The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  It was perplexing to him. Frustrated, annoyed, failing and unable to get sense from anyone, Eddie Deacon beaded on the priest. Perplexingly, the priest walked in the centre of the street and scooters swerved to pass him, going either way, and the street was lined with shoppers and gossipers, old and young, and no one spoke to him. He was young, no more than thirty, with a rounded, chubby face but there was no cheer in it: pallor and tiredness characterised him. He had come out of a courtyard through tall iron gates. The school had the name ‘Annalisa Durante’. Eddie sidled towards the priest.

  A quick side-step, like a soccer player’s swerve, and the priest had passed. Eddie called after him. No response, but the priest’s step quickened. He fastened on the back of the man – had to: he had been the length of the street and must have asked a dozen people where the Borelli home was, and had not received one coherent answer. The kids followed him still, but not with intensity. He didn’t think they regarded him as threatening, more as a curiosity, but they were behind him and he’d noted that each time he asked, the boy on the scooter quizzed the person he’d spoken to.

  The sun came higher. He sweated. Strips of light and warmth knifed on to the street from the alleys. More people were out. If he met eyes, they were averted. If he smiled, it was not returned.

  He didn’t know what else to do, but followed the priest. The spark had gone out for him, as if hope was extinguished. So alone. The priest went up the steps of the church and into it. Eddie had that sense of being the stranger and unwanted. In the stone slabs beside the main door, at about the level of a man’s head, there were chip marks, two scars where the stone had been gouged. He followed the priest inside. Cool and quiet enveloped him.

  They walked. Rossi led and he wore a lightweight poplin jacket so that his shoulder harness was covered. She followed, with Castrolami alongside her, Orecchia behind. They went down a side-road from the block, where the parked cars had been in place all summer, the bonnets and windscreens coated with the fine dust that came from the north African deserts, carried on the winds. The hill where they had brought her was empty of residents, still holidaying in the south or at the Sardinian resorts. That would have been why they had shipped her in here. There were so few people in the apartments and on the roads.

  The dogs had not been taken to the southern beaches, but abandoned to the care of maids and porters. They threw themselves at the balcony railings. Immacolata had forgotten, almost, the ferocity of the sun – but there were many things to be forgotten. She walked with a good step and Rossi had to sense her pace and stretch his stride to keep ahead of her. They went past the entrance to a tennis club and she glimpsed the pool, azure blue, and the loungers; the Borelli family had not been able, in Naples, to belong to a club where tennis was played and there was a pool, so Immacolata didn’t play tennis and couldn’t swim. Different worlds, and this one closed to her by the dictate of the clan’s security, but there were clubs like this in Posilippo and Pozzuoli north up the coast. There was a clinic, and more apartments set back, with different dogs and different porters, then the road ducked down and ran beneath a roof of pine branches.

  Castrolami said, conversationally, ‘We put you in a tower block on the north side or on the east side of Rome and on every floor women are looking to see who is new. It’s an intelligence-gathering system, unavoidable – you know that. It’s the same in a tower in Naples. We put you in a small town near Firenze, Pisa or on the Adriatic, you open your mouth and they hear you, Naples, and they hear us, outsiders, and they think that Mafia scum is being hidden among them, and there are demonstrations, perhaps violence, because they despise you and believe you contaminate their society. It’s good here because we’re among the people who don’t know the Mafia but hate the VAT officials and the Revenue investigators, and who seek to live in privacy. If, however, they believed that a collaborating criminal had been brought here, there would be outrage and the accusation that we’ve reduced the worth of their property. We don’t flaunt you.’

  ‘And when they come back from holiday?’

  ‘We’ll think again, look at the budget and—’

  ‘Move on?’

  There was an old bridge over the river ahead. They had left the shade of the trees and gone under a six-lane road. She could see over the parapet wall that the Tiber’s level was down. It looked played out, not like a famous river. He didn’t answer her. She thought they would keep her in the fine apartment while they stripped the meat of what she knew, then ship her on when only the bones remained.

