It was a brilliant line, so fast, so modern, so smooth. It was as if he had entered true civilisation. Didn’t have a line like this, or a carriage, on the route to Chippenham. He knew of nothing now that could block him. He was on a pedestal, had placed himself there.
He would find her.
‘Incredible! It’s Mac! Wow! Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’
‘Did you now? Funny old world, yeah?’ And hearing her voice, the accent and the lilt, and knowing she damn near laughed – not at him, with him.
‘Like you say, Mac, “funny old world”. Shall we go and get a beer?’
‘Can’t think of anything better.’
Didn’t know where he’d find her, couldn’t picture it – or where she’d lead him to find a beer. Didn’t care. Excitement was the narcotic in Eddie Deacon. On this train, on the new track, it would take ninety minutes to travel from Rome to Naples. Everything went for him, and luck smiled. Why should it not?
He read the note that the child had brought him. He needed a magnifying-glass to decipher the tiny characters. It was Carmine Borelli who had first taken the young lawyer, Umberto, inside the clan’s affairs. He had spotted the overweight and indulgent rookie with no resources of his own, and no family to keep him in a fitting standard of living, and had backed his intuition. It had been forty years the previous June since he had made the approach, and the youthful Umberto had virtually kissed his hand in gratitude. It astonished him that Umberto’s ponderous, stubby fingers were capable of writing in such a delicate minuscule style. He would have thought the lawyer too clumsy to fashion it. The magnifying-glass made the message clear.
Clear, but almost unbelievable.
Your daughter-in-law arrested, your grandsons also arrested. Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.
He couldn’t complain that four words were used when one sufficed. So few words and so great this effect. He was breathing hard, with wheezes and bubbling gasps. He understood. It was a situation as critical for the clan he had founded as that which had confronted the brothers in Sicily during the Fascist regime and the rule of the brutal ‘prefect of iron’, Cesare Mori, when the Cosa Nostra had been closest to defeat, and no different in Naples during the time of Mussolini. But Mussolini had fallen, and the Allies had landed first in Sicily, then on the mainland at Salerno, and a new era of opportunity had arrived. Carmine Borelli had seized that opportunity, had begun to form the apparatus of the clan that bore his name. It had survived, with respect, on the streets and in the files of the Palace of Justice for sixty-six years. He had been married to Anna only two years when American troops had entered the bombed streets of Naples. Everything he had built – according to the note a street child had brought him from the lawyer – was now at risk.
A convulsion of coughing shook his body. He spat phlegm into his handkerchief and the irritation passed. He sat still in his chair with the scrap of paper in his palm and the magnifying glass. He did not call his wife, but she had admitted the child and would have known that the much-folded piece of paper was of importance so had allowed him to digest it first, then would come to share. He had known, of course – as she did – that the boys were held, not merely Silvio, that Gabriella had been taken in the street and her photograph circulated in the day’s newspapers. The bite of the vipera was your granddaughter collaborates. If he smoked more than a full carton in a day there were pains in his chest – but no worse than those now in his mind. He could think of so many clans in which a member of the inner family had taken the pentito programme of the Palace of Justice, and he had always – in the fifteen years since the programme had been launched – felt a sense of superiority over those who had not been able to hold the loyalty of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters. It was his own nipote who sat now with the men who were his lifetime enemy.
Much for him to reflect on.
He remembered the contempt he had larded on those clans cut deep by the testimony of their own: the sneer, the retort, the shrug, and the secret feeling that it was but for God’s grace that… It could have been his brother, now long dead, or his brother’s son, shot and left to bleed to death on the via Carbonara, or his grandson, the least liked among his nipoti, Giovanni. It was none of them. Immacolata was accused.
He let his mind rove. His wife, Anna, had brought the newborn granddaughter to the visitors’ hall at the Poggioreale gaol. In that place of dirt, noise and despair, where he had been held for four months before the charges of extortion were dropped, the infant had slept, as if unaffected by where she was, had made a little island of calm in the clamour. Her christening had been delayed until his release. He had been present in the church at the top of the street in Forcella, and the priest had been his friend. The child’s father had been one of the many latitanti in the city, in flight from the prosecutor, and Carmine had replaced Pasquale in the place of honour at Immacolata’s first communion and had hosted the celebration lunch. The child became a teenager, then a young woman, and he would sit her beside him and give her the benefit of his experience, and she would listen. He would have said that her affection for him was great – greater than she harboured for her mother and father – and that her respect for him was total.
Anna came into the room. She had poor eyesight, poorer than his, and her chair was always by the window. She reached out a hand and he passed her the scrap of paper and the magnifying-glass. She glanced at the note, then shook her head sharply. It was for him to tell her what was written, and to repeat it would be another wound, cut ever deeper. He used the zapper to turn on the big TV and raise its volume. There had been police in the house so recently and not a chance of observing them: he would say nothing of importance without turning on the television and increasing the volume. She leaned close to him and he to her, his lips little more than ten centimetres from her ear. He could see each of the cancer marks on her skin, the wrinkles at her throat and the hairs on her upper lip. He told her everything, and always had.
He said, ‘The boy came from Umberto. Umberto writes, “Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.” Umberto denounces Immacolata. She is, Umberto says, an infame. Immacolata seeks to destroy us.’
She gave no answer. Carmine could see only the chill slab of his wife’s face, devoid of expression. The child, Immacolata, had spent as many of her waking hours in this apartment as she had in her mother’s. It was personal, the hurt. Anna gave no answer, he believed, because she still pondered on what her response should be. She would not speak unless there were words of substance to say. He felt the damp on his face. A tear trickled down his skin to the thin stubble on his cheek.