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.