He realised, now, many things. Clarity swamped the mind of Salvatore. The walkway was sealed at either end. The apartments fronting on to it were either evacuated or locked and barred. He had no freedom of movement, was as a rat in a corner – with teeth – without anywhere to run. He wondered at what stage Fangio had slipped away on his scooter. No mention made of Immacolata and whether she would retract evidence. No appeal, grovel or beg for the life – safety – of the boy he was close against. If he killed the boy, Eddie, who had slept with Immacolata and was her lover, then he himself was dead. Maybe half a second after he had pulled the trigger, he was dead.
Was it his destiny? Did he crave death?
Didn’t know. Had no one to tell him. Didn’t have Pasquale Borelli, who had taught him to read, write, shoot and kill. Didn’t have Gabriella Borelli to tell him whether he wanted to die, be shot down, and didn’t walk behind her and follow the sway of her hips. Had no one, was alone… He had seen so many. They didn’t lurch back when shot, as the movies showed it. They fell. They were like the cattle in the abattoir that the clan owned. They subsided. And they twitched. Chickens did, they flapped. Men’s muscles moved. While the blood flowed, the fingers fidgeted, tried to catch dirt or the concrete on a pavement, the vinyl tiles on a bar floor. He had seen it. Death was frozen on a face, that last expression. Laughing? Never. Happy? Never. Supreme? Never. Etched on to a dead face was, at the last, fear. Did he want it?
He saw a television cameraman who filmed and smoked, then heaved the camera off his shoulder, dragged a last time on the cigarette and threw down the filter. It would be on the walkway near his head. He saw two reporters and heard their laughter, as if they were the latterday crowd in the piazza Mercato when the aristocrats were hanged, and maybe the laughter was about the filth of his clothes and the smell of his body, and he saw children who stared blank-faced at the blood. He didn’t know how long his photo would stay on the screens of the kids’ mobiles.
‘One step more, and I blow his head away,’ Salvatore yelled. Didn’t have to, not to be heard twenty metres away. If he did, if he squeezed the trigger, he was dead a half-second later. Knew that, realised it.
The voice was so calm. ‘Because I’m here to help, I need to know the type of pizza we can order, and if the water should be still or with gas, and the brand of cigarettes. Look, we’re not in a hurry. You think about it, give me an answer when you’re ready – what’s on offer is food, something to drink and cigarettes. Take your time, Salvatore – we have all the time you need.’
And the face was so reasonable, and it smiled at him. He had no one to ask, to tell him whether he wanted to eat and drink and smoke, to die or to live, and the hands of his watch moved – couldn’t be stopped.
Three raids, supported by arrest warrants… In the via Forcella, a good-sized crowd watched as Carmine and Anna Borelli were led out through the main door of the block, escorted past the stall, empty, where the fish-seller traded. They didn’t look fearsome. Anna Borelli carried her teeth, had not inserted them in her mouth, and wore a pink night wrap over a white gown and had on fluffy pink slippers. Carmine Borelli looked confused and his hair was wild. He clutched his stick and wore striped pyjamas. A police officer followed them with two overflowing bags of day clothes. They had not been given time to dress because the police had feared a riot when they were taken away, but it didn’t happen. No riot, neither were they handcuffed. Two insults, both hard to stomach. To prompt no reaction in Naples was to be dead, irrelevant.
In an alleyway off the via Tribunali, the section running to the west of the via Duomo, the lawyer was arrested. He fared worse than the old clan leader and the old brothel keeper: he was handcuffed and the photographers of Cronaca and Mattino were there to poke lenses in his face. He was ashen. He wore the previous day’s socks, shirt and underwear, and had to hold up his trousers because he had dressed at such speed that he had forgotten his belt. The crowd jeered because it was a sport to see a big man taken down. He was headed now for the foul, faeces-smelling cells reserved at Poggioreale for prisoners arriving late at night. It was the ultimate insult to him that he was not ferried to the Questura or to piazza Dante, but to a common cell.
Near to the Palace of Justice, behind the Holiday Inn that rose in the business zone of the city, there was an apartment block that was a target only for the most successful to aspire to. It was – had been – the home of Massimo, the lawyer’s clerk and nephew. On a table in the kitchen area there was a fulsome letter of apology to his family, of explanation to the prosecutor, of pleading to his God. He apologised for the disgrace bred from greed. He explained the link between the kidnap of the English boy, the Borelli veterans and the hitman, Il Pistole. He pleaded that he should not be eternally damned for carrying a sentence of death. One of the police officers who found him suspended from a skylight in a smaller bedroom by a sheet had had experience of hangings. He said that the signs on the neck showed that the young man, having kicked away the chair, and choking, had tried to save himself, and failed; weals at the neck showed the efforts he had made following his change of heart.
The net closed around a clan, stifled its breath, strangled it.
Her mother spat at her.
Gabriella Borelli had been given an officer’s coat to drape over her shoulders but, with or without it, she gave no sign of cold.
No response from Immacolata.
They had thought, at the palace, that she would lecture her mother in her conversion from the clan’s culture. She did not. She said nothing. The tactic, employing silence, had been determined in the car that had brought her round the bay, along the coast road and through the gaol’s gates.
The spit was on Immacolata’s cheek and her chin and she did not wipe it.
There was a table between them. Two women guards were behind her mother, but Immacolata sensed they would intervene only if there was a physical attack. She thought them in awe of her mother. Rossi and Orecchia were behind her. Her mother, before spitting, had used different avenues to demonstrate her disgust, contempt for and loathing of her daughter: the shame to the family of a collaborator, the betrayal of her relatives, the treachery of siding with the prosecutor against her own.
She had not flinched. She had stared back at her mother, had ridden the punches as a boxer did. She had been taunted: where would she live, who would befriend her, could she live a lie for the rest of her life? Did she understand what it would be to cringe each time on a darkened street if she heard a footstep behind her? Did she know how much bounty money her mother and father in joint enterprise had placed on her life? Did she understand that she would never be forgiven?
There was the spit, then her mother’s final throw: ‘You sleep with a boy, you curl your legs round him, you take him into you, you fuck him, and you kill him… I never betrayed your father. You took the boy into your bed, and he means nothing to you. You kill him. It is not Salvatore who kills him, it’s you. I love your father and I love Vincenzo, Giovanni and Silvio, and they love me… You cannot love. The boy comes, searches for you, will give his life for you. You cannot love because you’re cold. You’re not a daughter. You have the cold of a whore. You don’t know what love is, what loyalty is. The boy did. You’re cold, not of Naples. You kill the boy. It’s as if you fire the shot or hold the knife. Do you imagine that one of our family, if there was love, would turn away and condemn to death? Perhaps you fucked him like a whore does, were cold… You will never love. You’re not capable. You’re not your father’s daughter, not my daughter. You’re not your brothers’ sister. All of our family have warmth, can love, not you. The proof of it? You killed the boy.’