The Collaborator

13

He didn’t know how long he had slept but, blessed relief, it had been dreamless, without nightmares. He had rubbed his eyes hard, stretched, scratched and had started again to search.

He talked quietly to himself, a whisper or a murmur – seemed to take the guys in the Dalston house as an audience. ‘What’s strangest is that I can’t hear anything from outside this place and I can’t see anything inside it. I have no light, and there’s no noise, other than my breathing and the chain. I’ve just slept on linoleum with no blanket under or over me. Where my mum lives, if a dog had to sleep on linoleum without bedding then someone, sure as hell, would be complaining to the animal-rights people.’

The routine of the search hadn’t changed from before he’d slept. He did sections of the floor and the walls, on his hands and knees, on his knees, crouched and standing.

‘I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’m going round again until I find it. Off my trolley, right? Might be, and I won’t argue with you. What sort of clears the mind, though, is the thought of that knife – ears, fingers and privates. Get me? Makes for good encouragement.’

Had to answer that, didn’t he? Had to face it. Couldn’t simply squat on his backside and wait for whatever the world threw at him. There was a knife on call. It was laborious, conscientious and repetitive but – too right – the thought of the knife kept boredom at bay.

‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible to exist without sound or light. It is. I have to find something. I have to believe there’s something to be found.’

It was the last sector of floor and the last area of wall, and he had gone over them, fingertips and palms, five or six times. When he had completed the sector, he would start again at the beginning where the chain was fastened. A success: the discovery of the crevice through which the ants went back and forth. Before he’d brushed them clear they’d countered the obstruction of his hand by crawling over it. There was dust at the angle where the linoleum met the wall’s base. Sometimes he forced it away from the wall, at others he didn’t. Sometimes there was compacted dirt at the angle and he would run his fingertip into it, excavate it, and at others not. He had lost track, had been round so many times in the search, of where he had prised up the flooring and where he had scraped at the mess caught in the join… but this time he felt something hard, and almost squealed. ‘Guys, it’s there. I have it.’

Hard and sharp, long and thin, buried and wedged. He must, each time before, have thought its slight shape was a flaw in the wall or a bulge in the linoleum. It came away. It had been deep in the dirt. Perhaps, on the previous searches, he had dislodged some of its covering or shifted it fractionally. He held a nail, and euphoria swept through him. It was a strong nail, a little bent in the middle, but otherwise flawless.

‘Can’t see, no eyes, have to do it all by touch. The nail’s about four inches long. I’d run my fingers along that place so many times, and now it’s there and I have it. Not thinking at my best – sorry and all that – and not being logical. It’s the window, the boarding across it, which was nailed and the nail heads recessed. Always, isn’t there, one nail that bends, jumps back and falls, and who has the patience to get down and find it? It’s no damn use anyway because it’s bent – but it’s a nail and I have it.’

He would have found one like it in the cardboard boxes his father kept in the shed, built as a lean-to at the far end of the garage. He had nails and screws of every size, calibre, length, and always said they should be kept because it was ‘a certainty of life that if you don’t have them all then the one you want will be the one you don’t have’.

‘Do any of you guys know what to do with a nail? Do they hand out nails in that toffs’ club or at Revenue and Customs or on a campus for PhD students or in the ticket hall of a mainline station? I doubt it. What I’m thinking is that a four-inch nail, even a bent one, is either a multi-task tool or a multi-task weapon. Can I have your thoughts, guys?’

His mind had begun to race: it could be used as a chisel, turned into a bar for leverage, could be a screw-driver, a stabbing knife – used against a soft stomach, an eye, a throat.

‘You disappoint me, you know that? Are you still in bed? Washed and shaved yet, in the bathroom queue? Not gone to work? Don’t know what time it is. Is it a tool or a weapon? You’re useless sods.’

They wouldn’t have known – how could they? – the value of a nail that was probably rusted, certainly blunt, and bent halfway up its length. He hadn’t been so clever either: he’d found the nail directly under the window hatch, which was boarded with heavy-duty plywood. The nail heads that held it in place, immovable, were recessed down. It was the obvious place to have searched and searched again. It was now his most important possession. Eddie doubted there was anything in the Dalston house, belonging to any of them, that competed with the importance of a single nail. And nothing in his parents’ home – prints from numbered editions, wide-screen TV, DVD player, jewellery that only came out of the wall safe for special occasions – was as important as the nail.

‘They’re useless, Mac. Couldn’t kick their way out of a paper bag, tossers. Mac, help me. There has to be a use for it. Do me a favour, Mac, and tell me what I can do with it.’

Couldn’t see it, could only touch it. Eddie started to think.

A dog barked at her from its high balcony. A maid, muffled against the morning cold, shuffled past her on flip-flops and went to work – she would have been Somali born, and taught already not to stare into the faces of Italians. A dustcart came round a corner. A porter, without his tie on, his collar unbuttoned, stood in front of the lobby of a block and coughed on his first cigarette of the day. Dawn was a smear, far away and grey on the mountains.

Immacolata walked down the street, past the long-stay parked cars with Saharan sand on their bonnets and roofs. A few lights were on above her, but most of the apartments were still dark. It had been easier than she could have believed.

