No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  Her father thought that Father Demetrio, booked to conduct the funeral of Marcantonio the next day, might be about to betray the family. Good enough for her. She trailed the priest towards Reggio, staying two or three vehicles back. She had lost any opportunity to drive him off the road. It was against her leg, hidden from view.

  If the Beretta was needed, and the chance came, she was experienced in its use.

  Shaken, but more determined, Father Demetrio crossed a high point and could see the city below. A group of men and women were spread out close to the road, standing behind telescopes and tripods. He identified them as a group of the foreign birdwatchers who came to Reggio to monitor migrating species. They straggled along ground left rough after road widening, and would have been half suffocated by vehicle fumes. He had read about them in a newspaper: they complained persistently about the old sport of shooting as practised in Calabria. Enough. Calabrians did not need foreigners to dictate their behaviour. It should be done from within. The future was in the hands of persons such as himself, and conscience tore at him, leading him towards his ultimate destination that day. He saw the city and the brilliant blue of the sea, the hazy outline of Sicily and the massive shape of Etna, capped with a wisp of thick cloud. He was looking for the piazza that lay in front of the Duomo, his destination.

  He left the bird watchers behind. The road dropped ahead of him. His hands shook and his leg muscles were wire tight. He glanced into the rear-view mirror several times but he didn’t see the black vehicle again.

  He drove down the steep, winding hill and accepted that his life had changed.

  Jago heard the dogs before he saw them.

  A sharp memory: a weekend of executive bonding in the Herefordshire countryside, on the edge of the Welsh Marches, when he had been slogging in the City. There had been hiking, zip-wire riding, paint-ball fighting and quad-bike racing. They’d been trying to cross the river with a ball of string and ten different egotists offering opinions when, out of the mist, on a Saturday morning, the hunt had cantered by. It jogged him now. Not the riders in fancy dress, or the big horses that probably lived better than their grooms, but the baying of hounds on a scent. At first he hadn’t seen them, but he’d heard the cry. On a dark moonless night, the sound would have terrified him. Now, though, it was bright sunshine and the cries of the dogs rang in the air, bouncing off the rock walls.

  It was not for him – Jago had that comfort. The dogs were headed, guided by whistles and calls, along a line that ran higher than where Jago was.

  The kid slipped into view, then out of it, but took secondary place. The dogs held him. They did not race ahead and have to be called back. They worked at a steady pace, quartering the ground, prancing on rocks and diving into caves. The kid held them with his commands. Jago didn’t know what or who they were tracking, but it was a form of sport. He assumed that the dogs had a line on the men who had fed him, but they’d have firearms and probably dog repellent – they’d be equipped to protect themselves. The dogs were almost as much a part of the family as any of the humans. He knew what their teeth could do because they had taken apart the wolf’s body.

  The kid directed them, and they must have been close to where he sent them. They seemed to have caught his mood because their cries were sharper. Then, at a final command, the noise was cut. Jago could see the outline of their ribcages, their spines, their flattened ears. The three dogs advanced in silence, their bellies hugging the ground. He thought they were closing on their target. He waited to hear shots fired.

  The yard beyond the kitchen remained empty and the solitary chair threw a longer shadow. Again he could hear the radio playing inside. The kid went slower and more carefully. Jago thought they were close to the target but far above him.

  She could no longer see the dogs.

  It was a moment of fear, unique to Consolata.

  Quiet cloaked the trees. She had not identified where the dogs were or the kid who was with them. She had frozen. She didn’t know where to go, what to do, where to turn.

  She looked around her, saw and heard nothing. She had come across the cleft between two great boulders. It was obvious that he had been there. She had found his rubbish and stayed too long. She thought of how he had been with her at the rendezvous, when he had taken the food but not her. The ground was squashed and she had found the poorly hidden rubbish – how had he come by food issued to the Italian military?

