White Death (2011)

by Jones, Tobias

  There was something about his breezy amusement that irritated me. Two people had lost their lives because of this land-scam and one, my client, was about to lose his livelihood. And here was the man at the top of the tree sniggering away like it was all terribly funny.

  ‘If I don’t get a name,’ I said, ‘I’ll go public with everything.’ I leant as close as I could bear to his ear. ‘It’ll put your name in the gutter with two stiffs.’

  ‘I’m afraid’, he said almost bashfully, ‘that I’m unable to help you.’

  ‘Find out who’s been lighting those fires.’

  He shook his head, raising his shoulders at the same time as if it were impossible.

  ‘You know Moroni, the gentleman who muscled his way into the Masi outfit? He’s the sort of man who pays for everything in cash, if you know what I mean. He doesn’t seem to listen to me. I figure he might listen to someone’, I looked down at the diminutive politician, ‘of your stature.’

  ‘What makes you think he’ll give up any information?’

  ‘Because you’ll tell him that if he doesn’t co-operate he’ll never win another contract in his life.’

  ‘You overestimate the amount of power I have. People like him don’t listen to men like me.’

  ‘He will if you threaten to turn the taps off.’

  He looked at me with incredulity. He didn’t seem used to being cajoled into any course of action, least of all asking a gentleman to give up their muscle.

  ‘It’s your career on the line.’ I put a card in the breast pocket of his suit.

  His smouldering stare suggested it was my life on the line too. But then, I knew that anyway. When there’s a link between a politician and a stiff, they do away with the link. That’s the way it’s always been.

  ‘Anything happens to me’, I whispered to him, ‘and you can kiss goodbye to your reputation. I know who you are; don’t let the rest of the world find out.’

  I turned round and walked back down the stone steps.

  Gaia, the girl from the petrol station, called to say she had found the face of the man who bought the cans of petrol on the CCTV footage. I told her I would come round. When I got there she was running the tape of the man backwards and forwards, trying to find the best frame. I stood behind her and watched the screen as a young but balding man walked towards the counter. He had a round, sad sort of face. He must have been in his late twenties, early thirties. He looked like he lacked confidence, like he couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

  We watched him on the screen handing over cash. She fast-forwarded the images and the man came back in again, this time to pay for the petrol. Cash again. The images were grainy but clear enough. I chose the best frame and she printed it off and passed it over to me.

  ‘Can you save that entire sequence?’ I asked.

  ‘I have already.’ She passed me a disk.

  I thanked her and walked back to my flat. I put the disk in the computer and watched him again. The camera must have been up high because most of the shot was of his pate and forehead, but his mug was fairly clear. I took out the print-off and wrote a quick sentence underneath it. ‘Have you seen this man?’ I left my name and number and ran off two hundred photocopies. I spent two hours walking round the city taping the mugshots to any lamp-post or wall where there was space.

  Whilst I was out and about I decided, on a whim, to go and see poor Tommy’s family, if he had any. I walked on the other side of the river to a small bar where the TV crews had interviewed people who knew him.

  The place had multicoloured rugs covering the windows. I pushed my way into the dark interior. There was a small bar in the corner that was little more than a couple of trestles with a plywood board. Old sofas with bright orange covers were pushed against the walls. It all looked very tidy and clean. The room was empty but there was a stereo somewhere playing sunlit afro-jazz.

  I pushed my way through another multicoloured rug behind the bar and saw a small kitchen. A thin black woman was washing up, singing to herself in the way people do when they don’t think anyone is listening.

  ‘Salve,’ I said loudly.

  She dropped whatever she was washing up. I heard something break in the sink.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking for Tommy Mbora’s family. I thought you might be able to help me.’

  ‘Eric,’ she shouted, trying to keep the nerves out of her voice. ‘Eric!’

  I heard a noise behind me and saw a man shuffling towards me in the darkness. He was wearing slippers. He had a sky-blue Lacoste shirt on, which made him look like he meant business. He had a book in his hand.

  ‘I’m looking for Tommy Mbora’s family,’ I said again.

  He looked at me. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m nothing to do with immigration, nothing to do with the Carabinieri.’ I held his stare. ‘I just want to talk to them.’ I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fifty and held it out to him.

  He shook his head. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be thirty pieces of silver?’ His Italian was perfect. Just a hint of a French accent.

  I put the note back in my pocket.

  ‘You think you can buy anything,’ he said. ‘And because we’re poor you think we’ll do anything once we’ve been bought.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  He closed his eyes as if trying to calm himself. ‘What exactly is it you want?’

  ‘I just want to talk to Tommy’s family.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m investigating the fire that killed him. I thought they should know what really happened.’

  He looked at me as if he were weighing me up with his eyes. ‘I don’t know his family,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Sure you do.’

  ‘Go home,’ he said with a condescending authority that surprised me.

  I passed him my card. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you,’ I said again. I watched him read the card. ‘If you change your mind, please tell me how to contact them.’

  He looked up at me and bounced his head. I wasn’t sure if it was a nod or a reiteration of his ‘go home’ command.

