The Collaborator

9

The hatred was like the wire scouring pad that his mother had by the kitchen sink, and it cleaned Eddie’s mind.

He needed it clean. He didn’t think he could lie propped up against the sacks, hooded, handcuffed and bound, with wet trousers, his guts aching with hunger, his throat dry with thirst, the scars on his face itching incessantly and those inside his mouth shooting pain, and do nothing else. Hate had taken over his mind, and given him clarity of thought.

He had ditched the disbelief. He knew the reality, had had it confirmed. He thought he needed, more than anything, to regain a sense of control – with nothing to see, no leg movement, nothing to eat, no arm movement, he needed a sense of some input into his destiny, whatever it was. He had to find control. He had kicked off the process. Thoughts came, and jumped, raced, flitted. He must remember everything he had seen when the hood had been off, the trapdoor lifted and light had flooded in: the dimensions of the bunker, the colour of the plastic sacks and what was printed on them, face of the bastard he hated, the clothes he had worn, the markings on the trainers that had done the kicking, the Nike symbol – he had all that. He should keep a sense of time… How? He screwed his right fingers on to his left wrist and realised that his watch wasn’t there – had to be somewhere on the floor, dislodged when he was beaten. They would bring him meals. Meals would be a routine. Told himself: no sentimentality and no self-pity.

Wait, heh… Wait, wait.

No self-pity? He’d picked up a girl in a park, hadn’t even used a hoary old chat-up line. Apologies and stumbles and embarrassments and then, ‘I don’t understand this – “turn over”. What is “turn over”?’ He’d been picked up – might have been a thousand different girls but hadn’t: had been her, Immacolata. Wouldn’t tolerate self-pity, wouldn’t entertain it… Would try not to tolerate and entertain self-pity.

No sentimentality? Didn’t know who he could be sentimental about – not his mum and dad… Good enough people, on railway lines of predictability, not particularly loving and not particularly disapproving, much like everyone else’s mum and dad. But worse things came into his mind and squeezed away the small matters, self-pity, control and sentimentality.

The man had spoken with a sing-song reciting voice, the sort of language he might have learned in a sixth-year classroom. He would have had a textbook open that showed a man’s body, with arrows pointing to an ear, a finger and a hand – not to a penis. She will leave the police… we send perhaps an ear… perhaps a finger… perhaps a hand… the pene… then all of you but not breathing… He saw a knife and his gut squirmed in fear as the shock waves surged and the pains came hard.

Not easy – fuck, no – to plead the need for control.

Hardest to understand: they wanted nothing of him. He had no secret to hide or squeal, no ideology to cling to or renounce. He was not an agent in occupied Europe or a heretic in Tudor England: he was just a piece of garbage.

Would Immacolata, his Mac, leave the police – she would be in protective custody – and walk away to save him, his ear, finger and…? Couldn’t say. He had slept with her, loved her, sucked her juices, whispered with her, laughed with her – he didn’t know.

Eddie thought he heard – indistinct – the moan of engine noise. Cars, lorries, vans? Couldn’t be sure. Might mean a new day had started. If he was right, noting that a new day was born was an act of control – pretty bloody small, pretty much all he was bloody capable of. He teetered then on the edge of self-pity – and righted himself. Another day.

Then teetered again, rocked, was near to capsizing. How big was Eddie Deacon in the emotions of Immacolata Borelli? Hard to say, admit, spit out that he didn’t know. He knew where the birthmark was, deep brown at the top of her right buttock, and where the minute polyp was in her left armpit, but he didn’t know her mind. Eddie had heard of prisoners in cells, or in interrogation rooms, who took a point on a wall or a ceiling and focused on it, or found a spider crawling and tracked it, but the hood didn’t allow that.

Perhaps it hurt most, and made the worst fear, that he didn’t know how Immacolata Borelli would react when she held his life in the palm of her hand and weighed its value.

‘You lied to me. I take much from the shit people I work with – but lying disgusts me.’

She hung her head.

Castrolami seemed to tower over her. It was a theatrical, contrived attack. A knock at her door, a request that she come now into the living room. She wasn’t dressed. Castrolami, Orecchia and Rossi were. No coffee had been made for her, no juice laid out, no rolls heated, but she had seen their plates on the draining-board in the kitchen. She thought they had ambushed her.

‘You lied. We took you on trust. We diverted resources. All the time you lied.’

She hung her head because she didn’t understand. She had talked of her father, her mother, her eldest brother. She had listed the names of men who laundered and bought for the clan, who handled transhipments. That day she had prepared herself to talk about Giovanni, the brother she loathed, and Silvio, who had depended and doted on her. She couldn’t think, then, of anything she had said that was untrue. There was, Immacolata believed, genuine anger in Castrolami’s accusation. His jaw wobbled and little froths of spittle were at the sides of his mouth.

‘We were about to offer you the contract. You would have read the document, seen what we offered and what we required in return, and it would have been signed by the palace and by you. Now we find you’ve lied to us. I don’t make deals with liars. I prosecute them, I send them to Poggioreale, but I don’t sweet-talk with liars.’

She saw that he was holding a roll of papers, maybe ten sheets, and she noted a photograph among them. For emphasis, Castrolami hit his palm with it. Rossi was at the kitchen door, sober-faced and impassive. Orecchia was sitting in the hall and neither made eye-contact with her. She was the daughter of her father. She wouldn’t bend the knee.

‘I don’t lie.’

