The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  He said simply, ‘I came to find Immacolata.’

  The old man had American-accented English. ‘You knew her in London? You knew her well?’

  The old woman had a crow’s croak, and spoke English. ‘Do you sleep with her? Do you do fuck-fuck with her?’

  He blushed. Eyes pierced him. The coarseness of the question neither unnerved him nor seemed peculiar – almost, in this place, natural. They were both, he estimated, in their eighties. He sensed that they moved with difficulty, were in pain, and near the door there had been a stand of walking-sticks. The room he was in was furnished, Eddie thought expensively, but with hideous taste – chrome, plastic, fluffy, pinkish. The PhD man in the house in Dalston would have called it kitsch, and his mother’s lip would have curled in disdain. He noticed there were no photographs. Not a picture of Immacolata, or of a man who would have been her brother, or of her parents. Everyone his mother knew, all her friends, had homes littered with photographs of grandchildren, shelves and surfaces groaning under them.

  The question, its vulgarity, almost amused Eddie, but the eyes of the old woman pierced him with a brightness that suggested she harboured a degree of humour. He would not have dared to lie to her. ‘Yes.’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘There are many girls. Why come to find Immacolata?’

  ‘I think… because I love her. You know… what I mean. Yes, I love her.’

  She said something to the old man, Eddie didn’t know what. She reached up from her chair, caught the collar of his shirt, tugged his face down and spoke into his ear, then moved her head to let him speak into hers, but her eyes stayed on Eddie.

  The old woman asked if Immacolata loved him. He thought she used the word ‘love’ as if it was strange to her, but he reckoned that was because she was struggling with the language. He wondered how she had learned English, what call this peasant woman had had to speak it. He repeated and amplified. ‘I hope she was in love with me – at least, very fond of me. We were very happy together.’

  She tugged again at her husband’s shirt collar.

  Her small spider fingers scratched at the material of his shirt, pulled and jerked his head down. She was, like him, in her eighty-eighth year, but her memory was as sharp as the day he had come back to her from the Poggioreale and she had told him – without a balance sheet to read from – the finances of the brothel. She murmured the numbers given her by Salvatore. He would have had to write them down. Her mouth to his ear, her ear to his mouth as he repeated the numbers. She told Carmine that it was equal to a gift from the Virgin – and ignored his shock at what he considered inappropriate, almost blasphemy – that leverage against the bitch had walked through the front door, presented itself, gift-wrapped. He understood. Anna would go to the kitchen, make coffee and take cake from the tin. He, Carmine, would go into the hallway and telephone. He repeated the number again.

  What they knew of the English language, American, was from the days when the troops had been in Naples. Good days, the best, he a king and she a queen. The fingers loosed his collar. He smiled at the young man, hoped it a smile of friendship, and there was a girlish charm about his wife’s smile, which he thought as insincere – and sweet – as the smile she had used for her customers more than sixty years before. The same smile and no truth in it. She said she would make coffee and bring cake, and she said that Carmine would go and telephone, that there was a man who knew where Immacolata was and, please, would the young man wait a little. There was an image of long ago, never forgotten. A shared cell in the south-west block of the Poggioreale. A spider, huge, whose territory was the angles between the brickwork, the bars and the grimy glass of the window. It had a web that extended nearly a metre across and half a metre high and the prisoners bet each evening, in cigarettes, how many new flies would be trapped in the daylight hours and eaten at night. The spider was esteemed and admired, its body the size of a matchbook. It trapped the ignorant and the innocent. She went to prepare coffee and bring cake, and Carmine went into the hall, leaving the young man alone. There was excitement on the young man’s face.

  Always, to fight against the testimony of an infame – the bitch whore who was his granddaughter – there must be leverage. Only that, applied with extreme violence, could destroy the most feared threat to the clans: the informer, turncoat and traitor.

