After geography came economics, the science of money-laundering and clean investment with washed funds, the creation of legitimate business where taxes were paid and respectability purchased.
She drove through the dark and hammered the detail at him. Politics was about making contact with men of political ambition, national and regional, and insinuation into the secretive world of freemasonry, from which came influence and contracts for infrastructure development. After politics, there was law – or its violation. Discipline was enforced with extreme violence and rumour, which ruined a man’s marriage and estranged his children. Then, a sort of anthropology: the development of the family and alliances with relatives. His head reeled, but his certainty was solid.
Silence. There was a camp site. Jago recognised the pennants on poles driven into the ground. The kids would be Scouts. Their fire had almost died, but the ground sheets had been hung on a line to freshen. She took only one.
She didn’t smile, didn’t seem either to congratulate herself on her acquisitions or feel the need to apologise for her thefts. Jago’s English master had read aloud The Jackdaw of Rheims, about a bird that had stolen a cleric’s ring. There was no traffic, no police or carabinieri roadblocks, but once a deer broke cover and bounded across in front of them. He thought she was bored with talking about organised crime.
‘Jago, I give you a final opportunity.’
‘To do what?’
‘I can turn round, leave you at a bus station and in a few hours there will be a connection to Lamezia. No one will know where you have been, what you have walked away from. Where you are going and what you try to do – if you fail, if they catch you . . .’
‘Consolata . . .’
‘. . . they will kill you, strangle you, bury you. Jago, you understand that?’
He nodded. They climbed higher. The moon was behind them and the beach forgotten. He was there because he had stayed to watch a spider trap and kill a fly. He shivered. If he had turned round, been at the bank late but before lunch, he couldn’t have lived with himself. A simple question floated in his mind: why had she not taken the lead on the beach? He knew the answer: she was a camp follower. She had never crossed a street to intervene, stumbling, outside a pizzeria. Useful, though? Yes.
7
Dawn broke: a tinge of grey in the skies that hovered over the tips of the pines. They were on steep roads that zigzagged around rock bluffs.
She talked, gave staccato information. There had been smallholdings, in village clusters, behind them. She’d pointed out the olive groves, where the harvest was almost ready, goats grazed, and sheep, cows and pigs were corralled. It was the world of peasants, Jago thought. He had seen nothing like it in England or in the few parts of Germany he knew, or on his brief trips to Spain. Dim lights burned in the houses. The work would have broken backs when the terrace fields were made and the retaining walls built to hold the soil, all done with muscle and sweat.
She wrestled with the wheel of the little car to get round the hairpins, and he reckoned she talked on so that he wouldn’t chicken out. It would have been easy to do so – ‘Excuse me, thanks for everything but I should be getting to the airport. This seemed a good idea twenty-four hours ago, not now. Somebody told me to get a life, move on and forget an everyday story of pizza-bar folk. You’ve been good company, but I have to get back to the real world of clients, their portfolios, and my bonus at the end of the year.’ She kept talking – her way of focusing him on what lay ahead.
She stopped by a rough concrete shrine two or three feet across and the same in height, with a roof of clay tiles to keep the weather off the interior. There was no figure of the Virgin, but a sealed photograph of a serious young man, called Romeo, who had a sharp haircut and wore a dark jacket, white shirt and neutral tie. His widow and his family had built the shrine. There were plastic flowers with the picture. It was here that he had been shot dead. She said that he was part of one family and had been killed by ‘men of honour’ of another family in one of the feuds that had split the ’Ndrangheta. Jago thought Consolata needed him as much as he needed her. She was dedicated to her work behind the combat lines, while he was governed by impulse. He was not allowed to brood or weaken. She spoke good enough English, had a dry sense of humour, and tried to interest him.