III
Cesco headed away from Cosenza as fast as his old van and the country lanes would allow. He didn’t remember these roads at all, and quickly got hopelessly lost – until to his relief he came to a junction with a sign directing him down to the Tyrrhenian coast. The road was new. It wended around craggy mountainsides and crossed deep canyons on tall thin bridges with views down to Paola’s saw-toothed coastline and twinkling lights. Ideally, he’d have put more distance between himself and Cosenza, but the day’s exertions finally caught up with him, and it was a struggle to keep his eyes open even long enough to find a spot to park for the night, in a small cul-de-sac away from street lighting and with a water fountain nearby.
He was too hungry to crash, however, so he took his laptop to a pizzeria for a funghi and a beer, using their Wi-Fi to scour the web for news. To his immense relief, he found not a word about any incidents in Scilla or any mention of his own name. He ordered another bottle of beer to celebrate, took it back to the van. He laid out his bedroll and sleeping bag, made a pillow of his towel. It was still early, but he was drained and there was nothing to stay up for, so he undressed and climbed in. Footsteps passed outside; a woman urged her dog to do its business against his wheel. He waited until she had passed then turned onto his side. Thoughts from the day kept jabbing at him, of Dieter and his mates, of Giulia and her father lying there with their throats slit beside the pretty American woman with the short fair hair. He kept them at bay with happier fantasies, threading his way between hapless defenders before bending the ball around the keeper to score the winner for—
Don’t leave me, she’d said. Don’t leave me.
He sat up abruptly in the back of the van, covered in sweat, his heart hammering. He buried his face in his hands.
What on earth had he been thinking, going back to Cosenza?
What on earth had he been thinking?
IV
Baldassare Mancuso was still at his desk when Cosenza’s chief of police rang to inform him of the murders. It was ostensibly a courtesy call, because they didn’t yet fall under Baldassare’s jurisdiction, despite their strong whiff of ’Ndrangheta. But the real reason, he knew, was to gloat a little. Having an anti-Mafia team on his doorstep and looking into his city was both an inconvenience and a reproach, and this was his opportunity to point out that getting rid of such people was easier said than done. He tried to return to work after the call, but his concentration was gone. He kept getting up to walk around the room, possessed of a troubling excitement. He knew better than anyone that the Cosenza Mafia were still active, even with the Critelli brothers and their top brass in custody.
It was the nature of the beast.
Italy’s other leading Mafias – Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Naples’ Camorra and the Pugliese Sacra Corona Unita – were organised rather like large corporations with multiple divisions, each of which recruited ambitious youngsters to fight their way up the ranks. But Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta was more like a loose collection of family firms. These were individually known as ’ndrines, and were run by men who groomed their sons almost from the cradle to follow in their footsteps. Turning such people pentiti was therefore far harder, for it meant they had to inform on and betray their families, not just their colleagues and rivals.
The structure had another strength too. Calabria had seen mass emigration over the past century and a half, so that – for example – the Critelli brothers and their top brass had numerous cousins and other kin spread all across Europe, South America and Australasia, making their drug smuggling and other such international ventures into family affairs, and thus far harder to penetrate.
Yet penetrate it Baldassare had.
It had started, as so often, with a lucky break. A Cosenza lowlife called Pietro Schillaci had been caught with a handgun during a routine traffic stop. When the gun had been tied to a gang killing, Baldassare had gone to interview him. He had a knack for getting such men to like and even trust him. So it had been with Schillaci. The Critelli brothers must have learned how close he was to turning on them, for he’d been ambushed in the jail one day, stabbed fifteen times with a sharpened toothbrush. Baldassare himself had announced Schillaci’s death in a furious address from the hospital steps. He’d vowed darkly to find the people behind the hit, and make them pay. In truth, Schillaci had survived. They’d smuggled him into this very villa, itself the proceeds of a previous campaign against this same Cosenza ’ndrine, and he’d told Baldassare everything he’d known.
A period of intensive surveillance had followed. They’d come to know the Critelli brothers and their Cosenza ’ndrine in all its malignant detail – the beatings, the murders, the protection, the corrupt contracts, the police backhanders. Wherever there was money to be made, there they found the Critellis at work. But nothing made money like drugs. A tapped phone call hinted at a vast consignment of cocaine about to arrive at Gioia Tauro, source of eighty per cent of Europe’s supply. Five metric tons of it, with a street value of half a billion euros. They couldn’t risk letting it out of the container terminal so they’d swooped in the following morning, while also raiding dozens of homes and businesses around Cosenza and arresting over a hundred suspects, many still in their pyjamas.
Baldassare had hoped these raids would net him the smoking gun he lacked. It had not. The Critellis were too smart, their network of cut-outs and offshore companies too opaque. For the past year he’d been striving to put together a case against them that a jury would understand. But he wasn’t certain that he’d yet succeeded, and now he was out of time. This Sunday would be his last day. The press conference for his announcement had already been arranged. And his choice was simple. One option was to prosecute the Critelli brothers and the rest for conspiracy to commit organised crime. But that would be a gamble, one that could easily result in acquittals for them all, which would be a catastrophe. The more cautious option would be to drop the conspiracy charges against the brothers and their top brass, and bring separate charges only against those foot soldiers where his evidence was watertight. But that would be seen, quite rightly, as a wretched failure.
