No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (39 page)

In the bank, the traders were the elite – aloof young men and women who accepted risk. Supposedly Jago belonged among the teams known for circumspection and calm evaluation, those who were
sensible
. Uncharted waters, new ground . . . The time would come when he went down, did the ‘hell or high water’ bit.

He thought the wolf’s pain was worse. He couldn’t help it – he could barely help himself. When he had tried to help a young woman in Charlottenburg he had made a poor fist of it . . . It had gone beyond her, and beyond the girl who had swum with him on the beach. Now it was about himself.

But not yet. He would go later.

He had never killed a priest – he didn’t know anyone who had. He hadn’t heard of a priest being killed in the Aspromonte.

Marcantonio knew every corner, every bend in the road out of the village and up into the heights of the Aspromonte. It was to be an accident. Along the routes towards the summits, the church of the Madonna and the great bronze cross of Christ, there were stretches where the safety barriers had never been installed and cliffs plummeted towards old mountain streams. It could be done in daylight or darkness. There was never much traffic. He would use a HiLux, one from the village, and would easily tip aside Father Demetrio’s small car. He could not refuse.

His throat was dry and he had brought no water. Sometimes the dogs would slip away from him to drink from the bowl in the yard, then return and slobber on his trousers. He loved the dogs, believed they loved him. His grandfather had told him to do it, and Marcantonio could not refuse or argue. He was dead himself if he did so. Any number of men would come up from the village and hold him. Likely it would be Stefano’s hands on his throat. A killing such as this was always arranged with deceit. A phone call to the priest’s house. Someone was sick and slipping, or bedridden and needing confession; an address would be given for a location in the mountains, only reached on a particular road, and the rider would be that the
padrino
himself had said that Father Demetrio should be called, not his curate. Simple to execute.

Marcantonio had never had any quarrel with Father Demetrio. His grandmother almost worshipped the ground on which Father Demetrio walked.

He would gain nothing from the killing, but his grandfather believed it necessary for his own safety. It tossed in his mind and his concentration on the noises of the night slackened. He barely noticed that the dogs were restless, or cold. Instead he saw the smile on the priest’s face, the steepest cliff on a bend in the road towards the village of Molochio, beyond Plati. He saw the car bounce and jump, roll and disintegrate. It was impossible to refuse, and the burden of it distracted him.

‘It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself,’ his wife said, and sat up on her side of the bed.

The prosecutor was late home again. He slumped on to the bed and bent to take off his shoes. He had explained little to her but she was familiar with the script. She had been asleep, had woken up and now vented her feelings.

‘You put your work before yourself, your health and me. You ignore the children. The job is a monster.’

He stood up. He put the shoes neatly into the bottom of the wardrobe. He didn’t look at her. He slipped off his trousers and put them on a hanger. He padded towards the bathroom. He had come quietly into the house but the slamming of the car doors might have woken her. Usually she suppressed her feelings – not that night.

‘The work is killing you. You get no thanks – and you can’t win. God knows, we try to support you, but there’s a limit.’

She had left a plate for him on the kitchen table – cheese, an apple and some ham under cling-film. He had said to his escort that he had no appetite.

‘If we have any life at all it’s like a stray dog’s – shunned, fearful, desperate for love and not finding it.’

In the bathroom he dumped his underwear in the laundry basket, then brushed his teeth hard. He saw himself in the mirror, bags below his eyes, which had the haunted dullness of failure. He couldn’t have argued with a word she had said. What hurt most was that the boys in the escort would have heard it all. Normally he and his wife made a pretence of harmony. He and his team had come from an expensive restaurant, above the city. A dinner had been in progress, a family party to celebrate a birthday, and an officer of the Squadra Mobile had been a principal guest. He had sat in the back of the car, smoked half a packet of cigarettes, drunk two bottles of water, gone behind flowering oleanders to relieve himself and waited for the policeman to come and speak to him. The delay might have been because the officer had received a call from a
carabinieri
colonel.

The two men had paced in the car park. His own people had carried their machine pistols openly and had sanitised the perimeter. He was not refused help from the Squadra Mobile – a blunt denial would have been unthinkable. Anyone who dealt with the Palace of Justice had the attuned antennae that enabled them to recognise whose star climbed and whose was barely seen. Of course he could count on co-operation, but . . . The sort of mission that required a substantial search team, and another deployed for cordon security, couldn’t be plucked from the skies. The prosecutor had been promised that a planning team would be put together when the necessary officers were available. They would be tasked to draw up a comprehensive plan for the containment of, and hunt for, a fugitive. It would be – why not? – a priority. Music had spilled out through the restaurant doors. He had thanked the man brusquely and walked back towards his car. He had muttered, and his guards would have heard him, ‘A priority – for when? Christmas?’ The clock was ticking and time was running out. They had come home.

‘Why are you spending so much time on this case? Can’t you make a start on another? Is it the only fish in the sea? Calabria is awash with corrupt, evil men.’

She was crying. He was in his pyjamas. He crawled into bed and switched off the light. She shivered. He thought they shared the pain. He was loath to move on and let the investigation slide. He would suffer if he did, and no colleague would share the pain. And there was the Englishman . . . A pleasant-looking lad, from the employee identification-card picture . . . No, he was irrelevant, as were the men who had come to apologise. He might sleep, might not.

‘Would you work here? If you had the choice, would you want to transfer to Calabria? Tell me, Carlo.’ Old friends and new had gathered. They drank Dutch beer. It was a back bar, far up the Via del Torrione, distant enough from the barracks and their senior officers. They’d eaten but the business of the evening was in the bar. There were old friends for Carlo and new friends for Fred. ‘I ask you, Fred, are we all crazy to stay in this city in a shit region?’

