The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  Immacolata allowed her bag to swing with the rhythm of her hips.

  It was as she remembered it. Nothing had changed.

  She saw the barber’s shop, the hardware shop and the shop where cheese and fresh milk were sold; she knew what pizzo each paid because she had determined the amount. She saw the shop where the wedding gowns were sold and the suits for grooms and principal guests, then the bakery. No one inside – shopkeepers and customers – caught her eye and no one called to her, abuse, support or a greeting. A scooter came towards her, bouncing on the basalt blocks. The rider’s visor was up and she recognised a young man who had been at school with her, whose father had been killed by hers. It swerved past her. Men played a last card game in the light thrown from a bar’s window but did not look up.

  It would have been easier if insults had been shouted, eggs or tomatoes thrown. It would have been a triumph if there had been a shout of support.

  What she was doing was not acknowledged. She did not exist as a living human. She passed many she had known since childhood. None cheered and none spat at her. She assumed that the mobile phones were in contact and a network of messages rippled the length of the street and off into the side alleys, that a foot-soldier had been called out, a handgun sent for, lifted from a cache, unwrapped and stripped of its protective cover, a magazine hurriedly loaded.

  She saw a man hosing down the cobbles where his stall had stood, and through the open door of a van boxes of unsold fish lay among melting ice. She had often bought octopus, mullet and bass from him, but he didn’t see her. She saw lights at the front windows of her grandparents’ home. She assumed, by now, they knew of her walk down via Forcella, but they didn’t show themselves on the balcony.

  The cars waited. Walking briskly – not running, as if afraid, but not dawdling with a fool’s conceit – they had covered some hundred and fifty metres in two minutes. Castrolami pushed her without dignity through a back door and had barely slammed it before the vehicle had pulled away. It wove down the street, headlights flashing to clear a way, and skirted the square in front of the Castel Capuano, then went fast on to the via Carbonara. In three minutes there might have been a gun and a marksman, in five there would have been. She thought she had sent a message of her resolve, and that she had killed Eddie Deacon.

  The boy wouldn’t speak – and had been kicked again – so Salvatore did.

  ‘I am from the city, from the old city. I do not know about fields or a village or where there is a river that is not a sewer ditch. I do not know about cows, and I have never been into the country and towards the mountains where they keep buffalo. I do not know it here. I am here because it was decided to bring you to this place. I hate it. My home is the old city. It is where people follow me… Many people follow me and give me respect.

  ‘I lived on the street, Eddie. I worked the street, the via Duomo and the via Carbonara. It was best on the via Duomo because tourists came to the cathedral, and fewer were on the via Carbonara because the Castel Capuana does not have many tourists. I start at nine years. I finish the school at nine years. I am a spotter at nine years. I spot for tourists who have a bag loosely held, or a Nikon camera that is on a shoulder strap, or a Rolex watch. At nine years old I am not strong enough to get a watch or a bag or a camera, but I am the best at spotting. At ten years old, I am the leader. Boys with more years do what I say. I am commander, and I sell on what we take from the tourists.

  ‘At eleven years old, I am taken by Pasquale Borelli, the father of Immacolata. He chose me. He could have had a thousand kids, our word is scugnizzi, but he chose me. I owe everything to him. I can read and I can write and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am not a kid from the gutter and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am a person of standing in Forcella and in Sanità, and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I think that after his eldest son, who is Vincenzo, I am the most important. I have more respect from him than Giovanni and Silvio. I am the favourite of Gabriella Borelli and she is among the most admired women in the clans in the city. Everybody has respect for me.

  ‘If I had wanted to, I could have been married with Immacolata. You understand that? Both Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli have sufficient respect for me to give to me Immacolata if I had wished it. Did I want her? I think she is not good in bed and I think she has poor skin on her face. I did not want her. I am trusted by them, and I am trusted by Carmine and Anna Borelli, the old people. They do nothing if they have not talked first with me. Do you know that the kids in Forcella have my picture on the screen of their mobile phones? I am a person of importance. All the police hunt me, and all the carabinieri special teams, and the prosecutor. I am, in Naples, in the list of the ten most wanted – I have that status, and that respect. I have a place in the ten with a Russo and a Licciardi and a Contini. There are many days when I am in the newspaper. In the newspaper is my photograph. The journalists write about me.

