Cry Wolf

by Michael Gregorio

  ‘Let Luigi run with the ball,’ the don had told him over the phone. ‘If he runs the right way, fine. If not, Raniè …’

  ‘Them bullets aren’t the end of it,’ Zì Luigi growled. ‘He chops the head off a fucking wolf and gets himself arrested! Where the fuck did Corrado find a wolf?’

  Raniero remembered the wolf Corrado had kept in the barn. ‘A wolf?’ he said, playing dumb. ‘That’s really pushing it.’

  Zì Luigi wasn’t listening. ‘That Franzetti was pissing his knickers. The coppers’ll put two and two together, he reckons, and come up four.’ He blew out noisily through his nose. ‘We need to get this sorted, Raniè.’

  Raniero eased his foot on the accelerator as they approached the restaurant. ‘If you want me to take care of him …’

  Zì Luigi cut him off quick. ‘Lunch, Raniè. First, we eat, then we talk.’

  Il Vecchio Mulino sat on the banks of a shallow trout stream that ran through the valley, wood-covered mountains on both sides. If you looked out of the picture window you could see a fish swim past occasionally. If it was a private chat you wanted, you took a table in one of the corners away from the window.

  It was quiet that day, only half-a-dozen customers in for lunch, all watching out for the live trout that would make their day. Raniero had been there a couple of times before with Zì Luigi, the first time watching fish, the other time talking business.

  The Zì didn’t wait for the waiter or the maître d’ to welcome them in, he just plopped himself down at the table furthest away from the water.

  ‘Sorted? How?’ Raniero reminded him, but a waitress appeared.

  A pretty kid, seventeen or eighteen, Raniero reckoned. Cherry ripe and ready for it. She smiled at him, then said, ‘What can I—’

  Zì Luì didn’t give her a look or let her finish her spiel. ‘I want that homemade pasta with the truffles,’ he said.

  ‘Strangozzi …’

  ‘No mean portions, mind. And give me a truffled trout to follow. With er …’ Zì Luigi picked up the menu, gave it a glance. The girl grinned at Raniero, her green eyes flashing at Zì Luigi, then back at him. ‘… roast potatoes and this stuff here, what is it … agretti?’

  ‘It’s a bit like wild spinach, sir.’

  ‘That’ll do. You, Raniè?’

  Raniero didn’t bother playing around. ‘Give me the same,’ he said, and watched her go – white cotton blouse, tight black skirt, fishnet tights. He knew she was giving her bum that extra little sideways push for him. When business was sorted, he would definitely be coming back here.

  He turned to Zì Luigi. ‘You want me to take out this manager, as well?’

  Luigi shook his head. ‘Franzetti learns fast, Raniè. All he needs is a whiff of this.’ He rubbed his thumb and fingertip together like a bankteller. ‘We have to clear the way for him, that’s all.’

  Raniero nodded. ‘I thought you said he wanted to put the blocks on?’

  Zì Luigi opened his mouth to speak but the waitress appeared again with a bottle of wine and a plate of ham, cheese and melon. Before she left them to it, Zì Luigi started in with his fingers.

  ‘Tasty ham,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Give me a bit of bread, Raniè.’

  Raniero sat back in silence and watched him clean the plate. ‘You were saying … about the bank manager,’ Raniero reminded Zì Luigi, but the waitress was back by then, asking if they liked the ham and carrying away the empty plates.

  A minute later she was back again with the pasta. As she laid the plates on the table – the pasta looked like a pile of tape-worms in a slimy black sauce – she glanced at Raniero, held his gaze and said, ‘I told the chef to treat you like family.’

  That made Zì Luigi laugh. ‘That’s what we are!’ he said as he grabbed his fork and tucked in. ‘Hmm, delicious!’ he said, his eyes closed and mouth full, a string of pasta dangling from the side of his gob leaving a trail of olive oil like snail slime.

  The waitress smiled at Raniero. ‘Enjoy!’ Going back to the kitchen, she moved even slower this time.

