‘I emphasise and repeat, Signorina, that intense pressure will be applied to you when your family learn what you’ve done. In the first period, before a legal process, we will protect you, but we can’t protect all those who may be dear to you. Could they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover?’
‘No.’
Put a second time, the question was redundant, but it was his practice to examine the face rather than merely listen to words.
‘In Naples, there’s no lover, no boy?’
‘No.’
‘In London, are you in a relationship with someone you met here? An Italian boy? A boy from the college you attend?’
‘Is that important?’
‘It is, Signorina, because you’ll be sequestered, perhaps for months, in a safe-house and under protection. A boyfriend won’t be able to visit you. You can’t get on a plane and come back to London because you want him, because-’
‘It won’t happen.’
‘So there is a boy here?’ His eyes bored into her, looking for truth, demanding it, and he towered over her. He was aware then that the first thin sunlight had broken through the cloud and played on her cheeks. ‘I have to know.’
‘Yes, but not significant.’
‘What does that mean – significato? Is there or isn’t there a boy?’
‘We go to bars, we go to films, we go-’
‘You go to bed. But you say it’s not “significant” – yes?’
‘He’s just a boy. We met in a park. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘You won’t pine for him?’
She threw back her head and raindrops cascaded from her hair, the sun catching them to make jewels. ‘I’ll forget him – maybe I have already.’
He looked into her eyes for evidence of a lie and couldn’t find it. Her eyes were clear, bright and unwavering. Mario Castrolami knew little of love. His wife and children were in Milan, lodgers at her mother’s home. There was little of love that he could remember – it might have been his uniform that had attracted her when he was young, slim and straight-backed, but now he no longer wore it, his shoulders were rounded, his stomach pushed at his belt, he was edging towards his forty-seventh birthday, and he slept with a loaded handgun in the drawer of his bedside table. There was a woman with whom he shared a restaurant table and the couch in her studio, but only once a month, never more than twice. She painted aspects of the great Vesuvio, exhibited some and sold a few, and he was fond of her – but it wasn’t love. Most of the time he forgot his wife and children, and if his friend, the artist, moved on, she, too, would be forgotten. He did not challenge her again. He believed he had found honesty in her features.
Not that honesty would help her. Deceit was a survivor’s weapon. Away from her, Castrolami used his mobile phone.
A new day, and Eddie felt better. Last night was gone.
Better and freer.
He had had breakfast with the others in the house, toast and cereal, and Eddie had said his piece about losing track of Mac, and there had been, almost, a collective howl. She was part of them all. Down the pub, and the laughter. Back home, her cooking lasagne or cannelloni, or making a sauce. Coming out of the bathroom with maybe just a shirt on, or the see-through robe, and fluttering her eyelashes at them. It just wasn’t possible. Eddie had thought that each of the others would have looked back to the last time they’d seen her, mentally stripped her mood and looked for indicators that she was bugging out on him – and them. He had said he was going to teach and that at the end of his working day he was going to find her. Didn’t know the number, but had dropped her off that first time at the end of a street – a bloody long one – and he’d find her if he had to bang on every door and ring every bell.
He taught with enthusiasm, was maybe at his best. He had ditched Dame Agatha, and had gathered up an armful of weathered, much-used digests of Shakespeare, condensed anthologies. Eddie himself, quietly and with sincerity, had read Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
And a Lithuanian car mechanic had read aloud:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque,
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.
The classroom had rung with applause and he had blushed. A Nigerian who wanted to nurse but needed the language before she could enrol was next:
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
A Somali man who washed dishes in a hotel but wanted to be a street trader stuttered through
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
An Albanian needed more English if he was to get customers for a delivery service up in Stoke Newington. He was last to be chosen and looked about to opt out but Eddie wouldn’t let him, so he tried:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Then the class stamped and slapped their palms on the desk tops. He thought a Hungarian girl, plump, with Beatle spectacles on her nose, was savvy enough to take stock first, and she said to the Algerian next to her, in halting English, that the sonnet was not performed for them but for their teacher, it was his love they had recited, and what she had said went on down the line, behind her, in front of her, and the room echoed with giggles.
They did more extracts and his medley of students, gathered from across the globe, played Ferdinand, Miranda and Prospero, Lysander and Hermia, Juliet and her Nurse, Lorenzo and Jessica. He ended with Sonnet 18, and had the Hungarian girl read it:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
He let her read alone and her delivery grew in confidence, but he brought in the whole class to echo the final couplet and make a chorus:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
It had been a unique class. He doubted it would be repeated.
He would find her, his Mac. He had promised to.
Eddie walked to the staff room and the coffee machine. He felt that purpose had returned.
The bustle of the prosecutor’s office was stilled. He was at his desk, which was littered with a carpet of opened files and more lay on the wood tiles beside it. The deputy prosecutor had a cigarette in his mouth, the lighter lit but left to burn ten centimetres from the tip. The liaison officer winced, air hissing between his near-closed teeth. The personal assistant to the prosecutor bit sharply at a pencil and looked up from her screen. The archivist was halfway across the office from the door to the desk and carried a load of cardboard file-holders that reached from her stomach up to her chin. They were the inner cabal. The call had come, faint and with a poor signal, from Castrolami. The prosecutor looked around, into each face, and they nodded, accepted his judgement: Operation Partenope, named after the mythical daughter of a goddess, who had drowned in the Gulf and was regarded as a symbol of deceit, treachery, was launched.
Now he spoke softly: ‘Let’s get to work. I want on the telephone the extradition team of the Metropolitan Police, if they’re not too arrogant to speak to me. I want the operations director of the Squadra Mobile, and the duty officer, ROS, here for fourteen thirty hours, with arrest squads on stand-by. There must be no breach in security and no names of targets given. We have a small window and must jump through it. And-’
His desk phone pealed. His assistant passed him the receiver, and mouthed that the caller was, again, Castrolami. The prosecutor began to scribble names and addresses, the light of triumph in his eye.