No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (16 page)

He turned into Via Giacomo Puccini, then the gated, sprawling apartment block. He was lucky they’d found him a job, they’d told him. He was in the basement, close to the communal boilers, and had a cramped room near the
portiere
’s small apartment. That man, with a uniform, regarded him with suspicion.

They would find him, one day. He had gambled and lost – was condemned.

The milk, ham and cheese were not for him: the
portiere
would take them to different households in the block above, and would receive a gratuity. He could be grateful for little, that he was still alive, that today he was beyond the reach of Bernardo, the
padrino
, his wife, the sons in the northern gaols and the grandson who, they said, was more brutal than any older member of the family. They had such power that all efforts against them were doomed. He had heard a journalist from Reggio say on television, ‘If the ’Ndrangheta target a man he is dead. There would be no escape not even on a Pacific island. When they want to kill him and are ready to do so, they will.’ He tapped in the code, let himself through the gates and did not look back. He was the walking dead.

He was in Rome.

The girl on the desk shrugged. Jago’s ticket was for Lamezia Terme, not Reggio Calabria’s Tito Minniti airport. Anyway, the next two flights to the city were fully booked so he would be on stand-by. Would he get on? Another shrug. And the connection to Lamezia Terme? A flight was due to leave in an hour. There were seats on it, but it was delayed. How long? There was a dispute with baggage handlers at Lamezia Terme. The early-morning flights were not affected because the baggage was handled by night-duty staff. The day shift were taking industrial action.

His certainty had slipped.

Men and women from around the world swept past and around him, anxious to display the urgency of their business. He was told that the industrial action at Lamezia Terme would be settled towards the end of the day shift because they would be paid electronically before the start of the weekend. No one was particularly helpful to him: why should they be?

He was not asked his business in Reggio Calabria, why it was important for him to travel and what priority he might be afforded. Had he been, Jago might have struggled to answer coherently. A Lufthansa flight to Berlin was called.

He could have gone to a desk, made a booking, and been back in his apartment by early evening, or searching out a bar where Elke might be. The final call for the Berlin flight. The bench he sat on was uncomfortable but he endured it. Jago was not quite ready to light the fuse that would burn the boat, but was considering his goal: it was not just to stand in front of the young man and see confusion but to achieve more. How? No idea.

He waited.

Bernardo heard the entry sounds. The outer doorway squeaked when it was opened or closed. Scrapes and scuffles came to him from the tunnel’s pipes. A smile lit his face.

In his mind he had been with the child in the cave, on one of those days when he had brought food to her and she lay on her side, convulsed in coughing, no longer crying. By the second week only Bernardo would take food to her – bread, cheese, perhaps an apple, water – and the dogs with him wouldn’t come into the cave. They stayed outside, their ears flat to their heads. His torch would find her in the far corner of the cave, beyond the lichen, and she cowered away from him. He never brought his boys, Rocco and Domenico, to the cave because he didn’t trust their reaction. The girl had given the family everything. She had been a sound, shrewd investment, and was the basis of the family’s success.

He heard the light knock on the outer wall of the container, scrambled across the interior and unfastened the makeshift doorway. Fresh air engulfed him as he held the boy who was his future, the dynasty’s.

They hugged, the clasp of two men, one old, one young, who had for each other the love that kept the family alive and was its strength. He remembered when he had struggled with his hands on the man’s throat and had called his fifteen-year-old grandson to his side, shown him the grip and had him finish the strangulation. He hadn’t seen him for six months. He had missed him. Now his grandson led the way. Bernardo switched off the lights, closed the inner door after him and started the long crawl up the sewer pipe.

Coming into the daylight was like breaking the surface of the sea after a dive – not that Bernardo could swim, but he had seen divers on the films. The chickens were round his feet, and Marcantonio had the bowl for their corn. They took the hidden path, passed Mamma’s sheets, then the trellis. He was in the kitchen, and had forgotten the child in the cave. He saw the pure joy on Mamma’s face.

A call came to the private-wealth section at the bank. A junior in the analysis unit, on a weekend watch, had had a query from a client in Bad Godesberg. The client, a widow, Frau Niemann, was persistent. She had been talking to her nephew, who was with Deutsche, and needed to know whether her account was listed as medium or low risk. She was an important client because her investment portfolio was worth some ten million euros. The junior was sitting at the end of a long work area, no natural light, and promised the client he would get straight back to her with an answer.

He rang the manager of the sales section, with overall responsibility for the client’s account, at home. He reached her as children flooded into her apartment for a birthday party. He heard the din, apologised to Wilhelmina for bothering her and was told to call Jago Browne immediately. Was Jago Browne not listed on the weekend duty sheet as being on stand-by? If he wasn’t, he should have been. Jago Browne knew about Frau Niemann’s affairs. He had been sick but was in the office the previous evening so had obviously recovered.

The junior found Jago Browne’s corporate mobile number, dialled it and let it ring. It went unanswered. The client’s enquiry was only about medium or low risk, and could have waited forty-eight hours to be dealt with on Monday morning. He called the number again.

Within a half-hour he had tried it seven times. It was unprofessional for any stand-by executive to be away from their phone for as long as thirty minutes. He rang the client, apologised and grovelled. He would be able to get back to her again within an hour.

He walked along the beach, the soft dry sand trapped between his toes. Fred Seitz felt free. His wife was nearer the sea, paddling and looking for shells. He
almost
felt free.

It was where he was happiest. Almost free, because the beach was almost a naturist venue. Nothing could be quite perfect. His work lingered because the break they had taken was not long enough for him to shrug it off entirely: he dealt with muggings and burglaries – not the small-scale thieves and pickpockets but those in large gangs with serious turn-over – day-to-day, but had responsibility at the station for organised crime with international implications. It could be Russian-originated, Albanian or Lithuanian, or it might have the stamp of the ’Ndrangheta. If it had been a ‘listed’ beach, Hilde would not have gone there.

