End Games - 11 (5 page)

‘I’m good,’ said Jake.

The flight from Milan was over an hour late due to a strike by baggage handlers earlier in the day and Tom had been seated in the very last row, next to the galley and the toilets, so by the time he finally emerged, the small airport of Lamezia Terme was almost deserted, public transport services had long since ceased and the last cab had driven away. An electronic display on the wall showed that the external temperature was a very pleasant twenty-three degrees, and after his overnight journey Tom was perfectly prepared to stretch out on a bench or underneath some shrubbery and go straight to sleep, but in the event this wasn’t necessary. As he walked towards the baggage carousels, he was accosted by a paunchy, well-dressed, middle-aged man whose expression alternated rapidly between pleasure, sorrow, respect and encouragement.

‘Signor Newman? I am Nicola Mantega. You called me from the United States a few days ago, if you remember. You said that your father had spoken of me.’

‘Oh yes, right.’

‘And you also mentioned that you would be arriving on the last flight from Milan tonight. Very pleased to meet you. I only wish that it could have been in happier circumstances.’

Having collected Tom’s luggage, they proceeded outside. Neither noticed the young man who had been scanning the titles of the books in the window of the locked newsagent’s stall and then followed them out, to be greeted effusively with a smacking kiss and a full embrace by the very attractive brunette standing beside a battered Fiat Panda. Tom’s escort led him to an Alfa Romeo saloon parked in a lane designated for emergency vehicles only. He gestured the American inside, then returned to the driver’s seat and started the engine.

‘Has there been any news?’ Tom Newman asked as the car sped away into the darkness beyond the airport perimeter lights. Mantega shook his head glumly.

‘I’m sorry, nothing. But that is not surprising in a case like this. It is normal, even reassuring.’

The Alfa slowed slightly to take the sharp curve of the slip road and then they were on the
autostrada
, heading north to Cosenza.

‘Reassuring?’ Tom queried. ‘I don’t see why. Surely the kidnappers should have got in contact by now and made their ransom demand. The longer they delay, the more chance there is of the whole thing going wrong.’

Mantega smiled in a superior way.

‘For them, the only things that can go wrong are the initial seizure and the ensuing payoff. The first apparently went without a hitch from their point of view. Now they are worried only about the second. They are going to take their time, extract every bit of information they can from their hostage …’

The victim’s son looked at him in dismay.

‘Oh, not by brutality,’ Mantega continued in a discursive tone. ‘They don’t need that. Your father, like any kidnap victim, is utterly dependent on them for the basics of life. Food, water, sleep. They need only threaten to withhold some or all of those to get his complete co-operation. They will make their plans accordingly and then, and only then, will they risk contacting a third party, quite possibly me, to announce the conditions of his release.’

‘But they are holding him somewhere, and I was told that the police have launched a massive investigation,’ Tom Newman protested. ‘Surely every day they delay increases the chances of his being found.’

By now, Mantega’s smile was openly contemptuous.

‘Your Italian is quite good,
signore
, although not quite as good as your father’s, but I fear that you don’t understand very well what you are talking about. The kidnapping took place on the road leading to my villa, just outside Cosenza. Twenty minutes later, the vehicle conveying your father would have been on this road, but heading the other way, towards Reggio. An hour after that, at the very most, he and his captors would be high up in the mountains of Aspromonte.’

He jerked his thumb towards the rear window.

‘The government – be it the ancient Romans and Greeks, invading Normans, colonising Spanish or nationalistic Milanese – has tried again and again to make its laws hold sway in Aspromonte. On each occasion it has failed. That massif is a vast, shattered landscape, wild, barren, virtually impassable in many places, and riddled with caves and caverns. The people are primitive, ignorant, tough as nails, and speak the truth to no man save family members, and not to all of them. Naturally the police will make a show of strength, but to no effect other than saving their faces. I could hide all the people who just got off your flight from Milan up there for a year and no one would ever find them!’

Tom looked at him curiously.

‘You could, Signor Mantega?’

Mantega hesitated a moment, then laughed lightly.

