He was an agent, a watcher, and had been sent on a crash course to gain the skills, was knowledgeable on the workings of electricity. Nobody, of course, who lived in the great Sail paid the state company for electricity. Nobody ever had to face final demands delivered by postal officials. Nobody was ever cut off for non-payment. Davide, as he was known, was not required to run cables from the main supply into the apartments on level three, but he was useful when a fusebox blew and when new plugs were needed. Then he was sent for. That was good. The poor, the derelicts and the addicts did not have the electrical appliances that blew out fuses. Men high in the chain of command did. That was good for his handlers.
Four months before, he had been to an apartment nineteen doors further along the walkway, and had wired in four new power sockets, had noted the carpeting and furniture, the shrine to the Virgin and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, in translation, on a table. So, Delta465/Foxtrot had identified the safe-house used by a principal clan leader on the third level of the Sail. He had seen the man, the reader of a Russian classic, that day. That man – who, the agent’s handlers said, was among the four most influential and powerful crime players in the city – had walked past the polished windows surrounded by his guards. He had gone towards the apartment, and an old man, limping, with another man, had been escorted after him. Then the big player had come again past Davide’s window, and a hooded man had been dragged by. His handlers would be interested only in information relating to that principal. His handlers were not policemen: they were interested only in the most senior men. Everything the agent saw he remembered, and to back his elephantine memory there were tapes.
His handlers had placed him in the Sail four years before.
He was a crusader. He was there because he wished to make a difference. A son buried, and the heroin microbe gone in his veins to the grave. A wife had walked out on him, unable to weather the strain of an addict youth. At the time of the death and the walk-out, he had worked in a bank in a resort town on the Adriatic. He had volunteered himself, had not been accepted, had come to live in a neighbouring tower on the far side of the viale della Resistenza, had made the second approach, had been accepted, given a code name and a cover history that checked, had been found the apartment, number 374. Once every week he took the bus into town, reported and delivered tapes. Once, also, every week he went to the mini-mart and bought the basics of sustenance. The rest of his waking hours he spent watching the walkway, or sat behind a lace curtain in his bedroom, observing the street below.
He knew every pulsebeat of the Sail.
Knew the times that the buses came from the railway station down the hill on piazza Garibaldi. Scampia, with the Sail at its heart, was the narcotics supermarket of Italy, even of Europe. Both users and dealers took trains to come here from all over Italy, from Frankfurt and Berlin, Paris and Marseille, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Madrid and Barcelona. The regular bus service waited for them at the station, and if the police stopped the buses there were taxis. A watcher on a street corner, a teenage youth, was paid two hundred euros a day, and there were twenty piazze, each administered by a capopiazza. They were the locations where cocaine, heroin and ecstasy were sold in Scampia. All needed watchers, and watchers were employed in three shifts. An army had been recruited to watch the bus passengers coming in, and those driving their own cars, and to warn of the approach of the police. The boy who went from the customer to the dealer could make eight thousand euros a month – and eight hundred if he was, extraordinarily, to get a job in a factory. Each piazza, his handlers had told Davide, generated an income of fifty thousand euros a week, so the trade for this abandoned urban slumland brought in a guaranteed minimum of fifty million euros a year. Just what was sold on the streets of one suburb of the city. The figure, they emphasised, was a minimum. A young buck, if ruthless, if charismatic enough to find blind followers, can head a clan by the age of thirty – can be worth a billion euros. It was a fighting ground. In the late evenings, when his television was turned off, Davide would sit in his darkened bedroom and rely on the few streetlights still working for necessary illumination to watch trading and killing, linked. Clans clashed: assassins went after a man, couldn’t find him, took his woman, tortured her for information on his whereabouts. She wouldn’t tell so she was trussed and put into a car, which was torched: in Scampia. A man was beheaded with a butcher’s axe: in Scampia. The assassins came to take a man from his mother’s home – he had already fled; his mother, in her nightdress, was shot on her step and bled to death: in Scampia.
He watched, every day and every night, and knew the vagaries of the pulsebeat of the Sail… and a short bus ride from the stop on via Baku was the old city, patronised by the tourists, the lovers of fine arts and the gourmets, who did not know about Scampia.
His eyes flitted between the mirror against his thigh and the game-show. He knew that, in the depths of this monstrous building, a drama played around a hooded man.
‘Don’t ask me any questions. If you ask it will be wasted breath, yours, wasted time, mine. All I can say, what you tell me is of critical importance to the well-being of your friend, of Eddie.’
He had marched them down to the pub. Roddy ‘Duck’ Johnstone had taken a corner table, then gone to the bar, had been given a tray by the barmaid and had come back with two pints for each of the three lads – one missing, still at work – and a single Scotch for himself, six packets of crisps and six of peanuts.
His question: ‘Tough or weak, determined or vacuous, hard or soft, serious or kid-like? Which is Eddie?’
He didn’t need names, hadn’t a tape-recorder and no need of a notepad.
From the club waiter, who would be late at work: ‘He’d like you to think he’s just a lazy tosser, that nothing matters to him, that he’s a push-over. Maybe he was, but not any more. He’s changed. Actually, he’s quite tough. I think he’s pretty determined.’
The PhD student’s contribution: ‘The role he acts is that he’s weak and soft – just a prat, really. Maybe he was. Everything’s altered, though, hasn’t it? A new man, our Eddie. Quite funny to watch it.’
Hunched forward, the Revenue and Customs clerk said, ‘He wanted to seem a kid still, never going to grow up – like the thing he’d run a mile from fast was responsibility. That’s in the past. Gone to the recycle bin. Different guy – and maybe carrying us with him. Tough? Probably, and getting tougher. Determined? Wouldn’t have jacked the job and done what he has if he wasn’t. Hard and serious, I suppose so – but it’s like I said, and us too.’
He listened. He let them tell their anecdotes, put more pints in front of them and didn’t speak until he felt he’d drained them.
Late, Duck asked, ‘What was different? How had he changed? What was new?’
Like a chorus, spoken together: ‘It was Mac. She turned up. That is one fantastic person. Immacolata was what was different. She changed him, maybe us. Immacolata was the new thing. Sorry and all that if we don’t express it well. Immacolata was brilliant. Any guy would be crazy not to go after her. Are you going to tell us what this is all about? What’s of critical importance?’
He bought a last round, more crisps, and left them.
He drove back to his office, went inside. He started to type and tried to express what three pretty inarticulate guys, decent enough, second-rate enough, had said about their friend and about the girl – and didn’t know whether he did a good job or a poor one, and whether he had painted a fair enough portrait of her.