There was no need to answer. They could have talked about the Turks of Green Lanes in Haringey, or opened a second front on the Albanian quarter of Berlin, or the Russians, who had a presence in Hamburg, or the Vietnamese . . . It was best just to fight a fast path to the bar and put beers on the tables. There was gossip: who was sailing well, who was shipping water, who was holed in the hull and sinking. There was talk, some proud, of successes, and of the women who had been in the squads in Carlo’s time, who they had been with then and who partnered them now. They had the slip of paper that would smooth introductions. Over on the east coast there would be
carabinieri
Fred knew from his time there after the Duisburg massacre. Each had sent a message to his office, in London and Berlin, that they could be useful for another forty-eight hours, and had added that the apology to the prosecutor might require reaffirmation. They had moved on to a vexed subject: the merits of the Glock, the qualities of the PPK, the superiority of the Beretta, and—

A voice behind Carlo: ‘Carlo, do you know anything about a man named Horrocks?’

He turned expansively. ‘Horrocks? Bent by name and bent by nature. Bentley Horrocks. That who you mean?’

‘You know him?’ The questioner was young, fresh-faced and pale enough to work in a communications room. He had no beer gut and was ornamented with big spectacles. Probably from the computer world, in which Carlo had few skills and enough sense to offer respect.

‘I know of him but he won’t have heard of me. He’s a bad bastard, south London. Make my day, tell me he’s fallen under a bus.’

‘A big man, Carlo?’

Serious questions. The young officer, already with the rank of
maresciallo
, had sought him out. That was clear. He would have heard which bar the Englishman from Customs, trusted by colleagues, had decamped to. He would have come off duty at ten that evening and walked up. He was nursing an orange juice in a fragile fist. The questions were serious enough for Carlo to sober up fast.

‘He’s about as much of a big man as we have in London.’

‘His speciality is what?’

‘This is a long way ahead of what I do. He’s a principal target, a major player. Sorry, I must correct myself. He
should
be a principal target – what we call a high-value target – but he’s protected. He has a reputation as an ‘untouchable’. We’re too yellow bellied to admit it. At my level that’s what he is because otherwise he’d be banged up for twenty-five years in high security. What’s he into? Extortion, protection, corruption of officials, smuggling Class-A drugs, fags and kids. Or that’s what the gossip says.’

‘What is “untouchable”?’

‘He has police on his payroll, those in the specialist agencies that are supposed to hunt him down, but they take his money, screw up investigations and tell him where potential witnesses are holed up so he can beat hell out of them and they don’t testify. It’s about buying some people and intimidating others. Why?’

‘I was merely clarifying who Horrocks is.’

Carlo gazed at him. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Why’s he on your radar?’

‘Because of where he is.’ The officer grinned, as if he was trailing a plastic mouse, on a length of string, in front of a lively kitten.

‘Which is where?’

The officer named a hotel, its ownership and location, then offered a confession. The usual – it might have been in English, German, French or Italian: lack of resources; a difficult week. Perhaps the following week would be easier for resources, but there might not be a target to direct them against. A shrug. The
maresciallo
was on the move. He went to another table where others greeted him. Always cocky, the guys who trawled the computers in the warm and dry, had good meal breaks and delivered gold dust.

Carlo said to Fred, ‘Did you get that?’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you have a word for men like Horrocks?’

‘It is
Unbestechlicher
, but we do not use it for a gangster. In Hamburg it would be employed for a big businessman living in the “bacon belt” and using bribery to get contracts. In Frankfurt, it would be used for a senior banker who is corrupt, fraudulent and evades tax but is too powerful to bring down, and protected. It’s not only Italy.’

‘Makes me want to throw up,’ Carlo spat. ‘Little bastards like me get nowhere because they block us, the detectives and investigators.’

‘What might you do, Carlo, while we take our vacation? I have an opportunity, I believe, to assuage my sense of responsibility for this entire affair – for what I did.’

‘Not called for.’

‘And it would be good to create some collateral. Satisfying.’

‘If we get on the road early, we might screw him up.’

They made their excuses. They were the first to leave the party, and their departure was barely noticed. The source had his back to them and was on a second orange juice. They went out into the night.

Fred said, ‘I would like to wreck him – far from home and regulation. It would be good to wreck your Bentley Horrocks. I am in that mood.’

It was an hour before dawn. Marcantonio had come inside to make coffee. He might have slept for a while in the chair. The dogs would have growled if they’d been disturbed, but they hadn’t.

He put the shotgun on the table. Tiredness wracked him, but it would be simple to have the call made to the priest, then to estimate when Father Demetrio would be on the road. Marcantonio would use the heavy vehicle with the bars on the front. Easy for him, and he didn’t need to have slept for that. There was a coffee machine in the kitchen. His grandmother detested it, but it was used. It was the sole relic of Annunziata in the house. Giulietta liked it, and Marcantonio didn’t mind it. Four months before she had gone into the acid, Annunziata had bought it for them on a trip to see her husband in gaol in the north. His grandmother hated what was new and mechanical, but there was another in the bunker where his grandfather slept.

The light blazed over him. He heard the door handle turning, then saw Giulietta. No love was lost between nephew and aunt. She gave him a withering glance and her lip curled: her eyes had settled on the shotgun. He had not broken it so she did. She was dressed formally in a dark trouser suit and white blouse. Her hair was pulled up into a ponytail. She wore no jewellery or makeup. He glanced at her nose – twisted from the break. That morning she would play the professional, who could put together an agreement, carrying detail in her head – all that he did not. She would tie together the ends left loose from his meeting with the Englishman, an arrogant shit, and she would do it over breakfast, as if she were a Berlin businesswoman. She looked at him as she peeled a banana, then started to eat it.