His assessment was correct. The producer appeared dishevelled and exhausted when he descended from the carriage. Scamarcio noticed a large, yellow stain on his jacket that looked like vomit. As Giacometti stepped onto the platform, ten officers surrounded him and brought him to his knees, but there was no need to pull him to the ground, because he quickly held out his hands for the cuffs. Once they were on, he closed his eyes and began whispering. Scamarcio wondered if he was praying. He couldn’t tell from any of this if he was surprised to have been captured or had prepared himself. Either way, it wasn’t relevant. Scamarcio’s sole objective was to get him to the station and make him talk.
There were deep, grey hollows beneath Giacometti’s eyes, and his salt-and-pepper hair was matted and awry. One of the lenses of his trendy glasses was chipped, and there was a cut to his upper lip. Scamarcio wanted to know when all of this had happened. Giacometti had the look of a rough sleeper, and Scamarcio wondered if he had been hiding out for a time up in Trieste, avoiding hotels while he tried to find a solution to the mess he’d created. Giacometti’s hands were shaking as they tried to grip the paper cup of coffee that had been handed to him. Scamarcio noticed a thin sheen of perspiration on his forehead that he kept trying to wipe away with a soiled paper tissue. He showed none of the self-assurance of their previous meeting.
‘Mr Giacometti,’ said Scamarcio, pulling out a chair. ‘I know all about you and Aconi, how he broke your heart, how you tried to get back at Micky by staging the kidnap. So let’s not to do the dance of you trying to pretend otherwise — we’ve come way too far for that. I’m sure that you, as much as I, want all this over with now. Let’s just get that little boy home.’
Giacometti looked dazed. His seemed to stare straight past Scamarcio, to some indefinable point, far far away. There was something disturbing about the emptiness of this gaze, and Scamarcio wondered if he should call Psych. Then he told himself that he should put this off for as long as possible, that he needed to get some sense out of Giacometti before Psych got all proprietorial and starting waving the rule book.
‘Giacometti, I understand what love can do to a man, believe me.’ Scamarcio stopped, and scratched his head. ‘But what I don’t get is why you had to kill Maia Proietti. That’s a breathtaking step too far.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ said Giacometti, deadpan, still staring into nothing.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Why would I kill her? That would be madness.’
‘Yeah — like the rest of it makes a whole lot of sense.’
‘It was just for show. We were going to bring Maia and the boy back after a couple of days. We just wanted to rattle Micky, make him stop and think for once, teach him a lesson.’
‘Well, killing his wife is a pretty clear lesson, I’d say.’
‘I didn’t kill her.’
Scamarcio wanted to yell in his face, but fought his frustration. ‘So if you didn’t, who did?’
Giacometti sighed. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’
Scamarcio had a fresh pack of Marlboro in his pocket that he had been doing his best not to work through too quickly. He knew that just the act of pulling it out would be enough to smash his resolve. He tore off the wrapping and handed a cigarette across to Giacometti. Then, after the briefest of pauses, he took one for himself and lit up for the pair of them.
‘So, Maia?’
‘God knows,’ said Giacometti after a long drag. ‘I hear glass smash, someone screaming, then I start to cough. Then my eyes are burning, and I’m retching and puking. My eyes feel like they’re going to melt in my head. I don’t know what’s up or down, left or right. It’s chaos.’ He took another drag, his fingers trembling as he brought the cigarette to his lips. ‘Then the shooting starts, and on and on it goes. It feels like it will never end. We all fall to the floor, screaming. Then, a few seconds later, someone starts yelling: ‘You got Maia, you got Maia.’ They didn’t sound too happy about it. Then I hear someone say, ‘Get her out, get her out, we need to get her to a hospital.’ I can’t see what’s happening, my eyes are gummed shut, but I hear a weight being dragged, and I presume it’s her body. Then they start shouting: ‘The boy, the boy, where’s the boy?’ I’m being kicked in the ribs by a boot. They’re kicking me for the answer, I realise. I tell them he’s at another location — we’d separated them, you see, the boy and Maia. They keep kicking, and I give them the address. But as soon as they’re gone, I realise I gave them the wrong place. That’s where we had him yesterday. We’d moved him in the morning, because the boiler had broken at the other place, but in my panic I’d forgotten.’
