The Collaborator

11

As did his wife, Carmine Borelli possessed the cunning of the elderly and the wiliness of a veteran.

He didn’t understand the technicalities of the most modern surveillance systems employed in the piazza Dante barracks or inside the Questura, but he had grasped the need for total vigilance… His jacket collar was turned up, a loose cotton scarf covered much of his lower face and he wore a cap with a peak to hide his nose and eyes from elevated cameras. He had walked more than two kilometres, done back-doubles and alleyways, before he was satisfied. Then he had been picked up in a small repair garage in which he had a commanding financial stake. An old friend had driven him.

The car in which he had travelled to the north of the city was not a Mercedes, a BMW 7 series or an Audi, not a vehicle of status. It was a humble mass-produced Fiat, churned out by the Turin factories, anonymous. He would have confessed, climbing stiffly from the passenger seat and stepping into the sunshine, to a flutter of apprehension. It was hostile territory, and he was inside it. Mobile phones would have logged each metre the Fiat had brought him deeper into the complex of towers. He saw the scooter accelerate towards him, then brake and swerve.

He was happier to have Salvatore at his back.

When Carmine Borelli had taken charge of the Forcella district of the old city, where the streets followed the old layout of foundations put down by Roman builders, the district of Scampia had been scrub, fields and smallholdings. There was now a population of some seventy thousand. It was outside the area of his experience, and a new breed of clan leader was found here. They did not frighten him, but were a cause of anxiety. He had created wealth that was exceptional by the stricken standards of the Forcella people, and Pasquale had built on it, hugely increasing it. Vincenzo – if he was ever freed – would take it further.

Salvatore had removed the helmet and tucked it under his arm. Carmine Borelli took a cue from the hitman and doffed his cap. He unwound his cotton scarf and smoothed the collar of his jacket. It was, almost, an act of submission. It was a sign that they accepted they walked now under the protection of a more powerful man’s authority.

The families, supreme in Scampia, had wealth on different strata from that of the Borellis. They were, here, among the richest in the entire Italian state.

Those families also employed violence on a scale that could almost turn Carmine Borelli’s stomach. They fought, pursued vendettas, tortured, amputated, burned alive. He came with a request. The difficulty of asking the more powerful for favours was that a high price could be exacted. Desperate times meant desperate measures were employed.

They were checked in at a pavement-level entrance. Men spoke on mobile phones, men searched him with aggressive, disrespectful hands, men took the firearm from Salvatore’s belt, men eyed them as if they were lesser creatures. Carmine Borelli could accept the reduced status, but thought it harder for Salvatore to bow the knee. He imagined, in Salvatore, that pride burgeoned. It had to. It could not be otherwise. They were led up a flight of stairs – filth had accumulated in the well – past scattered syringes. He would not have tolerated the heroin addicts’ needles left as litter in Forcella, but the drug trade and its trafficking had come after his time of ascendancy. He was brought to an iron-barred gate across the first-level walkway.

It was unlocked by more men.

They went through, heard it clang shut, then the rattle of a heavy chain. Carmine knew little of ironwork but would have been an imbecile not to have realised that the fire brigade would need sophisticated oxyacetylene cutting gear to get through it, and it would be slow work. They walked some more, then went through another gate, similar, and climbed another staircase.

Little in life could frighten Carmine Borelli – but later he would admit to Anna, if the Virgin smiled on him and he was clear of this fuck-place, that he was uncertain, unhappy, with his experience on the lower floors of the great Sail tower in Scampia. When they were on the third level, there was another pause at another barred gate, and he breathed hard, sucking air into his lungs – and cursed a lifetime’s cigarettes. His hip ached sharply. It was good that Salvatore, disarmed, was with him. He thought, by now, they must be close. More men waited here, more mobiles were used, and he heard little jabbers of code talk. He thought the numbers were a show of strength, of power. He must acknowledge it.

What would he say? How would he say it? And why?

He would say – and it had been rehearsed in his wife’s presence, with her making suggestions, and when he had walked, avoiding possible surveillance and the gaze of cameras, and when he was in the car, being driven north to Scampia: ‘I value this meeting. I appreciate that you have given me your time. I am grateful for this opportunity. To the point. These are difficult times in Forcella. My son, Pasquale, is in Novara, and I believe your cousin and your nephew are also in Novara. My eldest grandson, Vincenzo – a fine boy – is held in London, and my younger grandsons, Giovanni and Silvio, are in Poggioreale. My beloved daughter-in-law, Gabriella, also is arrested. These are very severe times for my organisation, built with my blood and sweat for half a century and more. The threat to us now is from our own. I could tear out my tongue for speaking her name. My granddaughter, my Immacolata, has prostituted herself and taken the money of the government. She destroys all I have built. We identify a weakness. A boy from England followed her here, is stupid, is ignorant, and loves her. We hope the whore loves him. We hold him, but not where we can keep him. We need a secure place. I ask for a secure place – a week, no more – under your protection. I ask also for my son’s most able associate, Salvatore, to be allowed free access. We will put as great a burden of pressure on my granddaughter – to retract and withdraw – as is possible. Here, under your control, is the most secure place in Naples. I would, of course, pay well for such a service.’ That was what he would say.

