The Collaborator

3

He blinked to see better. He was under a tree. During the night the wind had taken off enough of the foliage for the rain to drip on to his shoulders and head. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to clear out the water and the bleariness of a bad night. Mario Castrolami was looking for her.

The Ministero degli Interni, the vast, creaking bureaucracy on the Viminale in Rome, had an officer seconded to the Italian embassy. He was a policeman, not a member of the carabinieri, so Castrolami regarded him as a lesser creature – good enough to meet him last night at Heathrow and drive him to a Holiday Inn, not good enough to be given advance warning on the identity of a potential collaborator with justice and the implications that might splinter from it. An ROS investigator from Naples, a front-line salient in the war against organised crime, would have little trust in the combination of policeman and Viminale. So, after his failure to sleep, Castrolami had left the heavy sealed envelope containing the arrest-warrant papers for Vincenzo Borelli at the hotel’s reception desk, with the officer’s name on it… Laborious, complicated, but necessary, and if the woman did the business the officer would be told to collect the envelope and act on it. Trust, the lack of it, always governed Castrolami’s actions.

He searched for her. He had never seen her in the flesh, but had the surveillance photograph to remember. Rain spattered his head and jacket. He saw some old people, mostly men, many meandering with a toy-sized dog on a lead, and some youngsters of both sexes who wore tracksuits and earphones, and ran in a trance. The most exercise Castrolami took was to walk, via a bar for an espresso and a pastry, to the station for the Funicolare, and after his descent to the Stazione Cumana, he would cross via Toledo and reach the barracks at piazza Dante. He thought it sufficient exercise for any man in the morning, but if it rained he brought his car. Twice, while he had waited under the tree, a dog had come to the trunk, cocked its leg and pissed. On neither occasion had the owner apologised.

He couldn’t see her. He wondered if she was standing back, hesitating to show herself. He moved clear of the tree-trunk so that he was more visible. Put simply, there would be only one swarthy middle-aged Italian waiting at two minutes past nine – yes, he had remembered to alter the time on his watch – under a tree in diabolical weather. The city authorities in Naples were about to declare a drought: the skies had been clear for weeks and the temperature in late September still reached the high eighties. In his apartment he had a raincoat, unused and forgotten. Behind the front door umbrellas stood in a stand, also unused and forgotten. Maybe he’d drown. Maybe he’d catch pneumonia.

She appeared.

He could see her face. She had a small umbrella up, with a pretty flower pattern, but held it back over her head because at that angle it shielded her better. She wore a light plastic coat that came to her hips, but her legs were soaked, though she seemed not to notice it. He knew what he would say. Unable to sleep in the Holiday Inn, with the walls seeming to enclose him, a sealed tomb, he had passed the hours in deciding the tone he would take and the relationship he would create with her. Perhaps because she was here, not in Forcella, she seemed more vulnerable than he had expected. At home she would have known every trick in the game of counter-surveillance – had been born with the tactics in her genes. Anyone from the Borelli clan – other than the young idiot, Silvio – knew the craft of criminality from the moment they dropped out of their mother’s utero. A man had said that the Camorra would live until every woman in the clans was sterilised and every man castrated. She did not use any counter-surveillance tactic: it was clear that she knew she was late for a meeting and was looking for the second party.

He knew, too well, the enormity of what she had done, but Castrolami reckoned she knew it better than he did. Should he wave or hold his ground under the tree? He had thought she looked vulnerable, but this was Immacolata Borelli, daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella, sister of Vincenzo and Giovanni, educated and intelligent, granddaughter of Carmine and Anna, being groomed in financial management so that she could clean dirty money. Vulnerable… not innocent. She saw him.

She stopped. She was on a path and a cyclist swerved past her. Then two runners divided and went either side of her. The wind took the flaps of her coat and opened it as far as the lower buttons allowed. Castrolami noted the vivid orange blouse; he thought it was her statement. He smiled grimly to himself. She was entitled to make a statement, but this was the easy time. She would know the threat to her life if she came close to him, talked to him, did as she was instructed, but he doubted she had grasped the pressures that would now build in her mind. But that wasn’t his problem.

