But Jago hadn’t seen the face. He hadn’t completed what he had promised he would do. He did not consider that madness governed him, or that he was a changed man from the one who had sat in a park, killing time, watching the death of a fly in a spider’s web not a week ago. He had mapped the way out. He stretched, felt the stiffness in his joints, the tiredness in his legs and jumped off the rock. He sprawled on the path, then pushed himself to his feet.
They led him.
Jago understood where the refuge would be. He had been there. The path was overgrown and stones that had once been steps had slipped askew in rain torrents. There were places where trees had fallen and he had to crawl, steep banks to his right and a drop to a stream bed on his left. Years before – twenty, thirty or even forty – the path had been dug so that it could be used in daylight or at night, in summer or winter. They would have come at least once in every twenty-four hours to visit the child. The helicopter was louder, no longer a faint rumble in the night sky. They made more noise in front, which was good for Jago. He thought the girl had brought the old man as fast as he could manage, but they dared not use a torch and it would have been hard going for them. They were like the wolf, lost, vulnerable and hunted . . . At the bank they would have been on the way home, or already there, paying off the nanny and feeding children, working out in the gym, jogging along the circuits of the Tiergarten or shovelling bundles into a washing-machine. Or worrying whether an old woman had a good return on her investments and wondering what the bonus might be after a half-yearly assessment. None of them knew where he was or what he was doing.
The helicopter circled. Ahead, they went faster, needing the sanctuary of the cave. Any teenager from Canning Town knew what gear was slung underneath a police helicopter. After thieving or a mugging, they knew the helicopter would be up and would carry on its belly a thermal-imagery camera that located body heat, and a NightSun searchlight, with a grotesquely powerful beam. The body-heat job was what they needed to avoid: the cave would do it.
He followed. She went faster. The engine roar was closer. The helicopter had started to circle the house.
The ‘big bird’ in the air always made Fred feel warm. He and Carlo were in need of the comfort factor. The young man with them, Luca, would either be well on the way to colonello in five years, or sewing blankets at some remote outpost, probably Sicily . . . They were all smoking. Luca was between Carlo and Fred, holding the little screen. It showed the images from the helicopter.
Not promising.
They saw Mamma, slow on her feet, taking down the washing from the line, holding the pegs in her mouth, like shark’s teeth. It seemed far below her dignity to look up and acknowledge the pounding rotor blades of the Bell Agusta. She took down her washing and replaced it, showing no sign of the crisis around her: a grandson’s body in a coffin, a village priest, her friend, shot dead, a husband in flight, a daughter-in-law disappeared, and a form of vengeance carried out by a stranger. She held the pegs and folded the sheets.
Nothing justified the comfort factor.
The screen showed Stefano – identified by the maresciallo – playing football on the gravel in front of the house. The children with him, they were told, belonged to Annunziata who was a ‘disappeared’, buried or cut into pieces and scattered – who had taken a lover while married to one of the family’s men.
They looked for a sign, a moment of significance, and didn’t find it. The woman named Teresa, dressed for a promenade along the shore at Naples or on the Via Veneto in Rome – anywhere that wasn’t up a track from a mountain village – watched the football from the front door, smoking and holding a wine glass.
Nothing that was any good.
The men by the oil drum, between the carabinieri and the house, had left the warmth of the fire. Some had gone along narrow paths across the olive groves and others had walked down the road, through the chicane that the vehicles made, talking quietly among themselves. They didn’t spare a glance for the guns of the cordon, Carlo or Fred. Luca pointed out one, in big glasses with a cyst on his nose, and said he was the close cousin of a pentito executed that week in Rome; he had to work hard to demonstrate that he was no threat or he would himself be shot.
The screen showed the kid, the scooter boy, with the dogs around the chicken coop. They saw the heap of dumped stones at the side of the building and beyond the washing line. The dogs ran around the kid. Carlo and Fred didn’t need to be told, but Luca said it: the scent was confused, the trail muddied. But there was the pile of stones, which was precious. It was all they had to cling to.
