The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  A few moments after they began to walk up the path a figure emerged from the hut in the woods. Costa could make out that it was a very diminutive woman in a shapeless brown dress. As they got closer he could see she had shoulder-length grey hair that hung flat against her tanned head. She stood there, watching them, hands on bony hips, a short, compact woman, very sure of herself. A cigarette hung from her lower lip, almost extinct. There was a woodpile by the porch, an axe notched into the topmost log. Ragged washing hung on a line running from the front wall to a post by a patch of herbs. He could detect the distinctive and gamy smell of meat on the musty smoke that hung around the place with a permanence that suggested there was a fire burning here always.

  The woman stared at them, leaning against the rotten wooden frame of the door. Her arms were bony and the colour of old mahogany, as if they’d been stained by smoke over the decades too. She had the drawn, judgemental face of a medieval saint. Her small, sharp eyes never left them. When they stopped in front of her he could see the pupils were milky from what looked like the onset of cataracts. She might have been forty or fifty or more. Costa couldn’t begin to guess, though it did occur to him that she might seem entirely different in another context. There was something theatrical about her, as if she were an actress about to begin a performance.

  ‘You make such a pretty, pretty couple. I don’t see so many young people around here. Don’t see much of anything at all.’

  She had a hoarse voice, that of a hardened smoker, and a severe southern accent of the kind he was beginning to recognize.

  Rosa smiled and unhooked her arm from his.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Costa glanced around the place. She seemed to be on her own. ‘We were looking for someone.’

  The woman crooked her head to one side as if listening and asked, ‘Who?’

  ‘We don’t know his name.’

  There was brief, sarcastic laughter. ‘What are you? Psychic?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Rosa countered.

  ‘There’s no one here except a crazy old woman. What can I tell you?’

  Rosa shot him a rueful glance. She hated making mistakes. She was too quick to pass judgement too.

  Costa pulled out his wallet.

  The woman raised an eyebrow. ‘You think I have something for you, Roman?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  She finished the cigarette and ground the stub under her foot. He couldn’t help but notice she wore no shoes.

  ‘I’m the santina of this hill. Do you understand what that means?’ The little woman took two steps towards them and peered up into Rosa’s face. ‘You should know what I’m talking about, girl. Skin that colour. Face as pretty as a picture. We all came from the east, in the beginning. Even those fools—’ she nodded at the road – ‘in the city.’

  Rosa caught his eye. It signified something to her anyway.

  ‘A santina’s a fortune-teller, isn’t it?’ she said, amused, like a child discovering something new at the fair.

  The woman’s narrow, expressionless face was marked by deep, dark wrinkles in her walnut skin. Too much sun. Perhaps working the fields. Though it could just as easily come from an excess of time spent on the beach. Costa could see the pearly glint in her eyes more clearly now. He wondered how good her sight truly was. There was another smell too. Something alcoholic with the fragrance of mountain herbs was on her breath.

  ‘No,’ she said, leaning forward, looking into their faces in turn with her damaged, half-opaque eyes. ‘Your fortunes are your own to tell, not mine. All I do is see. While the rest of you are blind. Fifty euros. Then I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ She held out a bony hand. Costa pulled out the money and handed it over. ‘What you don’t as well if I feel like it. Which may be of more value.’

  He handed her the money. The santina brought the cash right up to her face, peering closely at the notes. Then she stuffed the wad into the pocket of her shapeless dress, kicked open the door with her filthy bare foot and said, ‘Come in.’

  The shack was little more than a single dark room with a rickety table, a few chairs and a blackened stove leaking smoke. A huge bubbling pan sat on top alongside a collection of battered pots and a tin kettle. In the corner, on a set of drawers, there was a tiny portable TV, a radio and a small black and white photograph of an old man with long white hair and a dark felt hat, the kind mountain shepherds wore.

  The woman closed the door, walked to the table and turned on the light, a single bulb dangling from a twisted cable. The curtains were closed on the front windows. The rear ones had no fabric at all but faced directly onto the woods. A thick line of silvery tree trunks fought each other a metre or so away from the glass. The place probably never saw much sun at all. It stank of mould and stale smoke, humanity and the rank odour of cooking meat.

  The santina walked to the table, picked up a bottle, and poured three shot glasses of dark spirit.

  ‘Drink this,’ she said. ‘It’s good. You get your money’s worth here.’

  ‘It’s a little early for me,’ Costa said. ‘And I’m driving.’

  ‘The Carabinieri won’t bother you. They don’t come this way. They know if they do they won’t go home.’

  Rosa eyed him, amused, and took a gulp, then began to cough and choke. Costa tried the stuff and just about managed a sip. It tasted of the mountain: of earth, wild herbs, and raw potent alcohol.

  ‘Sit down.’

  They took two old rickety wooden stools on one side of the table. The woman perched on an ancient dining chair opposite, one that had a cushion to raise her to the same height. The light of the single bulb fell above her face. She had the things she needed there already and her hands fell readily to them. A pack of Tarot cards. Two scarlet candles, blackened wicks curling like seared tendrils, half burned and attached to the bare cracked wood by swirls of long-hardened wax. She lit them and Costa could see, next to the cards, what looked suspiciously like the dark scrawny paw of a small animal, severed at the elbow or knee.

  This was an act, he thought, a performance that had been prearranged for the rare tourists who came to Aspromonte seeking something more than the usual local colour.

  ‘No crystal ball?’ Rosa asked.

  The santina glared at her then leaned across the table and peered at the silver crucifix around the young agente’s neck. ‘Christ stopped at Eboli. Didn’t you know? This is the south. Jesus won’t help you here.’

  Rosa cast Costa a querulous glance.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ the woman said, nodding at her. ‘The right one.’

  She obeyed and placed her dusky arm across the table. The santina took her fingers and turned them over to look at her paler palm. Then she traced her nails along the lines there, peering hard at the skin as if searching for something.

  Rosa seemed perturbed. Costa wasn’t surprised. He’d dealt with fake clairvoyants before and understood that they needed to instil a little fear into those they robbed. In Rome he’d hauled one or two into court when they picked on someone too poor, too gullible for the offence to pass. It was impossible to do more than rein in a few when time allowed. The national obsession with the occult was ubiquitous, fodder for an ever-increasing number of TV channels. Millions of good Catholics seemed to follow these supposedly dark arts without so much as a second thought.

  He recalled an incident when his father was alive. A government minister from the south visiting a hospital for disabled children and being pictured secretly making the sign of the horn behind his back, a traditional gesture for warding off the devil. Marco Costa had known the man responsible, a fellow politician, though gullible and right-wing. He’d sworn in fury at the picture when it appeared in the newspapers. The story had produced a howl of outrage from liberal commentators offended that a senior politician should give credence to the popular prejudice that the disabled somehow attracted their impairment through an association with evil. What was it his father h
ad said? It was seventeen hundred years since Constantine decreed Italy was a monotheistic state. Still the pagan gods refused to die.

  ‘You know why we’re here, signora,’ he said, looking at the santina. ‘Kindly earn your money.’

  ‘I rarely disappoint,’ she replied, and traced her dirty nails across the lines of Rosa’s right hand. ‘Wait your turn.’

  The woman’s fingers moved quickly across her dark skin. Rosa twitched automatically, affected by the swift, purposeful gestures she made, then rapidly withdrew her hand.

  The santina was staring at her. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ the woman said. She scowled at Costa. ‘He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.’

  ‘Know … what?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘You pretend you’re his lover and hope one day this game will turn to truth. You fool him. You fool yourself, perhaps. You do not fool me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean …’

  Rosa had her head down, eyes averted. Costa suddenly felt hot and uncomfortable. ‘Signora—’

  ‘If one day you should find your way to his bed … enjoy that moment. The pleasure will be fleeting and pain not far behind. Now you …’

  She reached for him with both hands, her sharp, hawkish eyes fixed on his face. ‘The right, not the left.’

  Her strong, bony fingers snatched at his with a touch that was coarse and leathery but purposeful, like that of a surgeon. She moved with a subtle, practised touch, probing the crevices and lines of his skin.

  The santina frowned, looked uncertain of herself for a moment, then stopped, still gripping him, but staring at the table, thinking.

  ‘What is it?’ Rosa asked.

  ‘This is his story. Not yours.’

  The woman dashed at her face with one hand, as if rubbing some invisible spot.

  ‘My story …’ Costa said with a sigh. ‘What is that exactly?’

  He caught his breath. Rosa uttered a low, frightened murmur. The woman’s head went back, her cloudy eyes rolled upwards into her head then, as he watched, feeling his skin turn cold, a line of livid shiny red emerged flooding from behind the lids. A trickle of thick blood began to run down each cheek with the precise vertical symmetry of the tears on a statue of the Virgin in some distant chapel.

  A trick, he said to himself. A cheap, fairground ruse. Something smuggled in her fingers in that curious movement a few seconds before.

  She took away one hand and wiped at her cheeks with her arm. The red sticky stain smeared across her face like cheap make-up.

  ‘Very good—’ he began to say.

  ‘Be silent!’

  Her milky eyes were on him again, filmed with gore. ‘Tell me. Why do you expect others to bury your dead? Why? That is what infants do.’

  He tried to take his hand away. She held onto him, tightly, with extraordinary strength.

  ‘I don’t pretend to understand these riddles,’ he murmured. ‘If you will excuse me …’

  She looked at his palm and placed a long stained finger in the centre. ‘I see your parents here. Your mother and father. I see another woman. Your dead wife. You loved them all. Still I feel their bodies inside you because, in your childish selfishness, you refuse to let them go.’

  ‘Signora …’

  ‘Is this your idea of devotion? To keep their rotting carcasses in your head as a reminder of your pain? What would their dead mouths say to you now if they could speak? Would they thank you …?’

  ‘Enough!’

  The woman let go of him then folded her grubby arms across her chest. ‘I can only tell you what I see. Your future is yours to direct, not mine.’

  For some reason he couldn’t understand the light bulb above the table was beginning to swing slowly, to and fro. Then he heard something outside, a noise. A car perhaps. Another smell cut into the noisome rankness of the shack: the acrid stink of a cigar.

  He couldn’t get her words out of his head.

  ‘This is not why I came,’ Costa insisted.

  ‘To seek the dead? It’s exactly why. Who do you wish to deceive with these lies? Others?’ Her dirty fingers indicated Rosa. ‘This girl? She would be your inamorata. As big a fool as you.’

  Costa got to his feet and said to the young agente, ‘We’re going.’

  The santina grinned at him. She had very white teeth, too perfect for a country crone. ‘Tanato we called him in the old tongue. The god of death. Twin to Hypnos, sleep, though fools may mistake the two. Unlike his twin he is a generous and curious spirit. If you keep calling his name he will hear. He will come. When summoned.’

  ‘I’m not going to listen …’ His hand cut the air, as if it could wave away her words.

  ‘Bury those you loved, before they come back to consume you for good.’

  ‘Nic …’ Rosa begged.

  He wanted to scream at the ugly little crone. Wanted to burn down this grubby, stinking shack around her ears.

  ‘Nic?’

  She was trying to draw attention to something. His rage blotted out her voice and her concern. Almost. The woman was right. They were losses that marked him, shadows from the past. They would not leave and a part of him was glad of that.

  Rosa Prabakaran’s deep brown eyes glistened in the darkness. There was fear in her face.

  The door was open. Two shapes filled it. A man and a woman, almost as tall as each other, and of similar appearance. Siblings by the look of it. They wore modern, fashionable clothes, brightly coloured, expensive, as if they were dressed for a social engagement, not an appointment in a squalid shack with a dwarfish witch who claimed to be living like a wild thing on the distant, isolated western reaches of Aspromonte.

  The man had a short-barrelled lupara shotgun across his arm, broken over his elbow, its leaden length incongruous against his bright pink shirt. The woman glanced at it for a moment in disapproval. Her hair was short and very black framing a pleasant round face that was disfigured by a faint but long scar on her right cheek. Her shirt was white and short-sleeved. Lurid tattoos of dragons and other mythical creatures crawled down her right arm to the wrist, so many they obliterated most of her olive skin.

  ‘They came alone?’ the santina asked, nodding at Costa and Rosa.

  ‘They came alone,’ the woman replied in a voice that bore the same southern burr. ‘We watched them all the way.’

  ‘Good.’ The santina pointed at Costa. ‘You will see the man you seek when our family knows it can trust you. How else may we proceed? Do you understand the risks of what we do? How few know of this?’ She stood up quickly and thrust her filthy hand into his face. ‘You can count them on these fingers. Before you may get close to him we must be sure you deserve our faith. Those who know nothing of what he’s planning surround him like hawks and would kill us all if they knew what he intended, as is their right. You will make them treat you as a brother in the ’ndrina. One of their own. Then, and only then, you may see him. Then, and only then, will we be able to find some way to allow him to escape into your world and become a pentito as he wishes.’

  They had thought this through, so much more than Falcone and the rest of the little police crew in Cariddi. This was their game, their plan.

  ‘What do you want of us?’ he asked.

  ‘Your patience. Your obedience. Your trust. This will take time. You have no choice. Neither do we.’

  He listened, trying to understand. ‘What exactly are you asking of me?’

  She laughed just for a moment and he saw again those white and perfect teeth. ‘You must join the ’ndrina. We’ve a story that will explain your presence. You can be a newcomer, a fugitive from a distant relative in Canada. You will follow our orders. There is no alternative. Our men will only trust those in the blood who earn their confidence. Without that your presence around the capo locale would arouse suspicion. They would kill you first, then us. So forget who you were. Become what we tell you. Otherwise you go home empty-handed. Or in a box.’

  ‘Rosa—’ he began.

  ‘Thi
s woman stays here,’ the santina interrupted. ‘I shall be her manutengola. Her keeper.’ She glanced around the surroundings. ‘I have a spare bed. She will not suffer. You have our word.’

  ‘I’m a hostage?’ Rosa asked, incredulous.

  ‘You’re a guest. If he—’ she jerked her head at Costa – ‘deceives us then you become a hostage.’ The woman glowered at him. ‘Don’t let that happen, police man. We make stalwart friends but heartless enemies.’

  ‘This was never part of the arrangement …’

  ‘What arrangement is that?’ asked the woman at the door, stepping into the room. She was about Costa’s age and there was something troubled about her he thought. The tattoos, the scar, the darting, anxious eyes. She held out her hand and he took it for a moment. ‘My name is Lucia Bergamotti. This is my brother Rocco. My aunt you have met already. The person you seek is my father, the head of our ’ndrina. Lo Spettro they call him. A man who risks his life, all our lives, everything, to help you. There is no arrangement. No bargain on our part. Not yet. Once he can trust you then he will do what you wish. But only if he’s promised immunity from prosecution and an absolute guarantee of his safety and ours.’

  ‘And in return?’ Costa asked.

  They glanced at one another and he found it interesting she was the one who spoke.

  ‘In return he will lead you to a meeting of the heads of the organisation within Calabria. You may detain them—’

  ‘We know their names, signora,’ he cut in. ‘We know where most of them live. If we could prosecute them we—’

  ‘My father will tell you things you’ve never guessed at.’ She looked at her brother again. ‘In addition he will give you Andrea Mancuso. Il Macellaio. The Butcher of Palermo. You know who he is.’