‘Beeswax,’ remarked Mirella, leaning over to sniff and touch the honey-coloured column with its oval tip of flame.
Tom didn’t reply. He’d just realised that the hackneyed phrase ‘falling in love’ means precisely what it says. It felt just like falling, a blissful abandonment edged with shame and panic. God, she was beautiful! But it wasn’t about that. He felt an instinctive revulsion — what the Italians called pudore — at the idea of enumerating and rating her physical attributes, even to himself. Yeah, she had good stuff, but so did lots of other women. What they didn’t have was the mantle that surrounded Mirella like a saint’s halo. Tom had never understood that musty old artistic convention, but he realised now that it was simply a means of expressing the fact that the person portrayed was exceptional in some way which we can neither define nor deny. He also realised that he was nuts, and maybe a little bit drunk.
‘I hate the smell of those cheap paraffin candles,’ Mirella said. ‘The light they give is cheap too, thin and soulless. Luce industriale.’
She laughed at her own joke. Maybe she’s a little drunk too, thought Tom. Maybe this might be going someplace. So when Mirella said that she’d heard of a good club in the perched city looming over them, one of the new locali which had opened in an attempt to restore some life to what was increasingly a ghost town, he enthusiastically endorsed the idea. They crossed the river on a narrow planked bridge, then proceeded across the road that ran along the right bank of the Crati and up several flights of very steep steps which brought them out at the end of a dimly lit, reeking alley that led up the hillside between two rows of unremarkable buildings that seemed to lean slightly towards each other, like old people seeking moral if not physical support.
When the man appeared from a doorway just ahead and dashed straight at them, Tom assumed that he must be late for an urgent appointment. Like the well-brought-up West Coast boy he was, he turned aside to let the other man pass and so the knife merely gashed his lower ribs rather than puncturing his bowels. In fact he was only aware of it when he touched his shirt to make sure it had not been disarranged by the encounter and his hand came away sticky red. Even then it took him some time to realise whose blood it was, largely because he was watching, with some dismay, what his date was doing to the poor man who had inadvertently bumped into him and had now turned back, no doubt to apologise for his clumsiness.
With a series of snarls and grunts that didn’t even sound human, never mind female, Mirella pushed the man’s outstretched arm aside, broke his nose with the heel of her hand, skewered him in the eyes with the long, delicately rounded fingernails that Tom had admired earlier, kneed him hard between the legs and then, when he bent over shrieking, in the face. Something fell to the cobblestones with a metallic ring. A hunting knife, it looked like. Gee, thought Tom, where did that come from?
‘Police!’ Mirella shouted. ‘You’re under arrest.’
She took a canister from her handbag and handed it to Tom.
‘I need to call in. Give him a dose of this if he shows any signs of activity. Eyes, nose, mouth. Oh my God! Are you all right?’
‘Sure, no problem.’
She tore his shirt apart and examined his flesh, exploring the region with intricate, intimate palpations, then got on her mobile and started talking in a way Tom had never heard her do: curt, concise and commanding. He couldn’t make out much of what she said, she was talking so fast, but she sounded like she was in the military or something. No, police she had said. Police?
Tom might not have been able to understand what Mirella was saying, but it had an invigorating effect on the man, who had been exploring the alley on his hands and knees but now started staring around muzzily and trying to stagger to his feet. Tom administered a dose of the pepper spray, but he was standing downwind and even the mild whiff he got just about knocked him out. The assailant, who had taken it straight in the eyes, started howling and clawing at his face. And then there were sirens, winding up through the streets from the new city. Within a minute the alley was full of uniforms and paramedics in green who gave Tom a check-up on the spot before stretchering him into the back of an ambulance that had somehow managed to reverse down the narrow alley without fouling any of the police cars which had arrived earlier. Italians always seemed to know where they were in space, Tom reflected as the ambulance drove off, siren beeping in a loud, cartoonish way. Maybe that was why they were so good at art.
Sitting out on the patio of his villa the next morning, savouring a cup of Earl Grey tea and a slice of bread smeared with apricot jam, soaking up the sun and admiring the magnificent view, Nicola Mantega couldn’t help but admit that he had been rather clever, if he did say so himself. It crossed his mind for a moment that he might have been a bit too clever, but after reviewing his plans time and time again he still hadn’t found any serious flaw.