  Zì Luigi cleared a third of his plate without a word. ‘He’s right, though. Franzetti, I mean. Bullets all over the place, the papers bursting with them, dead wolves and Corrado locked up in the jug. I should have gone up there to see him myself instead of sending you and Ettore. He took the message wrong, and that’s a fact! So now we’ve got a problem.’

  Raniero ignored the insult, Zì Luigi implying that he hadn’t handled Corrado right. To be honest he did blame himself a bit, though wasn’t going to admit it. He’d seen the tension building up in Corrado but he hadn’t read the situation. They’d let Corrado out on parole but they hadn’t let him go home. Stuck up on the mountain top alone he’d been like that nuclear plant in Japan, temperature rising, bound to blow sky high. It hadn’t taken much to get Corrado going, that was for sure. Still, it was Zì Luigi who’d fucked it up. He should have left Corrado where he was and let the cops and social workers keep an eye on him. The best thing would have been to blow him away, but the cops had been too close to risk something like that.

  ‘Things have taken a turn for the worse,’ Zì Luigi was saying, mopping up the last of the truffle sauce from his plate with a bit of bread. ‘Jesus, I could eat another plate of that!’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then stared at Raniero. ‘I want you to fix it, Raniè. The quicker the better.’

  Raniero put down his fork. He’d had enough. He didn’t like the grub they served in the country. Back home it was all fish – real fish, fish from the sea – not mouldy old truffles, farmed trout and fried lumps of grass.

  ‘Fix what, Zì Luì?’ he said, playing dumb again, stringing the old man along.

  Luigi didn’t answer him directly. ‘Not what, Ranié. Who … Corrado. You’ve got the connections.’ He rolled a lump of bread into a dough ball then popped it into his mouth. ‘I ain’t been inside for over twenty years. Is this what getting old means?’

  Raniero didn’t know how to take the question. ‘You did your best by Corrado,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left to do, Zì Luì.’

  ‘You’ll handle it, then?’

  Raniero raised his glass and held it up to the light. ‘This ain’t Sassicaia,’ he said with a smile.

  Zì Luigi smiled back at him. ‘I know the bubbly is more to your taste. Just get it done and you’ll be drinking some of that Pol Roger Winston Churchill. How does that sound?’

  Raniero nodded, wondering what the Don would give him. Don Michele was worlds apart from men like Zì Luigi. He was younger for a start, only five or six years older than Raniero. He knew a Philippe Patek from an Oyster Perpetual.

  Zì Luigi jumped up suddenly. ‘I need to take a piss.’

  ‘Consider it fixed,’ Raniero assured him. ‘A phonecall’s all it takes.’

  The lines around Zì Luigi’s eyes relaxed, then he toddled off to the loo.

  The old man’s prostrate was playing him up again.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The next day

  General Corsini closed the slim file.

  Calisto Catapanni was forty-two years old and he had spent his entire career in a small provincial town where nothing much ever happened. Perhaps his wife had held him back. Catapanni had married Elena de Bonis within a year of arriving from Milan to take up his first appointment as an investigating magistrate, and de Bonis was a well-known name in town. Her father, Aldo, had been a judge on the local circuit; two of her brothers ran a successful law firm which handled divorce and slander cases for the most part. The de Bonis family owned a splendid, once-noble palace in the oldest part of town, and they all had apartments there. Calisto and Elena Catapanni had been living in the building since the day of their marriage.

  And yet, Magistrate Catapanni wasn’t happy with life in the provinces.

  He seemed to harbour ambitions – dreams of escape, dreams of glory, as General Corsini saw them. On a couple of occasions he had tried to make a name for himself and
earn promotion, though neither attempt had come to much. Particularly the most recent one.

  In search of something which would bring him into the public eye, Catapanni had begun to take a special interest in the local maximum-security prison. Career magistrates were always keen on such places. They were full of criminals desperate to get out and not at all concerned about the means they used to do so. Catapanni had chanced on a prisoner named Andrea Bonanni. Bonanni had served less than three years of a ten-year sentence on charges connected with drug-trafficking and extortion, but he wasn’t cut out for prison. He was small fry, relatively speaking, a foot soldier from one of the strongest ’Ndrangheta clans in Catanzaro. Catapanni had spoken privately with him on four separate occasions, then secured his release and admission to a collaborators’ protection programme when the man declared that he was willing to ‘reveal important information regarding the importation of cocaine and heroin from Venezuela and Colombia’.

