Cry Wolf Read online

  ‘There are no wolves in heaven,’ his mother had said. ‘Go to London and stay there, Seb. The mafiosi will slaughter each other before too long. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come home.’

  The feud was still going on, one or two dead each week, his mother reported, sometimes more.

  Goodbye, PhD.

  Goodbye, Canis lupus italicus.

  He had found a job with an estate agency easily enough. He had a master’s degree in ethology, the branch of biology that deals with animal behaviour, but they didn’t give a damn about the life cycle of the Apennine wolf. His English was good enough to sell flats, and that was all they cared about. Could he sell two or three flats a month? He thought he could, so the interviewer came to the punchline. There was no salary, the woman said, just luncheon vouchers, an Oyster card if he had to use the Underground, and he’d be paid one per cent of every sale.

  ‘How much do flats in London cost?’

  The woman smiled at him. ‘Anywhere from one-fifty for a bedsit to six or seven hundred for a two-room flat with a view.’

  ‘Seven hundred thousand pounds?’

  She nodded while he did the maths in his head. Three flats at an average of three hundred thousand, and he’d be making nine thousand pounds a month. He didn’t think twice. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said.

  ‘You can rent a bedsit from us for one-fifty a week,’ the interviewer added.

  ‘One hundred and fifty thou …’

  ‘Pounds,’ she said, not getting the joke, and they shook hands on it.

  The bedsit was a dump. A basement room in a Victorian terrace near King’s Cross. After a fair start, he hadn’t sold a flat for three months. His bank roll was running low. He was going to have to smooth-talk the Americans today. The asking price for the ‘stunning views and spectacular panorama’ was five hundred thousand, five hundred and fifty pounds. ‘You can give them a fifty quid discount,’ Claire Maunders, the office manager, had said as he’d picked up the sales folder from her desk the night before.

  Talk about making life easier!

  He’d been checking his email ten times a day. He was waiting for a reply to the application he had sent off five weeks before. He hadn’t said a word to his parents about it. His father would have said he was crazy, his mother would have cried her eyes out trying to dissuade him. One night, while trawling the Internet, looking for news about wolves, he had checked out the Italian Parks Administration site and an announcement had caught his eye. They were recruiting rangers. All you needed was a degree in animal biology to gain admittance to the two-month training course. He would never have considered joining the police or the carabinieri, but a park policeman was a different proposition. You looked after animals, protected forests and mountains and warned off poachers. There was no chasing after criminals.

  And where there were forests and mountains, there were wolves …

  He was sick of London. Anywhere in Italy would do. Any place that didn’t stink of chips and beer and worn-out fitted carpet.

  Anywhere except Calabria.

  TWO

  January, 2012 – Rome

  Alfredo Dandini had never been there after dark.

  He had never seen the place so empty, hadn’t realized just how huge it really was.

  He stood beneath the massive colonnade, looking out across St Peter’s Square, trying to figure out which of the two fountains was the one that the Legend had called the fontana antica. There was no way of telling the two fountains apart. They looked identical, except for the papal coats of arms.

  As church bells chimed four a.m., he stepped out from behind the column and walked towards the nearest fountain.

  He had never felt so exposed in his life. There were lifesize statues of a hundred angels, saints and patriarchs along the parapets on all sides of the square. Anyone could be hiding up there, watching.

  Why had the Legend chosen such a place for a meeting? Did he already know what was going on?

  It had rained for most of the night. The paving stones gleamed in the first flush of dawn, mirroring the crushing mass of Michelangelo’s huge basilica and dome directly ahead of him.

  He reached the safety of the fountain with a sense of relief.

  He glanced behind him, then looked all around. A weak light was shining in the Vatican guardbox at the end of Via della Conciliazione, but there wasn’t another soul or light in sight. He lit a cigarette and dragged the smoke deep down into his lungs.

  It wasn’t like the Legend to be late.

  ‘Alfredo!’

  It might have been the voice of God calling out to him.

  Alfredo Dandini dropped his cigarette and went to meet the man who stepped out of the shadows, the man he had served so faithfully for the last five years.

