The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Like changing their underpants or brushing their teeth,’ Castrolami said. ‘In Naples, life doesn’t count. They would go for an espresso afterwards and talk football.’

  The dust in his eyes didn’t matter because he couldn’t use them. What came up his nose was an irritant and several times he sneezed uncontrollably, then froze to listen. He heard nothing – no engines, no music, no voices. He kept on scraping the chain against the ridge of concrete. He didn’t – wouldn’t – feel the chain to see whether the effort he made was winning a degree, however small, of success. He didn’t run a thumb or a finger, the sensitive part, against it to learn whether he had made a fraction of an indentation in the link – too scared of finding there was no difference. Then it would be hopelessness, he would slump, join the line that had shuffled towards the gas chamber, that hadn’t needed whipping or the prod of bayonets to keep it moving. How long had he been scraping? An hour? Might take a day, or three days. Might take a week.

  The bucket smelled worse. That was a new worry. Better to have the worry about the bucket than about the knife homing in on his ears, or his fingers, or of them pulling aside his trousers. He went on scraping the chain against the concrete, and the smell was lodged in his nose. He worked on the chain manically. A new worry: what if the scraping dulled his ears? What if the footsteps came to the trapdoor and he didn’t bloody hear them? What if they knew he was busy with escape in his mind? New worries, old worries – hardly fucking mattered which danced in him.

  ‘We tend to suggest that the hostage looks hard for opportunities to escape, but we can’t say where they might be. Every case is different and—’

  Castrolami grunted, ‘Do you go there?’

  The Union flag flew, had no more life in it than the American one. The British place was sixties modern with a water feature at the front. There was a police jeep outside and a uniformed guy lounged with his legs draped out through the open door, a submachine-gun across his thighs. In the square just beyond, a fine statue of a Bersaglieri soldier, double life size, stood high on a plinth. Lukas said, ‘Today I travel on a French passport – sort of a return for favours rendered. I work all right with UK Special Forces, and with spooks, but the diplomats tend to see me as street dirt. So, I’d go there for a glass of water if I was thirsty… I saw those troops in Iraq. I liked the feathers in the hat. You like useless information? Tough shit if you don’t. The feathers are from the capercaillie bird, and the gate behind is the Porta Pia through which they came to complete the unification of your God-forsaken country and give the Holy Father the boot.’

  He was punched, a hard, short-arm blow with a clenched fist, and Lukas rode it and rated it a compliment. They went through the gate – he thought there were bits of ancient Roman brickwork in the walls. ‘We’re nearly there,’ Castrolami said.

  ‘Where I was… We can lay down guidelines. We know how we think guys should behave but we cannot be arrogant enough to dictate… and this boy has never been to a seminar, nor on a chief executive’s course, or probably ever read a newspaper, a magazine, anything with hostage-survival guidelines. He’ll know nothing – which might be a bonus or might be fatal. I can’t say.’

  Castrolami said, straight face, without expression, ‘What a pity he cannot hear your encouraging words.’

  *

  Still, he had the discipline. Still, Eddie worked, and didn’t move his thumb or forefinger over the chain’s link. But with two hours gone he found the first evidence of progress. The chain seemed to lock more easily on to the ridge.

  Then feet.

  It would be such an opportunity – in a day, three days or a week, if the chain was broken and his legs untied: wait till the bastard came down the hole, belt him on the back of the head with the sharp edge of a manacle, knee him in the crotch and leave him stunned, be up and out, dropping the trapdoor, bolting it and running… Running where? Running anywhere. The scene played endlessly, as if it was on a loop in his mind, as he worked on the link, an image of action and response that pleased him. The image removed the fear, gave him the sense that he was not a fatted bloody calf tethered in a shed awaiting the stun-gun. But this was not the time. The opportunity did not exist. He blew hard on the floor, hoped he’d dispersed the dust he’d created, and edged himself back against a side wall. He groped to find the hood, arranged it on his head and let the rim cover his eyes. He waited, and didn’t know what would happen – didn’t know if the footsteps heralded the knife – and squeezed his thighs together so that his penis was protected, pinned back his ears and clenched his fists to hide his fingers.

