Cry Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  Cangio shrugged his shoulders. ‘The account had been emptied out. They’d found another frontman, probably. A kid in primary school, or one of those people you see working in the fields collecting tomatoes – an immigrant worker with a residence permit. They always have a long list of names …’

  ‘Is that what he was, the man they killed and buried in San Bartolomeo? A frontman? Is that what you’re worried about?’

  Cangio pulled her close. ‘When I go for a stroll in Umbria, I want to find truffles, mushrooms, wild asparagus, olives,’ he said. ‘Not corpses with bullets through their brains. Speaking of olives,’ he said, kissing the tip of her nose, ‘how much oil is left in that bottle?’

  TWENTY

  Later that day, Spoleto

  The door opened and a face appeared.

  Tonino Sustrico swallowed a curse. Special Constable Falsetti was the last person he felt like humouring at the end of a hectic day.

  ‘Can I trouble you, Brigadier?’

  ‘Try not to,’ Sustrico warned him, tidying a desk that was already neat.

  He had just printed out his case report regarding the discovery of the corpse in San Bartolomeo sul Monte. A phone call to the local monitoring station on Monte Pettino had helped a bit. The epicentre of the earthquake had been recorded on the seismograph at less than a mile from the village: 3.4 on the Richter scale, an undulating wave which had faded after 8.7 seconds. Not so large, the seismologist commented. There had been no damage to buildings, but the ‘upsurge’ effect had been intensified by the fact that the shudder had been less than four miles beneath the earth’s crust and that it had rumbled on for so long. Long enough to spew the body out of the ground.

  It sounded good as explanations went.

  Experience had taught Sustrico that there was nothing like scientific data and numbers with decimal points to add a touch of authenticity to whatever rubbish you were obliged to write. The problem was that there was nothing more he could say about it. He had summed up the accidental finding of the body by Roberto Casini, but had been unable to suggest which lines of enquiry the investigation should take. The identity of the victim still remained a mystery. And as for who had killed him, they weren’t even on the starting block. The Regional Forensic Laboratory thought the teeth might lead to an eventual match, but that could take weeks or months. Then again, it might lead nowhere.

  Cause of death: a .38 calibre shot through the forehead.

  Who had fired the fatal shot? Unless somebody came forward and confessed, they were a long way from ever finding out.

  ‘I thought you’d gone home,’ Sustrico said. ‘Didn’t your shift end at four?’

  Falsetti closed the door but didn’t sit down. ‘I’ll be going in a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ve been busy. In fact, I think I may be able to put a name to the body.’

  Sustrico shuffled the papers on his desk. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I’m not one hundred per cent certain. Eighty per cent, let’s say. Do you recall the skin on the shoulder blade?’

  Sustrico nodded, remembering one of the photographs in the lab report.

  ‘It was the only bit of skin that hadn’t rotted. There was a tattoo …’

  ‘More like a stain,’ Sustrico corrected him.

  Falsetti ignored him. ‘I thought I’d check it out. I may have been lucky, let’s say.’

  Sustrico smiled. ‘Lucky means clever, I take it.’

  He didn’t want the little shit to think he was a bumpkin. ‘Lucky,’ Falsetti said again. ‘There’s a tattoo shop in town, and they’re on the Internet. I compared the lab’s jpeg with the patterns shown on their website, then I phoned them up and asked some questions. The tattoo that we saw … The artist keeps records. That’s what I meant when I said lucky. He checked his books and he says he’s used that pattern only five times in the last two years, and – hear this! – he keeps the names of all his customers. He won’t do a tattoo unless you show an identity card. We know one of the names on his list, Brigadier Sustrico. He’s got a criminal record. Does the name Andrea Bonanni ring any bells?’

  Tonino Sustrico sat back in his seat and laid the report flat on the desk. He had never heard the name, but he knew from the grin on Falsetti’s face that he was going to have to rewrite his report before he went home. A wasted afternoon. Jesus! Next time they asked him to take a trainee copper from the north to cover for holiday absentees he was going to say no. It was better to muddle along without help. Less than a year spent working in a big city and smart-arsed characters like Eugenio Falsetti had seen it all and done it all. They seemed to know everything there was to know about policing.

