The routine of the search hadn’t changed from before he’d slept. He did sections of the floor and the walls, on his hands and knees, on his knees, crouched and standing.
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m going round again until I find it. Off my trolley, right? Might be, and I won’t argue with you. What sort of clears the mind, though, is the thought of that knife – ears, fingers and privates. Get me? Makes for good encouragement.’
Had to answer that, didn’t he? Had to face it. Couldn’t simply squat on his backside and wait for whatever the world threw at him. There was a knife on call. It was laborious, conscientious and repetitive but – too right – the thought of the knife kept boredom at bay.
‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible to exist without sound or light. It is. I have to find something. I have to believe there’s something to be found.’
It was the last sector of floor and the last area of wall, and he had gone over them, fingertips and palms, five or six times. When he had completed the sector, he would start again at the beginning where the chain was fastened. A success: the discovery of the crevice through which the ants went back and forth. Before he’d brushed them clear they’d countered the obstruction of his hand by crawling over it. There was dust at the angle where the linoleum met the wall’s base. Sometimes he forced it away from the wall, at others he didn’t. Sometimes there was compacted dirt at the angle and he would run his fingertip into it, excavate it, and at others not. He had lost track, had been round so many times in the search, of where he had prised up the flooring and where he had scraped at the mess caught in the join… but this time he felt something hard, and almost squealed. ‘Guys, it’s there. I have it.’
Hard and sharp, long and thin, buried and wedged. He must, each time before, have thought its slight shape was a flaw in the wall or a bulge in the linoleum. It came away. It had been deep in the dirt. Perhaps, on the previous searches, he had dislodged some of its covering or shifted it fractionally. He held a nail, and euphoria swept through him. It was a strong nail, a little bent in the middle, but otherwise flawless.
‘Can’t see, no eyes, have to do it all by touch. The nail’s about four inches long. I’d run my fingers along that place so many times, and now it’s there and I have it. Not thinking at my best – sorry and all that – and not being logical. It’s the window, the boarding across it, which was nailed and the nail heads recessed. Always, isn’t there, one nail that bends, jumps back and falls, and who has the patience to get down and find it? It’s no damn use anyway because it’s bent – but it’s a nail and I have it.’
He would have found one like it in the cardboard boxes his father kept in the shed, built as a lean-to at the far end of the garage. He had nails and screws of every size, calibre, length, and always said they should be kept because it was ‘a certainty of life that if you don’t have them all then the one you want will be the one you don’t have’.
‘Do any of you guys know what to do with a nail? Do they hand out nails in that toffs’ club or at Revenue and Customs or on a campus for PhD students or in the ticket hall of a mainline station? I doubt it. What I’m thinking is that a four-inch nail, even a bent one, is either a multi-task tool or a multi-task weapon. Can I have your thoughts, guys?’
His mind had begun to race: it could be used as a chisel, turned into a bar for leverage, could be a screw-driver, a stabbing knife – used against a soft stomach, an eye, a throat.
‘You disappoint me, you know that? Are you still in bed? Washed and shaved yet, in the bathroom queue? Not gone to work? Don’t know what time it is. Is it a tool or a weapon? You’re useless sods.’
They wouldn’t have known – how could they? – the value of a nail that was probably rusted, certainly blunt, and bent halfway up its length. He hadn’t been so clever either: he’d found the nail directly under the window hatch, which was boarded with heavy-duty plywood. The nail heads that held it in place, immovable, were recessed down. It was the obvious place to have searched and searched again. It was now his most important possession. Eddie doubted there was anything in the Dalston house, belonging to any of them, that competed with the importance of a single nail. And nothing in his parents’ home – prints from numbered editions, wide-screen TV, DVD player, jewellery that only came out of the wall safe for special occasions – was as important as the nail.
‘They’re useless, Mac. Couldn’t kick their way out of a paper bag, tossers. Mac, help me. There has to be a use for it. Do me a favour, Mac, and tell me what I can do with it.’
