The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  He told Anna Borelli of his uncle’s meeting with the prosecutor. She did not reply immediately, but instead coughed, hard and grating, then spat phlegm ahead of her and let her laced shoe step in it.

  They were near to the gate now. There, they would face banks of cameras and metal detectors, and they would go to cubicles for body searches. He was struck, always, by the quiet. With staff, some three thousand souls were inside the walls of rough-carved basalt from Vesuvio, but there was almost silence. Like many in the city, Massimo, the clerk, enjoyed the rewards of association and could not quite bring himself to break the link. Her voice was harsh in his ear. ‘We should have drowned the bitch at birth. Now we should slice up that boy, use a bacon cutter on him, and send her the pieces.’

  Massimo knew the old woman had made coffee for the boy, had brought him a slice of cake, and would have smiled and simpered at him while her husband went for the man, Salvatore. He had, in truth but unspoken, admired Immacolata Borelli. She was four years older than him, and had hardly seemed to notice him, but he had often thought of her – and his uncle would have approved.

  ‘She has to be broken. Only when he is in pieces will she break. Tell the fat fool that – tell your uncle. Salvatore will understand.’

  The smells hit him. He couldn’t have said which was stronger, the urine, the sweat or the disinfectant. They went through the side gate.

  Salvatore rode the pillion. The problem revolved in his mind. Would he use a sharpened short-bladed knife, a chopping knife or a knife with a line of tooth points? A knife for an ear, and a different one for a finger? And which one for a penis? It was what he thought of as he rode and his chest was tight against Fangio’s back. They wove through the traffic, went fast, and the pistol barrel was hard in his groin. The problem, and the wind on his shirt, ripping at his shoulders, gave him a sense of power. They had gone through Secondigliano, were now far away from his own territory, Sanità and Forcella. They were high above the bay and crossed the ground of the Licciardi and Contini clans. That part of Secondigliano was called by everyone, maybe even a postman, Terzo Mundo. If Secondigliano was the third world – another problem – what was Scampia? It was the war ground. He was used by Pasquale or Gabriella Borelli to enforce authority perhaps once a month and no more than twice. On these streets, and in Scampia, there were bodies on the pavements most nights. They had come off the Quadrivio di Secondigliano, gone past the low-security prison, the towers were to their left and they were on via Roma Verso Scampia. He had read a week ago, before the idiocy had started, in Il Mattino, that a sociologist had said: ‘If you live in Scampia you have no hope of anything ever being better. You cannot have optimism. You have nothing and no possibility of legal work or anything that is psychologically rewarding. It is a prison. The boy growing up here as a teenager might as well be locked in the cells of a goal.’ He had read that because it was on the same page as the story about himself, named, with a photograph. He had thought it a shit article about a shit place. He lived in safe-houses scattered through Forcella and Sanità, he was optimistic, his picture was on the screen of kids’ phones, and he was rewarded. One day, one day, he would drive a Ferrari on the seafront at Nice and stay in a hotel, where a movie star would have stayed, and it would not be Gabriella Borelli in his bed – one day.

  He saw the Sail again.

  Fangio took him towards the great weather-stained mountain of concrete. He supported Carmine Borelli’s decision to bring the boy here for safe-keeping, but he thought the old man had given too much in return: too much of a percentage of a shipment coming to the Naples docks in three weeks, too much of a share in a contract for the rebuilding of a sewage system on the north side of Sanità. He thought them peasants, contadini, here, but he had masked his anger when the weapon was taken from him and he was blindfolded.

  They were on the via Baku. Salvatore did not know where Baku was, in what country, or why a street in Scampia was named after it.

  They were waved down. He said who he and Fangio were, where he went and by whose authority, and he gave the registration of the van, its maker and colour, and then he was allowed to go through.

  There had been that knot of men, another at the outer end of via Baku and more at the junction of the viale della Resistenza, otherwise near emptiness… He knew that, from every angle, he was watched.

  He laughed.

  The scooter swerved – Fangio had twisted. He laughed because he had remembered the scratched line in the manacles. He laughed at the effort, wasted.

  He thought escape from here, from the Sail in Scampia, was impossible – as impossible as from the maximum-security wing at Novara, or the one for Sicilians at Rebibia. Impossible. He had not resolved which knife he would use, which blade.

  He was jolted. The braking of the van, no warning, threw Eddie forward and his shoulder cannoned against the bulkhead. The back door was opened. No ceremony. A blanket was draped over him. He was moved fast. No voices.

  Eddie thought it had been four or five paces from the van and into a building. He couldn’t see, but he could smell – all the human smells but, above all, decay. They had hustled him inside but it seemed they were happy to slow and go at their own pace now, wherever they were. He was taken up a staircase. He didn’t know whether it was enclosed or open, but there was no wind on his hands, and no sun’s warmth, and the rest of his body was covered with the blanket.

  He was not hit.

  Small mercy. He was thankful.

