The Collaborator

10

A new decision faced Eddie. A week before, it would have been whether to do Shakespeare or Agatha Christie with his class, drink British bitter or Czech lager, eat pasta or Oriental, sleep the night with Immacolata or send her home, put the whites in the washing-machine or the woollens. Big decisions, but all in the past.

How to get a pair of locked handcuffs off his wrists, in near total darkness, was the problem that needed a decision.

He doubted there would be an anaesthetic – maybe, at best, alcohol or iodine to keep the cut clean. It might be a medical student, a man who cut up chicken for his family’s evening meal – a butcher – or any bastard off the street. He had been told that his ears, his fingers, his hand and his penis would be chips in the negotiation stakes, which seemed a good enough reason to work on the locked handcuffs. Do nothing? Not a bloody option.

How to do it? He didn’t know.

He had searched the floor space for wire, then gone over each wall, hoping to find a nail hammered in. He had crouched under the ceiling and smoothed the surface with his hands, but there had been no nails, hooks or wire. They had done the Holocaust at school. There were pictures, downloaded from the net, of day-in-the-life scenes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belsen and Treblinka. It had seemed a long way from a sixth-form college in northwest Wiltshire, until an old man had been brought in on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February 1998. He had been in the camps as a child and had survived, and was – a half-century later – a witness. He had the tattooed number to prove it and had rolled up his sleeve to show it. The class had seen the photographs of the crowds shuffling in lines, with suitcases and bundles, holding their children’s hands, towards the gas chambers. The Jew had talked about death, its certainty. A boy, Robinson – cocky little sod – had asked the Jew: ‘Why did they all just accept it? Why didn’t they fight it? They were dead anyway, so why didn’t they give it a thrash?’ The class teacher had told Robinson that the question was offensive, but the Jew had waved him down and said, ‘A few did, a very few, not enough. The state of Israel today still has a sense of shame at what is seen as the inability to fight, the lying-down, the docility. Israel will defend itself now with the utmost robustness, but then we had come from ghettos, we were exhausted, starved, degraded of dignity. We did not have the strength, physical and mental, to combat the inevitable. It was a good question.’ They’d talked about it afterwards, in the canteen, the school corridors, and had all said – Robinson at the helm – that they wouldn’t have gone like sheep. Easy to say at a school in north-west Wiltshire. Eddie Deacon had not come from a walled-in ghetto, was tired from lack of sleep but not exhausted, was hungry but not starved, and his dignity was fired by hate. How best to regain the freedom of his hands?

He told himself that they would cut off his ears, fingers and penis. Maybe it had been his failure to react fast enough on the pavement, in the moment after the fish-seller had given the glance, but it was all an unwalked road for him.

Fighting was about films, about stories. Heroes did fighting with scumbags. He didn’t know heroes or lowlife. He had to learn how to fight. First lesson: shed the handcuffs.

Eddie found one place on the flooring where the concrete had a rough edge. Might have been where one load had gone down as liquid against the previous load that had almost set hard. The ridge was about half a centimetre high and sharp. The handcuffs were not the bar variety that the police were issued with when they came into Kingsland Road, but the old sort with a short chain linking the manacles. Eddie knelt. He planted his elbows, crouched, then had the chain against the ridge, made it taut and started to scratch, working the chain over the ridge. It hurt like fuck in his elbows but he kept on at it, and when he had rubbed smooth one short section of the ridge he edged further along to a new position. Dust came up and was in his nostrils.

Better to be beaten – face the knife – and have given it a thrash.

‘It’s about windows – the best opportunity for escape by the potential hostage – right at the start. Chaos, confusion, maximum tension for the hostage-taker. You can count it on the seconds of one hand, the sight of a window. That’s when the hostage is most likely to get clear, but an attempt to escape is when the hostage is most likely to be killed. It’s a hell of a risk and-’

Castrolami interrupted: ‘You go in there?’

Lukas saw the facade, behind high, heavy railings, of the building, the flag drifting limp, and the barricades to keep the truck bombs away from the embassy walls. There had been a time when he would have been welcomed, open arms, at any US embassy. He wondered how it was for them, living in a fortress, bringing the Baghdad Green Zone to the via Vittorio Veneto. ‘I’d go in there if I’d lost my documents, assuming I was travelling on American papers. Get it straight, I don’t belong to governments.’

They kept walking. It was hot, the sun high. Lukas thought the city not yet back from holiday and the temperature too great for the comfort of tourists. He was not told why they walked in the heat, or why Castrolami checked his watch, as if that would make the hands go faster. Castrolami said, ‘Sorry I interrupted. Don’t think I’m not interested.’

Lukas asked, blunt, ‘Are you fooling with me?’

‘No.’

