The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘If you’re found again in Naples, what will happen to you?’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘What do they do, Signorina, to an infame before he or she is killed?’ He was relentless. ‘What do they do?’

  ‘I don’t know what they do to a woman. I know what they do to a man.’

  The crowd was four deep in places where the best view was to be had. The girl reporter from the crime desk barged her way through, offered no apologies and kicked the ankle of an obese man who didn’t shift out of her way. When she was through the spectators, she looked for her photographer, located him and went to his side. ‘My car wouldn’t start,’ she said.

  ‘Your car’s shit and always will be. My cousin deals—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. What have we got?’

  Relaxed, the photographer smoked a small cheroot, took it out of his mouth and blew smoke, then used it to point at a space on the pavement between two parked vehicles. A checked tablecloth that doubled as a shroud filled it. The feet of the corpse, its shoes and blue socks, stuck out from the covering, and she could see where blood had diverted round sprouting weeds to dribble into the gutter, where it was dammed by a plastic bag. Beyond the cars, half hidden, a police scene-of-crime technician manoeuvred a camera fixed to a tripod, other officers standing around languidly, and an ambulance was parked further down the street. She stretched up, laying a hand on the photographer’s shoulder, and could see better past the parked cars. A woman sat on a straight-backed wooden chair no more than two metres from the body. She wore a nightdress of thin cotton with a dressing-gown, as if she’d been roused from her bed, and cradled a child – a boy of perhaps four – as she stared blankly ahead.

  The photographer said, ‘I done her – she’s the wife – wrong, the widow. I done her when she first came, bawling and screaming. That was before they covered him up.’

  ‘Do we have a name?’

  ‘The police have, but they haven’t shared it – you’ll get it off the street or, officially, at the Questura.’

  That was where she worked, on the ground floor of the police headquarters, off via Medina and down near the sea front, in the cavernous Mussolini-era building in the room where the crime-desk hacks fed off the information they were given. She was relatively new to the city but her father had a business partner who had an uncle who had influence at the newspaper, and it had always been her ambition to work as a crime reporter. The link had secured her the job – the normal way of things in the city. The more senior staffers on the team were out of town because a supplement was being prepared on the Casalesi clan operating in Caserta, so her phone had rung – and her car hadn’t started. She might well take up the photographer’s offer to introduce her to a cousin who dealt in secondhand vehicles. What they said in the newsroom about the photographer told her that a car from that source would be cheap, but the chance of paperwork to accompany it was slight. She had her notebook out and a ballpoint pen.

  ‘So, what happened? Was he shot?’

  ‘You sure you want to know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you had breakfast?’

  ‘No – because the car wouldn’t start and I was late and—’

  ‘Better on an empty stomach. It’s not pretty.’

  Most of the murders she had covered since she’d joined the crime desk had been pistol shots into the head of a man eating in a trattoria, drinking in a bar, sitting in a car, playing cards with associates. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You asked. See there, behind where he’s lying? There’s a grocery. The drogheria, of course, has steel shutters down at night. The padlock was cut and the shutters lifted enough to get a man under. They needed electrical power. They took the cable in with them, found a point and plugged it in. Then they went two doors down, called at the place and the wife said her husband wasn’t in and went back to bed. They waited for him to come back from wherever, jumped him and dragged him to where the shutter was up. He would have seen – not much light on the street but enough – what they had waiting for him and he’d have been shitting himself, too scared to scream, and they’d started the engine – can you take this?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘They’d plugged in a circular-blade tile-cutter.’

  ‘Jesus, help us.’

  ‘One of the cops told me before the big apparatchiks took over. There’s no pretty way to say this, but they cut off his balls first, then put them in his mouth – forced open his teeth and shoved them in. This is the twenty-first century, this is Naples, a cradle of civilisation. You doing all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘They put some euro notes in too. Then they cut his head off. The blade can go right through a bathroom or kitchen-floor tile, so it wouldn’t have had a problem with a neck. They took his head off and laid it in his crotch so it covered up where his balls had been.’

  ‘Did you say “a cradle of civilisation”?’

  ‘They did all this on a pavement and there’s a streetlight no more than fifty metres away. People must have passed him in the night after they’d driven off. They must have seen him with his head in his crotch, gagging on his balls and the money, and must have stepped round him, kept going. People live over the drogheria and alongside it, but they never heard anything. Nothing heard and nothing seen. The grocery owner came to open the shop before going to the market and found him. What more do you want to know?’

  She swallowed hard. If she had thrown up, she would have demeaned herself, and it would have gone straight round the city’s newsrooms and the hacks’ room at the Questura. She swallowed, gulped. Then she looked hard at the face of the widow, and thought she saw acceptance, not anger. She wondered if she could write her piece on the expression of fatalism, base it round the mood that seemed to grip the woman. She didn’t keen and the child didn’t weep.

