The father snarled, ‘You are a whore and you have no decency. I know everything about you. I know who you are, what nest of snakes spawned you, the poison that comes from you – which took the life of our beloved child. She died from leukaemia. We were told at the hospital by the oncology department why – how – she contracted leukaemia. You and your family are responsible. You may be welcome beside the autostrada as you wait for your clients, but you are not welcome here. Perhaps the only language you understand is that of the gutter – so fuck off.’
The mother said, ‘For four or five weeks, she complained of tiredness. We thought she’d been studying too hard. It was only when bruises appeared that we went with her to the doctor. She seemed anaemic. He examined her closely, particularly her eyes. They are trained to hide anxiety, but he rang the hospital, told them she was a priority case and sent us there immediately. I rang my husband at work and called him out of his class.’
Around Immacolata, cold, harsh faces blocked out the sun. When she dropped her head she saw the men’s trousers and the women’s knees, and if she stared at the dust there were shoes, men’s and women’s, and she feared she would be kicked again. She tried to make herself smaller, dragging her knees into her stomach, her elbows across her chest, but she couldn’t shut out what she was told.
The father said, ‘Of course, we know of the Triangle of Death – we’ve read about it – but we don’t talk about it. In Marigliano, Acerra and Nola we’re familiar with its mortality statistics, and the criminality of the Camorra in our town. They are paid to dispose of chemical waste – and dump it in fields, orchards and streams. That is what the Camorra, those foul gangsters, do. For two decades – starting long before we knew of it – the ground and water table were contaminated with poison so that the Camorra could get richer. They and their families have the scruples and greed of whores. You are part of a family so you’re guilty too.’
The mother said, ‘They found her platelet count was low. They took a sample of bone marrow to evaluate her condition, but there was no need to do any tests because that first evening her condition was obvious. First, she had an agonising headache until she lost consciousness. We were in a ward of twenty beds, most occupied, and had just a curtain for privacy as we watched the team struggle to save her life. We could see that they knew it was hopeless because they work in the Triangle and had been in such situations many times before. A neuro-surgeon was called, but she died in front of us. They tried to resuscitate her, but within forty minutes she was gone, snatched from us in a public ward, festooned with cables and breathing aids. There was no opportunity for us to comfort her, or send for the priest because that day he had gone to Naples to buy shoes. Her death hurt too much for us to weep. We were so unprepared.’
The words rang in her head. She knew now that they would not kick her again. They would have seen her hands trembling as she covered her breasts and clutched the shredded blouse.
He said, ‘A doctor told me she could have contracted the disease as much as a decade earlier, swimming in a stream, playing in long grass in a field or under the trees in an orchard…’
She said, ‘I used to take her to the fields and the stream behind our home. She would swim, splash, play, then roll in the grass to dry herself. While I watched her, laughed, and thought of her as a gift from God, she was being poisoned.’
The father said, ‘The doctor told me that the farmland around Nola and the water table are saturated with dioxins. If I wanted to know more, I was told, I should see the carabinieri… I didn’t think they’d speak to me. But yesterday I saw a maresciallo – I teach his son. He told me of the Camorra’s criminal clans who make vast profits from dumping chemicals in this area: they call them the eco-Mafia. He said the clan leader in Nola had sub-contracted the transportation of waste materials from the north to the Borellis from Naples. I believed him. You’ve prostituted yourself for greed. Go.’
The mother said, ‘There’s evil in your blood, but I doubt you’re capable of self-disgust or shame. Your presence here is an intrusion. Go.’
In all of her life, Immacolata had never before been spoken to in such a fashion. She couldn’t meet their eyes but kept her head low as she bent to pick up the destroyed flowers.
She passed a young man with a tidy haircut and a suit but no mourner’s tie. He wore dark glasses and she couldn’t read his expression. She made her way out of the cemetery. She had known for a decade and a half that her father dealt in long-distance heavy-goods traffic, and for a decade that her brother, Vincenzo, was involved with northern industry, and she herself, had arranged the hire of trucks from far-away hauliers. At the gate, by the statue of Angelabella, aged eighteen, she dumped the flowers in a bin and hobbled out to look for Silvio.
She felt numb and shivered.
She looked at them from the door, but they seemed not to have heard her come in. She had got off the bus and walked the last mile, ignoring the drizzle. She had had no coat, and the shoes, torn blouse and black suit were in the holdall, with the ripped underwear. She was wearing what her brother would have seen her in when she had gone out early that morning.
Vincenzo and three friends were playing cards. She watched them through a fog of cigarette smoke, and waited for their reaction so that she could resurrect the lie and embellish it. Each held a fan of cards up to his face.
Since she had been dropped off at Capodichino to wait for the flight, she had thought of the bundle lifted by the men on the ladders, the accusation made against her, and had seen the crowded hospital ward as a life had drained away. The bundle had been so easy to lift that the wind, however slight, might have wafted it from the men’s grip and carried it up and away into the cloudless sky.
Vincenzo was the heir apparent to their father. He was thirty-one, a target for the Palace of Justice, the detectives of the Squadra Mobile and the investigators of the ROS, the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale of the carabinieri. He had made one mistake in the ten years he had spent shadowing his father, the clan leader: he had used a mobile phone and the call had been traced. The apartment in the Forcella district from which it had originated had been raided and scribbled pizzini had been recovered. From these scraps of paper, covered with microscopic handwriting – Vincenzo’s – another covo had been identified and searched. There, a Beretta P38 handgun had been found stowed in greaseproof paper under a bath panel. It carried the DNA signature of Vincenzo Borelli, and the ballistics laboratory had reported that it had been used to fire the bullets taken from the bodies of three men. He would face a gaol sentence as long as his father expected when he came, eventually, to trial. Vincenzo had disappeared from the face of the earth, and so had his sister: he as a fugitive, she dropping from view and gaining new skills in handling money movements.
In the doorway, she could have recited every word that had been said to her as she had lain on the ground. Every last word. And she could remember how the aggression had cut into her, wounding her. Never in her life had anyone spoken to her with such venom, or made such an accusation, while seeming not to care for the consequences of denouncing the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, sister of Vincenzo and Giovanni. It should have meant a death sentence. To humiliate and abuse the daughter of a clan leader was the act of a man bored with living. If her father, in his cell in the north, or her mother, who flitted between safe-houses, had been told what her friend’s parent had hissed at her, that man would have been condemned. If she had interrupted the card game to say where she had been and what had happened, within twenty-four hours blood would have run on a pavement, a body would have lain at a grotesque angle and the authority of the clan would have been preserved. She had not even told Silvio, who had looked curiously at her torn blouse but hadn’t asked.