They left the flag, no wind to make it proud, behind them. Lukas said, ‘After that first open window, there’s less likelihood of another. We used to advise, at those seminars the state put on and the private security companies host for big bucks, that once taken a hostage shouldn’t try to escape. Then along came Iraq. Remember the Brit? Doesn’t matter how, but he managed a runner, barefoot and in darkness. He was actually within three hundred paces of an American checkpoint when they caught him. Maybe he was already condemned but the escape confirmed it. His throat was cut. Would we now advise people to hang about and see what the sun brings up? We’re a bit humbler with advice. What we do say: to escape and fail is a death sentence. These people here, do they have qualms about killing? Is it a big deal for them?’

‘Like changing their underpants or brushing their teeth,’ Castrolami said. ‘In Naples, life doesn’t count. They would go for an espresso afterwards and talk football.’

The dust in his eyes didn’t matter because he couldn’t use them. What came up his nose was an irritant and several times he sneezed uncontrollably, then froze to listen. He heard nothing – no engines, no music, no voices. He kept on scraping the chain against the ridge of concrete. He didn’t – wouldn’t – feel the chain to see whether the effort he made was winning a degree, however small, of success. He didn’t run a thumb or a finger, the sensitive part, against it to learn whether he had made a fraction of an indentation in the link – too scared of finding there was no difference. Then it would be hopelessness, he would slump, join the line that had shuffled towards the gas chamber, that hadn’t needed whipping or the prod of bayonets to keep it moving. How long had he been scraping? An hour? Might take a day, or three days. Might take a week.

The bucket smelled worse. That was a new worry. Better to have the worry about the bucket than about the knife homing in on his ears, or his fingers, or of them pulling aside his trousers. He went on scraping the chain against the concrete, and the smell was lodged in his nose. He worked on the chain manically. A new worry: what if the scraping dulled his ears? What if the footsteps came to the trapdoor and he didn’t bloody hear them? What if they knew he was busy with escape in his mind? New worries, old worries – hardly fucking mattered which danced in him.

‘We tend to suggest that the hostage looks hard for opportunities to escape, but we can’t say where they might be. Every case is different and-’

Castrolami grunted, ‘Do you go there?’

The Union flag flew, had no more life in it than the American one. The British place was sixties modern with a water feature at the front. There was a police jeep outside and a uniformed guy lounged with his legs draped out through the open door, a submachine-gun across his thighs. In the square just beyond, a fine statue of a Bersaglieri soldier, double life size, stood high on a plinth. Lukas said, ‘Today I travel on a French passport – sort of a return for favours rendered. I work all right with UK Special Forces, and with spooks, but the diplomats tend to see me as street dirt. So, I’d go there for a glass of water if I was thirsty… I saw those troops in Iraq. I liked the feathers in the hat. You like useless information? Tough shit if you don’t. The feathers are from the capercaillie bird, and the gate behind is the Porta Pia through which they came to complete the unification of your God-forsaken country and give the Holy Father the boot.’

He was punched, a hard, short-arm blow with a clenched fist, and Lukas rode it and rated it a compliment. They went through the gate – he thought there were bits of ancient Roman brickwork in the walls. ‘We’re nearly there,’ Castrolami said.

‘Where I was… We can lay down guidelines. We know how we think guys should behave but we cannot be arrogant enough to dictate… and this boy has never been to a seminar, nor on a chief executive’s course, or probably ever read a newspaper, a magazine, anything with hostage-survival guidelines. He’ll know nothing – which might be a bonus or might be fatal. I can’t say.’

Castrolami said, straight face, without expression, ‘What a pity he cannot hear your encouraging words.’

*

Still, he had the discipline. Still, Eddie worked, and didn’t move his thumb or forefinger over the chain’s link. But with two hours gone he found the first evidence of progress. The chain seemed to lock more easily on to the ridge.

Then feet.

It would be such an opportunity – in a day, three days or a week, if the chain was broken and his legs untied: wait till the bastard came down the hole, belt him on the back of the head with the sharp edge of a manacle, knee him in the crotch and leave him stunned, be up and out, dropping the trapdoor, bolting it and running… Running where? Running anywhere. The scene played endlessly, as if it was on a loop in his mind, as he worked on the link, an image of action and response that pleased him. The image removed the fear, gave him the sense that he was not a fatted bloody calf tethered in a shed awaiting the stun-gun. But this was not the time. The opportunity did not exist. He blew hard on the floor, hoped he’d dispersed the dust he’d created, and edged himself back against a side wall. He groped to find the hood, arranged it on his head and let the rim cover his eyes. He waited, and didn’t know what would happen – didn’t know if the footsteps heralded the knife – and squeezed his thighs together so that his penis was protected, pinned back his ears and clenched his fists to hide his fingers.

The bolt was drawn back. The torchbeam flared into the bunker and caught the hood. Pimples of light pierced the material. Could he, at that moment in time, rip off the hood, stand, grab a leg or a foot, drag the weight down, do damage with the handcuffs on? Eddie hesitated. Could he take the decision, allow the man to come down into the pit, rip off the hood, stand up? He heard the impact of the plastic bag. The light went off. The trapdoor closed and the bolt was pushed through.

