The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘You want to hear about something?’ The voice rasped in Lukas’s ear.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Could I try you with a snatch off the Niger Delta, about sixty klicks into the Gulf, an oil-flow platform? Yanks, Canadians and three Brits. What makes it different is that local workers were killed when the hostage-takers came on board the rig so they can’t simply be paid off. The temperature’s hot. Chevron have the rig and their security people asked for you. I’m merely passing it on.’

  ‘You could tell them I’m spoken for, regrets and all that.’

  ‘Any idea how much longer?’

  ‘It’ll move fast.’

  ‘Too fast for you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He liked Roddy ‘Duck’ Johnstone, trusted him and was appreciated, and he thought the call didn’t yet have purpose. It was peculiar for the boss not to needle in on a point without preamble – without crap.

  ‘I’m just throwing past you the second call on your time. The German Red Cross have contacted us. They have people in western Afghanistan, round Herat, and they’ve lost a field worker. Well, not actually lost him, just don’t know which warlord has him, and if he goes into the hands of the AQ… Well, they asked for you.’

  ‘Like the man said to Chevron,’ Lukas answered.

  ‘That you’re spoken for?’

  ‘That I’m spoken for. I feel kind of obligated to stay with this, let it run its course.’

  ‘Not getting soft and sentimental in your old age?’

  He heard a brief grim chuckle. No one who knew him would ever accuse him in seriousness of either.

  ‘Hope not.’ Lukas bridled, and the ball was back at his feet. The kids stayed off him and he did a shimmy, kicked for goal. Wide. Lukas thought hostage co-ordination was easier than kicking footballs.

  ‘Don’t take this as impertinence, but can you see yourself making a contribution of value?’

  ‘Hope to. Will try to.’

  ‘A good kid?’

  ‘I didn’t do the legwork. You did,’ he said softly. Lukas wouldn’t put down his boss. No one had ever labelled him sarcastic… and he thought of those he had searched out, the close-up witnesses: the hotel manager, the fish-seller, a priest with a knapsack of guilt.

  ‘It’d be nice to bring him out.’

  ‘Yes. I have a desk to get back to.’

  ‘I’ll tell them you’ve work in hand – not available for the Niger Delta. Tell them you’ve things stacking up, not available for Herat. Damn you, Lukas, because you never give me anything. He’s an ordinary kid with an ordinary background, yet I think he’s special. It’s what people say and—’

  ‘The desk calls.’ Lukas rang off. He understood why the company boss, the God almighty of Ground Force Security, should waffle on about a ‘good kid’ and ‘nice to bring him out’. In the company there were people from differing law-enforcement and military backgrounds, and personal involvement was regarded as suitable for the fairies, not for them. But the matter in hand involved the fate of a kidnap victim, not pipeline security, not close protection for an ambassador, not convoy escort up a road blighted with culvert bombs. Kidnapping was different. It had a particular status with the people of this company, all levels, and of every other company in the same trade. He understood why his boss had put saccharine on the assignment, would have known there was no possibility of Lukas pulling out from Naples and taking a flight to Lagos or heading to Kabul. Almost the boss had pleaded with him for a best effort. He’d never done that before. He’d trawled the boy’s background, had done the parents, the guys who lived in the east London house and maybe some people the boy worked with. Most important, the boss had been lined up by a guy, one-time Special Forces, who did close protection for the company in the dark corners where the money was earned and where the risk of getting lifted was greatest. They were all, in this trade, bound together like blood relatives. All that made sense to Lukas, but there was something more – as if his boss had been well hooked… Funny thing, the emotion business: he could feel emotional about a complete stranger. Lukas didn’t do emotion – if he did, he could be slashed, minced. Great to feel good when the hostage walked to a helicopter or an armoured Humvee, a luxury of indulgence. And when the hostage didn’t walk, but stank from the sun, the flies swarmed, and was carried away in a black bag, emotion would wreck him. He needed the protection of apparent indifference… but it had gotten harder to play-act.

