stepped from the pier inside the aircraft. Castrolami had had to stifle the urge to shove her the last metre, but it had not been necessary. He showed the boarding cards and a woman led them into business class, then to the front row where no other passengers would need to pass them and look at their faces.
The door was closed, the engines gained power. She had her belt fastened. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I feel, whether I am strong?’
He shook his head, then turned his face away and closed his eyes, as their speed on the runway gathered.
He put the phone down, gave the order of confirmation. Operation Partenope was named after the Siren woman who seduced men having lured them on to rocks and then killed them, and who had ultimately failed and had committed suicide by drowning and who lay in a pauper’s grave, if mythology were believed, among the sunk foundations of the buildings between the via Solitaria and the via Chiatamone. Operation Parthenope had legs and ran.
The prosecutor eased his hand off the receiver and saw that his palm had left a sweat sheen on it. He believed he presided over the dismantling of a clan. It would be, he could predict, an opportunity for a minister in Rome to speak of a blow of the ‘greatest significance’ to the heart of the city’s criminal activities. If it worked well, he would receive a congratulatory message from the minister. He could reflect on a durable heart, because many times central government had claimed such blows against it, and on the columns of men and women in patrol cars and riot wagons leaving the yards behind the Questura and piazza Dante. In London, more officers and guns would be moving into position to arrest the eldest brother. It was synchronised, choreographed. The silence fell over the room. They must wait. He was brought coffee. He pictured now the columns of vehicles snaking across the city – routes would have been worked out so that they seemed to head away from target locations, then swing back, giving minimal warning of their approach – and only now, inside the cars and wagons, would the officers know who they moved against. The prosecutor hated the lack of trust, was shamed by it. He regarded it as the single most impressive creation of the clans.
At about this time in the evening, the curtain would have been rising for the second act of the opera, a Mozart, for which he had begged tickets from a cousin. He had cried off in mid-afternoon and his wife had sighed and said she would find someone else to take with her. He was marginally disappointed to miss the performance. Opera soothed him. He believed fervently that whatever hours he worked at the palace he must enjoy something of life beyond.
Silence was good because words – at a moment such as this – were inadequate.
She was said to be strong – Mario Castrolami’s verdict – and she would need to be, if the arrest programme was successful.
A battering ram broke open the street door, forcing the lock. A small boy, reared on extravaganzas of video- screen warfare, watched big-eyed, in fascination. What he played at was happening. He was across the street, had a vantage-point between two parked cars and was almost hidden by a lamppost. He watched the uniformed guy with the ram step aside, and a charge of black-clad police plunged through the broken door. The boy recognised the firearms they carried in Hackney, east London. They were on display often enough. If he had had a friend with him he would have been able to report that the men were from the specialist firearms team, CO19, that they had Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols and Glock 9mm handguns, and one at the back had a Taser immobiliser. Now he heard wood splintering, oaths, frantic shouting, then quiet. Up on the first floor, a policeman drew the curtain, denying the child a clear view into the lit room.
He didn’t have to wait long. The prisoner was hustled into the doorway, out on to the step, then brought fast down the flight to the pavement. The boy knew him.
All the kids of his age knew Vincenzo – Vinny to them. His sister, too. They ran messages for Vinny, the Italian, would take a piece of paper to the other side of Hackney, up to Seven Sisters or south to Hoxton, a tiny scrap of cigarette paper that was folded up smaller than the bitten-down nail on the child’s little finger. They were paid for taking messages. This boy, and all the boys, knew the Italian as a gangster of style… real life and bigger than in the games they played in the arcades and on their machines. They idolised Vinny but were never close to his sister. She wasn’t there – only him. There was a moment when he could see, so clearly, Vinny’s face. The streetlight he was under threw enough illumination to reach across the street, and the blue lamp was circling on a police car. Plenty of light fell on Vinny’s face. Magnificent… ‘Fuckin’ fantastic,’ the child thought. Then the police gloves, black leather, came down on top of Vinny’s head and pushed him into the car. Handcuffs on his wrists – had seen them as Vinny was brought down the steps from the broken door – but not a mark on his face. There were no cuts on his mouth or round his eyes and his shirt wasn’t ruffled. The boy understood. To fight would have been pathetic. Scum would have fought.