There was food in the bag – more bread and cheese, one apple and water in a bottle. His bucket was not emptied. He ate a piece of the bread and a nugget of cheese, rinsed some of the dryness out of his mouth, then went back to scraping the chain on the rough ridge of the concrete. The heat in the bunker built on him and sweat drenched him.

Castrolami said that the parkland was the Villa Borghese gardens, that it dated back four hundred years, that it covered eighty hectares. Lukas said he didn’t care to know the history of the park and its significance: his feet hurt from walking and his throat was parched. Castrolami looked at his watch, might have been the tenth or twelfth time, and must have reckoned then that a schedule was on course. He supposed that the walk to the park was of similar importance to his own visit to the carabinieri barracks. He showed no impatience. Lukas knew people – at the Bagram base outside Kabul and at Anaconda camp inside the Balad air base – who would have demanded dedicated space, computers wired in, maps on walls, secure communications, iced water, iced coffee, iced tea, and maybe their name on a card at the front of the desk. Lukas could be patient because he sensed Castrolami – a hulk, heavy and clumsy – to be a man of substance, a guy with whom business could be done. He thought it would be rude – and tactical shit – to chivvy for detail. He didn’t require action to enhance his role. He saw two boys, rucksacks off their backs, half stripped and washing in a pool into which water fell from three levels. To him, the sculpture of rampant horses that supported the fountain was art. Set among huge mature pines, which gave wide shade, the massive statue of a man in fancy-dress uniform sat astride a warhorse, and Castrolami murmured that it was King Umberto I. There were mock Roman pillars, designed as ruins, and in an amphitheatre the workmen were setting up scaffolding for a concert’s sound systems. He saw men with dogs, women with buggies, and tourists who digested their lunch with a stroll, not a siesta. He saw everything, and let his eyes follow where Castrolami’s gaze went.

He saw her.

Had to be her.

There was a wide avenue lined with the high pines, sparse grass in the shadows. She led. A young man, good stride and arm movement, relaxed, was a metre behind her but close to her shoulder. Her T-shirt was damp-streaked and the shorts were baggy, too large – Lukas reckoned she’d begged or borrowed them from the young man. She ran well, but it was harder for her than him, and he thought she was not as conditioned as he was. Twenty metres behind them an older man rode a bicycle, the awkward sort with high handlebars that were hired out in parks, wherever. She didn’t look up, to left or right. He saw her face clearly, full and in profile. Gazed at the thrust of her chin and chest. He rated her as the type of girl who would collapse on her knees in serious exhaustion before she allowed the young man to go past her. Dust spurted from under their sneakers. He sensed the privilege he was given. He could make judgements from the sight of her, a few seconds of watching her. ‘Tough, hard and committed. Not a quitter,’ he said.

Castrolami was grim-faced. ‘We would have turned her out on to the street if we had thought she was.’

Lukas shook his head, ‘Why… why? Tell me, why does a decent nonentity boy get his arms and legs around that one – why?’

‘She is the daughter of her father. All her life she has what she wants. When she is finished with it, no longer wants it, it is discarded. There is something new she wants, and she takes it. It is the culture of the criminal clan.’

Lukas watched her draw away from him, and her escort. The bicycle squealed, needing oil. He almost enjoyed the wiggle of her butt, noted the drive in her arms and that she kept her head up and still.

‘A pity for the boy, our Eddie, that she once wanted him.’ Lukas saw her pass the kids washing in the fountain. She didn’t deign to glance at them, and he lost her.

She had made her own world and stayed inside it. She didn’t need panted conversation with Alessandro Rossi, wouldn’t stop, slump and have Giacomo Orecchia give her water. Sweat soaked her.

It was a city of betrayal, hers. Had been throughout the centuries of its history, and she thought herself a mere footnote. Betrayal was the ultimate weapon of the clans. It meant nothing, went against no culture. She took a text, an episode of the city’s history, better to remember betrayal.

She stretched her stride and couldn’t hear panting in Alessandro Rossi, but she could in Giacomo Orecchia and his wheeze went with the shriller wail of his bicycle wheels. She had learned the text as a child at school. In the year of 1486, a day in August, when Naples was further forward in architectural standards, sophistication and wealth than anywhere else in Europe, King Ferrante I of Aragon, the ruler, invited the aristocracy, who, he believed, were plotting his overthrow, to the Castel Nuovo on the shore to witness the marriage of his granddaughter to the heir of the Coppola family. They came. After the marriage service they attended a banquet in the great hall. Near the end of the feast, the king’s lord chamberlain read out the names on the arrest warrants: all of the nobility’s names were heard. The Royal Guard came in and took them into custody. That day they were tried and – before sunset – they met the king’s executioner in the yard below the castle’s ramparts. They would have betrayed the king, so the king betrayed them. It was a good story, and one from the history of her city.

She ran well.

