No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  Afterwards, Stefano would drive fast to Lamezia airport. There was a late flight to Rome, which met a connection to Berlin’s Tempelhof. Bernardo had never been outside Italy – never outside Calabria. He tipped the last of the feed onto the ground and the chickens scurried and pecked around him. The dogs sat quietly. God’s truth, he would miss the boy, yearn for him to return.

  Now it was time for him to go to his bunker, sneak away like a rat to its den . . . He saw again the grin that had played on his grandson’s lips and hoped the boy would heed his advice. A camouflaged door opened. His torch showed a tunnel made from concrete pipes. He went to bed.

  1

  He could have flapped a hand and distracted the fly. It was on the branch of a pruned rose, close to a carefully constructed spider’s web. It was a trap – and a work of art. Jago Browne had time to kill, more than twenty minutes, and had settled on a bench. The autumn sunlight was low and at that hour of the morning the frost had not dispersed. The grass around the tidy beds was whitened, the earth sparkled, and the web’s intricate lines were highlighted in silver. The fly was doomed – it seemed unaware of the danger. It took off, then seemed to charge the patterned fibres of the web.

  He was in the park because he was early for his appointment. He should have been sipping coffee with the Frauboss, as he thought of Wilhelmina, and glancing with her through the file, checking the client’s complaint and the level of the bank’s error. She had thought it would reflect well if she – the team leader in Sales Investment – was accompanied by a smartly presented young man from her office: it would demonstrate their commitment that the bank was taking the error seriously. His presence would underline the importance of this client’s account to the bank. He fancied, also, that it was an opportunity to drill him in the standard of care that the bank demanded of its employees. Earlier this morning Jago’s mobile had rung. Wilhelmina had had to cry off: the nanny was sick, the elder child had damaged an ankle so couldn’t go to school, and her husband was abroad on United Nations business, saving the planet with a climate-control programme. Jago was to keep the appointment. She had lectured him on to his manner and the apology he would offer on the bank’s behalf. He glanced at his watch. He had no need to hurry.

  The fly hurried to escape. Its legs and wings flailed and, with each quick movement, the web seemed stronger. It thrashed. Jago had known cobwebs. His mother had dusted them away in the one-time family home; staff used poles topped with feathers to clear them from office ceilings. He had never before sat outside on an autumn morning and marvelled at one. He couldn’t see the spider. He thought of the energy it would have taken to build the web, and the elements it had secreted in its body to do so. The fly fought for its freedom. If Jago had waved a hand when the fly was first close to the web, it would have been safe. He was between Charlottenburg and Savignyplatz, among pleasant, well-restored streets. The park was manicured, with bins for dog mess, cigarette ends, plastic and newspapers. It was a good environment for a client, a place where old Berlin wealth had survived.

  An elderly woman now sat opposite Jago. His attention had been on the fly and he hadn’t seen her arrive. Well preserved and well dressed, an expensive overcoat, a cashmere scarf and decent shoes – from two different pairs. There would be money there, an opportunity for a salesman from the bank. He had his business cards in his wallet and brochures in his briefcase . . . But the fly took his attention away from the woman who might need an investment portfolio. The fly struggled.

  A girl came out of a pizzeria, to the right of the elderly woman. Jago Browne was twenty-six, single and unattached, though Hannelore and Magda, who worked alongside him, might have wished otherwise. Her dark hair was piled high and she wore a shapeless cardigan under a broad apron. Her skirt’s hem was level with the apron’s. She swept the pavement outside the pizzeria with a stiff brush, punishing the slabs. The forehead above the pretty face was cut with furrows. She was interesting, but . . . The fly was not long for this world.

  He looked at his watch. Five more minutes. The apartment block where the client lived was at the far end of the square. The old lady opposite eyed him but didn’t encourage conversation. He thought she would be in her middle eighties. He had been in Berlin long enough, seven months, to know the principal dates and events. The fall of the Wall, the Kennedy speech, the defeat and the flooding of the destroyed streets by hungry men of the Red Army . . . She would have been, then, fifteen, probably in the first flush of beauty, hidden in cellars in the hope that an infantry platoon, an artillery team or a tank crew wouldn’t find her. She stared at and through him.

