The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  If the boy had screamed, begged, it would have given Salvatore more satisfaction. He could hear now the thudding blows he had inflicted. There would be more blood from the eyes, the lips, inside the mouth and the nose. There would be much more when the man with the nail wound in his chest took his turn, and the man who still walked badly because of the knee and the bruising.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘They found many new shirts in the cupboard, still wrapped, never worn. He’s Davide. He goes to the city each week and buys a new shirt. Why? Why does he need new shirts that he never wears? He’s an idiot. Is that the behaviour of an idiot? Why did he unlock the door for a fugitive? No one would.’

  Salvatore’s upper teeth closed on his lower lip and bit hard. He was a stranger here, isolated. He had loyalties: to Gabriella Borelli, whom he had not protected, to Carmine and Anna Borelli, whom he revered, to himself, paramount. He wondered where Fangio was, what he was doing, how he was treated down there among the shit, not allowed to come up to the third level. He sensed alarm. Two men waited, each with different wounds, to beat more hell out of the boy. He said they should not take the boy’s life. He dried his face. He said the idiot, Davide, could wait. He went to find Fangio. He walked along the walkway and past the apartment and noted, for the first time, the cleanliness of the window and the old man watching television inside.

  ‘He wants to know when.’

  There was surveillance throughout the city. Each of the forces, the carabinieri, the Squadra Mobile and the Guardia di Finanza, would have loved to be able to claim plaudits. For recognised faces – Umberto, Carmine Borelli, Salvatore, Il Pistole, named foot-soldiers of the clan – there was foot surveillance, camera surveillance, audio surveillance and telephone surveillance. Almost – not quite literally – the men and women of the three law-and-order agencies jostled each other.

  ‘When is he to kill him?’

  Fangio walked in a cemetery with Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew, beside him. Neither had any idea of the identity of the corpse in the coffin, the sex or the age. They took a position near the tail of the cortège as it wound towards a high wall and the line of small capelle in front of it. Within the last four months, over a meal in the evening heat at a ristorante on the west slopes of Vesuvio, Gabriella Borelli and Salvatore had chosen this as a method of avoiding watchers and cameras. Salvatore had activated it now, a plan decided on after the whore’s departure to London.

  ‘And where, for best effect, is he to leave the body?’

  Massimo cultivated a north-European pallor, but he fancied his face had gone bloodless. He was, could not avoid the implication, now at the heart of a conspiracy of murder; might before have avoided that conclusion by playing at semantics – no longer could deflect his own guilt.

  They had reached the capella in which that day’s body would be placed. By happy coincidence another funeral had ended. A column of mourners – men loosening their ties, women dabbing their necks with cologne and using the order-of-service cards as fans – came past them and headed for the gate that would lead into the Sanità district. They switched.

  ‘When? Where?’

  They didn’t leave together. Fangio was far down the via Foria and accelerating through slow traffic by the time Massimo had telephoned Anna Borelli, had apologised profusely for disturbing her siesta and begged permission to collect clean underwear for her grandsons and take the items with him on his visit the following day to Poggioreale gaol.

  It did not surprise him that Anna, the crow in her perpetual uniform of black, would make such a decision: when a young man would die and where his carcass would be dumped. But he was hooked and could not step back.

  He sat on great smoothed stones. They were at the foundations of the narrow metalled track leading to the main entrance of the castle that jutted into the bay. A wedding party hung back, but the girl bride and her fresh-faced new husband had come off the road and over the low wall, had stepped on to the stones, a photographer with them, and posed close to where Lukas sat.

  He should not have been there. He should have been in the annexe off the operations room. If he had been there he would have been able to soak in the collator’s surly acceptance of his presence, and the psychologist’s sneered hostility. The ROS men, who would have made up any assault team that might be mounted, would have sat around him, yawned, broken wind and belched, as such men did, as he had when he was a member of a hostage rescue team. And, if he had been there, he would have been close to Castrolami who seemed to him now a man of split priorities: the life of the boy, the testimony of the girl. And the scales, as Castrolami demonstrated them, slipped fast towards the girl as his priority. He watched the bride pose in front of the towering castle walls and hold out her train so that the afternoon breeze caught it and made a sail of it. He saw the adoration in the groom’s face. It had not happened in Lukas’s life.

