She saw that two stewardesses and a purser eyed her, almost stripped her. It was obvious that she was a fugitive returning. No sympathy, no clemency. She had been offered a rug for her knees and had declined it, also earphones for the stereo. The trolley had come with newspapers – Corriere, Messaggero and Repubblica and she’d said she didn’t want one. A few remarks only, and she wondered if they were sufficient for the cabin crew to know she was Neapolitan. If she was from Naples and in custody, she was a camorrista. She understood then that few shoulders would offer her a place to weep.
He had reached into his pocket and produced a pair of dark glasses. He handed them to her. The lights were poor in the cabin and outside it was late evening. She shook her head.
Castrolami said, ‘Maybe there’s a photographer. How do I know, when I have no control over it, what the security’s like? I’m off my patch. Maybe this place leaks. Maybe your name is out. You want to make it easier for them? Put them on and turn up your coat collar. I don’t want you dead, Signorina…’
She put on the glasses and pulled up the collar so that it half covered her cheeks. She thought, was not certain because his voice was only a murmur, that he added, ‘Not before we’ve had you in court and testifying.’
He took her arm, led her out through the door and on to the pier, then down a flight of side steps into the night. Two cars waited, and men had sub-machine guns. The rear door of the lead car was open for her. Fingers lay on trigger guards. She was from a clan family and couldn’t play at ignorance, and she understood the reaction towards a traitor and knew their fate. She attempted to bring to mind Marianna Rossetti’s face, the last time she had seen it, without the ravages of leukaemia.
Immacolata Borelli had completed the first stage of her journey home. She dropped her head, sank on to the back seat and the crackle of radios was around her as she was driven away.
Music played at one cafe and the last stages of a soccer game were on a television at the other. Lukas was about halfway between the soccer and the music, and had yesterday’s Herald Tribune in front of him with a month-old copy of Match.
Most evenings, when he was in Paris, he walked down the rue de Bellechasse and on to the rue St Dominique. There, he would pause outside the building with the double gate wide enough for a carriage and pair to go through, and he would take a moment under the plaque to consider the life and work of J. B. Dumas, Chimiste-Secretaire Perpetuel de l’Academie des Sciences, and note a date carved in the stone that put recognition of this man at 209 years ago. It was important for Lukas to stop for those few seconds, break his evening walk to the Bar le Bellechasse, the Drop Cafe or the Cafe des Deux Musees, because then he placed matters in his life into a correct perspective, one that he could manage to be alongside. There would be no plaque erected in Kabul, or Baghdad, up in the forests of the Midwest or in the triple-canopy jungle high in the Cordillera Central east of Cali for a co-ordinator who made the judgement – weighed lives and deaths – between the arguments of the negotiators and the storm-squad commanders. Nobody would read a plaque naming Lukas Sometimes a Saviour and sometimes a Killer, Federal Bureau of Investigation and lately of Ground Force Security (London). Lukas did not rate himself important enough to warrant a plaque.
He thought them good people who served in the cafes and bars he patronised. They were ordinary people, who would not know of the situations that confronted him when he worked. It was better not to bring back to Paris with him, in his rucksack, the situations and knife-edges on which he operated. If business was slack they talked to him about the concerns and excitements of ‘ordinary’ people, and did not push for entry into his life – his unexplained absences – or pry, and they brought him beer and he gave them tips in midsummer and before Christmas. He paid always for what was brought to him unless the patron came with the drink. They could all set agendas and choose the subjects – had free range – except one area. He would steer the talk away from sons: he didn’t welcome chatter about the triumphs and failures of sons. It was an area of pain suppressed, not shared, and he managed the deflection with subtle skill. In the bars and cafes, wiling away the evening hours, he never drank so that his mind clouded: the telephone in the apartment could ring at any time and activate the voicemail.
There was agitation at the far end of the bar. His name was called by a white-aproned waiter and he was told that the game had gone to penalty kicks and he should come for the death throes, but he smiled, shook his head, stayed in his chair and nursed his beer. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go to the museums – first the Musee d’Orsay and then that of the Legion – if the telephone had not rung and no message had been left.
5
The kid hissed, ‘No lights, only the torch. And no torch till the curtains are done.’
Eddie Deacon could honestly have said that never in his life had he done anything that warranted the intervention of the police. Maybe he was a bit drunk sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night, rolling along the street and using a lamp-post as a crutch, but he hadn’t done anything that required an officer to get stuck into him. It didn’t make him special, just ordinary. If a policeman’s torch had lit him now, it would have been handcuffs, the back of a wagon and a cell door slamming.
The kid had asked for fifty; they had haggled. He had settled for thirty. Eddie thought the kid might be as young as nine. Newspapers he glanced at in the staff room carried interminable features on the spread of hooligans on the capital’s streets. Thirty pounds had been passed, and to make it up Eddie had had to empty a pocket and dig up pound and fifty-pence coins. It was big money to him, but he didn’t think it was high-value work to the kid… He rather liked him.
They had gone to the parallel street at the back. The kid had led and Eddie had followed. There was a locked iron gate at the side of a four-house terrace, and the kid had unfastened the lock as if it was easier than opening a toothpaste tube. They had edged along a garden, while inside a baby cried and a television played, and Eddie had been helped over the end wall. They had dropped down into a yard filled with sodden cardboard cartons that would have come from the shop alongside the steps to the door used by Immacolata and her brother. Next, up a drainpipe using a dumped stool to get clear of the ground, then a window ledge. The kid used a penknife on the window while Eddie tottered beside him. The kid was sure-footed and showed no fear. The window was levered up and a small thin arm, width of a broomstick, came down, a hand took Eddie’s and wrenched it through the gap. Funny thing. When the small hand took his weight, Eddie never doubted that he was safe.
What he liked about the kid was his sheer anarchy. Didn’t do arithmetic, as nine- or ten-year-olds should, but did burglary. Didn’t do joined-up writing and reading aloud but did house-breaking. And smiled: wasn’t sour-faced, but had an openness and a sense of untamed rebellion about him that were captivating. They stood statue still in the darkened room, listened and heard nothing. Then the window was closed and the kid said – still a treble voice – his friend Vinny had boasted that a new alarm system had been installed, had cost a grand, that the system couldn’t be interfered with by an intruder. The kid said, shrill whisper, that the system was shit and he’d gone into the apartment by this route, disabled it and brought out a leather-covered Filofax by way of proof and carried it to the trattoria where Vinny ate his pizza. Eddie hadn’t understood how the circuits could be blocked but Vinny had. He had given the kid fifty pounds.
The kid worshipped Vinny. Only when he was talking about him did the anarchy light go out of his eyes. He had looked away just once, not done eyeball-to-eyeball, when Eddie had asked what work was Vinny in. The kid had said, ‘Business,’ and looked away. Eddie remembered how he had been at that age – guarded, protected, supervised, bred on a wish-list of ambition and success, and damn near frightened of his own shadow.