The Sacred Spoils

by The Sacred Spoils (retail) (epub)

  ‘Me.’

  She opened the door a little way. ‘What is it?’

  He put a finger to his lips then pushed his way inside and closed the door behind him. He made his way past a shiny white bathroom into a warmly lit room of powder blue, furnished with a desk, an armchair, a large-screen TV and a king-sized bed. He pressed down on the mattress. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Just so you know, I sleep right side.’

  ‘You what? Like hell!’

  He turned to stare at her. ‘Have you forgotten who’s in charge here?’

  ‘I don’t care. You’re not staying in my room.’

  ‘I’m staying wherever the fuck I want,’ he said, advancing on her. She backed away against the wall. He still came on, intruding into her space, their bodies almost touching, staring at her until she dropped her eyes. Women were like horses that way. You only needed to break them once. He nodded at her and walked off, leaving her still wilted.

  A floor-length white net curtain covered a smoked-glass balcony door. He slid it open. The gust of fresh night air made the net billow as he stepped out. Pink and blue neon crosses adorned the roofs of nearby churches. He could see the flutter of police lights, the red stream of tail lights on a one-way road, the white span of an illuminated suspension bridge that swept like an angel’s wing across the glossy black strip of a river. He leaned over the railing to look straight down five storeys to hard tarmac beneath.

  Perfect.

  He went back inside, closed the door behind him. Zara was still against the wall, forearms up like a boxer on a standing count. He winked at her then kicked off his shoes and stretched out on his side of the king-size. There was a remote control on the bedside table. He turned on the TV then started flipping channels in the hope of finding something halfway decent to watch. Then he smiled up at her and patted the bed beside him to invite her to come join him.

  III

  There were no provisions to speak of in the Moccono house, so Tomas and Guido stopped at a store on the way back from Cosenza. It began to pour as they set off with their purchases, misting up the glass even with the heating on, so that they had to buzz the windows down a hair, even though it meant being spattered by rain.

  They parked right by the front door. The guttering was so clogged that the rainwater poured over its side like a bead curtain, splashing down the collar of Tomas’s jacket as he wiggled the key in the stiff lock. It was cold inside. He tried the lights. Nothing happened. The grid around here was notoriously prone to failure in the rain, let alone in a storm like this – but at least they had a back-up generator. He found a torch in the kitchen then went down into the basement to start it.

  The rain abruptly stopped, leaving everything slick and dark. Clear sky reappeared, even a little warmth. Neither felt like cooking, so Guido went back into town for pizza. They turned on the outside lights and went out onto the covered terrace where they tore the pizzas apart with their bare hands and washed them down with a good coarse red that made the throat burn. Rainwater dripped from the eaves and gutters, like percussionists on a soft jam. The soil of the olive groves fizzed with moisture, releasing a perfume so rich it was almost intoxicating. The cicadas began their joyful screech. They opened a second bottle. Despite the setbacks of the day, a bellyful of pizza and red wine gave Tomas as profound a sense of contentment as he could remember. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Guido.

  Tomas threw his brother an affectionate look. He loved him more than anyone in the world, even more than his two sons, who he barely saw these days anyway. He and Guido had been inseparable their whole lives, but especially since moving to Amsterdam in their teens after Luca Critelli had asked their father to set up a base there, from which to supply their larger Western European customers with cocaine. He’d made a tremendous success of it too, despite sporadic turf wars with the Albanians and Russians.

  Liver cancer had taken their father four years before. As the elder son, Guido should by rights have succeeded him, but they’d both known that Tomas was the better choice. They’d agreed to call themselves partners, therefore, while letting Tomas make the decisions that mattered. Another man might have settled for carrying on as before. Not Tomas. He’d had an insatiable need to outdo his father, driven by the knowledge that he’d always held him in contempt, simply because he’d loved reading as a boy, and had wet his bed for a while after moving to Holland, and because he’d always been squeamish at the sight of blood.