He came out from the shelter of the tree. The rain in the wind layered on his face. His collar was damp, his tie bedraggled and the jacket’s shoulders were sodden. His hair was flat, and drips fell off his nose. He murmured, ‘Come on, you little bitch. Come and do the business.’

She did. She had a good swing to her walk. She was the daughter – clear to him – of the clan leader and the clan leader’s wife. The child of the padrino and the madrina locked eyes with him and closed on him. The vulnerability was now hidden. She stretched her stride. He believed then that she hoped to dominate him because that was her culture. She could wish it, but it would not happen.

She stood in front of him. She could have tried to use her umbrella to shield both of them, but she collapsed it, shook it, pocketed it. If he could be wet, so could she. She spoke coolly: ‘I am Immacolata. Are you Castrolami?’

He reached into his pocket, lifted out his wallet, flipped it open and showed his identification. He put it away.

He knew what he would say.

*

Over his shoulder, she saw a kid kick a football. So normal. She saw a man throw a stick for a yapping dog. So ordinary. Far behind him, kids were skiving from school and dropped sweet wrappers as they fooled. So predictable.

He said, ‘You asked me to come and I came. You can beckon once and I’ll run, but it won’t happen again. If you flick your fingers or whistle, a dog will come to you. I’m not a dog. So, I’m here. What do you want to tell me?’

‘Two days ago, I was at the cemetery in Nola for a funeral, my friend’s funeral, and-’ she stammered, uncertain.

He was harsh and his voice was cutting. ‘I know about Nola, Marianna Rossetti and the Triangle. I know what happened to you there, what was said and what was done. I repeat, what do you wish to tell me?’

She had thought there would be a car, a big Lancia or a Fiat saloon, and that a call on a mobile would bring it hurrying to the nearest kerb, that she would be whisked inside and away to an embassy house. She had expected a tone that was at least respectful, if not deferential. She wanted control and couldn’t find it. ‘I’m Immacolata Borelli, I-’

Withering: ‘I know who you are, who your parents are, who all of your family are.’

‘I am part of the Borelli clan, and-’

‘Of course you’re part of it.’

‘I said in my call to the palace, I wish to return to Italy,’ she blustered.

‘Then return to Italy. Does the Borelli clan not have sufficient funds to permit you to purchase an airline ticket? If you wish to return, then do so.’

‘I want protective custody.’

She saw his eyes roll and his lips moved on those words – I want protective custody – but soundlessly. The rain was harder now but he seemed not to notice its new intensity. He stared down at her, his eyes never off hers. Nobody had ever stared challengingly into the face of Immacolata, daughter of Pasquale Borelli. Then: ‘Why?’

‘And I require immunity from prosecution.’

Now his head shook, a comedian’s exaggeration, and she thought she heard a click of his tongue. ‘I very much doubt we would consider that. I presume we’d be talking through the statutes concerning money laundering, extortion, tax evasion – maybe not acts of physical violence – membership of a criminal conspiracy. We do reduced sentences but not immunity in circumstances such as yours. What would justify protective custody, a reduced sentence? What chips can you place on the table?’

‘It’s because of what my family has done.’

‘Indirect responsibility for the poisoning of your friend.’

‘I wish to do something in her name.’

‘Your friend was poisoned by the contamination of the water table with toxic waste illegally dumped.’

‘So that I can look, in my mind, into the face of my friend and not feel total shame.’

His expression showed no enthusiasm – rather, boredom. ‘That would be excellent. You do something, we’re not specific but something, and you can go to a priest, squat in the confessional box: “Can’t really tell you too much about all this, Father. Wouldn’t be healthy for you to know, but I’m doing something to right a wrong. My family did the wrong, not me personally, but I want overall forgiveness, and more sunlight in my life.” How gratifying. What are you prepared to tell me?’

‘I can tell you about my family.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper.

He lifted an eyebrow as a slow smile curved his lips. ‘I had difficulty hearing that – again, please.’

‘I said that I can tell you about my family.’ She had spoken boldly.

‘Did I hear that correctly? I’m not sure. Again.’

She knew he was toying with her, that he was the cat and she a small rat. The amusement was in the mouth, but not in the eyes that looked down on her. She broke. ‘I’ll tell you about my family,’ she shouted.

