A few took their fliers, glanced at them and discarded them. The majority sidestepped Massimo and Consolata, even crossed the road to avoid them. It was her home but she hated this place.
She made a point of staring into the faces of the men and women, locking eyes and daring them to break the contact. Some, not many, would have benefited from the clans who ran the town, the families who exercised control over life and death – they would have taken a share each month of the profits from drugs trafficking, extortion and corruption of local government.
Abruptly, her face lit.
The man was of the ‘grey zone’. She was from the ‘white zone’ and so, after a fashion, were Massimo, her parents, the magistrates, some of the prosecutors and most, but not all, of the police and carabinieri. The ‘black zone’ was inhabited by the Men of Honour – she shuddered at the irony – from the de Stefano, Condello, Tegano and Imerti families. She despised the grey zone more than the organised-crime groups.
The grey-zone man approaching her had the bearing of one who had sold out, a lawyer, banker or accountant. The criminals flourished through the professional help of such scum. Such a man danced to the families’ music, and might not be trusted but received fat fees. He would have a large villa facing the beach and would dread the arrival of the police at dawn or news that the shares bought with laundered money had collapsed. Perhaps, inhabiting the grey zone, they feared less the police coming at first light to arrest them than losing the families’ money. Perhaps the greater terror would come from trying to explain that a share price could go down as easily as up, that what had seemed a good investment was based on shifting sand. She watched the man. Tall, heavy, well-dressed in a three-piece suit, a phone at his ear. He had to come close to her because part of the pavement was blocked with uncollected bursting rubbish bags. Other people passed him and ignored her, as she now ignored them, but she could play a little with him.
‘Are you prepared to denounce the criminal profiteering of the ’Ndrangheta? Are you prepared to condemn the intimidation practised by the clans? Do you look forward to a day when our local government can be liberated from corruption? If so what are you prepared to do to bring it forward?’
Refuse clearance was at the dictate of the families. It was a matter of control: they decided who worked and when, who had a business and at what profit margin, whose son went to university and won good grades, who had access to corporation housing. He would step around the rubbish, cannon into her and apologise. A flier would be in his hand and her voice would be in his ear. He’d have to step into the filth to get past her.
Consolata did not see the boys. They came up behind the man, elbowed past him, and stood in front of her. They would have owed allegiance to the same family. The feud – the faida – that had divided the clans, let blood flow in the gutters, a hundred men dead in this town alone, had been patched up with marriages of convenience.
Their leader stood a half pace in front of them. He was smart, well turned-out, and might have come that morning from a hairdressing salon. The grey-zone man was behind her. The traffic was heavy and it was likely that Massimo was unaware that danger had surfaced. She felt threatened. Did they know her name? Probably not. It was too early in the day, perhaps, for them to be doing the rounds, collecting pizzo from shopkeepers and bar managers: they had identified her as potential amusement.
The one at the front was so polite. Could he, please, see a copy of what she was handing out?
She looked into the young face – he might already be a millionaire. If she had been a song bird they might have wanted to slice off her wings while she was alive. She couldn’t back away. If she did, she would betray every point she had made in the squat, about picket lines at the residences and confrontations with the principals of the families who controlled Archi. She hoped that her fingers were steady. He smiled at her.
She extracted one of the sheets. She remembered the crap that Piero and the others had cobbled together: she had thought it embarrassing and clichéd, and had said so. She passed it to him. He leaned forward and nodded, glanced at the page, then turned it upside-down, as if he could neither read nor write. Behind him there was laughter and two of his men sniggered.
It was the closest she had been, in all her years of protest, to a major family’s heir. He passed the sheet of paper to the kid who stood on his right and murmured to the one on his left. He loosened his belt, took back the sheet and made a play of wiping his arse with it. The one on the left flicked the top two buttons of her blouse, which opened easily. The leader had refastened his belt and was still smiling. He slipped the paper into the gap between her breasts.
Trying to keep her voice steady, Consolata said, ‘Go fuck your mother.’