The Collaborator

12

Three men brought food. Two filled the doorway, and the third came in. There was light behind them, above their heads and shoulders, and it flooded inside. He was still sitting, hadn’t moved, cramped and stiff, but he pushed himself up. The man who came in was the guy who had snatched him off the street; the eyes were clear, cold and blue-grey. The fingers were long, delicate, almost a musician’s. The lips were thin, without the life that blood brought, perhaps cruel. Eddie barely looked at the face, only the eyes and lips, then the fingers.

In the fingers there was a lightweight plastic plate, with slices of sausage and a portion of cheese. There was a plastic water bottle on its side. The plate was laid on the floor, but beyond Eddie’s reach. A trainer toe edged it across the floor. The movement shook it and a piece of bread fell off on to the worn, grimy linoleum. It could not have been washed in months, maybe years – there was a tackiness to it that could have come from dried urine or spilled food. Eddie looked into the eyes: had it been an accident or done purposely? Nothing showed.

It was no matter to the guy that the bread had gone on the floor. The lips didn’t move and no expression crossed his face. Eddie took the opportunity. He’d heard once that it was called ‘peripheral vision’, and he tried to keep his head static but to use his eyes to rake across the space. About eight feet square. About seven feet high. A window at the top of one wall, but covered with heavy-duty hardboard – he could see the pattern of the nails fastening it. There was a metal bucket. There was a ring attached to the wall to which the chain was fastened. There was graffiti on the walls, which had once been whitewashed, but he couldn’t read what had been written. The door had steel sheeting on the inside. All those things he absorbed and stored, and his head didn’t move. Why did he absorb, store?

It was his refrain. No self-pity, but acceptance of reality. No one was coming for him. His life was in his own hands, that sort of crap… Heavy, heavy stuff. He saw ants on the floor, little beggars scurrying. The piece of bread off the plate was in their line of march.

A voice: ‘You are OK?’

Eddie gagged. Why did the bastard care? He didn’t know how he should reply to the hesitant question in accented English.

‘Well, there’s a fucking chain on my-’

He was kicked. The trainer swung over the plate and the toecap caught him a little above his right knee, hard. When the foot swung back, the heel clipped the plastic plate, and all the bread was on the floor, with the cheese and the sausage. The water bottle rolled away. He wasn’t kicked again but the door was shut, locked and bolted, then nothing.

He would initiate a short debate. Better to say, in answer to the question ‘You are OK?’, that he was fine, grateful for the kindness and room service? Better to say that he was not OK because he had a ‘fucking chain’ on his ankle? Better to be passive, or better to earn a kicking? No decision taken. No consensus of opinion. Better to crawl to the bastard, or better to fight? Didn’t know. How could he? They hadn’t done survival training at the sixth-form college in Wiltshire, or at the university. At the language school there were no extra-curricular classes in it. The kick had hit the bone above the knee, and the bruising hurt, but he felt better for bawling out the bastard.

He wondered how far the ants had reached. Wondered if they had found his food on the floor. He squatted down, gave the chain a pull but merely jarred his wrists, then reached out, blind, to collect the bread, the sausage and the cheese. He had thought, when he had been able to see the food, that there might have been blue mould on the bread crust. Better when there was no light, and when he couldn’t see the ant column.

Eddie ate his food. He didn’t taste mould but had grit from the linoleum in his mouth, and didn’t know if he had swallowed a platoon of ants. He ate part of the food left for him, then went to work.

He stood up. Stretching, leaving his weight on the manacled foot, he could touch the wall where the window was set. It would be his first target. He tried to get his fingernails into the space between the wall at the edge of the hardboard, but could not. He tried until the nail of his right forefinger cracked far down. The pain was sharp and he winced, then sagged back – maybe half a minute, no more. Stood again, stretched again – and again could get no leverage on the window. He realised more. His head was against the hardboard, his ear to it, but he couldn’t hear anything: no music, no television, no kids, no laughter or shouting. What he did not hear told Eddie that there was soundproofing beyond the hardboard, which meant additional layers, and he couldn’t shift the first layer, and he couldn’t reach the door, and he couldn’t shift the ring that held the chain – and he couldn’t stop the pain in his finger from the broken nail. He’d once read something an academic had said on courage: ‘The important thing when you’re going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.’ And he’d read something an American had said on heroes: ‘We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the kerb and clap as they go by.’ Might have been both, might have been one – didn’t know which – but he laughed. Good to laugh, bloody good. Not a big laugh, a belly laugh, a gut-shaker, but a pleasant enough chuckle.

New experiences walked with Eddie Deacon. On his hands and knees, on linoleum and in the crack where the edge met the base of the wall, he searched, wondering whether he was close to the ants’ camp from which they came out to forage on his bread, cheese and sausage. While he searched he didn’t think of the knife, which blade they would use. His hands pushed and probed. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he searched.

