‘So you wanted to take what was owed.’

  ‘That’s about it. Anyway.’ He levelled the gun at my belly. ‘Enough chitchat. Pack up this stuff.’

  I did as I was told, desperately searching for a way out. Was there anything I could say, do, that was going to save me?

  ‘You killed the kids because that was part of the plan,’ I said. He gestured for me to continue. ‘Your buddy because he would give the game away.’ Nothing. ‘And the Volpatos?’

  ‘Ah.’ This seemed to spark his interest. ‘You mean that couple in Venice? I read about them.’ He waggled the long gun from side to side. ‘We had nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Come on, I saw the Carabiniere with that killer tattoo of yours.’

  ‘Be that as it may – no. Actually, I wondered about them myself. My guess is it’s down to you.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘All your questions. The guy stole from his own archive for a pay-off. Figured he’d been found out. Offed himself out of the shame. It happens, you know.’

  I thought of the old lady smothered in her bed. The way Volpato had died. Yes, from shame – with a suitably sardonic touch.

  I realised I had run out of words.

  I packed the bag and held it out.

  ‘Place it on the floor. Step back.’ He crouched to pick it up. ‘Well,’ he said, as if we were parting at a railway station, ‘I’ll be off, then.’

  He smiled, rather cruelly. He knew precisely what I was expecting.

  ‘Now you know how things stand,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided you’ll be more useful alive: you can make this work for us, and the Faustos. They will deliver the cash tomorrow, and you will be there to make sure it goes without a hitch. Alternatively, you can spend the remainder of your short life looking over your shoulder.’

  I nodded.

  He began to back out. ‘Cheer up, pal. You’ve been granted a second chance. Don’t blow it.’

  Chapter 37

  I didn’t leave straight away. I went to sit back on the stool, stare sightlessly at the Moviola. I’d thought I’d had it. I might still have: my bet was this was less a reprieve than a stay of execution.

  Still, the Comandante had been right – we and the Faustos may have fallen foul of the Ustica network but, as Greco himself had confirmed, this operation was rogue. It had nothing to do with the shady figures in the government and security apparatus – our problem was solely the sergeant and what remained of his gang.

  I let out a long, long breath.

  My phone buzzed a call: ANNA BLOOM. I wasn’t precisely sure what I had been thinking about myself and Anna, but whatever it was, it now seemed as distant as watching her on the big screen or reading about her in the news. I let it ring out. Instead, I called the Comandante.

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘I tried to call.’

  ‘I wanted to do something first.’

  ‘Daniel – are you all right? Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, all in one piece.’

  ‘But something has happened – tell me.’

  I told him.

  ‘Come home,’ he said. ‘We need to talk.’

  Everyone had left – Jacopo across the landing to his own apartment, the Comandante below, to his. I stepped onto the terrace. The automatic gates, whose vulnerabilities were earlier the main thing on my mind, closed behind Dolores, pedalling off into the darkness. Thankfully, Rose had long since gone to bed by the time I had arrived home, and in any case, I suspected my message would have sufficed. She had a head full of her own things – she only required the basics from me.

  There was a glow from the laptops of the Carabinieri in the workshops below, while across the courtyard the rather relentless, but reassuringly spirited, wailing of the baby whose name now hardly seemed to matter, was keeping at least one parent awake.

  The streets were empty, porticoes quiet. Bologna had hunkered down, dreaming sweet and foul – there was no lack of incident in her long history. And tomorrow I would add to it.

  I went back inside, pressed my ear to my daughter’s bedroom door. I could hear nothing. I moved on.

  Chapter 38

  There was an uncommon breeze the next morning, one of the few weather phenomena one did not often encounter in Bologna, ‘inside the walls’, at any rate. But then I was waiting outside, on the forecourt of the petrol station where the walls would have once stood, while the traffic whizzed around the four-lane Viale, sweat dripping down my flanks as a result of the ballistic vest strapped beneath my black jumper and brown sports jacket.