  I walked back out through the dark restaurant and into the bright light of day. I felt relief, as if I were back on familiar soil. In there I was on someone else’s ground, even in someone else’s country. I felt I had been trespassing. Perhaps it was just white man’s guilt. I had tried to buy betrayal. That’s how it must have felt to Eric. If Tommy was an illegal, the chances were that all his family were too. He wouldn’t put them at risk just because a stranger started waving notes around. I had tried to compromise, to corrupt. It was an old habit and no one, until recently, had ever complained about it. But that man’s reaction had made me feel ashamed. Ashamed that perhaps I really did, subconsciously, think I could buy a human life. I walked to the end of the road and got back into my car. It was facing away from the restaurant, so I could watch its entrance in the mirror.

  I sat there like that for a few minutes. I could see the bustle of Via D’Azeglio in front of me. All the shoppers and buses and cyclists seemed oblivious to the quiet sidestreets. Even the odd person who walked my way didn’t seem to notice me sitting behind the glinting windscreen.

  A few minutes later Eric came out. I saw him in the wing mirror. I waited for him to walk past the car before I got out and started to follow. I watched him turn left, walking away from the city centre. He was easy to keep track of; there weren’t that many black men of his height walking with his sense of purpose.

  At the roundabout he walked past the edicola and into the Parco Ducale. A few years ago they had tidied up the whole park to stop what normally happens in urban parks after dark: love-making, muggings, drug-taking, or just people sleeping rough for a night or two. They had thrown down glistening white gravel on the paths, dredged the lake, cut down hundreds of trees and radically pruned the ones they had left standing. It now looked more formal, less threatening but less exciting som
ehow. There were fewer hiding places, fewer intimate corners.

  Eric walked across the park and out the other side. He was heading towards the railway. He followed the road that went parallel to the tracks for half a mile, right to the outer fringes of the city. He walked towards the arches of a bridge, pulling back heavy covers that had turned one of the archways into some sort of temporary shelter.

  I followed him inside. The blankets propped up across the archway were damp, held in place by bits of wood leant against the bridge. Inside was a dirty dormitory. There were dark blankets heaped over mattresses. You couldn’t tell until you looked closer whether there was someone sleeping there or not. Near where I was standing there was a brown foot sticking out. There were twenty-five beds or so in that space, just enough to roam between the mattresses, like a path in a vegetable patch. The place smelt of sweat, of rotting rubbish and unwashed clothes. Hollow faces stared at me like I was the cause of their misery.

  Eric saw me immediately and strode up to me. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.

  ‘I told you, looking for Tommy Mbora’s family.’

  ‘You followed me.’

  I nodded. ‘I want to talk to Tommy’s Mbora’s family,’ I repeated.

  ‘I am Mbora,’ said a young boy. He was standing behind Eric in the dark. ‘I am brother.’

  I side-stepped Eric and looked at the young boy. He was barely a teenager: thin and hungry.

  ‘You’re the only family Tommy had here?’ I asked. I don’t know what I had expected: a father or mother maybe.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘You want a sandwich?’ I put my fingertips together and bounced them towards my mouth. He nodded eagerly.

  ‘I will come also,’ said Eric formally.

  ‘You following me?’ I tried to make him smile, but he was stern still, like he didn’t trust me or my motives. I could hardly blame him.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s find a sandwich.’

  I pushed the damp blanket aside. I walked gingerly across the waste land, trying to avoid aggravating my weak ankle on the abandoned bricks and poles, and various bits of other rubbish chucked from train windows. But the young boy danced across it all as if he did this journey every day.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘François,’ he said.

  I heard Eric talking to the boy in a language that sounded like gurgling water. We walked on in silence until we came to a bar. It looked unappealing, but there were panini in the window and that was all we needed.

  When we were sitting at a small table in the corner, Eric asked me what I wanted. I told him I was a private investigator looking into suspicious fires.

  ‘Who hired you?’

  ‘Bragantini.’

  He pulled a face like he was chewing glass. ‘That man …’

  ‘I don’t think he’s responsible for Tommy’s death.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Bragantini has been the victim of arson attacks. The fire in which Tommy died was just the latest.’

  Young François was looking from me to him like he was watching a tennis match. He was eating like he hadn’t seen food for a week.

  ‘It was deliberate?’ Eric asked.

  ‘The fire, yes, almost certainly. But I don’t think anyone intended to hurt Tommy, least of all Bragantini. No one knew he was there.’

  ‘That’s the point of illegals. They’re invisible.’

  I nodded. It felt like he was thawing.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he asked.

  I didn’t want to say ‘justice for Tommy’, because that’s what all the protesters were saying and people like Eric must have been fed up with blasé rhetoric.

  ‘I want to find out what really happened to him. Who lit the fire.’

  ‘I don’t think we can help you with that,’ he said.

  The boy tugged at his arm and they spoke in quick, urgent sentences. They both looked at me.

  ‘You’re looking for work?’ Eric asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m not looking for work, not asking for money. I’m just after Tommy’s family’s blessing.’