*

The game-show on television was new – one of the Milan-based independent channels – and the girls in the show went topless. It was the third week that Davide had watched it. He would have said, if asked for a true response, that he believed the girls on display were hopelessly anorexic… He didn’t have that level of conversation in the Sail.

Ostensibly, in his chair in front of the television, it appeared to any man on the walkway peering through the cleaned, polished window, that Davide – the idiot, harmless – gazed longingly at the slack breasts that bounced on gaunt, lined ribcages. But the agent had the mirror wedged between his thigh and the side of the chair. He had seen much movement that day, more than was usual, and personalities.

He was an agent, a watcher, and had been sent on a crash course to gain the skills, was knowledgeable on the workings of electricity. Nobody, of course, who lived in the great Sail paid the state company for electricity. Nobody ever had to face final demands delivered by postal officials. Nobody was ever cut off for non-payment. Davide, as he was known, was not required to run cables from the main supply into the apartments on level three, but he was useful when a fusebox blew and when new plugs were needed. Then he was sent for. That was good. The poor, the derelicts and the addicts did not have the electrical appliances that blew out fuses. Men high in the chain of command did. That was good for his handlers.

Four months before, he had been to an apartment nineteen doors further along the walkway, and had wired in four new power sockets, had noted the carpeting and furniture, the shrine to the Virgin and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, in translation, on a table. So, Delta465/Foxtrot had identified the safe-house used by a principal clan leader on the third level of the Sail. He had seen the man, the reader of a Russian classic, that day. That man – who, the agent’s handlers said, was among the four most influential and powerful crime players in the city – had walked past the polished windows surrounded by his guards. He had gone towards the apartment, and an old man, limping, with another man, had been escorted after him. Then the big player had come again past Davide’s window, and a hooded man had been dragged by. His handlers would be interested only in information relating to that principal. His handlers were not policemen: they were interested only in the most senior men. Everything the agent saw he remembered, and to back his elephantine memory there were tapes.

His handlers had placed him in the Sail four years before.

He was a crusader. He was there because he wished to make a difference. A son buried, and the heroin microbe gone in his veins to the grave. A wife had walked out on him, unable to weather the strain of an addict youth. At the time of the death and the walk-out, he had worked in a bank in a resort town on the Adriatic. He had volunteered himself, had not been accepted, had come to live in a neighbouring tower on the far side of the viale della Resistenza, had made the second approach, had been accepted, given a code name and a cover history that checked, had been found the apartment, number 374. Once every week he took the bus into town, reported and delivered tapes. Once, also, every week he went to the mini-mart and bought the basics of sustenance. The rest of his waking hours he spent watching the walkway, or sat behind a lace curtain in his bedroom, observing the street below.

He knew every pulsebeat of the Sail.

Knew the times that the buses came from the railway station down the hill on piazza Garibaldi. Scampia, with the Sail at its heart, was the narcotics supermarket of Italy, even of Europe. Both users and dealers took trains to come here from all over Italy, from Frankfurt and Berlin, Paris and Marseille, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Madrid and Barcelona. The regular bus service waited for them at the station, and if the police stopped the buses there were taxis. A watcher on a street corner, a teenage youth, was paid two hundred euros a day, and there were twenty piazze, each administered by a capopiazza. They were the locations where cocaine, heroin and ecstasy were sold in Scampia. All needed watchers, and watchers were employed in three shifts. An army had been recruited to watch the bus passengers coming in, and those driving their own cars, and to warn of the approach of the police. The boy who went from the customer to the dealer could make eight thousand euros a month – and eight hundred if he was, extraordinarily, to get a job in a factory. Each piazza, his handlers had told Davide, generated an income of fifty thousand euros a week, so the trade for this abandoned urban slumland brought in a guaranteed minimum of fifty million euros a year. Just what was sold on the streets of one suburb of the city. The figure, they emphasised, was a minimum. A young buck, if ruthless, if charismatic enough to find blind followers, can head a clan by the age of thirty – can be worth a billion euros. It was a fighting ground. In the late evenings, when his television was turned off, Davide would sit in his darkened bedroom and rely on the few streetlights still working for necessary illumination to watch trading and killing, linked. Clans clashed: assassins went after a man, couldn’t find him, took his woman, tortured her for information on his whereabouts. She wouldn’t tell so she was trussed and put into a car, which was torched: in Scampia. A man was beheaded with a butcher’s axe: in Scampia. The assassins came to take a man from his mother’s home – he had already fled; his mother, in her nightdress, was shot on her step and bled to death: in Scampia.

