No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  Which legend was fact and which fiction, Jago didn’t know: it was never spoken of again. When he had closed his books, she had chucked a coat at him and taken him out. There was a sports club on Caxton Street. She had signed him up. No questions were asked: he was a teenager doing what his mother demanded. He had hated the humiliation and her for inflicting it, and had hated his brother for going to his rescue when he had been whimpering on the ground.

  He could have trotted out all of that, if a shrink had been sharing the bench with him, to explain why he was there.

  The door of the pizzeria stayed closed and no car had edged up to the kerb close to it. He saw the girl more clearly when she came to the window and wiped it vigorously. At the bank, Jago was under what they called ‘360-degree reporting’. He was subjected to a form of close surveillance, monitored. They wanted to know if he had the skills to sell the bank’s product. It might be ‘cold calling’. It might be spotting a business in a road back from Unter den Linden, or a main drag through the Turkish quarter of Kreuzberg, pushing in through the door and doing the talk. There was a story the FrauBoss liked to tell – a sandwich bar on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse that always had a queue outside: she’d passed it often enough, and thought the owner looked sick. She had reckoned he was due to sell up and had gone in with the sales spiel. The investment was more than six million. Anyone could score if their eyes were open, and their brain was clear.

  He looked away from the pizzeria to the woman with odd shoes, and wondered what his chat-up line might be, how to attract her and her wealth to the bank’s stewardship. He should have known why he was there and what he hoped to achieve, what might be the consequence of failure or success. The woman breathed an aura of money. Something about a challenge, and something about a gesture.

  She came down the stairs.

  There was a dress code, of sorts, in the squat. Boys should not move about the rooms, the landing and stairs in their underwear: it was disrespectful to the girls. Consolata broke rules, written and unwritten.

  Her feet were bare and she was wearing a skimpy cotton nightie, short and low-cut. The sun wasn’t high enough to warm the inside of the building and she shivered but came down warily because there was no carpet or no lino on the stairs: she risked a painful splinter in a toe or the sole of her foot. She had no friends among the others and didn’t think anyone would miss her if she went out through the door with her duffel bag on her shoulder. She was there because it emphasised her indifference to their attitude towards her – and because she had nowhere else to go.

  She wandered into the communal area. In the inner room, a meeting had already started. On the table there were dirty plates and mugs, while the previous night’s bowls, from dinner, were in the sink. The front was off the photocopier: there would have to be a committee meeting, then a canvassing of the membership, and finally they might agree to buy a new or second-hand one. Perhaps the Palace of Justice would help . . . She stubbed her big toe on the copier’s metal cover and swore.

  If Consolata had left a man asleep in her bed, she might have viewed the world with more charity. But there was no man – hadn’t been for months – and the last had treated her as if she were a chattel, in the Calabrian way, on call when he wanted her. Before that there had been the carabinieri trooper: he had been good in bed, which she was not, and had thought of her as a trophy. She had wanted to talk about the ‘war against corruption’ and he about her cup-size and about the best kit he could buy for his work from survival magazine offers. Francesco had been amusing, and it had lasted fourteen weeks – Consolata had a good memory – before he had tired of her. She had seen his wedding notice in Cronaca della Calabria, with a picture of a smart, attractive woman – everything she was not, she had told herself. He had not hated the ’Ndrangheta families he spied on, but often said he had a decent job, was paid reasonably, and that there was camaraderie among the team. He’d shown her some of the disciplines of covert work, how to move and to lie motionless, and had boasted of his skill. Once he had let her wear his gillie suit and another time his flak-vest, with the armour plates. He had said she was good at covert movement and had an intuition for dead ground. Sometimes he had to ask her to show herself. She had cried when he ditched her, but in her room, not where he or anyone else would see.

