The Collaborator

4

He disliked to ask a favour, to place himself in debt or obligation to any man. He hadn’t asked one but Castrolami had endured an uncomfortable, awkward day, but now he had purpose. They were out of the city and on to the motorway. It was not yet dusk, but the sun was sinking and it would be evening when they left Heathrow, night when they reached Fiumicino. The man from the embassy drove.

In the hours since they had left the park, they had shopped – underclothes for her in a chain store. He had passed her euros from his wallet, which she had placed in her purse, then used British currency – he thought her the daughter of her father because she hadn’t given him change for what she had purchased. He had hustled her. They had been brought fifteen minutes in the car away from the park and he thought they were nearer to the heart of the city but distanced from where she lived and where her brother might be. Then she found a nightdress, a washbag and the items to go with it. For himself there was a sandwich in a cardboard and cellophane wrapping. He had not discussed with her the possibility of her returning to the apartment and packing a bag: it had been stated as fact that there was no question of her going near her street. They had stopped outside a railway station near the shopping area, and she had walked with him to a fast-photo booth and done portraits. Then they had killed time.

Had Mario Castrolami been prepared to ask for favours a choice might have presented itself.

He could have used the embassy man to contact the London police and request a secure room – in a police station, wherever – for them to wait in. In Naples, it was common talk among the Squadra Mobile and the carabinieri that the British police, in particular the London force, were self-serving and unhelpful to the point of obstruction. They lived, it was said, in a fantasy land of imagined and patronising superiority… So he had no secure room with the London police. He believed he must take precautions against a collapse of her determination, a sea-change in her mood: he couldn’t rely on her to say where they could lie up for the day – there might be a back doorway on to a street through which she could slip and disappear. Nor was he prepared to take Signorina Immacolata into the embassy to wile away the hours. He didn’t know the personnel so he didn’t trust them: he had had the driver from the ambassador’s staff park a block away from the embassy; then had given him the photographs of her from the booth. The man had been gone for half an hour, then returned with the new passport. It was not yet noon, so they had gone to another park. She had said it was Hyde Park. The rear doors of the car had been locked, and the radio turned up.

It was slow on the six-lane motorway.

Castrolami couldn’t have taken her out on the first available flight with seats free. He wasn’t prepared to move her until a signal came to him, via his mobile, that the extradition unit had eyeball on Vincenzo Borelli. She had not complained, had accepted what was incarceration, had refused food, had not asked for a lavatory, had not made empty conversation. It suited him that he was not required to do small-talk, and that others would begin the detailed debrief. He was not much more, really, than the bag-carrier. He neither liked nor disliked her, was neither attracted to nor disgusted by her. Her breathing was steady, giving no indication of stress… but he kept an eye on the front windscreen. The driver had a day-old copy of Corriere della Sera, and had heaved the news and arts sections over his shoulder and into Castrolami’s lap while keeping the sport pages. But Castrolami hadn’t looked at the paper and neither had she. They had watched the movement in the park – pedestrians, pram-pushers and horse-riders – and hadn’t talked. The call had come. His bladder had hurt, but he had known the vigil was near to its end. He didn’t know how she felt now that the surveillance team had eyeball on her brother, and didn’t ask.

They were leaving behind the tower blocks of London and the sun was dipping down. He had half expected her to crumple and look for comfort from him – she’d get fuck-all if she did. A bag-carrier didn’t do nurse. She sat bolt upright and her lip wobbled occasionally, but there were no tears.

Further out of the city, the traffic speeded up. The mobile-phone messages had told him of the eyeball in London, the readiness at the palace in Naples, the teams gathered in briefing rooms at the Questura and at the barracks in piazza Dante. He had gutted her for headline information before they had gone on the shopping jaunt and that information had gone. He doubted that she could, now, step back.

He had made one accommodation to his principle of refusing to ask favours. At the terminal the car was met – only a protocol chief, but sufficient, carrying the printouts of two tickets.

The plastic bag dangled from her fist. It was the symbol, he reckoned, of how far she had come. Her possessions were in one cheap bag, and they consisted of underwear, washing kit and a nightdress. Then there was whatever she had in her handbag. Castrolami handed his passport and the one she would use to the protocol guy. They were examined, the title pages flicked, and they were taken through locked doors and into hidden corridors where only permanent Heathrow staff had access. They emerged into a departure area, were given the printouts and brought to a Passport Control desk – one at the end, which had a Position Closed sign but where a young woman sat. She looked at the pages, at the faces, handed the documents back. There was a screen ahead, and he saw that the Rome flight had been called. He had been told that if the traffic was heavy on the motorway, and they were late, the flight would be delayed. He had a hand on her arm and steered her towards the pier, then hooked out his mobile, dialled, waited, was connected.

He said where they were, confirmed the schedule. He was told the operation had been named Partenope. He shut the mobile and switched it off. They came to the last exit off the pier. He thought she had walked well, not stumbling, not faltering. Maybe she was, as he had suspected, a hard bitch under the veneer of sadness at the death of a friend, hard and uncaring.

