No Mortal Thing: A Thriller (47 page)

The aisle that the drivers and hoods had made disintegrated. The cigarettes came out, were passed and lit. The kid had the dogs on the hill but the line they took was higher than the cleft in which he lay. They tracked but without a scent, and were well away from him. Then, among the dogs, there was pandemonium. A small deer bounded clear of them, acrobatic in its flight over rock faces. They chased it for a bit, then lost heart, and the kid called them back. It was a listless search and Jago did not feel threatened.

He thought only of the old man, the bunker plunged into darkness and him groping for matches and candles, or a torch, fear gathering round him, pressing close on him. Images flashed in his mind: a girl taking off her clothing, a girl whose face bled or had just been stitched, a policeman who had left a laptop open, and the
FrauBoss
who would by now have sent dismissal details to Human Resources.

He had not seen the old man who could decide who lived and who died. He would know him when he saw him, would recognise the fear, smell it.

16

He stirred because of the cockerel.

Jago had only rarely seen it. The coop where it ruled was hidden from his view. It was young, had a fine comb on its head, mahogany feathers with red flashes. The cockerel was another friend he had acquired. He liked it, watched it and felt part of its brotherhood. The dogs did not worry it and he thought that the old woman and the handyman talked to it. In the half-light, he wondered what the cockerel knew of shipments and killings and investments. If it knew that a corpse was laid out in the house, it showed no respect – its crowing was as loud as it was on any other morning. The bird said that the day started.

The last day . . .

Lights came on in the kitchen and the door opened. The dogs bounded out and the cockerel ignored them. That was the routine.

He had the feeling, relentless, that it was the last day.

The old woman appeared. He had no name for her. There would have been a name in the file he had glanced at it, but she had not been a priority family member. He looked hard at her and wondered whether she was capable of kindliness, whether she had wept that night in her bed. She held herself erect and carried a bundle of sheets . . . At that time in the morning. It was confirmation.

It seemed inevitable to Jago that the last day had dawned. The target ahead of him – the ultimate worthwhile challenge – was the old man, and the weapon was a buried cable.

She turned, called, seemed almost to stamp her foot in impatience. She waited, perhaps half a minute. The birds chorused and a strange fly danced on the rock in front of him – wide-winged, camouflage colours, with a tail that suggested it might sting. The pigeons and crows were stirring above him, and the dogs followed her, close to her legs. She was by the chair she had sat on when the boy’s life had bled away on the uneven concrete. She was only a few yards from where she had kicked the head of the injured wolf. She had not cried then, or shivered in grief. Her composure had been iron strong. He knew it was the start of the last day and was glad.

The handyman came to her and she cuffed him behind the ears. Jago saw it. He wasn’t sure if it was offensive or friendly. A familiarity, but it had hurt the man – his head had flipped sideways. He was given the sheets. The ritual began. He unfastened the old ones from the line and folded them over his arm. He lifted the one handed to him and pegged it, checked the length so that the hem hung within a centimetre of the pathway. She hovered near to him, approved or made him adjust the peg. It was good that it was the last day, near the end. Jago was calm.

At this time of the morning, the old man would have gone with the bucket, water bottles and food to the cave. There had been a child – Jago knew because he had seen the dress – a prisoner, with a chain to hold her. The cave had been abandoned and the evidence left where it was. He assumed the child had died. He could judge her age from the size of the dress. He remembered himself at that age, a kid in Canning Town, not yet at St Bonaventure’s. The streets around his home had been a kind of a jungle, but he had not been chained in darkness, alone and drifting towards death. At this time of day, the child would have heard the soft brush of footsteps on the ground – it might have lasted days or weeks, even months, and each morning the man would have come before the sun was up. He might have spoken and might not; he might have hit the child if she screamed and might not.

Those thoughts left Jago confused, so he moved on. He found new points on which to concentrate. The fly had deserted him. He would have liked something to eat, but could go without for a few hours longer. There was no warmth yet in the sun but the sky brightened slowly, the grey was softer and the haze thicker beyond the house and the small City-Van. Down the track and towards the slight bend the men had their fire in an oil drum. He had seen nothing unusual.

He was trained to observe clients, and credited with the knack of understanding their moods. The
FrauBoss
might talk to them and engage their attention while he watched and evaluated. They would find excuses for moments together out of earshot: most likely the client would need a comfort break or they would go to make coffee or bring fresh water. He would advise: a business approach, calculated and without eye contact, but with reference to the performance pamphlets. A softer approach to the client, a smile, understanding of what was needed, and empathy. He couldn’t read the old woman, and didn’t know how to interpret the smack she had given the handyman.

The sheets were up. He assumed that Bernardo would now return to the bunker – lit, heated, served by the cable that had been reburied, the join where the third sheet met the fourth – after a night in his own bed.

He thought it would be a busy day at the house because of the body.

Bernardo lay on his bed, facing the bright strip ceiling light.

He had been careless, which annoyed him. He had spent the night keeping vigil beside the open coffin, had stayed there after the old men had driven back to their own villages or down the hill to Locri. He had stayed too long. The men of the
cacciatori
team pulled victims from their beds at dawn. It was easier then for them to secure a building, and easier for the helicopter to make a safe landing. A target of importance, such as himself, would have warranted a helicopter flight – in handcuffs – to the barracks in Reggio on the far side of the mountains. He should have moved an hour earlier. Had they come, he would have been trapped in the old bed where he had been conceived and born, where he had made his sons and daughter – then given minutes to dress, yesterday’s shirt, socks and underpants, and spirited out. If it had happened he could have guaranteed he would not die in that bed. The end for Bernardo would have come in a prison cell, or a guarded room in a public hospital, a chain holding his ankle to the bed frame. He had overslept. They might well come that day. The clerk at the Palace of Justice was the provider of much information – all of it proving genuine. He was a necessity on the payroll but cheap: a hundred euros a week. But he would not have known whether a last-resort raid was to be launched. Bernardo shivered. Tomorrow would be different. He had the clerk’s guarantees that, as matters stood, the surveillance would be lifted and the file slid onto a high shelf to be forgotten.