  ‘I read everything that is written about me in the newspaper. They call me Il Pistole in the newspaper. Many times I have been on the front page of Cronaca and of Mattino, and they talk about me on the news from RAI. I am a celebrity in this city. I am more famous than a film star, or a singer, or a footballer. They say I am the assassino – you understand that? – who has no fear and who does not give mercy, we say senza misericordia. I have killed more than forty men. I do not know exactly how many men because it is not important to me. I am the killer, the expert at killing, and I do not have hesitation in killing.

  ‘When I have the instruction I will kill you, Eddie. It is not personal. It is not because you sleep with Immacolata Borelli who has fat ankles and bad skin. I will kill you when it is ordered by the clan. I will not kill you because I hate you, but because it is ordered. I will not hurt you. I am not your enemy, but if I was ordered to kill you and did not I would lose respect. I must have respect.’

  He heard the voices at the door, then heard it opened. Salvatore turned away from the figure bound on the floor, lying in the darkness.

  It had been a nightmare. Massimo thought himself in the corridors of hell, with no end to their length. They were a labyrinth. It had taken him an hour, might have been more, to travel the extent of a walkway set between reinforced doors, barred windows, dull-lit corners, refuse heaps, washing that was draped, and still stank, across his route. He did not think the nightmare complete, or half consumed. He had climbed the staircase and at the top had been searched. Fingers had prised into every pocket. Then he had been stripped almost bare and those fingers had gone inside the orifices of his body. Then he had been allowed to dress and had had to scrabble in the near darkness at his feet to collect what had been taken from his pockets, examined and dropped. He had gone through the first barred gate.

  There had been three more searches, as if no message had been passed ahead on the mobile phones. Three more times he had been questioned, then strip-searched. Then the fingers had been in his mouth and in the anal passage, and lights had been shone into his ears and up his nose and the sac under his penis had been lifted. There had been more delays at more barred gates. He thought contempt was shown him.

  He was left with little that preserved dignity.

  Each time he was allowed to progress he had taken time over dressing, knotting his tie and shoe laces.

  He feared for his life.

  He saw the silhouette of Salvatore’s head. He had seen the man several times before, always a half-stride behind Gabriella Borelli. Massimo had thought the man who hovered at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder to be a psychopath, probably medically certifiable. He thought his own feet, in the expensive handmade shoes of soft leather, were on a treadmill, that the motor went ever faster and struggled to keep up the momentum. If he did not he would fall, and he didn’t know how to jump clear of the treadmill.

  He saw the body on the ground, strained his eyes and detected cuts on the face.

  ‘What did they say?’ Salvatore murmured – the voice of a dreamer, a sleepwalker.

&n
bsp; He remembered the equation of fear: the cells of Poggioreale, or the anger and retribution of the old witch.

  Massimo did not lie, did not dare to. He stuttered through the message he had been given by Anna Borelli, now in her eighty-eighth year, and realised that what he had said was understood by Salvatore and by the figure bound on the floor near his feet. Salvatore nodded, as if the matter did not concern him, but the figure twitched and he heard the intake of breath. Massimo thought himself damned. He said where the body should be dumped.

  Damned. He had a law degree, he owned an apartment in the most select district of the city, he drove a high-performance car, and already could count his assets in hundreds of thousands of euros, yet he was reduced to ferrying instructions, was the boy sent from a reception desk at the Excelsior Hotel on the via Partenope. Damned for ever.

  He ran.

  He wasn’t stopped.

  He ran as fast as he could and the barred gates seemed to open ahead of him. He was not searched, questioned, delayed or hindered by men with mobile telephones. He careered down the staircase, syringes and glass shards crunching under his shoes, and broke out into the night.