  Castrolami said, ‘The bridge is the Ponte Milvio, one of the most important in the city. It was built by Gaius Claudius Nero more than two thousand years ago. Constantine won a great battle at the bridge in 312 AD. It’s been repaired many times, then a new phenomenon. Three years ago, young people in love were attracted to it, put padlocks on the lamppost and threw the keys into the river. So many padlocks – the bigger and heavier they were, the greater the love – were fastened there that the lamppost collapsed. For a few months there was a virtual lamppost, on the web, but now the mayor has put steel columns on the bridge and it’s possible to fix padlocks again. Do you find that interesting?’

  She shook her head decisively.

  Quietly, his response: ‘No, you wouldn’t because you assured me that you do not, at present, have a lover. You told me so. We should cross the road.’

  Rossi had already done so.

  It was a fast thought only, a brittle image – of him in a park, and in a small, grubby house, then laughter, the smoothness of skin and… She followed Rossi, and Castrolami was holding her arm. She didn’t think she was a prisoner but that he guided her between cars and vans. In her mind she had a list.

  She had shopped twice every week for food to cook for Vincenzo and his friends, and once a fortnight she had gone to the street market to buy enough to make a meal for him and his friends. It was a market far superior to those in London, laid out in splendour, stalls stacked high, every variety and every choice, but of a lower standard to that of the piazza Mercato and what was – had been – her home. She turned, tapped her hip pocket to show it was empty, pulled out the lining of a side pocket, grimaced, laughed… Orecchia passed her a ten-euro note, and Castrolami was taking his time, pecking in his wallet, so she leaned forward and took a twenty from it. Rossi gave her a ten. Immacolata chose veal and was about to point out the size of the fillets she wanted when she felt the pressure of Castrolami’s fingers on her arm. She indicated, and he spoke. She had learned. She selected potatoes, spinach and green beans, and Castrolami took the notes from her and paid. She bought tomatoes and peppers, button mushrooms and onions, and at another stall there was cream and cheese. On the way out at the far end of the covered market there were wines and spirits, and Castrolami bought one bottle, from Friuli, and she queried it with a gesture, then pointed to him, Rossi, Orecchia and herself. One bottle? He tapped his own chest, and the other men’s, then shook his head. She could drink; they would not.

  They didn’t take the bags from her. She carried three and Castrolami two. It was hotter, might have reached the eighties, and no breeze came off the river. In London, if she had shopped with him, he would have carried the bags. In Naples, a foot-soldier would have carried her shopping, just as he would have parked the car and waited a respectful pace behind her as she chose. Perhaps it was the glance she gave Castrolami that prompted him. He said, ‘If they carry your shopping it would impede their shooting. If they had to shoot it would be in your defence. A shopping bag doesn’t help in aiming and firing.’

  She thought, again, he had insulted her. She walked faster, away from him, and slowed only when she was a pace behind Rossi. The padlocks on the bridge were in her mind: if she’d been there with him, which of them would have taken the key, made the statement of love, and thrown it out into the slack water?

  Castrolami was with Orecchia. They were fifteen paces behind the young woman and kept that distance, and Castrolami listened to the older ma
n, who lived and ate with the criminals who collaborated, and slept near them – and held a grip, maybe a loose one, on sanity.

  ‘You ask me how she’ll be. You want to know if she’ll fall early or late, or stay on her feet and be strong enough for the court.’

  To Castrolami it was a pain to be endured. Some investigators and detectives were easy in the company of criminals, could go to weddings and birthday parties and survive allegations of corruption. Not Castrolami. He detested being with them.

  ‘I was with one from your city and you’ll have known him. He walked out of the door one morning and the next we heard he was in the Secondigliano area of Naples, or perhaps Scampia, whichever. He had taken a train from the north. A week afterwards we heard he’d arrived home and was on the street, dead. One bullet, middle of the forehead. We’d been with him for four months. Time and resources wasted.’

