To Giulietta, it was a disgrace that her father – past the average age of death in the Aspromonte communities – had to live out his last years in such degrading conditions: a hole in the ground.
There was a switch behind a stone in a wall. The stone was always removed carefully – lichen grew around it and it was kept sprinkled with soil. She pressed it, then replaced the stone. She rarely went into her father’s bunker – she detested it. More of the stones were mounted on a vertical slab, concreted and pinned to it; they slid away to expose the tunnel. Stefano oiled the mechanism. She took a deep breath and crawled inside. A concrete sewer pipe stretched ahead of her with low lights to guide her. She pressed another switch and the outer door was sealed. She crawled forward on her hands and her knees. There was another door ahead. Among the families there were many such bunkers. The most significant and luxurious belonged to the Plati clan, but the Pesche clan in Rosarno was similar. Both had refinements that her father had not wanted, that of champagne in the fridge, the internet and . . . She went on down the tunnel, scuffing her jeans. When she reached the door, she paused to collect herself. Was she stricken with grief? Hardly. She had had no love for her nephew, little respect. Was she angry? Consumed by it. More important to her than making an exhibition of grief beside the body was the image in her mind of a foreign client, coming to do business with her, staying at a hotel the family owned and being seen in the car park with two men who were quite obviously from European police agencies. She had seen them only because it was her practice to attend meetings early, scout and watch.
She went inside.
‘What in God’s name has happened this morning? Where’s Stefano? Have you brought my breakfast?’
She brushed the dust from her clothing. Sharply, she told her father to sit down. He did so.
They were given the white paper suits, over-boots and face masks. They were told not to speak. They sat in the back of an armoured jeep.
Carlo said, ‘We’ve fallen on our feet, mate. This beats sitting in an office.’
Fred was grinning. ‘We have been lucky, but I like to think that luck only goes to those who deserve it.’
The seats in front of them filled. Some of the men and women wore camouflage gear and others were kitted as they were. They lurched away, heading towards the narrow roads that led into the mountain foothills.
Bernardo listened.
He knew it was said of him, in the village and by other clans, that he had never shed a tear in his life. She spoke briskly, telling him what she knew, the facts. She omitted speculation. He had not wept when his mother had died, when he heard that his father had been killed by people from Siderno, or when his elder brother had died by the knife in a Roman gaol, or when his younger brother had been taken, trussed then thrown to his death in a gorge close to Plati. There had been no tears when news was brought from the aula bunker in Reggio that, on the word of a pentito, his two sons had been sentenced to the living death of Article 41bis. He heard what she said, and reflected. He was told it had been an accident, that a tyre iron, unexplained, had been near the body. She mentioned the wolf and its injury before Marcantonio had shot it at maximum range. He remembered what his grandson had told him – casual, expecting forgiveness, unrepentant – about a girl in a northern sector of inner Berlin who had an injured face, and a young man who had confronted him twice. About a pizzo . . . And he remembered what he had been told about an Audi sports car scratched in Berlin along its side, and back again, and the scrape on the City-Van, done during the night. He kept his counsel. If Marcantonio had had half of his aunt’s brains, if Giulietta had been a man . . . He could think it but not say it.
She said nothing that indicated any sorrow. He admired her honesty.
She made him coffee. She began to wash up the plates from his dinner. She allowed him to reflect. She went behind him and made the bed. He thought her nose, still bent from when he had dropped her, wrinkled as if the air in the bunker smelt stale. If he had not let her fall, she would have been a fine-looking woman, but he had, and she was not.