Rosaroll. He had the pistol out of his belt. He fired one shot and the bullet went into the back of the man’s knee and there was a little limp scream of shock, then another, shrill, from the pain’s spread. Salvatore waved up the street.
Extraordinary – true to Naples, Palermo and Reggio Calabria in the toecap of Italy’s boot: traffic had disappeared from the road. It had been there, a constant, hooting snarl, but was gone. The road was empty but for a white van, old, rusted, with no registration plates.
It could accelerate. The man would have seen it, heard it, but with his leg shot away at the knee he could not avoid it, and squirmed on the tarmacadam. He was in an oil slick now, his shirt smeared, and the van went over him, cleared him. No one saw. No witnesses in the bar, on the pavement or in cars on the road saw the van go over him. Perhaps it crushed his back or broke his neck. Perhaps it left him grievously injured but still living. It braked.
It reversed. It came back up the road and the rear tyres lifted as it mounted the body a second time. When the body was cleared and the van stopped again, there was no movement.
Salvatore climbed into the passenger seat. His driver, whom he called Fangio, went away down the road.
He thought that the clan, those still at liberty, clung to power by the thickness of the string used to bind a birthday present.
An hour later, a boy came to him. He and Fangio, for speed, shared the shower, scrubbed and washed. Their clothing was bagged for disposal. Few knew of that address. The lawyer was among the few. The child brought a scrap of paper and left, running. More than adults, Salvatore, Il Pistole, whose face was on their screensavers, trusted the kids. He had to wipe soap from his eyes before he could read the compacted handwriting. He shuddered.
He crumpled the paper, threw it at Fangio’s feet and saw it carried in the torrent of soapy water down the drain. To shoot a man in the back of the leg meant nothing to him. He was unaffected by the sight of a van speeding down a road well lit with high lamps, then bouncing over a sprawled body. He felt almost a tremble in his legs, under the damp towel.
He would have said he could believe anything of Naples – anything . He had been wrong. He could not have believed, if he hadn’t seen it written in the spider hand of the lawyer, that Immacolata Borelli had collaborated.
Not the thickness of string – the thickness of one strand woven to make string.
He didn’t know, then, what he could do, should do, without the power of the clan at his back. He, too, was dead – squashed, broken, bloody. He didn’t know where he should turn.
He couldn’t still the trembling – or the image of Immacolata Borelli – and he couldn’t believe.
He was at the end of the street under the sign that said it was via Forcella. He saw nothing familiar and nothing that offered a welcome. The light was poor, the shadows harsh. The spearing headlights of weaving scooters caught the shapes of men, women, kids, then lost them as the riders powered away. Eddie Deacon had told himself that it was important, before he went to sleep, to know where via Forcella was, how far away, how… He felt intimidated. There, at the head of the street, and he thought it hardly wide enough for two cars to pass, he realised that a group of kids watched him and he wished he hadn’t brought his wallet with him. He believed himself evaluated as worth a hit or not worth a hit. Nothing he saw reassured him. He was beside a church, but it was darkened and he sensed that the doors were bolted, locked, secure against the night and strangers.
He turned away.
It was as if he backed off.
The street corner seemed an interface. When he retreated he was on the via Duomo, and the map said that the city’s principal cathedral was there, and the shops had lights in their windows. There, he felt fine. Down that street, he had felt a cloying nervousness. It would be different in the morning, of course, and he would be back in broad, warm, sunshine-laden daytime. He trudged back to his bed, and was troubled that he had suffered what was bloody nearly a panic attack. He had thought, till then, that luck rode with him.
He would be back in the morning to find her.
Eddie was serenaded to faltering sleep by sirens – so many of them and for so long – and the vehicles came, raucous, to a street near where he was. Only when the sirens had died did the restlessness and tension drain away. Then he could think of her again, as she was in the photograph on his wall.
‘Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’
Because of the work he did, Lukas had long ago shed a body clock. He could work in the night, sleep in the day, just as he could type on his laptop in the back of a bucking Land Rover or Humvee in half-darkness.
He typed his report on Colombia, what they had achieved and whom they had lost.
He was as happy working late into the night as in the morning, was not fresher at the start of a day than at the end.
No drama would creep into his report, no descriptive factors and no colour. He would list briefly what he had known, and the advice he had offered on the basis of facts available. Nowhere in the text would there be disguised praise for his own part or criticism of others.
Only a professional could make sense of it. Only those who employed him now, the chief executive officer at Ground Force Security and the director of operations, or those who had employed him in years past – the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense – could have made drama from the few pages on offer. The descriptions were clinical, and he used the short-hand jargon of his trade. Men across the globe who dealt with the high-risk stakes of hostage rescue and negotiation would read the pages and know that Lukas had written them, and they would pray to God that the next time he was needed they found him available to travel and not marooned in some other shit-heap place.
Home for him, where he typed, was an apartment under the eaves on the top floor of a street off the rue de Bellechasse. The mother of the CEO of Ground Force Security had lived and died there, and when Lukas had come on the firm’s books, it had been offered to him. The French capital suited him. He had no wish to live in the UK when he was employed by a British-based company, and less to be resident in the United States after twenty-two years with the Bureau, the last two on secondment to the Department of Defense. He craved to be distanced from his work, and the Paris apartment satisfied him. Little more than a shoebox, it comprised a cramped living room and a kitchenette behind a chipboard partition, a bedroom under a sloping ceiling but that had room for a big bed where a man with nightmares could toss in the darkness, a bathroom with a power shower that could wash off Iraq’s sand and Colombia’s mud, and a hall with a table and the telephone. It might not ring for a week or a month, but a red light would flash if he had missed a call. Lukas did not like being far from the telephone.
He was finishing off the report. Ground Force Security would be heaped with praise by the Agency because their man had survived and cover had been maintained – ‘goddam brilliant, a mother-fucker of a triumph,’ his CEO would be told by Langley. His own view: pretty much OK – not desperate and not wonderful. Some whom Lukas dealt with at field level regarded him as a lunatic. A few told him he was a lunatic. He didn’t take it personally, or when a Spanish diplomat had tried to punch him after calling him a lunatic. He had written it up in the usual laconic way afterwards.
Negotiations with a tribal leader had been ongoing for excess of three days. Much reliance placed on the talks; my view, too much reliance. Asset intelligence reported the hostage held in a six-storey block of twenty-four apartments plus basement. Exact location of hostage and hostage-takers in the building was not known but we had electronics in the stairwell. A male – not seen before at the building – approached and carried a plastic bag containing one large potato. I advised readying the storm squad for immediate intervention. Spanish diplomatic personnel in the command centre took a contrary position. The electronics in the stairwell indicated the unknown male to have gone to the second floor, right side of staircase. I urged an instant assault…
No mention of the attempt to punch him, the screamed accusation that he cared nothing for the life of a Spanish-born expert in antiquities on attachment to the National Museum. No mention of a diplomat having to be restrained while frothing with rage. No mention in the report of an expert’s experience. A big potato, weighing more than two kilos, had been the trigger for him. The diplomats believed negotiation would free their national, that a premature assault endangered the captive’s life. To be told that a man carrying a potato into the building was reason enough to abandon the talks that had been so difficult to initiate had caused an explosion of fury.
The assault was successful. Four Iraqis were killed by troops from the Polish special forces team and the hostage was freed. He would have been dead within the hour. Signed, F. Lukas.