Scamarcio breathed in and out carefully for several moments, thinking hard, trying to suppress an unexpected disquiet.
‘It was a gas canister, I realised after,’ added Giacometti.
‘What was?’
‘What caused the coughing, the burning. They must have thrown it in. I found it when they left.’
The disquiet was now a rising tide of panic. Scamarcio counted to five in his head, reminding himself that Giacometti was in the business of TV drama, and could easily invent such a tale. He told himself that maybe the use of gas canisters was all the rage among the clans of Calabria right now. Stay on track, he told himself, keep your focus. OK, so Giacometti had come back to Rome because he was scared. He’d tumbled into something far darker than he’d imagined, and right now the police seemed a less intimidating prospect. Scamarcio’s mind drew a blank. The image of the gas canister was bubbling up to the surface once more, disrupting his concentration, eating away at his sanity. He suddenly felt cold.
He folded his hands across his notepad, then took the top off his pen and flipped to a fresh page. ‘These voices?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘Were they familiar at all? Did they have accents?’
‘Calabrian — definitely Calabrian. One of them was called Davide. They kept referring back to him; he seemed to be the leader.’
So, as they’d suspected, Stasio had decided to take matters into his own hands. But who had been helping him?
‘Any other names?’ he asked.
Giacometti shook his head. ‘No. I mean, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I just know I heard the name Davide a lot; they kept asking him what to do. He seemed to be the one in control.’
Scamarcio sank back against his chair. He was struggling to get a hold on his panic; the counting wasn’t helping now.
He stepped out into the corridor and took a long drag on his Marlboro, tracking the fragile smoke rings as they drifted aimlessly to the ceiling. He noticed watery patches of yellow and brown, a peppering of black mould. Were they all being slowly poisoned by the budget cuts now?
He sucked out the cigarette, then lit another. So Stasio had decided to act, believing the ’ndrangheta were involved. But why the cannisters? That was the million-dollar question. Was it really possible that Stasio had links to Dante Greco? If he knew Piocosta’s former men were owed a debt from Proietti, wouldn’t Greco have rounded them up and taken control by now? Wouldn’t he have put the thumbscrews on Stasio, trying to claw the money back, just as Piocosta’s boys had done? Scamarcio felt as if he were back at Piocosta’s villa, the poison seeping in. He could no longer be sure of the world around him; he could no longer make out the contours.
A further question was bothering him: why, when they realised they’d made a mistake, didn’t Stasio and his men take Maia Proietti to hospital? Perhaps she’d died on the way, and Stasio had panicked. Had he decided to save his skin, and lay the blame at the kidnappers’ door?
Scamarcio reminded himself that these were all secondary issues. The priority remained the same: they had to find the boy’s location, and find it fast.
Scamarcio stubbed out his cigarette and re-entered the interview room. He was surprised to see that Paolo Giacometti was slumped over the small table as if he had fallen asleep. When
Scamarcio walked in, he jerked awake and rubbed a shaky hand across his mouth.
‘Keeping you up, are we? Let’s cut to the chase so you can get some shut-eye. Where have you taken Proietti’s son?’ barked Scamarcio.
Giacometti kept rubbing his hand across his mouth, but his coordination was out; it was like watching a one-year-old trying to master its limbs. There was something very off about the gesture in a fifty-year-old man.
‘Come on, I’ve had enough,’ said Scamarcio, thumping the table.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ whispered Giacometti, a thin sliver of saliva working its way down his chin.
‘How can you not know?’
‘I don’t know where they’ve taken him.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The others.’
‘What others?’
‘The other ones.’
His speech was starting to slur, and his eyes weren’t holding focus. Scamarcio wondered if Giacometti was physically sick, or if this was indeed a mental-health problem.