  Consolata, looking down onto the back of the house, gave Jago credit for having found a perfect vantage point. The panorama offered a clear view of the back door. She saw a trellis, with ripe grapes hanging from it, a washing line, with sheets, towels and pillow cases pegged to it. She saw a chair, and a place where the yard had been scrubbed. She strained to hear. She was aware only of a radio playing light music. The silence unnerved her. The peace, she knew, was not real.

  At the squat, as a campaigner, she was thought of as determined and without fear. Those traits – she knew – unsettled some. She should have had a lover in the squat, but did not. Because she had no lover, Consolata had come in search of one. She had made her commitment: if she found him, she would drive him off the mountain and take him to Scilla. She would let the darkness fall and the moon rise, then lead him to the beach and would brook no argument. She hadn’t found him.

  The shadows were longer now, and dusk would come fast. She turned to look away from the house and wondered if he had spent his entire time in this place, where he was at the moment and what he was doing. Then she looked for a way to haul herself clear of the plateau and start back.

  She cursed him, not aloud, and despised herself for following him. It had been easy to come down, find this ledge, sliding on the backside of her jeans the last two metres, but was harder to pull herself up. She had a grip with one trainer and a hold with one hand, fingers gripping a smooth rock surface, but her foot slid away and she lurched back. She tried again, but her fingers couldn’t take the strain and, once more, she toppled back, and swore, then went at it yet again.

  She was up off the ledge and had a good grip with foot and fingers when the dogs came. Not big ones, not the dogs the police used or the military. There had been dogs of that build, that aggression, round the bigger rubbish dumps in Archi. They would fight each other for food scraps, but the worst ferocity would be directed at anyone foolish enough to interfere with them. They had her legs and she lost the foothold, kicked to get them clear of her and fell over the edge.

  The dogs went with her. Two leaped after her and one clung by its teeth to her jeans and held tight. She was shouting, near terror, and the dogs were snarling. She rolled and cannoned off a tree, then bounced into a rock face. She was dazed now, unable to help herself, and another dog had its teeth on her arm. The anorak was ripping. The kid was above her, crabbing sideways, sure-footed, managing the ground with ease. It was a snapshot moment, as if a camera had captured it: the coldness in the face, the absence of excitement, the lack of emotion. He was a teenager and had smooth cheeks. His eyes never left her and showed no pleasure at her fate but no sympathy either. Dead eyes. She rolled further, and the ground came up fast to meet her. She hit a chair on the slabs of the patio.

  An old woman had come out with a broom, which she waved at the dogs. They backed off. Consolata saw a face that was lined with age and the skin sagging, and knew she was confronting the mamma of the family. First a cackle, then the face set. Aspromonte granite.

  The old woman, ankle to throat in black, called, ‘We have a little bitch, all bones, a little spy, watching us.’

  They had a fine view of the yard, and the kitchen door.

  Women spilled out of it. They seemed uniformed in black, the ‘mourning squad’, and came armed. Some were hideously skeletal, others grotesquely obese. They would have been roused from their vigil over the dead boy by the snarling of the dogs and the old woman’s shout. From the kitchen, some had brought knives and one had a saucepan. Another brandished a meat cleaver, and the last gripped the
handle of a lump hammer.

  ‘Report or not?’

  Fabio hissed, ‘I have never been unprofessional and—’

  The dogs were outside the circle of women, sniffing the backs of legs. The kid had come down from the rocks and had the wisdom to stay back. The low sunlight caught the steel of the knives, the pan, the cleaver and the rim of the hammer head. Fabio thought he might be sick. He could no longer see her. She was blocked by the women’s backs. They bent. He heard no scream, and the dogs were quiet. The kid was at the edge of the yard and did nothing.

  ‘Do we shoot?’ Fabio asked.

  A hoarse answer from Ciccio: ‘We shoot only to preserve life, our lives or a victim’s. We do not shoot to warn. If we shoot it is to kill. Do you need me to read you the regulations? We do not do warning shots. Ever.’

  ‘Or shout?’

  ‘We’re not “intervention”, we’re “surveillance”. We watch, we note.’