The deal he had made with Martin Nguyen, negotiated in a mishmash of his own small stock of English and Nguyen’s crude but comprehensible Italian, was a thing of beauty. The American had apparently bought a full-scale replica of the menorah from an artisan in Israel and had it air-freighted to Calabria. The thing was constructed out of hollow steel with a gilt patina to a plausible approximation of the original design and dimensions, part of the beauty of the scheme being that no one knew for sure what these were. Nguyen intended to pass this off to his employer as the genuine article, supposedly looted by the tomb robbers who had first located Alaric’s resting place. To do so successfully, he needed Mantega to have some cosmetic work done on the too-perfect replica and then present it to the purchaser in a suitably convincing way. Oh, and one other thing. For these services, he would pay Mantega a quarter of a million euros in cash.
But the real beauty of this new arrangement was that it cut Giorgio completely out of the picture. Of course, Mantega would need to lure him to a meeting where the police would be lying in wait to arrest him, but that could be done later as a quite separate operation. Or not. The word on the streets was that Gaetano Monaco would be returning shortly from sick leave to take over the position of police chief from this northern intruder who had substituted for him during his recovery from a serious injury to his foot, incurred during a heroic personal intervention in one of the cases he was dealing with. Nicola Mantega had never had any dealings with Monaco during the latter’s previous posting to the neighbouring province of Catanzaro, but on the basis of what he had been told by various contacts who had, he was likely to be a much more approachable proposition than this Aurelio Zen. It wasn’t that he was overtly corrupt, rather that he understood the infinite nuances necessary to the facilitation of all business in Calabria and was prepared to play within that set of rules.
Mantega checked his watch. No problem, there was still almost an hour before the charade got under way. He was slightly surprised not to have heard from Rocco Battista, the Cosenza low-life he had employed to execute the ‘one other thing’ that Signor Nguyen needed done. Mantega hadn’t wanted to be a party to this, but Nguyen had been both insistent and persuasive. ‘All he needs to do is walk up to my boss and say, “I think there’s something you ought to know,” and we’re both looking at jail time.’ At least Mantega had been able to talk him out of having the young man killed, pointing out that the violent death of two generations of the Newman family would be bound to produce huge publicity and a massive police intervention, neither of which was in their joint interests. Mantega’s real reasons had been moral. Killing someone who had betrayed you was honourable; killing someone because you feared that he might betray you was not. On the contrary, it suggested weakness and was therefore despicable. Besides, Mantega quite liked Tom Newman. But the Chinese or Japanese or whatever brand of Oriental Nguyen was wouldn’t be capable of understanding the finer points of Calabrian ethics, so he’d stuck to the practicalities of the matter. In the end Nguyen had settled for a serious but non-fatal wound that would look like a mugging gone wrong and put the kid in hospital until the deal was complete and the money laundered.
After their lunch down on the coast, Mantega had returned to Cosenza and done the round of various bars until he tracked down a suitable individual for this operation. Rocco Battista was a low-level thug with an equine member, a heart of gilt and the brains of a quail who was employed as a hired spacciatore to sell the illegal drugs that Giorgio imported and distributed. From Giorgio’s point of view, Rocco was the cut-out, the fall guy. He had expendable written all over his tattooed, metal-pierced, razor-chop-side-burned face, and as far as Mantega was concerned the sooner he was expended the better. But given that he was still around, he had hired the little scumbag to do the necessary to Tom Newman, who would be dining that night at that fancy restaurant in Arenella with some hottie he’d picked up. Rocco was to call him from a payphone once the job was done with a coded message signifying that all had gone according to plan, and then he would be paid. But Rocco hadn’t called, which was odd. He was such a greedy, needy little fuck that normally he would have called even if he’d screwed it up. Ma pazienza! Life was full of anomalies. The important thing was to keep your eye on the ball, and in that respect Mantega felt himself to be way ahead of the game.
