The Good Mothers - Alex Perry

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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 Lea’s and Carlo’s mothers would send them as children 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.’

       V

      Denise wasn’t the only one living a lie in Pagliarelle. Watching Lea’s daughter offered the carabinieri one of their best leads for finding out what had happened to Lea. But any reminder of the state’s relationship with Lea, or any hint that it might continue with her daughter, would be enough to condemn Denise. The carabinieri decided the state’s only visible presence in Pagliarelle should remain the lone village policeman. Unseen and unheard, however, scores of officers would watch Pagliarelle day and night.

      Over the years, the challenge posed by the mafia had compelled Italy’s security services to innovate. To pursue violent ’Ndranghetisti through mountain terrain had led the Calabrian carabinieri to form a unique Special Forces-style squad, the cacciatori (‘hunters’), a unit made up of snipers, bomb disposal experts, heavy weapons operators, helicopter pilots and Alpinists. The sight of a cacciatori helicopter gunship flying low over the Aspromonte mountains was a corrective to anyone who doubted the state was fighting a war in southern Italy.

      But even the cacciatori’s resources paled next to those commanded by Italy’s covert intelligence units. Around the world, only a few specialised police units are permitted to eavesdrop on suspects’ telephone calls or spy on them electronically. In Italy, a measure of the mafia threat was that all three police forces – the domestic police, the militaristic carabinieri and the Guardian di Finanza, which specialised in economic crime – had surveillance divisions that employed thousands. In 2009, the Italian state was tapping a total of 119,553 phones and listening to 11,119 bugs. Almost no type of reconnaissance was forbidden. To establish targets’ whereabouts, plain-clothes officers followed them, filmed them through hidden mini cameras and larger zoom lenses set up at a distance – several miles across the valley, in the case of Pagliarelle – and tracked their phones’ GPS signal. To find out what the subjects were saying, they hacked their text messages, phone calls, emails and social media chats.

      In Reggio, almost an entire floor of the gracious building that served as the city’s carabinieri headquarters had been transformed into a humming indoor field of electronic espionage. At the centre was a control room from which chases and operations were coordinated. Around it were twenty smaller offices, each dedicated to a different surveillance operation. Every room was packed with scores of screens, servers, modems and snaking thick black wires. Working without interruption in six-hour shifts that ran continuously, day and night, officers in Reggio and an identical team in Milan had been following bosses like Carlo for years. Chosen for their facility with dialects and their ability to inhabit the skin of their subjects, the operators knew their subjects so well they could decipher the meaning of their words from a euphemism or even an inflection in their voice. The Calabrian teams also had a particular skill with bugs. They planted devices in cars, homes and gardens. They bugged a basement laundry whose underground, signal-cutting location made it a favourite ’Ndrangheta meeting place. They bugged an orange orchard where a boss liked to hold meetings, and for the same reason bugged a forest. One time they even bugged a road where one boss took walks, ripping up the asphalt and re-laying it with tar embedded with listening devices.

      Such entrepreneurialism brought results. In early 2008, the squad hunting ’Ndrangheta supremo Pasquale Condello, by then fifty-seven and on the run for eighteen years, observed that every two weeks, as though he were

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