He went up the stairs fast and hoped to find a washroom before he saw the principals. As he took the steps – two in each stride – the pain caught him.
The car was a high-performance Alfa 166, a three-litre engine. Orecchia drove and the seat beside him was empty, except for a machine pistol, gas canisters and a protective vest.
She had Rossi with her in the back. It might have been Orecchia’s sense of humour that he had insisted on driving and put her with Rossi, who had seen her naked as she had seen him. They sat at the far extremities of the black-leather bench seat, and there was another machine pistol between them, more gas and vests. She thought the car was low on its wheels and presumed it was armoured. Rossi, now, ignored her. It was as if, she thought – her signature on the ‘contract’, the agreement that she would collaborate and give evidence guaranteed – they were about to pass her on and therefore had no need to humour, flatter, cajole or dominate her. She was to them used goods.
Their eyes did not meet. Their hands stayed far apart, and their knees. She was behind Orecchia and stared out of the left side window. Rossi’s attention was locked on the right.
They went fast on the autostrada, kept a place in the overtaking lane. Traffic in front veered out of their path and blue lights flashed behind the radiator grille. They had been escorted out of the Roman suburbs by a marked car and would be met again when they approached the southern city. They were now south of Frosinone, north of Cassino, and cruised at an average of 145 kilometres an hour. Orecchia had music on, light opera, and there was no conversation. The radio filled the void.
She wore the best of her few clothes, had done her makeup and brushed her hair before leaving. She had seen residents on the balconies of the block on the hill and had walked straight-backed to the car. It would have been obvious from their body language that the men with her were a protection detail. She thought there would have been sneers from those balconies and it would have been obvious that she was a collaborator – she had protection but not the clothing of a person of status. By now she would be gossiped over. Like dogs with old bones, they would be exchanging anecdotes of sightings of her. Not one, she was certain, of the residents on the hill would have admired what she had done.
They had gone out to the autostrada by the north-east route. She had had only one glimpse of the river. The old bridge, built originally by a Roman-era architect, and carrying now a padlock sold that morning for thirty-five euros, was far behind her.
Immacolata Borelli was going home.
One man had a lacerated face, a ribbon of blood, from the chain swung against it.
Another had run and was gone down a corridor, a door slammed after him and a bolt pushed back.
Another was dazed from the collision of his head with Eddie’s and doubled from the impact of Eddie’s knee in his groin.
The man who had been stabbed with the nail and had grabbed Eddie’s shoulder, now moaned on the floor and held his throat. There were welts on it where the chain had wrapped round it, and he had almost choked with the constriction of his windpipe.
There were two doors, closed, ahead of Eddie.
The moment would not last, could not. They were in shock, and shock would clear.
Eddie opened the left-hand door. He saw a lavatory seat and a basin. He came out, twisted and dragged on the second door. He was in a hall. An artist’s conception of Christ hung on the wall, a candle under it, not lit. Eddie understood that adrenalin coursed through him. When it was used up, he would weaken. His pace would slacken, while their shock and confusion ebbed. There were more sacks in the hall and another door, with a steel-barred gate, and beyond it a steel sheet on wood. But the lock on the gate was unfastened and he could wrench it back. In the local paper, the one that did Dalston and Hackney, there had been a piece about crack houses that had been busted into by the police, with photographs and the crack houses had had those barred gates for security. Heavy keys were in the door. He didn’t know what was beyond it. He pulled it open.
An alarm wailed. He couldn’t have known the door was alarmed – had seen no key pad. Eddie reeled out on to a walkway. He could have gone right but he went left. In either direction there was only a long corridor of concrete with chest-high walls and wires running across it, looped to overhead bars, with washing slung on them – he had to duck his head below shirts, sheets and skirts, cotton trousers, lightweight towels and underwear. He ran, and heard the pursuit.
Because of the washing his head was down, and it was awkward running with the shackle on his ankle – bloody excuses, Eddie. He looked up. He saw, ahead of him, a gate. It was as if the air was vacuumed from his lungs. It was like when hope died. There was no way off the walkway and it was lined with doors – closed, blocked to him. There was a staircase, perhaps fifty paces ahead – might have been a mile or five. He slowed. There was a knot of men at the head of the staircase and between them and him the gate. He saw it so clearly. He could see five vertical and three horizontal bars, and it was topped with a loose coil of barbed wire. The pandemonium behind him came nearer. He had almost stopped. He saw the man, with caked blood on his face, approach the gate and talk to the guards there, and attention was distracted.
Eddie was level with a window. Some on the walkway had been broken and repaired with cardboard, others had old sheets or towels draped across them for privacy, or were too filthy to see through. He caught the eyes of an old guy slumped in a chair but who had turned, twisted, then was on his feet.
The door beside the window opened. It must have been in Eddie’s face: two big words – per favore. He heard a key turn. The door wasn’t opened. For him to do it.
Eddie understood the survival instinct. Refuge given, but for him to open the door, and for him to determine whether it brought the dogs of hell into the old guy’s room. Nowhere else to go. He went inside.
Old blood on Salvatore’s face. New blood on the men confronting him. He had been slowed at the gate, they had been slowed by the washing slung across. Some items had been torn down when the cloth was across their faces. Women screamed and were in the walkway, collecting up what had been torn down. For dirtying washing, foot-soldiers of the clan could be abused, not for murder, not for selling narcotics or for intimidation, but for washing that had been dragged off the pegs and would have to be washed again.
Salvatore was allowed through the barred gate. He could have been let through immediately, but that was not the way power was exercised in Scampia. He was kept waiting on the pretence that an answer to a mobile was needed – bullshit. And amusing, too, the blood on his face. He saw men coming towards him. He recognised three of the four, knew where they had been and what their work was.
Incoherent ramblings greeted him. Then clarity.
Salvatore screamed.
His man was lost. Where? Above the scream, close to where he stood, a television was turned up loud and blasted out of a closed window. He had to scream to be heard above it: ‘Knock down every fucking door. Find him.’
The handler of Delta465/Foxtrot had enjoyed his cake and coffee, had put the tapes given him into his briefcase and had wandered back to the office used by the service, a block in the Mussolini tradition that was behind the Posta e Telegrafi building and backed on to the piazza Carita.
He had wound fast through the picture images, had seen a clan leader whose image was perpetually on the database. He had seen a close-up of Carmine Borelli and his hood, Salvatore, both thrown up by computer recognition, and the three still frames that showed a hooded prisoner being frogmarched along the walkway – a front frame, a side frame, a back frame.