Always, to fight against the testimony of an infame – the bitch whore who was his granddaughter – there must be leverage. Only that, applied with extreme violence, could destroy the most feared threat to the clans: the informer, turncoat and traitor.
His was the cleanest and best-polished window of any in the long line looking out on to the central walkway on the third floor of the Sail. He was Davide. He spent many hours each week with a bucket and a rag washing his windows, outside and in. He used warm water and soap, then a disintegrating cloth to dry them. He sprayed them with polish, then used a dry cloth to take off the last of the filth that had accumulated on the glass. Those who lived in the box apartments, crumbling from neglect, on either side of him regarded the occupant of 374 with tolerance and amusement. Many in the Sail – a gigantic architectural monstrosity – existed with mental aberration. It was a dumping ground for the socially challenged and the medical misfits. On the eastern extremity of Naples, the district of Scampia had achieved notoriety as a supermarket of drugs, a killing ground in clan warfare, and as a place where the city authorities could dump the detritus of the city’s population. Davide was among the rubbish placed there, and he seemed to eke a minuscule living from delivering messages and packages for one of the Comando Piazza, who flourished around the Sail, and small handyman tasks.
Davide’s home was on one of the lower floors of a building that had become a cult symbol of ugliness. The lower floors, where No. 374 is found, represent the hull and level decking of a yacht, with ten storeys of floors. Above the deck there is a towering sail-shaped construction, vertical at the mast on the far end from Davide’s location, but terraced down for another ten levels. It has always been known as the Sail. Of the seventy thousand listed in the most recent census as living in Scampia and its tower blocks, some eleven thousand are in this architect’s eccentricity. Some call the different levels and ends of the Sail by colours, and others know each block there as a lotta. Davide was a resident of Lotta H, which was Green, and which had the franchise to market heroin, already refined. Through his well-cleaned windows, Davide observed much of the trade and the sight of him in his handkerchief-sized living room, the television blaring and only a side light on, was familiar to the lookout, the seller and the Comando Piazza who ran them, and to the magazzinieri who held the stockpiles of the narcotic, and even to the level of aquirenti who purchased in bulk, and bought from the capo of the clan that had authority in the Sail. All, from the top of the tree to the bottom, knew of the demented old fool who spent hours on the windows, bringing them to a brilliant shine, and left his apartment not more than once a week. He was almost always there and when he was not outside and window-cleaning, he was hunched in a chair with the curtains open.
To others, he was Delta465/Foxtrot, and valued – too valuable to be burned by the routine of drugs trafficking.
*
Salvatore came. He had left the van, with dark bloodstains on the tyres from where a stomach had burst when it was driven over, and was at the door. He was met by Carmine Borelli. He was briefed. He thought the old man panted as if some rare delight hooked him, anticipation… Sometimes Salvatore found that his own breath spurted in the moment that he lifted a pistol and aimed it. He thought it would have been, perhaps, before he was born that the old man had last made operational decisions. He was revelling in the chance to live again. The talk was short, as it should have been. He broke away, chuckled to himself: the young man who had screwed Immacolata in London, who loved her, would find that the bitch’s sweat, the bitch’s caresses and the bitch’s groans came expensive. Carmine Borelli had said the young man, screwer of Immacolata, was an idiot and would not make any difficulty. The radio that morning had quoted an unnamed official in the Palace of Justice as stating, no equivocation, that the Borelli clan was history, a broken reed. He saw nothing in the street that gave cause for anxiety.
The fish-seller, Tomasso, had had the pitch in the via Forcella for twelve years, his father for the twenty-three before him. Short but broad-shouldered and thick at the waist, he had cropped hair, controlled stubble, good jeans, a good-quality shirt and good shoes. What he wore was good because he sold fine fish fresh from the market that morning. There were, however, matters relevant to the state of mind Tomasso enjoyed that were not generally known to those who dictated the economics of his fish stall. His father’s cousin had a boat that fished from the harbour at Mergellina, but two years before Tomasso had been told by the Borelli clan that he must only buy fish landed from the boats they owned. He had not complained and had acquiesced because his chance of obtaining another pitch was minimal. Now, also, he must pay to the clan a hiked pizzo for the right to put the stall in that place. Also, now, he must supply fish at cut-price to the trattoria two streets away, at less than cost, because the trattoria was owned by the clan. The pesce spade, huge, with the malevolent eye, frozen, would have been taken by Giovanni on a normal day, and not paid for: that had happened more often in the last months.
But the shit-face hadn’t come, was in the cells at Poggioreale, and the cow who headed the clan was also in the cells, and Vincenzo who had sent the message by courier telling him where he could and could not buy. They were, in his opinion, fucked, but he knew what had been done last evening to a man who had shouted it. Tomasso kept quiet, sold where it was possible, but impotent anger burned in him. Where he stood, close to his till and scales, he was, perhaps, two metres from the door of the house where the old goat lived with his woman. He had seen the young man go into the building, had seen also that kids had come with him, and a scooter boy, and he had thought the young man a stranger. The kids had still been in place, on the far side of the road, till two minutes ago. Everyone knew Salvatore. Everyone who worked in the via Forcella or in the Sanita district knew the face of Il Pistole, who had come and talked inside with the old goat, had waved the kids away and gone. He felt the tension ratchet, and he was aware that the street, quietly and without fuss, was emptying.
The grocery was down the rue de Bellechasse, and Lukas – as was usual for him – bought only the bread, milk and eggs that he would eat in twenty-four hours, nothing that would go sour or stale in the fridge if the apartment was indefinitely abandoned. The red light had not been blinking when he had returned.
He had checked his post before he started on the cleaning, as he did every day. Nothing that needed attention. There was little enough for him to collect from the box by the main door: a few utility bills, offers of health insurance and holiday brochures, never anything personal. When he was away, in a war zone or counter-insurgency theatre, he always noted how men and women, far from home, yearned for mail from their families, emails or phone calls. Didn’t matter whether he yearned or not, he wasn’t getting any. No envelopes came with spidery writing, copperplate, a big fist or one that was near indecipherable. It was as if, wanting or not, he had no home and no folk who cared a shite. So, he built a wall, surrounded himself and… Lukas cleaned.
He did the cleaning, too, about every day, because he had the feeling always that he would go out through the front door, lock it behind him and might survive or might not. Might go down in a Black Hawk over a Shiite city in Iraq, and might get blown off a road by an IED outside Kandahar, and might fall off some dirt track in the mountains of central Colombia. He was like many of the gypsies who serviced the dirty little wars: he didn’t want to think of anyone making an entrance to collect his effects and puckering a forehead as they wondered where to start, thinking that the man was an untidy jerk and had left a mess. He might only have ten minutes between the telephone ringing or coming back in and having the red light alert him, dragging the bag out from under the bed, locking the door and starting the sprint for Solferino Metro. He kept the place neat and just about in a state that no one could be sure that anyone had recently lived there. All his washing went most days to the launderette, even if it was just briefs, singlet, socks and a shirt.