He had left her on the street in the gathering darkness. The Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi was the nearest Reggio Calabria had to a main shopping street. There were good brand names on display, but many were fakes, and the premier banks that did well out of the region’s criminality: the families needed banks, accountants and lawyers, and paid them well.
She had tried. She had stood in the middle of the street, pedestrianised, and had handed out fliers that called for non-payment of the pizzo, a boycott of any business that bowed to extortion and contributed. She had been ostracised. She accepted that perhaps her voice had become more shrill, as the evening crowds of window-shoppers and promenaders flowed around her. Most had looked at her with contempt. Some had brushed aside her outstretched arm. Others had glanced at what she held, then shaken their heads. The bag had stayed full. Then the shutters had begun to come down, and the lights behind the window displays had gone off, doors were locked and the street was emptied. She had finally turned away when the accordionist ceased playing.
The bench was in a small piazza. There was an obligatory monument to the writer Corrado Alvaro: celebrated, revered and taught in schools. At the bottom end of the piazza was the museum, but she had never been inside it. The foliage on the trees was thick and in daylight threw shade. At night it blocked out the light from the streetlamps. It was, she supposed, a pivotal moment. The wind was gathering off the sea, funnelled up the strait to enter the chokepoints between the buildings, and leaves blustered around her ankles. The bag was on the seat beside her. Her anger soared, its target the group. It wouldn’t last – after a couple more years its members would be applying for college places or town-hall jobs – all those places of employment where the introduction of a ‘friend’ was essential. Perhaps handing out leaflets was a rite of passage for the young before the serious business of adulthood and collaboration or the blind eye. If she dumped them, there would be no turning back, no crawling late at night to the squat in Archi and begging forgiveness: she would get her clothing and be regarded as a leper. To throw the fliers into the overflowing bin would result in an appearance before the Inquisition: no crime could be greater.
But she did it. She didn’t know how to escalate to a different level of protest, strike at ’Ndrangheta families, their corruption and complacency. She felt defeated, worthless.
She took the fliers from the bag and flung them in the general direction of the bin. The wind caught them and they scattered across the paving slabs. The wind was brisk enough to carry some to the darker shadows where other benches were. Dropping litter was an offence. She bent, snatched up some fliers and took them to the bin, then went for more.
Jago couldn’t read what was printed on the flier. He had stepped off at the small bus station on the sea front and approached some men to ask for a connection to the far side of the Calabria peninsula. They had pulled faces, made gestures of ignorance and turned their backs. He had walked past two four-star hotels and it was after eleven. There was a bench in a park, and the wind was strong but warm, with none of the cutting cold he had experienced in Berlin. He had sat on the bench.
The papers blew towards him and the girl followed them. He watched. He didn’t have the language to understand what was printed on them. She scooped them up and flounced to the bin, then went for more. She was, he thought, at the end of her tether.
She reached him – she was slight, muscular, nothing smart about her. A flicker of light showed she wore no makeup. Studs in her ears, nothing else. And there was no scar on her cheek. He’d almost looked for it. The face was the same as the girl’s in Berlin, with defiance written on it. He thought she was angry. Now she was on her knees, close to his legs, rooting beside his trainers and under the bench for more of the fliers. She snatched one in his hand.
‘What does it say?’ He had no Italian so asked in English. She looked up at him. Her eyes pierced him, and her lip curled. Jago persisted, ‘Please, would you tell me what it is?’
On the sheet of paper there were close-printed lines of text. In the first two or three, just below the headline, he saw a word he knew – pizzo. Then a frown cut her forehead. He thought she had been about to stand, take the last sheet from him and stride towards the bin.
She was someone to talk to – he groped towards the contact. ‘What does it say?’
She sucked in a long breath. ‘You are English?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have been many times to Reggio Calabria?’
‘It’s my first time.’
‘You sit on a bench at night, and the city is about to sleep. Why?’
‘I have nowhere to go to.’
‘There are hotels, plenty, all prices. Why not go to one?’
‘Confusion. Lack of certainty.’
‘What is confused? What is uncertain?’