‘Did we screw up, Fabio?’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
‘Because we packed too early?’
‘We took out the batteries, too, Ciccio, and the lenses.’
‘What did you see?’
‘Nothing. Was it Scorpion Fly?’
‘That’s what it was called, Fabio.’
‘Significant about the scorpion fly, Ciccio, is that it appears to have a sting in the tail but doesn’t. It’s harmless. I might get a badge made that shows it. Time for the pretty boys to deploy.’
The ‘pretty boys’ were the cacciatore. They packed again. If they were challenged they would claim ‘communications malfunction’. They had done their job to the best of their abilities and reckoned themselves above the dross but below the elite of the army that fought the long war. It hurt to fail but success was rare.
Carlo had the sense that his water told him the truth. Men like him, with his professional experience of hitting targets in the small hours, knew when success was guaranteed or failure beckoned.
Ahead of them were the cacciatore, off the helicopter now. Good guys. Berets worn jauntily, camouflage fatigues and pistol holsters slapping their thighs, grenades on their belts and machine guns carried warily, balaclavas over their faces, they’d sprinted up the track. The football was over and the washing hadn’t been replaced. The dogs barked round them and were kicked away. Carlo was with Fred, the maresciallo and some of his people. They were Wave Two, the back-up. The older man, Stefano, faced the wall, his hands on his head, the kid beside him, his hands at the back of his neck. Teresa was with them too, and they had brought a chair for Mamma – the one that had been on the patio. The crack guys had gone ahead and Wave Two followed. To Carlo it was always obvious when the cogs of a mission didn’t mesh.
They reached the house. The old woman stared defiantly ahead, appeared undisturbed by the crisis. Carlo’s experience told him that the women were always the bellwether of a win or a loss, of whether the handcuffs would be used or the target was clear of the location. The kid and the older man gazed at the wall. They gave no sign of interest but were not cocky. Carlo and Fred walked past the yard, skirted the patio and went under the trellis. Fred reached up and plucked a bunch of grapes—
The first explosion. The chickens squawked. It shook Carlo, and Fred choked on the first of his stolen grapes.
A second flash-bang. Carlo counted. He liked them because they disoriented the opposition – better than gas in the eyes when a doctor had to give clearance. They usually made a bollocks of their first statement: always a good one to get in the bag before the lawyers were on the scene. He and Fred went past the washing-line, Luca with them. He saw the derelict shed, the stone wall, the heap of rocks and the hole that gaped in front of the cacciatore boys. He heard a shout behind him, shrill with warning. He turned.
The boot had a shiny toecap but the instep was coated with dirt. It was Luca’s, and he had used it to scrape out loose earth where it had been disturbed. Bloody lucky he wasn’t up there with the angels singing anthems. Among the earth in the little excavated pit were the ends of two sections of wire. Fred was at his side.
‘There’s a bunker, but no power in it. The entrance is an electric-controlled door, but it’s dead. Back here, the wire’s broken. Who did that?’
‘Are you asking or telling?’
‘He’s quite a lad, your young man . . .’
He thought again of what the woman had said, in the kitchen of a small home in Canning Town, about her son – who had a brother working in the street market and a shop-assistant sister in the West End. He’d thought her strangely rude, and reckoned her opinion inappropriate. Nothing she had said would indicate why the boy, who should have been her pride and joy and had no link to the region, had decided on waging warfare on a criminal clan he didn’t know and with whom he had little argument. Two flash-bangs had been rolled the length of the tunnel. Anyone lingering inside would have been deafened and temporarily blinded.
‘Do you understand?’ Fred jabbed the question.
‘I don’t.’
They waited and watched. The tunnel was filled with searchers.
One came back. A head shaken, a gesture with a hand. He thought young Luca, beside him, drooped, like a guy who thinks he’s won the lottery and has spent the money twice, then finds he forgot to buy the coupon. A savage moment.