  ‘Signor Generale …’

  ‘Signore will do,’ the older man cut him off.

  ‘Sì, signore.’

  ‘Why aren’t we both at home in our beds, Alfredo?’

  It was hard to know where to start – even harder to act the part. ‘They’re out to get you, sir. The magistrates in Milan have opened a file, and your name is written on the cover.’

  The Legend took a deep breath. ‘What do they have on me?’

  ‘They’re questioning the way you operate, sir. Too many men, too much theatre, they say. The press is always on the scene when you arrive. They’re talking about the costs, the long-term gains.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Your reputation’s growing, signore – you should have expected it. There are people who are jealous; others who would want to step into your shoes.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘If you go down, sir, many of us will go down, too. I was part of those operations.’

  The Legend looked away. ‘I won’t forget your loyalty,’ he said.

  ‘I’m proud to have been of service,’ Dandini murmured, hoping that he hadn’t gone too far.

  The general was quiet for some moments. ‘As if criminals and the Mafia weren’t enough,’ he said, ‘I have to defend myself against Italian magistrates as well. I won’t give up without a fight.’

  Dandini lit another cigarette as General Corsini walked away cross the square, his footsteps echoing around the vast empty space until he vanished between the enormous columns like a wraith returning to the grave. He stood by the fountain for a few more minutes, shivering with cold, and with something else, too – an emotion he couldn’t easily put a name to. He flicked his cigarette into the fountain.

  Was it a sacrilege to use the holy fountain as an ashtray? he wondered.

  Was it any more sacrilegious than what he had just done?

  THREE

  March, 2012 – Turin

  They looked like Palestinian terrorists going into action.

  They were all wearing the same uniform – a black hoody, a keffiyeh, jeans.

  ‘Be careful, Giovanni!’ one of the girls cried, wetting her knickers for the fucker.

  Giovanni, my arse! Lorenzo thought. He could be anyone, a police spy, even.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Giovanni shouted to the boy below him.

  It was a trick they had used before, it seemed. As the boy below stood up straight, Giovanni used the cracks in the wall to pull himself higher. The others cheered as he stood like an acrobat in the circus, a paint canister in his hand, stretching in the direction of the CCTV camera. He pressed the aerosol button and hit the lens square in its electronic eye.

  Red paint dripped to the pavement like blood.

  ‘The camera’s dead!’ someone shouted, and the whole gang started screeching and prancing about as if their team had scored a goal.

  Lorenzo didn’t join the throng. He watched Giovanni jump to the ground like Braveheart, hoping the bastard would fall flat on his tits.

  At every demonstration there was a ‘Giovanni’ in the thick of it, organizing the ranks, giving out orders, telling everyone what to do, as if he’d seen it all a thousand times before. They were French or German as a rule,
members of the Black Block who came creeping out of the woodwork whenever there was something to protest about. Jean, Juan, Johann, or just plain Johnny-boy, the Italians found it easier to call them all Giovanni. It puzzled the cops, though. Giovanni was here and there and everywhere, just like the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  ‘While the fuzz are seeing red,’ Giovanni joked, uncovering his face, ‘we get on with the revolution!’

  All the others pulled their Palestinian keffiyeh scarves down, too.

  All except Lorenzo.

  He wasn’t taking his green scarf off for anyone. Green for the woods and the hills of Umbria that he was ready to fight for.

  Giovanni hit the metal roll-door of the garage with the flat of his hand and they all bent down to help him pull it up. A light blue Fiat Fiorino van reversed quickly out of the garage and pulled up on the pavement. The protestors crowded around the back of the van, stepping aside to let Giovanni through. Like Moses crossing the Red Sea, Lorenzo thought. They behaved like soldiers. They were disciplined, obedient to every word the foreign wanker said. Giovanni stood out in the crowd. He was tall and blue-eyed, with long blond dreadlocks tied back in a mangy ponytail. He spoke Italian well, but there was something not quite right about his accent. Maybe that was why the others obeyed him. He was exotic, charismatic, the undisputed leader of their group, even though they had only met him the night before.