Castrolami took a small tape-recorder from his pocket. He switched it on and held it out. There was the noise of the park – dogs barking, the kids screaming, the rain on the leaves, and his voice: Can they find, hold and hurt, maybe murder, a lover? She heard her own voice, dismissive: No. His voice again, seeking certainty: In Naples there is no lover, no boy? Her own voice again, giving the certainty: No. Castrolami pressed fast-forward briefly. She heard Castrolami first: So there is a boy here… I have to know. Her response: Yes, but not significant. Again, the fast-forward, Castrolami saying: You go to bed. But you say it’s not ‘significant’… yes? She said, crackling on the tape and distorted: He’s just a boy. We met in a park… It doesn’t mean anything. Querying her, testing her: You won’t pine for him? Heard herself snort, then, I’ll forget him – maybe I have already. ‘I believe you had a passionate affair in London, and that your protestation that the relationship was meaningless was a lie.’

‘I don’t lie.’

‘What was the boy’s name?’

She didn’t know where he was leading her. She saw the tape-recorder dropped into Castrolami’s pocket, as if its work was done. She said, ‘Eddie.’

Castrolami repeated the name, rolled it. ‘Eddie… Eddie… and he’s not significant and fucking him meant nothing?’

So, he was calling her a liar and a whore, implying she slept around. ‘I liked him.’

‘Only liked him?’

‘Yes, I liked him. There, I liked him. In London I liked him. Is that a sin? Do I go to confessional and blubber it to a priest who has his hand in his crotch? It was good in London. This isn’t London. People go on holiday, they fuck on holiday. People go to work conferences, meet others and fuck. People meet in cinemas in strange towns and fuck afterwards. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s what happens and-’

She was cut short. The papers were allowed to unroll, the photograph taken out and passed to her. She held it. Her Eddie was leaning on a gate, arms resting on the top bar. There were young cattle around him, nuzzling and nudging him. She could almost hear his laughter. She hadn’t seen the photograph before. She thought it would have come from an album at his parents’ home.

Castrolami curled his lip. ‘If I was the boy, and you were in my bed, and I said I loved you and asked, with a caress, how you felt about me, and you said I meant nothing to you, I’d be disappointed.’

She saw a trap, a cul-de-sac, and thought she was led into it. She handed back the photograph. ‘Why did you show it me?’

‘Because you lied to me. That boy is huge in your life, as you are in his.’

‘No.’

‘The best boy you ever knew.’

‘No.’

‘Free to sleep with him, fuck him, without your mother criticising who you chose.’

‘Not significant.’

‘We shall see…’ He dropped his voice, more theatre, and was casual, as in conversation. He smiled and held the photograph of Eddie in front of her face. ‘We shall see, Signorina Immacolata, whether you lie or not. He, your insignificant, meaningless bed partner, was taken off the street in Forcella yesterday. Why should the boy have come to Naples if he’s insignificant and meaningless? Why is he in Forcella? What is your response to him being taken?’

‘He’s not important. My evidence is.’

‘Another lie – or the truth?’

‘I’ll stay the course.’

‘A lie or the truth?’

‘I’ll go to court whatever-’ Castrolami’s big fingers made a small tear at the top of the photograph, above Eddie’s head, and then, with a sort of formality, he handed her the photograph. She knew what was expected of her. She did it sharply, but looked away, through the window. The sun clipped the roofs, the water tanks and the satellite dishes, and was above the mountain range. She knew, and had judged it, that the rip would go through the middle of his face – his forehead, between his eyes and down the length of his nose. It would split his lips, his chin and his throat. She did it. She let the two pieces fall to the floor. She said, ‘I’ll go to court, whatever is set against me. I’ll go in memory of Marianna Rossetti. Fuck you, Castrolami.’

He kicked away the two pieces of the photograph, and Rossi came forward to pick them up and bin them. Castrolami said he had to go out. She thought he despised her, but he hadn’t been in the cemetery at Nola.

She went and lay on her bed, heard the main door open, shut, and the key turn.

As he went into the via dei Condotti, Lukas understood why the piazza di Spagna had been chosen for the meeting. He came off the main drag and walked past the fashion houses. It was a good place to watch a man approach the steps, and to see whether he had a tail. He appreciated why they would be paranoid about security and didn’t argue with it. He was later than he would have wanted but Duck Johnstone had been on the phone for more than half an hour and had fed him morsels of intelligence that hadn’t been available last night. He reckoned Duck must have worked through most of it. It wasn’t that Lukas admired dogged hard work, just that he couldn’t abide the taking of shortcuts and easy opt-outs. He knew more about the boy, known now in the links as Echo – the girl was India – enough about him to have rated his journey to Naples as dumb-pig stupid, but Echo would still get his best effort – only effort he knew – to have him on a plane, and in a seat, not in the hold.

He came to the fountain. He knew that a description of his features had been sent ahead, for recognition. He didn’t know whom he would meet, or have a code to exchange. The steps were a good place because he could be watched from more than four and up to seven angles. There were tourists fooling in the fountain at the foot, and locals were waiting to use the water spout for drinking. Lukas went past them, and the museum that was the Keats-Shelley house. He didn’t do poetry – literature – or anything that was outside the confines of freeing poor bastards caught up, usually, in someone else’s fight. Would have said it was full time and… He started to climb the steps. Already the sun flared off the stonework and any shade was filled with sitting youngsters… Hostage rescue, hostage negotiation, hostage profiling and hostage co-ordination were big enough subject areas to swamp Lukas’s mind.

He had been a sniper on the rescue team. He had once fired a live round to kill. He had carried the rifle and been in full kit on a live call-out close to a hundred times, including Ruby Ridge and Waco, but had fired only once. A death shot but not a clean one: the brains, skull fragments and blood of the robber trying to break a siege and bug out of a bank in Madison, Wisconsin, had spattered across the face and spectacles of the cashier he was using as a shield, and the mess had spoiled her dress. The Bureau’s HRT had been called in because the target had crossed state lines. He’d had the cross-wires on the felon’s head for upwards of thirty seconds and had fired a second after the guy’s attention had gone to his right side and the handgun had been moved out from under the woman’s chin. It was a hell of a shot, the rest of the team told him, but a shame about the dress. God only knew what the hairdresser would have found the next time the woman went. He had moved on, ditched the rifle and the big telescopic sight when the Bureau launched the Critical Incident Response Group.

