in a school as an administrator and was vulnerable there, and his son was a teenager and could not have been protected without dislocation of his entire life. He himself had only a state pension to look forward to, and cash payments could be made easily into offshore accounts. He was away from home often, for meetings in Rome at the ministry, then slept in hotels and sometimes was lonely. He had enough cash in hand for a relatively frugal existence – his one indulgence his love of opera – but taxes were high and the cost of living had soared. There were many ways in which he might have been contaminated. They had such wealth, so many resources, those who sat in the cages, and he had been – so far – one of the few men regarded as incorruptible. His fear, nurtured in privacy, was that he would stumble at some hurdle. He went to conferences in Berlin, Frankfurt and London. In those cities, of course, there was criminality, organised and serious. In those cities, also, senior policemen and jurists regarded him – he was aware of it – with hands-off suspicion: he came from that city where the clan gangs ran out of control, where murder, violence and extortion were embedded, where integrity was long corroded. He did not have the respect of outsiders. For a few more years he would endure the pressure of prosecuting the clans, then retirement, home in a village in the northern mountains and… Alone, the fear was always with him.
He made a note in his diary. The lawyer to visit in person, no agenda set, the following day in mid- afternoon.
He believed events would play out predictably. He thought a boy’s life was threatened… and he would, in the next hours, prepare himself to make judgements on the value of that life.
He held his wrists as far apart as the pain would permit. Using the ridge of concrete and its serrated edge as a saw’s blade, Eddie worked on the chain. Now – yes – he was prepared to let the tip of his finger feel the scraped line on the chain’s link, and he was prepared to believe he had made a weakness. His mind roved as he scratched on the line… The time he had once grabbed a man: he had crossed a street to a far pavement where a man and a woman struggled and the man had hit the woman across the side of her face. He had intervened, had dragged the man back with some force. He had been kicked and punched – not with the ferocity of the beating in the bunker – and had been on the pavement. His eyes had misted, but he had seen the man and the woman walk away without a backward glance, and the woman had put her hand on the man’s arm, then he had dropped it across her shoulders… Scraping at the chain, feeling a line made by the concrete, switched his focus. If he succeeded and parted the chain, if he was free to fight, if it was the guy who had taken him off the street, if… What damn chance did he have?
Better than no chance. Big, brave thought. He kept on with the scraping.
He ate fit to bust, and the gastrics put the gas in his gut. Twice he had noisily released it, but Carmine Borelli had to eat a little of everything that was offered, and much was pushed at him. Most recently, he had had a piece of orange and ricotta cake, sfogliata, and a good slice of pizza Margherita, with a deep coating of mozzarella, and before that more ricotta cake, but the riccia version, with twisted pastry, and he had drunk tiny quantities of Stock brandy, sambuca and grappa, all of which should be consumed after the evening meal but would have come from handily available bottles. He must eat, drink and be seen.
He should not have drunk on the pills. Without the painkillers he could not have made his long walk around the territory he had claimed, so many years before, for his clan. The street urchins, the scugnizzi , followed him. Young men and women watched him from the pavements or from the seats of their scooters and seemed uncertain, as if they did not believe that he, Carmine Borelli, could deliver opportunity, money and the calm required for decent trafficking. It was the old who pushed cake and pizza on him, and the little glasses. Some, he thought, had known him all of those years since the power base had been formed and the men took off their caps for him and the women rose from their street chairs to touch, with a degree of reverence, his arm, his mottled gaunt hands, or to pinch a grip on his coat. The old had known him since he had made Forcella his own.
