The Collaborator

2

The glass-sided box of the public telephone was ahead. The pavement was crowded at that time of the early evening and it slipped in and out of her view but she kept her eye on it, as if it was the Holy Grail.

She had not slept the previous night and had not eaten that day. She had missed an all-day seminar on insolvency, had walked the streets and sat in a park, with Downs Road behind her and the open expanse in front where mothers pushed prams, smoked and gossiped, where kids threw off their hoods and kicked a ball, and where work-gangs – sullen, resentful and bored – cleared dumped litter under supervision. She had watched them all. Had seen the old walk arm in arm or dragged along by a dog on a tight lead and the young drift. She had watched the high windows and balconies of the tower blocks on the west side of the park, and seen wet washing put out on lines to dry and dry washing taken in. The hours of the day had been eaten up. It was about betrayal, a big word, as big as any she knew in its weight.

It had rolled in her mind. Tradimento. It had made her – in her bed, unable to sleep – shiver and feel dread, because she knew the reward that waited for those who betrayed their own.

Her hand was tight on her shoulder-bag as she walked down the shallow slope of the street towards the telephone box. It was occupied. Three boys in baggy trousers and oversized sweat tops were crowded inside it: she wondered why they used a public phone, not mobiles – and whether they bought or sold. She looked to see if any others were hovering to use the phone, and thought not. Where she came from, that culture and that society, the word tradimento had a taste as bitter as poison. Betrayal was an ultimate sin, was stamping on the face of Christ… and she had sat through today on the bench in the park. She had kept her hands tight on the bag’s straps and had watched but not absorbed. She had agonised on the implications of betrayal. Her first act of betrayal had been that morning when she had come out of the bathroom, dressed, and had crossed the living room. Vincenzo was lounging in a chair, smoking, a towel draped across his stomach as he turned the pages of a football fanzine about Napoli SSC. She had gone into her bedroom and come out a moment later with the bag that contained the notes she took in her classes. He had asked, without interest, about her day. She had answered, a mutter, that she had a seminar on insolvenza. She had needed to carry the work bag if she was to support the lie that she was attending her classes. She had lied to her brother and started the process of betrayal. Vincenzo had grinned – the idea of insolvency amused him. He, his father and mother, his brothers, his sister were worth hundreds of millions of euros, would never know insolvency… She had sat on the bench and watched, her stomach had growled, and she had steeled herself.

Was there something else she could do to reflect her feelings? Like what? Join a religious order and say prayers? Become involved with a charity, and help the mentally handicapped, alcoholics or HIV sufferers? Sign up for a campaigning political group and attempt to bulldoze change through a ballot box? Walk out, lose herself, try to forget what had been a part of her life? As alternatives, they had all – during the night – seemed inadequate and degrading to the memory of her best friend. Immacolata had found the strength to go to the telephone box.

When the self-doubt was worst she would stare out over the trees and up into the clouds, feel the rain on her skin and take herself back to those hours. Not many of them. She had been able to look at her watch and think that twenty-four hours earlier she had been hurrying along the verge of via Saviano, or that it was the moment her heel had snapped, or that she was hopping, hobbling, along a path between the family chapels, or that she was in the centre of the cemetery at Nola, staring across white gravestones to a far wall where the family slots were. She had recalled the hands taking the bundle and carrying it up the ladders. Clearest were the images of her clothing being ripped, her shin kicked, and the denunciation of her family’s part in the death of her friend.

Had she known of the trade in the disposal of toxic waste? Of course she had.

Had she known of the profits to be made from shipping contaminated rubbish from factories in the north to dumping grounds in the fields and orchards of the south? Of course she had.

Had it ever intruded into her thoughts that her family would fear responsibility for the killing of her friend? Never… She remembered the flowers, bent, worthless. What she remembered best gave her the strength to commit the act: tradimento.

She stood by the telephone box. She eyed the boys. Had she been at home, on her own streets, and ragazzi had used a telephone she was waiting for, she would have been recognised, the call terminated, the booth offered, and respect would have been shown to her. Maybe, even, one of the kids – had she been at home – would have wiped the receiver on his T-shirt to leave it clean for her. Two of the boys stared at her, challenging. Here, on Kingsland Road, in Dalston against the border of Hackney, the boys with hoods on their heads, Nikes and new tracksuits ruled and did not expect to be stared out. She thought they were shit. One, the biggest, seemed to make a decision about her. He didn’t pull a weapon, but ended the call and dropped the receiver, letting it dangle on its cable, then slouched out, his shoulder brushing hers. It was probably the nearest he had come to a moment of submission. She heard, behind her, another spit at the paving-stones.

She lifted the receiver. She knew the number. Anyone in her family knew the number, and the occupant of the desk on which the call would ring out. She had not thought of the young man. Perhaps he, too, was betrayed. He was ignored, didn’t matter to her, as she stood in the glass-sided box. The headlights of cars, buses and vans glistened on the street, the lamps above her were bright and threw an orange wash over the windows of shops, banks, building societies and betting shops – all closed now. The young man didn’t matter to her and had no place in the fierce heat of the cemetery at Nola. She put a Visa card into the slot and the display panel responded.

She dialled. She would not have needed to know the number. Neither would any of her family have ‘needed’ to know it. Knowledge of the number was power. Having it showed the tentacle reach of the clan. The direct line would have been listed only on the most confidential sheets and would have circulated only among a chosen, trusted few. Knowing it was a demonstration of the power of the clan to which she was integral. She took a deep breath, allowed it to whistle shrill from her lips.