  ‘Sheep,’ Lorenzo muttered.

  He wanted to be in on the revolution, but not as a follower of all the Giovannis who were knocking around. He wanted to be the leader. He wanted people to follow him.

  ‘All this for bottled water and Maalox?’ Lorenzo sneered. ‘They can’t arrest you …’

  Giovanni pulled his keffiyeh up over his face again, and everyone did the same thing.

  Lorenzo did the opposite. He wasn’t a mindless goon like this lot. No foreigner wanker was going to tell him what to do. An anarchist didn’t take orders from anyone.

  Giovanni turned on him, and Lorenzo saw a hint of a smile in his eyes. Was the bastard laughing behind his mask?

  ‘This is the serious stuff,’ Giovanni snapped.

  Lorenzo grinned at him. ‘You serving up snacks, now?’

  The asshole had been giving orders since the night before in the pizzeria.

  Well, Che Guevara had just fucked up! All this malarkey for pills and water.

  Giovanni threw open the rear doors of the Fiorino. There was enough wood and iron in there to build a railway. The van was loaded down to the axles with clubs, iron bars, yellow construction workers’ helmets, plastic binlid shields, Molotov cocktails, stones and gas masks.

  ‘Unload it fast!’ Giovanni shouted. ‘Hide it round the corner. The paint won’t block out the camera for long. If they realize what we’re doing, they’ll be on us like a ton of bricks.’

  All the kids made a grab for something, and the van was empty within minutes.

  Lorenzo stood by the door but he didn’t help. He caught Giovanni by the arm, swung him around.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Last night we were talking about a peaceful demonstration. We all lie flat on the ground and wait for the cops to carry us off—’

  ‘That was last night,’ Giovanni said, his blue eyes glaring hard into Lorenzo’s. ‘You’re the guy from the country – Umbria, right? You should go back to shagging sheep there. This is urban war.’

  Giovanni slapped his palm against the side of the Fiorino and the van drove back into the garage. ‘Now, slow down, everyone. Nice and slow. Bring out the bottles of water and the boxes of Maalox stacked against the wall,’ he shouted. ‘That’s what we want the coppers to see.’

  Lorenzo knew what the Maalox and water were for. If you soaked your scarf with the solution it protected your eyes from the effects of tear gas and stopped you from throwing up.

  Giovanni pointed his thumb at the camera. ‘This is all they’ll see. But when the moment comes for action, we’ll be ready. They won’t know where the ammunition came from.’

  He pushed past Lorenzo, giving him a playful slap on his shaven scalp. ‘They’ll see you, that’s for sure. Cover your face, you bumpkin!’

  Lorenzo stood there for a couple of minutes, watching the kids walk slowly into the garage, coming out with plastic packs of mineral water and big brown boxes marked Maalox. Then, he turned away. The sight of the water made him thirsty, but you couldn’t use the band’s reserves to slake your thirst.

  There was a fountain on the other side of the square so he went over there, ducked his head beneath the cold water gushing from a lion’s mouth and drank from the tap. By the time he turned back, the protestors had disappeared.

  Fuck them all! he thought.

  When he got back home to Umbria, he’d do things his own way.

  There was another CCTV camera above the fountain.

  He didn’t see it, blinded by the sun on his glasses.

  FOUR

  April, 2012 – Umbria

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  Still, Andrea Bonanni didn’t get in.

  One hand on the car door, a puzzled expression on his face. ‘You know how it is, Corrà,’ he said. ‘We all say things to pass the time inside the slammer.’

  Corrado Formisano gave him a smile. ‘Climb in, Andrea.’

  As Bonanni got into the car and made himself comfortable, Corrado gunned the motor then turned out of the car park heading for the mountains. ‘You know me,’ Corrado said. ‘A promise is worth more than the Ten Commandments.’

  They had shared a cell for almost a year.

