He was alone and lonely.
Loathed by his family, despised by his community and hunted by his enemies, he trudged along a street. He was at the outer edge of central Rome, and away to his right was the expanse of the Borghese Gardens. That was where he would be later. Now he was on his way back from an early visit to the convenience store where he had bought milk, cheese and ham. For four years he hadn’t spoken to his mother, his brother or any of the extended family.
He came past the big red-brick church dedicated to St Teresa d’Avila – a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun – and crossed himself. She looked down on him with what he reckoned was love. No one else did, except the dogs. Behind him was the Porta Pia and the Via Venti Settembre. When he was there he liked to stare through the railings at the gracious lawns and fountains of the British embassy, and would stay until the troops on guard waved him away. In front of him was the turning towards the apartment blocks where he worked and existed.
That he survived, he thought, was because St Teresa d’Avila watched over him, but should she be distracted . . . There was rubbish in the doorways – kids came out of school, bought fast food on little polystyrene trays, gobbled it and dropped them. In the days when the security men were still with him, a few weeks after the trial, they had referred to the kids as ‘feral vermin’ . . . Let them visit Reggio Calabria, then see if they complained of Rome’s pavements.
He hurried. The men, and sometimes women, of Public Security, who looked after state witnesses before they gave evidence, then briefly prepared them for an afterlife, had long been withdrawn. One day they were with him – a curt handshake, a telephone call from a magistrate wishing him well and thanking him for what he had done – and the next gone. He was left with an emergency phone number, and had been told that the heavens would have to fall in before he gained any response from the operations room at the end of the line.
He turned into Via Giacomo Puccini, then the gated, sprawling apartment block. He was lucky they’d found him a job, they’d told him. He was in the basement, close to the communal boilers, and had a cramped room near the portiere’s small apartment. That man, with a uniform, regarded him with suspicion.
They would find him, one day. He had gambled and lost – was condemned.
The milk, ham and cheese were not for him: the portiere would take them to different households in the block above, and would receive a gratuity. He could be grateful for little, that he was still alive, that today he was beyond the reach of Bernardo, the padrino, his wife, the sons in the northern gaols and the grandson who, they said, was more brutal than any older member of the family. They had such power that all efforts against them were doomed. He had heard a journalist from Reggio say on television, ‘If the ’Ndrangheta target a man he is dead. There would be no escape not even on a Pacific island. When they want to kill him and are ready to do so, they will.’ He tapped in the code, let himself through the gates and did not look back. He was the walking dead.
He was in Rome.
The girl on the desk shrugged. Jago’s ticket was for Lamezia Terme, not Reggio Calabria’s Tito Minniti airport. Anyway, the next two flights to the city were fully booked so he would be on stand-by. Would he get on? Another shrug. And the connection to Lamezia Terme? A flight was due to leave in an hour. There were seats on it, but it was delayed. How long? There was a dispute with baggage handlers at Lamezia Terme. The early-morning flights were not affected because the baggage was handled by night-duty staff. The day shift were taking industrial action.
His certainty had slipped.
Men and women from around the world swept past and around him, anxious to display the urgency of their business. He was told that the industrial action at Lamezia Terme would be settled towards the end of the day shift because they would be paid electronically before the start of the weekend. No one was particularly helpful to him: why should they be?
He was not asked his business in Reggio Calabria, why it was important for him to travel and what priority he might be afforded. Had he been, Jago might have struggled to answer coherently. A Lufthansa flight to Berlin was called.
He could have gone to a desk, made a booking, and been back in his apartment by early evening, or searching out a bar where Elke might be. The final call for the Berlin flight. The bench he sat on was uncomfortable but he endured it. Jago was not quite ready to light the fuse that would burn the boat, but was considering his goal: it was not just to stand in front of the young man and see confusion but to achieve more. How? No idea.
He waited.