The call was answered. She thought she had interrupted a meeting in the office on the upper floor of the Palace of Justice and that a subordinate had picked it up. She named the prosecutor. She was told he was unavailable. Who wished to speak to the dottore?

The moment of betrayal came fast, stampeded her. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Then she straightened her back and jutted her chin. ‘I think he’ll find time to speak with me. Tell him I’m Immacolata Borelli…’

He walked into the classroom. A chorus of voices, in scattered accents, greeted him. For Eddie Deacon it had been a bad day and now it was evening. The chance of improvement was minimal. The language courses often took place after working hours and his foreign students flocked in when their daytime employment, legitimate or not, had finished.

It had been a long-standing promise, made at least a month ago, that he would go in the morning by train from London to Chippenham. His father had collected him at the station, and they’d had a desultory conversation in the car about the state of the railways, the weather, the roads, his father’s pension, and just as they had exhausted all common subject matter, they’d reached the family home.

He’d had to go. He couldn’t have brought himself to call and tell them he had a problem and couldn’t make it. He would have heard undisguised disappointment, in whichever of them he had spoken to, and he’d known that for the last two days his mum would have been planning lunch: she worked, front-desk receptionist, at the offices of a local building contractor and would have told everyone there that she was taking the day off because her lad was coming down from London. They’d be waiting the next morning for a bulletin on how it had gone and how he was progressing, and from the way she told it, most would reckon he was a college lecturer and something of a highflier, not a language teacher who helped a cocktail of youngsters to speak basic English, and wasn’t concerned with chasing ‘prospects’. His father had taken early retirement on his fiftieth birthday, and pottered round the house fixing things that didn’t need fixing. Eddie Deacon had damn near nothing that connected with the lives of Arthur and Betty, his parents. What he couldn’t deny was the love they had for him. A bit humbling, actually. Like having a pillow shoved over his face that half suffocated him. There was love and there was expectation for his future. After lunch, if he was lucky, he’d escape for an hour, put on the old pair of boots that were kept on the shelf in the pristine garage, and walk by the river, maybe see a kingfisher in flight, lean on a field gate and have a herd of heifers nuzzle his sleeve. Then a quick tea, a pointed look at his watch and talk about the train he could catch.

He’d been up early. He had walked across from Dalston into Hackney and had turned up at the college where she was enrolled on the accountancy/book-keeping course. He’d asked for her at the administration office. ‘Something urgent,’ he’d said, ‘and I need to see Miss Immacolata Borelli. She’s a student on the B4 course. It really is important…’ They knew who he was because he was there three or four evenings or lunchtimes a week to meet her. Whenever she finished a class and he didn’t have one, he was there. A shrug… She hadn’t been in. Had she called in sick? She had not, just hadn’t turned up. Another shrug… He couldn’t go soft, begging and pleading, and ask for a sight of her home address. Couldn’t, because it would have shown up the biggest hole in their relationship – no address and no phone number. Then, an escape route – a walk in the fields, where the heifers were grazing, and down to the river.

The former soldier, from a bungalow down the lane, had been on the bank. Eddie Deacon was a good listener and didn’t reckon to wipe his own views over another’s and compete in conversation. He didn’t know the guy – Dean – well, but his mother had told him grisly stories. Not much older than Eddie, but there was a tattoo of a paratroop’s wings, and Dean had been Special Forces. Now he did contract work in Iraq and was gone for four months at a time. Listening seemed important and he noted that by staying quiet and lending an ear, the guy’s hands stopped shaking, the fingers didn’t clasp and unclasp, and the voice lost its breathiness. He didn’t hurry him or glance at his watch, and learned a bit about the airport road, procedures to counter vehicle ambush and command wires, things that had nothing to do with the river, the flight over the water of the kingfisher – twice – or the patrol of a heron. When it was done, the guy had gripped his fist – as if the listening had been important. At home, he apologised to his parents for having been away so long and told them where he’d been and why he’d stayed out. He’d sensed then that the world of a psychologically troubled ex-soldier was a route march away from that of his mum and dad, and his own.

He’d headed for Paddington and the main-line train, a later service than intended.

Not that Eddie Deacon knew too much about the workings of the KGB, old time, or the intelligence services, present time, but he liked to joke that his mum, Betty, would have had an interrogator’s job – no messing – if she ever chose to turn up and offer herself. It was a routine area. ‘Relationships’. The village seemed to him a rabbits’ breeding warren. Everyone they knew had children who were shagging and producing, some in marriage and others not. In everyone else’s house there were framed photographs of babies with red-eye. So, was there a girlfriend? Had he met anyone? Was there anyone important in…? As if he had to shove his thumb in a fractured dike, he’d done what he could to cut off the questioning. Stupid, but it was what he had done. Eddie had opened his wallet and taken out a photograph – Mac smiling, close up. He had seen his father’s jaw drop and his mother had purred in appreciation. Showed, really, what they thought of him… they could hardly comprehend that the layabout, the tosser, their only child, had a photograph of such an attractive, star-quality girl in his wallet.

