The Sacred Spoils

by The Sacred Spoils (retail) (epub)

  The discussion grew animated. Famine Eyes held up her passport. Cemetery Teeth scowled and waved his bloodstained knife. She watched transfixed, unable to make sense of it, but knowing that her life depended on the outcome. The debate ended. The two men walked back over. The verdict was in. Cemetery Teeth gave a set of car keys to the youngster who set off back up the slope. Famine Eyes squatted back down beside her. ‘Please forgive us for all this unhappiness,’ he began, with his incongruous courtesy. ‘But my… my companion here is worried – understandably worried, I think you will agree – that if we let you live you will tell of this unpleasant business to our good friends in blue uniforms.’ She could smell dust on him, and sweat, and a lemony shampoo. She’d never been so terrified of anyone or anything in her life. ‘I say to him, we are men of honour, not of evil. This girl is not our enemy, our faces are hidden from her, she knows none of us. What is it that she has seen to cause us grief? He says, why take the chance? Two dead people, three dead people, for us the rope is just as long. And he has a point, I think you will agree.’

  ‘I won’t say a word. Ever.’ Hope made her realise how badly she wanted to live. ‘I swear it. On my life. My mother’s life.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘So you would like, then, for us to let you live?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  ‘Even though to let you live is for us a great big risk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You will be in our debt, you realise? Big in our debt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now look at your friends. Please.’ He gestured towards them without looking their way himself, as though squeamish of the handiwork he himself had ordered. She turned to look at them: their contorted postures and ugly stillness; the plastic pallor of their skin; the glossy red wetness of the blood on their clothes congealing dark around their wounds; the flies as green as emeralds already settling upon them. She closed her eyes in cold horror then looked back up at him. He said: ‘Your friends owed my employers a very great debt. Money, yes, but not just money. Respect too. They gave their word to pay it all back. They never did. They never even tried. They thought they could make do with promises instead. So… now you know what happens to people who do not honour their debts to my employers. Debts such as the one that you agree you now owe me. Do you understand what I am saying?’

  ‘Yes. I… Yes.’

  ‘Good. Then let me tell you how you will honour this particular debt.’ He reached out and touched with his gloved fingertip the gash on the side of her head where she’d banged against the window. He didn’t press hard, but it was so sore that she winced all the same. ‘When our good friends in blue uniforms come to talk to you, you will tell them this: you will tell them that you were on your way home from the station when something bad happened, but you have no idea what. You banged your head so hard that you…’ He paused, frowning, searching for the right phrase.

  ‘Lost consciousness?’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes. Just so. You lost consciousness. When you woke again, it was to find your friends already dead and no one else here. You never saw me, or my companions, or our vehicles. You never saw anything at all. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ll do it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now listen closely, because this is very important. You will think, when we are gone, that you can be clever, that you can tell the truth of it to our good friends in blue uniforms in the most strict of confidence. But there is no such thing as the most strict of confidence with our good friends in blue uniforms. Please believe me on this. Their salaries are for shit. The only way they make enough to live any kind of life is by taking envelope money from me and my friends. You know what I mean, envelope money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. So I tell you this as a friend. Whatever you say to them, we will find out. Maybe not at once, but within an hour or two. A day at the most. They will sell your life to us for a hundred euros, and think they have made themselves a most excellent bargain. And do not listen to their promises to keep you safe. To put yourself under their protection only means that we will know exactly where to find you, and when you will be most vulnerable. My employers will have you killed then for sure. Then they will have me killed too. For I will be the one who chose to let you live. To talk, therefore, is to kill me as well as yourself.’

  ‘You have my word. I’ll never tell anyone anything.’

  ‘Good.’ He glanced around. The youth was dancing back down the bank, a roll of black tape in one hand, a sponge bag in the other. He held the latter out to his boss, who stood to take it. He still had her passport, which he now tucked away in his pocket. ‘In case you decide to go back to America,’ he said by way of explanation, ‘and think you can talk to our good friends in blue uniforms there.’