He checked his watch again and reluctantly got to his feet. When it came to appointments, Americans were notoriously terribili: they always arrived on time. He went back into the house, showered, shaved, dressed soberly to impress and then descended to the basement garage. With some trepidation, he turned on the overhead lighting, fearing to be shocked by what met his eyes. But instead of shock, he was almost tempted to go down on his knees, although he wasn’t sure that was what Jews did and as far as he was aware he hadn’t a drop of Jewish blood in him, but who knew? No, it was a purely aesthetic response to an amazing artefact, taller than he was, glowing as though from within and branching out like a well-pruned tree, or an orrery at that fateful moment when all the planets are aligned.
After engaging the services of Rocco Battista the day before, Mantega had hired a local man who did small haulage jobs around the area to pick up the freight shipment that Martin Nguyen had cleared through customs and bring it to Mantega’s villa. There it was unloaded, the wooden frame levered off, the plastic bubble-wrap removed and the candelabrum erected on its two-tiered hexagonal stand. At that point the gold-plated replica had looked impressive, finely detailed but rather raw and new. Mantega had also secured the services of a renowned goldsmith whose artisanal skills were unquestioned but who had fallen foul of the law some time ago over a delicate issue involving the precise provenance of the gold that he used to create his masterpieces. Mantega had been able to help Michele Biafora extricate himself from that self-inflicted injury, and in return for that and a thousand-euro sweetener, Biafora had agreed to come to the villa late the previous evening with one of his apprentices and spend the entire night treating the replica menorah to various toxic chemical substances and a terrifying variety of pointed and edged tools that reminded Mantega of youthful visits to the dentist.
All was now in readiness for the inspection by Nguyen and his boss. The local carrier’s van was parked in the forecourt, and his two brawny sons were skulking about looking exactly like members of the gang that had supplied the goods. But there was one final refinement to add. He set the three oil lamps that Gina used to create ‘atmosphere’ for their outdoor dinner parties down on the concrete floor of the garage, fired them into life and then threw the breaker on the fuse box supplying the basement. In the lambent, uncertain radiance of the lanterns, the menorah looked even better. In fact it looked perfect.
The two Americans arrived at precisely one minute before the appointed hour. Mantega had already seen the one that Nguyen referred to as his employer, although he found this hard to believe. He had privately dubbed him ‘the ape’, and felt almost aggrieved on behalf of his employee. Mantega didn’t like Martin Nguyen, much less trust him, but he respected him as a type of man he recognised, someone who knew how to get things done. So why was he working for the creature that now slouched in wearing a T-shirt that displayed his beefy tattooed forearms, a pair of torn jeans and some garish orange sports shoes? His gait, manners, expression and communication skills suggested that he was the lost sibling of the two haulage kids outside, but Nguyen had assured him that the ape was good for the one point eight million they had agreed to stick him for.
The fact that Tom Newman wasn’t present confirmed that although Rocco Battista hadn’t been in touch, he had done the business. Unfortunately it also meant that Mantega’s carefully prepared speech in Italian about the power being out — one of those storms last night must have hit a pylon somewhere, happens all the time out here in the country, we’ll just have to make do with these old-fashioned lamps I found — went for nothing. It didn’t matter. Whatever Mantega’s doubts about the ape, the latter evidently had none whatsoever about the merchandise being offered for sale. The visit was less of an inspection than an adoration. Mantega was reminded of a nonna venerating the miracle-working statue of some saint which was displayed once a year on his feast day, except that such devout elderly women would never disport themselves like this. Casting a huge hunched shadow in the wavering lamplight, the ape danced triumphantly about the golden trophy, uttering inarticulate cries and ejaculations and running his paws over the various knobs and curves as though he wanted to have sex with it right there and then.
In the end Nguyen managed to drag him away, but not before handing Mantega a note containing instructions regarding the place and time for the final handover and pay-off, and adding that he would need help to lift the wrapped and repackaged menorah into a waiting helicopter. Mantega was naturally bursting with questions, but Nguyen had made it clear that he wasn’t going to answer any of them. Still, a quarter of a million was a quarter of a million. What had he to lose?