To get to the river, he’d had to make a promise. Yes, next time he came down he was definitely going to bring her with him. Guaranteed, safe as a supermarket ‘special offer’. He’d told them a bit, not much. She was Italian, she was clever, she was going to be an accountant. Didn’t tell them he’d sat in an Afghan restaurant for three hours the previous evening with an empty place laughing at him across the table, that she’d stood him up. Did tell them that she was friendly, warm and made him laugh. Didn’t tell them that she had skipped classes that morning and hadn’t phoned in with an explanation… Didn’t tell them she hadn’t given him her home address or a contact number. Didn’t tell them he’d never walked her home. Did tell them, with his eyes, his face, and with the way he held the photo, that she was totally important to him. The sight of the girl, Mac, had silenced them, and he’d escaped to his river walk. Said it out loud, ‘Mac, for heaven’s sake, where the hell are you? Mac, where have you gone? What are you doing?’ Behind him, in the kitchen, the dishwasher would be churning, Arthur and Betty would be muttering about a girl coming at last into their boy’s life. All the time, down by the river, listening and offering a shoulder, she wasn’t out of his mind. He’d thanked his mum for lunch, promised again that he would bring Mac next time he came down, thanked his dad for the lift to Chippenham, and come back to London.

Hadn’t known what to do… and had gone to work. She throbbed in his mind.

‘Good evening, everybody.’

It came back at him, surf rolling on shingle. ‘Good evening, Mr Deacon.’

‘I hope everybody’s had a very good day.’

‘Thank you, Mr Deacon.’

He’d had a hideous day of hurt, wounds and anguish. No Mac and didn’t know where to find her. He was important to her, wasn’t he? Definitely he was, had to be. He knew it because she’d told him so… had told him when they were in bed. ‘Right, settle down. We’re going to continue this evening with our Agatha Christie story, and we’re going to pick up on page forty-nine. Let’s get there.’ When they were in bed, naked, ecstasy shared, she’d told him how important he was to her. She wouldn’t lie, would she?

It had been enough to bring Mario Castrolami in his car through red stop lights, then to get him as close to running along poorly lit corridors as he knew how.

Castrolami steadied himself, his hands clamped on the back of a chair. The fog of smoke made his eyes water and irritated his throat. Four men and two women in the prosecutor’s office had cigarettes alive. The desk and the mahogany table in the window were scattered with open files. The prosecutor headed the section in the Palace of Justice that attempted to combat the power, influence and control of the city’s Camorra clans. With him were his deputy, who had responsibility for the inner-city clans of Naples, his carabinieri liaison officer, who worked from the palace, his secretary and the archivist he most trusted. Castrolami knew them all, knew also that each man and woman in the room could be trusted implicitly. The liaison officer, Castrolami had heard, personally swept that office each morning for electronic devices. And a radio played – tuned to a rock programme on a commercial channel. The screen on the prosecutor’s desk showed the soft-focus close-up image of a young woman whose features he knew, whose history he had studied, whose importance he recognised and whom he had never met.

The secretary handed him coffee, a thimble cup. Castrolami hitched off his jacket, the pistol in his waist holster bouncing on his hip, and loosened his tie. He would have described the prosecutor as neat, like a manicured garden; his shirt was freshly laundered and his shave that morning had been close enough to hold the stubble at bay. A man who cared for himself. The deputy, tall and angular, was also tidy for a man now into the thirteenth hour of his day. The liaison officer was not in uniform but wore a well-cut jacket of expensive Scottish material. The women, too, did not show the day’s pressures, had probably changed in mid-afternoon… There was no fragrance about Castrolami.

A tiny cassette was loaded into a Dictaphone and a button depressed. He realised the machine had been activated late, after the call had been taken. ‘… him, I’m Immacolata Borelli… Do not interrupt me, Dottore… I am calling you from London, but I wish to return to Italy. It is my intention to collaborate… By saying that to you on the telephone, I put at risk my life… More important, I put at risk the possibilities of a successful prosecution of my family… I require immunity, and an officer who is trusted by yourself should meet me in the Hackney Downs park, in east London, and I will come to a bench at nine in the morning, London time, and will wait for one hour. He should bring with him a warrant for the arrest and extradition of my brother Vincenzo. Castrolami is an officer of the ROS whom my father respected. You should send him. You hold my life, Dottore. You hold also the prospect of the conviction of my family, the Borelli clan… Good night, Dottore.’

There was a click, then silence.

He looked at the photograph on the screen. Castrolami saw the haughtiness that verged on arrogance, that in the surveillance still she wore ‘ordinary’ clothes, and small, ‘ordinary’ trinkets, no lipstick or other makeup and her hair was tousled. He did not know when this photograph had been obtained, whether she had been on her way to terrify a shopkeeper who was late in filling the little envelope with twenty or twenty-five per cent of his takings, or to a meeting with the general manager of a cement-production company to tell him that her price should be accepted or none of his mixer fleet would reach the road again… The voice on the phone had made a play of being decisive and in control. He thought Immacolata Borelli had failed, was in bits, near to physical and mental collapse.

‘What is she worth?’ the deputy prosecutor asked.

Castrolami assumed he knew the response he would get, but needed confirmation of the obvious, and gave it him. His breathing had steadied and he lit his own cigarette from a heavyweight Marlboro lighter an American had given him. With the flame extinguished, he said, ‘Only a blood member of a family has a near to complete knowledge of its affairs.’

‘With her help, what might we achieve?’ the prosecutor queried.

He thought the prosecutor the best and most dedicated under whom he had worked in Naples. The man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s clan structure and the principal players. He imagined that the call had come during a meeting, when the day was winding down and perhaps a whisky bottle had been produced, and that it had exploded among them, a shellburst, fazing them. He thought he understood. ‘We could close down the clan. The whole mass of them would go into the net.’

