The capostazione was surprised to see three black Mercedes 220Sb saloons pull into the taxi rank outside Montellano central train station. As stationmaster he was responsible for everything that went on there: the tracks, the platforms, the station buildings and the cars outside. The Mercs had no taxi permits and had ignored signs that forbade unlicensed vehicles to take up spaces in the taxi rank, so he would have to move them to the car park opposite.
A group of ten men in black suits had decamped from their vehicles and hung around smoking, chatting and gesticulating at each other while being berated by a portly moustachioed fellow who, from the quality of his shoes and the glint of gold, looked like he was in charge. Capostazione Amato straightened his peaked cap and strolled over to the group, deciding pleasantries would be skipped in favour of authority.
“Move those cars,” he shouted as he approached, waving his hands in the air. “Taxis only!” None of the men appeared to have heard him so he repeated the order. “I said—!” he tried to continue but was stopped by the corpulent boss-man who held up a palm without even showing him the respect of looking in his direction. His outrage was complete. “Oi! You lot. Move! Now!”
Luigi Barone gave a tired shrug, reached behind his back and pulled out a Beretta. He pointed it at Amato’s head and Amato instinctively held up two hands in surrender.
“Vaffanculo! Imbecille!” snarled Barone.
“What are you doing?” blustered Amato, suddenly terrified.
“I told you to piss off, you moron. I won’t tell you again, so get back in there and play with your trains. We’ll go when we’re ready. Capisce?”
The gun twitched and Amato went into reverse, walking backwards with his hands still in the air as taxi drivers around him hastily climbed into their cabs and drove off. He backed up until his heels touched the bottom of the steps and he felt brave enough to turn around and scurry back inside. He went straight to his office to call Commissario Bianchi.
***
Luigi Barone was more irritated than usual. Precious time had been lost because that fat idiot Bruno had been certain the bitch and her boyfriend were heading towards Rome. It was clear they weren’t there. Even with a thirty-minute head start they should have overtaken them on the road, but they’d checked the car hire company, all the major hotels and done the rounds of the bars and restaurants in the city centre before he and the boys had dinner in a backstreet trattoria. He gave them a wad of cash and told them to go find somewhere to stay.
He’d got drunk alone in a seedy bar where he’d picked up a whore and taken her to his room at the Hotel Grand Duce. There, he spent twenty thousand lire to be tied to the bed, having his corpulent frame pinched, punched, slapped and generally abused by a heavily made-up, raven-haired vixen who, when naked, he judged to be many years older than she had first appeared.
He and his men piled into the Mercs the next morning, leaving two of them behind to watch the car hire firm, just in case. Apart from the hundreds of tiny villages in the region, Montellano was the only other option and the more he thought about it, the more likely it was they’d come back here. The inglese said he’d been recently and also during the war and the bitch came from here too. It had been his old stomping ground, until that bastardo Coppola had muscled in on his little empire. Well, his return was long overdue. It would be good to find out who now pulled the strings in his old town and whether perhaps he could expand his empire out of Casavento.
He’d split the town into three sections – east, west and centre – and given his men their orders. Check the hotels, check the restaurants, keep a lookout for a red Spyder and report any sighting through the in-car walkie-talkies. If possible, shoot the inglese and grab the bitch. He looked at his Rolex: one fifteen.
“We meet at the Piazza Vittoria at the north end of town in two hours. Avanti!”
***
Ernst Kessler was spending his second day in captivity in the high-security cell in Montellano central police station. He lay on a metal-framed cot on top of a thin mattress, one hand shackled to a rail on the wall. This allowed him movement across the length of the three-metre cell from the toilet bucket in the corner to the barred door at the front. His wrist and arm were aching again and as he had done repeatedly in the last twelve hours, he sat up to adjust his position and ease the pain. He’d been there thirty-six hours and had had no contact with anyone other than the pig who brought food and water on a tray and slid it under the barred door and who’d obviously been told not to engage with the prisoner under any circumstances.
Kessler had felt no urgency about talking his way out of the cell; his opportunity would come in due course. They would have to move him sometime and as soon as they did, he was confident there would be an opening he could exploit. It was tiresome, but temporary, and he was nothing if not patient. He had waited eighteen years after all.
The bucket stank even before he began using it and now it was worse. It had been the ultimate indignity taking a dump in plain view of anyone who cared to watch, but he’d experienced worse and he wondered how they were going to empty it without entering the cell, or if indeed they were going to empty it at all. As far as he could tell, he was now the only occupant of the four-cell block, the drunk who’d spent the night in the one alongside thrown out that morning. He could see the two cells opposite were empty and there was no sound from the one next to him. All he ever heard was the general noise of people moving around the station, the opening and shutting of doors, the constant ringing of telephones and the endless jabbering in Italian.
