She talked in the flat tone about the mother who had not kissed, hugged or praised her.
‘We think women are more capable at criminality, but less visible.’
‘We believe that few women will stand against the lust, an orgasmic attraction, of power.’
‘You owe your mother nothing.’
‘An accident of birth does not have the right to demand loyalty.’ Immacolata said she would go to the kitchen and make lunch. Salad, fruit and cheese. She had not asked if she could run again in the gardens at the Villa Borghese.
Through his cleaned window, using the small mirror that he kept between his knee and the arm of his chair, Davide watched, saw the movement on the walkway and the bustle, and his head did not seem to waver or his eyes to move off the big-screen television. It was not usual for there to be so much movement, so many men, so early in the day. He thought he had seen, also, a clan leader, hustled along the walkway among guards towards the barred gate on level three. But his pay-masters were not concerned with the day-to-day, night-to-night dross life of the Sail. He watched everything. In his memory he noted everything. But he had witnessed nothing that would break his routine of meetings.
Eddie reckoned that in five more minutes he would have broken the chain’s link. He worked feverishly, had pain in his arms and shoulders, more dust on his face and in his eyes, more sweat and The footsteps came.
With them there was music, louder, as if doors had been opened and not closed, and the music flowed closer with the footsteps. Not one pair – might be three. They had differing rhythms and weights. Eddie didn’t know whether to use the last moment, as the footsteps came nearer, to try to break the link, or to leave the goddamn thing. Could have fought one, couldn’t fight three. Low voices were above him. They would examine the handcuffs, see the scratch line, the sawed indentation, and know what he’d done. Wouldn’t kill him, no. Might beat him. He heard the bolt pulled back, had the hood on his head and peeled down the hem, and the fraction of light from between the trapdoor’s planks was gone. Darkness enclosed him.
What was the best that could happen? That the bucket was taken out. What was the worst? Eddie shivered. The sweat on him had no heat. He realised it was a tremble. A dog in a farmyard knows it has done wrong, is called and goes forward on its belly. He had seen that on the farm where the heifers were, near his parents’ place. Wanted still to hate the man who had taken him off the street, wanted more to hear him laugh and know he was not to be beaten. The trapdoor was opened, the hinges groaning. The torch shone down and light seeped below the hood. Hands grabbed him.
He could smell the breath – chilli, maybe, but onion and nicotine too. He was pulled up. As he was dragged out through the hatch there were hands under his arms. There were no grunts, no wheezes – big men, powerful. His feet scraped the edge of the hatch and he was swung clear. His hands were dragged forward and he felt the pressure as a key was inserted into the handcuffs’ lock. They were removed. He had enough freedom to run his hands over his wrists and felt the smoothness of the welt he had made as he scraped. Then the laughter broke round him, and the chain of the handcuffs rattled – as if one manacle was held and the other danced beneath it. He heard, then, the snap as the link was prised apart. The laughter was more raucous. He waited for the blow. He tried to duck his head and to have his hands in front of his crotch, waited and- His arms were pulled behind him and a plastic tie bit into the skin where it was raw. He thought – and was bitter – they should be fucking grateful to him for giving them a fucking laugh by trying to break the fucking chain. All the hours he’d done, sawing and scraping for nothing, had given them a laugh.
Eddie could have wept.
He was held. He heard one go down into the pit, and there was the noise of the bucket swinging – whining – as its handle took the weight, then an oath. Some of his urine or faeces might have spilled out as it was hoisted. He heard, also, the rustle of the plastic bag in which his food had been. The rope at his ankles was untied. He was taken forward, and the trapdoor dropped behind him.
New fear played with him, mocked him.
Was it now they would take his penis, his finger or his ear?
He had only her picture to cling to. He had the blown-up photograph on his wall, the smile, and was so far from it and…
He kicked out his foot, took a good step. He had verged towards self-pity: forbidden. Had edged into the area of regret – that he should never have come: forbidden. He tried to walk tall, upright.
He was led out of a building and his feet crunched on broken glass. A vehicle door opened, and he was pitched forward. He knew from the smells that it was the same van as before. He didn’t think, now, that they would bring the knife to him. A rug or a blanket and maybe an old carpet were heaped on him and a boot pushed him against the bulkhead.
They went out of a yard on to a potholed track, then a tarmacked road.
Where was he going? Why was he being moved? What was the immediate future? It didn’t fucking matter. Eddie lay on the floor of the van and rode with its motion. He didn’t know of anybody out there who cared, so it didn’t fucking matter. He was near to weeping, but held off.
It was Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew and clerk, who met Anna Borelli, a legitimate meeting, not one that could have aroused suspicion. He met the aged lady on the broken pavement, among the cheap little clothing stalls on the piazza Nazionale, and they walked slowly together, her dictating the pace, towards the Poggioreale gaol. It was natural that Anna Borelli should wish to visit her two grandsons in the prison, and natural that a lawyer’s clerk should attend with her – it was an opportunity to feed the prosecutor’s reaction to the family.
The clerk didn’t chivvy her to move faster. He was well paid, already owned a car and had bought a good apartment in the high complex of offices, hotels and accommodation close to the prison and the Palace of Justice. He had done better than any of his colleagues at the university in the Faculty of Law. He would, he realised, gradually take over greater responsibility for the legal affairs of the Borelli family – the Borelli clan. He was sucked in, pulled towards a vortex. How to step aside? Difficult. How to forsake the material rewards? More difficult. He believed, with the certainty of night following day, that his future would be eked out on the far side of the high wall, which had watchtowers, guards with guns, attack dogs, searchlights and cameras. He thought it had been only the brilliance of his uncle Umberto that had kept the old man from the cells in the blocks beyond the wall. He went slowly because he hated going inside the place. It had been built ninety years before. Massimo knew the statistics. It had statutory accommodation for eleven hundred inmates and actual accommodation for two and a half thousand. There was tuberculosis in the goal, hepatitis and HIV. A nine-hundred-metre subterranean tunnel linked the cell blocks to the Palace of Justice. It was a place of hell, but it was glorified in the folklore of the city: there, clan leaders had enjoyed carpeted cells, had had personal chefs and had drunk champagne. There, murders were commonplace, alliances forged. It was where he would go, and his uncle Umberto, into sardine-tin cells, into dirt and violence, if he did not break the link… But he had a high-performance car and a fine apartment with a balcony view of the mountain.