The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘The boy came of his own free will. He was not volunteered. We’ll do what we can for him.’

  ‘He doesn’t intrude on the priority.’

  ‘Even if we condemn him.’

  ‘I want to bring her back to the city.’

  They watched the taking of the mock vows, heard the moment of laughter filtering through the high building as the couple were invited to kiss, and did so with rare passion. Castrolami told the prosecutor what he wanted, why and when, and it was agreed.

  ‘And the boy? Attractive, intelligent, interesting?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Castrolami said. ‘We’ve decided on the priority. He is in second place.’

  The prosecutor bowed towards the altar where the couple talked small detail with the priest, crossed himself, then turned for the door. He was reflective. ‘In the world war, there were occasions when a ship was torpedoed and sunk, and sailors were in the water, injured and choking on oil, but because the enemy’s submarine wasn’t located ships didn’t dare to stop and pick up the survivors. They sailed past and through them. It was a question of priorities. I think they weigh heavily.’

  ‘We’ll do what we can,’ Castrolami said flatly. ‘Priorities rule us. A great truth can’t be ignored.’

  ‘Good night. Pray for him.’

  They parted, turned their backs on the church.

  Nobody could refuse her. Nobody could dare to leave a shuttered window, a locked door and a darkened interior for her.

  With a slow, crabbed step, Anna Borelli – in her eighty-eighth year – came late that evening along the via Duomo. She had already been the length of the via Carbonara, up the slope on the right and down on the left, and before she was finished she would have traversed the via dei Tribunali, the west side. Some boys walked with her. They had been ordered to stay outside the shops and bars she visited, but they were seen and they carried hand weapons – axe handles, a baseball bat, a claw hammer – and they had mobile phones linked to an outer ring of watchers. It was not necessary for her to intimidate. All paid the pizzo. It was not inside the perimeters of reality to avoid payment.

  She was a small crow of a woman.

  She stepped among filth and rubbish because those streets were not on the tourist routes. There was a corner, a junction, where Carmine had shot a rival more than a half-century before; had fired two shots and one had missed the target, the rival’s head; there was still the mark in the stone by the bar’s entrance where the bullet had struck. There was a bar, now under the clan’s control, in which five shots had been fired into the ceiling before Carmine had been accepted as protector. There was a vehicle-repair yard where a body – a man killed by Carmine, manual strangulation – had been kept for five days before it had been safe to move it to the pits of a factory’s foundations into which concrete was poured. She walked well, and felt the control that power gave, and fear. People on those streets begged for her cracked smile and blessed her when she gave it.

  She called on those shopkeepers, small businesses, cafés and bars, and all were there though it was now late in the evening. She was admitted and shown the books. She discussed profit margins and heard dismal explanations of the pressures from global, national and local economic recession.

  Unmoved, Anna Borelli told them what they should – in the future – be paying. In very few of the premises did she offer a reduction or no change in the amount paid monthly in the pizzo. She raised the protection fee, and in so doing she gave the impression that her daughter-in-law had allowed slackness to creep into the affairs of the clan. Those for whom the price was hiked did not complain, bluster, argue. There had been a woman, four years ago, who owned a paint store in the San Giovanni district: she had refused payment, and also to cash a cheque made out for a hundred thousand euros. Men had been imprisoned and the woman had been in the newspapers; and even in Time magazine. There had been demonstrations in support of her, but nothing had changed and people still paid as they had before. The woman lived under police guard now and made no money. An empty gesture, Anna Borelli thought.

  With some, she gossiped about their children. With some she talked about her husband – a bladder problem and difficulty in the hips. With a few she recounted the situation in the Poggioreale that faced her grandsons, the misunderstood, persecuted Giovanni, the innocent, gentle Silvio. With others she discussed the circumstances of the incarceration in the north of her only son, Pasquale, and the brutality of the prison officers. All of them, she knew, would have liked to talk about the infame, the treachery of her granddaughter, Immacolata. None did. None dared. The majority had had their pizzo fixed by Immacolata and confirmed by Gabriella Borelli. All knew the girl. She was not spoken of.

  The old woman knew that when she left each of the premises, and the door was locked, the shutters dropped, the lights turned off, it would be Immacolata – the whore – whose name flitted on the lips, and there would be sniggers. The bitch was dead. A grandmother had decreed it. The whore, the traitor, the infame was condemned.

  Her secret: she knew also what leverage could be exerted on the girl who was damned – as a lemon was squeezed until the pips burst through the rind.

  He searched. He crawled on the floor, went as far as the chain permitted him: there was no concrete ridge on this floor and the chain links were double the thickness of those in the bunker. That opportunity would not be repeated. He started again, and searched.

  Couldn’t find a thick woollen red sock under the bed or the easy chair or in a corner of his room in Dalston. And couldn’t find a shoe in his room at his parents’ home in Wiltshire. Couldn’t find the big bright-coloured folders with his teaching notes that he’d left lying in the staff room at the college. The idea of Eddie Deacon on his hands and knees in darkness, relying on touch to a methodical, careful, painstaking search would have appeared ludicrous to the guys in the house, or his mum and dad, or to the other lecturers. They would have had him down as a ‘shambles’ in personal organisation, ‘untidy’ to a degree, simply ‘chaotic’. The chain rattled, responding to each movement of his trailing leg.

