No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (38 page)

Carlo said to Fred, ‘Tilting at windmills, or slaying dragons? I’m no good at it.’

‘My ambition is to hold the line. When I quit, I want to be able to say that things were no worse under my watch. That’s about all. You going to turn her in?’

Carlo said softly, ‘I’m going to look at the castle, and then we’re going to have a beer. Not because we don’t care.’

‘Maybe we care too much.’

Birds were gathering in the trees above him.

Jago had no idea why they had selected those trees, oaks and high birches. The crows had come first, then pigeons. The food had filled his stomach but had had little effect on his thinking, which was still rambling, confused. He had scrambled to collect the wrappings before they blew away and had wedged them under the boulder at his right hip. He was waiting for darkness.

The wolf on the rock slab was just visible if he screwed his eyes tight and blinked hard – it was a darker shade on an indistinct ledge. The crows disputed perches on the upper branches, and scores had come.

He had learned a new lesson: that darkness was a friend. There’d have been kids out that night, in the back alleys off Freemasons Road and behind Silvertown Way, who’d have treasured the safety of darkness. He watched the sun, fiercely red, dropping below the trees. His target was the cable.

His stomach rumbled. He had attempted to eat slowly but had failed. Pain stabbed in his upper belly: he had been given
tortellini
,
wurstel
, a can of condensed milk, and a toothbrush impregnated with powder. They could have shot him, but Jago believed they had decided to trust him not to betray their position. He had a mission, and it would not be shoved into the sidings. Compatible? Perhaps – perhaps not. He was flattered that they’d had his photograph but he could have told them it was an image of a man who no longer existed. He was reborn, proud of it, and thought himself free. Confused . . .

The pigeons were quieter than the crows but in greater numbers. They thrashed for space and bickered, but were quicker than the crows to settle. He believed he could see the wolf but his eyes might have tricked him.

He had never seen the old man and wanted to trap him – a rat in a cage. He had seen him only from a monochrome image that had been up on a screen for a few seconds. He knew that Bernardo Cancello exercised power and had wealth beyond imagination, that he was inside the ’Ndrangheta syndicate, which turned over more in a year than Microsoft or Apple. A coarse face in the photograph, a stubby nose, and unforgiving eyes that had not been cowed when he had posed, many years ago, for the police photographer. And the old man took precedence over the grandson who had split open the girl’s face.

He knew where the cable was. He would find the place where he had seen it, now screened by a sheet and . . . He thought he heard a faint whimper, a small child’s cry or that of an animal in pain.

He watched and waited for the darkness to be total, the light in the house bright. Then he would hurt them.

13

Jago had pushed himself out of the cleft under the two great boulders, and had tied the laces of his trainers tightly. He had flexed his hands, then shoved them into the pockets of the coat, where they’d clasped the tyre wrench and the penknife. Then he stood up and rocked backwards and forwards, toe to heel. It was time to do it or to crawl away.

A couple of months back one of the German girls in the bank had talked – over a sandwich and some juice – about her first ski jump: Innsbrück or somewhere. She’d described, with a giggle, being at the top of the ramp and hesitating, looking for an excuse, but knowing it was too late for a bullshit cop-out. She’d taken a great gulp of the winter air, someone might have given her a shove. She’d stopped rocking back and forth, gone down, then been airborne. The elation, after she’d landed that first time, had been – said with a droll German grimace – better than sex. There had been a guy in the City office, a couple of years ago, who’d signed up, in support of a worthy cause, for a virgin parachute jump. Everyone at work had been so awestruck that they’d dug deep and the charity had gained more than five thousand pounds. He’d said that if, getting to the aircraft, he’d been told it was too windy, too cloudy, too any-bloody-thing, he would have screamed for joy. He’d rocked those last few seconds, forward and back, then had the heave and gone.

No one there could give Jago a shove or a heave.