  The scooter took him only to the edge of Scampia. He was dropped where the via Baku made a junction with the via Roma Verso Scampia. He was left at a bus stop.

  The evening air played on his face, and he waited for a bus, alone, and believed he had killed a man.

  They clustered round the screen. Those who worked the annexe had prime positions, but others from the operations room peered over shoulders for a glimpse of what the video showed. He had thought it a tipping point when a contact had been made, but had been wrong. This was.

  The collator gave the commentary, Lukas hunched beside him. ‘That is the Great Nose – to everyone except him and his face. That’s him. We have one photograph of him in ten years and that was with dark glasses. It’s excellent. He has that territory of the Sail. He has been a fugitive for more years than the photograph has existed… Incredible.’

  The image on the screen was monochrome and the walkway poorly lit. The figure of the man identified as Il Grosso Naso came from under hanging washing slung across the walkway and was clear for a matter of seconds in profile, then was gone under more draped sheets.

  ‘Typical of those bastards, the spies. They won’t share. They have a camera on him. Another visitor, far from his home ground. It is Il Camionista, the old man of Forcella, and his rheumatism is bad again. So, the Grosso Naso and the Camionista do business. Carmine Borelli is off territory. He will be nervous, he will not be there with a position of strength and he will have come to ask a great favour, for which he will pay.’

  Lukas reckoned that in other company the old man would have used a stick but not there: a stick was weakness and frailty. A younger man walked two, three paces behind him, but he was led, a cloth tight round his upper face, blindfolding him.

  ‘No trust. They’re strangers in the Sail. I cannot see all his face but I know from the walk, from the mouth, from the shoulders and the hips, that Carmine is escorted by his son’s killer – it is the hitman, it is Il Pistole, Salvatore. There is a file, fat, on him. When he goes to prison – if he is not shot dead by us, by another clan – he is locked up for the rest of his life. He is to be condanna all’ergastolo. He will never again feel grass under his feet, hear birds sing or swim in the sea. They were all here but the spies wouldn’t tell us until their man was dead and we couldn’t blunder into their precious world. The file, the fat one, says there are many murders proven to Salvatore, usually with the Beretta P38, usually with a man on a scooter to take him to the target and away, and there are many more homicides with him as first suspect. He has no parents, no family, no woman. He has only the pistol and his dependence on the family of Borelli. He would want to be killed, and that is the only reason not to kill him.’

  Lukas craned forward. Far beyond that point, the tipping done. He understood that he saw an opponent. He did not use, verbally or in his mind, a word such as ‘enemy’. In his world emotion and rancour were put aside. He saw an opponent brought under the draped washing, shuffling past the lens, then taken under more washing. They went on through the films and did fast view for the departure of Big Nose, the Lorry Driver and the Pistol. The collator muttered more names, but without enthusiasm, as if they had no part to play. Many images went at jerky old-movie speed across the screen, cigarettes were lit, more coffee was downed.

  Their attention, again, was jolted, and silence fell. Lukas could smell the sweat of many bodies, and his own, of socks and underclothing not changed, and his own. Men came down the walkway and gestured dismissively, women went indoors abruptly and kids fled. It was as if a route was cleared of obstruction and witnesses. Lukas saw Salvatore again, and the boy. He was within touching distance. Lukas could have reached out and let his finger brush the screen. The boy went slowly, as if exhausted and hurt. His feet did not have good traction on the walkway and he was mostly dragged; his shoulders were down. Lukas knew him because he had spoken with the man at the hotel, and with the man who sold fish. The fish, yes, the fish presented to the annexe at piazza Dante, the swordfish, was in a freezer tray in the kitchen area of a local restaurant. It would be thawed and cooked if there was a successful outcome, and would go on a rubbish heap if there was not – fuck the fish. He had spoken to both men and knew what clothes the boy had worn when he left the pensione in the morning and when he had met the eye of the fish-seller. Lukas had demanded of them what shirt, trousers and trainers the boy had worn. He saw them in the black-and-white image on the screen, and the hood. Lukas had only once been hooded – in his time as an instructor at Quantico, after he’d come off the Hostage Rescue Team and before he’d got himself lodged with the new Critical Incident Response Group. He had been one of the FBI instructors doing close-quarters battle training: in simulating the storming of a building, they had needed a ‘tame’ prisoner and it hadn’t seemed fair to allocate a rookie. He had done it. He could remember, still, the smell and taste of the sacking, his panic at his inability to breathe deeply, and the fear of what would happen next. He had had on ear protectors when the storm came, blank rounds and thunder-flash grenades. He had been hustled out, the hood had been lifted off, and no one seemed to have much time for him: interest was in the ‘bad’ guys, who were wasted, and the ‘good’ guys, who were heroes.

