The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  Carmine toured his streets. He tried to demonstrate his authority. He was not fooled. This was the city of the lazzaroni. The mob had taken its name from the patron saint of lepers. It wanted, to be satisfied, the three F words: farina, forca e festini. It was necessary to give the lazzaroni sufficient flour, a scaffold to gather round and public festivals of entertainment. Twice in the last forty-eight hours he had given them a whiff of the scaffold, and his progress up the street was similar to a celebration.

  All threatened, though, by his granddaughter. The mob could turn, owed no loyalty. If necessary, he himself would kill Immacolata’s boy. He could see, craning his neck, when he was at the top of via Forcella, near the church, the summit and cone of Vesuvio. The mountain had made him. He waved, and thought himself a king. How could she have betrayed him?

  He knew. It was a germ in the family, in their blood – she had been so pretty, and he had loved her with an old man’s passion. Now he would happily slaughter her, and feel no more than if she was a sheep in the mattatoio, kill her with a knife as they did the sheep in the abattoir. He wove again, and the old men and women applauded.

  Her clothes were in a loose heap. She heard the immersion heater going, as it did when someone was taking a shower. There was an en-suite bathroom off Immacolata’s room. She went into it, collected her towel from the rail, and wound it round herself, turned her back on the T-shirt, shorts, pants and bra, the socks stained with sweat from the run.

  Maybe she was what they called her, a whore…

  The towel covered her, except her shoulders and her legs below the knees. She went out of her room. The older one, who had bicycled, had his back to her but sat where he could see the front door to the apartment through the hallway, and did not look up as she glided, almost, over the marble veneer. She could hear the cascade of the water and went to that bathroom, which was off the corridor past the kitchen – the master bedroom was for her, the secondary two bedrooms were for them. Orecchia had not reacted as she went behind him.

  She headed for the water. Immacolata thought that Rossi had toyed with her on the run in the gardens, could have passed her, gone ahead, drawn away from her, speeded up till she had sagged – and had not. He had kept his station behind her, had finally called to suggest that enough was enough, but had not succeeded in disguising his superiority, his strength. So fucking patronising. She went through the room and saw the neat pile of clothes, sweat-streaked like hers but folded and laid carefully on the floor beside the bed, which was immaculately made with perfect corners. The holster with the pistol was on the table. She went into the bathroom. This one was half the size of the en-suite attached to her bedroom. She opened the door. She could see his outline behind the screen. Did she want – at that moment – to be what they thought her, a whore?

  Two movements, but simultaneous. She tugged back the plastic shower screen, and loosed the knot holding up her towel.

  He gawped at her. Water, steaming, cascaded over his forehead, down his face and through the hair on his chest to the tangle of his lower stomach, and she saw the size of him, and the thick thighs. She expected him to blush, but he did not – expected him to jerk up with an erection, but he did not. The gawp had lasted only a moment. She stood naked and the towel was on her feet. It was what she would have done in the terraced house in Dalston, but only when Eddie was in the shower – God, not when any of the other boys was there. Eddie always blushed and always went… His shock was brief. He reached past her. His right arm brushed the curve of her left breast. His hand came back with a towel. He put it round him, and water spilled down it. She didn’t move, make room for him. He had to work his way past her, and when he did, his hip was against her stomach and his chest was against hers. She looked into his eyes, and he into hers. Then he was gone, behind her.

  He said quietly, ‘I’m sorry your shower isn’t working, Signorina. We’ll get a plumber in to repair it.’

  She stood and regret bloomed.

  ‘Please, Signorina, feel free to use ours.’

  She stepped into the shower, felt the heat of the water, then dragged the screen across. She didn’t know then whether he watched her silhouette. She thought she had, indeed, made a whore of herself.

  He said, and she could see the shadow movements as he dried, matter-of-fact, ‘In our training for induction into the Servizio Centrale Protezione, we do role-plays to cover many situations. One concerns the pentita from Naples, Carmela Palazzo, known as Cerasella. She was barely literate, pregnant at twelve, and active in the Spanish Quarter. With the family men in gaol, she controlled their speedball industry, drugs – heroin and cocaine. At a meeting inside the Poggioreale prison visiting room, the men blamed her for huge debts arising from her incompetent dealing in narcotics. She screamed abuse and was slapped across the face. In her humiliation, she went to the carabinieri, offered herself for collaboration. She was taken to a safe-house, had protection. But she was beyond control. Our role-plays involved walking with a woman collaborator on a street of shops. She puts an arm through the guard’s, which is forbidden, pretends he is her lover, her husband. How can she be protected if she holds his hand or links his arm? She goes into stores that sell underwear. She waves items of intimate clothing at the guard – ‘How do you like this, my sweetheart?’ – and the guard is embarrassed. She runs away. She is brought back. She accuses, falsely, a guard of raping her. We did many role-plays, Signorina, that were based on the actions of Cerasella. Yes, she helped in the destruction of the Mariano clan. No, the protection didn’t last. We threw her out, cut her adrift, and she was regarded as a sad, inadequate person, fit only to sell narcotics. In the role-play we’re taught how to respond to erratic personality, as when a collaborator behaves with the modesty of a prostitute. Enjoy your shower.’