  There was one narrow window in the far wall, and the only thing you could see was the peak of a mountain far beyond the perimeter wall of the maximum-security prison. A regular torture. You saw the mountain every minute of the day, but you couldn’t go up there. It reminded Corrado of a book he’d borrowed from the prison library, the one with pictures of the Greek gods. They had this thing about punishment. The gods had chained this punk next to a pool of water. He could see it, but couldn’t reach it. In the end, he’d died of thirst.

  ‘I’ll take you up there one day,’ Corrado had said as they sat by the window, blowing smoke out through the bars.

  Today was the the day, though things were different now.

  Bonanni rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. ‘You didn’t go back home when you got out, then?’

  ‘I decided that I like it here,’ Corrado said.

  ‘How do you get by?’ Bonanni rubbed his thumb against his finger. ‘Money-wise, I mean?’

  ‘My sister runs a bar, remember? She sends me all I need.’

  ‘And you’ve never been back?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Got something going up here, then?’

  Corrado shrugged his shoulders. ‘I grow some veg, keep sheep and pigs.’

  Bonanni flicked his fag out of the window as they turned on to a stony track. Before they’d gone a hundred yards, he’d lit another one.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said, staring out of the window as if the trees and shrub were the only thing he cared about.

  Corrado shrugged his shoulders. ‘Shoot,’ he said.

  Bonanni turned to look at him. ‘You were someone in there, Corrado. Someone big, I mean. A man who … who …’ He struggled to find the right word, clenched his hand into a fist then shook it in the air, as if to say that that was the sort of man that Corrado had been. A clenched fist, invulnerable. ‘And now you’re growing fucking lettuce?’

  Corrado waved his hand across the windscreen. An olive grove was giving way to a field that had just been ploughed. ‘It’s sheep or salad up here in Umbria. Just look at it. You can see what sort of place it is.’

  That brought a snigger from Bonanni. ‘There’s other ways of living, Corrà. You don’t have to grow no fruit and veg. Who’s to know what the fuck you’re growing? There’s a serious market for weed up here. Perugia’s a pot-head’s paradise …’

  Corrado smiled and nodded. They’d pa
ssed some good times together in cell forty-three. Andrea Bonanni was a talker; he had an opinion about everything. It was what you needed on the inside, but, well, now that they were out, it didn’t seem right.

  ‘I take it you’re OK, then?’ he said.

  Andrea Bonanni didn’t answer at once. ‘I’m keeping busy,’ he said.

  Corrado kept quiet, waiting for the rest. All you had to do was wait. Inside a cell, or out of it, Bonanni would tell you everything you wanted to know if you had the patience. As the silence lengthened, Andrea said: ‘I get along the way I’ve always done, Corrado. But now … well, it’s … it’s different. Better. I got guarantees, ain’t I? I won’t be going back in there again.’

  ‘Guarantees? Is someone looking out for you?’

  The car hit a bump and lurched to the side. The unpaved track was badly rutted after heavy winter rains that the sun had baked hard.

  ‘There are people … you know, magistrates. They either break your balls or they leave you in peace. I play them along, use the fuckers. I give them a bit of news, they look the other way and hope I’ll give them more. I run with all the line that they give me. I can snap it any time I feel like.’

  Corrado turned his head and stared at his passenger.

  Andrea Bonanni held his stare, a thin smile on his lips.

  ‘How does it work?’ Corrado said, as if he might be interested.

  ‘I’m like a … sort of a … a consultant, like,’ Andrea said.

  Corrado let out a low whistle. ‘One of the big boys.’

  ‘One who intends to survive. I’ve spoken to this magistrate a couple of times. He’s the one that sprung me. He’s waiting for me to give him something juicy, the ambitious twat. His career got lost along the way in Umbria. I’ve got him eating out of my hand.’

  ‘He hasn’t given up on his ambitions, then?’

  ‘It looks that way. Which is a bit of luck for me.’

  Bonanni lit another fag, took a big puff and blew smoke out of the window. Then he leaned in a bit closer. ‘If you felt like having some guarantees yourself, Corrado, they’d roll out the red carpet for a man like you.’