He didn’t understand. It was more important to him that his fists hurt and the knuckles were scraped. Much more important: the boy had not yelled.
The man said, ‘Every door is locked. How did he get in? Was the door left open? Was there a plan? I think not. Was the door opened for him? I think it was.’
If the boy had screamed, begged, it would have given Salvatore more satisfaction. He could hear now the thudding blows he had inflicted. There would be more blood from the eyes, the lips, inside the mouth and the nose. There would be much more when the man with the nail wound in his chest took his turn, and the man who still walked badly because of the knee and the bruising.
‘What are you saying?’
‘They found many new shirts in the cupboard, still wrapped, never worn. He’s Davide. He goes to the city each week and buys a new shirt. Why? Why does he need new shirts that he never wears? He’s an idiot. Is that the behaviour of an idiot? Why did he unlock the door for a fugitive? No one would.’
Salvatore’s upper teeth closed on his lower lip and bit hard. He was a stranger here, isolated. He had loyalties: to Gabriella Borelli, whom he had not protected, to Carmine and Anna Borelli, whom he revered, to himself, paramount. He wondered where Fangio was, what he was doing, how he was treated down there among the shit, not allowed to come up to the third level. He sensed alarm. Two men waited, each with different wounds, to beat more hell out of the boy. He said they should not take the boy’s life. He dried his face. He said the idiot, Davide, could wait. He went to find Fangio. He walked along the walkway and past the apartment and noted, for the first time, the cleanliness of the window and the old man watching television inside.
‘He wants to know when.’
There was surveillance throughout the city. Each of the forces, the carabinieri, the Squadra Mobile and the Guardia di Finanza, would have loved to be able to claim plaudits. For recognised faces – Umberto, Carmine Borelli, Salvatore, Il Pistole, named foot-soldiers of the clan – there was foot surveillance, camera surveillance, audio surveillance and telephone surveillance. Almost – not quite literally – the men and women of the three law-and-order agencies jostled each other.
‘When is he to kill him?’
Fangio walked in a cemetery with Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew, beside him. Neither had any idea of the identity of the corpse in the coffin, the sex or the age. They took a position near the tail of the cortege as it wound towards a high wall and the line of small capelle in front of it. Within the last four months, over a meal in the evening heat at a ristorante on the west slopes of Vesuvio, Gabriella Borelli and Salvatore had chosen this as a method of avoiding watchers and cameras. Salvatore had activated it now, a plan decided on after the whore’s departure to London.
‘And where, for best effect, is he to leave the body?’
Massimo cultivated a north-European pallor, but he fancied his face had gone bloodless. He was, could not avoid the implication, now at the heart of a conspiracy of murder; might before have avoided that conclusion by playing at semantics – no longer could deflect his own guilt.
They had reached the capella in which that day’s body would be placed. By happy coincidence another funeral had ended. A column of mourners – men loosening their ties, women dabbing their necks with cologne and using the order-of-service cards as fans – came past them and headed for the gate that would lead into the Sanita district. They switched.
‘When? Where?’
They didn’t leave together. Fangio was far down the via Foria and accelerating through slow traffic by the time Massimo had telephoned Anna Borelli, had apologised profusely for disturbing her siesta and begged permission to collect clean underwear for her grandsons and take the items with him on his visit the following day to Poggioreale gaol.
It did not surprise him that Anna, the crow in her perpetual uniform of black, would make such a decision: when a young man would die and where his carcass would be dumped. But he was hooked and could not step back.
He sat on great smoothed stones. They were at the foundations of the narrow metalled track leading to the main entrance of the castle that jutted into the bay. A wedding party hung back, but the girl bride and her fresh-faced new husband had come off the road and over the low wall, had stepped on to the stones, a photographer with them, and posed close to where Lukas sat.
He should not have been there. He should have been in the annexe off the operations room. If he had been there he would have been able to soak in the collator’s surly acceptance of his presence, and the psychologist’s sneered hostility. The ROS men, who would have made up any assault team that might be mounted, would have sat around him, yawned, broken wind and belched, as such men did, as he had when he was a member of a hostage rescue team. And, if he had been there, he would have been close to Castrolami who seemed to him now a man of split priorities: the life of the boy, the testimony of the girl. And the scales, as Castrolami demonstrated them, slipped fast towards the girl as his priority. He watched the bride pose in front of the towering castle walls and hold out her train so that the afternoon breeze caught it and made a sail of it. He saw the adoration in the groom’s face. It had not happened in Lukas’s life.
It was good for him to see real people and share what they offered, not to be incarcerated in an annexe with a gallows-humour crowd.
There should, of course, have been intelligence coming in from the assets, but the way Castrolami had told it there were the usual, inevitable, divisions and rivalries. If it was a carabinieri -instigated investigation, would the police crime squad or the fiscal police help? Small chance. And there had been, at their meeting, the domestic security service. They wouldn’t. No chance. In the States, it might have been the Agency, the Bureau and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, might have been Counter-Terrorist, Intelligence and the Junglas, Colombia’s supposed elite, the Agency, the Bureau, Task Force 145 and the local warlords in Iraq – might have been in any goddam place where a life hung by a thread and the big boys disputed territory. The wedding party lined the road to the castle entrance, shouted approval, and the groom had come to hold her. Lukas liked the image.
He thought that unless luck was served up in buckets he had lost the boy: no assets quoted, no intelligence offered, just silence in close-set walls around him. He could lose a hostage, climb on to a flight, get himself back to Paris and not feel that the world had fallen in. He didn’t understand why this boy had gotten to him.
He let out a long, slow sigh, which was pretty damn self-indulgent. Nothing to do with his own boy – with whom contact was severed – not a piece of ‘replacement’ psychology that the shrinks would have enjoyed talking up. He didn’t know why this boy had burrowed, like a worm, under his skin. He had gone through the routines of hostage negotiation so many times and not felt that anything was personal. Maybe it was the goddam photograph he’d been shown, or the sight of the girl running in the park. Maybe their romance had fuelled that worm, and little of romance had crossed his tracks. Perhaps he was just damn jealous. He hailed a taxi and gave it piazza Dante as a destination. All his instincts told him that a body would soon be in a ditch, or in a car, or in an alley, and he felt shredded of power.
Gerald Seymour
The Collaborator
16
It was not mercy that stopped the beatings, but their exhaustion. He was a punch-bag, a kicked football, a bleeding, bruised mess.
Eddie lay on the floor of the same space where he had removed the chain’s pin from the wall and the door’s hinges. He had no longer any sense of time, or of hunger, but his throat burned with thirst. He thought he’d swallowed some of the blood, and mucus, and the sweat that poured in rivers off his head. He didn’t know whether his ribs were broken, only that the pain there came in sharp spasms if he moved an inch to right or left. He thought his forearm wasn’t broken, but it might have been: it had protected his kidneys and had probably screened his liver.