He said quietly, ‘I’m sorry your shower isn’t working, Signorina. We’ll get a plumber in to repair it.’
She stood and regret bloomed.
‘Please, Signorina, feel free to use ours.’
She stepped into the shower, felt the heat of the water, then dragged the screen across. She didn’t know then whether he watched her silhouette. She thought she had, indeed, made a whore of herself.
He said, and she could see the shadow movements as he dried, matter-of-fact, ‘In our training for induction into the Servizio Centrale Protezione, we do role-plays to cover many situations. One concerns the pentita from Naples, Carmela Palazzo, known as Cerasella. She was barely literate, pregnant at twelve, and active in the Spanish Quarter. With the family men in gaol, she controlled their speedball industry, drugs – heroin and cocaine. At a meeting inside the Poggioreale prison visiting room, the men blamed her for huge debts arising from her incompetent dealing in narcotics. She screamed abuse and was slapped across the face. In her humiliation, she went to the carabinieri, offered herself for collaboration. She was taken to a safe-house, had protection. But she was beyond control. Our role-plays involved walking with a woman collaborator on a street of shops. She puts an arm through the guard’s, which is forbidden, pretends he is her lover, her husband. How can she be protected if she holds his hand or links his arm? She goes into stores that sell underwear. She waves items of intimate clothing at the guard – ‘How do you like this, my sweetheart?’ – and the guard is embarrassed. She runs away. She is brought back. She accuses, falsely, a guard of raping her. We did many role-plays, Signorina, that were based on the actions of Cerasella. Yes, she helped in the destruction of the Mariano clan. No, the protection didn’t last. We threw her out, cut her adrift, and she was regarded as a sad, inadequate person, fit only to sell narcotics. In the role-play we’re taught how to respond to erratic personality, as when a collaborator behaves with the modesty of a prostitute. Enjoy your shower.’
The shadow was gone. Water fell. She scrubbed herself with soap. She had heard, of course, of Carmela ‘Cerasella’ Palazzo, had never met her or seen her from a distance.
She switched off the shower, towelled herself. She had wanted to show power over him.
When she came back into the living room, Rossi was dressed and sitting beside Orecchia. Nothing was said, which increased her humiliation.
She wanted arms round her, to be held, to be saved from the shame… Who could have held her? She saw his face – had gloried in betrayal – and knew who would have held her, forgiven her.
In the darkness, Eddie scratched at the chain. He reckoned he had now smoothed some two feet of the rough concrete that made the ridge, but had at least six more to work on.
New thoughts, new attitudes swam in his mind. He must cope with isolation and the fear it induced, and he believed that sawing at the chain, grinding at it obsessionally, focused him away from misery… which led to the next necessity: must try to stay positive. ‘Positive’, to Eddie, had meant advertisements to be sniggered at in which companies quoted some unheard-of American electric-shaver sales guru who would teach – for a fat fee – how to acquire confidence. His mother was a positive thinker – always regarded the glass as half full and ditched the empty bit – and his father had chided him for not having the ambition to go to the furthest limits of ability. There had been so much crap to Eddie Deacon – not any longer. And, because it was a positive reaction, he started to play a word game – took a word, stripped it, jumbled it, found new words. He would have derided it in the staffroom, and the guys in the house would have hooted at him if he’d suggested it as an exercise in mental agility… but he had stored it as an entertainment, with mental arithmetic, meaningless figures… and further down the line there would be physical exercise – maybe he would try squats, press-ups, or lying on his back and lifting his legs three or four inches. Eddie thought that being positive was important, and thought that if he ever broke the chain and freed his hands the agility – physical or mental – would save him… Had to think that.
Once he heard a voice, a whistle of some tune, and footsteps, but they didn’t approach the trapdoor. Once he heard an engine, faint and muffled, as if a car had come close, and then a radio had been switched on and off. The sounds didn’t make a pattern… That was another thing: a pattern was to be observed, noted, analysed, clung to in case the chain broke and… He worked hard, and the sweat was in his eyes, making them smart. The bucket stank worse.
