The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  A memory of the ferrets that most of the farmers’ kids had. Little sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed killing machines. Nets put across the burrows, the ferrets slipped in, then the listening, the pounding of a rabbit running and a net bulging. This child had not enjoyed the spectacle but had gone so as not to lose face – bloody important at nine or ten. He had often thought of a rabbit going deeper and further into the far extremity of the burrow and all the time hearing the scurrying brush of the little bastard’s clawed pads, and having nowhere further to run.

  The bathroom was the only room remaining off the corridor. The hunters were in the next apartment. The walls were thin, little more than partitions. He thought of it as a bathroom, but it had no bath. There was a basin, a lavatory without a seat, a shower unit with a curtain drawn half across and sagging for lack of support. There was a small cupboard, and a window.

  The memories were of the defenceless ones who had tried to reach thick reeds, bramble cover and the last extremity of the burrow.

  Not much went through Eddie’s mind as he looked at the window, heard the banging and shouting through the wall. She wasn’t in his mind. He didn’t think of love, of getting his leg over, of growing old in her company and owning a bloody cottage with roses growing. Eddie thought of survival. There was a man who had blood on his chest from a rusted nail’s wound, and another with slash marks on his face from a chain, and a third who had doubled when a knee had crunched his testicles. He thought they were all coming, they and plenty more, and where he was would be next for the search.

  He had the window open.

  The breeze through it, slight, riffled the plastic curtains. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go that offered the possibility of survival.

  Then the door down the corridor and beyond the living room was hit. He saw the men, in his mind, pouring inside, the blood on their clothing and skin.

  Eddie went out through the window. He stood on the rim of the lavatory bowl and swung a leg out, then the other, and his weight was taken on his shin, which was across the sharp metal of the window frame. He looked down. Once was enough. There was the road, and long, sun-scorched grass. There were bushes and rubbish trolleys, long filled to overflowing, and there was concrete. What had he thought when he was looking out of the window in the holding place, his cell? That the drop was fifty or sixty feet. Seemed fucking further now. A pipe jutted out of the concrete a little to his left – an overflow pipe for the lavatory, maybe – diameter of about half an inch, protruding maybe six. He thought, from what he heard, that they were now in the bedroom or the kitchen. The nail went into his pocket. Again, Eddie took a deep breath. It was about survival. If he was taken now he stood no chance. He didn’t think of her, or his father and mother – didn’t see the childhood home or the house in Dalston. Saw a bastard drop, a pipe from which water dripped, the edge of the window frame and the flutter of the curtain.

  Eddie went over, and the chain cascaded down. He let his chest and stomach scrape down the iron window fitting, then against the old concrete of the building. His feet kicked. His fists, clenched to give his fingers the strength needed and gripping the bottom of the window frame, took his weight. Then a trainer found the pipe and a fraction of the weight was shed. But, he did not know how long the pipe would carry its share of the weight, and the chain swayed beneath him. He hung.

  He played the idiot, a deaf idiot, well. They swarmed through Davide’s living room, shrieking questions at him, and he grinned but barely turned his head from the big screen in front of him where a gunfight blazed. He didn’t answer and left them to think he was afflicted by deafness as well as idiocy. The agent was not deaf and was not an idiot. His years of living the lie in the Sail had required of him the acutest sense of self-preservation. It was irrelevant at that moment whether his hearing was good or impaired: his sanity was on the line. He could not have articulated why he had risen from his chair, gone fast across the worn carpet through the polystyrene takeaway trays and unlocked his door. Their eyes had met. He had looked back through the window, had seen the face and the desperation, the stains on the clothing, the nail in the fist with the dark stain at the tip, and the chain, and he had known that a fugitive ran. Had seen that shirt below a hood, had seen that dark shade of jeans when a prisoner was brought along the walkway. He saw so much of human misery, the arrogance of the clan capos and the swagger of the foot-soldiers, and he performed his duty and reported to his handlers. He had never before intervened. Not much of an intervention, the unlocking of a door, but a first time. Now he was ignored. Four men at least flowed through his apartment and doors banged but he did not hear the whoop. There was no place of refuge if a search, barely a thorough one, was made but they came out of the corridor. He muttered a short prayer. He dedicated it to Matteo, the patron saint of bank workers and book-keepers – as he had been. He said the prayer again, silently but never allowed his eyes to leave the screen where revolver shots were exchanged in front of a timbered saloon. He could not imagine where the boy had hidden. They were all gone, but one stood in the open door and lit a cigarette.

  *

  It seemed that his arms were slowly being wrenched from their sockets. He didn’t know for how much longer he could keep it up. Cramp had set into his fingers, which gripped the base of the iron window frame. What sustained him was the diminishing voices. They had been right above him. The voices and the clatter of movement had come so close, within spitting range, but his hands – what little of them would have been visible above the window frame – had been behind the flutter of the curtain. It would have been just a glance, a moment’s check, and they would have seen no place where an adult could hide. Maybe they had then been in twenty apartments, maybe they had ten more to go through, maybe they had gotten careless… and the voices had drifted. Maybe another half-minute and then, God willing, he would begin the attempt to regain the window.

  The first stone missed him, was well wide.

  The second, thrown harder, more expertly, a better missile, hit the concrete level with his head, around a yard from him.

  He swung momentarily, as if he had tried to swat the grit its impact spat at him, on one hand, then clawed the other back into position, and the extra weight had shifted the overflow pipe on which there was room for one foot. Little voices were far below, shrill.

  He looked down. Had to tuck his head almost into his right armpit and his view went past flush window sills, to the paving, the rubbish bags, the bushes and the kids… Fucking kids. The chain swung languidly below his foot. Not the kids. Nothing halfhearted about the little bastards. Four of them down there. The smallest had a catapult. Three slung stones up at him, which made a random shower, but the smallest kid had the range, had damn near hit Eddie’s head, and had another stone loaded. Eddie looked back up at the window. Couldn’t look down any more. He heard their shouts – voices that were choirboys’ – and imagined they were all pointing up. Wrong. All except the sod with the catapult. He was hit in the shoulder-blade. Imagined one man looking down from a window and seeing them pointing. The next stone from the catapult hit the back of Eddie’s leg, where it was soft, just above the left knee.

  He tried to lift himself. It would have taken the ultimate of his concentration – real focus – to find that strength, channel it and get himself up high enough so that his elbows could go over the window frame. A stone hit the concrete a foot from his eye and level with it. He couldn’t turn his head away – wouldn’t dare destabilise himself. Eddie knew his strength was going, and with it the heart.

  The drop was below him, and the kids bayed, and more had come, and it was a chorus below his feet and the chain with the pin attached. Too much pain in his fingers.

  Where it all ended. Some God-fuck-forsaken awful housing estate somewhere out of Naples.

  Get it over with. Get it done. He had only to loosen his grip and it was over, done. The pain would be gone from his hands and he would have peace and… would hit the paving, a potato sac
k. Eddie felt tears welling.

  His wrist was grasped.

  He couldn’t look up. First one hand had taken his left wrist, then a second. He thought of the old man in the chair and sobbed, in silence, thanks to him. He didn’t doubt that the grip on his arm was strong and wouldn’t fail him. He’d hug him, kiss him. His foot was off the pipe and his hands had lost their hold on the window frame. He was reliant. When did he know?

  A truth came to Eddie Deacon when a third hand and a fourth, then a fifth had a grip on him. Two hands on his left wrist, two more on his right and a fifth had a fistful of his shirt. He was lifted. He saw the faces. There was blood on one, and blood on another man’s T-shirt. And there was the man who had put him in the van on via Forcella, whose eyes seemed to dance with laughter.

  He was pulled up, lifted through the window, then thrown down on to the floor. The tears came.

  *

  As the investigator in charge of the case, Marco Castrolami had the prime place at the end of the table. It was rare for this committee to be called together, but he thought it worth the effort. There were few other places he could go. The meeting had lasted twenty-four minutes, on the wall clock behind his chair, and its usefulness was exhausted.

  Around the table were the head of the carabinieri criminal-intelligence section for the province of Campania, the officer who headed intelligence-gathering for the Naples police, the senior intelligence co-ordinator of the Guardia di Finanza, and a dapper, slight man who seemed to offer no name and was set apart from the rest.

  Castrolami said, ‘I repeat, for the final time, that only a few hours are now available to save the life of this British boy, Eddie Deacon. I repeat that all surveillance of principals has failed to find – as best I know – a pattern of movements or intercepts that can locate him. I hope you will all examine your memories with due diligence. Whatever else you have in on-running investigations, I request your help. So, I repeat, has anyone even the smallest information on where the Borelli clan is holding this boy? Please.’

  His eyes travelled round the table: to his colleague, to the police officer he had known for a dozen years of late-night drinking, bitching, complaining and laughing, to the fiscal policeman who was new in the city. They had all shaken their heads or used their hands to gesture ignorance. Last, his glance rested on the official from the secret service, who was doodling on a sheet of paper. He looked up and Castrolami lip-read his quiet answer: ‘Nothing.’ But it was not said aloud.

  He stood. He had no more to offer.

  They came off the autostrada, through the toll booth, and on to the slip-road. Below, far to the west, were the city and the sea, its beauty and its magnificence.

  In the glove box, Orecchia had found a lightweight raincoat, flimsy, but sufficient for what he needed. If it hadn’t been there he would have used a newspaper. He covered the machine pistol with it, then switched off the flashing light behind the radiator grille.

  Now Rossi caught her eye, accepted the contact. There was a query in his expression and she nodded decisively. She was prepared for the last stage of the journey, into Naples.

  And memories swept her. Immacolata knew the features and signs of the road. She knew the filling station, owned by the Mauriello clan, and the garden centre that seemed to have hectares of rattan furniture on display and was owned by the Nuvoletta clan. There was the restaurant beside the dual-carriageway where her father had taken her and she had met the Lo Russo family – she had been seventeen and had taken an instant dislike to the boy whose company she was supposed to enjoy. It would have been a good alliance, and her father had laughed all the way back into the city at the scale of the failure. There was the truckyard where the long-distance lorries were kept, maintained and repaired; it was owned by the Licciardi clan, and the fleet could be hired by her father or her brother for the empty run north, under the terms of a sub-contract, and the return laden with chemical waste for the Moccia or the Alfieri clan. It was excellent commercial co-operation. They came past the great angled towers of the Scampia district, and on through Secondigliano and into the territory of the Contini clan. She saw cafés where men had been killed, and bars where men had been killed, and pavements where men had been killed, and she had come home.

  Immacolata was adult. She was intelligent. She knew what happened in her home city, and the history of its streets. She knew where the envelopes of five-hundred-euro notes, tight in elastic bands, had been slipped into the smart, expensive leather briefcases of politicians, national and local; she knew where civil servants who prepared recommendations on contract choice of cement manufacturers were entertained by Romanian or Belarussian girls; she knew where the men who led the clans housed their mistresses – and where there had been a concrete-lined hole in a yard that had been the home for eight months of a clan leader’s eldest son, his heir. The police had needed reinforcements before they could remove the twenty-six-year-old and had fired gas at a screaming crowd. They had lost two patrol cars, torched, before order was restored for long enough to make the retreat. She knew where. It was her city.

  She could see the Sail building, and knew that her father – in an earlier prison term – had been in an adjacent cell and had shared exercise with the clan leader’s cousin. Now it had drifted away from her view, with the other towers, and she saw the signs to Capodicino airport.

  The car went fast. She saw now that Orecchia spoke – outside her hearing – into a button microphone that hung loose from an attachment. She had not noticed him put an earpiece in place.

  They were near to the bottom of the last long hill, on the via Carbonara, going past the high walls of the Castel Capuano. Rossi had stiffened in his seat and had undone his seatbelt, as if he felt the need for greater freedom. His hand was on the stock of the machine pistol, and a car – unmarked – was in front of them, with another behind. It was not the direct route. She sensed they were playing with her, testing her, or steeling her.

  Immacolata saw, very clearly, the lower end of the via Forcella. There was the bar where her grandfather went for coffee and brandy, to play cards or dominoes with old friends. There was the vegetable stall where her grandmother bought broccoli and spinach, tomatoes and spring onions. There was the narrow entrance to the shallow arcade where Silvio played the machines, and the hairdresser Giovanni used was beyond it. Momentarily, she had a view of the façade of the block where her grandfather and grandmother lived, then the three cars – in unison – had swung left.

  She could see, fleetingly, the shops, businesses, outlets from which, as a teenager, she had collected the pizzo, and those to which, older, with the benefit of her newly learned book-keeping, she had gone to revalue their contributions. She could recall her ice-cool responses when she was told that such sums were not possible. They always were. They crossed the big square in front of the railway station, and it was from there – only a few times – that she had taken the train, anonymous and unidentified, to the town of Nola to visit her friend. On down a crowded, logjammed street. Then the siren started. They had gone the wrong way in the traffic chaos and the sun had been blocked by the height of the Poggioreale walls, where Giovanni and Silvio were held. She saw the church, modern and magnificent, and the triple towers of the Palace of Justice.

  They went down a subway entrance and a barrier was raised.

  She had never been there before, descending into the greyness of the tunnel under the palace. She had been through the main public entrance, off the pedestrian area, through which the families of the accused were admitted, but not this route. In Naples there were the Castel Capuano, the Castel Nuovo, the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel San Elmo, all great historic monuments, but the palace was another castle, as formidable, the home of what had been for every one of her aware years the ‘enemy’, the nemico. One thing to meet the enemy in a park in north-east London, and to travel with the enemy from London to Rome, then to be in a safe-house on a hill with exquisite views of the capital. It was another to be taken, under
the protection of guns, into the enemy’s castle.

  She was in an underground car park, dimly lit, and there was the stench of petrol fumes.

  Immacolata did not look into Rossi’s face as he stood beside the opened door of the Alfa. She climbed out, making light of the awkwardness in slipping her legs from the low seat, and stretched. She followed Orecchia towards a lift shaft where more men waited. She was ringed with guns. Theatre? Or real and present danger? The men had hard faces and she didn’t think they play-acted.

  In the lift, she was hemmed in, and Rossi’s machine-pistol magazine dug into her arm.

  She could not have said when on the journey she had last thought of Eddie Deacon. She wasn’t certain if she’d thought of him since she’d fastened the padlock and thrown the key into the river, where it meandered among sandbanks.

  *

  Salvatore came out through the door. The man with the face wound, now caked and dried, had taken his place. The door was closed, a poor fit since the power drill had replaced the hinges and gouged new screw holes. He went to the sink and started to wash the blood off his fists and the sweat from his body.

  A man came up behind him. ‘The door is always locked by any person who lives on any floor of any walkway in the Sail.’

  He didn’t understand. It was more important to him that his fists hurt and the knuckles were scraped. Much more important: the boy had not yelled.

  The man said, ‘Every door is locked. How did he get in? Was the door left open? Was there a plan? I think not. Was the door opened for him? I think it was.’