Tarantula (5 page)

There was no point in worrying about Ernesto. Either he would meet him or he would not. He would deal with either eventuality when he knew what the Italians had chosen to do.

Milton bought a pair of flip flops, shorts and a t-shirt. He bought a newspaper and ambled back to the restaurant. Tables had been dragged down to the promenade and he took a chair at one of them, turning it to face out to the sea. The sun was already hot, burning down from a clear sky, and the water in the wide bay sparkled and glittered. Milton opened his newspaper and read. There was nothing more on Number Three. His story, like his car, had sunk down beneath the surface to be forgotten. The table next to his was occupied by an American couple who, he quickly gathered, were on their own version of a Grand Tour, vacationing throughout Europe. They had a collection of postcards and spent half an hour filling them out. Milton tuned them out.

Milton had an early lunch and paused for a moment in the restroom. The space beneath his left armpit where he usually carried his pistol was conspicuously empty, and it made him feel uncomfortable. He knew the men he was dealing with were dangerous, and facing them without a weapon was unsettling.

He changed into the things that he had bought. The t-shirt was cut well up the arm and it revealed the wings of the angel tattooed across his shoulders.

It was time to go.

He turned on the tap and splashed cold water onto his face.

Showtime.

MILTON WAS sweating by the time he had walked the short distance from the town down to the beach. He stood for a moment in the shade of a beach café while he got his bearings.

The café was in bad shape, obviously only used in the high season and left to rot for the rest of the year. He heard the sound of a smartphone playing Italian dance music inside. The proprietor offered sandwiches wrapped in polythene, the bread gone stale and the cheese limp. There were expensive bottles of water, cans of Coke and Orangina.

There was a rocky breakwater that extended a finger out into the sea and, beyond that, a fashionable restaurant and bar. On the beach, a brown skinned local offered sun loungers and parasols for rent while a woman, his wife perhaps, stood guard over a small armada of pedaloes that had been dragged up onto the beach. There was a margin of flinty stones, fifty yards of sand, and then the hushing of the sea. There were a handful of bathers, two of them swimming out beyond the buoys that marked the start of the beach, the others splashing happily in the shallows. Milton counted eighteen people stretched out on the sand. He waited a minute, watching them quietly, but there was no suggestion that they posed him a threat. It was impossible to say for sure, of course, for it would have been simplicity itself for one of them to hide a gun or a knife beneath their towel, but Milton’s instincts had not been triggered by any of them. He took a final look to the left and the right and then stepped down from the stone wall of the promenade, onto the burning hot duckboards and then into the warm, soft, give of a sandy path through the stones.

He followed the path to the main beach and then kept going down to the sea. He was wearing the flip-flops and he took them off and stepped into the wash, deep enough so that the warm water could lap up at his calves. He took off the shirt, too, mopping his face and then stuffing it into the pocket of the cargo shorts. To the left, until it disappeared in the autumn heat haze, the beach swept away in a slight curve towards steep cliffs. To the right was the rocky breakwater and the seawall on which the restaurant had been constructed. Fishermen perched on the wall, their hopeful lines cast out before them. Milton turned back, scanning the beach again. He could see the sunbathers better from this direction, some of them sheltering under colourful parasols. Further back, he could see the parking lot where he had left his Ducati, the obscene green of a golf course that catered to tourists with pockets deep enough to afford a round, and then, at the back of it all, the gentle climb of brown and green uplands and the mountains beyond.

Milton’s eye was drawn to one of the sunbathers. She was lying on her stomach, her dark hair tied up in a bun that rested in the nape of her neck. Her skin was as brown as a nut, garlanded with little droplets of perspiration, the sun blazing down hard onto her.

Milton went across.

“Good afternoon.”

She was topless, her breasts pressed down beneath her chest. She looked up, her eyes obscured by a large pair of sunglasses. Milton’s shadow fell over her back. She was wearing a red bikini that contrasted with her darkened skin and she was lying on a pastel coloured beach towel.

“Signor Smith.”