Carlo asked, ‘Do you think we might have overstayed . . .?’
‘Maybe the only useful thing we did was scratch our names on that tree.’
‘Let’s get the fuck out – after our comprehensive exercise in learning the perils of shoving a snout where it has no right to be.’
They turned their backs. Another day, another dollar. Carlo sniffed. He thought it looked, again, like rain – and, again, like he hadn’t changed the world.
He’d known where to go.
They had led him.
It was a low entrance. He had to duck and his knees brushed the dried leaves that had accumulated at the mouth. Jago had the torch in one hand and in the other he gripped the penknife. The helicopter was still up but over the approach to the house, where the olives were grown, and towards the village. He thought it would come back, do more sweeps, but doubted that the thermal-imagery kit could penetrate the deep granite roof. There had been a little moonlight to help him find the hole, but instinct had told him where to look. They had gone quiet, off his radar, but the entrance was easy to find. He had relied on his memory – his lecturers at Lancaster had noted it, as had his line manager in the City and the FrauBoss. They had all remarked on it and his ability to retain what he had seen or been told once. The floor of the cave was compacted earth. He had a hand in front of him so that he did not snag an obstruction – there had been none when he had seen the cave’s interior. He could hear them.
The old man was breathing harshly. Jago sensed his ordeal. Alone, in pitch blackness, unable to communicate because no one had come for him. Maybe on the floor and hurt – a new experience for him. He assumed Bernardo, the padrino, had once been as young, as arrogant, as Marcantonio. As he had aged, he would have become more cunning, wary, determined to cling to power. Those hard hours, because of Jago Browne, were the price of his having sent his grandson to Berlin. The old man’s chest would be heaving, his heart pounding. She was quieter, but she must have shifted because he heard movement.
And he heard the firearm being cocked. The scrape of metal on metal.
A powerful torch was switched on and shone straight into Jago’s face. He could see nothing and it hurt his eyes, which watered. He mustn’t show fear. Fear was a killer in the alleys around Freemasons Road, behind the Beckton Arms or in any part of Kreuzberg. Consolata had shown no fear. If he showed fear, he was dead. They would read fear. He thought they didn’t know who he was but were aware of what he had done. He had time.
Lower down the hill there were still occasional shouts from the troops, and the helicopter stayed overhead. He didn’t think he would be shot, with the noise reverberating in the small space, before the search had finished.
He kept his face devoid of expression. He thought the family, for its survival, had snuffed out many lives. He neither smiled nor cringed. He thought they would be at the end of the cave, where the ring for the chain was. Jago waited to see the face of the old man. He would wait as long as he had to. The light never left his face, and he didn’t turn away.
20
The light hurt his eyes but he stared straight into it. He thought it was the same torch that had been used to illuminate the wolf’s head. Then he had seen the pain in the beast’s features, but it hadn’t flinched. As his example, Jago took a young wolf, with a wounded side. The animal had not backed down. He had his own torch and penknife.
He moved very slowly. It might have been a spider on a single strand of web that had come down from the ceiling and brushed the back of his neck, or a scrap of soil that had been dislodged. It irritated the skin at the gap where his hair and shirt met. It had been good of Consolata to bring clean clothing for him, but it was the food he had wanted – anything more from her? He didn’t think so. He hadn’t asked for her involvement. He laid the penknife in front of his crossed legs and showed that his hand was empty. He held it up, as if he was making an oath. He thought it would be Giulietta who held the pistol he had heard being armed. Unlikely that the old man would have been able – from his breathing – to hold it steady.
Her breathing was calm. The shouts far beyond the cave entrance were rarer and more distant. The drone of the helicopter placed it further away – he thought it was now over the village, searching there. Sometimes he heard the kid whistle for the dogs, but not close.
After he had shown his hand, and hadn’t blinked in the power of the beam, he reached behind his head, found where the spider or the soil had touched him and scratched. He brought his hand back to the front, showed his empty palm, then rested it on his knee, leaving the penknife, blade open, on the cave floor. A flattened cigarette packet lay near to the knife, saved from decay by its plastic wrapping, and there were slivers of silver foil from chewing-gum. He must show neither fear nor impatience.