Only one way, an old head had told him, to learn the skills of negotiation – and he had to know about negotiation if he was to command those people. ‘Find the construction cranes,’ the old head had said in a corner of the Quantico parkland, ‘and some good high big-span bridges.’

Suicides went up crane ladders and out on the walkways of bridges. Lukas had taken two years of evenings, days off and holiday time to be on stand-by for a call from a duty officer. Nobody in town, county or state police was queuing to go up a crane to talk to a nutcase who wanted to jump. Cranes and bridges were where ‘teeth were cut’, the old head had said. Couldn’t fail with wannabe suicides and hope to make it in the big-time of terrorist sieges. The way to learn the soft, gentle, persuasive talk, and to calm a situation, was to be a hundred feet up a crane ladder with not much to see of the ‘client’ but the soles of his shoes fifteen further up. He’d met some interesting people and heard some interesting life stories, and had had to breed trust if men and women were to decide to face another day and climb down. He’d never liked heights, but had a top job as a co-ordinator, the negotiator rookies needed to get up high on exercises, and Lukas had had to take them. Leadership was shit. It was said, he heard later, that some jerks climbed and threatened and only wanted the star man to come up after them; he’d gotten a reputation round Quantico and into the suburbs of the capital.

The sciences of hostage rescue were squashed into Lukas’s mind, which was why he didn’t know about poetry, or about Keats and Shelley… He didn’t look for the guy.

He reached the top. A big hotel faced him. Fellow Americans were spilling out of a taxi, and staff were bowing and scraping; others were having cases loaded into a limousine. From his crap room beside the station Lukas had come to the meeting by trolley bus, on the Metro and on foot. He didn’t have to justify what some said was eccentricity and others called pathetic obstinacy. A man stepped forward. He would, too right, have watched Lukas traverse the via dei Condotti, climb the steps and wipe away some perspiration.

‘You are Lukas?’

No warmth. A question put without enthusiasm, as if he was a stone in a shoe, a tick sucking blood on his leg, an irritation between the cheeks. He didn’t do point-scoring, but he didn’t do grovelling either.

‘Yes.’

‘I am here because I am instructed to be here.’

‘Thank you for meeting me,’ he said quietly, but briskly.

‘I am Mario Castrolami of the ROS. Excuse me, that is the-’

‘The special duties unit. I know what the ROS is.’ He didn’t spell out its full Italian name because that would have been to lord his knowledge – and get straight up the man’s nose. He was an intruder.

Castrolami was heavy-set and overweight. Lukas read him as one of the workaholic guys who slaved through all the hours, and more, and who were the backbone of pretty much every law-enforcement outfit he had come across. They didn’t get promotion, and they didn’t care. And they were busy, had clear-cut priorities, and failed on small-talk.

‘It is about Eddie Deacon?’

‘It is, and Immacolata Borelli.’ Lukas could have said it was about ‘Juliet and her Romeo’, because he had seen the movie on a flight out from JFK to Jakarta, a long time back, but neither of them wanted imbecile talk. He had to lead, but gently, as if the wind buffeted him when he was stuck up some God-awful crane and looking down wasn’t an option. ‘Can we go get a coffee? I’m told there’s a carabinieri barracks behind the Parliament building – near here, I think – and that a very good espresso is served in the non-coms’ mess. I imagine, Mr Castrolami, that you feel like you’ve stepped in a dog mess and that I’m the mess, but a coffee in the barracks might help to get the smell and the nuisance off your uppers. I suggest, though we’ll be using up your valuable time, that we say no more until we’ve had the coffee.’

Duck Johnstone had all these things on the file, could hack into them and carry Lukas back six years, an easy ride in the nostalgia stakes. Had taken him there for a reason.

Of course, Lukas knew where the barracks was, off which street on the far side of the via dei Corso, and how to get there quickest.

So, he led. It was a cheap trick, but he hadn’t time for subtlety. They exchanged cigarettes, but kept off the talking.

Carmine Borelli fired. The stock of the sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun was hard against his shoulder. He squinted down the valley between the barrels and fired again. The recoil, twice, rippled through his chest and up his neck. The sensation, shuddering through him, was incredible, and he shed years. The cordite was in his nostrils – extraordinary. It was one thing to have used a pistol the day before and have the retort ripple up his arm, but the shotgun at his shoulder was just pure pleasure.

One man squealed, held tight to a lamppost for support, then began to hobble towards the car. It was down the street, the doors already open, its exhaust spitting fumes. The other man had ducked down on his knees, then twisted and tried to run but was bent double. He could hear a man in the car shouting for them both to hurry. Carmine Borelli ejected the cartridges, dipped into his pocket for two more and loaded them. He had three of his own foot-soldiers further along the street than the car, and two more behind him. Salvatore, his visor down, was astride the pillion of a scooter across the street. None of the foot-soldiers, or Salvatore, were to intervene unless the life of Carmine Borelli was at high risk. He saw why the man who tried to run was bent: a hand gripped his hip and the tan trousers were bloodstained. Two shots, at twenty metres, and two hits. The two men made the car and it roared away, wheels shrieking as it spun right. There were several hospitals nearby where the passengers could be dropped off, but the Incurabili on the via della Sapienza was the nearest. A good hospital, where his Pasquale had been born and where he had sent many men.