  She bit into an apple. Others must have risen as dawn broke – the heap of printed leaflets was double the size it had been when she had left the night before. They would have burned out the photocopier, not had the patience to coax it. Massimo was in the inner room at the table. He looked away, blushing, because she was almost naked. He wore heavy glasses and was attempting to grow, not yet successfully, a beard. They believed in non-violent opposition to the criminal culture, as she had when she’d joined. Perhaps not tomorrow, but victory was inevitable. At first she had been a true believer. The man at the head of the table, Piero, waved to her.

  Was she still keen to picket? Would she picket the big villas in her nightdress?

  Where did she think it most appropriate to stand with a placard? Outside the home of the de Stefano matriarch in Archi, down towards the coast and up the private road? At the hilltop villa of the Pesce family in Rosarno? Or perhaps she would go to San Luca, or Plati in the Aspromonte?

  Laughter rippled around the table. She thought the other girls disapproved of her display of flesh, and that the boys’ eyes stripped her. Piero told her when they would divide up the leaflets, and where she should go with Massimo. They would start in an hour. She knew no other life. The men who headed the families were demons, and their faces, from the newspapers, flickered in her mind. They didn’t know who she was. She threw the apple core at the bin, missed and it rolled under the table. She left it where it was and went to dress.

  He passed her a cigarette, which she took, and lit it.

  Jago said, ‘Forgive me for disturbing you. I hope you won’t find this offensive. May I, please, give you my card and tell you what I do?’

  Her face was wreathed in smoke. She looked sharply at him, then nodded.

  Buried in his bunker, Bernardo – padrino, master of his family and of his village, a euro millionaire many times over – had only a minimal sense of time passing.

  An air vent in the ceiling of the container rose through the stone, earth and undergrowth to surface beyond the decrepit shed, behind the roots of an aged rotting oak. An air-conditioner rumbled inside, but it was covered with blankets so the noise was muted. He had enough power to run a fridge, a cooker, a TV, on which he could watch DVDs, and a battery radio, with a discreet aerial that ran up the ventilation shaft to emerge at the lip. He had an electric blanket in the bed for the winter. It was his second home.

  He eased himself out of bed.

  That bed was a source of annoyance. Until he had been forced into the bunker – an informant had said that the Palace of Justice was targeting him – Bernardo had never made a bed or folded away his pyjamas, not even during his two brief spells in the San Pietro gaol while he had awaited trial. His grandmother had done it when he was a child, then his mother, and his wife had understood her role to perfection. Mamma, married to him the day after her twentieth birthday, was too stiff in her knees and hips – rheumatism or arthritis, but she refused to visit a doctor – to crawl down the concrete tubing into the container.

  There was a picture of the Madonna, another of his grandson, and one of himself with his grandfather and father – if he died in his own bed, he would have done better than either of them. His grandfather had expired in the prison in Reggio, after a heart attack; his father had been blasted by a gunman with a sawn-off shotgun, acting on the instructions of the family of Siderno. One brother had been taken from his car by men from Plati, pinioned, then thrown alive down a vertical-sided gorge; the body had not been recovered for two years. A second brother was said to be in the foundations of the A3, the Highway to the Sun, north of Gioia Tauro. That was the price he had paid for his freedom.

  If he didn’t wash his d
ishes, he had nothing to eat off. There was a microwave to heat the food Mamma prepared, but he had to wash the ladles and spoons he used. He supposed he spent half of his day skulking inside his house, not exposing himself to any possible vantage points where a camera might be hidden, and the other half in the bunker, where the damp of autumn seemed to seep through the cold earth and the steel sides of the container. He slept there, slid furtively back to the house during daylight but never walked in the garden, soaking up the sunshine. To leave the property, he employed a variety of disguises and subterfuge. He remained free.

  He dressed.