  ‘I gave you my word,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, unzipping the sponge bag and taking out a syringe and a small brown flask. ‘And now I have your passport too.’

  II

  Cesco stopped at a petrol station outside Gioia Tauro with a car wash and a small auto parts store. He parked and turned on his phone. His various inboxes were filled with fury and accusations of betrayal, with threats and demands for repayment. He listened to or read a little of each, as a kind of penance, before deleting them all, saving only the message from Giulia with directions to her house. That done, he removed his SIM card so that no one could trace him through it.

  Any search would be for a dirty plain white van. Ideally, he’d trade it or at least respray it, but he didn’t have time, so he ran it through the car wash instead then went into the auto-parts store from which he bought a pair of adhesive A.C. Milan banners for his side panels, Italian and European flags for his rear doors, snowflakes for his windscreen and a dancing Hawaiian girl for his dashboard. Pleased with the results, he decided to give himself a makeover too. At a discount store up the road, he bought new clothes and toiletries, along with scissors and an electric razor. He took them into the toilets to change, then studied himself in the cracked and tinted mirror above the sink.

  Cesco didn’t like to think of himself as a conman or a thief. Not at heart. He saw himself, rather, as someone making the best of the hard hand life had dealt him. Denied the use of his own name and codice fiscale, he’d had to adopt false ones instead. That in turn had limited him to jobs that avoided scrutiny. He’d cooked and waited tables. He’d picked fruit and vegetables. Mostly, however, he’d tended bar. He enjoyed it and had the aptitude, good-looking as he was, well presented, cheerful, with an excellent memory for faces, a gift for languages and a sympathetic ear. Yet, as a once-precocious child, it had stung his pride that this was all he’d ever be.

  Cesco had always had a gift for spinning bullshit on the hoof. At school, he’d used it to entertain. Back in Italy, he’d used it to sprinkle himself with the stardust his real life had lacked. In Milan, he’d pretended to be an up-and-coming actor. In Turin, an abstract painter. All it took was bravado, a website and a certain skill with social media. He wasn’t quite sure why, but playing such roles gave him a brashness he lacked as his own true self – a brashness that, to his glad surprise, appealed to a certain class of married women. Was he to blame for adding spice to their lives, or for accepting their little loans and gifts? And, when they thoughtlessly forgot to reward him in this way, was it really so wrong of him to correct their oversight directly from their purses? He’d had his setbacks, of course, including arrests for theft and burglary. He’d also been set on a few times by furious husbands and their friends, but he’d usually been able to give as good as he got.

  In Rome, he’d reinvented himself as an aspiring photographer. He’d always enjoyed taking pictures, and he had a flair for catching striking-looking people in dramatic settings. He’d set up a website showcasing his best shots and then contacted the leading agencies. He’d only done it for cover, so he’d been gleeful when he’d actually made some sales. His sunse
t at the Spanish Steps had become a popular postcard; a young couple he’d captured kissing against a huge wave breaking on the Camogli coast now adorned the jacket of a romantic thriller. A couple of regulars at the bar where he’d worked had asked him to do their wedding. His digital hadn’t been up to it, so he’d nicked a proper camera and gone to work. Word of mouth had won him ever more commissions. Soon he’d been earning more from photography than from serving bar, for half the effort. Yet, perversely, he’d come to hate it, for it had exposed too much of his own true self. So one morning, without a word, he’d got on the train and left.

  In your mid-twenties, being a struggling artist was romantic. Approaching your thirties, it was pathetic. When he’d eventually reached Naples, therefore, he’d presented himself as a doctoral student writing a thesis on the city’s Duchy period. He had a perverse ability to soak up knowledge like a sponge when he needed it for a scam. Working in a bar by Porto Nolana one night, a party of drunken Romanians had tried to chat up a pair of exasperated young Frenchwomen. Intervening in such situations had been part of his job, so he’d engaged the Romanians himself. They were doctors, it had transpired, as well as amateur historians, organising a touring holiday that broadly followed Alaric’s own route. Raised in Cosenza as he’d been, Cesco knew Alaric well. The spirit of mischief had duly taken him, and so he’d spun them a yarn about how he and some historian friends had dived the Messina Straits a couple of years before, where they’d found traces of a Visigothic ship. The Romanians had been so excited by this that they’d offered him absurd sums to show them where. There was a dump outside the city he knew of, where the Romans had ditched their old pots. He’d gone there that night to fill several plastic bags with broken earthenware from approximately the right era. Then he’d driven down to Scilla to seed a plausible section of seabed with the shards.

