‘Okay, I’ll be heading back. Don’t stay up too late eyeballing the brood mares. We’ve got to make an early start. I’ll pick you up around four-thirty, quarter to five.’
For the first time, Tom felt genuinely dismayed by Nguyen’s job proposition.
‘Heck, it’ll hardly be light then!’
‘We’re headed for a facility where the shift starts at six, and I need to brief the personnel. Some of them speak English, some of them don’t.’
He broke off and stared at Tom.
‘How much did your dad tell you about what we’re doing here?’
‘Practically nothing. He never talked about his work.’
Or about anything else, he thought. My dad never talked to me. My dad never spoke Italian to me.
‘Okay, I’ll fill you in tomorrow,’ said Nguyen. ‘Be sure and get a good night’s rest. I want you on deck and ready to roll when my car pulls up at your hotel.’
‘Hell, you’re the one who should worry about that, Mr Nguyen! Getting in from the States today and all. That jet-lag can kill you.’
From one of the many secret drawers artfully concealed in the lacquered cabinet of his skull, Martin Nguyen produced a lush smile of poisonous beauty.
‘I’ve given up sleeping. My doctor said it was bad for me.’
Nicola Mantega was not a particularly stupid or careless man. His fatal weakness was that he was a creature of habit.
The massive police raid that afternoon and evening on the town of Altomonte Nuova had been widely reported on the local news, but without any reason being given. When interviewed, some of the townsfolk mentioned repeated flights by police helicopters during the day to the abandoned town perched high above its successor, but claimed to have no idea what this was all about. The police themselves were saying nothing and all access to the area had been cordoned off.
Superficially, none of this was of any obvious personal concern to Mantega himself. That was how a northerner would have argued, but Nicola knew better. The people of the south had been treated as a form of insect life for so long, he liked to argue, that they had evolved some of the faculties of insects. Almost powerless against the brute species that ruled the earth — although they could deliver a very nasty, even deadly, sting on occasion — they were hypersensitive to the most minute development in their immediate environment. And now Mantega’s antennae were twitching uncontrollably. He had no idea why, but he knew that further information about this incident was needed, and urgently.
Mantega had spent the evening closeted in his office with one of those clients it was better that he should not be seen consorting with publicly. The subject under discussion was a tender submitted by the client in question for the contract to upgrade a thirty-kilometre section of the toll-free regional A3 motorway to the standard of the rest of the national network, with a view to charging the same kind of money for using it. Recent political changes both in Rome and at local level had made these kinds of negotiation more difficult than formerly, and potentially much more dangerous. This was all very tiresome, and the worst part of it for Mantega was persuading his client that such a change had in fact taken place, that tact and patience were now required to resolve any ensuing problems, and that neither he nor anyone else could smooth everything over by making a couple of phone calls, like in the good old days.
Mantega had done his best, but his mind had been occupied with other matters. His client must have noticed, because he had made a few very pointed comments about possibly ‘needing to seek counsel elsewhere’ before leaving via the fire exit at the rear of the building. Had the circumstances been different, Mantega would have been very concerned by this veiled threat, given the power base and range of contacts of the client in question. As it was, he really didn’t give a damn. His meeting with Giorgio the day before, and now the news of the police raid on Altomonte, made such issues seem relatively trivial. Estimates of the number of officers involved in the raid varied wildly, but the gist was that an operation on such a scale had not been seen in the region for years. And that was only its public face. If a hundred or more officers had been committed to the task of publicly putting the frighteners on the population of an isolated town, there would be an equal or even greater number working covertly behind the scenes. Something big was under way, that was for sure.
All of which brought Mantega’s thoughts back to his relationship with Giorgio. They had attended the same school back in San Giovanni in Fiore, but Mantega had subsequently forgotten about Giorgio’s existence until one day, years later, he popped up seeking help after being fired from his job as a security guard. As a gesture of friendship to an old classmate who had fallen on hard times, Mantega had arranged an introduction to a small-time gang in the city that did armed robberies, lorry hijacks, some drug imports and the odd minor kidnapping. All had gone well for a year or two, but in the end the gang had dumped Giorgio because, as their capo had put it, ‘This guy’s round the fucking twist.’
Giorgio had then started up in business on his own, exploiting the mainly barren and unclaimed territory between Cosenza and Crotone, but occasionally making forays into the outskirts of either city. Mantega’s fable about Aspromonte to Tom Newman the other evening had of course been disinformational nonsense. Giorgio wouldn’t dare show his face on Aspromonte. But the n’drangheta was extremely territorial, and the clans took little or no interest in affairs outside their own borders. Giorgio had therefore been able to build up a modest but thriving trade on his home turf, to which Mantega acted as a general consigliere and fixer. So when an American named Peter Newman had hired him as a go-between with the local authorities over a film deal, Mantega immediately recognised the irresistible chance to at least quadruple the money on offer by suggesting to Giorgio that he would make an excellent kidnapping prospect.
It had all seemed to make sense at the time, but ever since that meeting in the abandoned barn Mantega had been deeply disturbed. Giorgio was by nature moody and violent, but Mantega had never felt himself personally threatened before. The manner in which the bundle of banknotes had been presented as a final, non-negotiable payment, coupled with the warning about reprisals in the event of his talking and the bald announcement that Newman was dead, had terrified him. The construction magnate he had dealt with that evening simply wanted to make a killing, but Giorgio was a killer.
Mantega placed various incriminating documents that had been lying on his desk into the safe, switched off the lights, locked the door and walked slowly downstairs, mulling over the problem which had preoccupied him all evening. As he reached the front door of the office block, the solution popped up. For all Mantega knew, he could be arrested the moment he left the office and interrogated by that hard-nosed bastard that they’d brought in to cover for Gaetano Monaco. It was all very well for Giorgio to say that he should say nothing even under duress, but that was a damn sight easier to do if you knew exactly what it was that you weren’t supposed to say. Given today’s developments, Mantega didn’t have a clue, so the situation was sufficiently serious to justify his calling Giorgio.
He walked around the corner towards the phone booth that he had used the night before. Mantega was inclined to dismiss Giorgio’s warning that he was being followed as a mere bluff, but nevertheless he paid extra attention to the action on the street before proceeding any further. A couple of vehicles passed, but the occupants paid him not the slightest attention. The only sign of life was from a young couple whose romantic evening had evidently turned out badly and were now having a vociferous row as they walked home along the other side of the street, the woman loudly proclaiming that if she was to be insulted like that then she would rather kill herself here and now and have done with it — and with you, you cold, heartless bastard!