There were more men on the walkway, at either side and in front of a door.

The door was rapped, opened.

He saw then that Salvatore was blindfolded with a cloth, perhaps one for drying dishes, but he himself was not. He prayed to the Virgin that Salvatore would accept the indignity, not curse and rip it off. He was rewarded, but he saw the heave in Salvatore’s chest. The people in Scampia could recruit Salvatore or shoot him and leave him sprawled on a pavement. He thought, himself, he was safe – too old to be butchered. Too feeble. Too insignificant. He was shown in. Salvatore was guided after him.

He was taken to the kitchen.

A man sat there, dapper, with rounded shoulders and a cigarette, lit, between his fingers. A packet of Marlboro Light lay on the table. He had good hair, well styled, and clothes that looked expensive but not luxury wear. Beside the cigarettes there was a pocket calculator and scrap paper with scrawled figures in columns. Pasquale had known this man. There were no alliances in Naples, as there were in Calabria or in Palermo, but there were arrangements. He played his part. He ducked his head, showed respect. He knew, if the request for help, co-operation, was granted that a high price would be exacted. There was no alternative. He was fascinated by the face of the man, his features. A photograph of him appeared regularly in the newspapers, but was more than twenty years old. No more recent image existed, and the newspapers said the police had never succeeded with a telephone intercept in recording his voice.

Salvatore had made the links, arranged the meeting. He had done well.

Carmine Borelli was waved to a seat. If his request was granted, the boy would be moved to the most secure suburb of the city, would be beyond reach.

He began, ‘I value this meeting. I appreciate that…’

*

He sawed at the chain. It was not a dream, not any longer. Eddie Deacon could ease his thumbnail into the growing slit in the link.

He worked harder, frantic.

He had his jacket off, hitched on his shoulder. Without the sticks that were offered at the cafe, Castrolami would not have reached halfway up the steep path.

It was still early morning, but already the haze was building and the dawn clarity was wiped out. The city was far away and distanced further by the skim of cloud that sat over it. When he stopped and turned, he could make out the runway at Capodicino, the high-rise blocks of Scampia, the cranes at the docks, the curved line of the via Francesco Caracciolo, the Castel San Elmo squat on the hill, and the Castel dell’Ovo that jutted out into the sea. He could not see his own district, let alone his block, or the block of the artist.

He had started this trek on the south-west side of the mountain for the view. It was so many years since he had attempted anything as childishly idiotic as a climb to the crater rim of Vesuvio – maybe ten. Perhaps, then, it had been in February or November, not in the heat of a September morning. The sweat spilled off him and the dust lay on his face.

It was annoying to Castrolami that the American – well, American, but claiming some Italian, maybe some German, a possibility of some British ancestry, and the certainty of being a gypsy, a mongrel that was a bastardo – walked well and kept just behind but did not heave, pant and gasp. His annoyance was increased by the refusal of the bastardo to ask, at any time, the purpose of the journey. They had left the barracks at piazza Dante, climbed into Castrolami’s car, driven away from the city and parked in the yard by the station at Scavi Pompeii. They took the bus up the hill, past the old fortifications that overlooked the sea, the ever-thinning scrub. When the bus came to the park, they were left with a final three hundred metres on foot to the rim. It would have been good to hear, ‘What the fuck are we here for?’

He had not thought to bring water. Sweat discoloured his shirt. Each time he stopped, to calm his breathing and pretend to examine the view, a steady column of tourists passed him, going up and coming down. He alone wore suit trousers and carried a jacket. It could have been that Lukas found amusement in the climb, in Castrolami’s discomfort. They hit the last metres.

The path of caked, stamped-on dust cut through a lunar landscape. Almost nothing grew here. The stones and rocks were angular, punishing, a dull, lifeless grey. There was a first viewpoint where a fence kept the tourists a metre or more back from the rim and the cliff beyond it. There were Japanese, in large numbers, so Castrolami pushed on and headed for a white metal and plastic contraption, a couple of metres high and fastened with wire stays. He thought it would do for his purpose. He leaned on a rail. Lukas came alongside him, gave him nothing, waited and kept silence. Not being asked why took the gloss from Castrolami’s moment.

His calm broke, almost a snarl of anger: ‘Do you want to know why you are here or do you not want to know?’

He was not certain but he thought he felt a weakness.