‘As I mentioned, your Italian is not quite as good as your father’s. What I meant was that all those people could be hidden up on Aspromonte, not that I personally could do it. An easy mistake for a foreigner. Our verbal forms are very complex.’

The
autostrada
was almost deserted at that time of night, and despite the long uphill gradient the Alfa was now touching two hundred k.p.h. Nevertheless, the modest, ageing Fiat containing the young couple who had apparently met back at the airport was able to keep pace with it, thanks to some expensive technical modifications, but a few kilometres back, where even its lights would be largely invisible to the target ahead on the winding, tunnel-ridden highway. The saloon belonging to Nicola Mantega had also been modified recently, although without the owner’s knowledge or consent. The result was a mobile circle with inset cross on the flat screen visible within the opened glove compartment just in front of the woman’s knees, on the basis of which information she told her colleague at the wheel if he was breaching the agreed distance parameters.

‘My father never spoke Italian to me,’ Tom Newman declared.

‘Indeed? Then how did you learn our beautiful language?’

‘From my mother.’

‘Ah! So she at least is Italian.’

‘Was. She passed away four years ago.’

‘My condolences.’

‘Her family was from Puglia. Her parents were American citizens, but when she was five they decided to move back to Italy. My mother was brought up bilingually, and when she was eighteen she went to college in the States. That’s where she met my father. He told me that he’d taken a course in Italian because he was in love and she liked to speak the language when they were alone together.’

A long silence followed this remark.

‘Then there appears to be a discrepancy between what your father told you and what he told me, which was that he had been born here in Calabria.’

The young American stared at him sullenly, and then his eyes lit up.

‘Then the man that you met can’t have been my father! This must all have been a mistake. Some impostor must have taken his place and got kidnapped, and now he’s –’

‘I quite understand your natural grief and distress,’ Mantega replied, ‘but you must not delude yourself with puerile fantasies. Of course it was your father. He showed me his passport at the outset just as I showed him my documents. The business we were discussing was extremely sensitive and confidential and it was essential that there should be absolute trust on both sides. There is no possibility that I could have been mistaken about his identity.’

Tom Newman was by now openly truculent.

‘Yeah well, I’ve also seen my father’s passport, Signor Mantega. If you had examined it more carefully, you would have noticed that the stated place of birth is the District of Columbia, USA.’

Mantega made the soft Italian gesture that turns away wrath.

‘As it happens, I did notice that, and when he later told me he was Calabrian I naturally mentioned it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That it was a long story. A very Calabrian reply. He clearly did not intend to discuss the matter. But he must have told you something about his origins. What did he say?’

‘That he was an American,’ Tom replied shortly.

Mantega smiled.

‘A Red Indian?’

‘Of course not! And we don’t call them that any more.’

‘Then where did he say that his family was from? All Americans are from somewhere else. Your country is only a couple of hundred years old.’

‘That’s quite a long time.’

Nicola Mantega’s smile turned into a smug smirk.

‘Long for you, short for us.’

‘He told me that his family had been in the States for generations, and had intermarried so much that no one could figure out where anyone was from. Besides, he didn’t care. “We’re Americans and that’s the end of it,” he used to say. And I don’t care about any of this either. All I want is to get my father back. Those bastards at the film company he was working for have disclaimed all responsibility on the grounds that he was an outside employee and his contract with them says nothing about liability for ransom demands. So the money’s all going to have to come from my family.’

‘Is it a large family?’

‘No. I’m an only child and my father isn’t particularly rich. I just hope the kidnappers realise that and are prepared to be reasonable.’

Nicola Mantega did not pursue this topic. By now they had crossed the col between the valleys of the Savuto and Craticello rivers, and were descending the long sweeping stretch of highway towards the lights of Cosenza nestled in the narrow plain below.

‘You must be exhausted,’ Mantega said. ‘I’ve booked you into the Centrale. It’s part of the Best Western chain – all-American comforts like air-conditioning and room service, and as the name suggests, right in the centre.’

‘Was that where my father stayed?’

