Authors: Michael Dibdin
Back in her flat, she tried calling her father, but there was still no reply. She had a shower and then went back into the bedroom of her modern apartment, searching for the thick white terry-towelling gown she used to dry off in. It was not on the hook where she kept it, and it took a moment to locate it on a similar hook on the other side of the closet. The jacket and slacks she had hung there, still in their plastic wrapping from the cleaners where she had picked them up two days earlier, were hanging on the other hook, the one where Carla always kept her towelling gown.
Her personal mobile started to ring. Carla sidled towards it, glancing at the open doorway and the various inner recesses of the apartment, as yet unchecked.
‘Signorina Arduini?’ a charmless male voice asked. ‘This is the Bar Nettuno. We have a message that was left by a friend of yours. She said to phone you and tell you to pick it up immediately.’
‘Can’t you give it to me now?’ asked Carla irritably. ‘Who is this supposed friend, anyway?’
‘She didn’t leave a name,
signorina
, just a written message sealed in an envelope. She told me to ring you at six o’clock precisely and tell you to come and pick it up.’
Carla glanced at the clock. It was just after six.
‘Very well, I’ll be there shortly,’ she said.
Naked except for the towel clutched around her belly, she opened every door in the small apartment and verified that no one was hiding there. Nothing seemed to be missing, either. Carla switched on her Toshiba laptop and turned away to look for some clothes. When she returned to the table, the screen was glowing. In the centre was a box with a circle slashed red and the words FATAL ERROR MESSAGE! THIS COMPUTER HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN. Looking out of the window at the apartment block across the street, Carla felt for the power switch and pressed it gently, stilling the computer, then closed the lid.
The Bar Nettuno was only a few steps away, an undistinguished enterprise installed on the ground floor of the apartment block visible from Carla’s window. Hurriedly dressed in jeans and a pullover, Carla strode in and identified herself to the barman, who nodded expressionlessly and passed her an envelope with her name on it. Inside she found a handwritten note: ‘I’ll call the pay phone in the corner, beside the video game, at six fifteen, then every five minutes until I get you. CN.’
Carla glanced at her watch. It was six twelve. Three minutes later, the phone started to ring. Corinna Nunziatella sounded embarrassed.
‘I apologize for all this nonsense,
cara
, but if we’re going to do this, we’d better do it properly.’
‘You think your phone is tapped?’
‘Under the circumstances, that’s the only sensible assumption to make. Yours too, for all I know. And cellphones are notoriously insecure. So this seemed the best way. How was your day in Palermo?’
Carla told her. There was silence the other end, then a long sigh.
‘This means we’re going to have to be even more careful about our arrangements for tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll explain when we meet. Have you got a pen and paper? Now listen carefully. Take the 10 a.m. AST bus to Aci Castello. Go down to the coast and walk north to Aci Trezza. It’s only a couple of kilometres along a very pretty path with a view of the rocks which the Cyclops named Polyphemus threw at Ulysses and his men after they blinded him. Do you know your Homer?’
‘Surely that happened somewhere in Greece?’
‘In Homer’s time, Sicily was somewhere in Greece. Are you paying attention? In Aci Trezza there’s a hotel called
I Ciclopi
. Go into the bar and wait for me. If I haven’t contacted you by midday, go home. Don’t mention my name, don’t ask questions, don’t try to call me, just go home. And another thing. After what you’ve just told me, it’s possible that you may be followed. If you notice anyone following you, try to lose him. If you can’t, again, just go home. Above all, on no account bring a tail to our rendezvous. Do you understand?’
‘Of course, but why should I be followed? No one’s interested in me.’
‘I’m interested in you,
cara
, and they’re interested in me. Your little lunch in “the triangle of death” proved that beyond a doubt.’
‘But that was…’
‘Please just accept what I’m telling you. As far as they’re concerned, we’re a couple. They will therefore be watching you.’
‘This is like some stupid movie!’ Carla exclaimed dramatically, sounding like a character in just such a movie.
‘All the more reason not to be stupid ourselves,’ Corinna Nunziatella replied calmly.