Rocco Battista had only made one mistake. Well, two really, but the second could be forgiven. Rocco had had no way of knowing that the girlfriend his target was escorting was a member of an elite anti-terrorist squad, well able to look after herself and her less capable companion even without her gun once she’d kicked her dress shoes off. And Rocco’s first mistake could also be forgiven. He had stripped his person of all identifying marks and documents, but naturally he had taken his mobile phone along. Rocco was in his early twenties, and would no more think of leaving the house without his phone than without his trousers. And if it hadn’t been for the intervention of Tom’s companion, no harm would have been done. As it was, though, Rocco’s defiant refusal to tell the (expletive deleted) cops the (expletive deleted) time by the (expletive deleted) clock on the (expletive deleted) wall became entirely irrelevant. The magnitude and resilience of Rocco Battista’s balls was in no doubt, but his phone proved to be as forthcoming as a logorrhoeic teenager. Un vero cacasentenze.
The cache of names and numbers that Rocco’s mobile yielded would however have meant little if Natale Arnone had not completed the assignment given him by Zen the day before. This had been to track down anyone by the name of Fardella who was connected by birth or residence with Giorgio’s presumed home town of San Giovanni in Fiore. There were five in all, two of whom had moved elsewhere and one who was in a hospice. There were also Silvia Fardella, resident in Via del Serpente 13, and her brother Giorgio of the same address, born in 1968 and a butcher by occupation. All of which made a very satisfying click when Silvia Fardella’s telephone number turned out to be present in the directory of Rocco’s mobile. Her name, however, didn’t. The script beside the number consisted of just three letters. Lui. Him.
Aurelio Zen was unable to attend immediately to the implications of this, since he had to deal with the appearance of the female Digos agent who had spent all night at the hospital with the victim she had been accompanying, on his orders, at the time of the attack. Mirella Kodra was extraordinarily lovely, he realised, in the abstracted way in which he thought of much younger women these days. Good legs, great cioccie, a fleece of fluffy hair atop an ovoid face that held its past experiences in perfect balance while eagerly looking forward to more.
‘How is Signor Newman?’ Zen asked.
‘Stable and in no danger. He managed to avoid the main thrust of the knife. The resulting injury was a clean flesh incision about a centimetre deep with no organ trauma. The wound was cleaned, sutured and dressed. He has been told to rest, avoid physical exertion but stay mobile and return tomorrow to have the dressing changed and the stitches examined. After that he will be free to go home to arrange for his father’s funeral. The doctors plan to discharge him this afternoon.’
‘Very good. Unfortunately his attacker sta faccendo il duro and we’ve barely been able to get a word out of him. We must therefore assume that young Newman was targeted for the same reason as his father — because the criminals involved believe that he is the last living representative of the Calopezzati family. Since the initial attack was unsuccessful, we must further assume that it may be repeated. I am therefore transferring you with immediate effect from surveillance duties on Nicola Mantega to bodyguard duties on the potential victim. It would be unwise for him to return to his hotel in Rende, as those concerned almost certainly know that he was staying there. I want you to find somewhere else for him to stay and to ensure his personal safety until further notice. I have a major operation in preparation and I don’t want it screwed up by some sideshow involving American tourists. Is that clear?’
The Digos agent came abruptly to attention.
‘ Sissignore! ’ she hissed.
She knows that I lied to her, thought Zen as Mirella Kodra stalked out. A major operation in preparation? Ha! He’d said that to sweeten the pill of taking this elite operative off active duties and relegating her to the status of a nursemaid. Judging by her expression and tone of voice, the pill had still tasted very bitter. And what a fatuous, obvious lie. With only two days left before being replaced by Gaetano Monaco, Zen was in no position to mount any major operations, and everyone in the building, including Mirella Kodra, knew that.
Only what if they were wrong?
Aurelio Zen didn’t think of himself as a gambler. He didn’t buy lottery tickets or even play the Totocalcio football pools. Passing the famous casino in Venice as a small child, he had asked his father what went on in there and his father had explained. Aurelio was accustomed to his father explaining things. The procedure could sometimes be a bit boring, but he valued it as one of the few links between them. Asked about some aspect of the operations of the railway he worked for, for example, his father would always deliver a lucid, detailed and convincing answer. When it came to what went on behind the imposing portal of the casino, Angelo Zen’s tone remained calm and authoritative, but the content was reduced to the gibbering of an idiot.