Could have been mistaken, didn’t believe so. Eddie Deacon worked at the link, running it on the rough concrete ridge. What was certain, the pit where his nail went was always deeper.

Lukas said, ‘Do you want any smart shit talk from me about what volcanoes I’ve visited, where I’ve picked up hunks of lava? I can do that talk if it’s necessary. I don’t think it is. The view is non-existent. Comfort is non-existent. Shade is non-existent. We’re the only two cretins in this place too dumb to bring water. You have, friend, my undivided attention.’

He saw Castrolami’s lips purse, reckoned the anger was at the edge of control. He thought the morning wasted. Lukas said, ‘Say what you want to say.’

There was a harshness about the crater’s rim, and the sun came up from the stones of lava fields to reflect back into his eyes. He looked down, could see far into the hole, and found himself straining to see better. A hawk soared on the east side. The drop of the cliffs from the rim to the core was uneven, ragged. Faint curls of thin smoke or steam emerged from the rocks and dissipated. Lukas supposed there was some relevance to it… and was patient. He was rewarded.

Castrolami said, defiant, ‘I should bring here everybody who visits the city to meet me. I should use it as a theatre set to explain the reality of Naples. Anyway, you are ready?’

Lukas didn’t often do snide and smartass, thought the rewards short-lived. He would need the big, sweaty, armpit-stinking carabinieri guy. He said, ‘I am.’

Castrolami flung out a hand theatrically, waved at the hole. ‘It is one thousand nine hundred and thirty years, less one month, since the eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Ercolano. There was an eruption in the year 1631, three more in the eighteenth century, four in the nineteenth century. There have been two in the last century, 1929 and 1944. Look down. You see nothing that is threatening. It is at peace, something dead. That it exploded is in history, not actual. You cannot look down and see anything that is a maximum danger. Maybe it is only the newspapers that speak of the danger. Look at it, see nothing, and be blind.’

Lukas permitted himself to be led. Did not interrupt. He assumed that Castrolami had flogged his body through the ordeal of the climb for a good reason, and waited for it.

‘The scientists call it, in English language, the “plug”. For us it is the tappo. The plug holds down the lava underneath. The plug hides the reality of what is there. The plug, to keep the vision of harmless peace, is some ten kilometres deep. Below the plug is the burning liquid mass, the lava, and you have to imagine an enormous cavern in which it boils, bubbles and is unseen, and that cavern may have a diameter of up to two hundred kilometres. If the plug breaks the cavern is emptied and pours upwards. The volcano is the city of Naples. At peace and tranquil, with fine churches and wonderful galleries and good food and wine, a triumph of sophistication, and safe. It is an illusion maintained by the strength of the plug. Out of sight and beyond your gaze there are powerful destructive forces. I brought you here to explain about Naples, the real danger and the false calm. We can go now.’

Lukas did not chide, did not complain. He thought, actually, it had been a good image and he doubted he would soon lose the sight of the scree slopes, the rockfall debris, the rough lava pieces and the smoke wisps that were all of the great forces at play he could see. He must imagine.

He started out again on the path, and dust slithered under his soles. The tourists came by him, gasping, struggling, and the sun was higher, hotter. He paused and looked down, not into the pit and on to the plug but at the city. He saw nothing that threatened, only the mist. He saw no danger in the faint hazed buildings that were toy-sized. Hard for him to understand that a poison was down there, hedged in by the blue of the sea. ‘I have it, thank you. Yes, let’s go.’

He thought of the boy – not good for him to feel emotional involvement. About the same age as the son who lived with his mother in the trailer camp, and didn’t write. He had heard from the London office that the boy’s parents spoke well of their son, and with love, and were on their knees with anxiety. He thought his own son, placed where the boy was, would have lost any will to fight after about ten minutes of capture, maybe less. He liked the face of the boy from the picture sent to him, and thought his own son nondescript, perhaps ugly. But Lukas didn’t do soap-opera sentiment. It wasn’t about the son he wished he’d had. Anyone, lame and halt or fit and fresh, would have his utmost endeavour. He had killed the thought of his own detached family, but not his mind image of the boy. They went down together. He thought Eddie Deacon would be existing in a living hell. Maybe the city itself lived under a plug but could destroy.

‘It is a good place, you agree?’

‘Do you want me to flatter you or kick you?’

‘Nothing in Naples is as it seems.’

‘Wrong,’ Lukas said. ‘The boy is kidnapped. That “is as it seems”. I enjoyed the walk, and this is not about tectonic plates, it’s about criminality. Don’t give it excuses. And I’ll buy you lunch.’

*

He thought it would break in another hour if he could increase the pressure on the link where it ran on the concrete. It seemed to bend, fractionally, in his hands.

When he had broken the link, and the chains hung from the two manacles, what would he do?