  His was the cleanest and best-polished window of any in the long line looking out on to the central walkway on the third floor of the Sail. He was Davide. He spent many hours each week with a bucket and a rag washing his windows, outside and in. He used warm water and soap, then a disintegrating cloth to dry them. He sprayed them with polish, then used a dry cloth to take off the last of the filth that had accumulated on the glass. Those who lived in the box apartments, crumbling from neglect, on either side of him regarded the occupant of 374 with tolerance and amusement. Many in the Sail – a gigantic architectural monstrosity – existed with mental aberration. It was a dumping ground for the socially challenged and the medical misfits. On the eastern extremity of Naples, the district of Scampia had achieved notoriety as a supermarket of drugs, a killing ground in clan warfare, and as a place where the city authorities could dump the detritus of the city’s population. Davide was among the rubbish placed there, and he seemed to eke a minuscule living from delivering messages and packages for one of the Comando Piazza, who flourished around the Sail, and small handyman tasks.

  Davide’s home was on one of the lower floors of a building that had become a cult symbol of ugliness. The lower floors, where No. 374 is found, represent the hull and level decking of a yacht, with ten storeys of floors. Above the deck there is a towering sail-shaped construction, vertical at the mast on the far end from Davide’s location, but terraced down for another ten levels. It has always been known as the Sail. Of the seventy thousand listed in the most recent census as living in Scampia and its tower blocks, some eleven thousand are in this architect’s eccentricity. Some call the different levels and ends of the Sail by colours, and others know each block there as a lotta. Davide was a resident of Lotta H, which was Green, and which had the franchise to market heroin, already refined. Through his well-cleaned windows, Davide observed much of the trade and the sight of him in his handkerchief-sized living room, the television blaring and only a side light on, was familiar to the lookout, the seller and the Comando Piazza who ran them, and to the magazzinieri who held the stockpiles of the narcotic, and even to the level of aquirenti who purchased in bulk, and bought from the capo of the clan that had authority in the Sail. All, from the top of the tree to the bottom, knew of the demented old fool who spent hours on the windows, bringing them to a brilliant shine, and left his apartment not more than once a week. He was almost always there and when he was not outside and window-cleaning, he was hunched in a chair with the curtains open.

  To others, he was Delta465/Foxtrot, and valued – too valuable to be burned by the routine of drugs trafficking.

  *

  Salvatore came. He had left the van, with dark bloodstains on the tyres from where a stomach had burst when it was driven over, and was at the door. He was met by Carmine Borelli. He was briefed. He thought the old man panted as if some rare delight hooked him, anticipation… Sometimes Salvatore found that his own breath spurted in the moment that he lifted a pistol and aimed it. He thought it would have been, perhaps, before he was born that the old man had last made operational decisions. He was revelling in the chance to live again. The talk was short, as it should have been. He broke away, chuckled to himself: the young man who had screwed Immacolata in London, who loved her, would find that the bitch’s sweat, the bitch’s caresses and the bitch’s groans came expensive. Carmine Borelli had said the young man, screwer of Immacolata, was an idiot and would not make any difficulty. The radio that morning had quoted an unnamed official in the Palace of Justice as stating, no equivocation, that the Borelli clan was history, a broken reed. He saw nothing in the street that gave cause for anxiety.

  The fish
-seller, Tomasso, had had the pitch in the via Forcella for twelve years, his father for the twenty-three before him. Short but broad-shouldered and thick at the waist, he had cropped hair, controlled stubble, good jeans, a good-quality shirt and good shoes. What he wore was good because he sold fine fish fresh from the market that morning. There were, however, matters relevant to the state of mind Tomasso enjoyed that were not generally known to those who dictated the economics of his fish stall. His father’s cousin had a boat that fished from the harbour at Mergellina, but two years before Tomasso had been told by the Borelli clan that he must only buy fish landed from the boats they owned. He had not complained and had acquiesced because his chance of obtaining another pitch was minimal. Now, also, he must pay to the clan a hiked pizzo for the right to put the stall in that place. Also, now, he must supply fish at cut-price to the trattoria two streets away, at less than cost, because the trattoria was owned by the clan. The pesce spade, huge, with the malevolent eye, frozen, would have been taken by Giovanni on a normal day, and not paid for: that had happened more often in the last months.

