No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  The girl in the pizzeria. The girl with the brother who had stammered about his inability to pay. The girl who had come at him with her nails. That girl had clawed a place in his mind.

  In the morning he would have the opportunity to go back to the pizzeria, as he had ‘promised’ he would, and collect the pizzo. They always paid. Tears, shouting, even threats of going to the authorities, but they always paid. Marcantonio had no need for an additional thousand euro a month, but the targeting of the pizzeria had made for entertainment. It was outside what was allowed, but few would know and fewer would care.

  He took the wrapped shirts. He met the girl’s eyes, allowed himself to smile and turned away. A woman had looked into his eyes on the last night he had been at home. She had been tied up and her clothes were torn because she had fought. He and Stefano had hoisted her up, and her legs had splashed into the stuff when they had begun to lower her. She had screamed in the night and would not have been heard. She, too, had challenged him. She had spat in his face, and then they had pushed her down. Her head had come up once more but she had been too weak and too much in shock to spit again. It would have been good to fuck her, his aunt by marriage, but he had not tried because she was part, temporarily, of the family.

  After she had gone down into the tank he had carefully wiped all trace of the spittle from his face, and Stefano would have burned the clothes they had worn, and the clan who had provided the facilities for a lupara bianca would have removed anything left in the sludge. He would tell his grandfather what had happened.

  The shop manager, tall, blond and aloof, stood behind the girl who had wrapped his shirts and taken his money. He was gazing at Marcantonio as if he were dog shit on a shoe. So German . . . but Marcantonio’s people owned much of the country, used it like a goat they milked regularly. He could have bought that shop, that franchise, its stock and the girl, and would have regarded the outlay as small change.

  He left. Time for lunch, some pasta – not as good as that prepared by his grandmother. It annoyed him that the girl that morning had not cowered in front of him. The next morning he would be back. He sauntered across the pavement to his car.

  Bernardo slipped out of the kitchen door.

  His route was skilfully prepared. Near to the door was a vine trellis, the leaves not yet shed, then a high wall. Beyond the wall was Mamma’s washing line, always with double sheets and large towels on it, then a second section of wall, a vertical cliff face – the path led right against it, perhaps ten metres up – then a retaining wall beside the steps that led to the old shed.

  Every man had a price, which was often surprisingly low. Sometimes favours were offered for nothing. A clerk in the Palace of Justice or at the Questura, in the headquarters of the carabinieri might cost a couple of hundred euros a month if he needed it for medical expenses, or he might supply information for free because he was screwing on the side and the truth would kill his elderly mother, or he gambled . . . There were so many reasons.

  He knew he was under close investigation.

  He took this route from the house each evening. He used neither telephone, nor computer, so he left no electronic trace. The ROS, the GICO and the Squadra Mobile worked on the principle that the best weapon in their hands was intercepts of messages, BlackBerry or email, so he denied them that chance. He would be vulnerable only to human surveillance, and their teams could not come to the village and sit in a closed van with spy-holes drilled into it. Strangers were not tolerated in their village. If electricity cables needed repair after a winter storm, local men did the work, not outsiders. His home could be watched only from the high ground behind it. There might be cameras there, or listening equipment, and it was possible even that men might be inserted in hiding places. Most of the picciotti, who owed him and his family total loyalty, had his blood in their veins: they regularly searched the upper slope with the dogs. But Bernardo was still careful.

  A combination of the vine, the walls and the washing protected from any viewer or lens, and he used the route each day to go to and from his home. At the end of the path, beside the shed, there might, many years earlier, have been an earth slip beside the retaining wall. That was how it would appear to a stranger. Underneath the earth, stones and scrub was the steel cargo container, his refuge.

  The retaining wall seemed solid. One stone could be removed to expose an electrical switch with a waterproof covering. When the switch was thrown a section of the wall eased quietly to the side. The first stone was then replaced and . . . He hated it. He had to get down on his old hands and knees and crawl through a tunnel of concrete pipes that, dimly lit, stretched ahead of him. Another switch closed the wall. He would have disappeared, no trace left of him. He could not stand or crouch in the tunnel, which was barely a metre high, but had to drag himself the five or six metres to the entrance in the iron side of the container, his other home.

  The pentito had known the location and the timing of the meeting to which his sons, Rocco and Domenico, were travelling when they were blocked, pinioned, handcuffed, taken. He had not known of the hidden container. Twice in the last nine months Bernardo’s home had been raided by the ROS teams – before Annunziata had died and afterwards. If he had not been in the bunker, he would now be in a gaol cell in the north, isolated, his power diminishing. He moved forward, pads protecting his knees. Bernardo would have given up a great deal to sleep in his own bed, with his wife, but not his freedom.

  He seemed to hear the voice, no spoken words, just a whimper. A child’s voice. Recently he had heard it more often than he had last year. Extraordinary that he would be aware of it when his hearing was fading. He had first heard the sound thirty-six years before, then forgotten it. For decades he had been free of it, but he heard it again now that he had to go like a rat down the tunnel to his room.

