the way back into the city at the scale of the failure. There was the truckyard where the long-distance lorries were kept, maintained and repaired; it was owned by the Licciardi clan, and the fleet could be hired by her father or her brother for the empty run north, under the terms of a sub-contract, and the return laden with chemical waste for the Moccia or the Alfieri clan. It was excellent commercial co-operation. They came past the great angled towers of the Scampia district, and on through Secondigliano and into the territory of the Contini clan. She saw cafes where men had been killed, and bars where men had been killed, and pavements where men had been killed, and she had come home.
Immacolata was adult. She was intelligent. She knew what happened in her home city, and the history of its streets. She knew where the envelopes of five-hundred-euro notes, tight in elastic bands, had been slipped into the smart, expensive leather briefcases of politicians, national and local; she knew where civil servants who prepared recommendations on contract choice of cement manufacturers were entertained by Romanian or Belarussian girls; she knew where the men who led the clans housed their mistresses – and where there had been a concrete-lined hole in a yard that had been the home for eight months of a clan leader’s eldest son, his heir. The police had needed reinforcements before they could remove the twenty-six-year-old and had fired gas at a screaming crowd. They had lost two patrol cars, torched, before order was restored for long enough to make the retreat. She knew where. It was her city.
She could see the Sail building, and knew that her father – in an earlier prison term – had been in an adjacent cell and had shared exercise with the clan leader’s cousin. Now it had drifted away from her view, with the other towers, and she saw the signs to Capodicino airport.
The car went fast. She saw now that Orecchia spoke – outside her hearing – into a button microphone that hung loose from an attachment. She had not noticed him put an earpiece in place.
They were near to the bottom of the last long hill, on the via Carbonara, going past the high walls of the Castel Capuano. Rossi had stiffened in his seat and had undone his seatbelt, as if he felt the need for greater freedom. His hand was on the stock of the machine pistol, and a car – unmarked – was in front of them, with another behind. It was not the direct route. She sensed they were playing with her, testing her, or steeling her.
Immacolata saw, very clearly, the lower end of the via Forcella. There was the bar where her grandfather went for coffee and brandy, to play cards or dominoes with old friends. There was the vegetable stall where her grandmother bought broccoli and spinach, tomatoes and spring onions. There was the narrow entrance to the shallow arcade where Silvio played the machines, and the hairdresser Giovanni used was beyond it. Momentarily, she had a view of the facade of the block where her grandfather and grandmother lived, then the three cars – in unison – had swung left.
She could see, fleetingly, the shops, businesses, outlets from which, as a teenager, she had collected the pizzo, and those to which, older, with the benefit of her newly learned book-keeping, she had gone to revalue their contributions. She could recall her ice-cool responses when she was told that such sums were not possible. They always were. They crossed the big square in front of the railway station, and it was from there – only a few times – that she had taken the train, anonymous and unidentified, to the town of Nola to visit her friend. On down a crowded, logjammed street. Then the siren started. They had gone the wrong way in the traffic chaos and the sun had been blocked by the height of the Poggioreale walls, where Giovanni and Silvio were held. She saw the church, modern and magnificent, and the triple towers of the Palace of Justice.
They went down a subway entrance and a barrier was raised.
She had never been there before, descending into the greyness of the tunnel under the palace. She had been through the main public entrance, off the pedestrian area, through which the families of the accused were admitted, but not this route. In Naples there were the Castel Capuano, the Castel Nuovo, the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel San Elmo, all great historic monuments, but the palace was another castle, as formidable, the home of what had been for every one of her aware years the ‘enemy’, the nemico. One thing to meet the enemy in a park in north-east London, and to travel with the enemy from London to Rome, then to be in a safe-house on a hill with exquisite views of the capital. It was another to be taken, under the protection of guns, into the enemy’s castle.
She was in an underground car park, dimly lit, and there was the stench of petrol fumes.
Immacolata did not look into Rossi’s face as he stood beside the opened door of the Alfa. She climbed out, making light of the awkwardness in slipping her legs from the low seat, and stretched. She followed Orecchia towards a lift shaft where more men waited. She was ringed with guns. Theatre? Or real and present danger? The men had hard faces and she didn’t think they play-acted.
In the lift, she was hemmed in, and Rossi’s machine-pistol magazine dug into her arm.
She could not have said when on the journey she had last thought of Eddie Deacon. She wasn’t certain if she’d thought of him since she’d fastened the padlock and thrown the key into the river, where it meandered among sandbanks.
*
Salvatore came out through the door. The man with the face wound, now caked and dried, had taken his place. The door was closed, a poor fit since the power drill had replaced the hinges and gouged new screw holes. He went to the sink and started to wash the blood off his fists and the sweat from his body.
A man came up behind him. ‘The door is always locked by any person who lives on any floor of any walkway in the Sail.’
He didn’t understand. It was more important to him that his fists hurt and the knuckles were scraped. Much more important: the boy had not yelled.
The man said, ‘Every door is locked. How did he get in? Was the door left open? Was there a plan? I think not. Was the door opened for him? I think it was.’
If the boy had screamed, begged, it would have given Salvatore more satisfaction. He could hear now the thudding blows he had inflicted. There would be more blood from the eyes, the lips, inside the mouth and the nose. There would be much more when the man with the nail wound in his chest took his turn, and the man who still walked badly because of the knee and the bruising.
‘What are you saying?’
‘They found many new shirts in the cupboard, still wrapped, never worn. He’s Davide. He goes to the city each week and buys a new shirt. Why? Why does he need new shirts that he never wears? He’s an idiot. Is that the behaviour of an idiot? Why did he unlock the door for a fugitive? No one would.’
Salvatore’s upper teeth closed on his lower lip and bit hard. He was a stranger here, isolated. He had loyalties: to Gabriella Borelli, whom he had not protected, to Carmine and Anna Borelli, whom he revered, to himself, paramount. He wondered where Fangio was, what he was doing, how he was treated down there among the shit, not allowed to come up to the third level. He sensed alarm. Two men waited, each with different wounds, to beat more hell out of the boy. He said they should not take the boy’s life. He dried his face. He said the idiot, Davide, could wait. He went to find Fangio. He walked along the walkway and past the apartment and noted, for the first time, the cleanliness of the window and the old man watching television inside.
‘He wants to know when.’
There was surveillance throughout the city. Each of the forces, the carabinieri, the Squadra Mobile and the Guardia di Finanza, would have loved to be able to claim plaudits. For recognised faces – Umberto, Carmine Borelli, Salvatore, Il Pistole, named foot-soldiers of the clan – there was foot surveillance, camera surveillance, audio surveillance and telephone surveillance. Almost – not quite literally – the men and women of the three law-and- order agencies jostled each other.
‘When is he to kill him?’
Fangio walked in a cemetery with Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew, beside him. Neither had any idea of the identity of the corpse in the coffin, the sex or the age. They took a position near the tail of the cortege as it wound towards a high wall and the line of small capelle in front of it. Within the last four months, over a meal in the evening heat at a ristorante on the west slopes of Vesuvio, Gabriella Borelli and Salvatore had chosen this as a method of avoiding watchers and cameras. Salvatore had activated it now, a plan decided on after the whore’s departure to London.
‘And where, for best effect, is he to leave the body?’
Massimo cultivated a north-European pallor, but he fancied his face had gone bloodless. He was, could not avoid the implication, now at the heart of a conspiracy of murder; might before have avoided that conclusion by playing at semantics – no longer could deflect his own guilt.
