Rocco Montale handed Don Michele’s envelope to the parish priest.
The priest dropped the envelope into his sack. ‘Mille grazie e mille miracoli per Don Michele.’
‘Ossequi alla beata Virgine,’ Rocco said in return, and made the sign of the cross.
Money bought miracles, and the Don had just doubled his usual donation.
The Feast of the Madonna was a time of truce, a day when all disagreements were left aside. A day of celebration, a safe place to meet and talk, a place to settle old disputes and throw out new challenges, a place where any man could demand justice, or revenge. The Feast of the Madonna of the Mountain was a day of reckoning, a day of planning, too.
The major action was taking place at a rustic villa on the edge of the town.
No guns.
That was the rule the ’Ndrangheta laid down in Polsi.
The procession over, Rocco walked into the courtyard of the villa.
Thirty-odd bodyguards were sitting at long tables laid out with food and drink in the cool beneath a big canvas sunshade.
‘What’s going on?’ Rocco said to one of his men.
‘They’re still arriving,’ Diego told him, as a big car pulled into the courtyard.
The driver stopped, jumped out and opened the rear door, helping out a man who looked as if he had five minutes left to live. Don Calogero Abbate’s legs were swollen with chronic kidney disease. There was talk of gangrene, possible amputation. Two soldiers carried him into the villa, linking their hands to make a seat for the Don to sit on, and Rocco Montale followed them in.
It was a big room. Low wooden rafters, small windows, a big round table.
He nodded to Don Michele, then took his place by the wall.
What a gathering. All the big names were there. Old men who still ruled over their clans with an iron hand, men of the next generation standing behind them, their sons and grandsons, who would take over when the don died, or was murdered. Twelve of the richest men in Italy, the most powerful men in an empire that was in continual expansion, not just in Europe, but all over the world. That was why guns were out of bounds in Polsi. The bosses of all the different ’ndrine were there, plus special guests from France, Spain and England. Guns were for the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year.
Don Michele stood up, asked to speak, and permission was granted.
‘Friends,’ he said, looking around the room, ‘I am glad to see you here once again. But what I see causes me great sadness. We are all growing old. Growing old fighting. Time will see us off, if violence spares us. I see before me a pressing problem. But I have a remedy to offer, if you will hear me out.’
Walking sticks banged on the stone floor, voices of assent were raised.
Don Michele spoke from behind dark glasses. Some wondered why he didn’t take them off. It wasn’t dark in the large room, but it wasn’t light, either. He looked around as he spoke, but his eyes fixed on no man.
Was it indifference? Arrogance? Something else?
He told them what was on his mind, how it would be organised.
‘A great deal of planning and preparation has gone into this,’ he was saying, ‘but in Umbria we’ve got everything we need.’
That word rumbled round the room – Umbria, Umbria – like a spell or an incantation. Umbria, an unknown mythical place, somewhere in the north.
‘Umbria will solve our problems, and guarantee our safety,’ the Don went on.
Rocco remembered the conversation he had had with Don Michele the week before. They had been working on the details, checking the logistics, calculating the available resources, weighing the dangers.
— Umbria, Don Michè? That ranger’s still in Umbria.
— Sebastiano Cangio?
— You’ve let him live too long, boss.
— We’ll settle with Cangio when the time comes. First, we need to work a miracle.
— A miracle, Don Michè? Your eyes, you mean?
— Not just my eyes, Rocco.
‘If you trust in me,’ Don Michele was saying to the other clan bosses, ‘you won’t regret it, I can promise you.’
He told them again what the plan would mean in practical terms, and all of them had a reason to listen. If not for themselves, then for their wives, their children, their soldiers and their families.
‘Does everyone agree?’ Don Michele concluded.
Glances were exchanged.
They all said yes.
Then hands were shaken, pledges were given.
A magnificent lunch was served in the courtyard beneath the sunshades.
Aubergine meatball starters, traditional chick-pea lasagne, barbecued swordfish steaks served with capers and lemons, followed by ice-cream, coffee, chocolate-coated figs, honeyed mostaccioli, brandy and cigars.
Umbria was on everyone’s lips, in everyone’s thoughts. They all wanted to know where Umbria was, and what went on there, wondering how Don Michele had managed to seize on a territory so far from home.
Later that afternoon, the young men carried the heavy statue of the Madonna back through the narrow streets to her resting-place in the parish church of Polsi. There were people crawling on their knees, others crying, beseeching the statue, begging for a holy miracle.
A miracle? Rocco Montale thought.
The Madonna was an amateur compared to Don Michele.
THREE
1 March, Valnerina, Umbria
Seb Cangio didn’t need a clock to know what time it was.
The sun rose from behind the mountain on the far side of the river, casting a pale shadow on the ancient wooden floorboards. Each strip of wood was like the marker on a sundial, though the intervals were growing shorter now with spring coming on. The sun crept into his room each morning, waking him more gently than any alarm clock.
Unlike the blinding, fiery blaze of dawn in his native Calabria, the slow infusion of light in Umbria was something that he looked forward to. He never closed the shutters, waking up early for the pleasure of seeing each new day unfold.