  The way his father had mocked him for this had given others licence to do the same. Tomas had said nothing while his father had still lived. But it had been the first thing he’d needed to address once the cancer had won. He and Guido had therefore taken a team to surprise the Albanians one night. They’d caught them in their own warehouse, taking them captive before they’d realised what was happening. He’d isolated their three bosses then made their foot soldiers watch as he himself had hacked off their heads one by one with a hunting knife. Guido had offered to do it for him – it was all just meat to him – but Tomas had insisted. He’d suffered nightmares for months afterwards, in which those three men had returned from the dead to do the same to him; but no one had ever again called him soft.

  The surviving Albanians had fallen into line. The Russians too. The threat of decapitation had that effect on people. It terrified them far more than the thought of merely dying. Their turnover had quickly doubled, then had reached nine figures. Their profitability had been insane until a vast shipment of cocaine had been seized in Gioia Tauro and the Critellis had been arrested. Soon enough, they’d run out of product to sell. That was when the Critellis had ordered him and Guido to come down here personally to carry out the Mancuso kidnap. Ordered them, mind, not asked. Because that was the ’Ndrangheta for you. To the ’Ndrangheta, Amsterdam meant shit. Only Calabria mattered.

  ‘You ever wonder about moving back?’ he asked.

  Guido looked curiously at him. ‘I thought we’d decided.’

  ‘We’d decided better to rule in Amsterdam than serve here. But we wouldn’t be serving, would we?’

  ‘You’re suggesting we take over?’

  ‘Someone’s going to, oh my brother. Why not us?’

  ‘We don’t have the numbers.’

  ‘No one has the numbers. Everyone’s in jail. Yet someone will end up boss. Someone always does.’

  ‘What about our oath?’

  ‘We did our best by it.’

  ‘The brothers won’t see it that way.’

  ‘No. But if we do this, they’re first to go. Along with their families. It’ll be how we announce ourselves.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Tomas reached out to touch his arm. ‘You like their cousin Magdalena still, don’t you?’

  Guido shrugged. ‘She’s always been nice to me.’

  ‘Fine. She can live, then. If she bends the knee.’

  Silence fell. Tomas let it. Guido was not an imaginative man, but once an idea took root, you’d need a tractor to pull it out. He drained his glass, refilled it, then drained that one too. ‘How would we go about it?’ he asked finally.

  Tomas was a strategist. He understood how power worked. Everything they needed to run Cosenza was already in place. Their South American suppliers, the ships’ crews, customs officers, customers, drivers, pushers, politicians, judges and police. Such people had no loyalty to the Critellis, only to the envelope and the gun. But Guido, he knew, wasn’t asking about that. He was a soldier. What interested him was blood. ‘We call Amsterdam,’ he said. ‘We have Massimo put together a team. A dozen should be plenty. Good Calabrian stock. Loyal only to us. They’ll need to bring their own guns, which means coming by road. Give them the order tonight, they can be here Wednesday. As for the brothers, there are plenty of good men inside with no reason to love them. Offer six figures a head, they’ll be dead by nightfall. Then we’ll set a new arse upon the throne.’

  ‘Whose? Yours or mine?’

  ‘Depends on whether peop
le come to kiss it or kick it.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ laughed Guido.

  ‘Well?’ asked Tomas.

  The sky had by now cleared completely. It was a perfect spill of stars. Amsterdam had its pleasures, especially while one was young, but they were neither of them that any more. They were Calabrian at heart, and nothing Holland had to offer could compare to a night like this. Guido’s chin lifted as he looked up at it, at all those constellations named for warriors and gods. His chest swelled with mountain air. ‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘Why the fuck not?’

  Tomas raised his glass. ‘The brothers are dead,’ he said.

