On the ground floor of a drab house in an uncared-for quarter of Reggio Calabria, a photocopier needed replacing – it was painfully slow to operate – but there were insufficient funds for a new one. Consolata cursed. Paper churned at snail’s pace into the tray. The printed sheets would be stuffed into plastic sleeves, then tacked to telegraph poles. In the committee meeting, everyone had argued against her.
‘We can’t frighten people, Consolata. It’s not up to us to hector them into action. They must be persuaded.’
‘Your suggestion, Consolata, of sticking our posters in the windows of businesses that we can only suspect of paying pizzo is ludicrous. We have to take people with us, not confront them.’
‘We’ll stay on the high ground, Consolata. We don’t stoop to their level.’
‘We know change is slow, Consolata, but it’s coming. Last year thousands marched on the Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi. Thousands.’
‘You must be patient, Consolata. Not this generation, but the next – perhaps – will reject the ’Ndrangheta state. Have faith.’
It was early in the morning, she wasn’t yet dosed up on coffee and had ‘turned the other cheek’, which was rare for her: she had torn up the page of notes she had made to justify ‘direct action’ going to the edge of violence, or beyond. She had proposed, too, that those who tacitly supported the taking of the pizzo, a percentage of the profits made by legitimate business, should be confronted and shamed . . . A deep breath. She had disappointed the committee – they would have expected her to fight, argue and then be destroyed by their arguments. She had ducked her head, almost with good grace, but Consolata burned with fury.
The pages continued to flop out of the photocopier. Soon the ink would run out.
Life, she believed, had passed her by. She was thirty-one, and reasonably slim. Her hair was medium length and naturally blonde, which was unusual in Calabria. She came to work in trainers and jeans, a T-shirt and a light loose jacket. No jewellery and no makeup. She was from the town of Archi, a few kilometres up the main road north from Reggio. Her parents were still there but she no longer lived with them. If circumstances had been different, she would have worked in a shop selling curtains and good-quality wallpaper. Her parents had owned the business, built it up and made a living from it. ‘One day’ they would have retired and she would have taken over. Then they had come. A figure had been fixed, which her father couldn’t pay. A whispering campaign had followed, and trade evaporated. Questions had been asked – was her father a paedophile? Had he been questioned by the police over the molestation of children? There had been no violence, no threats. Then they had made an offer to buy out the business. A few months before the price would have seemed ridiculous, but the bank was now calling in the overdraft and they would have prompted that. The business had been, in effect, stolen. Her father now drove a delivery van in Messina across the strait, commuting there each day, and her mother cleaned bedrooms in a hotel fronting the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, near to the ruins of a Greek settlement, dating to eight centuries before the birth of Christ. Consolata would have said that a new dark age had replaced the glories of that civilisation.
Archi was the town of the de Stefano and Condello clans, the Imerti people and the Tegano family. It didn’t matter which of them had decided to launder their money through a legitimate wallpaper and curtain business. One of them had and the business was gone. Consolata had been sixteen, in the year of supposed optimism, the new millennium, when her father had come from the bank, ashen with confusion. Now there were cut-price goods in the window and cocaine money was rinsed there.
The most significant bosses in Calabria lived in Archi. None would have known her name. None woke in the morning wondering what she was planning.
She had gone to university, to keep her mother happy, and had studied modern history. Then she had enrolled at a language laboratory and become an interpreter, but had seldom returned calls offering work. Now she was a volunteer with a group that denounced the plague of organised crime in their community. Four or five years before she could have left the toe end of the country, abandoning her parents, and flown to Germany, Belgium, France or Britain to put her language skills to use. She could have made a new life. She had not. Now it was too late – a window had closed. Her fervour for the group she had enrolled with was gone; her loathing of the target remained undiminished . . . They had laughed at her ideas.