‘I’m just throwing past you the second call on your time. The German Red Cross have contacted us. They have people in western Afghanistan, round Herat, and they’ve lost a field worker. Well, not actually lost him, just don’t know which warlord has him, and if he goes into the hands of the AQ… Well, they asked for you.’
‘Like the man said to Chevron,’ Lukas answered.
‘That you’re spoken for?’
‘That I’m spoken for. I feel kind of obligated to stay with this, let it run its course.’
‘Not getting soft and sentimental in your old age?’
He heard a brief grim chuckle. No one who knew him would ever accuse him in seriousness of either.
‘Hope not.’ Lukas bridled, and the ball was back at his feet. The kids stayed off him and he did a shimmy, kicked for goal. Wide. Lukas thought hostage co-ordination was easier than kicking footballs.
‘Don’t take this as impertinence, but can you see yourself making a contribution of value?’
‘Hope to. Will try to.’
‘A good kid?’
‘I didn’t do the legwork. You did,’ he said softly. Lukas wouldn’t put down his boss. No one had ever labelled him sarcastic… and he thought of those he had searched out, the close-up witnesses: the hotel manager, the fish- seller, a priest with a knapsack of guilt.
‘It’d be nice to bring him out.’
‘Yes. I have a desk to get back to.’
‘I’ll tell them you’ve work in hand – not available for the Niger Delta. Tell them you’ve things stacking up, not available for Herat. Damn you, Lukas, because you never give me anything. He’s an ordinary kid with an ordinary background, yet I think he’s special. It’s what people say and-’
‘The desk calls.’ Lukas rang off. He understood why the company boss, the God almighty of Ground Force Security, should waffle on about a ‘good kid’ and ‘nice to bring him out’. In the company there were people from differing law-enforcement and military backgrounds, and personal involvement was regarded as suitable for the fairies, not for them. But the matter in hand involved the fate of a kidnap victim, not pipeline security, not close protection for an ambassador, not convoy escort up a road blighted with culvert bombs. Kidnapping was different. It had a particular status with the people of this company, all levels, and of every other company in the same trade. He understood why his boss had put saccharine on the assignment, would have known there was no possibility of Lukas pulling out from Naples and taking a flight to Lagos or heading to Kabul. Almost the boss had pleaded with him for a best effort. He’d never done that before. He’d trawled the boy’s background, had done the parents, the guys who lived in the east London house and maybe some people the boy worked with. Most important, the boss had been lined up by a guy, one-time Special Forces, who did close protection for the company in the dark corners where the money was earned and where the risk of getting lifted was greatest. They were all, in this trade, bound together like blood relatives. All that made sense to Lukas, but there was something more – as if his boss had been well hooked… Funny thing, the emotion business: he could feel emotional about a complete stranger. Lukas didn’t do emotion – if he did, he could be slashed, minced. Great to feel good when the hostage walked to a helicopter or an armoured Humvee, a luxury of indulgence. And when the hostage didn’t walk, but stank from the sun, the flies swarmed, and was carried away in a black bag, emotion would wreck him. He needed the protection of apparent indifference… but it had gotten harder to play-act.
He had seen bad things in his time, and been party to them, and a tear had not fallen from his eye. Might be time to quit when it did. Should have felt calm, but didn’t. Should have felt on top of his game, the acknowledged expert in the field, but didn’t.
He went back inside, walked through the operations room and took his chair in the annexe. Quiet and respectful, he asked what was new, and was told that nothing was.
Two rats came close. They didn’t approach the body but blood had spurted from the mouth on impact.
Salvatore saw the rats when he craned out of the bathroom window. They had realised Davide had gone through the window a full half-hour before, and from three floors up each of the men who had looked at the man lying with his head at such an angle had pronounced death. They had gone on with the search. More had arrived. There was a capodecine , bustling with urgency, there to see at first hand the scale of an intelligence failure in the midst of the Sail, a comando piazza, who traded off that walkway, came to check on the parameters of that failure, and two magazzinieri who warehoused on the third level. There was an aquirento, the principal buyer for the clan. All came, from the walkway, to try to measure the limits of a small disaster. They had gone.