The street had been empty, now was filled. A woman stopped, set down her shopping bag on the pavement, crouched, picked up the two ejected cases and gave them to him. Briefly, he kissed her hand. She retrieved her bags and went on. A man filled the door of a bar and shouted, ‘ Viva Il Camionista! ’ and there was applause behind him.

Carmine saw Salvatore ride off down the street. He knew that those who had been wounded would live now in mortal fear of Salvatore coming after them. The matter concerned the pizzo paid for protection by a shop on that street between the via Cesare Rosaroll and the via Carbonara which sold wedding dresses. Carmine Borelli understood that his granddaughter – no longer spoken of without a spit on the pavement – had fixed the pizzo at five hundred euros a month: chicken shit to the Borelli clan, small change. The previous evening, he had learned early that morning, men from the Misso clan or the Mazzarella clan – it was unclear – had told the shop’s owner that they would take over protection, and the payment would be seven hundred and fifty euros a month. If he had weakened, if it was allowed to happen once, if it was seen that he couldn’t fight to defend what he held, the Borelli clan was finished, dead and buried, forgotten. So he had taken the shotgun from the cache where it had lain hidden for more than twenty years, stripped off the damp-proof, oiled wrapping, loaded cartridges and found the old coat with the inner pocket where a shotgun could be secreted. He had been on the pavement when the men had come to collect seven hundred and fifty euros or to slop petrol over the shop’s stock of gowns. He thought he had sent a second message.

Another shout: ‘ Forza Il Camionista. ’ He acknowledged it, a slight wave. The scooter came back down the street. Salvatore would have circled the block to see if more men waited in more cars for orders to intervene – it was an old friend who had shouted – and the helmet shook. At this moment, there was no more danger. A gloved hand reached out, snatched the shotgun and the scooter was gone, lost in the traffic. The shop’s owner was behind him, with the padlock that fastened the steel shutters to the loop in the pavement, but Carmine denied him permission to close for the day, demanded he stay open – his sent message would be reinforced by that gesture. He walked away.

They would now be arriving at the hospital, probably the Incurabili, and would be hustling for the Pronto Soccorso entrance, which was alongside General Surgery, where they were skilled in extracting bullets and pellets. It was near to Trauma – necessary if the wounds were serious – and the chapel was beside the mortuaria – a good design layout and convenient. The first professional man he had hired was from that hospital.

Sixty-six years earlier: the city starved, women picked dandelions and daisies to boil as soup, kids prised limpets off the seashore rocks and men hung nets to catch songbirds for plucking. Carmine and Anna Borelli made their first fortune from the brothels. Not all the women who went into the cubicles with American soldiers were married. They had to eat, so dropped knickers and opened thighs were the only currency they had, but the Americans had moved on. Carmine Borelli had hired a professore from the hospital, and for a fee per patient of ten thousand lire the eminent medical man restitched the virginity of the unmarried, and Carmine took fifteen per cent of the fee. That professore had delivered Pasquale safely into the world.

He would go first to the place where he could shower and change his clothing, then take more of the pain pills because he didn’t want people in Forcella to see him hobble or limp. Clean, he would go home. He believed he had done well, believed also that he was on a treadmill, running, and didn’t know how long, at that pace, he could last.

Once a week, regular as clockwork, Davide locked the door of his apartment, on the third floor of the Sail, and took a bus. It carried him from the architectural disaster zone that was Scampia into Naples, and there was a memorised sequence of meeting-places: the steep Funicolare climbing from the via Toledo, a gentleman’s hairdressing salon on the corso Umberto, the giardini pubblici in front of the royal palace of the Bourbons, the open ramparts of the Castel dell’Ovo, or one of the distinguished coffee houses of the city. When he was in any of those places, with tapes and cassettes in the hidden pockets sewn at his trousers’ waist, he was Delta465/Foxtrot.

He sat on the bus that morning.

He was not reckless, took no unnecessary risks in harbouring the secrecy of his double life, and felt no fear. In both his identities – Davide and Delta465/Foxtrot – he understood that the fate of an agent of the AISI, if uncovered, was death. Not negotiable. If it was discovered that a man from the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna was living in the Sail death was certain, with much pain beforehand. He lived with the threat. He had a compartmentalized mind, and could keep fear at arm’s length. That ensured he was an agent of quality and valued by his handlers. He enjoyed meeting them in the funicular carriage, the barber’s or in the gardens and would ask after their children and be told of their holidays – make-believe, of course, but it enabled him to feel he was inside a family, which was important to him. They had given him a number for the Apocalypse Call, but he doubted he would ever use it. He had no idea what his life might be outside the Sail and without the weekly meetings.

Nothing to report that week. Nothing that would interest the men and women who met him. They were interested only in material of high-grade importance. He had seen, through his obsessionally polished windows, nothing of that category. Neither did he believe there was anything on the tapes from the cameras in his living room or from the audio cassettes linked to the microphones buried in the outer wall. The position of his apartment, where a flight came up from level two and another down from level four, had not been chosen randomly: it was a meeting-place – men stopped, talked and took little notice of the cleaned windows, the blaring television and the old man slumped in a chair with his back to the walkway. He knew of nothing that week to intrigue his handlers.

She was no fool. Anna Borelli was as adept at losing a tail as any man half, a third or a quarter of her age. She did back-doubles, shop windows, was last on to a trolley bus on the corso Umberto, and went into the church of San Lorenzo Maggiore by the main entrance and out by the narrow emergency door. Only when she was satisfied that she was not under surveillance, or had lost it, did she head for the meeting-place. She carried a filled plastic shopping bag.