Immacolata could not have held that pace, and kept the length of her stride, without the escort behind her. She thought herself liberated. Nothing nagged in her mind. London was behind her, and the boy, and there was a new intoxication – the betrayal. She didn’t concern herself with Eddie Deacon. She hadn’t asked him to travel, hadn’t summoned him. She thought her hair flew behind her, and still there was the wail of the bicycle wheels, and she thought that, for the first time, Rossi struggled. Those betrayed were fools to have trusted; those who betrayed were tacticians and without guilt.

She ran until they called the halt.

‘In your experience, how does it play?’ Castrolami asked him.

‘They will have moved him first to a holding location, then will shift him to something more permanent. That completed, they make the contact. They have something they consider of value and wish to trade. There has to be dialogue. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see her.’

‘You want to walk some more?’

‘To my room, to pack, then to the train station. They have to make the contact.’

The prosecutor took a call. He knew the lawyer well. For all of the prosecutor’s years in the city – in the offices of the Castel Capuana, now deserted and derelict, and in the new tower to which the Palace of Justice had moved – this man had handled the legal affairs of the Borelli family. He had contempt for him. He believed him bereft of integrity. He thought him a symbol of the corruption alive in the city. He had first met the lawyer when he had tried to prepare a case against Carmine Borelli, himself a young official, his target a man of substance, and had failed. He had met him again after the arrest of Pasquale Borelli, had negotiated a way through the court-imposed minefields and now had that clan leader locked away in Novara. He would doubtless meet the lawyer frequently now, with the arrest of Gabriella Borelli, Giovanni Borelli and Silvio Borelli, and after the extradition of Vincenzo Borelli. He heard honeyed words.

The prosecutor was asked if he was available in his office to meet with the lawyer the following day, at any time in the afternoon that was convenient. He was called ‘Professore’. He was not a professor of any form of jurisprudence – or of street-sweeping, or of the cultivation of tomatoes under glass. He did not address the lawyer by any title that might flatter him, but he could not refuse the request. He named the time and rang off.

He worked in a fortified enclave. Below his office, in the basement, were the courts in which his accused were judged. In those courts, the accused would sit on benches inside barred cages. The prosecutor was prey to a personal fear that he had not shared with a living soul: would those men and women in the cage contaminate him? They probed, all of them, for weakness. It might be through intimidation, bribery, the honey-trap and a Ukrainian prostitute, or a business opportunity that seemed legitimate and offered rich returns. The prosecutor’s wife worked in a school as an administrator and was vulnerable there, and his son was a teenager and could not have been protected without dislocation of his entire life. He himself had only a state pension to look forward to, and cash payments could be made easily into offshore accounts. He was away from home often, for meetings in Rome at the ministry, then slept in hotels and sometimes was lonely. He had enough cash in hand for a relatively frugal existence – his one indulgence his love of opera – but taxes were high and the cost of living had soared. There were many ways in which he might have been contaminated. They had such wealth, so many resources, those who sat in the cages, and he had been – so far – one of the few men regarded as incorruptible. His fear, nurtured in privacy, was that he would stumble at some hurdle. He went to conferences in Berlin, Frankfurt and London. In those cities, of course, there was criminality, organised and serious. In those cities, also, senior policemen and jurists regarded him – he was aware of it – with hands-off suspicion: he came from that city where the clan gangs ran out of control, where murder, violence and extortion were embedded, where integrity was long corroded. He did not have the respect of outsiders. For a few more years he would endure the pressure of prosecuting the clans, then retirement, home in a village in the northern mountains and… Alone, the fear was always with him.

He made a note in his diary. The lawyer to visit in person, no agenda set, the following day in mid-afternoon.

He believed events would play out predictably. He thought a boy’s life was threatened… and he would, in the next hours, prepare himself to make judgements on the value of that life.

He held his wrists as far apart as the pain would permit. Using the ridge of concrete and its serrated edge as a saw’s blade, Eddie worked on the chain. Now – yes – he was prepared to let the tip of his finger feel the scraped line on the chain’s link, and he was prepared to believe he had made a weakness. His mind roved as he scratched on the line… The time he had once grabbed a man: he had crossed a street to a far pavement where a man and a woman struggled and the man had hit the woman across the side of her face. He had intervened, had dragged the man back with some force. He had been kicked and punched – not with the ferocity of the beating in the bunker – and had been on the pavement. His eyes had misted, but he had seen the man and the woman walk away without a backward glance, and the woman had put her hand on the man’s arm, then he had dropped it across her shoulders… Scraping at the chain, feeling a line made by the concrete, switched his focus. If he succeeded and parted the chain, if he was free to fight, if it was the guy who had taken him off the street, if… What damn chance did he have?

Better than no chance. Big, brave thought. He kept on with the scraping.

He ate fit to bust, and the gastrics put the gas in his gut. Twice he had noisily released it, but Carmine Borelli had to eat a little of everything that was offered, and much was pushed at him. Most recently, he had had a piece of orange and ricotta cake, sfogliata, and a good slice of pizza Margherita, with a deep coating of mozzarella, and before that more ricotta cake, but the riccia version, with twisted pastry, and he had drunk tiny quantities of Stock brandy, sambuca and grappa, all of which should be consumed after the evening meal but would have come from handily available bottles. He must eat, drink and be seen.

