fingers, eyes – whatever else of his body that can be cut off – the programme we have of collaborators with justice is finished. The postal service would be filled with the stink of decaying flesh.’
‘Again, I understand.’
Castrolami said, ‘Close to the autostrada, where we left it, was the territory of the Nuvoletta clan. We have bypassed the zone of Scampia, which is the base of di Lauro. Now we cross the suburb of the city called Secondigliano and it is under the control of the Licciardi clan and the Contini clan. As we drive towards the old city we pass the territory of Mallardo, Misso and Mazzarella. They are the principal families of the Camorra. Then there is another level – Lo Russo, Sarno, de Luca, Caldarelli, Picirillo – and the clan of Borelli, then another level of perhaps as many as eighty clans. The first level we cannot destroy. We can make arrests – occasionally, when we find a principal – and we can disrupt, but little more. The second level is where we find the Borelli clan. With a collaborator it is possible – I used it with care, but possible – to take the conspiracy apart to the extent that it ceases to exist. The opportunity does not come every week or month, it might come once in a year, but I would believe that is optimistic. Every two years or three…’
Lukas asked, ‘She has that capability, Immacolata Borelli?’
‘We believe so. We remove a clan’s leadership. It is a ship that has no crew. More important it has no rudder. It sinks. Warfare breaks out as the void is filled, but many opportunities then come our way. In the scramble for the empty territory, other clans – ruthless in what they will do, the risks they will take, the numbers they will kill – make mistakes. Mistakes are fertile ground for us.’
‘She has that importance?’ A gently posed question. The tower blocks of great housing estates, lights climbing into the darkened skies, were gone. The streets were filled now with cars and they had slowed. Off the route, Lukas could see narrow little openings. Noise – engines, horns, music, shouting – came through the windows.
‘Immacolata Borelli can deliver us the clan – her mother, her brothers, the hitman and the enforcers, the buyers and the bankers. It is a chance for us to win. Do you know what it is, Lukas, not to win?’
‘Keep it for another day – winning and losing,’ Lukas said.
‘Some days, in life, it is necessary to win.’
‘Another day we talk about winning – and we decide if we can win twice… with the girl, with the boy.’
‘I don’t bargain with you – it is not for discussion. We have to win with the evidence of Immacolata Borelli. It is primary. If, afterwards, we save the boy – Eddie Deacon, the idiot and the imbecile, now forgotten – then we may drink some spumante. It is made at vineyards near the town of Asti, in the region of Piedmont. They use the moscato bianco grape. It is very popular in Italy. It is drunk on a celebratory occasion. I like…’
Lukas said, drily, ‘I think you don’t often get to taste spumante, my friend.’
‘It is my regret that, true, I drink it rarely.’
Lukas gave him the winter smile – no love, no life, no humour. The car was stopped against the kerb. Lukas was given directions – how far he needed to walk, how long it would take him, and was told to watch his back and put his watch in his pocket, out of sight. Castrolami told him he was going to his office, his workplace in the barracks, and would set up, discreetly, a crisis-control desk. He took from his wallet a card that bore just his name on one side, no logo, wrote his mobile number on it and gave it to Castrolami. Then he reached to the back seat and pulled the laptop out of his rucksack – needed a contortion but he achieved it – and asked that the computer be lodged at the desk overnight. They shook hands perfunctorily, like an afterthought.
He closed the door and slung the rucksack straps over his shoulders. He saw the car veer away, then lost it in traffic, but he didn’t think Castrolami had swung in his seat and waved. The sort of man Lukas was – and his judgement of Castrolami – did not take time out for relationships with professionals. A sharp punch, a quick handshake was a good par on that course. He had asked to be dropped near to the piazza Garibaldi, had not been asked why, or where he had booked a room. He recalled what he had been told, peeled off his watch and pocketed it.
The streetlights were low, the headlights blinding, and it seemed that around him the city was vibrant, alive. It flourished. Lukas couldn’t walk along a street in Baghdad or Basra, Kabul or Kandahar, Bogota or Cali. He saw backpackers in front of him, guys and girls who were half his age, would have come off a train and now trekked from the main-line station to whatever fleapit they could afford. His clothes were, of course, clean – laundered but not pressed – and he was shaven but not closely, and his short cropped hair was not brushed or combed. He lit a cigarette, dragged on it, and tobacco smoke mingled with what he breathed out. He felt good here. He pondered: Castrolami and himself, were they on opposite sides of a chequered board? A girl who was needed as a state witness was one queen, and a boy who had done ‘wrong place at wrong time’ was the other, and if the game was played to conventional rules only one could be left standing. He would have to act, if they were to claim a victory, on maverick rules. But, he had been told, it was not a city that threw up victories. He went by the cafes, the bars, the little restaurants and pizza houses, past the stalls where clothing was slung, and past tall west Africans who had laid on the paving handbags with fancy labels.
Not good for a man in Lukas’s trade to stand up and cheer if the hostage walked free, or to crumple and sag if the hostage came out zipped into a body-bag. Could do his best, nothing more. After success came another day, and after failure there was one more day to be met. He thought, though, and this hurt, that the priorities were not with the boy, and it would be a difficult road to walk… He saw the sign, lit, hardly welcoming… One more backpacker in town, older and more wizened, but unexceptional. He smiled wanly at the small group of men who stood by the step up into the pensione, and worked his way past them. None seemed to notice him.
He was greeted at the desk. He thought himself a welcome diversion from the Australian kids who had come into the lobby complaining that the toilet was blocked and wouldn’t flush. He murmured a name – the one that had been used on the reservation, which was on a passport he now offered, Canadian – then asked the guy whether he was Giuseppe. He wasn’t: Giuseppe was the day manager, worked from seven in the morning until seven in the evening. Lukas lied, said a friend had been here, had spoken well of the pensione and of Giuseppe. He was given his key.
Slowly, tired, he started up the stairs. He did not know yet which had been the floor where Eddie Deacon had taken a room. He was tired, a little hungry, and the room allocated to Lukas would, inevitably, be shit, and his situation would, inevitably, be about a thousand times better than Eddie Deacon’s. He unlocked a door, went in, kicked it shut.
He said quietly, ‘You get my best effort, kid, can’t say more – and can’t say it will be enough.’
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
11
As did his wife, Carmine Borelli possessed the cunning of the elderly and the wiliness of a veteran.
He didn’t understand the technicalities of the most modern surveillance systems employed in the piazza Dante barracks or inside the Questura, but he had grasped the need for total vigilance… His jacket collar was turned up, a loose cotton scarf covered much of his lower face and he wore a cap with a peak to hide his nose and eyes from elevated cameras. He had walked more than two kilometres, done back-doubles and alleyways, before he was satisfied. Then he had been picked up in a small repair garage in which he had a commanding financial stake. An old friend had driven him.
The car in which he had travelled to the north of the city was not a Mercedes, a BMW 7 series or an Audi, not a vehicle of status. It was a humble mass-produced Fiat, churned out by the Turin factories, anonymous. He would have confessed, climbing stiffly from the passenger seat and stepping into the sunshine, to a flutter of apprehension. It was hostile territory, and he was inside it. Mobile phones would have logged each metre the Fiat had brought him deeper into the complex of towers. He saw the scooter accelerate towards him, then brake and swerve.
He was happier to have Salvatore at his back.
When Carmine Borelli had taken charge of the Forcella district of the old city, where the streets followed the old layout of foundations put down by Roman builders, the district of Scampia had been scrub, fields and smallholdings. There was now a population of some seventy thousand. It was outside the area of his experience,