Couldn’t face that. Couldn’t think about it while the chain still held. Christ, why did nobody come? Why no sirens? Why no help? Why did nobody care? Could have screamed it – didn’t. Eddie went on sawing at the link.

‘Very grave times, Professore. Grave and unhappy.’

‘Please, distinguished avvocato, explain your request for our meeting.’ The prosecutor had not done the lawyer the favour of meeting him in his personal office – had he done so, he would then have had to abandon it while fumigation and scrubbing were carried out. He was able to be civil to and understanding of the principal criminals he met after their arrest, always found them polite and correct, of good intelligence and, in a few cases, exceptional intellect. He found some well read in modern classics and some in poetry, and with a few he had discussed with passion his love of opera. He was not sworn at, neither did he feel his home and family were threatened. The professionals – the lice on the criminals’ backs – disgusted him.

‘You understand, Professore, that material comes, unsolicited and without prior notification, through the post to my office.’

‘I understand.’

‘Material that is sent anonymously, no cover note of explanation. In this case a single sheet featuring a photograph and a written demand. Upon receiving it, I immediately telephoned your office, Professore, and you were gracious enough to permit this meeting.’

Everyone called the lawyer by his given name, Umberto. He gloried in that familiarity. Even members of the judiciary were known to use it in court. The prosecutor would not. The professional men were, the prosecutor’s belief, essential crutches for criminality. They cared for the legal matters that were the inevitable cost of a career in organised crime: they opened the bank accounts and transferred the laundered monies; they placed investments and advised on what stock should be bought or sold; they were the politicians paid handsomely for access to contracts. Sometimes, if he walked alone and unknown in the darkness and thought deeply, the prosecutor considered that the professionals might indeed be the ones who pulled the strings and the clan leaders were mere marionettes. This lawyer disgusted him, but was clever. Many man-hours had been devoted in the Palace of Justice to bringing him before the courts. As yet they had failed.

‘What do you have for me?’

‘I must say also – I was this morning stopped in the street by a stranger. A message was given to me. I have this…’

From a frayed and scratched briefcase – a symbol of experience and also of humble poverty – a transparent sheath was taken. Not ‘poverty’. The lawyer would be worth, for his work with the Borelli clan, many tens of millions of euros – paid well because he served well. The meeting was in an interview room. There was a table, with an ashtray and, four chairs. Three walls were bare and one carried a framed portrait of the President of the Republic; it was minimalist and intended to offer no comfort. The sheath was passed across the table. He saw a photograph printed on the top half of the page, and under it was the handwritten message:

If Immacolata Borelli does not make, within one week, a statement that she has left the custody of the palace and will not give testimony now, or ever, against persons known to her, this man will be killed.

The prosecutor had enjoyed a varied career but remembered best the time – four years – he had spent in Reggio Calabria; there had been similar photographs then. Staring eyes trapped in a moment of fear by the brightness of the camera flash, the filth on the shirt, or blouse or dress, the thickening stubble on a man’s face and the tangle of uncombed hair if it was a girl. Usually they held a newspaper. Usually, also, they seemed to demonstrate the desperation of the damned, as if they didn’t believe help existed, or that they were anything more than supine participants. In this photograph, the boy had a pleasant face.

‘The man who stopped me in the street – I assure you, Professore, he is unknown to me – he said that the boy taken would lose an ear after four days, a finger after five, his penis after six, then would die if Immacolata Borelli’s statement was not passed to me. I don’t know why me.’

The prosecutor remarked briskly, ‘Because you represent Pasquale Borelli and all his tribe.’

‘I’m just a messenger.’

‘Of course.’

‘I would deny that my clients, the family I have the privilege to represent, and who are hard-working, honourable people, are linked to this sad, difficult situation.’ Then he asked, innocence creasing his face, ‘Do you know who this young man is, Professore? Do you know his connection with Immacolata Borelli?’

‘No.’

‘It would be a tragic distortion of reality if the position of this young man was to weigh against the family, my clients.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m only the messenger.’

‘Again, of course. You don’t have the envelope in which this communication was sent to you? For forensic studies?’

‘I regret that it had been shredded before its contents’ significance was noted.’

‘Could you give a description of the “stranger” who accosted you?’

‘He was behind me. I never saw his face.’

‘Of course.’

There were four directions in which the future career path of the prosecutor could go. He might write the letter, give the notice of termination, go to walk in the beloved Dolomites, quit. He might be transferred to the anti-terrorism force and posted anywhere. There was the chance of promotion to Rome and the chair of command over the three primary prosecutors in Palermo, Reggio Calabria and Naples. He might just soldier on, maintain his office at the palace, beaver away at his work and log seventy hours a week. The last option had a saving grace. One day or night, he would nail this shit bastard and see him dragged away in handcuffs, unable to shield his face, past the lines of flashbulbs, and know that he was headed for the remand cells of the Poggioreale gaol and a chance to share life with pimps, thieves and pushers, the scum of the city. He never lost his temper in public. He did at home – he would pace his living room, his child shut in a bedroom and his wife gone to the kitchen, and howl at the unfairness of life. He stood up.