He’d been working the evening before, revising Managing Survival – The Reintroduction of the Wolf in Umbria, before collapsing into bed in a state of exhaustion. He was pleased with the way the paper was shaping up. He had emailed a proposal to The European Wildlife Journal, and had received a reply from the editor expressing interest. It would be the first academic paper he had published since fleeing Catanzaro and the university almost two years before.
The sun lit up his jeans and jumper.
They were neatly folded over the back of a chair.
The shirt he’d been wearing the day before had disappeared. His uniform was dangling from the door of the wardrobe on a hanger, waiting for him to climb into it.
Lori was back …
She’d been staying at her parents’ place in Ceselli, which was further down the valley. The doctor had told her mum and dad to stay in bed. They both had flu, and Lori had spent the last three nights taking care of them.
He hadn’t heard her come in, so he must already have been sleeping.
She would have been tired, too, but that hadn’t stopped her from tidying up after him.
How many women would think of doing something like that for you?
Lori was the assistant manager of a supermarket in Spoleto. They’d been living together for almost a year in an old red cantoniera house that stood on the lower slopes of the mountainside looking out over Valnerina. Loredana took care of the house and him. And neither of them had ever once talked about marriage.
Down in Calabria, getting married seemed to be the only thing on every girl’s mind.
He sometimes wondered whether Lori avoided mentioning the subject for the same reason that he did: they seemed to be rubbing along well enough without the need for a wedding ring.
He turned on his side and looked at her.
He had never known a girl who looked so mysterious first thing in the morning. She slept face down, flat on her stomach, her hai
r tied back with an elastic band that always came loose during the night spilling glossy nut-brown curls across her shoulders.
The mere sight of her brought his blood to the boil.
His blood boiled easily, he had to admit.
He remembered arriving in London from Calabria, finding a job in an estate agent’s office in Islington, hitting the town on Friday nights. Getting laid was the easy part. Getting away the next morning was trickier.
In particular, he remembered a girl called Amanda Parsons …
She looked like a goddess. Had he ever been ogled by eyes so dark, touched by nails so perfectly manicured, kissed by lips so red? She’d come bursting out of a dress which had left little to the imagination.
He had caressed and kissed and probed that body all night long.
If this is London, he had told himself, it would suit him fine. Even if there were no wolves in the Royal Parks, no Calabrian sunshine to brighten the days, and food that smelled of grease wrapped up in a plastic carton. He could live with the grey skies, the stench of the Underground, the zombies munching junk food while they stared at their mobile phones and tablets and moved their heads to the racket coming out of ear-pods that, fortunately, only they could hear.
If all the girls were like Amanda Parsons …
In the first light of a Sunday dawn, the illusion had vanished.
On the pillow which separated him from a face that the night had treated badly, smearing lipstick on her chin, and mascara on her cheeks, he had found two revolting hairy insects that had scared him for an instant.
The goddess had shed her false eyelashes.
A hand resting on the pillow had lost two or three of the manicured fingernails which had torn into his flesh the night before as she groaned with passion into his ear.
He had rolled out of bed, and stepped on a bra containing two squashy cups of flesh-coloured silicone.
Was this what he had been making love to in beer-induced ecstasy?
The girl was as pale and stiff as a naked plastic mannequin in a shop window.
Would he need to press a button to reanimate the body with which he had been coupling so furiously the night before?
He remembered diving into his clothes and running out of there with his shoes in his hand for fear of waking her up and being forced to watch her put herself together again to face the world and him.
In that instant, Lori turned on her side to face him.
He reached out, laid his hand on her breast.
It was warm, soft, inviting.
Real …
Once, at the university, someone had asked him what he wanted out of life.
That was easy. He had always known what he wanted. A place to live that was full of wolves, good food and a girl with curves in all the right places. He’d been planning to live in Calabria – Soverato, maybe, somewhere by the Ionian Sea – close to the mountains, where he could specialise in wildlife biology (he was writing up his thesis on the wolves of Aspromonte at the time), go scuba diving and teach at the university.
Instead, he had found the Paradise that he was looking for in Umbria.
Mountains, wolves, great food, plus Loredana Salvini.
The problem was, you could die in Paradise, too.
He had found himself facing the nightmare which had forced him to flee from Calabria in the first place. Two years before, on Soverato beach, he had witnessed a murder, seen the distinctive tattoo on the neck of the killer. It was the trademark of the Cucciarilli clan.
‘They’ll kill you, Seb,’ his mother had warned him.
He had caught the first plane to London from Lamezia Terme.
It was easy to lose yourself in London, but he really missed his home and Italy.
Then Umbria had been hit by an earthquake and they had started recruiting volunteers to help in the devastated national park. He had sent in an application. Next thing, he was a trainee park ranger. Umbria was a long way from Calabria, he felt safe there. Safe? He fell in love with the place. And the wolves had secured him a permanent job there. The wolf population in the park was growing, they needed an expert who would monitor the animals when the earthquake crisis was over.
Sebastiano Cangio, assistant park ranger.
