Had the man actually said that Carmine Borelli was an old drunk and useless, fit only to pleasure himself in a chair? Had he? Who had heard him? He had been kept for an hour, to wait and sweat, in a lock-up behind the butcher’s, would have squatted among the bones and offal waiting for disposal. Some had said they had heard him say Carmine Borelli was fit only to take his penis in his own hand. It was enough that a rumour of what the man had said was abroad. Carmine Borelli had not risen to the position of clan leader by clemency and charity. It would be done on the street.
In his time, leading the clan, he had killed, it was estimated, thirty-six men with his own hand, and had ordered the proxy killing of at least another sixty.
It was high risk.
It was about authority and respect. It would be done on the street, in public view, in daylight, so that none could say Carmine Borelli slunk in the shadows. The man was brought out. Carmine recognised him. The man knelt on the pavement. Two of the foot-soldiers produced plastic bags – for garden fertiliser – and held them close to the man’s head. He gibbered. Carmine had known the man’s father, his uncles and his mother’s family. Many said he was an idiot and certifiable. But he shot him. He had not killed for twenty years.
He shot him low in the forehead at a point equidistant between the eyes. Blood spouted but was trapped by the plastic bags. Had Carmine wanted to run, he could not have. The damaged joints in his knees and hips prevented it. Salvatore took the pistol from him and was gone.
He turned his back on the man, who should have been in an asylum and was crumpled on the pavement, and made his way back to the via Forcella. He hoped he had sent a message or he, too, would be on the pavement. He would not give up the clan, would not see it cannibalised. His hand shook from the impact of the pistol when it had fired. He was out of the street by the time he heard the sirens. They would take the corpse to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, then to the mortuary. The police and the carabinieri would come. If he, Carmine Borelli, was named by a witness as the killer, his authority was sand dribbling between his fingers. If the investigators and detectives met the familiar wall of silence, there remained a small chance he could resuscitate the clan… meaningless, if the whore didn’t break with her interrogators.
He stopped at several more shops, small craftsmen’s businesses and showed himself. He thought it the best of fortune that a fool had come from England and had talked the rubbish of love for the whore. By the time he reached his main door, beside the fish-seller’s stall, he would not be able to hide the limp. The whore was the key; the fool was critical. He would go first to the home of a dear and long-standing friend and there he would strip and shower. The fine suit and the shirt would be bagged, and the change of clothes brought for him there by Anna would be neatly laid out. His friend would burn the clothes that carried the residue of the pistol’s firing, his body would be clean of such traces, and then he would go home – after visiting a cafe where many would swear he had spent two hours… if his authority held up. As he walked, Carmine Borelli shook his head. It was so hard to believe that Immacolata was the whore.
She wanted to dance. Orecchia refused and Rossi declined more politely but as firmly. She did not ask Castrolami.
She had had the music up, high volume. Castrolami had pushed his chair back from the table, gone to the radio, turned the volume down and talked of unwelcome complaints from the floor below. They had said she cooked well, that it was a fine meal, and she had thought the praise insincere. She did not dance in Naples, had not danced in London. She was not trained to dance. If she could dance with Orecchia or Rossi, she thought she might dominate whichever man held her.
They had eaten what she had put in front of them, but not had second helpings. It was not disguised: she believed they would have preferred to hit the freezer and do defrosts in the microwave.
She stood up, went round the table, worked her hips and let her hands drop first on Orecchia’s shoulders, then on Rossi’s. Neither reacted. When she was opposite Castrolami, he looked at her. She stared at him and undid an upper button on her blouse. He looked away.
She fell back on temper.
She didn’t wait for them to clear the table of glasses and the cheese plate, she scooped up what she could carry, and made as great a noise as possible by dropping them into the bowl in the sink, on top of the pans she had used for the meat and the pasta, the knives, forks and spoons. She expected them to come running. Their voices were low in the dining room. Immacolata went back for the wine bottle and her glass, then stalked again to the kitchen. There was enough in the bottle to fill her glass: the men had only drunk water. She ran a tap noisily, put the soap in. Everything could, of course, have gone in the dishwasher, but then there would have been no noise, no possibility of reaction. She had noise, not the reaction. She sang, made more noise.
Immacolata washed and stacked.
Songs from Naples – where else could they be from? She only knew songs from that city. It was her life. She heard him wheeze and turned.
‘Tell me how it was for her in the last twenty-four hours of her life…’
‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life.’
He stood in the kitchen doorway. He was not, then, proud of himself. Seldom, if ever, was. It was a job. He couldn’t bring himself to show sympathy or humanity. Had he done so, the emotions would have been fraudulent. The course he took was necessary for the job. He gave nothing of himself to Immacolata Borelli.
She reacted. Was a little drunk. It had not been a strong wine, but she’d put down most of a bottle. She stared hard at him and her lips moved, but no words came.
Castrolami said, ‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life. If you’ve forgotten what you were told I can remind you. Would that be a good idea? Should your memory have failed you, I have a note of what was said to you in the cemetery in Nola. I ask again. Tell me how Marianna Rossetti died, what the leukaemia had done to her, about the contamination. Does your memory need prompting?’
The reaction was not aggression but as if a deep wound had opened, the rawness exposed. There was, he thought, an inner struggle.
‘Do I have to?’
‘Yes,’ Castrolami said. He squeezed it out of her, as if from a tube that needed folding over and pressurising. He heard how the father had spat beside her feet, how her offer of the flowers had been rejected, and she was called a whore. He heard how the mother of her closest friend had used her fingers to rip her blouse and underwear, had kicked her, and she had fallen, crushing the flowers.
‘Don’t gild it. I’m not interested in you, how you felt, what they did to you. I’m interested, Signorina, in the last hours of your friend.’ He said it harshly, and had no regret.
‘Her last days were marked by exhaustion, very tired, very lethargic, no energy…’
He thought she spoke like a machine, and no emotion showed.
‘Then bruises appeared all over her body, but she had not hit herself or been hit. The bruises were there. She was very pale. It was high summer in Nola – hot sunshine – and she was so white, anaemic. She was taken to the doctor. He knew immediately. As soon as he had peered behind her eyes, used that little torch, he made the call to the hospital.’