Rossi knew – was thankful for it – that Orecchia was senior and would have to make the telephone call. They went down to the ground floor and checked there, then to the subterranean garage, which they didn’t use, and looked there. They were supposed to have a roster whereby one slept and the other was alert, but both had been asleep. In older times, in history, to be asleep on duty was to invite a meeting with a firing squad. Today it would be a return to the uniform of the Guardia di Finanza, and they would be checking VAT statements in Bari or Brindisi. Maybe for Orecchia it would be dismissal.
Rossi asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘That she is not here, yes.’
‘What has she taken?’
‘Her handbag – she has some money.’
‘Has she taken any clothes?’
‘She has hardly any to take, and no case to put them in.’
‘Could she have gone to the piazza to buy bread or a magazine?’
‘Could pigs fly to the moon? I think not.’
Rossi saw that Orecchia’s mobile was in his hand. He was scrolling through the directory. He felt aggression towards the girl, their ‘Signorina Immacolata’, and might have exploded, let the fury rip, but he turned away and took the deep breaths counselled by the anger-management people. He could see the rooftops, then the hills and part of the city, the haze and gold light on the mountains. Where could she be? How long had she been gone? How far?
Orecchia gave him a wintry smile and pressed the call button.
She sat on a bench by a bus stop, a weed- and litter-filled flowerbed behind her. The bushes were oleander. She knew them from Naples. Their flowers were soft pink and pretty, well formed. As a child she had walked with her mother in the garden between the sea and the riviera di Chiaia, and had picked a sprig of those flowers and put it in the top buttonhole of her blouse. Her mother had seen it, snatched it, thrown it away and smacked her, open hand and hard, on her bare thigh above the knee. She had said that the flower of the oleander was the most dangerous in the city, could cause grave illness, even death; the sap was a compound of strychnine, a poison of the same strength. It had been so pretty, so delicate. Nothing was as it seemed, and she had learned the lesson. The shop she wanted was across the street, and she was waiting for the man to come and the shutter to be raised.
Nothing was as it seemed, and nobody – except Eddie Deacon – those days, those nights and that time.
Mario Castrolami was not a man of crude temper. He took the call, he listened in silence, he cut the call.
In his mentality there was a practised survival routine in the event of what many would describe as ‘disaster’. He began it. He lifted down his jacket from the hook, shrugged into it. He slipped out of the annexe and into a toilet where he dribbled out some urine. Then he went to the canteen, bought coffee and chocolate and took them out past the desk at the front. He circled the piazza as he drank the coffee and ate the chocolate. The wrapper went into a bin and the plastic cup followed it after the next circuit. He did the disaster routine when news came through from the palace at the centro direzionale that the judiciary had thrown out a case that might have taken three years to prepare, had involved dedication and massive man-hours, because of a supposed ‘technicality’, or because a politician had interfered in the process, or a file had walked from a supposedly secure archive. Others went to bars and drank, or dug with manic intensity into new files. Some went home and took their women to bed, or walked by the sea and gazed at the water. He plodded round the piazza, with coffee and chocolate, and pretended that a new day was starting when he eased into his chair. Judges were not known for patience when a collaborator’s testimony was withdrawn.
His friend, the artist, would have said, if asked, that he needed a holiday, but she would not be asked.
His wife in Milan would have said, if asked, that there was work in the private sector – in that city’s banking industry – for a man of his experience and that he should take the plane north, but she would not be asked.
There was, of course, a check-list of actions that followed the disappearance of a collaborator. A watch on the railway station in Rome, on the principal coach station and the airports of Fiumicino and Ciampino – and she might have been gone for two hours, or four. Orecchia, a good man, had spoken woodenly on the phone and Castrolami had put the question: how long had she been gone? Had put another question: how long had he slept? And the final question: how long between the time she was found to be missing and the time of reporting it? She might have been, he reflected, through and out of the airport, at the other end of the country, holed up in Rome – might be dead with a bullet in her head.
He came back into the annexe. Both the men at the table, the psychologist and the collator, looked away, and the hard men of the ROS group shuffled in their seats and made room for him to get past. As if a black cloud hung over them, the cloud of failure. He could give instructions. They waited on his leadership. He didn’t often feel, or sense, the burden of aloneness, but it was his shout, his right to activate whatever procedures he thought appropriate. There were none. She was gone, was clear, lost. Castrolami let his head fall into his hands and his elbows on the table took the weight. He had hoped for a small victory and had thought it within his grasp – and the fate of a young man, held somewhere, was erased as of no importance. He stared at the surface of the table. There was silence around him, except for the breaking open of the cellophane round a cigarette packet, then the click of a lighter, and he felt a rare, isolated misery, then heard rippling laughter. First nervous and quiet, then growing, gaining confidence, then playing on the walls and bouncing on the table, driving into Castrolami’s ears. He looked up.
The fish could not be fitted through the door. Either the tail stuck or the sword did. The body, with the tail, would have been more than a metre long and the sword the same. The beast was two metres in total and death had left it rigid. It could not be bent or folded. It wedged. Lukas held it. Castrolami recognised it as pesce spade, and knew it as the most expensive fish on any market stall. It was the size that would be bought for the celebration of an extended family. No one helped Lukas.