  The bolt was drawn back. The torchbeam flared into the bunker and caught the hood. Pimples of light pierced the material. Could he, at that moment in time, rip off the hood, stand, grab a leg or a foot, drag the weight down, do damage with the handcuffs on? Eddie hesitated. Could he take the decision, allow the man to come down into the pit, rip off the hood, stand up? He heard the impact of the plastic bag. The light went off. The trapdoor closed and the bolt was pushed through.

  There was food in the bag – more bread and cheese, one apple and water in a bottle. His bucket was not emptied. He ate a piece of the bread and a nugget of cheese, rinsed some of the dryness out of his mouth, then went back to scraping the chain on the rough ridge of the concrete. The heat in the bunker built on him and sweat drenched him.

  Castrolami said that the parkland was the Villa Borghese gardens, that it dated back four hundred years, that it covered eighty hectares. Lukas said he didn’t care to know the history of the park and its significance: his feet hurt from walking and his throat was parched. Castrolami looked at his watch, might have been the tenth or twelfth time, and must have reckoned then that a schedule was on course. He supposed that the walk to the park was of similar importance to his own visit to the carabinieri barracks. He showed no impatience. Lukas knew people – at the Bagram base outside Kabul and at Anaconda camp inside the Balad air base – who would have demanded dedicated space, computers wired in, maps on walls, secure communications, iced water, iced coffee, iced tea, and maybe their name on a card at the front of the desk. Lukas could be patient because he sensed Castrolami – a hulk, heavy and clumsy – to be a man of substance, a guy with whom business could be done. He thought it would be rude – and tactical shit – to chivvy for detail. He didn’t require action to enhance his role. He saw two boys, rucksacks off their backs, half stripped and washing in a pool into which water fell from three levels. To him, the sculpture of rampant horses that supported the fountain was art. Set among huge mature pines, which gave wide shade, the massive statue of a man in fancy-dress uniform sat astride a warhorse, and Castrolami murmured that it was King Umberto I. There were mock Roman pillars, designed as ruins, and in an amphitheatre the workmen were setting up scaffolding for a concert’s sound systems. He saw men with dogs, women with buggies, and tourists who digested their lunch with a stroll, not a siesta. He saw everything, and let his eyes follow where Castrolami’s gaze went.

  He saw her.

  Had to be her.

  There was a wide avenue lined with the high pines, sparse grass in the shadows. She led. A young man, good stride and arm movement, relaxed, was a metre behind her but close to her shoulder. Her T-shirt was damp-streaked and the shorts were baggy, too large – Lukas reckoned she’d begged or borrowed them from the young man. She ran well, but it was harder for her than him, and he thought she was not as conditioned as he was. Twenty metres behind them an older man rode a bicycle, the awkward sort with high handlebars that were hired out in parks, wherever. She didn’t look up, to left or right. He saw her face clearly, full and in profile. Gazed at the thrust of her chin and chest. He rated her as the type of girl who would collapse on her knees in serious exhaustion before she allowed the young man to go past her. Dust spurted from under their sneakers. He sensed the privilege he was given. He could make judgements from the sight of her, a few seconds of watching her. ‘Tough, hard and committed. Not a quitter,’ he said.


  Castrolami was grim-faced. ‘We would have turned her out on to the street if we had thought she was.’

  Lukas shook his head, ‘Why… why? Tell me, why does a decent nonentity boy get his arms and legs around that one – why?’

  ‘She is the daughter of her father. All her life she has what she wants. When she is finished with it, no longer wants it, it is discarded. There is something new she wants, and she takes it. It is the culture of the criminal clan.’

  Lukas watched her draw away from him, and her escort. The bicycle squealed, needing oil. He almost enjoyed the wiggle of her butt, noted the drive in her arms and that she kept her head up and still.

  ‘A pity for the boy, our Eddie, that she once wanted him.’ Lukas saw her pass the kids washing in the fountain. She didn’t deign to glance at them, and he lost her.

  She had made her own world and stayed inside it. She didn’t need panted conversation with Alessandro Rossi, wouldn’t stop, slump and have Giacomo Orecchia give her water. Sweat soaked her.