Couldn’t see it, could only touch it. Eddie started to think.
A dog barked at her from its high balcony. A maid, muffled against the morning cold, shuffled past her on flip-flops and went to work – she would have been Somali born, and taught already not to stare into the faces of Italians. A dustcart came round a corner. A porter, without his tie on, his collar unbuttoned, stood in front of the lobby of a block and coughed on his first cigarette of the day. Dawn was a smear, far away and grey on the mountains.
Immacolata walked down the street, past the long-stay parked cars with Saharan sand on their bonnets and roofs. A few lights were on above her, but most of the apartments were still dark. It had been easier than she could have believed.
She hadn’t showered and risked the noise of the apartment’s plumbing, but she had washed quietly. She had dressed simply, trousers and T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt of Rossi’s, and trainers. They took turns to watch over her. Rossi had been in his room and she had heard his soft snore. The older man was in a chair in the living room and, had he been awake, would have had a clear view of the main doorway in the hall – but he had not. Half dressed, Orecchia had been sprawled on a settee, mouth open, eyes closed. A mug of coffee stood beside him, untouched, and a cigarette had burned out in the ashtray. The strapping holding the holster in place was across his open shirt, and the weapon – she recognised the types of pistol on offer and this was a Beretta – was loaded. She had skirted the room, slipped behind Orecchia and crossed the hall. She had slipped back the bolt, turned a key, gone out, closed the door gently. She had gone down the main staircase, not used the lift, and had seen no one. Half of the residents of the lower floors were still on the dreg days of their summer holiday. Had she met any she wouldn’t have spoken – wouldn’t have shown them what they would have recognised as a proletariat accent from Naples. The hill where they had housed her was among the most select neighbourhoods in the capital, and there would have been immediate protests at the thought of a collaborator harboured among them. She had gone out, and the chill had been on her skin.
She carried her handbag, nothing else.
She went past the clinic, past the tennis and swimming club, where sprinklers already played on the grass, past shops in the piazza where the steel shutters were down and nothing moved, except one scurrying cat.
It was a brisk walk. She wouldn’t run: that would draw attention to her, but she needed to be clear of the covo, and off the hill, before the sun rose over the mountains that formed the spine of Italy. She stepped out, and the pace she took helped to warm her. She went down the hill, was under the canopy of pine branches, then beneath the big highway, the via Flaminia, and walked along the river, but hugged the trees and tried to stay in the shadows.
Ahead of her was the piazzale di Ponte Milvio, where the early-morning buses were parked, and a long taxi line where drivers waited for the day’s first fares.
She knew where she was going, and why.
And in the square there were shops and bars. It was too early for her, but if she hadn’t gone before dawn, before Rossi’s alarm went on his wrist, before Orecchia shook himself, yawned and stirred, she wouldn’t have been able to slip away.
Sunlight speared her, caught her face, and her hair fell back as she tossed her head. Her shoulders were squared and her chin was thrust forward.
She cared nothing for the chaos she would have created when the alarm sounded and Orecchia wo
ke.
He had gone from the pensione in the half-light. The day manager, behind the desk, had glanced at him with bare recognition, then resumed his reading of the newspaper, and Lukas had dropped the two keys on the counter.
No small-talk, and nothing serious had been said – as if a conversation had not taken place the previous evening.
In London, or in a northern German city, or in that engine house of the Italian economy, Milan, people would already be on the move, office workers, shop managers, certainly the street cleaners and rubbish collectors. Not in Naples. A few moved, lost souls. There was a girl ahead of him, and Lukas thought she wore a party frock and that the buttons were not in kilter; her hair was a mess and her shoulders hunched: she had that look, her back did, of a girl who wished she’d been in her own bed half a dozen hours earlier. He followed her, playing his mind game, making associations for her, a life story, as he did with the individuals, randomly selected, who came to the Musée d’ Orsay and paused in front of the elephant and the rhinoceros – and his mind flitted. The daughter-in-law of the artist who did the river in crayon, the Notre Dame and the Louvre, had she had her baby? The waiter in the bar on the Bellechasse, had the laser for his eyes gone well? And Monique, who came once a month to clean the apartment – unnecessary because of the pristine state in which he kept it – and wash his clothes and iron them, had her cat survived the kidney infection? It was indulgent of Lukas to allow himself such fancies. He saw the sign high on the building at the top of the street.