  Another flight of stairs – he’d tried to count. To count was to be positive. Reckoned, as best he could, that he was on a third floor, then went along some sort of corridor – it was wide because men were alongside him, to his left and his right, and they had his arms at the elbows. Not a word spoken. Would have said he went a clear hundred paces along the walkway.

  Heard a knock, heard a door open in an instant response. Was jostled through the gap, narrow because one man led, he followed and another man had to wait to come behind. Now he heard a television set blaring, but not near. Bolts were drawn back, and another door opened. He was pushed and pulled inside a room, and knew the space was small and that there was no open window because he was hit by clammy warmth, suffocating.

  A chain was put on Eddie’s ankle – he felt its weight, tight against the bone. The blanket was pulled off, and the plastic strip that had gouged his wrists was cut.

  The door closed, was bolted.

  The sound of the television was gone, and silence crushed him. He did not start to learn his new prison, its dimensions. He slumped – stood against a wall, bent his knees and let his weight take him to his haunches, then toppled over. The chain tightened and he lay on his side. He had not bothered to remove the hood.

  He wondered if he was beaten.

  Lukas walked. It was good for him to feel the air of the city, to breathe it and learn from it. It might be the last chance he had to indulge himself, and he was mean with his time, did not willingly waste it. He soaked up what was around him.

  He called it a ‘tipping point’, and had identified it from what Castrolami had told him. A mobile call, the Italian’s phone clamped to his ear, the frown deepening, the gasps on the cigarette faster and deeper, the phone shut down. They had been close to the barracks at piazza Dante. He had been told of the meeting at which an official at the Palace of Justice had met the corrupt lawyer, one of those who always ran with bad guys, a photograph and a demand. He had asked them if he could walk, feel the small streets.

  They crowded close to him. Hanging washing made an arch over him. Cooking scents fed him. Lukas went to a chapel, paid to go past the door, stood in awe and stared at Sammartino’s Veiled Christ, so lifelike, marble made into flesh and cloth, and was in the majesty of the place for three minutes, no more, had learned and had pondered on the tipping point.

  Not original. A lecturer at Quantico had spoken of a tipping point, had offered an analogy of the final gram going on to the scales and toppling the equilibrium. A legal assi
stant, drawing up the separation agreement in Charlotte, had talked of the tipping point as the moment when a failing relationship became irretrievable. A sociologist doing demography out of the Green Zone, in safe, comfortable Baghdad, had done the study on Sunni and Shia mixed neighbourhoods, but when one side began to leave – Shia or Sunni – the tipping point was reached when goddam ethnic cleansing was on its way, the flight started, and what had been mixed was now either Shia or Sunni. A tipping point was reached when what had meandered took on a new momentum.

  It had.

  A photograph and a demand changed the game. It increased the pressure on Castrolami and his people to keep the girl in line, and on Lukas to get the boy out. It increased the pressure on the girl he had seen running, and on the people who held the boy. Heavy pressure now – all different.

  He did not have a map in his pocket. He was in an old city, on streets where shoes, sandals and boots had strolled, walked and trekked for two millennia. He did not know, could not have said, whether he was close or far distant from where Eddie Deacon was held, but Lukas seemed to flare his nostrils. He gazed at faces, at windows and at shadows. He was a fighter. It was his preparation once a tipping point had been reached.

  He went to work, walked faster.

  12

  Three men brought food. Two filled the doorway, and the third came in. There was light behind them, above their heads and shoulders, and it flooded inside. He was still sitting, hadn’t moved, cramped and stiff, but he pushed himself up. The man who came in was the guy who had snatched him off the street; the eyes were clear, cold and blue-grey. The fingers were long, delicate, almost a musician’s. The lips were thin, without the life that blood brought, perhaps cruel. Eddie barely looked at the face, only the eyes and lips, then the fingers.

  In the fingers there was a lightweight plastic plate, with slices of sausage and a portion of cheese. There was a plastic water bottle on its side. The plate was laid on the floor, but beyond Eddie’s reach. A trainer toe edged it across the floor. The movement shook it and a piece of bread fell off on to the worn, grimy linoleum. It could not have been washed in months, maybe years – there was a tackiness to it that could have come from dried urine or spilled food. Eddie looked into the eyes: had it been an accident or done purposely? Nothing showed.

  It was no matter to the guy that the bread had gone on the floor. The lips didn’t move and no expression crossed his face. Eddie took the opportunity. He’d heard once that it was called ‘peripheral vision’, and he tried to keep his head static but to use his eyes to rake across the space. About eight feet square. About seven feet high. A window at the top of one wall, but covered with heavy-duty hardboard – he could see the pattern of the nails fastening it. There was a metal bucket. There was a ring attached to the wall to which the chain was fastened. There was graffiti on the walls, which had once been whitewashed, but he couldn’t read what had been written. The door had steel sheeting on the inside. All those things he absorbed and stored, and his head didn’t move. Why did he absorb, store?

  It was his refrain. No self-pity, but acceptance of reality. No one was coming for him. His life was in his own hands, that sort of crap… Heavy, heavy stuff. He saw ants on the floor, little beggars scurrying. The piece of bread off the plate was in their line of march.

