The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  Lukas said, ‘I have his drift. Thank him.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘What I try to do is get up close, talk a bit, get the pistol off the boy’s neck, take it from there. Do you want to indulge the hood, give him police-assisted suicide – his legend – or do you want to fuck him?’

  ‘Charge him, convict him, hear the key turn and lose it, smell the decay as he rots and the years go by. That is a better message than giving him respect.’

  ‘Harder to achieve, but a goal… Just watch me, just be ready… as they say, on a wing and a prayer.’

  He moved forward but slowly. Like he was the tide coming in. Short, crabbed steps and he was gone from Castrolami and the comms kid and was, in a few steps, separated from the Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber.

  Lukas could see the boy’s face, part of it. There was bruising in rings, multicoloured, round the eyes, the cheeks were scarred, the lips grotesque, and there were blood smears from a wound on the forehead and from the nose, and more blood was caked where it had dribbled from the mouth. The boy wouldn’t be standing if he hadn’t been held by the belt and the arm. There had been just blind fear on the face when he had first seen it, but there had been a change, subtle. Like hope was born.

  There were many burdens on Lukas’s back and shoulders. The one he liked least was that he gave little packages of fragile hope to hostages when he approached them.

  He saw the increasing agitation on the hood’s face, and went slower. He did short steps that were barely the length of his shoe… If the mother-fucker moved the pistol from the boy’s neck, if the mother-fucker moved his own head clear of the boy’s, then he made an opportunity for Franco, the sniper, to shoot with the Beretta M501 rifle. Lukas reckoned, through a 1.5-6 x 42mm Zeiss scope, that the sniper would have a good view, wounds and warts, of the two faces… It would be Castrolami’s call before the sniper fired, and that was not the goal set.

  He did not, of course, but he would have liked to offer more of his advice to Castrolami. Would have stopped and turned and the advice would have been: ‘If a little guy who says he’s just there to help ever starts walking towards you – and you’re a hostage-taker – and has a decent, honest smile on his face, and looks concerned for you, just shoot him. Don’t hesitate. Shoot.’ He must have reached close to halfway from the start point to where the boy and the hood were. Would have been about twenty paces from them.

  Lukas felt the crisis moment was on him.

  The scream: ‘Stop.’

  The pistol did not move off the neck and the heads did not separate.

  A second scream: ‘Stop. Do not come close.’

  At twenty paces, Lukas could be almost conversational. ‘You don’t want me nearer, I’m not coming nearer. Like I said, I’m just here to help. Let’s make a start. I’m Lukas, and I’m not a policeman. I’m a friend of Eddie’s mother and father. I want to help them, and help Eddie, and I want to help you. I want this to end with everybody winning. It’s where I’m headed – everybody wins. You don’t want me closer, I don’t come closer. You’re called Salvatore, yes? Good name. The Saviour, Il Salvatore – it’s a great name to have. Right, I’m going to start doing some helping. Salvatore, what do you need? Do you need some food? We can get pizza up here. You need water? We can do water that’s still or with gas. Cigarettes? Tell me the brand and I can get it.’

  The pistol hadn’t shifted and the heads hadn’t separated. It was early. Lukas had time.

  ‘I will help you, and you can trust me…’

  There were some of them, dumb and stupid, exhausted and hungry, who believed they could indeed trust the little guy who came close and offered help, food and drink and cigarettes, and they either stared up at a cell window or were dead, buried.

  ‘Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you.’

  He realised, now, many things. Clarity swamped the mind of Salvatore. The walkway was sealed at either end. The apartments fronting on to it were either evacuated or locked and barred. He had no freedom of movement, was as a rat in a corner – with teeth – without anywhere to run. He wondered at what stage Fangio had slipped away on his scooter. No mention made of Immacolata and whether she would retract evidence. No appeal, grovel or beg for the life – safety – of the boy he was close against. If he killed the boy, Eddie, who had slept with Immacolata and was her lover, then he himself was dead. Maybe half a second after he had pulled the trigger, he was dead.