An email notification interrupted his meditation. The first police reports on tonight’s murders had arrived. His eyes were weary of his screen so he sent them to his printer, then he poured himself a stiff brandy and settled down to read.
Chapter Seven
I
It was one of those dreams that Carmen knew to be a dream, yet which was somehow convincing all the same. She was at the pulpit of a huge church of velvety darkness and fluttery candlelight, while the hushed congregation waited expectantly for her to pay tribute to the people in the caskets on either side, whose names and identities she couldn’t for the life of her recall. She sensed, moreover, that men of ill intent were watching her from the shadows, and her discomfort grew so acute that she forced herself to open her eyes.
She was lying on her back in a hospital bed in a private room with the early morning sunlight reflecting off the slatted blinds to paint watery yellow stripes upon her ceiling. Her mouth was dry, her temple throbbed and she had such a strong sense that someone else really was in the room that she lifted her head to look. An elderly black man in a charcoal suit beneath a loose white medical coat smiled benignly at her from the foot of her bed. He had lively grey hair, rounded shoulders and a faint tremor in his left hand, in which he was holding a clipboard. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Good. I mean… Good.’
‘Do you remember what happened? Why you are here?’
She closed her eyes to think. The train journey, Giulia, Vittorio, a truck in the trees, men in balaclavas swearing her to silence, the shame of lying to the police and that Oxford archaeologist. Arriving by ambulance, an impatient young doctor shining his torch into her eyes. A CAT scan revealing nothing to alarm, yet being woken twice by nurses in the small hours even so, lest she’d slipped into a coma. Yet all so fragmented and uncertain that any part of it might be imagined. ‘I thi
nk so, yes.’
He nodded. ‘We found ketamine in your blood.’ He came around the bed to touch a sticking plaster on the inside of her left elbow, which – now that she was aware of it – began to throb. ‘They must have injected you with it.’
‘Ketamine?’
‘An anaesthetic. It can play havoc with the memory.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She was too tired to care. ‘But it’ll wear off, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Then…?’
‘Then?’
‘What now?’
He smiled with great gentleness. ‘You took a severe blow to the head. From what you told my colleagues last night, you were unconscious even before the ketamine.’ His expression didn’t alter, yet somehow she sensed scepticism, though no reproach. ‘There is no great sign of trauma or swelling. But brains are unpredictable. It is our protocol here to keep someone in your situation under observation for twenty-four hours from the time the injury was sustained. Until this evening, then, assuming no adverse reaction. Six o’clock, say.’
‘And… what about money?’
‘Do you not have insurance?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘Try to rest. I’ll be back later.’
She waited until he was gone, then peeled back the sticking plaster to inspect the tiny red scab beneath, surrounded by a café au lait bruise. Her overnight bag and her purse were both on the floor against the wall. She sat up, only to feel so woozy that she lay straight back down again. She gave herself a minute then tried again, taking it more slowly. Better. She fetched over both her bags to check them. Her passport was gone, of course, but everything else was there. She tried to turn on her phone, but its battery was flat, so she plugged it in to recharge then flopped exhausted back into bed, and let herself doze.
When she woke again, she felt much stronger. She unlocked her phone with her thumb then checked, with a certain trepidation, for messages. She was both relieved and a tiny bit dismayed to discover that there weren’t any. It was the middle of the night back home, of course. Besides, how would anyone know of her condition until she told them? An update, then. She needed to couch it perfectly, however, or her mother would freak out and insist on catching the next plane over – the very last thing Carmen wanted. So she took a selfie with a thumbs up then set about composing an upbeat new post for her Facebook page.
II
The van’s antique suspension groaned and creaked as Cesco sat up, cold, stiff and drained from yesterday’s craziness. He yawned expansively then slung his towel over his shoulder and made his way to the water fountain, where he brushed his teeth and spat white foam down at the drain, soaped and dried his face and chest and beneath his arms. A net curtain twitched in an upstairs window. An elderly woman stared disapprovingly down. He winked at her and felt cheered.
He dressed then headed into town. A kiosk owner was folding newspapers into racks. The local daily had gone big on the Surace murders. He bought a copy, still warm from its bundle, and walked on. A large woman in a red apron was setting out tables and chairs on the pavement. Her shutters were still half closed, but he gave her his warmest smile and she made him coffee, muttering and shaking her head at him the whole time. He drank it at the counter, checking each of the stories for his name, relieved to find only a couple of references to a family friend who’d come across the tragedy and called the emergency services.
There was, however, plenty of speculation about who to blame, and their motive for the murders. Vittorio Surace had got in too deep with the Cosenza ’Ndrangheta, it appeared, for which recklessness he and his daughter had both paid. What startled Cesco was why. There was a photograph on an inside page of various artefacts, supposedly from Alaric’s tomb, that Vittorio had discovered near the Busento. That was why they’d needed the packing case they’d had Carmen bring down from Sapienza University. It had contained a ground-penetrating radar, as it turned out, with which to survey the plot in question before they started digging. That surely explained why Giulia had invited him too, for she’d believed him to be an experienced field archaeologist who’d used such equipment before.
