The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  In his time, leading the clan, he had killed, it was estimated, thirty-six men with his own hand, and had ordered the proxy killing of at least another sixty.

  It was high risk.

  It was about authority and respect. It would be done on the street, in public view, in daylight, so that none could say Carmine Borelli slunk in the shadows. The man was brought out. Carmine recognised him. The man knelt on the pavement. Two of the foot-soldiers produced plastic bags – for garden fertiliser – and held them close to the man’s head. He gibbered. Carmine had known the man’s father, his uncles and his mother’s family. Many said he was an idiot and certifiable. But he shot him. He had not killed for twenty years.

  He shot him low in the forehead at a point equidistant between the eyes. Blood spouted but was trapped by the plastic bags. Had Carmine wanted to run, he could not have. The damaged joints in his knees and hips prevented it. Salvatore took the pistol from him and was gone.

  He turned his back on the man, who should have been in an asylum and was crumpled on the pavement, and made his way back to the via Forcella. He hoped he had sent a message or he, too, would be on the pavement. He would not give up the clan, would not see it cannibalised. His hand shook from the impact of the pistol when it had fired. He was out of the street by the time he heard the sirens. They would take the corpse to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, then to the mortuary. The police and the carabinieri would come. If he, Carmine Borelli, was named by a witness as the killer, his authority was sand dribbling between his fingers. If the investigators and detectives met the familiar wall of silence, there remained a small chance he could resuscitate the clan… meaningless, if the whore didn’t break with her interrogators.

  He stopped at several more shops, small craftsmen’s businesses and showed himself. He thought it the best of fortune that a fool had come from England and had talked the rubbish of love for the whore. By the time he reached his main door, beside the fish-seller’s stall, he would not be able to hide the limp. The whore was the key; the fool was critical. He would go first to the home of a dear and long-standing friend and there he would strip and shower. The fine suit and the shirt would be bagged, and the change of clothes brought for him there by Anna would be neatly laid out. His friend would burn the clothes that carried the residue of the pistol’s firing, his body would be clean of such traces, and then he would go home – after visiting a café where many would swear he had spent two hours… if his authority held up. As he walked, Carmine Borelli shook his head. It was so hard to believe that Immacolata was the whore.

  She wanted to dance. Orecchia refused and Rossi declined more politely but as firmly. She did not ask Castrolami.

  She had had the music up, high volume. Castrolami had pushed his chair back from the table, gone to the radio, turned the volume down and talked of unwelcome complaints from the floor below. They had said she cooked well, that it was a fine meal, and she had thought the praise insincere. She did not dance in Naples, had not danced in London. She was not trained to dance. If she could dance with Orecchia or Rossi, she thought she might dominate whichever man held her.

  They had eaten what she had put in front of them, but not had second helpings. It was not disguised: she believed they would have preferred to hit the freezer and do defrosts in the microwave.

  She stood up, went round the table, worked her hips and let her hands drop first on Orecchia’s shoulders, then on Rossi’s. Neither reacted. When she was opposite Castrolami, he looked at her. She stared at him and undid an upper button on her blouse. He looked away.

  She fell back on temper.

  She didn’t wait for them to clear the table of glasses and the cheese plate, she scooped up what she could carry, and made as great a noise as possible by dropping them into the bowl in the sink, on top of the pans she had used for the meat and the pasta, the knives, forks and spoons. She expected them to come running. Their voices were low in the dining room. Immacolata went back for the wine bottle and her glass, then stalked again to the kitchen. There was enough in the bottle to fill her glass: the men had only drunk water. She ran a tap noisily, put the soap in. Everything could, of course, have gone in the dishwasher, but then there would have been no noise, no possibility of reaction. She had noise, not the reaction. She sang, made more noise.

  Immacolata washed and stacked.

  Songs from Naples – where else could they be from? She only knew songs from that city. It was her life. She heard him wheeze and turned.

