‘It is a good place, you agree?’
‘Do you want me to flatter you or kick you?’
‘Nothing in Naples is as it seems.’
‘Wrong,’ Lukas said. ‘The boy is kidnapped. That “is as it seems”. I enjoyed the walk, and this is not about tectonic plates, it’s about criminality. Don’t give it excuses. And I’ll buy you lunch.’
*
He thought it would break in another hour if he could increase the pressure on the link where it ran on the concrete. It seemed to bend, fractionally, in his hands.
When he had broken the link, and the chains hung from the two manacles, what would he do?
Couldn’t face that. Couldn’t think about it while the chain still held. Christ, why did nobody come? Why no sirens? Why no help? Why did nobody care? Could have screamed it – didn’t. Eddie went on sawing at the link.
‘Very grave times, Professore. Grave and unhappy.’
‘Please, distinguished avvocato, explain your request for our meeting.’ The prosecutor had not done the lawyer the favour of meeting him in his personal office – had he done so, he would then have had to abandon it while fumigation and scrubbing were carried out. He was able to be civil to and understanding of the principal criminals he met after their arrest, always found them polite and correct, of good intelligence and, in a few cases, exceptional intellect. He found some well read in modern classics and some in poetry, and with a few he had discussed with passion his love of opera. He was not sworn at, neither did he feel his home and family were threatened. The professionals – the lice on the criminals’ backs – disgusted him.
‘You understand, Professore, that material comes, unsolicited and without prior notification, through the post to my office.’
‘I understand.’
‘Material that is sent anonymously, no cover note of explanation. In this case a single sheet featuring a photograph and a written demand. Upon receiving it, I immediately telephoned your office, Professore, and you were gracious enough to permit this meeting.’
Everyone called the lawyer by his given name, Umberto. He gloried in that familiarity. Even members of the judiciary were known to use it in court. The prosecutor would not. The professional men were, the prosecutor’s belief, essential crutches for criminality. They cared for the legal matters that were the inevitable cost of a career in organised crime: they opened the bank accounts and transferred the laundered monies; they placed investments and advised on what stock should be bought or sold; they were the politicians paid handsomely for access to contracts. Sometimes, if he walked alone and unknown in the darkness and thought deeply, the prosecutor considered that the professionals might indeed be the ones who pulled the strings and the clan leaders were mere marionettes. This lawyer disgusted him, but was clever. Many man-hours had been devoted in the Palace of Justice to bringing him before the courts. As yet they had failed.
‘What do you have for me?’
‘I must say also – I was this morning stopped in the street by a stranger. A message was given to me. I have this…’
From a frayed and scratched briefcase – a symbol of experience and also of humble poverty – a transparent sheath was taken. Not ‘poverty’. The lawyer would be worth, for his work with the Borelli clan, many tens of millions of euros – paid well because he served well. The meeting was in an interview room. There was a table, with an ashtray and, four chairs. Three walls were bare and one carried a framed portrait of the President of the Republic; it was minimalist and intended to offer no comfort. The sheath was passed across the table. He saw a photograph printed on the top half of the page, and under it was the handwritten message:
If Immacolata Borelli does not make, within one week, a statement that she has left the custody of the palace and will not give testimony now, or ever, against persons known to her, this man will be killed.
The prosecutor had enjoyed a varied career but remembered best the time – four years – he had spent in Reggio Calabria; there had been similar photographs then. Staring eyes trapped in a moment of fear by the brightness of the camera flash, the filth on the shirt, or blouse or dress, the thickening stubble on a man’s face and the tangle of uncombed hair if it was a girl. Usually they held a newspaper. Usually, also, they seemed to demonstrate the desperation of the damned, as if they didn’t believe help existed, or that they were anything more than supine participants. In this photograph, the boy had a pleasant face.
‘The man who stopped me in the street – I assure you, Professore, he is unknown to me – he said that the boy taken would lose an ear after four days, a finger after five, his penis after six, then would die if Immacolata Borelli’s statement was not passed to me. I don’t know why me.’
The prosecutor remarked briskly, ‘Because you represent Pasquale Borelli and all his tribe.’
