by David Hewson
He sighed, filled the glass with booze, a cheap gin copy decanted into the real bottle, not that any of his customers were fooled. Then he passed the drink back through the cage, getting his fingers out of the way as quickly as he could. The thing had sharp teeth and claws and liked to use them. He didn’t know why he felt sorry for it. Or rather he did, but was reluctant to admit the truth. In the animal’s lost and miserable eyes he saw himself. This was self-pity and Emmanuel, a proud and independent man who left Nigeria for no other reason than to win a better life for his family back home, loathed such a trait in anyone, most of all himself.
Yet the marmoset amused his customers. A little monkey in a cage, a trapped animal that liked to drink and would even puff at a cigarette or something stronger given the chance. This was Europe. Even in the grimmest Lagos dive they never stooped to such games.
The solid front door to the bar opened and two shapes entered. The Nigerian squinted against the brief entry of sunlight trying to make out who it was.
One of them, a big man, very big, was shutting the door carefully and turning round the sign on the front so it read ‘Closed’.
Jackson the marmoset was watching them too. He downed his little shot glass and held it out for a refill. The creature’s feeble arm was shaking. Emmanuel wondered whether it was the hooch or something else.
‘Can I help …?’ he began to say again, then stopped.
They’d turned and this time he remembered what Rocco, the boss from Aspromonte, had said only two hours before.
These were the men he was supposed to look out for. Both middle-aged, both wearing winter jackets, heavy ones, even though it was boiling outside. The big one was hefty and muscular with an ugly, scarred face that might have met a razor some time. The other seemed very different. More a business type, tall, erect, a touch pompous. Cultured, bald, with a very tanned face and a silver goatee, he seemed the kind of man who possessed a natural and unquestionable authority.
Neither of the individuals who had just walked into the Zanzibar gave the impression they smiled much or were likely to any time soon.
The Nigerian’s phone was on the shelf behind the counter. Casually, so that they wouldn’t notice, he pressed the shortcut key on the handset so that it auto-dialled the number the boss gave him in case of trouble.
He’d only had to use that once before. The call was all it took. No need for an explanation or words at all. It was an alarm in itself, one that identified the source. The gang men had arrived in minutes. Clearing up the mess they left behind – blood and teeth and worse – took a lot longer.
‘We need to talk,’ said the cultured one with the goatee.
He was staring at Jackson in the cage.
‘It’s a monkey,’ Emmanuel replied without thinking.
The other one grunted something obscene then muttered to his companion. They had unusual accents. Roman maybe. Emmanuel had been in Italy long enough to notice.
The tough-looking guy walked round the bar, picked up the cage quite gently, placed the silent, scared monkey in the back office and closed the door.
‘Talk about what?’ Emmanuel wondered.
The bearded man looked tired and a little strained. They were both sweating in their heavy jackets. ‘My name’s Falcone. This is my colleague, Peroni. We’re here to discuss insurance.’
He laughed then. It was ridiculous. The most amateurish shakedown he’d ever seen. They even gave him names, real ones too, he thought, from the sound of them and the easy way they spoke.
‘I don’t need insurance. Listen. If you know what’s good for you get the hell out of here right now. This place may look a dump …’ He smiled brightly at the garish bleak interior of the Zanzibar. It was a dump, a dreadful one. ‘All the same. The people who own it are class. Of a kind. You don’t want to meet with them.’
The two looked at each other.
‘Trust me,’ the one called Falcone said. ‘You need insurance. You need it badly.’
He nodded at the other guy who reached inside his thick winter jacket and pulled out a shiny black handgun.
‘No, no, no …’ Emmanuel murmured, thinking all the time about the little shack he called home, his wife, their three kids there, wondering as he did on a daily basis why he’d been fool enough to leave it. ‘Please—’
Peroni stared at him, shook his big ugly head, pointed the gun and fired.
When the call came the three men from Aspromonte were sitting in a battered white VW van on the waterfront in the small town of Villa San Giovanni, twelve kilometres north of Reggio, the strong, sharp stink of fresh-killed swordfish still wafting round them. Ferries meandered across the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the mainland. In the middle distance the gentle shape of Etna rose to the perfect azure sky like a gigantic beached barnacle left behind by the Great Flood. A grey-brown wreath of smoke curled around the summit of the volcano. The mountain had been grumbling for nearly a week. Fontanarossa airport in Catania had closed for a few hours through poor visibility from the ash. At night, from the ghost village of Manodiavolo in the Aspromonte foothills where one of these men was living, a thin red line of livid fire was sometimes visible as lava trickled then died in the Valle del Bove.
To two of them this sight was nothing new, nothing strange. Rocco Bergamotti and Santo Vottari were Calabrians through and through. They had grown up in the shadow of the mountains, children of the badlands behind Reggio. Rocco was the son of the shadowy capo of the Reggio ’ndrina, the local unit of the ’Ndrangheta, a man known only to the locals as ‘Lo Spettro’, the Phantom, since few knew who he was, what he looked like, where he lived. Rocco was his visible lieutenant, holding the rank of crimine, the senior officer delegated to pass on the orders of the local lord to his troops. Santo Vottari was, like every member of the ’ndrina, a blood relative of the capo and his family, in his case a distant cousin, from a family well down the ranks. They shared the same southern Mediterranean looks: swarthy, with black wavy hair, dark, darting eyes, and lean, muscled bodies that always looked ready for a fight. Rocco was an inch or two shorter and skinnier, a handsome man with a quick and easy smile. Santo laughed a lot, though his face was coarse and exaggerated, that of a peasant straight from the land. Almost everywhere they went there was a pair of designer sunglasses tucked into their black hair, even at night. They were known too, quietly acknowledged in cafes and bars, stores and garages, the length of the coast around Reggio, from Melito in the east, on the Ionian Sea, to Bagnara Calabra in the north, on the Tyrrhenian, just beyond the Strait of Messina.
The third individual had found it difficult to take his attention away from the volcano across the water. The idea of a chasm in the earth, a living window into the fiery hell beneath the surface of the everyday world, continued to appal and fascinate him. He was a touch shorter and paler, just turned thirty, dark-haired and striking, with an accent quite unlike their sharp, coarse guttural Calabrian, littered with dialect and terms from Greek. Nor was he fully a member of the Bergamotti or any other ’ndrina, not yet at least. There was an act required of him, a sacrifice demanded before he would be allowed to become a ‘man of honour’. A rank that would only be attained through the shedding of blood.
Santo listened to Rocco issue the order to move from the back seat then started the van and began to pull off the beachside road.
‘Hey, Maso,’ he said to the man in the passenger seat. ‘You got stupid people in Canada too?’
He’d learned to respond easily to the alias they’d given him. That was important. His life, and those of others, depended on it. Tomasso Leoni – Maso he was and would be until this game played out. He reached down into the footwell for the briefcase they’d given him. ‘There are stupid people everywhere.’
‘Take your word on that. I never got around to travelling much. Went to Germany once and then it all turned nasty. Jesus. Vendettas. Dead men in a pizzeria. Who needs it?’
Maso took out the handgun from the briefcase and checked t
he magazine. He recalled reading about the ’Ndrangheta war that had left eleven men dead in Frankfurt and Cologne. The two ’ndrine involved were from the north of the region. The feud had never spread this far.
‘You worried?’ Rocco asked from the back seat.
‘Not much.’
Etna had disappeared. They were driving through suburbs of low white houses and uniform apartment blocks. Reggio was maybe fifteen minutes away.
‘Tell me about the mooses,’ Santo demanded, for the third time in an hour.
‘Guelph is just a town,’ he said patiently. ‘One hour east of Toronto. You don’t get moose in town any more than you get wolves in Reggio.’
Santo grinned. He had very white teeth, crooked and sharp. ‘They got us in Reggio. We’re wolves, aren’t we?’
‘We’re wolves,’ Rocco repeated from behind, his voice a tone lower, his accent a little less coarse. ‘Just drive, will you?’
‘A man’s gotta be curious,’ Santo objected. ‘I never met a guy from Canada before. I never even knew we had family over there.’
‘It happened seventy years ago,’ Rocco told him. ‘Back in history. What’s history to you?’
Santo turned onto the main highway south. ‘Nothing. If it happened seven weeks ago wouldn’t be none of my business. Not if you say so, boss.’ He stabbed a finger across the dashboard at his passenger. ‘You remember that.’
‘I will.’
‘You remember. You do this right. Shoot these stupid thieving bastards in the head. Good and proper. The way it’s supposed to be. Bullets cost money. Shouldn’t need more than one.’
‘I don’t give a shit where he shoots them,’ Rocco barked. ‘Or how many shells he uses. He can kick them to death for all I care. Or take them to the hills, put them in a cave with you, asking stupid questions about mooses and Canada all the time, boring the life out of them. What the hell?’
Santo nodded. ‘What the hell? What the hell? That’s right. What the hell?’
The man now determined to think of himself as the minor criminal Maso Leoni, not the state detective Nic Costa, had learned much about the ’Ndrangheta of late. How unlike its two great rivals, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra, it was. No one prospered inside the Bergamotti ’ndrina on talent alone. It was a true family, one bound together by direct blood ties. Without them one was always an outsider. With them absolute obedience was essential. His position still had to be earned.
He lifted the handgun above the dashboard and said, ‘I shoot them.’
‘Put that damned gun down!’ Santo yelled at him. ‘What are you? Soft in the head? They do that in Canada and no one minds, huh? Waving guns round on busy roads like this? Jesus, Maso. You got a lot to learn if you wanna be like us.’
‘You do want to be like us?’ the man in the back asked.
‘Yeah. Never wanted anything more.’
The shot didn’t go near Emmanuel but it shattered the grubby cracked mirror behind the bar. His fingers clung to the plastic counter of the Zanzibar as he stood still as a rock, breath frozen for a moment, aware there was nowhere to run, no chance to hide.
This was too crazy, even in the upside-down world of the ’Ndrangheta.
He thought of the gun in the drawer by the cash register. The Bergamotti made him keep a firearm. He didn’t like the thing, didn’t ever want to use it, even now. These two looked so much better with weapons than he could ever hope to be.
So he held hard to the sticky counter, trying not to shake as he looked at the ugly hulk with the scar. There was something wrong there, something odd in his scarred and battered features.
He didn’t like doing this, Emmanuel thought. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for robbing either, any more than he felt born to running an illicit shebeen for Italian mobsters and their fellow-criminals.
‘I apologize, friend,’ the big man said in that curious accent. ‘My finger must have slipped. I’m getting old and careless these days. Please God it doesn’t happen again.’
Jackson was screeching from the back room, terrified by the noise of the shot. The little monkey’s high-pitched bawling went on and on. Then Peroni moved slightly to one side and cracked a shell through the office door.
The shrieks got louder. Jackson wanted a drink, Emmanuel thought. A big, strong one. So, for once, did he.
‘Insurance,’ the leaner, sharper looking man who’d called himself Falcone repeated. ‘We want five hundred now. Five hundred weekly. You can afford that, can’t you?’
‘Five hundred?’ Emmanuel asked, exasperated. ‘You’re gonna get yourselves killed, both of you, for five hundred euros?’
‘You heard.’
‘Might as well ask for five thousand, man. Dead’s dead whatever. Don’t you understand who you’re ripping off here?’
Jackson’s cries got louder. Peroni started firing again, pumping lead into the mirror, the pinball table, the lines of grubby cocktail tumblers that sat on a shelf behind him. Glass and metal and wood started to jump up and down inside the airless little dive that was the Zanzibar. Emmanuel stopped counting the shots, grimaced and put his hands up to his ears. The racket was worse than the monkey’s terrified screams.
When the gun clicked on empty the lean one pulled out a weapon and pointed that across the bar.
‘Who exactly?’ he asked.
‘You don’t know? This isn’t Rome, friend. You’re in Calabria. It belongs to the ’Ndrangheta. They’re kings here. The government. The army. The church. You don’t mess with them. You never, ever steal from them. If you do that makes you a walking dead man. And me too.’ Emmanuel opened his long arms wide, aware of the sweat patches that had grown beneath them. ‘For what? You tell me. Five hundred stinking euros? Please. I did not come here for this.’
‘What did you come for?’ Peroni wondered.
Emmanuel stamped his fists hard on the bar, feeling something sting at his eyes. ‘I came ’cos I thought I had to. I came ’cos I thought …’ He stared around the grubby interior of the Zanzibar, realising what a fool he’d been. He shook his head. ‘Don’t matter. Go ahead. Do what you want. Shoot me. Who cares?’
Falcone walked behind the counter, went to the cash register, opened it, then stared at the meagre collection of notes and coins there.
‘There isn’t even five hundred here,’ he muttered. ‘Where’s the rest?’
Emmanuel reached inside his shirt for the key then, with both hands, lifted the chain that hung round his neck, got it over his head and held it out to them.
‘There’s a safe in the back room. With Jackson. I just keep the key for them.’
They stared at him and Falcone asked, ‘Who’s Jackson?’
‘The monkey.’
‘Show us.’
The marmoset was hunched on the bottom of its cage, silent, miserable. As he entered it rattled its little shot glass once across the bars then caught the mood and fell back into a quiet sulk.
Emmanuel had never looked inside the safe. He didn’t want to know what it contained. Didn’t want to think about what they used it for. The ’ndrina men came down from the hills and dipped in and out as they pleased. They only gave him a key in case a visitor needed to collect something, and when that happened he made certain he never watched.
The two men stood behind him as he crouched down and opened the metre-high iron box that sat on the floor next to the desk.
The light was bright in the little room. The big guy’s weapon grazed the back of his neck the moment they saw what was inside.
‘I had no idea,’ Emmanuel said honestly, mostly to himself. ‘Truly. I had no idea …’
The top shelf of the safe contained at least five brand new handguns still in clear plastic wrapping. The middle was full of packs of ammunition. The bottom contained more shell boxes and wad upon wad of neat new one-hundred euro notes bound together with the paper bands they came in from the bank.
He felt mad at them for doing this to him. It was worse than dope. There was en
ough here to put him inside for fifteen years or more. He was an African. Not even a true member of the ’ndrina, because for that you had to have the blood. If he’d gone to jail for owning the key to all this illicit weaponry and suspect money everything would have fallen apart. The monthly remittances home. The chance, one day, of a better life, back in his own land. The Calabrians looked after their own, sent round a moneyman each week with allowances for the sick, the wounded and the relatives of those who’d gone to jail. No one was going to do that in Lagos.
‘Bastards. Bastards …’ he whispered.
The hard metal of the weapon disappeared from his neck and the voice said, ‘Get back.’
Peroni hunched down and picked out the wads of cash. Emmanuel gazed at the wads of notes. It was more money than he’d ever seen, so much he couldn’t begin to imagine what it might buy.
‘Ten thousand a bundle,’ Peroni said, whistling as he counted them. ‘Ten bundles. You must sell a lot of beer.’
‘I swear to God I never saw any of this before.’ He glowered at them. ‘How the hell did you know it was here?’
‘You should follow the news,’ the other one said. ‘Someone stopped a wages van for the hospital eight days ago. It doesn’t take a genius …’
‘And I’m just their stupid little bagman,’ Emmanuel murmured.
‘Looks like it.’
Falcone opened his thick coat and beckoned to the other. Peroni passed each bundle over, one by one, and watched it go inside some deep pockets there.
‘A good day’s work, sirs,’ Emmanuel said, watching the money disappear. ‘They’re gonna take you for a walk in the hills and carve your heart out for that.’
‘You think?’
Peroni was looking at him, clutching at the last bundle. The gun, reloaded now, was in his left hand.
Emmanuel stood there and sighed. ‘No. I know. Just shoot me and get it over with. You. Them. What’s the difference? I’m dead anyway, just as dead as you.’
‘Take it,’ the man insisted, holding out the money. ‘Go on.’
Emmanuel took a deep breath. ‘This your idea of fun?’
