him.
Carmine saw Salvatore ride off down the street. He knew that those who had been wounded would live now in mortal fear of Salvatore coming after them. The matter concerned the pizzo paid for protection by a shop on that street between the via Cesare Rosaroll and the via Carbonara which sold wedding dresses. Carmine Borelli understood that his granddaughter – no longer spoken of without a spit on the pavement – had fixed the pizzo at five hundred euros a month: chicken shit to the Borelli clan, small change. The previous evening, he had learned early that morning, men from the Misso clan or the Mazzarella clan – it was unclear – had told the shop’s owner that they would take over protection, and the payment would be seven hundred and fifty euros a month. If he had weakened, if it was allowed to happen once, if it was seen that he couldn’t fight to defend what he held, the Borelli clan was finished, dead and buried, forgotten. So he had taken the shotgun from the cache where it had lain hidden for more than twenty years, stripped off the damp-proof, oiled wrapping, loaded cartridges and found the old coat with the inner pocket where a shotgun could be secreted. He had been on the pavement when the men had come to collect seven hundred and fifty euros or to slop petrol over the shop’s stock of gowns. He thought he had sent a second message.
Another shout: ‘ Forza Il Camionista. ’ He acknowledged it, a slight wave. The scooter came back down the street. Salvatore would have circled the block to see if more men waited in more cars for orders to intervene – it was an old friend who had shouted – and the helmet shook. At this moment, there was no more danger. A gloved hand reached out, snatched the shotgun and the scooter was gone, lost in the traffic. The shop’s owner was behind him, with the padlock that fastened the steel shutters to the loop in the pavement, but Carmine denied him permission to close for the day, demanded he stay open – his sent message would be reinforced by that gesture. He walked away.
They would now be arriving at the hospital, probably the Incurabili, and would be hustling for the Pronto Soccorso entrance, which was alongside General Surgery, where they were skilled in extracting bullets and pellets. It was near to Trauma – necessary if the wounds were serious – and the chapel was beside the mortuaria – a good design layout and convenient. The first professional man he had hired was from that hospital.
Sixty-six years earlier: the city starved, women picked dandelions and daisies to boil as soup, kids prised limpets off the seashore rocks and men hung nets to catch songbirds for plucking. Carmine and Anna Borelli made their first fortune from the brothels. Not all the women who went into the cubicles with American soldiers were married. They had to eat, so dropped knickers and opened thighs were the only currency they had, but the Americans had moved on. Carmine Borelli had hired a professore from the hospital, and for a fee per patient of ten thousand lire the eminent medical man restitched the virginity of the unmarried, and Carmine took fifteen per cent of the fee. That professore had delivered Pasquale safely into the world.
He would go first to the place where he could shower and change his clothing, then take more of the pain pills because he didn’t want people in Forcella to see him hobble or limp. Clean, he would go home. He believed he had done well, believed also that he was on a treadmill, running, and didn’t know how long, at that pace, he could last.
Once a week, regular as clockwork, Davide locked the door of his apartment, on the third floor of the Sail, and took a bus. It carried him from the architectural disaster zone that was Scampia into Naples, and there was a memorised sequence of meeting-places: the steep Funicolare climbing from the via Toledo, a gentleman’s hairdressing salon on the corso Umberto, the giardini pubblici in front of the royal palace of the Bourbons, the open ramparts of the Castel dell’Ovo, or one of the distinguished coffee houses of the city. When he was in any of those places, with tapes and cassettes in the hidden pockets sewn at his trousers’ waist, he was Delta465/Foxtrot.
He sat on the bus that morning.
He was not reckless, took no unnecessary risks in harbouring the secrecy of his double life, and felt no fear. In both his identities – Davide and Delta465/Foxtrot – he understood that the fate of an agent of the AISI, if uncovered, was death. Not negotiable. If it was discovered that a man from the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna was living in the Sail death was certain, with much pain beforehand. He lived with the threat. He had a compartmentalized mind, and could keep fear at arm’s length. That ensured he was an agent of quality and valued by his handlers. He enjoyed meeting them in the funicular carriage, the barber’s or in the gardens and would ask after their children and be told of their holidays – make-believe, of course, but it enabled him to feel he was inside a family, which was important to him. They had given him a number for the Apocalypse Call, but he doubted he would ever use it. He had no idea what his life might be outside the Sail and without the weekly meetings.
