There were no sounds from behind the door. No grumbles from the plumbing. It was long past the time she would normally have risen. The sense of disaster caught them. Not a word was exchanged.
They didn’t knock. They didn’t pause respectfully after calling her name. Orecchia went in first, Rossi at his heels. Perhaps from the door the shape in the bed might have confused them, but it was obvious that a pillow substituted for a body. Rossi heard the sharp intake of Orecchia’s breath.
They were not recruits. They had valued experience. They did not scream, curse, shriek or blaspheme. Rossi felt a chill settle on the hackles at his neck and shivered. Orecchia was breathing fast, gasping. Orecchia did the bathroom, went inside as if there was no chance of finding her on the toilet. They scoured the apartment, each room, each cupboard, each wardrobe.
Rossi knew – was thankful for it – that Orecchia was senior and would have to make the telephone call. They went down to the ground floor and checked there, then to the subterranean garage, which they didn’t use, and looked there. They were supposed to have a roster whereby one slept and the other was alert, but both had been asleep. In older times, in history, to be asleep on duty was to invite a meeting with a firing squad. Today it would be a return to the uniform of the Guardia di Finanza, and they would be checking VAT statements in Bari or Brindisi. Maybe for Orecchia it would be dismissal.
Rossi asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘That she is not here, yes.’
‘What has she taken?’
‘Her handbag – she has some money.’
‘Has she taken any clothes?’
‘She has hardly any to take, and no case to put them in.’
‘Could she have gone to the piazza to buy bread or a magazine?’
‘Could pigs fly to the moon? I think not.’
Rossi saw that Orecchia’s mobile was in his hand. He was scrolling through the directory. He felt aggression towards the girl, their ‘Signorina Immacolata’, and might have exploded, let the fury rip, but he turned away and took the deep breaths counselled by the anger-management people. He could see the rooftops, then the hills and part of the city, the haze and gold light on the mountains. Where could she be? How long had she been gone? How far?
Orecchia gave him a wintry smile and pressed the call button.
She sat on a bench by a bus stop, a weed- and litter-filled flowerbed behind her. The bushes were oleander. She knew them from Naples. Their flowers were soft pink and pretty, well formed. As a child she had walked with her mother in the garden between the sea and the riviera di Chiaia, and had picked a sprig of those flowers and put it in the top buttonhole of her blouse. Her mother had seen it, snatched it, thrown it away and smacked her, open hand and hard, on her bare thigh above the knee. She had said that the flower of the oleander was the most dangerous in the city, could cause grave illness, even death; the sap was a compound of strychnine, a poison of the same strength. It had been so pretty, so delicate. Nothing was as it seemed, and she had learned the lesson. The shop she wanted was across the street, and she was waiting for the man to come and the shutter to be raised.
Nothing was as it seemed, and nobody – except Eddie Deacon – those days, those nights and that time.
Mario Castrolami was not a man of crude temper. He took the call, he listened in silence, he cut the call.
In his mentality there was a practised survival routine in the event of what many would describe as ‘disaster’. He began it. He lifted down his jacket from the hook, shrugged into it. He slipped out of the annexe and into a toilet where he dribbled out some urine. Then he went to the canteen, bought coffee and chocolate and took them out past the desk at the front. He circled the piazza as he drank the coffee and ate the chocolate. The wrapper went into a bin and the plastic cup followed it after the next circuit. He did the disaster routine when news came through from the palace at the centro direzionale that the judiciary had thrown out a case that might have taken three years to prepare, had involved dedication and massive man-hours, because of a supposed ‘technicality’, or because a politician had interfered in the process, or a file had walked from a supposedly secure archive. Others went to bars and drank, or dug with manic intensity into new files. Some went home and took their women to bed, or walked by the sea and gazed at the water. He plodded round the piazza, with coffee and chocolate, and pretended that a new day was starting when he eased into his chair. Judges were not known for patience when a collaborator’s testimony was withdrawn.
His friend, the artist, would have said, if asked, that he needed a holiday, but she would not be asked.
His wife in Milan would have said, if asked, that there was work in the private sector – in that city’s banking industry – for a man of his experience and that he should take the plane north, but she would not be asked.
There was, of course, a check-list of actions that followed the disappearance of a collaborator. A watch on the railway station in Rome, on the principal coach station and the airports of Fiumicino and Ciampino – and she might have been gone for two hours, or four. Orecchia, a good man, had spoken woodenly on the phone and Castrolami had put the question: how long had she been gone? Had put another question: how long had he slept? And the final question: how long between the time she was found to be missing and the time of reporting it? She might have been, he reflected, through and out of the airport, at the other end of the country, holed up in Rome – might be dead with a bullet in her head.
He came back into the annexe. Both the men at the table, the psychologist and the collator, looked away, and the hard men of the ROS group shuffled in their seats and made room for him to get past. As if a black cloud hung over them, the cloud of failure. He could give instructions. They waited on his leadership. He didn’t often feel, or sense, the burden of aloneness, but it was his shout, his right to activate whatever procedures he thought appropriate. There were none. She was gone, was clear, lost. Castrolami let his head fall into his hands and his elbows on the table took the weight. He had hoped for a small victory and had thought it within his grasp – and the fate of a young man, held somewhere, was erased as of no importance. He stared at the surface of the table. There was silence around him, except for the breaking open of the cellophane round a cigarette packet, then the click of a lighter, and he felt a rare, isolated misery, then heard rippling laughter. First nervous and quiet, then growing, gaining confidence, then playing on the walls and bouncing on the table, driving into Castrolami’s ears. He looked up.
The fish could not be fitted through the door. Either the tail stuck or the sword did. The body, with the tail, would have been more than a metre long and the sword the same. The beast was two metres in total and death had left it rigid. It could not be bent or folded. It wedged. Lukas held it. Castrolami recognised it as pesce spade, and knew it as the most expensive fish on any market stall. It was the size that would be bought for the celebration of an extended family. No one helped Lukas.
He didn’t seem to want help. He had another go, but the sword caught the table and jarred it and the laughter was louder. He turned round and led with the tail, squeezed and heaved. The flank of the beast caught in the lock of the open door – and then it was through. Laughter chorused the success. Lukas dumped it on the table, and the annexe was filled with its smell. Only Castrolami did not laugh.