‘And I’m with a Hun?’
‘Organised-crime officer in Berlin, did an exchange after Duisburg. They’re shitting themselves that this boy is about to trample over a sensitive investigation at a critical time. I’m not briefed up on the connection between the policeman and our banker boy but it exists. You suggested, Carlo, that the boy is either dumb, ignorant or both. Could be both. What’s his motive? Fuck knows. Maybe he doesn’t know. It used to be your territory – and it’s not a nice place. Right?’
‘You could say that.’
Bernardo had regarded Father Demetrio as a friend, for many years.
Friendship could be temporary or everlasting.
Two old men, in the twilight of their working lives, sipping brandy with water: the friendship was sealed because each knew enough of the other for a prison sentence stretching to a distant future, a bullet and a body in a ditch, or a disappearance.
The priest had a history of collaboration and association with Bernardo’s family. Bernardo had committed the grievous crime of child murder and the priest had played a peripheral part in the disposal of a body. Neither was free of the other. Priests had been shot dead, had found severed pigs’ heads on the sacristy steps, had been denounced for the abuse of children to the bishop and forced into premature retirement and poverty. Bernardo worried about his friend Father Demetrio.
It was in Bernardo’s nature to identify a cause of worry and take action to staunch it.
They talked about men they had known who had died in their beds, women who were eccentric, younger men who languished in the prisons of the north, the weather forecast for the coming month, and the quality that year – good – of the projected olive harvest. They smoked and talked of plans for a new football pitch in the village that would need heavy plant to level a playing area, a project likely to warrant plaudits to the priest from his bishop, and credit to Bernardo, who would bankroll it. It would bring enhanced respectability to both men. They discussed the price of diesel – and, briefly, the increasingly intrusive investigations by the carabinieri and the Squadra Mobile. They did not mention the death of an informer, or a family in the village who now mourned a murdered but disowned man.
Bernardo’s anxieties stemmed from being alone in the bunker, from hearing and seeing the child. Her open eyes had caught the light of the flash and the newspaper had been laid on her chest. The photograph had told the lie. His age and his loneliness in the bunker made him think most nights of the cave and their prisoner. Mamma had insisted that Father Demetrio should come to the place in the woods. In the years of his married life, Bernardo had listened to her only rarely on a matter of conscience or tactics. He had then.
He let the priest shuffle the deck. They would play cards for an hour and talk a little more, though silences between them were not awkward. There was an old cellar underneath the kitchen of the presbytery where the priest lived. Once, both of Bernardo’s sons had hidden there when the carabinieri had come for them – the steps down were well disguised in a pantry cupboard. The church roof had been a good enough reward, new timbers and tiles; the school had needed new toilets and the bureaucracy in Reggio had backed away at the cost.
The cards were dealt. Father Demetrio’s hands were unlike Bernardo’s: no callouses, few wrinkles and no old blisters from hard work with tools. They were smooth-skinned and narrow, the nails clipped like a woman’s. There might have been truth in the rumours of where those hands had strayed but Bernardo had scotched them. He lifted his cards and scanned them.
It was about his age, the faint weakening of his resolve, and his inability to wipe away the image of the child. He worried that Father Demetrio might harbour similar feelings. The papers had said police were searching for a child, and later reported that a photograph of her, living, had been sent to her family, then that a ransom had been paid, but the parents had not been reunited with their child. That money, a million American dollars, had paid for the first investment, a deal done in Medellin in distant Colombia. The priest had been called and escorted to the place. He had knelt on a plastic bag beside the grave, a mound of earth. He would have realised a child lay in it, from its length, and had said a prayer.
He was ageing now. He would want to go to his Maker having made a clean breast of it. Presumably the priest believed in his Maker. Increasingly Bernardo worried that Father Demetrio might visit a senior figure in the archdiocese and confess his part in the matter.