  It was good for him to see real people and share what they offered, not to be incarcerated in an annexe with a gallows-humour crowd.

  There should, of course, have been intelligence coming in from the assets, but the way Castrolami had told it there were the usual, inevitable, divisions and rivalries. If it was a carabinieri-instigated investigation, would the police crime squad or the fiscal police help? Small chance. And there had been, at their meeting, the domestic security service. They wouldn’t. No chance. In the States, it might have been the Agency, the Bureau and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, might have been Counter-Terrorist, Intelligence and the Junglas, Colombia’s supposed élite, the Agency, the Bureau, Task Force 145 and the local warlords in Iraq – might have been in any goddam place where a life hung by a thread and the big boys disputed territory. The wedding party lined the road to the castle entrance, shouted approval, and the groom had come to hold her. Lukas liked the image.

  He thought that unless luck was served up in buckets he had lost the boy: no assets quoted, no intelligence offered, just silence in close-set walls around him. He could lose a hostage, climb on to a flight, get himself back to Paris and not feel that the world had fallen in. He didn’t understand why this boy had gotten to him.

  He let out a long, slow sigh, which was pretty damn self-indulgent. Nothing to do with his own boy – with whom contact was severed – not a piece of ‘replacement’ psychology that the shrinks would have enjoyed talking up. He didn’t know why this boy had burrowed, like a worm, under his skin. He had gone through the routines of hostage negotiation so many times and not felt that anything was personal. Maybe it was the goddam photograph he’d been shown, or the sight of the girl running in the park. Maybe their romance had fuelled that worm, and little of romance had crossed his tracks. Perhaps he was just damn jealous. He hailed a taxi and gave it piazza Dante as a destination. All his instincts told him that a body would soon be in a ditch, or in a car, or in an alley, and he felt shredded of power.

  16

  It was not mercy that stopped the beatings, but their exhaustion. He was a punch-bag, a kicked football, a bleeding, bruised mess.

  Eddie lay on the floor of the same space where he had removed the chain’s pin from the wall and the door’s hinges. He had no longer any sense of time, or of hunger, but his throat burned with thirst. He thought he’d swallowed some of the blood, and mucus, and the sweat that poured in rivers off his head. He didn’t know whether his ribs were broken, only that the pain there came in sharp spasms if he moved an inch to right or left. He thought his forearm wasn’t broken, but it might have been: it had protected his kidneys and had probably screened his liver.

  He was on his side.

  His wrists were fastened together behind his back, held with a plastic stay that had been pulled tight and cut into the skin, but with so much pain elsewhere that was a small matter and he ignored it. His ankles had new manacles. He was on his side and had been since they had dumped him. He had been able to lift his knees into his stomach, twist his shoulder and chest towards them, drop his head and shorten his neck, and he h
ad kept his eyes tight shut. Eddie knew he was condemned. They had not hooded him. It seemed unimportant to them that he saw their faces. One was contorted in rage and had new scars across one cheek. He had kicked and punched hard. One had laughed each time he had kicked and punched, and had the blood on his T-shirt. Eddie knew a name. He had heard the one whose testicles he had kneed call another Salvatore. Again, it had not seemed important to them that a name had been used within his earshot. It was confirmation that he was condemned. The one they called Salvatore was the man who had taken him in the via Forcella, who had kicked him before, who seemed to have a slack, irresolute mouth and vacant, distant eyes.

  Between the first beating and the second – the one from Salvatore and the one from the man with the scarred face – he had almost called out to Immacolata to end it for him, back off, quit, refuse. He had slid into weakness, but he had ditched it in the gap between the second and third beatings. He had thought of little between the third and fourth, nothing coherent. After the fourth, now, he had no thought of anything beyond survival for the next five or ten minutes.

