Banco Rosalia head office, Via Boncompagni, Rome 19th March - 9.24 p.m.
‘So? How much are we down?’ Santos sniffed, helping himself to a half tumbler of Limoncella from the drinks trolley.
Alfredo Geri looked up from his laptop, frowning slightly as he worked through the math. Five feet ten, he was wearing a grey suit, his tie yanked down, jacket trapped under the wheel of his chair where it had fallen on to the floor and he’d run over it. His thin black hair was slicked down against his marbled scalp, his face gaunt and bleached a cadaverous shade of white by lack of sleep and sunlight. To his right, balancing precariously on a slumping battlement of stacked files, was a pizza box that he’d not yet had time to open.
‘Now I’ve had a chance to look properly…eight…maybe nine?’
‘Eight or nine what?’ Santos snapped. He sat down heavily at the head of the table, a blanket of scattered paper stretching along its polished surface like an avalanche over a valley floor. ‘It’s a big number. Show it some respect.’
‘Eight or nine hundred million. Euro.’
‘Eight or nine hundred million euro.’ Santos closed his eyes and sighed heavily, then gave a rueful smile as he kicked back. ‘You know, the strange thing is that a few months ago losing just fifty million would have felt like the end of the world. Now, it feels like a rounding error.’
He reached for his tin of liquorice, shook it, then popped the lid.
‘It’s the CDOs that have killed us,’ Geri continued, putting his half-moon glasses back on and hunching over his screen. ‘The entire portfolio’s been wiped out. The rest is from currency swings and counterparty losses.’
‘I thought we were hedged?’
‘You can’t hedge against this sort of market.’
‘And the League’s deposits and investments?’ Santos asked hopefully.
‘Antonio, the bank’s entire capital base is gone,’ Geri spoke slowly as if trying to spell out complicated directions to a tourist. ‘It’s all gone. Everything.’
Santos sniffed, then knocked the Limoncella back with a jerk of his wrist.
‘Good. It makes things easier. This way I only
need to worry about myself. Where did I come out in the end?’
‘I’ve liquidated what I can,’ Geri sounded almost apologetic. ‘Most of it at a loss, like I told you when we spoke. But the bulk of your portfolio would take weeks if not months to sell.’
‘How much?’ Santos snapped.
‘Three, maybe four million.’
‘That barely gets me a chalet,’ Santos said with a hollow laugh. ‘What about the money market positions?’
‘Already included, minus what you had to sell to fund your fun and games in Las Vegas last week,’ Geri reminded him in a reproachful tone.
A long pause.
‘Fine,’ Santos stood up. ‘It is what it is and what it is…is not enough. I need the painting.’
‘You’ve found a buyer?’
‘The Serbs are lined up to take it off my hands for twenty million,’ Santos said with a smile. ‘I’m flying out to meet them later tonight.’
‘And the watches?’
‘I’ve got one already and another on its way. I’ll get the third on the night from De Luca or Moretti. They always wear theirs.’
‘They won’t let you get away with it,’ Geri pointed out, closing his file.
‘They won’t be able to stop me if they’re dead.’ Santos shrugged, moving round to stand behind him.
‘For every person you kill, the League will send two more. You can’t kill them all. Eventually they’ll find you.’
‘How?’ Santos shrugged, stepping even closer until he could see the liver spots and tiny veins nestling under Geri’s thin thatch. ‘The world’s a large place. And you’re the only other person who knows where I’m going.’
‘Well, you know I’ll never tell them,’ Geri reassured him, shoulders stiff, staring straight in front of him.
‘Oh, I know.’ Santos smiled.
In an instant, he had locked his left arm around Geri’s throat and pulled him clear of the table. Geri lashed out with his legs, catching the edge of his file and sending it cartwheeling to the floor, paper scattering like feathers. Then with his right hand, Santos reached round and grabbed Geri’s chin.
With a sharp jerk, he snapped his neck.
Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March - 9.56 p.m.
‘Drink?’
Fabio Contarelli had turned in the passenger seat to face them, battered hip flask in hand. In his mid forties, short and pot-bellied, he had the warm, jovial manner of someone who prided himself on being on first-name terms with everyone in his village, and who the local butcher had come to favour with the best cuts. Shabbily dressed, his weather-worn face was brown and cracked like a dried river bed, although his fern green eyes shone, as if he was permanently on the verge of playing a practical joke. There was certainly little there to suggest that he had been responsible for the horrors Allegra and Tom had witnessed in the basement of his house.
‘
No
,’ she refused, then watched as Tom did the same. Contarelli shrugged and took a swig
himself, turning back to face the road as the mudflecked Land Cruiser danced over the pot holes.
‘How long have you been a tombarolo?’ Tom asked.
‘Since I was a boy,’ Contarelli said proudly. He spoke fast and mainly in Italian, with a booming voice that was too big for his body. ‘It’s in the blood, you see. I used to come out to these fields with my father. In those days the earth would be littered with fragments of pottery and broken statues surfaced by the farmers’ ploughs. That’s when I realised there was another world under there.’ He gestured longingly out of the window towards the earthquake-scarred landscape now shrouded by night. ‘I sold what I found in the market, used the money to buy some books, got smarter about what pieces were and how much they were worth, climbed through the ranks. Now I’m a
Capo di Zona
and it’s the only life I know.’