  He had a wardrobe that swayed when he opened it. Marcantonio had brought it in pieces down the tunnel and assembled it, then the bed. The bed had been well made and was firm, but he would bring the young man down the next day or the day after and ask him to tighten the wardrobe’s screws, do what he could not do himself. Stefano was no longer agile enough to come through on his hands and knees, while Giulietta had a phobia of confined spaces and came reluctantly. Bernardo had more money than he could count, but lived in a hole. According to Giulietta, he owned bedrooms in apartment blocks in Monaco and Nice, a four-star hotel on the Costa del Sol – it was in the process of expansion – shares in a resort in Brazil, then more bedrooms in service flats in Dortmund and beside the river in London. He had never slept in any of them and for almost a year hadn’t slept beside Mamma. He pulled the sheets and the thin blanket into place and smoothed the pillow.

  He found the socks he needed, and the shoes.

  He used a battery-powered razor. A man of his status should have been able to go to the village barber, sit in a chair, then be shaved and treated with respect.

  He combed his hair, which was well cut – Mamma did it in the house.

  Bernardo did not appear from the tunnel when he wanted to leave his bunker. Mamma would come, or Stefano, with the corn for the chickens and call them near the hidden entrance. Then he could emerge.

  A good day awaited him. The boy was coming back for Mamma’s birthday. The pentito in Rome would be stalked and the plan made for a killing: he hoped that the man who had sent his sons to gaol would experience fear and pain. He ate some bread, and turned on the coffee machine. A freighter loaded with more containers was heading across the Mediterranean, en route from the Venezuelan Porto Cabello. It was two or three days from docking at Gioia Tauro and carried cargo for him.

  His eyes might dampen when the boy arrived and – for all his inbred caution – he could not envisage any danger capable of fracturing his mood.

  The girl, with her broom, had come out of the pizzeria. Jago didn’t think she had looked towards him. She had swept the pavement, polished the outside of the window, then gone back inside. He had talked to the woman as he would have done on any cold call. It had passed the time and he felt less conspicuous. At the bank, sales staff worked in teams of two, a man and a woman; the man did the business and the woman offered reassurance. From force of habit, Jago said to his prospective client, ‘I’d like you to meet my manager. She’s a woman of integrity. We’d bring you the brochures on what we can offer. Your money would perform much better than where it is now. We’d be there for you.’

  They watched her through the binoculars.

  Ciccio might have been wrong – she might once have been beautiful – but he doubted it. They knew her as Maria Concello, but logged her on the electronic report sheet as ‘Mike Charlie’. They saw her throw a cupful of corn beyond the front entrance to the house. There, they had a good eyeball on her. She would have been clucking for her chickens, which were locked up at night but let out at dawn by the handyman, Stefano – ‘Sierra’. Ciccio was convinced she’d never been worth a second glance. The families used marriage to form alliances, and the strength of her family would have served as her dowry.

  Quite soon, Giulietta – ‘Golf Charlie’ – would come up the track, and later the grandchildren, with their mother. The only target was ‘Bravo Charlie’: they had no recent photograph of him, but they would have recognised him, had he appeared, as an old man, lame on the left, with thick white hair. The pentito who had blown away the sons had said Bernardo still had his hair. His wife had a sharp face – jutting nose, a prominent chin, heavy grey eyebrows and a short, scrawny neck. She did not appear to have aged and thereby lost her looks.

  She turned. Only a few chickens had come for their food. She went along the unfinished paving by the side wall and disappeared behind the trellis and the sheets that were already hanging on the line, flapping in a light wind. It was weeks since Fabio and Ciccio had observed how often they were washed, how long they spent drying on the line and how often they were left to stiffen in the sunshine or to be soaked in a rare storm. She appeared again, this time with fowls at her feet. She was close to the shed, a dog with her.

  They took turns with the binoculars and both knew almost each wrinkle on her face – but they weren’t interested in her.

  Fabio and Ciccio were a major resource. There would have been a half-dozen prosecutors in Calabria who made representations to the colonel running the surveillance teams in the carabinieri. Each would emphasise the importance of their own investigation. The prosecutor who had commissioned Fabio and Ciccio would have had his back to the wall, and they would do what they could, but if Bravo Charlie didn’t appear . . . Ciccio whispered about the woman’s ugliness and wondered whether she had ever been different.

