There was nothing the matter with Carmen. Nothing physical, at least. Nothing other than having spent a good chunk of her day in mortal terror. She refused all offers of medical help and insisted on being taken directly to Cosenza police station so that she could give her statement while her memory was fresh and her anger hot. The station was in chaos, however. Dozens of ’Ndrangheta suspects had been arrested that afternoon and were being processed. Her escorting officer parked her in reception while he went in search of someone with decent English. She never saw him again. An hour passed. She asked at the desk. A kindly young woman made her a cup of mint tea and tried valiantly to take her statement, but her English simply wasn’t up to it, so Carmen volunteered to write it all down herself. Once she’d started, it all came out – not just what had happened that day, but the truth of the Surace murders too: how she’d in fact remained conscious throughout, witnessing the men in balaclavas as they’d murdered Vittorio and Giulia Surace, the grotesque conversation they’d had.
The office door opened abruptly. The ispettore walked in, holding her purse, which he returned to her with a show of gratitude and deference. They held an awkward conversation, translated as best as the woman officer could manage. Carmen asked about her phone and passport. Neither had been found, but he promised to send them on if they turned up. In the meantime, could he show her some mugshots for her two escaped abductors? She looked through several pages of photos, but saw neither. He asked whether she’d come back in the morning to work with a sketch artist. She agreed. He thanked her, then asked her not to talk to anyone yet about what had happened, as operations were ongoing and further arrests planned. She agreed to this too, then returned to her statement, finishing it – with a kind of bitter satisfaction – with an account of how Cesco had gone to the Suraces’ farmhouse last night and burned it down.
Her bravado was by now wearing thin. She felt a reaction coming on. She signed her statement, took a copy for herself, then left. Night had fallen. It had turned cold and gusty. It began to spit with rain as she walked, then turned suddenly into such a deluge that she had to run the last fifty metres for the sanctuary of her lobby. She dripped freely on the stairs as she made her way to the apartment, only to hesitate on the landing.
What if Cesco was still here? What if he was inside?
The door was locked. She listened a moment at it then opened it quietly and poked in her head. The place was empty. Sometimes you just knew. She called out anyway. Then, leaving the door ajar just in case, she checked each room in turn. His clothes and bag were gone, his duvet flapped out neatly over his bed. His keys were on the bedside table, but not her phone. There was no note, no apology, no effort at explanation or excuse. She told herself she was glad that he hadn’t tried to defend the indefensible. And yet, inside, she ached.
The road from Lamezia Terme to Cosenza ran north alongside the coast for much of the way, long dark strips of nothingness punctuated by quaint fishing villages with drab accretions of industrial estates and modern apartment blocks. Dov grew bored. He searched the radio for music to drum his fingers to. ‘Your plan,’ he said.
‘My plan?’ asked Zara.
‘The minister told me your first step was to hook up with some American woman.’
‘Yes. I was trying to write her an email at the airport. Only I kept being disturbed.’
‘You haven’t sent it, then? You need help?’
She shook her head. ‘She posted a picture of her apartment on my message board. I was planning to bump into her in the morning.’
He slid her a look. ‘Seriously? That’s easier than an email?’
She flushed a little. ‘I can always send one if this doesn’t work.’
‘You know what she looks like, then?’
‘Everyone on our discussion board has a profile photograph. Anyway, I’m hoping that she recognises me. I’m fairly well known in our community.’
‘A celeb, huh. Who’d have thought?’
The radio pipped the hour. An announcer read the news. There’d been great excitement in Cosenza that afternoon, it turned out. A dramatic hostage rescue and dozens of Mafia arrests. Dov scowled. It meant the police would be out in force. Sure enough, when they reached Cosenza, the night sky fluttered blue. But they made it to Zara’s hotel without alarm. It was large and modern, with a car park to its rear and a restaurant on its ground floor open to anyone, not just guests. He found an empty bay in the shadows then reached into the back to unzip his bag and take out a burner phone and its charger. ‘This is for contacting me,’ he told Zara. ‘My number’s already programmed in. Don’t use it for anything else, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Text me your room number the moment you’re in.’
‘Where will you be staying?’
‘You don’t need to know that. Now go on in. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t need to. Order room service then get an early night. Tomorrow’s a big day. Understand?’
‘I understand.’
