The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  A little gasp.

  Her gaze slipped to Castrolami. If he felt sympathy for the fate of her mother he disguised it. His expression was blank. He showed neither clemency nor triumph.

  She matched his mood.

  Her mother, whom she had feared, was on the ground – on concrete built up a few centimetres from the street – was helpless.

  For a moment she wondered, and then she asked, ‘Is she dead?’

  He shook his head.

  In the black-and-white photograph, enlarged to twenty centimetres by twenty-five, her mother was prostrate. A man was poised above her head, his pistol drawn and aimed at her. A woman crawled on her back and had wrenched up one arm so that the hand almost touched the neck, and held a pistol against the neck so that the barrel dented it. Her mother wore the dead look on her face. She was supine, had no fight, did not cringe. It was as if she was comatose from shock. She had fallen awkwardly under the weight of the woman, then must have wriggled backwards to get further clear of the man with the aimed pistol. The effect of that movement had been to ruck up her skirt. It had ridden up her thighs. Immacolata gazed at the photograph. It was the indignity… Her mother’s thighs were white on the grey concrete, but not as white as the knickers she wore. Immacolata had a glimpse of them, frozen by the camera. She thought of the respect her mother demanded – from her children, the clan, foot-soldiers and associates, from businessmen to foreign gang principals. She thought of when a stick had been taken to her, aged twelve, when she had refused to leave her bedroom to sweep the floor in the living room and hall, and when her face had been slapped, a stinging blow, as her mother had announced to her brothers that she was to be la madrina and Immacolata had not suppressed a giggle – of nerves at her mother’s self-elevation to such a height. She thought of the verbal criticism, offered in a café, when she had failed to bring back all the protection-payment envelopes from the via Casanova. It was her mother, humiliated, who lay prone in the road, and at the periphery of the camera’s view a small crowd had gathered and formed a wary half-moon. She believed, from the greyness and distortion of the picture, that her mother’s arrest had been captured on a mobile phone. She realised she had been brought this particular photograph – not one of her mother being led through paparazzi and cameramen, flashes and arc lights, able to use the haughtiness of a Pupetta Maresca, a Rosetta Cutolo or a Patrizia Ferriero – to see her mother laid out in a posture of vulgarity.

  ‘Did I do that?’ Immacolata asked, almost in awe.

  Castrolami: ‘Alone, nobody achieves anything. Together, much. You were part of “doing” that. A big enough part, when your involvement is known, to guarantee that the sentence of death is passed on you.’

  ‘What do you want of me now?’

  ‘I want you, Signorina – excuse me – to stop trying to play games with me. You should now consider your situation as set in stone. You see the photograph of your mother. I don’t think she’ll be pleased to know that her picture is now a source of amusement throughout Naples. When she knows, and she soon will – it’s inevitable – that her daughter has collaborated and is in part responsible for her being photographed with bare thighs and most of her arse on display, I believe she’ll feel resentful towards you. But there’s no turning back. And she’s behind bars, in a cell. She’s beginning the process of rotting.’

  ‘Do you know, Dottore, what it’s like to die of leukaemia?’

  ‘No. I would imagine, though, that it’s worse than being in a cell and rotting.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I rarely offer advice, Signorina, but now I’ll break a habit. Don’t waste my time again, and don’t forget your friend’s suffering.’

  ‘Where do we start?’ she asked, pushing away the photograph.

  ‘We should talk again of Vincenzo.’

  A corridor led from the staircase to the basement cell block and the interview rooms where prisoners met their lawyers. One of the detectives who had arrested Vincenzo Borelli accompanied the custody officers who escorted him from the cell along the corridor. Even for this short walk from a departure point to a destination deep inside a protected police station – and Paddington Green was a fortress, designed to hold resourceful terror captives – he was handcuffed to an officer. Since his arrest, he had seen no lawyer, no detective, only the uniformed men entrusted with guarding and caring for him. He knew nothing.