  A grey Audi limousine with tinted glass windows pulled up. The front passenger door opened. The Faustos. I ducked my head in – there was Alberto, and Elettra, in black jeans and a matching jacket, a baseball cap on her head with her hair tied back alla Anna Bloom.

  I got in. ‘The cash?’

  ‘In the boot,’ replied Alberto. I checked out the driver – an elderly guy in a suit and tie.

  ‘Our usual chauffeur,’ said Alberto. ‘They warned us – no surprises.’

  ‘I’m sure they did.’

  The car pulled out and we began to glide along the Viale. The instructions were simple – keep going until Alberto received a message on his phone, which he had set upon the armrest between himself and his granddaughter.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked her.

  She looked grave. ‘How do you think?’

  ‘But do you think you’ll be able to go through with it?’

  Now she looked offended. ‘Of course! A relief to get these pieces of shit off our backs once and for all.’

  ‘You settled on five million, right? But won’t Mestre be expecting something in return?’

  Elettra gave an impatient shake of the head. ‘Don’t worry about Paolo. I’ll deal with him.’ She looked out the window, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  I glanced again at the driver, then turned to Alberto. ‘He …’

  ‘Roderico has been with me since the beginning.’

  ‘So – Isabella?’

  Alberto’s face turned a paler shade of stone.

  ‘My mother,’ said Elettra, not looking away from the window. ‘The fucker raped my mother.’ She reached out and squeezed Alberto’s hand. ‘His daughter-in-law.’

  The limo ate up the Viale, glided between sets of traffic lights. Pulled up to shuffle forward in the inevitable queues.

  Without looking at my phone to check the dates, I made a crude calculation. As we accelerated from another set of lights, I said: ‘So …’

  ‘Yes,’ Elettra said coldly. ‘I am.’

  We had circled the old city for another thirty minutes when the message finally arrived. Before Alberto reached the phone, Elettra had picked it up and was showing it to Roderico.

  ‘But it’s just here.’ He braked, swung the limo over to the side. I looked around – a Vesper swerved around us, then zipped in front. We followed it into a small parking bay beside some traffic lights.

  ‘This is it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s what it says, signore.’

  In front of us, the rider had got off and given a thumbs up, although his visor remained down. It was an unlikely place for a handover, I thought – by the ruins of one of the city gates, with traffic streaming around the roundabout before continuing along the Viale or heading north along a major road out of the city. Va be’ – in a sense, I found the normality reassuring.

  Elettra and I got out. The others had been instructed to stay inside the car.

  The boot popped open. Inside, a pair of silver metal briefcases. I took them out. They were certainly hefty, but it didn’t feel like five mil. Elettra apparently read my mind: ‘It’s all there,’ she said. ‘Five hundred euro notes. They don’t make them anymore but, lucky us, they’re still legal tender.’

  ‘Lucky us.’

  We went around the front of the limo where the guy stood. He gestured us to follow him toward a green iron gate set in an old red-brick wall. He undid the padlock and stepped aside to let us in.

  Then it became clear.

  Chapter 39

  Because apart from its porticoes and food, its cars and computing and packaging, Bologna has always been an armed camp. Positioned as it is in the centre of the industrial north, the city has been Italy’s railway hub and the main base for its military ever since the railway network had figured in any general’s plan of attack.

  It should have come as no surprise Greco would choose one of these places for the handover – barracks were dotted along the Viale, precisely so the army could get to those railways. Only most of them were now abandoned. After Italy had dispensed with military service, the facilities had been mostly left to rot. Anywhere else they would have been sold off, maybe converted into much-needed housing, but – this was Italy.

  So there we were, barbed-wire crested wall to our backs, looking at a deserted military base, still in surprisingly good nick despite the grass sprouting through the tarmac of the road that we began to walk down behind our helmeted chum, passing between deserted brick buildings with mostly unbroken windows. My previous sense of relief had now dissipated. Despite being almost literally a stone’s throw from ordinary life – we could still hear the traffic churning beyond the walls – I felt queasy. We might as well have been on the Moon. We were certainly on Sergeant Greco’s turf.