He watched, every day and every night, and knew the vagaries of the pulsebeat of the Sail… and a short bus ride from the stop on via Baku was the old city, patronised by the tourists, the lovers of fine arts and the gourmets, who did not know about Scampia.

His eyes flitted between the mirror against his thigh and the game-show. He knew that, in the depths of this monstrous building, a drama played around a hooded man.

‘Don’t ask me any questions. If you ask it will be wasted breath, yours, wasted time, mine. All I can say, what you tell me is of critical importance to the well-being of your friend, of Eddie.’

He had marched them down to the pub. Roddy ‘Duck’ Johnstone had taken a corner table, then gone to the bar, had been given a tray by the barmaid and had come back with two pints for each of the three lads – one missing, still at work – and a single Scotch for himself, six packets of crisps and six of peanuts.

His question: ‘Tough or weak, determined or vacuous, hard or soft, serious or kid-like? Which is Eddie?’

He didn’t need names, hadn’t a tape-recorder and no need of a notepad.

From the club waiter, who would be late at work: ‘He’d like you to think he’s just a lazy tosser, that nothing matters to him, that he’s a push-over. Maybe he was, but not any more. He’s changed. Actually, he’s quite tough. I think he’s pretty determined.’

The PhD student’s contribution: ‘The role he acts is that he’s weak and soft – just a prat, really. Maybe he was. Everything’s altered, though, hasn’t it? A new man, our Eddie. Quite funny to watch it.’

Hunched forward, the Revenue and Customs clerk said, ‘He wanted to seem a kid still, never going to grow up – like the thing he’d run a mile from fast was responsibility. That’s in the past. Gone to the recycle bin. Different guy – and maybe carrying us with him. Tough? Probably, and getting tougher. Determined? Wouldn’t have jacked the job and done what he has if he wasn’t. Hard and serious, I suppose so – but it’s like I said, and us too.’

He listened. He let them tell their anecdotes, put more pints in front of them and didn’t speak until he felt he’d drained them.

Late, Duck asked, ‘What was different? How had he changed? What was new?’

Like a chorus, spoken together: ‘It was Mac. She turned up. That is one fantastic person. Immacolata was what was different. She changed him, maybe us. Immacolata was the new thing. Sorry and all that if we don’t express it well. Immacolata was brilliant. Any guy would be crazy not to go after her. Are you going to tell us what this is all about? What’s of critical importance?’

He bought a last round, more crisps, and left them.

He drove back to his office, went inside. He started to type and tried to express what three pretty inarticulate guys, decent enough, second-rate enough, had said about their friend and about the girl – and didn’t know whether he did a good job or a poor one, and whether he had painted a fair enough portrait of her.

Could she go into the Borghese and run?

Rossi said she couldn’t.

Why not?

‘Because Castrolami has to give permission, and he’s in Naples.’

Why was he in Naples?

‘I think you know, Signorina. Try to remember, please, the lie you told.’

The tape-recorder had been put away. Of course it was foolish to imagine they would allow her to run in the darkness. She worked towards the challenge.

Could they go that evening to a restaurant?

Orecchia said they could not.

Why was it not possible to eat in a restaurant?

‘It requires the permission of the investigating agent, Castrolami, or of the prosecutor. Both are in Naples, and I won’t call them for this. There is food in the kitchen.’

Why were they in Naples?

Orecchia did not look up from his magazine. ‘I think you know very well, Signorina, what business they have in Naples. If you hadn’t lied it would have been different, but you did. You aren’t going to run or to a restaurant.’

She stood then, legs a little apart, pelvis forward, head back, chin jutted, and built on the challenge. ‘Am I difficult? Are many collaborators “difficult”? Will you write a report on me as difficult?’

Rossi said, ‘A few aren’t particularly helpful.’

Orecchia said, ‘Some, not many, go on believing, Signorina, that they’re still on the pedestal they enjoyed while their family was Cosa Nostra or ’Ndrangheta or Camorra. Some, until they have disabused themselves, are “difficult”. We believe they’re frightened of the reality of their situation – which they created of their own free will. You can flounce, pout, stamp, throw plates and slam doors, shout or wave your boobs and fanny at Alessandro, but nothing will change.’

She sucked in her breath, prepared to bare her spirit.

‘I should tell you that Alessandro’s wife is exceptionally attractive. Very much more attractive, mentally and physically, than you.’

She spat the question: ‘What’s happened to him?’

