window at the top of one wall, but covered with heavy-duty hardboard – he could see the pattern of the nails fastening it. There was a metal bucket. There was a ring attached to the wall to which the chain was fastened. There was graffiti on the walls, which had once been whitewashed, but he couldn’t read what had been written. The door had steel sheeting on the inside. All those things he absorbed and stored, and his head didn’t move. Why did he absorb, store?
It was his refrain. No self-pity, but acceptance of reality. No one was coming for him. His life was in his own hands, that sort of crap… Heavy, heavy stuff. He saw ants on the floor, little beggars scurrying. The piece of bread off the plate was in their line of march.
A voice: ‘You are OK?’
Eddie gagged. Why did the bastard care? He didn’t know how he should reply to the hesitant question in accented English.
‘Well, there’s a fucking chain on my-’
He was kicked. The trainer swung over the plate and the toecap caught him a little above his right knee, hard. When the foot swung back, the heel clipped the plastic plate, and all the bread was on the floor, with the cheese and the sausage. The water bottle rolled away. He wasn’t kicked again but the door was shut, locked and bolted, then nothing.
He would initiate a short debate. Better to say, in answer to the question ‘You are OK?’, that he was fine, grateful for the kindness and room service? Better to say that he was not OK because he had a ‘fucking chain’ on his ankle? Better to be passive, or better to earn a kicking? No decision taken. No consensus of opinion. Better to crawl to the bastard, or better to fight? Didn’t know. How could he? They hadn’t done survival training at the sixth- form college in Wiltshire, or at the university. At the language school there were no extra-curricular classes in it. The kick had hit the bone above the knee, and the bruising hurt, but he felt better for bawling out the bastard.
He wondered how far the ants had reached. Wondered if they had found his food on the floor. He squatted down, gave the chain a pull but merely jarred his wrists, then reached out, blind, to collect the bread, the sausage and the cheese. He had thought, when he had been able to see the food, that there might have been blue mould on the bread crust. Better when there was no light, and when he couldn’t see the ant column.
Eddie ate his food. He didn’t taste mould but had grit from the linoleum in his mouth, and didn’t know if he had swallowed a platoon of ants. He ate part of the food left for him, then went to work.
He stood up. Stretching, leaving his weight on the manacled foot, he could touch the wall where the window was set. It would be his first target. He tried to get his fingernails into the space between the wall at the edge of the hardboard, but could not. He tried until the nail of his right forefinger cracked far down. The pain was sharp and he winced, then sagged back – maybe half a minute, no more. Stood again, stretched again – and again could get no leverage on the window. He realised more. His head was against the hardboard, his ear to it, but he couldn’t hear anything: no music, no television, no kids, no laughter or shouting. What he did not hear told Eddie that there was soundproofing beyond the hardboard, which meant additional layers, and he couldn’t shift the first layer, and he couldn’t reach the door, and he couldn’t shift the ring that held the chain – and he couldn’t stop the pain in his finger from the broken nail. He’d once read something an academic had said on courage: ‘The important thing when you’re going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.’ And he’d read something an American had said on heroes: ‘We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the kerb and clap as they go by.’ Might have been both, might have been one – didn’t know which – but he laughed. Good to laugh, bloody good. Not a big laugh, a belly laugh, a gut-shaker, but a pleasant enough chuckle.
New experiences walked with Eddie Deacon. On his hands and knees, on linoleum and in the crack where the edge met the base of the wall, he searched, wondering whether he was close to the ants’ camp from which they came out to forage on his bread, cheese and sausage. While he searched he didn’t think of the knife, which blade they would use. His hands pushed and probed. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he searched.
*
The game-show on television was new – one of the Milan-based independent channels – and the girls in the show went topless. It was the third week that Davide had watched it. He would have said, if asked for a true response, that he believed the girls on display were hopelessly anorexic… He didn’t have that level of conversation in the Sail.
