No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  Hilde was his wife, and Carlo’s woman was Sandy. That was established. They hadn’t fished out photographs but had mentioned them on the long journey from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ionian coastline. He would not tell Hilde what he could see as he stood beside the bonnet of the carabinieri vehicle. None of the men were at ease, but he reckoned he and Carlo bore the heaviest responsibility. He would never speak of this walk to a living soul when he returned to his home and doubted that the Englishman would. It was because of him, because of the laptop left on a table in an interview room at the station in Bismarck-strasse. He could source it all back. She walked steadily, and he reckoned that her mind was numb. She hid nothing of herself, and nothing about her explained where Jago Browne was.

  The maresciallo, at his elbow, said, ‘It’s about the power have. You understand? You think Carlo understands? They have the power to hurt far beyond the inflicting of pain. Total humiliation is worse than anything physical. That is what they have done to her. I cannot see a mark on her body. No electrodes have been used, no cigarette burns. They have broken no bones. She has lost her clothing, which she can replace for a hundred euros. She is scarred, though. She may never be free of the experience. Maybe six or seven women took part in stripping her. Technically that is an assault, but if I try to put them into a courtroom with no witness, I’ll be laughed at. Standing here, we are ignored. If I go closer, I risk a confrontation. They tolerate us here, but no nearer. On the eve of a funeral it doesn’t suit them to kick us half to death. They make the rules. They have awesome power.’

  Fred tried to look into her eyes, to offer solidarity – and thought Carlo would – but she sleep-walked past them. She was given a blanket from the tailgate of a vehicle. It was draped over her shoulder, lay on the soft skin, covering one nipple but not the other. She didn’t wrap it closely around herself. A car door opened and she was helped inside. He considered, not seriously, going to the door and asking her if she had seen Jago Browne on the hill. If she had, how was he? Had he yet explained his intentions – and when was the silly fucker coming out and getting himself onto a plane? He could have asked all of that, but did not. He wondered, again, where the boy was and what he would do. He heard sobbing, quiet and not theatrical.

  The maresciallo said, ‘They do what they want. They buy who and what they want. It is difficult to win.’

  Carlo, murmured, ‘But we have to keep trying.’

  Both men were sombre. Where was the boy and what would he do? And when would they have a chance to decide on his vision of victory, if ever?

  Jago Browne went down the last few yards of the slope with almost excessive caution. The women were gathered in the kitchen, with a television on. The kid had lit a fire in an incinerator and Consolata’s clothes had gone into it, all except the trainers. The kid had poked the fire, then called the dogs to him and now was on the high hillside. Why she had been there he had no idea, but it would have been ungrateful not to thank her – silently, fleetingly – for the diversion she had promised him. He didn’t know whether she was still with the police at the block far down the track. The daughter-in-law was at the house, with the children, and he could hear their shrieks as they played inside. The open coffin was not enough to quieten them. He thought now was a good time. He was certain that the old man, the head of the family, was in his bunker, underground. He went towards the sheets.

  He slid the last few feet. The chickens ran to him, but the cockerel was wary. They came near to his legs and pestered him. He kicked dirt at them and they pecked at it, looking for food. He came past the derelict shed and saw where the ground beyond it was sub-soil, with no bed of rock. There was weed and thorn, and he registered that part of the shed’s wall was of newer stone, freshly pointed. He went past a sheet where the motif was roses with wide stems. In front of him, almost under his feet, the earth was scuffed with footprints. He stood still and listened. He heard the sounds from the kitchen and the kid’s whistle from up the hill. He wondered whether his new friends – the providers of food – had watched him come down the last short cliff face. They couldn’t see him now, wouldn’t know where he was and what he was doing. The earth was loose and had been stamped on but had not settled. No excuse. He thought it the supreme moment of his life. No excuse to delay.

  He dropped to his knees.

  He scraped hard with his hands, tore at the soil and scratched, as a cat would have. The earth came clear and he drove his hands into the soil and found where it was looser. The pile he made grew.

  Jago opened the hole.

  He had been accurate to a pinpoint. The cable was revealed, and the PVC insulation tape wrapped round the join. He scrabbled with his fingers under the tape and cleared a further section of the cable.

  His fingers fastened on it. He had it in two hands and eased himself onto his haunches. The cable strained. He drew a deep breath.

  18

  He let the breath ease out, threw his bodyweight back and heaved. Jago had no knowledge of electricity, didn’t know what would happen, but thought himself safe. He wrenched.

  The cable leaped from the ground a few feet, then stuck fast. He pulled harder and saw the tape come loose. A last drag and it had parted. A flash of light dazzled him.

  Jago clung to the cable end. He saw the short folded ends of the copper wire and threw it aside. There was a scorch mark on the grass and a few leaves were singed. He was on his back, and rolled.

  The chickens came to him and he was surrounded by a clucking chorus, demanding corn or whatever they ate. He ignored them, his focus on the cable. He assumed it best to get the ends back into the little pit he had gouged and fill it again. He tossed in the dead end of the cable, and handled the live end with what he hoped was care. Each week in the Newham Recorder there were stories of fatalities caused by accidents linked to electricity. He kicked earth over the copper ends, covered them and stamped them down. The chickens had given up on him. He heard the kid and his whistles but they were high and far away from him.

  It was done, finished. In the morning it would be clear that the ground had been disturbed, but not now that dusk was coming and the shadows were longer. The sheets hung still, and light from the kitchen doorway reached the grapes on the trellis.

  Jago Browne was where he wanted to be, not in an air-conditioned office, not in front of a bank of screens, not looking up to see the big TV suspended from the ceiling that carried information from Bloomberg and CNBC, not wearing a suit and impressing a client who had made millions, not pounding on a bike in a gym or running on a treadmill. He thought the place raw, fresh, and felt no fear. He had a sense that it was where he belonged, and lingered for a few seconds, then was gone. There was still work to be done, more challenges in front of him.

  He eased away, left the chickens disappointed. He went back past the shed with the broken window frame and sagging door, the stone wall, and the slope where the soil and stones were different and fewer weeds grew. There, Jago strained to hear a sound – evidence of his work – but heard nothing. He began to climb. As he went up small cliffs, traversed little gullies, and tried to find the ledges for his feet, he thought himself most vulnerable. His eyes were inches from rocks and foliage and he was unable to twist his neck to see what was behind him – the women from the house, or the kid and the dogs could have crept up behind him to snatch him when he could not defend himself. He went on until he thought himself out of sight of the kitchen door. Then he rested.

  Jago had seen Consolata. Her appearance and capture had not involved him. He had seen Marcantonio, with the raised shotgun and the wounded wolf, and had hurled the tyre iron, then had seen the flash of light and smoke spurt from the barrel but had felt no involvement. Life and death moved on, and he went with the flow. He moved, did not rush to be back at the road and looking for a ride out. He had no torch, just his fingers to help him.

  Dusk hurried on him, and the colours around him greyed. He blundered onto it. He thought that once, long ago, it might have been a man-m
ade path – there were places where the slope had been cut away and it was level. It was narrow, wide enough only for one person, and wove around the bigger rocks. For the first fifty yards or so, he would have been in deep cover, hidden from the house and the yard. Not what he wanted: he had to see the shed, the sheets, the door and the yard.

  There was a rock beside the path.

  He could lever himself to the top by taking hold of a birch sapling and dragging himself up. He lurched onto it and looked down, panting. Deep tiredness gripped him. He lay on the rock and thought of the squat castle keep perched on the summit of the mass at Scilla, which dominated the beach below. He was rewarded. He had a gap between trees and foliage to peer through, a vantage point. He had a good view, better than the one from the cleft under the two boulders, from the shed to the kitchen door.

  And what Jago couldn’t see, he could imagine.

  Pitch darkness. He couldn’t see his hand.

  He was off the bed. There were power cuts often enough in the winter when the storms came in off the Ionian Sea and when the poles carrying the electricity were undermined by subsidence, or when trees came down on the lines. Usually, then, there was warning – the power would go, come back, go again. This time there had been none.

  He was Bernardo Cancello. He was the padrino of his cosca. He had authority over the village and responsibility for events far beyond it. If there was a power cut, the first house in the village to have its electricity restored would be his . . . but he had never been in the bunker when the power had failed, always in the house. Mamma knew where everything for such an emergency was kept.

  The blackness was total.

  His leg was bleeding. He could feel the moisture on his skin and the wound smarted. He had come off the bed and had not thought where he was going or where the torch was, but had stood, taken a step forward – a blind man – and hit a chair, scraping his shin against it. He hadn’t bled since he and Stefano had changed a tyre on the City-Van. The jack had slipped and he had caught his hand on the mudguard. He had blamed Stefano, cuffed him hard and . . . He didn’t know what to do. The power was never off for long unless there was a massive storm, as there had been three or four days ago. Then there had been no cut, not even a flickering of the lights.

  He couldn’t remember where the candles were or the matches. Stefano would have known where they were. Bernardo had an old watch, given him long before by a friend, who had been shot dead in the open market of Gioiosa Ionica. He had had it more than twenty years and it still told good time, but the luminous paint on the arms had faded. He could have had a Rolex, a Breitling, a Longines or an Omega for four or five thousand euros – he could have matched the watch Marcantonio had bought in Berlin. He could have had any watch, and the face would have been lit, the hands clear to see. Teresa had a good watch, and Marcantonio’s was on the chest in his bedroom. Mamma would not part with the one he had given her for a birthday twenty-nine years ago, from a shop on Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi in Reggio. No watch with illuminated hands. No red light on the plug for the small fridge, or for the two-ring stove, or for the mini-boiler on the wall. No light at the heater on the floor or the air-conditioner.

  If it had been midnight, and he had been in his house and the power had gone, he could have stood at the front door, while Mamma rooted out the candles, the hurricane lamp or the big torch, and looked down and to the east where he would have seen some of the streetlights on the coastal road. There might have been moonlight. Headlights on the roads below the village, and stars above. Some houses in the village had small generators. He had no light to look at. Nothing. It was as the cave had been – but not for Bernardo.

  The inner door, if he could find it, led to the tunnel of concrete pipes and was power-assisted. He could open it by hand, but electricity made the job easier. The outer door could be opened only when the power was on. And he didn’t know what he might trip over or blunder into next. The child in the cave had not been able to hurt herself in the darkness because the chain had held her. At the back of the cave, where she had been, where her mattress was and where water dripped from the rock above, there would have been the same black emptiness.

  He had been told by Stefano that he might blow the fuse if he overloaded the system – but he had not. Nothing new was plugged in. He had to wait for Stefano – but his driver was far away. If not Stefano, he must wait for his daughter, but Giulietta was tracking the priest whom he had condemned. His daughter-in-law would have had the strength to open the far door from the outside, but she never came to the bunker. She did nothing that might spoil her clothes. Mamma would not come – and she was deaf: she wouldn’t hear him if he shouted when she was next near to the door, feeding her chickens.

  The dark was unique to him. He could see nothing. He didn’t want to move for fear of hurting himself. There were times when the leader of a family, the padrino, must show courage, must lead his men of honour from the front, set the example. Now nobody was watching. Nobody cared to see his courage. He had begun to shake, and he couldn’t suppress the tremor in his arms and hands. His legs felt weak. Silence clawed at him. When the child had been in the cave there had been the noise of dripping water, and she had told him tearfully she had heard rats moving. No water dripped in his bunkers and no vermin had found its way in.

  He was surrounded by silence, in total darkness, and the shaking in his limbs was worse. He didn’t know when anyone would come, or whether he was forgotten. He thought it pointless to shout: he would not be heard.