  He wasn’t hungry or thirsty, but it seemed an age since he had eaten the food brought him.

  He had lost track of the times when it was necessary to eat and drink. Get up in the morning, in Dalston, wash, shave, do his teeth and use the toilet, then down the stairs and must have a slice of toast from old bread past its date, must have with it a smear of margarine and jam, must have coffee to wash it down. A break for lunch at work. Bells ringing, lecture rooms emptying, and sandwiches, rolls or instant soup in the staff room, must have something or all known forms of life would end. A microwave meal in the evening, or a trip to a cheap Italian, a curry house or the Afghan was a must-do, and the familiar corner seat afterwards in the pub and some pints. Down to his mother and father’s at a weekend and must have a piece of beef, pork or a leg of lamb for lunch – life couldn’t go on without it. Eddie had no watch, no sense of hours passing, no knowledge of when darkness would come beyond the boarded-up window, no hunger and no thirst.

  What did he look for? He didn’t know.

  Why did he look for something? There was no acceptable alternative. It wasn’t acceptable to lie back and wait for them to come with the knife.

  He did the floor and the walls, smoothed them with his fingertips and used the sensitivity of his palms. Didn’t find anything. Found nothing that was of use. Only the clank of the chain kept him company. He had gone round the floor, up the walls and round the blocked window, but had found nothing.

  He began again.

  He made a change. He took the image of Immacolata out of his mind, as if it was a transparency slide and slotted in a projector, and replaced it with the image of his captor – the man he hated – and kept it in his mind. Like a new day starting. Was he delirious? Was he hallucinating? Was the face a fantasy? It had its use: it concentrated him.

  He worked at the search, and had a refrain: he must save himself because no one else wou
ld.

  The streets around the pensione were raucous, crowded, exploding with noise and movement. Lukas came through the door, which swung shut behind him. Inside there was stillness.

  He was handed his key by a small man, dapper and neat.

  Lukas thanked him. ‘You’re Giuseppe?’

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘You’re the day manager?’ Lukas wore his best smile. ‘And it’s night. I thought I’d see you in the morning.’

  ‘Better at night… and my friend’s baby has a colic so…’ The man shrugged. Lukas recognised the conspiracy. He had asked, on leaving that morning and handing over his key – briefly but not furtively – to meet the next day. He hadn’t expected the duty rosters to be juggled. The man flashed his eyes across the darkened hall, looked briefly, but fast and comprehensively, for an eavesdropper, but the bar was empty, the breakfast room deserted and in shadow. ‘I took my friend’s shift. You are, sir?’

  Lukas did a droll grin. ‘I am who my passport says I am.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Truth was, end of a long day, Lukas could not have remembered with certainty which passport he had used when he checked in. It wasn’t that he was difficult, secretive, covert – he just couldn’t remember which goddam passport he’d had, and thought that age crept up on him, stabbed him in the back.

  ‘It was a Canadian passport, sir,’ the day manager said, impassive.

  From under the reception desk, a bottle was produced, with a couple of plastic beakers, and measures were poured. Lukas saw the shake in the day manager’s hand. He didn’t offer money. Might, but later. The best intelligence, in Lukas’s experience, was not bought.

  ‘It’s about the boy.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I would have talked to you this morning, but you had breakfasts, check-outs, the Dutch complaining about the hot water…’

  Still dry: ‘I had the New Zealanders who wanted a reservation in Sorrento for two nights and the Greek couple had fucked – excuse me, sir – till four in the morning, my friend told me, and broke the bed. They want a replacement not repair.’

  ‘It’s about the boy.’

  ‘I understood that, sir. Forgive me, sir. The world comes across my lobby, dresses in many ways and has many ages, many disguises. You’re not a tourist. You have no map and no book, and do not ask directions to the Palazzo Reale, the Castel dell’Ovo or the Teatro San Carlo, and no businessman stays here. I understand, sir.’

  ‘We have to trust each other.’

  ‘I expected you – someone. I made a telephone call. Perhaps I regret it. I realised afterwards there would be consequences. Someone would come. It is a city where humble people – myself – do not seek attention. I have to trust you… or I walk off the beach and into the sea.’

  ‘You have my word,’ Lukas said. His right hand took the day manager’s, his left lifted the beaker and brushed it against the other’s. He held the hand while he sipped bad brandy. He respected informants – many did not. The Brits, he knew, had put up bureaucratic barricades to block entry to Iraqi collaborators. They were lonely and unloved by most handlers, seldom thanked for the risk taken. He knew it from the FBI days. Lukas would have thought that a few hundred euros palmed across the desk would have insulted the integrity of the day manager. He did good sincerity when he guaranteed his word – and meant it. Many he had known, attached to Task Force 145 out at Anaconda in the Balad base, who did a year’s Iraq duty, had handled agents, milked their udders dry, then cut them adrift. Lukas had little sentiment, but he appreciated that agents who volunteered help were vulnerable – like the day manager. ‘My word is good.’

  ‘I telephoned the family of Eddie Deacon.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘It is not yet in the newspapers, his capture.’

  ‘They’re trying to keep it suppressed. Can’t do that for many more days.’

  ‘I did not see him taken.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was brought a piece of card. It is what we give to guests, our address and phone, and we write on it his room number. It was dropped in the street.’

  ‘And picked up and brought to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By a witness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who was the witness?’ Lukas saw the squirm on the day manager’s features. One thing to have involved himself, another to involve his informant. Lukas understood, in this culture and in this city, what would be an informer’s reward: death would come like mercy. Twice the day manager seemed to rehearse a statement but nothing was said, then… Lukas could have sworn, did not. An Australian couple, young, handsome, bronzed and near to collapse, came through the door. His eye was already closing and the bruise had started to swell, while below the hem of her shorts the knees were grazed. He backed away. Heard the babble about her handbag, the snatch from the motor scooter. Her dragged along the gutter. Him catching the shoulder of the snatcher who rode pillion and being lashed clear by the driver’s elbow. In the bag were passports, plastic and some cash and – Christ, did they think they were in bloody Woolagong on the Bondi? Christ, didn’t they know they were in Naples, Italy? He knew about Woolagong from a Special Forces guy who had a girl there and they’d spent long hours waiting for the assets to turn in something of value. Lukas thought he had lost his man.

  He hadn’t.

  The brandy was produced again. More beakers were found. The Australians were given alcohol, were sat down. The day manager said he was going to telephone the police, but as he lifted the phone he murmured into Lukas’s ear: ‘In via Forcella, at the bottom, is the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli, old people. He came out from their home and was taken. There is a stall for fish beside the outer door. He is Tomasso. He will have returned from the market at dawn. He saw it. Have I killed myself? Have I killed him?’

  ‘I gave you my word. The key, please.’

  The day manager dialled, 112, then started to shout. He did well. He stood in the corner of the robbed couple and demanded an appointment for them the following morning. Lukas thought it all bullshit, but the Australians would have been pleased with his vigour. While he shouted, he handed Lukas his own room key and a second. He thought the Greeks had had their bed repaired or a new one had been moved into their second-floor room. He went on up, climbed a further flight.

  There was police tape on the door.

  He broke it, used the key and went inside. He experienced the feeling that a law-enforcement man never lost on going into private space with entire legitimacy but as a trespasser. The room had been searched, but he reckoned the check had been perfunctory, done without interest or enthusiasm.

  Later he would sit on the bed, think and contemplate. He believed in the value of association, with a suitcase, clothes or just where there had been a presence. So little of Eddie Deacon was there. The bag, clothes on the floor, including the previous day’s socks and boxers. There was a passport, a wallet with a few euros. Lukas thought the boy had left behind as much as possible before venturing out. In the wallet was the photograph. The picture brought alive the girl he had seen run in the gardens; more important, it brought alive the boy. He had been, perhaps, a hundred yards from her in the villa Borghese gardens; here he was close and could touch her, could almost smell her, and hear the laughter that seemed to ring from the picture, infectious. He saw the prettiness, the vitality and the youth, not matched in Rome seen at a distance. He knew, holding the photograph under the ceiling light, why Eddie Deacon had crossed the continent to bring back the girl. In his trade, he was not supposed to feel emotion and relate to victims – it was thought dangerous for involvement to feature. He knew about hostage rescue, hostage negotiation and the co-ordinator’s job of evaluating talk against force, and his whole life was the work… Lukas had never loved.

  The work made do as his family. Could have been inside the broad family of the Bureau, or in the gargantuan family of the military, or in the close, tight-knit fa
mily of Ground Force Security. Love was now, had been in the past, absent from Lukas. He had admired his mother. He had felt affection for his wife, Martha, at first. He had not reacted to his son’s birth on a date after the divorce was finalised. He looked a long time at the face of the girl.

  Then, he had seen enough.

  He left everything as he had found it, except the photograph from the wallet. He laid the picture with care in the breast pocket of his shirt, careful neither to bend nor mark it. It was the photograph that screwed Lukas’s intention to deny any emotional involvement. He looked around him for a last time, switched off the light, closed the door, locked it, then resealed the jamb with the adhesive police tape. He went off down the corridor and down the stairs, and the Greeks were still at it. He felt, as if it was a weight on him, the picture in his pocket, saw the smile and heard the laugh.

  Good if it had been possible to make promises.

  ‘Can’t do it, kid,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not a business where promises are possible. Sorry, but you have to appreciate that.’

  His own room would be so empty, and without a photograph to light it.

  13

  He didn’t know how long he had slept but, blessed relief, it had been dreamless, without nightmares. He had rubbed his eyes hard, stretched, scratched and had started again to search.

  He talked quietly to himself, a whisper or a murmur – seemed to take the guys in the Dalston house as an audience. ‘What’s strangest is that I can’t hear anything from outside this place and I can’t see anything inside it. I have no light, and there’s no noise, other than my breathing and the chain. I’ve just slept on linoleum with no blanket under or over me. Where my mum lives, if a dog had to sleep on linoleum without bedding then someone, sure as hell, would be complaining to the animal-rights people.’