  ‘I want to know what he’d done to be punished like this.’

  ‘He was a carpenter.’

  ‘Why was he killed like that, though?’

  ‘The policeman who talked to me said that the Borelli clan, who have this territory, wanted the pizzo from him.’

  ‘So they extort cash from him – a hundred euros a week?’

  The photographer lit another cheroot, puffed at it, shrugged. ‘He shouted his mouth off. He said he’d go to the palace, inform – the police have that from the woman. Maybe he’d already made a statement to the prosecutor. Maybe he’d only said he would. In some districts you can do that and survive, but not in Forcella or Sanità. He’d threatened it, and that was enough.’

  ‘So that’s what they do to an informer?’

  ‘Yes. And nobody reported any noise or the body in the street, because they were frightened, and because nobody values an informer. He has the status of a leper.’

  The scene-of-crime technician had folded away his tripod. The ambulance crew had carried the body on a stretcher to the vehicle. The woman and the child were escorted by a priest to their door, and the owner of the drogheria lifted his steel shutter, uncoiled a hosepipe and sluiced the pavement. The crowd dispersed. The reporter and the photographer drove off, to write copy, check pictures and hear the police statement in the Questura. Within minutes, there was no trace – on the pavement or in the street – of where an informer had been killed.

  He glanced at his watch. She had promised detailed information on the functioning of the clan, her mother’s role in the running of the organisation, the dealings of Vincenzo, and the work Giovanni was put to in Forcella. What she had told him was merely headlines, but to an investigator it was mouthwatering, not that he showed enthusiasm. He took no notes, and didn’t wear a wire. He thought it important to be indifferent at this stage of his linkage with Immacolata Borelli.

  In his mind were the bullet points of what he needed, and two were outstanding. He asked where Vincenzo had been that day. Did she know anything about his diary? Where could he be found after midday? She was vague. It was difficult
for her, she said, to know her brother’s schedule. She gave him the address of the apartment they shared, his mobile number, the name and location of the cafe-bar he most often patronised, the warehouse where he stored the coats and shoes he imported and exported.

  ‘I emphasise and repeat, Signorina, that intense pressure will be applied to you when your family learn what you’ve done. In the first period, before a legal process, we will protect you, but we can’t protect all those who may be dear to you. Could they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover?’

  ‘No.’

  Put a second time, the question was redundant, but it was his practice to examine the face rather than merely listen to words.

  ‘In Naples, there’s no lover, no boy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In London, are you in a relationship with someone you met here? An Italian boy? A boy from the college you attend?’

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘It is, Signorina, because you’ll be sequestered, perhaps for months, in a safe-house and under protection. A boyfriend won’t be able to visit you. You can’t get on a plane and come back to London because you want him, because—’

  ‘It won’t happen.’

  ‘So there is a boy here?’ His eyes bored into her, looking for truth, demanding it, and he towered over her. He was aware then that the first thin sunlight had broken through the cloud and played on her cheeks. ‘I have to know.’

  ‘Yes, but not significant.’

  ‘What does that mean – significato? Is there or isn’t there a boy?’

  ‘We go to bars, we go to films, we go—’

  ‘You go to bed. But you say it’s not “significant” – yes?’

  ‘He’s just a boy. We met in a park. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘You won’t pine for him?’

  She threw back her head and raindrops cascaded from her hair, the sun catching them to make jewels. ‘I’ll forget him – maybe I have already.’

  He looked into her eyes for evidence of a lie and couldn’t find it. Her eyes were clear, bright and unwavering. Mario Castrolami knew little of love. His wife and children were in Milan, lodgers at her mother’s home. There was little of love that he could remember – it might have been his uniform that had attracted her when he was young, slim and straight-backed, but now he no longer wore it, his shoulders were rounded, his stomach pushed at his belt, he was edging towards his forty-seventh birthday, and he slept with a loaded handgun in the drawer of his bedside table. There was a woman with whom he shared a restaurant table and the couch in her studio, but only once a month, never more than twice. She painted aspects of the great Vesuvio, exhibited some and sold a few, and he was fond of her – but it wasn’t love. Most of the time he forgot his wife and children, and if his friend, the artist, moved on, she, too, would be forgotten. He did not challenge her again. He believed he had found honesty in her features.

  Not that honesty would help her. Deceit was a survivor’s weapon. Away from her, Castrolami used his mobile phone.

  A new day, and Eddie felt better. Last night was gone.

  Better and freer.