She was another elderly lady, keeping death at bay for perhaps another year or only another month, and she wore black from stockings to scarf. She was unnoticed. She rang a bell. She was admitted through high gates. She crossed a yard of cannibalised vehicles and a door swung open when she prodded it with her toe. She was inside the building that had once been a car-repair business, but was now a place where stolen Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and the best models from the Alfa and Fiat factories were brought and dismantled. The parts would be shipped into Moldova or Ukraine, then moved further east. It had been an excellent business but was now slack and the yard was deserted, except for the scooter tucked against a side wall. The building seemed empty, but for the cigarette smoke that curled from beneath an inner door.

Then she was met.

She showed Salvatore what she had brought. There was bread, cheese, two slices of cheap processed ham, two apples, three small bottles of water, and the morning’s edition of Cronaca di Napoli – on the front page a photograph of a man sprawled dead, half in a gutter, outside a bar. She had not read it. She thought that by now her husband would be home. She approved of what he planned to do, and she would appreciate that when he sat in his chair, with her beside him, he would be clean and not smell as was usual. Salvatore had a camera on the table, and the man who rode the scooter was stretched out on a sofa, asleep, with a pistol on the floor beside his head.

There was a corridor to the back, and a storeroom off it.

A trapdoor was lifted and a torch shone down.

A stench came up through the hole’s opening. She saw that the boy was hooded, bound, and that his arms were behind his back. She remembered him in her living room, his simplicity; remembered also when Immacolata, her husband’s angel, had been in the same room, had sat in the same chair, drinking from the same set of cups and eating off the same set of plates. She remembered the boy, his almost shy smile, the flush of gratitude when he was told that a man was coming to take him to Immacolata. She felt no sympathy.

The torch showed the discolouration at his groin. She had not felt sympathy for the women in her brothels who had contracted syphilis from the American officers and had had to tell their husbands of the disease they carried. She had not felt sympathy for those widowed when she and her husband had climbed but others had been pushed aside, or for Gabriella when the births of Vincenzo and Giovanni were complex and brutally painful, or for Carmine when he was taken three times to Poggioreale. She did not even feel sympathy for herself.

She watched.

Salvatore rolled up the hood so that it cleared the mouth and nostrils but covered the eyes. He pulled off the binding tape and the young man, Eddie, cried out in pain because it had happened without warning, but then – so quickly – his face settled. Anna Borelli understood. Then Salvatore unlocked the handcuffs and allowed him, Eddie, to work his fingers over his wrists and bring back the circulation. She wondered if he was Edmondo or Eduardo. Then the hands were put together in front of his waist and the handcuffs went back on. Anna Borelli thought, from his face and the little gestures, that he was a fighter – it didn’t matter to her.

She passed down a bucket and the newspaper she had brought.

She knew a little English from the Americans. Salvatore told the young man that he should use the bucket, that he could eat, that he was to put the hood back on his head each time he heard movement over the trapdoor. If he didn’t he would be beaten. The bucket was stood in a corner. Salvatore had the camera. The newspaper front page facing the lens was placed in the young man’s hands and held up. The torch was switched off. Anna Borelli thought then that Salvatore would snatch up the hood and immediately take the photograph. The flash lit the bunker, and the white face, the scars on it and the blood smears – easier to see in the flash than in the torch beam.

When the torch went back on, the hood was in place again.

The newspaper was left beside the bucket. The food was in the plastic bag beside the young man’s knee. Anna Borelli saw the young man’s ears and fingers, the stain at his crotch, and felt no sympathy. She accepted, however, that she didn’t know how her granddaughter would react – what her response to the pressure would be when it built.

Salvatore climbed out, the trapdoor fell back into place and the bolt was pushed home.

With the tab from the camera lodged in her brassiere, Anna Borelli set off for the office of the family’s lawyer.

Castrolami watched. He thought it a performance for him and no others. He was sitting in the canteen area on the second floor of the barracks, the coffee in front of them with a plate of sweet biscuits. The swing door had been pushed open, and an officer – probably a maresciallo – had come in, looked around, seen the man, Lukas, and come to him, arms opening wide. Hugs, kisses – and Castrolami believed he saw tears. Not Lukas who wept, and not Lukas who kissed.

It was about the establishment of credentials. The officer had small scars on his face and walked heavily, as if his left leg carried an old injury. He would have been in his early forties, plump and pasty-faced. He clung to Lukas.

It was explained.

The officer was Marco. He had been in the detachment of carabinieri posted to the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. He was asleep in quarters used by the detachment in the building that had once been the office of the local Chamber of Commerce. A suicide attack on it had involved a tanker truck rigged with explosives. Seventeen carabinieri had been killed, and more were injured. Marco suffered cut tendons in his right leg from shrapnel and his face was hit by glass shards. He had gone home, recovered, convalesced and demanded to be returned to his unit. He had come back to Nasiriyah… Castrolami heard the story and thought it told well and quietly. He waited to learn its purpose.

The canteen had filled. The short guy at Castrolami’s side, now extricated from the hugs and kisses, seemed to Castrolami to find it a necessary nuisance, and was impassive.

‘I went back, a dumb-fuck stupid thing to do – everyone told me so – but I was back. We had an outpost down the road and the day that those guys were supposed to get a week’s rations there was also a search mission under way. Just one of those days when a schedule gets fouled up, and people think it doesn’t matter. The consequence was a reduction in the size of the escort to take the rations. There were three of us, Italians, and two trucks. We got hit. They put an RPG through the engine of mine and blew us off the road. The driver, an Iraqi boy, was killed. The truck in front just kept going. I was taken.’

Castrolami didn’t hear, in the packed room, that a throat was cleared, that a man’s joints clicked as he moved his weight from one foot to the other, that a nose was blown, that a cup was put heavily on a saucer or that cutlery rattled. Lukas’s face gave nothing away.