  Castrolami remembered him. Police, not carabinieri, had handled his defection. He walked slowly, felt burdened.

  ‘There was another. We had him in Genoa for a whole year, with his wife, his mother, his aunt, her mother and three children. We brought him to Caltanisetta to give evidence against twenty prime Sicilian fuck-pigs. We dressed him in his good suit, a clean shirt and a tie and drove him to the courthouse. He smiled and said he now wished to renegotiate his terms – like his evidence was a piece of goddam property. More money, a better allowance, or no evidence. We had twenty men in the cage and were waiting on his testimony. We agreed the new terms, won the conviction. Then the agreement was torn up. I don’t know now whether he’s alive or dead.’

  Castrolami knew there was a segment of opinion, influential, which believed too many had been allowed to become a collaboratore di giustizia, that too much was given them. It was an easy way to win convictions. With the crimes of the Camorra or the Mafia, there was little opportunity for gathering forensic evidence, less chance of finding eye witnesses prepared to face down intimidation and go public in court. The collaborator, the infame, was an attractive solution.

  ‘I’ve seen little of her, but we were given some notes before her arrival. I read of the leukaemia death, her supposed friend. Perhaps it was merely that the guilt needed a trigger or perhaps the emotion was real. Now you talk to her about her mother, her brothers, but you haven’t played a big card. It’s there.’

  Castrolami faced him. They were now on the rough, narrow road that went up beneath the pines.

  ‘I’m not trying to teach you your job but I’d milk the disease. To be verbally abused, physically assaulted in a cemetery at a burial, is no small matter. Use it, twist it, work it. My advice, Dottore, there isn’t a living human being whom she loves. Make good with the dead.’

  They trudged on. Orecchia was fitter than Castrolami and climbed the hill easily. He could see, in front, the haughty swing of her hips.

  The priest came from a side door. A cleaner who polished the altar silver had said he would be there soon, but it had been an hour. The measure of Eddie’s stress, lethargy, lost nerve was that he had been prepared to sit out the hour on a shadowed pew, only moving to do something he had not attempted before: he had made a donation, taken a candle and lit it, then sat some more.

  When the priest came through the side door, the cleaner went to him, pointed to Eddie and returned to his polishing.

  The priest approached. His short hair, rimless glasses and creased cassock made no concession to style. He sat on the bench beside Eddie, who introduced himself, then asked for Immacolata Borelli. Oh, yes, the priest knew Immacolata Borelli. His eyes flashed and his back straightened. Eddie warmed. Where would he find her home? There was no immediate response. He thought the priest considered. Eddie, ignorant, didn’t understand. Why, if the priest knew, should he hesitate? Eddie, innocent, did not comprehend. Sadness fell on the face of the priest, as if he had made a decision that wounded him. He sighed, stood up, and the sadness was wiped away. The face was devoid now of expression. He took Eddie down the aisle, and Eddie paused to put a five-euro note into the box for the repair of the church. He was led out into the brightness. The kids waited on the far side of the street and watched, with the boy on the scooter. The priest pointed far down the via Forcella. Eddie could just make out the fruit and vegetables stall that protruded into half of the street’s width. Beyond it was the fish stand. The priest said that the door between the fruit and vegetables and the fish was the home of the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli. For a moment, his head was beside the two scars on the stone, then he backed away. Eddie had been past those stalls twice, had asked in the tabaccaio opposite and been ignored. When he turned to thank the priest the church door was already closed.

  What should he have done? What should he have said to the foreign boy, a fool, who came to Forcella and asked for the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli? What was his responsibility? Too tired, he had deflected the problem – had done as he was asked and had not accepted responsibility. The foreign boy wanted to meet Immacolata, and he could picture her, the granddaughter of Carmine and Anna Borelli: it had been her brother, the middle of their three grandsons, who had fired the two pistol shots at a predecessor. It was too much for him to take on as personal responsibility.