  He had had breakfast with the others in the house, toast and cereal, and Eddie had said his piece about losing track of Mac, and there had been, almost, a collective howl. She was part of them all. Down the pub, and the laughter. Back home, her cooking lasagne or cannelloni, or making a sauce. Coming out of the bathroom with maybe just a shirt on, or the see-through robe, and fluttering her eyelashes at them. It just wasn’t possible. Eddie had thought that each of the others would have looked back to the last time they’d seen her, mentally stripped her mood and looked for indicators that she was bugging out on him – and them. He had said he was going to teach and that at the end of his working day he was going to find her. Didn’t know the number, but had dropped her off that first time at the end of a street – a bloody long one – and he’d find her if he had to bang on every door and ring every bell.

  He taught with enthusiasm, was maybe at his best. He had ditched Dame Agatha, and had gathered up an armful of weathered, much-used digests of Shakespeare, condensed anthologies. Eddie himself, quietly and with sincerity, had read Sonnet 116:

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  And a Lithuanian car mechanic had read aloud:

  O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wand’ring barque,

  Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.

  The classroom had rung with applause and he had blushed. A Nigerian who wanted to nurse but needed the language before she could enrol was next:

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

  A Somali man who washed dishes in a hotel but wanted to be a street trader stuttered through

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  An Albanian needed more English if he was to get customers for a delivery service up in Stoke Newington. He was last to be chosen and looked about to opt out but Eddie wouldn’t let him, so he tried:

  If this be error and upon me proved,

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  Then the class stamped and slapped their palms on the desk tops. He thought a Hungarian girl, plump, with Beatle spectacles on her nose, was savvy enough to take stock first, and she said to the Algerian next to her, in halting English, that the sonnet was not performed for them but for their teacher, it was his love they had recited, and what she had said went on down the line, behind her, in front of her, and the room echoed with giggles.

  They did more extracts and his medley of students, gathered from across the globe, played Ferdinand, Miranda and Prospero, Lysander and Hermia, Juliet and her Nurse, Lorenzo and Jessica. He ended with Sonnet 18, and had the Hungarian girl read it:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

  He let her read alone and her delivery grew in confidence, but he brought in the whole class to echo the final couplet and make a chorus:

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  It had been a unique class. He doubted it would be repeated.

  He would find her, his Mac. He had promised to.

  Eddie walked to the staff room and the coffee machine. He felt that purpose had returned.

  The bustle of the prosecutor’s office was stilled. He was at his desk, which was littered with a carpet of opened files and more lay on the wood tiles beside it. The deputy prosecutor had a cigarette in his mouth, the lighter lit but left to burn ten centimetres from the tip. The liaison officer winced, air hissing between his near-closed teeth. The personal assistant to the prosecutor bit sharply at a pencil and looked up from her screen. The archivist was halfway across the office from the door to the desk and carried a load of cardboard file-holders that reached from her stomach up to her chin. They were the inner cabal. The call had come, faint and with a poor signal, from Castrolami. The prosecutor looked around, into each face, and they nodded, accepted his judgement: Operation Partenope, named after the mythical daughter of a goddess, who had drowned in the Gulf and was regarded as a symbol of deceit, treachery, was launched.

  Now he spoke softly: ‘Let’s get to work. I want on the telephone the extradition team of the Metropolitan Police, if they’re not too arrogant to speak to me. I want the operations director of the Squadra Mobile, and the duty officer, ROS, here for fourteen thirty hours, with arrest squads on stand-by. There must be no breach in security and no names of targets given. We have a small window and must jump through it. And—’

  His desk phon
e pealed. His assistant passed him the receiver, and mouthed that the caller was, again, Castrolami. The prosecutor began to scribble names and addresses, the light of triumph in his eye.

  She dictated. Castrolami repeated into the mobile phone what she told him: all of the addresses used as safe-houses by Gabriella Borelli; the location of the rooms where Giovanni Borelli slept; the apartment, off the via Forcella, that was the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli, and where Silvio Borelli stayed; the rooms off the piazza Mercato, a street behind the via Polveriera and an alley to the north of the vicolo Lepri that Salvatore, Il Pistole, used. She gave the last streets with dry relish and had long believed that the clan’s principal hitman fancied having his hands in her knickers, her stomach against his, and wanted to put a ring on her finger, thus ensuring his advancement in the clan: family would bring him that. She felt no emotion as she spoke. All the time she had clear images in her mind. They were not the faces of those she denounced. Or the features of Castrolami, jowled and clumsily shaven, with raw, bloodshot eyes, his sparse hair whipped up by the wind.

  She saw the cavernous space in the basilica, empty because she had been late. The face of an innocent carved in stone, Angelabella, with the single flower, as she had hurried past with one foot bleeding. She heard everything that had been said to her, and named the streets where the safe-houses were. She had done it.

  He cut the call, put the phone back into his pocket. He said quietly, almost conversationally, ‘I hope, Signorina, you aren’t fucking with me. This is big. We must win or be laughed at. If we lose because you’re fucking with me then I’ll put you into the sea, off the rocks, and hold you down.’