The liaison officer ground out his cigarette, scratched the bald crown of his head, murmured, ‘She telephoned from London. What happened there for her to attack her family with such venom? I find none of it credible.’

Castrolami told them of the young man who had come to his office late the previous evening, the barbarity of a street fight in a cemetery. His words painted a picture of a family’s controlled grief melded with aggression, and their courage. He said, ‘She could have reacted in two ways. She might have condemned that family to death for the insult, or crumpled under a burden of self-disgust. It’s happened before but not often. They feel overwhelming shame… Can you get the warrant in the time?’

He was told that the paperwork would be ready in an hour, that it had been on file, then given a flight number and a departure time. He preached the need for secrecy, which was accepted. He was told who would meet his flight in London, but the individual would be outside the loop of confidences. In that hour he could have gone back to his office in the barracks on the piazza Dante and packed a travel bag – spare shirt, singlet, socks and toilet bag – but he did not. He slumped into a chair, which squealed under the impact of his hundred-plus kilos. He wondered how she would be and whether she would greet him as an ally or an enemy. Then he swept an armful of files from the table and started to gut them, learning the latest intelligence, sparse and hearsay, on a clan now stalked by treachery, and he was smiling. He tried to bring life, animation, to the typescripts, flesh and blood to the photographs. He thought he walked with them.

Pasquale Borelli went to the recreation hall. He was fifty-five, slight and bald, with a prominent nose and a scarred head. He was allowed one hour in the hall per day under the terms of the pena dura . He was a strict-regime prisoner, under the terms of the Article 41 bis legislation, had no access to a mobile telephone, few and heavily supervised visits, little time in the company of fellow inmates. He was held in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Novara in the north; the city was near Turin and Milan, astride the route from Genoa into Switzerland. It was a long way from his home in Naples, hundreds of kilometres, and the authorities had intended that his incarceration there would sever his links with the clan he had dominated for two decades. Their intention was unfulfilled – a prison officer carried out messages written on cigarette papers. He still controlled an empire that was worth, perhaps, a half-billion euros. He awaited trial, and the chance of him enjoying freedom again was small, but he was optimistic that the evidence and testimony lodged against him could be challenged. He had to believe that no further denunciations would cloud his horizon. For an hour he would play pool in the hall; the table, of course, would be occupied when the officer unlocked the last barred gate, but a prisoner would immediately give up his place for Pasquale Borelli. In his cell he had a photograph of his daughter – not his wife. He loved her deeply, his principessa.

Gabriella Borelli was six years younger than her husband. Since his arrest, when he had been dragged out of the underground bunker by the ROS bastards, she had been undisputed in her leadership of the clan. They had been married for thirty-two years, since she, at seventeen, was little more than a child, but decisions inside the core of the clan had always been taken after her advice had been heard. Now she was a latitanta, and her continued liberty depended on her moving from safe-house to safe-house, a network of covert addresses. As a fugitive from justice, she was unable to utilise publicly the vast wealth the family had accumulated. Since her husband had been taken and the flight of her eldest son, she had won respect from other clan leaders. It had come from her clear-headed ability to strike deals, open up new markets and act with cold ruthlessness when such was required. She was feared. She was a small woman, petite, dark-haired, and well kept for her forty-nine years, but she wasn’t out to look for a new dress, as she would have liked, but to attend a meeting. She was an anonymous figure in the narrow streets, walking briskly and carrying an old shopping bag. She missed having the strengths and certainties of her eldest son close to her, but rarely thought of her daughter.

Vincenzo was in his thirty-second year, the eldest, and he was eating a pizza in a trattoria off Hackney’s Mare Street. He always had the Margherita, with mozzarella, tomato and basil – the colours, white, red and green, were those of his country’s flag. He was with friends, young men from the fringe of the clan, and together they dreamed of a day when they could return to the city and eat the best pizza from the via Duomo, the via Forcella or the via Ettore Bellini. He would go back. He would take authority from his mother. He would not be able to drive a Ferrari, wear Armani suits or have a penthouse apartment overlooking the Golfo di Napoli, but he would have power, and he would be careful not to leave a trail from himself to a killing hand-gun. Vincenzo faced four charges of murder if he was located and arrested, so it was important for him to maintain his unseen existence in London, but he was concerned that if he stayed away too long the fear in which he was held in Forcella, and the respect, would diminish. He barely noticed his sister, accepted the need for a member of the family to have a good knowledge of financial procedures and structures, but he expected her to clean the apartment they shared and to look after his laundry. She wasn’t important to him.

Nobody loved Giovanni, he knew that. He was twenty-three. That evening he was on a girl’s family bed. Her father and mother were in the next room and had the television on loud. He fucked the girl – a virgin until he had penetrated her the previous week – on her parents’ bed because it was bigger and more comfortable than hers. They would not complain, and they would not attempt to throw him out of their home. He was Giovanni Borelli, the son of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli. In the Forcella district, and in part of Sanita, his name gave him unquestioned power. He would not pay the girl under him, who was giving him as good a ride as he was used to. Neither would he pay for the meal he would have afterwards. He paid for nothing. The only man who had ever raised a fist to Giovanni was his elder brother, who had beaten him, split his lip and cut his eyebrow – the sister of a friend had accused Giovanni of putting his hand up her skirt. His father had not protected him from Vincenzo; neither had his mother. Now he grunted and cried out as the orgasm came, louder than was natural for him, but he knew the sound would carry into the living room and would not be drowned by the television. Good that they should know their daughter was a good ride. He was responsible for the collection of dues in the area north of corso Umberto, south of the via Foria, and between the via Duomo and the corso Giuseppe Garibaldi. The only excitement came when a smart-arse shite would plead poor business, inability to pay, and be beaten – as his brother had beaten him. He thought his sister, Immacolata, an arrogant bitch, and she had no time for him.