  Fear stalked him. Fear corroded principle, decency, courage. He had no stomach for the war on the streets. He had crumpled. Predecessors had fought the culture of criminality in Forcella and been broken, or had moved away in indecent haste, or were in Rome under police guard.

  He could justify to himself that he could have done nothing to divert the foreigner from visiting the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli – and she was the only one of them with, perhaps, a thimbleful of charity and goodness. He felt cold in the church, shivered and crossed himself.

  The Allies had reached Naples. The Fascists had fled. An opportunity had arrived. The troops, British and American, reached the city on 1 October 1943, and within a week the fortunes of the infant Borelli clan had prospered. Carmine, out of gaol, would never deny that the first moves of Anna, his young wife, were integral to them. She had opened the brothel.

  It was the first to function within a short walk of the seafront where American officers were billeted in the sequestrated hotels. She brought in women from all classes of Neapolitan society. They shared common features – acute hunger, extreme poverty, the ambition only to survive. It was on a small courtyard where the walls of two buildings were held up by timber supports; a third side had taken a direct hit during a bombing raid. It was within a stone’s throw of the Palazzo Sessa – home of Sir William Hamilton, Emma, and Horatio Nelson – and the officers trooped there. The women Anna Borelli recruited began work with the puffiness in their faces that came from near-fatal starvation, but food supplies came with the patrons, and silk stockings, lipsticks, chocolate and cigarettes. They were the wives of stall-holders and lawyers, of labourers and advocates, of street-sweepers and civil servants. Soon they had colour in their cheeks, and they started to eat well, their families too. There were mornings when a queue of women, dressed in their best, had formed outside the heavy front door to plead for the opportunity to be fucked by GIs, and Anna took the most attractive, the most sexually experienced. She did not employ uninitiated teenage girls: the GIs wanted women who did not waste time, were easy to penetrate, who knew the trade. It was said – among the women who came to work at noon and went home at midnight – that in the first days Anna Borelli herself had lain under the gross belly of an American lieutenant colonel, that she could make him squeal like a spiked boar, and the security of the building was guaranteed.

  The war of Carmine Borelli was fitful. Called up on his eighteenth birthday, the papers instructed him on which barracks in the town he should report to, and the day after he went into hiding, courting Anna while he was on the run and dodging raids by the Fascist police, coming out of hiding for the day, his marriage to Anna in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, being informed on, and arrested the following evening. A question never asked and therefore never answ
ered: how was Anna Borelli so skilled in lovemaking, after one night with her nineteen-year-old husband, that she could so successfully entertain the American lieutenant colonel? After two years in Poggioreale gaol, he was freed by Allied forces after he had woven a tale of a young, persecuted liberal democrat imprisoned for his beliefs. He had found the first employees of his wife in cubicles wide enough for a bed, a chair and a narrow table for a washstand, and had shaken the hand of the lieutenant colonel in the hallway, ignoring the man’s apparent intimacy with his wife. They had, together, not looked back.

  Within weeks, she had opened two more brothels. Within months, he had become a king in the black-market sale of goods brought by the Americans into the Naples docks, and he had started his mercato nero with those stockings, cans of food, packs of cigarettes, coffee, sugar and chocolate that the first customers had given his wife by way of a gratuity. First a handcart, then a small closed-sided van, then a flat-bed lorry, then many lorries, and always protection from the military government – and the question he never asked of his wife.

  It was in the bloodstream of both: the search for power, authority and wealth bred microbes in their veins, which they had never lost.

  He had walked down the street from the church, past the shops that were now familiar to him, past the men who sat and played cards or dominoes, and past the Madonna figures in niches in the stonework where candles burned and flowers drooped. He had paused beside the fish-seller’s stand and had watched water from a fine spray fall on the swordfish. He had never seen a swordfish, and this one was more than five feet long, its sword another four, and… he realised the outer door was open. He could have sworn on oath that it had been closed the previous times he’d gone by. He had known then that the kids or the scooter rider had forewarned them.