confusion nagged in him.
He left by the same walkway, and saw an old man low in a chair watching the television, could see the back of the head clearly because the window was well cleaned.
*
When the pain in his leg died and aching took over, Eddie put the nail to work. His fingertips told him that the chain’s links were slid into a loop at the end of an iron pin concreted into the outer wall. He used the point of the nail to drive down, two or three millimetres at first, into the minute gap between the concrete and the pin’s flank. He couldn’t hit the nail with the bucket because the noise would have reverberated, but he could use the heel of his trainer for want of a heavy-duty claw hammer. Eddie reckoned he’d done well, that the day had already given him something positive. He tapped with the shoe, felt the nail driving down, but every few millimetres he would extract it, then reinsert it, wiggle it, and feel the gap, the hole, widening. He thought he had, in probability, twelve hours before the man came with the knife. Time to be used. He had also learned a little of the routine. Two men at the door, only one entering the cell. Knew it was two because one had coughed and the other had lit a cigarette, and he had been able to separate the sounds.
He would not go quietly.
Denied the use of his eyes, left with the power of his ears, Eddie reckoned the man had lost certainty. Reckoned, also, that the loss had taken him on to unfamiliar ground. Downside: he didn’t know what was beyond the inner door, didn’t know what weapons the two men carried, didn’t know whether at the key critical moment he would be able to use the nail to stab, didn’t know whether he was capable of it. He’d have to learn the answer to that. It would have been so easy to roll over on his side, lie limp and wallow, give free rein to the self-pity and the unfairness – maybe they’d use alcohol on his skin before they made the cut, maybe they’d gag him or stick a wad in his mouth for him to bite on – but that wasn’t an option.
The concrete round the pin was of poor quality: it cracked easily, and little pieces crumbled. Then, using the nail as a lever, he could work the gap wider.
He thought it had been an hour, but it might have been two, before he could use his full strength, tug on the pin and feel it rock – but it wasn’t yet loose. Would be soon.
Carmine was under surveillance. Anna was not.
‘I promise you that the contract will be honoured, payments will be to the accounts you have nominated, nothing is different.’
Carmine, with his escort – he had life-long experience in recognising when he was tracked – went to a cafe in the square opposite the old entrance to the Castel Capuana, where he had done his first sentence of penal servitude a half-century before. He took coffee and, with old friends, played a game, twenty-ones, with cards and looked for the watchers. He had pleasure in identifying six, and two cars. Anna, with no tail, talked business.
‘For how long will I be making decisions that affect our contract? As long as is necessary. Depend on it. I have the authority to speak for my family, for my daughter-in-law, for my son, and you have my hand.’
Anna Borelli, who was less than 1.60 metres in height and less than forty-five kilos in weight, peered across a table at a Venezuelan, an Ecuadorian and an Irishman who together made up the cartel that would oversee the shipment from the Colombian port of Cartagena, via west Africa and transhipment at Dakar, into the port of Naples, of a tonne of cocaine. And she could haggle.
‘You have my guarantee, and I tell you that predictions of the collapse of my family are exaggerated, lies spread by envious rivals. You are wise to trust me.’
In front of her was an old calculator she had not used for more than twenty years. Her first stop that morning had been at a corner shop for batteries. What concerned her was the drop in the street price of cocaine, and she showed keen determination not to commit herself to an excessive front price when the market rate had deteriorated through saturation. A bony forefinger alternately rapped rhythms on the table and pointed at the men for emphasis. When her small hand was wrapped successively in the fists of the two South Americans and the Irishman, they would each feel the strength of her claw grip.
‘It’s a pleasure to do business with gentlemen,’ she said. Behind her, the clan’s treasurer beamed.
She was asked then – natural and inevitable – for news of her daughter-in-law, Gabriella.
‘I expect her home very soon, and my grandsons. We had a sweet granddaughter, wonderful as a child, but now suffering a mental collapse, a fugitive from those who tricked and deceived her. It’s cruel what they will do to turn the head of a naive and simple young person… It’s a good deal. Please don’t forget that my hand is my bond.’
She stood, tiny. They towered over her. She revelled in the deference offered her. She would have stood in line to slit the throat of Immacolata, ‘naive’ and ‘simple’, who had been ‘tricked and deceived’, and would happily have used a blunt knife.
She walked out of the shop, the sun beat down on her and the early-morning traffic built. Its fumes were in her nose, horn blasts in her ears, as she carried the bag they had given her.
She knew the stories of betrayal in her home city. She had learned them at school. Betrayal was in the culture of Naples, bedded in its stonework.
One story she had always enjoyed was that of Belisarius. The sixth century after the birth of Christ had been, Immacolata’s teacher had declared, a time of catastrophe. The city had fallen to Odoacre, king of the Ostrogoths, Roman rule had disintegrated, the network of lucrative trading routes had collapsed, malaria was rampant. A dark age had begun.
It was a story that still lived with her, carried forward from the classroom.
But in the year of our Lord 537 deliverance advanced. The Byzantine emperor, Justinian, sent his finest general, Belisarius, to win back the city. He came to Naples, saw the height and strength of the city walls, and despaired of capturing and sacking it. Then he found a traitor.
Immacolata could remember the hush of the children, the sucked-in breath of those around her, and the teacher spoke of an infame, a collaborator, a pentito.
And the traitor guided the general to a broken, disused aqueduct that had carried water to the city in the great days of the Empire. Led by the traitor, the soldiers of Belisarius entered the city through the forgotten tunnel, moved in silence in the quiet of the night – and sacked the city, butchering the Ostrogoths.
No child in Immacolata’s class had raised a squeal of indignation against the act of treachery. It was the Neapolitan way.
She walked towards the river.
Around the table in the annexe, there had been no criticism of Castrolami’s long absence from his chair. Reports were brought to the collator who beavered at them, opened computer cross-files, pushed paper at the others. The psychologist drew a word profile of Salvatore, enforcer to the Borelli clan, and painted a psychopath’s portrait. Lukas put bricks in place, built contact: he murmured, never allowing his voice to intrude, to both men the hopes he harboured for the hostage’s behaviour, how Eddie Deacon should be.
Should be… combating the sense of disbelief that ‘this is actually happening, and to me’, confronting fear and holding on, however grimly, to a sense of control. He should establish a routine for himself, and learn the routine of his captors. Regrets and sentimentality should be ruled out, unacceptable. Talk with his guards should be kept to a minimum and attempts to ingratiate himself with them would usually be doomed; they ‘don’t like a crawler or a whiner’, Lukas had said, or a guy who hit back and antagonised; ‘he’s best staying quiet’ and should never complain. He should not be uncooperative or short-tempered, and should not compromise his integrity. Always he should be remote from the cause of the hostage-taker. When a phone rang, or more paper was brought, Lukas would back off.
‘And escape?’ the psychologist had asked. ‘Does he work towards an escape attempt?’
‘Should he, shouldn’t he?’ the collator demanded, and the men behind – the storm squad – murmured support for an answer, an opinion.
Lukas said, ‘Eddie Deacon’s a nice guy, a second-rate guy, a teacher. He’s in a bunker, a cell, probably in darkness, likely hooded. Assuming he breaks clear of restraints, chains, gets through a door, a trap, he will have no knowledge of what’s beyond. Again, assuming he gets out of the building, he doesn’t know where he is, on hostile ground. Who will help him? Escape is the measure of desperation at a last resort. Almost inevitably it will fail.’
‘You paint a black picture,’ the psychologist said.
‘His situation is black.’
‘He depends on us,’ the collator said.
