The second stop, higher up the road, was at a German-built machine-gun bunker. It had been constructed with expertise, reinforced concrete slit trenches leading down from a command post to the forward position where some poor bastard would have been holed up to await the arrival of UK or Canadian troops. The defenders had withdrawn and gone north. The car strained against the steepness of the road, and the light grew steadily.
One more stop. If he had complained she would have listened. A high plateau, a flattened chain-link fence, a concrete building – the place had been systematically wrecked. There were deep bunkers, concrete foundations and heaps of rubble. It had been a Cold War listening point, she said. There might also have been long-range missiles there, with targets beyond the Iron Curtain; they might have had nuclear warheads. Jago wondered how it would have been for the military there. He didn’t know many Americans, but he imagined them marooned in these mountains, with a cinema and a PX shop to keep them sane, the quiet broken by their radios and Elvis Presley belting out over the emptiness. Lonely, maybe nervous, and isolated.
There was a wooden building near the summit; its windows were shuttered and the gravel car park was empty; she said it was for the use of forestry wardens. She told him local people despised them and the restrictions they brought with them. A wolf had been shot and its carcass hung in front of their shed. It was a protected animal, and its killing was a sign of indifference to authority. She spoke of the French general, Charles Antoine Manhès, and the villagers he had hanged in an attempt to subdue the mountain people. He had failed. Later in the morning, she said, the lay-bys along the road would be full as the elderly came with big baskets and searched among the forest trees for mushrooms and other fungus. She showed him a place where a great meeting of the heads of families had been held but the police had scattered them: the work of an informer, a soffiato. The word derived from soffiata, meaning ‘the whisper of the wind’. ‘Aspromonte’, she said, came either from the Greek, for ‘white mountain’ or the Latin, which, loosely, meant ‘mean, bitter or brutal mountain’. It was there that kidnap victims were brought – taken in the north, sold on, driven ever further south, kept in conditions of appalling barbarity while their freedom was negotiated.’ She showed no emotion.
The light grew. There was nothing gentle about her face, nothing sleek about her hair, which was a messy chaos of naturally blonde strands, and nothing insignificant about her sharp-angled nose, her mouth, full lips and teeth. They had peaked a summit and she drove faster down the hill. There was a first glimpse of the sun across the sea and beyond the black outlines, ragged and sharp, of the mountains’ lesser peaks. At last, now, she was quiet.
Her phone screen showed the crabbed lines of roads. One went close to a winking red point. A download from the group she was with – confidential to the leader but she’d hacked into it: the locations of the leading families’ principal homes. She’d grimaced as she’d told him that Bernardo Cancello was fortunate to have been allocated that status along with the de Stefanos, the Pesches, Condellos, Pelles and Miromallis. What would Jago do? Wait and see, take a look. Enough? Perhaps and perhaps not. He’d do what he could.
She swore. The road was blocked. A boy drove goats. Dogs ran among them and they stampeded. The boy cursed at her for frightening his animals and Jago smelt the acrid scent of the tyres, then the livestock pressed against his door. She went on, bundling the goats aside. Behind him, on the small bucket seat, were the clothing and the ground sheet she had stolen. She would want the cover of darkness and shadows, not the brightness of sunshine. He had nothing sensible to say.
In less than an hour the first of the team would arrive at the bank, where his life had been nailed down. Around him there was only desperate, cruel country, rocks, sharp stones, gorges, tumbled boulders, then lights, far ahead.
Stefano, a shrewd old bird for all his image as a helpless and limited buffoon, had reversed the City-Van to the back door, which led into the kitchen. He had unloaded some baskets, vegetable trays and firewood, then Bernardo had slipped from the cover of the doorway into the back. He had a large foam cushion to sit on. Marcantonio was with him.