The Few Read online

  Scribe Publications

  THE FEW

  Nadia Dalbuono has spent the last fifteen years working as a documentary director and consultant for Channel 4, ITV, Discovery, and National Geographic in various countries. The Few is her first novel.

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2014

  Copyright © Nadia Dalbuono 2014

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Dalbuono, Nadia, author.

  The Few / Nadia Dalbuono.

  9781925106121 (Australian edition)

  9781922247674 (UK edition)

  9781925113303 (e-book)

  1. Detective and mystery stories. 2. Criminal investigation–Italy–Fiction. 3. Political corruption–Italy–Fiction. 4. Politicians–Italy–Fiction. 5. Organized crime–Italy–Fiction.

  A823.4

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For my family

  Part I

  Prologue

  From his window on the fourth floor of Palazzo Chigi, he watches the skyline blacken, and feels the same stirrings of anxiety he’d experienced as a boy when he’d sensed a storm blowing in across the Aeonian sea. It is time to make the call, but he lingers at the window and tracks the shifting scents moving up from the garden below. The charged air runs across his skin, stirs his hair. In the garden the blossom is newly out, but he sees it hours from now, broken and battered by the rains, smashed into a thousand pieces against the stone. He closes his eyes and tastes the earth as it releases its ripeness, hears the pounding torrents as they tear the pavements, feels the Tiber on his lips, in his nose, as it breaks its banks and engulfs the city — all the filth of Rome momentarily washed away.

  He crosses his office to the oak desk at its centre. Three telephones face him, but he pulls a mobile from his pocket followed by a scrap of paper. He carefully punches in the number, arthritic fingers struggling with the tiny keys. It has been a long time.

  It rings just twice. ‘Garramone.’ It is a hard voice. Thirty years later, and the boy is now a man, tired and beaten by a life of work.

  ‘It’s Pino.’

  ‘Don’t know a Pino.’

  A pause: ‘Think back, to Gela.’

  Silence, then a whisper: ‘Pino? That Pino?’ He takes a moment. ‘Why?’

  ‘Can we meet? I need your help.’

  Hesitation and something else, maybe fear: ‘I work for the police now.’

  ‘I know.’

  He laughs, tightly and awkwardly. ‘But don’t you have a whole army? Secret Service, whoever you want?’

  ‘I want you, Garramone.’

  Silence again, then a fragile breath: ‘When?’

  1

  THE RAIN HAD turned the streets to chaos. Roadside repairs had been abandoned, broken concrete lost to sludge. Frustrated pedestrians wound their way between rows of illegally parked cars, desperately seeking out a gap that would allow them access to the pavement. Up ahead by Piazza Repubblica, the traffic had come to a halt, red necklaces of brake lights morphing through the windscreen.

  Scamarcio slammed his hand against the dash, then did it again because it brought some muted sense of something that wasn’t quite relief. How he hated this city: it was impossible, uninhabitable, corrupt, overpriced. Eight in the evening on a Friday was not the time to call a meeting in Via Nazionale, but he couldn’t say no to Garramone. Last month’s hand smash had knocked one of the chief’s framed certificates irreverently off-balance and had left a hole that needed repair. There had been the usual trite jokes about southern blood, but he knew that Garramone was watching him now. It was common knowledge that Garramone had been uncomfortable about Scamarcio’s appointment from the start, but had gradually grown to trust him as a man he could count on. Then had come the foul-up of last month and the unequivocal sense that the relationship had been pushed back to another, uncomfortable start, regardless of any previous victories. He wondered idly why he found it so hard to control his rage — whether it came from the maternal or paternal side, whether he should invest in some anger-management courses, whether he was beyond help.

  The traffic was starting to shift up ahead, the furious horns of the drivers backed up behind him dying away as they sensed the change. The miserable column of cars edged slowly around the curve of the piazza, and the fountain came into view, bleached grey and cold. The rain had stripped it of its splendour, and the usual cluster of threadbare pigeons had fled. He swung a right into Nazionale. Garramone had said Number 42. Why here and not HQ? Was the chief on the take? He had him down as clean.

  He found the building, and swung the car onto the kerb. There were no normal spaces, so parking in front of a goods entrance was the only option. Garramone had said to ring the bell for Bevilacqua. He did so, and the chief’s baritone crackled out over the intercom.

  ‘Fourth floor, first on the left. Make sure nobody sees you.’

  Scamarcio made a quick scan of the street and then pushed the door. He took the stairs because he needed the exercise. The chief was waiting for him in the doorway, his gaze shifting nervously. He looked like he had just been roused from a deep sleep: there were darker rings than usual beneath his eyes, and his greying hair stood up in greasy tufts.

  ‘Get inside.’ He placed a hand on Scamarcio’s back and almost pushed him into the narrow hallway.

  The flat was pokey and barely furnished. There was a door off to the left, and then ahead of him down the hallway a small room with a window facing the street. He saw a plastic desk to the right of the window with several cheap-looking chairs on either side. The floors were tiled and dirty.

  ‘Whose place is this?’

