It was a staccato interrogation and the frown had deepened. At any meeting with a client, in London or Berlin, he would have covered his true aims and intentions. There was honesty in her face, though, which trapped him. He wouldn’t dare lie to her. The night was around him and nothing intruded.
‘I’m confused about why I came here and uncertain about what I’ll do. What is the flier about?’
‘If you haven’t been here before, it will mean nothing to you.’
‘Try me. I know what pizzo is.’
She rapped out the translation. The fight against corruption. The demand for civil courage. The call for honesty in the judiciary and among politicians. The announcement of a march for peace and justice next week. There was no animation in her voice – she might have been a child parroting a Bible text. She finished. ‘For what reason have you come to Reggio?’
Jago said, ‘Why does an activist take a bag of fliers and dump them? Why aren’t they stuck to shop windows, under windscreen wipers?’
She stood up. He caught at her arm. She shrugged him off.
‘Because we lose. Too often we lose. More exact, every time we lose. You fight a force that has incredible strength, and you look for reaction and for small victories. I see none. Against ’Ndrangheta we do not win. Today I know it. We have forgotten what is winning.’
She had the empty bag on her shoulder. The last papers were in her hand and she was at the bin. She dumped them, rubbed her hands together and took the first step towards the piazza’s exit.
He called into the night, ‘I think I know what winning is, against them. I did it yesterday. It was only small but I won.’
She stopped and turned.
6
‘What was “winning”?’
She had good, accented English. He had her attention. She was in the heart of the small piazza, and what light there was filtered through the trees, silhouetting her body against the backdrop of a building behind her. He had halted her in mid-stride, hands on hips. In her question he heard a trace of annoyance, as if a foreigner, a stranger, had no right to mock her. But she had given him her attention. Jago named the place. She nodded. She knew of that village.
He kept his voice quiet and conversational and made her strain to hear him. A dog howled and youngsters laughed, all far away and unseen. They had the stage. Jago named the family, the old man who had topped the pyramid on the laptop report in the interview room.
There was no response, except a low hiss. She knew the village and the family. He told her the name of the grandson.
She walked back to him. They made an island in a sea, as if a spotlight were trained on them in the darkness.
‘I’m Jago.’
‘And I am Consolata. What happened?’
He was a banker, had gone to see a client in Charlottenburg, had time to kill, sat in a park. She flapped a hand at him. He told the story with no more fanfare than if he had been speaking to the FrauBoss – the first incident outside the pizzeria, his visit to the police station and what he had been told there. Then the second: a pistol produced, a girl’s face slashed, his charge at the young man, the trip and the hospital. She was on the bench beside him. He went on to detail his return to the police station, and the open screen.
Then he told her about the pavement, the keys, the Audi convertible and drawing the tip of the key along the paintwork. She laughed. He told her of how the guy behind the wheel had yelled as he had walked away, then of Marcantonio’s fury. She laughed again.
‘What’s so funny? I won, didn’t I?’
He had enjoyed telling the story, and had felt a trace of certainty return to him. But she had laughed. He thought she was ready to push herself up from the bench and leave.
Jago said, ‘If you’d heard him you’d have known I won. He was late for his flight and couldn’t chase me. He would have tried to kill me – he was that angry. I might as well have pissed in his face. That’s winning. I don’t believe anything like that had ever happened to him before. Any sort of comfort zone he inhabited, well, I’d bounced him out of it.’
Her hand touched his arm. ‘That was Berlin. This is Reggio Calabria. That was day, not night. Why not stay in Germany and continue with vandalism?’
‘Because of the girl. I don’t know her name, but I came because of her.’
‘That is ridiculous.’
‘Have you ever done anything that wasn’t sensible? It seemed a good enough reason.’
‘And here?’
‘Next week, next month, next year, that girl will live with the ugliness of that scar, deliberately inflicted. I was told by a policeman it was too small a matter for serious investigation. Marcantonio believed himself immune, that he could just walk away. Then I heard his fury. I came here to hear it again. I bought into it and now I want more. Is that a drug? I don’t know about narcotics but I want to hear that anger again. More than anything. That would be winning big.’
‘You would kill him?’ Her lips were close to his ear.
‘I don’t know. A big step, beyond my pay grade.’
‘And you tell a stranger all this.’
‘We all make judgements on trust.’