No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  He did not yet know what he could do, what would jolt the power.

  In Canning Town Jago had not known power other than in the boxing ring. In the City he had not known power, except on hearing one girl say to another, ‘He just walked in here, a chance many would kill for, on the say-so of a chap wanting to salve his conscience.’ In Berlin, at the bank, he had known power when he had cleared his desk, wiped his computer and gone out through the door without a backward glance. Here, on the hillside, he felt a degree of power because he could watch them.

  The message came up on the prosecutor’s screen.

  He read it, a cigarette in his hand.

  A young man from Berlin . . . British nationality . . . witness to an assault outside a pizzeria . . . protection and extortion . . . a subsequent, more serious assault, the girl scarred for life . . . two interventions by the Briton, beaten up both times, no hospitalisation . . . a one-way ticket to Reggio Calabria . . . an idiot who targeted Marcantonio, grandson of Bernardo, and . . .

  He stubbed out the cigarette. It was a good ashtray, heavy, cut-glass, a present to his father a half-century before.

  Men were coming from Berlin and London to liaise, and it was hoped that the unfortunate presence of Jago Browne, merchant banker, would not jeopardise his investigations into that particular family. Two words lingered: unfortunate and jeopardise. He had the ashtray in his hand and hurled it at the window. It hit bulletproof glass and shattered. A column of ash and embers made a glowing cloud around the impact point. It would have sounded like a pistol shot. Two of his men were in the room, weapons drawn.

  He held his head in his hands, then loosed one to wave them away. He had once been told by an old fighter against an earlier generation of the ’Ndrangheta that it was always necessary to employ extreme care: ‘A small mistake in any investigation can cause infinite damage’. An amateur, on a crusade, was blundering towards a target and would – as night follows day – alert him or her. The clock moved towards countdown, and the hours still available to him were fucked. Months of work, in their final hours, were jeopardised, which was unfortunate. Had there been another ashtray on his desk he would have thrown that after the first.

  ‘You want a confession?’

  ‘Always good for the guts.’

  The only movements they made were to tilt their heads fractionally when they spoke so that a mouth was against an ear, then to reverse the movement.

  ‘The sneeze,’ Fabio whispered. ‘My sneeze.’

  ‘Does a priest need to hear about a sneeze?’ Ciccio asked.

  ‘What did we say about my sneeze?’

  ‘That didn’t matter, the noise, because no one would be out in the storm.’

  They lay close for warmth. They often had long conversations to pass the time. They were there as a last resort. There was no bug in the house, or hidden outside the back door, and most mornings the old man, Stefano, swept the vehicle for a tracker. They did not use mobile phones or computers for deals or planning, but relied on written text and couriers. The daughter organised communications. The last resort was having two men in a cleft, almost a cave, and hoping they had the staying power to notice any small but important ‘mistake’. The families always made a ‘mistake’, but it had to be seen, noted and evaluated. They were looking for the old man but hadn’t found him.

  ‘What does a priest need to hear?’

  ‘We didn’t flag a message through. A man came past us. We couldn’t identify or place him. Where’s he gone?’ Ciccio’s voice was lower than the moan of the wind. ‘No name, no description, no reason for him to be on the slope. The significance of this? He didn’t emerge.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘We haven’t seen him come out at the bottom – and his route would have taken him below the track where they come with the dogs. He hasn’t shown himself.’

  ‘Shit again.’ Fabio’s teeth ground. It was the work of survivors not intellectuals, for those without imagination but strong on discipline and able to analyse what they saw.

  ‘He’s still there.’

  ‘And any man on the slope would have heard that sneeze. We’ve shown out.’

  ‘First time ever.’ Ciccio gave a little sigh.

  ‘Who should know?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘That’s the greater sin, worse than showing out.’

  ‘I can live with it,’ Ciccio told him.

  ‘Because the mission and the investigation are fucked. We’re in the final hours.’ Fabio gave a minute shrug. ‘Not worth confessing. Think . . . No winners.’

  ‘Wrong. The winner is the entomologist. He has our collection of carcasses and will make a unique study of the scorpion fly. Be positive.’

  ‘Our friend is still out there, so we’re sharing our space with him. I say he’s no threat to us. Why should he be? Relax, enjoy your work. If they lay hands on him they’ll take the skin off his back before they kill him. Tonight, we’ll be eating tacchino in gelatina . . . We have a grandstand seat – no priests, no confessions. I didn’t sneeze. And, I tell you, he is there, the target. He’s there.’

  His voice trailed away. They watched the rain fall and heard the wind.

  Fred said, ‘Here, my friend, a mouse doesn’t break wind unless it has permission.’

  Carlo looked around. They had no umbrella between them but had hired a car at Lamezia, bickered as to whether KrimPol or HMRC should pay. The Solomon solution was that they would split general costs and HMRC would do meals. On the drive south they had barely talked because the wipers had trouble clearing the windscreen and the lorries threw up spray. Fred drove. Now he’d come off the big highway and driven into the town of Rosarno. He had parked and they had both climbed out. Why? Carlo was unsure.