He should not have drunk on the pills. Without the painkillers he could not have made his long walk around the territory he had claimed, so many years before, for his clan. The street urchins, the scugnizzi , followed him. Young men and women watched him from the pavements or from the seats of their scooters and seemed uncertain, as if they did not believe that he, Carmine Borelli, could deliver opportunity, money and the calm required for decent trafficking. It was the old who pushed cake and pizza on him, and the little glasses. Some, he thought, had known him all of those years since the power base had been formed and the men took off their caps for him and the women rose from their street chairs to touch, with a degree of reverence, his arm, his mottled gaunt hands, or to pinch a grip on his coat. The old had known him since he had made Forcella his own.

Trade in the brothels had declined and the troops had moved north towards Cassino. Heavier competition existed for the dispersal of American aid, stolen and available on the street stalls, and then God had smiled on him – a day in March 1944. Carmine looked on it as the most significant of his life. Vesuvio had erupted. A great cloud had risen from the crater in daylight, and the beginning of the molten flow was visible when night fell. Villages were consumed, roads blocked. A military airfield and its planes were enveloped in the caking, heavy dust. Food warehouses collapsed – disaster for many, a triumphant moment for a few. Carmine Borelli was Il Camionista. He owned a small fleet of lorries. The shortage of transport was desperate. He was given a lucrative contract by the military government. He prospered. He bought more lorries and was able to profit mightily from post-war reconstruction, then speedboats to pick up contraband cigarettes, heavy plant for digging the foundations of industrial sites as Rome’s government ladled money at the disaffected city. But it had all begun when he had mobilised a small fleet of lorries on the morning after Vesuvio had erupted. It was said that only firearms and ammunition, of all the items brought to Naples’ docks by the Americans, were not available on the stalls of the via Forcella the morning after they were unloaded. The men who now pressed close to him had driven those lorries and unloaded them, and the women who touched him had sold from the stalls.

Carmine toured his streets. He tried to demonstrate his authority. He was not fooled. This was the city of the lazzaroni. The mob had taken its name from the patron saint of lepers. It wanted, to be satisfied, the three F words: farina, forca e festini. It was necessary to give the lazzaroni sufficient flour, a scaffold to gather round and public festivals of entertainment. Twice in the last forty-eight hours he had given them a whiff of the scaffold, and his progress up the street was similar to a celebration.

All threatened, though, by his granddaughter. The mob could turn, owed no loyalty. If necessary, he himself would kill Immacolata’s boy. He could see, craning his neck, when he was at the top of via Forcella, near the church, the summit and cone of Vesuvio. The mountain had made him. He waved, and thought himself a king. How could she have betrayed him?

He knew. It was a germ in the family, in their blood – she had been so pretty, and he had loved her with an old man’s passion. Now he would happily slaughter her, and feel no more than if she was a sheep in the mattatoio, kill her with a knife as they did the sheep in the abattoir. He wove again, and the old men and women applauded.

Her clothes were in a loose heap. She heard the immersion heater going, as it did when someone was taking a shower. There was an en-suite bathroom off Immacolata’s room. She went into it, collected her towel from the rail, and wound it round herself, turned her back on the T-shirt, shorts, pants and bra, the socks stained with sweat from the run.

Maybe she was what they called her, a whore…

The towel covered her, except her shoulders and her legs below the knees. She went out of her room. The older one, who had bicycled, had his back to her but sat where he could see the front door to the apartment through the hallway, and did not look up as she glided, almost, over the marble veneer. She could hear the cascade of the water and went to that bathroom, which was off the corridor past the kitchen – the master bedroom was for her, the secondary two bedrooms were for them. Orecchia had not reacted as she went behind him.

She headed for the water. Immacolata thought that Rossi had toyed with her on the run in the gardens, could have passed her, gone ahead, drawn away from her, speeded up till she had sagged – and had not. He had kept his station behind her, had finally called to suggest that enough was enough, but had not succeeded in disguising his superiority, his strength. So fucking patronising. She went through the room and saw the neat pile of clothes, sweat-streaked like hers but folded and laid carefully on the floor beside the bed, which was immaculately made with perfect corners. The holster with the pistol was on the table. She went into the bathroom. This one was half the size of the en-suite attached to her bedroom. She opened the door. She could see his outline behind the screen. Did she want – at that moment – to be what they thought her, a whore?

Two movements, but simultaneous. She tugged back the plastic shower screen, and loosed the knot holding up her towel.

