Cry Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  I was saved by the earthquake …

  They’d have punched his lights out.

  He looked up.

  Now, Venus was a ghost of a shadow. A new day was about to begin. Another day in Umbria. He felt like shouting out for joy, he felt so good. Then something his grandfather had told him popped into his head.

  ‘Never tell anyone you’re happy, Sebastiano. Don’t even tell God. He’ll try to take it away from you. We’re supposed to suffer on Earth, remember that.’ Then his grandad had raised his hands to the heavens and started to whine out loud. ‘O, what a tragedy! What a terrible disgrace! Something bad’s going to happen, I can feel it in me bones.’

  His grandad had winked.

  A golden crown of sunlight lit up the lip of the ridge. Cangio stood up, folded the blanket and raised his hands to the heavens.

  ‘Oh, what a tragedy!’ he moaned out loud. ‘What a disgrace! Something bad is going to happen. I can feel it in me bones.’

  In the woods on the other side of the valley, a wolf began to howl.

  By then, Venus had almost disappeared.

  NINE

  4 August, 2012

  ‘So, what are we looking at?’

  The technician hadn’t heard General Corsini enter the Special Ops video room, hadn’t seen him move along the banks of monitors, glancing over the shoulders of the other video operators, then pass on to the next one.

  ‘Sir …’

  He pressed the pause button, meaning to stand up and salute, but the general’s hand fell heavily on his shoulder and held him in his seat.

  ‘Continue,’ General Corsini ordered him.

  The man in the white lab coat pressed ‘play’ and the action rolled on. ‘This footage is from the NO TAV demonstration in Turin, sir. That high speed rail tunnel through the Alps is attracting all the media attention. A CCTV camera caught the Black Block up to their old tricks. There are a lot of new recruits, by the look of it.’

  ‘Italy’s Got Talent,’ Corsini said, edging closer to the screen.

  ‘I thought you’d want to see it, sir.’ He pressed a button with a double-arrow and the video began fast-forwarding. ‘This is the bit. Just look at what’s happening around the van, and you’ll see what I mean.’

  He pointed to a light blue Fiat Fiorino that was backing out of a garage.

  ‘They must have hidden it inside the off-limits zone a couple of days before the march.’ He froze the frame, then zoomed in closer. ‘They sprayed the camera, but the paint was cheap and runny.’ He prodded the button and the film moved forward again in slow motion, advancing frame by frame.

  The rears doors of the van were open, and someone was handing out gas masks, crash helmets and long wooden pick-handles. ‘The registration plate has been identified. It belongs to an agitator from Monza that we’ve been following for some time. We can’t identify any of the faces, unfortunately.’ He froze the frame again and pointed with his finger. ‘Except for this one. This lad here, General Corsini.’

  A gang of masked and hooded youths in black clothes were crowding around the back of the van. There was only one exception: a boy in a green sweatshirt, hair shaved close to his scalp, an owlish pair of black-framed glasses on his nose and a green scarf dangling around his neck, who was standing beside one of the open doors of the vehicle.

  ‘Watch what he does, sir,’ the technician said.

  The figures on the screen began to move again, hands going backwards and forwards, passing out clubs, masks, Molotov cocktails. There was no sound, no way of knowing what had been said. The boy in green grabbed the arm of one of the others, pulled him round and the two faced up to one another. They seemed to be arguing.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Corsini asked.

  ‘He seems to be trying to stop them,’ the technician suggested.

  ‘My guess is that he wants a mask and a billy-club.’

  ‘Maybe, sir. But …’

  The technician rushed the frames forward quickly, then slowed the film down to normal speed again. ‘Here, the real action’s over. The van’s disappeared inside the garage, and they’ve hidden the gear. As you can see, sir, the one with the green scarf hasn’t got a gas mask or a pick-handle. He’s either careless, or stupid …’

  ‘Directing operations, it seems.’

  The technician cleared his throat. ‘We stitched on a clip taken three minutes later from a camera on the other side of the square.’ The video speeded up. ‘This one’s only black-and-white, sir, but you can’t mistake him.’

  ‘Stop there!’ General Corsini whipped off his glasses and leant so close to the screen that his nose almost touched it. ‘Now, go back slowly.’

  Seen in reverse, the boy in the glasses wiped his mouth on his sleeve, drank from a fountain, stood up, then walked backwards away from the fountain.

  ‘They seem to have left him on his own, sir.’

  ‘Maybe he ditched them. Job done, he’s off to organize the troops somewhere else. A lone wolf with a mission.’

  ‘It’s possible, sir.’

  ‘Do we know who he is?’

  ‘We’ve got him charted, sir. He turns up in quite a few protest videos. And he isn’t always on his own. We’ve spotted three other agitators from the same town. A nascent cell, if I may say so, sir, though we’ve never seen them caught up in anything as big as this before.’

  Corsini patted the technician on the shoulder. ‘You’ve done an excellent job. The “Lone Wolves”, let’s call them. I want to know everything that you can find about them. Who they are, where they live, what they do.’

  11.20

  His morning capuccino lay on the desktop gathering dust.

  General Corsini was studying the photographs and factsheets in the case file. One picture in particular had caught his attention. Those clear eyes peering out inquisitively from behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses eyes were intelligent, alert, ironic. They stared with a bright twinkle directly into the general’s eyes. The boy’s lips were parted slightly, his head to one side, as if he were saying to the person who was taking the picture: Hey, what’s all the fuss about?

  Corsini read the factsheet that came with the mugshot.

  Lorenzo Micheli, twenty-two years old. He still lived in the small town where he had been born – Spoleto in Umbria. A third-year student of philosophy at the university in Perugia, he was near the top of his class. The father was a left-wing trade unionist, the mother worked in an old folks’ home. Lorenzo was a blood donor and a volunteer in a soup kitchen.

  An angel, by all accounts.

  The boy was a regular protestor in the region where he lived. If anybody was planning to build something up or knock something down, Lorenzo Micheli was in the front line carrying a placard saying NO! He had even organized a protest march in his home town against a proposal to construct a wind turbine plant in the nearby mountains.

  Tilting at windmills?

  General Corsi smiled as he read that Lorenzo attended classical music concerts when they were free, and philosophy conferences even when he had to pay. The close-up photo had been taken in Turin the day before the NO TAV march; he had been attending a two-day conference at the University of Turin regarding Socrates.

  ‘A spot of philosophy, then a good old punch-up,’ the general murmured.

  There was another photograph in the file. Obviously shot at another protest march, the boy was wearing the standard Palestinian scarf over his nose and mouth – he seemed to favour the red one. The glasses looked out of place with the mask. Even so, dressed up for battle, Lorenzo Micheli looked menacing enough.

  The scant material remaining in the file dealt with the three close friends who had gone on protest marches in Rome and Perugia with the Philosopher.

  ‘D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers,’ he murmured.

  Then, he opened the OS map and spread it out on his desk: UMBRIA.

  A lot of things had been happening in Umbria in the months following the latest swarm of earthquakes. The na
tional database kept coughing up odd statistics. Illegal arms had been seized in Foligno and Gubbio. Vast sums of money were pouring into the area as reconstruction work began. The banks in the province were having a high old time of it now that European money was involved. And not just the banks, General Corsini thought. Where there was cash, there were people who knew how to siphon it off: builders and planners, politicians and administrators, fixers and go-betweens. Plenty of controversy for Lorenzo Micheli and his crusading acolytes to get their teeth into.

  He put the files aside and drained his cold coffee in a single draught.

  Maybe he had found the ‘egg’ that he was looking for.

  TEN

  17 August, 2012

  The abandoned badger’s sett would serve as a den.

  Cangio stopped by the roadside, studied the area through his binoculars. The area was isolated, easy to defend, perfect for hunting.

  The first thing he had spotted in his new job was the pack of wolves that had taken winter shelter in the woods down on the lower slopes. There were droppings and piles of abandoned bones – birds, voles and even the ribs of a wild boar – spread over an area of a square mile. With the mating season about to start, and if everything turned out the way he hoped, he would be able to document and photograph the regeneration cycle – courtship, mating, digging out the den, the weaning of the cubs, the raising of the family. An article about the wolves in Umbria would have a better chance of getting into the RRN, Rivista delle Riserve Naturali, than the foxes he had left behind in London.

  He didn’t miss London one little bit.

  The Sibillini Mountains were all he had been hoping for. For the first few months he’d been involved in civil defence work, helping to clear the rubble after the earthquake, but there hadn’t been that much to do. The park was empty, more or less, and he had soon been allowed to get on with his job as a ranger.

  Obviously, he had started out by taking a census of the wolf population.

  He changed down to second gear, pulled into the turning space, and parked the ancient Land Rover, wanting to check the den’s location from a different angle. It had been an uneventful patrol – no fallen rocks blocking the single-track road, no dead sheep, roaming bears or wild boars, just a huge crested porcupine sleeping slap bang in the middle of the road halfway up the mountain. Nothing to report, as usual.

  It was a beautiful day. A cerulean blue sky above his head, a chill wind raking through the mountains. Wrapped up in his hooded, camouflage ski jacket, he peered through the binoculars, convinced that wolves would soon move into the area.

  He intended to be there when they arrived.

  It was a perfect place for wolves to breed. Scattered over the landscape were abandoned farms, forgotten churches and stone huts where shepherds used to sleep in the old days when they brought their flocks to graze up on the mountain top for the summer. Now the ruins were home to owls and a host of other birds, a perfect environment for a family of wolf cubs to thrive. Most of the people had gone, leaving earthquake-damaged homes and living in container boxes or wooden huts down in the valley. Nature was slowly taking possession of the land again, and no animal was better adapted to do so than the wolf.

  He woke up every morning looking forward to the day ahead. And yet, for an instant, before he was wide awake, he had the strange sensation that if he opened his eyes he’d find himself back in his flat in London again.

  He focused the binoculars, thought he saw a flash of movement near the hole.

  Had the colonization started?

  Cangio glanced at his watch. He should have been patrolling the woods further down the mountainside. A large herd of wild boar had been reported in the last week, marauding on the edge of town after dark. Complaints had been coming in about damaged fences, uprooted shrubs, ruined fruit trees and ravaged lawns. If a plant had a root, the boar would dig until they found it. The day before, Marzio had been talking about issuing hunting licenses to cull back the herd. Cangio didn’t like the idea of shooting the boar, even if they were a damned nuisance, but something would have to be done about them, that was for sure.

  The local hunters would be over the moon.

  He packed up his binoculars and turned around. The Calabrian he had seen in the bar the week before was standing twenty feet away. While he had been watching the den, the man had been watching him. There was no way of knowing how long he might have been there, except by asking him, of course.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked, walking towards the man.

  The man grunted something in reply.

  ‘You’re a farmer, aren’t you?’ Cangio asked him.

  The man didn’t answer him directly. ‘I’ve seen you up here often. Looking for something, are you?’

  There was something about him that Cangio couldn’t quite put his finger on. He didn’t seem curious but he was certainly inquisitive. He asked you questions as if he knew the answers already.

  ‘There’s an abandoned badger’s sett over there,’ Cangio said. ‘I saw a wolf sniffing around it the other night. He’ll be back soon with his mate, I reckon.’

  The man’s eyes never shifted. ‘You going to shoot them?’ he said.

  Cangio couldn’t hold back a laugh. ‘They’re a protected species,’ he said. ‘It’s my job to protect the wolves. If they do decide to use the den, I’ll probably have to cordon off the area for a mile around here to keep people away. How close is your farm?’

  The man pointed to the west. ‘More than a mile. Over that way,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t leave any animals out at night,’ Cangio warned him. ‘Not even dogs. If wolves have got to feed a family, they’ll kill anything in sight. Whatever you do, don’t throw waste food on compost heaps. And for God’s sake, don’t try to feed them. They’ll bite your hand off.’

  A smile appeared on the Calabrian’s face. ‘Would I do something like that?’ he said, then mumbled something about his sheep and turned away, leaving the ranger standing there on his own.

  Cangio watched him disappear over the brow of the hill.

  ELEVEN

  18 August, 2012

  There were just the four of them up there.

  Which wasn’t surprising, Zì Luigi Corbucci thought. Who the fuck would drive to the top of a mountain on a day like that? There was still no sign of the sun and it was freezing in the shadows.

  Raniero and Ettore were sitting on the church steps wrapped up in their jackets, a life-sized lion reclining on either side of them. The stones lions had been guarding the entrance to the church since the days when Francis of Assisi used to come up there to pray, Cosimo Landini had chosen to inform them. But so fucking what? He hadn’t come all that way to see a locked-up church.

  Corbucci watched the two picciotti over Landini’s shoulder.

  Raniero and Ettore were fresh from home – Don Michele’s boys – but they showed respect and did what he told them to do. Not like this old buzzard, Luigi Corbucci thought, staring into the face of the man with the silver-hair combover.

  The banker was dressed for business: grey pinstripe suit, a trench coat worn loose, designer scarf with the label on show. They’d picked him up outside the station of the next town down the railway line – his idea. Cosimo Landini didn’t want to be seen with them on his own patch. His face was the colour of battered beefsteak, blue and pink in the cold air. His hair kept lifting up like a silvery curtain in the wind.

  ‘What’s the problem, Landini?’

  ‘I’ve been hearing rumours,’ the banker said, looking him dead in the eye.

  ‘What sort of rumours?’

  ‘Other banks,’ Landini said. ‘We had an agreement, Signor Corbucci. I thought of you as a privileged client.’

  ‘I should hope so, too.’ Luigi nodded. ‘The money we’re putting up. But we need to get things moving …’

  Landini cut him off sharply. ‘Nothing happens overnight, Signor Corbucci. It could take years. These projects have to go through so many planning co
mmittees. I understand how frustrating it must be, but that’s the way it is. There are so many different levels, the local council, the regional authorities, the provincial government, the parliament in Rome. They all have to have their say. I’d be happier if we could speed things up, I assure you.’

  Luigi Corbucci made one last try. ‘You see that space down there?’ he said, pointing to a field beyond the crossroads, white spots moving on a green board. ‘We get rid of those sheep, put up a motel, catch the passing trade – travelling salesmen, lorry drivers, tourists. And that field next to it,’ he pointed again. ‘There’s room for a four-storey car park with outside space for coaches. You make them pay for parking, obviously. A nice little town like this, you’ve got too many cars clogging up the centre. That’s no way to greet your average day-tripper. We’ll clean the place up then market it properly. You won’t recognize this town in five years.’

  Corbucci remembered reading somewhere that Hitler had said the same about Berlin before the Americans blasted it to smithereens.

  ‘I believed that we were partners,’ Landini was saying.

  Partners in crime, Corbucci thought. Instead, he said: ‘You need to speak with the movers and shakers, find out what they want, how much they’re asking.’

  ‘Me?’ Landini objected. ‘I’m a banker. I have a reputation in town. All this has got nothing to do with me.’

  Zì Luigi took a deep breath, struggling to control his breathing. Landini had always known what he was getting into. That was what they were paying him for.

  ‘Listen, Landini. Either you’re in on the deal or you’re out.’ Corbucci turned and waved to Raniero and Ettore, telling them to start moving. Then he turned back to Landini. ‘Make up you mind. I haven’t got all week.’

  The banker looked at him, a tight smile playing on his lips. ‘Signor Corbucci, don’t tell me how I ought to run my business. I’ve helped you as far as I can.’

  The soldiers were moving towards the car.

  Raniero pointed the key, pressed a button and the clunk of opening doors sounded thunderously loud in the crisp, cold air.