They didn’t take the bags from her. She carried three and Castrolami two. It was hotter, might have reached the eighties, and no breeze came off the river. In London, if she had shopped with him, he would have carried the bags. In Naples, a foot-soldier would have carried her shopping, just as he would have parked the car and waited a respectful pace behind her as she chose. Perhaps it was the glance she gave Castrolami that prompted him. He said, ‘If they carry your shopping it would impede their shooting. If they had to shoot it would be in your defence. A shopping bag doesn’t help in aiming and firing.’
She thought, again, he had insulted her. She walked faster, away from him, and slowed only when she was a pace behind Rossi. The padlocks on the bridge were in her mind: if she’d been there with him , which of them would have taken the key, made the statement of love, and thrown it out into the slack water?
Castrolami was with Orecchia. They were fifteen paces behind the young woman and kept that distance, and Castrolami listened to the older man, who lived and ate with the criminals who collaborated, and slept near them – and held a grip, maybe a loose one, on sanity.
‘You ask me how she’ll be. You want to know if she’ll fall early or late, or stay on her feet and be strong enough for the court.’
To Castrolami it was a pain to be endured. Some investigators and detectives were easy in the company of criminals, could go to weddings and birthday parties and survive allegations of corruption. Not Castrolami. He detested being with them.
‘I was with one from your city and you’ll have known him. He walked out of the door one morning and the next we heard he was in the Secondigliano area of Naples, or perhaps Scampia, whichever. He had taken a train from the north. A week afterwards we heard he’d arrived home and was on the street, dead. One bullet, middle of the forehead. We’d been with him for four months. Time and resources wasted.’
Castrolami remembered him. Police, not carabinieri, had handled his defection. He walked slowly, felt burdened.
‘There was another. We had him in Genoa for a whole year, with his wife, his mother, his aunt, her mother and three children. We brought him to Caltanisetta to give evidence against twenty prime Sicilian fuck-pigs. We dressed him in his good suit, a clean shirt and a tie and drove him to the courthouse. He smiled and said he now wished to renegotiate his terms – like his evidence was a piece of goddam property. More money, a better allowance, or no evidence. We had twenty men in the cage and were waiting on his testimony. We agreed the new terms, won the conviction. Then the agreement was torn up. I don’t know now whether he’s alive or dead.’
Castrolami knew there was a segment of opinion, influential, which believed too many had been allowed to become a collaboratore di giustizia, that too much was given them. It was an easy way to win convictions. With the crimes of the Camorra or the Mafia, there was little opportunity for gathering forensic evidence, less chance of finding eye witnesses prepared to face down intimidation and go public in court. The collaborator, the infame, was an attractive solution.
‘I’ve seen little of her, but we were given some notes before her arrival. I read of the leukaemia death, her supposed friend. Perhaps it was merely that the guilt needed a trigger or perhaps the emotion was real. Now you talk to her about her mother, her brothers, but you haven’t played a big card. It’s there.’
Castrolami faced him. They were now on the rough, narrow road that went up beneath the pines.
‘I’m not trying to teach you your job but I’d milk the disease. To be verbally abused, physically assaulted in a cemetery at a burial, is no small matter. Use it, twist it, work it. My advice, Dottore, there isn’t a living human being whom she loves. Make good with the dead.’
They trudged on. Orecchia was fitter than Castrolami and climbed the hill easily. He could see, in front, the haughty swing of her hips.
The priest came from a side door. A cleaner who polished the altar silver had said he would be there soon, but it had been an hour. The measure of Eddie’s stress, lethargy, lost nerve was that he had been prepared to sit out the hour on a shadowed pew, only moving to do something he had not attempted before: he had made a donation, taken a candle and lit it, then sat some more.
When the priest came through the side door, the cleaner went to him, pointed to Eddie and returned to his polishing.
The priest approached. His short hair, rimless glasses and creased cassock made no concession to style. He sat on the bench beside Eddie, who introduced himself, then asked for Immacolata Borelli. Oh, yes, the priest knew Immacolata Borelli. His eyes flashed and his back straightened. Eddie warmed. Where would he find her home? There was no immediate response. He thought the priest considered. Eddie, ignorant, didn’t understand. Why, if the priest knew, should he hesitate? Eddie, innocent, did not comprehend. Sadness fell on the face of the priest, as if he had made a decision that wounded him. He sighed, stood up, and the sadness was wiped away. The face was devoid now of expression. He took Eddie down the aisle, and Eddie paused to put a five-euro note into the box for the repair of the church. He was led out into the brightness. The kids waited on the far side of the street and watched, with the boy on the scooter. The priest pointed far down the via Forcella. Eddie could just make out the fruit and vegetables stall that protruded into half of the street’s width. Beyond it was the fish stand. The priest said that the door between the fruit and vegetables and the fish was the home of the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli. For a moment, his head was beside the two scars on the stone, then he backed away. Eddie had been past those stalls twice, had asked in the tabaccaio opposite and been ignored. When he turned to thank the priest the church door was already closed.
What should he have done? What should he have said to the foreign boy, a fool, who came to Forcella and asked for the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli? What was his responsibility? Too tired, he had deflected the problem – had done as he was asked and had not accepted responsibility. The foreign boy wanted to meet Immacolata, and he could picture her, the granddaughter of Carmine and Anna Borelli: it had been her brother, the middle of their three grandsons, who had fired the two pistol shots at a predecessor. It was too much for him to take on as personal responsibility.
Fear stalked him. Fear corroded principle, decency, courage. He had no stomach for the war on the streets. He had crumpled. Predecessors had fought the culture of criminality in Forcella and been broken, or had moved away in indecent haste, or were in Rome under police guard.
He could justify to himself that he could have done nothing to divert the foreigner from visiting the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli – and she was the only one of them with, perhaps, a thimbleful of charity and goodness. He felt cold in the church, shivered and crossed himself.
The Allies had reached Naples. The Fascists had fled. An opportunity had arrived. The troops, British and American, reached the city on 1 October 1943, and within a week the fortunes of the infant Borelli clan had prospered. Carmine, out of gaol, would never deny that the first moves of Anna, his young wife, were integral to them. She had opened the brothel.
It was the first to function within a short walk of the seafront where American officers were billeted in the sequestrated hotels. She brought in women from all classes of Neapolitan society. They shared common features – acute hunger, extreme poverty, the ambition only to survive. It was on a small courtyard where the walls of two buildings were held up by timber supports; a third side had taken a direct hit during a bombing raid. It was within a stone’s throw of the Palazzo Sessa – home of Sir William Hamilton, Emma, and Horatio Nelson – and the officers trooped there. The women Anna Borelli recruited began work with the puffiness in their faces that came from near-fatal starvation, but food supplies came with the patrons, and silk stockings, lipsticks, chocolate and cigarettes. They were the wives of stall-holders and lawyers, of labourers and advocates, of street-sweepers and civil servants. Soon they had colour in their cheeks, and they started to eat well, their families too. There were mornings when a queue of women, dressed in their best, had formed outside the heavy front door to plead for the opportunity to be fucked by GIs, and Anna took the most attractive, the most sexually experienced. She did not employ uninitiated teenage girls: the GIs wanted women who did not waste time, were easy to penetrate, who knew the trade. It was said – among the women who came to work at noon and went home at midnight – that in the first days Anna Borelli herself had lain under the gross belly of an American lieutenant colonel, that she could make him squeal like a spiked boar, and the security of the building was guaranteed.