  He was Neapolitan, a man – it was right that strangers should see he cared. He asked softly, with concern, ‘My sister, Immacolata, where is she? Is she held?’

  The detective behind him sniggered. He would have thought, Vincenzo recognised, that he dealt with crap, with an Italian. ‘Not held, friend, not here and not likely to be. Actually, friend, she’s shafted you – she’s singing like a whole damn choir… Sorry, did I say that? I don’t think I did.’

  Vincenzo thought it was arrogance. The detective needed to appear a mastermind, senior, and to have detailed knowledge of an extradition case. Vincenzo looked blankly ahead as he was led down the corridor, and mimed being simple, fitting a stereotype, not understanding.

  In an interview room, he met a lawyer. The lawyer offered him cigarettes, said he came from Catania in Sicily, was based in the British capital and dealt exclusively with cases – criminal and civil – in which Italian citizens needed representation. He said, too, that he had been appointed to act on Vincenzo’s behalf by Umberto. He gave the name of a street and quoted a telephone number as verification that he knew where the clan’s lawyer lived and the number of his personal mobile. Vincenzo told him to call it and deliver a message urgently.

  The message was in English: The diva performs with rare beauty and is hired for many performances. He told the lawyer that the message was to be spoken once, fast. That was all he wished to say. He wanted the man gone.

  Vincenzo, in his cell, believed that within half an hour the message would be on Umberto’s desk. Umberto would have recorded it for safe transcription, memorised it, then destroyed the tape and the typescript. The door shut on him, a key turned in a lock. He leaned against a wall, much scribbled on and graffiti-strewn, then beat the painted brickwork with his fist till the bruising came.

  His own sister…

  He left the ticket window and ran. He was last on the train, and he thought that, too, was luck. Eddie Deacon had managed to rip open the heavy door while the uniforms shouted, waved their arms and blew hard on whistles, but he jumped aboard, closed the door after him, they did a sweet smile for the man who reached the window and glowered.

  The train rolled out of Rome.

  He had come into the city on an airport bus, and had suffered a sea-change. Realised it now. He didn’t have a seat, but stood and rocked with the motion of the carriage. The engine gathered acceleration. The sea-change was in him. Luck was sprinting with him, and he was thankful for it. Darkness flanked the train as it cleared the Roman suburbs, and then he made out the tight clusters of lights high up, and imagined the track had been routed between hills and their old villages. He felt exhilaration, as if he challenged himself. Not bad, was it, getting himself halfway across western Europe on the same day that he’d jacked a job, cleared a bank account? He had plastic his family would guarantee, and was hightailing through the hills south of the Eternal City. Excitement, adventure: they wouldn’t have contemplated it – ‘they’ being the HM Revenue and Customs clerk, the waiter, the ticket man and the student. One would be dragging himself back to the house after a day of staring at a screen with a head fit to bust, the next would be making polite noises to pompous farts in the club and bringing them drinks, the ticket man would be on late shift and counting the minutes till he finished, and the last would be buried in some damn book about manorial field divisions in the Tudor period. They would find his note, hasty, scrawled, and would each feel – Eddie reckoned – a spasm of jealousy – but not half of the jealousy they’d feel when he brought her back. It was excitement, adventure, and he felt himself lifted, almost euphor
ic.

  It was a brilliant line, so fast, so modern, so smooth. It was as if he had entered true civilisation. Didn’t have a line like this, or a carriage, on the route to Chippenham. He knew of nothing now that could block him. He was on a pedestal, had placed himself there.

  He would find her.

  ‘Incredible! It’s Mac! Wow! Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’

  ‘Did you now? Funny old world, yeah?’ And hearing her voice, the accent and the lilt, and knowing she damn near laughed – not at him, with him.

  ‘Like you say, Mac, “funny old world”. Shall we go and get a beer?’

  ‘Can’t think of anything better.’

