could be found in a procedural manual.
Sure, she worked in criminal law, but ultimately what she really liked was the chance to deal with the worst side of people, men and women, day after day. It was neither a sadistic nor masochistic pleasure, simply that she believed someone should be responsible for defining the boundaries of abnormal behaviour. By applying the law, of course.
There was also an undeniable narcissistic element. The work gratified her and kept her in check, because it gave her the chance to enjoy visibility, respect, attention. She was a woman in what was still very much a man's world, and having power and being popular were some kind of reward, especially given that she had built her career brick by brick, with no easy shortcuts. She was still good-looking, mind you, which probably gave her an advantage with lawyers, judges and maybe even the occasional defendant.
She went back to the small blue notebook. She slid her hand under the rubberband that kept it closed, but she didn’t open it.
She twisted the key Carraro had given her between her fingers.
Thought about it and shook her head.
She put the notebook in her handbag and promised herself she would check it out at home.
For now, she really needed to go over the police reports on what looked like a pretty big issue: the Badia Polesine massacre, which had all the hallmarks of a couple of rival gangs settling scores.
The sun was casting soft rays on the snowy mountaintops.
After three days of complete rest, her leg hadn't fully healed yet, of course, but the inactivity had been beneficial. She was still limping, but at least she could walk.
It would take some time, but eventually everything would be as it was before. The flesh would repair itself. And slowly, with training and rehabilitation, she would get back in perfect shape.
Mila left her house.
She took a deep breath. She detected the acrid smell of the spruces, the snow glittering in the morning light.
It felt as if she had awakened from a long sleep. An intoxicating feeling of regeneration poured through her body. A light breeze arose. Quite pleasant.
Still ringing in her ears, the words she had heard on the phone, spoken by a male voice with a thick foreign accent: “The boss wants to see you,” he had said. “We're waiting for you.”
Clearly her snuff clips had impressed someone, enough to give her some hope of joining the BHEG, sooner or later.
She had packed her bag with only the bare necessities.
Her itinerary read: Seven Communities plateau, Pergine, Trento, the Brenner motorway up to the border, then Innsbruck and straight to Garmisch Partenkirchen and Oberammergau. A little over two hundred miles. A four-hour drive in the snow.
All this to get to the Slaughtered Roe Inn at 12 sharp.
As agreed.
It was the perfect day to leave.
She loaded her luggage into the car. She had carefully stuffed the false bottom of the tennis bag with the cash she'd taken from the Galesso twins.
Her blue Ford Focus shone in the morning light.
She locked the door and got in the car. Her leg wasn't bothering her too much.
She revved the engine while the car was still in neutral just to hear the engine roar in anger.
She changed into drive and left with a screech of tyres, the wide treads tearing up the snowy slush as John Kay’s low-pitched, resonant tones embark on the opening lyrics of Born to Be Wild.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN TIM WILLOCKS AND MATTEO STRUKUL
TW: I am often asked what authors were my greatest influences. I always feel that I should say something like 'Nabokov, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner', but the truth is I fell in love with reading - and started writing, as a boy - through pulp fiction. Richard Stark, Mickey Spillane, George G. Gilman, and a lot Western authors whose names no one remembers except Jo Lansdale and I. Why do you think that pulp fiction reaches the parts that other forms of literature can't reach? And why is there such a cultural prejudice - which I myself am not immune to, even though I know it’s wrong?
MS: I agree and I must confess that even my inf
luences are very pulp oriented, thinking about novelists like Chester Himes, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, James Crumley even if I loved authors like Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffman, Friedrich Schiller, Wolfgang Goethe among others. But even these authors were very popular, you know what I mean? What I could say about pulp fiction is that maybe it can reach parts and readers more than all other forms of literature because it’s profoundly popular. Thinking about pulp magazines like Amazing Stories or Black Mask, I must confess that there's an enormous amount of characters that have been created thanks to those magazines: The Shadow, Doc Savage, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Fu Manchu, Solomon Kane, Zorro, characters so iconic and powerful that they can capture with just one sentence the reader's attention. I think, in fact, because the novelists who were contributors to those pulp magazines were amazing narrative talents, you know, authors like Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, and, more than this, I must confess that - during that period we are talking about, the '30s - even in Italy we had pulp like Per terra e per mare - Il giornale di avventure e di viaggi, directed by Emilio Salgari, an amazing Italian novelist, from Verona, who was a real pulp novelist, in fact, who invented characters like Sandokan or Il Corsaro Nero (The Black Corsair). I mean that pulp fiction was so popular because it offered so much amusement and amazing but low-cost stories. And popular literature, in my opinion, is only really popular literature, if it can be mass market distributed. Professors and academics and intellectuals are so boring and selfish and in fact they use literature like a weapon to divide and create differences between high culture and low culture, between upper and middle class and common people. Fuck them all! Man, it's a shame. I want to be an honest pulp writer, I love mass-market books and cheap literature and as a reader I must confess that I consider you one of my masters even because you are so pulpy and gory when you write your stories... so I hope not to offend you if I say this, but in my opinion what I've written now is an amazing compliment for you, ha ha! This is also the reason why there is this kind of prejudice against pulp fiction: because it’s popular and low-cost and honest and... cool. Anyway, I would like to know how much you think movies have influenced pulp and crime fiction today, especially thinking about the fact that you are a novelist and a screenwriter?
The Ballad of Mila Page 15