She was first out of the taxi and let Jago follow her.
The moon was up and its light shimmered on the street. She waited. The driver had his hand out of the window. Consolata let Jago pay. He was five or six years younger than her, and she thought he had talked with a teenager’s enthusiasm. He passed her the money, and she was left to negotiate and challenge the driver’s estimate – he hadn’t switched on the meter. She beat the man down, paid him, and, was sworn at. The taxi drove away, but the driver gave her the finger.
They had hardly spoken in the car. She had said she would take him to the village. He had thanked her. Consolata thought him an innocent.
They were outside her home. Since her fifth birthday she hadn’t met anyone, male or female, educated or ignorant, young or old, who knew so little about ’Ndrangheta. She had done well at school, had been to college, but had never lived outside Calabria. Everyone knew of the ’Ndrangheta and its ability to destroy. No one she knew was ignorant of it: to explain anything about the ’Ndrangheta, other than at a comic-book level, was beyond her. She reflected. To travel as he had – away from Berlin and from the security of a job he should be returning to the next morning – was the mark of an innocent or a fool. But there had been, she acknowledged, something honest and clean in his ambition. The ambition of an imbecile?
The streetlights were dim. There was a glimmer behind the door, but the upstairs window was dark. She did not plan to give him a tour. The cruise boats came into Catania, across the strait, and Naples. They sailed past Archi through the narrow point where the Scylla and Charybdis myth had originated. Few tourists visited Calabria and needed guiding. She would not have known how to go about it.
If it had not been for the moon she would not have seen the high rubbish pile outside the doorway. Men loitered across the street, which stank: it was now the fourth week that the refuse carts had been on strike in her parents’ area. It was ingrained in her: in Archi there were always men on street corners who watched. In daylight and at night, men watched to see who came and went.
She rang the bell. They would be asleep – they had to be up early to get to work, driving the courier van across the strait, in Messina, or cleaning a local hotel. She would not show him either of the de Stefano villas, with the high walls around them, or the modern church where the body of Paolo de Stefano had been greeted by the priests in a way that would have graced a head of state. Thousands had gathered to watch the coffin arrive, drawn by eight coal-black horses; he had been killed – without dignity – in a drive-by shooting. She would not show him the social centre, expensively built and never used: the ’Ndrangheta would not tolerate a government programme that in any way violated their control. They had put horses into the grounds and the buildings stood derelict. She would not show him the prime locations of the faida: the street corners where the great feud had claimed the lives of the most powerful families’ blood relations. She would not show him the filth and decay, where hope had died – her hope. A window opened above her.
She called up to her father, told him what she wanted. She heard her mother’s voice, no warmth in it – they had given her the opportunity and she had not taken it. She was still there, wasted, and even the dream had died. Her father held the key away from the window and dropped it.
Jago caught it.
She called up again. Her father shuffled away and her mother came to the window and hung out a towel, big and pink. The wind whipped it and she let it go. Consolata snatched it before it hit the pavement. The window was closed.
He handed her the key. Consolata thought he would serve a purpose. She knew the village on the far side of the Aspromonte mountains, and the name of the padrino. In fact, she knew most of the names in Calabria because a police map had been donated to the anti-racket protesters; it had listed the location of each family with the name of its head. Some were now out of date, but this one was still relevant. The padrino was at large, as was his grandson, who would succeed him. She knew from that map where the family’s principal villa was, and the homes of their relatives.
They walked to her parents’ car. It was the best they could afford, a Fiat 500, nine years old, with many thousands of kilometres on the clock.