  Didn’t know where he’d find her, couldn’t picture it – or where she’d lead him to find a beer. Didn’t care. Excitement was the narcotic in Eddie Deacon. On this train, on the new track, it would take ninety minutes to travel from Rome to Naples. Everything went for him, and luck smiled. Why should it not?

  He read the note that the child had brought him. He needed a magnifying-glass to decipher the tiny characters. It was Carmine Borelli who had first taken the young lawyer, Umberto, inside the clan’s affairs. He had spotted the overweight and indulgent rookie with no resources of his own, and no family to keep him in a fitting standard of living, and had backed his intuition. It had been forty years the previous June since he had made the approach, and the youthful Umberto had virtually kissed his hand in gratitude. It astonished him that Umberto’s ponderous, stubby fingers were capable of writing in such a delicate minuscule style. He would have thought the lawyer too clumsy to fashion it. The magnifying-glass made the message clear.

  Clear, but almost unbelievable.

  Your daughter-in-law arrested, your grandsons also arrested. Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.

  He couldn’t complain that four words were used when one sufficed. So few words and so great this effect. He was breathing hard, with wheezes and bubbling gasps. He understood. It was a situation as critical for the clan he had founded as that which had confronted the brothers in Sicily during the Fascist regime and the rule of the brutal ‘prefect of iron’, Cesare Mori, when the Cosa Nostra had been closest to defeat, and no different in Naples during the time of Mussolini. But Mussolini had fallen, and the Allies had landed first in Sicily, then on the mainland at Salerno, and a new era of opportunity had arrived. Carmine Borelli had seized that opportunity, had begun to form the apparatus of the clan that bore his name. It had survived, with respect, on the streets and in the files of the Palace of Justice for sixty-six years. He had been married to Anna only two years when American troops had entered the bombed streets of Naples. Everything he had built – according to the note a street child had brought him from the lawyer – was now at risk.

  A convulsion of coughing shook his body. He spat phlegm into his handkerchief and the irritation passed. He sat still in his chair with the scrap of paper in his palm and the magnifying glass. He did not call his wife, but she had admitted the child and would have known that the much-folded piece of paper was of importance so had allowed him to digest it first, then would come to share. He had known, of course – as she did – that the boys were held, not merely Silvio, that Gabriella had been taken in the street and her photograph circulated in the day’s newspapers. The bite of the vipera was your granddaughter collaborates. If he smoked more than a full carton in a day there were pains in his chest – but no worse than those now in his mind. He could think of so many clans in which a member of the inner family had taken the pentito programme of the Palace of Justice, and he had always – in the fifteen years since the programme had been launched – felt a sense of superiority over those who had not been able to hold the loyalty of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters. It was his own nipote who sat now with the men who were his lifetime enemy.

  Much for him to reflect on.

  He remembered the contempt he had larded on those clans cut deep by the testimony of their own: the sneer, the retort, the shrug, and the secret feeling that it was but for God’s grace that… It could have been his brother, now long dead, or his brother’s son, shot and left to bleed to death on the via Carbonara, or his grandson, the least liked among his nipoti, Giovanni. It was none of them. Immacolata was accused.

  He let his mind rove. His wife, Anna, had brought the newborn granddaughter to the visitors’ hall at the Poggioreale gaol. In that place of dirt, noise and despair, where he had been held for four months before the charges of extortion were dropped, the infant had slept, as if unaffected by where she was, had made a little island of calm in the clamour. Her christening had been delayed until his release. He had been present in the church at the top of the street in Forcella, and the priest had been his friend. The child’s father had been one of the many latitanti in the city, in flight from the prosecutor, and Carmine had replaced Pasquale in the place of honour at Immacolata’s first communion and had hosted the celebration lunch. The child became a teenager, then a young woman, and he would sit her beside him and give her the benefit of his experience, and she would listen. He would have said that her affection for him was great – greater than she harboured for her mother and father – and that her respect for him was total.