He didn’t know the route he would take. The way down to the sheets that camouflaged the path and the disturbed soil had been hidden from him by foliage. He might find an animal track or a cliff face that fell away. He would go near to the wolf – if it was still there. He thought he had heard it a half-hour before, but it might have been the leaves or branches rubbing. He thought he had heard a light cry of suffering.

He rocked again. He believed there was a cellar or an excavated hole under the derelict building. If he cut the power, if he created a panic the like of which the man had never known, if he had him shrieking in pitch darkness, all his wealth, power and authority would be meaningless. That was Jago’s aim. He would have bet his life on it: a man could kill, could order others to kill, could inflict misery and pain, but trapped without power in darkness he would crumple in terror. He supposed, at the heart of it, he felt a sort of jealousy at what the old man had achieved: if the
padrino
glanced at others, they would feel fear rising at the nape of the neck; if he smiled, he would leave others brimming with happiness because he approved of them. In Jago’s terms, the old man had bypassed the grandson.

He was exposed on his ledge and it was totally dark. He had no excuse. He reached forward and felt for a hazel sapling, let his fingers run down it, then broke it off and stripped away the lesser branches. It was now a blind man’s stick and he would feel his way with it.

Lights were on throughout the house. There were more lights down the track that went to the village. Short of the house he saw cigarettes glowing, smoked by the men who watched, night and day. The mother had been out of the kitchen door and had adjusted a rug at the trellis. The daughter had been on the gravel at the front, smoking and pacing. Later she had been at her bedroom window and had not drawn the curtains or lowered a blind. The driver had spent some time with the City-Van, its bonnet open – he might have been checking the oil, but had now gone inside. Jago had to factor in the dogs, but they were quiet. Enough light came from the kitchen for him to see that the kid was tickling their throats, relaxing them.

The kitchen door opened and Marcantonio stepped out. He carried a big flashlight in his left hand, and the sawn-off shotgun in his right. He gazed around him, stood tall, then went behind the draped rug and the trellis. A little of his shadow showed between the vine leaves. The air was clean, cool and quiet, and Jago believed he heard the scrape of metal on concrete – he took it to be a chair’s legs grating on a paving stone. He had confirmation of sorts when a cigarette lighter flared.

Time for calculations. Marcantonio had settled near to the point where the join in the cable had been excavated during the storm. The dogs had disappeared from the yard, and he imagined them now close to Marcantonio. It was quiet. The birds in the oaks and birches were calmer – they cackled and flapped but were undisturbed. He didn’t know what to do.

Minutes passed. Jago wondered how comfortable Marcantonio was on a hard chair, how long it would be before he was bored and went inside. He heard another cry, the gentlest whimper: the wound must be deeper in the animal’s flank than he’d thought. He was surprised that it had stayed on the rock slab. He would have expected it to search for a refuge in which it could curl up and die. He thought for a long time about the wolf and its injury. A clock chimed far down the valley. Some lights had gone off in the house – in the kitchen and in Giulietta’s bedroom – but the flash of the lighter warned him that Marcantonio was still keeping watch.

Jago cursed his stupidity. If he hadn’t scratched the side of the City-Van, the chair, the flashlight and the shotgun would not be there. He waited. He didn’t dare to step back and burrow into his hiding place under the boulders. If he turned, he would keep walking, might see the guys in the sniper suits and say to them, in English:
Sorry, guys, didn’t work out so I’m quitting. Thanks for the rations. I’m an idiot for getting involved and should have stayed at my desk
. He knew he would not turn.

Above him the birds had settled. Below, there were the shotgun and the dogs. Jago watched and waited. He thought of the wolf and its pain. He could only watch, wait and hope.

He had the dogs around him.

The pack leader, still troubled by its watering eyes, was curled across Marcantonio’s feet. The shotgun, loaded, was on his lap, the flashlight balanced beside the barrels. When he drew on the cigarette, he cupped his hand over the glowing end to shield it. The chair was hard, the evening air chilly, and the wind blew in the upper trees . . . He could picture the man.