The child reckoned he knew about gangsters, and had no ambition in his life but to have the status and stature of Vinny, the Italian. If he had fought they would have belted him, like they did the big black guy, bouncer at the club off Kingsland Road. It had taken eight pigs to get him down, and then they’d kicked shit out of him and more. He caught Vinny’s eye. The child was nine but thought himself the friend of Vinny, the big man from Naples that was somewhere way down south. In that moment, he was certain that the Italian gave him the slightest nod of recognition. Then a policeman was in front of him, telling him, ‘Go and get fucking lost, kiddo.’ The car had gone down the street, and the guys in black were spilling out down the steps from the main door.
It was a big man’s cool, a top man’s, that he didn’t fight and didn’t get himself thugged. The child thought that Naples, wherever it was, was a prize place if it was where Vinny had come from – proud, not frightened, ignoring all the guns round him and going at his own pace into the back of the car. He wondered where the sister was, and whether she would go in the cage with her brother. The car had gone round the corner at the end of the street, headed, he thought, for Lower Clapton Road and the Hackney police station.
The policeman was blocking his view of the front door, so he got ‘fucking lost’, but only to the corner. There, he sat on a low wall near to the Kentucky Fried Chicken place. He’d wait there for the sister to come and warn her not to go in the cage.
A window exploded out and glass crashed down into the street, which was enough to tilt eyes upwards. Heads were already craning at the block’s front door where carabinieri, in protective gear, stood guard. A flashlight was aimed up three storeys and locked on to the window. The man appeared and screamed.
The crowd knew who the carabinieri had come for.
In that narrow street, spanning the top end of Forcella and the southern extremity of the Sanita labyrinth, they all knew who Giovanni was. Before the first of the attack wave had levered themselves out of the wagon and sprinted for the door, on the warning of their approach the street had been blocked with boxes, cartons from shops, pallets from building sites, rubbish and debris. Gas canisters were loaded in the barrels of some of the rifles confronting the crowd of local people and plastic baton round launchers were aimed at them. The second wave had had to negotiate a storm of abuse, and when the crowd had heard the door broken down above them, the first rocks had been thrown at the men in the cordon.
There was a gasp. He was naked. His body glistened. Giovanni had screamed, but now he swung clear of the window, evaded a heavy gloved fist that attempted to grab his arm, reached out and caught the downpipe from the gutter. His legs hung free, and the crowd saw the hair between them, at the trunk. A half-brick arced up and reached the broken window. The crowd heard the oath of a casualty. It was encouragement.
The fugitive slithered up the pipe, then took hold of the old ironwork guttering and the two nearest stanchions. Rocks and cobblestones, apples, potatoes, melons rained against the carabinieri at the entrance and at the window where arms attempted to grab Giovanni. Obvious – he’d been in the shower. As he sought to lever himself on to the gentle slope of the tiles, high above the streetlights, the beam still held him, and there were flashes from a score of mobile phones. His genitalia wobbled, danced, girls screamed, mothers giggled and old women shrieked happy obscenities. It was a huge effort, but he succeeded. Giovanni lifted a leg high and lodged his foot on the tiles. Then he was up, and standing.
At shouts from below, he turned and saw the black-clad carabinieri on the roof ridge. Then he would have known he was as trapped as if he had stayed in the shower cubicle or his bedroom. He ripped out a single tile and threw it viciously, two-handed, at the hunters.
It was theatre, and the crowd’s participation in the performance was demanded. Forgotten: the pizzo taken from every shopkeeper, every small man trying to build a business, the extortion that robbed them. Forgotten: the conceit and bullying by the son of a clan leader. Forgotten: the weeping mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters of those slaughtered to create discipline. Giovanni Borelli had milked the moment.