They looked at her dumbly. Perhaps they’d practised their expressions of incomprehension. Orecchia had returned to his magazine, as if he didn’t understand who ‘him’ was. Rossi had not reacted to the description of his wife. Orecchia’s tone had been harsh and unforgiving, as if he had spoken to a child in a school room – not that such a volley of insults had ever been directed at Immacolata Borelli at school. Her mother had brought her on the first day to the Forcella infants’ classroom. The head teacher and the year teacher had been lined up as if she was heiress to the Bourbon dynasty. A seat had been found for her at the front of the room, and the staff had bowed and scraped because she was the daughter of the Borelli clan. Her father had taken her on the first day to the middle school, had materialised from his life as a fugitive, and slipped an envelope stuffed with banknotes into the hand of the head teacher, murmuring about new electronic equipment. It had been pocketed, with discretion. Her eldest brother, Vincenzo, had escorted her to the senior school, and had oozed power as he walked alongside her into the building. At every level of school she had attended, her marks in examinations had been exceptional, her reports remarkable. She was the daughter of the Borelli family, and no teacher would have been stupid enough to mark her down or criticise her. Only at the accountancy and book-keeping college had she been treated, almost, as another kid – and there she had met her friend, Marianna Rossetti, and… Orecchia and Rossi spoke to her as if she was any other child, one who was not given the seat of privilege at the front.

She repeated it, more shrilly: ‘What has happened to him? What has happened to Eddie?’

Their eyes met. Unspoken acceptance that something must be said, something minimal.

Orecchia said, ‘The boy you indicated was unimportant to you? Yes? We don’t know what has “happened” to him.’

Rossi said, ‘Signorina, we are very junior links in a very long chain. We would not be told the latest intelligence. We don’t know.’

‘Castrolami would tell you if he knew anything, or the prosecutor.’

‘We are merely functionaries. They don’t share that sort of information with people at our level.’

Doubt clouded her. ‘You know nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing of substance.’

She went to her room, didn’t bang the door but closed it carefully. She stood at the window and gazed out over the roofs, and myriad lights stretched away from her. None was in the home of a friend, or lit the street of a friend, or was driven on a road by a friend. She had no friend in this city. She stripped, let her clothes fall, and stared out of the window at the expanse of lights. The air chilled her skin. It hurt that she didn’t know what had happened to him – hurt that she had made a play in her mind of ignorance.

She knew what happened to members of the family of a collaborator, to their friends and lovers. Ignorance was not a screen behind which she could hide.

She thought it was Orecchia’s voice she could hear, and imagined he had telephoned Naples to tell Castrolami of her hysteria – but had not rated it a problem.

Off the operations room at the piazza Dante barracks there was a square annexe space, four metres by three, no more. Into it had been crowded a work surface, six computer screens and keyboards, the same number of chairs and scattered telephones and, at the edge, more chairs. There was no window, and cigarette smoke fogged the air.

He knew the names of the two men who shared the work surface with him, but Lukas did not make conversation, had no wish to or need to; neither did he think it would be welcomed. One was the carabinieri unit’s psicologia, the other was the unit’s intelligence collator. He bided his time because experience had taught him that the psychologist and the collator had to be won over, would not respond to being battered into submission. Lounging against the annexe walls there were sometimes three, sometimes four, of the fast-reaction team – Lukas knew about the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale – their kit scattered at their feet: flak-vests, caps, windcheaters, boots and radios. Down a corridor there were more of them. He was an intruder, tolerated only because word would have come from Rome that he had saved the life of a colleague: it allowed him to be accepted but not welcomed. That would come later, if he could insinuate himself without breeding hostility. They talked Italian round him and he gave no sign of understanding a word they said. He had good Italian but, as with other European languages, he favoured often disguising the fact.

A concession: he had been brought coffee, with a ham- and salad-filled roll.

He learned that every informant in the city, used by the Squadra Mobile of the police and by the carabinieri ’s serious crime squad, had been alerted to the kidnap of the English boy. Learned also that teams scoured CCTV tapes for evidence of the abduction and the movement of a hostage. Learned as well that the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli were now under twenty-four-hour surveillance, as was their lawyer, as were all known associates, and that the watchers and tailers had been stripped from high-profile targets. Learned that one of the clans’ most effective and feared assassins, the Borelli family’s man, was loose on the streets, location unknown. Learned that an ear, a finger or a penis was expected in the post, soon.

And Lukas learned that the informants had produced nothing. Learned that the CCTV tapes had given up nothing, or the surveillance operation. He would have said that the faces around him were not cut by disappointment: he sensed fatalism, the inevitability of failure. Too early in the relationship with the annexe for him to chivvy, far too early to press a point. Did time exist for the niceties and the protocols? It had to. An alternative did not.

Lukas would know when he was accepted by the psychologist and the collator, the guys from the ROS, the storm squad, when they took his cigarettes and offered him their own… Not yet. They smoked theirs and he smoked his, but the coffee and the roll were a start.