  An open sports car pulled up outside the pizzeria, but the death of the fly consumed his attention. One last movement of the wings and legs, then a convulsion. Life extinguished or hope gone? Jago didn’t know. Now he saw the spider. Cunning little sod. It had stayed back, against the angle of the main trunk of the rosebush and a stump to which part of the web was hooked. He supposed it needed to hide in case a hungry sparrow or robin passed by. Now it came out and tracked fast over its web. A resourceful killing machine closed on its meal. Whatever sustenance there was on the body of a fly was likely to be more nourishing than a scrap of meat or cheese swept off the pavement in front of the pizzeria. He looked at the web more keenly and realised that what he had taken for fragments of old leaves were the husks of previous victims. He’d learned something. The spider might not be hungry. It was a killing machine and fed regardless of need. That was its nature. It reached the fly and seemed to try to cover it, belly on back. It was smaller than the fly, but had the intellect to plan the trap, the engineering skill to build the web and would eat when opportunity arose.

  Jago pondered. He wondered what he might have done.

  Jago glanced again at his watch, then unfastened the clasp on his case, checked that the papers were beneath his laptop and closed it. Time for a quick cigarette. He lit it, dragged the smoke into his throat and wheezed a little. The old woman leaned towards him and asked, in a gravelly voice, if he would, please, offer her a cigarette. He did so. Would he, please, light it for her? The flame lit her eyes, a cough convulsed her, and he won a wintry grin. She told him that her doctor forbade her to smoke, that her children thought the habit disgusting, that her grandchildren were nicotine-Nazis.

  Jago Browne, on a bank’s sales team, reflected that the fly – by keeping him there – might have inched him towards a possible client . . . He mouthed, silently, the first sentence of what he would say to the client.

  ‘A thousand euro a month, is what it will be.’

  He blustered an answer but his words were indistinct. It was the third time he had told the man the figure. The face had gone pale and glistened.

  A smile curled Marcantonio’s lips. ‘You understand? I can’t make it any clearer. A thousand euro each month. For that you’ll have total protection and your business will prosper.’

  The man’s face was sheened with sweat. There was no heat in the pizzeria, not enough sunshine yet on the windows for warmth and Marcantonio’s cousin filled the open doorway. Marcantonio posed as a friend, almost a business associate. He was there because he was bored.

  ‘A thousand euro a month. I don’t negotiate. You’ll pay in advance and I’ll come tomorrow to collect. A thousand to start with, but when your business is doing well, it’ll attract more attention from rivals so my fee will go up. For now, though, a thousand a month.’

  The man jabbered something. Marcantonio couldn’t understand him. The pizzeria had been open for two weeks in a fashionable quarter of the city. The rent would be high but the rewards, potentially, were good. The man seemed as timid as a rabbit cornered by dogs.

  Marcantonio had been in Berlin just over six months. Home – the village, his grandfather – seemed increasingly distant. His cousin in the doorway, Alberto, was a long-term resident in the city and his minder – his subordinate in the clan’s pecking order. He had collected rents from properties owned by the family, cleaned sums paid in
Hamburg and Rotterdam, and inspected proposed leisure or business sites on the Baltic coast and in the Ruhr district. Old habits died hard and boredom irked Marcantonio. He knew how to create fear.

  ‘Without protection, you risk a petrol bomb through the windows and then fire. Same time tomorrow.’