‘Good.’ He watched her fetch her bags from the boot then go inside. She had a nice walk. He took a fresh shirt, underwear and toiletries from his overnight bag and packed them into his laptop case. Ten minutes passed. His phone pinged. Zara was in room 512. He pulled on a baseball cap and dark glasses, slung his laptop bag over his shoulder then went around the front to enter the restaurant that way. It was large, dimly lit and almost empty. He ordered a beer and a cheeseburger then sat in the darkest available booth.
On a mission this delicate, Dov couldn’t afford to leave a trail. That made accommodation awkward. Hotels insisted on seeing a passport, booking websites required a credit card. Avram had given him 5,000 euros in cash for incidental expenses, but even that would mean having to meet someone to hand it over. And he could hardly sleep in the Renault, not with the police on high alert.
His burger arrived. He squeezed a couple of sachets of ketchup onto the chips then scoffed it all down. He grabbed his laptop bag again then found the stairs and walked briskly up to the fifth floor, keeping his head down from the cameras. There was a tray on the floor outside Zara’s room, a half-eaten tagliatelle in a creamy sauce and the smears of chocolate dessert. He checked both ways to make sure the corridor was empty, then knocked. Footsteps padded on carpet. ‘Who’s there?’ asked Zara.
‘Me.’
She opened the door a little way. ‘What is it?’
He put a finger to his lips then pushed his way inside and closed the door behind him. He made his way past a shiny white bathroom into a warmly lit room of powder blue, furnished with a desk, an armchair, a large-screen TV and a king-sized bed. He pressed down on the mattress. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Just so you know, I sleep right side.’
‘You what? Like hell!’
He turned to stare at her. ‘Have you forgotten who’s in charge here?’
‘I don’t care. You’re not staying in my room.’
‘I’m staying wherever the fuck I want,’ he said, advancing on her. She backed away against the wall. He still came on, intruding into her space, their bodies almost touching, staring at her until she dropped her eyes. Women were like horses that way. You only needed to break them once. He nodded at her and walked off, leaving her still wilted.
A floor-length white net curtain covered a smoked-glass balcony door. He slid it open. The gust of fresh night air made the net billow as he stepped out. Pink and blue neon crosses adorned the roofs of nearby churches. He could see the flutter of police lights, the red stream of tail lights on a one-way road, the white span of an illuminated suspension bridge that swept like an angel’s wing across the glossy black strip of a river. He leaned over the railing to look straight down five storeys to hard tarmac beneath.
Perfect.
He went back inside, closed the door behind him. Zara was still against the wall, forearms up like a boxer on a standing count. He winked at her then kicked off his shoes and stretched out on his side of the king-size. There was a remote control on the bedside table. He turned on the TV then started flipping channels in the hope of finding something halfway decent to watch. Then he smiled up at her and patted the bed beside him to invite her to come join him.
There were no provisions to speak of in the Moccono house, so Tomas and Guido stopped at a store on the way back from Cosenza. It began to pour as they set off with their purchases, misting up the glass even with the heating on, so that they had to buzz the windows down a hair, even though it meant being spattered by rain.
They parked right by the front door. The guttering was so clogged that the rainwater poured over its side like a bead curtain, splashing down the collar of Tomas’s jacket as he wiggled the key in the stiff lock. It was cold inside. He tried the lights. Nothing happened. The grid around here was notoriously prone to failure in the rain, let alone in a storm like this – but at least they had a back-up generator. He found a torch in the kitchen then went down into the basement to start it.
The rain abruptly stopped, leaving everything slick and dark. Clear sky reappeared, even a little warmth. Neither felt like cooking, so Guido went back into town for pizza. They turned on the outside lights and went out onto the covered terrace where they tore the pizzas apart with their bare hands and washed them down with a good coarse red that made the throat burn. Rainwater dripped from the eaves and gutters, like percussionists on a soft jam. The soil of the olive groves fizzed with moisture, releasing a perfume so rich it was almost intoxicating. The cicadas began their joyful screech. They opened a second bottle. Despite the setbacks of the day, a bellyful of pizza and red wine gave Tomas as profound a sense of contentment as he could remember. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Guido.
Tomas threw his brother an affectionate look. He loved him more than anyone in the world, even more than his two sons, who he barely saw these days anyway. He and Guido had been inseparable their whole lives, but especially since moving to Amsterdam in their teens after Luca Critelli had asked their father to set up a base there, from which to supply their larger Western European customers with cocaine. He’d made a tremendous success of it too, despite sporadic turf wars with the Albanians and Russians.
