No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (44 page)

She told him she didn’t know. Then she was gone and he was alone again. He sat, his head in his hands, but his eyes were dry.

There had been negotiations, which Jago had witnessed.

A uniformed
carabinieri
officer had come forward. The man who had held the assault rifle – it had gone – spoke for the family. Jago assumed that ‘respect’ was called for. The old woman remained in her chair and refused to meet the officer’s eyes, and Teresa was still on her knees. Her children had been escorted away. The men kept a perimeter around the body.

Jago wondered how the officer felt to find himself in the den of an organised-crime family, studying the body of a juvenile criminal whose offences went beyond delinquency. Other movements had attracted Jago’s eye. ‘Follow the money’ was the diktat of the fraud investigators: his was ‘Follow Giulietta, the daughter.’ He had seen the direction she had gone, past where the cable had been exposed. He thought himself clever. He would wait for an opportunity.

The negotiations were over.

The officer had departed. An ambulance was now coming up the track from the village. In its wake were two all-terrain long-wheel-base vehicles in
carabinieri
colours. Teresa was eased aside by other women. The principal mourner was helped up from her chair. The women, family and spectators, backed towards the kitchen door. A man and a woman crew, neither looking comfortable, came towards the body from the ambulance. They were ringed by the village men, and the handyman was there but stayed back. Jago saw, too, the kid who drove the scooter and handled the dogs. The tea-towel was lifted away. The woman paramedic gulped and sat back on her haunches. Her colleague felt at the neck for a pulse, then shook his head. They had a collapsible stretcher, but were waved away: the scene-of-crime team, after a fashion, took over. The shotgun was bagged in a plastic sack. The tea-towel was removed and they took photographs. The uniforms kept back, leaving the area around the body to the forensics team. They were dressed in brilliant white coveralls, their faces hidden, and Jago wondered how their breath might contaminate the yard. They seemed to take few samples. They were not given the tyre iron.

The wolf carcass was dragged out and examined. It was noted that there was already a considerable wound behind the creature’s right shoulder and pellets in the chest and face. They spent time examining the eyes.

Jago noted that two of the uniforms wore protective vests and sub-machine guns slung from straps. They seemed nervous. They would have been looking for the wolf’s position, where it might have been when Marcantonio had shot it.

Not the men in uniforms. Not the men crouched over the body and making that examination. There had been a moment, as the cloth was lifted and the face exposed, when the most senior officer had looked behind him, met the glance of one of those men, and there had been a slight nod: that moment in TV cop drama when identification is made in a mortuary chapel, confirmation. Jago focused on the two who seemed to have no role to play. They looked for the ledge on which the wolf had been. The shorter one was slight and his suit too large. The other was heavier, taller and had a beer belly. They looked at the escarpment above the yard. Why were they interested in where the wolf had been? Their noses and mouths were covered with the face masks, but he could see their eyes. Not casual. Both men were gazing across the rocks and trees for a reason. They exchanged comments in whispers, mouth to ear, beyond the hearing of the uniforms, forensic team and village men. Abruptly, both seemed satisfied. It was natural when something of significance had been noted to take a last look, but they did not.

The stretcher was unfolded. The body was lifted, then a blanket pulled over it. The handles were taken but not by the two other men. They left, and the body was loaded into the ambulance.

The handyman brought out a bucket and a yard brush, then washed away the blood, scrubbing hard, then left it to dry. He went to the wolf carcass and lifted it by the tail. Jago saw him take it to the front and down the track, the dogs following hopefully, but he kept them back. Perhaps he threw the wolf into a riverbed in a deep gully. When he came back he filled another bucket, and scrubbed some more. Jago knew what else he should do, but not when.

Soon he would go to look for the girl.

15

Jago wriggled from his belly to his knees and elbows.