‘I’m just a messenger.’
‘Of course.’
‘I would deny that my clients, the family I have the privilege to represent, and who are hard-working, honourable people, are linked to this sad, difficult situation.’ Then he asked, innocence creasing his face, ‘Do you know who this young man is, Professore? Do you know his connection with Immacolata Borelli?’
‘No.’
‘It would be a tragic distortion of reality if the position of this young man was to weigh against the family, my clients.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m only the messenger.’
‘Again, of course. You don’t have the envelope in which this communication was sent to you? For forensic studies?’
‘I regret that it had been shredded before its contents’ significance was noted.’
‘Could you give a description of the “stranger” who accosted you?’
‘He was behind me. I never saw his face.’
‘Of course.’
There were four directions in which the future career path of the prosecutor could go. He might write the letter, give the notice of termination, go to walk in the beloved Dolomites, quit. He might be transferred to the anti-terrorism force and posted anywhere. There was the chance of promotion to Rome and the chair of command over the three primary prosecutors in Palermo, Reggio Calabria and Naples. He might just soldier on, maintain his office at the palace, beaver away at his work and log seventy hours a week. The last option had a saving grace. One day or night, he would nail this shit bastard and see him dragged away in handcuffs, unable to shield his face, past the lines of flashbulbs, and know that he was headed for the remand cells of the Poggioreale gaol and a chance to share life with pimps, thieves and pushers, the scum of the city. He never lost his temper in public. He did at home – he would pace his living room, his child shut in a bedroom and his wife gone to the kitchen, and howl at the unfairness of life. He stood up.
The lawyer rose awkwardly from his chair. The advantage of the interview room was that it did not have air-conditioning, and was therefore uncomfortable: sweat streaked him. ‘Should I be telephoned, should I be accosted again, is there a response I can give, something that will save this unfortunate from mutilation or death?’
‘No, there is not.’
The lawyer said, a cut in his voice, ‘You play, Professore, with a life.’
‘Do you speak as a link in a chain of negotiation, and therefore as part of a criminal conspiracy, or as the mere messenger?’
He did not expect a reply. The guard outside the door would escort the shit bastard from the building.
How hard was she, the girl? The prosecutor took a lift high up the tower, to look for coffee. Who could read her, and know her break-point? He carried the sheath that protected the paper with the photograph of the staring eyes, the white cheeks under the stubble, colour burned from them by the flash, the tousled hair and the dried blood on the skin. To destroy the Borelli clan would be a triumph but would carry a price. It was indeed, beneath the wide-eyed fear, a pleasant face.
He sawed, and felt the chain link weaken. He hadn’t imagined it – he knew
it. He began to think of it, fighting. Began to stiffen with the stress of it – a dream or a nightmare – but kept sawing. The dust was thick on his face and his eyes hurt. He thought of everyone he knew, and wondered if any among them would believe that Eddie Deacon – in a hole with no water and a shit bucket – could break out of handcuffs and fight. His Mac, would she? Couldn’t answer that.
The shower hadn’t been mentioned, or her strip in front of Alessandro Rossi. She was subdued. Immacolata talked of her mother. The tape-recorder was controlled by Rossi and Orecchia prompted. It was general, not the detail required by Castrolami, the prosecutor or his deputy. She scratched in her mind for memories and tried to offer up the minutiae of detail. And between what she had to offer, Orecchia would speak or Rossi, as though events elsewhere had taken centre stage, and the safe-house apartment on the Collina Fleming was no longer of pivotal importance.
Orecchia had said, ‘The position of women in Naples is unique. In Naples a woman can rise higher, faster, than in the south or in Sicily. It was the legislation of 1991, all the collaborators provided for, all the arrests that followed, that took away the glass ceiling, and women flourished. If there’s a problem, what do they do? They call for the women.’
Rossi had said, ‘The women have less loyalty than the men. Pupetta Maresca, first lady of Nola, knows that her son is dead, knows that her son is in the tower supporting a flyover bridge, knows that a cocaine importer killed him, and she moves in with that man and has twins with him. She was a star – not as clever as your mother, but colder.’
