Michael Dibdin - End games

Nguyen digested this in silence for some moments.

‘Well, I can offer you a job right here and now,’ he finally said. ‘It’s only temporary, for as long as I have to stay here, but I’ll pay five hundred dollars a day in cash.’

‘To do what?’

‘Act as my translator and general assistant.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Tom said doubtfully. ‘Pretty much the only thing I can think about right now is my dad, you know?’

‘Okay, how about five hundred euros? That’s over six hundred bucks at current exchange rates.’

Tom thought about this proposition for at least a couple of seconds. After Dawn did a fugue back to her mother in Idaho, citing irreconcilable differences and environmental issues, he discovered that her rosy fingers had previously used his cash card, whose PIN Tom had given her when he was too slammed to go to the machine, to remove all the money in his bank account. He’d had to leverage his Visa credit limit just to get here, but that wouldn’t last for ever and there was no way of knowing how long he’d have to stay. He looked at Nguyen with what he hoped was the expression of a dutiful and disturbed son in a difficult situation.

‘Gee, I don’t know what to say! I could sure use the money, but it might look bad, you know? I mean, profiting from my father’s ordeal.’

‘Who’s to know? You’ll be paid in cash, either here or back in the States, whichever you prefer. And if someone does find out, so what? You were just helping out a family friend in a tough spot.’

Tom sighed deeply.

‘Well, okay, I guess. Plus it might help take my mind off this nightmare.’

‘But for that kind of money I expect you to be on call twenty-four seven, okay? I can’t tell when something might come up where I need you. In fact, tomorrow you’d better move to the hotel where I’m staying. I’ll comp you the room and all meals.’

He glanced at the tab and threw some money on the table.

‘Okay, I’ll be heading back. Don’t stay up too late eyeballing the brood mares. We’ve got to make an early start. I’ll pick you up around four-thirty, quarter to five.’

For the first time, Tom felt genuinely dismayed by Nguyen’s job proposition.

‘Heck, it’ll hardly be light then!’

‘We’re headed for a facility where the shift starts at six, and I need to brief the personnel. Some of them speak English, some of them don’t.’

He broke off and stared at Tom.

‘How much did your dad tell you about what we’re doing here?’

‘Practically nothing. He never talked about his work.’

Or about anything else, he thought. My dad never talked to me. My dad never spoke Italian to me.

‘Okay, I’ll fill you in tomorrow,’ said Nguyen. ‘Be sure and get a good night’s rest. I want you on deck and ready to roll when my car pulls up at your hotel.’

‘Hell, you’re the one who should worry about that, Mr Nguyen! Getting in from the States today and all. That jet-lag can kill you.’

From one of the many secret drawers artfully concealed in the lacquered cabinet of his skull, Martin Nguyen produced a lush smile of poisonous beauty.

‘I’ve given up sleeping. My doctor said it was bad for me.’

Nicola Mantega was not a particularly stupid or careless man. His fatal weakness was that he was a creature of habit.

The massive police raid that afternoon and evening on the town of Altomonte Nuova had been widely reported on the local news, but without any reason being given. When interviewed, some of the townsfolk mentioned repeated flights by police helicopters during the day to the abandoned town perched high above its successor, but claimed to have no idea what this was all about. The police themselves were saying nothing and all access to the area had been cordoned off.

Superficially, none of this was of any obvious personal concern to Mantega himself. That was how a northerner would have argued, but Nicola knew better. The people of the south had been treated as a form of insect life for so long, he liked to argue, that they had evolved some of the faculties of insects. Almost powerless against the brute species that ruled the earth — although they could deliver a very nasty, even deadly, sting on occasion — they were hypersensitive to the most minute development in their immediate environment. And now Mantega’s antennae were twitching uncontrollably. He had no idea why, but he knew that further information about this incident was needed, and urgently.

Mantega had spent the evening closeted in his office with one of those clients it was better that he should not be seen consorting with publicly. The subject under discussion was a tender submitted by the client in question for the contract to upgrade a thirty-kilometre section of the toll-free regional A3 motorway to the standard of the rest of the national network, with a view to charging the same kind of money for using it. Recent political changes both in Rome and at local level had made these kinds of negotiation more difficult than formerly, and potentially much more dangerous. This was all very tiresome, and the worst part of it for Mantega was persuading his client that such a change had in fact taken place, that tact and patience were now required to resolve any ensuing problems, and that neither he nor anyone else could smooth everything over by making a couple of phone calls, like in the good old days.

Mantega had done his best, but his mind had been occupied with other matters. His client must have noticed, because he had made a few very pointed comments about possibly ‘needing to seek counsel elsewhere’ before leaving via the fire exit at the rear of the building. Had the circumstances been different, Mantega would have been very concerned by this veiled threat, given the power base and range of contacts of the client in question. As it was, he really didn’t give a damn. His meeting with Giorgio the day before, and now the news of the police raid on Altomonte, made such issues seem relatively trivial. Estimates of the number of officers involved in the raid varied wildly, but the gist was that an operation on such a scale had not been seen in the region for years. And that was only its public face. If a hundred or more officers had been committed to the task of publicly putting the frighteners on the population of an isolated town, there would be an equal or even greater number working covertly behind the scenes. Something big was under way, that was for sure.

All of which brought Mantega’s thoughts back to his relationship with Giorgio. They had attended the same school back in San Giovanni in Fiore, but Mantega had subsequently forgotten about Giorgio’s existence until one day, years later, he popped up seeking help after being fired from his job as a security guard. As a gesture of friendship to an old classmate who had fallen on hard times, Mantega had arranged an introduction to a small-time gang in the city that did armed robberies, lorry hijacks, some drug imports and the odd minor kidnapping. All had gone well for a year or two, but in the end the gang had dumped Giorgio because, as their capo had put it, ‘This guy’s round the fucking twist.’

Giorgio had then started up in business on his own, exploiting the mainly barren and unclaimed territory between Cosenza and Crotone, but occasionally making forays into the outskirts of either city. Mantega’s fable about Aspromonte to Tom Newman the other evening had of course been disinformational nonsense. Giorgio wouldn’t dare show his face on Aspromonte. But the n’drangheta was extremely territorial, and the clans took little or no interest in affairs outside their own borders. Giorgio had therefore been able to build up a modest but thriving trade on his home turf, to which Mantega acted as a general consigliere and fixer. So when an American named Peter Newman had hired him as a go-between with the local authorities over a film deal, Mantega immediately recognised the irresistible chance to at least quadruple the money on offer by suggesting to Giorgio that he would make an excellent kidnapping prospect.