They went down. He was underneath Salvatore and his head was held, gripped, and his face was beaten into the concrete… and they came. His eyes were closed, shut tight – couldn’t absorb more.
Nightmare engulfed him. He was crushed. Weight on him squeezed out the breath from his lungs. His head was in blood. He couldn’t move, see or breathe. There were voices, muffled and indistinct, and he didn’t understand what was yelled. He felt himself sinking, then falling, then lost, and the abyss closed over him… and the weight was lifted. Eddie dared to open his eyes.
He was ignored.
He lay in a smeared strip of blood that now sank into the porous dirt of the concrete. Two figures, huge in vests over black overalls, with firearms hooked on their shoulders, took turns to work on the chest of the man who had called himself Lukas. They pounded on the chest and didn’t stop until the door behind him, where he had been held, was kicked flat, then used as a litter. Two more of them took him. Hoisted on the door, Lukas was carried away. Eddie didn’t know whether it was boredom or impatience, or just shit luck that had failed Lukas.
He didn’t move his head. Beyond where Lukas had been, Salvatore lay on his stomach as his hands were hitched behind him and fastened with ties. One more of them in the black overalls and the masks stood over Salvatore and had a dirty boot across his neck, and Eddie knew he was alive because the chest heaved and there were small yelps of pain when the boot was shifted or pressed harder. Eddie was glad he lived. He thought it a worse, more severe punishment to live than to be proxy shot.
Last they came to him.
A big man towered over him, wearing a suit that now had rents at the knees and elbows and was stained with the dust of the concrete; a vivid tie was loosened at the neck and a collar button undone, and his hair was a tangled mess, and there was blood on his shirt and jacket. Eddie might have been wrong, but he thought he saw wet glisten in the man’s eyes. A short-bladed knife was used to cut the ties at his ankles and wrists.
He was turned over.
The man in the suit stood back. Another, whom they called Tractor, crouched over him and felt his face with mittened fingers, then lifted each of his arms and flexed them, did the same for his legs. There were cuts, abrasions and bruising on every part of his body that the hands touched but he didn’t cry out. The Tractor stood and backed away, as if he had no more interest. Another, and he was called the Engineer, stood over Eddie and reached down.
Eddie took the hand, the fist closed over his wrist and he was heaved up.
The suit led… The Tractor followed, then their prisoner with men close around him. Eddie trailed, and the one they called the Bomber was behind him. The cat that had been shut out scratched at a door but was not admitted. They went past the broken apartment he had run into and he saw the wreckage and didn’t ask about the man who had opened his home to a fugitive. They went through two barred gates, one open, one destroyed, and down three flights of stairs.
There was a crowd at the main entrance of the block.
He was not jeered or jostled. He was stared at. The black overalls were close round their prisoner and hustled him to the transport, but the crowd didn’t push or surge. Eddie thought they wanted either their beds or to get back to their work and trade. It was a far place that he had come to and he didn’t know them and they didn’t know him, so he gave them no greeting or acknowledgement.
The suit stood beside the door of a minibus. The prisoner was in already. The suit waited for him.
Eddie came to the door.
The suit said, ‘I’d known him for less than one week. He was the best… What are you? Are you worth the life of the best? But you didn’t think of that…’
He climbed in. He was driven away.
20
It was still dark when they left the hospital, a great cavern of a building on the edge of the Scampia district. The pronto soccorso section was as grim a place as Eddie had known and he had been left with two black overalls on a plastic seat in a corridor, and the world had gone by him – beaten-up tarts, overdosed druggies, knife-wound victims, complicated pregnancies. He had known it was a formality but had sat still, and a nurse had come with a bowl and a towel and had cleaned his face wounds and had stitched, expertly, his lips, and he had had sutures under his right eye. He had not mentioned the pain in his ribcage, had thought it disrespectful of Lukas’s injuries. A little after the American consul had arrived, with a phalanx of security around him, Castrolami had emerged from behind the swing doors. It had been obvious when they had gone in that the injuries were terminal, that Lukas was dead, but Eddie supposed it necessary for them to go through the procedures of resuscitation and fail. Castrolami – the suit had given his name in the minibus in a curt growl and had not offered a hand for the greeting – had walked up to him in that wide corridor outside the emergency section, and had flicked his fingers as a gesture for Eddie to follow him and had kept walking. He might have been the damn dog.
They did not use the minibus. There were hugs and cheek-brush kisses between Castrolami and one called the Tractor, another called the Engineer and a third called the Bomber, and the one who had a sniper rifle – uncased – made a joke of complaining that he had not been given the opportunity to shoot. Eddie realised then that the prisoner was gone, would have been transferred to a different wagon and taken away. Beside the minibus was a marked carabinieri saloon, with a uniformed driver and an escort, and the engine idled. He was put into the back and Castrolami slumped beside him.
They left the hospital where a body would now be wheeled towards the mortuary building.
Not much to talk about. He was the best… What are you? Are you worth the life of the best? There was no warmth on offer, nothing that soothed the jumbled confusion in his mind. He supposed that, by now, a telephone call would have been made to England, to a corner of Wiltshire, to a bungalow in a lane, and that lights had flashed on in answer to the persistence of a bell, and that his parents now sat on their bed, in their night clothes, in shock and relief – his mother might have gone to make two mugs of cocoa. He couldn’t face making a call himself – would have to, but later. They sat silent and they looked out of their different windows.
The light grew, came slowly.
He did not ask where they went, why. What are you? Wasn’t prepared to try to answer, and the blood of the ‘best’ was caking his T-shirt and jeans. They didn’t go towards the city, but drove away from it and the first light, soft gold, was above distant hills.
There was no beauty, no majesty alongside the road.
They went by homes and small farms, scorched orchards, compact factory units and ribbon developments of advertising hoardings. He thought of the orderly, managed greenery of the village where he had spent his childhood; here there was anarchy. The sun peeped a fraction higher, and the first glimpse of a segment, still gold, was over the hills’ horizon.
Castrolami had taken from his pocket an old leatherbound notepad, with scuffed corners, and had started to write busily. It would have been his memory jottings for his report on the death of the ‘best’.
Eddie was, and he realised it, an intruder, not wanted.
He felt no anger at this but accepted it and sat deep on the seat, and the car was driven fast on empty roads. He had, of course, no watch, but if he craned forward he could see the dash in front of the driver, and thought they had been travelling for a little more than half an hour.
There was a sign beside the road, and the driver slowed and the escort studied his map, then written instructions. The place was called Nola.
They went into the heart of it, past a cathedral-sized church. The low sun was nestled on the tower, the road was rough, the pavements worse, and a very few hurried to be at work. Eddie thought the place desolate, as if hope had gone.
He did not ask why they had come here, for what purpose.
Nobody had fed him, nobody had offered him coffee or water, or a beer. He saw more churches, and the road took them along the perimeter of a hospital’s grounds. Then they veered off a main route and headed on narrower, meaner streets.
The driver stopped a few metres short of a cemetery’s main gates. They were of heavy ironwork and closed;