  ‘No idea,’ said the chief.

  He thought about making a joke, asking whether the chief was planning to seduce him, but decided against it. ‘What’s going on?’

  He ignored the question and reached for the chair nearest the window, beckoning for Scamarcio to do the same. From a briefcase, he pulled out a thin cardboard file and slid it across the desk. He offered no explanation, and just nodded.

  Scamarcio opened the file. It seemed to consist of a series of grainy photographs, blown up to A4. A fit-looking man was in various stages of undress. He was surrounded by two muscular men in their underwear, both of them raising champagne glasses, with several spent bottles resting on a side table next to overflowing ashtrays. The furnishings were expensive; the lighting, low. They were smiling, toasting each other — it looked like the end of a good night. Then the photos suddenly became a whole lot more graphic. Scamarcio looked away for a moment, trying to catch his breath, and in the same instant he realised two things. The first was that one of these men looked young, perhaps slightly too young — there was a fullness in the cheeks, a brightness in the eyes, that gave it away. The second was that the man in the midst of it all was the foreign secretary, Giorgio Ganza. It hadn’t been clear at first because he’d been photographed in profile, but the final images left no room for doubt. The date stamp indicated that they had been taken three months ago.

  Scamarcio looked
up at the chief. There was no smile, no sense of them sharing an amusing secret. He struggled to keep his face sombre, to match the mood.

  ‘Who took these?’

  ‘No idea. But the photos were handed to two of your colleagues four weeks ago.’

  ‘My colleagues?’

  ‘Two officers from Salaria precinct. Some guy they had never seen before gave them an envelope, and then disappeared.’

  ‘So why are we only hearing about this now?’

  ‘They’ve been blackmailing Ganza, and it’s only just been brought to my attention.’

  Scamarcio wasn’t completely surprised. It wasn’t unheard of for colleagues to try to supplement their meagre 1,200 euros-a-month salary. But something wasn’t making sense.

  ‘How did you hear about this?’

  ‘From the prime minister.’

  ‘What?’

  The chief barred his arms across his chest, saying nothing.

  ‘How?’

  ‘He called me.’

  Scamarcio had no idea that Chief Garramone was on speaking terms with the prime minister. He didn’t quite know how to feel about this, and wasn’t sure how it reflected on the chief.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Garramone, ‘I don’t want to get into the whys and wherefores. We don’t have time. The PM learned about this because someone tried to sell the photographs to one of his magazines.’

  The prime minister presided over a sizeable media empire that included magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, bookshops, and several TV channels. He had begun his career as a business consultant, and had then set up a successful IT company that had allowed him to purchase a football team. The media empire had followed on from there. It seemed that everything the man touched had turned to gold — until, that is, he became prime minister. As Scamarcio saw it, Italy had not turned to gold under his stewardship; it had turned to shit. Some people wondered whether the problems were insoluble: if a dynamic businessman like the PM couldn’t do it, who could? Then there were others, like Scamarcio, who questioned whether he had the will — whether running the country was nothing more than an amusing personal project, the ultimate power trip at the expense of the millions of unemployed and underpaid.

  The chief was eyeing him closely now, as if he was testing a personal theory and observing whether Scamarcio was responding as expected.

  ‘This will be your case, Scamarcio. I am giving it to you as a demonstration of my faith in you.’

  Scamarcio shifted in his seat and rubbed his neck. He didn’t like the feel of this. He had the sense that he was here because no one else wanted to be, or because the chief needed to keep it under the radar. He knew that Scamarcio was a loner at work and would best be able to do that.

  ‘It goes without saying that this must be kept solely between ourselves. It’s not on the books at HQ yet. For now, I am handling it unofficially and have passed it to you in the same capacity.’

  Scamarcio nodded. There was a moment of silence, and he heard the slap of tyres wet and slick on the street below. Had he missed something? ‘I’m sorry, but what is it exactly that you want me to do?’

  The chief picked up a photo, and then laid it down again.

  ‘The story is about to go public. People magazine has bought the pictures, and most of the media knows about it. It will probably break tomorrow. Ganza has already packed his bags, and has spent the last forty-eight hours safely installed in a retreat outside Florence where he will enjoy several weeks of rest and reflection.’

  ‘So you want me to pin down our guys — tie them up for blackmail?’

  The chief waved a hand away. ‘No, that’s an internal disciplinary matter — I will deal with it.’

  Something wasn’t adding up. ‘Why are you trying to keep this secret if it’s about to break in the media?’

  The chief rubbed tiredly under his right eye. His skin held an early tan from several May weekends at the beach at Sperlonga, but right now it looked liverish and sickly in the ebbing light.

  ‘It’s not that part of the story I’m worried about. It’s the second part I want you to deal with.’ He pulled a photo towards him, scanned it, and then turned it to face Scamarcio. His index finger was resting on the man to the right of the foreign secretary.

  ‘His name is Arthur.’

  He was striking — with dark brows and burnt-amber eyes — but there was something about him that wasn’t quite right, that remained perhaps just the wrong side of legal.

