There was a dress code, of sorts, in the squat. Boys should not move about the rooms, the landing and stairs in their underwear: it was disrespectful to the girls. Consolata broke rules, written and unwritten.
Her feet were bare and she was wearing a skimpy cotton nightie, short and low-cut. The sun wasn’t high enough to warm the inside of the building and she shivered but came down warily because there was no carpet or no lino on the stairs: she risked a painful splinter in a toe or the sole of her foot. She had no friends among the others and didn’t think anyone would miss her if she went out through the door with her duffel bag on her shoulder. She was there because it emphasised her indifference to their attitude towards her – and because she had nowhere else to go.
She wandered into the communal area. In the inner room, a meeting had already started. On the table there were dirty plates and mugs, while the previous night’s bowls, from dinner, were in the sink. The front was off the photocopier: there would have to be a committee meeting, then a canvassing of the membership, and finally they might agree to buy a new or second-hand one. Perhaps the Palace of Justice would help . . . She stubbed her big toe on the copier’s metal cover and swore.
If Consolata had left a man asleep in her bed, she might have viewed the world with more charity. But there was no man – hadn’t been for months – and the last had treated her as if she were a chattel, in the Calabrian way, on call when he wanted her. Before that there had been the carabinieri trooper: he had been good in bed, which she was not, and had thought of her as a trophy. She had wanted to talk about the ‘war against corruption’ and he about her cup-size and about the best kit he could buy for his work from survival magazine offers. Francesco had been amusing, and it had lasted fourteen weeks – Consolata had a good memory – before he had tired of her. She had seen his wedding notice in Cronaca della Calabria, with a picture of a smart, attractive woman – everything she was not, she had told herself. He had not hated the ’Ndrangheta families he spied on, but often said he had a decent job, was paid reasonably, and that there was camaraderie among the team. He’d shown her some of the disciplines of covert work, how to move and to lie motionless, and had boasted of his skill. Once he had let her wear his gillie suit and another time his flak-vest, with the armour plates. He had said she was good at covert movement and had an intuition for dead ground. Sometimes he had to ask her to show herself. She had cried when he ditched her, but in her room, not where he or anyone else would see.
She bit into an apple. Others must have risen as dawn broke – the heap of printed leaflets was double the size it had been when she had left the night before. They would have burned out the photocopier, not had the patience to coax it. Massimo was in the inner room at the table. He looked away, blushing, because she was almost naked. He wore heavy glasses and was attempting to grow, not yet successfully, a beard. They believed in non-violent opposition to the criminal culture, as she had when she’d joined. Perhaps not tomorrow, but victory was inevitable. At first she had been a true believer. The man at the head of the table, Piero, waved to her.
Was she still keen to picket? Would she picket the big villas in her nightdress?
Where did she think it most appropriate to stand with a placard? Outside the home of the de Stefano matriarch in Archi, down towards the coast and up the private road? At the hilltop villa of the Pesce family in Rosarno? Or perhaps she would go to San Luca, or Plati in the Aspromonte?
Laughter rippled around the table. She thought the other girls disapproved of her display of flesh, and that the boys’ eyes stripped her. Piero told her when they would divide up the leaflets, and where she should go with Massimo. They would start in an hour. She knew no other life. The men who headed the families were demons, and their faces, from the newspapers, flickered in her mind. They didn’t know who she was. She threw the apple core at the bin, missed and it rolled under the table. She left it where it was and went to dress.
He passed her a cigarette, which she took, and lit it.
Jago said, ‘Forgive me for disturbing you. I hope you won’t find this offensive. May I, please, give you my card and tell you what I do?’
Her face was wreathed in smoke. She looked sharply at him, then nodded.
Buried in his bunker, Bernardo – padrino, master of his family and of his village, a euro millionaire many times over – had only a minimal sense of time passing.
An air vent in the ceiling of the container rose through the stone, earth and undergrowth to surface beyond the decrepit shed, behind the roots of an aged rotting oak. An air-conditioner rumbled inside, but it was covered with blankets so the noise was muted. He had enough power to run a fridge, a cooker, a TV, on which he could watch DVDs, and a battery radio, with a discreet aerial that ran up the ventilation shaft to emerge at the lip. He had an electric blanket in the bed for the winter. It was his second home.