In his bedroom, Silvio Borelli read a comic and listened to music on his iPod. He was seventeen, the youngest of the tribe. He had been told by his grandmother, never one to mince words, the circumstances of his conception. Eighteen years ago, in 1991, his mother had been sneeringly informed that his father flaunted an amante, had been seen with her in an hotel on the sea front, the via Francesco Caracciolo. When Pasquale Borelli had next come home she had punched his head, scratched his cheeks, kicked him in the stomach and kneed him in the groin. He had suffered a tempest of abuse. He had crawled to Gabriella Borelli and pleaded for her forgiveness, promising abjectly that such behaviour would never be repeated. They had made up, her on top of him, calling the shots, at her speed and for her gratification. The result had been Silvio. He was a sickly child from birth, and was doted on by his mother, but he loved his sister. He told her everything. Giovanni sniped that he wouldn’t wipe his arse without asking Immacolata’s permission. He lived with his grandparents, above the via Forcella, and sensed their contempt for him because he was not blessed with the family’s hardness. He wanted little more from life than to speed in narrow alleyways on his scooter, and to mess with old schoolmates – and almost resented that his name denied him friendships. He knew that some spoke of him as a cretin, but a reputation for stupidity brought its rewards, and the clan used him to ride round the district and drop off narcotics, cash, messages and firearms. He was unsettled. Driving back from Nola the previous afternoon, he had been bewildered by the transformation in his sister’s mood – and her shoe was broken, her clothing ripped and her knee scraped raw. She had been near to tears. And she was the best person he knew, the most important in his life.

The parents of Pasquale, the grandparents of Vincenzo, Immacolata, Giuseppe and Silvio, were Carmine and Anna Borelli. They were both eighty-seven, though she had been born four months after him. They had founded the clan, given it teeth and muscle, then passed its control to their son. They lived now in via Forcella, and as she sewed a collar back on to a shirt, he snored quietly in his chair and…

The television screen in the prosecutor’s office was blank, the photograph killed. The files on the clan family were back in the secure area of the archive. The office was darkened. He had gone home, as had his deputy, the liaison officer and the women who ran his life; they were as dedicated as he was to the extermination of the Camorra culture.

A car’s tyres had screamed as it had headed for Capodichino. The liaison officer drove Castrolami. No sirens and no blue lights, but speed on the back-streets. They had swept into the airport and the Alfa had rocked at the sudden braking outside Departures. Then he was out and on the forecourt. He slid the pancake holster off his belt, the loaded pistol in it, and left them on the seat. No backward glance, no wave, and he heard the liaison officer power away. He scurried through the doors to Check-in. An officer of Mario Castrolami’s seniority could have demanded, and received, preferential treatment at the airport – a ticket already processed, a boarding card presented to him, a lounge to wait in until the rest of the passengers had been herded to their seats, a drink, a canape and an automatic upgrade – but such treatment would have been noticed. He went past the site of the death – unmourned – from heart failure of Salvo Lucania, known to law enforcement in the States as ‘Lucky Luciano’. He thought that the pain of the coronary was a fitting end for that man. He always noted the place where that boss had collapsed.

He went to the communal lounge and had barely flopped into a seat before the flight was called. He walked to the aircraft, the last flight of the day to London Gatwick, in a swell of tourists. Voices played across his face and behind his head. He spoke quite reasonable English, and was able to distinguish appraisals of the ruins at Pompeii and Ercolano, judgements on the Capella Sansevero compared with the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the merits of the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel Nuovo. He was happy to be among tourists. He accepted that an army of watchers, foot-soldiers, maintained a sophisticated web of surveillance over the city and its suburbs. Every district would have entrances watched by men and boys, and myriad mobile phones would report which policeman moved and the direction of his journey. The camera systems of the police and the carabinieri were sophisticated but could not compete with those of the clans. It would be a disaster if it were known that Mario Castrolami had caught the last flight of the night to Britain: warnings would have been issued, coded messages sent, and it would have been known in London before the Boeing’s undercarriage had dropped that a Camorra hunter was travelling.

He eased into a seat. The watchers were everywhere – the policeman on the forecourt, the porters on the concourse, the check-in staff, the baggage-handlers, the cabin crew. He put his face into the in-flight magazine, but tapped his jacket to reassure himself – for the fourth or fifth time – that the envelope with the warrant folded inside it was still there. He sensed the admiration of the tourists for his city, and their ignorance: they knew nothing. The watches were still on their wrists, the wallets and purses in their coats and handbags, and Naples was wonderful. He thought that an ignorant man or woman was blessed. He could count on the fingers of his two hands all the men and women in the city whom he believed had no price.

Sicily was bad for corruption inside the forces of law and order, money changing hands in return for intelligence and warnings. In Calabria, little was planned that did not reach the ears and eyes of the criminal tribes. From his own city, Castrolami could not have put twenty men – police, Palace of Justice and carabinieri – in a line and sworn on oath that he harboured no suspicion against them. The fear of corruption and the suspicion it engendered against colleagues should be ranked as one of the greatest successes of the Camorra. He had not phoned his wife to tell her that he would be away, had had no need to: she had long ago left for Milan, taken the children, gone back to her mother. She had sworn that Naples was a cloaca and that she and they would never return to that sewer. There was, of course, another woman, for mutual convenience, and he hadn’t phoned her either… As the aircraft thrust up the runway and lifted, he replayed in his mind what that voice had said.

