Nevertheless, the resulting experience was enough to make Emanuele feel as though he was back at school already. That had been just about acceptable when he was ten, or even fourteen, but time had now run out for this means of dealing with an event in the distant past which had changed his life for ever but wasn’t really of much interest to him any more. Too bad if his parents couldn’t get over it. Emanuele was on holiday in the deep south, almost a thousand kilometres from the apartment in Brescia where he lived with his mother. He wanted to relax, have fun and maybe even get a chance to chat up one of those juicy girls he had glimpsed from time to time through the car window as his father drove him home after another long day at the museum. Enough cultural uplift, enough history lessons. He programmed his mobile phone to ring, faked a brief conversation, then shuffled out to the living area of the spacious apartment facing Piazza del Duomo in the heart of the old city. His father was drinking coffee and consulting a map.
‘Ah, Emanuele! I’ve been thinking about what we should do today. The Sila Piccola seems the obvious answer, with a diversion to Carlopoli to see the ruins of the monastery founded in the twelfth century by the Benedictines and later taken over by the Cistercians. This complesso monastico was the religious, economic and cultural centre of the region, its abbot at one time having been the illustrious Giocchino da Fiore, but it was later suppressed and then destroyed in an earthquake shortly after — ’
‘Actually, dad, a friend of mine from school just called. He’s on holiday down here too, staying at a villa down on the beach. He says he’s getting a bit bored with the sun and sand bit so he wants to come into Cosenza and have a look around.’
‘Who is this boy?’
‘Oh, just a friend. Anyway, we’ve arranged to meet in half an hour. We’ll prowl around the streets a bit and then grab a bite to eat somewhere. So you can take the day off.’
‘But when will you be back?’ demanded his father in an almost panicky tone.
‘Depends. I’ll call you. Okay, I’d better go and put on some sharp clothes. You know how important personal appearance is down here. Don’t want these southerners to get the idea that the rest of us are all slobs!’
Twenty minutes later, Emanuele emerged from the front door of the building and sauntered away down the main street. This initially provoked a moment of indecision in the two men sitting in a van parked outside the eighteenth-century palazzo on Via Giuseppe Campagna. Their instructions were to go to the Pancrazi apartment on the third floor, abduct the son and leave certain brutal verbal instructions with his father Achille, Professor of Ancient History at the local university. Now they faced a quandary.
On the one hand, Giorgio had made it quite clear — in one never-to-be-forgotten instance by a personally administered beating that had ended with his being pulled off the offender just in time — that he wouldn’t tolerate his associates exercising any individual initiative in operational matters. On the other, taking the boy while he was alone would involve the two men and their boss in vastly less personal risk should anything go wrong. The normal course of action would have been to report in for further instructions, but the pair had been forbidden to make contact until the mission was complete. After a hasty discussion, they decided to go for it.
Their choice was validated almost immediately. If the kid had carried on the way he had set out, down the sinuous curves of Corso Telesio towards the bridge leading over the Busento river to the broad boulevards of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century city sprawled out below, it might have proved difficult to take him unchallenged. But Emanuele soon became intrigued by the network of alleys leading off to either side of the main street, and wandered away into the warren of mediaeval dwellings which formed an increasingly abandoned slum surrounding the gentrified core of the original centre. One of the two men Giorgio had selected for this job had grown up in just that part of town and knew his way around blindfold. He also knew that, despite his colleague’s doubts, their van would fit into the alley that the boy had taken, and that there was an exit at the other end that would have them out of town in minutes, up on the superstrada into the mountains.
‘We just won the lottery!’ he said as they both pulled on their masks.
Tom Newman was seated up front in Nguyen’s Mercedes, beside the driver. Nguyen sat alone in the back, furiously silent. The car gave Tom the creeps. It was like a hearse for the living. Maybe it was this thought that sparked his idea when Nicola Mantega rang him. He kept his responses down to the ‘I’ll be there right away’ level. In theory his boss didn’t understand Italian, but Tom had already been around Martin Nguyen long enough to know that it would always be dangerous to underestimate exactly how much he understood about anything.
‘That was the police, Mr Nguyen,’ he said when Mantega hung up. ‘They want me to go to central headquarters right now. Some bureaucratic business involving my late father.’
He didn’t even get a glance of sympathy in return.
‘Get back to the hotel as soon as possible,’ was the reply. ‘These continuing distractions are a pain in the ass. If they continue, I’ll be looking for a new interpreter.’
Tom didn’t give a damn. He told the driver to pull over, stepped out into the balmy air and strutted off down the street as happy as a lord. Nicola Mantega wanted to talk to him in his office and then buy him lunch. This was very convenient, because Tom wanted to talk to il notaio about the big idea he’d had the evening before when he’d gone out to explore the dreary suburban streets of Rende, feeling lonely and disorientated for the first time since arriving, and in a weak moment had allowed himself to be seduced by an eatery named American’s Dream. The brilliantly lit interior vaguely resembled a bad acid flashback to a classic 1950s diner, with grilles and hubcaps from autos of that era arrayed on the walls and a Beach Boys album playing at an unsubtle volume. Tom had ordered a cheeseburger and fries, insalata Cesare and a beer. It took twenty minutes to arrive and was horrible. The meat patty was thin and dry, the fries limp and tasteless, the Caesar a soggy mess made with the wrong kind of lettuce, prefabricated croutons and gloopy sauce out of a bottle. The bill came to almost twenty bucks.
Big deal, he’d thought as he retreated to his gaudy, sterile, whorehouse-minus-the-whores hotel. If you travel, you’re going to have a bad meal once in a while. But while he was down at the municipio that morning, mindlessly offering Martin Nguyen a simplified version of the deputy mayor’s pronouncements, so shaded with multiple layers of nuance that they often appeared to be meaningless, Tom had had his idea. The stuff that he had tried to eat the night before had all been simple American dishes that were easy to prepare and in their way delicious — not great cuisine, but satisfying and tasty when they were properly made and you were in the mood for them. And there was evidently a demand or how could the place stay in business?
The problem wasn’t the concept, it was the execution. That was Tom’s area of expertise, plus over here political correctness hadn’t hit the table yet. Imagine being able to use raw egg in the Caesar, grind up nicely marbled chuck and foreshank fresh every day and soften hand-cut fries in pure beef dripping before crisping them at scorch temp. The concept felt solid, and in the changed financial circumstances following his father’s decease he might well be able to realise it, but he was going to need insider assistance. There should be enough seed money there once the will was probated, but Tom had already been in Italy long enough to know that money was not enough for what he had in mind. You couldn’t just rent a storefront property, kit it out with the necessary, turn on the neon sign and open the door for business. You needed some official paper or stamp to do almost anything — they even had one called the certificato di esistenza in vita, which officially affirmed that you were still alive, or at least had been when you applied for it — and while these were in theory available to any suitably qualified applicant on a first-come first-served basis, in practice the system didn’t work quite like that. If you wanted results, above all if you wanted them fast, you needed a fixer who could cut corners and get the job done. Nicola Mantega was a perfect match.