She talked of her mother with detachment, as if she was speaking of a stranger she had met casually and briefly.
From Orecchia, ‘The men in the family will usually follow the orders of their father but always the orders of their mother. Another, from near Naples, Anna Mazza from Afragola. Her husband is shot so she sends her thirteen-year-old son to kill the assassin. He fails. All the men in her family are enlisted, and they go to war. Her order, the family of the killer is exterminated, and another family. One of Anna Mazza’s hitmen is killed. The revenge? That killer is taken within a day, tortured with electricity, then crucified against a door – because a woman wanted it.’
From Rossi, ‘We say of the women that they’re clever, they’re ignorant, they can’t read and write, they’re coarse or vulgar, but they’re respected and feared. All of those are true of your mother, except that she’s neither illiterate nor innumerate. She’s clever and she’s feared.’
She talked of her mother holding a meeting in the house, rare, and discussing a pending shipment from Venezuela, and seemed to acknowledge no blood ties, no family.
‘The woman at the clan’s heart enjoys the privilege given her – if she leaves it, she has nothing. Maybe it’s more important to the women than it is to the men.’
‘They say escape is impossible from Poggioreale, but Patrizia Ferriero succeeded in taking out her husband. The scam: she complained he had a severe kidney problem. She was the supreme fixer. She went to a hospital, bought the blood of a kidney patient, then arranged for it to be fed into a dialysis machine brought into Poggioreale to monitor his condition. She was allowed to transfer him to a hospital and he served his sentence in luxury. And she bought the policemen on guard duty with cocaine. Then, one day, he rose, and the police did not look, and he walked out of the hospital. Her driver and bodyguard was a former carabiniere. She was very intelligent.’
She talked in the flat tone about the mother who had not kissed, hugged or praised her.
‘We think women are more capable at criminality, but less visible.’
‘We believe that few women will stand against the lust, an orgasmic attraction, of power.’
‘You owe your mother nothing.’
‘An accident of birth does not have the right to demand loyalty.’ Immacolata said she would go to the kitchen and make lunch. Salad, fruit and cheese. She had not asked if she could run again in the gardens at the Villa Borghese.
Through his cleaned window, using the small mirror that he kept between his knee and the arm of his chair, Davide watched, saw the movement on the walkway and the bustle, and his head did not seem to waver or his eyes to move off the big-screen television. It was not usual for there to be so much movement, so many men, so early in the day. He thought he had seen, also, a clan leader, hustled along the walkway among guards towards the barred gate on level three. But his pay-masters were not concerned with the day-to-day, night-to-night dross life of the Sail. He watched everything. In his memory he noted everything. But he had witnessed nothing that would break his routine of meetings.
Eddie reckoned that in five more minutes he would have broken the chain’s link. He worked feverishly, had pain in his arms and shoulders, more dust on his face and in his eyes, more sweat and—
The footsteps came.
With them there was music, louder, as if doors had been opened and not closed, and the music flowed closer with the footsteps. Not one pair – might be three. They had differing rhythms and weights. Eddie didn’t know whether to use the last moment, as the footsteps came nearer, to try to break the link, or to leave the goddamn thing. Could have fought one, couldn’t fight three. Low voices were above him. They would examine the handcuffs, see the scratch line, the sawed indentation, and know what he’d done. Wouldn’t kill him, no. Might beat him. He heard the bolt pulled back, had the hood on his head and peeled down the hem, and the fraction of light from between the trapdoor’s planks was gone. Darkness enclosed him.
What was the best that could happen? That the bucket was taken out. What was the worst? Eddie shivered. The sweat on him had no heat. He realised it was a tremble. A dog in a farmyard knows it has done wrong, is called and goes forward on its belly. He had seen that on the farm where the heifers were, near his parents’ place. Wanted still to hate the man who had taken him off the street, wanted more to hear him laugh and know he was not to be beaten. The trapdoor was opened, the hinges groaning. The torch shone down and light seeped below the hood. Hands grabbed him.
