Eddie went out through the window. He stood on the rim of the lavatory bowl and swung a leg out, then the other, and his weight was taken on his shin, which was across the sharp metal of the window frame. He looked down. Once was enough. There was the road, and long, sun-scorched grass. There were bushes and rubbish trolleys, long filled to overflowing, and there was concrete. What had he thought when he was looking out of the window in the holding place, his cell? That the drop was fifty or sixty feet. Seemed fucking further now. A pipe jutted out of the concrete a little to his left – an overflow pipe for the lavatory, maybe – diameter of about half an inch, protruding maybe six. He thought, from what he heard, that they were now in the bedroom or the kitchen. The nail went into his pocket. Again, Eddie took a deep breath. It was about survival. If he was taken now he stood no chance. He didn’t think of her, or his father and mother – didn’t see the childhood home or the house in Dalston. Saw a bastard drop, a pipe from which water dripped, the edge of the window frame and the flutter of the curtain.
Eddie went over, and the chain cascaded down. He let his chest and stomach scrape down the iron window fitting, then against the old concrete of the building. His feet kicked. His fists, clenched to give his fingers the strength needed and gripping the bottom of the window frame, took his weight. Then a trainer found the pipe and a fraction of the weight was shed. But, he did not know how long the pipe would carry its share of the weight, and the chain swayed beneath him. He hung.
He played the idiot, a deaf idiot, well. They swarmed through Davide’s living room, shrieking questions at him, and he grinned but barely turned his head from the big screen in front of him where a gunfight blazed. He didn’t answer and left them to think he was afflicted by deafness as well as idiocy. The agent was not deaf and was not an idiot. His years of living the lie in the Sail had required of him the acutest sense of self-preservation. It was irrelevant at that moment whether his hearing was good or impaired: his sanity was on the line. He could not have articulated why he had risen from his chair, gone fast across the worn carpet through the polystyrene takeaway trays and unlocked his door. Their eyes had met. He had looked back through the window, had seen the face and the desperation, the stains on the clothing, the nail in the fist with the dark stain at the tip, and the chain, and he had known that a fugitive ran. Had seen that shirt below a hood, had seen that dark shade of jeans when a prisoner was brought along the walkway. He saw so much of human misery, the arrogance of the clan capo s and the swagger of the foot-soldiers, and he performed his duty and reported to his handlers. He had never before intervened. Not much of an intervention, the unlocking of a door, but a first time. Now he was ignored. Four men at least flowed through his apartment and doors banged but he did not hear the whoop. There was no place of refuge if a search, barely a thorough one, was made but they came out of the corridor. He muttered a short prayer. He dedicated it to Matteo, the patron saint of bank workers and book-keepers – as he had been. He said the prayer again, silently but never allowed his eyes to leave the screen where revolver shots were exchanged in front of a timbered saloon. He could not imagine where the boy had hidden. They were all gone, but one stood in the open door and lit a cigarette.
*
It seemed that his arms were slowly being wrenched from their sockets. He didn’t know for how much longer he could keep it up. Cramp had set into his fingers, which gripped the base of the iron window frame. What sustained him was the diminishing voices. They had been right above him. The voices and the clatter of movement had come so close, within spitting range, but his hands – what little of them would have been visible above the window frame – had been behind the flutter of the curtain. It would have been just a glance, a moment’s check, and they would have seen no place where an adult could hide. Maybe they had then been in twenty apartments, maybe they had ten more to go through, maybe they had gotten careless… and the voices had drifted. Maybe another half-minute and then, God willing, he would begin the attempt to regain the window.
The first stone missed him, was well wide.
The second, thrown harder, more expertly, a better missile, hit the concrete level with his head, around a yard from him.
He swung momentarily, as if he had tried to swat the grit its impact spat at him, on one hand, then clawed the other back into position, and the extra weight had shifted the overflow pipe on which there was room for one foot. Little voices were far below, shrill.
He looked down. Had to tuck his head almost into his right armpit and his view went past flush window sills, to the paving, the rubbish bags, the bushes and the kids… Fucking kids. The chain swung languidly below his foot. Not the kids. Nothing halfhearted about the little bastards. Four of them down there. The smallest had a catapult. Three slung stones up at him, which made a random shower, but the smallest kid had the range, had damn near hit Eddie’s head, and had another stone loaded. Eddie looked back up at the window. Couldn’t look down any more. He heard their shouts – voices that were choirboys’ – and imagined they were all pointing up. Wrong. All except the sod with the catapult. He was hit in the shoulder-blade. Imagined one man looking down from a window and seeing them pointing. The next stone from the catapult hit the back of Eddie’s leg, where it was soft, just above the left knee.
He tried to lift himself. It would have taken the ultimate of his concentration – real focus – to find that strength, channel it and get himself up high enough so that his elbows could go over the window frame. A stone hit the concrete a foot from his eye and level with it. He couldn’t turn his head away – wouldn’t dare destabilise himself. Eddie knew his strength was going, and with it the heart.
The drop was below him, and the kids bayed, and more had come, and it was a chorus below his feet and the chain with the pin attached. Too much pain in his fingers.
Where it all ended. Some God-fuck-forsaken awful housing estate somewhere out of Naples.
Get it over with. Get it done. He had only to loosen his grip and it was over, done. The pain would be gone from his hands and he would have peace and… would hit the paving, a potato sack. Eddie felt tears welling.
His wrist was grasped.
He couldn’t look up. First one hand had taken his left wrist, then a second. He thought of the old man in the chair and sobbed, in silence, thanks to him. He didn’t doubt that the grip on his arm was strong and wouldn’t fail him. He’d hug him, kiss him. His foot was off the pipe and his hands had lost their hold on the window frame. He was reliant. When did he know?
A truth came to Eddie Deacon when a third hand and a fourth, then a fifth had a grip on him. Two hands on his left wrist, two more on his right and a fifth had a fistful of his shirt. He was lifted. He saw the faces. There was blood on one, and blood on another man’s T-shirt. And there was the man who had put him in the van on via Forcella, whose eyes seemed to dance with laughter.
He was pulled up, lifted through the window, then thrown down on to the floor. The tears came.
*
As the investigator in charge of the case, Marco Castrolami had the prime place at the end of the table. It was rare for this committee to be called together, but he thought it worth the effort. There were few other places he could go. The meeting had lasted twenty-four minutes, on the wall clock behind his chair, and its usefulness was exhausted.
Around the table were the head of the carabinieri criminal-intelligence section for the province of Campania, the officer who headed intelligence-gathering for the Naples police, the senior intelligence co-ordinator of the Guardia di Finanza, and a dapper, slight man who seemed to offer no name and was set apart from the rest.