‘Better. Again.’

She yelled, over him, past him and out across the worn grass of the park, at the trees, the walkers and joggers, the talkers and the kids who should have been at school. ‘I’ll denounce my family.’

Many in the park had heard her. Some merely turned their heads but went on their way, others stopped to gawp. ‘I hear you, but do I believe you?’ he said softly.

‘You have my word.’

He allowed the irony to run over her: ‘I have the word of the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli?’

‘Everything.’

Now he was an uncle to her. As a zio would, he tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and walked with her through the rain, their shoes squelching on the grass and the mud. ‘You travelled to Nola, Signorina, you were late, for whatever reason, and did not reach the basilica in time for the funeral mass, but you travelled on to the municipal cemetery. There, you were humiliated, and subject to the emotional experience of parting from a friend. You flew back to London. You didn’t sleep. The accusations are alive in you and guilt haunts you. You pick up the telephone. None of this, yet, is difficult. You make a statement to the prosecutor’s office that is laced with dramatic intent. You put down the telephone and imagine champagne corks pulled, an executive jet on stand-by and that you will be brought back to Naples to be met on the tarmac with a red carpet, the cardinal in attendance and the mayor. No, it hasn’t happened. They sent Mario Castrolami, as you requested, and the flight home will be in economy where there is little leg room, the food is foul and English barbarians are talking about the culture fix they’ll get in our home over seventy-two hours. You will then, Signorina, be surrounded by strangers – and don’t expect them to regard you as a resurrected Mother Teresa. They will try to leech from you every scrap, morsel, titbit of information so that they can shut away your family for even longer – the family who has trusted you with their lives, and whom you will have betrayed. Many months after you’ve taken that flight back to Italy you’ll have to appear in court. At one end of the room there will be the judges, in the well of the court the ranks of the lawyers, and at the other end a cage. Behind its steel bars you will see your family. Will you turn to me then and say, “Dottore, I have doubts now on the course of action to which I was committed last September. I’ve changed my mind. I don’t wish to go ahead with this. It was a mistake. I want to be reunited with my family. I want the love and warmth of my gangster father, my ruthless, vicious mother, my murderous eldest brother and my psychopathic middle brother. I want to return to them.” Will you turn your back on the court? Many do, Signorina. They climb high, survey the view and scramble down. Their nerve doesn’t hold. Will your nerve hold?’

She lowered her head and looked at the toecaps of her shoes. She allowed him to lead her along. ‘It’ll hold.’

‘They all say that, but many fail to deliver.’

She stopped. She felt his fingers drop from her arm. She faced him and tilted her head. She could see the cage, their faces, the hatred that beamed at her, and the contempt. ‘My word should be sufficient guarantee.’

‘You will never be forgotten, never forgiven. You will never again walk the streets of your city as a free woman. Can you turn your back on Naples?’

It was her home.

Those Greek traders who had first anchored their boats in the shadow of the great mountain, mid-eighth century BC, had called it Nea Polis, the New City. The Romans came later from the north and corrupted the name to Napoli. Now it is a city adored and detested, admired and despised. It is one of UNESCO’s proudest World Heritage Sites, and is regarded by Interpol as having the greatest concentration in the world of Most Wanted organised-crime players. Horace, the Roman poet, coined the phrase ‘Carpe diem’, ‘Seize the Moment’, and it is still the maxim of Neapolitans.

Many cultures have left their mark on Naples. After the collapse of Rome’s civilisation and its hold on the city, the occupying army was that of the Ostrogoths, then the Byzantines from Constantinople, the Normans and the Spanish. There were Bourbon satraps and Napoleonic revolutionaries. Admiral Nelson’s fleet covered the port with cannon, the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo sought to control it, after which the Americans gave it military government. In the last century, Communists, democrats and Fascists have attempted to bring Naples to heel, but failed.