I put at risk my life.

He would not dispute that. She might, the bitch, have changed her mind by morning – they did, often enough. But he could recall each word of that young officer from Nola and believed she would be there. He could sleep wherever he found himself so he threw back the seat, ignoring the protest from behind, loosened his trouser belt, and saw, in a dreamer’s kaleidoscope, the features of Immacolata Borelli. He heard himself say, in a sort of wonderment, ‘I don’t intend to talk you out of this, but have you any idea at all of where this will lead you, what is at stake?’ Not just wonderment: astonishment. It wasn’t the face of a camorrista, it was a good face, with smooth skin, not a cheap whore’s and pocked. Or did he delude himself?

They were bored but polite. It was as plain as a pikestaff to Eddie Deacon that Agatha Christie needed high-profile selling in Mogadishu or Lagos, Vilnius or Bratislava – anywhere they came from. Agatha Christie was not holding them.

But he ground a nail into his palm and kept going. He was talking about the author’s sentence construction. All the language schools did Agatha Christie; she was supposed to be the route towards decent spoken English.

Maybe, he wondered, Agatha Christie was taking the blame for his own inadequacy. He was droning. He had as much interest in who was the murderer as they did. His students wanted to be able to do the business with a gang-master, a bureaucrat at the Job Centre, the warden of a hostel, while the brightest needed to be able to communicate in a good-quality three-star hotel. What they also needed, and somebody was paying for, was a teacher with enthusiasm who could concentrate on a text. It was as though he was on auto-pilot. He could hear his voice, monotonous and flat.

The straw he clung to was that his Mac would be back at his place. She had an outer door key and a Yale to his room. It was only a straw, a pretty thin one, but it was possible that she’d be there. They all liked her at the house – couldn’t believe she was real. A guy who pushed paper for H M Revenue and Customs, another who waited at tables in a club on Pall Mall, the one who sold train tickets for Great Western, and the PhD student from Goldsmiths couldn’t believe she was real because once a week she made pasta with a sauce to die for.

They would all have known when he and Mac were on the bed in his room, must have heard, through those walls and down those narrow stairs, enough noise… Then she’d cook. She always brought plastic bags of food, and would never accept money – it was the only time she splashed out and showed she was flush. When they were out, as they should have been in the Afghan place, they shared. It had been laid down between them at the start…

He ached for her…

He didn’t care about Miss Marple, or Poirot, didn’t give a damn who’d done it. He wouldn’t wait for a bus: he’d run all the way back to the little house and pound up the stairs and burst through the door and hope, hope, she was there… his straw. He hadn’t made the bed that morning, hadn’t straightened the coverlet. Seemed to see it still in chaos. He said, ‘I apologise to you all. I’m not myself today. I hope it’s not the flu. Thank you for your attention, and I’ll see you all next week.’

As he gathered together his dog-eared lecture notes, they chimed, ‘Thank you, Mr Deacon. A very good evening to you.’

He fled. Hit the pavement, at full stride, and tears blistered his cheeks.

She liked Salvo – always used the diminutive, not Salvatore, and never called him by his street name, ‘Il Pistole’ – more than any of her own children, and had since the day he had been introduced into the heart of the clan three years earlier.

When she reached the bar, she went inside and past the counter, the tables, and into the inner room. He was already there, and immediately stood up. Giovanni was at the table but did not get to his feet. She could accept her eldest, Vincenzo, because he possessed the dynamism of his father, and could feel affection for the youngest, Silvio, because he was helpless, devoid of authority and ambition. She had never considered her daughter of equal importance to the boys. She disliked Giovanni for his painful and prolonged birth, and for his conceit and exploitation of the family name. If he had not been of her blood and had behaved with such arrogance in her presence he would now, like as not, be dead. Dead at the hand of Salvo, Il Pistole. It gave Gabriella Borelli some slight pleasure to know that her middle son, Giovanni, not only loathed Salvo but also feared him.

And Giovanni had cause to fear Salvo.

When she had come into the outer area of the bar, the staff would have begun to prepare coffee for her, a variety that was gentler on her throat than the small, bitter measures the men swore by.

She thought Salvo was similar to a ferocious dog that ran wild and free at night inside the fence of a scrap-metal yard and showed obedience to none but his acknowledged master. Her husband had recruited Salvo and advanced him, had been that master, but on his arrest the young man’s loyalty had turned to her. She believed his devotion to be as honest as that of any slobbering Rottweiler or German Shepherd.

At a light knock on the door, Salvo was up again. He opened it, took the cup and saucer and closed it. He put the coffee in front of her. Indeed, Giovanni had cause to fear Salvo. The young man, recruited and advanced by her husband and now only twenty-four, was a killer. He could kill with a pistol but, if circumstances warranted, he could kill more artistically. He was best known for the pistol. In the Forcella and Sanita districts, the kids had photographs of the Beretta P38 on their mobile-phone screens, and images of the weapon’s owner. As the ultimate enforcer of the Borelli clan Salvo had accumulated enemies. Vendetta blood feuds were no longer practised in Naples, but there were enough stones in the cemeteries around that quarter of the city for many to long for the day when he was a corpse in a crimson pool, or at least looking at a maximum-security cell’s bars.