He went briskly down the slight hill that was via Forcella. A church door, on his right, opened and he saw a young priest, but their eyes did not meet. The girl was no longer in front of him, and the artist’s grandchild, an operation and a cat’s ailment were ditched from his mind. He was focused. There had been kids at the top of the street and he had seen them stare at him, comatose. It was why he had come at that time, before the street’s awakening.
He imagined how it had been. Eddie Deacon would have come down the street, walked on the hard cobblestones, but later in the morning, kids would have followed him. He wouldn’t have known where he was going, would have stood out as a stranger. He saw the fish stall.
There was a door, the paint flaking off, and immediately beyond it a man was laying out plastic trays and polystyrene boxes, then shovelling ice from a big rubbish bin. There was a van behind him with the rear doors open. Lukas slowed. Not difficult to anticipate the sequence. The ice went on to the trays and into the boxes. The fish were brought from the back of the van and laid out without order, and a car hooted for the van to move. Impatience built. A brief argument followed, the two drivers. All predictable. The van driver slammed his rear doors, gave a finger to the car driver, then pulled away. The man on the stall began to place his fish in the correct trays and boxes. Lukas went forward.
‘Excuse me… it is important for me to meet you. You’re Tomasso?’ When he needed it, he had good enough Italian.
A nod of agreement. A wild look past Lukas’s shoulders, suspicion and anxiety. Sour: ‘If I am?’
‘Please, keep working, and I’m examining your fish. It’s natural. The swordfish is magnificent.’
Wary of an outsider: ‘It was caught yesterday, brought in today. I think it is thirty kilos.’
‘I’ll take it. Tomasso, please listen to me. I am here now, I’ll leave with the fish. I won’t be back. I have come to you to save a man’s life…’
He saw Tomasso flinch. He had nowhere to go. He would have realised that setting out his catch, brought from the market, and preparing for a day’s trading was explicable and that an early-bird customer – even a stranger – was also explicable. He couldn’t run, shout or protest without attracting attention.
‘I’ll have the swordfish, but show me the mullet too. You tried to help the boy, Tomasso. You reported what you’d seen. You’ll never see me again, I promise. When I go, your involvement ceases. All I work for is the safety of the boy and his freedom. Tell me.’
A low voice, guttural, perhaps coarsened by years of nicotine: ‘He saw Carmine and Anna Borelli. He was English, an outsider. I do not know why.’
‘To find Immacolata.’
‘They call her the whore. Everybody in via Forcella now calls her the whore. Before, they called her Signorina Immacolata and she could have anything, everything. I do not know why he came.’
‘To find her.’
‘They would kill me.’
‘It’s to save his life.’
‘I, too, have a family.’
‘Tell me, and I’m gone. I’ll never come back.’
The trays were filled, the fish sorted, the water spray turned on, the scales were set up and the cash tin was opened. The man, Tomasso, looked Lukas straight in the eye. ‘The price for the swordfish is a hundred and fifty euros. The boy stayed upstairs in the Borelli apartment, with the old bitch who is Anna. Carmine came down and sent a message and then he went back. I saw him at the window several times. I regret, sir, that I cannot do a better price for the fish. It is rare. The van arrived and the driver waited, and Salvatore came here, to where you stand. Salvatore is called Il Pistole and he is the assassin of the clan Borelli. Do you follow me?’
‘I do.’
‘You pay me a hundred and fifty euros for the fish, and the old bitch takes fifty euros. They screw me in the market and on the stall. I apologise for the price. I tried to warn the boy with my eyes. He did not react quickly. You say he came to Naples to find Immacolata?’
