She ran until they called the halt.
‘In your experience, how does it play?’ Castrolami asked him.
‘They will have moved him first to a holding location, then will shift him to something more permanent. That completed, they make the contact. They have something they consider of value and wish to trade. There has to be dialogue. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see her.’
‘You want to walk some more?’
‘To my room, to pack, then to the train station. They have to make the contact.’
The prosecutor took a call. He knew the lawyer well. For all of the prosecutor’s years in the city – in the offices of the Castel Capuana, now deserted and derelict, and in the new tower to which the Palace of Justice had moved – this man had handled the legal affairs of the Borelli family. He had contempt for him. He believed him bereft of integrity. He thought him a symbol of the corruption alive in the city. He had first met the lawyer when he had tried to prepare a case against Carmine Borelli, himself a young official, his target a man of substance, and had failed. He had met him again after the arrest of Pasquale Borelli, had negotiated a way through the court-imposed minefields and now had that clan leader locked away in Novara. He would doubtless meet the lawyer frequently now, with the arrest of Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni Borelli and Silvio Borelli, and after the extradition of Vincenzo Borelli. He heard honeyed words.
The prosecutor was asked if he was available in his office to meet with the lawyer the following day, at any time in the afternoon that was convenient. He was called ‘Professore’. He was not a professor of any form of jurisprudence – or of street-sweeping, or of the cultivation of tomatoes under glass. He did not address the lawyer by any title that might flatter him, but he could not refuse the request. He named the time and rang off.
He worked in a fortified enclave. Below his office, in the basement, were the courts in which his accused were judged. In those courts, the accused would sit on benches inside barred cages. The prosecutor was prey to a personal fear that he had not shared with a living souclass="underline" would those men and women in the cage contaminate him? They probed, all of them, for weakness. It might be through intimidation, bribery, the honey-trap and a Ukrainian prostitute, or a business opportunity that seemed legitimate and offered rich returns. The prosecutor’s wife worked in a school as an administrator and was vulnerable there, and his son was a teenager and could not have been protected without dislocation of his entire life. He himself had only a state pension to look forward to, and cash payments could be made easily into offshore accounts. He was away from home often, for meetings in Rome at the ministry, then slept in hotels and sometimes was lonely. He had enough cash in hand for a relatively frugal existence – his one indulgence his love of opera – but taxes were high and the cost of living had soared. There were many ways in which he might have been contaminated. They had such wealth, so many resources, those who sat in the cages, and he had been – so far – one of the few men regarded as incorruptible. His fear, nurtured in privacy, was that he would stumble at some hurdle. He went to conferences in Berlin, Frankfurt and London. In those cities, of course, there was criminality, organised and serious. In those cities, also, senior policemen and jurists regarded him – he was aware of it – with hands-off suspicion: he came from that city where the clan gangs ran out of control, where murder, violence and extortion were embedded, where integrity was long corroded. He did not have the respect of outsiders. For a few more years he would endure the pressure of prosecuting the clans, then retirement, home in a village in the northern mountains and… Alone, the fear was always with him.
He made a note in his diary. The lawyer to visit in person, no agenda set, the following day in mid-afternoon.
He believed events would play out predictably. He thought a boy’s life was threatened… and he would, in the next hours, prepare himself to make judgements on the value of that life.
He held his wrists as far apart as the pain would permit. Using the ridge of concrete and its serrated edge as a saw’s blade, Eddie worked on the chain. Now – yes – he was prepared to let the tip of his finger feel the scraped line on the chain’s link, and he was prepared to believe he had made a weakness. His mind roved as he scratched on the line… The time he had once grabbed a man: he had crossed a street to a far pavement where a man and a woman struggled and the man had hit the woman across the side of her face. He had intervened, had dragged the man back with some force. He had been kicked and punched – not with the ferocity of the beating in the bunker – and had been on the pavement. His eyes had misted, but he had seen the man and the woman walk away without a backward glance, and the woman had put her hand on the man’s arm, then he had dropped it across her shoulders… Scraping at the chain, feeling a line made by the concrete, switched his focus. If he succeeded and parted the chain, if he was free to fight, if it was the guy who had taken him off the street, if… What damn chance did he have?
Better than no chance. Big, brave thought. He kept on with the scraping.
He ate fit to bust, and the gastrics put the gas in his gut. Twice he had noisily released it, but Carmine Borelli had to eat a little of everything that was offered, and much was pushed at him. Most recently, he had had a piece of orange and ricotta cake, sfogliata, and a good slice of pizza Margherita, with a deep coating of mozzarella, and before that more ricotta cake, but the riccia version, with twisted pastry, and he had drunk tiny quantities of Stock brandy, sambuca and grappa, all of which should be consumed after the evening meal but would have come from handily available bottles. He must eat, drink and be seen.
He should not have drunk on the pills. Without the painkillers he could not have made his long walk around the territory he had claimed, so many years before, for his clan. The street urchins, the scugnizzi , followed him. Young men and women watched him from the pavements or from the seats of their scooters and seemed uncertain, as if they did not believe that he, Carmine Borelli, could deliver opportunity, money and the calm required for decent trafficking. It was the old who pushed cake and pizza on him, and the little glasses. Some, he thought, had known him all of those years since the power base had been formed and the men took off their caps for him and the women rose from their street chairs to touch, with a degree of reverence, his arm, his mottled gaunt hands, or to pinch a grip on his coat. The old had known him since he had made Forcella his own.
Trade in the brothels had declined and the troops had moved north towards Cassino. Heavier competition existed for the dispersal of American aid, stolen and available on the street stalls, and then God had smiled on him – a day in March 1944. Carmine looked on it as the most significant of his life. Vesuvio had erupted. A great cloud had risen from the crater in daylight, and the beginning of the molten flow was visible when night fell. Villages were consumed, roads blocked. A military airfield and its planes were enveloped in the caking, heavy dust. Food warehouses collapsed – disaster for many, a triumphant moment for a few. Carmine Borelli was Il Camionista. He owned a small fleet of lorries. The shortage of transport was desperate. He was given a lucrative contract by the military government. He prospered. He bought more lorries and was able to profit mightily from post-war reconstruction, then speedboats to pick up contraband cigarettes, heavy plant for digging the foundations of industrial sites as Rome’s government ladled money at the disaffected city. But it had all begun when he had mobilised a small fleet of lorries on the morning after Vesuvio had erupted. It was said that only firearms and ammunition, of all the items brought to Naples’ docks by the Americans, were not available on the stalls of the via Forcella the morning after they were unloaded. The men who now pressed close to him had driven those lorries and unloaded them, and the women who touched him had sold from the stalls.