Читать книгу The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on The World's Most Powerful Mafia - Alex Perry, Alex Perry - Страница 13

Denise slept for an hour and a half the night Lea disappeared.1 The next morning, 25 November 2009, she ate breakfast with her Aunt Renata, walked with her to the kindergarten where she worked, then spent the morning silently smoking cigarettes with Andrea and Domenico in a nearby piazza. In the afternoon, Carlo phoned and told her to meet him at Bar Barbara. On the way there, Denise ran into a cousin from Lea’s side of the family, Francesco Ceraudo, who lived in Genoa. She told Francesco that Lea was missing and asked him if he had seen her. Francesco blanched. ‘Do you know anything?’ Denise asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, and walked on.

The entire Cosco clan were in Bar Barbara: Carlo, his brothers Vito and Giuseppe, and Aunt Renata. Giuseppe and Renata were playing video poker in the corner. Giuseppe won 50 euros and, clumsily, gave the winnings to Denise. After a while, the carabinieri called Denise on her mobile and said they needed to speak to her. During the call, a squad car pulled up outside. Vito asked what was happening. ‘Lea’s missing,’ Carlo told him.

The Coscos weren’t about to let one of their own go to the carabinieri alone. Vito dropped Carlo and Denise at the station around 8.30 p.m., and father and daughter entered together. Inside, however, carabiniere Marshal Christian Persurich told Carlo he had to talk to Denise unaided. Persurich showed Denise to an interview room. He informed her that in Calabria her Aunt Marisa had reported Lea missing. Marisa had also told the carabinieri that Lea had testified against the ’Ndrangheta and that she and Denise had spent time in witness protection. Lea had now been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Persurich needed the whole story. Denise should take her time and leave nothing out. The interview would be strictly confidential.

Denise nodded. ‘If my mother’s missing,’ she began, ‘then it’s probably because she’s been killed by my father.’

Marshal Persurich interviewed Denise for five hours, finishing just before 2 a.m. Denise emerged to find Carlo pacing the waiting room, demanding that the officers let him read her statement. Seeing his daughter, Carlo confronted her. ‘What did you tell these people?!’

‘You asked us to Milan,’ Denise replied blankly. ‘We spent a few days together. You were meant to pick her up. But you couldn’t find her. Then we looked for her all over.’

Carlo looked unconvinced. Five hours for that?

On the way back to her cousin’s, Carlo and Denise stopped at a restaurant, the Green Dragon, named after the symbol of Milan. Inside was Carmine Venturino, the cousin who had given Lea some hash to smoke. Carmine had a babyish face and looked like a born truant, and Denise had liked him from the moment she met him at a wedding in Calabria the previous summer. But that night they had nothing to say to each other. After Carmine and Carlo had a brief, hushed discussion, Carlo walked his daughter back to Viale Montello. There, Denise slept in Andrea’s room for a second night.

The next morning, Carlo, Denise and a friend of Carlo’s, Rosario Curcio, saw a lawyer in town. Carlo told the lawyer he wanted to see Denise’s statements. The lawyer asked Denise what she’d told the carabinieri. Denise repeated what she had told Carlo: that she and her mother had come up to Milan to spend a few days with her father and Lea had vanished on their last night. She began crying. The lawyer said he could arrange to have Lea’s disappearance publicised on national television. There was a show, Chi l’ha Visto? (Have You Seen Them?), which appealed for information on missing people. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ cried Carlo. The lawyer didn’t get it at all. Carlo stood up and walked out, leaving Denise crying in the lawyer’s office.

After Denise recovered, she, Carlo and Rosario drove to a beauty salon owned by Rosario’s girlfriend, Elisa. Carlo took Rosario aside for another quiet talk. Elisa asked Denise what was going on. Denise burst into tears once more and told Elisa that her mother had gone missing two nights before. Elisa said that was strange because Rosario had vanished for a few hours the same evening. They’d had a date, said Elisa, but Rosario had cancelled, then switched off his phone. When she finally got through to him around 9 p.m., he’d told Elisa something about having to fix a car with Carmine. It didn’t make sense. Why the sudden rush to fix a car? Why at night? Denise was about to say something when Carlo interrupted to say he was taking Denise back to Viale Montello. She slept in her cousin’s room for a third night.

The next day, three days since Lea had disappeared, Denise detected an improvement in Carlo’s mood. He announced that he and Denise would drive to Reggio Emilia, not far from Bologna, to stay the night with another cousin. They left in the early afternoon. While her father drove, Denise watched silently as the winter sun flashed through the poplar trees like a searchlight through the bars of a fence. How could her mother just vanish? How could anyone be there one minute, and there be no sign of her the next? How would she ever talk to her father again?