Ostensibly, in his chair in front of the television, it appeared to any man on the walkway peering through the cleaned, polished window, that Davide – the idiot, harmless – gazed longingly at the slack breasts that bounced on gaunt, lined ribcages. But the agent had the mirror wedged between his thigh and the side of the chair. He had seen much movement that day, more than was usual, and personalities.
He was an agent, a watcher, and had been sent on a crash course to gain the skills, was knowledgeable on the workings of electricity. Nobody, of course, who lived in the great Sail paid the state company for electricity. Nobody ever had to face final demands delivered by postal officials. Nobody was ever cut off for non-payment. Davide, as he was known, was not required to run cables from the main supply into the apartments on level three, but he was useful when a fusebox blew and when new plugs were needed. Then he was sent for. That was good. The poor, the derelicts and the addicts did not have the electrical appliances that blew out fuses. Men high in the chain of command did. That was good for his handlers.
Four months before, he had been to an apartment nineteen doors further along the walkway, and had wired in four new power sockets, had noted the carpeting and furniture, the shrine to the Virgin and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, in translation, on a table. So, Delta465/Foxtrot had identified the safe-house used by a principal clan leader on the third level of the Sail. He had seen the man, the reader of a Russian classic, that day. That man – who, the agent’s handlers said, was among the four most influential and powerful crime players in the city – had walked past the polished windows surrounded by his guards. He had gone towards the apartment, and an old man, limping, with another man, had been escorted after him. Then the big player had come again past Davide’s window, and a hooded man had been dragged by. His handlers would be interested only in information relating to that principal. His handlers were not policemen: they were interested only in the most senior men. Everything the agent saw he remembered, and to back his elephantine memory there were tapes.
His handlers had placed him in the Sail four years before.
He was a crusader. He was there because he wished to make a difference. A son buried, and the heroin microbe gone in his veins to the grave. A wife had walked out on him, unable to weather the strain of an addict youth. At the time of the death and the walk-out, he had worked in a bank in a resort town on the Adriatic. He had volunteered himself, had not been accepted, had come to live in a neighbouring tower on the far side of the viale della Resistenza, had made the second approach, had been accepted, given a code name and a cover history that checked, had been found the apartment, number 374. Once every week he took the bus into town, reported and delivered tapes. Once, also, every week he went to the mini-mart and bought the basics of sustenance. The rest of his waking hours he spent watching the walkway, or sat behind a lace curtain in his bedroom, observing the street below.
He knew every pulsebeat of the Sail.
Knew the times that the buses came from the railway station down the hill on piazza Garibaldi. Scampia, with the Sail at its heart, was the narcotics supermarket of Italy, even of Europe. Both users and dealers took trains to come here from all over Italy, from Frankfurt and Berlin, Paris and Marseille, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Madrid and Barcelona. The regular bus service waited for them at the station, and if the police stopped the buses there were taxis. A watcher on a street corner, a teenage youth, was paid two hundred euros a day, and there were twenty piazze, each administered by a capopiazza. They were the locations where cocaine, heroin and ecstasy were sold in Scampia. All needed watchers, and watchers were employed in three shifts. An army had been recruited to watch the bus passengers coming in, and those driving their own cars, and to warn of the approach of the police. The boy who went from the customer to the dealer could make eight thousand euros a month – and eight hundred if he was, extraordinarily, to get a job in a factory. Each piazza, his handlers had told Davide, generated an income of fifty thousand euros a week, so the trade for this abandoned urban slumland brought in a guaranteed minimum of fifty million euros a year. Just what was sold on the streets of one suburb of the city. The figure, they emphasised, was a minimum. A young buck, if ruthless, if charismatic enough to find blind followers, can head a clan by the age of thirty – can be worth a billion euros. It was a fighting ground. In the late evenings, when his television was turned off, Davide would sit in his darkened bedroom and rely on the few streetlights still working for necessary illumination to watch trading and killing, linked. Clans clashed: assassins went after a man, couldn’t find him, took his woman, tortured her for information on his whereabouts. She wouldn’t tell so she was
