No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  What was he doing? Why was he still there? Fred said a compulsion drove him. ‘He was never been anywhere that is remotely a front line, never experienced close-quarters danger and may never have another opportunity to match this so he is reluctant to leave. What will he go back to? Driving a taxi? A factory bench? The work of a ledger clerk in an insurance company? Of course it is difficult for him to prise himself away from what he has here.’

  But they and the guys on the hill were pulling out. He’d be on his own if he stayed, no friend within reach. Fred used his phone to check flights out, and book seats, to Rome together, then onwards separately. Carlo thought it would be fun to meet Bentley Horrocks on the leg to Heathrow – intimidating but fun.

  Cars streamed from the house higher up the track, younger men driving, their elders beside them, their faces turned away from the carabinieri photographer. From what he could see of them, Carlo thought their expressions masked their feelings: there was no sign of hate, contempt, arrogance or humility. They didn’t notice the men in uniform, and the cars travelled a respectful speed, slowing to go into the chicane, then accelerating out of it. Dust billowed after them.

  The maresciallo said, ‘The families have destroyed Calabria, with physical and moral vandalism. We can’t break it. Is your man on the mountain so conceited that he believes it possible to alter the historical certainties of the region? To do what we cannot? Or is it a gesture?’

  ‘I’ve never liked gestures,’ Carlo said, ‘but I’m not reading him too well.’

  He had a quick look behind him.

  Time to go: the sheets had rippled, as if something had brushed against them. He had not seen the old woman and imagined that she was entertaining those who had come to keep vigil with her. He had heard cars leaving, and when he’d lifted his head the obvious had been confirmed. The men had gone. Bernardo would have entertained them – the movement at the far side of the sheets had told him that the padrino was going to his bunker.

  Jago pushed himself forward.

  He had worn down the lichen on the stones under the boulders, compressed the moss and flattened the grass. There was a small bag that he had managed to push under the boulder on the left side so it was well hidden. The two lines he had scratched on the side of the opposite boulder were clear to see. He had done it with the penknife. Simple, like a signature. He had been there and left evidence as proof: only the young man who lay dead in an open coffin would have recognised the significance of two scratched lines. He would not linger on the way out.

  It was the last time he’d see it. The gap into which he had wriggled seemed so narrow.

  The kid was out, and so were the dogs. They were on the far side of the property, climbing. Jago had a good view of the kid and didn’t feel threatened. He was confident that it was the right time, and he thought it best to be away and clear in daylight. His chance, he reckoned, of getting away up the slopes and over the rock falls, was good in daylight, and slight in darkness. That was his banker’s training: an evaluation of risk.

  He went down, trying to hug ground that was in shadow. He didn’t know where Giulietta, the handyman or the daughter-in-law were, but he could see the men far down the track keeping watch there, and beyond them, near to the bend that was the start of the village, carabinieri trucks were parked across the road. They’d be too far away to save him. He went steadily and carefully, thinking of the pandemonium he would create when the power failed . . .

  17

  Jago did his best to be silent but he trod on dry twigs, which snapped, and scuffed dried leaves.

  He had slipped twice. The first time he had gone down hard and broken the fall by clinging to a birch sapling growing from a crevice. On the second, his left foot had hit a level platform of rock that might have been three inches at the widest point. Pain had shot up his leg into his pelvis. Delusions gripped him. He thought he was closer to the family than to anyone sitting in judgement over him at the bank. His chair had been taken by someone else now.

  His trainer soles scraped over rock surfaces and squealed as they slipped. Each time, Jago stopped. He froze and hugged the ground, tried to bury himself in rock, scrape a trench where the moss and earth were less than an inch deep, or to hide behind a tree trunk that was four or five inches in diameter. He had come halfway down. He hadn’t been seen: no one had come out of the house. He believed that the head of the family had retreated to his bunker, that the kid and the dogs were on the far side of the valley, that the men stayed at the outer gate and the uniforms were further away, beyond earshot. When he stopped he worked hard to slow his breathing.

  The chair in Sales was occupied. Jago could not see the occupant’s face but he seemed to have strong shoulders and wore a white shirt with a tie. A suit jacket was draped on the chair back. He was close to the FrauBoss, and his blond hair, cut short, contrasted with her ebony. It had not taken Human Resources long to find a replacement. A few days – he was not sure how many, or what day of the week it was. That had little relevance when he was sliding on his backside down rock faces, or clinging by his fingertips to ledges. Below him was a patio and beyond that an open area in which the hard seat was still placed, the trellis of vines, and the line of sheets. He could see the shed better now, the walls and the damaged frame of what had once been a window. The chickens ignored him, and he couldn’t see the cockerel.

  He had not aroused an alert. The door was open and he could hear a radio playing sentimental music in the kitchen.

  He looked closely at the next stage of his descent: he should track to his right. Below him he had seen a small cliff face, a drop of more than twenty feet. He searched to his right for places where his fingers could grip and others that would give a foothold.