He didn’t seem to want help. He had another go, but the sword caught the table and jarred it and the laughter was louder. He turned round and led with the tail, squeezed and heaved. The flank of the beast caught in the lock of the open door – and then it was through. Laughter chorused the success. Lukas dumped it on the table, and the annexe was filled with its smell. Only Castrolami did not laugh.
Lukas said, droll, ‘If there’s a restaurant the guys use, maybe they’d do us the favour of cooking it. My news is useful. I look at you, friend, and say to myself that yours is between disaster and catastrophe. Get it over with.’
‘We have lost the girl.’
He saw the grin wiped off Lukas’s face. ‘What did she take?’
‘Her bag, money, her ID. She went early and—’
‘What clothes?’ He used Italian now, as if the pretended ignorance of the language was no longer important.
Castrolami said he didn’t know of any.
‘Did she take knickers and a spare bra?’
Castrolami said he didn’t know.
‘Just an opinion, and humbly put. I know very little of women, enough to fill the back of a postage stamp, but I doubt they travel far without next-to-the-skin necessities. Think about it. Each item you’ve spoken of, however small, it’ll be there – usually is. I make, of course, only a suggestion. It might be worth thinking about the little things.’
Castrolami looked sharply at him, wondered if he was mocked – realised he wasn’t. He thought he saw honesty in Lukas’s face. He couldn’t criticise a man who had confessed to failure with women. After all, he had no medals in relationships. He turned behind him, poked a finger at the chest of a man from the ROS, perhaps his favourite in the unit. The guy had unevenly cut hair that fell to his shoulders, and his cheeks, jaw and upper lip were painted with stubble. He
told the man to take the fish, and its spike, to Donato at the restaurant on the piazza Gesù Nuovo, book a table for a dozen that evening, or whenever cause for rejoicing was justified, and ask for the beast to be prepared for cooking. The big man heaved it off the table and carried it out, but the stink stayed.
‘What was your news, Lukas?’
He was told, and instructed the collator on action, if any. He didn’t rate what he’d learned against the importance of the girl having gone, but he took the suggestion given him, and went back outside to pace, think and scratch at his memory. It had started as a bad day and Castrolami thought it had the potential to get worse.
Twin celebrations grew in pitch. A senior police officer took a call in his car and was heard by his driver to say, ‘They’ve lost her? Tell me again… Incredible… If they’ve lost her, can they hold the mother, the brothers? Will the case against the Borelli clan collapse?… Incredible…’
The driver, an elderly policeman with little in his life to create excitement, and little to augment his status, told a colleague that Immacolata Borelli was loose on the streets. The colleague told a cousin who ran a quality furniture chain. The cousin, meeting a young man who sought to bring in a comprehensive contract for the refurnishing of an apartment in the bank section of the city, repeated the story – and the young man was Massimo, nephew of the flamboyant Umberto. Word rushed along certain selected channels that Immacolata Borelli had fled protective custody. From the lawyer’s office, news of it was inside the gates of Poggioreale within an hour, and within an hour and a half it would be behind the walls of the Posilippo gaol at the far end of the Gulf. At both prisons the foot-soldiers offered congratulations, which were received by Gabriella Borelli, and by Giovanni and Silvio Borelli. Within two hours, the message had infiltrated the top-security prison on the eastern outskirts of London, HMP Belmarsh. Men and women crowded around the mother and her sons. It was felt that power had been restored, an old order retained.
Davide, the agent who was Delta465/Foxtrot, saw more movement on the walkway that early morning, and recognised the clothing as that worn by a blindfolded man. He noted the presence, and his memory would be backed by the tapes. He did not himself sift and evaluate what he saw. It was for his handlers to make definitions of priority.
*
Salvatore held the torch. He alone went into the chamber. Two men, neither known to him, held back and guarded the door. More were on the walkway. He couldn’t complain of the number of men allocated, but had thought, still thought, the price to be exacted from Carmine Borelli was cruel. The door was left ajar behind him. He was good, the boy, disciplined. He had the hood over his upper face and eyes, and seemed grateful when told food had been brought. It was fruit, some cold pasta, coffee in a plastic cup, more cheese and water. He bent and took the boy’s ankle in his hands. The leg kicked clear, but he stayed at the task and checked that the chain did not cut deep. He thought it a gesture of kindness: he was not familiar with compassion, could not have explained why he showed it, here, now. The boy had his head ducked down and did not respond. He let his hand brush the boy’s arm, only a slight touch, and the boy shrank from him, his fist clenched.
Since he had been eleven or twelve, people had recoiled from close contact with him – other children, women, old men and men in their prime had backed away. His reputation now was that of a killer – no conscience, no mercy, no love. Salvatore needed that reputation to survive in Naples – but he did not think it important that a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger, should have that fear of him – but he would still, of course, cut off the boy’s ear, finger or penis. There were confusions in the mind of Il Pistole. He did not love and did not attract it. The nearest he knew of ecstasy was not in laughter with a friend, or in the penetration of a girl. It was when he looked deep into the eyes of a man he would kill and saw the spreading terror. It was the greatest thrill in Salvatore’s life. He didn’t know how he would go to his own death, but swore to anybody who needed to be told that he would not be taken alive, locked away and left to rot in Novara, Ascoli or Rebibbia: he would not be captured, arrested, and if there was a hallucinating nightmare in his life, it was the moment of failure, capture, and the parade past the camera flashes, and of being merely a number on a landing of a cell block. He did not hate the boy. What was more difficult for Salvatore: he wasn’t indifferent to him either. Confusing.
