He heard the voices at the door, then heard it opened. Salvatore turned away from the figure bound on the floor, lying in the darkness.
It had been a nightmare. Massimo thought himself in the corridors of hell, with no end to their length. They were a labyrinth. It had taken him an hour, might have been more, to travel the extent of a walkway set between reinforced doors, barred windows, dull-lit corners, refuse heaps, washing that was draped, and still stank, across his route. He did not think the nightmare complete, or half consumed. He had climbed the staircase and at the top had been searched. Fingers had prised into every pocket. Then he had been stripped almost bare and those fingers had gone inside the orifices of his body. Then he had been allowed to dress and had had to scrabble in the near darkness at his feet to collect what had been taken from his pockets, examined and dropped. He had gone through the first barred gate.
There had been three more searches, as if no message had been passed ahead on the mobile phones. Three more times he had been questioned, then strip-searched. Then the fingers had been in his mouth and in the anal passage, and lights had been shone into his ears and up his nose and the sac under his penis had been lifted. There had been more delays at more barred gates. He thought contempt was shown him.
He was left with little that preserved dignity.
Each time he was allowed to progress he had taken time over dressing, knotting his tie and shoe laces.
He feared for his life.
He saw the silhouette of Salvatore’s head. He had seen the man several times before, always a half-stride behind Gabriella Borelli. Massimo had thought the man who hovered at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder to be a psychopath, probably medically certifiable. He thought his own feet, in the expensive handmade shoes of soft leather, were on a treadmill, that the motor went ever faster and struggled to keep up the momentum. If he did not he would fall, and he didn’t know how to jump clear of the treadmill.
He saw the body on the ground, strained his eyes and detected cuts on the face.
‘What did they say?’ Salvatore murmured – the voice of a dreamer, a sleepwalker.
He remembered the equation of fear: the cells of Poggioreale, or the anger and retribution of the old witch.
Massimo did not lie, did not dare to. He stuttered through the message he had been given by Anna Borelli, now in her eighty-eighth year, and realised that what he had said was understood by Salvatore and by the figure bound on the floor near his feet. Salvatore nodded, as if the matter did not concern him, but the figure twitched and he heard the intake of breath. Massimo thought himself damned. He said where the body should be dumped.
Damned. He had a law degree, he owned an apartment in the most select district of the city, he drove a high-performance car, and already could count his assets in hundreds of thousands of euros, yet he was reduced to ferrying instructions, was the boy sent from a reception desk at the Excelsior Hotel on the via Partenope. Damned for ever.
He ran.
He wasn’t stopped.
He ran as fast as he could and the barred gates seemed to open ahead of him. He was not searched, questioned, delayed or hindered by men with mobile telephones. He careered down the staircase, syringes and glass shards crunching under his shoes, and broke out into the night.
The scooter took him only to the edge of Scampia. He was dropped where the via Baku made a junction with the via Roma Verso Scampia. He was left at a bus stop.
The evening air played on his face, and he waited for a bus, alone, and believed he had killed a man.
They clustered round the screen. Those who worked the annexe had prime positions, but others from the operations room peered over shoulders for a glimpse of what the video showed. He had thought it a tipping point when a contact had been made, but had been wrong. This was.
The collator gave the commentary, Lukas hunched beside him. ‘That is the Great Nose – to everyone except him and his face. That’s him. We have one photograph of him in ten years and that was with dark glasses. It’s excellent. He has that territory of the Sail. He has been a fugitive for more years than the photograph has existed… Incredible.’
The image on the screen was monochrome and the walkway poorly lit. The figure of the man identified as Il Grosso Naso came from under hanging washing slung across the walkway and was clear for a matter of seconds in profile, then was gone under more draped sheets.
‘Typical of those bastards, the spies. They won’t share. They have a camera on him. Another visitor, far from his home ground. It is Il Camionista, the old man of Forcella, and his rheumatism is bad again. So, the Grosso Naso and the Camionista do business. Carmine Borelli is off territory. He will be nervous, he will not be there with a position of strength and he will have come to ask a great favour, for which he will pay.’
Lukas reckoned that in other company the old man would have used a stick but not there: a stick was weakness and frailty. A younger man walked two, three paces behind him, but he was led, a cloth tight round his upper face, blindfolding him.
‘No trust. They’re strangers in the Sail. I cannot see all his face but I know from the walk, from the mouth, from the shoulders and the hips, that Carmine is escorted by his son’s killer – it is the hitman, it is Il Pistole, Salvatore. There is a file, fat, on him. When he goes to prison – if he is not shot dead by us, by another clan – he is locked up for the rest of his life. He is to be condanna all’ergastolo. He will never again feel grass under his feet, hear birds sing or swim in the sea. They were all here but the spies wouldn’t tell us until their man was dead and we couldn’t blunder into their precious world. The file, the fat one, says there are many murders proven to Salvatore, usually with the Beretta P38, usually with a man on a scooter to take him to the target and away, and there are many more homicides with him as first suspect. He has no parents, no family, no woman. He has only the pistol and his dependence on the family of Borelli. He would want to be killed, and that is the only reason not to kill him.’
Lukas craned forward. Far beyond that point, the tipping done. He understood that he saw an opponent. He did not use, verbally or in his mind, a word such as ‘enemy’. In his world emotion and rancour were put aside. He saw an opponent brought under the draped washing, shuffling past the lens, then taken under more washing. They went on through the films and did fast view for the departure of Big Nose, the Lorry Driver and the Pistol. The collator muttered more names, but without enthusiasm, as if they had no part to play. Many images went at jerky old-movie speed across the screen, cigarettes were lit, more coffee was downed.
Their attention, again, was jolted, and silence fell. Lukas could smell the sweat of many bodies, and his own, of socks and underclothing not changed, and his own. Men came down the walkway and gestured dismissively, women went indoors abruptly and kids fled. It was as if a route was cleared of obstruction and witnesses. Lukas saw Salvatore again, and the boy. He was within touching distance. Lukas could have reached out and let his finger brush the screen. The boy went slowly, as if exhausted and hurt. His feet did not have good traction on the walkway and he was mostly dragged; his shoulders were down. Lukas knew him because he had spoken with the man at the hotel, and with the man who sold fish. The fish, yes, the fish presented to the annexe at piazza Dante, the swordfish, was in a freezer tray in the kitchen area of a local restaurant. It would be thawed and cooked if there was a successful outcome, and would go on a rubbish heap if there was not – fuck the fish. He had spoken to both men and knew what clothes the boy had worn when he left the pensione in the morning and when he had met the eye of the fish-seller. Lukas had demanded of them what shirt, trousers and trainers the boy had worn. He saw them in the black-and-white image on the screen, and the hood. Lukas had only once been hooded – in his time as an instructor at Quantico, after he’d come off the Hostage Rescue Team and before he’d got himself lodged with the new Critical Incident Response Group. He had been one of the FBI instructors doing close-quarters battle training: in simulating the storming of a building, they had needed a ‘tame’ prisoner and it hadn’t seemed fair to allocate a rookie. He had done it. He could remember, still, the smell and taste of the sacking, his panic at his inability to breathe deeply, and the fear of what would happen next. He had had on ear protectors when the storm came, blank rounds and thunder-flash grenades. He had been hustled out, the hood had been lifted off, and no one seemed to have much time for him: interest was in the ‘bad’ guys, who were wasted, and the ‘good’ guys, who were heroes.