The Savage Shore

by David Hewson

  She took his hand and closed it on the clasp. ‘You keep it. The woman who wore that doesn’t exist anymore. The one who took her place appreciates her solitude. She craves that. Talking to a god that probably doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Lucia. Please …’

  ‘No.’ With a rush she was on her feet. ‘You need to understand. We have to go. Me and Rocco. If you can find us they can. Mancuso’s nephew. Il Macellaio’s offered money for our heads. He won’t stop looking either.’

  There was a look of Vanni in her at that moment. His blunt determination. One that never wavered. All the same he took her by the shoulders, tried to peer into her eyes, wondered what and who he saw there.

  ‘You can’t spend your entire life running …’

  ‘I have,’ she threw back at him. ‘Didn’t you listen?’

  ‘We can change things.’

  ‘How?’

  Maso Leoni knew how to lie. How to deceive, fool, pretend. But he wasn’t there. It was just Costa, a Roman, who could never master that talent.

  ‘How?’ she asked again.

  ‘We can try.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her composure back. ‘We can’t. That’s the last thing we must do. Here.’ She held out her hands, as if for cuffs. ‘Arrest me. Do it. See how long I live in jail.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Then what?’ Her eyes filled with tears again and there was nothing he could say or do to stop them. ‘What? I become your secret mistress? A ghost again? Hide away in some dismal apartment wondering if the knock on the door’s you or Mancuso’s hoods waiting on the other side? Look at me. Look at me. This is who I am, Nic. I run. I hide. I change the way I seem. The way I am. Rocco and me. Brother and sister. Different names. Different people everywhere we fetch up. In Italy … in places you’d never think of. This is who we are. Tra Scilla e Cariddi. This is the place we live. The only place. If I stop … I die.’

  ‘Lucia—’

  ‘I die!’

  There was no arguing with the Bergamotti. Never mind what name they used. He held her then. She responded to him, long and slow, a farewell kiss. It had that considered finality to it. Then she whispered, ‘Do you think I want this? Do you think that? Really?’

  ‘I will be in Rome,’ he said. ‘If ever things change—’

  ‘They won’t. They can’t.’ She tore herself away from him. ‘We have to pack. He’s useless at it. Don’t come looking for me. You’ll kill us all.’ She pointed down the narrow path, past the Devil’s Bridge. ‘The boat’s down there.’

  There were barely twenty passengers on the number twelve boat back to Fondamente Nove. If he was lucky he’d make the last fast train to Rome. A place he’d almost forgotten. A life too.

  He sat in the outside area at the stern, watching Torcello vanish on the twilit horizon. Their mansion was just visible along the shore. They might flee that very night.

  His phone rang and another piece of glass fell from the screen as he answered. ‘Leo.’

  ‘Finally. Where are you? What have you been doing?’

  The sound of the office was behind him, like a murmur of busy bees.

  ‘Chasing fairy tales.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘I thought I might have a lead for Rocco.’ A lone gull hovered over the churning wake behind him, hoping it might throw up a fish. ‘I didn’t.’

  Home was where your friends were. Family and those you loved. People who didn’t feel the need to scurry into the shadows. Fixed points in life. Everyone craved that comfort. Vanni and his family too, but for them it would always be out of reach.

  Tra Scilla e Cariddi. A place that seemed to choose them and never let them go.

  ‘I want you in here tomorrow,’ Falcone replied and it sounded as if Cariddi and the Bergamotti were behind him already. ‘We’ve got too many damned malingerers in this office and a pile of work to catch up on.’

  ‘I was wondering …?’

  What did you say? What could you? Give me more time. Let me run. Like her. And maybe one day change her mind.

  ‘Yes?’ Falcone always sounded puzzled, a little embarrassed, if he thought the conversation might turn personal.

  ‘Nothing.’

  There was no point. He knew it.

  The boat was past Mazzorbo. There was nothing to see of the island now except the campanile of Santa Maria Assunta jutting from a low line of darkness at the edge of the lagoon.

  A phone that was about to die.

  A wallet with fifteen euros and a couple of credit cards.

  A choice that had to be made.

  ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said and cut the call.

  Tired and grubby, he longed to be back in his own bed. One thing only had followed him from Aspromonte: the silver bracelet, a reproduction of an ancient clasp a renegade thief and murderer once spirited from Catalonia to the Mezzogiorno where it lay in a cave next to his tomb for centuries, hidden away in the hills.

  He took it out and turned the thing over in his fingers. The blood that had to be Gaetano Sciarra’s almost looked like a decoration, a varnish on the soft metal dulled by years of wear.

  A gift from a woman whose real name he’d never know.

  Diesel fumes swirled all round him from the engine. Someone, somewhere had lit an illicit cigarette. A plane rose from the runway of Marco Polo and roared above the number twelve motonave to Venice, lights flashing, spewing a whiff of avgas over the dank and fusty aroma of the lagoon. The scents of Calabria, the exotic bergamot, the fragrant bitterness of wild thyme, might have been nothing more than memories from a dream.

  Costa leaned over the stern of the boat and peered at the turbid, opaque water in its thrashing wake. Then threw Lucia’s bracelet over the edge and watched as it vanished beneath the waves.

  Author’s Note

  This story is a work of the imagination, though one founded on some fact. Four books in particular provided reference points during its creation. Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, though not set directly in Calabria and dating from the 1930s, remains an eye-opening revelation of the reality of the Mezzogiorno and the response to it of one, cultured, northern Italian. Letizia Paoli’s Mafia Brotherhoods, Organized Crime, Italian Style provides a vivid academic insight into the social context of the three principal Italian crime organisations, the Mafia, the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta. Tommaso Astarita’s Village Justice, Community, Family and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy is a fascinating account of a murder trial in Pentedattilo in 1710 which affords a sobering view of the society and culture of this unique region. As in Levi’s work, its description of the difficulty of imposing conventional moral and judicial rigours on Calabrian rural communities carries considerable contemporary resonance. Old Calabria, written by Norman Douglas, first published in 1915, is strong on the region’s Greek roots and offers some laconic observations about the long history of brigandry in the Mezzogiorno.

  The complex hierarchy of positions within the modern ’Ndrangheta has been greatly simplified for the sake of brevity and clarity. Those wishing to understand the highly prolix structure behind the organisation will find this described in detail in Paoli’s work. The mythical history of the region, from the origins of the crime organisations in the Andalusian Garduña to the persistence of Greek and pagan culture, has been similarly elaborated upon from common folk tales and other sources.

  I have reworked the geography of the Strait of Messina for this tale. Visitors to the tip of Calabria may, however, find echoes of the story in Scilla, on the coast in the Strait of Messina, among certain hamlets in Aspromonte, and in the ghost village of Pentedattilo which lies east of Reggio close to the bergamot-growing region of the Ionian coast.

  David Hewson, 2018