‘I was taken off quickly – fast, immediate. Would have been well gone by the time a reaction force was back in there… I was held fourteen days. They didn’t want a ransom, didn’t want a truckload of dollars, didn’t want a statement of intent to leave from our government. They told me they wanted prisoner exchange, people of theirs who were in Abu Ghraib under American jurisdiction. After fourteen days they got the message. No deal. They were ready to do me – would have been a knife job, decapitation. I thought they’d kill me that night. Those were fourteen long days – a different meaning to long than I’ve known before, like years and like hell. The guys who broke in were from Task Force 145, because we Italians didn’t have that sort of group. They came out of the Anaconda Camp in the Balad base. This man – Mr Lukas – did the co-ordination. He married what the assets brought in with prisoner interrogation and reconnaissance, and did it right. I owe him my life. I’m supposed to be a rock-hard bastard but the sight of this little runt, and the knowledge of what he did for me, his skill, makes me want to fucking weep. I never had a chance to thank him there. We, the Italian contingent, didn’t have such a man in Iraq. It was my great fortune that he was in country, with Defense Department, and allocated to my situation. Great fortune because he’s the best. I saw him in the distance and then he was gone, but guys told me… What I’m saying, if he’s in town, if some poor bastard goes through what I went through, then fuck the protocol and fucking listen to him.’

Applause spattered the canteen.

‘Can we get out of here?’ Lukas asked softly, close to Castrolami.

‘It was your call to come,’ Castrolami said.

‘Someone thought it was a good idea. The chief honcho in the company I work for would have pulled him up on the files.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t and maybe it was – a good idea.’

He disengaged from the veteran – and Castrolami thought Marco now did some soft liaison job in Parliament but would never forget. Lukas endured one last, awkward embrace, then was pushing for the double doors, and the coffee hadn’t been drunk. They went along corridors and down flights of stairs. They hit the street going fast, as if both men wanted to be shot of a place that was sugar-sweet on sentimentality.

‘I suppose I should apologise, but it was reckoned a good, clean, fast way of establishing credentials – like fast-tracking them.’

‘Could you do that sort of cabaret in other places, other cities?’

‘’Fraid so, quite a number. I do apologise – a stunt and a gimmick. Not my way but-’

‘Give it me,’ Castrolami demanded.

Lukas said, ‘I don’t horn in and play rank and pedigree. Inside there was just about a CV, and to save you time, and somebody else’s idea, if I’m invited I come in. If my advice is looked for, I offer it. There are no other strings, and no other agenda.’

‘I warn you, we pull in different directions.’

Lukas was looking at his feet as they walked. ‘When was it ever different?’

‘I make no commitment to you, an outsider.’

‘In your place, I doubt I would.’

*

The cell had no air and the heat was trapped in it. If she had been charged with shop-lifting, bag-snatching or aggravated assault, Gabriella Borelli would have shared a cell with five others, even nine. But she was special, had status, was awarded solitary confinement. She had been escorted back to the cell, and the heat had wafted at her as the door was unlocked, had wrapped round her as it was closed after her. The sun was climbing and played directly on the window. Distorted shadows were thrown over her from the light hitting the bars.

It had been a sour meeting with her lawyer, Umberto.

She had sensed his shock when he saw her with chains fastened to manacles at her wrists. He would have heard them rattling as she was led down the corridor and into the interview room, and she sensed he felt personal pain for her, and also that his worst nightmare would have been to wear those chains, to sleep in a cell like hers and not to walk on the Tribunali or the Duomo but in an exercise yard. He had dabbed a handkerchief dosed with cologne at his nose. They had taken the chains off her when she was ready to sit opposite him.

Did he believe that a case conference between accused and advocate was free of electronic audio surveillance? He did not.

Did she believe that a microphone was not wired into the room, its furniture, its walls, ceiling and electrical fittings? Most certainly she did not.

It had been a bizarre conference – she flopped on to the bunk bed on a raised concrete base. She kicked off the sandals which she had been issued with, loosened the blouse that had been torn when they’d felled her and unzipped the skirt that had ridden up when she was on the ground, but there was no relief from the heat. Umberto had produced a packet of cigarettes, cigarette papers for rolling but no loose tobacco, and two match books. The cigarettes were between them, and each had had a set of the matches. He had divided the papers so that they had half each. They had done the case conference.

He had asked her if she was well and she had told him she was.

He had written in an insect scrawl on a slip of the paper: A boy, the lover of Immacolata, came from England to find her. Had an address of via Forcella. The priest sent him to Carmine and Anna. He had pushed the slip towards her, and she had read it, then crumpled it and put it into the tinfoil ashtray between them.

She had written: Was he stupid? Was he ignorant? She had shown it to him, then crushed it and dropped it with the other.

They lit cigarettes, and allowed the lighted matches to burn the papers in the ashtray. A rhythm had developed.

Did she have complaints that he should take up with the authorities? She did not.

He knew nothing, had met Immacolata in London, loved her, knew nothing. Carmine took control. He sent for help.

What control? What help?

More paper burned in the ashtray.

Was the food satisfactory? It was.

It’s control through leadership. It’s to prevent secessionists and intrusion. He sent for Salvo.

To what purpose?

Smoke rose from the paper. More smoke curled up from the cigarettes.

Was she treated with respect? She was.

Carmine thinks the boy from England can be used as leverage on Immacolata. Salvo has taken the boy, holds him in Sanita. Bits of him will be sent to Immacolata if she doesn’t retract her accusations.

I doubt the bitch will – but good to use the boy. Make pressure with him. More important, find the bitch, shoot her, stamp on her face.

In that note, she had allowed emotion to escape: her writing had been faster, larger, and the response had taken both sides of the paper.