Would she stay the course? They all said they would, but only a few did, and were alive, able to build a new life, when the trials were over.

He stood aside and let his hand fall from her arm. He couldn’t read her, couldn’t pierce her thoughts. She stepped from the pier inside the aircraft. Castrolami had had to stifle the urge to shove her the last metre, but it had not been necessary. He showed the boarding cards and a woman led them into business class, then to the front row where no other passengers would need to pass them and look at their faces.

The door was closed, the engines gained power. She had her belt fastened. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I feel, whether I am strong?’

He shook his head, then turned his face away and closed his eyes, as their speed on the runway gathered.

He put the phone down, gave the order of confirmation. Operation Partenope was named after the Siren woman who seduced men having lured them on to rocks and then killed them, and who had ultimately failed and had committed suicide by drowning and who lay in a pauper’s grave, if mythology were believed, among the sunk foundations of the buildings between the via Solitaria and the via Chiatamone. Operation Parthenope had legs and ran.

The prosecutor eased his hand off the receiver and saw that his palm had left a sweat sheen on it. He believed he presided over the dismantling of a clan. It would be, he could predict, an opportunity for a minister in Rome to speak of a blow of the ‘greatest significance’ to the heart of the city’s criminal activities. If it worked well, he would receive a congratulatory message from the minister. He could reflect on a durable heart, because many times central government had claimed such blows against it, and on the columns of men and women in patrol cars and riot wagons leaving the yards behind the Questura and piazza Dante. In London, more officers and guns would be moving into position to arrest the eldest brother. It was synchronised, choreographed. The silence fell over the room. They must wait. He was brought coffee. He pictured now the columns of vehicles snaking across the city – routes would have been worked out so that they seemed to head away from target locations, then swing back, giving minimal warning of their approach – and only now, inside the cars and wagons, would the officers know who they moved against. The prosecutor hated the lack of trust, was shamed by it. He regarded it as the single most impressive creation of the clans.

At about this time in the evening, the curtain would have been rising for the second act of the opera, a Mozart, for which he had begged tickets from a cousin. He had cried off in mid-afternoon and his wife had sighed and said she would find someone else to take with her. He was marginally disappointed to miss the performance. Opera soothed him. He believed fervently that whatever hours he worked at the palace he must enjoy something of life beyond.

Silence was good because words – at a moment such as this – were inadequate.

She was said to be strong – Mario Castrolami’s verdict – and she would need to be, if the arrest programme was successful.

A battering ram broke open the street door, forcing the lock. A small boy, reared on extravaganzas of video-screen warfare, watched big-eyed, in fascination. What he played at was happening. He was across the street, had a vantage-point between two parked cars and was almost hidden by a lamppost. He watched the uniformed guy with the ram step aside, and a charge of black-clad police plunged through the broken door. The boy recognised the firearms they carried in Hackney, east London. They were on display often enough. If he had had a friend with him he would have been able to report that the men were from the specialist firearms team, CO19, that they had Heckler amp; Koch machine pistols and Glock 9mm handguns, and one at the back had a Taser immobiliser. Now he heard wood splintering, oaths, frantic shouting, then quiet. Up on the first floor, a policeman drew the curtain, denying the child a clear view into the lit room.

He didn’t have to wait long. The prisoner was hustled into the doorway, out on to the step, then brought fast down the flight to the pavement. The boy knew him.

All the kids of his age knew Vincenzo – Vinny to them. His sister, too. They ran messages for Vinny, the Italian, would take a piece of paper to the other side of Hackney, up to Seven Sisters or south to Hoxton, a tiny scrap of cigarette paper that was folded up smaller than the bitten-down nail on the child’s little finger. They were paid for taking messages. This boy, and all the boys, knew the Italian as a gangster of style… real life and bigger than in the games they played in the arcades and on their machines. They idolised Vinny but were never close to his sister. She wasn’t there – only him. There was a moment when he could see, so clearly, Vinny’s face. The streetlight he was under threw enough illumination to reach across the street, and the blue lamp was circling on a police car. Plenty of light fell on Vinny’s face. Magnificent… ‘Fuckin’ fantastic,’ the child thought. Then the police gloves, black leather, came down on top of Vinny’s head and pushed him into the car. Handcuffs on his wrists – had seen them as Vinny was brought down the steps from the broken door – but not a mark on his face. There were no cuts on his mouth or round his eyes and his shirt wasn’t ruffled. The boy understood. To fight would have been pathetic. Scum would have fought.

The child reckoned he knew about gangsters, and had no ambition in his life but to have the status and stature of Vinny, the Italian. If he had fought they would have belted him, like they did the big black guy, bouncer at the club off Kingsland Road. It had taken eight pigs to get him down, and then they’d kicked shit out of him and more. He caught Vinny’s eye. The child was nine but thought himself the friend of Vinny, the big man from Naples that was somewhere way down south. In that moment, he was certain that the Italian gave him the slightest nod of recognition. Then a policeman was in front of him, telling him, ‘Go and get fucking lost, kiddo.’ The car had gone down the street, and the guys in black were spilling out down the steps from the main door.