  ‘Arthur … as a name, I’m not sure it suits him.’

  The chief sighed. ‘Doesn’t matter now. He was murdered this morning — stabbed to death in his flat in Trastevere.’

  2

  It saddened him that it had come to this. It was not how he liked to run things. He looked down to the gardens and saw the smashed blossom like blood, cast around in the new eddies of the fountain. He had sensed that these would be cleansing rains, but now he knew that they were just the opposite: With them they would bring a tide of filth, all the sewage of the city pushing up to drown them all.

  Trastevere was quiet for a Friday night. The weather must have been keeping people away. He saw a man pushing a trolley full of empty bottles up ahead, the clink of glass echoing down the street as the bottles rattled across the paving stones. A group of young people were huddled in a doorway, a raincoat stretched out above their heads, waiting for the deluge to subside. A girl was struggling to light up under the coat, and Scamarcio decided to trouble her for a cigarette — not because he particularly felt like a smoke, but mainly because she had an interesting face.

  He stood with them for a few minutes, trading small talk about the rain, and then he raised his jacket collar against the elements and continued his journey towards Via Cosimato. This was a part of town he liked: cobbled alleyways finishing at nothing; darkened windows with tiny diamond panes pushing out through webs of ivy; wooden shutters barred above mysterious workshops. It was the sense of the medieval that he enjoyed — the chance to escape from that other century outside.

  There was a single officer on the doorway of Number 20, just as Garramone had told him there would be. It was still quiet for now, because no one realised the connection. As far as the police were concerned, Arthur was just another rentboy who had met an untimely end.

  Scamarcio murmured a greeting to the officer, who turned to push open a huge oak door. He stood back to let him through. ‘Upstairs, first on your right.’

  Scamarcio thanked him and climbed the stairs. There were patches of damp on the walls where the paint was peeling. The place needed work. They’d have to sort it all out anyway after the murder — if they wanted to entice new tenants, that is.

  A light was coming from the entrance to the flat. As he drew closer, he saw that the door was ajar. It had been kicked in, leaving small craters in the wood to the right and tiny shards of paint across the carpet. He eased through the gap, and the first thing he saw was Filippi, on his hands and knees, his gloved hands searching for something on the floor. Scamarcio hadn’t seen him for a while, but wasn’t altogether surprised to see him here; Trastevere was his beat, after all. Scamarcio surveyed the flat, or what was left of it. Nearly every painting had been smashed and knocked off-balance, photos had been ripped from their frames, and rugs cut to shreds. A plush-looking sofa bore a thick gash through its middle, which had caused foam to spill out in all directions. Oily black paint had been strewn everywhere — on the floors, across the ceiling, coating walls and partitions. He guessed he was standing in the living room, but the general chaos left some room for doubt.

  Filippi grimaced as he tried to straighten from his crawling position. A slight man, no more than five foot seven, whose suits always hung badly, he was in his mid-forties, with thinning blond hair and quiet blue eyes. Scamarcio remembered that he was originally from the north, transferred dow
n from Brescia. He held out a hand to help him up and Filippi accepted it, although irritated by the gesture. Once on his feet, he stretched slowly, hands behind his hips. ‘I don’t suppose you have this problem.’

  Scamarcio was a good ten years younger, and known for keeping in good shape. He didn’t push it to extremes, though; he didn’t want that freakish look.

  ‘What are you doing here? Last time I looked, this was my neck of the woods.’ Filippi had to raise his head when he spoke, because of the height difference. Scamarcio could tell that this also troubled him.

  ‘Just taking a look — wondered if it might tie into something else I’ve got going on.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  Scamarcio smiled and said nothing.

  Filippi shook his head, bored, as though he’d seen it all. ‘You’re welcome to it. I’ve had more than my fair share of road-kill this week.’ He brushed some dirt from the knees of his trousers and gestured through what remained of the living room to a doorway at the back. ‘He’s still in the bedroom, and it’s not a pretty sight. Forensics are on their way, so don’t touch anything. I’m going round the corner for a bite — back in five.’

  As Scamarcio approached the doorway, the air seemed to thicken. He stopped where the door should have been and looked through, heeding Filippi’s warning, not wanting to contaminate the scene. On what remained of the bed he could just about make out a human form. There were two legs, two arms, and a head, but that was as far as it went. The corpse was so deeply bloodied that it was practically a hunk of meat — it was impossible to see whether it was male or female.

  The smell was overwhelming. Scamarcio pulled a paper tissue from his pocket and spread it over his mouth. He’d seen shootings, beatings, and knife fights, but never a stabbing like this. He was about to go and find Filippi, share the experience, and laugh it off, when he became aware of a dim light coming from somewhere deep in the room — an alien glow that didn’t quite belong. He stepped forward, careful not to cross the threshold. To the left was a bunch of shattered fragments of something wooden — maybe a chest of drawers — and then to its right, in the middle of what remained of a tall cabinet, was a small shelf with a mirror, its glass strangely white in all the blackness. A high-end camera lay open in front of it, its lens and body smashed, but the green light still pulsing.