‘Excuse me, have you no sense of sincerity? You see her as shallow?’
‘You know better than I, friend, what she’ll face. When the pressure crushes her, we’ll see sincerity or not…’
Orecchia handed him the cup, no saucer, and a sweet biscuit. ‘Me, when I go home – not often – I stand in the shower for a full fifteen minutes and the family screams there’ll be no hot water for the rest of that day. They say I’m mad, that I sup with devils. I say I eat with a long spoon. You know what’s worse? The collaborators believe they do me, Rossi, you, society, a great favour by coming to us. I despise them.’
Castrolami smiled grimly. ‘Maybe you’d find spiritual fulfilment as a street sweeper. Thanks for the tea.’
Orecchia said, ‘I’m not joking. I trust this one, all of them, as far as I can kick them. They entangle people, squeeze and suck the goodness from them.’
‘I hear you.’ Castrolami couldn’t have argued with a word he’d said, but he wondered how a man survived in his work if he saw only bleakness. Did he laugh at home? Did he follow a football team with the fanaticism of the Mastiffs in Naples? Did he pay tarts? Castrolami wondered if Orecchia was ever saddened when a collaborator was cut loose from the protection programme and left to fend for himself – did he ever respect them? That evening he would talk to Signorina Immacolata about her mother’s hard-drugs-importation programmes and…
The voice droned again at him: ‘To be touched by them is to be contaminated.’
More luck. He was told that a single room was available, the last, and that it was the first day after the end of the high-season rate – big luck double time for Eddie Deacon, innocent and ignorant.
The accommodation desk at the city’s railway station had found him the room. A pretty girl had circled the hotel on a map and confirmed it would not be expensive. He had slung the bag over his shoulder and started to walk, making his way – only two wrong turnings – from the wide square, the piazza Garibaldi. He had tasted the heat, the noise, the smells and the chaos of traffic and scooters, and had known the first pangs of nerves. He had stood outside the hotel door and the neon above him blinked without pattern. Kids stood on the streets, smoked and didn’t talk but eyed him. More nerves. They spoke some English inside, and the man who gave him the key had a squint, a khaki mole on his cheek and a stutter. Eddie spoke kindly to him. He thought, then, that he needed a friend – any bloody friend from any bloody place. Maybe the excitement, the adventure, the exhilaration, like the neon, blinked.
He went up to the room. His step was heavier and the bounce had gone. They were saving on power for the stairs: the bulbs were low-wattage and made the shadows longer, the greyness of the walls and ceiling deeper, the lack of light accentuating the scratches in the paint. He was no longer within the civilisation boundaries of the train carriage that had brought him south. He heard a couple row in German about the cost of the meal that evening and the budget being blown. Another couple on the next floor up grunted, squealed and worked the bedsprings, and there was a tray outside the door on which was a barely nibbled pizza: the sex sounded good but the pizza had dried out. He had been told by the girl at the accommodation desk at Napoli Centrale that this pensione was the best he could afford. He went on up the staircase, the carpet thinner, more faded and worn with each flight.
The key was on a chain that hooked on to a small wooden ball. He slipped the little card that had come with it – his name, room number, the hotel address – into his trouser pocket, opened the door and groped for the switch.
The room was smaller than a prison cell, with a wardrobe, an upright chair, a table hardly deep enough for an A4 sheet of paper and a single bed. Beside the wardrobe there was a square section of transparent plastic for a shower, basin and toilet. Only a damn small cat, a kitten, could have been swung in it. Had he expected a Marriott room, or one from a Holiday Inn, maybe an InterContinental? Old story: in this world, Eddie, you get what you pay for. Eddie Deacon, in Germany or France, had never felt himself a stranger, had not been the lonely foreigner.
He pushed open a window and the sounds of the night buffeted against him – cars, screaming, music turned up high. He knew he was in a street behind the piazza Garibaldi because it showed up on the map he had been given. He had asked the girl if it was near to the via Forcella and she had shrugged as if to indicate that only an idiot needed that information, and then she had agreed it was. Another visitor to Naples, with a rucksack on his back, had elbowed Eddie away from the desk. He felt an increase in those nerve pangs.