  It was a city of betrayal, hers. Had been throughout the centuries of its history, and she thought herself a mere footnote. Betrayal was the ultimate weapon of the clans. It meant nothing, went against no culture. She took a text, an episode of the city’s history, better to remember betrayal.

  She stretched her stride and couldn’t hear panting in Alessandro Rossi, but she could in Giacomo Orecchia and his wheeze went with the shriller wail of his bicycle wheels. She had learned the text as a child at school. In the year of 1486, a day in August, when Naples was further forward in architectural standards, sophistication and wealth than anywhere else in Europe, King Ferrante I of Aragon, the ruler, invited the aristocracy, who, he believed, were plotting his overthrow, to the Castel Nuovo on the shore to witness the marriage of his granddaughter to the heir of the Coppola family. They came. After the marriage service they attended a banquet in the great hall. Near the end of the feast, the king’s lord chamberlain read out the names on the arrest warrants: all of the nobility’s names were heard. The Royal Guard came in and took them into custody. That day they were tried and – before sunset – they met the king’s executioner in the yard below the castle’s ramparts. They would have betrayed the king, so the king betrayed them. It was a good story, and one from the history of her city.

  She ran well.

  Immacolata could not have held that pace, and kept the length of her stride, without the escort behind her. She thought herself liberated. Nothing nagged in her mind. London was behind her, and the boy, and there was a new intoxication – the betrayal. She didn’t concern herself with Eddie Deacon. She hadn’t asked him to travel, hadn’t summoned him. She thought her hair flew behind her, and still there was the wail of the bicycle wheels, and she thought that, for the first time, Rossi struggled. Those betrayed were fools to have trusted; those who betrayed were tacticians and without guilt.

  She ran until they called the halt.

  ‘In your experience, how does it play?’ Castrolami asked him.

  ‘They will have moved him first to a holding location, then will shift him to something more permanent. That completed, they make the contact. They have something they consider of value and wish to trade. There has to be dialogue. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see her.’

  ‘You want to walk some more?’

  ‘To my room, to pack, then to the train station. They have to make the contact.’

  The prosecutor took a call. He knew the lawyer well. For all of the prosecutor’s years in the city – in the offices of the Castel Capuana, now deserted and derelict, and in the new tower to which the Palace of Justice had moved – this man had handled the legal affairs of the Borelli family. He had contempt for him. He believed him bereft of integrity. He thought him a symbol of the corruption alive in the city. He had first met the lawyer when he had tried to prepare a case against Carmine Borelli, himself a young official, his target a man of substance, and had failed. He had met him again after the arrest of Pasquale Borelli, had negotiated a way through the court-imposed minefields and now had that clan leader locked away in Novara. He would doubtless meet the lawyer frequently now, with the arrest of Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni Borelli and Silvio Borelli, and after the extradition of Vincenzo Borelli. He heard honeyed words.

  The prosecutor was asked if he was available in his office to meet with the lawyer the following day, at any time in the afternoon that was convenient. He was called ‘Professore’. He was not a professor of any form of jurisprudence – or of street-sweeping, or of the cultivation of tomatoes under glass. He did not address the lawyer by any title that might flatter him, but he could not refuse the request. He named the time and rang off.

  He worked in a fortified enclave. Below his office, in the basement, were the courts in which his accused were judged. In those courts, the accused would sit on benches inside barred cages. The prosecutor was prey to a personal fear that he had not shared with a living soul: would those men and women in the cage contaminate him? They probed, all of them, for weakness. It might be through intimidation, bribery, the honey-trap and a Ukrainian prostitute, or a business opportunity that seemed legitimate and offered rich returns. The prosecutor’s wife worked in a school as an administrator and was vulnerable there, and his son was a teenager and could not have been protected without dislocation of his entire life. He himself had only a state pension to look forward to, and cash payments could be made easily into offshore accounts. He was away from home often, for meetings in Rome at the ministry, then slept in hotels and sometimes was lonely. He had enough cash in hand for a relatively frugal existence – his one indulgence his love of opera – but taxes were high and the cost of living had soared. There were many ways in which he might have been contaminated. They had such wealth, so many resources, those who sat in the cages, and he had been – so far – one of the few men regarded as incorruptible. His fear, nurtured in privacy, was that he would stumble at some hurdle. He went to conferences in Berlin, Frankfurt and London. In those cities, of course, there was criminality, organised and serious. In those cities, also, senior policemen and jurists regarded him – he was aware of it – with hands-off suspicion: he came from that city where the clan gangs ran out of control, where murder, violence and extortion were embedded, where integrity was long corroded. He did not have the respect of outsiders. For a few more years he would endure the pressure of prosecuting the clans, then retirement, home in a village in the northern mountains and… Alone, the fear was always with him.

