Michael Dibdin - End games

He was awakened by stabbing pains and a sense of suffocation that induced muffled shrieks.

‘Shut up!’

The low voice was also muffled, but Mantega had already recognised Giorgio’s body odour. The gag over his mouth was removed.

‘On your feet.’

The intruder twisted Mantega’s right arm up behind his back and walked him through the dark topography of the house to the kitchen. Visibility was slightly better here, thanks to the security light on the patio. Giorgio sat his captive down on a chair beside the long table strewn with various incongruous artefacts purchased by Gina as part of her unending attempts to create a gracious home and stood over him, his back to the window, his face in shadow. He was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket and a dark woollen hat. His huge hands gleamed in the ambient light like dangling crabs.

‘Keep your voice low,’ Giorgio said. ‘The house is under surveillance.’

‘Who by?’

‘The cops, of course. It took me almost two hours to get in. They’re good, but I’m better.’

Mantega thought this over, then frowned.

‘The burglar alarm?’ prompted Giorgio. ‘One of my friends disabled that on a previous visit, before things got hot. He’s a wizard with wiring. The system looks like it’s working, but it’s just talking to itself. Or perhaps it was your dog you were thinking of? Another friend of mine tossed a chunk of poisoned meat over the fence after the cops outside had handed you off to the team that follows you around during the day.’

Mantega’s eyes had adjusted by now, and his brain was more alert. The reason for the strange gleam on Giorgio’s hands became obvious. He was wearing a pair of those skin-tight latex gloves used by doctors.

‘It seems like this is all news to you,’ Giorgio went on, ‘which just confirms my feeling that you’ve become a liability rather than an asset. All these phone calls you’ve been making, whining and bitching away like some woman! That’s not how a man conducts himself. I need men about me, Nicola, now more than ever. So I’ve decided that the time has come to sever our connection.’

One of the gleaming hands disappeared for a moment. Then it was back, holding a blade whose gleam was even more intense and much colder.

‘No one saw me come and no one will see me go. I suppose you will be missed eventually, but not for many days. Those days are vital to us to make our plans without the fear of being betrayed by a scumbag like you. Your job for us is done, Nicola. All you can do now is harm.’

To his surprise, Mantega found that he was perfectly calm.

‘You’re right about one thing, Giorgio,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of harm that I can do, even from beyond the grave. Do you think it didn’t occur to me that you might try this? The way you murdered Newman and mutilated that poor kid, it’s clear that you’ve gone out of your mind. Well, I’ve been in this game long enough not to trust crazies, so a complete statement of all our dealings — not just about Newman, but everything, back from the very beginning — is in the hands of a third party and will be deposited with the authorities if anything happens to me. Names, locations, dates, ransom paid and all particulars of both you and your friends. Given that this latest exploit of yours is headline news, that would naturally result in the biggest manhunt this country has seen for years, with you as the star of the show.’

He held up his hand.

‘Now, you may think that the whole community will form a circle and protect you faithfully whatever the cost. That would be a mistake. People round here have a healthy respect for power and patronage, but they don’t have any more time for sadistic crackheads than I do. You’ll be on your own and on the run, Giorgio. Even your friends may eventually start wondering how much your friendship is worth. Sooner or later there’ll be a fire-fight at some ruined farmhouse where you’ve been holed up in misery for months like a kidnap hostage yourself, and you will come out of it either dead or facing a life sentence without parole in that high-security hostel in Terni.’

Giorgio gestured his boredom.

‘This is just talk, Nicola. The plain fact is I don’t need you any more.’

He approached, knife held out. It was then that Mantega had his supreme inspiration.

‘Maybe not, but you do need money. And I’m talking about serious money, the kind that will buy friends and influence people or spirit you away abroad if things get too hot here. That’s what you need, Giorgio, and I know where you can get it. Therefore you need me.’

Even Mantega didn’t really believe that this last-minute appeal was going to work, but he felt he owed it to his reputation as a notaio di fiducia to give it a whirl. In the event, it stopped Giorgio in his tracks. He must be even more cash-strapped than I thought, Mantega reflected. This didn’t entirely surprise him. Giorgio’s eagerness when Mantega had suggested Peter Newman as a kidnapping prospect indicated that his finances had been at a low point. Since he had chosen to kill his hostage rather than ransom him, with the additional costs of the operation he might well be close to broke by now. Despite their operational efficiency and ruthless enforcement methods, Giorgio and his associates hadn’t progressed much beyond the ‘feast or famine’ approach of the historical brigands. Whatever money they had, they spent, then looked around for more.

Mantega stood up and smiled widely.

‘Put away that knife, Giorgio, and I’ll tell you how you can make yourself a sackful of cash in a week or two, and at no risk whatsoever. Because the beauty of this scheme is that it isn’t even illegal, strictly speaking.’

Giorgio attempted a contemptuous laugh.

‘What kind of bullshit is this?’

‘A very easy and lucrative kind,’ Mantega returned with just the right professional polished ease. ‘Draw up a chair, Giorgio. Let’s get rich!’

Aurelio Zen stayed at his desk until ten o’clock that night, feeling more and more like the captain of a doomed vessel who is reluctantly observing the tradition of going down with his ship. Should he contact the investigating magistrate and advise the arrest of Nicola Mantega and Dionisio Carduzzi, both of them prima facie material witnesses and probable accessories to murder, the former before the fact and the latter after, as the call-catcher and go-between for the man known as Giorgio? Or should he hold off and wait for the even more opportune moment which all his instincts told him was not far off?

In the end he decided that he was too tired to make an effective decision. He walked back through the brooding darkness to his apartment, packed an overnight bag, then phoned the Questura’s car pool and arranged for a vehicle to drive him first to the Cosenza Nord service station on the autostrada, where he bought a panino and a litre of mineral water, and then up the spectacular highway that snaked up out of the Crati flood plain before piercing the range of mountains in a series of tunnels and viaducts and twisting steeply down to the coast and the main north-south railway line.

It was a mild night, and Zen spent the hour or so he had to wait sitting outside on a station bench eating his ham and cheese roll, smelling the heady perfume of the sea breezes and listening to the distant hushing of waves on the beach. Leaving Cosenza felt like escaping from a locked room. By the time the Conca d’Oro night sleeper from Palermo pulled in at twenty to one in the morning, he was quite content to stretch out on his bed in a spacious Excelsior compartment and fall asleep for five and a half dreamless hours.

It was only when he was ejected from this sanctuary into the commuter rush hour at Rome that he realised to what extent he had become a provincial after just a few months in Calabria. He found it both physically difficult and emotionally repugnant to battle his way through the riptide of people coming at him from every direction, empty eyes trained like a gun on the personal zone immediately in front of them, attention absorbed by the loud songs or little voices in their heads, fingers fiddling with iPods and mobile phones, all oblivious of each other and their surroundings, marching relentlessly onwards like the ranks of the damned.