‘Hard to see against the wood, isn’t it?’ said his father. ‘That’s because it’s gold.’ He picked it up again and quickly pricked his forefinger, index finger and thumb, and squeezed them till pearls of blood bobbed to the surface. ‘A carbine, a golden needle, a dagger, a lemon and a glass of water with poison in it. These are the symbols that were laid out before me upon my induction as a santista for the Honoured Society. It is both wrong and right for me to be telling you this.’
Somewhere in the distance, something made a hollow pop, followed immediately by two more, then a pause. Suddenly there was such a volley of pops and cracks that they became innumerable, and then there was silence, like the end of a fireworks show.
‘Papa?’
His father held up his hand. ‘Wait.’ Three more popping sounds reached them. Then they heard the sound of tyres screeching on hot asphalt.
‘Papa?’ said Ruggiero again.
‘It’s all right, son. We are safe now.’
A car roared by the front of the house. Someone beeped timidly at it as it took the corner and started heading out of town, up the mountain.
His father let out a long breath. ‘When you are sworn in as a santista, only another santista may take your life. If a santista should commit an error, he is expected to punish himself, because no one else may touch him. That is what the glass of poison represents.’ So saying, he picked it up and drank it.
‘No!’ cried Ruggiero, leaping up and running over to him.
His father grabbed him and almost squeezed the life out of him, and laughed. Ruggiero could smell alcohol on his breath.
‘Don’t worry. That was Aquavit I just drank. Maybe you’d like one? But no, your mother would not approve.’
He squeezed some drops of lemon onto the beads of blood and winced a little, then licked his fingers. ‘There are thirty-three santisti. When you receive the title, you leave the Honoured Society. You no longer swear in the name of the angels and saints, but take an oath instead to the secular heroes of the Italian Risorgimento: Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe La Marmora. These are men of the state, men of law enforcement. Like other santisti, I pledged allegiance to them. By this act, I left the Society, yet continue to work exclusively in its interests and for its benefit. We members of the Santa collaborate with the authorities. We have friends in uniform, lunch with Senators, negotiate with the political parties of the Republic, and have even helped design new laws. Our peers are not men with guns, but bankers, lawyers, developers and investors. All that we do, we do to advance the fortunes of the Society and enrich its members. When a man joins the Santa, he is condemned to a life of loneliness, exile and betrayal. The first thing he must do is undertake to keep his status secret from the group to which he belongs, from his closest companions, from the ’ndrina that brought him up, and even from the boss that commands him. In the case of a conflict of interests, the santista shall always prevail. To do so, he calls on the help of other santisti. Usually, but not always, he will call on the three fellows who were present at his induction. They will act personally or through the agency of sgarristi, camorristi, or even mere contrasti d’onore.
‘Eventually, circumstances will conspire to make the real status of a santista become known even to his former companions. If they are wise and farseeing, and if they are not greedy for power, they may recognize that their brother has become a santista and withdraw their claims. If they are not, they will accuse him of calumny, collaboration, theft and betrayal.
‘A santista can also become a vangelista. This is a great honour, and there are but twenty-five such persons. But the life of the vangelista is even lonelier. A vangelista writes the rules of the Society. He determines the rites, and enforces them, maintaining unity of purpose, discipline and clarity within the Society as it expands. A vangelista should be a man who is steeped in history and tradition, but one who also knows how to maintain those traditions in this violent and rapidly changing world. A vangelista, for instance, might live his whole life in Germany, or Australia, or Canada, making sure the traditions and lines of command are obeyed, preventing infiltration from the authorities while ensuring the Society has representatives within the authorities. It would be hard, say, for anyone to challenge a vangelista on the protocol of revealing some of the secrets of his work to his own son, since the vangelista is endowed with magisterium. Like a Doctor of the Holy Apostolic Church, a vangelista is the ultimate arbiter of moral codes and the scriptures. It would take another vangelista to challenge him.’
‘What’s higher than a vangelista?’
‘A trequartista. So called because he has access to and command over three-quarters of the entire Society. A trequartista must be an old man, as I hope to be some day.’
‘Is Mamma coming home?’
‘Of course! She cannot be touched. Neither can you. But I don’t think you want to have the reputation of one whose valour derives from his untouchability, do you?’
Ruggiero shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Although I have seen proof of your courage on many occasions, none so striking as the other evening when I found you standing guard, with a throwing knife that would barely scratch a cat, you have not had any opportunity for a public display of this strength of character and determination.’
Ruggiero heard the low wail of sirens as Carabinieri cars shot out of the fortified compound in the centre of the town and came racing up the hill towards the place where the popping noises had come.
His father picked up the golden needle and dropped it into a tiny cylinder pouch and tucked it into his pocket. He grasped the antique carbine, and said, ‘I’m going to hang this back on the wall in our bedroom. I suppose you are dying to get out of the house and see what has happened. The men you will see out there thought they were coming for us. If their wounds shock you, consider that that is what they intended for me, your mother, you and the baby. I will almost certainly be gone by the time you get back.’
51
Ardore
With almost the last of his strength, Blume rolled the heavy log table across the floor, trying to get up some speed without losing aim. It hit the door full on, but without much force, and the weakened hinge stayed firmly in place. He heaved the log away, realizing that he would never manage to gather the strength to try again.
He lifted the lantern and examined his handiwork. Around the hole he had chipped away, the pozzolana cementing the metal frame of the door to the wall of the cave had cracked and begun to crumble. He was able to pull away quite large slabs of it, though some of it stayed hard and unyielding. He went back to the table and took the final lantern as backup. He was pleased at his foresight when the third one died. For a while, he worked in the dark, pulling and punching, breaking his nails and bruising his knuckles. A hot trickle down his arm told him he had reopened the gash in his hand, but he continued working in the dark, putting off the moment of truth.
Finally, he switched on the last lamp to see what he had achieved. Between the frame of the door and the wall was a gap large enough for him to insert his arm and shoulder. He sat down, placed the lamp beside him, leaned his back against the overturned log, and rhythmically, but without violence which would lead to injury and desperation, started kicking at the edges of the gap he had opened. Pozzolana dust and shards of limestone fell on his leg. The frame showed no signs of giving way, but its position relative to the wall seemed to have moved very slightly. He kept at it, alternating from left foot to right every thirty kicks, until the misalignment between the bottom part of the steel frame and the cavern wall was a question of inconvertible fact and not blind hope. A lump of cement, biscuity and welcome, fell on his leg. He rested, slept, had no visitations, woke, and continued.
Eventually there was space for his head. What was the rule? If a cat could fit its head through a crack, then the rest of its body could follow? Or was that a rat? At any rate, he didn’t think it applied to large policemen. And yet, he was going to try. He stretched o
ut his arms and clasped his hands religiously together, then pushed them through the gap and followed with his head before he could stop himself. Immediately he was stuck, but he had been expecting this. Using his elbows and pushing with his foot against the log on the other side, he half turned, and his right shoulder slipped through the breach, wedging his body very firmly against the sharp upper part of the gap, but the sensation of one shoulder going through had given him courage. If the only barrier was pain and not the laws of physics, he would get through. He pushed and heaved and thrashed, and then something came loose in his shoulder and he screamed and cried, and found to his chagrin that he was calling for his mother. But the dislocation of his shoulder saved him. His upper body was out, the rest followed. Weeping with pain, he started edging forwards, realizing that he had left the lamp burning in the darkness behind him out of reach.
He got to the partially collapsed section of tunnel, and was so overcome with anguish at the idea of pushing his head into the jaws of the rock, that he thought he might prefer to die where he was. He remembered the hope he had felt when his hand, emerging from the narrow space, had touched the warm polymer of his pistol.
He pulled Pietro’s lighter from his pocket and used it to illuminate the space around him. Right in front of him, touching his feet, though he had not felt it, lay Pietro’s shotgun, cracked open and discarded by Curmaci before entering the narrow space. He pulled the shotgun to him and poked and pushed it into the black hole in front of him. It came up against an obstruction that had not been there before. He probed at the blockage, which yielded. Curmaci, deliberately or not, had caused a small avalanche of rubble to fall. As he bent down, an unmistakable taste of fresh air streamed into his dry mouth, and it was this that drove him on. Squirming like a worm, floundering like a fish on dry land, and scrabbling like a rodent, he managed to make his way through the narrow section and emerged in the first section of tunnel that had seemed so dark before, but now seemed bathed in soft light. The tunnel roof rose in height, and he walked the final part stooped but on two legs.
The light that came down from above was green, filtered through the corrugated plastic cover that hid the entrance from police helicopters and anyone else who might be interested. The ladder had been drawn up. This did not surprise him, yet it brought tears to his eyes, and he felt ashamed. The glistening rocks and silt that formed the walls of his new prison were appalling in their smoothness. Even with both arms functioning, he could never have scaled them.
He took the phone out of his pocket again and slid the cover back. The small antenna symbol flashed at him, and the reception bars were still absent. He walked around the walls, holding the phone above his head. Nothing.
Blume retreated to just inside the tunnel entrance, and banged the shotgun barrel against the dry rock shaking out as much dirt as he could. He cleared out the left bore and, holding it up to the green light from above, peered into it. The barrel was filthy, but it was a shotgun. With no rifling in the bore, even quite a lot of dirt would not be a problem. The only thing that needed to be precise was his aim, because he had one shot only. He put the left barrel of the shotgun into his mouth, and blew down it. That was as clean as it would get.
He could not suppress the thirst that was taking over his whole being, but in between thoughts of water, he patiently gazed at the green plastic above, watching the play of the sun and shadows on its surface, looking for the hinges and for signs of any objects weighing it down. The best point to hit it would be where the border of the plastic rested on the rim of the hole. He fixed the spot in his mind, stared at it, and imagined how, when he had blasted a hole through it, the sunlight would come in as an angled beam hitting the walls of his deep prison halfway down like a searchlight.
He fished the cartridge out of his pocket, inserted it into the left chamber of the shotgun. The only way this was going to work was if he was lying down. He pressed the recoil pad against his right shoulder and slowly, pausing now and again to let the pain subside, brought his left arm over to steady the barrel. No. He was shaking with pain, and would bury the shot in the sides of the pit. He set the recoil pad on the ground below his armpit and, crooking his arm, pressed the stock into the side of his body. He focused on the pain in his left arm. It was all in the shoulder, not in the finger that was going to pull the trigger. The finger that was going to pull the trigger was steady, and firm. Steady and firm. He looked upwards and fired.
The roar deafened his ear, the shotgun leaped away from him like a pogo stick and a pile of dry dirt and stones tumbled down onto his face, and for a desperate moment he thought he had hit the walls. Instead, he had blasted a patch of blue sky into the green trapdoor and a sunbeam was shining down, not at an angle but straight down upon his face.
He tried to shout for joy, but his voice came out as a dying croak.
He slid open the phone, worked out its menus. There was one bar left on the battery. He found the option for redial, and set it to maximum, which was just five. The phone would dial the same number five times, then give up. And there was no point in calling emergency services, since none of the operators would give a second thought to hanging up on a mute call from a mobile phone.
Blume tested the phone by lobbing it up half a yard and allowing it to fall. As the phone hit the ground, its front panel snapped closed and the call was shut down. Even the slightest bump snapped it closed. He scraped at the earthy parts of the walls till he had come up with some twigs and pieces of root. He shoved them under the sliding panel of the phone, pushed in small pebbles and dirt, and let it fall. The panel stayed open. He stripped his shoelaces from his shoes, and using his teeth and his good hand, bound them tightly around the battery cover.
Blume only had one phone number in his memory. He dialled it with reverential care and lobbed the phone upwards towards the hole he had blown in the corrugated plastic. He missed twice. The first time he caught the phone one-handed before it hit the ground. The second time, it clattered at his feet, but the battery cover stayed on and the panel stayed wedged open. He brushed it down, pressed disconnect, kissed and blessed the phone, then dialled the same number again. He could already see the message flashing no signal as he lobbed it skywards again. This time, it sailed through the shining gap above.
52
Milan
She need not have worried about her reception in the bereaved household. Letizia Arconti did not expect Caterina to answer angry questions. She was just thankful, immensely thankful, that Caterina had taken all the trouble to come up here and talk to her. She had heard that the East Europeans who had done this to Matteo were dead and that it had all been part of some warning to a judge in Rome. What she really wanted Caterina to tell her was how he had looked when they found him.
‘You came down to identify him in the morgue in Rome. You saw what he looked like,’ said Caterina.
‘But they had cleaned him up then, closed his eyes, his mouth. My father died at home, and I remember how my sister and I smoothed away the rictus of pain on his face before we let my mother see him again. What did Matteo look like when you found him? Were his eyes open? Could you see fear?’
They taught you that it was better to withhold as many details as possible from the family of a murder victim. It did no one any good.
‘No, no. I could not see fear,’ said Caterina.
‘That’s because it was a stupid question. Of course, you can’t see fear. The dead are dead. I’m sorry. I’m doing the hysterical widow act.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Caterina. ‘And it wasn’t a stupid question. I’ve seen fear on the faces of the dead. Immigrants who suffocated in the back of a semi. I promise you he didn’t have that sort of fear in him.’
‘Are you trying to be kind?’
‘Yes, but I’m a widow, too. I lost my husband in a road accident.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘He was on a motorbike, got hit by a car. His body was broken all over, his face pulped, and so there was
no recognizable expression on it, but I can guess it would have been shock and anger. He would have been so angry to die at that age. I knew him, knew what he was like. I see the same look of stunned anger on my son’s face, sometimes. You knew your husband. How you imagine he faced his death is probably how he died. They didn’t torture him, you know.’
‘The hours before they killed him would have been torture.’
‘As long as people are alive they don’t really believe they’re going to die. If the realization came to him, it will have been in the last moment, maybe with a sense of resignation.’
‘Thank you, Caterina.’ Letizia clasped her hand. ‘You’ve restored my faith in the system of justice in this country. You people can never get paid too much for what you do.’
Caterina freed her hand as gently as she could.
‘Sorry,’ said Letizia. ‘I have no right to throw myself at you like this. Where are you going now, back to Rome?’
‘Yes,’ said Caterina. ‘There’s a train… The Eurostar.’
‘Matteo used to fly. I always told him he should take the train, but he preferred flying. Come into the kitchen, the children are there.’
‘No, really…’
‘Please? It’ll only take a moment.’
She led Caterina down the hallway. It was a beautiful apartment. The hallway was broad enough to be a room in its own right. Arconti must have been doing well for himself.
‘Children, this is Inspector Mattiola. Caterina. She has a train to catch, so she’s just saying hello.’
An adolescent girl and a boy who probably thought he was an adolescent but was only a baby, sat at the table, a jar of Nutella between them. Caterina lifted her hand in awkward greeting. The boy slowly scanned her face and sought out her eyes; the girl examined her face and then her body.
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