  Within three weeks of his release, Bonanni had disappeared.

  If the corpse that the earthquake had disgorged at San Bartolomeo sul Monte – just five miles from the magnificent palace where Calisto Catapanni was living – turned out to be the corpse of Andrea Bonanni, it was a fair bet that the magistrate would be stuck in the provinces until the day they decided to pension him off.

  Would any desperate prisoner entrust him with their lives again? On paper, Calisto Catapanni was the man that he was looking for. General Corsini picked up the telephone and called the number.

  A voice answered, though not immediately. A female voice, a woman who identified herself as a clerk to the court, announced that Procurator Catapanni was ‘not in his office at the moment’.

  General Corsini told her who he was and she put him through immediately. ‘Procurator Catapanni,’ Corsini began, ‘I apologise for disturbing you. You’re busy, I imagine, but there is something that I wish to discuss with you. I was hoping to come up from Rome to see you personally, but …’ he paused for a moment, ‘… I’m pretty busy, too, as you can imagine.’

  ‘I fully understand, General Corsini. I was writing up a case report … a case of no great urgency, I do assure you. How can I help you?’ The man’s voice sounded diffident, yet curious at the same time. Corsini thought he could hear the dialogue going on inside the magistrate’s head: Friend? Or foe?

  ‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Corsini said. ‘It concerns an investigation on which I am working. If I may steal a few minutes of your time, I’ll fill you in on the details.’

  Five minutes later Corsini stopped speaking and waited for the magistrate to react.

  Calisto Catapanni was silent for some moments, and when he did speak up, he seemed even more reserved and measured than before.

  ‘I’ve been working in this part of the world for … well, for almost fifteen years now, General.’

  ‘Fourteen years, seven months and a week or two,’ Corsini informed him.

  ‘You seem to be informed of the facts,’ Catapanni said, and he might have been forcing himself to smile as he said it. ‘What I really meant to say was that … well, I’m surprised, truly surprised. In all the time I’ve been here I have never heard the slightest mention of anything so serious as what you are suggesting.’

  ‘I can understand that, Doctor Catapanni.’

  Corsini using the formal expression, dottore, a term of little meaning which many magistrates seemed to love.

  ‘The thought of such things happening here in Umbria,’ Catapanni said. ‘The green heart of Italy, as the poet, Carducci, once—’

  ‘A magnificent image,’ General Corsini pounced, ‘but dated and rhetorical, don’t you agree? The earthquake knocked the “green heart” for six, and things are bound to get worse before they get any better. The reconstruction of the province will have the gravest consequences, as I told you, with money pouring in from Bruxelles. Umbria will never be the same again, I fear. The important thing is to strike, and strike quickly.’

  The general needed a magistrate’s signature to authorize his operation, while the magistrate in question seemed to be hedging his bets, nervous about what he might be letting himself in for.

  ‘An emergency situation,’ the magistrate said.

  ‘An emergency which can be averted,’ Corsini shot back at him.

  ‘And you can document everything you’ve told me so far?’

  ‘Everything.’

  The general paused for a moment, letting the message sink in.

  ‘A corpse has come to light in Umbria in the last few days,’ he went on. ‘I have read the carabinieri reports. So have you, I imagine. The body has not been identified as yet, but if it does turn out to be the man whom you released from prison … well, I’m sure you don’t need me to elaborate any further. It would be a serious blow to your career. I advise you to take the opportunity that I am offering. It may never come your way again, and will turn your colleagues green with envy. I do not wish to sound rude, Procurator Catapanni, but really … you ask me if my investigation is watertight? If you would rather place your hopes in the Andrea Bonannis of this world, just tell me and I’ll look elsewhere for help. You are not the only magistrate in Umbria.’

  Moments passed in silence, then the magistrate spoke. ‘What do you want from me, General Corsini?’

  ‘For the moment, I need authorisation to put my men in place in the area under your jurisdiction. All the risk, if that’s what you want to call it, will be on my head. But you and I will share the glory.’

  ‘I can have the papers on your desk tomorrow morning,’ Catapanni said.

  A minute later General Corsini put the phone down, opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out three things: a green carboard box stamped with the face of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a slim Prometheus lighter made of solid silver, and a cheap metal ashtray which advertised Cynar. He smoked a toscano cigar only four or five times a year – when he needed to concentrate, or when he had something to celebrate.

  This time, it was a combination of the two.

  THIRTY-SIX

  One hour later

  The Watcher was glad to be back home in Rome, his mission over.

  He killed the jet of hot water and heard the phone ringing.

  The voice of his supervisor was quivering with a rage he could barely contain. ‘Where the fuck were you? Why didn’t you answer the phone?’

  Am I supposed to shove it up my arse to keep it dry? he thought.

  ‘I was in the shower,’ he said instead. ‘I wasn’t expecting any calls. Not after handing in the final report—’

  Another curse cut him off. ‘All leave’s cancelled. You’re back on duty.’

  Clearly, there was a problem. Equally clear was the fact that he was going to be a part of the solution.

  ‘The Legend wants to see you, pronto. Given that you’re as clean as a baby’s bum I’ll tell him to expect you straight away.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Someone’s sent some bullets through the post to the President of Umbria. The Legend wants to know what’s going on. You were up there …’

  ‘Wasting my time, minding those bloody kids!’

  ‘Following orders,’ the supervisor reminded him. ‘And here’s another one. Get down here double quick!’

  ‘I’ll be twenty minutes, depending on the traffic.’

  ‘Make it ten, or you’ll be in trouble.’

  The Watcher snapped his mobile phone shut then reached for his underpants. Jesus Christ! If the Legend had lost interest in those kids he could say goodbye to the promotion he’d been counting on, and the office job that went with it.

  ‘Shit!’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  18 September, 18.03

  The green light blinked on.

  A moment later, the cablegram machine began to spew out a message.

  It was a rare occurrence, and Brigadier Tonino Sustrico just happened to be in the operations room at the time. He picked up the sheet of paper, read it once, then r
ead it out loud to his three subordinates.

  ALL RANKS RECALLED TO ACTIVE DUTY – STOP – IMMEDIATE MOBILISATION – STOP – FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FOLLOW ON – END OF MESSAGE.

  Mario Pulenti, the radio operator, stared up at him. ‘What’s going on then, Brigadier?’ He and Sustrico would have been going off duty at eight o’clock.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Sustrico admitted. It might be anything from the whim of some high-ranking officer who happened to be passing through town to the announcement of a full-blown coup d’état. ‘You’d better start making the calls. I want everyone here asap. Now,’ he added, before Pulenti could ask him what he meant.

  By the time the clock struck seven, the twelve carabinieri who manned the station were crowded into the operations room, staring at the cablegram machine. Nothing more had come through after the first message. Three minutes later, the green light blinked on and another sheet of paper came rolling into the collection tray, like a snake uncoiling.

  ‘Their clock’s slow,’ Pulenti said.

  SPEC OPS COORDINATOR ARRIVAL IMMINENT – STOP – ALL RANKS CONFINED TO BARRACKS – STOP – RADIO SILENCE IMMEDIATE – END OF MESSAGE.

  Sustrico passed the sheet of paper to the others.

  ‘Special Operations Coordinator?’ Carosio asked him. ‘What’s the operation?’

  ‘I know as much as you do,’ Sustrico replied.

  Mario Pulenti was in a proper state. ‘You’d think they frigging owned us! I’m supposed to be taking the missus to her mother’s for dinner. She’ll go bloody nuts, she will!’

  Fifteen minutes later, everyone was busy on their mobile phones, calling family or friends, trying to explain that there was an emergency without having any idea of what the situation was. Carosio was saying that he wouldn’t be home that night, asking his father to pick up his son from catechism lesson. Luisella Tonelli, the only female, was cancelling the pizza she had arranged with her friends. Tonino Sustrico was telling his wife for the fourth time: ‘You know how it is, love. We’re a paramilitary police force. If an order comes in, it has to be obeyed. Do you want me to lose my pension?’