He felt her shaded eyes on his body, the tightly packed muscles of his stomach. It might have been that or perhaps she had seen his litany of scars: the knife wound in his side, the bullet hole in his clavicle, the evidence of his motorcycle accident on his legs.

“It is hot, yes?”

“Very.”

He sat down next to her. The sun was burning hot.

“Too hot for an Englishman?”

“Almost,” he said, deciding not to tell her of the time he had spent in the deserts of the Middle East. This was hot.
They
had sweltered.

“Why did you want to see me?”

“I told you. You are a pretty—“

She snorted, waving the compliment away. “I don’t think so, Signor. You want to know about Ernesto and the others.”

“Only if it is safe for you to talk about them.”

She laughed again, a bitter laugh. “Safe? Of course it isn’t safe. This is the mafia, Signor Smith. Worse, it is the
Camorra
. I have become too involved with them to ever be safe. Safety is for other people.”

“What happened?”

“How did I become involved?” she asked. He nodded. “My father was an important man in the organisation. He was Ernesto, before Ernesto was Ernesto. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt that you do.”

Milton looked away discreetly as she arranged her bikini top around her, and then she sat up and took a bottle of water and a packet of cigarettes from her bag. She took a long draught of the water and offered the bottle to Milton. He drank.

“My father was shot by a rival. His killer, too, was killed. I was involved in the family business long before it happened. I was seeing a man, too, a capo.”

“And where is he?”

She smiled at him. “He is dead. They are all dead.”

She tore the packet open, took a cigarette and offered the packet to Milton. He took one, held it between his lips and ducked his head so that she could light it for him.

“I do not need your pity, Signor Smith. What good will it do me? It is worthless.”

She blew smoke into the air, her eyes inscrutable behind the dark saucers of her sunglasses.

“Did you tell anyone that you were meeting me?”

“No, but they will know. The tourists,” she said the word contemptuously, “they are oblivious, but everyone else is either in the mafia or paying the mafia. Privacy is difficult here, Signor.”

“Is there somewhere we could go? Your room?”

Her lips twitched up in a half smile but she shook her head. “I do not think so. We will stay here and you may ask me your questions. What is it you want to know?”

She drew up her knees, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and drawing down on it hungrily. He found it difficult to read her.

“Who killed my colleague?”

She shrugged.

“Tell me?”

She inhaled and exhaled. “Ernesto would be very angry with me if I told you that.”

“There’s no reason why he would ever find out.”

“You are so naïve, Signor Smith. It is almost charming.”

“Humour me, then. Who was it?”

“He is Tarantula.”

“What?”

“That man, that is what they call him. Tarantula.”

“Why?”

“I hear he has a spider on his face. A tattoo. I have never seen him. He only works for the Camorra. No-one else. They say that you only see him for a moment before…” She drew her finger across her shapely neck. “Before
la fine
. The end.”

There came the sound of a cellphone from inside Antonietta’s bag. She reached inside and took it out. Her face changed as she saw who was calling. The insouciance that seemed such an important part of her character fell away, the rug pulled from beneath her feet.

He knew it was Ernesto.

She took the call, standing and walking away from Milton so that he could only hear the soft sound of her voice. It was a short conversation, but Milton could tell from the way that her posture became defensive that she was being chided for some ill. She finished the call and returned her cellphone to her bag.

“Well?” he said.

“They are not coming.”

Milton stiffened. “They don’t want to see me?”

“No, they do. But in Naples. Not here.”

“Where in Naples?”

“The docks. There is a restaurant there, a working man’s place, not like here, not for tourists like this. I can tell you where it is.”

“Is that good or bad?”

She didn’t answer.

“Antonietta? Is there anything else I should know?”

She paused, almost reflexively looking around. “I do not know you, Signor Smith, but I like you. I would not like to see you killed. Ernesto is a very dangerous man and I have been involved with him for long enough to have blood on my hands. Your friend, Signor Grieve, he was pleasant, like you have been pleasant. I liked him, too. And what happened to him was unfair. It was wrong. And I do not want it to happen to you.”

“What happened to him, Antonietta?”

“He met Ernesto at the restaurant, on the Monday. Like you. They spoke. Ernesto told him to come back again on the Tuesday. And he didn’t come. He told me to send him to the restaurant in Naples. The same as you.”

“And then he was shot?”

“Yes.”

MILTON SAT on the Ducati and thought about what he should do. He knew there was a very good chance that he was being set up. He knew everything that had happened to Number Three now. Grieve had been sent to the restaurant to establish his location. Antonietta had called her cousin when he had set off for Naples and Ernesto had contacted the assassin. There was only one route north from Castellabate and he would have known that Owen Grieve would have had to follow it. There would have been little else to do. The road, the point where it curved around the cliff face, the perfect vantage point, the perfect spot to fire.

The snare was laid and the rabbit had been sent right into the middle of it.

All that the sniper had to do was take the shot.

If Ernesto had not bought his story last night, the odds were that he was going to be next.

Had
he bought his story?

There was no way of knowing short of going to see him.

And if he wanted to make the appointment, he had no choice but to follow the coast road.

The same route that Number Three had taken.

Would they try the same trick, even though they knew Milton must surely anticipate it?

Or were they teasing him? Trying to keep him off guard?

He started the engine. He turned back to the beach and saw Antonietta watching him, her eyes unfathomable beneath the pellucid shades. She waited and watched as he put the bike into gear and pulled away.

He turned to the north.

MILTON FOLLOWED the road out of the town and into the verdant countryside that surrounded it. It was even hotter now and he raised his visor a little to let the air in. The roads were quiet, with just a few cars and merchants’ trucks buzzing into and out of town. As he pressed on to the north, the traffic became scarcer until it disappeared altogether.

He turned onto the coastal road.

The ocean stretched away to the wispy horizon to his right and the sheer face of the rock hemmed him in on the left. Gulls wheeled high overhead. Scuds of cloud raced across the emerald water.

Milton entered the tunnel and began the lazy curve that would end in the straight where Number Three had been shot.

He gripped the handlebars, opened up the revs and felt the sudden acceleration. He flicked up through the gears, touching sixty, leaning down with the bike so that his knee was inches from the asphalt.

Seventy.

The big bike roared out of the tunnel and burst forward onto the straight.

Eighty.

Milton glanced up at the ridge where the sniper had lain in wait for Three, but the sun was behind the trees and the glare blinded him. He blinked it away and kept the throttle open.

Ninety.

The straight lasted for nine hundred yards.

One hundred miles an hour.

It took him fifteen seconds to race across it. The ridge passed in a blur of green vegetation and grey rocks and then he was speeding headlong towards the unguarded drop where Three’s journey had come to an abrupt, and fatal, end.

He was going too fast to take the corner.

He squeezed the brakes and turned in, the rear wheel sliding out, impossible to control. The bike skidded across the road, the front wheel passing the apex, and Milton held on tight and opened the throttle again. The back wheel scrabbled against the rough dirt on the edge of the road, inches from the drop to the water below, and then Milton found enough traction to aim the bike back onto the road.

He was clear.

He slowed, dropping down to forty.

There had been no shot.

He was still in one piece.

IT TOOK another two hours to reach the outskirts of Naples. Milton followed Antonietta’s instructions, tracing his way around the perimeter of the city towards the sea. He found the Corso San Giovanni and kept turning towards the sea until he found the Calata Porta di Massa and the port.

Milton drove onto the dock. He parked the bike and walked the rest of the way to the address he had been given. It was a rough and edgy place, with an atmosphere of incipient violence that put him on edge. He passed little groups of men, workers on their breaks, smoking, glaring at him with unmasked enmity. He followed the line of the wharf, counting down the various piers. The water down below looked diseased: ships emptied their bilge tanks and hosed down their holds, spraying out the detritus from whatever it was that they had carried. Yellow foam dripped into the water like poison. Diesel and petrol glistened on the surface, refracting the light in tiny rainbows. Pleasure craft tossed their trash overboard, and it was swept into the bay. The mess of garbage and pollution congealed into a hard scum that crusted up against the pilings and slid to and fro on the listless tide, all along the coastline. The water, in places, looked more like slime.