No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  They hadn’t touched. He wondered at what stage of the night she had choreographed the situation. It would have been after he had retorted about winning, and before they had taken the taxi to her parents’ home. It would have been easy to believe she came here most weeks, with different guys, and skinny-dipped where, legend had it, Greek sailors of centuries before Christ’s birth had drowned. He didn’t think she had done it before. He reckoned it had been a fast decision, taken on the hoof.

  She leaned forward, imperceptibly, then seemed to screw up her nose. The moonlight hit the water on her skin and hair, brighter than diamonds. She sniffed, then nodded as if she were satisfied. Jago Browne dropped his hands. It would have been so easy to touch her, but he didn’t.

  ‘Do you want to swim?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It is time to go to work.’

  Jago grimaced. She began the tramp back to the beach. It was an idyllic place, and he felt a sense of renewal. He was thought to be bright and intelligent. He was paid to look into people’s faces and read their minds, whether or not they had small breasts, fine hips and skin without wrinkles. He thought he had read her now. His shyness was gone, his hesitation past. He had the certainty. It was about winning. Why had she gone to the trouble? She must have thought that the experience would challenge and harden him, take him further from what was familiar. Too bloody right. And that was important because, where he was going, nothing would be familiar.

  She started to dry herself. He watched. Then, she threw him the towel and began to dress.

  They turned their backs to the sea, the moonlight that dappled it, the castle high on the rock above the bay, the shuttered bars where the canopies flapped, and went to the car. They had not touched. There had been no discussion on why each needed the other in a relationship of convenience. It was recognised. No explanations, none needed. She drove up the hill towards the dark mass of the mountains where, soon, the dawn would come.

  The team manager had phoned Magda. She’d left her boyfriend in the club and taken a taxi to Stresemannstrasse.

  Wilhelmina knew something of her father’s background. The family was prosperous and had settled in west Berlin, with a fine house in the suburbs. The business had thrived, and Magda’s father’s past occupation had been erased, almost. He had served in the State Security Service, had risen to warrant officer in the political police and headed a small team responsible for the internal security of the Democratic Republic. On a frozen December morning in 1989, he had dumped his uniform, abandoned his flat, crossed the Wall with his family, then taken a train to the Tegel district on the other side of Berlin and had not looked back. Before he had gone into business, he had burgled and bugged his way the length and breadth of the former East Germany. The first time Magda had lost the key to her school locker, she had called home in a panic and been told what to do. Once, when a filing cabinet at the bank jammed, she had shown her talent.

  The Englishman, Jago Browne, had long intrigued and attracted her, but he had always declined her invitations. She had sensed crisis in the air, and she was the last resort before the police were called. If a bank employee was ‘missing’ and worked in a department with knowledge of wealthy investors’ affairs, the situation was serious. She’d heard the edge in Wilhelmina’s voice: no panic yet, but it wasn’t far away. The outer door was a challenge, but she’d managed it. The inner door, leading into the apartment, was easier.

  So neat, so tidy, so soulless. The two rooms, the bathroom and kitchen, she thought, had been cleaned specifically, and the occupant would not be back in the morning.

  It was child’s play to Magda, no need to call her father. A notepad beside the telephone. A clean sheet uppermost.

  She did not need to scatter black powder from a printer toner on the top sheet of the pad. She crouched, tilted her head, let her auburn hair flop over her face and read. She phoned, even though it was past three in the morning. ‘Wilhelmina? He was in touch with a travel agent by phone, one on Friedrichstrasse. He bought an economy ticket, via Rome, to Lamezia Terme, which is in Calabria, southern Italy. Lamezia is the final destination. It was a one-way ticket. There is no indication of a hotel booking, or that he called ahead to arrange to be met by friends. Didn’t he intervene in a fight among Italians? You have enough, Wilhelmina?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘May I suggest . . .’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘I apologise, but it is a police matter. The client list, the portfolios, the one-way ticket, the brawl in the street . . . it is for the police.’ Magda owed Jago Browne nothing: he had deflected her. He could sink or swim: it wasn’t her problem. The bank’s client security was paramount.