  ‘Tell me how it was for her in the last twenty-four hours of her life…’

  ‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life.’

  He stood in the kitchen doorway. He was not, then, proud of himself. Seldom, if ever, was. It was a job. He couldn’t bring himself to show sympathy or humanity. Had he done so, the emotions would have been fraudulent. The course he took was necessary for the job. He gave nothing of himself to Immacolata Borelli.

  She reacted. Was a little drunk. It had not been a strong wine, but she’d put down most of a bottle. She stared hard at him and her lips moved, but no words came.

  Castrolami said, ‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life. If you’ve forgotten what you were told I can remind you. Would that be a good idea? Should your memory have failed you, I have a note of what was said to you in the cemetery in Nola. I ask again. Tell me how Marianna Rossetti died, what the leukaemia had done to her, about the contamination. Does your memory need prompting?’

  The reaction was not aggression but as if a deep wound had opened, the rawness exposed. There was, he thought, an inner struggle.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes,’ Castrolami said. He squeezed it out of her, as if from a tube that needed folding over and pressurising. He heard how the father had spat beside her feet, how her offer of the flowers had been rejected, and she was called a whore. He heard how the mother of her closest friend had used her fingers to rip her blouse and underwear, had kicked her, and she had fallen, crushing the flowers.

  ‘Don’t gild it. I’m not interested in you, how you felt, what they did to you. I’m interested, Signorina, in the last hours of your friend.’ He said it harshly, and had no regret.

  ‘Her last days were marked by exhaustion, very tired, very lethargic, no energy…’

  He thought she spoke like a machine, and no emotion showed.

  ‘Then bruises appeared all over her body, but she had not hit herself or been hit. The bruises were there. She was very pale. It was high summer in Nola – hot sunshine – and she was so white, anaemic. She was taken to the doctor. He knew immediately. As soon as he had peered behind her eyes, used that little torch, he made the call to the hospital.’

  ‘You miss nothing, and you spare yourself nothing. Continue.’

  He tested her, her toughness and resolve. He had to strain to hear her, but he didn’t lean forward: he stayed propped against the door jamb. ‘The doctor thought it too urgent for Marianna and her mother to wait for an ambulance. Her mother drove her, and they called her father from work.’

  He was told of the fast collapse of the patient, the pain in the skull, the uncontrolled internal bleeding, the neurosurgeon arriving too late, the failed resuscitation.

  ‘How did she contract the disease that took her life, that left her in her last hours without dignity and peace? How?’

  ‘Being in the fields, bathing in streams, having gone close to where toxic waste was dumped.’

  ‘Who dumped the poison?’

  He was told that the father of Marianna Rossetti had said that the clan at Nola had, for more than twenty years, paid for the toxic waste to be left in the fields, the orchards and the riverbeds around the town.

  ‘The question I asked was “Who dumped the poison?” You have not yet answered it.’

  He was told that the transportation of the waste from the north was sub-contracted to the Borelli clan in Naples who had an empire of lorries and trucks. Her father had arr
anged the transportation. Her brother and her mother had banked the money paid for it.

  ‘The food on your plate, Signorina, was the blood money for the poisoning of your friend. That isn’t a question. It’s a statement.’

  She nodded. All the time she had spoken, and he had listened, she had washed plates, knives, forks and glasses. He hadn’t noticed. It was as if they were tied together, bound by what he said and what she said, and all else was shut out.

  ‘The clothes on your back.’

  Again, she nodded, then tipped out the water from the bowl, but did not face him.

  ‘The classes where you have learned book-keeping, the basics of accountancy, so that you can more successfully launder the cash from poisoning others.’

  She peeled off the rubber gloves, threw them into the bowl, then nodded – accepted what he had said.