They couldn’t come out of the cave without passing him, dead, incapacitated or alive. He didn’t smile at the torch beam when he had eased the discomfort on his neck because to try to make easy contact would demonstrate weakness. He didn’t play poker, had never sat in a smoke-filled room with a tumbler of Scotch and gambled with cards. It was about bluff. He would wait and however long it took, he would see the face of the old man and learn how greatly he had taxed him. It seemed that nothing was more important to Jago than seeing the jaw, cheeks, mouth and eyes of the padrino, and moving on from the monochrome image. When he had seen the face, learned the damage he had done, the power would have been transferred to him. He could wait.
The wind had freshened behind him. Jago fancied that old leaves danced. He heard the first patter of rain.
Jago had come of his own free will to a far corner of Europe and sat in a cave. He was sheltered from the coming storm and outside – in the mountains, coastal towns and hard-to-locate villages – were the organisers of the greatest criminal clans anywhere in the world as he knew it. The heat of the day had gone and the chill had settled under the low ceiling. The rain would soon surge and the drips would fall. When he put on his torch he would look into the face of the old man who was responsible for what had happened in the cave – and much else. He could have smiled at the thought of it, seeing the pain he had caused, the confusion he had brought down on the clan, but he kept his expression wooden and passive.
He no longer heard the helicopter. The shouts had died. The wind blew more fiercely and would scatter a carpet of leaves over the path they had taken, where their footprints might have shown. The rain would further degrade the scent they had left. He waited, the torch loose in his hand. He thought the old man’s breathing had regained a regular rhythm. Perhaps he was over the experience of darkness in the dungeon. Jago wondered how long she could hold the pistol’s aim.
Consolata came back to the squat. It was late but another meeting was in progress.
She stood at the door and watched them for a moment. Then Pietro gave her the dismissive wave that meant he had seen her, but that she should not interrupt – and that she had no part to play in their deliberations. She felt wretched, awkward in the clothing that had been wi
shed on her, which was too large. She would tell no one. She went down the stairs and into the basement storeroom. Her bed was in the corner, beside the line of filing cabinets. Her pillow was under a poster of the group holding a big anti-Mafia banner when they had marched in Rosarno. She saw her bag. She didn’t think it had been searched: they had ignored her. She wouldn’t tell them of going to a park, dumping leaflets and finding a boy, or of taking him to a place of danger, or of facilitating the killing of a family heir, or of being rejected, humiliated. Her secret.
She stripped. At that time of night, to save money, the water was cold and the heater off. She took a cold shower, shivering and flinching under the spray.
Consolata dressed. She saw the radio she had once left on so that she could monitor every news bulletin. She put it into a cupboard. She went upstairs and found a computer still switched on in the room next to the one where the meeting continued, and began to fill in the electronic diary with events in the coming days that supporters could attend. She thought she had leaped for the stars, but had fallen into the gutter. Nothing had altered. She felt broken by the power she had confronted, but would go back to war, armed with leaflets: someone had to.
They were the last to board. They sat together, the engines gained power and the plane started to taxi. The storm was close and the pilot wanted to be airborne.
It was rare for Carlo to engage in small-talk, but he asked, ‘Much on this weekend?’
‘I’ve a boy at college in Dresden. We’re due to go down and help him move to a new student hostel.’ Fred grimaced. ‘And I’ve papers to look at for a court appearance on Monday, vehicle theft. And you?’
‘Nothing much. My partner’s bought a new greenhouse, self-assembly from a flat pack. I hate them. And I’m behind with my expenses, not that they’ll add up to much. Also there’s a training course, ethnic diversity, on Monday that I have to read up on. I’m knackered, a bit vintage for all this. But it’s been fun.’
No Mortal Thing: A Thriller Page 43