  The place was all squares and rectangles – the vast, grass-pitted space of the parade ground, row upon row of single-storey residential and office blocks. Ahead, the single building that looked as if it pre-dated 1960 – a kind of military monolith crossing the T of the entire site, a portico running its length, squared columns and arches supporting three storeys of regimented, rectangular windows.

  That portico was interrupted at the main entrance, set in the centre like an open robot mouth. Parked in front – a navy-blue SUV I recognised as Greco’s, although I noted the number plate had been changed.

  The double doors were jammed open. We followed the man into a dim, fusty-smelling entrance. Dingy stone staircases swept upwards on either side, while matching lifts were sealed off with hazard tape. But we continued onward, through another set of double doors, where things brightened up.

  In fact, we were back outside, or at least that was how it felt – a vast, roofless space that may have once been an auditorium but appeared to have become a receptacle for dumped office equipment, while three storeys above, great, rust-coloured iron girders criss-crossed the cloud-patched sky.

  ‘They sold the roof.’ It was Greco, sitting upon the side of what appeared to have once been a filing cabinet but had been swallowed up by the weeds and creepers that had taken over this place. ‘Or maybe someone took it, who knows.’ He nodded amiably at Elettra – ‘Hello again, princess’ – before levelling the machine gun I’d seen him with in the woods at me.

  Paolo Mestre, who had risen from his own perch as we entered, approached us looking at once terrified and love struck.

  ‘Elettra.’ He stood before her but kept his arms pinned to his sides. She gave him the merest of smiles and didn’t move an inch.

  ‘Over there.’ Greco gestured to me with the gun.

  I carried the cases to a folding table that appeared to have been brought especially for the occasion, and set them down. ‘Step back. Aldo.’ The motorcyclist came up behind me and forced my arms upwards to frisk me.

  ‘He’s wearing a vest,’ he said. Greco nodded at me with, perhaps, what may have been a little respect.

  ‘Over there.’ He gestured to a desk turned upon its side hung with ivy. ‘Aldo’ produced a gun and prodded it in my back. When I reached the desk, I turned around to face him and was somehow dismayed to see he had lifted his visor. It did not, apparently, matter if I was able to identify him. Beyond the barrel of the gun, which demands the attention of anyone being held at the wrong end of one, I saw disinterested blue eyes.

  The click of latches. Even from ten or so metres away – the metallic whiff of five million euros. Greco, machine gun slung over his shoulder, checked the contents as Paolo and Elettra looked on.

  ‘Well,’ Greco said finally, failing to keep an edge of relief from his voice, ‘it’s all there.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Elettra said flatly.

  ‘Letti.’ Paolo could no longer restrain himself. He took her, limply, in his large arms. ‘I promise you, you won’t regret this.’

  ‘The negatives, Paolo,’ I heard her say.

  ‘Of course!’ He let her go and walked over to the upturned cabinet from behind which he produced the canvas bag. He brought it over to her. ‘We could keep them if you like – just you and I.’ She took the bag and crouched to go through it. He squatted opposite. ‘I mean, now we have them, we don’t actually have to destroy them, we could keep them in the family, now they’re safe …’

  Had it been anyone else, Paolo Mestre might have instinctively raised an arm in his defence, but precisely because it was Elettra Fausto, the love of his life, apparently reaching out to embrace him over that great bridge of time, he welcomed her with open arms, of course he did.

  Blood drove down the blade, flowed over Elettra’s fingers.

  Mestre’s eyes bulged, hands flapped around her arm as she dug the dagger deep into his neck.

  Raising her other hand to close around the quivering handle, with an effortful grunt she drew the knife sideways.

  It was only now Sergeant Greco, busy admiring the money, took notice – the eruption of blood may have splashed his cash.

  He unharnessed the machine gun, swinging it toward the pair. He pulled the trigger. The bolt snapped but nothing happened.