‘What is your name?’
‘My name is Eddie.’
‘What is that, Eddie?’
‘It’s not Eduardo. It’s Edmondo, but I’m called Eddie. That’s my name.’
The hood masked most of the face, but the mouth was good, hair grew clumsily around it and the skin was clear. Salvatore despised men who had acne and pimples. The replies were hesitant, soft-spoken. He saw that the bucket had not been used, and that only part of the food was eaten.
‘You have not finished the food.’
‘No.’
‘I brought food for you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But you do not eat it.’
‘I apologise that I did not eat the food you very kindly brought me.’
‘All right – I have brought more food and more water.’
‘Thank you.’
Was the gratitude sincere? Always, Salvatore craved to know what people thought of his character, his actions. So difficult to know with certainty… Was he generous? Was he intelligent? Was he handsome? Was he the best company, the best in bed, the best enforcer in all Naples? He didn’t know who could tell him. He had been thanked for the food and had received an apology, but he couldn’t judge sincerity from a dropped, hooded head. He had killed men, had shot or strangled them, because they had not offered him respect.
‘You are from London.’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you do in London?’
‘I am a teacher, a language teacher.’
‘I speak English very good.’
‘Very good.’
Was that respect? He had gone into a bar in Sanità and a man had spat on the floor, just in front of his feet, a metre from Salvatore’s shoes. That was not respect. A man, who had known his face and identity, had parked a saloon car on a street in the piazza Mercato so that Fangio’s scooter was blocked in, then had told Fangio to ‘go fuck your mother’ but his eyes had been on Salvatore. That was not respect.
‘In London you met Immacolata?’
‘I did.’
‘It was bad for you that you did.’
‘I love Immacolata. So I came to find her.’
‘She is dead.’ The boy, Eddie, cringed away from him, huddled against the wall. His shoulders trembled and his arms shook. ‘Not yet – she will be. She is condemned. She is living but dead. Better that you had not met her and loved her.’
‘When… when do you…?’
‘I understand you well. Tomorrow. They have until tomorrow. If we do not have heard by tomorrow, we send… our word is dono – you say “gift”, yes? Or do you say “present”? You ask… It is tomorrow. I think my English is good, Eddie.’
‘Who are you?’
‘It does not matter to you.’
He thought the boy, Eddie, might have cursed and tried to kick him, or to plead with him. Some swore or screamed when he came at them with the knife or the handgun, and there were others who wet themselves or soiled their trousers, who knelt and clutched his legs, begging for their lives and moaning their children’s names. The boy had not sworn or begged – and he loved Immacolata Borelli, and she had ignored him as scum.
He kicked the boy. Did it hard, in the shin, saw the pain that spiralled up the leg, the jerk of the hood and heard the gasp. He went out, shut the door and bolted it. He was escorted away. He felt unsettled, and the confusion nagged in him.
He left by the same walkway, and saw an old man low in a chair watching the television, could see the back of the head clearly because the window was well cleaned.
*
When the pai
n in his leg died and aching took over, Eddie put the nail to work. His fingertips told him that the chain’s links were slid into a loop at the end of an iron pin concreted into the outer wall. He used the point of the nail to drive down, two or three millimetres at first, into the minute gap between the concrete and the pin’s flank. He couldn’t hit the nail with the bucket because the noise would have reverberated, but he could use the heel of his trainer for want of a heavy-duty claw hammer. Eddie reckoned he’d done well, that the day had already given him something positive. He tapped with the shoe, felt the nail driving down, but every few millimetres he would extract it, then reinsert it, wiggle it, and feel the gap, the hole, widening. He thought he had, in probability, twelve hours before the man came with the knife. Time to be used. He had also learned a little of the routine. Two men at the door, only one entering the cell. Knew it was two because one had coughed and the other had lit a cigarette, and he had been able to separate the sounds.
He would not go quietly.
Denied the use of his eyes, left with the power of his ears, Eddie reckoned the man had lost certainty. Reckoned, also, that the loss had taken him on to unfamiliar ground. Downside: he didn’t know what was beyond the inner door, didn’t know what weapons the two men carried, didn’t know whether at the key critical moment he would be able to use the nail to stab, didn’t know whether he was capable of it. He’d have to learn the answer to that. It would have been so easy to roll over on his side, lie limp and wallow, give free rein to the self-pity and the unfairness – maybe they’d use alcohol on his skin before they made the cut, maybe they’d gag him or stick a wad in his mouth for him to bite on – but that wasn’t an option.
The concrete round the pin was of poor quality: it cracked easily, and little pieces crumbled. Then, using the nail as a lever, he could work the gap wider.
The Collaborator Page 34