So, he slapped his face with the palm of each hand, then unfolded the map. He didn’t feel good, he didn’t feel right, but he didn’t feel as if he was about to bloody lie down and cave.
He mapped out a route.
A man had said – in public – that the family was shit, finished, a spent power. Might have been right. Salvatore walked into the bar.
He wore no face mask. The room was brightly lit and his face, features, identity were clear. The clan of which he was the enforcer was worth – if all property investments, treasury bonds and shares in a half-dozen of the leading money markets were added up – in excess of half a billion euros. As an enforcer, he could have been directed to a penthouse apartment on the Côte d’Azur or a villa in a smart, protected suburb of Frankfurt, and his target would have been a banker or investment manager who had misappropriated tens of thousands of euros, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Also, his work was to maintain the respect and dignity the clan family needed. He handed down the justice of the Borellis to those who were high and mighty, to the potential informer who refused to pay a hundred euros a week – and to the braggart in the bar. He looked around him.
He was seen, noticed. He didn’t want anonymity. If many saw and knew him, the word went faster. His eyes fastened on the man.
It had always surprised Salvatore that when he confronted a victim, they seldom ran or fought. They were, almost all, helpless and trapped in terror. This one was no different. He would have said it, that the family were shit, would have repeated it, would have gone home and lain beside his whore-wife in their bed, and the bravado would have oozed away. He would have known that within hours, a few days but less than a week, the enforcer of the clan would come for him. He had nowhere to hide. A victim, a man of forty, would have been familiar with only the few streets that surrounded the districts of Sanità and Forcella, and the labyrinth inside the area of two or three square kilometres. He was, and would have realised it, a dead man walking from the time his mouth had opened and his tongue had flapped, who lived out the final stages of his life in a small flat with his wife and children, in a bar where others were cautious of his company, who was in la cella dei condannati a morte. Others now backed away from him. His jaw was slack, the spittle was white against dark lips and sweat gleamed on his high forehead. He would have felt his legs sag under the weight of his body.
He did not have to show the pistol, the Beretta, at his waist. Salvatore flicked his fingers. He gestured with his head to the door. At that moment some men – bankers or street scum – wet their trousers in the crotch or fouled their seat. Some closed their eyes and began to pray. Some wept, some pleaded. Some spoke of their children, their wives. Some went as if they sleepwalked.
This one did.
Salvatore also knew that the man he had called out would have friends in the bar with whom he had played in the street as a child, sat in schoolrooms, talked and watched football in that bar for an adult lifetime, and none would help him now. Perhaps in a week… not yet. Power not yet gone: a photograph in a newspaper of the thighs and the covered arse of Gabriella Borelli, more photographs of her children in custody, but no certainty, yet, that power was in new hands. None of those friends, once valued, would block the door, defend him.
It was the way of Naples. The authority of the clans, even one seriously wounded – weakened – ruled.
And none in that crowded bar would say they had seen Salvatore’s face. W
ithin two minutes the bar would have emptied, well before the first sirens and lights arrived. Only the staff would be there. All would claim to have been facing the far wall, or busy at the coffee machines, or in the rear store for more milk. That, too, was the way of Naples, unchanged and unchanging.
Clear of the bar, he pushed the man across the broken pavement, a vicious shove. Where a slab should have been there was a pit and the man’s shoe caught in it and he fell forward. He was half in the street and half in the gutter. Salvatore kicked him in the buttock and the man crawled limply forward. He had chosen this place because he knew that no street cameras covered the stretch of road between the Porta Capuana and the via Cesare Rosaroll. He had the pistol out of his belt. He fired one shot and the bullet went into the back of the man’s knee and there was a little limp scream of shock, then another, shrill, from the pain’s spread. Salvatore waved up the street.
Extraordinary – true to Naples, Palermo and Reggio Calabria in the toecap of Italy’s boot: traffic had disappeared from the road. It had been there, a constant, hooting snarl, but was gone. The road was empty but for a white van, old, rusted, with no registration plates.
It could accelerate. The man would have seen it, heard it, but with his leg shot away at the knee he could not avoid it, and squirmed on the tarmacadam. He was in an oil slick now, his shirt smeared, and the van went over him, cleared him. No one saw. No witnesses in the bar, on the pavement or in cars on the road saw the van go over him. Perhaps it crushed his back or broke his neck. Perhaps it left him grievously injured but still living. It braked.
It reversed. It came back up the road and the rear tyres lifted as it mounted the body a second time. When the body was cleared and the van stopped again, there was no movement.
Salvatore climbed into the passenger seat. His driver, whom he called Fangio, went away down the road.
He thought that the clan, those still at liberty, clung to power by the thickness of the string used to bind a birthday present.
An hour later, a boy came to him. He and Fangio, for speed, shared the shower, scrubbed and washed. Their clothing was bagged for disposal. Few knew of that address. The lawyer was among the few. The child brought a scrap of paper and left, running. More than adults, Salvatore, Il Pistole, whose face was on their screensavers, trusted the kids. He had to wipe soap from his eyes before he could read the compacted handwriting. He shuddered.
He crumpled the paper, threw it at Fangio’s feet and saw it carried in the torrent of soapy water down the drain. To shoot a man in the back of the leg meant nothing to him. He was unaffected by the sight of a van speeding down a road well lit with high lamps, then bouncing over a sprawled body. He felt almost a tremble in his legs, under the damp towel.
He would have said he could believe anything of Naples – anything. He had been wrong. He could not have believed, if he hadn’t seen it written in the spider hand of the lawyer, that Immacolata Borelli had collaborated.
Not the thickness of string – the thickness of one strand woven to make string.
He didn’t know, then, what he could do, should do, without the power of the clan at his back. He, too, was dead – squashed, broken, bloody. He didn’t know where he should turn.
He couldn’t still the trembling – or the image of Immacolata Borelli – and he couldn’t believe.
He was at the end of the street under the sign that said it was via Forcella. He saw nothing familiar and nothing that offered a welcome. The light was poor, the shadows harsh. The spearing headlights of weaving scooters caught the shapes of men, women, kids, then lost them as the riders powered away. Eddie Deacon had told himself that it was important, before he went to sleep, to know where via Forcella was, how far away, how… He felt intimidated. There, at the head of the street, and he thought it hardly wide enough for two cars to pass, he realised that a group of kids watched him and he wished he hadn’t brought his wallet with him. He believed himself evaluated as worth a hit or not worth a hit. Nothing he saw reassured him. He was beside a church, but it was darkened and he sensed that the doors were bolted, locked, secure against the night and strangers.
He turned away.
It was as if he backed off.
The street corner seemed an interface. When he retreated he was on the via Duomo, and the map said that the city’s principal cathedral was there, and the shops had lights in their windows. There, he felt fine. Down that street, he had felt a cloying nervousness. It would be different in the morning, of course, and he would be back in broad, warm, sunshine-laden daytime. He trudged back to his bed, and was troubled that he had suffered what was bloody nearly a panic attack. He had thought, till then, that luck rode with him.
He would be back in the morning to find her.
Eddie was serenaded to faltering sleep by sirens – so many of them and for so long – and the vehicles came, raucous, to a street near where he was. Only when the sirens had died did the restlessness and tension drain away. Then he could think of her again, as she was in the photograph on his wall.
‘Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’
Because of the work he did, Lukas had long ago shed a body clock. He could work in the night, sleep in the day, just as he could type on his laptop in the back of a bucking Land Rover or Humvee in half-darkness.
He typed his report on Colombia, what they had achieved and whom they had lost.
He was as happy working late into the night as in the morning, was not fresher at the start of a day than at the end.
No drama would creep into his report, no descriptive factors and no colour. He would list briefly what he had known, and the advice he had offered on the basis of facts available. Nowhere in the text would there be disguised praise for his own part or criticism of others.