  Was it his destiny? Did he crave death?

  Didn’t know. Had no one to tell him. Didn’t have Pasquale Borelli, who had taught him to read, write, shoot and kill. Didn’t have Gabriella Borelli to tell him whether he wanted to die, be shot down, and didn’t walk behind her and follow the sway of her hips. Had no one, was alone… He had seen so many. They didn’t lurch back when shot, as the movies showed it. They fell. They were like the cattle in the abattoir that the clan owned. They subsided. And they twitched. Chickens did, they flapped. Men’s muscles moved. While the blood flowed, the fingers fidgeted, tried to catch dirt or the concrete on a pavement, the vinyl tiles on a bar floor. He had seen it. Death was frozen on a face, that last expression. Laughing? Never. Happy? Never. Supreme? Never. Etched on to a dead face was, at the last, fear. Did he want it?

  He saw a television cameraman who filmed and smoked, then heaved the camera off his shoulder, dragged a last time on the cigarette and threw down the filter. It would be on the walkway near his head. He saw two reporters and heard their laughter, as if they were the latterday crowd in the piazza Mercato when the aristocrats were hanged, and maybe the laughter was about the filth of his clothes and the smell of his body, and he saw children who stared blank-faced at the blood. He didn’t know how long his photo would stay on the screens of the kids’ mobiles.

  ‘One step more, and I blow his head away,’ Salvatore yelled. Didn’t have to, not to be heard twenty metres away. If he did, if he squeezed the trigger, he was dead a half-second later. Knew that, realised it.

  The voice was so calm. ‘Because I’m here to help, I need to know the type of pizza we can order, and if the water should be still or with gas, and the brand of cigarettes. Look, we’re not in a hurry. You think about it, give me an answer when you’re ready – what’s on offer is food, something to drink and cigarettes. Take your time, Salvatore – we have all the time you need.’

  And the face was so reasonable, and it smiled at him. He had no one to ask, to tell him whether he wanted to eat and drink and smoke, to die or to live, and the hands of his watch moved – couldn’t be stopped.

  Three raids, supported by arrest warrants… In the via Forcella, a good-sized crowd watched as Carmine and Anna Borelli were led out through the main door of the block, escorted past the stall, empty, where the fish-seller traded. They didn’t look fearsome. Anna Borelli carried her teeth, had not inserted them in her mouth, and wore a pink night wrap over a white gown and had on fluffy pink slippers. Carmine Borelli looked confused and his hair was wild. He clutched his stick and wore striped pyjamas. A police officer followed them with two overflowing bags of day clothes. They had not been given time to dress because the police had feared a riot when they were taken away, but it didn’t happen. No riot, neither were they handcuffed. Two insults, both hard to stomach. To prompt no reaction in Naples was to be dead, irrelevant.

  In an alleyway off the via Tribunali, the section running to the west of the via Duomo, the lawyer was arrested. He fared worse than the old clan leader and the old brothel keeper: he was handcuffed and the photographers of Cronaca and Mattino were there to poke lenses in his face. He was ashen. He wore the previous day’s socks, shirt and underwear, and had to hold up his trousers because he had dressed at such speed that he had forgotten his belt. The crowd jeered because it was a sport to see a big man taken down. He was headed now for the foul, faeces-smelling cells reserved at Poggioreale for prisoners arriving late at night. It was the ultimate insult to him that he was not ferried to the Questura or to piaz
za Dante, but to a common cell.

  Near to the Palace of Justice, behind the Holiday Inn that rose in the business zone of the city, there was an apartment block that was a target only for the most successful to aspire to. It was – had been – the home of Massimo, the lawyer’s clerk and nephew. On a table in the kitchen area there was a fulsome letter of apology to his family, of explanation to the prosecutor, of pleading to his God. He apologised for the disgrace bred from greed. He explained the link between the kidnap of the English boy, the Borelli veterans and the hitman, Il Pistole. He pleaded that he should not be eternally damned for carrying a sentence of death. One of the police officers who found him suspended from a skylight in a smaller bedroom by a sheet had had experience of hangings. He said that the signs on the neck showed that the young man, having kicked away the chair, and choking, had tried to save himself, and failed; weals at the neck showed the efforts he had made following his change of heart.