  The shadow was gone. Water fell. She scrubbed herself with soap. She had heard, of course, of Carmela ‘Cerasella’ Palazzo, had never met her or seen her from a distance.

  She switched off the shower, towelled herself. She had wanted to show power over him.

  When she came back into the living room, Rossi was dressed and sitting beside Orecchia. Nothing was said, which increased her humiliation.

  She wanted arms round her, to be held, to be saved from the shame… Who could have held her? She saw his face – had gloried in betrayal – and knew who would have held her, forgiven her.

  In the darkness, Eddie scratched at the chain. He reckoned he had now smoothed some two feet of the rough concrete that made the ridge, but had at least six more to work on.

  New thoughts, new attitudes swam in his mind. He must cope with isolation and the fear it induced, and he believed that sawing at the chain, grinding at it obsessionally, focused him away from misery… which led to the next necessity: must try to stay positive. ‘Positive’, to Eddie, had meant advertisements to be sniggered at in which companies quoted some unheard-of American electric-shaver sales guru who would teach – for a fat fee – how to acquire confidence. His mother was a positive thinker – always regarded the glass as half full and ditched the empty bit – and his father had chided him for not having the ambition to go to the furthest limits of ability. There had been so much crap to Eddie Deacon – not any longer. And, because it was a positive reaction, he started to play a word game – took a word, stripped it, jumbled it, found new words. He would have derided it in the staffroom, and the guys in the house would have hooted at him if he’d suggested it as an exercise in mental agility… but he had stored it as an entertainment, with mental arithmetic, meaningless figures… and further down the line there would be physical exercise – maybe he would try squats, press-ups, or lying on his back and lifting his legs three or four inches. Eddie thought that being positive was important, and thought that if he ever broke the chain and freed his hands the agility – physical or mental – would save him… Had to think that.

  Once he heard a voice, a whistle of some tune, and footsteps, but they didn’t approach the trapdoor. Once he heard an e
ngine, faint and muffled, as if a car had come close, and then a radio had been switched on and off. The sounds didn’t make a pattern… That was another thing: a pattern was to be observed, noted, analysed, clung to in case the chain broke and… He worked hard, and the sweat was in his eyes, making them smart. The bucket stank worse.

  He thought he wanted the bucket taken and emptied more than he wanted fresh food, more even than he wanted water.

  Eddie was certain of it now. The link in the chain had a clear indentation. Not wishful thinking, more than mere positive thinking, there was a line in the steel of the chain’s link that his nail could settle in. He went at the work harder, and didn’t care to think of the consequence if he were to break open the chain link and free his hands.

  Time drifted – and he created word games, arithmetic games that were more complicated, taxing, and the dust of the smoothed concrete was thicker in his nostrils, caking the outer skin of his lips. He had to do it for himself. No other bastard would.

  ‘How will he be?’

  ‘Scared,’ Lukas said. ‘Scared and alone, feeling that the world, already, has given up on him. Probably in darkness, probably trussed up, likely to be hooded.’

  Castrolami drove. ‘We have kidnapping in the south, in the toecap of the boot. It is an industry, and when payment is slow there is the possibility of a knife taking off an ear or a finger and the item consigned to the postal services. But not here. I do not have the experience of it.’

  Lukas thought Castrolami drove well. They went fast, had come off the autostrada and were now on a dual-carriage way. Ahead, there was a wide panoramic vista of lights, different intensity but constant, then a short, curved horizon and beyond it almost total darkness. But the Gulf of Naples was broken up by oases of lights and Lukas thought one would be the island of Capri, but didn’t know which. He could keep most layers of excitement well suppressed, but always a faint buzz-glow grew in him when he saw, the first time, his place of operations. Might have been from the hatch window of a Cessna light aircraft coming in to a jungle strip up in the mountains and far from Bogotá, or from the porthole of a C-130 as it corkscrewed down towards the Bagram runway outside Kabul, or from a Black Hawk’s open hatch and over the shoulder of the machine-gunner anywhere in Shia or Sunni Iraq. If he didn’t have the buzz-glow, if he’d gotten too cynical for it, it would probably be past time for him to call it a day, go quit. It was all, sort of, routine and he had played this game so many times, and he didn’t expect to be surprised. He still had, and was grateful, the focus. They hadn’t talked much on the journey. Lukas reckoned that Castrolami was poor with chatter: they had done a little – Castrolami had a wife and children up in Milan, and they’d gone there because the job was shit and they never saw him; and he had a friend who painted, and most times he took her out he was asleep at the table by the time the meat was served; and he was forty-six, and bullets had come through the post in little padded bags… Lukas had given some: had done the FBI’s unit for Hostage Rescue, had been on the sidelines at the ‘big’ events, Ruby Ridge and Waco, did coordination now, and was a year older at forty-seven. His mother had brought him up in a trailer camp and had cleaned offices to get him through college; she was American-Italian and his father was pretty much a shit and long gone. There was a wife, Martha, and a boy, Dougie – had only mentioned his son’s name, but Lukas had said nothing else of him. They all lived together now, mother and wife and son, in the trailer park, adjacent to each other, and the cut-off didn’t seem to bother him… They had talked a bit about things that didn’t matter and didn’t affect why they rode in a car down a hill and into the city of Naples… Seemed they’d each talked enough about themselves.

