He had asked her if she was well and she had told him she was.
He had written in an insect scrawl on a slip of the paper: A boy, the lover of Immacolata, came from England to find her. Had an address of via Forcella. The priest sent him to Carmine and Anna. He had pushed the slip towards her, and she had read it, then crumpled it and put it into the tinfoil ashtray between them.
She had written: Was he stupid? Was he ignorant? She had shown it to him, then crushed it and dropped it with the other.
They lit cigarettes, and allowed the lighted matches to burn the papers in the ashtray. A rhythm had developed.
Did she have complaints that he should take up with the authorities? She did not.
He knew nothing, had met Immacolata in London, loved her, knew nothing. Carmine took control. He sent for help.
What control? What help?
More paper burned in the ashtray.
Was the food satisfactory? It was.
It’s control through leadership. It’s to prevent secessionists and intrusion. He sent for Salvo.
To what purpose?
Smoke rose from the paper. More smoke curled up from the cigarettes.
Was she treated with respect? She was.
Carmine thinks the boy from England can be used as leverage on Immacolata. Salvo has taken the boy, holds him in Sanita. Bits of him will be sent to Immacolata if she doesn’t retract her accusations.
I doubt the bitch will – but good to use the boy. Make pressure with him. More important, find the bitch, shoot her, stamp on her face.
In that note, she had allowed emotion to escape: her writing had been faster, larger, and the response had taken both sides of the paper.
He asked her what she needed. She had said clothing, a portable electric fan, a radio and some magazines.
What else?
Use the boy, with a knife. Kill the bitch.
What else did she want? She had not said that her love should be sent to her husband, to Vincenzo in London, to Giovanni or Silvio. She had not spoken of her parents-in-law or of Salvatore… She had said she needed a pair of her own shoes and more toothpaste. Together they had checked that all of the paper slips were burned to cinders, then had screwed out the cigarettes in the ash. He had stood, knocked on the door and the escort had come in. The manacles had gone back on her wrists. She had not thanked him for coming to the women’s gaol at Posilippo: she paid him, and he was rich on the family’s back.
She sat now in the cell.
She would, herself, have slit her daughter’s throat.
She would, herself, have sliced off the ears, fingers and nose of the English boy, her daughter’s lover. What Gabriella Borelli loathed most was the removal of power, the loss of authority. She must play-act with cigarette papers across a table. Anger welled in her, but was confined inside the walls, three metres by two, of the cell. She could do none of it herself. She was off the bed. In fury, Gabriella Borelli beat her forehead against the wall, bruised and scratched herself against the graffiti. She didn’t care about clothes, an electric fan or shoes. She wanted her daughter dead.
The old lady had been waiting for him. She was sitting in his office amid the mountains of paper and files that were Umberto’s trade. When he came back from Posilippo – and he had had coffee at the Cafe Gambrinus, where old friends, the advocates of other clans, had greeted him – she was in front of his desk. Extraordinary, but she didn’t speak. She handed him a small envelope, then stood, looked around as if she was searching for a dead cat carcass, and was gone. He tore open the envelope, retrieved the camera’s memory pad, then called for his clerk, Massimo. The young man was his nephew, had his trust. He told Massimo to take money from the petty-cash box and go to the camera shop on the corso Vittorio Emanuele – a long bus ride but there was little chance of his clerk being recognised there – buy a portable printer and bring it back. If the clan fell, Umberto fell. So hard for him to believe that the sweet pretty face of Immacolata – always his favourite – might cause him to fall, and fall far.
She had talked through the morning to the deputy prosecutor, up from Naples. She had found, with each anecdote and each item of evidence, that old loyalties had frayed, disintegrated. A few days before she had hugged her brother, Silvio, for driving out to Capodicino, collecting her, ferrying her to Nola and back. That morning she listed all the occasions she knew, and would swear to it on oath, that Silvio had ridden on his scooter around the city distributing handguns and ammunition. She skewered him. She identified the weapons caches he had visited, the men from whom the weapons were collected and those to whom they were given. The tape spools had turned. She had seen, across the table, grim satisfaction on the face of the deputy prosecutor. She felt no more affection for her youngest brother than she did for the others, and none for her mother. She didn’t think of her father. She kept in her mind, central, the image of her friend. She saw, as she condemned her family, the features of Marianna Rossetti. There was no other face in her mind. No other friendship was ‘significant’. I’ll go to court, whatever. She sensed, that morning, a growing relaxation in the apartment, as if a barrier had been broken down. She was not treated with the same suspicion – near hostility.
When they broke, the deputy prosecutor for coffee and she for juice, she had stood and stretched, sensing that her T-shirt rode up over her navel, then wandered towards Rossi. He was on the balcony, through the open doors, sitting in a rattan easy chair, browsing a newspaper. She could fight, as she did with Mario Castrolami, scratch. She could smile, too, flash her eyes and be docile. ‘Please…’
‘Yes?’ Rossi looked up at her. ‘What do you need?’
‘Do you run – for exercise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please… may I run? It’s claustrophobic here. I’d like to run – if it’s allowed but I don’t have the clothes – I’d be so grateful if I could.’
‘Can’t see why not. Let me float it.’
‘Thank you.’
Why did she want to run? Not for fitness. She didn’t have a weight problem, she was young and healthy. She believed that if she could run along a pavement, as other women did, she would take another step towards changing her life. She drank the juice Orecchia brought her, sat again at the table and talked about Salvatore, Il Pistole, who had fancied her, had wanted to sleep with her and might have wanted to marry her. She stabbed him, too, with the stiletto, pushed it deep. Another tape was slotted into the recorder. She thought of nothing that was insignificant or meaningless.
There wasn’t a dog in the household for Arthur Deacon to walk. Best he could do was borrow his immediate neighbour’s, a cheerful golden retriever. He’d needed to get out of the house, stretch his legs and have someone – or something – to commune with who brought no complications. Betty had taken the day off work, and had warned them it might be the week. He’d felt hemmed in, as he had in the last months at the water-board office, and the dog was a sort of therapy against worrying – agonising – about Eddie. They hadn’t slept, either of them, last night. Could have taken the dog round the loop of byways and bridlepaths all over again, but felt he should go home. He had dropped the dog off at the neighbour’s, well short of Dean Weymouth’s bungalow, and tramped the last hundred yards to his house. The back door, of course, because his dirty shoes lived in the utility room. He lived a pretty boring life, ordered, predictable and boring, so there was a place on a shelf for muddy shoes, and another place on another shelf for merely dirty shoes, and a cupboard spot for clean shoes – it was about as boring as it could get. He was about to sing out, ‘Hello, it’s me, I’m back,’ but didn’t. Who else might it be? The Queen? The Pope? Osama bin bloody Laden? He said nothing, but as he took off his shoes he heard his wife’s voice, the accent she used for work, with all the vowels and consonants in place.