‘A domani, cara.’
Six men sat around the metal table set up in the shade of the ancient carob and palm trees in the centre of the small square. On the table, painted green and chipped and flecked with rust, lay a chessboard. The six men were seated on folding chairs of a similar colour and condition. Only two of the men were actually playing, but the other four watched as though their lives depended on the result. So, to a lesser degree, did a larger group, about ten in all, who stood in a rough circle at a respectful distance from the players and their immediate entourage. Beyond them, cars lay as though abandoned in the empty street, ranks of shuttered houses kept their counsel, while above all Etna smouldered like a badly doused fire.
‘The queen,’ said the man playing White, placing his cigar in the ashtray to the right of the chessboard.
All the onlookers perked up, but for a long time no one spoke.
‘She’s exposed,’ the other player agreed at length.
‘But that pawn is only a few moves from queening itself,’ the first mused. ‘If I move against the queen, the pawn will have a chance to get through to the back file. What to do?’
‘Try the Sicilian Defence!’ said a voice from the surrounding crowd. Ironic but anonymous guffaws broke out all around, as though to protect the speaker against the possible consequences of this insolence.
The man at the table picked up his cigar and leaned back slowly, looking up at the shards of blue sky visible through the thickly massed leaves overhead. There was a terrible silence. The speaker exhaled an expanding galaxy of smoke.
‘We really must respond to the recent communication from our friends in Corleone before too long,’ he said. ‘Not to do so might appear discourteous.’
‘But how?’ asked his opponent, shifting a rook forward five squares and then instantly withdrawing his hand, so quickly that the piece might have moved by itself.
The man playing White did not even look at the board.
‘I think an invitation to lunch,’ he said.
‘They’d never come!’ burst out the voice in the crowd which had spoken before.
‘Not to Catania, of course. But if the invitation came from Messina…’
He glanced down at the table and took the threatening rook with a knight.
‘Then we’d have to give them something in return,’ remarked Black.
‘Precisely. We give them the judge.’
‘Nunziatella? She’s already been removed from the picture.’
‘From our point of view, yes. But she’s still investigating the Maresi business, which spills over in all sorts of ways into the interests of our Messina friends.’
There was a long silence.
‘If we do that, then the authorities will crack down on us,’ said Black.
‘No, they won’t,’ White replied. ‘No one will know it was us. As you pointed out, we have no reason to be interested in Nunziatella. Why should we stir up trouble when everything has been sorted out so nicely?’
‘In that case, they’ll go after Messina. And our friends there won’t like that.’
‘Who cares what they like? By then it will be too late. They’ve been getting a bit above themselves recently, anyhow.’
He took a long satisfied draw on his cigar, then glanced back at the board and moved his queen diagonally from one side to the other.
‘Check.’
The man playing Black looked at him in astonishment.
‘How do you do it, Don Gaspare?’
‘You like it?’ the cigar-smoker enquired coyly.
‘It’s beautiful!’
A frown came over his face.
‘But what about the Corleonesi?’
‘What about them?’
‘Well, supposing they come to this lunch …’
‘They’ll come all right! Now that Totò is in prison and Binù’s in deep hiding, they need allies. I happen to know that they’ve been flirting with our friends in Messina for some time. An invitation like that? They’ll cream in their pants!’
Another round of laughter from the onlookers.
‘All right, so they come,’ said Black. ‘What then?’
‘Then they go home again,’ the other man said, staring his opponent in the eyes, his voice brutally harsh. ‘Since there’s no railway to Corleone, we can’t offer them a free ride in a freight car. But to avoid appearing discourteous, we must return the favour somehow. Saverio!’
‘Sì,
capo,’
said the rogue voice in the crowd.
The man at the table paused to draw on his cigar.
‘We’ll need a lorry,’ he said at last. ‘Something big. Maybe one of those articulated jobs. We can’t be sure how many of them will show up, and we wouldn’t want them to be too cramped.’
More laughter.
‘Do you think you could you arrange that?’ the cigar-smoker concluded.
‘A couple of hours,
capo,’
Saverio replied. ‘Would you be interested in a refrigerated lorry, by any chance?’