  ‘Long live the brothers,’ replied Guido.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I

  Carmen poured herself a large glass of white wine then knocked half of it straight back. She felt so restless and alone that she turned on the local news purely for the company of voices. There was only one story, of course, though it had different strands. An inset screen showed a line of empty chairs behind a table covered by microphones waiting for Baldassare’s announcement of charges against the Critelli brothers and their ’ndrine, while the rolling caption at the foot of the screen advised that it was running late because Baldassare was passing on the duty to a deputy, who needed to be briefed. In the meantime, a panel of studio guests breathlessly discussed the emerging details of the kidnapping and rescue of Baldassare’s wife and daughter.

  Carmen already knew much of the story. She’d heard it first-hand from Alessandra in snatched whispers whenever their guards had left them. How death threats had persuaded her and Bettina to move to Sweden until the Critellis affair was finished. How they’d all missed each other so much that they’d rented a villa on the coast for the weekend and flown home, only for masked men to burst in on them and inject them with some anaesthetic drug. The two of them had then awoken in that dreadful dungeon, the slow passage of days since marked only by meals and newspapers brought for proof-of-life videos.

  It explained, of course, why Baldassare had pressed her so hard that morning in the hospital. He’d realised the deeper significance of the ketamine. The thought that he might despise her for her earlier silence was too uncomfortable to bear. She could hardly call him, not with everything going on, so she put her apology into an email instead, and attached a copy of her statement to the police.

  A flurry of activity in the press conference hall. It went full screen. A blaze of camera flashes and an excited buzz of chatter announced Baldassare himself. He looked so rumpled and drained that it was no surprise that he began the press conference by announcing – as best Carmen could follow – that he’d be taking an indefinite break directly after this was over for himself and his family to recuperate from their ordeal, passing the case on to the able deputies on either side of him, whom he proceeded to introduce. Then he began reading out the charges. His delivery was so dry and matter of fact that the TV station spiced it up with footage of the Critellis and their acolytes at the moments of their arrest – a strangely interchangeable procession of paunchy middle-aged men in leather jackets and with the same contemptuous stares as they were bundled into the back of police cars – as if they all knew they were being filmed, and wanted to look their best.

  The charges continued. She grew bored. She checked the fridge for food. Pasta, butter, eggs, pancetta, Parmesan and garlic. Plenty for a carbonara. She filled a large saucepan with water, added oil and salt, put it on a burner. She melted butter in a smaller pan then fried the pancetta and diced garlic to a golden brown. She grated a knob of Parmesan, whipped it with an egg, then stirred it into the garlic and pancetta, tossing the fusilli into the water as it came finally to the boil.

  On TV, Baldassare finished reading out the charges and invited questions instead. The third one was from a BBC correspondent, asking in English how that day’s hostage rescue had come about. Carmen hurried from the kitchen to turn the volume up. Operation Trinity had been in the works for months, Baldassare replied, also in English. From even before the kidnapping of his wife and daughter, key ’Ndrangheta suspects and properties had been under intensive surveillance. He hadn’t known for sure where his wife and daughter were being held, so they’d waited until the last possible moment, both to gather maximum information and in the hope of a lucky break. But this afternoon, with his time up, he’d finally given the order to go.

  At this, the last glowing ember of hope that Cesco might after all have had something to do with her rescue turned black inside Carmen’s chest, and so died.

  The smoke alarm began suddenly to shriek. She rushed back to the hob. Too late. Her carbonara was an omelette; her fusilli was mush. Too weary to start over, she stirred it all together in a cereal bowl and ate it with a spoon. ‘Fuck you, Cesco,’ she muttered.

