Old Enemies (23 page)
A petulant pause, but he had to ask. ‘Why?’
‘Because of what they said. About dropping Ruari down a deep hole. Now, if you’re sitting in Venice or anywhere by the sea, they’d be talking about feeding him to the fishes, something like that. They wouldn’t suggest dropping him down a hole.’
J.J. didn’t respond, still refusing to catch her eye. Terri couldn’t tell whether his silence implied scorn or deep concentration. She hurried on. ‘They didn’t even talk about burying him, digging a hole. They made it sound as if the hole already existed.’
‘It was just a phrase.’
‘No, it may be more than that. A little beyond Venice there’s a huge limestone plateau that stretches all the way to Austria and Slovenia. It’s riddled with sinkholes, caves, underground rivers, the lot. J.J., I looked at some travel books this afternoon in Hatchards. That area is like a chunk of honeycomb, it’s got holes so big and deep some of them are tourist attractions. You know, after the last war they found that thousands of prisoners had been dumped down there. It fits, don’t you think?’
‘It might.’
‘Yes, it might. And it
might
be worth suggesting that the Italian police take a particularly close look at the area.’
‘He conjures all this out of one stray remark from the kidnappers?’
Her exasperation was growing, and beginning to show. ‘They’ve already let slip they’re in Italy, they may have let slip a little more. Use it, for pity’s sake. It might just give you a little more leverage. What have we got to lose?’
‘Have you been seeing him?’
She flustered at the unexpected assault. ‘I don’t understand, he telephoned, you know that . . .’
‘Simple question, I’d have thought. Have you seen him?’
‘What do you mean?’ But her question trailed off into a fatal hesitation.
‘I wondered, you see, how he would know what the kidnappers said. About dropping Ruari down a hole.’
‘Just remember, J.J., this is about Ruari, nothing else.’
‘I hope so.’
Dammit! She’d been trying so hard, the ridiculous man was being so inflexible, unreasonable. And now she felt vulnerable, and guilty. The Harry thing. So she decided not to mention Chombo. It was a possibility, no more, another of Harry’s theories that wasn’t going to go down well. Nothing for J.J. to do with it except grow still more suspicious. Yet they needed each other, they’d been married too many years to play childish games. She stood up, moved towards him to give it one last try.
Yet because they’d been married these many years he sensed she was holding something back, so when she stretched up to kiss him, she found only his cheek.
‘I’m tired,’ he complained. ‘Going to bed early, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you in the morning.’ Without another word he took his shirt and began climbing the stairs with a slow, heavy step, dragging his pain behind him.
As she listened to the familiar creak of the treads, she wondered if he would ever sleep in her bed again.
The bare bulb suddenly sprang to life and Cosmin stumbled his way down into the cellar. He was holding a battered tin bowl of bean soup and bread, and as he tried to negotiate the primitive wooden steps his foot slipped, leaving him swaying and struggling for balance. For a moment it seemed as though he would fall, then he recovered and burst into laughter.
‘Hey, Little Shit, see that? Not a drop spilled!’ He stared in triumph and with glazed eyes at the bowl, then at Ruari, before bending to dump the food beside his prisoner. That’s when he almost toppled, spilling a good portion of the soup onto the dirt floor. Up close, Ruari could smell his sour breath. The Romanian had been drinking again, the South Africans must be away.
Cosmin straightened himself, planted his feet firmly for balance, unaware that he was standing in the puddle of soup he had just spilled. ‘What, you think I’m drunk, Little Shit? No! Well, maybe a little.’ He laughed again.
Ruari groaned, not wanting to meet the Romanian’s eye or do anything that might antagonize him. His hand was still a throbbing mass of dried blood and he was terrified Cosmin had come to do him more harm. Yet, as he cowered, expecting more hurt, he began to realize it wasn’t as simple as that. Things had changed, and in one respect at least for the better. Like Casey and Mattias he, too, had suffered at the hands of these animals, and that put all three of them back on the same side, didn’t it? They were together again. He had lost a finger but through that he had regained his friends and also his self-respect. The ghosts had gone and he was no longer alone. The finger had been worth it.
‘We have been celebrating, drinking toasts to you,’ Cosmin was declaring, swaying above him.
‘To me? Why?’ Ruari asked weakly. With his uninjured hand he reached out for the bread on the floor and began eating the thick soup as quickly as possible before Cosmin had the chance to stumble once more and scatter the rest of the meal.
‘You are our prince. You make us all rich men. We keep you here six months, maybe more. That costs someone a fuck of a lot of money.’ The Romanian sniggered.
Six months? The bread stuck in Ruari’s throat and he choked. Yet as he forced his food down, he realized it meant they intended to keep him alive, long enough maybe for the rats to help dig him a way out of this wretched hole. Even now he could see bright red eyes lurking in the shadows, eyeing up the spilt food.
‘Any chance I can join the celebration?’ Ruari asked.
‘You? You want to drink, too?’ More rough laughter.
‘All I want is a bowl of water so that I can wash.’ He held up his hand to Cosmin, covered in black, hardened bandage. His wrists were also raw. The shackles had rubbed through the skin and had formed pus-filled scabs. He had noticed that the scratches on his body and legs were no longer healing so fast, either. ‘All I want is to keep clean. Otherwise I’m going to get sick.’
Cosmin stared and scratched himself as he considered the matter.
‘At least ask your boss when he gets back, will you?’ Ruari said.
‘Him?’ Suddenly Cosmin’s mood had darkened, the high spirits replaced by a sneer. ‘Bastard!’
Even locked away down in the cellar Ruari had heard the arguments and raised voices. They were getting more frequent. His jailers sounded like sled dogs snarling over who should get the first bite of the carcass. Ruari might not be the only one to get chunks taken out of him, and that thought gave him heart.