He gawped at her. Water, steaming, cascaded over his forehead, down his face and through the hair on his chest to the tangle of his lower stomach, and she saw the size of him, and the thick thighs. She expected him to blush, but he did not – expected him to jerk up with an erection, but he did not. The gawp had lasted only a moment. She stood naked and the towel was on her feet. It was what she would have done in the terraced house in Dalston, but only when Eddie was in the shower – God, not when any of the other boys was there. Eddie always blushed and always went… His shock was brief. He reached past her. His right arm brushed the curve of her left breast. His hand came back with a towel. He put it round him, and water spilled down it. She didn’t move, make room for him. He had to work his way past her, and when he did, his hip was against her stomach and his chest was against hers. She looked into his eyes, and he into hers. Then he was gone, behind her.

He said quietly, ‘I’m sorry your shower isn’t working, Signorina. We’ll get a plumber in to repair it.’

She stood and regret bloomed.

‘Please, Signorina, feel free to use ours.’

She stepped into the shower, felt the heat of the water, then dragged the screen across. She didn’t know then whether he watched her silhouette. She thought she had, indeed, made a whore of herself.

He said, and she could see the shadow movements as he dried, matter-of-fact, ‘In our training for induction into the Servizio Centrale Protezione, we do role-plays to cover many situations. One concerns the pentita from Naples, Carmela Palazzo, known as Cerasella. She was barely literate, pregnant at twelve, and active in the Spanish Quarter. With the family men in gaol, she controlled their speedball industry, drugs – heroin and cocaine. At a meeting inside the Poggioreale prison visiting room, the men blamed her for huge debts arising from her incompetent dealing in narcotics. She screamed abuse and was slapped across the face. In her humiliation, she went to the carabinieri, offered herself for collaboration. She was taken to a safe-house, had protection. But she was beyond control. Our role-plays involved walking with a woman collaborator on a street of shops. She puts an arm through the guard’s, which is forbidden, pretends he is her lover, her husband. How can she be protected if she holds his hand or links his arm? She goes into stores that sell underwear. She waves items of intimate clothing at the guard – ‘How do you like this, my sweetheart?’ – and the guard is embarrassed. She runs away. She is brought back. She accuses, falsely, a guard of raping her. We did many role-plays, Signorina, that were based on the actions of Cerasella. Yes, she helped in the destruction of the Mariano clan. No, the protection didn’t last. We threw her out, cut her adrift, and she was regarded as a sad, inadequate person, fit only to sell narcotics. In the role-play we’re taught how to respond to erratic personality, as when a collaborator behaves with the modesty of a prostitute. Enjoy your shower.’

The shadow was gone. Water fell. She scrubbed herself with soap. She had heard, of course, of Carmela ‘Cerasella’ Palazzo, had never met her or seen her from a distance.

She switched off the shower, towelled herself. She had wanted to show power over him.

When she came back into the living room, Rossi was dressed and sitting beside Orecchia. Nothing was said, which increased her humiliation.

She wanted arms round her, to be held, to be saved from the shame… Who could have held her? She saw his face – had gloried in betrayal – and knew who would have held her, forgiven her.

In the darkness, Eddie scratched at the chain. He reckoned he had now smoothed some two feet of the rough concrete that made the ridge, but had at least six more to work on.

New thoughts, new attitudes swam in his mind. He must cope with isolation and the fear it induced, and he believed that sawing at the chain, grinding at it obsessionally, focused him away from misery… which led to the next necessity: must try to stay positive. ‘Positive’, to Eddie, had meant advertisements to be sniggered at in which companies quoted some unheard-of American electric-shaver sales guru who would teach – for a fat fee – how to acquire confidence. His mother was a positive thinker – always regarded the glass as half full and ditched the empty bit – and his father had chided him for not having the ambition to go to the furthest limits of ability. There had been so much crap to Eddie Deacon – not any longer. And, because it was a positive reaction, he started to play a word game – took a word, stripped it, jumbled it, found new words. He would have derided it in the staffroom, and the guys in the house would have hooted at him if he’d suggested it as an exercise in mental agility… but he had stored it as an entertainment, with mental arithmetic, meaningless figures… and further down the line there would be physical exercise – maybe he would try squats, press-ups, or lying on his back and lifting his legs three or four inches. Eddie thought that being positive was important, and thought that if he ever broke the chain and freed his hands the agility – physical or mental – would save him… Had to think that.

Once he heard a voice, a whistle of some tune, and footsteps, but they didn’t approach the trapdoor. Once he heard an engine, faint and muffled, as if a car had come close, and then a radio had been switched on and off. The sounds didn’t make a pattern… That was another thing: a pattern was to be observed, noted, analysed, clung to in case the chain broke and… He worked hard, and the sweat was in his eyes, making them smart. The bucket stank worse.

He thought he wanted the bucket taken and emptied more than he wanted fresh food, more even than he wanted water.

Eddie was certain of it now. The link in the chain had a clear indentation. Not wishful thinking, more than mere positive thinking, there was a line in the steel of the chain’s link that his nail could settle in. He went at the work harder, and didn’t care to think of the consequence if he were to break open the chain link and free his hands.

