A driver sat on a hard chair in an interview room and two guys watched him. His passport was Albanian, and the find was two kilos of smack. The current price of heroin, at this point in the chain, wavered around an estimation of its purity. What they had on the table might be worth anything between two hundred thousand and three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It would have helped with the cultivation of the legend if Carlo had told her he didn’t get out of bed in the morning for less than a million, and it took more than five kilos to stop him yawning. The uniforms had done well and wanted congratulating, so he did that, augmenting his popularity.
The driver didn’t speak English – or German, French or Italian. It usually took four hours to get hold of an interpreter, and then the little bugger – shivering and pleading for a fag – would likely communicate in a dialect that stumped the translator. There was nothing in the cab that indicated the end destination, except a Europe-wide road map, with crosses in pencil on the page that had the M6 toll route round the east of Birmingham and might be a service station or an exit. Difficult – next to impossible – to let the Albanian head onwards and tail him to his rendezvous.
If the driver was allowed back on the road with a surveillance team attached to him, that would mean ten guys and girls tied down, maybe a dozen. For a million, anything was possible. For five million it was probable. For a third of a million it was pretty much a charge sheet, a trip to the docks police station where the holding cells were, a beer or a shiraz in the bar, and not much more. It would not have been right to pour cold water over them, and the girl was keen. Carlo had been keen once, a long time ago. Keenness, he reckoned, was likely to wear out, like the heel of a favourite shoe. If his keenness had slid it was because incentives were scarce. The cuts pared resources and the poaching of staff by the National Crime Agency removed the best and the hungriest.
He congratulated the team, gave them what they wanted to hear. He didn’t tell them that there was a container port on the coast of southern Italy, where formerly only mosquitoes had flourished, at which, on average, four thousand kilos of pure cocaine was seized each year, and that was the tip of the iceberg of what was brought through Gioia Tauro, far less than a quarter. He suggested they inform the press desk that the haul had a street value of half a million. He showed interest, was polite.
Four good years in Rome, and because he had achieved so much there it would have been thought he needed cutting down to size. The tag ‘gone native’ never helped a career. He had been posted two years before to Felixstowe, and his skills were wasted there: he was supposed to collect dross and filter it, then pass it, if relevant, to the investigation teams. No one thanked him for less than a million’s worth in smack, coke or the recreational stuff.
He backed off. The driver eyed him. Where he used to work, the driver would have been labelled a picciotto, a foot-soldier, at the bottom of the food chain, expendable, replaceable, little more than a mule with a condom up the back passage full of resin. He had seen big players taken down in Italy, those with the rank of padrino or the title of vangelista or santista, and had played a part in their downfall. He had seen the faces of men numbed at the shock of arrest, with the cuffs tight on their wrists, and had felt the glow of achievement. Before that he’d done well on Green Lanes in north London, targeting the Turkish Mafia importers, and up in Liverpool where the heavy action was . . . but Rome had been the love affair.
But he was not in Rome now, at the embassy on Via Venti Settembre. Carlo was at Dooley Terminal in Felixstowe. He was short and squat, with a barrel chest, now aged fifty-three. His hair was thinning and silver, but his moustache was red – he coloured it.
‘It’s a good one. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you calling me.’
He went back to his office to push paper round his desk and on his screen, and killing time until he could go home.
Hi, Wilhelmina. Sorry, but feeling the after-effects, a bit sick. Seeing a doctor tomorrow morning. Apologies about your seminar. Best, Jago.
He sent the text.