The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  ‘Jesus. Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes. We can’t get there. Not quickly. What’s happening?’

  Silence.

  ‘Teresa …’

  ‘I’ll put the picture back on your phone. If you really want to watch.’

  Vanni got out of the car and walked straight up to Mancuso. They’d met three times over the years, the last a decade before to settle a disagreement about percentages on some of the ferry routes. That had ended amicably. It was not always the case.

  Two men came and stood in the way and patted him down as he waited, hands up. He kept looking at Mancuso all the time. There were such stories told about this man. About his capacity for cruelty and violence. These habits were not unknown in the Bergamotti ’ndrina, but they were always used for a reason, never mere malice or entertainment. The Sicilians under Il Macellaio were different.

  The sons of the Garduña had taken on the characteristics of the lands they came to inhabit over the centuries. Across the water on a rich and exotic island that seemed to be fought over constantly by armies and bands of robbers alike, all seeking to tame its people. In Naples with its restless impoverished millions, glitz and glamour living cheek by jowl with squalid urban sprawl. On Aspromonte and along its savage shoreline where the sons of Carcagnosso could retreat into the mountains, into caves, hide until it was time to come out in the sun again. Unlike the men of Palermo and Naples it was in their nature to be reclusive, to watch the world then hope to shape it. Not the reverse which was the habit of men like this.

  ‘I have no weapon,’ he said as the two foot soldiers got down to his ankles. ‘Others carry those in my name.’

  Mancuso laughed at that and came and embraced him, kissing both his cheeks in that quick and meaningless fashion that was common across the water.

  ‘Bergamotti. You still play that game?’

  ‘It’s not a game. It never was. We’re different to you. We don’t need the world to see our face.’

  ‘No.’ He looked so much older. Sick too. There were rumours Mancuso had some kind of cancer and was too frightened to seek proper treatment since then the police would surely pounce. ‘But you would show ours to everyone it seems.’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘True.’ The Sicilian nodded. ‘Let’s take a walk among those trees.’

  Vanni didn’t move. ‘My daughter …’

  ‘We can talk of that.’

  He glanced back at the car. Rocco was still at the wheel. ‘Don’t let my son see. He doesn’t deserve that. Not after his mother—’

  ‘Your wife was nothing to do with me.’

  ‘As if that matters.’ He stood his ground and waited. ‘You’re a man of your word. Let him go.’

  Mancuso hesitated for a moment then nodded. One of his henchmen went over to the Alfa and spoke through the window. Still the car didn’t move.

  ‘Rocco!’ Vanni yelled. ‘Get out of here.’ Still nothing. ‘Be gone!’

  The engine started then and the car moved off. Rocco didn’t look back. It was wrong that the last words of his he’d hear were angry ones. He’d tried to be a good father. It wasn’t easy.

  ‘I need to go back to Palermo,’ Mancuso said. ‘That walk of ours …’

  ‘Come,’ Vanni replied and stepped off the road onto the dry ground, beneath the shadow of the bergamot orchard.

  ‘Why?’ the Sicilian asked.

  ‘Because I’m old and tired. Because we’ve no easy way of renouncing this life. A life I no longer want for my children. They deserve better. Not this …’ It was hard to find the words. ‘Not this constant sense of battle.’

  They were walking side by side. For the moment.

  ‘Do you never feel that too?’

  Mancuso shook his head. ‘Never. I was given this rank by my father. Who earned it killing the man before him. I would disgrace his memory if I walked away. Like a coward.’ The man’s eyes turned on him then and they were hard and cruel. ‘If I handed others over to our mutual enemies …’

  Vanni laughed. ‘Oh please. You would have strung them out with lawyers. Or escaped more likely. You do yourself so little credit.’

  ‘I would,’ he agreed. ‘That doesn’t lessen the insult.’

  The fruit were good this year. There’d be a rich harvest come November. He reached up and picked a fine specimen, running his thumbnail through the rough yellow citrus skin. When he held it up to his nose the smell of home was there, the perfume of bergamot, a fragrance he’d grown up with and, like his father, loved so much they’d use the name to fox all strangers, hiding behind it in their lairs among the peaks.

  ‘They’ll fight you if you try to take this territory,’ he said. ‘It’s for us. The Calabrians. We know how it works. We know how to care for it. Don’t fool yourself otherwise—’

  Mancuso had fallen back until he was half a step behind. He’d take the weapon out soon. There was no reason to see.

  ‘The arrangement,’ Vanni added. ‘You’re an honourable man so I know you’ll abide by it. My sister is unharmed. Rocco will leave for good. You’ll never see or hear from the Bergamotti again.’

  ‘Agreed.’ His voice was faint, his mind it seemed on other things.

  ‘The territories and the land you’ll discuss with the other ’ndrine. There were arrangements by which they paid a tithe to me on certain transactions. In return for my looking the other way.’ He cut the fruit again and sniffed it. ‘That’s worth several million euros a year. You will have to bargain with them over that.’

  ‘We will.’

  He stopped. It was time. ‘And of course … my daughter.’ Vanni held out his hand. ‘A phone call. I was promised. One phone call. To say she’s free and well.’

  Something in the man’s face troubled him.

  ‘Your daughter,’ Mancuso said and nothing more.

  ‘I wish to speak to Lucia as we agreed.’ He was still holding the bergamot so he dropped it and gestured with his fist. ‘As … we … agreed.’

  The Sicilian’s gun was out. Small, black, insignificant almost. The type he couldn’t guess. Vanni didn’t lie when he said he never handled weapons.

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  The chop of a helicopter’s blades were getting louder overhead and they sounded like the ticking of a clock running up to midnight.

  ‘My daughter.’ Vanni said more loudly and turned to him.

  Mancuso shrugged and waved the gun as if it was an issue of no consequence. ‘Things happen. They—’

  But he was halfway to the Sicilian now, fist out, fury real and livid. Words no longer mattered.

  Two kilometres away, by the wrecked car piled into a tree on the narrow track, they watched the last act of the drama on the cracked screen of Costa’s phone.

  One shot.

  An old man falling.

  A group of others quickly scurrying away.

  Then, frightened by a sound they couldn’t hear, a lone eagle emerging from the bergamot orchard, vast wings opening wide, rising to soar on the hot summer breeze, circling to the jewelled coast below.

  PART SEVEN

  A Momentary Music

  Calabrian Tales

  Chapter XXII: Great Pan is Dead

  There are a great many churches across Calabria yet not a single temple to the oldest god many still worship in their hearts, the deity of fertility and the fields, of rustic wilds and savage nature. Of theatre too, tragic and comic, played behind those dramatic masks one still sees in museums.

  Pan is his name, half man, half goat. A wild spirit, forever stalking forest glades and mountain passes, pipe in hand, wont to steal nymphs back to his native Arcadia for pleasure. Yet according to the historian Plutarch he’s dead. It happened during the reign of Tiberius when a ship’s pilot, Thamus, on his way to Italy from Paxos across the Ionian, heard a strange and heavenly voice call out, ‘Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim the great god Pan is dead.’

  Now no one knows for s
ure where Palodes is, but on Aspromonte we believe it to be on our coastline close to the resort of Pellaro. Sure enough when Thamus was off the shore he called out his message and in return heard a terrible, inhuman wailing from the coast and Aspromonte behind: Great Pan is Dead.

  The Christians naturally took up Plutarch’s story as proof that the pagan world was gone, and the only god still remaining their own. Yet for the poor and the oppressed the more a belief is damned, the more it is likely to flourish, albeit in the shadows. Centuries after Pan’s supposed end, travellers in Greece and across Aspromonte reported finding secret shrines and temples to the divinity in rural communities everywhere. Indeed the very chapel in the cavern rumoured to contain the silver bracelet of the Virgin brought by Carcagnosso was reputed to be a temple to him before the Christians came.

  Perhaps it still is. Perhaps those who worship there say an unspoken prayer for an older god when they kneel before the altar. I am not in a position to say, but this I do know. When I was a child in Manodiavolo, after school, we would sometimes search for him in the bergamot orchards and the fir forests, along mountain streams and the thrashing torrents rain and snow would bring in winter. Once – just once – alone, hunting for rabbits, I caught sight of something through the trees. It seemed to be a crouching man, two horns on his hairy head above a pair of twinkling eyes. He gazed at me and winked as I stood there in fear and amazement. It was winter and there was ice upon the streams. Yet his chest was naked and as he moved I saw his hindquarters were furry and bent, those of a goat not a man, cloven-hooved as he scuttled away into the woodland whence he came, the fleeting music of his pipes behind him.

  When I met my teacher the next morning I told him what I’d seen. A wise and educated man, he made me swear never to mention it outside Manodiavolo, then found a poem he liked and made me read. I remember the words still. They were by an American I’d never heard of, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  O what are heroes, prophets, men,

  But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow

  A momentary music.

  God of mischief and the savage wilds, god of masks and lies and drama.

  Great Pan is Dead.

  Not here.

  Five days on the recriminations had begun. Lombardi was back in Rome where a furious Justice Ministry had opened an internal inquiry. Teresa Lupo, Gianni Peroni and Silvio di Capua had returned too. The word from on high was that the civil servant was likely to carry most of the blame. The team in Cariddi weren’t the only ones he’d exasperated. Plenty of his own colleagues were ready to sharpen their knives as well.

  The lawyers had just one individual in their sights, an out-of-work actor called Gabriele Amalfitano, and he’d been released on bail after telling them how he was forced into the act after his wife was kidnapped. The prosecutors were reluctant to charge him. Amalfitano had talked freely and frankly of how he’d been seized, given the story he was supposed to recount to the police and the character he had to play. Dragging him into court would only make the embarrassment public and rouse sympathy for a man who’d been forced to go along with the pretence to save his wife.

  Costa and Falcone were left to explain to the local force why they’d been kept in the dark throughout. That had gone rather more easily than either expected. There were a few muted protests from on high but the need for secrecy was something the state police and the Carabinieri in Reggio appeared to accept. It seemed to Costa that both were grateful not to have been involved directly. Perhaps they knew how difficult a task it would prove, and how messy the fallout. When he put that to Scuderi, one of the more friendly local officers, the man simply shrugged and said in a resigned fashion, ‘The Bergamotti. We only had the faintest idea of who they really were. We knew what they did. But faces, where exactly they lived from day to day, they didn’t call the man Lo Spettro for nothing.’

  ‘I believe his real name was Giovanni Ursi,’ Costa had said.

  ‘Do you?’ Scuderi replied with a smile. ‘Well … what does it matter now? They’re gone. And we get someone else in their place.’

  That change occurred without the mob war everyone had predicted. The Corigliano ’ndrina had taken over Bergamotti territory overnight. The arrangement, as far as the police understood, was that the Sicilians would receive the percentage cut once given to the Bergamotti, applied to the whole territory. In return Mancuso and his men had slipped back home, doubtless by private boat from somewhere along the coast, and vanished. Intelligence believed the link man between the two would be Santo Vottari, newly-promoted to crimine within the Corigliano crew.

  All of this must have been improvised in the twenty-four hours before Vanni died. There was no sign of the Sicilians by the time Costa, Falcone and Casale’s men made it to the bergamot grove. No trace of Vanni either, only blood on the parched September ground beneath the trees. Rocco had been seen vanishing in his scarlet Alfa down towards Cariddi. His car was found later in an autostrada garage. Of him there was no trace. The only news of his sister came from vague reports in Sicily. They suggested she’d been taken hostage as surety for the Sicilians’ visit, and murdered when her father’s treachery became apparent. Alessia, the aunt he’d first met when she was playing the part of santina as they lured him into the hills, had gone too, all her business interests in Cariddi and elsewhere, the restaurant included, passed over to new masters.

  For more than a century this territory had been in the hands of the family that called themselves the Bergamotti. It seemed they’d played the part of rulers, benign mostly, taking their share of public contracts, rigging elections, milking everything from construction works to hospital supply contracts, drug contraband and prostitution. Few ordinary civilians prospered in business or public institutions without their support. Even the church was not immune to their persuasive powers; they had friends and allies everywhere, most of whom now shifted their allegiance to the new regime.

  And all the while the capo, Vanni, had lived the quiet and modest life of a humble farmer in the abandoned mountain hamlet of Manodiavolo, ruling an empire that spanned businesses around the world while tending his animals and his orchards. Nothing like this could happen in Rome, in Sicily, in Naples, anywhere else in Italy. Yet to Costa, through the time he’d spent as Maso Leoni, it seemed eminently believable. They were the people painted in that book he’d been given at the start. Criminals ‘full of a strong goodness’.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to forget that pool of dark dried blood beneath the bergamot trees. All that was left of the man. No corpse. No hard evidence. In Aspromonte even a treacherous, murdered gang lord would never be left for the police if those who killed him could possibly avoid it.

  Five days and everything was petering out. One last lunch over the water in Cariddi, a meal in which Toni, the waiter, served them politely but said scarcely a word. Then they picked up their bags from the house and took the hired car to the airport.

  He drove. Falcone stared out of the window.

  ‘We’ve nothing to worry about,’ he said as they turned into the airport. ‘We did what we were asked. How they found out …?’ Falcone shook his head. He looked older, more gaunt after all this time beneath the harsh Calabrian sun. ‘I doubt we’ll ever know.’

  ‘Rocco,’ Costa said. This thought had been bugging him for days. ‘They let him live.’

  ‘You think he’d give up his father. His sister?’

  It wasn’t much of an airport. So few people came here.

  ‘Leo. They let him live. I saw these people on the inside. If they were going to kill him they’d have done it there and then. They don’t wait on anything. They never have.’ He pulled up outside the car hire cabin. ‘Rocco. It has to be.’

  One hour to the plane. One hour to Fiumicino and Rome. They had coffee then Costa’s phone rang. A caller who withheld the number. A caller who didn’t speak until he did then said, ‘You’re fleeing. Are you happy?’

  A croaky, smoke-stained woman’s voice he’d first hea
rd in a shepherd’s hut in the hills. ‘Alessia. Where are you?’

  ‘The place you just left and never even saw me. Some policeman you are.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘Walk outside. I’m in the cheap little blue car by the gate. I’ve something for you. Something you need to see as well.’

  The line went dead. He walked back to Falcone and said he’d have to fly alone.

  ‘Something,’ he added, ‘something’s come up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I do.’

  Falcone didn’t move.

  ‘Here,’ Costa begged. He handed over his case. ‘Check that in for me. I’ll pick it up as soon as I can. There’s a … contact. From Manodiavolo. They won’t talk with you around. Just …’ He had to stop. They were calling the flight on the crackly airport speakers. ‘I’ll phone you when I can.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer. The car was where she said.

  ‘Get in,’ Alessia told him, pushing open the door.

  She was wearing black. Black cardigan, long black dress, black boots. Her hair was tied behind her skinny neck in a black bow. Her eyes were clear. The cataracts were contact lenses as he’d suspected. It was hard to picture her as the scruffy santina he’d met with Rosa in the hills. But that was a part she played, an act, like everything else.

  Costa settled into the seat and asked, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘What about the man with you? Is he going to follow us?’

  ‘No. He’s on the plane to Rome. No one’s going to follow us.’ All the same she looked round the car park to see.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  A quick glance at herself. ‘A funeral. Where do you think?’

  Half an hour later they were pulling into the piazza of Manodiavolo. There was a hearse parked up by the fountain, a single wreath of lilies and laurel leaves leaning against the front.

  The place looked deserted. But then he heard voices, coming from the cemetery behind the church, and they walked there, slowly.