He thought he wanted the bucket taken and emptied more than he wanted fresh food, more even than he wanted water.
Eddie was certain of it now. The link in the chain had a clear indentation. Not wishful thinking, more than mere positive thinking, there was a line in the steel of the chain’s link that his nail could settle in. He went at the work harder, and didn’t care to think of the consequence if he were to break open the chain link and free his hands.
Time drifted – and he created word games, arithmetic games that were more complicated, taxing, and the dust of the smoothed concrete was thicker in his nostrils, caking the outer skin of his lips. He had to do it for himself. No other bastard would.
‘How will he be?’
‘Scared,’ Lukas said. ‘Scared and alone, feeling that the world, already, has given up on him. Probably in darkness, probably trussed up, likely to be hooded.’
Castrolami drove. ‘We have kidnapping in the south, in the toecap of the boot. It is an industry, and when payment is slow there is the possibility of a knife taking off an ear or a finger and the item consigned to the postal services. But not here. I do not have the experience of it.’
Lukas thought Castrolami drove well. They went fast, had come off the autostrada and were now on a dual- carriage way. Ahead, there was a wide panoramic vista of lights, different intensity but constant, then a short, curved horizon and beyond it almost total darkness. But the Gulf of Naples was broken up by oases of lights and Lukas thought one would be the island of Capri, but didn’t know which. He could keep most layers of excitement well suppressed, but always a faint buzz-glow grew in him when he saw, the first time, his place of operations. Might have been from the hatch window of a Cessna light aircraft coming in to a jungle strip up in the mountains and far from Bogota, or from the porthole of a C-130 as it corkscrewed down towards the Bagram runway outside Kabul, or from a Black Hawk’s open hatch and over the shoulder of the machine-gunner anywhere in Shia or Sunni Iraq. If he didn’t have the buzz-glow, if he’d gotten too cynical for it, it would probably be past time for him to call it a day, go quit. It was all, sort of, routine and he had played this game so many times, and he didn’t expect to be surprised. He still had, and was grateful, the focus. They hadn’t talked much on the journey. Lukas reckoned that Castrolami was poor with chatter: they had done a little – Castrolami had a wife and children up in Milan, and they’d gone there because the job was shit and they never saw him; and he had a friend who painted, and most times he took her out he was asleep at the table by the time the meat was served; and he was forty-six, and bullets had come through the post in little padded bags… Lukas had given some: had done the FBI’s unit for Hostage Rescue, had been on the sidelines at the ‘big’ events, Ruby Ridge and Waco, did coordination now, and was a year older at forty-seven. His mother had brought him up in a trailer camp and had cleaned offices to get him through college; she was American-Italian and his father was pretty much a shit and long gone. There was a wife, Martha, and a boy, Dougie – had only mentioned his son’s name, but Lukas had said nothing else of him. They all lived together now, mother and wife and son, in the trailer park, adjacent to each other, and the cut-off didn’t seem to bother him… They had talked a bit about things that didn’t matter and didn’t affect why they rode in a car down a hill and into the city of Naples… Seemed they’d each talked enough about themselves.
Lukas said, ‘Very few hostages taken have an expectation of the risk. They come to the situation with an experience bank equal to that of a newborn child.’
‘We talk the language of “leverage”?’
‘That would be an appropriate word. “Leverage” is where we’re at.’
‘And negotiation is not an appropriate word?’
‘When we have an open line of communication, we talk a fair amount about negotiation. But it’s talk. I accept that. Talk buys time… The time is used for assets of intelligence, surveillance, informers, for just plain old-fashioned luck to chip in – I don’t come from a world where hostage-takers get rewarded. Maybe, up front, I’ve been party to them being paid for a freedom exchange, but then they get hunted down, shot or hanged, or they disappear off the face of the earth. I understand the reality.’
‘In this case, Immacolata Borelli, if we paid we would destroy an anti-kidnap strategy applicable in domestic Italy for more than thirty years.’
‘I said I understood,’ Lukas murmured.
‘And if we permitted Immacolata Borelli to withdraw her evidence in return for the boy keeping his ears,