In Reggio Emilia, Denise went to bed early while Carlo and his cousin went out for dinner. The following morning, Carlo drove Denise back to Milan, changed cars to a blue BMW and announced that he and Denise were leaving immediately for Calabria with two other friends. As they were packing, Carmine arrived to say goodbye. Denise was struck by his expression. Stiff and formal, she thought. Something about the way he wouldn’t look her in the eye.

From the back seat of the BMW, Denise watched as Milan’s grand piazzas and chic boutiques gave way to the flat, grey farmland north of Florence, then the rust-coloured hills of Tuscany and Umbria and finally, as the sun sank into the sea to the west, the towering black volcanoes around Naples and Pompeii. It was dark by the time they crossed into Calabria. Denise felt the road change from smooth asphalt to worn, undulating waves. The car negotiated an almost endless succession of roadworks, then plunged into the steep valley of Cosenza, skimming the cliffs as it wound down into the abyss before hitting the valley floor.

Soon Denise felt the car turn left and accelerate back up into the hills. She registered the tighter turns and the sound of tyres scrabbling on loose stones. The cold of the window dried her tear tracks to a salty crust. As the car filled with the smell of pines, the conversation between the three men took on a giddy, jubilant tone. ‘The only thing in my head was my mother,’ she said. ‘I was just sitting in the back, crying. But the others – they were so happy. Chatting and smiling and joking and laughing out loud.’

After an hour of climbing, the car crested a mountain pass and began to descend. At the edge of a forest, by the side of a stream, they came to a small village. They were heading to the one place where Carlo could be sure Denise would never speak out of turn again. Pagliarelle.

‘Pagliarelle’ comes from the word pagliari, meaning shelter. The name commemorated how for thousands of years, as the winter snows melted, Calabria’s shepherds would lead their sheep and goats up a track into the mountains and find a stream on whose banks they would graze their animals for weeks at a time. Keeping one eye out for wolves and another on the sea on the horizon, the men would collect pinewood, barbecue goat meat, drink wine and sleep in a handful of open-sided shacks that they roofed with fir and clay. In the twentieth century, the track leading from the nearby town of Petilia Policastro was tarred, electricity arrived and the shepherds’ rest grew into a modest settlement of grey-stone, red-tiled townhouses gathered around a small central square. The name survived, as did the stream, which was channelled into a fountain in the piazza where, as children, their mothers would send Lea and Carlo to fill buckets for the day.

It was here, high up in the frozen, granite mountains of eastern Calabria, that Denise found herself walking a tightrope of pretence in the weeks after Lea’s disappearance. Lea hadn’t just been Denise’s mother. After so many years alone together, she had defined Denise’s life. Now Denise found herself back in the place that her mother had tried to escape for so long, adrift among the people she was sure had killed her. It was impossible to know how to behave. With no body and no funeral, Denise couldn’t mourn. Carlo was telling people that Lea had run off, maybe to Australia, and Denise found herself having to make believe that her murderous father hadn’t really killed her courageous mother at all but that, rather, her fickle mother had abandoned her husband and only child and jetted off to a new life in the sun. Denise knew the way she looked so much like Lea – the same hair, the same cheekbones – made her an immediate object of suspicion. Worse, Carlo was making so much of Denise’s return. After years of problems with his wife and daughter, the boss finally had both his women where they belonged – and he wanted everyone to know. Ten days after Lea’s disappearance, Carlo organised an eighteenth birthday party for Denise, inviting hundreds of people from Pagliarelle and Petilia Policastro and even buying Denise a car. When Denise refused to go, Carlo went ahead with the party anyway.

Mostly, Denise spent her days trying to learn from her Aunt Marisa, with whom she was now living. Ever since Lea had first denounced the ’Ndrangheta in 1996, Marisa had been forced to pull off a daily performance in Pagliarelle. Convincing an entire village they needed to have no doubts about her had required Marisa not just to tell lies but to live them too. In her mind, Marisa suffocated any affection she had for Lea and focused instead on the resentment she felt towards her sister for the trouble she had caused. Denise realised she would have to learn to hate her mother, too. ‘I knew my aunt and her family,’ said Denise. ‘I knew how they thought. My idea was to understand their mentality and see if I could also work out how to live there. I didn’t want to end up like my mother. I wanted to keep living.’