As a kid from the trailer park, he had found virtue in waiting and patience. Any kid from a trailer home – a father who was part-Brit, part-Polish, and gone in search of better-carat gold-paved streets, a mother who was part-American, part-Italian, who cleaned offices, no money sloshing in pockets – knew that waiting and patience paid dividends. He would wait with patience until his opinion was asked and advice requested. Already he sensed a poor outcome was anticipated.
Could have been worse. There was an icon story about hostage negotiation, had to be true, too precious not to be. Some said the icon was a British guy, having a real black day, climbing a crane ladder to a jerk sitting on a spar above him, squealing that he was about to go fly and that he’d not be talked out of it, mind-made-up crap. The icon had shouted back: ‘Way I’m feeling this morning, friend, way my missus is carrying on, do you mind if I come up there and join you? We can bloody jump, fly, together.’ The story was that the Brit guy meant it – would have. The story also was that the jerk didn’t want to share and came straight down. There was always somewhere that it was worse for someone.
It was getting late, and there was room in the ashtray, on the table between Lukas, the psychologist and the collator, for maybe six more butts. He’d stay that long… It was always about intelligence. The psychologist could feed in opinions, but intelligence gave facts – and nothing came.
Late that evening, he walked with the prosecutor. It was difficult for either man to say that he was subjected to a greater or lesser emotion – or no emotion – than usual when they knew a wretch was beyond reach. Both the prosecutor and Castrolami relished the cool of the air, almost a chill on the face, drying the day’s sweat. They were outside the palace and traversed the wide piazza, with the towers of the financial district, the Holiday Inn and sought-after apartments ahead. On what they earned as servants of the state, Castrolami and the prosecutor had no chance of purchasing or renting a place in one of those blocks. Neither did they need the services of the financial institutions lodged there, but to their right was a church, a better place. Lights beamed from it, and Castrolami could see the figures inside. He thought it a rehearsal for a wedding.
There were bodyguards behind them, the prosecutor’s, a pair of men. The church drew them as they talked.
The desk at piazza Dante reported nothing.
Rome reported a crisis point.
What to do?
The church was modern, finished in 1990, and the concrete of its slim pyramid shape, and the narrowing twin towers that supported the bell, was not yet weather-stained. It was named after a saint, Carlo Borromeo – died 1584, aged forty-six, in Milan of a fever from the plague sweeping the city; he had helped the sick at great personal risk and paid for it with his life. It was a dramatic building, a feature of the centro direzionale, and the prosecutor was a familiar figure there. He led Castrolami inside.
The bride was not beautiful and the groom was not handsome; she wore a skirt about three centimetres too short and the other faded jeans. They pledged their future, and had good voices.
Castrolami said, ‘I had felt her to be strong. Now I sense weakness.’
The prosecutor’s voice was soft, would have been inaudible to the couple, their supporters, the priest, and the woman who worked the portable CD player for their music. ‘I always look for a priority.’
‘Her evidence statement, taken with full legal cover, her appearance in person in court as a witness.’
‘I look for a priority, then for accommodation of it.’
‘There is no accommodation – excuse me. There cannot be.’
‘We cling, then, to the priority.’
‘The statement, then the appearance. There can be no manoeuvre.’ Castrolami shrugged. Perhaps then he thought of his own marriage. His wife, severe-faced, wrapped in sheets of white material, and himself in a full-dress uniform, a serious dispute within a week over the date of her mother’s first overnight stay at their one-bedroom apartment: his mother-in-law and his wife would share the marriage bed, and he would sleep in the living room on a pump-up – no accommodation, no compromise, no manoeuvre. Extraordinarily, he had stayed long enough with his wife to produce three children. He visited each year, stayed a few days, drank too much, then piled, with relief, on to the fast train from Milan to the south. He was – his own words – pathetic, sad and a committed, dedicated, single-minded, focused investigator. He supposed that – in an inexplicable fashion – he represented the hopes of the girl with the short skirt and the boy in old jeans. ‘The priority alone is worthy of consideration. She goes to court, she gives evidence. There is no question of stepping aside from the priority.’
‘The boy came of his own free will. He was not volunteered. We’ll do what we can for him.’
‘He doesn’t intrude on the priority.’
‘Even if we condemn him.’
‘I want to bring her back to the city.’
They watched the taking of the mock vows, heard the moment of laughter filtering through the high building as the couple were invited to kiss, and did so with rare passion. Castrolami told the prosecutor what he wanted, why and when, and it was agreed.
‘And the boy? Attractive, intelligent, interesting?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Castrolami said. ‘We’ve decided on the priority. He is in second place.’
The prosecutor bowed towards the altar where the couple talked small detail with the priest, crossed himself, then turned for the door. He was reflective. ‘In the world war, there were occasions when a ship was torpedoed and sunk, and sailors were in the water, injured and choking on oil, but because the enemy’s submarine wasn’t located ships didn’t dare to stop and pick up the survivors. They sailed past and through them. It was a question of priorities. I think they weigh heavily.’
‘We’ll do what we can,’ Castrolami said flatly. ‘Priorities rule us. A great truth can’t be ignored.’
‘Good night. Pray for him.’
They parted, turned their backs on the church.
Nobody could refuse her. Nobody could dare to leave a shuttered window, a locked door and a darkened interior for her.
With a slow, crabbed step, Anna Borelli – in her eighty-eighth year – came late that evening along the via Duomo. She had already been the length of the via Carbonara, up the slope on the right and down on the left, and before she was finished she would have traversed the via dei Tribunali, the west side. Some boys walked with her. They had been ordered to stay outside the shops and bars she visited, but they were seen and they carried hand weapons – axe handles, a baseball bat, a claw hammer – and they had mobile phones linked to an outer ring of watchers. It was not necessary for her to intimidate. All paid the pizzo. It was not inside the perimeters of reality to avoid payment.
She was a small crow of a woman.
She stepped among filth and rubbish because those streets were not on the tourist routes. There was a corner, a junction, where Carmine had shot a rival more than a half-century before; had fired two shots and one had missed the target, the rival’s head; there was still the mark in the stone by the bar’s entrance where the bullet had struck. There was a bar, now under the clan’s control, in which five shots had been fired into the ceiling before Carmine had been accepted as protector. There was a vehicle-repair yard where a body – a man killed by Carmine, manual strangulation – had been kept for five days before it had been safe to move it to the pits of a factory’s foundations into which concrete was poured. She walked well, and felt the control that power gave, and fear. People on those streets begged for her cracked smile and blessed her when she gave it.
She called on those shopkeepers, small businesses, cafes and bars, and all were there though it was now late in the evening. She was admitted and shown the books. She discussed profit margins and heard dismal explanations of the pressures from global, national and local economic recession.