  Fabio logged her appearance, and they discussed their breakfast. As carabinieri, they had army survival rations: the breakfast was a chocolate bar, some sweet bread and a measure of cold coffee. For lunch they had a choice of tortellini al ragù, pasta e fagioli or insalata di riso. There had been times when the two men had almost fallen out over the choice of field rations.

  They hated to fail. If they did not get an eyeball, fare a occhio, they would crawl away at the end of a long duty, file an interim brief, soak in the shower and go home to their women in the knowledge that their prosecutor’s case was weakened.

  A stick broke under a foot. A dog barked. Each was armed. A major inquest would follow if they fired, wounded or killed. Every morning, close to that time, a foot-soldier came with a dog and walked the boundaries of the property. The discussion of menus was suspended. They couldn’t stretch or clear their throats, but they were confident. If asked, each would have said he was the best. That was why they were on the squad, why they had been chosen. The sounds died. The quiet returned. Nothing moved. They waited, watched.

  Three cigarettes were smoked, none by him. The filters lay on the paving.

  Abruptly, the woman – prospective client – stood up. With the soles of her unmatched shoes, she squashed any life from the butts. The man came out of the pizzeria and looked up and down the street. He was at least fifty paces from where Jago sat but he recognised the man’s fear. Then the door slammed after him. They had not reported the incident: had they done so, there would have been a squad car parked nearby. He wondered if the investigator would show, or if the matter was too insignificant. It was at about this time yesterday that the Audi had stopped at the door.

  Jago wasn’t looking at his ‘client’. He was talking mechanically now and she’d have known it. She hadn’t given him a card or scribbled a phone number for an appointment, and she was on her way. It was a brush-off but seemed immaterial. He said, from the side of his mouth, his eyes on the door, ‘Thank you for your interest. I’ll follow it up with my manager.’

  Marcantonio left his apartment. He was on his way to collect the first instalment of a pizzo, and was confident that what he could extract from the sister and brother at the pizzeria would soon escalate. It was acknowledged in Reggio, Catanzaro and Cosenza that the families knew more about the profit possibilities of a business than its owners. He would advise them, convince them that he was not an enemy – he might even gain their gratitude: a saviour who had, at small cost, kept their premises safe.

  He had on a new shirt, not his most recent purchase but
from the summer, and his windcheater was hooked on his shoulder. His partner of the night had left already. A pinch of her cheek as she slept, then a smack on her buttocks, and she had got dressed up. None of his women were allowed to stay in the apartment after he had gone out, and none had her own key. A Bulgarian woman came in to clean, but only when he was there and the contents had been sanitised: papers and property brochures were locked in a floor safe.

  His boys were waiting with the car. He liked to think of them as his ‘boys’, though both were older than Marcantonio, because they were more distant than he was from the heart of the family. Their fathers would not have considered making an important decision without referring first to a padrino. Nothing would be decided – in Milan, Germany, some Canadian cities or Australia – without sanction from the towns on the Ionian coast or the communities high in the Aspromonte. His boys drove him, watched over him, pimped for him and bolstered his ego.

  It might be amusing, a diversion from the tedium of life in the German capital, and a decent parting gift before he flew south that evening. The girl had been feisty and spirited, although the man had been weak.

  He expected her to be calm now and rational, and her brother to co-operate. Not immediately, but quickly – it might be necessary to show them the plastic milk bottle, with urine coloured contents and the rag in its neck, and to produce the claw hammer that could splinter the pizzeria’s windows. But they wouldn’t offer serious opposition. He thought that when he came back to Berlin he would seek out more Italian businesses that didn’t yet pay for protection and begin to build a small client list. The car was open-topped. He vaulted into the passenger seat.