He walked away from her. At an entry fifty metres down the via Forcella from the hardware shop, he paused in the shadow. The priest passed her, the bastard priest from the church of San Giorgio Maggiore – should have been shot – and she didn’t acknowledge him. Salvatore thought she bartered with the shop owner for a discount on the broom, and – for certain – she would be given it. There were many who would delight in dancing on his corpse and many who would queue for the privilege of dropping him. He reached his man, Fangio, put on the helmet with the smoked-glass visor and was gone.
It was perplexing to him. Frustrated, annoyed, failing and unable to get sense from anyone, Eddie Deacon beaded on the priest. Perplexingly, the priest walked in the centre of the street and scooters swerved to pass him, going either way, and the street was lined with shoppers and gossipers, old and young, and no one spoke to him. He was young, no more than thirty, with a rounded, chubby face but there was no cheer in it: pallor and tiredness characterised him. He had come out of a courtyard through tall iron gates. The school had the name ‘Annalisa Durante’. Eddie sidled towards the priest.
A quick side-step, like a soccer player’s swerve, and the priest had passed. Eddie called after him. No response, but the priest’s step quickened. He fastened on the back of the man – had to: he had been the length of the street and must have asked a dozen people where the Borelli home was, and had not received one coherent answer. The kids followed him still, but not with intensity. He didn’t think they regarded him as threatening, more as a curiosity, but they were behind him and he’d noted that each time he asked, the boy on the scooter quizzed the person he’d spoken to.
The sun came higher. He sweated. Strips of light and warmth knifed on to the street from the alleys. More people were out. If he met eyes, they were averted. If he smiled, it was not returned.
He didn’t know what else to do, but followed the priest. The spark had gone out for him, as if hope was extinguished. So alone. The priest went up the steps of the church and into it. Eddie had that sense of being the stranger and unwanted. In the stone slabs beside the main door, at about the level of a man’s head, there were chip marks, two scars where the stone had been gouged. He followed the priest inside. Cool and quiet enveloped him.
They walked. Rossi led and he wore a lightweight poplin jacket so that his shoulder harness was covered. She followed, with Castrolami alongside her, Orecchia behind. They went down a side-road from the block, where the parked cars had been in place all summer, the bonnets and windscreens coated with the fine dust that came from the north African deserts, carried on the winds. The hill where they had brought her was empty of residents, still holidaying in the south or at the Sardinian resorts. That would have been why they had shipped her in here. There were so few people in the apartments and on the roads.
The dogs had not been taken to the southern beaches, but abandoned to the care of maids and porters. They threw themselves at the balcony railings. Immacolata had forgotten, almost, the ferocity of the sun – but there were many things to be forgotten. She walked with a good step and Rossi had to sense her pace and stretch his stride to keep ahead of her. They went past the entrance to a tennis club and she glimpsed the pool, azure blue, and the loungers; the Borelli family had not been able, in Naples, to belong to a club where tennis was played and there was a pool, so Immacolata didn’t play tennis and couldn’t swim. Different worlds, and this one closed to her by the dictate of the clan’s security, but there were clubs like this in Posilippo and Pozzuoli north up the coast. There was a clinic, and more apartments set back, with different dogs and different porters, then the road ducked down and ran beneath a roof of pine branches.
Castrolami said, conversationally, ‘We put you in a tower block on the north side or on the east side of Rome and on every floor women are looking to see who is new. It’s an intelligence-gathering system, unavoidable – you know that. It’s the same in a tower in Naples. We put you in a small town near Firenze, Pisa or on the Adriatic, you open your mouth and they hear you, Naples, and they hear us, outsiders, and they think that Mafia scum is being hidden among them, and there are demonstrations, perhaps violence, because they despise you and believe you contaminate their society. It’s good here because we’re among the people who don’t know the Mafia but hate the VAT officials and the Revenue investigators, and who seek to live in privacy. If, however, they believed that a collaborating criminal had been brought here, there would be outrage and the accusation that we’ve reduced the worth of their property. We don’t flaunt you.’
‘And when they come back from holiday?’
‘We’ll think again, look at the budget and-’
‘Move on?’
There was an old bridge over the river ahead. They had left the shade of the trees and gone under a six-lane road. She could see over the parapet wall that the Tiber’s level was down. It looked played out, not like a famous river. He didn’t answer her. She thought they would keep her in the fine apartment while they stripped the meat of what she knew, then ship her on when only the bones remained.
Castrolami said, ‘The bridge is the Ponte Milvio, one of the most important in the city. It was built by Gaius Claudius Nero more than two thousand years ago. Constantine won a great battle at the bridge in 312 AD. It’s been repaired many times, then a new phenomenon. Three years ago, young people in love were attracted to it, put padlocks on the lamppost and threw the keys into the river. So many padlocks – the bigger and heavier they were, the greater the love – were fastened there that the lamppost collapsed. For a few months there was a virtual lamppost, on the web, but now the mayor has put steel columns on the bridge and it’s possible to fix padlocks again. Do you find that interesting?’
She shook her head decisively.
Quietly, his response: ‘No, you wouldn’t because you assured me that you do not, at present, have a lover. You told me so. We should cross the road.’
Rossi had already done so.
It was a fast thought only, a brittle image – of him in a park, and in a small, grubby house, then laughter, the smoothness of skin and… She followed Rossi, and Castrolami was holding her arm. She didn’t think she was a prisoner but that he guided her between cars and vans. In her mind she had a list.
She had shopped twice every week for food to cook for Vincenzo and his friends, and once a fortnight she had gone to the street market to buy enough to make a meal for him and his friends. It was a market far superior to those in London, laid out in splendour, stalls stacked high, every variety and every choice, but of a lower standard to that of the piazza Mercato and what was – had been – her home. She turned, tapped her hip pocket to show it was empty, pulled out the lining of a side pocket, grimaced, laughed… Orecchia passed her a ten-euro note, and Castrolami was taking his time, pecking in his wallet, so she leaned forward and took a twenty from it. Rossi gave her a ten. Immacolata chose veal and was about to point out the size of the fillets she wanted when she felt the pressure of Castrolami’s fingers on her arm. She indicated, and he spoke. She had learned. She selected potatoes, spinach and green beans, and Castrolami took the notes from her and paid. She bought tomatoes and peppers, button mushrooms and onions, and at another stall there was cream and cheese. On the way out at the far end of the covered market there were wines and spirits, and Castrolami bought one bottle, from Friuli, and she queried it with a gesture, then pointed to him, Rossi, Orecchia and herself. One bottle? He tapped his own chest, and the other men’s, then shook his head. She could drink; they would not.