“He’s got a phone, though?” asked Pernazzo.
“He’s got lots of phones. This is one of them.”
“You had better stop any vehicles. Taxis. That’s how he’ll get away.”
“I worked that out for myself, thanks,” said Massoni.
“Just out of interest, Massoni, why did you shoot that cop?”
“I don’t want to talk like this on the phone.”
“We’ve both changed our numbers.”
“Even so. The cop didn’t look like a cop. He could have been someone Innocenzi sent.”
“What? You thought he was one of Innocenzi’s soldiers or something?”
“I didn’t think too hard. He looked like he wanted to stand in my way, so I removed him. Are you at the dog cages yet?”
“Almost,” said Pernazzo. “Why would Innocenzi do something like that?”
In front of Pernazzo lay a bright field, flat and manicured enough for a professional football match. It looked to him like England or Ireland or one of those perfect places with horses and church spires. At the far end of the field, Italian squalor reasserted itself in the form of crumbling outhouses made mostly out of corrugated sheets of aluminium that could be seen through a thin curtain of tall reeds and sedges. It was becoming hard to walk and talk in the heat without gasping. Pernazzo stopped on the edge of the perfect field.
“I am out near Civitavecchia,” Massoni informed him. “Take the motorway all the way to the end, call when you come off it,” said Massoni. “Alleva has passports, money, accounts. A thing for printing or something. I saw the stuff. He pretends the two of us are going to get away to Argentina together, but there’s no photo of me in any of those passports.”
“So you’ve parked out of sight from the house?”
“Yeah, and I’m dying of the heat here.”
Pernazzo said, “So get in the car and turn on the air-conditioning.”
“Can’t. Can’t see the lane properly from inside the car and I need to be able to hear any cars coming.”
Pernazzo hung up and entered the field. Halfway across, he suddenly felt he had entered an invisible gas chamber filled with the powerful and repelling stench of the dogs. He paused to get used to it, bent down a little to reset his senses.
He reached the end of the field, which sloped down into a ditch containing a small canal that was supposed to carry the brackish waters away to the sea. But the canal had been dammed by the plastic and rubble thrown into it, and sat stagnant, feeding the vegetation that screened off the outhouses and the cages containing the dogs.
The smell of the dogs had been growing stronger, but he had been accustoming himself to it. He scampered down the embankment, hopped over the ooze of water, and ran up the other side to peer out from behind a clump of sedge grass.
In front of him, fifty meters away, sat a row of about thirty iron cages, deep brown with rust. Every other cage contained a dog, or at least no two dogs were placed in adjacent cages. The long row was protected from the sun by an asbestos roof supported at either end by concrete walls and intermittently propped up by metal pylons. It looked like the gable end of an old factory or warehouse.
Pernazzo could not see from the shade of the sedges into the shade of the cages, but the dogs seemed mostly to be prostrate. To his left, the orange carcass of a stripped-down bus was subsiding into the earth. Someone had boarded up two of the windows with plywood, and the next one was curtained off with a dark tartan blanket that swayed gently. It looked as if a tramp had made it his home. Outhouses constructed of wood, plastic sheets, and corrugated iron were collapsing into each other on the right.
Glancing on both sides of him, he emerged from the hedge and started making his way across the abandoned lot toward the dogs in the cages. A rolling growl indicated that his approach was being watched.
The guttural sounds from the cages began to rise in pitch and spread among the dogs. One of them was on the verge of barking. He felt his Glock, still attached to his belt, still in danger of slipping. When all this was over, he would get himself a nice holster.
Suddenly a Tosa Inu rose majestically in its cage and, overcoming the exhaustion of hunger and heat, roared its disapproval of the furtive figure approaching. It was the command the other dogs had been waiting for. At once, they all began to bark and snarl, though an American bulldog decided to howl and yelp instead. Pernazzo froze. He could smell the breath of the dogs, and they smelled his fear, which he was now converting rapidly into aggression. It felt like the very earth was shaking. He could feel it vibrate, up to his thigh.
Shocked by the sudden uproar from the dogs, it took him a few seconds to realize the vibrating and singing was coming from his phone. He yanked it out. The sun was too bright to read the screen. He pressed a finger into his ear to drown out the dogs.
Massoni was shouting. “You in the van yet? I’ve turned back a taxi. I’m standing dying in a field in the sun. If you don’t do it, I’ll just go back, kill Alleva myself. I’ll kill him twice.”
“Wait, Massoni. We can do better. You’ll see. Stop the taxis. Taxis are good. Much better than accomplices. Pay them if you want. They like being paid when there’s a no-show. Don’t make them go to the police or anything. Pretend you’re the one who called. Car broke down but is OK now. If you kill him now, you won’t get his money or anything else he has on the computer. If I was him, I’d have hotels, plane tickets, houses abroad-everything lined up and ready, saved in virtual space.”
“Hurry. I’m going insane here. Insects.” Massoni hung up.
Pernazzo found a good strong stick, held it in his left hand and walked by each cage banging on it and roaring at the animals. He got the best reaction from a Doberman pinscher.
He held the pistol in his right hand just in case a lock was faulty. The animals had worked themselves into a fury, except for a black-and-white mongrel, with a lot of German shepherd genes that just stood there, baring its thin and sharpened teeth. He tried to goad it by poking the stick between the bars. It didn’t react.
“Are you the underdog I was supposed to bet on?” Pernazzo asked the beast. He walked back toward the cages. Some of the dogs were already getting used to his presence and had stopped barking in the hope of food.
Tucked into what looked like a field latrine several meters from the cages were three refrigerators powered by an external generator exuding diesel. A new aluminium covering and generous use of masking tape protected the wiring and the generator from the elements.
He opened the first one and stared in fascination at the heaving pink mass of horsemeat packed into plastic bags squeezed into every corner. The sweet smell of the meat, fat, and blood was so strong that he thought for a moment the refrigerator must have broken down, but then he realized that if it had, he’d have known the difference. The second refrigerator contained more of the same, though the meat in this was whiter, less pungent, and wrapped in paper. The third contained strings of meat on bones and three bottles of Peroni beer with twist-off caps.
Lying next to the refrigerator was a long white pole with a twisted bit of cable coming out of one end and a hoop at the other. He pulled on the cable and watched the hoop at the other end tighten.
Pernazzo drank a beer, which tasted a bit oily. He tossed the bottles at an abandoned caravan, aiming at the windows and missing. He thought he saw something moving beneath. A rat, probably. A large one, from the shadow it cast.
He grabbed a handful of meat, and went directly to the mongrel’s cage and threw it at the bars. About a third went in; the rest wrapped itself on the bars and fell outside. The dog took what had arrived, and ate it calmly. Other dogs growled and some barked, but there was a lot more whining this time. He risked putting his hand near the cage and picking up the dropped bits, which he inserted between the bars. The dog soon ate those. Pernazzo tossed him more and more meat, which the animal ate with equanimity.
Then he fetched the long pole with the wire noose and held it in front of him, unsure what to do. A small pulley system allowed the front bars of the cage to slide up, like a portcullis. Pernazzo reckoned the mongrel was small enough, and risked opening the trapdoor a third of the way. The animal meekly poked its head out, and Pernazzo slipped the steel cord over its neck, then pulled the lever on the pole. He dragged the animal sideways across the gravel, keeping a good distance with the pole, and then opened the trapdoor of a cage containing the Tosa Inu. His courage and skill now increased, he performed the same operation with the Doberman, feeding it, holding it down with the control pole and maneuvering it into the same cage, so that all three dogs were enclosed