As a kid from the trailer park, he had found virtue in waiting and patience. Any kid from a trailer home – a father who was part-Brit, part-Polish, and gone in search of better-carat gold-paved streets, a mother who was part-American, part-Italian, who cleaned offices, no money sloshing in pockets – knew that waiting and patience paid dividends. He would wait with patience until his opinion was asked and advice requested. Already he sensed a poor outcome was anticipated.

Could have been worse. There was an icon story about hostage negotiation, had to be true, too precious not to be. Some said the icon was a British guy, having a real black day, climbing a crane ladder to a jerk sitting on a spar above him, squealing that he was about to go fly and that he’d not be talked out of it, mind-made-up crap. The icon had shouted back: ‘Way I’m feeling this morning, friend, way my missus is carrying on, do you mind if I come up there and join you? We can bloody jump, fly, together.’ The story was that the Brit guy meant it – would have. The story also was that the jerk didn’t want to share and came straight down. There was always somewhere that it was worse for someone.

It was getting late, and there was room in the ashtray, on the table between Lukas, the psychologist and the collator, for maybe six more butts. He’d stay that long… It was always about intelligence. The psychologist could feed in opinions, but intelligence gave facts – and nothing came.

Late that evening, he walked with the prosecutor. It was difficult for either man to say that he was subjected to a greater or lesser emotion – or no emotion – than usual when they knew a wretch was beyond reach. Both the prosecutor and Castrolami relished the cool of the air, almost a chill on the face, drying the day’s sweat. They were outside the palace and traversed the wide piazza, with the towers of the financial district, the Holiday Inn and sought-after apartments ahead. On what they earned as servants of the state, Castrolami and the prosecutor had no chance of purchasing or renting a place in one of those blocks. Neither did they need the services of the financial institutions lodged there, but to their right was a church, a better place. Lights beamed from it, and Castrolami could see the figures inside. He thought it a rehearsal for a wedding.

There were bodyguards behind them, the prosecutor’s, a pair of men. The church drew them as they talked.

The desk at piazza Dante reported nothing.

Rome reported a crisis point.

What to do?

The church was modern, finished in 1990, and the concrete of its slim pyramid shape, and the narrowing twin towers that supported the bell, was not yet weather-stained. It was named after a saint, Carlo Borromeo – died 1584, aged forty-six, in Milan of a fever from the plague sweeping the city; he had helped the sick at great personal risk and paid for it with his life. It was a dramatic building, a feature of the centro direzionale, and the prosecutor was a familiar figure there. He led Castrolami inside.

The bride was not beautiful and the groom was not handsome; she wore a skirt about three centimetres too short and the other faded jeans. They pledged their future, and had good voices.

Castrolami said, ‘I had felt her to be strong. Now I sense weakness.’

The prosecutor’s voice was soft, would have been inaudible to the couple, their supporters, the priest, and the woman who worked the portable CD player for their music. ‘I always look for a priority.’

‘Her evidence statement, taken with full legal cover, her appearance in person in court as a witness.’

‘I look for a priority, then for accommodation of it.’

‘There is no accommodation – excuse me. There cannot be.’

‘We cling, then, to the priority.’

‘The statement, then the appearance. There can be no manoeuvre.’ Castrolami shrugged. Perhaps then he thought of his own marriage. His wife, severe-faced, wrapped in sheets of white material, and himself in a full-dress uniform, a serious dispute within a week over the date of her mother’s first overnight stay at their one-bedroom apartment: his mother-in-law and his wife would share the marriage bed, and he would sleep in the living room on a pump-up – no accommodation, no compromise, no manoeuvre. Extraordinarily, he had stayed long enough with his wife to produce three children. He visited each year, stayed a few days, drank too much, then piled, with relief, on to the fast train from Milan to the south. He was – his own words – pathetic, sad and a committed, dedicated, single-minded, focused investigator. He supposed that – in an inexplicable fashion – he represented the hopes of the girl with the short skirt and the boy in old jeans. ‘The priority alone is worthy of consideration. She goes to court, she gives evidence. There is no question of stepping aside from the priority.’

‘The boy came of his own free will. He was not volunteered. We’ll do what we can for him.’

‘He doesn’t intrude on the priority.’

‘Even if we condemn him.’

‘I want to bring her back to the city.’

They watched the taking of the mock vows, heard the moment of laughter filtering through the high building as the couple were invited to kiss, and did so with rare passion. Castrolami told the prosecutor what he wanted, why and when, and it was agreed.

‘And the boy? Attractive, intelligent, interesting?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Castrolami said. ‘We’ve decided on the priority. He is in second place.’