‘No, he hired a car and needed to drive around, so for him I suggested a location out in a suburb called Rende, with easy access to the
autostrada
.’

The Alfa braked sharply as it entered the ramp off the
autostrada
. Fifteen minutes later, having seen Tom Newman checked into his hotel and made an agreement to get in touch the next day, Mantega climbed back into his car and started to drive home. On the parallel street to the east, two young men on a MotoGuzzi kept pace. The man on the pillion talked incessantly into his mobile phone.

In Viale Trieste, the Alfa pulled up to a public phone booth. It was after midnight, and there was no one about except for a few derelicts. Mantega looked around, then fed a phone card into the machine. A couple of moments later, a white delivery van entered the square at the far end and came speeding round the corner. Mantega started to dial, then broke off at the squeal of tortured rubber and final crash and turned to look. It was quite clear what must have happened. A motorbike had turned into the square from a side-street just as the van hurtled past, and had been knocked to the ground. Luckily the two young men riding on it appeared to be uninjured. They picked themselves up, ran over to the van and started abusing the driver with a verbal violence that seemed likely to turn physical at any second. A stream of obscenity and blasphemy filled the air. Mantega grinned contemptuously and turned his attention back to the phone.

‘Giorgio?’ he said when the number answered. ‘Nicola. He’s arrived.’

‘Too late. Tomorrow, the way we arranged.’

By now the altercation across the street had begun to wind down. The two bikers picked up their machine, revved up the engine and tested the brakes and lights. The van driver was intently scrutinising the front end of his vehicle, picking at the paintwork with his thumbnail. Meanwhile, in the back of the van the fourth member of the team lowered the directional microphone from the circle of plastic mesh forming the centre of one of the zeroes in the phone number emblazoned outside.

Nicola Mantega returned to his car and drove off just as a deafening blast from the MotoGuzzi’s twin exhaust consigned all van drivers to the lowest circle of hell. But the motorcycle had also been modified, and when it doubled back to follow the Alfa up to Mantega’s villa in the foothills above the city, its engine sounded no louder than a kitten’s purr.

Ever since he arrived in Cosenza, Aurelio Zen had been sleeping badly. This was not the fault of the weather, although a few weeks earlier the thermometer had been nudging forty, nor of his accommodation, an efficient, soulless apartment maintained by the police for the use of visiting officers in one of the concrete blocks that disfigured the area around the Questura. It consisted of a sitting room and kitchenette with a dining area, two bedrooms, one of which Zen used as a study, and the best-equipped bathroom he had ever seen. A maid came once a week to clean the floor and change the bedding, and he had arranged for her to wash and iron his clothing as well. Apart from that, he was left entirely alone. The apartment was quiet, air-conditioned and just a few minutes’ walk from his office.

Despite this, he had been sleeping badly, waking for no apparent reason and dreaming too much and far too vividly. Zen had never paid much attention to his dreams, but now they were thrusting themselves on his attention like a swarm of gypsy beggars, most of all in the intermediate state between sleep and waking when he was partly conscious but completely defenceless. As soon as he surfaced sufficiently to realise what was happening, he climbed out of bed, walked through to the state-of-the-art bathroom and took a cool shower before finishing off in a torrent of water as hot as he could bear. Standing naked in the well-equipped kitchen, he then filled the
caffetiera
and put it on the flame, lit his first cigarette of the day and phoned his wife in Lucca before she left home to open her pharmacy.

Zen had considered asking her to send him some sleeping pills, but he disliked admitting a weakness. Besides, he and Gemma had an unspoken agreement to keep their professional and personal lives separate as far as possible. In fact, he would have found it very difficult to say what they did talk about in these daily ten-to fifteen-minute conversations that seemed to flow along as effortlessly as a river and left him feeling calm, capable and ready to face the day. Having slurped down his muddy coffee, he then shaved, got dressed and left for work. Stepping out into the street was the final phase of his psychic detox ritual. Life in Calabria was by no means perfect, but the spectres and ghouls which tormented his nights could find no refuge in its merciless, crystalline light.