  ‘You should know, Signorina, that the Camorra has a profit of three billion euro each year from this trade. That is a vast amount of food, clothes and classes. Cancer rates are up in some categories – liver, colo-rectal, leukaemia, lymphoma – to levels three times that of the rest of Italy. It is the Triangle of Death, Signorina Immacolata. Do you accept responsibility?’

  She was staring out of the window. From the little movements of her shoulders, Castrolami thought she might weep. ‘I do.’

  ‘I care little for the killings in Naples. Bad guy kills bad guy. Excellent. Fewer bad guys to pollute the streets. Marianna Rossetti was not a bad guy. I seldom do speeches, Signorina. This one is about those already dead, those already condemned and those yet to be contaminated, all innocent. A whole district, hundreds of square kilometres, is poisoned and no one knows how to clean that ground and filter that water. For generations to come there will be the misery of the visit to the doctor, the rush to the clinic, the failure to prolong life – and for your like there will be meals on the table, the best clothing on your back and a fat bank account. You confirm to me that you take responsibility?’

  She had lifted the glass. Drained it. Held it up so that not a drop of the wine should be left in it. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you will see this through?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Whatever?’

  ‘Correct.’

  He heard the glass fracture. He realised she had crushed it in the palm of her hand. She opened the rubbish bin with the foot-pedal, let the shards fall into it and blood dripped. He thought he’d done well. Theatrical, but acceptable in context. Castrolami’s opinion: it had been necessary to cut away the bullshit in her and break her. Having broken her, he could rebuild her. He thought her stronger now, and focused. He believed she would, as she had said, see it through in the face of whatever was thrown at her.

  The policeman stood on the step and the porch light played on his shaven scalp. His suit was crumpled, his shirt was second-day-on and the tie was loosened; he should also have smeared some polish on his shoes – shouldn’t have been there, should have been in Salisbury at County Headquarters, should have been changing into the best suit, clean shirt, best tie and better shoes, should have been focusing on the seminar kicking off that evening: ‘Terrorism – Tackling the Reality of Today’s Threat’. Was, instead, at a bungalow in a village outside Chippenham. The rain was tipping down.

  ‘We have to look, Mr Deacon, at the actual world – as it is, not as we’d like it to be. Do we have at the moment – I’m just repeating what I’ve already told you and your wife – the resources to look into this, as you would like us to? We do not. It’s a matter of priorities, Mr Deacon – difficult as that may be for you to appreciate – and what you’ve told us doesn’t top the priority ladder. Then there’s the cutbacks. If we could link your son’s disappearance to international terrorism, it’s a different ball game – could probably send an aircraft-carrier down there. Sorry, not appropriate, Mr Deacon… Look, I understand how upset you are, but see it, please, from our viewpoint.’

  The father said, ‘I’m sorry if my son’s situation is inconvenient.’

  ‘I think you’re getting the hang of ours, sir. He’s gone off, your boy, to try to patch up a scene with a girl who walked out on him in London. You get a garbled call, all the language difficulties thrown in, saying your son’s been kidnapped. Who says? You can’t tell us. What’s the source? You don’t know.’

  ‘I’m probably keeping you,’ the father said evenly.

  ‘We’ve called the carabinieri – those people in pantomime uniforms – in Naples. They have no report of a kidnap. We’ve not been idle. We’ve called the consulate there and they’ve checked with the police. Nothing heard. I’m being frank with you, sir. It’s about resources and priorities – and also about our pretty desperate relations with Italian law and order.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve something more important to be getting on with.’

  He saw the brief smile of relief and watched the man scuttle to his car, which was parked in the lane. He checked his watch. It had been twenty-eight minutes of pass-the-buck messing.

  From behind him, Betty asked, ‘Arthur, what’s Eddie worth?’

  He looked out on to the lane, then the darkened outline of the hedges and fields, hearing the smack of the rain around him. ‘Pretty much everything we have. That’s what Eddie’s worth to us. Not the easiest boy, but the only one we have.’

  ‘A difficult enough little beggar.’

  ‘But he’s our son.’