She sipped her coffee, and her thinly applied lipstick left a pale smear on the cup’s rim.

But hers was a city of betrayals. Gabriella Borelli did not trust readily, so she had brought the son she disliked to the meeting. There should always be a witness. She would never place her faith entirely in one man. She could smell the sweat of sex on her son, seeping through his shirt and off his chest; he didn’t even have the respect for her that would have made him shower afterwards. He flaunted the smell, and she wondered which teenage whore had opened her legs for him. Since Pasquale had been flown north to Novara, she had not taken a man into her bed – had not, but wished she had when she smelt the sweat.

They talked. She controlled a huge financial empire now. It involved property in the city, in other parts of Italy, the holiday resorts of the Balearics and the Canaries, the South of France and on the coast east and west of Spanish Malaga. It covered import and export of goods through the Naples docks and a dozen ports near and far from Italy. Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni and Salvatore could have talked of legal and illegal trading and mentioned millions of euros. They did not. They talked instead of the merits of a power supply. Which was better? Should a two-stroke petrol engine be preferred to one driven by mains electricity but needing a cable plugged into a wall socket? It was all a matter of the time available, the location and whether the power was within easy reach. They considered the problem of a cold petrol engine, and how many pulls there would be on the starter cord – and what if it flooded? Much of the Borelli clan’s business utilised laundered cash and that could be done in the back rooms of a major bank – local, American, German or British – but other matters needed close attention in the rear room of a back-street bar in the depths of Forcella. It was the place to decide between electrical power or a two-stroke engine. Salvatore would not have been consulted on commerce or investments. It was the matter of enforcement that necessitated his presence.

Gabriella Borelli liked Salvo, but was wary of him. In the world of Forcella, and the clans that ran so much of the city and its population, enforcement was critical. Respect must always be secured; lack of respect must be answered. To ignore disrespect showed weakness. To show weakness, even in a trivial matter, was fatal for a clan leader. A moment of perceived weakness was enough to alert circling rivals. A position of power must be reinforced with decisive action. That was Salvatore’s role. Most often the P38 was used for quick, clean intervention, but reputation required innovation. That evening the discussion was on power supplied by petrol or by electric cable.

The decision taken, with Giovanni as a witness, herself sanctioning it, Gabriella Borelli left the bar.

Because she had chosen her way of life, she never complained about it, not even in her thoughts. Her husband would be in gaol for the rest of his life, and her eldest son was a fugitive; her middle son was a vain bastard, and her youngest son was a useless idiot. Her daughter was intelligent but had neither her mother’s commitment to the clan nor the determination to succeed. Gabriella was more than twice Salvo’s age, and he had no future beyond a quick death from a gunshot, or arrest and a long sentence that was slow death. On the street, alone, hugging shadows, both hands gripping the strap of her shoulder-bag, she thought of the arms of the man who killed at her demand, their thin, hairless beauty, his light, narrow fingers, his waist, flat under the T-shirt, and the jeans that bulged when he stood to greet her, to collect her coffee or to escort her from the bar. It was unthinkable. She flushed and… returned to the image of her daughter. A scooter swept past her, its fumes flagged into her face, and the picture was lost.

Eddie had studied the Victorian poets, the Lakes people, and Byron, at the small, unfashionable university in the Thames Valley. If he’d managed the entry to a better university or worked harder where he’d ended up, he would have been qualified to teach those poets, as eventual head of department at a sixth-form college. He hadn’t, so he taught basic English to foreigners, and his high literature was from Agatha Christie.

There was no poetry in his pain. Nothing noble, romantic, or edifying about it. The pain hurt bloody bad, and left an emptiness he couldn’t fill. The hole in his life gaped.

She hadn’t been there. He had gone through the front door, brushed aside the taxman in the hallway, met the man from the ticket desk halfway up the stairs and reached his own door, then fumbled so badly that he couldn’t insert the key. He had started to kick it when the PhD fellow did the honours with the lock. He had snapped the light on, heeled the door shut hard enough for it to slam and had seen the bed, empty – unmade.

What to do?

Too much pain. Yearning for his Mac, not daring to believe she had just walked out on him.

Music was playing downstairs, soul stuff, as if the others had caught his mood and sought to offer solace. He had said it to himself so many times, but he had never felt so bad before. Girls? Yes. Before? Yes. Village girls, university girls and language-school girls? Yes. Kissing? Yes. Groping? Sometimes. Shagging? Not often. Really caring? Not even with the hygiene inspector. It had never really mattered whether he was hooked into a girl or not. He was cold, he was lonely – he was so bloody unhappy. Hadn’t eaten and hadn’t slept much the night before. He asked the question aloud: ‘So, what to do?’

He could see her magazines on the floor, her dressing-gown hanging limp from the hook on the door. The scent of her was still in the room. He could have leaned over, buried his face in the sheets and she would have been there, the sweet smell of her. He did not. He stared at the wall, found her picture. Sat taller and straighter. He told himself, ‘Don’t know what happened, don’t know why it happened – whatever. Going to find out. Going to go to work in the morning, hack the day, and track it down, the problem of Mac, in the evening. Promise? Yes, bloody promise.’

He’d thought he wouldn’t go downstairs and face them. Wrong. He went down and put his head round the door of the communal living room. Eyes looked at him, then evaded him, as if he had the plague. They wouldn’t have known how to react to his unhappiness. The TV was on, bloody football… Yes, they all loved her, as if she was Wendy and they were Peter Pan’s kids – and she cooked wonderful pasta…

Eddie Deacon forced a smile. His voice quavered but he got through it: ‘It’s been a grim day, double-whammy awful. I don’t know where she is, don’t know anything. Tomorrow I’ll find out. Right now I’m going out for a drink or three.’