  The net closed around a clan, stifled its breath, strangled it.

  Her mother spat at her.

  Gabriella Borelli had been given an officer’s coat to drape over her shoulders but, with or without it, she gave no sign of cold.

  No response from Immacolata.

  They had thought, at the palace, that she would lecture her mother in her conversion from the clan’s culture. She did not. She said nothing. The tactic, employing silence, had been determined in the car that had brought her round the bay, along the coast road and through the gaol’s gates.

  The spit was on Immacolata’s cheek and her chin and she did not wipe it.

  There was a table between them. Two women guards were behind her mother, but Immacolata sensed they would intervene only if there was a physical attack. She thought them in awe of her mother. Rossi and Orecchia were behind her. Her mother, before spitting, had used different avenues to demonstrate her disgust, contempt for and loathing of her daughter: the shame to the family of a collaborator, the betrayal of her relatives, the treachery of siding with the prosecutor against her own.

  She had not flinched. She had stared back at her mother, had ridden the punches as a boxer did. She had been taunted: where would she live, who would befriend her, could she live a lie for the rest of her life? Did she understand what it would be to cringe each time on a darkened street if she heard a footstep behind her? Did she know how much bounty money her mother and father in joint enterprise had placed on her life? Did she understand that she would never be forgiven?

  There was the spit, then her mother’s final throw: ‘You sleep with a boy, you curl your legs round him, you take him into you, you fuck him, and you kill him… I never betrayed your father. You took the boy into your bed, and he means nothing to you. You kill him. It is not Salvatore who kills him, it’s you. I love your father and I love Vincenzo, Giovanni and Silvio, and they love me… You cannot love. The boy comes, searches for you, will give his life for you. You cannot love because you’re cold. You’re not a daughter. You have the cold of a whore. You don’t know what love is, what loyalty is. The boy did. You’re cold, not of Naples. You kill the boy. It’s as if you fire the shot or hold the knife. Do you imagine that one of our family, if there was love, would turn away and condemn to death? Perhaps you fucked him like a whore does, were cold… You will never love. You’re not capable. You’re not your father’s daughter, not my daughter. You’re not your brothers’ sister. All of our family have warmth, can love, not you. The proof of it? You killed the boy.’

  Her mother swung round, did not spit again, and strode to the door. As if she was a monarch, the two women officers scurried to get to it first and to open it for her. They stood aside so that she could pass through. Immacolata heard more keys jangle in harmony, more doors opened and closed in slammed timpani, the distant trill of her mother’s laughter, as if she deigned to share a joke with her escort. Then the voices, the footsteps, the music of keys and the percussion of doors faded, were gone.

  Her chin trembled.

  They had set Immacolata hurdles to leap, she understood that. She had cleared them all, except this one. Here, she had stumbled.

  She looked at her watch – had no reason to but did – and saw that the minute hand showed five to the hour. The watch was in a gold setting but discreet. It had been her father’s present to her on her twenty-first birthday, one of many presents, and had become part of her. She had worn that watch in the telephone kiosk on an east London street when she had made the international call, and in an east London park when she had met the enemy of her family, and on a flight to Rome and in a car that had carried her south and home. It was five minutes to an hour, and the time had no significance to her. The watch was part of an old life. She took it off, opened her fingers, let it fall to the concrete floor of the room that had been made available to them in the late hours while a prison slept. She had been wounded, and knew it. Deliberately, Immacolata put her heel on the watch face, and killed it at five minutes to an hour.

  Rossi pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded it and – without fanfare – wiped the spittle off her face. Orecchia took her arm.

  She left the watch behind her, for a cleaner to find or a trustee prisoner, as she had left behind a padlock on a bridge.

  ‘Do we have long?’ she asked.

  ‘Not long,’ Orecchia answered.