  He had seen bad things in his time, and been party to them, and a tear had not fallen from his eye. Might be time to quit when it did. Should have felt calm, but didn’t. Should have felt on top of his game, the acknowledged expert in the field, but didn’t.

  He went back inside, walked through the operations room and took his chair in the annexe. Quiet and respectful, he asked what was new, and was told that nothing was.

  Two rats came close. They didn’t approach the body but blood had spurted from the mouth on impact.

  Salvatore saw the rats when he craned out of the bathroom window. They had realised Davide had gone through the window a full half-hour before, and from three floors up each of the men who had looked at the man lying with his head at such an angle had pronounced death. They had gone on with the search. More had arrived. There was a capodecine, bustling with urgency, there to see at first hand the scale of an intelligence failure in the midst of the Sail, a comando piazza, who traded off that walkway, came to check on the parameters of that failure, and two magazzinieri who warehoused on the third level. There was an aquirento, the principal buyer for the clan. All came, from the walkway, to try to measure the limits of a small disaster. They had gone.

  Salvatore watched the rats from the window and saw them lap the blood of an old man who had played at being an idiot, like cats with milk.

  The body lay on the concrete paving, with a crown of weeds for the shattered head, the feet between two overflowing rubbish bins.

  Immacolata stepped out of the Alfa, Orecchia and Rossi on either side of her. Two more men had peeled from the police car outside the gate. The front door was open and she saw more men in the hallway. She wore dark glasses that covered most of her cheeks, with a headscarf over her hair: it was a crude disguise, would have fooled few. A man, with no intention of backing off in the face of force, the guns and the threat, watered a flowerbed in the middle of his front garden. She had been told she shouldn’t hesitate on the pavement or the path. Across the street, a couple watched the show – little else would match the arrival of an armed convoy. Orecchia had taken her arm.

  She had been to the house before but it seemed an age since she had last walked up that path and gone through the front door to be greeted with the hug and the kiss of the closest friend she had known.

  It was because they didn’t trust her that she had been brought here. There had been no consultation. She was a gift-wrapped parcel on a conveyor-belt. She had not spoken in the car but her mind had turned over the previous time she had been on that road out of Naples and across the flat inland plain that stretched to Nola. Then Silvio had driven. Then there had not been a machine pistol on the seat, gas grenades and a vest. She could not have said, tracing that same route, how many days, hours, nights it had been since Silvio had driven her to Nola. The days and nights since had concertinaed, and the spread of time no longer had meaning for her. She couldn’t have said how long it had been since she had run from the basilica, how long since she had paid fifty euros for a ten-euro posy, how long since the heel of her shoe had broken, her clothes had been torn and she had lain on the ground, assaulted and abused. She didn’t know.

  She followed Orecchia into the hall. Castrolami was there. He seemed to tower in the place, to minimise it. On the floor, near to his feet, there were two neat piles of female clothing at hip height. Across the hallway there were three black plastic sacks, filled and knotted at the neck. She realised her visit had interrupted a schedule. One of the two piles was of clothes for early spring, late autumn and winter, a
nd she recognised the anorak Marianna had worn on a January day, down on the via Partenope, when they had walked and done the farewells. The next day Immacolata had gone to London. The other pile was of late-spring clothes, which would have lasted through summer and early autumn, and at the top of the heap lay the faded T-shirt with the image of Che that had been a favourite of Marianna. She had arrived, which meant the disposal of her friend’s clothes was delayed. She assumed the plastic bags would go to a rubbish tip, and that the heaps had been sorted carefully and would be taken to a charity – perhaps one overseen by the nuns at the basilica. She could remember her friend in the yellow anorak with the black underarm panels and the North Face logo, and in the guerrilla T-shirt.