  She drove and she collected. Between stops, where she picked up what she wanted, Consolata talked. She told him the history of the ’Ndrangheta movement – the word came from the old Greek dialect of the peninsula – of the great military drives of the nineteenth century to eradicate the brigands, the ferocity of the Napoleonic generals, the brutality of executions, and the survival of hard, ruthless men in the mountains. She explained it all, Mussolini’s failed attempts to combat the threat, then the indifference of the American occupiers. Even Rome had tried at the end of the last century. Too late, and now it was endemic. They climbed high, leaving the coast behind.

  A collection of small homes were built into a rock face, and the headlights of the Fiat 500 captured a line of washing, perhaps done that evening. It was a clear night and there would be no frost. He would not have seen the heavy bottle-green trousers pegged to a line in front of one house. She was gone only moments from the car, and whacked them into his lap. After history came geography. The great families of Reggio Calabria, Archi, Gioia Tauro and Rosarno lived on the Tyrrhenian Sea; family groups from San Luca, Plati and Locri were on the Ionian. The Aspromonte mountains – from which the ‘second coming’ of the ’Ndrangheta had appeared, then the wisdom of investing in the cocaine market – separated them.

  Higher, where the air was cold and mist had gathered between the trees, there was a woodman’s hut with a decent padlock. She stopped, rummaged under the back seat for a toolbox, took a tyre lever and broke the lock. She found a camouflage coat, a forestry warden’s, and a pair of heavy boots.

  After geography came economics, the science of money-laundering and clean investment with washed funds, the creation of legitimate business where taxes were paid and respectability purchased.

  She drove through the dark and hammered the detail at him. Politics was about making contact with men of political ambition, national and regional, and insinuation into the secretive world of freemasonry, from which came influence and contracts for infrastructure development. After politics, there was law – or its violation. Discipline was enforced with extreme violence and rumour, which ruined a man’s marriage and estranged his children. Then, a sort of anthropology: the development of the family and alliances with relatives. His head reeled, but his certainty was solid.

  Silence. There was a camp site. Jago recognised the pennants on poles driven into the ground. The kids would be Scouts. Their fire had almost died, but the ground sheets had been hung on a line to freshen. She took only one.

  She didn’t smile, didn’t seem either to congratulate herself on her acquisitions or feel the need to apologise for her thefts. Jago’s English master had read aloud The Jackdaw of Rheims, about a bird that had stolen a cleric’s ring. There was no traffic, no police or carabinieri roadblocks, but once a deer broke cover and bounded across in front of them. He thought she was bored with talking about organised crime.

  ‘Jago, I give you a final opportunity.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘I can turn round, leave you at a bus station and in a few hours there will be a connection to Lamezia. No one will know where you have been, what you have walked away from. Where you are going and what you try to do – if you fail, if they catch you . . .’

  ‘Consolata . . .’

  ‘. . . they will ki
ll you, strangle you, bury you. Jago, you understand that?’

  He nodded. They climbed higher. The moon was behind them and the beach forgotten. He was there because he had stayed to watch a spider trap and kill a fly. He shivered. If he had turned round, been at the bank late but before lunch, he couldn’t have lived with himself. A simple question floated in his mind: why had she not taken the lead on the beach? He knew the answer: she was a camp follower. She had never crossed a street to intervene, stumbling, outside a pizzeria. Useful, though? Yes.

  7

  Dawn broke: a tinge of grey in the skies that hovered over the tips of the pines. They were on steep roads that zigzagged around rock bluffs.

  She talked, gave staccato information. There had been smallholdings, in village clusters, behind them. She’d pointed out the olive groves, where the harvest was almost ready, goats grazed, and sheep, cows and pigs were corralled. It was the world of peasants, Jago thought. He had seen nothing like it in England or in the few parts of Germany he knew, or on his brief trips to Spain. Dim lights burned in the houses. The work would have broken backs when the terrace fields were made and the retaining walls built to hold the soil, all done with muscle and sweat.

  She wrestled with the wheel of the little car to get round the hairpins, and he reckoned she talked on so that he wouldn’t chicken out. It would have been easy to do so – ‘Excuse me, thanks for everything but I should be getting to the airport. This seemed a good idea twenty-four hours ago, not now. Somebody told me to get a life, move on and forget an everyday story of pizza-bar folk. You’ve been good company, but I have to get back to the real world of clients, their portfolios, and my bonus at the end of the year.’ She kept talking – her way of focusing him on what lay ahead.

  She stopped by a rough concrete shrine two or three feet across and the same in height, with a roof of clay tiles to keep the weather off the interior. There was no figure of the Virgin, but a sealed photograph of a serious young man, called Romeo, who had a sharp haircut and wore a dark jacket, white shirt and neutral tie. His widow and his family had built the shrine. There were plastic flowers with the picture. It was here that he had been shot dead. She said that he was part of one family and had been killed by ‘men of honour’ of another family in one of the feuds that had split the ’Ndrangheta. Jago thought Consolata needed him as much as he needed her. She was dedicated to her work behind the combat lines, while he was governed by impulse. He was not allowed to brood or weaken. She spoke good enough English, had a dry sense of humour, and tried to interest him.

  The second stop, higher up the road, was at a German-built machine-gun bunker. It had been constructed with expertise, reinforced concrete slit trenches leading down from a command post to the forward position where some poor bastard would have been holed up to await the arrival of UK or Canadian troops. The defenders had withdrawn and gone north. The car strained against the steepness of the road, and the light grew steadily.

  One more stop. If he had complained she would have listened. A high plateau, a flattened chain-link fence, a concrete building – the place had been systematically wrecked. There were deep bunkers, concrete foundations and heaps of rubble. It had been a Cold War listening point, she said. There might also have been long-range missiles there, with targets beyond the Iron Curtain; they might have had nuclear warheads. Jago wondered how it would have been for the military there. He didn’t know many Americans, but he imagined them marooned in these mountains, with a cinema and a PX shop to keep them sane, the quiet broken by their radios and Elvis Presley belting out over the emptiness. Lonely, maybe nervous, and isolated.

  There was a wooden building near the summit; its windows were shuttered and the gravel car park was empty; she said it was for the use of forestry wardens. She told him local people despised them and the restrictions they brought with them. A wolf had been shot and its carcass hung in front of their shed. It was a protected animal, and its killing was a sign of indifference to authority. She spoke of the French general, Charles Antoine Manhès, and the villagers he had hanged in an attempt to subdue the mountain people. He had failed. Later in the morning, she said, the lay-bys along the road would be full as the elderly came with big baskets and searched among the forest trees for mushrooms and other fungus. She showed him a place where a great meeting of the heads of families had been held but the police had scattered them: the work of an informer, a soffiato. The word derived from soffiata, meaning ‘the whisper of the wind’. ‘Aspromonte’, she said, came either from the Greek, for ‘white mountain’ or the Latin, which, loosely, meant ‘mean, bitter or brutal mountain’. It was there that kidnap victims were brought – taken in the north, sold on, driven ever further south, kept in conditions of appalling barbarity while their freedom was negotiated.’ She showed no emotion.

  The light grew. There was nothing gentle about her face, nothing sleek about her hair, which was a messy chaos of naturally blonde strands, and nothing insignificant about her sharp-angled nose, her mouth, full lips and teeth. They had peaked a summit and she drove faster down the hill. There was a first glimpse of the sun across the sea and beyond the black outlines, ragged and sharp, of the mountains’ lesser peaks. At last, now, she was quiet.

  Her phone screen showed the crabbed lines of roads. One went close to a winking red point. A download from the group she was with – confidential to the leader but she’d hacked into it: the locations of the leading families’ principal homes. She’d grimaced as she’d told him that Bernardo Cancello was fortunate to have been allocated that status along with the de Stefanos, the Pesches, Condellos, Pelles and Miromallis. What would Jago do? Wait and see, take a look. Enough? Perhaps and perhaps not. He’d do what he could.