A few years older than himself, a little taller but less muscular at the shoulders, his face far paler, northern European, a straight back, big eyes that widened in astonishment and lips that thinned in anger. He remembered how the man had surged from the park and across the road, how they had felled him – it had been the second time – and remembered the girl’s face, the cut and the spilling blood. For Christ’s sake, he hadn’t intended to split her cheek and if the bitch hadn’t . . . It was an ‘incident’ in his life.

Marcantonio had shot a man for his grandfather and that had, too, been an incident; he had strangled a man for his grandfather, another incident; for his grandfather he had put his aunt into a tank of acid, yet another ‘incident’. Incidents littered the life of Marcantonio, aged twenty, and there would be many more. The face of the girl in Charlottenburg was a small incident, trivial.

The chair was hard and his legs cramped. The dogs breathed in a regular rhythm.

He had shot a man. Marcantonio could recall with great clarity how it had felt to arm the pistol, aim at the man’s temple, see the flinch in the eyes, the opening of the mouth and the failed scream, the body frozen with fear, unable to escape the car seat, the squeeze on the trigger, and the spatter that had exploded on the inside of the windscreen. And the pressure required to close the windpipe inside a flabby throat – there had been a jowl to push up and out of the way with his thumbs – and the long ache in the muscles he’d used. No problem in recalling the tipping of Annunziata, bound and gagged, into the shimmering darkness of the acid tank. He saw again her eyes, the hatred, the despising, her lover already dead. The last he could barely remember – the girl’s face, the pistol raised as a bludgeon, never about to fire it, then the impact and the cutting edge that was the foresight. An incident, but not meaningful.

It was the only one of his ‘incidents’ that had kicked back. He sat on the chair. It was beyond his capacity to understand: why?

The man might have worked in a tower block of offices – an accountant, a lawyer, a banker or – any of the professions that the family employed to ease the acquisition and multiplication of their wealth. He had twice crossed the road to intervene, then had found Marcantonio’s Berlin address and had scraped the side of his pride and joy, the car that was his statement of who he was. Unimportant, even the car. What was bigger than anything else that had intruded into Marcantonio’s life was that the man had come in the night to the family’s house and used a key, a coin or a knife to leave a mark on the old City-Van. He had pissed on Marcantonio. No one, before, had done that. He sat examinations at school and always passed, well. He wanted a girl, and she was available. He laughed and all those with him laughed. He showed anger and anyone near him looked away. That was the circle enclosing him. He sat on the chair, watched, waited and listened.

When he strained to hear, sometimes, there was a light moan – almost a trick in his ears – and the dogs would stiffen. He could, of course, have called out the village, brought together all the men and had them form scrambling lines to track across the rocks and ravines, poke in the caves and clefts. He could, of course, have told them that in the German capital he had played a second-rate gangster, raising
pizzo
payments, and had been faced down by a guy off the streets. He would not. It was close to night, and the moon was high, throwing rinsed light on the high hillside.

Minutes passed, then hours.

He stood, his back resting against the cleft in the boulders.

There was light from the moon so he could see the outline of the sheets and the dark shape of the trellis but it might have been an hour since he’d last seen the lighter flame’s flash. Questions exercised him. From where he was, could he have seen Marcantonio go back to the kitchen? No light had come on in there. It was probable that Marcantonio was still keeping vigil with the dogs and the shotgun.

Jago had never known a soldier. They were of a world divorced from his. Neither had he known a policeman. A man had come from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency to lecture the City bankers and had talked about money-laundering. Jago was ignorant about how covert forces operated – he supposed that the men further up the hill, hidden among the rocks, would be endowed with patience, which Jago was short of. He heard nothing but the wind, the trees rubbing, and the sharper sounds of the wolf’s pain. He saw nothing because the moon was still low. Would he take the chance and go down? Would he wait – and for how long?