audience. ‘What’s strangest is that I can’t hear anything from outside this place and I can’t see anything inside it. I have no light, and there’s no noise, other than my breathing and the chain. I’ve just slept on linoleum with no blanket under or over me. Where my mum lives, if a dog had to sleep on linoleum without bedding then someone, sure as hell, would be complaining to the animal-rights people.’
The routine of the search hadn’t changed from before he’d slept. He did sections of the floor and the walls, on his hands and knees, on his knees, crouched and standing.
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m going round again until I find it. Off my trolley, right? Might be, and I won’t argue with you. What sort of clears the mind, though, is the thought of that knife – ears, fingers and privates. Get me? Makes for good encouragement.’
Had to answer that, didn’t he? Had to face it. Couldn’t simply squat on his backside and wait for whatever the world threw at him. There was a knife on call. It was laborious, conscientious and repetitive but – too right – the thought of the knife kept boredom at bay.
‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible to exist without sound or light. It is. I have to find something. I have to believe there’s something to be found.’
It was the last sector of floor and the last area of wall, and he had gone over them, fingertips and palms, five or six times. When he had completed the sector, he would start again at the beginning where the chain was fastened. A success: the discovery of the crevice through which the ants went back and forth. Before he’d brushed them clear they’d countered the obstruction of his hand by crawling over it. There was dust at the angle where the linoleum met the wall’s base. Sometimes he forced it away from the wall, at others he didn’t. Sometimes there was compacted dirt at the angle and he would run his fingertip into it, excavate it, and at others not. He had lost track, had been round so many times in the search, of where he had prised up the flooring and where he had scraped at the mess caught in the join… but this time he felt something hard, and almost squealed. ‘Guys, it’s there. I have it.’
Hard and sharp, long and thin, buried and wedged. He must, each time before, have thought its slight shape was a flaw in the wall or a bulge in the linoleum. It came away. It had been deep in the dirt. Perhaps, on the previous searches, he had dislodged some of its covering or shifted it fractionally. He held a nail, and euphoria swept through him. It was a strong nail, a little bent in the middle, but otherwise flawless.
‘Can’t see, no eyes, have to do it all by touch. The nail’s about four inches long. I’d run my fingers along that place so many times, and now it’s there and I have it. Not thinking at my best – sorry and all that – and not being logical. It’s the window, the boarding across it, which was nailed and the nail heads recessed. Always, isn’t there, one nail that bends, jumps back and falls, and who has the patience to get down and find it? It’s no damn use anyway because it’s bent – but it’s a nail and I have it.’
He would have found one like it in the cardboard boxes his father kept in the shed, built as a lean-to at the far end of the garage. He had nails and screws of every size, calibre, length, and always said they should be kept because it was ‘a certainty of life that if you don’t have them all then the one you want will be the one you don’t have’.
‘Do any of you guys know what to do with a nail? Do they hand out nails in that toffs’ club or at Revenue and Customs or on a campus for PhD students or in the ticket hall of a mainline station? I doubt it. What I’m thinking is that a four-inch nail, even a bent one, is either a multi-task tool or a multi-task weapon. Can I have your thoughts, guys?’
His mind had begun to race: it could be used as a chisel, turned into a bar for leverage, could be a screw- driver, a stabbing knife – used against a soft stomach, an eye, a throat.
‘You disappoint me, you know that? Are you still in bed? Washed and shaved yet, in the bathroom queue? Not gone to work? Don’t know what time it is. Is it a tool or a weapon? You’re useless sods.’
They wouldn’t have known – how could they? – the value of a nail that was probably rusted, certainly blunt, and bent halfway up its length. He hadn’t been so clever either: he’d found the nail directly under the window hatch, which was boarded with heavy-duty plywood. The nail heads that held it in place, immovable, were recessed down. It was the obvious place to have searched and searched again. It was now his most important possession. Eddie doubted there was anything in the Dalston house, belonging to any of them, that competed with the importance of a single nail. And nothing in his parents’ home – prints from numbered editions, wide-screen TV, DVD player, jewellery that only came out of the wall safe for special occasions – was as important as the nail.
‘They’re useless, Mac. Couldn’t kick their way out of a paper bag, tossers. Mac, help me. There has to be a use for it. Do me a favour, Mac, and tell me what I can do with it.’
Couldn’t see it, could only touch it. Eddie started to think.
A dog barked at her from its high balcony. A maid, muffled against the morning cold, shuffled past her on flip-flops and went to work – she would have been Somali born, and taught already not to stare into the faces of Italians. A dustcart came round a corner. A porter, without his tie on, his collar unbuttoned, stood in front of the lobby of a block and coughed on his first cigarette of the day. Dawn was a smear, far away and grey on the mountains.
Immacolata walked down the street, past the long-stay parked cars with Saharan sand on their bonnets and roofs. A few lights were on above her, but most of the apartments were still dark. It had been easier than she could have believed.
She hadn’t showered and risked the noise of the apartment’s plumbing, but she had washed quietly. She had dressed simply, trousers and T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt of Rossi’s, and trainers. They took turns to watch over her. Rossi had been in his room and she had heard his soft snore. The older man was in a chair in the living room and, had he been awake, would have had a clear view of the main doorway in the hall – but he had not. Half dressed, Orecchia had been sprawled on a settee, mouth open, eyes closed. A mug of coffee stood beside him, untouched, and a cigarette had burned out in the ashtray. The strapping holding the holster in place was across his open shirt, and the weapon – she recognised the types of pistol on offer and this was a Beretta – was loaded. She had skirted the room, slipped behind Orecchia and crossed the hall. She had slipped back the bolt, turned a key, gone out, closed the door gently. She had gone down the main staircase, not used the lift, and had seen no one. Half of the residents of the lower floors were still on the dreg days of their summer holiday. Had she met any she wouldn’t have spoken – wouldn’t have shown them what they would have recognised as a proletariat accent from Naples. The hill where they had housed her was among the most select neighbourhoods in the capital, and there would have been immediate protests at the thought of a collaborator harboured among them. She had gone out, and the chill had been on her skin.
She carried her handbag, nothing else.
She went past the clinic, past the tennis and swimming club, where sprinklers already played on the grass, past shops in the piazza where the steel shutters were down and nothing moved, except one scurrying cat.
It was a brisk walk. She wouldn’t run: that would draw attention to her, but she needed to be clear of the covo, and off the hill, before the sun rose over the mountains that formed the spine of Italy. She stepped out, and the pace she took helped to warm her. She went down the hill, was under the canopy of pine branches, then beneath the big highway, the via Flaminia, and walked along the river, but hugged the trees and tried to stay in the shadows.
Ahead of her was the piazzale di Ponte Milvio, where the early-morning buses were parked, and a long taxi line where drivers waited for the day’s first fares.
She knew where she was going, and why.
And in the square there were shops and bars. It was too early for her, but if she hadn’t gone before dawn, before Rossi’s alarm went on his wrist, before Orecchia shook himself, yawned and stirred, she wouldn’t have been able to slip away.
Sunlight speared her, caught her face, and her hair fell back as she tossed her head. Her shoulders were squared and her chin was thrust forward.
She cared nothing for the chaos she would have created when the alarm sounded and Orecchia woke.
He had gone from the pensione in the half-light. The day manager, behind the desk, had glanced at him with bare recognition, then resumed his reading of the newspaper, and Lukas had dropped the two keys on the counter.
No small-talk, and nothing serious had been said – as if a conversation had not taken place the previous evening.
In London, or in a northern German city, or in that engine house of the Italian economy, Milan, people would