  Castrolami said, not dropping his voice, seeming not to care if he was overheard, ‘At the palace the decision was taken to provide security for the family as soon as rumour would have reported your collaboration, Signorina. It was thought that the parents of your friend were at risk when you came into our custody, as leverage. Then the boy, your one-time lover, made himself available to them and the threat against the parents was – briefly – reduced. We anticipate that the boy will be murdered. You have not made a public announcement that you are withdrawing your potential testimony and the deadline expires in a few hours. If we had a good line into the kidnap situation we would be able to delay and protract the process. We do not. We cannot rescue him because we don’t know where he is held. He will be murdered very soon, we anticipate tomorrow, unless we can stall and deceive. Then they – the Borelli family – will need more leverage. Possibly they will come here for it. The lives of these people are doubly ruined, Signorina. They have lost their daughter, poisoned by toxic greed, and they should – if they have any sense – pack up, sell their home, leave their employment and move away. They would then have left behind the grave of their daughter, and to visit it they would require an armed escort.’

  ‘Will they run?’ she asked.

  ‘For them to answer,’ was his curt response. ‘There is a consequence for your actions. You should know that. If they were to stay, we couldn’t commit the resources for a permanent guard. They would be alone. The support of their neighbours would be temporary and soon they would be alone. Every day they must look over their shoulders and try to spot the killer stalking them. Quite soon, at their places of work, Human Resources will say, “It’s not personal but you bring danger to your colleagues, and it’s with great regret that we must ask you to leave. We must think of the company’s welfare, the school’s, the safety of colleagues and pupils.” If they stay they won’t be forgotten. They’re marked. They’re a permanent way of hurting you. It’s the world in which we live.’

  ‘Why do I have to see them?’

  ‘So that you can never say you didn’t know the consequences of your actions. And when the boy is dead and we’re given the body, I’ll drive you to the mortuary – perhaps the small one at the Incurables – so that you can look into his face and see what they’ve done to him. You’ll never be allowed to say you didn’t know.’

  She stepped out. She pushed past him. She knew the layout of the house and went right, through a door that bypassed the kitchen entrance, then out through the room where the computer was that Luigi Rossetti used to prepare the modules of his classes for his pupils, and where Marianna had done work she brought home from her college course. The doors were wide open and there was a patio outside, with chairs and a table, and wire mesh on which a vine grew, throwing shade.

  Beside that door there was a large cardboard box, whose top flaps had not been folded down so she could see textbooks – the same she had used – and ring binders. She thought they had eradicated their daughter from the home. How long was it? She had kept no track of time, but it might have been a week.

  They were sitting down. The garden stretched away, neat and small, and a policeman stood at the far end with a machine pistol slung on his neck from a webbing strap. She saw the hands that had snatched at her clothing, the feet that had kicked her and the mouths that had torn away her dignity. Neither stood and neither waved her to a chair. Nothing, Immacolata thought, is forgiven.

  Marianna’s father, Luigi, said, ‘We didn’t want you to come, but they insisted. There is no welcome.’

  Marianna’s mother, Maria, said, ‘There is a boy, nineteen, admitted this week to the ospedale. He has followed Marianna to the Santa Maria della Pietà. He may now be in the same bed, but certainly in the same ward, and he has the same symptoms. I don’t know the family but Luigi taught him for a year. It’s said he’ll die the day after tomorrow.’

  Luigi said, ‘We haven’t visited the family – we didn’t want to intrude on the crisis afflicting them.’

  Maria said, ‘There were others before Marianna. There will be others after the boy.’

  ‘Will you go?’ she blurted.

  ‘Go where?’ A frown knitted the father’s forehead.

  ‘Will you leave?’

  ‘And take Marianna with us, break her peace? Or leave her behind? Can you imagine us doing either?’ The mother’s shaking head expressed her incredulity.

  ‘I wondered if—’

  ‘We shall stay. If they kill us we’ll join her. We’re not frightened of them. There’s nothing else they can take from us,’ they said in chorus.

  ‘You know what I’m doing?’

  ‘We were told,’ the father said.

  ‘We respect it… but we do not forgive and we do not forget,’ the mother said. ‘Also, we were told of a boy who loves you, and that they’ll kill him. But you won’t weaken – it is what we were told.’

  ‘I’ll testify against my family.’