He drummed his fingers on the countertop. According to the story, the Suraces had taken the location of Alaric’s tomb with them to their graves. Which put Carmen Nero’s lies from last night in a very different light. She’d known what was in the packing case, he was sure of it. The only question was whether she’d known where they’d planned to look. His heart began to pump a little faster. What if Alaric’s tomb really was out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered? What if the person best placed to find it was lying in Cosenza Hospital, shaken by yesterday’s traumas and in dire need of a friend – preferably one with excellent English who she was already disposed to trust?
If Cesco couldn’t take advantage of this, he needed to find himself a new line of work. He drained his coffee, folded his paper beneath his arm and hurried to his van.
III
Carmen dozed off again after posting her Facebook update, then woke to the abrupt entry of a formidable tall young man in dark shirt and suit, wearing mirror sunglasses and an earpiece, a holster strapped to his belt. Without a word, he checked the cupboard and bathroom and beneath her bed. He closed her blinds then returned to the door to beckon someone out of view. A second man now came in. He could hardly have looked more different. Short, portly, bearded, rumpled, in his mid fifties, with that kind of grey tiredness that comes from weeks without proper sleep. He gestured at a chair, asking permission to set it by her bed. She was too bewildered to do anything but nod. Relief washed over him as he stretched out his legs in front of him. ‘My name is Mancuso,’ he said, extending the penultimate vowel in that lovely Italian way. ‘Baldassare Mancuso.’
Carmen nodded. She recognised the name. ‘The Mafia man.’
His smile made him look ten years younger. ‘The anti-Mafia man, if you please.’
‘Of course. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—’
‘Forgive me. I only tease.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But why are you here? Was yesterday… Mafia?’
‘That is what I hope to establish.’
‘And you think I can help? I only wish. But I know nothing, I’m afraid.’ She touched her temple. ‘I hit my head, you see. I was out the whole time.’
‘Yes. So I understand from what you told my friend the ispettore. I read his notes last night.’ He leaned forward with his hands on his knees, as if uncertain how to proceed. Then he glanced around at the door, at his two men on guard outside, and seemed to find his way. ‘I live in a villa a short drive outside Cosenza. A very nice villa, at the top of a hill. I hardly ever leave it any more. Too much work to do. And also because, whenever I do go out, I put so many people at risk. Myself, of course. I am nothing like so brave as the stories would have you believe. But also everyone I pass on the street, and those I go to see. People like you. Most of all, though, I worry for my bodyguards. The handsome young man who checked your room just now is called Manfredo. He is twenty-five years old. His daughter celebrated her first birthday last month. And now his wife is expecting again. Yet he volunteered to be my bodyguard. He volunteered, despite the danger, because he believes my work – our work, I should say – is helping to make our country better. That’s quite something, don’t you think?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
‘So you can see why I think I owe him and his comrades a responsibility not to leave my villa without good cause. Yet here I am anyway, even though you remember nothing, even though the murders of your friend and her father are not my case. I am here because of the various statements and reports I received about what happened last night. I read them again and again. Then I lay awake all night brooding on them. Which is crazy! I have insane amounts of work to do, and no time in which to do it! I can’t afford to lie awake! But I couldn’t get it out of my head. There is something about it all that I don’t understand, you see. And I badly, badly need to
understand it.’
‘And?’ asked Carmen. ‘What is it?’
He gave her an apologetic smile. ‘I need to understand why those bastards let you live.’
Chapter Eight
I
Zara was first to arrive at the prison that morning. She checked in with security, who she persuaded with some effort to allow her to wander around the side of the prison, between its huge exterior slab wall and the perimeter wire fence. The sun climbed higher. She stood in the wall’s shrinking shade and stared out over the plateau. It had a real shimmer to it today, hot sandy wastes beneath a sky of perfect blue. The terrain here was high, exposed, dry and windswept, so that soil had never settled, leaving it almost completely barren save for the very hardiest of plants. Only the fact that it was made of dolomitic limestone, from which Jerusalem’s entire Old City had been built, had ever given it any real value. Yet people had been spilling blood over it for millennia, rival dogmas clashing like sharpened blades.
And no one could deny there was a beauty to its starkness.
She checked her watch again. The others were running late. Getting anything moving on Shabbat was always hard, and particularly in times of tension. Religious observance was a kind of patriotism, a flag to wave. She did not attend synagogue any more herself, except when courtesy demanded. It felt too much like a lie. Yet childhood habits died hard, and working on Shabbat still felt transgressive. Particularly their work today. For every activity specifically prohibited by the Torah had something or other to do with the tabernacle, even though no part of the tabernacle had existed in many, many centuries.
Yet maybe that was about to change.
The thought made her shiver, despite the heat of the day. She crouched to place her palm upon bare rock. If the Menorah truly were somewhere beneath… She felt apprehension as much as excitement. She heard the scratch of footsteps behind her, looked around to see Kaufman, hands clasped behind his back like a kindly schoolteacher. ‘A penny for them,’ he said.
The Sacred Spoils Page 8
