The light burned down on him and the television was loud. Bernardo remained on his back on the unmade bed, and time passed. And he pondered – he had much, that afternoon, to think about. His guests had gone and some had nodded in imitation of sincere condolence or had touched his arm in a private gesture. All were familiar with sudden death.
He had moved on from the death of Marcantonio. The clock could not be turned back. There was much that could not be halted. The funeral the following day would be a grand occasion: the coffin would be brought from the house to the church on a bier pulled by four black horses, plumed. He would not be there, but it would happen. His man, Stefano, would be on his way by now to a hotel in Brancaleone: another situation that would not be stayed. And somewhere on the road to Reggio, the capital city of the region, his daughter was tracking the car of the priest and might now have dealt with it where the hairpins were sharpest and the cliff edges steepest. Had she not already done so, then she had in her handbag the gift he had made her.
He was not dragged down by grief but was victim to a high level of aroused emotion – it was as if the good days, long gone, had returned, power with them. He had been told, and Giulietta had sworn it was on the word of the clerk in the Palace of Justice, that this would be his last full night in the bunker. He would not go to the funeral, but would be discreetly out of his gaol. The priest would have thought himself Bernardo’s friend. He had no friends.
The kid saw her.
He had little formal education. His teachers had found him brightly intelligent, bored beyond salvation, almost impossible to motivate. They had told him to his face that his mind was sufficiently sharp for him to go far – they had meant he had the wit to move away from a village in the foothills of the Aspromonte and make a success of himself in any world beyond the boundaries of organised crime. Their advice had been decisively rejected. He had stayed and made himself useful.
Now he was tested.
No one in the village had the right to be on the steep, wooded slopes behind the family’s home. No stranger would be there in innocence. No surveillance team from the Guardia, the Squadra or the cacciatore would be represented by a woman who wore no camouflage clothing, seemed to carry no weapon and was alone . . . Alone, but might represent a threat.
The kid belonged to the family. He had made his choice. If the family fell, he would go down with them. It was not possible to hold up a hand when the padrino lay in his own blood and suggest to a new family that he could switch allegiance without hesitation and belong to those whom, a few hours before, he would have helped to garrotte, strangle or shoot – not that he had been asked to kill yet, but if the time came he didn’t think he would fail. His experience of taking life was confined to slitting the throat of a goat when its foreleg was broken and of drowning an old dog that was no longer of use.
He assumed her to be the reconnaissance of a rival family. There was no love between the clans. The feuds were mostly suppressed, but they didn’t go away even after alliances of marriage had been made. If the power of the family faltered, others would come from the villages around or from Locri, Siderno or Brancaleone and take control of their lives. He doubted he would survive – so a movement on the hillside alerted him.
He thought the girl he had seen was in her twenties. She wore jeans and a dark anorak. She might have a handgun, but he hadn’t seen it.
Three dogs worked with the kid. At his whistle they’d freeze, raise their ears, listen for his next command, and he would guide them with the calls used by generations of shepherds in the mountains. They had ground to cover – they had to get to the far side of the valley where the trees grew thickest and the rocks were steeper.
The kid had had only a glimpse of her, but that was enough.
The sun was at its zenith, the heat as intense as it would be that day.
Where the men were was hazy, but the light fell high on the hillside, leaving it clear and easy to watch.
Fred saw Carlo mopping his forehead with a handkerchief and there were sweat stains on the Englishman’s shirt, across his back and at the armpits. They had no hats. Most of the men had taken refuge inside the vehicles but the doors were open to allow any breeze to blew through. They stood together in the shade available from a stunted oak, which offered little cover. They were surplus to requirements but had half a day to kill. It was often like that. Fred’s superior officer, young, groomed, climbing, would have forgotten he had sent a man to Calabria, the cliff edge of the known world. If he had talked of his man’s presence on the Ionian coast he would have justified it as ‘someone else’s problem, the Italians. We’re giving them all possible support’. No great moral issue at stake.