Could she go into the Borghese and run?
Rossi said she couldn’t.
Why not?
‘Because Castrolami has to give permission, and he’s in Naples.’
Why was he in Naples?
‘I think you know, Signorina. Try to remember, please, the lie you told.’
The tape-recorder had been put away. Of course it was foolish to imagine they would allow her to run in the darkness. She worked towards the challenge.
Could they go that evening to a restaurant?
Orecchia said they could not.
Why was it not possible to eat in a restaurant?
‘It requires the permission of the investigating agent, Castrolami, or of the prosecutor. Both are in Naples, and I won’t call them for this. There is food in the kitchen.’
Why were they in Naples?
Orecchia did not look up from his magazine. ‘I think you know very well, Signorina, what business they have in Naples. If you hadn’t lied it would have been different, but you did. You aren’t going to run or to a restaurant.’
She stood then, legs a little apart, pelvis forward, head back, chin jutted, and built on the challenge. ‘Am I difficult? Are many collaborators “difficult”? Will you write a report on me as difficult?’
Rossi said, ‘A few aren’t particularly helpful.’
Orecchia said, ‘Some, not many, go on believing, Signorina, that they’re still on the pedestal they enjoyed while their family was Cosa Nostra or ’Ndrangheta or Camorra. Some, until they have disabused themselves, are “difficult”. We believe they’re frightened of the reality of their situation – which they created of their own free will. You can flounce, pout, stamp, throw plates and slam doors, shout or wave your boobs and fanny at Alessandro, but nothing will change.’
She sucked in her breath, prepared to bare her spirit.
‘I should tell you that Alessandro’s wife is exceptionally attractive. Very much more attractive, mentally and physically, than you.’
She spat the question: ‘What’s happened to him?’
They looked at her dumbly. Perhaps they’d practised their expressions of incomprehension. Orecchia had returned to his magazine, as if he didn’t understand who ‘him’ was. Rossi had not reacted to the description of his wife. Orecchia’s tone had been harsh and unforgiving, as if he had spoken to a child in a school room – not that such a volley of insults had ever been directed at Immacolata Borelli at school. Her mother had brought her on the first day to the Forcella infants’ classroom. The head teacher and the year teacher had been lined up as if she was heiress to the Bourbon dynasty. A seat had been found for her at the front of the room, and the staff had bowed and scraped because she was the daughter of the Borelli clan. Her father had taken her on the first day to the middle school, had materialised from his life as a fugitive, and slipped an envelope stuffed with banknotes into the hand of the head teacher, murmuring about new electronic equipment. It had been pocketed, with discretion. Her eldest brother, Vincenzo, had escorted her to the senior school, and had oozed power as he walked alongside her into the building. At every level of school she had attended, her marks in examinations had been exceptional, her reports remarkable. She was the daughter of the Borelli family, and no teacher would have been stupid enough to mark her down or criticise her. Only at the accountancy and book-keeping college had she been treated, almost, as another kid – and there she had met her friend, Marianna Rossetti, and… Orecchia and Rossi spoke to her as if she was any other child, one who was not given the seat of privilege at the front.
She repeated it, more shrilly: ‘What has happened to him? What has happened to Eddie?’
Their eyes met. Unspoken acceptance that something must be said, something minimal.
Orecchia said, ‘The boy you indicated was unimportant to you? Yes? We don’t know what has “happened” to him.’
Rossi said, ‘Signorina, we are very junior links in a very long chain. We would not be told the latest intelligence. We don’t know.’
‘Castrolami would tell you if he knew anything, or the prosecutor.’
‘We are merely functionaries. They don’t share that sort of information with people at our level.’
Doubt clouded her. ‘You know nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing of substance.’
She went to her room, didn’t bang the door but closed it carefully. She stood at the window and gazed out over the roofs, and myriad lights stretched away from her. None was in the home of a friend, or lit the street of a friend, or was driven on a road by a friend. She had no friend in this city. She stripped, let her clothes fall, and stared out of the window at the expanse of lights. The air chilled her skin. It hurt that she didn’t know what had happened to him – hurt that she had made a play in her mind of ignorance.
She knew what happened to members of the family of a collaborator, to their friends and lovers. Ignorance was not a screen behind which she could hide.
She thought it was Orecchia’s voice she could hear, and imagined he had telephoned Naples to tell Castrolami of her hysteria – but had not rated it a problem.
Off the operations room at the piazza Dante barracks there was a square annexe space, four metres by three, no more. Into it had been crowded a work surface, six computer screens and keyboards, the same number of chairs and scattered telephones and, at the edge, more chairs. There was no window, and cigarette smoke fogged the air.
He knew the names of the two men who shared the work surface with him, but Lukas did not make conversation, had no wish to or need to; neither did he think it would be welcomed. One was the carabinieri unit’s psicologia, the other was the unit’s intelligence collator. He bided his time because experience had taught him that the psychologist and the collator had to be won over, would not respond to being battered into submission. Lounging against the annexe walls there were sometimes three, sometimes four, of the fast-reaction team – Lukas knew about the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale – their kit scattered at their feet: flak-vests, caps, windcheaters, boots and radios. Down a corridor there were more of them. He was an intruder, tolerated only because word would have come from Rome that he had saved the life of a colleague: it allowed him to be accepted but not welcomed. That would come later, if he could insinuate himself without breeding hostility. They talked Italian round him and he gave no sign of understanding a word they said. He had good Italian but, as with other European languages, he favoured often disguising the fact.
A concession: he had been brought coffee, with a ham- and salad-filled roll.
He learned that every informant in the city, used by the Squadra Mobile of the police and by the carabinieri ’s serious crime squad, had been alerted to the kidnap of the English boy. Learned also that teams scoured CCTV tapes for evidence of the abduction and the movement of a hostage. Learned as well that the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli were now under twenty-four-hour surveillance, as was their lawyer, as were all known associates, and that the watchers and tailers had been stripped from high-profile targets. Learned that one of the clans’ most effective and feared assassins, the Borelli family’s man, was loose on the streets, location unknown. Learned that an ear, a finger or a penis was expected in the post, soon.
And Lukas learned that the informants had produced nothing. Learned that the CCTV tapes had given up nothing, or the surveillance operation. He would have said that the faces around him were not cut by disappointment: he sensed fatalism, the inevitability of failure. Too early in the relationship with the annexe for him to chivvy, far too early to press a point. Did time exist for the niceties and the protocols? It had to. An alternative did not.
Lukas would know when he was accepted by the psychologist and the collator, the guys from the ROS, the storm squad, when they took his cigarettes and offered him their own… Not yet. They smoked theirs and he smoked his, but the coffee and the roll were a start.