At the university, the academics seek to excuse the inner city’s million people for its ungovernability. They quote the actual and the potential. The actual is the Camorra, the generic name for the criminal families that are the principal employer and major pulsebeat in Naples. The potential is the lowering image of the mountain, Vesuvio, with its volcanic capability and history of destruction. The criminality survived the most savage reprisals of the Mussolini era and now cannot be beaten: the threat of the volcano mocks any who look far to the future: it may erupt at any time and warning will be minimal. Those same academics point proudly to the magnificent churches and palaces, and strangers flock there from across the world.

John Ruskin, the English art critic and reformer, came to the city in the late nineteenth century and saw the Naples that has attracted the first overseas tourist industry. He wrote, ‘The common English traveller, if he can gather a black bunch of grapes with his own fingers, and have a bottle of Falernian brought him by a girl with black eyes, asks no more of this world or the next, and declares Naples a paradise…’ But he would not be seduced and continued, ‘… [Naples] is certainly the most disgusting place in Europe… [combining] the vice of Paris with the misery of Dublin and the vulgarity of New York… [Naples] is the most loathsome nest of caterpillars… a hell with all the devils imbecile in it’. Outsiders may come, criticise and leave, but those who are bred and live in Naples are held by loyalty, as if in chains, to the city.

The gulf makes a perfect natural harbour. The sea ranges from azure to aquamarine. The churches are noted for their splendour, and the castles that defend the shore are reassuring in their strength. It has the best of everything – architecture, painting, sculpture, music, food, vitality, and the refusal to be cowed – with the biggest open-air narcotics supermarket ever created, the wealthiest criminal conspiracies ever known, and a degree of violence that makes both the brave and the cynical cringe.

In the heart of the old city, where the streets were laid by Roman road builders, then wide enough only for a handcart to pass and now for only a scooter, is the district of Forcella. The Borelli clan ruled Forcella.

‘Can you do that, erase that place from your mind?’

‘I hope…’

‘What’s hope? Useless, inadequate. Either you can or you can’t.’

She flared. ‘I am Immacolata Borelli. You offer me no respect.’

Castrolami shrugged, as if she had scored no points. He said, ‘I see so many of them. This isn’t Sicily. The vow of silence doesn’t exist in Forcella, Sanita, Secondigliano or Scampia. In the far south, the gangs are linked by blood. It’s impossible to consider that a family would turn in on itself. But you’re not Calabrian – I’ll get to the point, Signorina – or Sicilian. The clans of Naples have greed, brutality and no honour. Do you understand? We have more men and women offering to collaborate than in any other part of Italy. They’re practically queuing outside the palace. Sometimes the prosecutor has to check his diary to make sure he has a slot for a new one. Many are rejected because they have little to offer that we don’t already know, a few because we don’t believe they can sustain the pressure of their treachery. I offer no informer respect, and I’m used to rejecting them. Don’t think, Signorina, that you have earned my admiration or have my gratitude.’

‘You insult me.’ She tried to stamp her foot, and mud spattered out from under her shoe. No avenue of retreat was open to her. She knew it, and so did he. She couldn’t throw a tantrum, spin on her heel – slip probably – and walk away. She had met him. Perhaps she had been photographed with a long lens from a car among those parked bumper to bumper around the park. Perhaps he had a wire strapped to his chest and a microphone in one of his jacket buttons. Did she believe that – if she walked out on him – the ROS would not allow a photograph limited distribution among the journalists accredited to the palace, or not make available a snatch of her voice to the RAI correspondent in the city? On Sunday mornings priests talked often about taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, the need to consider consequences beforehand. She couldn’t meet his eyes and dropped her head. It had stopped raining, the wind had freshened, and she shivered.

He said, ‘You know better than I do that the name for such a person is infame. That person is not a patriot, a hero or heroine. Disgrace walks with them, and the infame who betrays his or her family is the lowest of the low. You could never stand, Signorina, on a box in the piazza del Plebiscito and attempt an explanation of what you have done. You’ll become a pariah and be forced to make a new life.’

Her lip trembled and her voice, to her, was hoarse. ‘I will.’

‘Never go back?’

‘I won’t.’

‘If you’re found again in Naples, what will happen to you?’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘What do they do, Signorina, to an infame before he or she is killed?’ He was relentless. ‘What do they do?’

‘I don’t know what they do to a woman. I know what they do to a man.’