Nothing to report that week. Nothing that would interest the men and women who met him. They were interested only in material of high-grade importance. He had seen, through his obsessionally polished windows, nothing of that category. Neither did he believe there was anything on the tapes from the cameras in his living room or from the audio cassettes linked to the microphones buried in the outer wall. The position of his apartment, where a flight came up from level two and another down from level four, had not been chosen randomly: it was a meeting-place – men stopped, talked and took little notice of the cleaned windows, the blaring television and the old man slumped in a chair with his back to the walkway. He knew of nothing that week to intrigue his handlers.
She was no fool. Anna Borelli was as adept at losing a tail as any man half, a third or a quarter of her age. She did back-doubles, shop windows, was last on to a trolley bus on the corso Umberto, and went into the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore by the main entrance and out by the narrow emergency door. Only when she was satisfied that she was not under surveillance, or had lost it, did she head for the meeting-place. She carried a filled plastic shopping bag.
She was another elderly lady, keeping death at bay for perhaps another year or only another month, and she wore black from stockings to scarf. She was unnoticed. She rang a bell. She was admitted through high gates. She crossed a yard of cannibalised vehicles and a door swung open when she prodded it with her toe. She was inside the building that had once been a car-repair business, but was now a place where stolen Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and the best models from the Alfa and Fiat factories were brought and dismantled. The parts would be shipped into Moldova or Ukraine, then moved further east. It had been an excellent business but was now slack and the yard was deserted, except for the scooter tucked against a side wall. The building seemed empty, but for the cigarette smoke that curled from beneath an inner door.
Then she was met.
She showed Salvatore what she had brought. There was bread, cheese, two slices of cheap processed ham, two apples, three small bottles of water, and the morning’s edition of Cronaca di Napoli – on the front page a photograph of a man sprawled dead, half in a gutter, outside a bar. She had not read it. She thought that by now her husband would be home. She approved of what he planned to do, and she would appreciate that when he sat in his chair, with her beside him, he would be clean and not smell as was usual. Salvatore had a camera on the table, and the man who rode the scooter was stretched out on a sofa, asleep, with a pistol on the floor beside his head.
There was a corridor to the back, and a storeroom off it.
A trapdoor was lifted and a torch shone down.
A stench came up through the hole’s opening. She saw that the boy was hooded, bound, and that his arms were behind his back. She remembered him in her living room, his simplicity; remembered also when Immacolata, her husband’s angel, had been in the same room, had sat in the same chair, drinking from the same set of cups and eating off the same set of plates. She remembered the boy, his almost shy smile, the flush of gratitude when he was told that a man was coming to take him to Immacolata. She felt no sympathy.
The torch showed the discolouration at his groin. She had not felt sympathy for the women in her brothels who had contracted syphilis from the American officers and had had to tell their husbands of the disease they carried. She had not felt sympathy for those widowed when she and her husband had climbed but others had been pushed aside, or for Gabriella when the births of Vincenzo and Giovanni were complex and brutally painful, or for Carmine when he was taken three times to Poggioreale. She did not even feel sympathy for herself.
She watched.
Salvatore rolled up the hood so that it cleared the mouth and nostrils but covered the eyes. He pulled off the binding tape and the young man, Eddie, cried out in pain because it had happened without warning, but then – so quickly – his face settled. Anna Borelli understood. Then Salvatore unlocked the handcuffs and allowed him, Eddie, to work his fingers over his wrists and bring back the circulation. She wondered if he was Edmondo or Eduardo. Then the hands were put together in front of his waist and the handcuffs went back on. Anna Borelli thought, from