  But the shit-face hadn’t come, was in the cells at Poggioreale, and the cow who headed the clan was also in the cells, and Vincenzo who had sent the message by courier telling him where he could and could not buy. They were, in his opinion, fucked, but he knew what had been done last evening to a man who had shouted it. Tomasso kept quiet, sold where it was possible, but impotent anger burned in him. Where he stood, close to his till and scales, he was, perhaps, two metres from the door of the house where the old goat lived with his woman. He had seen the young man go into the building, had seen also that kids had come with him, and a scooter boy, and he had thought the young man a stranger. The kids had still been in place, on the far side of the road, till two minutes ago. Everyone knew Salvatore. Everyone who worked in the via Forcella or in the Sanità district knew the face of Il Pistole, who had come and talked inside with the old goat, had waved the kids away and gone. He felt the tension ratchet, and he was aware that the street, quietly and without fuss, was emptying.

  The grocery was down the rue de Bellechasse, and Lukas – as was usual for him – bought only the bread, milk and eggs that he would eat in twenty-four hours, nothing that would go sour or stale in the fridge if the apartment was indefinitely abandoned. The red light had not been blinking when he had returned.

  He had checked his post before he started on the cleaning, as he did every day. Nothing that needed attention. There was little enough for him to collect from the box by the main door: a few utility bills, offers of health insurance and holiday brochures, never anything personal. When he was away, in a war zone or counter-insurgency theatre, he always noted how men and women, far from home, yearned for mail from their families, emails or phone calls. Didn’t matter whether he yearned or not, he wasn’t getting any. No envelopes came with spidery writing, copperplate, a big fist or one that was near indecipherable. It was as if, wanting or not, he had no home and no folk who cared a shite. So, he built a wall, surrounded himself and… Lukas cleaned.

  He did the cleaning, too, about every day, because he had the feeling always that he would go out through the front door, lock it behind him and might survive or might not. Might go down in a Black Hawk over a Shiite city in Iraq, and might get blown off a road by an IED outside Kandahar, and might fall off some dirt track in the mountains of central Colombia. He was like many of the gypsies who serviced the dirty little wars: he didn’t want to think of anyone making an entrance to collect his effects and puckering a forehead as they wondered where to start, thinking that the man was an untidy jerk and had left a mess. He might only have ten minutes between the telephone ringing or coming back in and having the red light alert him, dragging the bag out from under the bed, locking the door and starting the sprint for Solferino Métro. He kept the place neat and just about in a state that no one could be sure that anyone had recently lived there. All his washing went most days to the launderette, even if it was just briefs, singlet, socks and a shirt.

  When he had finished the cleaning – it took all of a quarter of an hour – he checked the laptop. There were copies of the fulsome praise from DC that had come into Ground Force Security, and gratitude for his report. The company didn’t give him saccharine accolades for what he had achieved in the last trip, knew that the sweet stuff was unwelcome. Lukas could have reeled off the story of disasters in the hostage-rescue trade. He didn’t do celebrity and didn’t want back-slapping. Truth was, the fear of failure gripped his gut more when he was in the field than the demands of success. Failure was a body-bag. There had been enough for them never to be forgotten.

  He wound up the cord of the vacuum cleaner that did the living-room rugs and the bedrooms’ carpet. Ruby Ridge was in Lukas’s battle honours, and nobody was keen to shout that one up to the clouds. Lukas, if he had engaged in a discourse about his work – which he never did – would have said that Ruby Ridge, up in the forests of Idaho where it was wild enough for mountain lion, had been the first pinpoint lesson of where a screw-up had happened. An innocent woman shot dead by official marksmen, and a child, and in return fire a US marshal killed, then the circus of a full-blown FBI-controlled siege of ten days’ duration, with a cast of maybe five hundred agents, and millions paid by government in subsequent compensation. Lukas had not been senior, had been then a marksman with the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, and had seen a cock-up played out close enough to smell the shit that emanated. A good lesson for a rookie. He had been far back from the front line overlooking the cabin, and his Remington Model 700 had never been out of its bag, let alone loaded, but he had seen, played out before him, how bad it could get. He knew he walked a fine line between Ruby Ridge and the broken careers, and the hero-gram stuff on his laptop.

