They had reached the capella in which that day’s body would be placed. By happy coincidence another funeral had ended. A column of mourners – men loosening their ties, women dabbing their necks with cologne and using the order-of-service cards as fans – came past them and headed for the gate that would lead into the Sanita district. They switched.
‘When? Where?’
They didn’t leave together. Fangio was far down the via Foria and accelerating through slow traffic by the time Massimo had telephoned Anna Borelli, had apologised profusely for disturbing her siesta and begged permission to collect clean underwear for her grandsons and take the items with him on his visit the following day to Poggioreale gaol.
It did not surprise him that Anna, the crow in her perpetual uniform of black, would make such a decision: when a young man would die and where his carcass would be dumped. But he was hooked and could not step back.
He sat on great smoothed stones. They were at the foundations of the narrow metalled track leading to the main entrance of the castle that jutted into the bay. A wedding party hung back, but the girl bride and her fresh- faced new husband had come off the road and over the low wall, had stepped on to the stones, a photographer with them, and posed close to where Lukas sat.
He should not have been there. He should have been in the annexe off the operations room. If he had been there he would have been able to soak in the collator’s surly acceptance of his presence, and the psychologist’s sneered hostility. The ROS men, who would have made up any assault team that might be mounted, would have sat around him, yawned, broken wind and belched, as such men did, as he had when he was a member of a hostage rescue team. And, if he had been there, he would have been close to Castrolami who seemed to him now a man of split priorities: the life of the boy, the testimony of the girl. And the scales, as Castrolami demonstrated them, slipped fast towards the girl as his priority. He watched the bride pose in front of the towering castle walls and hold out her train so that the afternoon breeze caught it and made a sail of it. He saw the adoration in the groom’s face. It had not happened in Lukas’s life.
It was good for him to see real people and share what they offered, not to be incarcerated in an annexe with a gallows-humour crowd.
There should, of course, have been intelligence coming in from the assets, but the way Castrolami had told it there were the usual, inevitable, divisions and rivalries. If it was a carabinieri -instigated investigation, would the police crime squad or the fiscal police help? Small chance. And there had been, at their meeting, the domestic security service. They wouldn’t. No chance. In the States, it might have been the Agency, the Bureau and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, might have been Counter-Terrorist, Intelligence and the Junglas, Colombia’s supposed elite, the Agency, the Bureau, Task Force 145 and the local warlords in Iraq – might have been in any goddam place where a life hung by a thread and the big boys disputed territory. The wedding party lined the road to the castle entrance, shouted approval, and the groom had come to hold her. Lukas liked the image.
He thought that unless luck was served up in buckets he had lost the boy: no assets quoted, no intelligence offered, just silence in close-set walls around him. He could lose a hostage, climb on to a flight, get himself back to Paris and not feel that the world had fallen in. He didn’t understand why this boy had gotten to him.
He let out a long, slow sigh, which was pretty damn self-indulgent. Nothing to do with his own boy – with whom contact was severed – not a piece of ‘replacement’ psychology that the shrinks would have enjoyed talking up. He didn’t know why this boy had burrowed, like a worm, under his skin. He had gone through the routines of hostage negotiation so many times and not felt that anything was personal. Maybe it was the goddam photograph he’d been shown, or the sight of the girl running in the park. Maybe their romance had fuelled that worm, and little of romance had crossed his tracks. Perhaps he was just damn jealous. He hailed a taxi and gave it piazza Dante as a destination. All his instincts told him that a body would soon be in a ditch, or in a car, or in an alley, and he felt shredded of power.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
16
It was not mercy that stopped the beatings, but their exhaustion. He was a punch-bag, a kicked football, a bleeding, bruised mess.
Eddie lay on the floor of the same space where he had removed the chain’s pin from the wall and the door’s hinges. He had no longer any sense of time, or of hunger, but his throat burned with thirst. He thought he’d swallowed some of the blood, and mucus, and the sweat that poured in rivers off his head. He didn’t know whether his ribs were broken, only that the pain there came in sharp spasms if he moved an inch to right or left. He thought his forearm wasn’t broken, but it might have been: it had protected his kidneys and had probably screened his liver.
He was on his side.
His wrists were fastened together behind his back, held with a plastic stay that had been pulled tight and cut into the skin, but with so much pain elsewhere that was a small matter and he ignored it. His ankles had new manacles. He was on his side and had been since they had dumped him. He had been able to lift his knees into his stomach, twist his shoulder and chest towards them, drop his head and shorten his neck, and he had kept his eyes tight shut. Eddie knew he was condemned. They had not hooded him. It seemed unimportant to them that he saw their faces. One was contorted in rage and had new scars across one cheek. He had kicked and punched hard. One had laughed each time he had kicked and punched, and had the blood on his T-shirt. Eddie knew a name. He had heard the one whose testicles he had kneed call another Salvatore. Again, it had not seemed important to them that a name had been used within his earshot. It was confirmation that he was condemned. The one they called Salvatore was the man who had taken him in the via Forcella, who had kicked him before, who seemed to have a slack, irresolute mouth and vacant, distant eyes.
Between the first beating and the second – the one from Salvatore and the one from the man with the scarred face – he had almost called out to Immacolata to end it for him, back off, quit, refuse. He had slid into weakness, but he had ditched it in the gap between the second and third beatings. He had thought of little between the third and fourth, nothing coherent. After the fourth, now, he had no thought of anything beyond survival for the next five or ten minutes.
He did not have a noble, romantic or heroic thought. All gone. He existed in a vacuum, no hope and no despair, where no intellect was admitted. He was the animal in the snare or the burrow, or the treble-hooked fish unable to reach the reed bed. He did not consider a greater picture, the rule of law over the supremacy of criminality, that might govern Immacolata. Eddie thought of nothing beyond lying still and managing the pain in his ribs and the pain in his forearm, which might be broken, and the pain in his lip, which was bloody and swollen, and the pain in his eyes where the bruising had spread. His vision was through tear-wet slits. He didn’t think of his class filling a room, or the guys in the house, didn’t think any longer of Immacolata. They had nothing to do with his possible survival for the next five or ten minutes.
They hadn’t closed the door on him. He could see, through the open door, the shoes, trainers, that had kicked him and they were propped on other chairs, and he could see the fists that had punched him, which cradled cigarettes – one was wrapped in a handkerchief and the blood showed through.
The inspiration of escape was behind him.
He could see a spider. It was in the angle between the wall and the ceiling. A monster of a spider, with a fortress of close mesh around it and a food store. It moved lethargically. Eddie wondered how long it took a spider to weave a web of that extent. It was his first thought – other than survival – since the fourth beating. Who was the enemy of the spider? Who threatened it? His mind turned, cranked, on the queries and…
Salvatore had gone, was no longer in the room with the others, but the one with the shirt wound, blood in the chest from the nail, came to the door and stood there, tobacco smoke playing across his face. He was a grown man, might have been thirty. Eddie didn’t understand how a man of thirty could be as savage as a cat with a victim as helpless as a winged songbird. He didn’t have the clarity to think it through. The man watched him. Was it work for a man? The man was older than Eddie. He guarded prisoners, kicked and punched them. Maybe he might just
