No Mortal Thing: A Thriller by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online Page B

sometimes with his minder and sometimes with the woman at the edge of his life, because on most days he had little else to do.
    He had learned a little of what might be useful to him in his future life, if not as much as his grandfather would have wished. He found the company poor and the preoccupation with business contacts and investment opportunities tedious. Also, in Berlin he had no special status. He was not recognised, as he would have been in the village. It was as if, here, he was a probationer, having to prove himself worthy of respect, which was about the margins of percentages, buying and selling prices, what could be bought in property, square metres for how many euros . . . It bored him.
    It was more interesting to shop, buy shirts and jeans. They would go into a cupboard at his apartment – when the door was opened there was often an avalanche of clothing, still in its cellophane wrapping. Marcantonio did not, of course, give out his mobile number: difficult to do it because the device changed so often and he used a new number most weeks. If he wanted the girl, he would drive past at near to closing time, park on the kerb and hoot. She would come running. Many did, and the banknotes in his hip pocket were an encouragement. Sometimes he tipped lavishly with the absurd profits made from the sale of cocaine, or firearms, or immigrants without papers, or from the rents raised by apartment blocks and the profits from restaurants and hotels, and . . . So much money. It cascaded through his hands on a level not possible in Calabria. There, it was likely to be noticed and draw attention. Here, no eyebrow was raised. The girl’s lashes fluttered, her blouse bulged, and her fingers were smooth over the wrapper, but he did not reward her. First, Marcantonio had no time to screw her as tomorrow his half-year of imprisonment in Berlin would be over and a little freedom beckoned. It was as if he was out ‘on licence’ – which his father and uncle would never know. He was going home to the village, and he would no longer need to change into a clean shirt halfway through each day. The second reason that Marcantonio did not tip the girl was that a nagging frustration diverted him.
    The girl in the pizzeria. The girl with the brother who had stammered about his inability to pay. The girl who had come at him with her nails. That girl had clawed a place in his mind.
    In the morning he would have the opportunity to go back to the pizzeria, as he had ‘promised’ he would, and collect the pizzo . They always paid. Tears, shouting, even threats of going to the authorities, but they always paid. Marcantonio had no need for an additional thousand euro a month, but the targeting of the pizzeria had made for entertainment. It was outside what was allowed, but few would know and fewer would care.
    He took the wrapped shirts. He met the girl’s eyes, allowed himself to smile and turned away. A woman had looked into his eyes on the last night he had been at home. She had been tied up and her clothes were torn because she had fought. He and Stefano had hoisted her up, and her legs had splashed into the stuff when they had begun to lower her. She had screamed in the night and would not have been heard. She, too, had challenged him. She had spat in his face, and then they had pushed her down. Her head had come up once more but she had been too weak and too much in shock to spit again. It would have been good to fuck her, his aunt by marriage, but he had not tried because she was part, temporarily, of the family.
    After she had gone down into the tank he had carefully wiped all trace of the spittle from his face, and Stefano would have burned the clothes they had worn, and the clan who had provided the facilities for a lupara bianca would have removed anything left in the sludge. He would tell his grandfather what had happened.
    The shop manager, tall, blond and aloof, stood behind the girl who had wrapped his shirts and taken his