  The expedition had gone swimmingly. He’d relished his return to Calabria too, the cadence of conversation and the familiar slang, the mountains and the sea and the particular scents and flavours of its food. So when Naples had grown too hot for him a couple of months later, he’d reinvented himself as Cesco Rossi PhD, in Scilla to write a book on the history of the Messina Straits, paying his way with bar work supplemented by shipwreck dives that he advertised on travel websites. He’d also changed his look dramatically, lest his recent Neapolitan friends come looking. That was where his beard and ponytail had come from, the various pieces of metal in his face. But they’d served their purpose now. He therefore pocketed the studs and earring, took out his new razor and scissors. But hair, while easy to cut off, was a bugger to grow back. So he settled for trimming his beard down to a goatee and combing out his ponytail with his fingers. Then he climbed back in his van and headed north.

  Road signs counted down the kilometres to Cosenza. His back began to ache with stress. He left the A2 south of the city, cut across country. Dusk settled over the landscape. He turned on his headlights. A high bridge took him across a thin thread of river. He checked Giulia’s directions then slowed to second gear, peering into the darkness for the concealed entrance to their farmhouse drive. A BMW came racing up behind him, flashing its beams in irritation at his dawdle. He retorted with a middle finger only for the white gateposts marking the entrance to the Suraces’ drive suddenly to appear on his left. He braked so sharply that the BMW almost rear-ended him, before swinging out around him in a furious screech of horn.

  The drive was a cratered moonscape. He wended a careful path around the worst of the potholes. He could see glitter ahead, as though a casket of diamonds and rubies had been scattered across the track. He drew closer and realised it was in fact shards of broken glass. And the edge of the track had been chomped away as if by some kind of landslide. He felt uneasy suddenly. He got out to look. A pickup truck lay on its side at the foot of the embankment, three ghostly shapes arrayed beside it. His heart seemed to stop beating. He’d feared that returning here would mean grief. But he hadn’t expected it to happen quite this quickly.

  He took out his phone and his SIM card too. But calling the emergency services would give them his number, helping them to trace him if any of those bikers were badly hurt. Even if they weren’t, it would be reckless to get involved without first finding out what had happened. The embankment was so steep that it forced him ever faster, trusting to the skill of his quick feet. An overnight bag lay on its side halfway down. The ghostly shapes turned into bodies. Giulia was closest to him, her throat a dark red mess, blood pooled around her head like a grotesque halo. A silver-haired man, presumably her father, lay nearby, his neck hacked almost clean through, a pair of coins placed over his eyes.

  Cesco stood there numbly. Such coins were an old Mafia calling card, code for an unpaid debt or other betrayal. He had a sudden panic this was somehow to do with him – that Giulia had discovered his true identity and blabbed of it to the wrong person. Or even that her invitation had been bait. He looked around in alarm, but there was no one in sight. He needed to get away all the same. That much was clear. Get away then find a phone box from which to call it in anonymously.

  He was about to climb back up the slope when the third body twitched. He told himself it was only the breeze upon their sleeve. Except there was no breeze. Reluctantly, he went across. A fair-haired woman in her mid to late twenties was lying on her side, her wrists and ankles bound, her face as grey as bone, save for the strip of black tape over her mouth and the dried blood on her temple and below her nose, from which tiny flecks and bubbles blew at every exhalation. He picked up a corner of the tape then ripped it off, leaving her skin reddened like drunken lipstick. The pain of it woke her from her stupor. She rolled onto her back, eyes open in narrow slits. ‘Who are you?’ she murmured, in English.