  A girl hovered at the back by the cash desk. She wasn’t as dark as girls in Calabria and the high Aspromonte villages. He saw hatred in her eyes. She hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t addressed a word to her. No reason why he should have. Where Marcantonio came from, the women and girls kept silent and were obedient. Any who were not went into the tank as Annunziata had. To ease the boredom, Marcantonio wanted to set up his own ring of protected businesses, draw an income and see eyes blink in fear, smell the sweat and hear the gabbled answers. This would be the first, and already he felt better. His car was outside. In Berlin he drove an Audi R8. Sometimes, on the open roads, going south or west out of the city, he laughed at the thought of his grandfather and Stefano in the City-Van, the engine chugging when it climbed hills. He was not supposed to draw attention to himself . . .

  The man slumped, shaking into a chair as Marcantonio strolled to the door. Marcantonio had been polite and specific. His behaviour could not have been faulted. He went outside, lit a cigarette and began to walk towards where the Audi was parked. It was capable of acceleration to speeds above 160 k.p.h. on the Autobahns.

  His arm was grabbed.

  He turned. The girl’s fingers were locked into the fabric of his windcheater. Alberto had spun and was ploughing towards her.

  She hissed, ‘We won’t pay you pizzo. This is not Naples, Palermo or Reggio. We don’t pay thieves. You’re scum. Don’t come back.’

  Alberto caught her shoulder and tried to pull her back, but her grip on Marcantonio’s arm was too tight. Her nails came up towards his face. He saw them as they came for his eyes. He hit her with the back of his hand. She reeled away, freeing him, and screamed.

  The elderly woman’s face showed no change of expression, but she would have heard the scream. He swung round and saw the girl who had been sweeping the pavement at the entrance to the pizzeria. She reeled away from the guy and would have fallen if a bigger man hadn’t held her upright, making her a better target.

  She spat at the one who had hit her, and kicked the shin of the man who held her arms. The two men were speaking Italian – Jago had learned some in his sessions at the language laboratory in Prenzlauer. The boy hit her again with a clenched fist, first her head, then her stomach. Her nose bled. Now he kneed her in the back.

  What to do?

  Jago was wearing one of his two work suits; the bank expected him to be formally dressed. That day, with a client to visit and an error to be corrected, he needed to be at his best. The elderly woman had disappeared.

  Different for Jago.

  How different? Quite different . . . the scream had been anger but the punch to the stomach had squeezed the air from her and she had first wheezed, then coughed, then choked on a squeal, and there had been another gasp as the knee went into her back.

  A man was at the door to the pizzeria. He didn’t move – as if he had decided that intervention would gain him nothing. At work Jago Browne was assessed on his ability to ‘care for clients’, his ‘dedication’ to his employer, his ‘work ethic’ and ‘attention to detail’. For that he received a touch north of four thousand euros per month, plus bonuses. He was not paid to rescue distressed girls.

  Now she was writhing on the pavement. Cars went by but none slowed. A woman pushed a pram towards the girl and manoeuvred it round her. A couple stepped off the pavement into the gutter to avoid her.

  Jago took a step forward, than another. The man who had hit her was smartly dressed: designer jeans, windcheater, lightweight maroon pullover and polished shoes. His hair was well cut. The look on his face was part pleasure and part about the need to exercise power: he had been challenged by a lesser creature. He called a few words to the man in the doorway, who cringed. Something about ‘tomorrow’ and ‘coming back’, a warning to be ‘very careful’. Then he headed towards the parked sports car.

  The older man, the one who had held and kneed her, passed her, following the first. Her arm came out and she grabbed his ankle. He pitched forward, then went down hard onto the pavement. He swore. The first man came back as the second stood up. They circled her, then launched the attack. They kicked her . . . People passed them, looking away.

  Jago started to run. He shouted, in German, ‘Stop that. Leave her alone!’

  This was a criminal assault. He expected them not to yell back at him but to walk away. Where he had been brought up, in East London, kids carried knives after dark and only an idiot would intervene in a fight. An even bigger idiot would stay behind as a witness when the police arrived. But this was Berlin, and not just any part of Berlin: it was the Charlottenburg and Savignyplatz area. He went forward – it was about bloody time that the guy in the doorway shifted himself, but he didn’t.

  Both men kicked the girl’s backside and belly. She was shouting at them, struggling to get the words out and trying to claw their ankles but they danced out of her reach. Neither had yet turned towards him.

  ‘Stop that! Stop it, for God’s sake.’

  He was armed with his leather briefcase, a self-indulgent purchase during his first week in the German capital. A church clock chimed, telling him he was now late for his appointment. He couldn’t turn back. They hadn’t run to the car. He was drawn in, as people were towards a cliff’s edge. Logic had clouded, and the red mist came down. He reached her, crouched over her.

  They watched him. He looked into the face of the younger man. Nothing was said but Jago saw his expression. It said, Who the fuck do you think you are? Or None of your business. Superior, dismissive. His heart was pounding and he had lost the calm that the bank’s Human Resources people looked for in young people they employed. The girl looked up into his eyes, and the two men peered down at him. There was a moment of quiet before he spluttered, ‘Go away, you bastards! Leave her alone. Scum—’

  The older one hauled him upright. Jago’s eyes were close to the younger face. He could see the clean skin and the immaculate hair, could smell the deodorant and the mint on the breath. He noted the scar on the right side of the chin. The heel of the hand came up fast, no warning, and caught his upper teeth, lip and nose. His eyes watered as pain shot through him. He was dropped. When he could see again, the sports car was reversing into the traffic flow. They didn’t look at him. He wasn’t important enough, he realised, for them to glance back and see how he had reacted.

  She didn’t thank him, or ask how he was. She pulled herself onto her hands and knees, then half upright. The man in the doorway come to help her, and the two of them went inside. Jago used his handkerchief to wipe away the blood that was streaming from his nose.

  He steadied himself, then walked down the pavement towards the client’s apartment block.

  The messenger had come across Europe and far to the south, delivered and gone. Giulietta had met him. Then the dutiful daughter, whom he could not marry off but was precious to him for her understanding of the technology he would never master, had brought it to him. Bernardo danced.

  It had been a good summer, warm, with little rain. There were corners of his garden, tucked out of sight or shielded by trees, where he had been able to sit and allow the sunlight to filter onto his legs, hips and back. The weather had been good for his arthritis. Dancing, therefore, was easier than it would have been had he attempted it in the spring. The single sheet of cigarette paper had been brought by hand from Rome, not entrusted to BlackBerry instant messaging or Skype. A man had flown from Ciampino, Rome, to Lamezia, where he had been picked up by a cousin and driven to Locri, which was overlooked by the village where Bernardo lived. Every week on that day, Giulietta went to the local covered market to buy vegetables – she hardly needed them because Bernardo grew enough for the family. Today the sliver of paper had been sl
id into her hand. She had brought it to him, then whispered in his ear what verbal message the courier could take back on the next flight.

  His dance was almost a jig. He was sure he wasn’t being watched by strangers to the village. Enough of the picciotti scrambled regularly over the rocks and along the goat trails on the steep-sided hills above his home, checking for ROS teams. The message was confirmation. A man had been located. A traitor had been identified as living in Rome, his address pinpointed. It confirmed the instruction Bernardo had sent back with the courier to those who now watched the target and would carry out the sentence of death. The killing would be publicised and no tears would be shed in the villages around Bernardo’s home. His dance steps were in the tradition of the Aspromonte mountains.

  It would be good for his sons to learn that the man who had put them in their cells was dead.

  He would have liked his grandson to kill the turncoat with a knife, face to face, seeing the fear build, or with a pistol, sidling close, then shouting a name. It wouldn’t be the name given to the rat by the Servizio Centrale di Protezione, but his old name, bestowed at his baptism. He would start and turn, then face the last few seconds of his life. It had been almost as great a disgrace to Bernardo as any that had befallen him. A pentito on the fringes of his clan, a former man of honour who knew some of the clan’s secrets, had taken seventeen men to the aula bunker in Reggio where, in the subterranean fortified courthouse, he had given the evidence that had sentenced them with Bernardo’s sons, to long, life-destroying sentences. He grinned to himself.