  ‘Five names, you said.’

  Falsetti nodded. ‘True, but Andrea Bonanni’s the only one who’s ever been in the local maximum-security prison. He served three years of an eleven-year sentence for drug trafficking. Originally he’s from the town of Crotone down in Calabria. He got himself a tattoo to celebrate the week he was released. But there’s something else …’

  Sustrico didn’t bother to ask, just waited out the melodramatic pause.

  ‘I called the prison. There’s a guy who works there – a mate of mine from Milan, as a matter of fact. We sometimes grab a beer together. He checked the prison archive. While Andrea Bonanni was banged up inside he asked to speak with Magistrate Catapanni. They met on four occasions.’

  ‘Calisto Catapanni?’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘He’s attached to the local procurator’s office. What makes you think it’s important? Magistrates speak with criminals all the time.’

  Falsetti arched his eyebrows as if to say, Are you really stupid, or just pretending? ‘Why?’ he said. ‘This is a clan killing, Chief. The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, to be precise. The name comes from the Greek word for a brave and honourable man. Bonanni was brave, all right, but he wasn’t honourable. He spoke with Magistrate Catapanni and the clan didn’t like it. That’s my take on it. It’s a typical mafia-type MO. They wiped him out with a bullet between the eyes. That’s what they do to anyone who rats on them.’

  Boom! How Sustrico hated people from Milan. Everything that happened to them was big, important, super, mega. Silvio Berlusconi was only one of the hated millions. The Milanesi were full of themselves. Fast-tracked Special Constable Eugenio Falsetti goes off on a holiday placement to a country town where they stopped robbing hens just the day before yesterday and straight away, there you go: the Mafia did it!

  ‘That’s what who does?’ Sustrico said sarcastically.

  ‘I told you, Chief. The ’Ndrangheta …’

  ‘I’ve seen the same films you’ve seen,’ Sustrico said. ‘I watch the news as well. But let me remind you, Falsetti, this is not the deep south. This isn’t Naples or Palermo. Up here things are different.’

  Falsetti wasn’t phased. ‘Maybe so, but somebody with the same tattoo Bonanni had was found with a bullet in his head. Bonanni’s disappeared, and he was collaborating with a magistrate. It sounds like Naples or Palermo, or Catanzaro in Calabria to me. That farmer on the hill was right about one thing: they didn’t want that body to be found. We wouldn’t have found it at all if it hadn’t been for Mother Nature.’

  Tonino Sustrico let out a rasping sigh. ‘If you like to read in bed, Falsetti, I suggest you catch up on the latest crime statistics for the province. We’ve got the lowest murder rate in the nation. No violent crime. Some drug consumption but it’s under control. Not a single reported case of criminal extortion. What would the ’Ndrangheta be doing up here? Boring themselves to death? Or maybe they like a decent glass of wine with their salami sausages—’

  ‘They’re national, Chief, mobile,’ Falsetti interrupted him. ‘Milan’s overrun with mafiosi. They’re taking over the country. Not the way it happens in the films, of course. These people are businessmen. They’re on the look-out for new investment opportunities. Especially in a quiet place like this, where nobody would suspect what’s going on—’

  Sustrico interrupted h
im. ‘Let me tell you how I see it, Falsetti. That is not Andrea Bonanni. I’ve no idea who he is, I admit, but it hardly matters. A travelling salesman or a railway worker, maybe. He was visiting town and he met a woman. The woman’s husband killed him in a fit of jealousy and he knew where to get rid of the corpse. A crevice up in the mountains? That’s local knowledge, that is.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘If you want a tale a bit more colourful,’ Sustrico continued, ‘let’s say that drugs come into it. A local dealer, a customer who doesn’t pay. The dealer shoots him then gets rid of the body. No corpse, no crime. It might be as simple as that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  Sustrico breathed out loudly through his nostrils. ‘Thanks for trying, Falsetti. It’s been a tough day but you’ve been a great help.’

