‘We’re not bullet-catchers or human shields.’
‘We know our trade. We’ll do all in our power to protect you.’
She poured more coffee for herself, slurped it. The doorbell rang. Orecchia glanced at his watch, was satisfied. Rossi took his hand off the pistol in the holster and went to the hall, but Orecchia stayed in front of her, blocking a view of her from the archway linking the kitchen to the hall. His hand did not leave the pistol in his holster.
Immacolata was introduced to the prosecutor. She had seen him many times before – on most days his picture was in Cronaca or Il Mattino, or his image was broadcast on the local RAI channel, and he had been in court when she had seen her father brought in chains to the cage. He was slighter than she had imagined, his hair was thinner and his checks had the pallor of exhaustion. She thought of the magnetism in her father’s eyes, the way they mesmerised and captured attention. Ash stained the front of the prosecutor’s jacket and he dumped a heavy briefcase on the kitchen table.
He pulled out a file with her name and photograph on it. She thought of the cemetery at Nola. The table was cleared. She was told that the woman with the prosecutor was his personal assistant. A tape-recorder was laid on the table and wires were connected to a small microphone. She noticed now that the plates and cups had been stacked in the sink, and the guns had gone.
The tape-recorder was switched on, there were the briefest preliminaries. Immacolata kept the cemetery in her mind, the statue of Angelabella, the screams directed at her, the anger, and the pain inflicted on her. She started to talk.
Gabriella Borelli needed to work. There had been La Piccolina a decade earlier, and before the Little Girl, as Maria Licciardi was known, there had been Rosetta Cutolo, known as ‘Ice Eyes’ in the city. There had been Carmela Marzano and Pupetta Maresca. All had been figures of consequence on the streets of Naples, as was Gabriella Borelli. She had to work if she was to cling to the most important strand in the life of a woman who craved and valued the title ‘ la madrina ’, which was power. The gaining of it far outstripped the acquisition of money. Power came, primarily, from the ability to do successful deals.
She could not hide in an underground den, as Pasquale had been able to. She needed meetings, and to be at them without the clay of the countryside on her shoes or the dust of cement-floored bunkers on her skirt. She was in the back room of a pizzeria on the northern side of the via Foria, one of the busiest streets in the city for traffic and pedestrians, where noise and movement were constant, overpowering and engulfing. She had slept fitfully at the home of the mother of a man who drove cement-mixing trucks for the clan; had arrived on the doorstep, had been admitted in time to see the midnight news on the local RAI channel, had seen tape of Giovanni and Silvio paraded past the ranks of the paparazzi, an old monochrome picture of Vincenzo, had heard the mayor in front of the grand building on piazza Municipio speak of a ‘great blow against the heart of the evil of the criminal culture’ of the city. She had been brought fruit and cheese and had been offered the woman’s big bed, had declined and slept on a settee, with her handbag on the floor beside her head, the small pistol in it within easy reach. It was the first time she had used that address as a refuge for a single night: it would not have been known as a place of importance to her – as were the safe-houses that had been raided. She understood that she had been betrayed from inside the clan, but did not yet know by whom. She had been gone early in the morning, as the city’s life returned, and had walked to the pizzeria.
Salvatore was outside the inner door.
She met with Albanians. They talked of the movement of girls – none, she demanded, to be more than fourteen – who would be taken from Moldova overland to Tirana, then brought to the Adriatic coast to be ferried by speedboat to a fishing village north of the Italian port of Bari, then driven to Naples. She was firm on the price, would not haggle. She demanded also that the girls be made available for medical examination to prove virginity, then stared at a dull ceiling light while they bickered among themselves. She presumed they would have learned that she was a police and carabinieri front-line target, that her organisation was in danger of being successfully dismantled, and that they might believe she was vulnerable.
The matter of the girls was dealt with. Brusquely, she continued with the agenda: refined heroin – the poppies from Afghanistan, the chemical from the laboratories of Turkey, then shipped from the Balkans and Montenegro to the port of Naples. The price of the heroin. Again, no debate permitted. She said what she would pay. Monies were agreed, delivery dates accepted.
Her meeting broke. She shook their hands formally to bind the agreements.
She went out of the pizzeria’s front door on to the street.
She did not, of course, carry a diary. Everything was in her head. Meeting locations and times, rendezvous points, market prices. The next meeting – in another back room, in a bar on the via Arenaccia – was to determine the volume of hardcore stone for the foundations of a new apartment block on Cristoforo Colombo, then the amount of concrete required for the six-storey construction, the prices for the materials and the fee for the men in the municipio who would give permission to build. It was a normal routine for Gabriella Borelli.
The sun was warm on her face. She felt as if a winter frost thawed. By the conclusion of the meeting the Albanians had shown her the necessary respect. She wondered if those who had guided them to the rendezvous had shown them a half-page of yesterday’s Cronaca and translated a report on the death of a man in a street, the meal made of his testicles. She walked briskly, Salvatore, Il Pistole, behind her, and felt she had regained control.
They broke. The recorder was switched off and a new tape inserted. The prosecutor’s assistant went to the toilet.
She looked up into the prosecutor’s face and hoped for a smile and praise. Immacolata Borelli had been prompted to talk about her brother, Vincenzo, who was to appear before magistrates that morning and would then be transferred to a maximum-security facility. She was confused. ‘You haven’t mentioned my mother.’
‘That is correct,’ the prosecutor answered gravely.
‘You took her?’ she pressed.
‘We did not.’ A small frown cut into his forehead.
‘Because you couldn’t find her.’
‘She wasn’t where we looked for her.’ The prosecutor’s tongue licked his lower lip.
‘I told you where to go.’
‘You did.’
‘She was the principal target.’
‘She was one target. We regret she isn’t yet in custody. She will be, very soon.’ He smiled wanly. The assistant came back to her chair and the recorder was switched on again. ‘It shouldn’t concern you whether or not your mother’s in custody.’
The gesture was fast, instinctive. Immacolata hit the table with the heel of her hand. The impact bounced the tape-recorder and spilled the prosecutor’s coffee. There was a flicker of movement in a doorway off the hall as if a watcher had been alerted. She said, ‘I won’t talk to you until my mother has been taken. I trusted in your competence. You have failed.’
‘Do you imagine I travel lightly from Naples to Rome to hear the tantrum of a woman who overestimates her own importance? I can cut you loose and-’
‘You won’t take my mother.’
She stood and the chair fell behind her, clattered. She didn’t look at them, didn’t see the slow turn of the spools in the tape-recorder. She went to her room and slammed the door. It was her mother’s face, lit by camera flashes, that she wanted to see, her mother’s face, in shadow as a cell door closed on a corridor’s lights, and her mother’s face, when early sunlight caught the cell windows and the bars made stripes on her skin. Her strongest emotion that morning was not love but hate. It went so deep. It covered a mother’s apparent indifference to a girl-child, the failure of the parent to rate the achievements of a daughter. Immacolata had been denied attention, denied praise, ignored. She lay on the bed. There had been hate for her mother, but now there was fear at the reach of her arm.