When the bastard had been shown out and escorted from the building, the prosecutor stayed by his phone. Dusk turned to evening, and it didn’t ring.
Salvatore stood over the boy. There was no light and he could see only the outline of the body, but he could hear the breathing and smell the boy.
He broke the silence that had been long, lonely. There were other men outside the main door on the walkway but none inside. Those who had been hurt and who had taken revenge were gone… He needed to talk.
‘What do they call you? At your home, in your family, how do they call you?’
Salvatore didn’t know anything about the season of spring, had not noticed its start six months ago, or the blooming of small flowers. Without a sense of romance or fantasy, he would not have seen that question – ‘What do they call you… how do they call you?’ – as a mood change, as if he had come from the darkness of winter. Why should he wish to know such a thing about a boy he was shortly to slaughter? In Forcella he wouldn’t have asked or in Sanita. He wouldn’t have asked if Fangio had been with him, or if he had come from Gabriella Borelli. And flowers played no part in the life of Salvatore, Il Pistole, and he had never in his life picked or bought any to give to a girl. If he had given a bouquet to Gabriella Borelli she would have laughed in his face and maybe slapped it. He didn’t know whether his own parents were still alive, or had been buried and had needed flowers. Maybe there would be flowers at his own funeral, because he would not be taken alive to rot in a cell – and maybe kids would throw flowers at the hearse as it passed. He didn’t see that asking such questions weakened his resolve to kill and, if he had been told, he would not have believed it.
‘They call me Eddie.’
‘Just that?’
‘It’s what they call me. Eddie.’
‘Where is the home of Eddie?’
Many thousands of people lived inside the Sail, and many tens of thousands in the other towers around it, but quiet had fallen, which heightened his isolation. The need to talk was an itch that had to be scratched.
‘In the country.’
‘What is in the country?’
‘Fields – green fields – villages built of stone, with churches, and a river through the fields, and cows.’
‘We do not have fields, green, because it is too warm, and everything is built in concrete, and we do not have cows but we have buffalo – and we have to kill many.’
‘Why are the buffalo killed?’
‘They have poison.’
He heard surprise, a smear of confusion, from the shape on the floor. ‘How do they have poison?’
‘It happens. There is poison.’
‘Ridiculous – where is the poison? Why are the buffalo killed?’
‘The buffalo make the milk for the mozzarella cheese, and they have poison so the cheese cannot be eaten and they are killed. Enough.’
‘Where is the poison from?’
‘Too many questions.’
‘Why is there poison for the buffalo to eat?’
‘You ask too much. It is enough.’
He kicked out. He caught the boy on the hip, and the jolt went up through Salvatore’s ankle and his knee and right to the joint in his pelvis. The boy did not shout or whimper, but seemed to wriggle further from him. Salvatore thought he had shown weakness by kicking Eddie, but he was angry: he had wanted to talk, he had asked in innocence where the boy came from, and had said in innocence – without thought – that buffalo were killed because the cheese made from their milk was poisoned, and he had been questioned. Salvatore, Il Pistole, was not questioned by any man. He could not have said, ‘They are poisoned because we, the clans, have killed the ground with toxic material from which great disposal profits are made, and the ground is poisoned for generations to come, and the poison is now in the blood of the buffalo and the milk for the mozzarella is contaminated. We spread the poison so that we could make money.’ He could not say it. Instead he kicked. Again, he heard the quiet and felt the aloneness.
‘It is a good place, the village, Eddie?’
The handler, Beppe, was told by his line manager to bring to his office the recent package from the agent, Delta465/Foxtrot. He retrieved it from his safe and carried it along the high, echoing corridors of the building, knocked and was admitted.
The line manager said, ‘Whether he was taken to the window and thrown out, therefore murdered, whether he was in flight and crawled out in an escape attempt and fell, whether he has determined to take his own life to avoid capture and the rigour of interrogation, I don’t know. Whatever, he’s in the mortuary of the hospital in Secondigliano, and in due course we’ll find some women to claim him and show suitable grief. This evening, we have no more use for him. We don’t admit to ownership or knowledge of him. Because we don’t need to safeguard that intelligence source, his past film can be sent to the relevant officials. There is a carabinieri officer, Marco Castrolami, at piazza Dante. He should be given the films and told that the camera was sourced at apartment 374 on the third level of the Sail. He should be assured that this material reached us only this evening and has been transferred to him directly, without delay. We will answer no other questions about the film. Beppe, the death of an agent, whether by murder, accident or suicide, is sad. It leaves emptiness and creates humility, tomorrow is another day. Take it. Thank you.’
He put it into his leather bag, hitched it on his shoulder, and went off down the wide, high corridor, symbol of an age of power. He didn’t know that a life depended on the package in the bag that swung against his hip.
The priest had told her she was sitting in the seat Eddie Deacon had taken when he had come to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. She didn’t know the priest well, had seldom confessed to him before she had gone to London. She had known better the one who had fled under armed guard to Rome, who had despised her and her family. Two of Castrolami’s men were on the door, one inside and one out, and another was at the side entrance to the sacristy. Two women were at the altar, arranging the flowers, and they would have seen her come in, but hadn’t acknowledged her, their backs to her: know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Immacolata thought Castrolami, three rows behind her, was playing with her.
The priest said, ‘If you’ve come to me for the Church’s praise of what you’re doing you’ll leave with empty pockets. I, the Church, have little interest in your conversion to legality. Society in this city embraces criminality, which feeds half of our population, provides work and opportunity, is enjoyed. I hazard the opinion that the majority of Neapolitans take pleasure and pride from the reputation of their home as the centre of the western world’s most successful criminal conspiracy. The reason for your conversion, after so many years of benefiting from illegality, is not important to me. You denounce your family. You seek to imprison your mother and brothers, to earn their enmity for the rest of the days you will all breathe God’s air, and reconciliation will be denied you even on a death-bed. Your family is destroyed, but that doesn’t mean Forcella is freed from its criminal burden. Outsiders will use these streets as a battleground while they fight for supremacy over insiders who believe they are the natural successors to your family. Equilibrium is broken and I will be called upon for many funerals. It will be a time of great danger for the old and young who live here. Your actions will create no respite… and you will have on your shoulders, until the day God calls you, the weight of responsibility for the life of the boy who came, with his love, to find you. All you will have as solace is a principle. Those are the complications you face, the potholes in the road you have taken, but I admire your determination to walk along it. The example you set cannot be countered by sneers or contempt, and cannot be ignored. Immacolata, may God go with you.’