He started to explore.
The concrete floor was not wet but moist. He had been dragged out of the van and had slipped. His head had careered into the bottom of the side hatch and the impact had dazed him, but the hold on him had not slackened. He had heard a door unlocked ahead and had been propelled through it, then down some steps. On the steps he had stumbled again and fallen forwards unable to use his arms to protect his face. The hands gripping him had let him go, and Eddie’s shoulders had taken his weight against the wall, but his nose had bled. He had been held upright in a room, a basement or, more likely, a cellar, and the trapdoor had been lifted and his ankles freed. Hands had held him under the armpits and he had felt his feet dance in a void, like a hanged man’s. He had been lowered into the space and then, as his feet had made contact with concrete, he had been shoved violently sideways so that he collapsed and was prone. Then the trapdoor had been shut. Now he moved, with the grace of damaged reptile, across the floor.
To learn about his surroundings, Eddie had to manoeuvre himself backwards so that his fingers could touch and feel. He made calculations. He reckoned he was in a bunker dug into the earth below a cellar, and that its dimensions were six feet by eight. The sides were of breeze blocks and the mortar holding them was crudely applied. In a corner there were two sacks, heavy-duty plastic and well filled.
Something now was worse than the darkness and the silence. He imagined the hood over his head had once been a pillowcase on a child’s bed. Maybe since then it had been used as a rag to clean floors, windows or lavatory seats. The smells in it were deep in his nostrils. Bad enough not to be able to breathe through his mouth, worse when the passage into his nose was clogged with the hood’s stench. Eddie found he could tilt his back against a wall and wriggle his body downwards while his head and the hood had contact against the roughness of the mortar. The movements eased the hem of the hood upwards. He scratched his shoulders against the barbed edges of the mortar and might have drawn more blood, but the hem was lifted from the nape of his neck, then to the back of his skull and on to the crown. It was important to him that he did this. Since the street, and the slamming of the door behind him, the eye-contact with the fish-seller and the raising of his hands, Eddie had done nothing for himself, had been like a bloody vegetable. He shook his head violently. Rotated it, waggled it. The hood came off. A different air and a different smell were on his face and in his nose.
He thought it a victory. There was no light in the bunker. All he could see now, with the hood off, was a thin outline where the trapdoor sides met the ceiling it was set in, and one pinpoint where there must have been a flaw in one of the trapdoor’s planks. He stood. He couldn’t straighten to his full height – and reckoned the bunker was five feet high. It was a victory that he had shed the hood, and the guys in the house in Dalston would have rated it. A Revenue clerk, a clubland waiter, a ticket seller and a work-shy PhD student would have seen the value of success.
Shortlived, the sense of that victory.
Eddie wanted to pee. He had crawled backwards around the bunker’s walls and found the filled sacks, but no bucket. With his wrists held in the small of his back, he couldn’t drop his zip. He hadn’t wet his trousers since he was five, on a school outing. Also gone, with the sense of victory, was the belief that the guys in Dalston would have the faintest comprehension of being in darkness and feeling the urge to wet their trousers. He slumped.
He could hear nothing – no vehicles, no music, no voices and no sirens. It was as if he had gone off the face of the earth. Fight, be passive or think. Time for Eddie Deacon to face the alternatives and make a choice. Time to wonder why it had happened.
He sat against the sacks, with only the bloody darkness and the bloody silence for company. The bladder pressure grew, and he knew that the fear would return.
It was a gesture of his new-found defiance. Carmine Borelli left his stick propped in the corner inside the doorway. He had swallowed three Nurofen tablets – the strong ones – washing them down with cold water. He knew that Anna would watch him from a high window and he would be tongue-whipped if he failed.
Between the clans that were labelled ‘Camorra’, there was no overall authority, no consensus of leadership. On the island of Sicily, Cosa Nostra groups acknowledged the disciplines imposed by a cupola, a cabinet of principals; there was a predictability and a certainty about the future. Not so in Naples. A clan was dead when power was lost… Now the Borelli clan teetered on the brink of oblivion.
The drugs compensated for his leaving behind his stick. The pain from his rheumatism was controlled. In old age, Carmine watched much daytime television and flipped between the satellite channels – so many dealt with the big animals of the African plains, elephant and lion and buffalo. When their teeth failed and they could no longer forage, or when their muscles and strength failed, or when their eyesight was gone and their keen hearing, the great beasts were pushed aside by the young. Many afternoons he had sat in his chair and watched as an old elephant, lion or buffalo was killed or pushed aside and left to starve. As brutal as Naples. He had shaved closely, and wore a suit with a laundered shirt and a tie. His thick hair was slicked back with gel, and Anna had wiped the dust off his shoes.
He felt himself born again.
He walked down the street where a man had been taken from a bar and shot in the leg, then driven over. Salvatore was a half-pace behind him, while a dozen of the young men who wanted to be enforcers and had tried to find favour with his son, Pasquale, and daughter-in-law, Gabriella, fanned out around him. Carmine wore his suit jacket open, the jacket flapping from his walk, the butt of the pistol in his waistband there to be seen. Salvatore had a fist buried in a deep pocket that bulged, and some of the young men carried wooden staves or pickaxe handles. If he was not on the street and not exercising authority, his clan area would be lost. It would not be gone over a year or six months, but in a day. His right hip hurt in a throbbing ache. To compensate he put more weight on his left knee and experienced stabs of pain there. He kept walking, his smile broad.
Some of the older men gathered in doorways. They had been on the payroll in the early days of power when the city was devastated by bombing, the sewers were fractured, epidemics rife and money was to be made. Now they called the name he had once been given. Then, now, he was ‘Il Camionista’, the Lorry Driver, because he had had the first fleet of trucks on the road, the permit, the petrol and the goods they transported from the Americans. He had skewered his way into so much in those incredible, prosperous days. He had been told, and had believed it, that a third of all cargo landed by the Americans ended up on the stalls of the street traders in Naples, a good proportion of it in the via Forcella: food, clothing, oil. Best of all was the copper wire used for the Allies’ telephone communications – it fetched massive prices: his people cut down the wire before the first connection was made. He acquired good business from funerals. He could arrange, for a price, to summon that ‘successful cousin from Rome whose intellect and wealth enhanced a sad day’, and therefore lifted the prestige of the bereaved family. Nothing had been beyond Carmine Borelli, but it was sixty-five years ago that he had been known as Il Camionista. The younger men looked at him questioningly.
They would have thought: Pasquale Borelli already in gaol, Gabriella Borelli also in gaol, Vincenzo, Giovanni and Silvio in gaol, and the whore of a granddaughter singing to the Palace of Justice. Where was the power? Would the Misso clan take it, or the Contini clan, or would a new boy come out of the shadows? Was the old guard already dead, or moving only in the last spasms? At the cafe, from which a customer had been taken and killed, the owner brought out a small tray of bogus silver with coffee and a brandy aperitif. Carmine drank the coffee first, then the alcohol, and stifled successfully the choke that rose in his throat. Further down the street, a haberdasher who was three days late in payment of his pizzo thrust the envelope into Carmine’s hand, murmured apologies and said he had put in extra. He had been on the street for five or six minutes, and little time was left.