  Lukas said, ‘Very few hostages taken have an expectation of the risk. They come to the situation with an experience bank equal to that of a newborn child.’

  ‘We talk the language of “leverage”?’

  ‘That would be an appropriate word. “Leverage” is where we’re at.’

  ‘And negotiation is not an appropriate word?’

  ‘When we have an open line of communication, we talk a fair amount about negotiation. But it’s talk. I accept that. Talk buys time… The time is used for assets of intelligence, surveillance, informers, for just plain old-fashioned luck to chip in – I don’t come from a world where hostage-takers get rewarded. Maybe, up front, I’ve been party to them being paid for a freedom exchange, but then they get hunted down, shot or hanged, or they disappear off the face of the earth. I understand the reality.’

  ‘In this case, Immacolata Borelli, if we paid we would destroy an anti-kidnap strategy applicable in domestic Italy for more than thirty years.’

  ‘I said I understood,’ Lukas murmured.

  ‘And if we permitted Immacolata Borelli to withdraw her evidence in return for the boy keeping his ears, fingers, eyes – whatever else of his body that can be cut off – the programme we have of collaborators with justice is finished. The postal service would be filled with the stink of decaying flesh.’

  ‘Again, I understand.’

  Castrolami said, ‘Close to the autostrada, where we left it, was the territory of the Nuvoletta clan. We have bypassed the zone of Scampia, which is the base of di Lauro. Now we cross the suburb of the city called Secondigliano and it is under the control of the Licciardi clan and the Contini clan. As we drive towards the old city we pass the territory of Mallardo, Misso and Mazzarella. They are the principal families of the Camorra. Then there is another level – Lo Russo, Sarno, de Luca, Caldarelli, Picirillo – and the clan of Borelli, then another level of perhaps as many as eighty clans. The first level we cannot destroy. We can make arrests – occasionally, when we find a principal – and we can disrupt, but little more. The second level is where we find the Borelli clan. With a collaborator it is possible – I used it with care, but possible – to take the conspiracy apart to the extent that it ceases to exist. The opportunity does not come every week or month, it might come once in a year, but I would believe that is optimistic. Every two years or three…’

  Lukas asked, ‘She has that capability, Immacolata Borelli?’

  ‘We believe so. We remove a clan’s leadership. It is a ship that has no crew. More important it has no rudder. It sinks. Warfare breaks out as the void is filled, but many opportunities then come our way. In the scramble for the empty territory, other clans – ruthless in what they will do, the risks they will take, the numbers they will kill – make mistakes. Mistakes are fertile ground for us.’

  ‘She has that importance?’ A gently posed question. The tower blocks of great housing estates, lights climbing into the darkened skies, were gone. The streets were filled now with cars and they had slowed. Off the route, Lukas could see narrow little openings. Noise – engines, horns, music, shouting – came through the windows.

  ‘Immacolata Borelli can deliver us the clan – her mother, her brothers, the hitman and the enforcers, the buyers and the bankers. It is a chance for us to win. Do you know what it is, Lukas, not to win?’

  ‘Keep it for another day – winning and losing,’ Lukas said.

  ‘Some days, in life, it is necessary to win.’

  ‘Another day we talk about winning – and we decide if we can win twice… with the girl, with the boy.’

  ‘I don’t bargain with you – it is not for discussion. We have to win with the evidence of Immacolata Borelli. It is primary. If, afterwards, we save the boy – Eddie Deacon, the idiot and the imbecile, now forgotten – then we may drink some spumante. It is made at vineyards near the town of Asti, in the region of Piedmont. They use the moscato bianco grape. It is very popular in Italy. It is drunk on a celebratory occasion. I like…’

  Lukas said, drily, ‘I think you don’t often get to taste spumante, my friend.’

  ‘It is my regret that, true, I drink it rarely.’

  Lukas gave him the winter smile – no love, no life, no humour. The car was stopped against the kerb. Lukas was given directions – how
far he needed to walk, how long it would take him, and was told to watch his back and put his watch in his pocket, out of sight. Castrolami told him he was going to his office, his workplace in the barracks, and would set up, discreetly, a crisis-control desk. He took from his wallet a card that bore just his name on one side, no logo, wrote his mobile number on it and gave it to Castrolami. Then he reached to the back seat and pulled the laptop out of his rucksack – needed a contortion but he achieved it – and asked that the computer be lodged at the desk overnight. They shook hands perfunctorily, like an afterthought.

  He closed the door and slung the rucksack straps over his shoulders. He saw the car veer away, then lost it in traffic, but he didn’t think Castrolami had swung in his seat and waved. The sort of man Lukas was – and his judgement of Castrolami – did not take time out for relationships with professionals. A sharp punch, a quick handshake was a good par on that course. He had asked to be dropped near to the piazza Garibaldi, had not been asked why, or where he had booked a room. He recalled what he had been told, peeled off his watch and pocketed it.