‘We know the driver was a fake. Are there other people involved, besides you and your researcher?’
‘Of course,’ he murmured. ‘We all hate him, we’re all sick of his arrogance. But their agenda wasn’t quite as personal as …’ His head was beginning to loll against the desk once more. Scamarcio shook him by the shoulder. ‘Come on, Giacometti, keep up. What’s the matter?’
The saliva was still running from Giacometti’s mouth, and his eyes were rolling in their sockets, the whites exposed now. When he saw this change, Scamarcio finally understood that something was very wrong. He jabbed at the emergency buzzer, and two uniforms ran in.
‘Call an ambulance,’ he snapped.
One of the officers darted out again.
Giacometti’s breathing was laboured. The officer who had remained lifted his wrist and felt for his pulse. ‘It’s sky high,’ he said after several seconds.
Scamarcio scratched at his hairline. There was heat in his stomach, and he felt jittery. ‘Do you think it’s a fit, some kind of epilepsy?’
The officer was shaking his head. ‘To me, it looks like an overdose.’
‘How can that be? We searched him at the station, and he hasn’t swallowed anything since I’ve been with him.’ Scamarcio thought about the few minutes when he’d stepped outside. Had it been then? But Giacometti had seemed slightly out of it from the moment he’d arrived.
‘Could he have necked it before we cuffed him? Maybe whatever it was took some time to work,’ said the officer.
Scamarcio’s mind flashed back to events at the station. He wondered if Giacometti could have swallowed something just before he stepped off the train.
‘Jesus,’ he hissed.
At that moment, Giacometti’s breathing became more of a rattle. It was a repugnant, animal sound that made the hairs on Scamarcio’s neck stand on end.
‘Fuck, is he dying?’
The officer bent down next to Giacometti’s mouth. ‘Help me get him on his side.’
They manoeuvred him onto the floor and rolled him carefully onto his right side. The rattle was becoming more pronounced, more desperate now.
‘What about mouth-to-mouth?’ said Scamarcio. Then: ‘Where the fuck are the paramedics?’
The officer leaned over Giacometti’s chest and began administering CPR. ‘I don’t think it’s going to work, Sir,’ he said after a few tries. ‘Not if he’s overdosed.’
‘Just keep going. I don’t have a location for the little boy.’
The officer worked on, up and down on the chest, pinching Giacometti’s nose, breathing into his mouth, on and on, until Scamarcio felt as if they’d been in the room forever, as if they’d become trapped inside a loop in time. He began to count, higher and higher, past 100, then 200, until finally the paramedics ran in and the young officer slumped aside, exhausted.
Scamarcio could tell by the calm approach, by the careful rhythm with which they progressed through their routine that they knew Giacometti wasn’t going to make it.
When he was pronounced dead at 13.14, Scamarcio slid down the wall and buried his head in his hands. They were fucked.
34
‘IT’S GOT TO BE THE GIRL BELLAGAMBA,’ said Chief Mancino. ‘We focus all our efforts on her now. She’ll come home eventually; she’ll lead us to him.’
‘And what if she doesn’t?’ asked Scamarcio.
‘We can’t think like that.’
‘We must.’
He saw Garramone flinch.
‘What would you suggest then, Detective? You failed to prevent our prime suspect from committing suicide on your watch, so you’ll understand that I now have serious reservations when it comes to taking your advice.’
Scamarcio pushed on. ‘There are others involved. Giacometti told me as much. His exact words were: “They all hate him, but their agenda is not quite as personal.” We need to look harder at the TV scene, at the people Proietti does business with.’
Mancino dismissed the thought with a flick of his hand. ‘A massive waste of time — we follow the girl, we get the boy.’
Scamarcio shook his head. ‘You won’t get the girl, and you won’t get the boy. When we went back to the CCTV at the studio location, it bore fruit; we need to keep mining this vein — we can’t just give up and expect the girl to tie it all up for us.’
