He flicked open the file cover, and spilled out the photographs.
She saw her mother. Immacolata held the photograph under the table light. She looked at the wife of Pasquale Borelli, the leader of the clan and controller of most business activities in Forcella and Sanita, the woman who did deals that had relevance in the north of Italy, in the South of France, in Spain and Germany, who had ambitions for the opening of opportunities in Great Britain, who aspired to be a player on the east coast of the United States and had links with organisations operating in the west of the former Soviet Union. She looked at the photograph of her mother.
A little gasp.
Her gaze slipped to Castrolami. If he felt sympathy for the fate of her mother he disguised it. His expression was blank. He showed neither clemency nor triumph.
She matched his mood.
Her mother, whom she had feared, was on the ground – on concrete built up a few centimetres from the street – was helpless.
For a moment she wondered, and then she asked, ‘Is she dead?’
He shook his head.
In the black-and-white photograph, enlarged to twenty centimetres by twenty-five, her mother was prostrate. A man was poised above her head, his pistol drawn and aimed at her. A woman crawled on her back and had wrenched up one arm so that the hand almost touched the neck, and held a pistol against the neck so that the barrel dented it. Her mother wore the dead look on her face. She was supine, had no fight, did not cringe. It was as if she was comatose from shock. She had fallen awkwardly under the weight of the woman, then must have wriggled backwards to get further clear of the man with the aimed pistol. The effect of that movement had been to ruck up her skirt. It had ridden up her thighs. Immacolata gazed at the photograph. It was the indignity… Her mother’s thighs were white on the grey concrete, but not as white as the knickers she wore. Immacolata had a glimpse of them, frozen by the camera. She thought of the respect her mother demanded – from her children, the clan, foot-soldiers and associates, from businessmen to foreign gang principals. She thought of when a stick had been taken to her, aged twelve, when she had refused to leave her bedroom to sweep the floor in the living room and hall, and when her face had been slapped, a stinging blow, as her mother had announced to her brothers that she was to be la madrina and Immacolata had not suppressed a giggle – of nerves at her mother’s self-elevation to such a height. She thought of the verbal criticism, offered in a cafe, when she had failed to bring back all the protection-payment envelopes from the via Casanova. It was her mother, humiliated, who lay prone in the road, and at the periphery of the camera’s view a small crowd had gathered and formed a wary half-moon. She believed, from the greyness and distortion of the picture, that her mother’s arrest had been captured on a mobile phone. She realised she had been brought this particular photograph – not one of her mother being led through paparazzi and cameramen, flashes and arc lights, able to use the haughtiness of a Pupetta Maresca, a Rosetta Cutolo or a Patrizia Ferriero – to see her mother laid out in a posture of vulgarity.
‘Did I do that?’ Immacolata asked, almost in awe.
Castrolami: ‘Alone, nobody achieves anything. Together, much. You were part of “doing” that. A big enough part, when your involvement is known, to guarantee that the sentence of death is passed on you.’
‘What do you want of me now?’
‘I want you, Signorina – excuse me – to stop trying to play games with me. You should now consider your situation as set in stone. You see the photograph of your mother. I don’t think she’ll be pleased to know that her picture is now a source of amusement throughout Naples. When she knows, and she soon will – it’s inevitable – that her daughter has collaborated and is in part responsible for her being photographed with bare thighs and most of her arse on display, I believe she’ll feel resentful towards you. But there’s no turning back. And she’s behind bars, in a cell. She’s beginning the process of rotting.’
‘Do you know, Dottore, what it’s like to die of leukaemia?’
‘No. I would imagine, though, that it’s worse than being in a cell and rotting.’
‘I think so.’
‘I rarely offer advice, Signorina, but now I’ll break a habit. Don’t waste my time again, and don’t forget your friend’s suffering.’
‘Where do we start?’ she asked, pushing away the photograph.
‘We should talk again of Vincenzo.’
A corridor led from the staircase to the basement cell block and the interview rooms where prisoners met their lawyers. One of the detectives who had arrested Vincenzo Borelli accompanied the custody officers who escorted him from the cell along the corridor. Even for this short walk from a departure point to a destination deep inside a protected police station – and Paddington Green was a fortress, designed to hold resourceful terror captives – he was handcuffed to an officer. Since his arrest, he had seen no lawyer, no detective, only the uniformed men entrusted with guarding and caring for him. He knew nothing.
He was Neapolitan, a man – it was right that strangers should see he cared. He asked softly, with concern, ‘My sister, Immacolata, where is she? Is she held?’
The detective behind him sniggered. He would have thought, Vincenzo recognised, that he dealt with crap, with an Italian. ‘Not held, friend, not here and not likely to be. Actually, friend, she’s shafted you – she’s singing like a whole damn choir… Sorry, did I say that? I don’t think I did.’
Vincenzo thought it was arrogance. The detective needed to appear a mastermind, senior, and to have detailed knowledge of an extradition case. Vincenzo looked blankly ahead as he was led down the corridor, and mimed being simple, fitting a stereotype, not understanding.
In an interview room, he met a lawyer. The lawyer offered him cigarettes, said he came from Catania in Sicily, was based in the British capital and dealt exclusively with cases – criminal and civil – in which Italian citizens needed representation. He said, too, that he had been appointed to act on Vincenzo’s behalf by Umberto. He gave the name of a street and quoted a telephone number as verification that he knew where the clan’s lawyer lived and the number of his personal mobile. Vincenzo told him to call it and deliver a message urgently.
The message was in English: The diva performs with rare beauty and is hired for many performances. He told the lawyer that the message was to be spoken once, fast. That was all he wished to say. He wanted the man gone.
Vincenzo, in his cell, believed that within half an hour the message would be on Umberto’s desk. Umberto would have recorded it for safe transcription, memorised it, then destroyed the tape and the typescript. The door shut on him, a key turned in a lock. He leaned against a wall, much scribbled on and graffiti-strewn, then beat the painted brickwork with his fist till the bruising came.
His own sister…
He left the ticket window and ran. He was last on the train, and he thought that, too, was luck. Eddie Deacon had managed to rip open the heavy door while the uniforms shouted, waved their arms and blew hard on whistles, but he jumped aboard, closed the door after him, they did a sweet smile for the man who reached the window and glowered.
The train rolled out of Rome.
He had come into the city on an airport bus, and had suffered a sea-change. Realised it now. He didn’t have a seat, but stood and rocked with the motion of the carriage. The engine gathered acceleration. The sea-change was in him. Luck was sprinting with him, and he was thankful for it. Darkness flanked the train as it cleared the Roman suburbs, and then he made out the tight clusters of lights high up, and imagined the track had been routed between hills and their old villages. He felt exhilaration, as if he challenged himself. Not bad, was it, getting himself halfway across western Europe on the same day that he’d jacked a job, cleared a bank account? He had plastic his family would guarantee, and was hightailing through the hills south of the Eternal City. Excitement, adventure: they wouldn’t have contemplated it – ‘they’ being the HM Revenue and Customs clerk, the waiter, the ticket man and the student. One would be dragging himself back to the house after a day of staring at a screen with a head fit to bust, the next would be making polite noises to pompous farts in the club and bringing them drinks, the ticket man would be on late shift and counting the minutes till he finished, and the last would be buried in some damn book about manorial field divisions in the Tudor period. They would find his note, hasty, scrawled, and would each feel – Eddie reckoned – a spasm of jealousy – but not half of the jealousy they’d feel when he brought her back. It was excitement, adventure, and he felt himself lifted, almost euphoric.