Had he been asked, and had he answered frankly, he would have said, ‘When I’m hurting them they’ll kill me. If I’m winning against them, I’m dead.’
To go from his office to any public engagement required that his full escort travel with him. Good boys – and sometimes a woman. If he was winning they would all be dead alongside him. His enemy was the criminal conspiracy of ’Ndrangheta, named from the Greek settlers of this far corner of Europe almost three millennia before. The word encompassed ‘heroism’ or ‘virtue’ and a member of the conspiracy – held together by family blood – was thought of as a ‘brave man’, not as a killer, not as a purveyor of life-destroying narcotics, not as a seller of the weapons that killed innocents in faraway wars, not as the provider of smuggled children brought into Europe to satisfy the lusts of perverts. He regarded them as the enemy and saw himself as something of a crusader. He liked to employ the old tags of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ when he was with schoolchildren and college students. Cocaine importation played well, but the weapons supplied to African warlords and the youngsters transported from Asia and the old Soviet satellite states for paedophiles played better. The beast, as he described it to audiences, was akin to an octopus, with many tentacles, hidden deep among subterranean rocks. Its arms could insert themselves into the smallest space.
He liked to quote the Englishman, Edmund Burke, and could quieten a lecture theatre when he intoned, ‘“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.’ Then he would tell them of the huge demonstrations against Cosa Nostra in neighbouring Palermo, just across the strait, after the murders of the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino, and they would applaud and imagine themselves chanting anti-Mafia slogans. Then would punch them collectively in the gut by saying that nothing changed, that Cosa Nostra would be broken by dedicated police work, not by kids marching. The point he made was that ‘occasional antipathy’ against organised crime meant little: commitment was required. It was a necessary part of his workload to deliver such addresses.
The prosecutor was surrounded by defeatism. He struggled against it. Sometimes he believed in minor successes; at others he was afflicted by minor catastrophes. He neither won nor lost. He had so few Holy Grail moments to treasure. Convictions, little triumphs, went hand in hand with men of great savagery being freed by the courts on technicalities. Close at hand there was corruption: a judge, a magistrate, a colleague, a senior officer in the carabinieri, a lowly clerk . . . Who knew where?
He was exhausted by the load he carried, and he believed that, for all his endeavours, the clans tolerated him. He lived with his guards, but his wife went shopping and took the kids to school unprotected. His protection was cosmetic. The day they wanted him, they would have him.
They went north and the cars were onto the Viale Manfroce. He had left his work piled on his desk in the office that had a door reinforced sufficiently to block high-velocity rounds or a hand grenade’s blast. The last message in was for the Scorpion Fly file. The daughter and the wife had been seen, the grandchildren had come to the house and been seen. Each week the prosecutor had to fight tenaciously for a decent share of the finances allocated by Rome. It was a major investigation, and the family had considerable importance in the hinterland above the coastal towns of Locri and Brancaleone. The clan’s leader was worth his place on the most-wanted lists, and the disappearance of the daughter-in-law – who had declined to be a vedova bianca, a white widow, and either discreet or chaste – was an added incentive . . . Without results his resources would be drained and the whispers would start that he had not used the precious money well. Hard times. He acknowledged it. He would tell the students that afternoon how remarkable it was that this obscure corner of Europe had a single claim to fame: that it was home to the continent’s most renowned organised-crime group, which spread misery and dishonesty thousands of kilometres to the north of their city. He liked to tell them that.
How would he know if he was winning? He murmured, ‘I don’t know? It has never happened to me so I can’t answer your question.’
His escort never interrupted him when he talked to himself. But the one in the front passenger seat eased aside the machine-gun, took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, and extracted one, then lit it and passed it to him. He loved his guards as if they were good friends, loved them as much as he loved his work . . . But without results on the old fugitive he would be lost.
‘My God, what happened to you?’ He worked on the third floor of a modern block. The office space given to the sales section was small, cramped: they were on top of each other. ‘Are you all right, Jago – have you been attacked?’
Heads turned. Questions speared at him.