They all went. They had their arms round his shoulders, in the rain, not a coat among them, and headed for the Talbot, the public bar, as if everything was all right. He’d know tomorrow evening if he’d kept the promise he’d made to himself.

She didn’t sleep. She was in her room with the light off so there wouldn’t be a strip showing under the door when the gang came back and she wouldn’t be called to get up and make coffee or pour beer.

Immacolata knew most of the stories of betrayal in the folklore of her city, although her mother, father and brothers would not: she had gone to a school that had taught her more than how to write a police statement in an interview room. She had been educated. She also knew what happened to the men, yesterday, today or tomorrow, who betrayed their own… She didn’t know what they did to the women. Her mind raced, flicked through a score of images, and glimpsed the nightmare sight of what might happen to a woman before it was superseded. She was in the crowd, at the back, and the polizia were unwinding the roll of crime-scene tape. She was on tiptoe and had just seen the blood and the white underwear, the tanned thighs, maybe black hair, and the blanket was cast to cover… Her mind had gone on.

She told herself that only one person would have understood what she had done in the public phone box on the Kingsland Road. That person was dead. Marianna Rossetti would have understood. But her friend was immured behind the concrete hatch with the marble facing, which might now have been sealed with grouting. She lay still and breathed quietly. She had heard her father speak of Castrolami, the investigator from the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, and she imagined a man of dignity, stature and bearing. She thought of how he would welcome her, show gratitude for the sacrifice she intended to make and talk to her of the nobility of what she did… He seemed handsome and… But she didn’t sleep.

She was in that street again – in the via Foria, or the via Cesare Rosaroli, or the via Carbonara – and the pain bit into her toes as she struggled for greater height to see better the woman on the pavement, who had been accused of betrayal, and know what had been done to her. Always, shoulders and heads impeded her view.

The hours went slowly. They came in. They drank, talked, played cards, watched TV, then Vincenzo was alone. She thought he paused outside her door and listened. If she had moved in her bed he would have come in and talked to her – maybe he had some problem with money, foreign-exchange regulations, the opening of a new account or a transfer – so she lay still. After half a minute she heard him clear his throat and go to his room.

Her mind was made up, the seed sown in the cemetery at Nola.

He had stomach cramps. He walked down the long pier inside Arrivals at Charles de Gaulle airport. The pain snatched at nerves in Lukas’s gut, made his mouth twitch and brought a frown to his forehead. The cramps had not been brought on by the landing of the aircraft that had brought him from Madrid to Paris, a catastrophic bump, leap and skid in a fierce cross-wind that carried driving rain. Nor were they the product of the food served on the long Atlantic crossing, or the result of the confined leg room – he’d gone steerage because business class was fully booked. He had not smoked since he had gone through the departure gate at El Dorado. He walked slowly and soaked up the ache in his guts. Within a few strides he had killed the pain, the twitch and the frown. Nothing about him was noticeable to a stranger. He would go through Immigration and Customs briskly. He didn’t need a visa for France, living now on a UK passport, and had only the rucksack slung loose from his shoulder. He had been authorised, some months back, at permanent-secretary level, to carry two passports; in Washington this had been endorsed by an under-secretary. The passport with the Colombian entry and exit stamps was at the bottom, under his laptop. The one he would show at Immigration bore only East European and north African stamps – nothing from the Middle East, or Latin and Central America – so his movements would not go down in the computers that tracked international travellers. It was important in the work he did that he left no paper trail.

He would take a bus into the city centre.

He’d have a chance at a bus stop, in the driving rain and wind, to light a cigarette. That seemed important to Lukas, about as important as gaining a return of three unhurt, two wounded, one fatality. He didn’t triumph, nor expect hero-grams, only a long debrief with his employer when he would sift in his mind what was relevant and what could be discarded. Not something to boast about, playing God, making decisions that might cost the lives of men and women. He thought more about the cigarette he would light in the bus queue than about a return of five survivors from six… It had been about the one guy, the Agency man, but Lukas declined to recognise a stark fact. When the bus came, he would ride into the city, then get himself down into the late train on the Metro and walk from the subway at Solferino to his apartment.

If he had permitted it, a limousine would have been waiting for him at the kerb outside Arrivals. The Americans would have sent one as a mark of gratitude. The company would have ordered one. He had, perhaps, a Low Church love of frugality. None of the good men, the ones to whom Lukas gave respect, sought greasepaint, flashbulbs and welcoming bands. It was just possible that he was the most competent of the ‘good men’. If he was the elite figure among them it was not because of his crusading spirit but the attention he gave to detail, the depth of his experience and his rejection of conceit when he won through. It was said that many who knew Lukas waited to spy out his emotions and motivation, and still waited. No car, no congratulations. Might have been because he knew how fine the lines were between success and failure…

He had one regret that evening. It was a few minutes short of midnight and he was returning to Paris too late to meet up with his friends. By the time he had negotiated the bus ride, the Metro and done the walk, his friends would have gone home.

Lukas was back where he lived – would be there until the next time the phone shrilled in his ear. It was his life. As someone had once said to him: ‘Lukas, you dance on other people’s misery. If it wasn’t such a crap world you wouldn’t have work.’ He hadn’t disagreed.