  She rinsed her plate and pans, refilled her glass, then undertook a task she’d been dreading since her return – running an internet search for Cesco Rossi PhD, archaeologist of Oxford. She did find a few traces of him, on message boards and the like, but nothing he couldn’t easily have planted himself. While she was at it, however, she came across contact details for Karen Porter. She sent her an email, therefore, explaining who she was and how a man named Cesco Rossi had been claiming to have helped her on her Syracuse documentary, but that she had reason to be suspicious. The answer came back just five minutes later. Carmen held her hand up in front of the screen, to protect herself from the blow that she knew full well was coming. Sure enough, Karen had never heard of Cesco Rossi, and he’d certainly never helped her on any of her books or programmes. Who was he? Did she need to be concerned? Carmen wrote straight back, assuring her that everything was fine, the situation had been taken care of locally. Then she set about changing the passwords to all her social media and other accounts, in case Cesco – or whatever his real name was – had managed to hack into her phone. It left her feeling so dispirited that she went to bed early, then paid for it by lying there awake in the darkness. After all the turmoil and terror she’d been through that day, how come this was the thing that hurt?

  ‘Fuck you, Cesco,’ she said again.

  And, finally, she slept.

  II

  Cesco spent the evening in the seaside town of Rosarno, two-thirds of the way between Cosenza and Scilla, distant enough from each that he’d be safe from being recognised. He took his day’s allowance from an ATM then bought painkillers and fresh dressings for his back and shoulder from a pharmacy, as well as writing paper, envelopes and a pen from the general store next door.

  He grew hungry. He took an outside table at a restaurant where he was waited on by a very Caesar-looking man, with an aristocratic nose and forward-curling sideburns. He ate grilled fish with a deliciously crisp and salted skin then sat back in his chair. His arm and shoulder began aching fiercely. He washed down a pair of painkillers with water. Lights on the harbour wall flickered like fireflies. A band a little way along the front played wine-bar music, only for the waves to keep shushing them. He finished his dinner, then over coffee wrote a letter of apology to his old landlady Donatella that he sealed into an envelope along with the cash from the ATM. It was a ruse he’d used before when breaking into a place, to give himself an excuse should he be caught. Yet this time, for some reason, the words actually resonated. He went for a walk. A corpulent man who’d been selling lottery tickets along the front climbed into a tiny three-wheeler that sank almost to the tarmac beneath his weight. He met Cesco’s gaze with a poignant smile, trying to be amused rather than ashamed by his own absurdity. Utterly drained by now, Cesco wanted only to find a bed and sleep. But he didn’t let himself. Church bells tolled midnight. He took a new day’s allowance from the ATM, then climbed back on the Harley and set off south.

  He reached Scilla a little after one. Its streets were empty and quiet save for the low mutter of his own engine. He parked a street away from his apartment building, checked that no one was around, then walked briskly but without haste to his front door. All the lights were
out. He checked again that he was alone. His key still fit. Once inside he took off his shoes then went upstairs, tiptoeing past Donatella’s front door. He reached his apartment, put his ear to the door. Silence. This lock hadn’t been changed either. He slipped inside. Using his phone’s torch, he padded through to the kitchen. There was a toolkit beneath the sink. He took a screwdriver from it then placed a chair against the wall, standing on it to unscrew the air vent panel. His envelope was still inside, covered with grit and dust. He wiped it with his sleeve. Its flap was tucked in rather than stuck down. He checked inside to make sure everything was still there, including his driving licence under his next name and bank cards for various savings accounts. He clamped it between his knees and screwed the panel back in. Then he climbed back down and replaced the chair by the table.

  The envelope was too big for his pocket and he didn’t want to fold it, so he tucked it into the waistband at the back of his trousers instead, hiding it beneath his jacket. Then he took out his note to Donatella. He’d only written it to give himself an excuse if he were caught. Or so he’d told himself. But now that he was here, the desire to make amends overcame him. He set it on the kitchen table and turned for the door before he could change his mind.

  There was a scuffing noise in the passage. The lights flickered on and then Donatella herself appeared, dressed in fluffy slippers and a frilly pink dressing gown, and with a look of intense satisfaction on her face. And, for the second time that day, Cesco found himself staring at the wrong end of a double-barrelled shotgun, this one aimed directly at his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I

  ‘I knew you’d be back,’ gloated Donatella. ‘All those pretty clothes. Men like you are too cheap to leave behind pretty clothes.’

  ‘Men like me?’ asked Cesco.