  He watched the telephone and thought it might be an opportunity to go visit his friend who did the artwork down by the river, shit work and without talent, but by a good friend. The artist would never have heard of Ruby Ridge – or seen the face of a hostage when it was frozen in death, attached to or severed from the neck, or incoherent and trembling in the moment after liberation. Lukas played the strings, did God, and he went round a last time with a duster.

  When he closed the door he stood in the lobby for a moment and listened. The bell did not ring. He went off down the flights of stairs.

  8

  Eddie came out of the main door on the ground floor. He had been told he would be met and taken to Immacolata. He saw a great deal in the moment he was on the outer step but he assimilated the importance of nothing.

  The door swung shut behind him. He caught a glimpse of it and the grandfather’s old hand, pocked with cancer scars, that had heaved it: too fast, no chance to thank. A van was parked on the street as if about to unload, but nothing was taken from the tail doors and nothing was carried to them. A pavement opposite had bustled and was now still. The kids were not crowded in the street but further up the slope of via Forcella and further down, as if they formed a cordon and made a perimeter. A man came forward and did not play-act friendship, a frown puckering his forehead. A hand from the interior slid open a side door of the van. The guy on the fish stall caught Eddie’s eye, the swordfish in ice beside him, and held his gaze.

  Eddie had his hand in his pocket, was reaching for a handkerchief – must have been dust, up his nose and in his throat. He was about to sneeze. A man closed on him, came from the van, and behind was a dark interior, and sacking, a rope trailing out of the opening. The man on the fish stall held Eddie’s eyes. So much, then, for Eddie Deacon to assimilate. Time slowing. The man coming slower. People in the café opposite pirouetting their chairs to face away from the street, but the pace of the movement slackening. Trying to understand… The fish-seller had that look, unmistakable, no argument with it. Like a warning shout, but nothing passed his lips. The quiet, like fog, settled on him but the sights were clearer.

  He could not comprehend why the fish-seller should give the warning. He cou
ld only react to it.

  The hands of the man reached towards him. Not open, not in greeting, clenched. The veins stood out in his muscled arms, like highways through the hairs. Eddie ripped his hand from his pocket and moved into that defensive stance, as a boxer does, trying to go forward on to the balls of his feet. He had never, since he was a child in a tantrum, hit anyone. He had never punched, kicked, gouged or bitten another adult. He had only once intervened in a fight and played a hero and— So fast. His hand was only halfway up to protect his chin and throat when the fist of the man came at him. He felt himself buffeted. Pain riddled his nostrils and there were tears in his eyes. A grip tightened on his shirt and he was dragged forward. He was pulled past the fish-seller and saw nothing but a face without expression. Should he have tried to run? No chance: blocked by the van and the fish stall on its heavy trestle legs. Could see only the backs of the heads in the café opposite.

  He was dragged forward and when he was close enough the man’s knee exploded into Eddie’s groin.

  About the end of it, his experience as a street-fighter. Real pain now. He tried to double up, which merely offered his jaw, the chin, to a short-arm hook punch. He went into the side hatch of the van.

  Eddie was face down, his head buried in a heap of loose sacking, foul-smelling and tasting – hard for him to breathe, and he struggled, but one fist was clamped in his hair and the other whipped his face, used it as if it was a boxer’s training gear. He stopped the struggle. The door was slammed. Then all light went and a hood was over his head. His arms were snatched down into the small of his back, handcuffs snapped on. He heard the tearing of heavy-duty tape and his hood was lifted, the tape fastened over his mouth, and the van was moving.