  They stood in the centre of the Piazza Duomo. It was wide and open, and the rain lashed them. Why? Carlo had known of Rosarno but had never investigated the resident families. On one side of the square he could see the Speedy Market Alimentari and opposite, the magnificent church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista. He had read the carving over the main doorway: ‘Come, King of Peace, end hatred and turn it to love, revenge into forgiveness.’ A tall order.

  The town was closed. The doors of the restaurants and bars were shut and the lights off. The parked cars were Mercedes, Audis and BMWs, and the streets were clean – well-paid discipline ruled. On the Via Roma, coming up the hill and into the square, there had been decent small houses, the window boxes alive with geraniums. It was Pesche country. The family had an overview of the docks at Gioia Tauro, with control of the workforce and the routes away from the wharves and containers. Fred had talked about a leader who had buried himself in a bunker but had needed a woman. There was a mistress under surveillance, who came to the safe house close to the bunker and brought her toy dog. She was his weakness and the opportunity for the cacciatore. Fred and Carlo were drenched.

  ‘I was there when he was taken,’ Fred said. ‘It was a mark of the trust they had in me that I was allowed to witness a significant arrest. He had assets in Germany, which was why I was permitted access. He lived in a hole in the ground, but he had champagne and caviar. It was an important arrest but nothing changed. He was in a cell, but the power of the family was as great as before. In the town there are good churches, and there was affluence, but no one seemed to have a job and there was no industry, except the port. I found it depressing – beautiful but an example of a broken state. And this is Europe. It makes me sad if I think too hard about it. I reckon I understand your English boy.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I think he was disrespected. He is a banker, has a good job, is a subject of envy and would regard himself as a member of an elite. He is different from many other young men. An incident plays out in front of him, and he responds, expecting the bad boys to back off. He is dumped on the pavement. I think he yearns for respect and needs to earn it. He’s no Knight Templar riding to the rescue of holy sites in Jerusalem, but an arrogant boy whose pride was hurt.’<
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  They started to walk back towards the car. The rain was irrelevant. Carlo thought the assessment sounded fair. They would not hurry to fulfil the purpose of the journey – to make their apologies at the Palace of Justice. He thought two old men had been dragged from the comfort of their jobs because they were pawns of diminished status, suitable for work that no ambitious officer would want.

  ‘Where to?’ Fred asked.

  Carlo told him.

  The rainwater pooled in their seats and under their feet. They drove towards Reggio and the skies stayed ashen.

  It was a little lighter over the sea. Giulietta was at her computer; the screen showed the returns on investments in hotel resorts on the Brazilian coast, made comparisons with Florida, and threw up launch costs and profit margins. She shut it down. Nothing illegal there. Nothing that could justify a charge of ‘Mafia association’ if the house was raided and the hard drive taken. She shrugged on a coat, went out into the rain and lit a cigarillo, stronger than a cigarette. It was her problem that she had not been born a boy. What power she had would soon be stripped away from her when Marcantonio came home for good.

  She felt contempt for her nephew. Had she been born a boy she would by now have been undisputed head of the family and her father would have been an old man with memories and little else. He had left her with a twisted nose: when she was fourteen months old, he had dropped her on a stone floor. Her nose had been broken and allowed to knit by itself. She had no lover because of her status. A young man in the village could not have considered walking out with her. A young man from another family, equal in importance to her own, would have raged if his father had told him that Giulietta Cancello was his chosen bride. She had no girlfriends with whom she could go to a disco at a hotel in Locri, Brancaleone or Siderno. Love was beyond her reach.

  Teresa, her sister-in-law, had once bought her some clothes from the new boutique in the mall outside Locri but she didn’t wear them – her mother would cluck with disapproval if she did. Annunziata had treated her as if she were an imbecile. Giulietta had denounced Annunziata, condemning her.

  She threw away the cigarillo. Marcantonio would go back to Berlin. Word would seep from the Palace of Justice that a prosecutor’s investigation had run its course. They owned enough men in the Palace for the information to be reliable. Her father would emerge from his bunker, and Marcantonio would return from Germany. She would spend more time at the computer, offering advice, seeing it ignored, as age chased her.

  A shipment was coming into Gioia Tauro in the rudder trunk of a cargo ship from Venezuela. An Englishman was installed at Brancaleone and would stay there until the family was prepared to meet him, hear his proposition and determine whether or not he was safe as a commercial partner. Her nephew would be in a bar and other boys would be around him, hanging on his stories. At the tables, girls hoped to be noticed and that a finger would beckon them over. Stefano would be by the door, in the City-Van, the rainwater sloshing dirt off the bodywork. No one called for Giulietta, or waited for her, or hoped she would notice them. She kicked a pebble, which ricocheted into the bushes. She had seen how her mother smiled only when Marcantonio was near her, and that the porcelain Madonna was positioned prominently on the window ledge. It was quiet and the dogs were alert. She would have sworn that nothing moved near the house, that no one was close, that there was no threat. She went inside.

  Nine calls had been received at a bed-and-breakfast on the north side of the city. The same answer was given each time: the guests had not yet arrived. No message was left. The rain made a river of the street, and the hills – usually a fine sight – were buried in cloud.

  Carlo said, ‘I wasn’t on the street here. I would have liked to be around when they took him. He was one of the men who controlled the whole of Reggio, and blood would have been dripping off his fingers. I saw him when the carabinieri took him past the cameras. I was there for a meeting, about stuff going into London. Anyway, they lifted the guy on this street.’

  It was the Via Pio. Rain came off the roofs, and gutters over-flowed. No point in wearing their coats.

  While the man had been in hiding he had needed someone he trusted to be his courier. His son-in-law was among thirty who ran messages, brought food and set up meetings. He had been using eleven different safe houses. All thirty had to be located, bugged and tracked, but the son-in-law – the most trusted – was the bad link in the chain and blew him out. It had taken four years to pinpoint where the guy was. He was armed when they went in, but didn’t try to use his weapon, went quietly. Four years for one man, with scores of people working on the case. Carlo told the story. It was important to him – the only time he had been there when the cameras flashed. The guy would have been worth hundreds of millions of euros. To go after a target for four years and believe that the investigation would be successful was dedication.

  They were two old men, who stood on a pavement, had no protection against the rain and seemed not to notice. A German and a Briton . . . They might have been veterans of Cassino on the road to Rome, in opposite slit trenches, now meeting in a graveyard, or at Juno Beach and falling on each other’s necks, but instead, they had war stories of Rosarno and the Via Pio. It was important to demonstrate that they knew what the game was about.

  Carlo said, ‘If, towards the end of that stake-out, a fly-by-night had screwed up what they had, the anger would have been indescribable. We’re not going to be anyone’s favourite visitors. We put all the money towards anti-terrorism now, but the real threat to our society is the corruption and criminality of the gangs. It’s a cancer. Does a young banker go to war in a grey suit with a neutral tie? I don’t know. I do know that he’s gone into acute personal danger. Do we cheer him on or call him fucking stupid?’

  ‘If only it were that simple. . .’

  Carlo said, ‘You told me his boss spoke poorly of him. I can cap that. His own mother bad-mouthed him. A confusing picture. I believe you win some and lose some. Nothing’s personal. How do you see your future?’

  The walls of the gaol were behind them and a little queue of women, black clothes and inadequate umbrellas, were waiting for visiting time.

  ‘I hope Carlo, to be on a naturist beach and feel freshness on my skin.’

  ‘I rate the boy. Are you going to strip off? I’ve never been driven by a bare-arsed chauffeur. It was good to come here, see the place.’

  Fred said, ‘Nobody I’ve spoken to has had a good word for him. He has no friends, no champions. It makes him more interesting and less predictable. Do I sound like a profiler? I hate them. He’s independent – and not liked.’

  ‘Irrelevant. Who said, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? If he bloodies a nose or kicks a shin, that’s good enough. I don’t have to like him. You met him. How will he strike me?’

  The pipe was out. Fred shielded the bowl as he tried to relight it. A cascade of failed matches fell to the pavement. ‘He is a banker, investment and sales. They are not impetuous. He will wait. It will be similar to the market performing as he wishes it. He will be patient. It will be in his time of choosing. I think he will be out there, in this weather, and it will not concern him. I think he has the talent to surprise us. Time to go.’

  ‘It can’t be put off.’

  ‘We face the music, and it’ll be an orchestra, full blown.’

  They went to the car.

  Jago set himself puzzles. They had started as mental arithmetic on the portfolios at the bank. The light dipped fast, and it was almost the time that the majority of the team would be leaving the building, heading for the bars or coffee shops, the gymnasium along the street and the launderette. None of that had any relevance to where he was and what he was doing.

  He had found a good teaser. It had legs and ran.

  The sheets on the line attracted him.

  The rain fell on them and, though sodden and heavy, they flapped in the wind. Some of the pegs had been dislodged, but as day disappeared and grey dusk settled, thos
e remaining seemed to do a job. They were good sheets, for king-sized beds, a rich blue that was similar to the sea. Four sheets, and they obscured a stretch of the route between the trellis and the wall short of the dilapidated shed. Trees blocked his view of most of the building, but the sheets . . . He turned the matter in his mind.

  And remembered.

  A shower in Canning Town, washing out on the lines in the little back gardens or slung along the balconies of the blocks, and the women were straight out quick with white plastic baskets to scoop the clothes and bedding off the lines. They did it at speed. Nobody in Canning Town left the washing on the line when it rained. The mother could have taken it in, or the daughter, or even the driver while he waited for Marcantonio, slasher of a girl’s face, to come out. Even Marcantonio might have done it. But the bedding had been abandoned on the line through a storm, as dusk merged with night.

  The rain had eased but not stopped. The skies melded with the ground and distant lights brightened. Through the kitchen window he saw the mother and thought she was preparing vegetables. The cold had set in. Had it not been for the teaser – why was the washing still on the line? – he might have frozen solid. He had to keep on his clothing because to take it off would expose him to the water and the wind.

  He knew that behind him, higher, there was another vantage point, and at least one more watcher. The kid came up the track to the house and Jago saw a torch shone in his face and the outlines of two men, broader and taller than the kid. Cigarettes were exchanged, a lighter flashed, and he heard a low cackle.