Salvatore climbed out, the trapdoor fell back into place and the bolt was pushed home.
With the tab from the camera lodged in her brassiere, Anna Borelli set off for the office of the family’s lawyer.
Castrolami watched. He thought it a performance for him and no others. He was sitting in the canteen area on the second floor of the barracks, the coffee in front of them with a plate of sweet biscuits. The swing door had been pushed open, and an officer – probably a maresciallo – had come in, looked around, seen the man, Lukas, and come to him, arms opening wide. Hugs, kisses – and Castrolami believed he saw tears. Not Lukas who wept, and not Lukas who kissed.
It was about the establishment of credentials. The officer had small scars on his face and walked heavily, as if his left leg carried an old injury. He would have been in his early forties, plump and pasty-faced. He clung to Lukas.
It was explained.
The officer was Marco. He had been in the detachment of carabinieri posted to the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. He was asleep in quarters used by the detachment in the building that had once been the office of the local Chamber of Commerce. A suicide attack on it had involved a tanker truck rigged with explosives. Seventeen carabinieri had been killed, and more were injured. Marco suffered cut tendons in his right leg from shrapnel and his face was hit by glass shards. He had gone home, recovered, convalesced and demanded to be returned to his unit. He had come back to Nasiriyah… Castrolami heard the story and thought it told well and quietly. He waited to learn its purpose.
The canteen had filled. The short guy at Castrolami’s side, now extricated from the hugs and kisses, seemed to Castrolami to find it a necessary nuisance, and was impassive.
‘I went back, a dumb-fuck stupid thing to do – everyone told me so – but I was back. We had an outpost down the road and the day that those guys were supposed to get a week’s rations there was also a search mission under way. Just one of those days when a schedule gets fouled up, and people think it doesn’t matter. The consequence was a reduction in the size of the escort to take the rations. There were three of us, Italians, and two trucks. We got hit. They put an RPG through the engine of mine and blew us off the road. The driver, an Iraqi boy, was killed. The truck in front just kept going. I was taken.’
Castrolami didn’t hear, in the packed room, that a throat was cleared, that a man’s joints clicked as he moved his weight from one foot to the other, that a nose was blown, that a cup was put heavily on a saucer or that cutlery rattled. Lukas’s face gave nothing away.
‘I was taken off quickly – fast, immediate. Would have been well gone by the time a reaction force was back in there… I was held fourteen days. They didn’t want a ransom, didn’t want a truckload of dollars, didn’t want a statement of intent to leave from our government. They told me they wanted prisoner exchange, people of theirs who were in Abu Ghraib under American jurisdiction. After fourteen days they got the message. No deal. They were ready to do me – would have been a knife job, decapitation. I thought they’d kill me that night. Those were fourteen long days – a different meaning to long than I’ve known before, like years and like hell. The guys who broke in were from Task Force 145, because we Italians didn’t have that sort of group. They came out of the Anaconda Camp in the Balad base. This man – Mr Lukas – did the co-ordination. He married what the assets brought in with prisoner interrogation and reconnaissance, and did it right. I owe him my life. I’m supposed to be a rock-hard bastard but the sight of this little runt, and the knowledge of what he did for me, his skill, makes me want to fucking weep. I never had a chance to thank him there. We, the Italian contingent, didn’t have such a man in Iraq. It was my great fortune that he was in country, with Defense Department, and allocated to my situation. Great fortune because he’s the best. I saw him in the distance and then he was gone, but guys told me… What I’m saying, if he’s in town, if some poor bastard goes through what I went through, then fuck the protocol and fucking listen to him.’
Applause spattered the canteen.
‘Can we get out of here?’ Lukas asked softly, close to Castrolami.
‘It was your call to come,’ Castrolami said.
‘Someone thought it was a good idea. The chief honcho in the company I work for would have pulled him up on the files.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t and maybe it was – a good idea.’
He disengaged from the veteran – and Castrolami thought Marco now did some soft liaison job in Parliament but would never forget. Lukas endured one last, awkward embrace, then was pushing for the double doors, and the coffee hadn’t been drunk. They went along corridors and down flights of stairs. They hit the street going fast, as if both men wanted to be shot of a place that was sugar-sweet on sentimentality.
‘I suppose I should apologise, but it was reckoned a good, clean, fast way of establishing credentials – like fast-tracking them.’
‘Could you do that sort of cabaret in other places, other cities?’
‘’Fraid so, quite a number. I do apologise – a stunt and a gimmick. Not my way but-’
‘Give it me,’ Castrolami demanded.
Lukas said, ‘I don’t horn in and play rank and pedigree. Inside there was just about a CV, and to save you time, and somebody else’s idea, if I’m invited I come in. If my advice is looked for, I offer it. There are no other strings, and no other agenda.’
‘I warn you, we pull in different directions.’
Lukas was looking at his feet as they walked. ‘When was it ever different?’
‘I make no commitment to you, an outsider.’
‘In your place, I doubt I would.’
*
The cell had no air and the heat was trapped in it. If she had been charged with shop-lifting, bag-snatching or aggravated assault, Gabriella Borelli would have shared a cell with five others, even nine. But she was special, had status, was awarded solitary confinement. She had been escorted back to the cell, and the heat had wafted at her as the door was unlocked, had wrapped round her as it was closed after her. The sun was climbing and played directly on the window. Distorted shadows were thrown over her from the light hitting the bars.
It had been a sour meeting with her lawyer, Umberto.
She had sensed his shock when he saw her with chains fastened to manacles at her wrists. He would have heard them rattling as she was led down the corridor and into the interview room, and she sensed he felt personal pain for her, and also that his worst nightmare would have been to wear those chains, to sleep in a cell like hers and not to walk on the Tribunali or the Duomo but in an exercise yard. He had dabbed a handkerchief dosed with cologne at his nose. They had taken the chains off her when she was ready to sit opposite him.
Did he believe that a case conference between accused and advocate was free of electronic audio surveillance? He did not.
Did she believe that a microphone was not wired into the room, its furniture, its walls, ceiling and electrical fittings? Most certainly she did not.
It had been a bizarre conference – she flopped on to the bunk bed on a raised concrete base. She kicked off the sandals which she had been issued with, loosened the blouse that had been torn when they’d felled her and unzipped the skirt that had ridden up when she was on the ground, but there was no relief from the heat. Umberto had produced a packet of cigarettes, cigarette papers for rolling but no loose tobacco, and two match books. The cigarettes were between them, and each had had a set of the matches. He had divided the papers so that they had half each. They had done the case conference.