It was a big man’s cool, a top man’s, that he didn’t fight and didn’t get himself thugged. The child thought that Naples, wherever it was, was a prize place if it was where Vinny had come from – proud, not frightened, ignoring all the guns round him and going at his own pace into the back of the car. He wondered where the sister was, and whether she would go in the cage with her brother. The car had gone round the corner at the end of the street, headed, he thought, for Lower Clapton Road and the Hackney police station.

The policeman was blocking his view of the front door, so he got ‘fucking lost’, but only to the corner. There, he sat on a low wall near to the Kentucky Fried Chicken place. He’d wait there for the sister to come and warn her not to go in the cage.

A window exploded out and glass crashed down into the street, which was enough to tilt eyes upwards. Heads were already craning at the block’s front door where carabinieri, in protective gear, stood guard. A flashlight was aimed up three storeys and locked on to the window. The man appeared and screamed.

The crowd knew who the carabinieri had come for.

In that narrow street, spanning the top end of Forcella and the southern extremity of the Sanita labyrinth, they all knew who Giovanni was. Before the first of the attack wave had levered themselves out of the wagon and sprinted for the door, on the warning of their approach the street had been blocked with boxes, cartons from shops, pallets from building sites, rubbish and debris. Gas canisters were loaded in the barrels of some of the rifles confronting the crowd of local people and plastic baton round launchers were aimed at them. The second wave had had to negotiate a storm of abuse, and when the crowd had heard the door broken down above them, the first rocks had been thrown at the men in the cordon.

There was a gasp. He was naked. His body glistened. Giovanni had screamed, but now he swung clear of the window, evaded a heavy gloved fist that attempted to grab his arm, reached out and caught the downpipe from the gutter. His legs hung free, and the crowd saw the hair between them, at the trunk. A half-brick arced up and reached the broken window. The crowd heard the oath of a casualty. It was encouragement.

The fugitive slithered up the pipe, then took hold of the old ironwork guttering and the two nearest stanchions. Rocks and cobblestones, apples, potatoes, melons rained against the carabinieri at the entrance and at the window where arms attempted to grab Giovanni. Obvious – he’d been in the shower. As he sought to lever himself on to the gentle slope of the tiles, high above the streetlights, the beam still held him, and there were flashes from a score of mobile phones. His genitalia wobbled, danced, girls screamed, mothers giggled and old women shrieked happy obscenities. It was a huge effort, but he succeeded. Giovanni lifted a leg high and lodged his foot on the tiles. Then he was up, and standing.

At shouts from below, he turned and saw the black-clad carabinieri on the roof ridge. Then he would have known he was as trapped as if he had stayed in the shower cubicle or his bedroom. He ripped out a single tile and threw it viciously, two-handed, at the hunters.

It was theatre, and the crowd’s participation in the performance was demanded. Forgotten: the pizzo taken from every shopkeeper, every small man trying to build a business, the extortion that robbed them. Forgotten: the conceit and bullying by the son of a clan leader. Forgotten: the weeping mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters of those slaughtered to create discipline. Giovanni Borelli had milked the moment.

They had him. His wrists were wrenched behind his back and handcuffed.

Who ruled here?

One carabinieri vehicle was overturned and torched before they brought him out. Three volleys of the plastic baton rounds were fired and a dozen gas canisters. Men in full riot gear, the masks distorting their faces, used their clubs to batter a passageway to a vehicle with mesh over its windows. By then they had found boxer shorts for Giovanni Borelli. The scugnizzi, the urchin kids of the street – the watchers, couriers and wallet thieves – cavorted near to the burning truck. Giovanni was driven away. More gas was fired, but with him gone the anger fled. Show over.

It was said that, within an hour, half of the kids on the north side of Forcella and the south side of Sanita, had transferred the image of the naked Giovanni Borelli to their mobiles’ screens, and that the penis, hair and testicles were in good focus. He was, if briefly, a hero.

A police team from the Squadra Mobile knocked at the door of the old couple’s apartment. When it was opened, they stood back respectfully, as if apologising, and Carmine Borelli stepped aside and allowed them to pass him. The detectives wore their own clothes, rough-wear garments. Their jeans were faded, some torn and ragged at the knees, their sneakers had not been cleaned and their T-shirts were sweat-streaked and creased. They had on, also, lightweight plastic tops with Polizia emblazoned across the chest, and holsters that pulled down their belts. Carmine Borelli, founder of the clan, was treated with deference. The detectives used the mat inside the door to wipe their feet before they went further inside and, in the living room ducked their heads to Anna Borelli, who sat and sewed and watched television, a hundred-centimetre-wide screen that dominated the small room, the sound turned high. She did not acknowledge them and kept her eyes on the needle.

He was given respect because he was of the old guard of clan leaders. His fortune had been founded in the weeks after the Allies had reached the city in the autumn of 1943 when a mercato nero had run free. Its profits, from trading in every commodity that commanded a price, had been huge. It was long ago, and actuality was blurred. Pimping, prostitution, the corruption of medication, the purchase of politicians, the killing of rivals, the theft of funds sent by the military government for the restoration of utilities were unknown to these young detectives, who saw a humble, bent old man in a cardigan, a faded shirt and trousers, with scuffed leather sandals. He was in his eighty-eighth year, and his marriage to Anna had been celebrated, and consummated, sixty-eight years earlier. Together they had chased money and tracked power and… He was asked where his youngest grandson was.

Silvio was brought from his bedroom and was not handcuffed. Now his grandmother discarded her needlework, rose stiffly from her chair and smoothed his hair. The detectives took him down the flight of stairs from the apartment – Carmine and Anna had lived there since their wedding day and it was furnished in the fashion of four decades past – to the lobby on the ground floor. The door was closed quietly by the last detective to leave.

There was no riot. Carmine Borelli was as good as his word. A crowd was outside now and resentful murmurs eddied. The police stood nervously, defensively, around their vehicles and the outer door, with gas loaded and baton rounds. The grandfather came to the window. He opened it wide, pushed back the shutters and his arms were out – as if he were Papa, the place was piazza San Pietro and it was the Sabbath. He made a calming gesture with his gnarled hands. His word, in Forcella, carried weight, and had done since American troops had released him from a cell in the Poggioreale gaol after he had told the intelligence officer that he was a political prisoner, a youthful but implacable enemy of Mussolini’s Fascism. He did not wish a disturbance outside his home because it might aggravate his wife’s heart condition. The scugnizzi were denied their hour. They let the rocks drop to the cobbles and put the fire bombs – petrol in Coca-Cola bottles – in shop doorways. Not even they, feral and wild, would ignore the demand of Carmine Borelli.

Silvio was driven away. His hair was in place, and no missiles were thrown or gas fired.

When they had gone and the street had emptied, Carmine Borelli leaned against the living-room wall. His jaw jutted, his face was set and the blood drained from his bitten lips. He knew, and Anna knew, that they couldn’t use a telephone but must wait for news. How great was the attack on the clan, his family?

She had the shop, its owner and contents to herself. In the salon, below the piazza dei Martiri, Gabriella Borelli was queen. It was in the folklore of the family that she had spent sixty thousand euros on dresses, chosen, purchased and carried away on the afternoon that her husband had stalked, confronted and shot a man from the piazza Garibaldi who had ambitions to reach into Forcella. Also in the folklore of the family, but not talked of, was the stacking of the boxes containing the dresses in a lock-up garage for a full half-year before Pasquale had decided it safe for her to wear such expensive clothes at a hotel south of Sorrento where, under false names, he had taken her.

The obvious shops for her to visit, the most exclusive in the city, were down the hill from the piazza dei Martiri in the via Calabritto where there were the outlets for Valentino, Prada, Damiani, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, and shoes from Alberto Guardini, but she preferred a smaller street behind the via Calabritto. She was, of course, one of the wealthiest women in the city, and had control of sums in excess of half a billion euros. Price was immaterial to Gabriella Borelli. What mattered to her more was that she could not drive a top-of-the-range Mercedes sports to Capodichino, book a first class air ticket to Gran Canaria, stay at a hotel with a hundred luxury rooms, take a suite, then soak up the sun during the day, dance in the evening, and strip for the night in a king-size bed with Pasquale or… It was not possible. She stood in her underwear – brassiere and knickers – in front of the full-length mirror and held up to her the dresses and pirouetted, letting the music, a string quartet, waft over her.

She had no stake in the shop, minor or major. Could have bought it outright, and not noticed the price. The family owned hotels, apartments, time-share blocks, offices and many shops. However, it was more satisfactory to have a straightforward commercial arrangement to buy clothes even if they were seldom on her back.

Those she didn’t like – too small or tight, too revealing for her age, she threw on the floor. The owner could pick them up, smooth and rehang them. Those she liked she laid across a chair. She could have had any of the dresses she tried – which were a genuine label from Paris, Milan or London – manufactured for her, exact imitations, in the sweat-shops on the slopes of Vesuvio. The little factories, hidden among villages on the slopes, were the responsibility of her eldest son, Vincenzo. She yearned for Vincenzo more than she did for her husband, suffered from her inability to talk to him, to hear his certainties. In fact, she purchased the label, not the dress. It was an escape for her.

Discarded dresses lay on the carpet, but she had chosen four. Perhaps one more would go on the chair. She was, normally, a middle-aged woman scurrying alone on the streets, or driving a small car with plates that showed it to be old. There were the boxes in the lock-up garage, and more in a basement, and she had had an air-conditioning system fitted in a cellar behind the Duomo where more clothes were stored, unworn, and in three of the safe-houses she flitted between there were wardrobes filled with dresses, skirts, light jackets and blouses. The escape was to dream, and dream alone. The money the clan had accumulated brought power, influence, control and authority – but the opportunity to pamper herself was remote. She smiled cheerfully and the owner clucked with enthusiasm. The dress was turquoise, not so close round her waist as to accentuate the first traces of flab, neither a tart’s dress nor a matron’s. It covered her knees. It would have looked well on her daughter, Immacolata – it was the first time that day she had thought of her. It would have fitted Immacolata but she wouldn’t have chosen it. There were girls at the heart of the Contini clan, the Misso clan and the Lo Russo clan who would have worn that dress, turned heads and stopped conversations, but not her dull, dreary Immacolata. She held the dress up to her and the owner – with skill – gave a small squeal and clapped her hands. Gabriella Borelli turned the full circle, then laid it on the chair with the others. She didn’t know when she would wear it… she saw herself – made up, with jewellery from strong boxes in two of the safe-houses, or the diamonds kept for her by the few she could depend on – as she walked on the young man’s arm past the small orchestra, the restaurant manager grovelling a greeting, and was taken to the best table. Above her was the suite, and in the suite was the king-size bed, and the young man who admired the turquoise-silk dress was- A telephone rang.

She felt a chill and shivered. She recognised that call tone. It had no romance, no style, was not stolen from an opera aria or something popular. It was piercing, like a car’s alarm. Brief, then silence. She turned her back on the clothes and went to the chair where her coat and bag were.

Salvatore had that number, the young man who… and Umberto, the lawyer long used by the family. It was for times of emergency.

A text message waited. ‘Three run, Four run – Bravo five boxes – Twelve walk – block 5 alpha.’ She studied the text, memorised and deleted it.

She said to the owner that she would call for the dresses she had chosen and would then settle the account. The owner was at pains to indicate that settlement was a small matter and should not concern the signora. Gabriella Borelli left the shop the way she had come, through the staff area, past the toilets and the storeroom, then went out into the street through a reinforced door. She waited. She listened. She looked from a corner for a loose cordon, for men who lounged and smoked or sat in parked cars. The text messages she sent and received on her mobile were always coded: ‘Three’ was Giovanni, ‘Four’ was Silvio and ‘run’ was arrested. She was ‘Bravo’ and ‘boxes’ were safe-houses that had been hit. ‘Twelve’ was Salvatore and ‘walk’ meant still at liberty, while ‘block 5 alpha’ told her where he would be and at what time.

She was a woman in a dowdy coat because the chill came in from the sea with the evening, and slipped among shadows. Dreams had been curtailed and an escape cut short. Fuck Giovanni and fuck Silvio. If five of her safe-houses had been hit, searched, then the security of the clan, on which she prided herself, was split open. How was it possible? Almost – not quite – fear held her.

The pictures came on the screen. There were digital images of Vincenzo Borelli in the custody suite at a London police station, full face and profile. They were replaced by a photograph of Giovanni Borelli being brought out of a door, wearing only boxer shorts. An officer behind him carried a bundle of clothing. The youngest, Silvio, walked meekly, appearing confused, between two towering men. The locations followed the individuals, a sequence of smashed-down doors, succeeded by an interior of a living room or bedroom.

The deputy prosecutor, unable to mask his disappointment, said, ‘We have the three cubs, but not the vixen. We were given five safe-house addresses, have hit each of them but she wasn’t there. Possessions? Yes. Recent clothes down to dirty ones? Yes. Jewellery not put away? Yes. She was due back at one of them. I suppose we have to query the tactic of overt hits.’

The liaison officer smarted. ‘We agreed on simultaneous strikes and-’

‘And we do not have Salvatore, Il Pistole.’

‘We were given five locations for the vixen, and couldn’t have delayed the lift.’ The liaison officer was prepared to rebut any criticism of the operation, which he had overseen.

The deputy prosecutor, maybe from frustration or tiredness, or from the simple matter of dashed expectations, snarled, ‘You had a free hand. They were your decisions. Where is she? Under your leadership we were the Gadarene swine in a headlong dash. Perhaps – and I say this with all charity – a calmer approach and surveillance stake-outs might well-’

‘We had to act in concert.’

The prosecutor thwacked a fist on his desk. ‘If we’re divided, we lose. I believe we’ll have the mother within hours. The plane is now, I estimate, thirty minutes away. We’ll push the girl harder.’

The prosecutor reckoned it was not his optimism that won a truce in the recriminations, but his mention of Immacolata Borelli. They had all been in the room when the tape was played and her tinny voice, with traffic noise surging across it, had told them a plain truth: ‘It is my intention to collaborate. By saying that on the telephone to you, I put my life at risk.’ The voice, the memory of it, might have shamed the protagonists. The deputy prosecutor shrugged, and the liaison officer went for water. They were all thinking of her, the prosecutor decided, and the enormity of what she had done. He was offered a biscuit, but waved away the plate. He said, ‘I don’t know how, but we’ll have the vixen.’

Two and a quarter hours of street tramping, and failure. Fortune did not shine on Eddie Deacon. He had started so brightly, full of hope and anticipation, when he had reached the street corner to which he had brought her from the pub. There, she had slipped her hand off his arm, grinned, waved and wandered down the street under the streetlamps. She hadn’t looked back. He had stood on one corner and she had disappeared round another. He had never been back. Always his Mac had turned up on time, punctual as a digital clock. He knew only that she had turned off to her left. He had stood there and had seen a pretty much main route with bus stops, and smaller streets going off to right and left. There were shops with flats above. There were smart little residential roads where professionals from the City or the Law Courts had come with their Polish builders, and there were bollards at the end to stop rat-runners and twockers. There were streets where there seemed to be more bell buttons on a pad by the front entrance than windows. She might have gone to a high-grade road, or to a couple of rooms above a launderette or a travel agent.

What to do? He could hardly stop anyone he saw going about their business: ‘Excuse me, have you seen an Italian girl in this street/road? We have this big thing, but she never gave me an address or a phone number, and she stood me up for a meal in the Afghan up Kingsland Road. Do you know where I can find her?’ He had walked – had been into Pakistani-run shops that sold everything and takeaways that did chicken or curries, and at first he had shyly shown the photograph he kept in his wallet, but for the last two hours he had just walked, peering into every young woman’s face, and found that he was doubling back on himself.

He went past a doorway, Edwardian, set in London brick, between a Turkish bank and a charity shop. Both had been open when he’d gone by the first time but now they were closed and showed only security lights. A pair of police stood outside, a regular officer and a Community Support girl. He remembered now that the door was covered with tacked hardboard.

His feet hurt, but not as much as his mind. He kept seeing her. Every time a girl materialised, round a corner, off a bus, out of a shop, into the throw of a streetlight, Eddie Deacon stared her out. Worst was when he had run after a girl – had seen the swing of the hips, the straight back, the chuck of hair over a shoulder – had caught her, gone in front of her, damn near blocking her on the pavement and she’d been reaching into her handbag – could have been a nail file, a personal alarm or even a pepper spray – when he had seen the spectacles. He had apologised, grovelling, had just about scraped the knees of his jeans on the pavement. She had walked on after one glance that measured him up as a sad thing or maybe a lowlife pervert. He stopped. Everybody watched policemen. Everybody pretended policemen standing on the first step of a flight were interesting, and doubly interesting when the door was opened, two men came out with filled plastic bags and put them into the back of an unmarked van, then went back inside. So interesting… and it rested his feet, which hurt bad. He looked down at them, and noticed the glow beside his legs.

The kid smoked. Eddie Deacon thought he was about ten, but the face was too near the pavement for him to make out the features. He sat on the kerb and his feet were in the gutter. He couldn’t have been seen by the police across the street.

The kid asked if he was looking for Vinny.

He said he wasn’t. It was just good to stop walking and rest his feet.

Was he looking for Vinny, the Italian? He heard a tremor of worship in the kid’s voice, as if he was talking about a footballer.

Eddie Deacon took a deep breath and told the kid he was looking for a girl – an Italian girl. Then he had his wallet out and bent down with it. The kid struck a match, and Eddie showed him the photo.

‘She’s Immacolata,’ the kid said, reedy, then coughed and flicked away his cigarette. ‘She’s Vinny’s sister. There’s filth here. They took Vinny, and I stayed to warn her if she came so they didn’t lift her. They put a girl’s bag and clothes in the van. Then I heard them talking and one said to a sergeant who came in a car that her bag was for shipping home to her. That was all.’

He thanked the kid. It was an afterthought but he asked him if he’d still be there later.

‘Something of yours in that place? Something important?’

He said there might be. Then, ‘I have to get inside.’

Was he a friend of Immacolata? He was.

A good friend?

He thought so.

‘Did you shag her?’

Eddie Deacon looked at the kid crouched on the ground, his shoulder level with Eddie’s knees. He said quietly, ‘Not your business. Important? Maybe. How do I get inside? God – you’d know, wouldn’t you?’

‘I would, too.’

He tried to sound authoritative: ‘Then you’d better take me.’

A smile slashed the kid’s face and Eddie saw it when another match was struck and cigarette lit. He was told to give it a couple of hours, then come back – and that it would cost him.

He had no doubt that the kid would have the skills to break into a property that had a police guard on the front step.

*

Salvatore felt her tremble. He had not known Gabriella Borelli, madrina, leader of the clan, show fear, but she shook and couldn’t stifle it. He held her close to him and the warmth came off her body. One arm was close round her shoulders and the other round the small of her back. She was twice his age. She was the most feared woman in the city. He could feel the straps of her underwear, and she would have felt the hardness against her belly. He could have pushed aside her coat, lifted her skirt, pulled down the panties, then flicked his own zip and hitched her up so that her arms were round his neck. Could have leaned her back against a wall and gone into her. Had he, it would have been – sad – the stupidest action of his life. Against a wall of old brick, put up by craftsmen centuries before, to have fucked a madrina while her husband was in gaol in the north and subject to Article 41 bis would have condemned him. Already Salvatore, Il Pistole, was a marked man and could live with it. If he fucked Gabriella Borelli he was a dead man and walking nowhere. And yet… He let a hand worm round from her back along the top of the pelvis, let it slide down and heard her breath quicken. And yet… He was not stupid.

He kissed her lightly on the forehead, at the hairline, and eased back from her. He thought – could not see in the darkness – that she clenched her fists and maybe drove the nails into the soft palms. He was glad, then, that he had backed off first. Her face would have hardened, and her jaw would be out.

The moment – body against body, juices aroused, heat rising – would not be referred to again. She would show no sign in the future of that intimacy. Neither would he. He thought she would have been a good fuck, better than the daughter. Salvatore knew that if ever she believed he was conceited enough to think he had any hold over her she would destroy him.

She touched his arm. It seemed to acknowledge a moment of weakness that was now stamped on, bagged, disposed of. She said, ‘They have searched five addresses I use. Who knew five of my addresses?’

No cheek, no attempt to joke. ‘I did.’ He knew she would consider him as much of a suspect as anyone else. She had the ability to detach herself, analyse, and act. It was not necessary to bluster innocence to her.

‘Who else?’

The wall behind her was high, dwarfing them, and above it was the Certosa di San Martino, of the fourteenth century, and behind the monastery, the fortress of Sant’Elmo, whose first stones had been laid eight hundred years before. That he was in the deep shadow of two of the most remarkable buildings in a city that was, itself, a miracle of history did not impress the clan’s principal killer. He had one boast only: he would never be taken alive. Coming after him were the police detectives and the ROS investigators, the families and associates of those he had killed on the instructions of the Borelli clan, and if he rose too fast that clan would destroy him.

He had been found and taken in hand by Pasquale when he was a scugnizzo. The padrino had lifted him off the street, where he thieved, conned and tricked for food and money, no family to care for him, and created a ladder of advancement for him to climb. He had done street-corner spotting – who came into Forcella, what was their business and where they went – message-running, with tiny scraps of paper, sealed in plastic and secreted in body orifices, and had given out beatings when monies due were not paid. When he was eighteen, Pasquale – identifying talent where he could find it – had put the P38 into his smooth hand, had driven him to a disused quarry beyond Acerra and let him fire two magazines at rusty cans. A week later he had been given his first living, walking, breathing, spitting, cursing target. He had money and status, and wouldn’t see his thirtieth birthday, which he accepted. He would be dead, and would not have – at his last breath – a regret.

‘All the brothers, they knew.’ He had taken instructions from Vincenzo before his flight to London but always after a moment had elapsed as if clarifying that his obedience was considered, not automatic, and instructions from Giovanni only if they were prefaced with ‘My mother says.’ He was contemptuous of Silvio and had never received an instruction from him. It did not cross his mind that he should include the sister, now gone eight months, with the brothers in having knowledge of the safe-houses.

‘Yes – and who else?’

‘Did Carmine and Anna Borelli know the addresses?’

Her father- and mother-in-law might have known two of the five, three at maximum. Not all.

‘Did Umberto know?’

The lawyer, used by the family for more than thirty years, was now elderly, run to obesity and looked a fool, a pompous one, but his intellect was sharper than any other city lawyer’s. He was skilled in the manipulation of court processes, the transfer of monies while they were rinsed clean, and the avoidance of surveillance. Umberto, perhaps, was a more significant aide to the clan than Salvatore, the killer.

She thought briefly, then replied that the lawyer might have known two addresses, no more.

‘Did Pasquale know?’

She did not dismiss it. Her body seemed to stiffen, tighten, then a coil was loosened. She relaxed. She said that however desperate her husband was to regain his freedom, he wouldn’t dare to betray her – and he would have known three addresses, but not five.

He shrugged, had no more to offer. He took out a small pocket torch and flashed it three times down the lane. He heard the response, the gunning of a scooter engine. It came forward, no lights shown. Did she want to be taken somewhere? She shook her head decisively. Who now to trust?

She walked away. He thought her wealth could have provided her with a Bentley, a Maserati or a Porsche, a driver in uniform and a guard to protect her. The scooter came up and collected him, the lights were flicked on and he saw her trudging the other way, along the rough track that would bring her out on the corso Vittorio Emanuele. He didn’t know where she would head for but he reckoned it an hour’s fast walking to get back to Forcella and Sanita.

He sat astride the pillion, slapped his man on the shoulder – he called him ‘Fangio’ – and they powered away. He did not look down from the track at the beauty of the bay and the reflections on the sea from ships’ lamps and portholes or up at the illuminated ramparts of the castle. He let his mind scratch at the problem. Who had betrayed the clan? Who had earned death – not the fast death of the P38, but slow, stretched death? Who?

The aircraft landed, hit hard. She reached out, instinct, as the wheels bounced and the aircraft seemed to fly again, then the impact was repeated. Her hand took his. The fingers did not close on hers, and there was no comfort from them. Then she realised Castrolami thought nothing of her and had no concern whether she was terrified on landing or not.

They taxied, turned, idled and then, with a last lurch, the aircraft braked and was still. A ripple of applause shimmered behind them: it had not been a smooth flight, with turbulence over southern France, then powerful cross-winds as they had descended on Fiumicino, and the landing had been rough. Immacolata Borelli did not join in. She had only once, while they were in the air, left her seat. Then she had gone to the toilets in front of Business and had changed into the few new clothes she had been permitted to buy. She had washed her face and hands and had looked at herself in the mirror. She had tried to smile – and could not.

She had returned to her seat. Castrolami had not spoken to her. She thought he reckoned it enough that he had her on the plane, out of British jurisdiction and on her way to Italy, home. He hadn’t asked if she was comfortable, if she was hungry, if she wanted a drink or a magazine. He had scribbled on a pad, might have been his report or his expenses, and she thought his socks smelled worse in the cabin than they had in the car.

She heard, behind her, a stampede. She had expected that she would have to wait. Castrolami squeezed his bulk past her, no apology, stood in the aisle and successfully blocked any passenger wanting to short-cut through Business to the forward door. Then he flicked his fingers – as if he had called a dog. She didn’t move. Heard the flick of the fingers again, louder, more insistent and closer to her ear. Sat, didn’t shift. The hand came down – the one she had clutched when the plane hit – caught her coat and yanked her up. Her waist snagged on the belt, still fastened. His other hand came across her thighs, almost groping her, and opened the catch. She thought he wouldn’t have noticed where his hand had been. She stood.

She saw that two stewardesses and a purser eyed her, almost stripped her. It was obvious that she was a fugitive returning. No sympathy, no clemency. She had been offered a rug for her knees and had declined it, also earphones for the stereo. The trolley had come with newspapers – Corriere, Messaggero and Repubblica and she’d said she didn’t want one. A few remarks only, and she wondered if they were sufficient for the cabin crew to know she was Neapolitan. If she was from Naples and in custody, she was a camorrista. She understood then that few shoulders would offer her a place to weep.

He had reached into his pocket and produced a pair of dark glasses. He handed them to her. The lights were poor in the cabin and outside it was late evening. She shook her head.

Castrolami said, ‘Maybe there’s a photographer. How do I know, when I have no control over it, what the security’s like? I’m off my patch. Maybe this place leaks. Maybe your name is out. You want to make it easier for them? Put them on and turn up your coat collar. I don’t want you dead, Signorina…’

She put on the glasses and pulled up the collar so that it half covered her cheeks. She thought, was not certain because his voice was only a murmur, that he added, ‘Not before we’ve had you in court and testifying.’

He took her arm, led her out through the door and on to the pier, then down a flight of side steps into the night. Two cars waited, and men had sub-machine guns. The rear door of the lead car was open for her. Fingers lay on trigger guards. She was from a clan family and couldn’t play at ignorance, and she understood the reaction towards a traitor and knew their fate. She attempted to bring to mind Marianna Rossetti’s face, the last time she had seen it, without the ravages of leukaemia.

Immacolata Borelli had completed the first stage of her journey home. She dropped her head, sank on to the back seat and the crackle of radios was around her as she was driven away.

Music played at one cafe and the last stages of a soccer game were on a television at the other. Lukas was about halfway between the soccer and the music, and had yesterday’s Herald Tribune in front of him with a month-old copy of Match.

Most evenings, when he was in Paris, he walked down the rue de Bellechasse and on to the rue St Dominique. There, he would pause outside the building with the double gate wide enough for a carriage and pair to go through, and he would take a moment under the plaque to consider the life and work of J. B. Dumas, Chimiste-Secretaire Perpetuel de l’Academie des Sciences, and note a date carved in the stone that put recognition of this man at 209 years ago. It was important for Lukas to stop for those few seconds, break his evening walk to the Bar le Bellechasse, the Drop Cafe or the Cafe des Deux Musees, because then he placed matters in his life into a correct perspective, one that he could manage to be alongside. There would be no plaque erected in Kabul, or Baghdad, up in the forests of the Midwest or in the triple-canopy jungle high in the Cordillera Central east of Cali for a co-ordinator who made the judgement – weighed lives and deaths – between the arguments of the negotiators and the storm-squad commanders. Nobody would read a plaque naming Lukas Sometimes a Saviour and sometimes a Killer, Federal Bureau of Investigation and lately of Ground Force Security (London). Lukas did not rate himself important enough to warrant a plaque.

He thought them good people who served in the cafes and bars he patronised. They were ordinary people, who would not know of the situations that confronted him when he worked. It was better not to bring back to Paris with him, in his rucksack, the situations and knife-edges on which he operated. If business was slack they talked to him about the concerns and excitements of ‘ordinary’ people, and did not push for entry into his life – his unexplained absences – or pry, and they brought him beer and he gave them tips in midsummer and before Christmas. He paid always for what was brought to him unless the patron came with the drink. They could all set agendas and choose the subjects – had free range – except one area. He would steer the talk away from sons: he didn’t welcome chatter about the triumphs and failures of sons. It was an area of pain suppressed, not shared, and he managed the deflection with subtle skill. In the bars and cafes, wiling away the evening hours, he never drank so that his mind clouded: the telephone in the apartment could ring at any time and activate the voicemail.

There was agitation at the far end of the bar. His name was called by a white-aproned waiter and he was told that the game had gone to penalty kicks and he should come for the death throes, but he smiled, shook his head, stayed in his chair and nursed his beer. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go to the museums – first the Musee d’Orsay and then that of the Legion – if the telephone had not rung and no message had been left.