  She had said it, ‘I’ll testify against my family,’ and at that moment the scales tipped and she had made her commitment. They turned away from her. It was as if she was of no further use to them. She was ignored, vulnerable. Did Castrolami rescue her? He did not. She fidgeted and shuffled her feet. She wondered if, one day, she would be somewhere in England, in the countryside, green, near cows, and she would be with the father and the mother of Eddie Deacon, explaining to them what choices had been made and the consequences.

  She spun on her heel.

  She faced Castrolami who lounged at the door. Immacolata said, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  A smile widened at his mouth, his arms unfolded and he took her elbow. At that moment, she believed, she had his respect.

  She walked past the box of books, the files, and past the bags that would go to a tip, and past the two heaps of Marianna’s clothing. Orecchia came out of the kitchen, Rossi following him, and they readied their weapons.

  They went out into the sunlight and the brightness dazzled her.

  They headed back towards the dual-carriageway and Naples, driving past fields that had been harvested and groves of apple trees, and crossed a stream that was almost dry. She didn’t know where the poisons had been dumped or where Marianna Rossetti had played, or whether that was the stream she had paddled or swum in. The car was silent.

  Nothing more to be said. She had made her pledge and could not turn back if she wanted ever again to walk with a pinch of pride. She had killed the boy – might, herself, have held a knife or a pistol.

  She broke the quiet: ‘Am I a circus freak?’

  She wasn’t answered.

  ‘Do I have the right to know where I am to be exhibited next?’

  No reply.

  It couldn’t be challenged. A lawyer’s clerk had the right to escort the mother-in-law of an accused woman, not yet convicted and entitled to legal presumption of innocence, to see the daughter-in-law, and take her toiletries, clothing and fruit.

  Massimo escorted Anna Borelli, drove his car and listened.

  ‘Too much time is lost, and no message is sent.’

  He wished he hadn’t heard.

  ‘It should be done in the morning.’

  His own grandmother had a baggy stomach, wide hips, an excessive bosom, a twinkling eye
and a smiling mouth. She teased him about the marriage invitation that hadn’t been sent to her, the lack of babies to drool over. This woman, the hag, was sheer contrast: not a gram of spare flesh, no fullness in her chest, a dulled deathlight in her eyes and thin lips. She seemed to find no pleasure in her world. His own grandmother, on his mother’s side, living in comfort in Merghellina, north along the coast and only a few kilometres from the city’s centre, couldn’t have spoken those whipped words.

  ‘Or done in the night, then dumped in the morning.’

  He crossed the piazza Sannazzaro, then cut down to the via Francesco Caracciolo. Soon they would be close to his grandmother’s apartment. At this time of the day, she would be watering the plants on her balcony, or maybe she would have started to mix a pesto for Massimo’s uncle, a bachelor of fifty-three who hadn’t yet left home. His grandmother’s life was ordered and regulated. His other uncle, Umberto, the lawyer, was on his father’s side and his character was harsher and colder. Umberto would have been at ease with this woman – a strega – in his car and would have listened unfazed as she discussed, without passion, the killing of a young man.

  ‘I have thought of where the cadaver should be left.’

  His own grandmother was nervous of small spiders and wouldn’t even swat a fly on a window-pane. Massimo wondered as he drove – near to his grandmother’s now – how many men and women had lost their lives on the witch’s say-so. He could imagine those fingers, with the wrinkled skin and the pared nails, wrapped tight round a man’s throat – he swerved and nearly hit a taxi.

  ‘The cadaver should be where the impact is greatest.’

  They were past Merghellina and the marina where the launches rolled on the gentle waves in the shelter of the breakwater. At one more set of traffic-lights they were beyond the franchise area of the Piccirillo clan, and were entering the territory of the Troncone and Grasso families. That information might have been given on an advertising hoarding or a frontier control point. A man who answered to the Piccirillo would not cross that street beyond the traffic-lights and go north to trade narcotics or to extract protection dues; neither would a man employed by the Troncone or the Grasso come south. Very ordered. He would be at the gaol in ten minutes.