  He did not have a noble, romantic or heroic thought. All gone. He existed in a vacuum, no hope and no despair, where no intellect was admitted. He was the animal in the snare or the burrow, or the treble-hooked fish unable to reach the reed bed. He did not consider a greater picture, the rule of law over the supremacy of criminality, that might govern Immacolata. Eddie thought of nothing beyond lying still and managing the pain in his ribs and the pain in his forearm, which might be broken, and the pain in his lip, which was bloody and swollen, and the pain in his eyes where the bruising had spread. His vision was through tear-wet slits. He didn’t think of his class filling a room, or the guys in the house, didn’t think any longer of Immacolata. They had nothing to do with his possible survival for the next five or ten minutes.

  They hadn’t closed the door on him. He could see, through the open door, the shoes, trainers, that had kicked him and they were propped on other chairs, and he could see the fists that had punched him, which cradled cigarettes – one was wrapped in a handkerchief and the blood showed through.

  The inspiration of escape was behind him.

  He could see a spider. It was in the angle between the wall and the ceiling. A monster of a spider, with a fortress of close mesh around it and a food store. It moved lethargically. Eddie wondered how long it took a spider to weave a web of that extent. It was his first thought – other than survival – since the fourth beating. Who was the enemy of the spider? Who threatened it? His mind turned, cranked, on the queries and…

  Salvatore had gone, was no longer in the room with the others, but the one with the shirt wound, blood in the chest from the nail, came to the door and stood there, tobacco smoke playing across his face. He was a grown man, might have been thirty. Eddie didn’t understand how a man of thirty could be as savage as a cat with a victim as helpless as a winged songbird. He didn’t have the clarity to think it through. The man watched him. Was it work for a man? The man was older than Eddie. He guarded prisoners, kicked and punched them. Maybe he might just get to kill one. Eddie shivered. Did it fucking matter whether the man had a wife he went home to sleep beside, or small children to play with at the end of a long, hard day of smoking, kicking and punching? Did he talk about kicking, punching and guarding over supper with his wife and kids? Eddie knew nothing. Did the man say to his woman that it had been a good day at work?

  To think, to imagine, was all the independence left to him. Better off without them. He turned, which hurt his ribs and tried to get on to his other side so that his back was to the man, but the pain was too bad. He managed only to flop on to his back, which left him more vulnerable: his privates were unprotected. He rolled back. He was where he’d started. Better to have stayed put, better not to think and not to imagine.

  There had been the one chance. He’d given it his best shot, but it hadn’t succeeded. And he was condemned, which was what Immacolata had done for him, and the certainty of it gave him a sort of peace.

  Were the foot-soldiers of the Borelli clan inside the Palace of Justice?

  Immacolata had been given a soft drink, iced, and now was brought down a corridor, guns in front of and behind her.

  Did Salvatore, Il Pistole, have access here?

  She could smell the gun oil, the chilli on their breath and the scent from their armpits.

  A door was knocked at respectfully. A pause. Then it was opened and a smartly dressed woman, who might have been as old as her mother, gazed at her with the expression that was devoid of approval or criticism, then stepped aside. She was walked through an outer office. She realised now that the guns were gone. So this was the sanctum into which her father’s foot-soldiers and even Salvatore were thought unable to penetrate. An inner door was rapped on. Another pause, long enough to indicate that work must be completed, then a call: ‘Enter.’ Of course the prosecutor had not looked up. His head was low over carpets of papers that were rumpled across the desk.

  She was not asked to sit.

  She realised then that this was deliberate – a casualness meant to implant in her the certainty that she was not extraordinary. There were many files on the floor and she wondered if they had been laid out to a purpose: they carried the names in heavy indelible ink of Lo Russo, Contini, Mazzarella, de Lauro, Misso and Caldarelli. It might have been done to demonstrate to Immacolata that she was a small fish, that she swam in a big sea, but she didn’t know.