The prosecutor bowed towards the altar where the couple talked small detail with the priest, crossed himself, then turned for the door. He was reflective. ‘In the world war, there were occasions when a ship was torpedoed and sunk, and sailors were in the water, injured and choking on oil, but because the enemy’s submarine wasn’t located ships didn’t dare to stop and pick up the survivors. They sailed past and through them. It was a question of priorities. I think they weigh heavily.’

‘We’ll do what we can,’ Castrolami said flatly. ‘Priorities rule us. A great truth can’t be ignored.’

‘Good night. Pray for him.’

They parted, turned their backs on the church.

Nobody could refuse her. Nobody could dare to leave a shuttered window, a locked door and a darkened interior for her.

With a slow, crabbed step, Anna Borelli – in her eighty-eighth year – came late that evening along the via Duomo. She had already been the length of the via Carbonara, up the slope on the right and down on the left, and before she was finished she would have traversed the via dei Tribunali, the west side. Some boys walked with her. They had been ordered to stay outside the shops and bars she visited, but they were seen and they carried hand weapons – axe handles, a baseball bat, a claw hammer – and they had mobile phones linked to an outer ring of watchers. It was not necessary for her to intimidate. All paid the pizzo. It was not inside the perimeters of reality to avoid payment.

She was a small crow of a woman.

She stepped among filth and rubbish because those streets were not on the tourist routes. There was a corner, a junction, where Carmine had shot a rival more than a half-century before; had fired two shots and one had missed the target, the rival’s head; there was still the mark in the stone by the bar’s entrance where the bullet had struck. There was a bar, now under the clan’s control, in which five shots had been fired into the ceiling before Carmine had been accepted as protector. There was a vehicle-repair yard where a body – a man killed by Carmine, manual strangulation – had been kept for five days before it had been safe to move it to the pits of a factory’s foundations into which concrete was poured. She walked well, and felt the control that power gave, and fear. People on those streets begged for her cracked smile and blessed her when she gave it.

She called on those shopkeepers, small businesses, cafes and bars, and all were there though it was now late in the evening. She was admitted and shown the books. She discussed profit margins and heard dismal explanations of the pressures from global, national and local economic recession.

Unmoved, Anna Borelli told them what they should – in the future – be paying. In very few of the premises did she offer a reduction or no change in the amount paid monthly in the pizzo. She raised the protection fee, and in so doing she gave the impression that her daughter-in-law had allowed slackness to creep into the affairs of the clan. Those for whom the price was hiked did not complain, bluster, argue. There had been a woman, four years ago, who owned a paint store in the San Giovanni district: she had refused payment, and also to cash a cheque made out for a hundred thousand euros. Men had been imprisoned and the woman had been in the newspapers; and even in Time magazine. There had been demonstrations in support of her, but nothing had changed and people still paid as they had before. The woman lived under police guard now and made no money. An empty gesture, Anna Borelli thought.

With some, she gossiped about their children. With some she talked about her husband – a bladder problem and difficulty in the hips. With a few she recounted the situation in the Poggioreale that faced her grandsons, the misunderstood, persecuted Giovanni, the innocent, gentle Silvio. With others she discussed the circumstances of the incarceration in the north of her only son, Pasquale, and the brutality of the prison officers. All of them, she knew, would have liked to talk about the infame, the treachery of her granddaughter, Immacolata. None did. None dared. The majority had had their pizzo fixed by Immacolata and confirmed by Gabriella Borelli. All knew the girl. She was not spoken of.

The old woman knew that when she left each of the premises, and the door was locked, the shutters dropped, the lights turned off, it would be Immacolata – the whore – whose name flitted on the lips, and there would be sniggers. The bitch was dead. A grandmother had decreed it. The whore, the traitor, the infame was condemned.

Her secret: she knew also what leverage could be exerted on the girl who was damned – as a lemon was squeezed until the pips burst through the rind.

He searched. He crawled on the floor, went as far as the chain permitted him: there was no concrete ridge on this floor and the chain links were double the thickness of those in the bunker. That opportunity would not be repeated. He started again, and searched.

Couldn’t find a thick woollen red sock under the bed or the easy chair or in a corner of his room in Dalston. And couldn’t find a shoe in his room at his parents’ home in Wiltshire. Couldn’t find the big bright-coloured folders with his teaching notes that he’d left lying in the staff room at the college. The idea of Eddie Deacon on his hands and knees in darkness, relying on touch to a methodical, careful, painstaking search would have appeared ludicrous to the guys in the house, or his mum and dad, or to the other lecturers. They would have had him down as a ‘shambles’ in personal organisation, ‘untidy’ to a degree, simply ‘chaotic’. The chain rattled, responding to each movement of his trailing leg.

He wasn’t hungry or thirsty, but it seemed an age since he had eaten the food brought him.

