‘Is that what he said?’
‘It’s what I was told he said.’ Salvatore was at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder. His voice had been a murmur and his lips had barely moved. While he had guarded the inner door of the pizzeria, the scugnizzi had brought messages to him. Lower in the chain than the foot-soldiers were the kids who watched entrances to the quarters of the city and reported, listened to conversations in bars and reported, sat in the gutter opposite police stations and carabinieri barracks and reported.
‘Say it to me again.’ She spoke from the side of her mouth, a whisper, as the traffic roared by, horns blasted, men and women walked along the pavement, and her words were lost to all but Salvatore.
‘He was in the bar at the top end of Casanova, Luigi Pirelli’s bar. He was in a group and the TV was on. The arrests… Alfredo’s youngest heard him. He said, ‘The Borelli clan is history. They’re finished, old, shit and soft. They have no authority now. Count the days, they’ll be gone.’
‘That man, he is not to say that again.’
She walked on. Salvatore dropped back. He was soon fifteen or twenty paces behind her. He had much to think about. He was the enforcer of the clan and answered only to Gabriella Borelli. He had taken on, also, responsibility for her security and the offshoots of the group. Three years ago, before he had been arrested, Pasquale Borelli would have had the last say on security. Eight months ago, before his flight to London, Vincenzo had been given that responsibility in his father’s absence. He did not know where such leakage of information had come from: the faces of men bounced in his mind, called forward, then discarded. He kept her back in his sight, and the pistol, the Beretta P38, was in his belt. He wore a loose-fitting jacket to conceal it.
She was tough, and her walk showed it. The weakness of the last evening had been short-lived. Salvatore thought Gabriella Borelli magnificent as he tracked her, watching her back.
He asked, respectfully, if Lottie would join him in the staffroom alcove. Eddie Deacon hardly knew her, had offered her no friendship, but now he needed her. She was – and the young guys who taught at the language school tittered over it – shyly lesbian. Obvious, but never confessed. Lottie had not outed herself. She was reluctant to come with him, suspicious, but then he did what he reckoned was his best imitation of ‘Labrador eyes’ and she would have seen it mattered to him. There was no snigger on his lips.
Eddie said, ‘Sorry and all that, but I need help. I’ve lost a girl. It’s really hacked me off. Don’t know where she is, other than gone home, and she’s Italian, from Naples. Says on Google that a million people live there, that the city is a hundred and twenty square kilometres. I have to find her, but I don’t know where to start.’
Lottie looked at him in the marginal privacy of the alcove, perhaps remembered slights that were not imagined, remarks behind hands and little darts of cruelty. ‘What if little Miss Perfect doesn’t want to be found – at least, not by you?… All right, all right. What have you got that might help?’
Eddie had the torn scrap of paper in a see-through plastic bag, as if it was priceless. He seemed reluctant to give it up, share it, but did so.
‘You didn’t answer me. What if she rates you a pain, and wants shot of you?’
‘I’ll have her say it to my face,’ Eddie said. He shrugged, then did the smile he was famed for – it implied that no woman could possibly want shot of him. Lottie grinned, then looked at the handwriting. He had gone to her because she had spent time in Naples, at the university, and spoke the language fluently. He tried to joke: ‘I really don’t understand why any female of the species could want shot of me, let alone rate me a pain. Just not on the agenda.’
She studied the paper as if it were a crossword puzzle, then gazed at him. ‘I’m wondering, Eddie, if you’re behaving like an adult or reverting to teenage male, all acne and infatuation – or is that not my business?’
‘Just a little old cry for help… please. If it wasn’t for her, it’s you I’d be chucking red roses at.’
She rolled her eyes, almost blushed. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Immacolata Borelli.’
She breathed out hard. ‘Right, line one, try Borelli. Line two, go with a number and via Forcella. Line three will be the zip code, four more preceding digits, then 157, for that part of the Forcella district that runs between via del Duomo and the Castel Capuano. The last line is Napoli. It’s hardly Enigma code-breaking but, then, you’re only a man.’
‘A specimen to be pitied.’
After she’d repeated it, and he’d written it in ballpoint on the back of his hand, he surprised himself, and her, by taking hold of her shoulders and kissing her hard on both cheeks. He was turning away as she said, ‘Are you really going there?’
‘Too right – what else?’
Eddie Deacon set off down the corridor for the principal’s office.
Twenty metres had become forty. They were on via Carbonara, close to the old castle that had doubled as a courthouse. He understood the route she had taken. In Salvatore’s mind many issues competed for prominence: the man who had said the Borelli clan was ‘finished, old, shit and soft’, a leak in security, his job as protector to Gabriella Borelli. Any could have claimed priority, but he didn’t make that choice. Then he looked at his watch, saw the time, recognised he was late for the rendezvous with his scooter driver, Fangio, and smiled. Gabriella Borelli was at the lights, waiting for the pedestrian green and would cross via Carbonara above the castle. He smiled when he remembered ‘Fangio’, who had done a ‘Wall of Death’ stunt in a circus, had crashed spectacularly in front of five hundred punters, or more, and would not have had the money to buy a new bike. He had always enjoyed the memory of Fangio’s face when he was offered the post of scooter rider to Salvatore, Il Pistole. Fangio had been in Poggioreale and Secondigliano, was no altar-boy. There were few Salvatore trusted, but Fangio was one. Many people were waiting to cross at those lights, then the traffic slowed and the charge started. Not for Neapolitans to wait. Sinewy lines of pedestrians wove among the vehicles. He could barely see her.
She had heard doors close, and a minute later a car had revved outside the block. Then music had started in the apartment, and the only voices were those of the minders.
She lay on the bed, her head on the pillow, straining to hear what was said. The music was opera and distorted the voices. She realised the prosecutor had gone, would now be on his journey to Naples. There had been no soft knock on her door, and no discreet voice – maybe that of the woman, his assistant – had urged her to come out of her room, to co-operate. She had been abandoned.
She had convinced herself that walking out on them was justified by their display of incompetence. They had failed to arrest her mother.
The doorbell rang.
They were at the bottom of the seniority heap. He was twenty-four and she was his senior by three months. They had started at the training school on the same Monday morning, had been posted to Naples on the same Monday, accepted and begun duty with the Squadra Mobile on another, very recent, Monday. To survive, they stayed close, had volunteered to work together. Around them there were men and women who were prematurely aged, jaundiced and pessimistic, who preached that ambition was heresy in the team. They had been up all the previous night and now headed for their homes out to the south on the sea front and sleep.
He had driven one of the Alfas carrying a senior man to a block where, on the third floor, they had hoped to find la madrina. She had driven a car filled with officers to another of the addresses given by an informant – not identified at the briefing. Now she drove and stifled a yawn, changed down and braked. Pedestrians flooded the roadway around them. The photographs, blown up, of Gabriella Borelli, the target, were in the car. He cursed. Both were hungry, exhausted; both, for the operation the night before, had studied the photograph long and hard.