The crowd was four deep in places where the best view was to be had. The girl reporter from the crime desk barged her way through, offered no apologies and kicked the ankle of an obese man who didn’t shift out of her way. When she was through the spectators, she looked for her photographer, located him and went to his side. ‘My car wouldn’t start,’ she said.

‘Your car’s shit and always will be. My cousin deals-’

‘Yeah, yeah. What have we got?’

Relaxed, the photographer smoked a small cheroot, took it out of his mouth and blew smoke, then used it to point at a space on the pavement between two parked vehicles. A checked tablecloth that doubled as a shroud filled it. The feet of the corpse, its shoes and blue socks, stuck out from the covering, and she could see where blood had diverted round sprouting weeds to dribble into the gutter, where it was dammed by a plastic bag. Beyond the cars, half hidden, a police scene-of-crime technician manoeuvred a camera fixed to a tripod, other officers standing around languidly, and an ambulance was parked further down the street. She stretched up, laying a hand on the photographer’s shoulder, and could see better past the parked cars. A woman sat on a straight-backed wooden chair no more than two metres from the body. She wore a nightdress of thin cotton with a dressing-gown, as if she’d been roused from her bed, and cradled a child – a boy of perhaps four – as she stared blankly ahead.

The photographer said, ‘I done her – she’s the wife – wrong, the widow. I done her when she first came, bawling and screaming. That was before they covered him up.’

‘Do we have a name?’

‘The police have, but they haven’t shared it – you’ll get it off the street or, officially, at the Questura.’

That was where she worked, on the ground floor of the police headquarters, off via Medina and down near the sea front, in the cavernous Mussolini-era building in the room where the crime-desk hacks fed off the information they were given. She was relatively new to the city but her father had a business partner who had an uncle who had influence at the newspaper, and it had always been her ambition to work as a crime reporter. The link had secured her the job – the normal way of things in the city. The more senior staffers on the team were out of town because a supplement was being prepared on the Casalesi clan operating in Caserta, so her phone had rung – and her car hadn’t started. She might well take up the photographer’s offer to introduce her to a cousin who dealt in secondhand vehicles. What they said in the newsroom about the photographer told her that a car from that source would be cheap, but the chance of paperwork to accompany it was slight. She had her notebook out and a ballpoint pen.

‘So, what happened? Was he shot?’

‘You sure you want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘No – because the car wouldn’t start and I was late and-’

‘Better on an empty stomach. It’s not pretty.’

Most of the murders she had covered since she’d joined the crime desk had been pistol shots into the head of a man eating in a trattoria, drinking in a bar, sitting in a car, playing cards with associates. ‘Tell me.’

‘You asked. See there, behind where he’s lying? There’s a grocery. The drogheria, of course, has steel shutters down at night. The padlock was cut and the shutters lifted enough to get a man under. They needed electrical power. They took the cable in with them, found a point and plugged it in. Then they went two doors down, called at the place and the wife said her husband wasn’t in and went back to bed. They waited for him to come back from wherever, jumped him and dragged him to where the shutter was up. He would have seen – not much light on the street but enough – what they had waiting for him and he’d have been shitting himself, too scared to scream, and they’d started the engine – can you take this?’

‘Try me.’

‘They’d plugged in a circular-blade tile-cutter.’

‘Jesus, help us.’

‘One of the cops told me before the big apparatchiks took over. There’s no pretty way to say this, but they cut off his balls first, then put them in his mouth – forced open his teeth and shoved them in. This is the twenty-first century, this is Naples, a cradle of civilisation. You doing all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘They put some euro notes in too. Then they cut his head off. The blade can go right through a bathroom or kitchen-floor tile, so it wouldn’t have had a problem with a neck. They took his head off and laid it in his crotch so it covered up where his balls had been.’

‘Did you say “a cradle of civilisation”?’

‘They did all this on a pavement and there’s a streetlight no more than fifty metres away. People must have passed him in the night after they’d driven off. They must have seen him with his head in his crotch, gagging on his balls and the money, and must have stepped round him, kept going. People live over the drogheria and alongside it, but they never heard anything. Nothing heard and nothing seen. The grocery owner came to open the shop before going to the market and found him. What more do you want to know?’