He had lost track of the times when it was necessary to eat and drink. Get up in the morning, in Dalston, wash, shave, do his teeth and use the toilet, then down the stairs and must have a slice of toast from old bread past its date, must have with it a smear of margarine and jam, must have coffee to wash it down. A break for lunch at work. Bells ringing, lecture rooms emptying, and sandwiches, rolls or instant soup in the staff room, must have something or all known forms of life would end. A microwave meal in the evening, or a trip to a cheap Italian, a curry house or the Afghan was a must -do, and the familiar corner seat afterwards in the pub and some pints. Down to his mother and father’s at a weekend and must have a piece of beef, pork or a leg of lamb for lunch – life couldn’t go on without it. Eddie had no watch, no sense of hours passing, no knowledge of when darkness would come beyond the boarded-up window, no hunger and no thirst.

What did he look for? He didn’t know.

Why did he look for something? There was no acceptable alternative. It wasn’t acceptable to lie back and wait for them to come with the knife.

He did the floor and the walls, smoothed them with his fingertips and used the sensitivity of his palms. Didn’t find anything. Found nothing that was of use. Only the clank of the chain kept him company. He had gone round the floor, up the walls and round the blocked window, but had found nothing.

He began again.

He made a change. He took the image of Immacolata out of his mind, as if it was a transparency slide and slotted in a projector, and replaced it with the image of his captor – the man he hated – and kept it in his mind. Like a new day starting. Was he delirious? Was he hallucinating? Was the face a fantasy? It had its use: it concentrated him.

He worked at the search, and had a refrain: he must save himself because no one else would.

The streets around the pensione were raucous, crowded, exploding with noise and movement. Lukas came through the door, which swung shut behind him. Inside there was stillness.

He was handed his key by a small man, dapper and neat.

Lukas thanked him. ‘You’re Giuseppe?’

‘I am, sir.’

‘You’re the day manager?’ Lukas wore his best smile. ‘And it’s night. I thought I’d see you in the morning.’

‘Better at night… and my friend’s baby has a colic so…’ The man shrugged. Lukas recognised the conspiracy. He had asked, on leaving that morning and handing over his key – briefly but not furtively – to meet the next day. He hadn’t expected the duty rosters to be juggled. The man flashed his eyes across the darkened hall, looked briefly, but fast and comprehensively, for an eavesdropper, but the bar was empty, the breakfast room deserted and in shadow. ‘I took my friend’s shift. You are, sir?’

Lukas did a droll grin. ‘I am who my passport says I am.’

‘Of course, sir.’

Truth was, end of a long day, Lukas could not have remembered with certainty which passport he had used when he checked in. It wasn’t that he was difficult, secretive, covert – he just couldn’t remember which goddam passport he’d had, and thought that age crept up on him, stabbed him in the back.

‘It was a Canadian passport, sir,’ the day manager said, impassive.

From under the reception desk, a bottle was produced, with a couple of plastic beakers, and measures were poured. Lukas saw the shake in the day manager’s hand. He didn’t offer money. Might, but later. The best intelligence, in Lukas’s experience, was not bought.

‘It’s about the boy.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I would have talked to you this morning, but you had breakfasts, check-outs, the Dutch complaining about the hot water…’

Still dry: ‘I had the New Zealanders who wanted a reservation in Sorrento for two nights and the Greek couple had fucked – excuse me, sir – till four in the morning, my friend told me, and broke the bed. They want a replacement not repair.’

‘It’s about the boy.’

‘I understood that, sir. Forgive me, sir. The world comes across my lobby, dresses in many ways and has many ages, many disguises. You’re not a tourist. You have no map and no book, and do not ask directions to the Palazzo Reale, the Castel dell’Ovo or the Teatro San Carlo, and no businessman stays here. I understand, sir.’

‘We have to trust each other.’

‘I expected you – someone. I made a telephone call. Perhaps I regret it. I realised afterwards there would be consequences. Someone would come. It is a city where humble people – myself – do not seek attention. I have to trust you… or I walk off the beach and into the sea.’

‘You have my word,’ Lukas said. His right hand took the day manager’s, his left lifted the beaker and brushed it against the other’s. He held the hand while he sipped bad brandy. He respected informants – many did not. The Brits, he knew, had put up bureaucratic barricades to block entry to Iraqi collaborators. They were lonely and unloved by most handlers, seldom thanked for the risk taken. He knew it from the FBI days. Lukas would have thought that a few hundred euros palmed across the desk would have insulted the integrity of the day manager. He did good sincerity when he guaranteed his word – and meant it. Many he had known, attached to Task Force 145 out at Anaconda in the Balad base, who did a year’s Iraq duty, had handled agents, milked their udders dry, then cut them adrift. Lukas had little sentiment, but he appreciated that agents who volunteered help were vulnerable – like the day manager. ‘My word is good.’

