the cavity in the wall, and never noticed the mould that bloomed on the banknotes. When he at last pulled out the hidden packets, three-quarters of the banknotes inside had turned into a greasy black sludge. Those that remained were disintegrating.
He prepared himself for death, and reported his incompetence and loss to the contabile of his locale. But his story of the rotten money was greeted with laughter.
‘Burn what’s left, Tony. And find a better hiding place.’
‘I shall repay my debt.’
‘You made an honest mistake, did you not? 40 million lire. That is not even the salary of a hospital administrator. Let’s write it off as capital invested in experience.’
But he did not like the easy laughter that had greeted him, nor the way in which his expectation of death and willingness to accept it had been treated so lightly. For months, rumours about the circumstances of his birth, about his blood, had been circulating. Not only had his natural ascent been blocked, but there was, he could feel it, a collective sniggering behind his back when his name was mentioned.
But he always knew there was one way he could silence all the laughing and sweep away the scorn. When he decided the time had come, he acted without asking his father or his stupid but faithful elder brother Pietro for their opinion or blessing. For who could bless a son who kills his mother? A man who commits an unforgivable sin and shows no fear of certain eternal punishment is a man with no fear. Not only was he prepared for hell fire, he expected it immediately, since his foster father would surely put him to death for what he had done. Instead, they both left the village and transferred to Germany while the story of the boy who murdered his natural mother was quietly absorbed and mythologized by the town.
It had been harder than he imagined to plunge the knife into the old woman. She was sleeping when he came in, and her face was upturned, displaying so many of the fine lineaments of his own: the sharp chin, the tiny ears like two commas, the way the eyebrows swept upwards. When he saw all this, he hesitated, and as he hesitated, she awoke, and spoke his name in a way that filled him with rage, and allowed him to strike. Once she screamed it was easier, and, as when he was killing a suckling pig, the pity and revulsion merged into pleasure and fascination.
The sports bag he was now holding in his hand contained 5,000 euros. The bag and the money in it were to attract the attention of the Romanians, and excite their greedy minds.
He did not despise the two Romanians. He even felt some liking for them. They had carried out his instructions to the letter. It was hard to find reliable people nowadays. If they had not been Romanian, and if the situation had been a little different, he might have eventually put their names forward as potential contrasti onorati, faithful men worthy of being baptized into the organization.
He stood in the shadow of a tall tree that grew straight out of the cement paving. He was standing on what used to be the storage yard of the Falck steelworks, and yet here was a tree as tall as the factory walls fifty yards behind him. He remembered news reports about the works closing in the 1980s. It did not seem possible that the tree could have grown so tall since then.
His car was parked behind a pile of twisted rebar and rubble, out of sight. When the Romanians arrived, all they would see was him and the bag. Two of them in a vehicle, just one of him, on foot, in a wide-open space, ready to part with money and perhaps ready to commission a new job. They would wonder whether he was really alone. Well, he was.
The traffic on the highway made a steady hushing sound like the sea, and, in the tree, two birds of some sort seemed to be squabbling over a single purple berry, pecking at each other, fluttering, hopping on and off the same branch, ignoring the hundreds of other branches and thousands of other berries. The only other sound was the creaking of the steel girders and corrugated roof on the part of the factory that had yet to be torn down.
He heard the diesel engine before he saw the vehicle. Probably the same vehicle they had used to transport the body. Always a van with the fucking Romanians. You never saw a Russian in a van, never saw a Romanian in anything else. It stopped fifty yards away and flashed its headlights. He raised his hand in greeting, bent down, and picked up the bag, held it aloft, then put it down again. Did they think this was a kidnap exchange of some sort? He waved them over. The van drew closer, slowly, suspiciously. He signalled impatience, but saw no increase in speed. Dirty suspicious animals, the Romanians. Gypsy in all of them.
Finally, it stopped and out got Teo. Behind the wheel sat the other Romanian. Teo was upon him, his face all bristles and smiles, his thin cheekbones twitching, his eyes moving side to side.
Tony pointed to the bag on the ground. ‘There you are. You get to keep the bag, too. Pity. It’s Adidas, same as this tracksuit. I bought them as a matching set.’
‘Great,’ said Teo, making no move to retrieve it.
‘You want me to bend down and open it, show you the money?’
‘No, no,’ began Teo, but Tony bent down, unzipped the bag completely, and opened it so Teo could see inside. He could feel the Romanian’s eyes being drawn towards the grip of the pistol protruding from the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms.
‘You came armed,’ said Teo.
‘I live in a dangerous world.’ Tony picked up a broken piece of rubble from the ground and tossed it in his right hand, then from hand to hand as he straightened up. ‘This,’ he showed the lump of concrete to Teo, ‘is all that remains of Italian industry.’
Teo glanced quickly at the rock in Tony’s fist, but his gaze was drawn inexorably to the cash-filled bag. He lifted it up, and casually ran his hand inside it.
Tony slipped the piece of concrete into the kangaroo pocket on the front of his tracksuit top, adjusted his crotch, pulled out the lump of rubble again, and rubbed it with his thumb. ‘You’re not going to count the money?’
‘No. You need us again, you know where to come. Always glad to help.’
He turned around.
‘Hey, Teo!’
The Romanian spun around, his dark eyes widening in alarm.
‘Zip up the bag or you’ll lose the money. Two days’ work and nothing to show for it. What would your wife say to that? She’d be suspicious, wouldn’t she?’
Teo smiled, then nodded, and zipped up the bag. Tony watched him, giving him a friendly wave as he opened the door of the van and got in beside the driver. He allowed them to say a few words, waited till he saw the driver begin to turn the steering wheel, then called out again:
‘Hey, Teo!’
The driver stopped his action. Tony dropped his hand into the kangaroo pocket of his tracksuit, pulled out a black object the size of a computer mouse, and tossed it casually from hand to hand as he approached the van. He got to the window, which was a little higher than he had anticipated.
‘There is one thing you could do for me next week, but…’
Teo rolled down the window.
‘I didn’t hear that. You said something about next week?’
‘Yeah, I was saying there is something you could do. It’s a little harder than this job.’
‘What?’ asked Teo.
Tony stretched his arm out and dropped the black object at Teo’s feet.
‘What’s that?’ asked Teo.
‘A Mecar something or other. I forget the make.’ He fell to the ground and rolled to the rear wheel of the van, hoping the young Slovakian dealer who had explained this trick to him was right about the ‘relatively contained’ explosive force.
Teo and the driver managed to get a lot of words out between them before an enormous thud caused the entire vehicle to jump from the ground. The sound banged against the wall of the factory and bounced back. The Slovak had told him the fragmentation grenade would not make much noise, but he’d been wrong.
Megale stood up, a little unsteady. His ears felt as if they were full of water, and he realized he couldn’t hear the traffic on the highway any more. He surveyed the front of the vehicle. The blast had lifted the windscreen out, frame and all, peeled back part of the roof, and knocked out Teo’s door, which was hanging on the buckled remains of a hinge. Teo lay on his seat, his head back. Something blunt and harmless looking, like a piece of soft plastic, was sticking out of the front of his throat. The driver had found time to turn around, because his head was draped
