He had typed his report.
He had gone down a corridor and had knocked with due respect on the door of his line manager. He had been admitted. He had explained what matters the agent – Delta465/Foxtrot – had felt sufficiently important to warrant an extraordinary meeting. He had shown the images.
The concerns of the agent were logged.
His line manager said, ‘We operate, Beppe, in a world of priorities. We’re not policemen, not detectives of the Guardia di Finanze, or investigators of the carabinieri. We are defenders of the state in matters of national security. This is mere criminality. We do not, for any short-term position, endanger the safety of a long-term asset. If the police or other units were to act on this information it would hazard his safety – our agent. It should be filed. Thank you. Please, excuse me, I have a meeting. The usual file and without specific flagging.’
The search had started. In the warren of concrete that was the Sail, on its third floor, where the walkway had the numbers of the three hundreds, odd and even, doors were hammered on for entry. Like a pack of hunting dogs, hurt and demanding blood, men went about the task of tracking down a fugitive.
It had been the washing suspended from the wires criss-crossing above the walkway that had permitted the escaper to lose his pursuers. The washing was gone now, and the women had retreated.
It was a methodical search, down two sides, and every apartment was scoured. All those who hunted or watched waited for the triumphant shout that would tell them of success. There was no love for strangers here.
News travelled fast in Naples and its environs. It might as well have been carried on the hourly bulletins of the independent radio stations or on the RAI network. It burrowed through prison walls, over the barbed-wire defences, into the great heat-stifled blocks, where the cells were, and into the wire-roofed exercise yards.
At Posilippo, north of the city, Gabriella Borelli heard a whisper through her door that her daughter was back in the custody of the Servizio Centrale Protezione and would testify. She sat on her bunk and the sweat streamed off her. She thought of the boy, the one lever left, and wished him dead, his corpse dumped at her daughter’s feet. She was near to tears.
At Poggioreale, south of the city, Giovanni Borelli strutted in a yard and Silvio Borelli slouched around the circuit, and it was murmured to them that their sister had returned to the protection of the state and had guaranteed her willingness to give evidence. The older swore, cursed and blasphemed, his cheeks reddened, and his brother heard him say, ‘The whore, the fucking whore – she should have her boy, have him dead.’ The younger shook his head, didn’t understand the scale of his sister’s hatred or why it was directed against himself. He would have seen the boy butchered if it would open the Poggioreale gate for him.
Umberto, the lawyer, heard – brought to him by the grapevine his nephew, Massimo, listened to. He thought: then the boy is condemned. And his building had cameras aimed at it, his phones were listened to. If he walked to a bar for coffee and a pastry he was followed on foot, and if he drove to the launderette to deliver or collect his cottons a car came after him. ‘The boy is condemned and has little time. Sad but inevitable… little time.’
Eddie Deacon had no bloodlust, would have said he did not practise cruelty to the defenceless. He had memories. He could hear – through doors, walls, above the volume of the television – the search coming closer… doors breaking, shouting, always closer.
A memory of fishing for pike in the Avon as a child, with other children. A small roach or a juvenile perch, maybe three inches long, was impaled alive on treble hooks, then thrown into still water in the ebb of a weir and near a reed bed, and a float would bob around as the fish swam for safety from the predator. It would try to reach the cover of the reeds and find shelter there from the pike’s jaws, and the children would yank the line and pull it away from the reeds so that it would swim where the big beast could see it. Always the live bait went for the most tangled reeds to hide.
The apartment was a trap, and its teeth had closed round him.
A memory of the kids who lived on farms – and the child, Eddie, went to their homes at weekends and headed off with them across the fields – and had set snares. They were put in place on a Friday afternoon, inspected on Saturday and Sunday morning. Sometimes the rabbit was already dead, sometimes there was just blood and fur and a fox would have taken it but occasionally the rabbit had crouched, so still, and seemed to know its fate and merely waited for the killing blow. Always, with its final strength, it had tried to get into what deep cover the snare’s restraint allowed.
There was a front room in which an old man sat and watched the television. It was a dirty, smelly, hot room, and the man had gone back to his chair after turning the key and hadn’t looked at Eddie. He had watched a film, technicolour, cowboys – it could have been Robert Mitchum, half a century old, and had not caught Eddie’s eye. What alternative? A pack running behind him. A closed gate in front. No steps off to the sides, up or down. The door had been unlocked for him to open and close. A front room with a window that was exceptional for its cleanliness. He had gone inside. A corridor ran from the living room, and there was no air-conditioner, no electric fan, and the heat caught inside was a blanket in his face. There was a kitchen space off the corridor with a small cooker and a fridge, both from a museum, and small cupboard units. It wasn’t a place where a man – five foot ten, twelve stone six – could hide. No chance. There was a bedroom and a double bed, and under the mattress there were fixed drawers, a wardrobe that looked ready to fall apart and a chest with more drawers. Again there was no hiding place.
A memory of the ferrets that most of the farmers’ kids had. Little sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed killing machines. Nets put across the burrows, the ferrets slipped in, then the listening, the pounding of a rabbit running and a net bulging. This child had not enjoyed the spectacle but had gone so as not to lose face – bloody important at nine or ten. He had often thought of a rabbit going deeper and further into the far extremity of the burrow and all the time hearing the scurrying brush of the little bastard’s clawed pads, and having nowhere further to run.
The bathroom was the only room remaining off the corridor. The hunters were in the next apartment. The walls were thin, little more than partitions. He thought of it as a bathroom, but it had no bath. There was a basin, a lavatory without a seat, a shower unit with a curtain drawn half across and sagging for lack of support. There was a small cupboard, and a window.
The memories were of the defenceless ones who had tried to reach thick reeds, bramble cover and the last extremity of the burrow.
Not much went through Eddie’s mind as he looked at the window, heard the banging and shouting through the wall. She wasn’t in his mind. He didn’t think of love, of getting his leg over, of growing old in her company and owning a bloody cottage with roses growing. Eddie thought of survival. There was a man who had blood on his chest from a rusted nail’s wound, and another with slash marks on his face from a chain, and a third who had doubled when a knee had crunched his testicles. He thought they were all coming, they and plenty more, and where he was would be next for the search.
He had the window open.
The breeze through it, slight, riffled the plastic curtains. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go that offered the possibility of survival.
Then the door down the corridor and beyond the living room was hit. He saw the men, in his mind, pouring inside, the blood on their clothing and skin.