He asked her what she needed. She had said clothing, a portable electric fan, a radio and some magazines.

What else?

Use the boy, with a knife. Kill the bitch.

What else did she want? She had not said that her love should be sent to her husband, to Vincenzo in London, to Giovanni or Silvio. She had not spoken of her parents-in-law or of Salvatore… She had said she needed a pair of her own shoes and more toothpaste. Together they had checked that all of the paper slips were burned to cinders, then had screwed out the cigarettes in the ash. He had stood, knocked on the door and the escort had come in. The manacles had gone back on her wrists. She had not thanked him for coming to the women’s gaol at Posilippo: she paid him, and he was rich on the family’s back.

She sat now in the cell.

She would, herself, have slit her daughter’s throat.

She would, herself, have sliced off the ears, fingers and nose of the English boy, her daughter’s lover. What Gabriella Borelli loathed most was the removal of power, the loss of authority. She must play-act with cigarette papers across a table. Anger welled in her, but was confined inside the walls, three metres by two, of the cell. She could do none of it herself. She was off the bed. In fury, Gabriella Borelli beat her forehead against the wall, bruised and scratched herself against the graffiti. She didn’t care about clothes, an electric fan or shoes. She wanted her daughter dead.

The old lady had been waiting for him. She was sitting in his office amid the mountains of paper and files that were Umberto’s trade. When he came back from Posilippo – and he had had coffee at the Cafe Gambrinus, where old friends, the advocates of other clans, had greeted him – she was in front of his desk. Extraordinary, but she didn’t speak. She handed him a small envelope, then stood, looked around as if she was searching for a dead cat carcass, and was gone. He tore open the envelope, retrieved the camera’s memory pad, then called for his clerk, Massimo. The young man was his nephew, had his trust. He told Massimo to take money from the petty-cash box and go to the camera shop on the corso Vittorio Emanuele – a long bus ride but there was little chance of his clerk being recognised there – buy a portable printer and bring it back. If the clan fell, Umberto fell. So hard for him to believe that the sweet pretty face of Immacolata – always his favourite – might cause him to fall, and fall far.

She had talked through the morning to the deputy prosecutor, up from Naples. She had found, with each anecdote and each item of evidence, that old loyalties had frayed, disintegrated. A few days before she had hugged her brother, Silvio, for driving out to Capodicino, collecting her, ferrying her to Nola and back. That morning she listed all the occasions she knew, and would swear to it on oath, that Silvio had ridden on his scooter around the city distributing handguns and ammunition. She skewered him. She identified the weapons caches he had visited, the men from whom the weapons were collected and those to whom they were given. The tape spools had turned. She had seen, across the table, grim satisfaction on the face of the deputy prosecutor. She felt no more affection for her youngest brother than she did for the others, and none for her mother. She didn’t think of her father. She kept in her mind, central, the image of her friend. She saw, as she condemned her family, the features of Marianna Rossetti. There was no other face in her mind. No other friendship was ‘significant’. I’ll go to court, whatever. She sensed, that morning, a growing relaxation in the apartment, as if a barrier had been broken down. She was not treated with the same suspicion – near hostility.

When they broke, the deputy prosecutor for coffee and she for juice, she had stood and stretched, sensing that her T-shirt rode up over her navel, then wandered towards Rossi. He was on the balcony, through the open doors, sitting in a rattan easy chair, browsing a newspaper. She could fight, as she did with Mario Castrolami, scratch. She could smile, too, flash her eyes and be docile. ‘Please…’

‘Yes?’ Rossi looked up at her. ‘What do you need?’

‘Do you run – for exercise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please… may I run? It’s claustrophobic here. I’d like to run – if it’s allowed but I don’t have the clothes – I’d be so grateful if I could.’

‘Can’t see why not. Let me float it.’

‘Thank you.’

Why did she want to run? Not for fitness. She didn’t have a weight problem, she was young and healthy. She believed that if she could run along a pavement, as other women did, she would take another step towards changing her life. She drank the juice Orecchia brought her, sat again at the table and talked about Salvatore, Il Pistole, who had fancied her, had wanted to sleep with her and might have wanted to marry her. She stabbed him, too, with the stiletto, pushed it deep. Another tape was slotted into the recorder. She thought of nothing that was insignificant or meaningless.

There wasn’t a dog in the household for Arthur Deacon to walk. Best he could do was borrow his immediate neighbour’s, a cheerful golden retriever. He’d needed to get out of the house, stretch his legs and have someone – or something – to commune with who brought no complications. Betty had taken the day off work, and had warned them it might be the week. He’d felt hemmed in, as he had in the last months at the water-board office, and the dog was a sort of therapy against worrying – agonising – about Eddie. They hadn’t slept, either of them, last night. Could have taken the dog round the loop of byways and bridlepaths all over again, but felt he should go home. He had dropped the dog off at the neighbour’s, well short of Dean Weymouth’s bungalow, and tramped the last hundred yards to his house. The back door, of course, because his dirty shoes lived in the utility room. He lived a pretty boring life, ordered, predictable and boring, so there was a place on a shelf for muddy shoes, and another place on another shelf for merely dirty shoes, and a cupboard spot for clean shoes – it was about as boring as it could get. He was about to sing out, ‘Hello, it’s me, I’m back,’ but didn’t. Who else might it be? The Queen? The Pope? Osama bin bloody Laden? He said nothing, but as he took off his shoes he heard his wife’s voice, the accent she used for work, with all the vowels and consonants in place.

She said, ‘I’m grateful, Mr Johnstone, more grateful than I can say, and my husband… Yes, please do, please keep in touch with us, any time of day or night… Can I ask you one question, Mr Johnstone, only one?… Thank you… Why, Mr Johnstone, are you doing this for us?… Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t, but thank you.’