  A fly came. He hadn’t seen one like it before. It was very near to him. There was a stone outcrop almost level with his eyes and nose and above it a cobweb, its mesh designed to trap. He couldn’t see the spider that had made it, but he used a finger to dismantle the web so that it was no longer a threat to the fly. It seemed important. The fly had long antennae stretching from its head, six fine legs, and its wings, camouflaged with dark brown blotches, stretched beyond the length of its body, which was thin, as if it had been shaped on a potter’s wheel. The tail had an orange tip that was like a scorpion’s sting. He thought he had made it safe. That was where it had begun: a fly in a web. He had watched the fly’s death, and the car had come. If he had been later, if the FrauBoss had not been delayed, if he had looked the other way and minded his own business, the fly would still have been killed and eaten, but Jago would not have joined a fight in which he had no stake.

  The fly flew away. His mind cleared.

  Jago looked for the route he would need to take, to his right, for the next leg of his descent, which would bring him to the line of sheets and a buried cable.

  They packed their gear carefully into the bags. The camera’s lenses and the image intensifier for the binoculars were worth thousands of euros, and their arses would be well kicked if the kit was not securely stowed and they dropped it, damaging the optics. They had had glimpses of the boy going forward. To Ciccio, he was now a part of the scenery. The suit, tie and shaven cheeks in the photo that had seen sent to their communications hub were long gone. They had seen Jago Browne twice, maybe three times, moving down the hill towards the house. What to do?

  Fabio had said, ‘I didn’t see or hear anything. What did you think you saw or heard?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Better to be incompetent than devious. They had had no sight or sound of him. At their pay-grade, they would be thanked only for hard, clear information. He was ‘a can of worms’, and their intent was to get off the slope before darkness with everything they had brought in. Problem solved.

  Ciccio swore.

  She was no more than five metres from them.

  She moved as he had taught her to.

  Ciccio tilted his head and saw Fabio’s face: incredulity. She went past them. They
had the scrim net in front of them. It hid their hands and faces. She might, actually, have tripped over them and stayed ignorant of their presence. Ciccio’s assessment of her: a good kid, a fair shag but intense. Her mind had been at war with the criminal classes of Calabria. Her conversations all ran along the same tracks and finished with the demand for detail of the families: that was all that concerned her. His own interest was based on her performance beneath him, and the matchless fun of tracking her hiding places and hunting her down, or reversing their roles, when he hid and she came after him. Always, when she’d got her breath back, she would ask questions. How many weeks? A few. How had it finished? It had run its course. Had he been fond of her? He’d sort of felt responsible – he’d thought her confidence was fake, that she was vulnerable.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘A woman.’

  ‘What in fuck’s name is . . .’ Ciccio’s mouth was an inch from Fabio’s head. She was gone. She didn’t move badly but was still a novice. She had been a quick learner, but eventually he’d had enough, ignoring her texts and not returning calls. He added, ‘She’s called Consolata. She’s an activist; anti-pizzo shit. I knew her.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you didn’t— Ciccio, were you screwing her? What about Neomi?’

  ‘It was before Neomi.’

  They couldn’t see her now, but heard her once when she must have kicked loose stones and a few had fallen. Ciccio had had a view of her face: she had looked close to breaking point. She had glanced around her, as if searching for something, then gone on.

  ‘If you were cheating on Neomi, I’d—’

  ‘I told you the truth.’

  Silence clung between them. Repeat: hear, see and know nothing. They could justify it. They had a ‘mission objective’. They were there to identify the hiding place used by Bernardo Cancello, padrino of a clan, locate it and report it. They liked the jokes: Q. Why do elephants paint their toenails red? A. So they can hide in cherry trees. Q. Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree? A. No, so it works . . . There was no humour now. They hadn’t found him.

  The thought of having to offer explanations, have his career examined, his liaisons subject to scrutiny, was unattractive. They made no call. It was sufficient for him to register that they had not seen the high-value target.

  The light burned down on him and the television was loud. Bernardo remained on his back on the unmade bed, and time passed. And he pondered – he had much, that afternoon, to think about. His guests had gone and some had nodded in imitation of sincere condolence or had touched his arm in a private gesture. All were familiar with sudden death.

  He had moved on from the death of Marcantonio. The clock could not be turned back. There was much that could not be halted. The funeral the following day would be a grand occasion: the coffin would be brought from the house to the church on a bier pulled by four black horses, plumed. He would not be there, but it would happen. His man, Stefano, would be on his way by now to a hotel in Brancaleone: another situation that would not be stayed. And somewhere on the road to Reggio, the capital city of the region, his daughter was tracking the car of the priest and might now have dealt with it where the hairpins were sharpest and the cliff edges steepest. Had she not already done so, then she had in her handbag the gift he had made her.

  He was not dragged down by grief but was victim to a high level of aroused emotion – it was as if the good days, long gone, had returned, power with them. He had been told, and Giulietta had sworn it was on the word of the clerk in the Palace of Justice, that this would be his last full night in the bunker. He would not go to the funeral, but would be discreetly out of his gaol. The priest would have thought himself Bernardo’s friend. He had no friends.

  The kid saw her.

  He had little formal education. His teachers had found him brightly intelligent, bored beyond salvation, almost impossible to motivate. They had told him to his face that his mind was sufficiently sharp for him to go far – they had meant he had the wit to move away from a village in the foothills of the Aspromonte and make a success of himself in any world beyond the boundaries of organised crime. Their advice had been decisively rejected. He had stayed and made himself useful.

  Now he was tested.

  No one in the village had the right to be on the steep, wooded slopes behind the family’s home. No stranger would be there in innocence. No surveillance team from the Guardia, the Squadra or the cacciatore would be represented by a woman who wore no camouflage clothing, seemed to carry no weapon and was alone . . . Alone, but might represent a threat.

  The kid belonged to the family. He had made his choice. If the family fell, he would go down with them. It was not possible to hold up a hand when the padrino lay in his own blood and suggest to a new family that he could switch allegiance without hesitation and belong to those whom, a few hours before, he would have helped to garrotte, strangle or shoot – not that he had been asked to kill yet, but if the time came he didn’t think he would fail. His experience of taking life was confined to slitting the throat of a goat when its foreleg was broken and of drowning an old dog that was no longer of use.

  He assumed her to be the reconnaissance of a rival family. There was no love between the clans. The feuds were mostly suppressed, but they didn’t go away even after alliances of marriage had been made. If the power of the family faltered, others would come from the villages around or from Locri, Siderno or Brancaleone and take control of their lives. He doubted he would survive – so a movement on the hillside alerted him.

  He thought the girl he had seen was in her twenties. She wore jeans and a dark anorak. She might have a handgun, but he hadn’t seen it.

  Three dogs worked with the kid. At his whistle they’d freeze, raise their ears, listen for his next command, and he would guide them with the calls used by generations of shepherds in the mountains. They had ground to cover – they had to get to the far side of the valley where the trees grew thickest and the rocks were steeper.

  The kid had had only a glimpse of her, but that was enough.

  The sun was at its zenith, the heat as intense as it would be that day.

  Where the men were was hazy, but the light fell high on the hillside, leaving it clear and easy to watch.

  Fred saw Carlo mopping his forehead with a handkerchief and there were sweat stains on the Englishman’s shirt, across his back and at the armpits. They had no hats. Most of the men had taken refuge inside the vehicles but the doors were open to allow any breeze to blew through. They stood together in the shade available from a stunted oak, which offered little cover. They were surplus to requirements but had half a day to kill. It was often like that. Fred’s superior officer, young, groomed, climbing, would have forgotten he had sent a man to Calabria, the cliff edge of the known world. If he had talked of his man’s presence on the Ionian coast he would have justified it as ‘someone else’s problem, the Italians. We’re giving them all possible support’. No great moral issue at stake.

  Carlo was swaying on his feet, suffering. Fred prodded him.

  ‘I was reflecting, my friend, on my senior officer’s view of this affair. And you?’

  ‘I was about asleep on my feet. My gold commander will be with a chum on a golf course. I won’t figure among the bogies.’

  ‘And nothing’s happening.’

  ‘My experience,’ Carlo said, ‘is that when nothing seems to be happening, all hell is about to break loose. Remind me to tell you a few old tales that prove it. It’s confusing, sudden, chaotic and . . .’

  Fred was no longer listening. The maresciallo was peering through his binoculars, not scanning and searching but focused and following. He slipped them towards Fred and pointed. Fred locked on the kid. Dogs barked far away, the sound they made when they’d found a scent or a target. The kid followed them, skipped between rocks, then was lost among trees that towered up behind the house. He was above the line of sheets to the right of the house. The binoculars were taken from him. He a
sked the maresciallo what his orders were. His response: to observe, monitor and have a presence, no more, until dusk. In the evening there would be a farewell gathering.

  ‘Confusing, sudden and chaotic’: when was it ever different? Where was their boy? Why was he there? When would he appear? The mood had changed, as if the sun had cooled. The lenses watched the hillside.

  She drove well and was calm. The priest led and she followed on the Reggio road, past the Montalto turning, and past the place they called Serro Juncari. Her father liked to talk about it. He had not been there but her grandfather had. A great meeting of important men held in secret one misty morning on a high plateau, hidden from view by wild pine trees. An informer had betrayed them: carabinieri had crept close and attempted a mass arrest. Her grandfather had escaped but many had not. Those captured had spent a short time in the San Pietro gaol in Reggio. The combination of political influence, judicial complicity and well-targeted envelopes had ensured that life soon, in the mountains, regained normality. The role of the informer had hurt the families, the whispers of the soffiato; different from a pentito, more dangerous. The latter ended up in a police cell, then called for a prosecutor and appeared in court. The damage could be contained. The soffiato was the murmur in the wind, unknown and unsuspected, probably liked and certainly trusted. The leeching of information went on over months and even years; the details of arrests were muddied at the Palace of Justice and the role of the informer was hidden. When her father had used the word – soffiato – he had spat.