After leaving his office exceptionally late, Nicola Mantega drove up the superstrada to Spezzano Grande, a ragged stack of concrete boxes perched on the precipitous slopes of the Sila massif. The radio was tuned to the same local news channel he had listened to while driving to work, and as the Alfa Romeo skimmed round the long curving viaduct leading up to the Spezzano turn-off, Mantega was surprised to hear the familiar voice of the new police chief, Aurelio Zen.
‘… where officers under my command discovered the remains of the American lawyer Peter Newman, who has subsequently been identified as a member of the Calopezzati family and hence of Calabrian origin. The victim’s head had been blown off by a charge of plastic explosive detonated by remote control. Forensic tests have revealed that the explosive substance was identical to that used last night to force an entry into a house in the new town of Altomonte, located near by. The capofamiglia, Antonio Nicastro, was then shot while attempting to defend his nine-year-old son Francesco, whose tongue was subsequently severed…’
The exit for Spezzano angled sharply right, then left up a steep gradient, and at the speed Mantega took it a lesser car than the Alfa 159 Q4 might well have spun out of control. He stopped at the side of the road until his breathing had calmed down to something approaching normal, then nosed through the narrow streets and parked in front of a pizzeria. Gina and the boys were visiting her brother in Leipzig, where he had found work stripping Communist-era plumbing out of desirable nineteenth-century apartment buildings for rich Wessis, so on top of everything else Nicola couldn’t get a home-cooked meal. The street was empty except for a kid who had been showing off his MotoGuzzi bike to his piece of arm-candy. She looked vaguely familiar, Mantega thought as he walked in and ordered. He’d definitely seen her before, maybe even that day, but where?
He sat down and gulped some beer. It wasn’t surprising that his mind was going after what he’d been put through. He’d spent a miserable afternoon pretending to listen to the needs and demands of some Oriental who had flown in from America to represent the film company that Peter Newman had worked for, but his thoughts had been elsewhere. He already knew that the interim police chief didn’t believe his story about the circumstances of Newman’s disappearance, but hadn’t had enough evidence to proceed against him when the case under investigation had merely been one of abduction. Now it was murder, and of the most atrocious kind. Crimes on that scale create their own judicial momentum, and Mantega knew that he would be one of its first victims. The only surprise was that they hadn’t come for him already.
To prepare for that onslaught, he needed to be briefed by Giorgio on what exactly had happened, and above all why, but any contact from that quarter now looked as unlikely as an intervention from the other quarter was inevitable. He had made his final pitch before lunch, borrowing Tom Newman’s mobile on the grounds that it was new and therefore untapped. The only reply was from an answering machine, on which he had left a frenzied message whose tone he now regretted. In retrospect, his spontaneous reaction to Tom’s news looked distinctly risky. Giorgio was not one to take kindly to threats and abuse. But what was he supposed to have done? The original deal they had struck was a straightforward business transaction, the victim returned a little poorer but otherwise unharmed and the perpetrators enriched by several million euros. A traditional Calabrian crime, with its roots in the immemorial banditry of the region. Nothing had ever been said about murder, still less a barbaric and apparently motiveless execution such as the one the police chief had described at his press conference.
He chomped his pizza down, then spent a little time flirting jokingly with the waitress, whose husband had been screwing the sister of the priest in Pedace ever since the difficult birth of their second child. The night outside was a still, solid block of oppressive heat. The storm that should have ripped it open, letting in the fresh air and a cooling downpour, had merely brooded over the area for a few hours and then shifted off to the east, leaving no resolution to the problems it had created. Mantega slipped gratefully into the air-conditioned zephyrs within the Alfa and drove up a tilted labyrinth of minor roads to his villa, where the electronic gates in the boundary fence automatically closed behind him. Tonight, there were no welcoming barks and plaintive whines to greet him. Attilio, his lively pit bull terrier, had come down with an acute intestinal ailment a few days earlier and was still in the care of the vet. Mantega unlocked the house, bolted the door behind him, reset the alarm system and then fetched a bottle of the local digestivo he favoured and watched an hour of mind-numbing television before going to bed.
He was awakened by stabbing pains and a sense of suffocation that induced muffled shrieks.
‘Shut up!’
The low voice was also muffled, but Mantega had already recognised Giorgio’s body odour. The gag over his mouth was removed.
‘On your feet.’
The intruder twisted Mantega’s right arm up behind his back and walked him through the dark topography of the house to the kitchen. Visibility was slightly better here, thanks to the security light on the patio. Giorgio sat his captive down on a chair beside the long table strewn with various incongruous artefacts purchased by Gina as part of her unending attempts to create a gracious home and stood over him, his back to the window, his face in shadow. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket and a dark woollen hat. His huge hands gleamed in the ambient light like dangling crabs.
‘Keep your voice low,’ Giorgio said. ‘The house is under surveillance.’
‘Who by?’
‘The cops, of course. It took me almost two hours to get in. They’re good, but I’m better.’
Mantega thought this over, then frowned.
‘The burglar alarm?’ prompted Giorgio. ‘One of my friends disabled that on a previous visit, before things got hot. He’s a wizard with wiring. The system looks like it’s working, but it’s just talking to itself. Or perhaps it was your dog you were thinking of? Another friend of mine tossed a chunk of poisoned meat over the fence after the cops outside had handed you off to the team that follows you around during the day.’
Mantega’s eyes had adjusted by now, and his brain was more alert. The reason for the strange gleam on Giorgio’s hands became obvious. He was wearing a pair of those skin-tight latex gloves used by doctors.
‘It seems like this is all news to you,’ Giorgio went on, ‘which just confirms my feeling that you’ve become a liability rather than an asset. All these phone calls you’ve been making, whining and bitching away like some woman! That’s not how a man conducts himself. I need men about me, Nicola, now more than ever. So I’ve decided that the time has come to sever our connection.’
One of the gleaming hands disappeared for a moment. Then it was back, holding a blade whose gleam was even more intense and much colder.
‘No one saw me come and no one will see me go. I suppose you will be missed eventually, but not for many days. Those days are vital to us to make our plans without the fear of being betrayed by a scumbag like you. Your job for us is done, Nicola. All you can do now is harm.’
To his surprise, Mantega found that he was perfectly calm.
‘You’re right about one thing, Giorgio,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of harm that I can do, even from beyond the grave. Do you think it didn’t occur to me that you might try this? The way you murdered Newman and mutilated that poor kid, it’s clear that you’ve gone out of your mind. Well, I’ve been in this game long enough not to trust crazies, so a complete statement of all our dealings — not just about Newman, but everything, back from the very beginning — is in the hands of a third party and will be deposited with the authorities if anything happens to me. Names, locations, dates, ransom paid and all particulars of both you and your friends. Given that this latest exploit of yours is headline news, that would naturally result in the biggest manhunt this country has seen for years, with you as the star of the show.’