‘I telephoned the family of Eddie Deacon.’

‘That’s why I’m here.’

‘It is not yet in the newspapers, his capture.’

‘They’re trying to keep it suppressed. Can’t do that for many more days.’

‘I did not see him taken.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I was brought a piece of card. It is what we give to guests, our address and phone, and we write on it his room number. It was dropped in the street.’

‘And picked up and brought to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘By a witness?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was the witness?’ Lukas saw the squirm on the day manager’s features. One thing to have involved himself, another to involve his informant. Lukas understood, in this culture and in this city, what would be an informer’s reward: death would come like mercy. Twice the day manager seemed to rehearse a statement but nothing was said, then… Lukas could have sworn, did not. An Australian couple, young, handsome, bronzed and near to collapse, came through the door. His eye was already closing and the bruise had started to swell, while below the hem of her shorts the knees were grazed. He backed away. Heard the babble about her handbag, the snatch from the motor scooter. Her dragged along the gutter. Him catching the shoulder of the snatcher who rode pillion and being lashed clear by the driver’s elbow. In the bag were passports, plastic and some cash and – Christ, did they think they were in bloody Woolagong on the Bondi? Christ, didn’t they know they were in Naples, Italy? He knew about Woolagong from a Special Forces guy who had a girl there and they’d spent long hours waiting for the assets to turn in something of value. Lukas thought he had lost his man.

He hadn’t.

The brandy was produced again. More beakers were found. The Australians were given alcohol, were sat down. The day manager said he was going to telephone the police, but as he lifted the phone he murmured into Lukas’s ear: ‘In via Forcella, at the bottom, is the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli, old people. He came out from their home and was taken. There is a stall for fish beside the outer door. He is Tomasso. He will have returned from the market at dawn. He saw it. Have I killed myself? Have I killed him?’

‘I gave you my word. The key, please.’

The day manager dialled, 112, then started to shout. He did well. He stood in the corner of the robbed couple and demanded an appointment for them the following morning. Lukas thought it all bullshit, but the Australians would have been pleased with his vigour. While he shouted, he handed Lukas his own room key and a second. He thought the Greeks had had their bed repaired or a new one had been moved into their second-floor room. He went on up, climbed a further flight.

There was police tape on the door.

He broke it, used the key and went inside. He experienced the feeling that a law-enforcement man never lost on going into private space with entire legitimacy but as a trespasser. The room had been searched, but he reckoned the check had been perfunctory, done without interest or enthusiasm.

Later he would sit on the bed, think and contemplate. He believed in the value of association, with a suitcase, clothes or just where there had been a presence. So little of Eddie Deacon was there. The bag, clothes on the floor, including the previous day’s socks and boxers. There was a passport, a wallet with a few euros. Lukas thought the boy had left behind as much as possible before venturing out. In the wallet was the photograph. The picture brought alive the girl he had seen run in the gardens; more important, it brought alive the boy. He had been, perhaps, a hundred yards from her in the villa Borghese gardens; here he was close and could touch her, could almost smell her, and hear the laughter that seemed to ring from the picture, infectious. He saw the prettiness, the vitality and the youth, not matched in Rome seen at a distance. He knew, holding the photograph under the ceiling light, why Eddie Deacon had crossed the continent to bring back the girl. In his trade, he was not supposed to feel emotion and relate to victims – it was thought dangerous for involvement to feature. He knew about hostage rescue, hostage negotiation and the co-ordinator’s job of evaluating talk against force, and his whole life was the work… Lukas had never loved.

The work made do as his family. Could have been inside the broad family of the Bureau, or in the gargantuan family of the military, or in the close, tight-knit family of Ground Force Security. Love was now, had been in the past, absent from Lukas. He had admired his mother. He had felt affection for his wife, Martha, at first. He had not reacted to his son’s birth on a date after the divorce was finalised. He looked a long time at the face of the girl.

Then, he had seen enough.

He left everything as he had found it, except the photograph from the wallet. He laid the picture with care in the breast pocket of his shirt, careful neither to bend nor mark it. It was the photograph that screwed Lukas’s intention to deny any emotional involvement. He looked around him for a last time, switched off the light, closed the door, locked it, then resealed the jamb with the adhesive police tape. He went off down the corridor and down the stairs, and the Greeks were still at it. He felt, as if it was a weight on him, the picture in his pocket, saw the smile and heard the laugh.

Good if it had been possible to make promises.

‘Can’t do it, kid,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not a business where promises are possible. Sorry, but you have to appreciate that.’

His own room would be so empty, and without a photograph to light it.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator