The sun shone on her.
A maid sluiced the tiles of the kitchen floor.
Orecchia lounged on a settee behind her and read his newspaper – a socialist one that her father, Pasquale, said was fit only for wiping a backside. He never spoke or coughed or intruded in any way, but his holster harness was round his shirt.
Rossi was on the balcony and swept up dried leaves that had fallen from the plants in the ochre pots. He would have been aware that he could be seen by the residents in other blocks so his holster was hitched on a chair. She had fired a pistol, but never at a human target. Had her mother? Perhaps, but she didn’t know. She couldn’t have said whether her mother killed by proxy – Vincenzo, Giovanni, or the cold, creepy one they used – or had done it for herself. It didn’t matter. After she had talked about money, she would go on to killings. With killings she might raise Castrolami’s eyebrows. Rossi swept diligently, but sometimes she looked up and out through the opened glass doors to the terrace and she thought he watched her, and each time she set her shoulders back and allowed her blouse to be stretched. Then he swept some more.
There had been no views from the apartment her brother rented in London or from the buildings they had occupied in Sanita and Forcella: roofs, water tanks, satellite dishes, and glimpses of the great mountain where the cap was missing. Here, from Collina Fleming, the view was exceptional. Clear skies above, trees and an autostrada link below, and a distant horizon of grey hazed hills on which clouds perched. Maybe she would live here… Have a maid who came in and cleaned… Finish accountancy courses and have diplomas… Set up in a small business with money provided by Castrolami’s people, or the prosecutor’s people, until she was able to support herself… A new name… And maybe meet someone, have babies, maybe… The warmth filled the apartment but a small zephyr wind came with it. Immacolata had dreamed of her future and talked of her mother.
‘Every April she goes to the Societe Generale bank on the road called La Canebiere, number fifteen, in Marseille. She is driven to Bari, then flies to Milan and connects to Marseille. She starts early. She has lunch with her manager, and is back the same evening. They think she’s a resident of Milan. That account is for more than two million euros and-’
A plastic bucket on the balcony toppled. She realised then that Rossi had swept and now watered the pots. He had kicked over the bucket. She stopped. That brought a reaction from Castrolami, a little hissed curse because she had been interrupted and the flow broken.
‘How am I doing?’
‘You talk and we listen. That’s what’s expected.’
It was the place, in a dream, that she might live, away from the dark, drear streets of Naples, beyond the reach of Sanita and Forcella – and the gaols at Poggioreale and Novara – beyond the reach of the hands that would be scrabbling for her eyes.
‘Please, I want to go out.’
Now wariness clouded Castrolami’s face. ‘You know what’s dictated. No phone calls, no meetings, no contacts. Signorina Immacolata, they’ll kill you.’
‘I want to buy food – I want to cook.’
He sighed. She thought him confused. He had finished shaving. Now he opened the head of the machine and blew the mess out on to the floor. ‘What other banks outside Italy does your mother use?’
‘And we’ll shop and I’ll cook?’
‘Yes… The other banks?’
‘She doesn’t visit it but meets a representative in Turin each January, the Danske Bank in Stockholm, on Norrmalmstorg. In Spain, in Madrid, the family uses the Banco Santander for fixed-term deposits.’
Her mind had drifted. It was where she could be, could settle, could live, could make a new family.
His mobile rang. The noise, insistent, clamoured in his pocket: he had tried to emphasise that he shouldn’t be called when he was with the pentita, Immacolata Borelli, unless to be given information of seismic importance. They had gone beyond European banks, were now in the Cayman Islands – a Swiss bank – and had just talked through Greek Cyprus, a Larnaca branch. She stopped and he switched off the tape.
He listened. It was the message he had expected – he might have been surprised had it not surfaced the previous evening.
A Naples newspaper, Cronaca, had telephoned the Palace of Justice and asked for guidance on a rumour in the Forcella and Sanita districts that Immacolata Borelli, twenty-five-year-old daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, was collaborating. Was the rumour confirmed or denied? He was told that time had been bought, that the prosecutor was unavailable, in meetings, and that the press office could neither confirm nor deny – but only a few hours could be bought. He thanked the caller and pocketed the mobile.
They had had the gentle hours. He imagined the word racing through the district of her birth and childhood – as it had with an Alfieri, a Contini, a Misso and a Giuliani. But for it to be a girl, pretty, educated, intelligent, would captivate the city. He did not hide news. Good or bad it should be spelled out.
He said, ‘It’s rumoured in Naples that Immacolata Borelli is an infame. Word is out and on the streets. They would spit at your picture, if they had you in via Forcella, they would stamp on you until your breath had gone. If you ever believed there was a time for turning back it’s gone. Now I shall ask you a very serious question.’
‘What?’
‘Is there anything in your life that I should know about which you have not told me? Signorina Immacolata, is there anything that can be exploited, a weakness?’
‘No.’
‘Should I believe you?’
‘You insult me.’
She looked at her best when she was angry. But, and it troubled Castrolami, the sunlight was reflected on to the white marble floor and her eyes, making them black pockets. He liked to look deep into the eyes when he was deciding whether a suspect was truthful or lied. He could not see hers. He thought her strong, and that she would need to be strong.
He said, ‘In an hour, maybe, we will go to the piazza, where the stalls are, and you can shop. I think you’ll find that a chic corner of Rome is more expensive than Forcella or any part of Naples, and probably the produce is inferior. That we give permission is a gesture of trust.’
She didn’t thank him. He thought her an enigma: tough and vulnerable, resolute and frightened, hard and pliant. He didn’t yet know her, didn’t know whether he ever would – whether a gesture of trust was misplaced.
She had shuffled towards him. Salvatore watched the approach of Anna Borelli, grandmother to the family and icon in the clan. He had heard she had been the strength behind her man, that the clan would not have prospered without her and that she was the worst woman in Naples to make an enemy of. He knew her to have been born in 1922, the year Mussolini had launched, from Naples, the march on Rome that elevated him to power. He knew her to have been married in 1941 when her husband had come out of hiding from military conscription and posting to Montenegro. He knew her to have stepped back from the running of the clan in the middle 1980s when its strength was assured and Pasquale was given authority, knew that she had paramount importance in the clan’s territory. She came close to him.
She was frail, with bent shoulders, and walked with a stick to mitigate her rheumatism. She had cropped white hair, but her clothes were always ebony black. If she ever smiled he hadn’t seen it. If she ever laughed he hadn’t heard her. She paused outside a hardware shop and he saw her examining brooms, weighing the advantages of one against another: she was worth, by whatever calculation, millions of euros, but fingered brooms to decide whether one that cost three euros was as good value as one that cost five. He came close to her, and the owner of the shop, who had been solicitous and grovelling as if to royalty, stepped back to give him room and privacy.
He said, ‘Grandmother, it is a time of maximum danger to the clan. Nonna, the wolves circle because they believe us weak. Nonna, without Pasquale, Gabriella and Vincenzo, and with the bitch Immacolata whoring with the palace, we need leadership or we’ll disintegrate. Everything you and Carmine achieved will be lost. Unless you lead now, your lives will have been wasted. I beg you, take control. Fight. Umberto can find me, but in extreme emergency call this…’ He slipped a piece of paper into her clawed hand. He relied on her memory, in her eighty-eighth year, to absorb the number. He was satisfied she would have done so within an hour. With total sincerity Salvatore said: ‘We depend on you, Nonna, and on Carmine. If we’re led we’ll follow. If we don’t fight, we’re dead, and the whore has killed us.’