The dogs were asleep by the door, and the area where the blood had been swilled away was now drying. The whole yard had been swept and the handyman had gone inside. He had seen no one else. The daughter-in-law and the children had gone, the village men were back down the track. He could smell food cooking. A death in the family but the living needed to eat. And must have needed clean bedding: a half-hour ago the old woman had emerged and hung out double sheets, pillow cases and towels. He’d looked for extra washing – the clothing of the hidden man, the
padrino
– but Marcantonio’s shirts, boxers, vests and socks were hanging with the rest. Not dead five hours and his gear was already on the line. No one had come to the house to share with them their grief.

Had the living not liked the boy? Did they find him an arrogant waste of space? Did they exist in a climate of death and judge it an unremarkable event? Jago didn’t know. No one was in the yard and the dogs were asleep. The kid wasn’t there to take them to work the hillside, and he didn’t know how suspicious they were about the tyre iron, but he moved with extreme caution. He thought he had learned fast the ways of the Aspromonte.

He kept his body low, hugging the ground, and went in a sort of spider crawl. In a few yards he was among the trees and the foliage would close behind him so he could straighten. But he didn’t hurry. He reckoned himself a good student. He watched for dried leaves and twigs and seemed to remember the route he had taken before. With each hour that had passed, he had become more familiar with the family and was – almost – a part of it, but the old man, the missing piece of the puzzle, was still just a photographic image in monochrome. In it he was young, with a good head of hair and smooth skin. Now the eyes might have dimmed.

He was glad to have moved and not fallen victim to the scent of the cooking coming through the kitchen door. He remembered the wolf, and the feel of its whiskers at his ankles, its gentle tugging with its fangs at the hems of his jeans. He remembered it in the moments before its death: defiant, caught in the beam, too weak to find cover, a proud animal. Best, he remembered how it had not cringed when the dogs had been close and when the barrels were aimed at it.

Many memories . . . A pretty face. A spider that lured a fly into a web. A woman who wore odd shoes, both from expensive pairs. A well-appointed apartment and a client who needed the reassurance that millions of euros were in good hands. A trip on a kerbstone as a hero went forward – no dog in that fight. A cut across a face that was no longer pretty.

He went on up the hill, threading between rocks, and took care that his feet fell mostly often on rock, not on any small pads of bare earth where he might leave prints.

Jago was almost on them before he was aware of it – they wore camouflage, with dark cream or mud on their hands. A fine net of russet material mixed with natural colours – black, olive green, sweeps of brown brushstrokes – but the lens behind it caught the light. He paused for a few seconds, then went past them.

They exchanged no words. It never crossed Jago’s mind to offer gratitude for the food they had given him, ask about the weather forecast or the weekend’s Serie A games. He could not have said whether they would, from that vantage point, have seen him take aim, then hurl the tyre iron at Marcantonio as he levelled the shotgun on the crippled wolf – Jago’s friend. There was only one similarity between him and them. He was quiet, light on his feet, and thought he could compete with them in skills that would be second nature to them and new to himself. The similarity? He knew the family, was growing closer to it, and they, too, would be familiar with its members, their vagaries and habits. A second similarity: they would be waiting for a sighting of the old man and they, too, would have just the black-and-white photograph, decades old, for identification. He and they shared ignorance. Both waited.

Higher up was the open space where trees and foliage pressed close around what a poet might have called a glade. There was grass and soft moss, and the sun filtered through the leaves. In the books his mother read it was the sort of place where a boy might take a girl. It was hidden, and the house was not visible. He sat, checked his watch and determined how long he would wait. He might have slept. If he had slept and dreamed, he might have seen the man he had never met.

Giulietta walked with her father. They were there to be seen. It was a way of answering those who might have whispered the poison of doubt. He had gone past the war memorial of Locri and by the statue in the small square that commemorated Padre Pio. They had had coffee in a bar on a side-street, the Via Piave, had sauntered along Via Giacomo Matteotti, and now he was at the fruit and vegetable market. He would have brought tomatoes and olives here most weeks recently, had he not been incarcerated in the bunker. It was important that day that men should note he was free, not crushed by the death of his grandson. It was on the radio – and would have been the subject of vivid gossip. The corpse was now in the Ospedale Civile, and the rumour mill would be spinning that the death was ‘mysterious’. It would have been known that he was in hiding, that a magistrate in Reggio was conducting an investigation into his affairs. It was important to be seen – and to be seen with his daughter. Word would pass to those of influence in the community.