He shivered because he had overslept after the long night with the open coffin.

The bird had woken him – his fingers must have fumbled when he set the alarm clock, which hadn’t roused him. And much would happen that day. He must be seen in his own home, scrutiny must be at its most intense and danger to his freedom constantly evaluated. He had made a list and briefed Giulietta on what was required of her.

So much to be completed that day – there always was when death came to a family – and other matters concerned him. So much to be done. The ceiling light flickered. It was newly installed – Stefano had done it – but it flickered. The annoyance fuelled his tiredness, but he couldn’t rest.

The pigs were the product of Italian Large White sows and a Calabrese boar, noted for their size and the quality of the meat they produced. Also on that small farm, high beyond the foothills and at the edge of the most remote mountain ridges, there were specimens of the locally bred Black Pig. Their owner farmed some seventy of them. They were valuable to him when the slaughter man came and also when requests of a different nature were made – which also paid well.

The few boars were kept apart, but the sows had areas, when not farrowing, where they foraged among the scrub and thin woodland. They seldom found enough to gorge themselves but had to search for food and stayed lean. It was said that the meat they provided was the finest in that small area of the region. They were never bloated, always hungry. At all hours, such was the reputation of the farm, customers called to be sold meat – fresh or smoked – and visited for other services.

The kid arrived on his scooter.

The reason for his visit had not been explained to him but there was an envelope in his hip pocket. He thought the place was as lonely as anywhere he had ever been in his short life. He rejoiced in the trust placed in him. He was two and a half years younger than Marcantonio and had been regarded as a shepherd – good with goats and dogs – until the grandson of the
padrino
had travelled to Berlin. The kid had not been outside Italy, or the Calabrian region, and had been over the Aspromonte to Reggio only once, with a school trip to the museum to see the bronzes. He parked the scooter, put it on its stand. Two men came from a hut away from the main house, where washing hung and smoke spilled from a chimney. One wore a rubber apron stained with blood. They eyed him.

He told them, stammering, who had sent him, produced the envelope and passed it to them. A hand was wiped on the seat of its owner’s trousers, then took the envelope. The man read what had been written on a small sheet of paper, then took from his pocket a cigarette lighter, set fire to the paper and held it until the flame was against his skin. Then he let it fall and ground his heel into it. What was asked of him would be ready, the kid was told. Nothing more.

Pigs were around him, big, comfortable and reassuring. They butted at his legs with their snouts and seemed no threat to him, broad enough for a child to ride on. He went back to his scooter, swung his leg across the saddle and fired it up. He started on the journey down the mountainside on the rough track. It was good to be trusted.

Massive concentration. Two men wholly focused. A plastic jar was held ready. The target was in front of them.

Fabio would respond first. His call, not Ciccio’s. They had been talking about their wives. They would be out by the end of the day – not allowed to call ahead, of course not, from the stake-out site, but they would ring home when the transport brought them to the barracks and after the debrief. It might be midnight or into the small hours. The job had wreaked havoc on his marriage, on any relationship, and the surveillance teams were flooded with guys trawling foreign dating sites. He and Ciccio were from the same town, Cittanova, and their parents’ homes were separated only by the park with the old trees in it, near to the war memorial and the school where they had been pupils. Fabio and Chiara never went back together to the town to see their families. She could; he could not. When he wanted to see his own parents a rendezvous had to be agreed in Cosenza or further north: he would don the disguise of a priest, or a crippled beggar, and all the time he’d watch for cars coming out of a steel-fronted gate. Chiara hated the job, and one day he’d have to choose. Fabio had the plastic jar, but it might be that he’d cede authority to Ciccio, who had the handkerchief.

The scorpion fly was beautiful. They had killed so many unnecessarily in the jar: they had been trapped, then died in the damp captivity.

His own situation was bad, but Ciccio’s was worse. Ciccio was Fabio’s best friend, only friend, his irreplaceable friend. Ciccio’s Neomi had a degenerative condition of the hip or pelvis. The four use to ski together in the Alto Adige but that was not possible now. In the summers they would go together to the beaches up by Salerno, where the men would not be recognised, but Neomi hardly swam now and could not play beach games. The strain told on all of them. When they talked about women it was not their conquests but the value of being together, quiet and calm. Hard times. Enough stories circulated in their barracks about men coming off a surveillance duty, arriving home in the middle of the night to find a strange car parked outside the block, knickers on the stairs and chaos. There but for the grace of the good Lord . . .

Fabio murmured, ‘Do you hate it?’

‘Hate what?’ Ciccio, puzzled, looked away from the scorpion fly but his hands were poised to sweep it up.

‘Do you hate that insect?’

‘Of course not. I love it.’

‘Why condemn it for the benefit of an entomologist’s study if it’s done you no harm?’

Ciccio took the plastic jar from Fabio. He put it by his shoulder and let it slip. It rolled back to lodge between them. Both chuckled. They could laugh soundlessly, and rejoice. Better to have saved the life of a Scorpion Fly and have laughed than to have gone further with their analysis of the women. The insect stayed close. It was not afraid of them.

And Scorpion Fly, the operation originated by a prosecutor in the Palace of Justice on the far side of the Aspromonte peaks was running towards its conclusion.