  As soon as Falsetti closed the door, Sustrico pulled the document up on to the computer screen again and added a note at the end of his report: We await the results of dental evidence in the hope that the teeth may throw light on the possible identity of the corpse.

  He printed out the corrected page, threw the old one into the rubbish bin, then phoned the courthouse. The court was closed for the day, a woman’s voice replied, but when Sustrico told her who he was and who he was looking for, he got the answer he was after.

  ‘I’ve got his home number if you want it, Brigadier,’ the woman said.

  Sustrico wanted it, and made a note of it.

  He thanked the woman, put the phone down, then picked it up again and called the new number. It rang and rang for quite some time. He was almost on the point of giving up when he heard a click and a voice whispered gently in his ear: ‘Yes?’

  ‘Magistrate Catapanni?’

  ‘Who is that?’ the voice asked, sharply now.

  Sustrico identified himself and explained why he was calling. He had met the magistrate a number of times in the exercise of his duties, though he had never been able to work up much sympathy for the man. Calisto Catapanni was always cold and distant, a cut above the rest of humanity, it seemed, though everyone knew he’d been stuck in the same job in the same small town for almost twenty years.

  ‘Andrea Bonanni?’ the magistrate repeated. ‘But you can’t be certain of it. Well, Brigadier, the wisest thing would be to wait for the outcome of the forensic tests, don’t you agree? Let’s see what the experts have to say … rather than muddy the waters any further.’

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking, sir,’ Sustrico said.

  The line went dead without a word of goodbye, or even thanks.

  Bugger you! thought Sustrico as he reached for his jacket.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Two weeks later, Spoleto

  Three of the boys were stretched out on the steps of a fountain.

  It didn’t look as though they’d had much sleep, and they were wearing the clothes they’d worn the day before, the creases showing. The lanky one called Riccardo Bucci was making short work of an ice-cream cone, while the other two popped cans of beer they had bought from the general store on the corner.

  Hair of the dog, the Watcher decided, given what they’d put away the night before.

  Between sips, the drinkers let their beer cans rest inside the overflowing basin of the ornamental fountain. The water flowed from one of the mountain springs which had made the town a sort of primitive spa. He had picked up a pamphlet from the hotel desk which claimed that the Romans had colonized the town a couple of thousand years before because the water was so cold; there were the remains of the ancient Roman baths to prove it.

  He sipped his coffee and took another glance.

  They were messing around, splashing each other with water, the noise they were making turning heads in the square. A vegetable market was going on, and there were quite a few people about, so he had no chance of overhearing what they might be talking about. Still, he had a pretty good idea. He hadn’t been out of his room the night before. Instead of reading or watching TV he had tuned in on the signal coming from the bugged car, then switched over to the frequency used by the long-distance surveillance team that had been trailing them out in the woods after dark.

  Now he knew precisely what they had been doing.

  First, they’d driven out of the town and into the hills, where they’d spent the early part of the night roasting sausages, drinking beer and smoking things they shouldn’t have been smoking. Shortly after two a.m. they had called it a night, making one short – pre-planned? – stop in town before they all went home to sleep it off.

  He had listened to the recording again that morning. Summing it up, there’d been a barbeque in the woods. The four boys who made up the band, plus the sister of one of them, and a couple of her girlfriends. When it was time to pack up and go home, Lorenzo Micheli had loaded the girls into the sister’s car and taken them home, while the other three lads had piled into Lorenzo’s car, the one that was fitted with the bug.

  When they had got back to town, the cars had gone in different directions.

  The recording of the conversation in the car was a mess. To make a readable transcript of what had taken place would not be easy. There’d been plenty of high-pitched shouting and wild enthusiasm before the event, self-congratulation and noisy celebrations afterwards. Now, of course, it was as clear as a bell what they’d been up to. He sat at a table beneath a sunshade in the open-air café, one eye on the suspects, the other on the mobile phone in his hand, and the article which had appeared that morning on a local website.

  VANDALS AT WORK

  Police were called to a work site on the northern edge of town where the new flyover is being built. Construction workers arriving at 6.30 this morning found the main gates broken open, according to the site foreman, Aldo Cuccia. ‘A lot of damage has been caused to plant and machinery,’ he said.

  The windscreen and the headlights of a company van had been shattered, while all four tyres of a dumper truck had been spiked with nails. The intruders also wrote insulting phrases on a wall with spray paint.

  There has been public opposition to the building project in recent months from local environmentalist groups, including Legambiente, Italia Nostra and the WWF, as the new flyover rises in front of the façade of the church of San Caterina, which is widely held to be one of the finest examples of early Renaissance architecture in central Italy.

  A police spokesman issued a short statement. ‘Judging from the amount of wilful damage, we believe that the delinquents made a lot of noise. We entreat local residents, or anyone passing the site last night, to get in touch with us. They may have seen a car drive in or out, and might be able to help us clear up the time at which the aggression took place.’

  The article closed by promising ‘more details before the day is out’.

  What the article did not know, and what the police had refused to reveal, was that the vandals had gone one step further before they went home. The Watcher had been lying on his hotel bed, smoking one cigarette after another, following the situation as it began to unfold. Maybe ‘unwind’ was a better way of describing it. It was all there on the tape, and he had heard it as it happened. As a witness on behalf of the prosecution, he would be lethal.

  Or would he?

  ‘At 02.47 I heard a loud crash as the suspect’s car smashed through the gate …’

  ‘Objection!’ The defence lawyer would jump up, appealing to the judge with supplicating hands. ‘This loathsome snitch may say he heard my client’s car crash into something last night, but there is no way of knowing what the car may have crashed into, nor of saying with any precision where the crash took place. If, indeed, it did take place.’

  ‘Objection sustained.’

  A judge had a vested interest in dragging out a case, of course. Even so, no judge in his right mind would deny the other damning bit of evidence. There’d been almost fifteen minutes of silence, broken only by an occasional whoop of excitement or the crash of glass as it broke. They had been inside the compound
, causing damage to vehicles and building equipment, pissing into the fuel tank of a bulldozer. Then, one of the boys had returned to the car, taken something from the boot, then sat inside the bugged car and made a phone call. This was Federico Donati, the one who studied art and fancied himself as the Italian Keith Haring. He had taken a spray can from the boot, grabbed his phone and called the fourth member of the gang, Lorenzo Micheli, the one who had taken the girls home.

  The transcript read as follows:

  Federico: Are you in bed, Lorenzo? Who with?

  Lorenzo replied, but the microphone didn’t pick up what he was saying, not that it made the slightest bit of difference.

  Federico: We’ve almost finished here. You’re missing all the fun. There’s this big blank wall … it’s fresh cement. Like a big, empty canvas. I was going to spray a psychedelic dick on it, but … Yeah, that’s what I thought. A real waste … So, what shall I write?’

  Lorenzo had told him, and Federico had repeated the slogan, and that was what the workers found on the blank cement wall of the flyover-to-be. The carabinieri had taken photographs before it was painted out, of course.

  An exploding cartoon cloud of a bomb, and the word BOOM!

  ‘That’ll put the shits up them,’ Lorenzo had said.

  The Watcher smiled to himself, seeing in his mind’s eye the gobsmacked defence lawyer trying to crawl his way out of that deep hole.

  But then his smile clouded over.

  He watched Riccardo Bucci go into the shop on the corner and return with three more cans of beer. He chucked them into the fountain, splashing the other two boys, who yelled at him and splashed him back until someone shouted at them, telling them to stop behaving like a bunch of kids or he’d call the coppers.

  That was the problem. It wasn’t just the fact that they behaved like kids – big kids, oversized kids, bored kids, who were old enough to buy beer – the truth was that was exactly what they were. A bunch of kids with no responsibilities, nothing to do, nowhere to go, and it didn’t look as though things would change much in the near future. OK, a couple of them were students working part-time through the summer vacation. They were only working for the beer money. Come autumn they’d stick their noses back in their books again. The other two had no qualifications, and one of them was unemployed. Only a miracle would save them. The Watcher might be gone within the month when the students went back to school, but the other two boys might be emptying cans of beer beside the fountain every day for the next fifty years.