‘It’s for rich people. They pay a lot of money to wager a lot more on a certain number or the cards they hold. Then they wait and see what happens.’
‘And what does happen?’ Aurelio had asked, clutching his father’s hand as they walked along the redolent alley leading to the station.
‘The right number or card either comes up or it doesn’t. If it does, those rich bastards get even richer.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’
‘Then they lose everything.’
At the time, Zen hadn’t understood why anyone would want to take risks like that, entirely dependent on forces beyond one’s control, an opinion that was confirmed when his father disappeared shortly afterwards. He’d lost everything without even being conscious of placing the bet, and had never thought to do so again. But life has a way of mocking such resolutions, and he now decided — instantly and without reflection — to stake everything on one spin of the wheel. He therefore summoned Natale Arnone and instructed him to fetch Rocco Battista up from his holding cell in the basement.
The prisoner was an unprepossessing specimen, vaguely resembling a genetic cross between a wild boar and a stockfish. It is no doubt true that the triumphs of art cannot redeem the defects of nature, but the various forms of mutilation that Rocco had inflicted on his features provided conclusive evidence that there is always room for disimprovement. He shuffled into the room and was about to sit down on the chair facing Zen’s desk, when Natale Arnone adroitly removed it.
‘Stand up straight before the chief of police, you scum!’
Battista stumbled back to his feet and stood looking around dully, but probably no more dully than usual. Zen had already been told that since his initial defiant statement of intent, the prisoner had not once responded by word or gesture to any of the questions and comments of the interrogating officers. He was also acutely aware that the success of the plan he had in mind depended on his eliciting not just a response but the one he needed, so he left Battista standing there, hanging his head and staring down at the floor in a manner which suggested, in a pathetically inadequate way, that while the cops could break his bones they would never break his will.
Zen lounged back in his chair and stared unblinkingly at the individual with whom he had to deal, taking him in, sizing him up, getting his measure. After an intolerable and seemingly interminable silence had fully matured, he leant forward like a doctor who has concluded his diagnosis, and spoke.
‘In my opinion, Rocco, the root of the problem is that you are stupid. That’s not your fault. Men can no more control the degree of intelligence they were born with than they can the size of their membro virile.’
A satisfied smirk appeared on Rocco Battista’s lips.
‘They can however control what they do with the equipment that nature has provided,’ Zen went on. ‘You were observed speaking to Nicola Mantega yesterday. When I broke him early this morning, I told him that he’d been silly. In your case, the appropriate word is stupid. I therefore suggest that we take stock of the situation in which you find yourself. The only witnesses to the attack were you, the victim and his lady friend. One, two, three. When this case comes to trial, any testimony you may give in your own defence will of course be discounted as worthless. As for the victim, he appears to have gone into shock immediately after you knifed him and has only the vaguest and most confused ideas about what happened. In other words, the only credible witness — the person who will in effect decide your fate — is the woman who was accompanying him.
‘As you learned to your cost last night, she is also a police officer. Unless she wishes to relinquish that career, she will tell the magistrates simply and solely what I order her to tell them. If she testifies that your intentions were clearly homicidal, and thwarted only by the victim’s agility and alertness, you will be convicted of attempted murder. If on the other hand she deposes that, far from being flustered and off balance, you knew exactly what you were doing — inflicting a painful but non-life-threatening injury, a little lesson for Signor Newman with the implied threat that he might not get off so lightly next time — then you will go down for assault occasioning minor bodily harm.
‘Now there’s a big difference between an assault and a botched homicide, Rocco. At least ten years and possibly a lot more, depending on whether the judge’s piles are playing up. But at the bare minimum, a whole decade when instead of eating, drinking, fighting, fucking and indulging in whatever other pastimes console you for your destined role in life as a dickhead, you’ll be locked up for twenty-two hours a day with five other dickheads in a cell designed to accommodate two, under the beady eyes of the uniformed dickheads who run the house of punishment according to their own tried and trusted methods, and take particular pleasure in denying their charges the tempting option of suicide by slow strangulation from a knotted bedsheet tied to the window bars.