The man at the table stared down at the chessboard for so long it seemed that he had not heard the question, his attention devoted wholly to the game. Then a slow smile spread across his face. He swivelled in his chair and looked directly at the man who had spoken.
‘Refrigerated,’ he repeated.
‘A lot of them are,’ Saverio explained. ‘For vegetables and meat and so on. It wouldn’t be hard to get one, down on the
autostrada.’
‘Refrigerated!’ the chess player said again, his smile broader than ever. ‘Saverio, you’re a genius.’
Saverio made a humbly submissive shrug and did not speak further. The cigar-smoker turned back to the table.
‘They give it to us hot, we give it to them cold!’ he exclaimed triumphantly.
The man playing Black moved a pawn forward to block the White queen’s threat to his king.
‘They’ll know it was us,’ he remarked in a neutral tone.
‘Of course they will!’ the other man exclaimed. ‘So will their erstwhile hosts in Messina. They’ll also know that their explanations and excuses will never be believed. So with the Corleonesi going nuclear west of the mountains and the Calabrians moving in from the east, our friends in Messina will finally be forced to ally with us or face a classic pincer attack on two fronts.’
Silence fell. At length the other chess player broke it with a sharp intake of breath through his rotten teeth.
‘How do you do it, Gaspare?’ he repeated wonderingly
The other man sucked complacently at his cigar.
‘I think,’ he said. ‘I think, and then I think again. Then I review my conclusions with my friends here in my home town, and occasionally even have the pleasure of discovering that one of them has a streak of imagination to add a detail to my scheme, like young Saverio here.’
He bent forward and stared at the man across the table.
‘You used to be like that, Rosario. That’s why I always talked things over with you first. You were intelligent and creative. What happened, Rosario? Where did all that energy go?’
There was no reply. In the intense silence which had fallen on the group of men, a precise pattern of sound made itself heard. No one looked round, but each person seemed to become marginally denser and more still. The footsteps tapping rhythmically across the cobbles grew ever closer, passing beneath the statue of a nineteenth-century native of the town who had briefly achieved limited fame as a poet, then shifted to a rich crunching on the gravel strewn under the trees in the centre of the square.
The newcomer moved at a steady pace through the men gathered about the table with its chessboard. He was tall and imposing, in his eighties perhaps, his face collapsed on to the bones beneath, but with eyes of a startling blue clarity. He wore a brown blazer over a check shirt, with a dark red tie and grey flannel trousers. His feet were clad in beige socks and open leather sandals and he carried a briar walking-stick in one gnarled hand, with the aid of which he favoured his left leg. No one said a word to him, or gave the slightest impression of being aware of his presence. The man stopped in front of the green-painted table. He looked neither at the players, nor at the attendant entourage, but at the chessboard.
He stood there for over a minute, completely absorbed in his study. No one spoke, no one moved, but a sense of unease seemed to have come over the company. At length the newcomer straightened up and sniffed deeply.
‘Black to win in five moves,’ he announced in an Italian whose flexible spine had been replaced by a steel pin.
Only now did he look at the two players. The one called Don Gaspare glanced up at him in a curious way, simultaneously contemptuous and apprehensive.
‘Ah, yes, of course you know all about winning, Herr Genzler.’
The other man looked back at the board for an instant, then turned implacably back to Don Gaspare.
‘Black in five,’ he repeated. ‘Unless one of you makes a mistake.’
There was a subliminal gasp all around the table. No one talked to the
capo
like that. But Don Gaspare simply puffed contentedly on his cigar.
‘I don’t make mistakes,’ he replied calmly.
‘Perhaps. But I hear that Rosario is not as good as he used to be.’
The intruder bowed vestigially.
‘At your service, Don Gaspare.’
The chess player returned an even more sketchy bow.
‘And yours, General.’
The intruder turned his back and stalked off. The men around the table listened with communal intensity to the crunch and then the slapping of his sandals as he made his way across the square to what was to all appearances the town’s only commercial enterprise, a combination bar and grocery store, into which he disappeared.