‘Yes.’
‘He must have believed he was going to her. He looked very happy. Perhaps that is why, when I warned him with my eyes, he was slow. Salvatore put him in the vehicle. Salvatore is the killer, has killed more than he has years. Salvatore took him.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Salvatore would kill me, and would kill the person at the pensione, would kill anyone. It cooks well, the fish. He looked a nice boy.’
Lukas paid him for the fish, and it was wrapped in newspaper and plastic. Blood oozed from where it had been gutted and from the gills. The tail stuck out behind Lukas, the sword in front of him. His promise to Tomasso, a fish-seller and frightened, with reason to fear, was meaningless, so the guarantees had been sculpted with care. Those pledges of anonymity, handed out with the carelessness of jelly babies and chewing-gum, had no value.
He carried the fish out of the street, hoisted on his shoulder, and never looked back. Lukas thought the day had started well.
Rossi’s alarm woke him. He blundered towards the bathroom, showered, shaved and dressed fast. He came into the living room. It was a few minutes past seven and the sunlight stormed through the blinds. He opened them, illuminating Orecchia, and started to whistle a tune popular in the far south, then went to Orecchia and slapped his face gently.
Orecchia jerked up, and groped for the holster under his arm, then saw the grinning Rossi.
Rossi went to the kitchen, switched on the electric kettle and took a carton of juice from the refrigerator. What they had in common, the two men from the Servizio Centrale Protezione, was a love of tea, exported in tins from England; they started each day with a mug, but Rossi also had juice. He called from the kitchen, with the mock-respect of a courtier, and asked if she, the important one, had yet made an appearance. How could Orecchia have known? He’d been asleep. He hadn’t heard her, or been woken by the water system. It was agreed that she was not yet up.
Rossi said, as the kettle boiled, ‘She’s usually washed and dressed by now.’
Perhaps because he was irritated at having been discovered asleep on his watch, Orecchia snapped, ‘Today she isn’t. Today she sleeps.’
‘I only said it was unusual.’
Rossi went down to the ground-floor hall, collected the newspaper from the front gate and came back up. He heard Orecchia in the bathroom, poured the tea, took him a mug, put the rolls into the oven and switched on the television for the breakfast news: more killings in Iraq, a bigger bomb in Afghanistan,
instability in the currency markets, defections from the ruling coalition… Time passed.
Orecchia was dressed and smelled good, had used the Hugo Boss stuff. Rossi made a show of recognising it and teased his colleague. They had worked together many times. They had been on a detail that had done a Cosa Nostra killer, and twice had done the escort and security on an ’Ndrangheta bagman. They had been with the collaborator from the Misso clan in Naples, and with a Triad from the Chinese community in Genoa. They knew each other, were regarded by their superiors as of exceptional competence and… Together they had the thought. Rossi, extraordinary for a man who had been with the Guardia di Finanza before transferring to the SCP, could call upon almost poetic imagery. He thought of a wave on its way from the horizon, not yet seen, then closer and noticed for its ripple. Closer still, it seemed to cry that catastrophe approached, broke upon them and swallowed them. They were choking. He was in the spume and under the green darkness of the water, Orecchia too.
There were no sounds from behind the door. No grumbles from the plumbing. It was long past the time she would normally have risen. The sense of disaster caught them. Not a word was exchanged.
They didn’t knock. They didn’t pause respectfully after calling her name. Orecchia went in first, Rossi at his heels. Perhaps from the door the shape in the bed might have confused them, but it was obvious that a pillow substituted for a body. Rossi heard the sharp intake of Orecchia’s breath.
They were not recruits. They had valued experience. They did not scream, curse, shriek or blaspheme. Rossi felt a chill settle on the hackles at his neck and shivered. Orecchia was breathing fast, gasping. Orecchia did the bathroom, went inside as if there was no chance of finding her on the toilet. They scoured the apartment, each room, each cupboard, each wardrobe.
The Collaborator Page 33