He heard the phone put down. He heard her choke, like a sob, and couldn’t remember when he had last heard or seen his Betty in tears – wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard the choke. He took off his shoes, put them on the correct shelf, went inside and put his arm round her shoulders. She was still standing by the hall table, facing the silent phone.

She said, ‘That was Mr Johnstone. He says his name’s Duck, but I’m not indulging him. He’s building what he calls a “profile” of Eddie.’

‘Don’t know that I could.’

‘He says Eddie’s been kidnapped and the likelihood is that he’s in the hands of an organised-crime group. This one, called the Camorra, is in Naples. The likelihood is that the girl Eddie spoke of, Immacolata Borelli, is from a criminal family, a very successful one.’

‘God, poor Eddie – an innocent abroad.’

‘It gets blacker. The girl has turned herself in as a state witness against her family. Eddie, our Eddie, barged in there – supremely innocent but also supremely ignorant, I don’t know which is worse – and Mr Johnstone says they will try to use his captivity to persuade the girl to withdraw her evidence. He wanted to know how Eddie would withstand extreme pressure and stress – he didn’t say torture, but I think that’s what he meant – and the information will help in building the profile. I said he was just ordinary, a bit lazy and a bit stubborn.’

‘Usually aware, kind, not very ambitious.’

‘Without malice. I said that. It was almost like I was doing his obituary for the Western Daily Press. I said he was a nice boy, decent, and steady, but hadn’t too much imagination. His own mother, selling him short.’

She did a brief sniffle, blinked, and the weakness of tears was gone. Arthur Deacon held her tight. Her eyes were still on the phone.

‘A man’s flown to Rome. I wasn’t told his name. He’s called a co-ordinator, and he works on a freelance basis for Mr Johnstone’s company. He has FBI experience and has been in Iraq for the American military. He’s an expert on hostage rescue, whether by negotiation or use of force. It’s all because of Dean. Dean spoke well of Eddie. I’m in areas I don’t understand but I think it’s a sort of family – Dean Weymouth, the people who work for this company at whatever level of importance, and the man who’s going to Naples. It’s like a brotherhood of mutual support because of the awful places they operate in. The expert – he’s as good at his work as anyone in the world, Mr Johnstone says.’

‘We have to be strong, and pray Eddie is.’

‘What Mr Johnstone also says, we must hope, we must believe, and we must understand the desperate nature of the situation Eddie’s in. And Mr Johnstone says we mustn’t feel angry with him. That’s the natural emotion, extreme anger, for having caused our misery. Eddie may not be the brightest star but he’s done nothing wrong, has nothing to be ashamed of. This expert, the co-ordinator, is used to going where governments get entangled in bureaucracy and pomposity and guarding territory, Mr Johnstone says, and side-stepping them all. But he doesn’t flannel.’

‘You live nearly a lifetime, then into your cosy world come people you didn’t know existed. I’m not trying to be profound, but now we share space with them.’

‘He says Eddie’s position is “difficult”. He’s going to ring us twice a day, and he promised that all the questions he’ll ask are relevant for the profile. I asked him why. He said that people climb mountains because they’re there, cross deserts because they’re there, get involved in problems because they’re there. He didn’t mention anything about money… I’m frightened for Eddie.’

Arthur held her, couldn’t do it tighter.

‘Which is more important? That the girl gives her evidence or our Eddie’s life? I’m not asking you for an answer.’

They had walked without speaking, had had a coffee and walked some more, not spoken, and drunk a second coffee. Lukas knew that the exhibition in the canteen had left a sour taste in Castrolami’s mouth, but it was easier done that way than having to explain himself.

Near the end of the second coffee, at a bar that over looked the big square, piazza Venezia, where the coffee cost more than a meal, Castrolami put his gripe: ‘Mr Lukas, it was dishonest.’

‘If you want it to be.’

‘Implication – you win them all.’

‘I win a lot.’

‘Not all.’

‘I could have had you put on an Alitalia big bird and you’d be mid-Atlantic now, and I could take you to a trailer camp in Arkansas or Alabama, and I could wheel out the family of a marine or a ranger or a military truck driver not past his nineteenth birthday who was lifted and killed because I didn’t save him. I could do that, if it would help you.’

‘You don’t win them all.’

‘I lose people, yes. I try to win. I don’t ask for a shoehorn. I’m there if I can help, and I try to win.’

‘What keeps you in the game?’

Lukas said, ‘It’s what I know – about all I know.’

A hand reached out, slapped Lukas’s face – quite hard but not malevolent, and not playful. Lukas supposed he had said the right words, the right thing at the right time, but that, too, was a skill of his. One day, if time allowed, he would work at sincerity – what was real and what was not.

Castrolami said, ‘We should go and see her. Then maybe you can judge better what happens to the boy.’

*

He had eaten, used the bucket and ditched the hood. The focus in his mind was the hatred, and the need for control, and Eddie held it. With the darkness around him there was the silence.

Self-pity, which would not have been control, cursed that he had stepped on to a flight when he’d thought he was ‘lucky’, cursed that he had made it on to a train going south, cursed that he had found a priest in a great church who, distracted and seeming not to care, had told him where to find his Mac’s family – and cursed that he had lingered over cake while the man was sent for. Any cursing was self-pity. He would not have turned his back on Immacolata – would not and could not. Mixed it up in his mind – the face that was the source of hatred, and the face of Immacolata, and she was laughing, sharing her happiness with him. He mixed the two, but the hatred was of greater importance… He mustn’t lose control.

He couldn’t stand in the bunker, couldn’t pace, couldn’t lose the smell of the bucket, couldn’t allow his head to drop.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator