The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  ‘I hope he doesn’t catch anything,’ Peroni said, watching the boat edge past at a speed that was little more than walking pace.

  ‘Why?’ Falcone asked.

  ‘How many swordfish are left? You look at the way we take everything we can lay our hands on. The greed. The excess …’

  Teresa reached over and squeezed his hand. This assignment hadn’t pleased him. Peroni was ill at ease with everything at that moment. He was too honest a man to be happy pretending to be someone else. The state of the world, confused, dangerous and out of sorts, had begun to weigh on his mind, along with the plain truth that Falcone had, yet again, thrust Nic Costa into the front line with scarcely a second thought, the somewhat fragile Rosa Prabakaran at his side. She’d no idea how to comfort him when he felt like this. He’d always been the rock, and not just for her. This task was difficult enough. If he faltered …

  The waiter had returned bearing two platters, each full of tiny dishes of tempting looking antipasti. All of them fish. They seemed to eat little else here. The sea was their larder and they visited each and every day. This was their third meal in the place. Realising they were staying nearby, not visiting day trippers, the waiter had introduced himself as Toni and begun to offer extras – glasses of a dark, bitter spirit at the end of the meal, once a plate of delicately sliced prickly pear – as thanks for their custom. The locals, it seemed to her, were friendly in a distant fashion, always keen to keep a customer, inquisitive about one’s motives.

  ‘Not here, sir,’ Toni announced. He had a charming smile and a dark and handsome face marked by a scar close to his left ear. A knife, she thought. Definitely a knife. ‘In Cariddi we hunt the old way. A strong arm, a keen eye and a spear. If those men catch one fish today they’re lucky. Two. Three …’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Someone up there is smiling on us.’

  Silvio Di Capua waved his phone in the hot, sparse air. He had a knowing look on his face. Teresa should have guessed what he’d been looking at as he watched the sea. ‘According to this the Mediterranean swordfish is an endangered species.’

  Toni frowned then walked inside. One minute later he returned with the silver head of a swordfish, young and small, still with its long sharp spike intact and eyes that shone. Cleaved at the neck, the flesh there was pale but so fresh it might have been killed that morning.

  ‘See this?’ He pointed to a crossword of four crude slashes across the creature’s right cheek. ‘That’s the cardata da cruci. My cousin’s fingernails made those marks the moment they landed her in the boat and quelled her thrashes. We do not fish here. We hunt.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful creature,’ Teresa said quietly, staring at the dark, glistening eyes.

  ‘It is.’ The head was almost too heavy and awkward for him to hold. ‘We’ve been hunting here since people spoke nothing but Greek. Or earlier. In Spain, in Sardinia, they use long-lining or worse, nets. No one would dare try such a thing in Cariddi. They would not find themselves welcome. Why would we destroy one of the few precious things we have?’ He nodded at the steep green mountain behind them. ‘Calabria is a poor country. We possess so little. What we can grow. What we can catch. To lose the pisci spata through greed or vanity …’ His expression lightened. ‘I know you think we’re all dumb. Trust me. We’re not that stupid.’

  ‘No one who lives in such a beautiful place and manages to keep it secret can possibly be stupid,’ Teresa said.

  It was true too, she thought. Just as it was true that the rest of Italy did look down on this strange, almost foreign part of the country. Few Romans knew it, except as a brief stopping place on the way to their holiday in Sicily. Few much cared. The wine wasn’t good enough. The food, though cheap, was deemed unsophisticated. People spoke of the south, the Mezzogiorno, with a shrug and a sigh. It was a lost world beyond both comprehension and rescue, not that it seemed to seek salvation.

  ‘For the benefit of those with a sensitive disposition,’ the waiter announced, nodding at the rolls of exquisite-looking fish on the plates in front of them, ‘these are swordfish. From my friend here, as fresh as you’ll ever find.’

  He left, the severed head in his arms. They leaned over the table and examined the selection of little dishes: squid and tuna, bright red shrimp and tiny octopus. Falcone got his fork in first. The rest weren’t far behind. No one left a scrap. The food was astonishing, twice the quality and half the price of home.

  Teresa looked round, making sure there was no one within earshot, not unless they had smuggled some very fancy listening equipment into one of the ancient, crooked houses next to the restaurant, which seemed unlikely.

  ‘Four days and we’re still in the dark. Is there a plan, Leo?’ she asked. ‘If so, are we to be allowed to know about it?’

  Falcone removed a scarlet shrimp from its shell very delicately and examined its pink body, like a baby’s finger, before popping it into his mouth. ‘We don’t even have a name for this man,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘We don’t know why he suddenly wants to rat on his fellow criminals. We’re not entirely sure he’s serious.’

  ‘That’s comforting,’ Peroni grumbled. ‘We’ve just sent two bright young officers out into that wilderness up there—’ he glanced at the bare mountain behind them – ‘without a clue what’s in store for them.’

  Falcone nodded, seemingly accepting the point. ‘What else could I do? That’s what our new friend in the ’Ndrangheta demanded.’ He gazed at Peroni. ‘Seriously. Tell me. What else could I do? You understand this better than I. Please.’

  ‘He does?’ Teresa asked, watching Peroni. ‘How come?’

  ‘The Bonetti case.’ Falcone said simply.

  The Bonetti case.

  She tried to recall the details. It must have been eight years before, and her memory was hazy. All that she remembered was that it was not a pleasant story. A crook turned pentito. Then there were consequences.

  ‘You dealt with that, Gianni?’ Silvio Di Capua asked. ‘Before my time. I remember the name from the papers.’

  Peroni took a deep breath and said, ‘That was back when I held rank. It was my case. Bonetti was a well-connected pimp. We had him under surveillance when I was running vice. A weak guy. Scared of everyone.’ He grimaced. ‘Me in particular. One day I bullied him into thinking the only way he could keep himself out of jail was to start squealing. The idiot believed me. I can be a good bully when I feel like it. Or at least I could back then.’ He shrugged and looked briefly ashamed. ‘I beat him about a bit. Reckoned he wouldn’t complain. He didn’t dare.’

  The details still eluded her.

  ‘And?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘The guy went to court and coughed up everything he knew. We sent down two of the biggest hoods in Lazio and a handful of their lieutenants.’ He grabbed a glass of water from the table and took a long draught. They weren’t drinking wine. It wasn’t right somehow. ‘Couple of days later someone shot dead his wife, his brother and his seven-year-old son. The brother was driving the little boy and his mamma back from school. One day later we found Bonetti in his safe house hanging from a rope in the bathroom. I still don’t think he killed himself. He didn’t have the guts. Someone got there.’ His eyes didn’t leave Falcone. ‘Someone who knew where he was. One of us. A cop. A lawyer. We never did find out.’

  Di Capua was tapping away at his phone again.

  ‘Please, Silvio,’ Peroni said quietly, putting his hand on the young forensic officer’s fingers as they dashed across the screen. ‘You don’t need to know any more. The point is—’ he closed his eyes as in pain – ‘once we step outside the system like this anything goes. We’re as bad as them. Sometimes they can be as good as us. It’s not black and white any more. The consequences can be …’

  Teresa did remember. It came back in a sudden, hurtful flash. The papers carried pictures of the Bonetti child. He was a lovely-looking boy, so it made the front pages, a photo of a gap-toothed kid with a head of bouncy black hair, and a big, broad smile. His de
ath would have broken Peroni’s heart.

  ‘I don’t get why he doesn’t just come in,’ Di Capua said. ‘Call and tell us where to pick him up. Have done with it. Nice and simple and—’

  ‘Nothing’s nice and simple here,’ Peroni said with some heat. ‘Do you really not understand why he won’t do that?’

  Silence then she said, ‘Tell us, genius.’

  ‘First, the men around him would kill him if they knew. There’s maybe a hundred people employed inside that ’ndrina. If any but his closest family have a clue this is going on I’d be very surprised.’

  Makes sense, Teresa said. ‘And the second?’

  ‘Because there’s a price to be paid. He won’t just hand himself over. Not without getting something in return.’

  ‘I know that!’ Falcone’s temper was shorter than usual. ‘There’ll have to be negotiations about immunity from prosecution. Where he’ll stay. How we’ll bring him to court. I understand that. I expect it. We’ll check everything they tell us. Every location for a meeting. Everyone we encounter. I won’t risk a single officer—’

  ‘You’re risking them already,’ Peroni pointed out.

  ‘We’ll check out what they tell us—’

  ‘You shouldn’t have sent Rosa.’

  Falcone looked baffled. ‘Why not? She’s a serving officer. She volunteered—’

  ‘Because she’s got feelings,’ Teresa said. ‘For Nic. Did you really not notice?’

  He stared at her, his tanned face immobile, trapped, she thought, between shame and anger. Falcone was a cold man and to make matters worse he knew and hated that in himself. ‘We all must distance ourselves from our emotions,’ he said and seemed embarrassed by the words. Then, as if to change the subject, he picked at more food.

  ‘They won’t,’ Peroni said eventually. ‘Lo Spettro and his people. Their emotions tell them that nothing matters except themselves. Their family. Their clan. Their blood. Do you think they’ll give us real names? Do you imagine for one moment they’ll tell us the truth about anything? This guy hasn’t been scared into standing up in court and talking. Not by us anyway. He hasn’t had a sudden attack of conscience. It doesn’t work that way. There’s a reason we’re here, a reason he’ll never tell us, not unless it serves his purpose. This is their game. Not ours. And it’s going to be dirty. That’s just about the only thing you can take for granted. We’re on their level now. Best not forget it.’

  Falcone carried on as if he hadn’t quite heard. ‘We assemble the facts. We verify them. We’ve got all the equipment we need in the house. Links into Rome. When we need something the people there—’

  ‘Intelligence …’ Peroni’s voice had a cold, mocking tone, one she’d never heard before. ‘Listen …’

  He got up, grimaced at the food on the table, looked around him. ‘You keep staring at your computers hoping they’ll tell you something if you like. I want to understand what kind of place this is. What kind of people we’re dealing with. I’ll see you back at the house when I’m ready.’

  ‘I’m in charge here!’ Falcone barked, suddenly cross. ‘You will do what I say. Agente!’

  He spoke Peroni’s rank in haste. It was too loud. She looked around. There was no sign of the waiter, no other customers in earshot. All the same this argument was foolish.

  ‘I think,’ Teresa said, ‘for all our sakes you two had better calm down.’

  Peroni shook his head and walked into the dark interior of the restaurant. She saw him climbing the stairs up to street level, nodding at the waiter who was at the till, on the phone. Taking a reservation she hoped, not that the place seemed to attract many customers.

  A few short years before Gianni Peroni and Falcone had been equals, both inspectors, Peroni perhaps more highly regarded than the dry and stoical Falcone. Then his world had collapsed, along with his marriage, through a simple mistake made in the heat of the moment, a brief and stupid affair that brought down everything.

  This was before her time. She didn’t regret any of it. She couldn’t. She was selfish, and it was his downfall that had brought them together.

  In all the years she’d known the man he’d never behaved like this. She wanted to tell herself it wasn’t like him. Not the Peroni she’d come to love. But the Peroni who’d had an affair while married with kids was a stranger too and occasionally she’d wondered where he’d gone.

  Falcone was staring at the menu again, embarrassed, lost for words. Silvio Di Capua caught her eyes and pretended to whistle.

  ‘Do you want something else?’ Falcone asked, not looking at her.

  ‘Just coffee,’ she said. ‘Let Gianni go his own way, will you? He has a kind of …’ The phrase ‘emotional intelligence’, a cliché she loathed, sprang into her head. ‘He knows what he’s doing, Leo.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ For once Falcone looked unsure of himself. Then he scowled and added, ‘But do I?’

  Two hours before his colleagues sat down for their meal on the Cariddi waterfront, Nic Costa had pulled in by the side of a narrow mountain road twenty-two tortuous and winding kilometres away and once more checked his directions. They were deep in the mountainside behind Reggio, with a breathtaking view back to the point at which the Tyrrhenian gave way to the Ionian, Homer’s wine-dark sea, the waters once owned by ancient Athens. In places hereabouts the locals still spoke a kind of Greek. Another thing that set them apart and made the place feel foreign. He could see the coastline and the ragged shore of Sicily across the shimmering azure gulf. Cariddi, he guessed, was just out of sight, lost behind a massive spine of rock that hid the western shore.

  A lone eagle hung in the air over a craggy bare peak to their right. They were in the upper ranges of Aspromonte, more like the Alps than the south. It was a wild, deserted region where some took to skis in the winter. Houses were few and mostly confined to a scattering of hamlets. Those they had long left behind and scarcely met another car on the road. It was ten thirty in the morning and there was still the smell of fresh dew in the pine-scented air.

  ‘We should have brought the satnav,’ Rosa Prabakaran said from the passenger seat of the rented Fiat saloon.

  The young policewoman was dressed in jeans and a white cotton shirt. A small silver crucifix hung around her neck on a chain. She had sunglasses on her head and her dark, serious Indian face bore a little make-up. The two of them were playing the part of tourists, lovers on a brief holiday. The pretence appeared to work on the pair of young armed Carabinieri officers in bulletproof vests who’d stopped them in the lower reaches of the mountain, asking for ID and their intentions. The men had glanced at their fake identity cards then sent them on their way, shaking their heads as if to say, ‘Why bother?’

  The air was so thin and clean, the land so untouched by civilisation, the language of the locals so different, he found it hard to believe he was still in Italy.

  ‘And what exactly would I have asked it?’ he wondered, amused that they were beginning to play the part of a bickering couple with such ease.

  She looked at him and laughed. He felt, for a moment, embarrassed.

  They had been given no place name. No directions to or from a nearby village or town. Only an anonymous message by mobile phone, passed on from Lombardi, the Justice Ministry official who led the small support team in Rome from a private office away from the prying eyes of the Questura. He said they were to follow a particular route into the mountains and look for a marker: an old, abandoned farm tractor, rusting, with a red seat. Then drive three kilometres along the narrow track by its side and wait. Which was what they were now doing.

  Searching for what? The prospect of taking in a local gang lord, one who had somehow communicated his willingness to turn pentito, though how exactly, or why, none of them had been told. All he knew was that they were chasing a ghost and they never came when you called.

  He got out of the car and looked around. Rosa followed, putting on her sunglasses, looking every inch the pretty holidaymaker. He couldn�
�t help but glance at her, the same way the Carabinieri had earlier. Without her drab work clothes, away from the everyday cares of the job in Rome, she seemed as unexpected as this foreign and unfamiliar landscape.

  They were still on the western side of the mountain. The steep stretches of rock and vegetation around them were, for the most part, lush and green from the incoming wind and rain. Tracts of woodland meandered up the slope towards an unseen peak. Thickets of strange tall weeds dotted with straggly prickly pears ran along the meandering lines of what he assumed must have been winter torrents. On an irregular patch of high grass pasture in the distance a herd of sheep or goats – it was difficult to tell from this distance – grazed with the lazy, unconcerned nonchalance their ancestors might have possessed two millennia before.

  There seemed to be some kind of a building in a clump of low woodland a few hundred metres up a rough stone path ahead. A thin curling line of smoke was rising from the crooked rusty chimney on the roof.

  ‘I’m going to take a look,’ he announced.

  ‘Me too.’ She was by his side in an instant, linking her arm through his. ‘Not on your own. What if they’re watching? We’re a couple, aren’t we?’

  He scanned the nearest line of woodland, a tangle of weak, lanky trees that looked undernourished. In winter, the books said, it would be thick snow here. Men who lost their way were lucky to survive. Somewhere close by, on the bare, high plateau, lay complexes of caves where the ’Ndrangheta kept their prisoners and kidnap victims, and buried their dead too. He wondered what the local police and Carabinieri knew of the kind of people they were trying to reach, understood too that he would never dare find out. Everything about this venture was covert. An idle word to a stranger could cost them their lives.