So, he slapped his face with the palm of each hand, then unfolded the map. He didn’t feel good, he didn’t feel right, but he didn’t feel as if he was about to bloody lie down and cave.
He mapped out a route.
A man had said – in public – that the family was shit, finished, a spent power. Might have been right. Salvatore walked into the bar.
He wore no face mask. The room was brightly lit and his face, features, identity were clear. The clan of which he was the enforcer was worth – if all property investments, treasury bonds and shares in a half-dozen of the leading money markets were added up – in excess of half a billion euros. As an enforcer, he could have been directed to a penthouse apartment on the Cote d’Azur or a villa in a smart, protected suburb of Frankfurt, and his target would have been a banker or investment manager who had misappropriated tens of thousands of euros, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Also, his work was to maintain the respect and dignity the clan family needed. He handed down the justice of the Borellis to those who were high and mighty, to the potential informer who refused to pay a hundred euros a week – and to the braggart in the bar. He looked around him.
He was seen, noticed. He didn’t want anonymity. If many saw and knew him, the word went faster. His eyes fastened on the man.
It had always surprised Salvatore that when he confronted a victim, they seldom ran or fought. They were, almost all, helpless and trapped in terror. This one was no different. He would have said it, that the family were shit, would have repeated it, would have gone home and lain beside his whore-wife in their bed, and the bravado would have oozed away. He would have known that within hours, a few days but less than a week, the enforcer of the clan would come for him. He had nowhere to hide. A victim, a man of forty, would have been familiar with only the few streets that surrounded the districts of Sanita and Forcella, and the labyrinth inside the area of two or three square kilometres. He was, and would have realised it, a dead man walking from the time his mouth had opened and his tongue had flapped, who lived out the final stages of his life in a small flat with his wife and children, in a bar where others were cautious of his company, who was in la cella dei condannati a morte. Others now backed away from him. His jaw was slack, the spittle was white against dark lips and sweat gleamed on his high forehead. He would have felt his legs sag under the weight of his body.
He did not have to show the pistol, the Beretta, at his waist. Salvatore flicked his fingers. He gestured with his head to the door. At that moment some men – bankers or street scum – wet their trousers in the crotch or fouled their seat. Some closed their eyes and began to pray. Some wept, some pleaded. Some spoke of their children, their wives. Some went as if they sleepwalked.
This one did.
Salvatore also knew that the man he had called out would have friends in the bar with whom he had played in the street as a child, sat in schoolrooms, talked and watched football in that bar for an adult lifetime, and none would help him now. Perhaps in a week… not yet. Power not yet gone: a photograph in a newspaper of the thighs and the covered arse of Gabriella Borelli, more photographs of her children in custody, but no certainty, yet, that power was in new hands. None of those friends, once valued, would block the door, defend him.
It was the way of Naples. The authority of the clans, even one seriously wounded – weakened – ruled.
And none in that crowded bar would say they had seen Salvatore’s face. Within two minutes the bar would have emptied, well before the first sirens and lights arrived. Only the staff would be there. All would claim to have been facing the far wall, or busy at the coffee machines, or in the rear store for more milk. That, too, was the way of Naples, unchanged and unchanging.
Clear of the bar, he pushed the man across the broken pavement, a vicious shove. Where a slab should have been there was a pit and the man’s shoe caught in it and he fell forward. He was half in the street and half in the gutter. Salvatore kicked him in the buttock and the man crawled limply forward. He had chosen this place because he knew that no street cameras covered the stretch of road between the Porta Capuana and the via Cesare Rosaroll. He had the pistol out of his belt. He fired one shot and the bullet went into the back of the man’s knee and there was a little limp scream of shock, then another, shrill, from the pain’s spread. Salvatore waved up the street.
Extraordinary – true to Naples, Palermo and Reggio Calabria in the toecap of Italy’s boot: traffic had disappeared from the road. It had been there, a constant, hooting snarl, but was gone. The road was empty but for a white van, old, rusted, with no registration plates.
It could accelerate. The man would have seen it, heard it, but with his leg shot away at the knee he could not avoid it, and squirmed on the tarmacadam. He was in an oil slick now, his shirt smeared, and the van went over him, cleared him. No one saw. No witnesses in the bar, on the pavement or in cars on the road saw the van go over him. Perhaps it crushed his back or broke his neck. Perhaps it left him grievously injured but still living. It braked.
It reversed. It came back up the road and the rear tyres lifted as it mounted the body a second time. When the body was cleared and the van stopped again, there was no movement.
Salvatore climbed into the passenger seat. His driver, whom he called Fangio, went away down the road.
He thought that the clan, those still at liberty, clung to power by the thickness of the string used to bind a birthday present.
An hour later, a boy came to him. He and Fangio, for speed, shared the shower, scrubbed and washed. Their clothing was bagged for disposal. Few knew of that address. The lawyer was among the few. The child brought a scrap of paper and left, running. More than adults, Salvatore, Il Pistole, whose face was on their screensavers, trusted the kids. He had to wipe soap from his eyes before he could read the compacted handwriting. He shuddered.
He crumpled the paper, threw it at Fangio’s feet and saw it carried in the torrent of soapy water down the drain. To shoot a man in the back of the leg meant nothing to him. He was unaffected by the sight of a van speeding down a road well lit with high lamps, then bouncing over a sprawled body. He felt almost a tremble in his legs, under the damp towel.
He would have said he could believe anything of Naples – anything . He had been wrong. He could not have believed, if he hadn’t seen it written in the spider hand of the lawyer, that Immacolata Borelli had collaborated.
Not the thickness of string – the thickness of one strand woven to make string.
He didn’t know, then, what he could do, should do, without the power of the clan at his back. He, too, was dead – squashed, broken, bloody. He didn’t know where he should turn.
He couldn’t still the trembling – or the image of Immacolata Borelli – and he couldn’t believe.
He was at the end of the street under the sign that said it was via Forcella. He saw nothing familiar and nothing that offered a welcome. The light was poor, the shadows harsh. The spearing headlights of weaving scooters caught the shapes of men, women, kids, then lost them as the riders powered away. Eddie Deacon had told himself that it was important, before he went to sleep, to know where via Forcella was, how far away, how… He felt intimidated. There, at the head of the street, and he thought it hardly wide enough for two cars to pass, he realised that a group of kids watched him and he wished he hadn’t brought his wallet with him. He believed himself evaluated as worth a hit or not worth a hit. Nothing he saw reassured him. He was beside a church, but it was darkened and he sensed that the doors were bolted, locked, secure against the night and strangers.