Trade in the brothels had declined and the troops had moved north towards Cassino. Heavier competition existed for the dispersal of American aid, stolen and available on the street stalls, and then God had smiled on him – a day in March 1944. Carmine looked on it as the most significant of his life. Vesuvio had erupted. A great cloud had risen from the crater in daylight, and the beginning of the molten flow was visible when night fell. Villages were consumed, roads blocked. A military airfield and its planes were enveloped in the caking, heavy dust. Food warehouses collapsed – disaster for many, a triumphant moment for a few. Carmine Borelli was Il Camionista. He owned a small fleet of lorries. The shortage of transport was desperate. He was given a lucrative contract by the military government. He prospered. He bought more lorries and was able to profit mightily from post-war reconstruction, then speedboats to pick up contraband cigarettes, heavy plant for digging the foundations of industrial sites as Rome’s government ladled money at the disaffected city. But it had all begun when he had mobilised a small fleet of lorries on the morning after Vesuvio had erupted. It was said that only firearms and ammunition, of all the items brought to Naples’ docks by the Americans, were not available on the stalls of the via Forcella the morning after they were unloaded. The men who now pressed close to him had driven those lorries and unloaded them, and the women who touched him had sold from the stalls.
Carmine toured his streets. He tried to demonstrate his authority. He was not fooled. This was the city of the lazzaroni. The mob had taken its name from the patron saint of lepers. It wanted, to be satisfied, the three F words: farina, forca e festini. It was necessary to give the lazzaroni sufficient flour, a scaffold to gather round and public festivals of entertainment. Twice in the last forty-eight hours he had given them a whiff of the scaffold, and his progress up the street was similar to a celebration.
All threatened, though, by his granddaughter. The mob could turn, owed no loyalty. If necessary, he himself would kill Immacolata’s boy. He could see, craning his neck, when he was at the top of via Forcella, near the church, the summit and cone of Vesuvio. The mountain had made him. He waved, and thought himself a king. How could she have betrayed him?
He knew. It was a germ in the family, in their blood – she had been so pretty, and he had loved her with an old man’s passion. Now he would happily slaughter her, and feel no more than if she was a sheep in the mattatoio, kill her with a knife as they did the sheep in the abattoir. He wove again, and the old men and women applauded.
Her clothes were in a loose heap. She heard the immersion heater going, as it did when someone was taking a shower. There was an en-suite bathroom off Immacolata’s room. She went into it, collected her towel from the rail, and wound it round herself, turned her back on the T-shirt, shorts, pants and bra, the socks stained with sweat from the run.
Maybe she was what they called her, a whore…
The towel covered her, except her shoulders and her legs below the knees. She went out of her room. The older one, who had bicycled, had his back to her but sat where he could see the front door to the apartment through the hallway, and did not look up as she glided, almost, over the marble veneer. She could hear the cascade of the water and went to that bathroom, which was off the corridor past the kitchen – the master bedroom was for her, the secondary two bedrooms were for them. Orecchia had not reacted as she went behind him.
She headed for the water. Immacolata thought that Rossi had toyed with her on the run in the gardens, could have passed her, gone ahead, drawn away from her, speeded up till she had sagged – and had not. He had kept his station behind her, had finally called to suggest that enough was enough, but had not succeeded in disguising his superiority, his strength. So fucking patronising. She went through the room and saw the neat pile of clothes, sweat-streaked like hers but folded and laid carefully on the floor beside the bed, which was immaculately made with perfect corners. The holster with the pistol was on the table. She went into the bathroom. This one was half the size of the en-suite attached to her bedroom. She opened the door. She could see his outline behind the screen. Did she want – at that moment – to be what they thought her, a whore?
Two movements, but simultaneous. She tugged back the plastic shower screen, and loosed the knot holding up her towel.
He gawped at her. Water, steaming, cascaded over his forehead, down his face and through the hair on his chest to the tangle of his lower stomach, and she saw the size of him, and the thick thighs. She expected him to blush, but he did not – expected him to jerk up with an erection, but he did not. The gawp had lasted only a moment. She stood naked and the towel was on her feet. It was what she would have done in the terraced house in Dalston, but only when Eddie was in the shower – God, not when any of the other boys was there. Eddie always blushed and always went… His shock was brief. He reached past her. His right arm brushed the curve of her left breast. His hand came back with a towel. He put it round him, and water spilled down it. She didn’t move, make room for him. He had to work his way past her, and when he did, his hip was against her stomach and his chest was against hers. She looked into his eyes, and he into hers. Then he was gone, behind her.