Time drifted – and he created word games, arithmetic games that were more complicated, taxing, and the dust of the smoothed concrete was thicker in his nostrils, caking the outer skin of his lips. He had to do it for himself. No other bastard would.

‘How will he be?’

‘Scared,’ Lukas said. ‘Scared and alone, feeling that the world, already, has given up on him. Probably in darkness, probably trussed up, likely to be hooded.’

Castrolami drove. ‘We have kidnapping in the south, in the toecap of the boot. It is an industry, and when payment is slow there is the possibility of a knife taking off an ear or a finger and the item consigned to the postal services. But not here. I do not have the experience of it.’

Lukas thought Castrolami drove well. They went fast, had come off the autostrada and were now on a dual-carriage way. Ahead, there was a wide panoramic vista of lights, different intensity but constant, then a short, curved horizon and beyond it almost total darkness. But the Gulf of Naples was broken up by oases of lights and Lukas thought one would be the island of Capri, but didn’t know which. He could keep most layers of excitement well suppressed, but always a faint buzz-glow grew in him when he saw, the first time, his place of operations. Might have been from the hatch window of a Cessna light aircraft coming in to a jungle strip up in the mountains and far from Bogota, or from the porthole of a C-130 as it corkscrewed down towards the Bagram runway outside Kabul, or from a Black Hawk’s open hatch and over the shoulder of the machine-gunner anywhere in Shia or Sunni Iraq. If he didn’t have the buzz-glow, if he’d gotten too cynical for it, it would probably be past time for him to call it a day, go quit. It was all, sort of, routine and he had played this game so many times, and he didn’t expect to be surprised. He still had, and was grateful, the focus. They hadn’t talked much on the journey. Lukas reckoned that Castrolami was poor with chatter: they had done a little – Castrolami had a wife and children up in Milan, and they’d gone there because the job was shit and they never saw him; and he had a friend who painted, and most times he took her out he was asleep at the table by the time the meat was served; and he was forty-six, and bullets had come through the post in little padded bags… Lukas had given some: had done the FBI’s unit for Hostage Rescue, had been on the sidelines at the ‘big’ events, Ruby Ridge and Waco, did coordination now, and was a year older at forty-seven. His mother had brought him up in a trailer camp and had cleaned offices to get him through college; she was American-Italian and his father was pretty much a shit and long gone. There was a wife, Martha, and a boy, Dougie – had only mentioned his son’s name, but Lukas had said nothing else of him. They all lived together now, mother and wife and son, in the trailer park, adjacent to each other, and the cut-off didn’t seem to bother him… They had talked a bit about things that didn’t matter and didn’t affect why they rode in a car down a hill and into the city of Naples… Seemed they’d each talked enough about themselves.

Lukas said, ‘Very few hostages taken have an expectation of the risk. They come to the situation with an experience bank equal to that of a newborn child.’

‘We talk the language of “leverage”?’

‘That would be an appropriate word. “Leverage” is where we’re at.’

‘And negotiation is not an appropriate word?’

‘When we have an open line of communication, we talk a fair amount about negotiation. But it’s talk. I accept that. Talk buys time… The time is used for assets of intelligence, surveillance, informers, for just plain old-fashioned luck to chip in – I don’t come from a world where hostage-takers get rewarded. Maybe, up front, I’ve been party to them being paid for a freedom exchange, but then they get hunted down, shot or hanged, or they disappear off the face of the earth. I understand the reality.’

‘In this case, Immacolata Borelli, if we paid we would destroy an anti-kidnap strategy applicable in domestic Italy for more than thirty years.’

‘I said I understood,’ Lukas murmured.

‘And if we permitted Immacolata Borelli to withdraw her evidence in return for the boy keeping his ears, fingers, eyes – whatever else of his body that can be cut off – the programme we have of collaborators with justice is finished. The postal service would be filled with the stink of decaying flesh.’

‘Again, I understand.’

Castrolami said, ‘Close to the autostrada, where we left it, was the territory of the Nuvoletta clan. We have bypassed the zone of Scampia, which is the base of di Lauro. Now we cross the suburb of the city called Secondigliano and it is under the control of the Licciardi clan and the Contini clan. As we drive towards the old city we pass the territory of Mallardo, Misso and Mazzarella. They are the principal families of the Camorra. Then there is another level – Lo Russo, Sarno, de Luca, Caldarelli, Picirillo – and the clan of Borelli, then another level of perhaps as many as eighty clans. The first level we cannot destroy. We can make arrests – occasionally, when we find a principal – and we can disrupt, but little more. The second level is where we find the Borelli clan. With a collaborator it is possible – I used it with care, but possible – to take the conspiracy apart to the extent that it ceases to exist. The opportunity does not come every week or month, it might come once in a year, but I would believe that is optimistic. Every two years or three…’

Lukas asked, ‘She has that capability, Immacolata Borelli?’

‘We believe so. We remove a clan’s leadership. It is a ship that has no crew. More important it has no rudder. It sinks. Warfare breaks out as the void is filled, but many opportunities then come our way. In the scramble for the empty territory, other clans – ruthless in what they will do, the risks they will take, the numbers they will kill – make mistakes. Mistakes are fertile ground for us.’