  ‘She was your girl. You knew her . . .’ Fabio let it tail off. It was a cheap shot. He couldn’t see her. He hadn’t met her. Ciccio had not brought her on a foursome outing for a meal, a drink, a movie. He had kept her to himself. It was difficult to work out what the women were doing. They were crouched now, but he didn’t think the knives had been used, while the hammer and the saucepan were not raised high to strike. A card came up in a wizened hand. It was encased in cellophane, and would have been hung around Consolata’s neck. Fabio had his pistol in one hand and a pepper spray in the other, but Ciccio held the binoculars. It was an ID card. It was passed among the women. Ciccio mouthed that it was the card for a member of the Addio Pizzo or the Reggio Libera. Gales of coarse laughter rose to them.

  Fabio said, ‘The camera! Use the camera.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Use the camera! Record it!’

  A hesitation. ‘It’s packed. It’s in the fucking case. Lenses are off. Everything stowed.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Fuck you, Fabio. You saw me pack it. We agreed. We were due to go – we had nothing to report, nothing to see. It was over, finished.’

  Two good friends had fallen out. That was new in their relationship. It had damaged mutual fondness and respect, which might not be retrieved. They didn’t shoot, shout or use the camera. The women were bent over the girl.

  He could have intervened. Jago was close enough to use his fingers to root a stone from the ground – which wasn’t hard after the rain – and hurl it at the bent backs of the women. Guaranteed a hit. They were, he thought, a colony of ants boiling over the girl: he couldn’t see what they were doing. Had he thrown a stone, hit someone and caused her to squeal, the ants would have exploded in all directions, but Jago wouldn’t do it.

  If he deflected their attention from Consolata in any way, he would kiss goodbye to any chance he might have of reaching the cable. He would do nothing. He had only seen the cable from a distance but he could almost feel the smooth plastic that coated it. He was near enough to the washing line to see the different colours of the plastic pegs and distinguish the simple pattern on the sheets, autumn leaves on one and faded full-bloom roses on an other. Where they hung together, hiding the track, he would unearth the cable at the join. He would not give up the chance. It would come only once.

  He barely moved, only the flicker of an eyelash. His heartbeat and breathing were regular. He could see what they were doing to her. There were many stones he could have used – they had fallen down long slopes, dislodged by heavy rain.

  When he had sat on the bench, fresh off the train, and her poster had blown out of the overfilled waste-bin to snag against him, he had said to her, ‘I think I know what winning is against them. I did it yesterday. It was only small but I won.’ She had stopped and had asked him what ‘winning’ was. She had never managed it. He would win when he broke the cable, trapped the padrino in darkness and frightened him. The child chained in the cave would have been terrified, and the old man would be.

  The knives were on the ground, with the saucepan, the cleaver and the hammer. The kid collected them, then was waved away by a gaunt, scrawny arm. Women’s work, not for the kid to see. Jago was the witness. The laughter came more often, guttural. Sometimes shoulders shook because this was their joke. He couldn’t see her but knew what they were doing. The kid was at the kitchen door, watching unnoticed. The clothing came off, to be flung over shoulders. An anorak, jeans, trainers, and the two T-shirts – everything she had offered to take off for him. The women broke apart.

  She lay huddled in the foetal self-preservation posture. All that she wore was the ID card in its plastic holder, hung from her neck on its lanyard. He had seen it on the beach. They pulled her up. The sun, low-slanted, caught her skin. She was not given her clothes, which were left at the kid’s feet, close to the door. They marched her round the side of the house. He thought her beaten, but was wrong.

  She flailed with her arms and her hair flew, fighting free of the hands clawing at her and yelled to the skies, in his language: ‘Jago, where are you? Jago, I need—’

  A moment of defiance, which was gone as fast as it had come. The hands had her arms and one pulled at her hair, shaking her head hard.

  They walked her to the side of the house, up past that wall and out to the front, then took her across the gravel, where the City-Van was usually parked. She would have walked over sharp stones but she no longer resisted. They took her as far as the gates that led onto the track. In the distance, ahead of her, was the block where the village men were and beyond them the carabinieri vehicles.

  She was pushed, dismissed, and began the long walk.

  Jago’s target was the cable. He had not been compromised.

  Ciccio said, ‘We didn’t have to shoot. Her life wasn’t at risk.’

  ‘Good-looking, all of her.’

  Ciccio hit Fabio. With a clenched fist.

  Stefano was a humble man, ran errands, said what he was told to say and played his part well. He had no language other than the dialect peculiar to the Ionian coast of the Aspromonte. The lawyer who lived in the near-deserted coastal development up the beach from Brancaleone, Humphrey, was the go-between. He could not have faulted Stefano, even to the way the man held his cap across his stomach, in counterfeit respect, and realised the seriousness of his own situation. Stefano had told him, and he had understood the implications, that two foreign policemen had been seen talking with Horrocks. He and a member of the family had witnessed it. Humphrey should be careful about the company he kept, whom he took money from. He had shivered and protested that he knew nothing of such a security breach. He hoped fervently that he was believed. He explained the situation to Horrocks and tried to smile.

  ‘This chap is going to drive you to the meeting. You’ll meet the top man – that’s out of my league and I’m not invited. They’re in mourning because of the death of the boy who came to see you, so they’re making a big gesture by seeing you. A mark of respect, you might say. Jack will stay with me but you’ll be fine. It’s the big league, Bent, top-table stuff.’

  Humphrey did his best. Bentley Horrocks was vain, not really a man of the world. The lawyer thought Stefano played it well. A smile and a wink, they said, was best when handling a man who had been condemned but was ignorant of it. He remembered seeing the two men with Bent outside the hotel – he had been in the lobby. Bent hadn’t answered when Humphrey had asked who they were. Silly boy for being seen with them, and a dangerous boy for Humphrey to know too well.

  Jack said, ‘Where you deserve to be, Bent, top table and big league. Brilliant.’

  Humphrey drove a big car, and assumed Bent had a Beemer or a Merc in London, perhaps even a Bentley cabriolet, so it had been a surprise for him to be ushered into the passenger seat of a Fiat mass-market, seen-better-days, City-Van. He went off, good as gold. They watched him driven round the corner and out of sight. He saw that Jack – no fool, Giacomo, a survivor, who put up with serious shit in the interests of comfort – was white-faced an
d his hands were trembling. He told Jack to clear their rooms, and pack the two bags: they’d be leaving for Lamezia in a half-hour.

  ‘You know what’s good for you, Jack? They’ve long arms, and not many places they don’t reach to. Always gets awkward when anyone opens their mouth out of turn, pulls anything fast on them . . .’

  ‘I do, Humphrey. I think I know it quite well – what’s good for me. Yes.’

  ‘Is that her?’

  ‘It is.’

  Carlo’s question, Fred’s response.

  She came towards them.

  The carabinieri, same as the Customs man and the investigator, would have ‘seen it all’ and were not often fazed. Heads dropped or eyes went to the skies, to the lowering sun, big, red and full of war, and the loose puffs of cloud. She walked as if in a dream, the ID card on her chest. Her arms hung slack at her sides. She made no attempt to cover herself, as if she were beyond modesty. At first the maresciallo had followed her with his binoculars but now he let them hang from the neck strap. The women would have resumed the vigil, something to chat about over the open coffin.

  She was alone and walked in the centre of the track, with no protection for her feet. Sometimes the rhythm of her stride broke and she hopped – must have stepped on a sharp flint.

  The men stood aside, ignored her. Backs were turned, shoulders offered. One, not meeting her eyes, offered her an old sack, hessian, which he’d picked up from the ground beside the oil drum, and held it out to her. She didn’t take it so he let it fall.

  She left them, looking straight ahead. From where they were, that far away, they had heard one long shout, an entreaty, but not her words.

  Fred had said to Carlo, outside the communal house in Archi, when the door had been slammed on them, ‘God protect us from crusaders, bigots, her and her crowd . . . She laughs at us because we are the little people.’