It was early autumn and the usual chilly wind came off the sea and from the Scandinavian plains. She was topless but with a thick towel hanging round her shoulders and she wore drill shorts. Fred, in deference to the weather, also wore shorts.

Fred had cooked lunch in the camper and they’d slept after the meal. The sun was slipping now and he thought the day
almost
perfect. He was never away from his job. The kids in the section had lives beyond the police station – they went clubbing, rode mountain bikes in the forests around the capital, joined book groups and socialised with each other. Some studied for university-sponsored e-degrees. The wind tugged at his close-cropped hair and sometimes a gust shook him or he shivered. He was dedicated to a job that the kids found obsessive – and tedious. His wife, bless her, knew when to leave him to his thoughts. He nurtured images, couldn’t escape them: the scar, the girl pushing past, elbowing him aside.

She hummed softly beside him, and the gulls screamed. One naturist had braved the chill, a woman, and a small dog scurried close to her. It wasn’t fair. If the victim made no accusation and no other witness corroborated the Englishman’s story, the case would collapse.

Fred walked on. He knew where the boy came from – he had been to San Luca, Plati and the coast at Locri, where the beaches were warm and the
carabinieri
had their barracks.

Did he make a difference? he wondered. The question nagged at him whether he was at work or not. It was hard to imagine that he did, or ever had, and even harder to believe he could in the future.

‘The key thing to remember, all of you, whatever your rank, is that you make a difference.’

Carlo sat at the back. The canteen was the usual venue for a talk by an HMRC visitor from London. The woman doing the chat might have been from Human Resources or one of the myriad managers who seemed capable of beating the cull that emasculated uniforms and investigations.

‘What we’re aiming for is what I call “harm reduction”. Cutting down the damage caused to the addicts in our society, and getting a firmer grip on the revenue lost to the Treasury by the smuggling industry. We want a lean, modern organisation to be at the cutting edge of knocking back the power of today’s criminal sitting cockily on the international scene.’

He didn’t yawn. Some of the younger uniforms seemed impressed that a big player had travelled to see them, and at a weekend. The old sweats – Carlo to the fore – were too canny to show their contempt.

‘We know when we’re on course because the price of cocaine rises. The higher it goes – through your efforts – tells us we’re doing well, seizures are up and the criminals are suffering, losing money. The higher the price, the better we’re placed. It’s evidence of our success at interception. You are on the front line and you’re doing damn well.’

Except that the price was in free-fall. There was a journalist at the back, from a national paper, scribbling energetically. He might even have believed some of the crap that the press office was feeding him. In common with most of the guys who had cut their teeth on Green Lanes, Carlo was underwhelmed by administrators. But he needed his job and kept quiet. He should have been at home, raking leaves or . . . If redundancy beckoned, the future didn’t look good.

‘We want to improve the statistical rate of seizures, arrests and convictions. They all send a message loud and clear that the United Kingdom has elite security on its borders. We want to see a rise in the confiscation of assets, so that felons cannot live the good life after release from well-deserved custody sentences. Whatever it is – bootleg vodka, cigarettes without duty paid, bogus labels on clothing that comes from cheap sweat-shop labour – we want to demonstrate zero tolerance. You are achieving this, and we’re sincerely grateful to you. Thank you.’

No mention of cutbacks or staff lay-offs, nothing about the price of Class-A stuff being at rock bottom because narcotics were swamping the country . . . and nothing about China, the big moneybags who must not be offended: a container load of cheap leather wallets of third-world origin is shipped to a UK dock, then reshipped to Naples on Gioia Tauro, where the fake Gucci labels are added, and sent on, as genuine, to China. The Italians bankroll the operation with British criminal connivance, and the money comes back from China, rinsed and dried, perfectly laundered.

There was faint applause, then a stampede to get back to the duty posts. He would return to the cottage, maybe do some expenses, rake some leaves and dream.

‘It’s an opportunity. Don’t know much about the people or the place . . .’

Bent Horrocks lay on his back and the woman’s fingers, not her finest feature but with long nails, played in his chest hairs. By now Angel, his wife, would also be flat on her back, snoring quietly after her lunchtime drink: ‘I’m not an alco, love, just like a drop to help my digestion.’

‘Can’t take you, Trace. Like to, course I would. Hardly fun, but an opportunity.’

The apartment he had bought her was high in the tower. One of the best that had been available in Canada Wharf, it was convenient and discreet. There were lifts, or staircases, if he had the energy. He was not at his best that afternoon. His mind was not on the business of justifying the basic outlay of a thousand a week, which was what it cost to keep the roof over Trace’s head, food in her belly, the frequent hair and nail appointments, the holidays with her sister, clothes and pocket money. A grand a week wasn’t unreasonable.

It was his fault. She’d tried hard – wasted effort. She was unsettled and it showed. Bent could have said, no fear of contradiction, that he ruled that part of east London – Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, Peckham – where Trace was installed. No one would have denied it, neither the Flying Squad detective who’d checked his file, nor any dealer in the area. He’d dealt with foreigners enough times, of course, and none had considered taking a liberty with him, except one Russian. The man had gone home and would have had a bad flight – difficult to travel by air with a leg in plaster because your kneecap’s shattered. Different, what was coming. Off his territory. He’d not met them, didn’t speak their language.

Trace said, ‘You’ll be all right, Bent. It’ll be fine, like it always is.’

The room behind the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, with a view up the Thames to die for, was immaculate. He liked it that way, ordered. Her clothes were folded in a small pile on a chair, and his hung from hangers. He disliked mess and confusion. He had a phobia about the unknown, but his life was about taking opportunity when it came up. He couldn’t back off.