‘And you believed he would order that?’
‘I am an excellent investigator and I have a good mind. But sometimes hope obfuscates even a fine intellect. It did not occur to me until now that the torn Madonna will have been your idea. Megale is not so subtle. He is just an ignorant pig. I had hopes which were unrealistic.’
‘You realize I did not need to tell you anything? I did you a favour.’
‘You enjoyed the telling. You knew it would be a torture for me.’
‘Speaking of torture,’ said Curmaci, ‘how can you be persuaded to get rid of that evidence you have built up on money laundering?’
‘Not just that,’ said Hoffmann defiantly. ‘I know about your operations through Rotterdam into Duisburg. Plus several other things. Hotels in Provence, housing projects outside Dresden. I have a lot of stuff.’
‘What will it be: money to buy your silence; threats against people you love? You tell me, Hoffmann.’
‘I have no one. No family, no parents, no colleagues who are friends.’
‘ Frei aber einsam. What about Dagmar’s parents?’
‘You can’t hurt them any more.’
‘Well, that can be tested. But it seems to me the easiest thing to do would be for you to disappear, unless you can give me a better idea.’
‘I have sent the evidence to myself multiple times, including by parcel post to the office. If something happens to me, my colleagues will eventually get around to looking at my files. The same files are also attached to an email stored on a site called Time Cave. They’ll start arriving in various inboxes in the future unless I go to my account and cancel them from the outbox.’
‘You have everything covered.’ Curmaci stood up. ‘It seems the only choice we have is to let you go and hope for the best. If we do that, can we have your word that you will hold back on these revelations?’
‘Yes,’ said Konrad.
‘But you didn’t get the revenge you were seeking, did you?’
‘At least I got some information.’
Basile came out from behind the bar, and retrieved Konrad’s glass, and placed it out of harm’s way. The three men who had come in earlier emerged from the kitchen. Two stood behind him, Basile, Curmaci and the other in front.
‘I think your specialization in the Camorra has misled you, Hoffmann,’ said Curmaci. ‘But I don’t think even the feckless Neapolitans would allow you to come down from Germany, sit in the bar of a capo, and threaten the Society. But us? Have you even read anything about our history?’
‘I read a lot.’
‘You understood nothing, then. We always put honour before money. If you don’t understand the word “honour”, think of it as a willingness to invest in long-term reputation and goodwill at the cost of short-term benefits. That’s why the South Americans trust us so much. We will sever our own limbs rather than be seen to give in to threats. There are countless examples of us sacrificing huge business empires built up over years merely for the sake of reputation. You will have noted that fact while studying our Society?’
Konrad nodded, unable to speak. He needed the water Basile had taken from him.
‘Your naivety is unbelievable.’
Konrad put up no resistance as they steered him towards the kitchen. The temperature in there was cool and the air was scented with sugar and cleaning alcohol. The ice-cream makers looked like woodchip stoves, and they gleamed. A black rubber hose was attached to the tap above the double sink, and lay coiled on the white tiles that had recently been washed clean and were still slightly slippery. Not quite now, he thought. It would not be in this clean kitchen, the very place the boss himself worked.
But once again, Konrad had misread the situation.
45
Gerace-Locri, Calabria
It was years since Blume had been in this part of the country. After an initial section of squalor in the form of a prefabricated shopping centre and a clutch of apartment buildings cluttered with balconies, which resembled makeshift spectator stands erected to observe the spectacle of cars passing by, the road narrowed and straightened and darkened, as sturdy metal fences and tall olive trees appeared on either side. Sometimes, where a new olive grove with younger trees had been planted in the red earth, the light would intensify and the vista open, but then the tall trees and fences returned to reiterate the relentlessly linear plan. It was like driving up the longest ever avenue to a stately home, an impression intensified by the absence of any traffic coming in the opposite direction. Occasionally, he caught glimpses of parked or discarded small boxy Fiats so old they still had number plates with ‘RC’, the abbreviation for Reggio Calabria, marked out in pale orange, a system he wished the country had never abandoned, since it was always interesting and sometimes useful to know from which province the fool in the car in front of you hailed. In some of the groves, the bare earth was already overlaid with dark green nets, ready to catch the olives that would be combed off in a few months by African immigrants or shaken off by vibrating mechanical bars attached to tractors.
The olive oil from here was among his favourite things in the world. He preferred the bitter and complex tones of Calabrian oil to the mellow, fruity Tuscan varieties that Japanese tourists came all the way from Tokyo to taste. No Japanese tourists came down here.
After half an hour, the road started turning and climbing. The repetitive but soothing pale grey and silver of the olive groves gave way to a dark composition of greens and yellows. Blume rolled down the window to get the scent of the pine trees, whose cones and needles lay baking on the bumpy asphalt, sometimes causing the wheels to lose grip. Similar to olive trees, but taller and more sober, holm oaks stood behind thickets of juniper and birch, a tree he had always associated with the cool north. Yet here it was, perfectly at home. Hazels, hornbeams and green alder, all heavy, sturdy and oppressive plants linked by chains of ivy, fought for dominance, then fell back as the road continued to climb. Just when he thought he had seen the last of the taller trees, the road dipped downwards and suddenly he found himself driving through a forest of ancient beeches whose rippled leaves fended off the sun so well that the air was damp and mushroom-scented.
As the trees finally began to give way to the increasing altitude and the bushes turned into shrubs, he was able, thanks also to the added height of the car he was driving, to see how insidious the steep banks on the roadside were. Now that he was nearing upper reaches of the range, the vistas he had glimpsed through the side window lay in front of him. Dozens of mountaintops, the shape of upturned egg boxes or cloche hats, lay before him, their slopes sudden, steep and gleaming. His father had once taught him that painters used lighter colours for the background, darker for the foreground, but the hills before him seemed to increase the depth of their green as they stretched northwards, while the one he was driving across was sand-coloured and dominated by yellow flowers and scratching woody plants.
It would be difficult to paint this landscape without seeming to idealize it, he thought, but the solution to that particular problem of representation soon presented itself in the form of a sudden hamlet made up of a scattering of brutal cement houses, most of them missing a top storey but all equipped with satellite dishes. They were fronted by messy gardens containing stubby Indian figs, discarded plastic bottles of motor oil and rotting cars. The larger houses had McMansion gates, and all the smaller houses had yellow and brown aluminium-framed windows and doors.
These people do not deserve their environment, thought Blume. With Naples, one could always hope for Vesuvius, but here… three cars came racing around the corner so close together they might have been linked by a chain. Suddenly, as if they had been waiting for a secret command, vehicles appeared behind him and in front of him. The empty road was suddenly busy. He checked the time. Four o’clock. The Ionian sea lay before him; the town of Locri, a modern excrescence of the Norman citadel of Gerace, which he had just driven through without stopping, was visible in the distance.