Her mother swung round, did not spit again, and strode to the door. As if she was a monarch, the two women officers scurried to get to it first and to open it for her. They stood aside so that she could pass through. Immacolata heard more keys jangle in harmony, more doors opened and closed in slammed timpani, the distant trill of her mother’s laughter, as if she deigned to share a joke with her escort. Then the voices, the footsteps, the music of keys and the percussion of doors faded, were gone.
Her chin trembled.
They had set Immacolata hurdles to leap, she understood that. She had cleared them all, except this one. Here, she had stumbled.
She looked at her watch – had no reason to but did – and saw that the minute hand showed five to the hour. The watch was in a gold setting but discreet. It had been her father’s present to her on her twenty-first birthday, one of many presents, and had become part of her. She had worn that watch in the telephone kiosk on an east London street when she had made the international call, and in an east London park when she had met the enemy of her family, and on a flight to Rome and in a car that had carried her south and home. It was five minutes to an hour, and the time had no significance to her. The watch was part of an old life. She took it off, opened her fingers, let it fall to the concrete floor of the room that had been made available to them in the late hours while a prison slept. She had been wounded, and knew it. Deliberately, Immacolata put her heel on the watch face, and killed it at five minutes to an hour.
Rossi pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded it and – without fanfare – wiped the spittle off her face. Orecchia took her arm.
She left the watch behind her, for a cleaner to find or a trustee prisoner, as she had left behind a padlock on a bridge.
‘Do we have long?’ she asked.
‘Not long,’ Orecchia answered.
She said where, now, she wanted to be taken. Rossi shrugged. Orecchia said it would be done. She thought they humoured her because of what her mother had said. She didn’t know the importance of a watch stopped at five minutes to an hour.
He did not want food. He did not want water. He did not want cigarettes. It was five times now that he had been asked if he wanted to eat, drink, smoke. He yelled it back at the small man who sat cross-legged on the walkway. Nobody listened to him. Why did nobody listen? In Forcella, in Sanita, men listened when he spoke. He didn’t have to raise his voice. He could whisper and men would crane forward to hear what he said, and others would hush those at the back. If he was angry, men were fearful. If he made a joke, men laughed.
‘I don’t want anything.’
‘It’s just that it’s a long time since you ate or drank, Salvatore. Myself, I could do with a cigarette and-’
‘Anything except that you look at the time. Look.’
The man had a gentle voice. ‘Use my name,’ he said. ‘It’s Lukas. What I always say is that a guy’s name is the most important thing he owns. I’m Lukas, you’re Salvatore, he’s Eddie. I don’t want to be hustled by time.’
‘Look at your watch.’
‘All right, easy, all right. Can I say something, Salvatore? The gun. Can the gun be moved from where it is? Eddie’s head? You’re tired, course you are. Can you just shift the gun a little? They frighten me, guns do.’
‘Look at your watch – see the time.’
‘How about you move the gun and I look at my watch? Is that reasonable? You’re tired, that situation, your hand might slip. Maybe you have a hair trigger. We don’t want an accident.’
‘Look at the time.’ He couldn’t now see his own watch. Hadn’t seen it since the man had come forward and offered food, then sat, and Salvatore hadn’t dared to move, not a centimetre, and the guns’ aim was on him. The way his arm was across the boy’s chest, and his own head was half buried in the hair at the back of the boy’s skull, didn’t allow him to see the face of his watch… but now he heard the chime, distant. A church’s clock, a church’s bell. Could have been the Church of the Resurrection he had passed on Fangio’s pillion. Midnight’s strike… If a player of importance, a figure who was respected, let a given deadline drift, allowed an ultimatum to slip, then face – authority – was lost, could never be regained.
‘That is fair exchange, Salvatore. You move your pistol, shift it a little, and I’ll check my watch. Listen, friend, all I’m here to do is to help.’
He screamed. He heard his own voice, detached from it, as if it was another who howled in the night, a cat’s cry. ‘Where is she? Where is her statement? Where is the retraction? Answer me.’
The gentle voice was so reasonable, and there was a shrug, helpless, from the small shoulders and the hands gestured it. ‘Way above my level, that sort of decision, Salvatore. Nobody tells me anything. The jerks who make that sort of decision, they’d have gone home long ago. People like us are left out of bed, no food and no water and no goddam cigarettes, and there’ll be no decision from them till the morning comes. Better, Salvatore, for you, for me and for Eddie, that we sort this out ourselves, and I can go home, and Eddie can, and you can go get some sleep.’
It was like honey, the voice, sweet and cloying and satisfying, and he knew the deadline of an ultimatum had gone and could not be clawed back… If he killed the boy then he, himself, was dead, and he could see the light reflected from the scope’s lens. He couldn’t clear it from his mind: did he want to die?
He cocked the pistol, scraped metal on metal, and the sound echoed along the concrete of the walkway and filtered through the washing lines, and the hammer was back. He had no hatred of the boy. He had no love for Gabriella Borelli, or loyalty to Pasquale Borelli who had created him. He loved the respect that was shown him. A slow gathering smile came to his face but his stomach growled and his throat was dry, and he craved to smoke, and his finger tightened on the trigger stick, squeezed on it.
The watch face was in front of his mouth, and it looked as though Lukas examined the time it showed and had difficulty in that light. He murmured, lips barely moving, ‘Don’t shoot. Don’t respond.
‘You were asking me the time, Salvatore, about five minutes past-’
The shot was fired.
Lukas saw the flash and the recoil of the weapon, and saw the boy flinch, cringe, sag, but he was held up by the arm and the belt. There was no blood.
He knew that if a second shot was fired it would be a killing shot.
What a fucking way to live, what a fuck-awful job to have… He had stood once in a corner of the board room of Ground Force Security, had been a day back from Baghdad and had come out with a freed hostage, and Duck had led the directors in celebration drinks – Lukas wouldn’t have been there had there not been delays at Heathrow from the baggage handlers. He had been sober and his employers had not. One had quoted, declaimed it, a Shakespeare speech: their King Harry on the eve of the battle. ‘And gentlemen in England now abed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here…’ Not if the ‘here’ was a mud-wall village beyond the conurbation of Ba’aquba. Likewise, not if the ‘here’ was a stinking, foul, dirt-laden walkway on the third level of the Sail. Bullshit… And any right-minded person, valuing sanity, should have been ‘now abed’. But it was what Lukas did, and was all he knew. He had slipped out of that boardroom and doubted that any of them had noticed that he, the cause of their celebration, had quit on them. He had the watch again in front of his face.
‘Next time will be for real. I’m not usually this much of a glory-hunter, but I fancy it’s time to go and do some walking.’
There was no answer in his earpiece. He didn’t expect it. It was the side show. It was the B flick. The main event was Miss Immacolata and her denunciation, and the boy was rated as secondary. He could do what he damn well pleased.
He called forward, ‘I think I have that message, Salvatore. You should trust me. I am here to help, and best for all of us – if I am to help – is that you give me trust. Watch me.’