  Anna came into the room. She had poor eyesight, poorer than his, and her chair was always by the window. She reached out a hand and he passed her the scrap of paper and the magnifying-glass. She glanced at the note, then shook her head sharply. It was for him to tell her what was written, and to repeat it would be another wound, cut ever deeper. He used the zapper to turn on the big TV and raise its volume. There had been police in the house so recently and not a chance of observing them: he would say nothing of importance without turning on the television and increasing the volume. She leaned close to him and he to her, his lips little more than ten centimetres from her ear. He could see each of the cancer marks on her skin, the wrinkles at her throat and the hairs on her upper lip. He told her everything, and always had.

  He said, ‘The boy came from Umberto. Umberto writes, “Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.” Umberto denounces Immacolata. She is, Umberto says, an infame. Immacolata seeks to destroy us.’

  She gave no answer. Carmine could see only the chill slab of his wife’s face, devoid of expression. The child, Immacolata, had spent as many of her waking hours in this apartment as she had in her mother’s. It was personal, the hurt. Anna gave no answer, he believed, because she still pondered on what her response should be. She would not speak unless there were words of substance to say. He felt the damp on his face. A tear trickled down his skin to the thin stubble on his cheek.

  His shin was kicked.

  A sharp blow with a heavy lace-up shoe, which stabbed pain into the bone.

  He thought she might as well have condemned their granddaughter. It had taken five or six seconds for him to relay the message, and twenty-six years of love, commitment and caring were obliterated.

  He looked into his wife’s face. Many times in those sixty-six years of marriage she had worn an expression that frightened him, and so it was. He saw in that face a terrible, but controlled, hatred. Where Immacolata was involved, he could be soft – but his wife could not.

  They had broken. Castrolami came into the kitchen to make tea and left Immacolata Borelli to sip a glass of juice.

  It was different. He had fastened the photograph to the wall. From where he had sat her at the table, the microphone close to her, she faced it. He was to the side of her. It was natural for her to look up, to be certain that a point made was assimilated, and then she saw her mother – on the ground, in humiliation, the skirt pushed up, white skin, whiter underwear, dignity and control stripped. It was different because the Borelli girl now talked, and during the time he had been there he had used three spare tapes from the stack he had brought. They had moved beyond Vincenzo, enough on the first two tapes to e
nsure an extradition case to go with the evidence already laid before the British courts on charges of murder, and the third detailed the control of Gabriella Borelli over the clan, not mere supposition. Supposition would have been that Pasquale Borelli slipped out messages from the gaol of Novara through a route in the gaol’s catering; detail was that the route, whereby the husband let the wife have his advice, involved the man who brought the flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and cheap dried milk to the prison bakery, and was a facilitator for the communications of two maximum-security Sicilians. Supposition was that the contract for a new sewage works at a town inland from Naples had corrupt political involvement; detail named the men who had granted the contract in the local town hall, what they had been paid for their cooperation, how the payment was made and how that contract would be shared between different clans – who had trucking, who had labour, who had cement. Castrolami needed to break the meeting for tea.

  Orecchia took milk from the refrigerator and poured it. ‘You’re pleased with her.’

  ‘More so than before.’

  Orecchia’s smile was cold. ‘You were hard on her.’

  Castrolami said, ‘Because I feel nothing for her. She is not a true pentita. There is no sense of penitence. The death of a friend, linked to her, and an attack on her at a cemetery, her being too late to attend the funeral Mass combine to create a sense of guilt. She seeks to redress the guilt, but that’s not penitence. Revenge, anger, dislike for her family, who may not have valued her as she thought she deserved… Many things. But it’s not a road-to-Damascus conversion.’

  ‘She’s not Paul,’ Orecchia murmured, ‘but few of them are.’

  ‘And no shining light, only little grievances topped by the friend’s death. No sense of outrage at the criminality of the Camorra, what has happened to the city, Naples distinguished by callousness. Shit, that’s boring.’