  But tomorrow night the boy would be home. A smile cracked his lined, weathered face as he reached the prefabricated door, opened it, straightened and stepped into his other home. It would be so good to have the boy back. Warmth again flowed in his veins, and a degree of happiness.

  ‘Consolata reckons life is about confrontation.’

  She had heard them discuss her.

  ‘She wants drama – sirens, flashing lights. I just don’t think she grasps the virtues of non-violence.’

  She had her own room, with space for a single bed, a rack for her clothes, boxes for the rest of her possessions – shoes, underwear, books and one photograph.

  ‘Consolata should leave our group.’

  The photograph, framed in cheap plastic, showed her father and mother standing proudly outside their shop in Archi. It had been taken a year before they were approached and made an offer – take it or leave it – that amounted to grand theft. The photograph lay in a cardboard box, covered with books and papers on the regime of the ’Ndrangheta in Archi, Rosarno, at the port of Gioia Tauro and in Reggio Calabria, knickers, old trainers, T-shirts and more jeans. She had been a good student at her school, not obsessed with work but performing more than adequately – she was thought by the staff to have an anarchic streak, which they liked, and had run the shop on any Saturday morning when her parents could not be there. She knew the price of paint and wallpaper, and was imaginative on colour co-ordination. Everything had been predictable, unremarkable. Now the certainties had gone, picked up, tossed, scattered, but the scars remained. She had kept her past from the committee.

  ‘She’s with Massimo for the next two days. He’s steady . . . a good influence.’

  Later that night there was to be a meeting at the university. A prosecutor was due to speak. He would flatter them, talk up their influence and bolster morale. She had already decided not to attend, pleading a headache. It was that time in the afternoon when the squat went quiet. Some would read and others would smoke. Consolata couldn’t be bothered to read and had no stomach for learning more on the influence of the clans, how their empire stretched from Calabria, their wealth, the bribery they practised and the v
irus of corruption. She punched the pillow. They didn’t know her name and they were not aware of her efforts to sabotage them – if handing out leaflets and going to meetings qualified as sabotage. She didn’t do drugs, and had no boyfriend to take to bed.

  But she couldn’t break away. Consolata couldn’t see herself, with a packed duffel bag, going out into the dawn, leaving the front door to swing on its hinges, then trekking to the station for the journey to Reggio. She just couldn’t believe herself capable of it. Massimo was a true believer: it would be torture to endure two days with him . . . And the city was quiet. When it was quiet that didn’t mean ’Ndrangheta was too nervous to be about its business: on the contrary. It was how they liked it and how they functioned best. They did not know her name, and the chance that they would learn it soon seemed remote. She punched the pillow again and again.

  If she had been going to the prosecutor’s address at the university, she would have asked, ‘How do you know when you’re losing?’

  And his answer, if he was truthful, would have been ‘I know I’m losing if they ignore me.’

  The question the prosecutor was never asked: ‘Against the ’Ndrangheta, how do you know if you’re winning?’

  He was in the Lancia, wheels low on the tarmac because of the weight of the armour plating in the doors and the chassis. One of his boys drove fast from south to north across Reggio Calabria, and another held a machine-gun on his lap; three more were in the car behind, blue lights flashing. It was hard for him to concentrate because of the wail of the sirens. He was going to give a talk: it seemed important for him to be seen and to attempt to engage a younger generation. His address would not be brilliant but would satisfy his audience. He was a servant of the state, a work horse, and lived inside a fragile bubble of supposed protection. The name of the padrino of a remote village on the far side of the Aspromonte was at the top of his in-tray. Bernardo Cancello was uppermost in his mind, dogging and taunting him.

  Had he been asked, and had he answered frankly, he would have said, ‘When I’m hurting them they’ll kill me. If I’m winning against them, I’m dead.’

  To go from his office to any public engagement required that his full escort travel with him. Good boys – and sometimes a woman. If he was winning they would all be dead alongside him. His enemy was the criminal conspiracy of ’Ndrangheta, named from the Greek settlers of this far corner of Europe almost three millennia before. The word encompassed ‘heroism’ or ‘virtue’ and a member of the conspiracy – held together by family blood – was thought of as a ‘brave man’, not as a killer, not as a purveyor of life-destroying narcotics, not as a seller of the weapons that killed innocents in faraway wars, not as the provider of smuggled children brought into Europe to satisfy the lusts of perverts. He regarded them as the enemy and saw himself as something of a crusader. He liked to employ the old tags of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ when he was with schoolchildren and college students. Cocaine importation played well, but the weapons supplied to African warlords and the youngsters transported from Asia and the old Soviet satellite states for paedophiles played better. The beast, as he described it to audiences, was akin to an octopus, with many tentacles, hidden deep among subterranean rocks. Its arms could insert themselves into the smallest space.

  He liked to quote the Englishman, Edmund Burke, and could quieten a lecture theatre when he intoned, ‘“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.’ Then he would tell them of the huge demonstrations against Cosa Nostra in neighbouring Palermo, just across the strait, after the murders of the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino, and they would applaud and imagine themselves chanting anti-Mafia slogans. Then would punch them collectively in the gut by saying that nothing changed, that Cosa Nostra would be broken by dedicated police work, not by kids marching. The point he made was that ‘occasional antipathy’ against organised crime meant little: commitment was required. It was a necessary part of his workload to deliver such addresses.

  The prosecutor was surrounded by defeatism. He struggled against it. Sometimes he believed in minor successes; at others he was afflicted by minor catastrophes. He neither won nor lost. He had so few Holy Grail moments to treasure. Convictions, little triumphs, went hand in hand with men of great savagery being freed by the courts on technicalities. Close at hand there was corruption: a judge, a magistrate, a colleague, a senior officer in the carabinieri, a lowly clerk . . . Who knew where?

  He was exhausted by the load he carried, and he believed that, for all his endeavours, the clans tolerated him. He lived with his guards, but his wife went shopping and took the kids to school unprotected. His protection was cosmetic. The day they wanted him, they would have him.

  They went north and the cars were onto the Viale Manfroce. He had left his work piled on his desk in the office that had a door reinforced sufficiently to block high-velocity rounds or a hand grenade’s blast. The last message in was for the Scorpion Fly file. The daughter and the wife had been seen, the grandchildren had come to the house and been seen. Each week the prosecutor had to fight tenaciously for a decent share of the finances allocated by Rome. It was a major investigation, and the family had considerable importance in the hinterland above the coastal towns of Locri and Brancaleone. The clan’s leader was worth his place on the most-wanted lists, and the disappearance of the daughter-in-law – who had declined to be a vedova bianca, a white widow, and either discreet or chaste – was an added incentive . . . Without results his resources would be drained and the whispers would start that he had not used the precious money well. Hard times. He acknowledged it. He would tell the students that afternoon how remarkable it was that this obscure corner of Europe had a single claim to fame: that it was home to the continent’s most renowned organised-crime group, which spread misery and dishonesty thousands of kilometres to the north of their city. He liked to tell them that.

  How would he know if he was winning? He murmured, ‘I don’t know? It has never happened to me so I can’t answer your question.’

  His escort never interrupted him when he talked to himself. But the one in the front passenger seat eased aside the machine-gun, took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, and extracted one, then lit it and passed it to him. He loved his guards as if they were good friends, loved them as much as he loved his work . . . But without results on the old fugitive he would be lost.

  ‘My God, what happened to you?’ He worked on the third floor of a modern block. The office space given to the sales section was small, cramped: they were on top of each other. ‘Are you all right, Jago – have you been attacked?’

  Heads turned. Questions speared at him.

  From Hannelore, who liaised with the Frankfurt traders and had made a push for him at the summer party: ‘Were you mugged?’

  And Magda, who did pretty much the same as himself and had twice invited him to run with her in the Tiergarten: ‘Did it happen on the S-bahn?’

  And Renate, who was the fixer, kept the section’s moving parts oiled, and whose rare mistake had sent him to the client to make a fulsome apology: ‘Have those injuries been looked at?’

  And Wilhelmina, the FrauBoss, who regarded him with suspicion and had done so from his first day: ‘Where, when, why?’

  Nothing from Friedrich, their analyst, who squinted at him, seeming to say silently that his appearance in that state was inappropriate.

  He went to the FrauBoss. She pushed her papers aside, and the plastic tray on which she’d had her sandwich. He leaned against her desk. He said he had seen a young woman attacked near the client’s address, that he had attempted to help her and . . .

  Jago Browne was a success story, against the odds, from Canning Town in east London. He knew about street fights. All around the cul-de-sacs and alleyways near to the Beckton Arms there were teenage fights, thefts, knives shown and boots used. He would not have come through it without his mother’s spirit. He reckoned she had fought for him more than for either of his siblings: Billy, wh
ose father was a Polish roofer, and Georgina, who had come after the ‘lodger’, a Nigerian student, had moved on. Carmel Browne had nagged him, driven him, cracked a whip over him at junior school, had stood in his corner at the Royal Docks Community School, and had found the best teacher, the old-school Miss Robinson, to take him on as a ‘work in progress’. And his mother – at Miss Robinson’s demand – had taken him to an interview for St Bonaventure Catholic Comprehensive, the top-performing local school. He had been taken into Heath House, named after the Blessed Henry Heath, a martyr, held at Tyburn, 1643, then taken out for hanging, drawing and quartering. They had drilled into the pupils at the school that it was important to stick to ‘principles’. Arthur Bell and John Forest were martyrs of the same period, also put to death hideously, also remembered by the school.