  Eric translated for the boy, who looked at me again as if he didn’t understand.

  ‘Why?’ the boy said, looking at me with suspicion, like kindness wasn’t to be trusted. I knew how he felt and admired the suspicion.

  ‘Because your brother is already an icon. People are claiming him for political causes. That’s what they do around here. They sign him up posthumously to their party, their crusade. They invoke his name as if he were a martyr.’ I wasn’t sure if he was following. ‘I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to exploit his death. But I want to know why he died.’

  ‘Why?’ he said again. He was sharp, able to see that behind my self-righteousness there was guilt.

  ‘Because’, I looked up at him, ‘I feel responsible. It’s my fault it happened. I told Bragantini to sort out security, to get someone to watch the place.’

  He stared at me, motionless.

  ‘I had no idea it would be that dangerous,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t think …’ I trailed off.

  We sat there in silence for a long time.

  ‘Capisco’ was all he said. Not with bitterness, just matter-of-factly, to say he understood.

  The serenity of children always amazes me. The way they take things in their stride that would paralyse most adults. He had lost his only relative in a foreign country. He had no one left to protect him and he was here, with a stranger, saying ‘I understand.’

  We listened to the noise of the outside world: the sound of someone over-revving a car, someone shouting a joke across the street, a baby crying. I looked at the boy as he was staring out of the window. He reminded me of what I must have been like twenty years ago: alone in the world, completely by himself.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ I asked him.

  He just smiled and shook his head.

  I suddenly felt dizzy. He looked so young and vulnerable and I could feel the furies rising up again. I got up to go to the bathroom quickly. I shut myself in the cubicle and recognised the stirrings of another panic attack. I stared at the white laminated door and tried to breathe calmly but I sounded like a cyclist in the mountains, panting hard. The floor seemed to be floating and I could barely feel my feet. I put my hand on either wall and tried to steady myself, but even then I was unwittingly rocking from side to side. It kept going like that for a few minutes until I slowly came back to normal, standing straight and breathing steadily. My shirt felt damp with sweat and I suddenly felt very cold. I walked out of the cubicle and saw François there.

  ‘Ciao,’ he said.

  I looked at him. He had stuffed green paper towels into his pockets and had a fistful of toilet paper in his right hand. I smiled at him and walked over to the washbasin, looking at my flushed face in the mirror. I could see the boy behind me, watching what I was doing.

  At the bar I bought a couple more sandwiches for François and we headed back to his hovel.

  ‘I’ll come back and tell you what I find out,’ I said to him.

  He either didn’t understand or didn’t really care. He smiled like I was a strange alien. He was kind of inscrutable and I wasn’t sure if that was the culture gap or his character.

  ‘Understand?’ I asked.

  ‘OK boss,’ he said.

  When he had walked away, Eric turned to me. ‘Shall we walk side by side this time?’

  It was his first hint of warmth or humour. ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We walked a few hundred metres in silence.

  ‘How do you know him?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘François?’

  ‘And Tommy.’

  ‘They’re from the same part of the same country as me. We’re a tight-knit community here. We all know each other.’

  ‘And how do they survive living like that?’

  ‘You just do. I did. That’s where everyone starts. Most of them are working, they’ve got jobs. Most o
f them are saving money somehow.’

  ‘And they’re all illegal?’

  ‘Some are, some aren’t. It doesn’t make any difference for getting a job. None of your fellow countrymen’, he stopped walking and turned to look at me, ‘wants to do certain jobs any more. Street-cleaner, janitor, porter. They don’t want to look after the elderly or work in a factory. There’s plenty of work.’ He turned and started walking again. ‘Your politicians talk about expelling illegals, and whenever there’s a crime involving an immigrant, the pubic demands action. But nothing ever happens. And it can’t happen. You can’t lose your cleaners and carers and factory workers. Take them away and the whole building will collapse. The whole of European society is built upon cheap, immigrant workers.’

  ‘The footballers aren’t so cheap,’ I said, trying to lighten the tone.

  ‘You know, to most people in this country, black people offer only two kinds of service. If you’re a black woman they assume you’re selling your body, and if you’re a black man, they assume you’re selling drugs. That’s just how it is. They think that’s all we do. They think we’re all from the ghettos and that our only way out is selling either one thing or the other. People who are nurses, or teachers, or doctors in their own countries – here they’re taken for pimps and pushers.’

  ‘And what will happen to François?’

  He was still silent. We just kept walking, watching the cars on Viale Piacenza as we got closer to the centre. ‘He’ll be OK. He’s smart.’

  I thought about the paper towels in his pocket. ‘How can I help him?’

  He looked at me with a weary expression. ‘Why?’

  I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell him I identified with a boy who had lost his family. I just shrugged.

  He stopped walking and turned to face me. ‘If you want to help him, find out who was responsible for his brother’s death.’ We shook hands formally, like there was a bond between us, and he headed back into his bar.

  I pulled out my phone and called Bragantini. I needed to hear some of his defiance. He felt like one of the few allies I had. But when his voice came on he sounded weary and broken. It sounded like he had lost the will to fight.