‘She has that importance?’ A gently posed question. The tower blocks of great housing estates, lights climbing into the darkened skies, were gone. The streets were filled now with cars and they had slowed. Off the route, Lukas could see narrow little openings. Noise – engines, horns, music, shouting – came through the windows.

‘Immacolata Borelli can deliver us the clan – her mother, her brothers, the hitman and the enforcers, the buyers and the bankers. It is a chance for us to win. Do you know what it is, Lukas, not to win?’

‘Keep it for another day – winning and losing,’ Lukas said.

‘Some days, in life, it is necessary to win.’

‘Another day we talk about winning – and we decide if we can win twice… with the girl, with the boy.’

‘I don’t bargain with you – it is not for discussion. We have to win with the evidence of Immacolata Borelli. It is primary. If, afterwards, we save the boy – Eddie Deacon, the idiot and the imbecile, now forgotten – then we may drink some spumante. It is made at vineyards near the town of Asti, in the region of Piedmont. They use the moscato bianco grape. It is very popular in Italy. It is drunk on a celebratory occasion. I like…’

Lukas said, drily, ‘I think you don’t often get to taste spumante, my friend.’

‘It is my regret that, true, I drink it rarely.’

Lukas gave him the winter smile – no love, no life, no humour. The car was stopped against the kerb. Lukas was given directions – how far he needed to walk, how long it would take him, and was told to watch his back and put his watch in his pocket, out of sight. Castrolami told him he was going to his office, his workplace in the barracks, and would set up, discreetly, a crisis-control desk. He took from his wallet a card that bore just his name on one side, no logo, wrote his mobile number on it and gave it to Castrolami. Then he reached to the back seat and pulled the laptop out of his rucksack – needed a contortion but he achieved it – and asked that the computer be lodged at the desk overnight. They shook hands perfunctorily, like an afterthought.

He closed the door and slung the rucksack straps over his shoulders. He saw the car veer away, then lost it in traffic, but he didn’t think Castrolami had swung in his seat and waved. The sort of man Lukas was – and his judgement of Castrolami – did not take time out for relationships with professionals. A sharp punch, a quick handshake was a good par on that course. He had asked to be dropped near to the piazza Garibaldi, had not been asked why, or where he had booked a room. He recalled what he had been told, peeled off his watch and pocketed it.

The streetlights were low, the headlights blinding, and it seemed that around him the city was vibrant, alive. It flourished. Lukas couldn’t walk along a street in Baghdad or Basra, Kabul or Kandahar, Bogota or Cali. He saw backpackers in front of him, guys and girls who were half his age, would have come off a train and now trekked from the main-line station to whatever fleapit they could afford. His clothes were, of course, clean – laundered but not pressed – and he was shaven but not closely, and his short cropped hair was not brushed or combed. He lit a cigarette, dragged on it, and tobacco smoke mingled with what he breathed out. He felt good here. He pondered: Castrolami and himself, were they on opposite sides of a chequered board? A girl who was needed as a state witness was one queen, and a boy who had done ‘wrong place at wrong time’ was the other, and if the game was played to conventional rules only one could be left standing. He would have to act, if they were to claim a victory, on maverick rules. But, he had been told, it was not a city that threw up victories. He went by the cafes, the bars, the little restaurants and pizza houses, past the stalls where clothing was slung, and past tall west Africans who had laid on the paving handbags with fancy labels.

Not good for a man in Lukas’s trade to stand up and cheer if the hostage walked free, or to crumple and sag if the hostage came out zipped into a body-bag. Could do his best, nothing more. After success came another day, and after failure there was one more day to be met. He thought, though, and this hurt, that the priorities were not with the boy, and it would be a difficult road to walk… He saw the sign, lit, hardly welcoming… One more backpacker in town, older and more wizened, but unexceptional. He smiled wanly at the small group of men who stood by the step up into the pensione, and worked his way past them. None seemed to notice him.

He was greeted at the desk. He thought himself a welcome diversion from the Australian kids who had come into the lobby complaining that the toilet was blocked and wouldn’t flush. He murmured a name – the one that had been used on the reservation, which was on a passport he now offered, Canadian – then asked the guy whether he was Giuseppe. He wasn’t: Giuseppe was the day manager, worked from seven in the morning until seven in the evening. Lukas lied, said a friend had been here, had spoken well of the pensione and of Giuseppe. He was given his key.

Slowly, tired, he started up the stairs. He did not know yet which had been the floor where Eddie Deacon had taken a room. He was tired, a little hungry, and the room allocated to Lukas would, inevitably, be shit, and his situation would, inevitably, be about a thousand times better than Eddie Deacon’s. He unlocked a door, went in, kicked it shut.

He said quietly, ‘You get my best effort, kid, can’t say more – and can’t say it will be enough.’

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator