No Mortal Thing: A Thriller

by Gerald Seymour

  He came, ashen-faced. The prosecutor had dared to hope. All he had been told in the priest’s phone call was his name and his village, which had been enough to whet the appetite of a starving man. His joy had been huge, but short-lived. The ambulance had arrived. He had been promised that roadblocks were in place around the city on all principal routes to north and south, and on the main road heading up into the mountains. Useless. Why? Myriad routes led from the outskirts of Reggio towards the high villages of the Aspromonte.

  When he arrived beside the body, the recriminations ceased. A man of dignity, wedded to his work, had been dealt a crushing blow. He was handed the contents of the pockets and a phone, and saw that the last call made was to himself. It was the nature of his work: the Lord in his wisdom gave and the same Lord with the same wisdom took. The flashes were from the photographer. The forensics and scenes-of-crime people were impatient to collect what was left in the way of evidence that had not been trampled over. The prosecutor saw, under arc lights, the face of the priest. The colour had drained from it and the jowl hung slack. He reflected that death had not treated the corpse kindly. He had not met but had known of him, and would have regarded him as one of the professionals who wormed close to the families and facilitated respectability.

  His guards hovered close to him. The phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. They closed round him, feeling his frustration. He noted the number, answered it, then listened to what he was told from the control room. He thought himself a man who clutched at dreams. It was a calm voice, without the emotion of the chase, and he could gain no impression of whether he was offered a good chance, an average chance, or a chance with no provenance. He was told of a young man of above average intelligence, but of junior rank and limited experience. He could have demanded answers to a cascade of questions. He stood within two or three metres of the body of the priest, who might have resurrected an investigation and had been silenced. He was nudged aside and the ambulance team began to heave the cadaver onto a gurney. He thought one question important.

  ‘Is he sure?’

  Carlo said, ‘What you have to understand, Luca, is that – to quote – ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men . . .’ You have to jump on it and ride the wave up the beach. Know what I mean?’

  Fred said, ‘It was their beloved Shakespeare, writing about Rome, and it is from one of Caesar’s killers, from Brutus, “Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries”. In other words, don’t think me impertinent, you get off your arse and get on with it or spend a long time regretting the inaction. Are you with me, Luca?’

  Luca, the maresciallo, shrugged, betraying nervousness. ‘I take a huge chance. I was very definite. Apparently the prosecutor was about to receive the priest from the village. He was walking across the car park at the Palace of Justice, and had requested a meeting. A confession? What else? He was shot dead. The killer escaped and the chance was lost. He was told what I said. He tries to grasp it, the last throw. He asked Control one question, about me. ‘Is he sure?’ Am I sure, Carlo, Fred? They’ll flay me if my intuition falls short.’

  Carlo said, ‘You’ll be good, Luca, and you’re riding with the A Team, the best.’ Then, shit, do I believe that? A confident blow on the back followed.

  Fred said, ‘It’ll take you onwards and upwards, Luca, and when you’re at the top you’ll remember two old men who gave you a push in the right direction.’ He thought that if it failed, and the line of the sheets was irrelevant, he and Carlo would be long gone, not facing the brickbats. He clasped the maresciallo’s arm and squeezed confidence into it.

  A helicopter was tasked. The cacciatore would be deployed, and the local carabinieri would have a role. A senior prosecutor was coming from Reggio, and there would be tracker dogs. The maresciallo had said it was the last chance. It was Carlo’s work, and Fred’s. They had opened their mouths, woven a skein of trust and now had to wait.

  The clerk sat in his office, but only the observant would have noticed his door was not quite shut. He worked on expenses claimed, and was often late at his desk. It was assumed by those who dealt with him that he was deaf because he wore a hearing aid. He often reflected that much of critical sensitivity was said between men hurrying across the lobby. He heard the prosecutor come back to his office and rap out the combination on the door lock. Then he had held a staccato conversation with the leader of his escort: how long would the Bell Agusta take to be readied, then to fly to the location, and how long it would take for the prosecutor to be driven there? He heard it all; as he had heard much over many months.

  He would need to wait until the building quietened, feet no longer sounding on the staircase. His attention seemed locked on his screen and the lists of items for which staff charged. The clerk received little reward for his work. The family paid him only five hundred euros a month, but it was never late; whether he had information or nothing to report, the envelope turned up without fail. He gave it to his wife, who sent it by registered post to an aunt in the Friuli district of the north-east, and she banked it. The money lay untouched in the account.

  Hatred governed him. He was poorly treated at the Palace, regarded as incompetent and useless, good only for filling in the electronic ledger, nothing else. He could recite the date and the hour at which each perceived insult had been lobbed at him. If any had suggested that greed motivated him, he would have denied it. Such an accusation would be made only in a police cell, or an interview room when disgust confronted him. The risk he took was invigorating. The staircase was quiet. He used his phone to call a friend in a coastal town south of Pellaro. He dictated a message, succinct and clear.

  It was the first leg of the cut-off calls. Four more would be needed before the message reached a destination.

  A girl came to the checkpoint.

  She would have seen Carlo, Fred and the young maresciallo, who paced and smoked. She was a teenager and rode an old scooter. She had come up from the village, with a packet of Rizla cigarette papers in her pocket. The message was in a code of old dialect words. She was waved through. Why should she not be? Stefano came after her and had to produce identity papers, then was permitted to pass. Control’s instruction was that the community close to the family should not be alerted by a new level of security: calm must prevail.

  The girl on the scooter, followed by the City-Van, reached the second block. Everyone knew from the radio that there had been a fatal shooting at the Palace of Justice and that the corpse had been identified as Father Demetrio, their priest. He was not mourned. Had he been alive, the men beside the oil drum would have ducked their heads in his presence, but he was dead. More activity: Giulietta had returned, driven by Teresa, Stefano had been to the mini-mart, and Giulietta had shopping bags.

  Beyond the block, short of the house, Giulietta was shown the message that covered one side of a single cigarette paper. She gave no sign of thinking it important and went inside through the front door. Stefano knew his place and went with his bag to the kitchen door. All appeared normal in their lives – and nothing was as it seemed.

  He had a good view of her. She came out with the handyman, and the old woman hovered by the kitchen door. Jago thought the entertainment had begun.

  He felt the excitement he’d known as a child when he was taken to see a film or to a show in the West End, the anticipation of hearing an orchestra tuning or sitting forward as the lights dimmed.

  The old woman held some clothes while the handyman had a newspaper and a small plastic container for petrol. Giulietta kicked off her shoes, then dropped her suit trousers – her legs were pale, not browned by the sun – and snatched the pair of jeans her mother held out to her. She had on a different blouse from the one she’d worn when coming to the front of the house. There was no panic, but she was quick, which told Jago that time was short. He thought that traders could move fast when the markets needed a reaction, but didn’t panic, not even at the cliff edge of a crash. They kept their cool, as did she. He didn�
��t know why the clothes had to be destroyed. They went into the oil drum where the trash was incinerated, and the fuel was splashed on top. The women stood back as the handyman did the business with a spill of rolled paper and a match.

  Jago’s mind leaped – it wasn’t too great a chasm to cross. Clothes for destruction had been in up-close-and-personal contact with a killing. The flames climbed higher. Easy for Jago to see that Giulietta had fastened her jeans and was ready to take the small pistol her mother offered. It went into her waistband. A car cleansed and clothing burned. Evidence of a murderous few hours, Jago thought.

  Giulietta led; the handyman followed.

  The old woman was back inside. The kid now loitered and the dogs picked up the mood, were poised, but didn’t know where the threat lay. The grandson would still be in the coffin in the house – maybe the lid had been screwed down. Jago had seen Marcantonio’s confidence, had watched him strut about, as if he thought it his right to do so. Now he was forgotten. She had control. Giulietta had sent her mother inside and the handyman was following in her wake, a bag carrier . . . She was behind the trellis now, and he saw the ripple of the sheets as she passed behind them.

  A little light fell from the kitchen, a little more from the fire in the oil drum, a fraction of moonlight from between the trees. He saw her crouch and fiddle with something. She must have found a switch or a catch that was controlled by electricity. It had been pretty obvious to Jago that the doorway was electrically powered: logical because of the weight of the stones in the wall. She was scrabbling, and must have failed. She whistled. He knew the sound, had learned its pitch. It was the whistle the kid gave when he directed the dogs. The kid ran towards her, and she must have made a gesture he recognised but that Jago couldn’t see. He sprinted behind the sheet, under cover of the trellis, and was lost. The dogs scampered about, confused. The television or radio was loud in the kitchen. She was still struggling, trying to use her weight to open the door. Stones had come loose from the wall and she scrabbled, like people did on news bulletins when there had been an earthquake and victims were buried. The kid came back.

  Jago saw the hammer.

  She belted at something. The handyman tried to push her aside and do the job himself. She wouldn’t have it. She hit again. Her calm was replaced now with frantic hammering . . .

  Stone-faced, pissed off, they were in their cave and had taken out the bare minimum of the kit they had packed. The messages on the screen had been pithy, unpleasant. For days they had been on top of the sheets hanging on the line, for days they’d had the view of part of a derelict shed’s roof and of the ground where the chickens scratched. They had been upstaged by a maresciallo at a roadblock, who was two hundred and fifty metres back from them and claimed to have identified the bunker where the head of the clan had his refuge. They didn’t know where the Englishman was. Now they could hear but not see. They could hear hammering, the wrenching of metal and stones landing on the ground, but they couldn’t see what was happening.

  Fabio had muttered, ‘If that’s where he is, they won’t believe we had no idea of it. We’ll be accused of collaboration.’

  Ciccio had said, ‘Life isn’t fair. If it was, everyone would be a hero, not washed up, like we are.’

  The hammering reached fever point.

  She pulled. The door hatch creaked, shrieked and came loose.

  There should have been lights in the tunnel but there was darkness. She told the kid what she wanted. He scuttled off to fetch it. She led into the hole and Stefano followed. She called her father, at first softly, then louder but there was no response. She was at the inner door and Stefano was jabbering in her ear about the mechanism, the power needed and the override. The kid was back. He seemed frightened to enter the tunnel – and had cause to be because he was privy now to the family’s greatest secret – but Stefano turned on his haunches, spat an instruction and the kid rolled the torch down the tunnel. Stefano issued more orders and the kid fled.

  Giulietta took the torch.

  She had seen the small intimacies between Stefano and her mother. They might once have slept together, but long ago. She had wondered whether she might be the bastard daughter of the family’s driver. She had taken comfort in the evidence that she was not. She was her father’s. If she had not been his, he would have registered the signs and Stefano would have gone into the acid or down a cliff, been fed to the pigs or shot and left in a ditch. She was her father’s and would fight with her life for him and— Stefano knew the catch better than she did. He used the reverse of the hammer end, inserted it behind a lever and broke it.

  More darkness, and faint moaning. She snatched the torch.

  Giulietta went through the entrance, dropped to the floor and found him. She shone the torch and saw the blood. She came only rarely to the bunker, which had been built by her brothers who had expected to use it for their own safety from arrest. She hated the place and the smell. She tried to block out the stench of old sweat, fresh blood and stale food. It was cold in there and damp. She saw where his nose had bled and more dark stains on his trouser leg. There were no lights and she had no idea why the system had failed – the power was on in the house. She remembered.

  She lifted her father’s head. He seemed not to recognise her – but she was his daughter. She slapped his face. It was a punishing blow, calculated. His head jerked back and anger soared in his eyes. She dragged him up.

  She didn’t tell him. It wouldn’t help her father, as the minutes fled, to know that the English player, travelling with an escort of foreign police, was now inside the bellies of pigs, or that Father Demetrio would by now be on a mortuary slab. Neither did he need to know that a helicopter was flying at speed towards their village, carrying cacciatore, or that a prosecutor was being driven in an armoured limousine, hemmed around by his escort, along the mountain roads. She remembered.

  Marcantonio’s return: a story told of a pizzo collection in a fashionable corner of Berlin, the intervention of an idiota, and a girl’s face cut. She remembered that Marcantonio’s car had been scratched, then the City-Van – the vehicle was worthless but not the gesture. She remembered that Francesco, the village butcher, had picked up a tyre iron beside Marcantonio’s body. She remembered that the power was off, leaving her father imprisoned in the dark without explanation. And she remembered the message from the Palace of Justice, the imminence of a raid, that they’d know where to search for him. She remembered it all.

  Between them, they were able to get him to his feet, to the hatch, then into the tunnel. No time to collect anything. If she hadn’t slapped him he would have been a dead weight. He had, in part, recovered. They dragged him down the tunnel, metre by metre, and she remembered all that had happened in the few short days since Marcantonio’s return. She wondered who he was – and why.

  There was one place she could go, just one. She had never made a judgement on the funds that had launched the family towards success, affluence and a position of respect among the leaders of the mountain villages and coastal towns. She had never asked questions or interrogated her father. There was only one place. She had found it a few days after her thirteenth birthday, had understood why the chain was there, with the bucket and the child’s dress. The place had fascinated and hardened her. She had made no judgement on the long-ago death of a little girl, or on the killing of Annunziata and her lover, or on why men were fed to the pigs. She had made no judgement on killing the priest, who was the family’s friend. They came out into the night and the torch was off. He had regained the use of his legs but his arm was over her shoulders. She hissed to Stefano what he should do.

  The kid watched them go, the dogs beside him, and they seemed to hear – a long way off – the throb of a helicopter’s engines.

  The path went from the back of the building and climbed.

  They came past Jago. The path was below but close to the rock he sat on.

  They were two dark shapes, seeming joined at the hip and shoulder. She was
supporting him. They had no torch so would barely have been able to make out the path and might have fallen off it. He heard the woman curse, and a moan from the man. Again he heard her voice, soothing now.

  He knew it was them.

  Jago couldn’t see the face. He hadn’t seen it when they’d come out of the hole in the wall. He had known where it would be and had focused on it, but the handyman had blocked his view at the critical moment. He had seen her – there had been a moment before the torch was doused when it played on her features. Calm, in control. Jago had seen the man’s shoulders and then they had ducked to the side. He had not seen them again until they were almost upon him. The moan told him the punishment he’d inflicted. It was time to be gone. He knew each footstep he must take, each sharp escarpment he’d scramble up, and each sapling strong enough to bear his weight when he levered himself higher up the slope towards the road. There was the airline equivalent, out of Lamezia, of the milk train – they’d find a seat on it for him. He’d get to a bar on the road back to the west side of the peninsula and call Consolata. She’d meet him, and give him back the last of his possessions. It had not been Jago Browne’s fault that she had been on the hill – she’d had no call to be there – had been found, driven down and stripped. He could not have intervened. He would call and she’d drive him to the airport. There was a way up the slope if he caught at the saplings above and used them to lever himself to the next level. He would go fast then and . . .