  ‘Fuck.’

  Aldo looked around. I was about to go for his gun, but wasn’t quick enough: ‘Shoot him,’ Greco shouted.

  I lurched sideways as he pulled the trigger.

  The shot holed the desk, but before he could get off another, a shot ripped through the air and his helmet exploded.

  Aldo staggered backwards, a third of his helmet gone in a smoking mash of carbon, plastic and brain. He dropped the gun and fell flat on his back.

  I scrambled toward him, grabbed the pistol, but Greco was already making for the exit. As he ran, there was another deafening shot and a clump of creeper, that may have once been a chair, disintegrated in his wake.

  I picked myself up and went after him, pushing through the swing doors into the reception. He was already outside, digging into his pocket in front of the SUV, the useless machine gun flung to the ground, a silver briefcase set upon the car roof.

  ‘Stop.’

  He hesitated for a moment, but then carried on, as if in slow motion, without looking around. He finally produced his key fob and clicked. There was a clunk as the doors unlocked.

  ‘What I’m going to do, Englishman,’ he reached for the handle, ‘is get in the car.’ He began to open the door. ‘Take my money.’ He lifted the case off the roof. ‘Well, part of it, anyway.’ He flung it inside. ‘And get out of your life. Don’t worry – you won’t see me again.’

  ‘Stop.’

  He didn’t stop.

  I pulled the trigger.

  Greco sank to his knees, still holding onto the open door. He let go, flopped forward, face down onto the driver’s seat.

  ***

  Sergeant Davide Greco remained like that, as did I, gun pointed at his inert body, until the Ispettore arrived, rifle slung over his shoulder.

  He went over to the car and checked Greco, shook his head and came to me.

  ‘He won’t be any more trouble.’ The Ispettore gently eased the gun from my grip. ‘Shall we see how the lady is getting along?’

  He led me back into the auditorium.

  Elettra Fausto knelt trembling beside the corpse of her childhood friend.

  Discarded nearby, sauced with gore – a double-edged dagger with a silver swastika embossed upon its ebony handle.

  Chapter 40

  Dolores came to pick me up and was canny enough to keep quiet. The Comandante and Jacopo were waiting in the courtyard when we pulled in and, sure, we embraced long and hard, but again with barely a word.

  I went upstairs to the apartment. Rose was nowhere to be seen, her bedroom door open as it had been that morning – she had left before I got up so I had never had a chance to kiss her goodbye. Perhaps that hadn’t been a bad thing.

  I closed the bathroom door, stripped and loaded my cordite- and blood-stinking clothes into the washing machine.

  I stepped into the shower, standing with my hands flat against the tiles as the water washed over me. Slid down into a squat to finally sit with my back against the wall and my knees pressed against my chest.

  Stayed like that until finally, after many, many gallons, even the boiler said basta and the water ran cold.

  Chapter 41

  ‘Oh, hey, Dan.’ Dino’s paddle hand engulfed mine. The flash of that spade tattoo beneath his sleeve line.

  I surveyed the film set – the usual chaos. ‘Have you seen Rose?’

  He frowned. ‘I think so, at the refreshments trailer earlier. Can I buy you a coffee?’

  ‘That’s kind, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’d just like a word with my daughter.’

  ‘Sure, boss. No problem. I’ll take you over.’

  I followed Dino through the alleyways of trailers. Truth be told, I also hoped to apologise to Anna for ignoring her calls, as she was now apparently ignoring mine.

  Dino left me at the door to Anna’s trailer. I knocked. No answer. As I tried again, the door fell open.

  ‘Hello?’ I peered in.

  Rose was on her knees among half packed tubs.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  She burst into tears.

  ‘She’s gone, Dad. She’s left.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Apparently there was this part in a western and they needed her immediately. There was a clause in her contract or something … whatever, anyway, she’s gone. Indigo says most of the location stuff was done in any case and he only needed her for the scenes in the US.’

 

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