  She said where, now, she wanted to be taken. Rossi shrugged. Orecchia said it would be done. She thought they humoured her because of what her mother had said. She didn’t know the importance of a watch stopped at five minutes to an hour.

  He did not want food. He did not want water. He did not want cigarettes. It was five times now that he had been asked if he wanted to eat, drink, smoke. He yelled it back at the small man who sat cross-legged on the walkway. Nobody listened to him. Why did nobody listen? In Forcella, in Sanità, men listened when he spoke. He didn’t have to raise his voice. He could whisper and men would crane forward to hear what he said, and others would hush those at the back. If he was angry, men were fearful. If he made a joke, men laughed.

  ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘It’s just that it’s a long time since you ate or drank, Salvatore. Myself, I could do with a cigarette and—’

  ‘Anything except that you look at the time. Look.’

  The man had a gentle voice. ‘Use my name,’ he said. ‘It’s Lukas. What I always say is that a guy’s name is the most important thing he owns. I’m Lukas, you’re Salvatore, he’s Eddie. I don’t want to be hustled by time.’

  ‘Look at your watch.’

  ‘All right, easy, all right. Can I say something, Salvatore? The gun. Can the gun be moved from where it is? Eddie’s head? You’re tired, course you are. Can you just shift the gun a little? They frighten me, guns do.’

  ‘Look at your watch – see the time.’

  ‘How about you move the gun and I look at my watch? Is that reasonable? You’re tired, that situation, your hand might slip. Maybe you have a hair trigger. We don’t want an accident.’

  ‘Look at the time.’ He couldn’t now see his own watch. Hadn’t seen it since the man had come forward and offered food, then sat, and Salvatore hadn’t dared to move, not a centimetre, and the guns’ aim was on him. The way his arm was across the boy’s chest, and his own head was half buried in the hair at the back of the boy’s skull, didn’t allow him to see the face of his watch… but now he heard the chime, distant. A church’s clock, a church’s bell. Could have been the Church of the Resurrection he had passed on Fangio’s pillion. Midnight’s strike… If a player of importance, a figure who was respected, let a given deadline drift, allowed an ultimatum to slip, then face – authority – was lost, could never be regained.

  ‘That is fair exchange, Salvatore. You move your pistol, shift it a little, and I’ll check my watch. Listen, friend, all I’m here to do is to help.’

  He screamed. He heard his own voice, detached from it, as if it was another who howled in the night, a cat’s cry. ‘Where is
she? Where is her statement? Where is the retraction? Answer me.’

  The gentle voice was so reasonable, and there was a shrug, helpless, from the small shoulders and the hands gestured it. ‘Way above my level, that sort of decision, Salvatore. Nobody tells me anything. The jerks who make that sort of decision, they’d have gone home long ago. People like us are left out of bed, no food and no water and no goddam cigarettes, and there’ll be no decision from them till the morning comes. Better, Salvatore, for you, for me and for Eddie, that we sort this out ourselves, and I can go home, and Eddie can, and you can go get some sleep.’

  It was like honey, the voice, sweet and cloying and satisfying, and he knew the deadline of an ultimatum had gone and could not be clawed back… If he killed the boy then he, himself, was dead, and he could see the light reflected from the scope’s lens. He couldn’t clear it from his mind: did he want to die?

  He cocked the pistol, scraped metal on metal, and the sound echoed along the concrete of the walkway and filtered through the washing lines, and the hammer was back. He had no hatred of the boy. He had no love for Gabriella Borelli, or loyalty to Pasquale Borelli who had created him. He loved the respect that was shown him. A slow gathering smile came to his face but his stomach growled and his throat was dry, and he craved to smoke, and his finger tightened on the trigger stick, squeezed on it.

  The watch face was in front of his mouth, and it looked as though Lukas examined the time it showed and had difficulty in that light. He murmured, lips barely moving, ‘Don’t shoot. Don’t respond.

  ‘You were asking me the time, Salvatore, about five minutes past—’

  The shot was fired.