Liver cancer had taken their father four years before. As the elder son, Guido should by rights have succeeded him, but they’d both known that Tomas was the better choice. They’d agreed to call themselves partners, therefore, while letting Tomas make the decisions that mattered. Another man might have settled for carrying on as before. Not Tomas. He’d had an insatiable need to outdo his father, driven by the knowledge that he’d always held him in contempt, simply because he’d loved reading as a boy, and had wet his bed for a while after moving to Holland, and because he’d always been squeamish at the sight of blood.
The way his father had mocked him for this had given others licence to do the same. Tomas had said nothing while his father had still lived. But it had been the first thing he’d needed to address once the cancer had won. He and Guido had therefore taken a team to surprise the Albanians one night. They’d caught them in their own warehouse, taking them captive before they’d realised what was happening. He’d isolated their three bosses then made their foot soldiers watch as he himself had hacked off their heads one by one with a hunting knife. Guido had offered to do it for him – it was all just meat to him – but Tomas had insisted. He’d suffered nightmares for months afterwards, in which those three men had returned from the dead to do the same to him; but no one had ever again called him soft.
The surviving Albanians had fallen into line. The Russians too. The threat of decapitation had that effect on people. It terrified them far more than the thought of merely dying. Their turnover had quickly doubled, then had reached nine figures. Their profitability had been insane until a vast shipment of cocaine had been seized in Gioia Tauro and the Critellis had been arrested. Soon enough, they’d run out of product to sell. That was when the Critellis had ordered him and Guido to come down here personally to carry out the Mancuso kidnap. Ordered them, mind, not asked. Because that was the ’Ndrangheta for you. To the ’Ndrangheta, Amsterdam meant shit. Only Calabria mattered.
‘You ever wonder about moving back?’ he asked.
Guido looked curiously at him. ‘I thought we’d decided.’
‘We’d decided better to rule in Amsterdam than serve here. But we wouldn’t be serving, would we?’
‘You’re suggesting we take over?’
‘Someone’s going to, oh my brother. Why not us?’
‘We don’t have the numbers.’
‘No one has the numbers. Everyone’s in jail. Yet someone will end up boss. Someone always does.’
‘What about our oath?’
‘We did our best by it.’
‘The brothers won’t see it that way.’
‘No. But if we do this, they’re first to go. Along with their families. It’ll be how we announce ourselves.’
‘Oh.’
Tomas reached out to touch his arm. ‘You like their cousin Magdalena still, don’t you?’
Guido shrugged. ‘She’s always been nice to me.’
‘Fine. She can live, then. If she bends the knee.’
Silence fell. Tomas let it. Guido was not an imaginative man, but once an idea took root, you’d need a tractor to pull it out. He drained his glass, refilled it, then drained that one too. ‘How would we go about it?’ he asked finally.
Tomas was a strategist. He understood how power worked. Everything they needed to run Cosenza was already in place. Their South American suppliers, the ships’ crews, customs officers, customers, drivers, pushers, politicians, judges and police. Such people had no loyalty to the Critellis, only to the envelope and the gun. But Guido, he knew, wasn’t asking about that. He was a soldier. What interested him was blood. ‘We call Amsterdam,’ he said. ‘We have Massimo put together a team. A dozen should be plenty. Good Calabrian stock. Loyal only to us. They’ll need to bring their own guns, which means coming by road. Give them the order tonight, they can be here Wednesday. As for the brothers, there are plenty of good men inside with no reason to love them. Offer six figures a head, they’ll be dead by nightfall. Then we’ll set a new arse upon the throne.’
‘Whose? Yours or mine?’
‘Depends on whether people come to kiss it or kick it.’
‘Fuck you,’ laughed Guido.
‘Well?’ asked Tomas.
The sky had by now cleared completely. It was a perfect spill of stars. Amsterdam had its pleasures, especially while one was young, but they were neither of them that any more. They were Calabrian at heart, and nothing Holland had to offer could compare to a night like this. Guido’s chin lifted as he looked up at it, at all those constellations named for warriors and gods. His chest swelled with mountain air. ‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘Why the fuck not?’
Tomas raised his glass. ‘The brothers are dead,’ he said.
‘Long live the brothers,’ replied Guido.