Salvatore watched the rats from the window and saw them lap the blood of an old man who had played at being an idiot, like cats with milk.
The body lay on the concrete paving, with a crown of weeds for the shattered head, the feet between two overflowing rubbish bins.
Immacolata stepped out of the Alfa, Orecchia and Rossi on either side of her. Two more men had peeled from the police car outside the gate. The front door was open and she saw more men in the hallway. She wore dark glasses that covered most of her cheeks, with a headscarf over her hair: it was a crude disguise, would have fooled few. A man, with no intention of backing off in the face of force, the guns and the threat, watered a flowerbed in the middle of his front garden. She had been told she shouldn’t hesitate on the pavement or the path. Across the street, a couple watched the show – little else would match the arrival of an armed convoy. Orecchia had taken her arm.
She had been to the house before but it seemed an age since she had last walked up that path and gone through the front door to be greeted with the hug and the kiss of the closest friend she had known.
It was because they didn’t trust her that she had been brought here. There had been no consultation. She was a gift-wrapped parcel on a conveyor-belt. She had not spoken in the car but her mind had turned over the previous time she had been on that road out of Naples and across the flat inland plain that stretched to Nola. Then Silvio had driven. Then there had not been a machine pistol on the seat, gas grenades and a vest. She could not have said, tracing that same route, how many days, hours, nights it had been since Silvio had driven her to Nola. The days and nights since had concertinaed, and the spread of time no longer had meaning for her. She couldn’t have said how long it had been since she had run from the basilica, how long since she had paid fifty euros for a ten-euro posy, how long since the heel of her shoe had broken, her clothes had been torn and she had lain on the ground, assaulted and abused. She didn’t know.
She followed Orecchia into the hall. Castrolami was there. He seemed to tower in the place, to minimise it. On the floor, near to his feet, there were two neat piles of female clothing at hip height. Across the hallway there were three black plastic sacks, filled and knotted at the neck. She realised her visit had interrupted a schedule. One of the two piles was of clothes for early spring, late autumn and winter, and she recognised the anorak Marianna had worn on a January day, down on the via Partenope, when they had walked and done the farewells. The next day Immacolata had gone to London. The other pile was of late-spring clothes, which would have lasted through summer and early autumn, and at the top of the heap lay the faded T-shirt with the image of Che that had been a favourite of Marianna. She had arrived, which meant the disposal of her friend’s clothes was delayed. She assumed the plastic bags would go to a rubbish tip, and that the heaps had been sorted carefully and would be taken to a charity – perhaps one overseen by the nuns at the basilica. She could remember her friend in the yellow anorak with the black underarm panels and the North Face logo, and in the guerrilla T-shirt.
Castrolami said, not dropping his voice, seeming not to care if he was overheard, ‘At the palace the decision was taken to provide security for the family as soon as rumour would have reported your collaboration, Signorina. It was thought that the parents of your friend were at risk when you came into our custody, as leverage. Then the boy, your one-time lover, made himself available to them and the threat against the parents was – briefly – reduced. We anticipate that the boy will be murdered. You have not made a public announcement that you are withdrawing your potential testimony and the deadline expires in a few hours. If we had a good line into the kidnap situation we would be able to delay and protract the process. We do not. We cannot rescue him because we don’t know where he is held. He will be murdered very soon, we anticipate tomorrow, unless we can stall and deceive. Then they – the Borelli family – will need more leverage. Possibly they will come here for it. The lives of these people are doubly ruined, Signorina. They have lost their daughter, poisoned by toxic greed, and they should – if they have any sense – pack up, sell their home, leave their employment and move away. They would then have left behind the grave of their daughter, and to visit it they would require an armed escort.’
‘Will they run?’ she asked.
‘For them to answer,’ was his curt response. ‘There is a consequence for your actions. You should know that.