  He made a note in his diary. The lawyer to visit in person, no agenda set, the following day in mid-afternoon.

  He believed events would play out predictably. He thought a boy’s life was threatened… and he would, in the next hours, prepare himself to make judgements on the value of that life.

  He held his wrists as far apart as the pain would permit. Using the ridge of concrete and its serrated edge as a saw’s blade, Eddie worked on the chain. Now – yes – he was prepared to let the tip of his finger feel the scraped line on the chain’s link, and he was prepared to believe he had made a weakness. His mind roved as he scratched on the line… The time he had once grabbed a man: he had crossed a street to a far pavement where a man and a woman struggled and the man had hit the woman across the side of her face. He had intervened, had dragged the man back with some force. He had been kicked and punched – not with the ferocity of the beating in the bunker – and had been on the pavement. His eyes had misted, but he had seen the man and the woman walk away without a backward glance, and the woman had put her hand on the man’s arm, then he had dropped it across her shoulders… Scraping at the chain, feeling a line made by the concrete, switched his focus. If he succeeded and parted the chain, if he was free to fight, if it was the guy who had taken him off the street, if… What damn chance did he have?

  Better than no chance. Big, brave thought. He kept on with the scraping.

  He ate fit to bust, and the gastrics put the gas in his gut. T
wice he had noisily released it, but Carmine Borelli had to eat a little of everything that was offered, and much was pushed at him. Most recently, he had had a piece of orange and ricotta cake, sfogliata, and a good slice of pizza Margherita, with a deep coating of mozzarella, and before that more ricotta cake, but the riccia version, with twisted pastry, and he had drunk tiny quantities of Stock brandy, sambuca and grappa, all of which should be consumed after the evening meal but would have come from handily available bottles. He must eat, drink and be seen.

  He should not have drunk on the pills. Without the painkillers he could not have made his long walk around the territory he had claimed, so many years before, for his clan. The street urchins, the scugnizzi, followed him. Young men and women watched him from the pavements or from the seats of their scooters and seemed uncertain, as if they did not believe that he, Carmine Borelli, could deliver opportunity, money and the calm required for decent trafficking. It was the old who pushed cake and pizza on him, and the little glasses. Some, he thought, had known him all of those years since the power base had been formed and the men took off their caps for him and the women rose from their street chairs to touch, with a degree of reverence, his arm, his mottled gaunt hands, or to pinch a grip on his coat. The old had known him since he had made Forcella his own.

  Trade in the brothels had declined and the troops had moved north towards Cassino. Heavier competition existed for the dispersal of American aid, stolen and available on the street stalls, and then God had smiled on him – a day in March 1944. Carmine looked on it as the most significant of his life. Vesuvio had erupted. A great cloud had risen from the crater in daylight, and the beginning of the molten flow was visible when night fell. Villages were consumed, roads blocked. A military airfield and its planes were enveloped in the caking, heavy dust. Food warehouses collapsed – disaster for many, a triumphant moment for a few. Carmine Borelli was Il Camionista. He owned a small fleet of lorries. The shortage of transport was desperate. He was given a lucrative contract by the military government. He prospered. He bought more lorries and was able to profit mightily from post-war reconstruction, then speedboats to pick up contraband cigarettes, heavy plant for digging the foundations of industrial sites as Rome’s government ladled money at the disaffected city. But it had all begun when he had mobilised a small fleet of lorries on the morning after Vesuvio had erupted. It was said that only firearms and ammunition, of all the items brought to Naples’ docks by the Americans, were not available on the stalls of the via Forcella the morning after they were unloaded. The men who now pressed close to him had driven those lorries and unloaded them, and the women who touched him had sold from the stalls.