  He asked, ‘A good journey, Signorina?’

  ‘I sat in a car. It was satisfactory.’

  ‘I’m told your mind is made up.’

  ‘I said so.’

  ‘You will give evidence?’

  ‘I said I would so I will.’

  ‘I regret that your decision may cost the life of Eddie Deacon. I regret that.’

  ‘I will give evidence.’

  ‘And you will not, Signorina, be surprised if I seek to stiffen your resolve.’

  She was told where she would be taken. She turned on her heel. It was a grander exit than had been her entry. She knew they did not trust her word.

  *

  Salvatore stood by a broken wardrobe. Under its plywood sides, back and doors there were dozens of cellophane-wrapped shirts. None of the packaging had been opened, none of the shirts used.

  The man sat in his chair. The television played. He seemed oblivious to the movement around him.

  The apartment was filled with men.

  The truth came slowly to them all – to Salvatore and to the men of the Sail clan. He was Davide. He was an electrician and could be relied upon to fix a broken fusebox, to route power round a meter box and bypass it. He would come at any time, was so helpful. He was a man of routine and went to the city centre, down the long hill, on the bus every week and would mutter to any who listened that he thought, that week, he needed a new shirt. He was a man who polished the window behind his chair, which fronted on to the walkway. When he had been ordered to stand, there had been a secreted mirror in his chair, like a woman kept in her handbag to check her eye makeup or lipstick. He was almost unique in the great block in that he had allowed a fugitive to enter his apartment. Either his main door had been unlocked, or he had seen the fugitive and decided to aid him. Nothing fitted. Only suspicion meshed.

  With the suspicion, the adding of the parts, came realisation of a truth.

  The apartment was searched, stripped bare.

  The camera was found.

  The cables from the camera led to the recording box.

  The recording box and its loaded tapes were lifted from the hidden recess.

  The wire that ran from the recording box to the audio microphone, the pinhead type fitted to the outside wall, was ripped clear.

  And he stood. None of the men, the clan foot-soldiers or Salvatore, seemed aware of him as he left his chair and the television. He took a last glimpse at the screen. It was afternoon scheduling, too late for the midday film and too early for
the girls to be topless; they wore flimsy one-piece swimming costumes and pranced cheerfully. He did not, of course, bolt for the front door. He went down the corridor.

  He did not know what he had achieved in his recent life.

  Could not know to what use the handlers had put the information he had supplied.

  He understood that the men who swarmed in his apartment were, almost, in shock at what they had found, and that time was short for him. Soon enough heads would clear and thoughts would focus. He went down the corridor towards his bathroom.

  ‘Duck here. Can you speak?’

  ‘Wait one—’

  Lukas was in the corridor, had passed the main desk, where his ID was checked, had been through the metal detector, and turned. It raised eyebrows that he went back through the doors and on to the street, then into the square. He made for a central point, and it didn’t concern him that he had intruded into the middle of a soccer game. The kids buzzed round him.

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘It’s like you’ve been on the dark side of the earth.’

  ‘Nothing to report. Didn’t report because I had nothing.’

  ‘I’m not nagging.’

  ‘I didn’t report because I had nothing to report. One-syllable stuff.’ The ball came by him and he hoofed it away. The kids clapped. ‘There’s no intelligence. There are no assets that anyone will share. Every agency here is fighting a breezy turf war. The contact, my door-opener, thinks the spooks are less than frank. Duck, how many times we heard that? But it’s just his reading of body language. I have nothing to do. I can’t advise on negotiation because we haven’t reached that status. I can’t suggest how a rescue might be launched because we don’t have a location. There’s no role for a co-ordinator if no negotiation’s in place, and there’s nowhere for a storm team to assault. Sorry and all that, Duck. That’s pretty goddam obvious. It’s frustrating.’