  A voice: ‘You are OK?’

  Eddie gagged. Why did the bastard care? He didn’t know how he should reply to the hesitant question in accented English.

  ‘Well, there’s a fucking chain on my—’

  He was kicked. The trainer swung over the plate and the toecap caught him a little above his right knee, hard. When the foot swung back, the heel clipped the plastic plate, and all the bread was on the floor, with the cheese and the sausage. The water bottle rolled away. He wasn’t kicked again but the door was shut, locked and bolted, then nothing.

  He would initiate a short debate. Better to say, in answer to the question ‘You are OK?’, that he was fine, grateful for the kindness and room service? Better to say that he was not OK because he had a ‘fucking chain’ on his ankle? Better to be passive, or better to earn a kicking? No decision taken. No consensus of opinion. Better to crawl to the bastard, or better to fight? Didn’t know. How could he? They hadn’t done survival training at the sixth-form college in Wiltshire, or at the university. At the language school there were no extra-curricular classes in it. The kick had hit the bone above the knee, and the bruising hurt, but he felt better for bawling out the bastard.

  He wondered how far the ants had reached. Wondered if they had found his food on the floor. He squatted down, gave the chain a pull but merely jarred his wrists, then reached out, blind, to collect the bread, the sausage and the cheese. He had thought, when he had been able to see the food, that there might have been blue mould on the bread crust. Better when there was no light, and when he couldn’t see the ant column.

  Eddie ate his food. He didn’t taste mould but had grit from the linoleum in his mouth, and didn’t know if he had swallowed a platoon of ants. He ate part of the food left for him, then went to work.

  He stood up. Stretching, leaving his weight on the manacled foot, he could touch the wall where the window was set. It would be his first target. He tried to get his fingernails into the space between the wall at the edge of the hardboard, but could not. He tried until the nail of his right forefinger cracked far down. The pain was sharp and he winced, then sagged back – maybe half a minute, no more. Stood again, stretched again – and again could get no leverage on the window. He realised more. His head was against the hardboard, his ear to it, but he couldn’t hear anything: no music, no television, no kids, no laughter or shouting. What he did not hear told Eddie that there was soundproofing beyond the hardboard, which meant additional layers, and he couldn’t shift the first layer, and he couldn’t reach the door, and he couldn’t shift the ring that held the chain – and he couldn’t stop the pain in his finger from the broken nail. He’d once read something an academic had said on courage: ‘The important thing when you’re going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.’ And he’d read something an American had said on heroes: ‘We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the kerb and clap as they go by.’ Might have been both, might have been one – didn’t know which – but he laughed. Good to laugh, bloody good. Not a big laugh, a belly laugh, a gut-shaker, but a pleasant enough chuckle.

  New experiences walked with Eddie Deacon. On his hands and knees, on linoleum and in the crack where the edge met the base of the wall, he searched, wondering whether he was close to the ants’ camp from which they came out to forage on his bread, cheese and sausage. While he searched he didn’t think of the knife, which blade they would use. His hands pushed and probed. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he searched.

  *

  The game-show on television was new – one of the Milan-based independent channels – and the girls in the show went topless. It was the third week that Davide had watched it. He would have said, if asked for a true response, that he believed the girls on display were hopelessly anorexic… He didn’t have that level of conversation in the Sail.

  Ostensibly, in his chair in front of the television, it appeared to any man on the walkway peering through the cleaned, polished window, that Davide – the idiot, harmless – gazed longingly at the slack breasts that bounced on gaunt, lined ribcages. But the agent had the mirror wedged between his thigh and the side of the chair. He had seen much movement that day, more than was usual, and personalities.

  He was an agent, a watcher, and had been sent on a crash course to gain the skills, was knowledgeable on the workings of electricity. Nobody, of course, who lived in the great Sail paid the state company for electricity. Nobody ever had to face final demands delivered by postal officials. Nobody was ever cut off for non-payment. Davide, as he was known, was not required to run cables from the main supply into the apartments on level three, but he was useful when a fusebox blew and when
new plugs were needed. Then he was sent for. That was good. The poor, the derelicts and the addicts did not have the electrical appliances that blew out fuses. Men high in the chain of command did. That was good for his handlers.

  Four months before, he had been to an apartment nineteen doors further along the walkway, and had wired in four new power sockets, had noted the carpeting and furniture, the shrine to the Virgin and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, in translation, on a table. So, Delta465/Foxtrot had identified the safe-house used by a principal clan leader on the third level of the Sail. He had seen the man, the reader of a Russian classic, that day. That man – who, the agent’s handlers said, was among the four most influential and powerful crime players in the city – had walked past the polished windows surrounded by his guards. He had gone towards the apartment, and an old man, limping, with another man, had been escorted after him. Then the big player had come again past Davide’s window, and a hooded man had been dragged by. His handlers would be interested only in information relating to that principal. His handlers were not policemen: they were interested only in the most senior men. Everything the agent saw he remembered, and to back his elephantine memory there were tapes.