He eased himself out of bed.
That bed was a source of annoyance. Until he had been forced into the bunker – an informant had said that the Palace of Justice was targeting him – Bernardo had never made a bed or folded away his pyjamas, not even during his two brief spells in the San Pietro gaol while he had awaited trial. His grandmother had done it when he was a child, then his mother, and his wife had understood her role to perfection. Mamma, married to him the day after her twentieth birthday, was too stiff in her knees and hips – rheumatism or arthritis, but she refused to visit a doctor – to crawl down the concrete tubing into the container.
There was a picture of the Madonna, another of his grandson, and one of himself with his grandfather and father – if he died in his own bed, he would have done better than either of them. His grandfather had expired in the prison in Reggio, after a heart attack; his father had been blasted by a gunman with a sawn-off shotgun, acting on the instructions of the family of Siderno. One brother had been taken from his car by men from Plati, pinioned, then thrown alive down a vertical-sided gorge; the body had not been recovered for two years. A second brother was said to be in the foundations of the A3, the Highway to the Sun, north of Gioia Tauro. That was the price he had paid for his freedom.
If he didn’t wash his dishes, he had nothing to eat off. There was a microwave to heat the food Mamma prepared, but he had to wash the ladles and spoons he used. He supposed he spent half of his day skulking inside his house, not exposing himself to any possible vantage points where a camera might be hidden, and the other half in the bunker, where the damp of autumn seemed to seep through the cold earth and the steel sides of the container. He slept there, slid furtively back to the house during daylight but never walked in the garden, soaking up the sunshine. To leave the property, he employed a variety of disguises and subterfuge. He remained free.
He dressed.
He had a wardrobe that swayed when he opened it. Marcantonio had brought it in pieces down the tunnel and assembled it, then the bed. The bed had been well made and was firm, but he would bring the young man down the next day or the day after and ask him to tighten the wardrobe’s screws, do what he could not do himself. Stefano was no longer agile enough to come through on his hands and knees, while Giulietta had a phobia of confined spaces and came reluctantly. Bernardo had more money than he could count, but lived in a hole. According to Giulietta, he owned bedrooms in apartment blocks in Monaco and Nice, a four-star hotel on the Costa del Sol – it was in the process of expansion – shares in a resort in Brazil, then more bedrooms in service flats in Dortmund and beside the river in London. He had never slept in any of them and for almost a year hadn’t slept beside Mamma. He pulled the sheets and the thin blanket into place and smoothed the pillow.
He found the socks he needed, and the shoes.
He used a battery-powered razor. A man of his status should have been able to go to the village barber, sit in a chair, then be shaved and treated with respect.
He combed his hair, which was well cut – Mamma did it in the house.
Bernardo did not appear from the tunnel when he wanted to leave his bunker. Mamma would come, or Stefano, with the corn for the chickens and call them near the hidden entrance. Then he could emerge.
A good day awaited him. The boy was coming back for Mamma’s birthday. The pentito in Rome would be stalked and the plan made for a killing: he hoped that the man who had sent his sons to gaol would experience fear and pain. He ate some bread, and turned on the coffee machine. A freighter loaded with more containers was heading across the Mediterranean, en route from the Venezuelan Porto Cabello. It was two or three days from docking at Gioia Tauro and carried cargo for him.
His eyes might dampen when the boy arrived and – for all his inbred caution – he could not envisage any danger capable of fracturing his mood.
The girl, with her broom, had come out of the pizzeria. Jago didn’t think she had looked towards him. She had swept the pavement, polished the outside of the window, then gone back inside. He had talked to the woman as he would have done on any cold call. It had passed the time and he felt less conspicuous. At the bank, sales staff worked in teams of two, a man and a woman; the man did the business and the woman offered reassurance. From force of habit, Jago said to his prospective client, ‘I’d like you to meet my manager. She’s a woman of integrity. We’d bring you the brochures on what we can offer. Your money would perform much better than where it is now. We’d be there for you.’