He could smell the breath – chilli, maybe, but onion and nicotine too. He was pulled up. As he was dragged out through the hatch there were hands under his arms. There were no grunts, no wheezes – big men, powerful. His feet scraped the edge of the hatch and he was swung clear. His hands were dragged forward and he felt the pressure as a key was inserted into the handcuffs’ lock. They were removed. He had enough freedom to run his hands over his wrists and felt the smoothness of the welt he had made as he scraped. Then the laughter broke round him, and the chain of the handcuffs rattled – as if one manacle was held and the other danced beneath it. He heard, then, the snap as the link was prised apart. The laughter was more raucous. He waited for the blow. He tried to duck his head and to have his hands in front of his crotch, waited and— His arms were pulled behind him and a plastic tie bit into the skin where it was raw. He thought – and was bitter – they should be fucking grateful to him for giving them a fucking laugh by trying to break the fucking chain. All the hours he’d done, sawing and scraping for nothing, had given them a laugh.
Eddie could have wept.
He was held. He heard one go down into the pit, and there was the noise of the bucket swinging – whining – as its handle took the weight, then an oath. Some of his urine or faeces might have spilled out as it was hoisted. He heard, also, the rustle of the plastic bag in which his food had been. The rope at his ankles was untied. He was taken forward, and the trapdoor dropped behind him.
New fear played with him, mocked him.
Was it now they would take his penis, his finger or his ear?
He had only her picture to cling to. He had the blown-up photograph on his wall, the smile, and was so far from it and…
He kicked out his foot, took a good step. He had verged towards self-pity: forbidden. Had edged into the area of regret – that he should never have come: forbidden. He tried to walk tall, upright.
He was led out of a building and h
is feet crunched on broken glass. A vehicle door opened, and he was pitched forward. He knew from the smells that it was the same van as before. He didn’t think, now, that they would bring the knife to him. A rug or a blanket and maybe an old carpet were heaped on him and a boot pushed him against the bulkhead.
They went out of a yard on to a potholed track, then a tarmacked road.
Where was he going? Why was he being moved? What was the immediate future? It didn’t fucking matter. Eddie lay on the floor of the van and rode with its motion. He didn’t know of anybody out there who cared, so it didn’t fucking matter. He was near to weeping, but held off.
It was Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew and clerk, who met Anna Borelli, a legitimate meeting, not one that could have aroused suspicion. He met the aged lady on the broken pavement, among the cheap little clothing stalls on the piazza Nazionale, and they walked slowly together, her dictating the pace, towards the Poggioreale gaol. It was natural that Anna Borelli should wish to visit her two grandsons in the prison, and natural that a lawyer’s clerk should attend with her – it was an opportunity to feed the prosecutor’s reaction to the family.
The clerk didn’t chivvy her to move faster. He was well paid, already owned a car and had bought a good apartment in the high complex of offices, hotels and accommodation close to the prison and the Palace of Justice. He had done better than any of his colleagues at the university in the Faculty of Law. He would, he realised, gradually take over greater responsibility for the legal affairs of the Borelli family – the Borelli clan. He was sucked in, pulled towards a vortex. How to step aside? Difficult. How to forsake the material rewards? More difficult. He believed, with the certainty of night following day, that his future would be eked out on the far side of the high wall, which had watchtowers, guards with guns, attack dogs, searchlights and cameras. He thought it had been only the brilliance of his uncle Umberto that had kept the old man from the cells in the blocks beyond the wall. He went slowly because he hated going inside the place. It had been built ninety years before. Massimo knew the statistics. It had statutory accommodation for eleven hundred inmates and actual accommodation for two and a half thousand. There was tuberculosis in the goal, hepatitis and HIV. A nine-hundred-metre subterranean tunnel linked the cell blocks to the Palace of Justice. It was a place of hell, but it was glorified in the folklore of the city: there, clan leaders had enjoyed carpeted cells, had had personal chefs and had drunk champagne. There, murders were commonplace, alliances forged. It was where he would go, and his uncle Umberto, into sardine-tin cells, into dirt and violence, if he did not break the link… But he had a high-performance car and a fine apartment with a balcony view of the mountain.
The Collaborator Page 29