  ‘Can be infuriating. What do we do?’

  ‘Can be an utter wretch. I was thinking, top of my head, of going down to Dean’s. Hear what he has to say.’

  ‘You should. Eddie met him, didn’t he, last time he was here? Had a good talk. A pretty sensible chap. Just troubled… I can’t think, right now, of anyone better – or what else to do.’

  He came inside and – as if it was something he should do more often and had forgotten for too long – gave his wife a brush kiss on the cheek. He dialled a number, and spoke to Dean Weymouth’s partner at their home a quarter of a mile up the lane. He wouldn’t have gone near the man without first checking that it was a good time to call. All the village knew Dean Weymouth had bad turns when he came back from the three-month visits to Iraq, and his space was respected – but he had always said the company he worked for was the best: efficient and dedicated.

  Arthur Deacon didn’t know where else to go. But it involved his son so he had to go somewhere.

  ‘Each time I go back, Mr Deacon, it’s worse. But I keep going… Doesn’t make sense, does it? I go back because there’s nothing else. Going back is my way of saying I’m not history, not scrap, not finished and chucked out. I’m a soldier, Special Forces, that family. I have no other skills. I’m diagnosed PTSD – my stress levels go up to the top of the gauge – but I keep going back, have to.’

  They were outside, in the wilderness of the untended back garden. Dean Weymouth was happier there than in the house.

  ‘I’m not accusing anybody, certainly not you, Mr Deacon, but I hear the word is, round here, that I’m “peculiar” or “unpredictable” or “difficult”… maybe just round the twist. People don’t understand “traumatic stress” and don’t see it as a medical affliction, like a worn-out hip or a hernia. They cross the street, pretend to look anywhere else, find excuses not to talk. You’re almost crying on the Black Dog days for someone to talk to – but people haven’t the time or the inclination.’

  He wore only a T-shirt on his upper body and it was short-sleeved. The rain ran down the decorative lines of his tattoos, and was in his cropped hair. Mr Deacon had on an anorak and a cap. Dean Weymouth spoke softly and without rancour, in a flat, almost lifeless monotone.

  ‘All right, wrong. Most people haven’t. Your boy, your Eddie, he did, he made time. We didn’t talk stress, trauma, disorder. He let me ramble on down by the river – only last Sunday – about that new weed that’s taking over on the banks, and we saw the kingfisher fly, and I told him about the fish in there and… It was nothing talk. Would have bored a sa
int half to death. He gave me time, not many do. It was precious.’

  He lit a cigarette. It took three matches because of the shake in his hands – he remembered his hands hadn’t shaken when he’d been by the river and given time. The trembling was always bad when the end of a home leave was in sight.

  ‘I’m going back in a couple of weeks. What spooks us most there is the thought of getting lifted – being taken. It’s like your worst nightmare but ratcheted up. We do close protection, usually of civilian experts. We have to take them to work. Could be lifted in the office, hoods in bogus police uniforms, or blocked in on the road and not able to shoot a way out of it. We know about kidnapping. It scares the shit out of us. If that’s happened to your boy, Mr Deacon, in Naples, then I’m sincerely sorry.’

  He threw the cigarette on to the uncut grass.

  ‘There’s a man who works for our company. I’ve not met him. He’s a sort of freelancer and gets hired out to corporations and governments, and to people with big bank balances. I don’t know if we can fix something. We say, out in Baghdad, that if ever we’re lifted, we’d pray this guy isn’t on another assignment, that he’s sent for. He has a gold-plated reputation – a nose for what to do and what angle to come in from… but I’ve not met him. Have to see what’s possible.’

  The rain was across the face of the father and dripped off the cap’s peak. In the half-light from the kitchen window he couldn’t tell whether it was only the rain on his cheeks or tears too.

  ‘I’m going to make a call for you. It’s the best shout I can do. Your boy had time for me. I’ll let you know.’