The town of Locri housed a
carabinieri
unit and a team from the Squadra Mobile. The Guardia di Finanze was also present. It was possible, in this town, that a rival might pick up a firearm, hurry to where he was in the marketplace, and blow the back off his head, probably dropping his daughter at the same moment. It was not possible that any man who had seen him on the street, or had taken coffee with him, or now discussed the quality of the fruit and vegetables on sale, the effect of the recent storm on the crops in the poly-tunnels would reach for a mobile phone. Of that he was certain. No one would dial the numbers of any of the three police units in the town. None would be told that a wanted man, gone to ground, was close to them and vulnerable.

He had good conversations in the market, and seemed not to hurry, but Giulietta watched his back and carried in her handbag an Italian-made Beretta 84F.380 Auto calibre, deluxe, with gold inlay. She could use it – probably shot better than his grandson had. Men would murmur about her behind their hands, about her nose, but not to his face. Men talked about the produce, about the weather, and when Marcantonio was mentioned it was with sympathy. It was not Bernardo’s prime territory but he was accepted there. He had a financial interest in some bars, a restaurant and two of the new apartment blocks along the Siderno road. It was good to have Giulietta with him, but it hurt that she had no man to look after her and that now no one other than his daughter could take over the family business. Would a woman be tolerated as an equal? He couldn’t say. He shrugged off commiseration about his grandson.

He had been seen.

Later, at home, the major personalities from Locri and the foothills where his village was would come to pay their respects to him and Mamma. He had no friends in whom he confided, to whom he let slip his worries or to whom he crowed about successes. He had allies and associates, but no friends. That morning he had used, at Giulietta’s prompting, a new method of leaving home.

Giulietta had walked down the track to Teresa’s villa and borrowed her car. Beppe, once a postman in the village and semi-retired, still wore his old uniform each day and always brought the mail – usually tax demands – on foot to the house. Beppe sat in the kitchen and Mamma give him lunch, breakfast or coffee. Bernardo put on the postal uniform, pulled the cap well down on his forehead, took the sack and swung it over his shoulder, then walked back down the track, where Giulietta picked him up. A change of clothes behind a cow byre – another of Giulietta’s ideas.

The sun beat down on him as he left the market.

She said, ‘Not long now, Papa. What else do you want to do?’

‘We shouldn’t waste time, but I’d like to see the sea, be close to it.’

‘Have you any idea what we’re here for now?’ They were on the beach.

The excitement of the early morning had dissipated. Carlo thought he had seen a lens flash in the sun’s brightness, and Fred thought it odd that the washing had been left out overnight – ‘No one with a cadaver in the backyard is going to go out at first light with a mouthful of pegs.’ Fred reckoned his colleague had an itch that needed scratching. He carried his trunks and his towel, rolled together. He couldn’t even begin to estimate what sort of payback might be called in at some time in the future for the help given them. He had sensed a failure in morale, a cliff-edge drop in confidence, among the men he had been alongside when he had made two visits to Calabria and been embedded. He thought the mood worse now than when he had first come nine years ago, and when he had been back three and a half years previously.

He didn’t answer – Fred was rarely short of words. Which was why Carlo’s itch needed scratching. He wanted a response to ‘Why?’ It was the fourth time he had asked the question which had gone unanswered. It was not a pretty beach and now contained too much debris from the storm. It was unlikely that it would be cleaned before the following spring when the tourists came back. The water would be too cold to swim, but better than the Baltic. The banker boy was up on that slope. Where the lens might have flashed but there would have been a covert team in position there, with a chance to scoot out, but the backup would have been closer. Did he feel responsible for the girl who had been scarred for life? That was what happened, and the boy who had done it had lost his life that morning: was that a fair return? Fred was unsettled because answers should have come easily, and it annoyed him that they didn’t. Why were they there?