Only a professional could make sense of it. Only those who employed him now, the chief executive officer at Ground Force Security and the director of operations, or those who had employed him in years past – the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense – could have made drama from the few pages on offer. The descriptions were clinical, and he used the short-hand jargon of his trade. Men across the globe who dealt with the high-risk stakes of hostage rescue and negotiation would read the pages and know that Lukas had written them, and they would pray to God that the next time he was needed they found him available to travel and not marooned in some other shit-heap place.
Home for him, where he typed, was an apartment under the eaves on the top floor of a street off the rue de Bellechasse. The mother of the CEO of Ground Force Security had lived and died there, and when Lukas had come on the firm’s books, it had been offered to him. The French capital suited him. He had no wish to live in the UK when he was employed by a British-based company, and less to be resident in the United States after twenty-two years with the Bureau, the last two on secondment to the Department of Defense. He craved to be distanced from his work, and the Paris apartment satisfied him. Little more than a shoebox, it comprised a cramped living room and a kitchenette behind a chipboard partition, a bedroom under a sloping ceiling but that had room for a big bed where a man with nightmares could toss in the darkness, a bathroom with a power shower that could wash off Iraq’s sand and Colombia’s mud, and a hall with a table and the telephone. It might not ring for a week or a month, but a red light would flash if he had missed a call. Lukas did not like being far from the telephone.
He was finishing off the report. Ground Force Security would be heaped with praise by the Agency because their man had survived and cover had been maintained – ‘goddam brilliant, a mother-fucker of a triumph,’ his CEO would be told by Langley. His own view: pretty much OK – not desperate and not wonderful. Some whom Lukas dealt with at field level regarded him as a lunatic. A few told him he was a lunatic. He didn’t take it personally, or when a Spanish diplomat had tried to punch him after calling him a lunatic. He had written it up in the usual laconic way afterwards.
Negotiations with
a tribal leader had been ongoing for excess of three days. Much reliance placed on the talks; my view, too much reliance. Asset intelligence reported the hostage held in a six-storey block of twenty-four apartments plus basement. Exact location of hostage and hostage-takers in the building was not known but we had electronics in the stairwell. A male – not seen before at the building – approached and carried a plastic bag containing one large potato. I advised readying the storm squad for immediate intervention. Spanish diplomatic personnel in the command centre took a contrary position. The electronics in the stairwell indicated the unknown male to have gone to the second floor, right side of staircase. I urged an instant assault…
No mention of the attempt to punch him, the screamed accusation that he cared nothing for the life of a Spanish-born expert in antiquities on attachment to the National Museum. No mention of a diplomat having to be restrained while frothing with rage. No mention in the report of an expert’s experience. A big potato, weighing more than two kilos, had been the trigger for him. The diplomats believed negotiation would free their national, that a premature assault endangered the captive’s life. To be told that a man carrying a potato into the building was reason enough to abandon the talks that had been so difficult to initiate had caused an explosion of fury.
The assault was successful. Four Iraqis were killed by troops from the Polish special forces team and the hostage was freed. He would have been dead within the hour. Signed, F. Lukas.
NB A large potato was used as a pistol’s silencer in the assassination of a British national, the barrel tip being indented into the potato and the killing bullet passing through its bulk.
A British co-ordinator – one whom Lukas admired – had told him about big potatoes. It didn’t offend him to be accused of lunacy because he understood too well the stresses they all felt. The Brit had given him a cassette and Lukas had gone off to watch, alone, the video of a killing. The potato as the end of an automatic-pistol barrel, a Makharov, had dulled the noise on the soundtrack of the firing. He had seen the body collapse – not fall forward but go down like one of those big old cooling towers that were dynamited. The co-ordinator, tough, hard, had seemed badly cut by that loss. They were all in the same club, limited membership, and all felt badly when they lost out. He had failed to save the life of a European tourist who was a damn fool stupid guy to think he could walk those mountains without having looked through websites and Foreign office advisories – but it still hurt. It just seemed cheap to Lukas to show the world what hurt.
The Collaborator Page 16