The lawyer rose awkwardly from his chair. The advantage of the interview room was that it did not have air-conditioning, and was therefore uncomfortable: sweat streaked him. ‘Should I be telephoned, should I be accosted again, is there a response I can give, something that will save this unfortunate from mutilation or death?’

‘No, there is not.’

The lawyer said, a cut in his voice, ‘You play, Professore, with a life.’

‘Do you speak as a link in a chain of negotiation, and therefore as part of a criminal conspiracy, or as the mere messenger?’

He did not expect a reply. The guard outside the door would escort the shit bastard from the building.

How hard was she, the girl? The prosecutor took a lift high up the tower, to look for coffee. Who could read her, and know her break-point? He carried the sheath that protected the paper with the photograph of the staring eyes, the white cheeks under the stubble, colour burned from them by the flash, the tousled hair and the dried blood on the skin. To destroy the Borelli clan would be a triumph but would carry a price. It was indeed, beneath the wide-eyed fear, a pleasant face.

He sawed, and felt the chain link weaken. He hadn’t imagined it – he knew it. He began to think of it, fighting. Began to stiffen with the stress of it – a dream or a nightmare – but kept sawing. The dust was thick on his face and his eyes hurt. He thought of everyone he knew, and wondered if any among them would believe that Eddie Deacon – in a hole with no water and a shit bucket – could break out of handcuffs and fight. His Mac, would she? Couldn’t answer that.

The shower hadn’t been mentioned, or her strip in front of Alessandro Rossi. She was subdued. Immacolata talked of her mother. The tape-recorder was controlled by Rossi and Orecchia prompted. It was general, not the detail required by Castrolami, the prosecutor or his deputy. She scratched in her mind for memories and tried to offer up the minutiae of detail. And between what she had to offer, Orecchia would speak or Rossi, as though events elsewhere had taken centre stage, and the safe-house apartment on the Collina Fleming was no longer of pivotal importance.

Orecchia had said, ‘The position of women in Naples is unique. In Naples a woman can rise higher, faster, than in the south or in Sicily. It was the legislation of 1991, all the collaborators provided for, all the arrests that followed, that took away the glass ceiling, and women flourished. If there’s a problem, what do they do? They call for the women.’

Rossi had said, ‘The women have less loyalty than the men. Pupetta Maresca, first lady of Nola, knows that her son is dead, knows that her son is in the tower supporting a flyover bridge, knows that a cocaine importer killed him, and she moves in with that man and has twins with him. She was a star – not as clever as your mother, but colder.’

She talked of her mother with detachment, as if she was speaking of a stranger she had met casually and briefly.

From Orecchia, ‘The men in the family will usually follow the orders of their father but always the orders of their mother. Another, from near Naples, Anna Mazza from Afragola. Her husband is shot so she sends her thirteen-year-old son to kill the assassin. He fails. All the men in her family are enlisted, and they go to war. Her order, the family of the killer is exterminated, and another family. One of Anna Mazza’s hitmen is killed. The revenge? That killer is taken within a day, tortured with electricity, then crucified against a door – because a woman wanted it.’

From Rossi, ‘We say of the women that they’re clever, they’re ignorant, they can’t read and write, they’re coarse or vulgar, but they’re respected and feared. All of those are true of your mother, except that she’s neither illiterate nor innumerate. She’s clever and she’s feared.’

She talked of her mother holding a meeting in the house, rare, and discussing a pending shipment from Venezuela, and seemed to acknowledge no blood ties, no family.

‘The woman at the clan’s heart enjoys the privilege given her – if she leaves it, she has nothing. Maybe it’s more important to the women than it is to the men.’

‘They say escape is impossible from Poggioreale, but Patrizia Ferriero succeeded in taking out her husband. The scam: she complained he had a severe kidney problem. She was the supreme fixer. She went to a hospital, bought the blood of a kidney patient, then arranged for it to be fed into a dialysis machine brought into Poggioreale to monitor his condition. She was allowed to transfer him to a hospital and he served his sentence in luxury. And she bought the policemen on guard duty with cocaine. Then, one day, he rose, and the police did not look, and he walked out of the hospital. Her driver and bodyguard was a former carabiniere. She was very intelligent.’

She talked in the flat tone about the mother who had not kissed, hugged or praised her.

‘We think women are more capable at criminality, but less visible.’

‘We believe that few women will stand against the lust, an orgasmic attraction, of power.’

‘You owe your mother nothing.’

‘An accident of birth does not have the right to demand loyalty.’ Immacolata said she would go to the kitchen and make lunch. Salad, fruit and cheese. She had not asked if she could run again in the gardens at the Villa Borghese.

Through his cleaned window, using the small mirror that he kept between his knee and the arm of his chair, Davide watched, saw the movement on the walkway and the bustle, and his head did not seem to waver or his eyes to move off the big-screen television. It was not usual for there to be so much movement, so many men, so early in the day. He thought he had seen, also, a clan leader, hustled along the walkway among guards towards the barred gate on level three. But his pay-masters were not concerned with the day-to-day, night-to-night dross life of the Sail. He watched everything. In his memory he noted everything. But he had witnessed nothing that would break his routine of meetings.

Eddie reckoned that in five more minutes he would have broken the chain’s link. He worked feverishly, had pain in his arms and shoulders, more dust on his face and in his eyes, more sweat and The footsteps came.

With them there was music, louder, as if doors had been opened and not closed, and the music flowed closer with the footsteps. Not one pair – might be three. They had differing rhythms and weights. Eddie didn’t know whether to use the last moment, as the footsteps came nearer, to try to break the link, or to leave the goddamn thing. Could have fought one, couldn’t fight three. Low voices were above him. They would examine the handcuffs, see the scratch line, the sawed indentation, and know what he’d done. Wouldn’t kill him, no. Might beat him. He heard the bolt pulled back, had the hood on his head and peeled down the hem, and the fraction of light from between the trapdoor’s planks was gone. Darkness enclosed him.

What was the best that could happen? That the bucket was taken out. What was the worst? Eddie shivered. The sweat on him had no heat. He realised it was a tremble. A dog in a farmyard knows it has done wrong, is called and goes forward on its belly. He had seen that on the farm where the heifers were, near his parents’ place. Wanted still to hate the man who had taken him off the street, wanted more to hear him laugh and know he was not to be beaten. The trapdoor was opened, the hinges groaning. The torch shone down and light seeped below the hood. Hands grabbed him.

He could smell the breath – chilli, maybe, but onion and nicotine too. He was pulled up. As he was dragged out through the hatch there were hands under his arms. There were no grunts, no wheezes – big men, powerful. His feet scraped the edge of the hatch and he was swung clear. His hands were dragged forward and he felt the pressure as a key was inserted into the handcuffs’ lock. They were removed. He had enough freedom to run his hands over his wrists and felt the smoothness of the welt he had made as he scraped. Then the laughter broke round him, and the chain of the handcuffs rattled – as if one manacle was held and the other danced beneath it. He heard, then, the snap as the link was prised apart. The laughter was more raucous. He waited for the blow. He tried to duck his head and to have his hands in front of his crotch, waited and- His arms were pulled behind him and a plastic tie bit into the skin where it was raw. He thought – and was bitter – they should be fucking grateful to him for giving them a fucking laugh by trying to break the fucking chain. All the hours he’d done, sawing and scraping for nothing, had given them a laugh.

Eddie could have wept.

He was held. He heard one go down into the pit, and there was the noise of the bucket swinging – whining – as its handle took the weight, then an oath. Some of his urine or faeces might have spilled out as it was hoisted. He heard, also, the rustle of the plastic bag in which his food had been. The rope at his ankles was untied. He was taken forward, and the trapdoor dropped behind him.

New fear played with him, mocked him.

Was it now they would take his penis, his finger or his ear?

He had only her picture to cling to. He had the blown-up photograph on his wall, the smile, and was so far from it and…

He kicked out his foot, took a good step. He had verged towards self-pity: forbidden. Had edged into the area of regret – that he should never have come: forbidden. He tried to walk tall, upright.

He was led out of a building and his feet crunched on broken glass. A vehicle door opened, and he was pitched forward. He knew from the smells that it was the same van as before. He didn’t think, now, that they would bring the knife to him. A rug or a blanket and maybe an old carpet were heaped on him and a boot pushed him against the bulkhead.

They went out of a yard on to a potholed track, then a tarmacked road.

Where was he going? Why was he being moved? What was the immediate future? It didn’t fucking matter. Eddie lay on the floor of the van and rode with its motion. He didn’t know of anybody out there who cared, so it didn’t fucking matter. He was near to weeping, but held off.

It was Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew and clerk, who met Anna Borelli, a legitimate meeting, not one that could have aroused suspicion. He met the aged lady on the broken pavement, among the cheap little clothing stalls on the piazza Nazionale, and they walked slowly together, her dictating the pace, towards the Poggioreale gaol. It was natural that Anna Borelli should wish to visit her two grandsons in the prison, and natural that a lawyer’s clerk should attend with her – it was an opportunity to feed the prosecutor’s reaction to the family.

The clerk didn’t chivvy her to move faster. He was well paid, already owned a car and had bought a good apartment in the high complex of offices, hotels and accommodation close to the prison and the Palace of Justice. He had done better than any of his colleagues at the university in the Faculty of Law. He would, he realised, gradually take over greater responsibility for the legal affairs of the Borelli family – the Borelli clan. He was sucked in, pulled towards a vortex. How to step aside? Difficult. How to forsake the material rewards? More difficult. He believed, with the certainty of night following day, that his future would be eked out on the far side of the high wall, which had watchtowers, guards with guns, attack dogs, searchlights and cameras. He thought it had been only the brilliance of his uncle Umberto that had kept the old man from the cells in the blocks beyond the wall. He went slowly because he hated going inside the place. It had been built ninety years before. Massimo knew the statistics. It had statutory accommodation for eleven hundred inmates and actual accommodation for two and a half thousand. There was tuberculosis in the goal, hepatitis and HIV. A nine-hundred-metre subterranean tunnel linked the cell blocks to the Palace of Justice. It was a place of hell, but it was glorified in the folklore of the city: there, clan leaders had enjoyed carpeted cells, had had personal chefs and had drunk champagne. There, murders were commonplace, alliances forged. It was where he would go, and his uncle Umberto, into sardine-tin cells, into dirt and violence, if he did not break the link… But he had a high-performance car and a fine apartment with a balcony view of the mountain.

He told Anna Borelli of his uncle’s meeting with the prosecutor. She did not reply immediately, but instead coughed, hard and grating, then spat phlegm ahead of her and let her laced shoe step in it.

They were near to the gate now. There, they would face banks of cameras and metal detectors, and they would go to cubicles for body searches. He was struck, always, by the quiet. With staff, some three thousand souls were inside the walls of rough-carved basalt from Vesuvio, but there was almost silence. Like many in the city, Massimo, the clerk, enjoyed the rewards of association and could not quite bring himself to break the link. Her voice was harsh in his ear. ‘We should have drowned the bitch at birth. Now we should slice up that boy, use a bacon cutter on him, and send her the pieces.’

Massimo knew the old woman had made coffee for the boy, had brought him a slice of cake, and would have smiled and simpered at him while her husband went for the man, Salvatore. He had, in truth but unspoken, admired Immacolata Borelli. She was four years older than him, and had hardly seemed to notice him, but he had often thought of her – and his uncle would have approved.

‘She has to be broken. Only when he is in pieces will she break. Tell the fat fool that – tell your uncle. Salvatore will understand.’

The smells hit him. He couldn’t have said which was stronger, the urine, the sweat or the disinfectant. They went through the side gate.

Salvatore rode the pillion. The problem revolved in his mind. Would he use a sharpened short-bladed knife, a chopping knife or a knife with a line of tooth points? A knife for an ear, and a different one for a finger? And which one for a penis? It was what he thought of as he rode and his chest was tight against Fangio’s back. They wove through the traffic, went fast, and the pistol barrel was hard in his groin. The problem, and the wind on his shirt, ripping at his shoulders, gave him a sense of power. They had gone through Secondigliano, were now far away from his own territory, Sanita and Forcella. They were high above the bay and crossed the ground of the Licciardi and Contini clans. That part of Secondigliano was called by everyone, maybe even a postman, Terzo Mundo. If Secondigliano was the third world – another problem – what was Scampia? It was the war ground. He was used by Pasquale or Gabriella Borelli to enforce authority perhaps once a month and no more than twice. On these streets, and in Scampia, there were bodies on the pavements most nights. They had come off the Quadrivio di Secondigliano, gone past the low-security prison, the towers were to their left and they were on via Roma Verso Scampia. He had read a week ago, before the idiocy had started, in Il Mattino, that a sociologist had said: ‘If you live in Scampia you have no hope of anything ever being better. You cannot have optimism. You have nothing and no possibility of legal work or anything that is psychologically rewarding. It is a prison. The boy growing up here as a teenager might as well be locked in the cells of a goal.’ He had read that because it was on the same page as the story about himself, named, with a photograph. He had thought it a shit article about a shit place. He lived in safe-houses scattered through Forcella and Sanita, he was optimistic, his picture was on the screen of kids’ phones, and he was rewarded. One day, one day, he would drive a Ferrari on the seafront at Nice and stay in a hotel, where a movie star would have stayed, and it would not be Gabriella Borelli in his bed – one day.

He saw the Sail again.

Fangio took him towards the great weather-stained mountain of concrete. He supported Carmine Borelli’s decision to bring the boy here for safe-keeping, but he thought the old man had given too much in return: too much of a percentage of a shipment coming to the Naples docks in three weeks, too much of a share in a contract for the rebuilding of a sewage system on the north side of Sanita. He thought them peasants, contadini, here, but he had masked his anger when the weapon was taken from him and he was blindfolded.

