Cry Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  Corrado kept his eyes on the track, avoiding a pot hole.

  ‘I’d give you a hand, of course,’ Bonanni rattled on. ‘Get in touch, know what I mean? Smooth the way, and all that. You know, have a quiet chat, say hello, see exactly what they might be offering …’

  This was another version of the man that he had known inside. A load of lip as always, but never one to shoot his mouth off. Now he was like a wheel rolling downhill fast. Making suggestions like that? To him?

  Maybe Andrea was sniffing more than he was selling …

  ‘You know,’ Bonanni was saying, ‘you made the right move staying here, Corrado. Peace and quiet, no pressure from the law, no one muscling in. I’m thinking of settling here myself. Life looks good in Umbria. It’s just like home, but there’s more money knocking about, rich folk building a decent habit, know what I mean? That’s long-term earnings, regular business. They start on weed then move up. You can’t beat an escalating demand, Corrado. Ask me, you’re always better going with the flow. We could set up together, if you fancy it, make a fortune …’

  On and on – he never stopped.

  They passed the road sign, and he read it out loud. ‘San Bartolomeo sul Monte, 783 metres above sea level. That’d look good on a visiting card.’

  Another hundred yards or so, Corrado pulled into the car park. There was no one up else there. There never was when it was that cold up on the mountain.

  Bonanni left the car door open as he walked towards the viewing platform. ‘You can see for miles,’ he called back, excited by the view.

  Corrado doubled round behind the car and shut the door. You had to do things right. An open door could compromise a situation if you had to make a quick getaway. It was a question of order, discipline. That was the first thing he’d learnt when he started working with Zì Luigi thirty years ago.

  No loose ends.

  Bonanni was standing on what they called the Belvedere, a flat table of grey limestone, vertical on three sides, twenty or thirty feet high, projecting out over the valley and offering a fantastic view.

  Corrado pointed down into the valley. ‘You can see the prison better from here,’ he said, taking a couple of paces to the left. ‘That was our cell, there.’

  Bonanni stared and nodded, but he didn’t move. ‘It looks like a grand hotel from up here. Except the windows are so small. You can’t see the bars, either. Which one are we talking about, Corrà, the second from the end on the east wing?’

  ‘The third,’ Corrado said.

  ‘You sure? I’d have sworn on my mother’s grave …’

  Bonanni’s brow furrowed, an expression of puzzlement on his face.

  It was the Force 99 that did it, because Corrado was pointing the pistol in his face.

  Bonanni glanced back at the prison, as if he thought Corrado was going to kill him because they didn’t agree which cell they’d shared.

  Corrado felt the jolt and saw the bullet take a piece out of Bonanni’s left ear.

  The sight was off a fraction, or he was out of practice. Yes, that was it. He hadn’t put anyone away for twelve years. He shifted the weapon a fraction to the left and squeezed the trigger again.

  Dead centre.

  A spray of red caught in the wind like a glorious sunset. Bonanni dropped on to his knees, then fell flat on his front.

  Corrado lowered the gun and moved in close, making sure the fucker was dead. His own heart was ticking like a clock. He felt a surge of something tight in his chest and caught his breath. It had been a long time. Too long since he had shot someone. But now he felt the rush he had always felt.

  The stench the body was giving off, piss pooling on the rock, the smell of shit. It always happened, an instant before or an instant after. The body emptying out, nothing else to give.

  There was nothing like it.

  He shifted the corpse with his foot, rolling it over, then went through Bonanni’s jacket, taking his wallet, keys, some bits of paper, and stuffing them into his pockets. The less the coppers found, the better.

  A minute later, he was driving carefully back down the mountainside.

  It felt good to be working again.

  When he got back home, the first thing he did was phone Zì Luigi.

  ‘All sorted, boss,’ he said. ‘If he’s talking now, it’s to the angels.’

  That was when Zì Luigi went berserk.

  FIVE

  15 April, 2012 – London

  It was a cold, wet Sunday morning.

  Another one …

  Cangio thought of going for a walk, but then the rain turned to sleet and the wind started gusting. There wouldn’t be much to see in any case, apart from the fox holes he had already mapped in his notebook.

  Another down side to London – there were no wolves.

  He was watching the foxes with a growing sense of frustration. For an Italian, they had been a novelty at first. You heard them at night overturning dustbins, scavenging for food. Sometimes you even saw them slinking through the back streets after dark. Foxes in London? He had been amazed. It was a rare thing to see one in Italy. Foxes were virtually extinct at home, while England was overrun with them. There were half a million running wild, according to the Sun, and a tenth of the fox population was living in the capital. The problem was that ‘urban’ foxes were dismissed as a pest. If you said you liked them, people thought that you were crazy.

  He had stopped telling everyone that he studied wolves after his first day at work. The other salesmen had started talking about Lon Chaney Jr. He had never heard of the actor or seen the film until he checked it out on Wikipedia. They’d called him ‘The Italian Wolfman’ for a week or two, then finally decided that Seb was easier.

  The Americans hadn’t bought the flat in Docklands.

  Canary Wharf was ‘cute’, they’d said, then disappeared as surely as the wolves that had terrorized the British Isles back in the Middle Ages. The other guys in the office had said that things were bound to get worse before they got better.

  ‘The crisis is walloping the property market,’ Barry had declared. He was the most seasoned salesman working out of the agency. ‘Even London’s a disaster. Who could have foreseen a thing like that? The Arabs are buying like crazy in Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but they reckon Europe’s on the slippery slope. They’re rubbing their hands, I bet, just waiting for our property prices to start free-falling.’

  ‘They’ll be waiting till bloody doomsday,’ Roger had said, his voice low, his eyes flicking in the direction of Claire Maunders, who was speaking on the telephone. ‘You see how busy she is? All the customers want to do is sell. And the index price is going up, not down. I’ve only managed one bloody sale this month. A lousy bed-shit …’

  Barry had secured a sale, as well: a penthouse with a view of Parliament.

  Cangio was praying the Americans would come back, but he knew that the God of Property was no longer paying any attention to his prayers.

  He looked out of the window. The rain was still lashing down.

  He opened his laptop, checked the latest news from Italy. In Umbria there had been more earthquakes, not big ones like the one that had killed twenty-six people a couple of years before, but big enough to frighten the life out of anyone who felt them. His mother had told him they had even felt some of them down in Calabria, almost four hundred miles south of Umbria. It was like a train rushing past, she’d said. You heard a rumble, then the house began to creak and shake, and the light fittings started moving. The Apennines ran all the way from the Alps in the north to Calabria in the south. There’d been a ‘swarm’ in Soverato some years before. He still recalled the helplessness you felt, the fear that the house would come crashing down on your head at any moment. The only thing you could do was sleep in the car and wait for things to settle down again. If it was cold and wet in Umbria, he could imagine the hardship the people were going through.

  He opened his UK email, but there was nothing of interest.

  He checke
d his old Italian email, and half-a-dozen emails popped up.

  The one marked Ministero dell’Ambiente was at the bottom of the list. He opened it first and something like an earthquake rumbled in his chest. He read it again, three or four times, then let out a howl like an alpha wolf, the leader of the pack.

  ‘Bingo!’ he cried, the Wolfman now, back inside his own skin.

  He caught the Tube a bit earlier than usual.

  It was Monday morning, everyone subdued after the weekend, depressed at the thought of another working week, though Cangio didn’t feel the weight of it. He gave a bright ‘Good morning’ to the girl sitting opposite who was giving him the once-over as he dropped into his seat and made himself comfortable.

  She grunted something, pushed earphones deeper into her ears and closed her eyes.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said, though she couldn’t hear him. ‘You’ve got a lousy day ahead, I bet.’

  Claire Maunders was already at her desk when he got to the office. She didn’t look up from the computer screen but she knew that he was there.

  ‘Get me a coffee, Seb. Black, no sugar.’

  Good morning to you, my dear Sebastiano. How are we today? Is all well with you, my dear Italian friend? Claire didn’t waste her breath on small talk any more. Her time was too valuable for that sort of crap. Claire Maunders – Claire of the ravishing long legs, Claire of the swishing blonde ponytail – was his equal no longer. She had been promoted to sales manager on account of her amazing record.

  A record he had helped to boost.

  She had smiled at him one evening, asked him whether he was ‘up for a drink, a Chinese meal, some fun and games in Soho’. They had ended up in bed, of course. London was like that. Fast and furious. You flirted, you fucked, you forgot. The morning after – yes, there’d even been a morning after! – Claire had brought him coffee in bed and told him to take it easy. She would cover the sales appointment he had fixed for nine a.m.

  The flat had sold for four hundred thousand, and Claire had beaten Barry’s annual sales record by a hair’s breadth. From that moment on, there’d been no more drinks, no meals, no fun, no games. Claire had a career going for her. She was the boss, and he was demoted to making coffee whenever Claire was thirsty, running out for sandwiches if Claire felt a hollow spot deep down in her belly. Her favourite drink was a Bloody Mary. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that she drank male blood by the pint. Then again, she was no better or worse than any of the other girls he had met in London.

  Sick of London? Tired of life? Sick of London women?

  These thoughts were rattling through his brain as he pulled her a doppio espresso on the genuine Italian Ariete coffee machine. He made a cup for himself as well, and wondered how to tell her what had happened the day before.

  ‘Where’s my coffee?’ a sharp voice called.

  He drank his own coffee slowly, savouring the expression that his announcement was bound to provoke on her face.

  ‘Seb!’ Claire’s voice cut through the air again. ‘Where – is – my – coffee!’

  He picked up Claire’s drink, carried it to her desk and placed it beside her computer, waiting for her to look up, thank him, maybe. But she didn’t say a word, just kept on staring at the screen.

  ‘I’ve got news for you,’ he said.

  She didn’t react. Maybe she hadn’t even heard him.

  He leant forward, caught her ponytail in his fist, put his teeth to her neck and began to suck hard. She tried to pull away, but he held on tight. He hadn’t been thinking of lovebites as a way of handing in his notice.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she cried.

  ‘A souvenir,’ he said, letting go of her, seeing the burst blood vessels flowering on her lily-white neck. ‘Something to remember me by.’

  ‘A hickey?’ She raised her hand and tried to slap his face. As the slap came winging in, he caught her by the wrist and held her firm. Her eyes were open wide, alarmed, as if she thought that he was going to hurt her.

  ‘My resignation, let’s call it. Signed, sealed, delivered.’

  She glared at him as if she hadn’t understood a word he had said.

  ‘Tomorrow you can make your own coffee. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she snapped.

  ‘Italy,’ he said, letting go of her, taking a step back. ‘Umbria, to be exact.’

  ‘Selling property?’ she demanded, as if it was the only job worth doing.

  ‘Working as a ranger in a national park,’ he said.

  ‘What about the Americans? They’re ready to sign.’

  ‘You look after them,’ he said. ‘I’ve got better things to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He didn’t bother to tell her about the wolves.

  A minute later, he was heading for the nearest travel agent’s.

  SIX

  21 April, 2012 – Calabria, Italy

  ‘It’ll be like Eldorado once the funding starts to flow …’

  Raniero listened carefully, wondering where the boss was going.

  He’d heard about the earthquakes up in Umbria. He didn’t know how big the last one had been, or if anyone had died. He only knew that Don Michele was interested in getting in first, before the other clans caught on.

  ‘Luigi’s up there, but things aren’t working out the way they should. You’ll go up with him next time. You’ve got a nose, Raniero – I want you to use it. Stick close. If he so much as farts I want to know. Are you listening?’

  Listening?

  Raniero had been waiting a lifetime to hear that voice saying those things.

  He drained the coffee from his cup, the phone glued to his ear, and turned his face towards the turquoise sea beyond the picture-window of the hotel room. The slag he’d brought down for the weekend wouldn’t notice a thing, but why take chances? Even so, it was hard to hide his excitement. He felt like a choir boy who’d been made up to bishop. He took in the news from Don Michele, fixed a smile on his face, then turned to look at the girl. Great face, great body.

  She smiled back at him.

  She respected men like him, she said. Real men who could handle themselves and show a girl a good time. She’d spent half the night telling him, working hard to keep him happy, hoping for a bonus.

  ‘Is Luigi sick, or something?’

  Don Michè was quiet for a bit. ‘Luigi’s still breathing,’ he said at last. ‘His brain’s the problem. That’s his trouble. He’s stuck with old friends, old ideas … We’re fresh blood, me and you, Raniè. We know we’ve got to change if we want to do business up there. Adapt, that’s the key word. Luigi Corbucci don’t think that way. Truth is, Raniero, he don’t think much at all. That man of his, Corrado Formisano … They shut him up too long in a small dark cage. Luigi gave him a job to do, the minute he got out, and didn’t he go and fuck it up.’

  Raniero heard a click of disappointment on Don Michele’s tongue.

  ‘They could have ruined everything up there.’ Don Michele blew hard on his lips. ‘We need to send the right men in, men who do what they’re told and do it right. You keep tags on Luigi. Don’t let him out of your sight. Push him in the right direction, but … Now, this is important, Raniè. Tell me if he doesn’t take the hint, OK? Take Ettore up to keep you company. He’s no genius … useful though, a solid worker. We need to get this ship on track, Raniè. You answer to me, and no one else. Right?’

  What else was there to say? Zì Luigi would still be giving the orders, but it was just a front. Raniero would be standing right behind him, reporting back to Don Michele. Zì Luigi Corbucci was one step away from being ‘retired’.

  ‘This is really a … a great honour,’ Raniero said, managing to smother the emotion welling up in his chest. He looked out to sea again as the girl turned towards him. Maybe she had caught the lilt of gratitude in his voice.

  The boss was quiet for a minute. ‘If everything goes the way I want it to go,
Raniè, you may be running the shop up there in Umbria soon.’

  Raniero held the phone in a trance, then realized the line had gone dead.

  Don Michele’s orders were simple – keep Zì Luigi on the straight and narrow; make sure Corrado doesn’t blow the place apart. If he could handle the job, Don Michè would give him what he wanted: his own commandamento in Umbria, maybe, a cow that hadn’t been milked yet.

  Raniero glanced at the radio clock by the bed.

  Ten thirty-three.

  It would look good inscribed on a medal. Solid gold. The Madonna of Polsi, Queen of All the Clans on the front, the time and date on the back. He would wear it around his neck for the rest of his life. The miracle had been a long time coming, but here it was at last.

  He turned his attention to the girl.

  Tired of watching him, she was making the most of the breakfast tray the waiter had brought to the bedroom just before Don Michele phoned. She caught his eye, her teeth biting into a cream-filled croissant.

  Raniero eased back in the armchair, opened his bathrobe and showed her what was growing under it. ‘Get over here and chew on this,’ he said.

  The girl’s eyes opened wide. She squeezed the cream from the cake across her lips, then fell down on her knees in front of him. He closed his eyes as he felt her hot breath on his flesh, but it wasn’t her that he was seeing in his thoughts. He saw the face of Don Michele, heard Don Michele’s voice, remembered the way heads turned when the don drove down the promenade in his red Ferrari, the throbbing roar of the mighty engine.

  Raniero didn’t want a red Ferrari.

  He wanted a black one.

  SEVEN

  24 April, 2012 – Bari, Italy.

  General Corsini checked his watch.

  02.58 …

  The breeze coming off the sea was freezing cold, but he didn’t feel a thing.

  Adrenaline was racing through his blood as the moment approached. He’d been watching the Furore for almost an hour. The rusty tramp steamer had docked late that afternoon from Lagos. Now, she was moored against the dock wall, outlined against the warehouses. Only her night lights were showing, red and green, the portholes dull black dots down near the waterline. No one seemed to be keeping watch on deck, but you learned not to trust appearances. A great deal of planning went into these operations. You could never entirely guarantee the outcome, but nothing had ever gone wrong before.