‘Yes, but you only found the girl. You failed to locate any of the others from the CCTV, so the girl is all we have to work with.’ Mancino snapped his large notebook together with a thud. ‘We’re done here. Go get me a result. I’ve been waiting long enough.’
When they were out in the corridor, Garramone said: ‘If there are a few people you met first time round who caught your eye, then go back and talk to them. Keep it on the QT, though. Mancino has his spies.’
Scamarcio raised an eyebrow. ‘Spies?’
‘You didn’t hear it from me.’
Scamarcio rode the elevator to the offices of the Matrix TV company. When he arrived, Francesco Bruno, the Calabrian producer, was hovering in the foyer and let him in. ‘I saw you come up,’ he explained, seemingly embarrassed.
Scamarcio couldn’t work out how that would be possible unless there was a camera on the front door, or unless Bruno had been hanging out the window, watching out for him.
Bruno quickly retreated into his office and pulled the door shut behind Scamarcio.
‘The rumour mill is buzzing,’ said Bruno, moving hastily around his desk and perching on the edge of his swivel chair. ‘Word is that you guys have Paolo Giacometti in your sights.’
Scamarcio didn’t read any anxiety there, just curiosity. He pulled out a seat opposite and felt in his pocket for his notebook, weighing up quite how much to reveal.
‘I can’t go into all that,’ he murmured.
‘Right,’ said Bruno, clearly disappointed.
‘When we first spoke, you said you couldn’t imagine that any of the producers who work for Proietti would do this.’
‘I stand by that. For the life of me, if Paolo was involved, I can’t understand what he would have been thinking. He’d been getting great business from Micky over the years. He would have had to have lost his mind.’
‘Mr Giacometti has suggested to me that others are involved — others from the business.’
The realisation slowly dawned. Bruno had been given confirmation that Giacometti was involved. He traded glances with Scamarcio, a momentary triumph in his eyes, then he exhaled sharply and just shook his head. ‘He’s got to be spinning you a line — I don’t buy it.’
Scamarcio leaned in. ‘I’ve been around the block a bit. I know when to spot a faker, and I don’t believe I was being lied to.’
Bruno took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. I have no idea.’
‘Really?�
��
‘Really.’
Here they were, right back at the beginning, thought Scamarcio. The worst thing was that he believed him. Bruno was playing it straight.
‘Go see some of the others, but I don’t think they’re going to bring you any further,’ he said. ‘They’ll just tell you the same as me.’
Scamarcio’s mood wasn’t improved by his most recent encounter with Micky Proietti.
‘I have no idea who these people might be,’ he slurred. ‘Paolo Giacometti knew everyone in the industry, same as me. He could be talking about anyone.’
‘But he must have had particular friends, people he hung around with.’
‘I wouldn’t know, Detective. My relationship with Paolo was professional; I couldn’t tell you who his friends were.’
‘That’s bullshit. You attended the same parties.’
‘I don’t much like your tone.’
‘And I don’t much like your attitude. You need to start helping your little boy. This has gone way too far. Start talking, Proietti, before you condemn your son to death.’
Proietti tried to get to his feet, but couldn’t quite manage it. He slumped back down in his armchair, a fist balled. ‘Don’t you fucking talk to me like that,’ he spat. ‘Get the fuck out of my house. I want to deal with someone else, someone professional. I’m sick of the sight of you, you incompetent fuck.’ He attempted to stand again and managed to get shakily to his feet this time, but tottered as he tried to swing an arm towards the door. ‘Now fuck off back to the mafia hellhole you came from, you son of a whore.’
It had taken five Marlboros to bring Scamarcio down after that. As he was contemplating whether to finish the last cigarette in the box, Sartori shuffled in. He was covered in sweat and trying to eat a Big Mac while checking his phone at the same time. He’d just completed another trawl of Proietti’s principal producers, and didn’t look that happy about it.
He took a large bite of burger and wiped the fluorescent mayonnaise away with the back of his stubby hand. ‘I hate to say it, but we’re barking up the wrong tree.’
The Hit Page 25