She swallowed hard. If she had thrown up, she would have demeaned herself, and it would have gone straight round the city’s newsrooms and the hacks’ room at the Questura. She swallowed, gulped. Then she looked hard at the face of the widow, and thought she saw acceptance, not anger. She wondered if she could write her piece on the expression of fatalism, base it round the mood that seemed to grip the woman. She didn’t keen and the child didn’t weep.

‘I want to know what he’d done to be punished like this.’

‘He was a carpenter.’

‘Why was he killed like that, though?’

‘The policeman who talked to me said that the Borelli clan, who have this territory, wanted the pizzo from him.’

‘So they extort cash from him – a hundred euros a week?’

The photographer lit another cheroot, puffed at it, shrugged. ‘He shouted his mouth off. He said he’d go to the palace, inform – the police have that from the woman. Maybe he’d already made a statement to the prosecutor. Maybe he’d only said he would. In some districts you can do that and survive, but not in Forcella or Sanita. He’d threatened it, and that was enough.’

‘So that’s what they do to an informer?’

‘Yes. And nobody reported any noise or the body in the street, because they were frightened, and because nobody values an informer. He has the status of a leper.’

The scene-of-crime technician had folded away his tripod. The ambulance crew had carried the body on a stretcher to the vehicle. The woman and the child were escorted by a priest to their door, and the owner of the drogheria lifted his steel shutter, uncoiled a hosepipe and sluiced the pavement. The crowd dispersed. The reporter and the photographer drove off, to write copy, check pictures and hear the police statement in the Questura. Within minutes, there was no trace – on the pavement or in the street – of where an informer had been killed.

He glanced at his watch. She had promised detailed information on the functioning of the clan, her mother’s role in the running of the organisation, the dealings of Vincenzo, and the work Giovanni was put to in Forcella. What she had told him was merely headlines, but to an investigator it was mouthwatering, not that he showed enthusiasm. He took no notes, and didn’t wear a wire. He thought it important to be indifferent at this stage of his linkage with Immacolata Borelli.

In his mind were the bullet points of what he needed, and two were outstanding. He asked where Vincenzo had been that day. Did she know anything about his diary? Where could he be found after midday? She was vague. It was difficult for her, she said, to know her brother’s schedule. She gave him the address of the apartment they shared, his mobile number, the name and location of the cafe-bar he most often patronised, the warehouse where he stored the coats and shoes he imported and exported.

‘I emphasise and repeat, Signorina, that intense pressure will be applied to you when your family learn what you’ve done. In the first period, before a legal process, we will protect you, but we can’t protect all those who may be dear to you. Could they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover?’

‘No.’

Put a second time, the question was redundant, but it was his practice to examine the face rather than merely listen to words.

‘In Naples, there’s no lover, no boy?’

‘No.’

‘In London, are you in a relationship with someone you met here? An Italian boy? A boy from the college you attend?’

‘Is that important?’

‘It is, Signorina, because you’ll be sequestered, perhaps for months, in a safe-house and under protection. A boyfriend won’t be able to visit you. You can’t get on a plane and come back to London because you want him, because-’

‘It won’t happen.’

‘So there is a boy here?’ His eyes bored into her, looking for truth, demanding it, and he towered over her. He was aware then that the first thin sunlight had broken through the cloud and played on her cheeks. ‘I have to know.’

‘Yes, but not significant.’

‘What does that mean – significato? Is there or isn’t there a boy?’

‘We go to bars, we go to films, we go-’

‘You go to bed. But you say it’s not “significant” – yes?’

‘He’s just a boy. We met in a park. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘You won’t pine for him?’

She threw back her head and raindrops cascaded from her hair, the sun catching them to make jewels. ‘I’ll forget him – maybe I have already.’

He looked into her eyes for evidence of a lie and couldn’t find it. Her eyes were clear, bright and unwavering. Mario Castrolami knew little of love. His wife and children were in Milan, lodgers at her mother’s home. There was little of love that he could remember – it might have been his uniform that had attracted her when he was young, slim and straight-backed, but now he no longer wore it, his shoulders were rounded, his stomach pushed at his belt, he was edging towards his forty-seventh birthday, and he slept with a loaded handgun in the drawer of his bedside table. There was a woman with whom he shared a restaurant table and the couch in her studio, but only once a month, never more than twice. She painted aspects of the great Vesuvio, exhibited some and sold a few, and he was fond of her – but it wasn’t love. Most of the time he forgot his wife and children, and if his friend, the artist, moved on, she, too, would be forgotten. He did not challenge her again. He believed he had found honesty in her features.

Not that honesty would help her. Deceit was a survivor’s weapon. Away from her, Castrolami used his mobile phone.

A new day, and Eddie felt better. Last night was gone.

Better and freer.

He had had breakfast with the others in the house, toast and cereal, and Eddie had said his piece about losing track of Mac, and there had been, almost, a collective howl. She was part of them all. Down the pub, and the laughter. Back home, her cooking lasagne or cannelloni, or making a sauce. Coming out of the bathroom with maybe just a shirt on, or the see-through robe, and fluttering her eyelashes at them. It just wasn’t possible. Eddie had thought that each of the others would have looked back to the last time they’d seen her, mentally stripped her mood and looked for indicators that she was bugging out on him – and them. He had said he was going to teach and that at the end of his working day he was going to find her. Didn’t know the number, but had dropped her off that first time at the end of a street – a bloody long one – and he’d find her if he had to bang on every door and ring every bell.

He taught with enthusiasm, was maybe at his best. He had ditched Dame Agatha, and had gathered up an armful of weathered, much-used digests of Shakespeare, condensed anthologies. Eddie himself, quietly and with sincerity, had read Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

And a Lithuanian car mechanic had read aloud:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring barque,

Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.

The classroom had rung with applause and he had blushed. A Nigerian who wanted to nurse but needed the language before she could enrol was next:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

A Somali man who washed dishes in a hotel but wanted to be a street trader stuttered through

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

An Albanian needed more English if he was to get customers for a delivery service up in Stoke Newington. He was last to be chosen and looked about to opt out but Eddie wouldn’t let him, so he tried:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Then the class stamped and slapped their palms on the desk tops. He thought a Hungarian girl, plump, with Beatle spectacles on her nose, was savvy enough to take stock first, and she said to the Algerian next to her, in halting English, that the sonnet was not performed for them but for their teacher, it was his love they had recited, and what she had said went on down the line, behind her, in front of her, and the room echoed with giggles.

They did more extracts and his medley of students, gathered from across the globe, played Ferdinand, Miranda and Prospero, Lysander and Hermia, Juliet and her Nurse, Lorenzo and Jessica. He ended with Sonnet 18, and had the Hungarian girl read it:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

He let her read alone and her delivery grew in confidence, but he brought in the whole class to echo the final couplet and make a chorus:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

It had been a unique class. He doubted it would be repeated.

He would find her, his Mac. He had promised to.

Eddie walked to the staff room and the coffee machine. He felt that purpose had returned.

The bustle of the prosecutor’s office was stilled. He was at his desk, which was littered with a carpet of opened files and more lay on the wood tiles beside it. The deputy prosecutor had a cigarette in his mouth, the lighter lit but left to burn ten centimetres from the tip. The liaison officer winced, air hissing between his near-closed teeth. The personal assistant to the prosecutor bit sharply at a pencil and looked up from her screen. The archivist was halfway across the office from the door to the desk and carried a load of cardboard file-holders that reached from her stomach up to her chin. They were the inner cabal. The call had come, faint and with a poor signal, from Castrolami. The prosecutor looked around, into each face, and they nodded, accepted his judgement: Operation Partenope, named after the mythical daughter of a goddess, who had drowned in the Gulf and was regarded as a symbol of deceit, treachery, was launched.

Now he spoke softly: ‘Let’s get to work. I want on the telephone the extradition team of the Metropolitan Police, if they’re not too arrogant to speak to me. I want the operations director of the Squadra Mobile, and the duty officer, ROS, here for fourteen thirty hours, with arrest squads on stand-by. There must be no breach in security and no names of targets given. We have a small window and must jump through it. And-’

His desk phone pealed. His assistant passed him the receiver, and mouthed that the caller was, again, Castrolami. The prosecutor began to scribble names and addresses, the light of triumph in his eye.