He lay down again and turned on his side. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Lucia had said. She’d said his daughter was alive and if she were telling the truth, then she was probably still living in the area. Why else would they come back to Montellano? But he’d seen it with his own eyes and the memory had never left him: the English butcher with his bloody knife and his crazed expression of violent lust. He still had the urge to kill Male and be done with it and wouldn’t hesitate if given the chance, but if it were true and the baby had survived, then the Englishman might be useful to him now. He could always kill him later, one more for the fatherland.
Lucia would be useful to him too. She reminded him of Isabella: the same strong feisty character, a typical Italian woman. He had a new mission now, probably the most important of his life, and he revelled in it. He would never be defeated.
His thought process was interrupted. Something was wrong. There had been some frantic activity earlier, but he noticed the ambient sound gradually being sucked out of the building and now, an eerie silence had descended – silence apart from telephones that rang and were not answered. He got up and approached the bars, stretching as far as the chain would allow, straining his neck for a view down the corridor. It sounded as if everyone had gone.
***
By three thirty, and a kilometre away from Kessler’s cell, Luigi Barone was getting angrier by the minute and taking out his frustration on his useless troops.
“Are you sure? How do you know they are not lying? How do you know, eh? They must know something? It is not possible to hide a car like that!”
He and his hoods had barged into and terrorised the owners of every hotel, bar, restaurant, café and shop in the centre of Montellano to no avail. They had not heard of anyone called Male, Barone or Girardi, or seen anyone fitting their description, nor noticed a red Fiat Spyder, even when threatened.
“Maybe they are in Roma,” ventured Bruno helpfully but all it earned him was a slap on the face.
“Imbecille!” screamed Barone, pacing up and down on the pavement while his men stood around smoking and looking every bit as useless as they were. He stopped and looked around the Piazza Vittoria until he spotted what he wanted. A phone box. “Salvatore! Go telephone Vito in Roma and ask him if there is anything from the car hire company.” Salvatore stubbed out his cigarette and lazily climbed off the bonnet of his Merc. “Avanti!” screamed Barone, kicking his backside, and Salvatore broke into a trot across the road towards the telephone box. He was back in five minutes.
“Capo! Sono a Napoli! Vito has been waiting for you to call him. The car has been returned to Napoli and they are at the Hotel Vesuvio.”
“Napoli?” said Barone, frowning, then suddenly pointed at the three cars. “Andiamo!” They turned to face their vehicles and then froze. Two black Mercs similar to their own raced across the piazza towards them, spinning sideways and screeching to a halt, puffs of smoke billowing from the tyres. Eight guys in black suits and sunglasses got out and arranged themselves in a line twenty feet away. They stood with legs apart, each with one hand in a trouser pocket, the other inside his jacket. Barone and his men circled their cars and casually stepped into the piazza, assuming similar positions.
Another black Merc arrived and pulled up behind the others. The driver jumped out and opened the door for an elderly man with slicked-back silver hair. He wore a fur-trimmed brown camel coat over his shoulders and stepped forward, removing his sunglasses. Luigi nodded and relaxed, hands on hips.
“Mario Coppola. Come stai?”
“Bene. And you?”
“Molto bene, grazie.” Barone affected a small bow and waved an arm with a flourish.
“What brings you to Montellano, Signore Barone?”
Barone could see that the piazza had miraculously cleared itself of people and that only a few pigeons remained.
“It’s a personal matter,” he offered, grinning. He was not about to explain nor embarrass himself in front of his erstwhile rival.
“Perhaps your wife would rather live in my town than in yours?”
Barone bristled at the insult but managed to maintain a rictus grin. The disrespect had persisted even after all these years; the war was never over.
“We were just leaving for Napoli. So I will bid you good day.”
The encounter might have ended there and then. Both sets of men would have got back into their cars, driven off and got on with their business without incident. But they were distracted by rapidly approaching police sirens and half of Barone’s men turned to see four squad cars screech to a halt behind them, doors opening to allow a dozen armed polizia to leap out. Barone held up a hand to calm the situation, but he was too late. One of his men instinctively pulled a gun and started waving it around, whereupon one of Coppola’s men did the same and the situation spiralled out of control.
It was not clear who fired the first shot but within seconds all three groups of men were shooting at each other from behind cars which took the brunt of the fire, showering them all with fragments of shattered glass before gradually settling down on punctured tyres. Three of Barone’s men fell along with two of Coppola’s and four polizia amidst shouts by all concerned to drop weapons and surrender.
***
The sound of continuous gunfire peppered the silence in the police station and echoed down the empty corridor to Kessler’s cell. It sounded to him like World War Three had broken out in Montellano and it excited him, reminding him of the good old days. He rattled the bars with his free hand and shouted.
“Hey, Scheiß-Itaker!” he called out, deliberately using a highly insulting term they’d had for Italians during the war. If there was anyone there, they would surely respond. He heard a sound and saw a pig he recognised appear at the end of the corridor. “Hey, what’s happening? Where is everybody?”
“Shut it, Adolf,” the pig called back.
“Too young to play with the big boys, eh?”
“I said shut it!”
“Hey, my bucket’s full. Needs emptying.”
“Tough.”
“If you don’t empty it, I’m going to piss in your corridor.” He heard a muttered curse followed by the sound of footsteps. He went to the back of the cell and picked up the enamel bucket that was half full of liquid excrement and sodden toilet paper.
“Show me,” said the young police officer, standing by the bars. Kessler walked forward and tipped the bucket forward to reveal the contents. “That’s not even half… ” he started, but didn’t finish the sentence.
Kessler flung the contents into the man’s face, his open mouth ready and able to receive a sizeable quantity of the putrid, semi-liquid substance that drenched his head and upper torso. He convulsed in shock, trying to expel the raw sewage that coated his teeth and tongue and dripped down his face. Kessler dropped the bucket and reached out through the bars, grabbing the young man’s wet and slimy tunic, yanking him forward so his face collided with the metal bars, emitting a loud clang. He screamed, spraying a mixture of blood and sewage into the face of Kessler, who, unmoved, yanked again and again until the screaming and the clanging stopped. The man went limp and his body slid down the bars and onto the floor.
Kessler reached for the cop’s holster and took out the Beretta, pulling the slide and then shooting once to sever the chain holding his tethered arm to the rail. He fumbled with the groaning cop’s tunic trying to find any keys, but then noticed a bunch on the floor across the corridor out of reach. He shook the cop awake and he coughed and spluttered and groaned again. Kessler held his face close to the bars and pressed the gun against the cop’s brown-smeared cheek.
“Listen, my friend. Let me out of here and I promise you won’t come to any harm. Your keys are behind you.”
The cop’s tongue was working overtime trying to eradicate the filth and stench from his mouth and he spat some of the mixture at Kessler in defiance. Kessler moved the gun away from his cheek and shot him in the thigh. His body twisted, his face creased in anguish and he bellowed in pain.
“The keys, pig. You have seven rounds to go.”
The cop whimpered and moaned and turned his head. Kessler released his tunic but held on to his belt as the cop stretched a hand across the floor and retrieved the bunch of keys. Kessler dragged him backwards and helped him up to a kneeling position in front of the door. His trouser leg glistened red and wet and blood smeared the corridor floor. Kessler rammed the gun in the cop’s mouth.
“Now, just unlock the door and everything’s going to be fine and you’ll be able to get that leg fixed. Capisce?” The guy couldn’t speak with the gun in his mouth but, nodding furiously, fumbled with the keys. “Quickly. I won’t shoot you again if you help me,” said Kessler, trying to sound soothing and supportive, but he was in a hurry. The shooting across town had stopped and could only mean at some point soon, the other polizia would be back. The key was found and inserted, the lock sprung and the door moved outwards. “Thank you,” he said and pulled the trigger.
The cop flew backwards into the corridor and his head hit the bars opposite, where he lay dead, eyes open wide. Kessler found another key to unlock the cuff, then strode down the corridor, ready to shoot anyone that appeared, but he was alone. He heard car sirens howling by outside, or maybe ambulances, but he had to get out. He stopped by a closed door, the glass in the upper half etched with a name: Commissario F. Bianchi.
He pushed it open and swung the gun around. No one. He went over to the desk. It bore several piles of papers and two manila folders: one with a white label marked H. Male; another, Kessler/Schneider/Radler. He picked them up, then rifled through the drawers on each side of the desk. He found a grey metal tin with a security lock, key left in place. It contained some receipts and bundles of lire notes in various denominations. He grabbed a handful, stuffed them in his trouser pocket and left.
Out in the street, people were standing and gossiping, all looking optimistically in the direction of something they couldn’t see but then another ambulance flashed by, sirens wailing, and all eyes swung to follow its progress up the hill towards Piazza Vittoria. He pocketed the gun and walked briskly in the opposite direction, heading for the train station. He was there in ten minutes just as a train came in and he glanced at the departure board. Rome.
He flipped open one of the manila files, scanning the front page. It had a range of scribbled notes, yesterday’s date, the names of Harry Male and Lucia Barone and a place: Roma! He rushed to the ticket office.
“Biglietto per Roma.” The uniformed ticket master looked at him in disdain. The tramp before him had brown streaks on his face and in his hair and he stank of drains. He guessed the customer was foreign from his accent.
“You have luggage?”
“Nein! No luggage. Quick! Presto! Schnell!”
Kessler dumped a handful of notes on the stainless-steel counter and the official slid a ticket across in return. Without waiting for change, he sprinted onto the platform and over the footbridge and ran, as fast as his aching legs would allow, hoisting himself onto the already moving train bound for Rome.