His shin was kicked.
A sharp blow with a heavy lace-up shoe, which stabbed pain into the bone.
He thought she might as well have condemned their granddaughter. It had taken five or six seconds for him to relay the message, and twenty-six years of love, commitment and caring were obliterated.
He looked into his wife’s face. Many times in those sixty-six years of marriage she had worn an expression that frightened him, and so it was. He saw in that face a terrible, but controlled, hatred. Where Immacolata was involved, he could be soft – but his wife could not.
They had broken. Castrolami came into the kitchen to make tea and left Immacolata Borelli to sip a glass of juice.
It was different. He had fastened the photograph to the wall. From where he had sat her at the table, the microphone close to her, she faced it. He was to the side of her. It was natural for her to look up, to be certain that a point made was assimilated, and then she saw her mother – on the ground, in humiliation, the skirt pushed up, white skin, whiter underwear, dignity and control stripped. It was different because the Borelli girl now talked, and during the time he had been there he had used three spare tapes from the stack he had brought. They had moved beyond Vincenzo, enough on the first two tapes to ensure an extradition case to go with the evidence already laid before the British courts on charges of murder, and the third detailed the control of Gabriella Borelli over the clan, not mere supposition. Supposition would have been that Pasquale Borelli slipped out messages from the gaol of Novara through a route in the gaol’s catering; detail was that the route, whereby the husband let the wife have his advice, involved the man who brought the flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and cheap dried milk to the prison bakery, and was a facilitator for the communications of two maximum-security Sicilians. Supposition was that the contract for a new sewage works at a town inland from Naples had corrupt political involvement; detail named the men who had granted the contract in the local town hall, what they had been paid for their cooperation, how the payment was made and how that contract would be shared between different clans – who had trucking, who had labour, who had cement. Castrolami needed to break the meeting for tea.
Orecchia took milk from the refrigerator and poured it. ‘You’re pleased with her.’
‘More so than before.’
Orecchia’s smile was cold. ‘You were hard on her.’
Castrolami said, ‘Because I feel nothing for her. She is not a true pentita. There is no sense of penitence. The death of a friend, linked to her, and an attack on her at a cemetery, her being too late to attend the funeral Mass combine to create a sense of guilt. She seeks to redress the guilt, but that’s not penitence. Revenge, anger, dislike for her family, who may not have valued her as she thought she deserved… Many things. But it’s not a road-to-Damascus conversion.’
‘She’s not Paul,’ Orecchia murmured, ‘but few of them are.’
‘And no shining light, only little grievances topped by the friend’s death. No sense of outrage at the criminality of the Camorra, what has happened to the city, Naples distinguished by callousness. Shit, that’s boring.’
‘Excuse me, have you no sense of sincerity? You see her as shallow?’
‘You know better than I, friend, what she’ll face. When the pressure crushes her, we’ll see sincerity or not…’
Orecchia handed him the cup, no saucer, and a sweet biscuit. ‘Me, when I go home – not often – I stand in the shower for a full fifteen minutes and the family screams there’ll be no hot water for the rest of that day. They say I’m mad, that I sup with devils. I say I eat with a long spoon. You know what’s worse? The collaborators believe they do me, Rossi, you, society, a great favour by coming to us. I despise them.’
Castrolami smiled grimly. ‘Maybe you’d find spiritual fulfilment as a street sweeper. Thanks for the tea.’
Orecchia said, ‘I’m not joking. I trust this one, all of them, as far as I can kick them. They entangle people, squeeze and suck the goodness from them.’
‘I hear you.’ Castrolami couldn’t have argued with a word he’d said, but he wondered how a man survived in his work if he saw only bleakness. Did he laugh at home? Did he follow a football team with the fanaticism of the Mastiffs in Naples? Did he pay tarts? Castrolami wondered if Orecchia was ever saddened when a collaborator was cut loose from the protection programme and left to fend for himself – did he ever respect them? That evening he would talk to Signorina Immacolata about her mother’s hard-drugs-importation programmes and…
The voice droned again at him: ‘To be touched by them is to be contaminated.’
More luck. He was told that a single room was available, the last, and that it was the first day after the end of the high-season rate – big luck double time for Eddie Deacon, innocent and ignorant.
The accommodation desk at the city’s railway station had found him the room. A pretty girl had circled the hotel on a map and confirmed it would not be expensive. He had slung the bag over his shoulder and started to walk, making his way – only two wrong turnings – from the wide square, the piazza Garibaldi. He had tasted the heat, the noise, the smells and the chaos of traffic and scooters, and had known the first pangs of nerves. He had stood outside the hotel door and the neon above him blinked without pattern. Kids stood on the streets, smoked and didn’t talk but eyed him. More nerves. They spoke some English inside, and the man who gave him the key had a squint, a khaki mole on his cheek and a stutter. Eddie spoke kindly to him. He thought, then, that he needed a friend – any bloody friend from any bloody place. Maybe the excitement, the adventure, the exhilaration, like the neon, blinked.
He went up to the room. His step was heavier and the bounce had gone. They were saving on power for the stairs: the bulbs were low-wattage and made the shadows longer, the greyness of the walls and ceiling deeper, the lack of light accentuating the scratches in the paint. He was no longer within the civilisation boundaries of the train carriage that had brought him south. He heard a couple row in German about the cost of the meal that evening and the budget being blown. Another couple on the next floor up grunted, squealed and worked the bedsprings, and there was a tray outside the door on which was a barely nibbled pizza: the sex sounded good but the pizza had dried out. He had been told by the girl at the accommodation desk at Napoli Centrale that this pensione was the best he could afford. He went on up the staircase, the carpet thinner, more faded and worn with each flight.
The key was on a chain that hooked on to a small wooden ball. He slipped the little card that had come with it – his name, room number, the hotel address – into his trouser pocket, opened the door and groped for the switch.
The room was smaller than a prison cell, with a wardrobe, an upright chair, a table hardly deep enough for an A4 sheet of paper and a single bed. Beside the wardrobe there was a square section of transparent plastic for a shower, basin and toilet. Only a damn small cat, a kitten, could have been swung in it. Had he expected a Marriott room, or one from a Holiday Inn, maybe an InterContinental? Old story: in this world, Eddie, you get what you pay for. Eddie Deacon, in Germany or France, had never felt himself a stranger, had not been the lonely foreigner.
He pushed open a window and the sounds of the night buffeted against him – cars, screaming, music turned up high. He knew he was in a street behind the piazza Garibaldi because it showed up on the map he had been given. He had asked the girl if it was near to the via Forcella and she had shrugged as if to indicate that only an idiot needed that information, and then she had agreed it was. Another visitor to Naples, with a rucksack on his back, had elbowed Eddie away from the desk. He felt an increase in those nerve pangs.