  She swore. The road was blocked. A boy drove goats. Dogs ran among them and they stampeded. The boy cursed at her for frightening his animals and Jago smelt the acrid scent of the tyres, then the livestock pressed against his door. She went on, bundling the goats aside. Behind him, on the small bucket seat, were the clothing and the ground sheet she had stolen. She would want the cover of darkness and shadows, not the brightness of sunshine. He had nothing sensible to say.

  In less than an hour the first of the team would arrive at the bank, where his life had been nailed down. Around him there was only desperate, cruel country, rocks, sharp stones, gorges, tumbled boulders, then lights, far ahead.

  Stefano, a shrewd old bird for all his image as a helpless and limited buffoon, had reversed the City-Van to the back door, which led into the kitchen. He had unloaded some baskets, vegetable trays and firewood, then Bernardo had slipped from the cover of the doorway into the back. He had a large foam cushion to sit on. Marcantonio was with him.

  Stefano drove. Bernardo reflected on the meeting ahead of him. His grandson yawned. Bernardo did not know which girl’s bed the boy had graced, whether he had been into the village or had gone as far as Locri to find company. He wondered where Marcantonio would find a wife. He had discussed it with Mamma – he would not make a decision based on her opinions, but would consider her suggestions as to who would be suitable. Mamma would know which families had a history of fertile women, and which were plagued with miscarriages or deformities through breeding too close to the blood line. His own opinion would be based on matters of finance and power, areas of influence and control of territory. There were families in Locri and Siderno, and one at Brancaleone with daughters, but serious negotiation had not begun. The windows at the back of the City-Van were dusty but Stefano had drawn a small smiley face in one so that Bernardo could see out.

  The boy yawned again. God, had he been at it all night? It was a long time since Bernardo had been his age. In his day, a girl would fight tooth and nail to preserve her virginity. Now she would drop her knickers in exchange for a mandarin or a ripe lemon. He strained to see through the window. They passed the house where the shutters were always closed. He kept that traitor’s family there as an example. They existed in a living hell, as he intended. He saw them
sometimes as they trudged, isolated and ignored, through the village. They had no money, no friends, and even the priest did not visit. Maybe they would watch television that day.

  Stefano drove out of the village and pulled into an abandoned quarry.

  A kid on a scooter waited there.

  The kid knew him, was bright-eyed and eager to please him. He knew Stefano and helped him clean engines, learning how they worked. The boy knew Marcantonio, too, and had joined the school at Locri when Marcantonio was leaving. The kid knew them better than he knew his own father, who was serving the twelfth year of twenty after conviction for murder: Bernardo had ordered the killing. The height of the kid’s ambition was to become a giovane d’onore, ‘honoured youth’, rise to picciotto and gain the family’s trust. He had a Vespa, the Piaggio model, 124cc engine. It was silver, his pride and joy, and had cost more than two thousand euros. The kid waved to them: cheeky, cocky and proud to be close to them. The family’s trust showed in the cost of the scooter, paid for by Bernardo, which was the envy of other village boys. He might marry into the fringes of the extended family. The kid was important, and Bernardo, with Stefano driving, went nowhere without him.

  Stefano told the kid where they would go, which route they should take. The kid had a mobile phone in his jacket pocket and waved it at them. Then Stefano rifled in a bag at his feet and peered through his spectacles at a dozen different mobile phones, their distinguishing covers, and frowned as he remembered which one he needed. He concentrated, selected and tossed it into Marcantonio’s lap. It was switched on. The kid was told that the phone was live.

  They went in humble transport to meet a man with whom the final decisions would be taken on the purchase of a half-ton of pure cocaine. They would also discuss the transshipment of Syrian exiles inside the EU. The Arabs would be provided with well-forged documentation. It was good that he had brought his grandson: the boy’s presence would show that Bernardo’s dynasty had a future. The scooter would travel at a little under forty kilometres an hour, and the gap between them would be two kilometres. The kid’s phone was live, the number set. He would have to press a single button to indicate that a carabinieri or polizia roadblock was in place. They would pass through a remote area of countryside. On some roads there would be interference or a weak signal, but they would avoid them.