  ‘I assume that’s Eddie Deacon.’

  Lukas made his first contribution. ‘It is.’

  ‘He has been beaten.’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘If he still lives, he is on the third level of the Sail building in Scampia. It is not my expertise but I would suggest there is no more difficult place inside the state from which to extract a prisoner.’

  Lukas said, ‘I don’t intrude, gentlemen, I don’t push or impose my opinions. I’m here to give help if I’m asked for it.’

  Castrolami said they would go in five minutes, not a suggestion but a demand.

  Lukas knew them now by their familiar titles. The bustle broke around him. He had little to take, nothing of consequence other than his laptop. Some that he knew of made occasional trips into Baghdad or Bogotá, for the FBI, DoD or a contractor and travelled with their bespoke flak vest, blood and sterile dressings. Lukas had never bothered. Neither did he have manuals to refer to because everything he needed, and half a ton more, was in his head, but he regretted that he had no fresh socks or underwear in the rucksack.

  They had discarded their given names, were identified by those their colleagues used for them. The Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber were loading big kitbags. There was no more talk of military survival kit, water-resistant socks, small strengthened hacksaw blades and fishing hooks. Lukas had learned how they would operate at the first wave of an ROS assault. The Ingegnere would take off a door or blow out a window for entry. The Bombardiere would put in a handful of XM84 stun grenades, the ‘flash and bang’ gear – the flash was up to seven million candela and the bang
180 decibels. The Trattore would lead the storm guys inside. Lukas had seen it done in practice and for real, sometimes the practice was fouled up but the actual thing went a treat. At others the practice was perfect and the actual a disaster. What the Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber did was a definition of the old ‘inexact science’, but so was Lukas’s work.

  Lukas hung back in the annexe. He heard Castrolami talking in the operations room. The small team, which would fit into one large minibus, would travel to Scampia ahead of a larger squad. Only when the initial group was in place would the numbers for securing a perimeter be deployed. Lukas understood. It was about security, about maintaining secrecy. He thought it a harsh world in which police officers and paramilitary men couldn’t be trusted – might have a place on a gang leader’s payroll.

  A last brief act was played out in the annexe. The psychologist announced defiantly that he could monitor, observe, contribute from the operations room. The collator gave as his opinion that he was better employed close to his big computer and his archive. Lukas felt that the reputation of the Sail lay on them. He was not invited. Neither was it suggested that he should find a quiet corner and get involved in basket-weaving. He wasn’t accused of imposing himself. Lukas was on board.

  He thought, and it suited him well, that he was barely noticed as they hiked out of the annexe and skirted the side wall of the operations room, the far side from the banks of screens and the illuminated map. Castrolami was given a brief bear-hug by a superior, while others slapped the arms and shoulders of the ROS guys in encouragement. Lukas was offered no warmth, no good will, and flitted out. Apprehension burgeoned. He had seen the face, in monochrome, of his opponent. Had been there so often, looking into a face and wondering which well-trodden path to take to consign the face to the rubbish heap. Had been there so often – was concerned, again, that the magic moment was dulled. God, let it not be said that, almost, he was bored with all the faces.