  ‘A friend,’ he told her.

  ‘Are they gone?’

  ‘They’re gone,’ he assured her. ‘You’re safe.’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Her eyelids fluttered and then closed. She seemed to let go of something as she relaxed back into sleep. Her breathing came easier; a little colour returned to her cheeks. She looked childlike and horribly vulnerable at the heart of all this horror. He looked back up to his van. This was the ’Ndrangheta. The fucking ’Ndrangheta. He couldn’t get involved. He just couldn’t. He needed to find a public phone box and call it in from there.

  Don’t leave me, she’d said.

  Memory reached up out of his deep past like a hand out of the night. He swore loudly. Then he took his phone from his pocket, reinserted his SIM card and made the call.

  III

  The Bernsteins had a video-entry system at their gate. It was Avram’s wife Rivkah herself who answered it. She was, as ever, immaculately made up, but she’d aged visibly since Zara had seen her last. Her lips went thin and bitter when she saw who it was. ‘You have a nerve,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Zara sweetly. ‘That means a lot, coming from you.’

  Hatred burned like coals in her eyes. ‘Isaac’s not here,’ she said. ‘He’s in America, getting treatment for what you did for him.’

  ‘We’re not here for Isaac. We’re here for Avram.’

  ‘We have synagogue.’

  ‘Please. This is important. It could help his career.’

  Rivkah glared at her several seconds, then the screen went dark, leaving Zara uncertain whether they’d been dismissed. She turned to ask Kaufman his opinion when the gates began to open and then the great man himself appeared at the front door, wearing a sharp black suit and a yarmulke. He was a year and a day younger than his wife, but his fitness regime, dyed hair and occasional nip and tuck made him look a full decade younger. ‘This is Shabbat,’ he said as they approached.

  ‘We know, Minister,’ said Zara, opting for formality. ‘And we’re deeply sorry to disturb you. But this can’t wait.’

  He gazed appraisingly at her. She gazed back. In the end he gave a smile so small it might have only been
her imagination. ‘My office, then,’ he said, opening the door wide. He led them along a gloomy passage to a warmly lit, wood-panelled room, its bookshelves stuffed with impressively academic works in less impressively pristine condition. A large Israeli flag hung in a glass frame on the wall behind Avram’s oak desk, along with photographs of him standing beside the American president, the German chancellor and other world leaders. He sat at his desk and waved vaguely at chairs set against the wall. ‘This is about that damned mosaic, I take it.’

  ‘You know of it?’ asked Zara, moving a chair then sitting down.

  ‘Cohen found out you’d been to his prison. He put two and two together. Though I don’t understand the fuss.’ He turned to Kaufman. ‘He told me you’d agreed a deal.’

  ‘It’s not the mosaic, Minister,’ replied Zara. ‘It’s what’s beneath.’

  ‘The catacombs, yes. They are to be sealed. Do I seriously need to explain why? Or have we grown so sentimental over a few old bones that we’ll put our children’s lives at risk?’

  ‘With respect, Minister,’ said Kaufman. ‘It might be more than a few—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But we—’

  ‘No. Is there anything else? Or may I now go to service?’

  Kaufman turned helplessly to Zara. Zara silenced him with a look. For a man so drawn to power, Kaufman lacked the first idea of how and why it was exercised. Of course the minister and his warden wanted the chambers sealed. Not despite the chance of finding something important, as Kaufman seemed to think, but because of it. Should a full excavation be required, it would cause ructions at the prison, maybe even lead to it being temporarily closed. That would mean finding new places for its inmates, setting off a cascade of transfers across an already overburdened system with massively constrained budgets. It was a headache the minister didn’t need – especially with the cure so close to hand, in the form of a digger and a cement truck. Yet that didn’t make their case hopeless. It simply meant they had to find the right approach. ‘This is your opportunity, Minister,’ she said. ‘The one you’ve been waiting for.’