Fred said, ‘It was their beloved Shakespeare, writing about Rome, and it is from one of Caesar’s killers, from Brutus, “Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries”. In other words, don’t think me impertinent, you get off your arse and get on with it or spend a long time regretting the inaction. Are you with me, Luca?’
Luca, the maresciallo, shrugged, betraying nervousness. ‘I take a huge chance. I was very definite. Apparently the prosecutor was about to receive the priest from the village. He was walking across the car park at the Palace of Justice, and had requested a meeting. A confession? What else? He was shot dead. The killer escaped and the chance was lost. He was told what I said. He tries to grasp it, the last throw. He asked Control one question, about me. ‘Is he sure?’ Am I sure, Carlo, Fred? They’ll flay me if my intuition falls short.’
Carlo said, ‘You’ll be good, Luca, and you’re riding with the A Team, the best.’ Then, shit, do I believe that? A confident blow on the back followed.
Fred said, ‘It’ll take you onwards and upwards, Luca, and when you’re at the top you’ll remember two old men who gave you a push in the right direction.’ He thought that if it failed, and the line of the sheets was irrelevant, he and Carlo would be long gone, not facing the brickbats. He clasped the maresciallo’s arm and squeezed confidence into it.
A helicopter was tasked. The cacciatore would be deployed, and the local carabinieri would have a role. A senior prosecutor was coming from Reggio, and there would be tracker dogs. The maresciallo had said it was the last chance. It was Carlo’s work, and Fred’s. They had opened their mouths, woven a skein of trust and now had to wait.
The clerk sat in his office, but only the observant would have noticed his door was not quite shut. He worked on expenses claimed, and was often late at his desk. It was assumed by those who dealt with him that he was deaf because he wore a hearing aid. He often reflected that much of critical sensitivity was said between men hurrying across the lobby. He heard the prosecutor come back to his office and rap out the combination on the door lock. Then he had held a staccato conversation with the leader of his escort: how long would the Bell Agusta take to be readied, then to fly to the location, and how long it would take for the prosecutor to be driven there? He heard it all; as he had heard much over many months.
He would need to wait until the building quietened, feet no longer sounding on the staircase. His attention seemed locked on his screen and the lists of items for which staff charged. The clerk received little reward for his work. The family paid him only five hundred euros a month, but it was never late; whether he had information or nothing to report, the envelope turned up without fail. He gave it to his wife, who sent it by registered post to an aunt in the Friuli district of the north-east, and she banked it. The money lay untouched in the account.
Hatred governed him. He was poorly treated at the Palace, regarded as incompetent and useless, good only for filling in the electronic ledger, nothing else. He could recite the date and the hour at which each perceived insult had been lobbed at him. If any had suggested that greed motivated him, he would have denied it. Such an accusation would be made only in a police cell, or an interview room when disgust confronted him. The risk he took was invigorating. The staircase was quiet. He used his phone to call a friend in a coastal town south of Pellaro. He dictated a message, succinct and clear.
It was the first leg of the cut-off calls. Four more would be needed before the message reached a destination.
A girl came to the checkpoint.
She would have seen Carlo, Fred and the young maresciallo, who paced and smoked. She was a teenager and rode an old scooter. She had come up from the village, with a packet of Rizla cigarette papers in her pocket. The message was in a code of old dialect words. She was waved through. Why should she not be? Stefano came after her and had to produce identity papers, then was permitted to pass. Control’s instruction was that the community close to the family should not be alerted by a new level of security: calm must prevail.
The girl on the scooter, followed by the City-Van, reached the second block. Everyone knew from the radio that there had been a fatal shooting at the Palace of Justice and that the corpse had been identified as Father Demetrio, their priest. He was not mourned. Had he been alive, the men beside the oil drum would have ducked their heads in his presence, but he was dead. More activity: Giulietta had returned, driven by Teresa, Stefano had been to the mini-mart, and Giulietta had shopping bags.
Beyond the block, short of the house, Giulietta was shown the message that covered one side of a single cigarette paper. She gave no sign of thinking it important and went inside through the front door. Stefano knew his place and went with his bag to the kitchen door. All appeared normal in their lives – and nothing was as it seemed.