They were on the via Baku. Salvatore did not know where Baku was, in what country, or why a street in Scampia was named after it.

They were waved down. He said who he and Fangio were, where he went and by whose authority, and he gave the registration of the van, its maker and colour, and then he was allowed to go through.

There had been that knot of men, another at the outer end of via Baku and more at the junction of the viale della Resistenza, otherwise near emptiness… He knew that, from every angle, he was watched.

He laughed.

The scooter swerved – Fangio had twisted. He laughed because he had remembered the scratched line in the manacles. He laughed at the effort, wasted.

He thought escape from here, from the Sail in Scampia, was impossible – as impossible as from the maximum-security wing at Novara, or the one for Sicilians at Rebibia. Impossible. He had not resolved which knife he would use, which blade.

He was jolted. The braking of the van, no warning, threw Eddie forward and his shoulder cannoned against the bulkhead. The back door was opened. No ceremony. A blanket was draped over him. He was moved fast. No voices.

Eddie thought it had been four or five paces from the van and into a building. He couldn’t see, but he could smell – all the human smells but, above all, decay. They had hustled him inside but it seemed they were happy to slow and go at their own pace now, wherever they were. He was taken up a staircase. He didn’t know whether it was enclosed or open, but there was no wind on his hands, and no sun’s warmth, and the rest of his body was covered with the blanket.

He was not hit.

Small mercy. He was thankful.

Another flight of stairs – he’d tried to count. To count was to be positive. Reckoned, as best he could, that he was on a third floor, then went along some sort of corridor – it was wide because men were alongside him, to his left and his right, and they had his arms at the elbows. Not a word spoken. Would have said he went a clear hundred paces along the walkway.

Heard a knock, heard a door open in an instant response. Was jostled through the gap, narrow because one man led, he followed and another man had to wait to come behind. Now he heard a television set blaring, but not near. Bolts were drawn back, and another door opened. He was pushed and pulled inside a room, and knew the space was small and that there was no open window because he was hit by clammy warmth, suffocating.

A chain was put on Eddie’s ankle – he felt its weight, tight against the bone. The blanket was pulled off, and the plastic strip that had gouged his wrists was cut.

The door closed, was bolted.

The sound of the television was gone, and silence crushed him. He did not start to learn his new prison, its dimensions. He slumped – stood against a wall, bent his knees and let his weight take him to his haunches, then toppled over. The chain tightened and he lay on his side. He had not bothered to remove the hood.

He wondered if he was beaten.

Lukas walked. It was good for him to feel the air of the city, to breathe it and learn from it. It might be the last chance he had to indulge himself, and he was mean with his time, did not willingly waste it. He soaked up what was around him.

He called it a ‘tipping point’, and had identified it from what Castrolami had told him. A mobile call, the Italian’s phone clamped to his ear, the frown deepening, the gasps on the cigarette faster and deeper, the phone shut down. They had been close to the barracks at piazza Dante. He had been told of the meeting at which an official at the Palace of Justice had met the corrupt lawyer, one of those who always ran with bad guys, a photograph and a demand. He had asked them if he could walk, feel the small streets.

They crowded close to him. Hanging washing made an arch over him. Cooking scents fed him. Lukas went to a chapel, paid to go past the door, stood in awe and stared at Sammartino’s Veiled Christ, so lifelike, marble made into flesh and cloth, and was in the majesty of the place for three minutes, no more, had learned and had pondered on the tipping point.

Not original. A lecturer at Quantico had spoken of a tipping point, had offered an analogy of the final gram going on to the scales and toppling the equilibrium. A legal assistant, drawing up the separation agreement in Charlotte, had talked of the tipping point as the moment when a failing relationship became irretrievable. A sociologist doing demography out of the Green Zone, in safe, comfortable Baghdad, had done the study on Sunni and Shia mixed neighbourhoods, but when one side began to leave – Shia or Sunni – the tipping point was reached when goddam ethnic cleansing was on its way, the flight started, and what had been mixed was now either Shia or Sunni. A tipping point was reached when what had meandered took on a new momentum.

It had.

A photograph and a demand changed the game. It increased the pressure on Castrolami and his people to keep the girl in line, and on Lukas to get the boy out. It increased the pressure on the girl he had seen running, and on the people who held the boy. Heavy pressure now – all different.

He did not have a map in his pocket. He was in an old city, on streets where shoes, sandals and boots had strolled, walked and trekked for two millennia. He did not know, could not have said, whether he was close or far distant from where Eddie Deacon was held, but Lukas seemed to flare his nostrils. He gazed at faces, at windows and at shadows. He was a fighter. It was his preparation once a tipping point had been reached.

He went to work, walked faster.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator