The curse became a gasp. He jack-knifed and snatched up a picture that had been on the rubber matting, smoothed it, gawped. He elbowed her hard in the ribcage below her right breast, jarring his bone on her holster. For a moment the photograph was in her face. She nodded. They had the certainty of youth, and neither would have considered their judgement flawed, their recognition wrong.
Weapons drawn, they ran from the car, left the doors wide. The crown of her head bobbed in front of them and the gap closed.
*
Not hate, but fear. After the doorbell had rung, Immacolata heard a bucket, water splashing, a woman’s voice, and laughter from the minders. She thought a maid had come to clean, and she was ignored.
She realised the weight of her fear.
No warning. No shout to alert her that police with guns drawn were immediately behind her. No opportunity to raise her hands as the pistols were aimed at the point in her back where straps and shoulder muscle met.
Salvatore saw a small tableau in front of him that seemed mimed.
He was used to making calculations, those that involved a reasonable chance of survival within a time frame of a second or two. He could cruise on the pillion his chest and stomach against Fangio’s back, have the P38 in his fist inside the right pocket of his leather jacket, and he would see the target – darkened by his helmet visor – walking, sitting or eating, on the pavement, in a car or at a pizzeria table, and he would know whether or not that was the moment to strike. If he went in for the kill, he would rap his left hand on Fangio’s shoulder, the scooter would swing and take him close, then stop for the few moments he needed to aim and achieve a clean hit. If he hit Fangio’s shoulder twice, Fangio would take the scooter past the target and the hit was aborted: might be an escort in place, a folded windcheater on a table when the temperature was high that would conceal a firearm, might be that a carabinieri or police vehicle was following or approaching. He wouldn’t intervene if he couldn’t succeed.
She was pitched over. The young man stood, legs apart in a movie pose, his weapon aimed – two-handed – at her. The young woman had launched herself and landed on Gabriella Borelli’s back – a she-cat on prey – had wrestled her down and, with one hand, had wrenched an arm of la madrina behind her back. The other held a heavy pistol, big in a slight fist, so that the barrel pressed against the neck. Salvatore had the Beretta half out of his waist belt, and the moment was gone. The man no longer covered Gabriella Borelli but the people – men, women and children – who scattered away from where they had their prisoner, as cars and vans veered to the side. It was as if a cordon was around them, an exclusion area. He thought she would have said, and perhaps stroked his arm as she did so, that she trusted him alone. Because of the open area between him and them, he would be seen and identified if he ran forward, and would have to enter the space to be close enough to fire killing shots.
It could not be done.
He thought that she looked old with her face crushed down on the sand and shit and weeds of the little island where once there had been a traffic bollard. There was dirt on her face, her hair had lost its shape and there was shock in her eyes. He had broken the trust, had failed her.
She was dragged to the car. Her feet did not get a hold and a shoe came off, but she was pulled there and the door thrown open. The young man thrust her in and threw himself on top of her. Fumes spewed from the exhaust and the car sped off. Salvatore saw, before he lost it, a hand clamp a light on the roof and the blue flashes that spilled from it. He heard the siren wail.
He walked away, more alone than he could remember at any time since Pasquale Borelli had chosen him, had taught him to kill, and taught him well.
Flashes in her mind of the moments of fear. A girl left to mind a slow-cooking meat – baby lamb – in the oven, told when to take it out, forgetting, and coming back into the kitchen to see the smoke then cringing from her mother’s beating, a hard one. Her mother made fear, and the hate was secondary. There was no love in her life, not from her family. Love was sealed away from her in the cemetery at Nola. She knew only hatred and fear. More laughter came through her door, but Immacolata did not share it.
He put the phone down, ended one of the calls that seemed to consist of almost endless silences. The display panel told him the connection had been for four minutes and nine seconds, but it had seemed to Arthur Deacon a fair imitation of eternity. He walked slowly from the hall table towards the kitchen. He couldn’t go in as Betty was washing the floor but he came to the doorway and coughed, as if that was the best way to gain his wife’s attention.
She squeezed out the mop, quizzed him with a glance. ‘Well?’
‘It was Edmund.’
‘I know – what did he want?’
She used a mop on the kitchen floor three mornings a week, then went to work at a family firm of builders, and would tut if he stepped on the clean tiles and messed up. He was watching her, thinking how to relay what he had been told.
‘Have you lost your tongue? What did he want? Money? At his age he ought to be able to-’
‘Listen. Just for once. Listen. Thank you.’ He saw astonishment on her face. His boldness, almost, surprised him. She liked to say that her mother had told her on the eve of their wedding, ‘Always remember, Elizabeth, a husband is for life but not for lunch.’ She was at work over lunch time and he made himself sandwiches. She liked also to remind him that she was now the principal breadwinner and he was a pensioner who had taken the early bullet. ‘Yes, best if you simply listen. Edmund has resigned from his job.’
‘What for?’
‘He packed it in as of today. He’s going tomorrow, or this evening if he can arrange it, to Naples.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Listen, and you might – after a fashion. That girl he spoke of, the one he promised to bring to meet us, she’s gone. Gone home. No warning, no explanation, but gone. Sadly, he intends to follow her.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said there were other fish in the sea. Apparently not. I said he’d run the risk of hurting himself. He said he was hurting enough as it was and wouldn’t notice any more pain. He’d never said anything like that to me before, bared himself in that way.’
‘Extraordinary.’
‘I don’t want to be rude, Betty, but I’m wondering whether either of us would have gone chasing halfway across Europe if the other had done a bunk. I doubt that’s unfair. I said I’d look after his Visa bills – and couldn’t think of anything else. Oh, yes, I wished him luck. It didn’t seem sensible to be parental, old and cautionary. That’s it.’
His wife said, ‘No, I wouldn’t have followed you. She must be very special, that girl.’
At that time in the morning, the tourists had not yet come to the museums. Lukas had. The bars, coffees and beers were for later in the day, while squatting close to his friend who drew the river, the Louvre and Notre Dame was for the middle. Early, he came with a plastic bottle of fizzy water to sit on a bench and watch the first arrivals. Most would not know a Millet from a Manet or a Monet, but Lukas had no sense of superiority, and could not have made the distinction himself. He came to see people and search their faces, the better to understand them.
The science he practised affected humble people, average people, ordinary people. It was they who looked at the great statues, the bronzes, outside the former railway station that was now a museum and gazed at the massive charcoal grey bulk of the rampant elephant with flared ears and the rhinoceros that looked ready to charge, both larger than life. It was those people – businessmen, teachers, backpackers, engineers, charity workers, and those of whom it was said ‘Wrong place at the wrong time’ – whom he worked to liberate, to keep alive.