Wolves, good food, and Loredana Salvini …
But the earthquake brought the jackals, too, criminals and thugs, the men of Don Michele Cucciarilli among them, killers who wore the salamander tattoo and waged an endless war against their enemies.
Was he supposed to run away again, go back to London, leave the wolves, and Loredana?
He had made his decision. He wasn’t going anywhere.
They had tried to kill him twice already.
A bullet in the thigh had left him with a permanent limp. Six months before, they had murdered his partner, Marzio Diamante, blowing his head off with a shotgun, probably mistaking Marzio for him. The ’Ndrangheta hadn’t killed him yet, but they were definitely trying to.
He felt a warm hand settle on his shoulder.
‘Good morning,’ he said.
‘What time is it?’ Lori murmured.
Her eyes opened wide as he told her.
‘Five o’what? I need my beauty sleep … Hey … Seb? What the hell are you doing?’
He was slipping off his boxer shorts.
‘Cristo santo,’ she sighed. Then she began to giggle. ‘You are insatiable, Seb Cangio. No morning nap for me, then?’
‘Later,’ he said, his hands beneath her T-shirt, exposing her breasts.
She arched her back, eased out of her panties. ‘This is rape,’ she said, falling back on the pillow, spreading her legs. He moved down slowly, nuzzling her stomach, the grooves of her thighs, then stroked her sex very slowly with his tongue.
He had learnt a lot from watching wolves.
Touching and feeling were as important as mating. If the she-wolf wasn’t ready to play the game, she would snap, snarl and bite. But if she was, her mate would smell the hormones she released as she opened up to receive him.
Lori was no yielding she-wolf, though.
She let him have his way for a while, then she laid her hand flat on his chest and pushed him away.
‘Now, you lie back,’ she ordered, rolling on top of him, sitting astride of him, taking hold of him, guiding him into her. Her face was hidden beneath the veil of her hair, her hands sat heavily on his shoulders holding him down as she began to pump him, slowly at first, then gathering momentum.
In a moment of lucidity before he lost it completely, he knew one thing.
You fight to save the things you love.
FOUR
3 March, London, England
He was stuck in heavy traffic when the phone began to ring.
He read the name on the digital display, thought fucking hell.
He pressed the hands-free button: his voice sounded loud in the empty car.
‘Hiya, Pat. What’s up, then, love?’
Patrizia started talking, couldn’t hold it in. Talking and talking. She didn’t stop as he crawled onto the Wandsworth Bridge, heading for Brixton and the club. She didn’t draw a breath, or so it seemed, the words pouring out in an endless rush.
The same old problem, obviously.
Patrizia was flat-out terrified as she told him what had happened.
‘He fucking what?’ He couldn’t believe it, really couldn’t.
Thank God the traffic was moving so slowly, or he might have run into the car in front.
‘He’s getting worse,’ she was saying. ‘Much worse than the last time. This can’t go on, Vince. Where the fuck will it end? There must be something we can do …’
‘And he wasn’t drinking, you say? Not a drop? So why did he take his clothes off, then?’
He listened for a while, his eyes gaping wider as she told him the story.
‘Christ knows what came over him,’ she was saying.
Her husband had gone into the garden the night before and strangled Simba.
�
��Simba? Jesus Christ, he loved that girl! He always had a lot of time for Simba … What a fucking turn-up! You sure you’ve got your facts straight?’
Patrizia swore she wasn’t joking.
‘Naked, too, you say?’
‘Not a stitch on him,’ Patrizia said, ‘all silver in the moonlight.’
It didn’t stop there. There was more, much more. Patrizia told him everything.
‘That takes the bloody biscuit!’
Simba was the family dog. A German shepherd. Getting on a bit, but still a formidable animal. Perfect with the kids, and handy as a guard-dog. Jimmy’s pride and joy. Stone cold sober, he’d stripped himself arse-naked the night before, then gone into the garden and torn the family pet apart with his bare hands.
‘There was blood all over his face …’
Patrizia started sobbing, the sound echoing inside the car like a wah-wah guitar.
He didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He waited, let her cry herself out.
‘What am I gonna do with him, Vince? He’s totally lost it. He’s gonna get us all in the shit unless we put a stop to it.’
She was right, of course.
As soon as she put down the phone, he called the boss, explained the situation.
‘This won’t go away,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to fix it quick.’
‘He’s got a temper, everyone knows that. Who ain’t got a temper?’
‘This ain’t temper, Franco. This is something else. Something mental. You ain’t seen nothing like it. He’s like a kettle coming to the boil. He focuses on something, someone … If someone stares at him a bit too long, or answers him back, his eyes turn into two glass balls, boring into the fella like a fucking power drill. Then, he … well, he just explodes. An’ there’s no way of stopping him. You know what he can do. That girl, the slag, remember what he did to her?’
‘You’re talking about my only son and heir.’
‘I’m talking about a sick boy, boss. He needs help. We gotta sort him out, before he goes too far. OK, so last night he went for the dog. Tonight, he might decide to have a go at Patrizia, or one of the kids.’
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