  Jago sat on the flat surface of the rock, his back against a bank of sparse earth, stones and the network of roots from a birch tree; all of his body was in shadow and he thought himself well hidden.

  He had a view he rated excellent – maybe that was what his life had come down to, the rating of a view, not the credit rating of a company or the wealth rating of a potential investor. He could see the porch roof at the front of the house, the parking area where the City-Van was usually left, and down the track to where the men stood guard. The oil drum was lit and threw up sparks; beyond it were the lights of the carabinieri vehicles. He could also see the kitchen door, the patio with the single wooden seat, the yard before the trellis blocked him, the line of sheets and the roof of the derelict shed. Nothing happened, no panic. Only the chickens scratched and fussed in the grit. He wondered how it was in the darkness, what the man was doing.

  It might have been a total failure. The old boy could have slipped off his bed or out of his chair, found his way immediately to a shelf, a cupboard or drawer, picked up a power torch, and switched it on. The dark might have been only a minor inconvenience. Jago considered that unlikely. Chaos and confusion, in his limited experience, always accompanied a power-cut, as if the world was ending. Nobody stayed calm when the electricity failed. He expected that Bernardo would appear eventually, stressed, and breathless.

  He did not consider his effort worthless. The picture in his mind was of the old man trapped in darkness, afraid. Jago had his knees up and his arms round them. At that moment, with the crows and the pigeons settled in the branches above him, and the light gone, he reflected that he held the power, not Marcantonio’s grandfather. He had, he thought, more power and control than he had ever possessed in his life.

  He thought it would play out in front of him that evening. The cool breeze was refreshing. Food would have been acceptable, but in comparison to what he had achieved, and where he was headed, that was a trivial concern. Below him, it would explode, he was sure.

  The City-Van struggled on the steeper sections of the road. Stefano had to drive in a low gear when the little engine strained. When they had slowed right down and fumes billowed from the exhaust, he would smile sweetly at his passenger. They didn’t talk. Because Stefano had no English and his passenger no Italian, he could hold a conversation only in sign language. He pointed to his watch to indicate when they would reach their destination. He offered cigarettes out of politeness, which were declined, and a fresh bottl
e of water, which was accepted.

  It had been easier than Stefano had anticipated. That the Englishman would make this journey into the unknown, without the company of his associate, had surprised him. He thought the lawyer from along the coast, Humphrey, had understood and possessed the wisdom to give no sign of it. The associate had shown nerves, was Italian by birth, and might also have grasped what lay in the Englishman’s future. It was not for Stefano to make judgements on what was planned and would happen.

  But – but – he had seen the Englishman talking with two men, an hour before a scheduled meeting, who were obviously foreign law enforcement. They had made no attempt to disguise themselves. He had sat beside Giulietta and felt her . . . He wondered where they were now, where they were waiting. They’d have a long wait. The Englishman’s phone, of course, was off and it had been Humphrey’s job to guarantee that basic security procedure. He pointed again to his watch – twenty minutes more on the road. He needed now to have his headlights on and the sole excitement of the journey – other than the bends and cliff faces – was a small deer rushing into the road and freezing in the headlights, then sprinting into the trees. When he pointed to the hands of his watch, he fastened his smile on the Englishman.

  He saw the belt buckle, quite heavy, ornate. He saw the teeth and wondered how many were artificial. He saw the length of the fingernails.

  The belt would come off – it was usually necessary – and then the Englishman’s trousers would drop but that would not be important. Teeth were always a problem – few of Stefano’s were his own but he was well looked after financially and the artificial ones were comfortable. Natural teeth were a problem because they didn’t degrade. Neither did fingernails. Otherwise, little remained to be shovelled up and buried. He laughed. The Englishman looked sharply at him. There had been a man near to Cosenza, a businessman who had defrauded a significant padrino. The businessman, elderly and arthritic, had had hip-replacement surgery to regain his mobility and the metal – of course – had survived. It had been dangerous to retrieve it afterwards: not willingly given up by the pigs. Men always laughed when it was mentioned over shots of coffee.