‘I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble,’ Ruari lied.
‘What trouble?’ Cosmin roared.
‘You know, like last time . . .’ Ruari stroked his nose, but the Romanian needed no reminding.
‘That ugly bastard touch me again and I deal with him, you wait and see, so good he never screw another sheep, not ever! I am boss man here, not him. You hear that, Little Shit?’ Cosmin raged, shaking his fist as though he had been accused of weakness. He turned and stomped back up the stairs, slamming the door, but he left the light on.
The rats were enjoying an unexpected feast when the door opened again. Toma brought down a towel soaked in warm water and a supply of fresh bandage. He stood over Ruari while the boy did his best to clean himself up. The Romanian appeared agitated, kept glancing at the open door as though listening for the return of the South Africans, and disappeared back upstairs as quickly as he could, taking the towel with him. Not everyone seemed as confident as Cosmin about who was running the show.
Trieste. A city of aquamarine tints and azure skies that gazes out across the waters of the Adriatic in search of something it appears to have lost. It has a melancholy air, like that of an ageing spinster remembering a long-lost lover and living in the hope that one day he will reappear over the horizon. In the meantime she is not certain what she wants – except that she doesn’t want to be Venice, which lies seventy miles along the coast. In the view of Triestines, Venice has thrown away her honour and become a tart. So what if she draws the eye and the crowds? Trieste is highly disapproving, and quietly jealous. And when the blossom is but a faded memory and the leaves have begun to fall, and the grey streaks of winter take hold of the skies, Trieste sits with her back against the Carso, her shoulders hunched and her shawl wrapped tightly around her as she waits for the ferocious Bora wind that charges down off the limestone plateau with such force that it can knock over trams and sweep life off the streets.
Trieste is a complex community. It uses several languages, contains many nationalities, and has been ruled by Austrians, Germans, Yugoslavs, and for a short while was once even nominally an independent city state, and all that crammed into the past hundred years, but now, and for the moment, it is part of Italy. Yet much of it remains illusory. Trieste was the dividing line of the Cold War, the seam of the Iron Curtain so famously described by Churchill with his gravelly voice as stretching from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, the frontier between Europe east and west, always on the fold in the map, where Latin civilization runs out of breath and disappears beneath the Balkans.
It has a main square, the Piazza dell’Unità, a construction of fine Middle European temperament overlooking the sea, where every hour two bronze figures on top of the City Hall are spun into motion to strike the passing of time on a great bell, which can be heard inside the Questura, the police headquarters that sits directly behind the City Hall. It had been dark for several hours when the sounds reached into the office of Inspector Francesco D’Amato of the Squadra Mobile, the Italian equivalent of Britain’s CID. He was in his early forties, on the small side of average with colouring that suggested he came from the south, hair that was beginning to lose its black sheen, sloping shoulders and a face that rarely relaxed, as if he were constantly studying a passage from the Bible. He was almost too carefully dressed, in the manner of most urban Italians, yet his office was informal to the point of verging on the unkempt, dominated by a dark wooden desk with two unfashionable armchairs, an old television and a glass-fronted bookcase packed with tired volumes that gave the impression of not having been opened in years. The paintwork was scratched, the walls crowded with police badges, framed certificates, photos and mementos of D’Amato’s many trips abroad during his twenty years of service. It was a practical, unpretentious room, but it also contained another accessory of which the inspector was inordinately proud – Simona Popescu, his secretary. The two of them made what he thought was a productive team, since he was conscientious and she was efficient and flexible. There was also the point that working with Simona kept him in the office when otherwise he might have been losing himself in some bar. She was sitting there now, in one of the armchairs, taking notes, her legs crossed, her thigh generously exposed, lips pursed in concentration. And her breasts were rising and falling, like a pump powering up his lust. She wasn’t Italian but an immigrant, like so many others in this frontier town, and had worked in the Questura for less than a year, yet she had made her way rapidly from the secretarial pool in the basement all the way up to the second floor. She’d even done shifts for the Chief of Police himself and had developed quite a reputation: reliable, well educated, excellent shorthand and exceptional ankles. In a city where so many young Triestines moved elsewhere in search of more exhilarating challenges, girls like Simona had little trouble finding work and D’Amato was delighted to have her – except, that is, he hadn’t had her, not in the way he dreamed of almost every night. And that was becoming a problem. D’Amato, like many other senior police officers in Trieste, was on secondment, transferred from his home in a small southern town for a three- or four-year stretch to combat the endemic corruption that might all too easily take hold when police and criminals are born on the same streets. Good pay, promotion prospects, but challenging in the long watches of the night when home is a long way away and you’ve left your wife and family behind to avoid uprooting the kids from their schools and friends. A weekend back with them every month, that was all. Mother of God it hurt, in all sorts of ways.
Simona recrossed her legs, her skirt rustling on her thigh. She watched as D’Amato’s eyes crawled up her ankles. He uttered something indistinct, she asked him to repeat it, pencil poised, and he came out from behind his desk, that dull institutional slab of furniture with its chrome-framed family photos and piles of too-neatly sorted papers, until he was standing beside her, flicking his finger as he did when he was nervous. There was a bulge beneath his belt, she could see he was stiff, and she struggled to suppress a laugh. He’d propositioned her before, touched her, like many men in the Questura, but that was as far as she’d allowed him to go. Now he sank to his knees beside her with a weird, helpless look on his face, placed his hand inside her blouse and groaned. Simona was twenty-two, was born out of grinding poverty and had always known that her rise from the basement to the second floor wasn’t simply because she was good with the paperwork. She also felt sorry for Francesco, lonely sap. So she didn’t object as he began loosening her buttons.