I took them off, tied the laces together and slung them around my neck.
That was better.
Now that I wasn’t making much noise, I could hear all the other noises.
There were rumbles.
And creaks.
And groans.
The subterranean San Luca certainly was a whole lot livelier than the above-ground one.
I kept on going, retracing the way I’d come with Carlo.
Once again, I wasn’t sure how I did this – it had been a complicated route – but my internal GPS was spot-on as usual.
Eventually I reached the cell.
It was still unlocked.
Excitement growing, I lay down on my stomach so that my eyes were at the level of the hole and positioned the torch so that I could work.
I removed the rock.
There was nothing inside!
No, it couldn’t be!
But no matter how much I shone the torch into the hole, it was still empty.
‘Hell!’ I screamed, not caring who heard me.
Hell! Hell! And more hell!
And when I’d finished, out of the darkness came a voice. ‘Silvagni.’
Right stresses in the right places.
Droopy Eye.
But how did he …?
As soon as I’d asked myself that question I knew the answer – he’d had my phone for hours, more than enough time to put some tracking software on it.
What an idiot I’d been.
An idiot for coming back here.
An idiot for not checking my phone.
I shone the torch in the direction of the ‘Silvagni’ and there he was; there they were, three of them, the three eldest kids.
One of them was carrying a lamp.
‘Maybe you’re looking for this,’ said Droopy Eye, holding up the notebook with the initials on the cover.
Droopy Eye obviously wasn’t stupid – his English was fluent – but what did he want from me? Money? They couldn’t possibly believe in some crazy feud that had been started more than a hundred years ago, could they?
‘Maybe,’ I said, shuffling away from the wall, getting closer to the cell door so they couldn’t close it on me.
As I did, I remembered how Zoe had alerted me that she’d been kidnapped that time, how she’d surreptitiously dialled my number.
One hand reached into my pocket. Trying to remember how the icons were arranged, I went to Phone, then Recent and hopefully dialled a number.
‘Your father killed my father,’ said Droopy Eye.
His words echoed back and forth along the tunnel, the words colliding with each other … killed my father … killed my father … killed my father.
‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ I said, choosing my words carefully.
‘He killed him like a coward, stabbed him in the back, and then he ran back to Australia.’
‘I’m not sure you’ve got that right,’ I said. ‘My father has never even been to Italy.’
‘You think I am an idiot – everybody in this village knows what Silvagni did. But they are not men anymore.’
He looked at his two accomplices and they nodded their agreement – not men anymore.
‘All they think of is this, the money,’ he said, rubbing thumb and finger together.
There goes my money theory.
‘But not me, for me it is this.’
As he said ‘this’, he thumped his chest with his fist.
And that’s when I saw the glint of steel.
He had a knife.
And what did I have? A cheap screwdriver.
‘This is crazy,’ I said. ‘I’m sure we can work something out.’
‘There is nothing to work out, Silvagni,’ he said. ‘Occhio per occhio, dente per dente.’
That I got: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
He stepped closer to me.
A crappy screwdriver, that’s all I had.
But then I remembered: maybe not all.
I shuffled back to the wall, my hands feeling behind me.
Until I had a can.
He kept coming towards me, slicing the air with the knife.
And when he was about three metres away, I took careful aim and threw with a snap of my wrist.
As the can spun through the air, his eyes opened wide.
He tried to dodge, but he was too late and the can smacked into his chin. The contents flew upwards, into his face, up his nostrils.
I ran straight at him.
The knife came up, but I easily knocked it out of his grasp with a sideways chop of my arm. He went to grab me, but another chop of my arm and I was free.
As for his two accomplices, they were hardly worthy of the name. They cowered as I made towards them, saying something pathetic in Italian.
But visiting violence on them was the last thing on my mind – I just had to get the hell out of here.
Obviously, when the barefooted Abebe Bikila won that gold medal in the marathon he was lot tougher than I was, because as I scampered back along the tunnel, my feet were seriously letting me down.
It seemed like I’d stubbed each of my ten toes.
I’d definitely sliced my heel on something sharp and nasty.
And I would’ve stopped and put my shoes back on, except somehow we’d become separated from each other.
So I had no choice but attempt a Bikila, to run like an Ethiopian.
But when I stopped to get my bearings, there was no sign of pursuers, no footsteps or voices.
Maybe that piss bomb had done its job and taken the sting out of him, I thought.
And I knew that without Droopy Eye, the others were nothing. They didn’t have his appetite for vengeance, as misguided as it was.
So now I was thinking ahead: how to get back down the mountain?
It was pretty much downhill all the way – so all I needed was a bicycle, or even a skateboard.
I stopped again.
Still no sound of pursuers.
Piss weak, I thought.
And I couldn’t help laughing at my own excellent joke.
I hurried back through the door.
Out through the hut.
And right into the very teeth of the ’Ndrangheta.
SUNDAY
THE TEETH OF THE ’NDRANGHETA
Carlo had changed his clothes since I’d last seen him, but he still had that same look, like he belonged in a café in Rome, saying sexy things to the girls.
The men with him – there were about a half-dozen – wouldn’t be in Rome with him, though.
They were more the sort of men who ate girls. Al dente.
They were ugly and they were mean and I could smell the violence on them the same way you can smell the lab on a chemistry teacher.
Droopy Eye was also there, the front of his shirt soaked.
I looked around for possible escape routes, but there didn’t seem to be any.
There was even a man standing, legs planted wide, at the entrance to the tunnel, making sure I didn’t scamper back in there.
One of the men said something angry in Italian.
Another responded with something even angrier in Italian.
Which set them all off, angry Italian flying all over the place.
Until Carlo said, ‘Tranquillo!’
Immediately they were quiet and I had some indication of Carlo’s high standing – if he wasn’t the boss, he was pretty close to him.
‘You are a very silly boy,’ he said, and I wasn’t going to argue with him. ‘I give you money to go back to Roma, but you insist on coming back here.’
‘I had to find out about my great-great-great-great-grandfather Dominic Silvagni,’ I said.
At the mention of his name, all the angry Italian started again.
Which became even angrier Italian.
And again Carlo had to do his tranquillo thing.
There was a sweep of headlights and a car pulled up nearby.
A door slammed.
Fo
otsteps.
Obviously Carlo and his men weren’t expecting anybody, because they started talking excitedly amongst themselves.
I saw a gun go into a pocket.
A man appeared: small, dark-skinned, Asian.
It was Father Luciano.
‘This is no place for you, Father,’ said Carlo.
Father Luciano moved closer to me.
‘I am taking him with me,’ he said.
More angry Italian.
‘Get in front of me,’ said Father Luciano.
I wasted no time in doing what he asked.
‘Make sure you stay there as we walk,’ he said. ‘Even these men will not shoot a priest.’
It was maybe two hundred metres across the stony field, but it was the longest two hundred metres I’d ever covered.
Every second I expected the sound of a gun, the slam of a bullet.
We came to Father Luciano’s car and I allowed myself a look behind.
The men had followed us.
‘Get in the front and keep low,’ he said.
Again, I did exactly as he asked.
Father Luciano hurried around to the driver’s seat and we were off.
I couldn’t help but feel disappointed: I’d come all this way, taken all these risks, and had nothing to show for it. But maybe that wasn’t the way to look at it, I told myself. Maybe I was lucky to be getting out of this unharmed.
‘How did you know?’ I asked Father Luciano.
‘Divine intervention,’ he said, a smile playing on his lips. ‘Actually, my altar boy told me.’
I thought of the chubby boy.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Go back to the church and then figure out a way to smuggle you out of here.’
I looked behind: there were no cars following us yet.
We passed the skatepark I’d seen earlier where there were still a couple of shadowy figures practising stunts.
An idea flashed across my mind.
‘Can you let me off here?’ I said.
‘But –’ said the priest.
‘With all due respect, Father, if I stay with you they will eventually catch me. But if you let me out now, they’ll think I’m still in the car and they’ll follow you, and then I can find my way out of this town.’
‘How?’ said Father Luciano.
It was a fair enough question, but I wasn’t going to give it a fair enough answer.
‘I just will, okay,’ I said. ‘Trust me, this is the best way.’
Father Luciano pulled up quickly and I didn’t even have time to offer him a proper thankyou.
I snapped the door open, got out, and he took off with a very unpriestly squeal of the tyres.
SUNDAY
SKATE+HITCH = SKITCH
Yes, I had ridden skateboards – I don’t reckon there is a kid, boy or girl, on the Gold Coast who hasn’t. I’d even ridden one downhill a couple of times. Yes, I was an athlete with an athlete’s excellent reflexes, an athlete’s excellent balance. Yes, I needed to get out of here. Yes, gravity was on my side. Add all these up and what did I have: a pretty straightforward ride down from San Luca all the way to Siderno on the coast.
Yeah, right!
For a start, there were the people who were after me, mean murderous men who would not think twice about passing a knife across your throat. There was the skateboard, the one I’d exchanged for my wad of cash. It was short, made for doing tricks, not for tooling down a mountain. There was the road, which was poorly maintained, with potholes and swathes of gravel across it. There was the fact that the darkness was only relieved by the occasional streetlamp. There was my lack of shoes, because on a skateboard your shoes make pretty good brakes. And finally there was me – did I have the skill, the courage, the audacity to pull this thing off? Basically, did I have the guts?
On YouTube I’d seen downhill skaters use their gloves with bits of plastic stuck to them to brake, so I figured that I’d do something similar.
So as I made my way out of town I scrounged around in bins until I found a plastic Coke bottle.
It didn’t take long before I was at the start of the descent. I threw the board down, pushed off, and I was away.
The skateboard quickly gathered speed, too much speed, but there wasn’t much I could do about it as it hurtled down the mountain.
I went into a half-crouch, making sure my weight was mostly on the front of the board.
A car approached from the opposite direction, its headlights on high beam. I was immediately blinded.
I covered my eyes with one hand, and the skateboard went into a wobble. Relax, I told myself.
Relax. Relax. Relax.
Because I knew that if I tensed up, the wobble would become a death wobble.
The wobble stopped, the car passed and my eyes readjusted to the darkness once again.
Black tar flew under me, the wheels screaming, and there it was: the first corner, a radical dogleg to the right.
As I careered into it, I crouched down lower, throwing the board into a slide, maintaining balance by pressing the Coke bottle on the road.
The effect was instantaneous – I slowed down, enough so that I could coax the skateboard around the bend.
Then, as I came out of it and onto straight road, I quickly picked up momentum again.
Ahead I could see the twinkling lights of the coast.
This stretch I remembered from the trip down: it was quite a long straight, with an even more radical hairpin at the end of it.
I put my hands behind my back like I’d seen the longboarders do on YouTube.
I’ve said before, you can’t be a runner and not enjoy speed. And this speed was about as raw as it gets. As thrilling as it gets. As terrifying as it gets.
Then ahead, some tail-lights.
A car.
But why were they going so slowly?
This is Italy, I wanted to yell. You’re supposed to drive like a lunatic.
But they obviously didn’t conform to the national stereotype.
Or maybe they were Germans. Or Dutch. Or whoever it is who are supposed to drive really, really slowly.
Whatever they were, I had no choice. I had to pass them.
If it had been terrifying before, it was beyond that now.
As I got closer, the tail-lights getting brighter and brighter, I crouched down as low as I could.
Then I hit the car’s slipstream, and got sucked even closer.
Now! I told myself, the car’s rear filling my vision. Now!
Making sure my feet were planted, I threw all the weight in my upper body to the left.
The board changed course, I broke out of the slipstream, and was alongside the car, level with the back window.
On this narrow road, if a car came from the other way, I was front page of the Gold Coast Times.
Australian Runner Killed in Italy While Skateboarding down Mountain at Night.
I was level with the driver’s window.
And the driver – funnily enough, he did look a bit like a German – was staring at me, a mixture of shock and miscomprehension and outrage on his face.
He did have the courtesy to touch the brakes, however, and I was able to duck in front of him.
Now the road ahead was illuminated by the German’s headlights. Which was pretty fortunate, because I was coming up to the mother of all hairpins.
Once again, as I moved into the curve I went into a slide, pressing the Coke bottle onto the road for balance.
This time I was going much faster and the plastic began disintegrating.
But again I was able to negotiate the corner and barrel into another straight.
And that’s when they caught up to me.
The same Mercedes SL that had taken me down the mountain, the same madder-than-mad driver at the wheel.
Carlo was in the front seat and the back seat was full of ugly meanness or mean ugliness; whatever way you looked at it, I was a goner.
What possible chance di
d I have against the ’Ndrangheta in their own hood?
They had a car, I had a skateboard, and a busted Coke bottle.
They had guns, I had nothing.
Why not just give up?
But while one part of me was surrendering, another part considered other, less cowardly options.
Run the skateboard off the road and then try to escape by foot?
The problem with that was we were on a serious mountain, not just some hill, and trying to escape by foot, at night, would probably end up with me falling. To my death.
The Mercedes made its first move, and it was a pretty obvious one.
It swerved across the road, trying to force me off.
I was ready for it, though.
I threw the skateboard into a huge slide, using what was left of the Coke bottle to keep my balance.
The bitumen tore up the plastic, flesh met road, but I gritted my teeth.
And it worked – the skateboard lost enough momentum and the Mercedes whooshed past me, missing by centimetres.
But now I was on gravel, and gravel and skateboards aren’t a great mix.
The board was wobbling, wobbling, wobbling.
Relax, I told myself.
But I knew I was going to lose it.
So I bailed.
Just rolled off the board, making myself as small and compact as possible.
I bounced once, twice, before I came to rest.
A quick inventory: everything was hurting like hell. My feet, my hands, my left hip, and the side of my right buttock was on fire – road rash! – but I couldn’t feel anything broken.
I unballed myself, looked up to see my board smash into the guard rail and fly into the air, wheels spinning.
For an agonising second it looked like it was going to go over the rail and over the mountain.
But it came down on top of the rail, bounced into the air again, and then came down on the right side – for me, anyway – of the rail.
I rushed over and grabbed it.
Now I noticed how incredibly quiet it was up here. The only sound was my heart drumming in my chest.
The Mercedes was about twenty metres ahead of me.
Just sitting there, all black and ominous.
They knew, like I knew, that they had me. That there was no escape route.
But then, below the silence, a low rumble.
My bare feet could feel the vibrations on the road: a truck was coming. If I had a chance, this was it.
Fetch the Treasure Hunter Page 12
