father, my ruthless, vicious mother, my murderous eldest brother and my psychopathic middle brother. I want to return to them.” Will you turn your back on the court? Many do, Signorina. They climb high, survey the view and scramble down. Their nerve doesn’t hold. Will your nerve hold?’
She lowered her head and looked at the toecaps of her shoes. She allowed him to lead her along. ‘It’ll hold.’
‘They all say that, but many fail to deliver.’
She stopped. She felt his fingers drop from her arm. She faced him and tilted her head. She could see the cage, their faces, the hatred that beamed at her, and the contempt. ‘My word should be sufficient guarantee.’
‘You will never be forgotten, never forgiven. You will never again walk the streets of your city as a free woman. Can you turn your back on Naples?’
It was her home.
Those Greek traders who had first anchored their boats in the shadow of the great mountain, mid-eighth century BC, had called it Nea Polis, the New City. The Romans came later from the north and corrupted the name to Napoli. Now it is a city adored and detested, admired and despised. It is one of UNESCO’s proudest World Heritage Sites, and is regarded by Interpol as having the greatest concentration in the world of Most Wanted organised-crime players. Horace, the Roman poet, coined the phrase ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Seize the Moment’, and it is still the maxim of Neapolitans.
Many cultures have left their mark on Naples. After the collapse of Rome’s civilisation and its hold on the city, the occupying army was that of the Ostrogoths, then the Byzantines from Constantinople, the Normans and the Spanish. There were Bourbon satraps and Napoleonic revolutionaries. Admiral Nelson’s fleet covered the port with cannon, the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo sought to control it, after which the Americans gave it military government. In the last century, Communists, democrats and Fascists have attempted to bring Naples to heel, but failed.
At the university, the academics seek to excuse the inner city’s million people for its ungovernability. They quote the actual and the potential. The actual is the Camorra, the generic name for the criminal families that are the principal employer and major pulsebeat in Naples. The potential is the lowering image of the mountain, Vesuvio, with its volcanic capability and history of destruction. The criminality survived the most savage reprisals of the Mussolini era and now cannot be beaten: the threat of the volcano mocks any who look far to the future: it may erupt at any time and warning will be minimal. Those same academics point proudly to the magnificent churches and palaces, and strangers flock there from across the world.
John Ruskin, the English art critic and reformer, came to the city in the late nineteenth century and saw the Naples that has attracted the first overseas tourist industry. He wrote, ‘The common English traveller, if he can gather a black bunch of grapes with his own fingers, and have a bottle of Falernian brought him by a girl with black eyes, asks no more of this world or the next, and declares Naples a paradise…’ But he would not be seduced and continued, ‘… [Naples] is certainly the most disgusting place in Europe… [combining] the vice of Paris with the misery of Dublin and the vulgarity of New York… [Naples] is the most loathsome nest of caterpillars… a hell with all the devils imbecile in it’. Outsiders may come, criticise and leave, but those who are bred and live in Naples are held by loyalty, as if in chains, to the city.
The gulf makes a perfect natural harbour. The sea ranges from azure to aquamarine. The churches are noted for their splendour, and the castles that defend the shore are reassuring in their strength. It has the best of everything – architecture, painting, sculpture, music, food, vitality, and the refusal to be cowed – with the biggest open-air narcotics supermarket ever created, the wealthiest criminal conspiracies ever known, and a degree of violence that makes both the brave and the cynical cringe.
In the heart of the old city, where the streets were laid by Roman road builders, then wide enough only for a handcart to pass and now for only a scooter, is the district of Forcella. The Borelli clan ruled Forcella.
‘Can you do that, erase that place from your mind?’
‘I hope…’
‘What’s hope? Useless, inadequate. Either you can or you can’t.’
She flared. ‘I am Immacolata Borelli. You offer me no respect.’
Castrolami shrugged, as if she had scored no points. He said, ‘I see so many of them. This isn’t Sicily. The vow of silence doesn’t exist in Forcella, Sanita, Secondigliano or Scampia. In the far south, the gangs are linked by blood. It’s impossible to consider that a family would turn in on itself. But you’re not Calabrian – I’ll get to the point, Signorina – or Sicilian. The clans of Naples have greed, brutality and no honour. Do you understand? We have more men and women offering to collaborate than in any other part of Italy. They’re practically queuing outside the palace. Sometimes the prosecutor has to check his diary to make sure he has a slot for a new one. Many are rejected because they have little to offer that we don’t already know, a few because we don’t believe they can sustain the pressure of their treachery. I offer no informer respect, and I’m used to rejecting them. Don’t think, Signorina, that you have earned my admiration or have my gratitude.’
‘You insult me.’ She tried to stamp her foot, and mud spattered out from under her shoe. No avenue of retreat was open to her. She knew it, and so did he. She couldn’t throw a tantrum, spin on her heel – slip probably – and walk away. She had met him. Perhaps she had been photographed with a long lens from a car among those parked bumper to bumper around the park. Perhaps he had a wire strapped to his chest and a microphone in one of his jacket buttons. Did she believe that – if she walked out on him – the ROS would not allow a photograph limited distribution among the journalists accredited to the palace, or not make available a snatch of her voice to the RAI correspondent in the city? On Sunday mornings priests talked often about taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, the need to consider consequences beforehand. She couldn’t meet his eyes and dropped her head. It had stopped raining, the wind had freshened, and she shivered.
He said, ‘You know better than I do that the name for such a person is infame. That person is not a patriot, a hero or heroine. Disgrace walks with them, and the infame who betrays his or her family is the lowest of the low. You could never stand, Signorina, on a box in the piazza del Plebiscito and attempt an explanation of what you have done. You’ll become a pariah and be forced to make a new life.’
Her lip trembled and her voice, to her, was hoarse. ‘I will.’
‘Never go back?’
‘I won’t.’
‘If you’re found again in Naples, what will happen to you?’
‘They’ll kill me.’
‘What do they do, Signorina, to an infame before he or she is killed?’ He was relentless. ‘What do they do?’
‘I don’t know what they do to a woman. I know what they do to a man.’
The crowd was four deep in places where the best view was to be had. The girl reporter from the crime desk barged her way through, offered no apologies and kicked the ankle of an obese man who didn’t shift out of her way. When she was through the spectators, she looked for her photographer, located him and went to his side. ‘My car wouldn’t start,’ she said.
‘Your car’s shit and always will be. My cousin deals-’
‘Yeah, yeah. What have we got?’
Relaxed, the photographer smoked a small cheroot, took it out of his mouth and blew smoke, then used it to point at a space on the pavement between two parked vehicles. A checked tablecloth that doubled as a shroud filled it. The feet of the corpse, its shoes and blue socks, stuck out from the covering, and she could see where blood had diverted round sprouting weeds to dribble into the gutter, where it was dammed by a plastic bag. Beyond the cars, half hidden, a police scene-of-crime technician manoeuvred a camera fixed to a tripod, other officers standing around languidly, and an ambulance was parked further down the street. She stretched up, laying a hand on the photographer’s shoulder, and could see better past the parked cars. A woman sat on a straight-backed wooden chair no more than two metres from the body. She wore a nightdress of thin cotton with a dressing-gown, as if she’d been roused from her bed, and cradled a child – a boy of perhaps four – as she stared blankly ahead.
The photographer said, ‘I done her – she’s the wife – wrong, the widow. I done her when she first came, bawling and screaming. That was before they covered him up.’
‘Do we have a name?’
‘The police have, but they haven’t shared it – you’ll get it off the street or, officially, at the Questura.’
