He’d shrugged. She would have thought him an imbecile and a Philistine, and the roll of her eyebrows seemed to suggest he’d have been better off in Milton Keynes or Welwyn Garden City. When the cigarette was finished and he’d stamped on it and she’d ground her heel on it, she asked, ‘That address we worked out, what was there?’ He’d said there was a couple of old people, the girl’s grandparents, and he’d smiled and just seemed to tell her that the subject area was closed. No talk about the Sail, and about a pistol in the neck and the gouge it had made and shots fired and a man who was the ‘best’ killed. No war stories.
A bell rang in the corridor.
Neither did he tell her about a cemetery, with the sun rising, and about a girl who looked drained and wan and near broken, and was dressed drably, and who had spoken of a padlock and… He said to Lottie that it was good to be back in the comfort zone of Agatha Christie, and Poirot and Jane Marple, and The Body in the Library. Well, for a bit – grateful for the work but no one should bet their shirt on him not moving on. He thought that Lottie had believed nothing he had told her, but was too polite to quiz him further.
He went into his class. Of course, same walls and same posters of tourist Britain, same desks and same students as there always were for that day of the week at ten in the morning, and the same table for him to spread out his notes. Nothing changed – except there was a private emptiness and he did not know how, whether, it could be filled.
A month later… They were gathered on a viewing platform in the Crowders Mountain State Park. It was out west from Charlotte, beyond Gastonia and along Route 85, and was a favoured place for those seeking good rock-climbing conditions. The family were there, and a man from the New York office of Ground Force Security, and another represented the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those men held back and allowed the mother, the wife and the son of Foster Lukas to do their bit with the small veneer wood casket. It could have been a short experience of dignity and respect, but Ground Force had realised early that the blood relatives gave not a damn once a will had been produced that left all worldly chattels to a clinic that helped military veterans acclimatise with their new artificial limbs, and the Bureau had come up with the idea of scattering the ashes at a place of natural grandeur. Trouble was, the wind was wrong. The FBI man was retired as an agent, but was kept as a freelancer on the payroll for the funerals of those who had long left the Bureau but required recognition. ‘What I heard, there was burnout: too much work, till it had gotten to obsessional levels and no hobbies – Lukas didn’t give himself time for women, for golf, not even for wall-eye fishing. Wasn’t that old but the work levels and the places they took him sort of left him crisped.’ The wife had the top off the small casket, supplied by a crematorium in London, and the mother tilted it, but the goddam wind was wrong. The Ground Force man said, ‘Our evaluation, from the debriefs of those who were closest to him, he’d gotten careless. Happens with burnout cases.’ A good handful of the ash blew back over the viewing platform rail and became embedded on the son’s trousers and provoked a barely suppressed oath. The Bureau man responded, ‘There were two factors that killed him. The one was that carelessness which comes from having done something so many times that it’s clockwork, but the other was involvement, emotional involvement. We say that any form of involvement is a road to failure and worse than “careless”, but emotional involvement is the pits. That’s the combination that killed him. But I reckon “careless” was bigger.’ Mother threw some more and a little went into the wife’s eye, and a sprinkling of it on to her coat.
The two men walked away, left them bickering about the wind and about a dirty coat and a pair of trousers that would need cleaning and a mote in the eye, and both thought their work done… It was indeed a hell of a place with a hell of a vista, and the Ground Force man said, as he fished car keys from his pocket, ‘He felt for the boy he was trying to bust out of a bad time – wasn’t just a dreary routine. Lukas was the sort of man you need in that kind of scrape – difficult, taciturn, lacking in social skills, and as good a type as we throw up. The boy was lucky to have him on the case.’ The family had finished and had turned away from the platform. They both waved at them, and called out their good wishes – which were not acknowledged. The Bureau man said, ‘The boy was indeed lucky, and will probably never know how lucky.’ They parted, would drive in their own hire cars to the airport at Charlotte and the flights would take them back to DC and to New York City, and neither could have pictured the Sail building and a walkway where the washing hung, and a little runt of a guy naked except for his boxers.
A year later… The senior judge thanked her.
She bobbed her head. She stood. She turned for the aisle and the double doors. The prosecutor had told her that the sentences would range between ergastolo, life, for the younger men, except her juvenile brother, thirty years for her mother, twenty years for the advocate, ten years for her grandfather who would die in Poggioreale, and eighteen months at Posilippo for her grandmother.
In the cage, no one looked at her. Her mother and her three brothers, her grandfather and grandmother, the lawyer who had known her since she was a babe in arms, and the hitman, all looked away as if that co-ordinated gesture demonstrated their contempt of her. It was a wasted effort. She never glanced at them. On earlier hearings the abuse from the cage – particularly from Giovanni and Anna Borelli – had blistered across the court room, and on her fourth day in court Vincenzo had come to the front of the cage and spat venomously at her, and her mother had declaimed that Immacolata would rot in a living hell, and on many days Silvio had wept. Her evidence was completed after a month of daily testimony. She had forsworn cosmetics and dressed in lifeless colours for her appearances. That day, her last in court, she was different. She had brought, almost, a possessive smirk to the face of Orecchia and a bounce to the step of Rossi when they had collected her from the safe-house and driven her early to the Palace of Justice. They, alone, were privy to the transformation.
Rossi and Orecchia had taken her the previous evening to the boutique salon in the back-street on the seaward side of the piazza dei Martiri. Her mother’s account? Of course it would be on her mother’s account. Who would have refused her? The owner faced an investigation from the Guardia di Finanza, so easily arranged, if Immacolata Borelli and her escorts were turned away… and the account was still open because her mother needed fresh underwear and required the changes of plain clothing that might, to a court, indicate a misunderstood and guiltless woman. That day, her daughter had been driven to court in the bulletproof and armour-plated Lancia in clothing that was chic, elegant, styled. Her jacket and skirt were Asian silk, sea blue and severe, her shoes were white, with low heels, her blouse was cream and hung loose. She wore no jewellery. Also, the night before, the wife of a court security guard, had come to the safe-house, cut and styled her hair. She had turned heads in court, all except those of her family and her family’s closest confidants. It was as if a trapped bird had escaped a cage.
She went down the stairs from the court, through guarded double doors into a concrete underground cavern, and was led to the Lancia.