‘And you always go out at night?’
‘It depends on the site.’ He shrugged, lighting a cigarette from the smouldering stub of the one which had preceded it, his fingernails broken and dirty. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘For some of the larger ones, we offer the landowner a share in the profits. Then my boys turn up in the day with a bulldozer and some hard hats. If anyone asks, we tell them we’re working on a construction project. If they ask again, we pay them off. Or shut them up.’
Allegra felt her anger rising, its delirious scent momentarily blinding her to the danger they were in and to the armed man seated in the back with her and Tom. She’d seen enough already to know that this wasn’t just tomb robbing. It was cultural vandalism, Contarelli’s brutal methods probably destroying as much as he found. The fact that he was now happily boasting about it only made it worse.
‘So you’ve never been caught?’ Tom asked quickly, his worried glance suggesting that he could tell she was about to snap.
‘The Carabinieri need to find us before they can catch us,’ he explained with a grin. ‘They do their best, but there are thousands of tombs and villas buried out here and they can’t be everywhere at once. Especially now the politicians are tablethumping about immigration, drugs and terrorism. You know, a few years ago, I even cleared out three graves in a field next to the police station in Viterbo. If they can’t stop us there, right under their snouts, what are their chances against us out here?’
He laughed, slapping the knee of the driver next to him in merriment.
‘Why do you still do it?’ Allegra snapped. ‘Haven’t you made enough money?’
‘I don’t do it for the money, my dear. Not for a long time now. Archaeology is my sickness, my addiction,’ he explained, his eyes shining, his
hands conducting an unheard symphony. ‘The thrill of finding a tomb, the smell of a freshly opened chamber, the adrenaline rush as you crawl inside, the fear of being caught…’
‘What you do is not archaeology,’ Allegra snapped. ‘It’s rape. You take innocence and corrupt it, turning beauty into a bauble for the rich to decorate their mantelpieces with.’
‘I bring history back from the dead,’ he shot back, his face hardening. ‘I restore artefacts from thousands of years of neglect. I provide them with a home. A home where they will go on display and be appreciated, rather than languish in some museum’s basement storeroom. Now tell me, is that rape?’
The same tired old excuses, the same selfserving justifications.
‘What about
your
basement and the fresco we saw there, hacked into pieces?’ she retorted. ‘Or the fingers ripped from the dead, or the remains of tombs that have been gouged clean like a backstreet abortionist scraping out a womb. Is that archaeology?’
Contarelli, face now like thunder, eyed her coldly, then turned to face the front.
‘Stop the car,’ he ordered the driver tonelessly. ‘We’ll walk from here.’
19th March - 10.31 p.m.
They had parked at the end of a rutted track and then set out across the fields on foot, Contarelli leading the way, his two men at the rear. One of them had a pair of infra-red binoculars that he held to his face every few minutes to scan the horizon, presumably on the lookout for a possible Carabinieri patrol. Tom and Allegra, meanwhile, had been roped together by their wrists; Tom’s tied behind his back, Allegra’s fixed in front of her so that she could follow behind.
Contarelli was grasping a
spilloni
, a long metal spike that he had explained was used to identify a site’s size and entrance. He was still smoking, Tom noted, although he had turned the cigarette around so that the lit end was inside his mouth, to mask its glow when he inhaled. For the same reason no one was using a flashlight, relying instead on the low moon to light their path.
‘The most important thing is to be able to read the land,’ Contarelli expounded, having decided, it seemed, to focus all his attention on Tom after Allegra’s outburst. ‘You see how the grass is drier there?’ He pointed out a patch of ground that, as far as Tom could see, didn’t look any different from the rest of the field. ‘The earth above a hollow space has less moisture. And those brambles there -’ he gestured to his right - ‘when they grow tall and yellowish like that, it means that their roots are leaning on a buried wall.’
Tom nodded, struggling to keep up - Contarelli was proving to be surprisingly nimble over the rough terrain, although unlike Tom he didn’t have to cope with his arms being forced up behind his back every time he stumbled.
‘Wild fig trees are a give-away too,’ he continued. ‘And fox and badger tracks can often lead you straight to the entrance.’
‘Where are you taking us?’ Tom demanded, the hopelessness of their situation growing with every step. Over this rough ground, roped together, they had no chance of escaping.
‘Don De Luca told me you were interested in understanding what we do.’ Contarelli shrugged, turning to face him.
‘I think I’ve got the general idea, thanks.’ Tom gave a tight smile. ‘We can make our own way back from here.’
Contarelli gave one of his booming laughs and
strode on, leaving one of his men to prod Tom forward.
‘It takes us two nights to break into a tomb normally. On the first night we clear away the entrance and let whatever’s inside oxidise and harden. Then on the second night we come back and take what we can before dawn. Usually I never come back a third time. It’s too risky. But I’ve made an exception for you.’
He stopped and signalled at someone standing beneath a low hillock covered in trees. The man was leaning wearily on a shovel and had clearly been waiting for them. As they approached him and the dark passage he had uncovered, he waved back, jumping down to greet them.
‘It’s an Etruscan burial chamber,’ Allegra breathed.
Contarelli turned, smiling.
‘You see,’ he said with a pained sigh, as if he was wearily scolding a small child. ‘That’s the type of cleverness that’s got you both killed.’
Before Tom could move, a plastic hood was placed over his head by one of the men standing behind him and he was forced to his knees. Working quickly, they deftly passed a length of duct tape several times around his neck, sealing the bag against his skin.
He felt himself being lifted and then dragged along the tomb’s short corridor into the Stygian darkness of the burial chamber. Moments later,
Allegra was thrown down on to the damp earth next to him, struggling furiously.
‘Compliments of Don De Luca,’ Contarelli intoned from somewhere above them, his disembodied voice echoing off the tomb’s domed roof.
For a few moments Tom could hear nothing apart from the rattle of his own breathing and Allegra’s muffled shouts as her heels scrabbled in the dirt. But then came the muted sound of steel against stone.
They were filling the entrance in.
19th March - 11.06 p.m.
They didn’t have long, Tom knew. Each breath used a little more of the oxygen sealed within the bag. He could already feel the plastic rubbing against his face, warm and moist; hear it crinkling every time he inhaled, growing and shrinking like a jellyfish’s pulsing head. In a few minutes the air would all be gone and then the CO
2
levels in his blood would rise, shutting down first his brain’s cerebral cortex and then the medulla.
It was a cruel death - light-headedness, followed by nausea, then unconsciousness. And finally oblivion. But then that was hardly a surprise, given that they were here at the orders of the same man who had, by his own admission, ordered Cavalli to be slowly choked by the Tiber’s strong current and Argento to be partially decapitated and left to bleed out like a slaughtered lamb.
Lying next to him, Allegra had stopped struggling
but was still shouting, using up her air far more quickly than she should. He’d have to get to her first. He shuffled back towards her, feeling for her with his hands, which were still tied behind his back. Touching her arm, he bent forward and pulled himself round with his feet until he made contact with the hood’s slippery surface. She seemed to guess what he was doing, because she went quiet and bent towards him until he was able to feel the outline of her mouth.
Digging his finger hard into the shallow depression formed between the hard edges of her teeth, he gouged the thick plastic with his nail, weakening its surface until it suddenly gave way. There was a loud whistling noise as Allegra sucked air greedily through the small hole.
But the effort had cost Tom more than he’d expected. He felt light-headed, almost as if he was floating outside of himself. He didn’t have long before he went under. Thirty seconds at most. He shuffled down, bending his head towards where he guessed Allegra’s hands had been retied behind her back so that she could feel for his mouth. With her longer nails, it took far less time for her to rupture the plastic, the chamber’s stale air tasting sweet to Tom’s starving lungs.
‘You okay?’ Tom called through the darkness when his head had cleared, the plastic hood both muffling and amplifying his voice.
‘Not really,’ she answered, coughing.
‘Where are your hands?’
Feeling for her wrists, he carefully picked away at the knot, the rope resisting at first, until little by little he was able to loosen it and then undo it completely. Sitting up, Allegra returned the favour. As soon as he was free they felt for each other in the darkness and hugged with relief - relative strangers brought unexpectedly close by the intimacy of fear.
‘Which way’s the entrance?’ Tom asked as he broke away and ripped the remainder of the plastic hood from his neck.
‘We should be able to find it if we feel our way along the walls,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps if we…what’s this?’
A light clicked on, forcing Tom to shield his eyes as it was pointed at him. Allegra snatched it away with an apology. Unless it had fallen from Contarelli’s pocket, it appeared that he had left them a torch. Perhaps he had anticipated that they might free themselves? Perhaps he was trying to help them escape? The thought filled Tom with hope.
He glanced around excitedly, noting the low domed roof above them and the earthen floor littered with pottery fragments. Lying discarded in the corner was a bundle of rags that Tom suspected marked what was left of the tomb’s original occupant.
‘That way -’ Allegra pointed towards the low tunnel that led to the entrance.
He crawled hopefully down it, but soon found his path blocked. As the shovelling sound earlier had suggested, the entrance had been filled in. And not just with earth, but with a massive stone plug that they must have brought there with this single purpose in mind.
‘We should have left the bags on,’ Allegra said in a shaky voice. ‘I’d rather suffocate quickly than starve down here.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about starving,’ Tom said with a grim smile. ‘I’d say we have six hours of air, eight max.’
‘That’s reassuring.’ She gave a short laugh, then frowned as her torch picked out a dull metal object lying near the entrance.
It was a Glock 17. Tom picked it up and checked the magazine. It contained two bullets.
Contarelli, it seemed, was offering them a way out after all.