She dictated. Castrolami repeated into the mobile phone what she told him: all of the addresses used as safe-houses by Gabriella Borelli; the location of the rooms where Giovanni Borelli slept; the apartment, off the via Forcella, that was the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli, and where Silvio Borelli stayed; the rooms off the piazza Mercato, a street behind the via Polveriera and an alley to the north of the vicolo Lepri that Salvatore, Il Pistole, used. She gave the last streets with dry relish and had long believed that the clan’s principal hitman fancied having his hands in her knickers, her stomach against his, and wanted to put a ring on her finger, thus ensuring his advancement in the clan: family would bring him that. She felt no emotion as she spoke. All the time she had clear images in her mind. They were not the faces of those she denounced. Or the features of Castrolami, jowled and clumsily shaven, with raw, bloodshot eyes, his sparse hair whipped up by the wind.

She saw the cavernous space in the basilica, empty because she had been late. The face of an innocent carved in stone, Angelabella, with the single flower, as she had hurried past with one foot bleeding. She heard everything that had been said to her, and named the streets where the safe-houses were. She had done it.

He cut the call, put the phone back into his pocket. He said quietly, almost conversationally, ‘I hope, Signorina, you aren’t fucking with me. This is big. We must win or be laughed at. If we lose because you’re fucking with me then I’ll put you into the sea, off the rocks, and hold you down.’

She looked at him. ‘I’ll go the course, whatever they throw at me.’

She stood then, feet a little apart, shoulders back. Her coat was now open and had dried on her, her blouse stretched across her breasts. She slipped her hand into the damp crook of his arm and they walked together.

It was a good morning by the river. The rain and cloud had cleared and Lukas was hunched on the step with his friend.

Squatting on a canvas stool, Philippe drew with crayons on heavy white paper pinned to a wooden board. With midday coming, it was close to the high seventies and in the afternoon the temperature might hit eighty. But where he had taken his pitch there was shadow from the doorway. Down and across the street, there was a foot bridge over the river, marked by a larger-than-life-size statue of Thomas Jefferson. Lukas didn’t know much about Jefferson’s life and times, but it was a good place for the artist. Tourists from the United States came and took photographs of the statue, then seemed to want to remember the place with something more authentic, so they purchased his crayon drawings of the statue, the bridge, the river, and the Louvre, which was on the far side of the Seine. Usually, when he was at home, Lukas would come to that doorway and settle beside his friend. If his friend was concentrating, he would sit quietly and do some thinking of his own.

If they talked it was about little things. The price of bread, the state of the football championship, whether the weather was lifting or closing in. He would never pry into Philippe’s life, and in return he was not asked, when he came back after a week or three, or a month, where he had been or why. There was always, in late September, a strong odour rising off the river because its level was low, and when he looked upstream he could see the little island covered with Notre Dame. He came to this place, unwound his emotions, let them slacken, and was distanced from where he’d been – Afghanistan, Iraq, an Uzbek or Tajik city, the jungle of the high mountains in Colombia – and Philippe wouldn’t press him. Why was the man his friend? In one limited area there was total and compelling frankness between them. Philippe said his work was shit, and Lukas never disagreed. He valued honesty – men and women died when assault-squad commanders or hostage negotiators and co-ordinators fought little patches of territory and declined to be truthful. The work was shit, but it sold and fed his friend, and meant there was a place for at least another month where Lukas could find company.

He was anonymous here, which suited him. He didn’t carry a mobile in Paris, but the way he lived his life meant he was seldom far from the telephone on the small table inside the apartment’s front door, and a light flashed if a call had come in and a message had been left. He always hesitated a couple of seconds, no more, before he picked it up when the light flashed red.

They’d gone round it for a long time and had now reached consensus. Philippe, busy on Jefferson’s face, the second work since the discussion had begun, was certain who would win the weekend’s football games, and Lukas agreed. In his own trade, he knew that disagreement killed.

Three times a day, Lukas was out of his apartment, but seldom for more than two hours. It was always a stampede to catch up when the call came and the light flashed red.

Philippe shared his flask – it was good coffee, as always.