She hadn’t showered and risked the noise of the apartment’s plumbing, but she had washed quietly. She had dressed simply, trousers and T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt of Rossi’s, and trainers. They took turns to watch over her. Rossi had been in his room and she had heard his soft snore. The older man was in a chair in the living room and, had he been awake, would have had a clear view of the main doorway in the hall – but he had not. Half dressed, Orecchia had been sprawled on a settee, mouth open, eyes closed. A mug of coffee stood beside him, untouched, and a cigarette had burned out in the ashtray. The strapping holding the holster in place was across his open shirt, and the weapon – she recognised the types of pistol on offer and this was a Beretta – was loaded. She had skirted the room, slipped behind Orecchia and crossed the hall. She had slipped back the bolt, turned a key, gone out, closed the door gently. She had gone down the main staircase, not used the lift, and had seen no one. Half of the residents of the lower floors were still on the dreg days of their summer holiday. Had she met any she wouldn’t have spoken – wouldn’t have shown them what they would have recognised as a proletariat accent from Naples. The hill where they had housed her was among the most select neighbourhoods in the capital, and there would have been immediate protests at the thought of a collaborator harboured among them. She had gone out, and the chill had been on her skin.

She carried her handbag, nothing else.

She went past the clinic, past the tennis and swimming club, where sprinklers already played on the grass, past shops in the piazza where the steel shutters were down and nothing moved, except one scurrying cat.

It was a brisk walk. She wouldn’t run: that would draw attention to her, but she needed to be clear of the covo, and off the hill, before the sun rose over the mountains that formed the spine of Italy. She stepped out, and the pace she took helped to warm her. She went down the hill, was under the canopy of pine branches, then beneath the big highway, the via Flaminia, and walked along the river, but hugged the trees and tried to stay in the shadows.

Ahead of her was the piazzale di Ponte Milvio, where the early-morning buses were parked, and a long taxi line where drivers waited for the day’s first fares.

She knew where she was going, and why.

And in the square there were shops and bars. It was too early for her, but if she hadn’t gone before dawn, before Rossi’s alarm went on his wrist, before Orecchia shook himself, yawned and stirred, she wouldn’t have been able to slip away.

Sunlight speared her, caught her face, and her hair fell back as she tossed her head. Her shoulders were squared and her chin was thrust forward.

She cared nothing for the chaos she would have created when the alarm sounded and Orecchia woke.

He had gone from the pensione in the half-light. The day manager, behind the desk, had glanced at him with bare recognition, then resumed his reading of the newspaper, and Lukas had dropped the two keys on the counter.

No small-talk, and nothing serious had been said – as if a conversation had not taken place the previous evening.

In London, or in a northern German city, or in that engine house of the Italian economy, Milan, people would already be on the move, office workers, shop managers, certainly the street cleaners and rubbish collectors. Not in Naples. A few moved, lost souls. There was a girl ahead of him, and Lukas thought she wore a party frock and that the buttons were not in kilter; her hair was a mess and her shoulders hunched: she had that look, her back did, of a girl who wished she’d been in her own bed half a dozen hours earlier. He followed her, playing his mind game, making associations for her, a life story, as he did with the individuals, randomly selected, who came to the Musee d’ Orsay and paused in front of the elephant and the rhinoceros – and his mind flitted. The daughter-in-law of the artist who did the river in crayon, the Notre Dame and the Louvre, had she had her baby? The waiter in the bar on the Bellechasse, had the laser for his eyes gone well? And Monique, who came once a month to clean the apartment – unnecessary because of the pristine state in which he kept it – and wash his clothes and iron them, had her cat survived the kidney infection? It was indulgent of Lukas to allow himself such fancies. He saw the sign high on the building at the top of the street.

He went briskly down the slight hill that was via Forcella. A church door, on his right, opened and he saw a young priest, but their eyes did not meet. The girl was no longer in front of him, and the artist’s grandchild, an operation and a cat’s ailment were ditched from his mind. He was focused. There had been kids at the top of the street and he had seen them stare at him, comatose. It was why he had come at that time, before the street’s awakening.

He imagined how it had been. Eddie Deacon would have come down the street, walked on the hard cobblestones, but later in the morning, kids would have followed him. He wouldn’t have known where he was going, would have stood out as a stranger. He saw the fish stall.

There was a door, the paint flaking off, and immediately beyond it a man was laying out plastic trays and polystyrene boxes, then shovelling ice from a big rubbish bin. There was a van behind him with the rear doors open. Lukas slowed. Not difficult to anticipate the sequence. The ice went on to the trays and into the boxes. The fish were brought from the back of the van and laid out without order, and a car hooted for the van to move. Impatience built. A brief argument followed, the two drivers. All predictable. The van driver slammed his rear doors, gave a finger to the car driver, then pulled away. The man on the stall began to place his fish in the correct trays and boxes. Lukas went forward.

‘Excuse me… it is important for me to meet you. You’re Tomasso?’ When he needed it, he had good enough Italian.

A nod of agreement. A wild look past Lukas’s shoulders, suspicion and anxiety. Sour: ‘If I am?’

‘Please, keep working, and I’m examining your fish. It’s natural. The swordfish is magnificent.’

Wary of an outsider: ‘It was caught yesterday, brought in today. I think it is thirty kilos.’

‘I’ll take it. Tomasso, please listen to me. I am here now, I’ll leave with the fish. I won’t be back. I have come to you to save a man’s life…’

He saw Tomasso flinch. He had nowhere to go. He would have realised that setting out his catch, brought from the market, and preparing for a day’s trading was explicable and that an early-bird customer – even a stranger – was also explicable. He couldn’t run, shout or protest without attracting attention.

‘I’ll have the swordfish, but show me the mullet too. You tried to help the boy, Tomasso. You reported what you’d seen. You’ll never see me again, I promise. When I go, your involvement ceases. All I work for is the safety of the boy and his freedom. Tell me.’

A low voice, guttural, perhaps coarsened by years of nicotine: ‘He saw Carmine and Anna Borelli. He was English, an outsider. I do not know why.’

‘To find Immacolata.’

‘They call her the whore. Everybody in via Forcella now calls her the whore. Before, they called her Signorina Immacolata and she could have anything, everything. I do not know why he came.’

‘To find her.’

‘They would kill me.’

‘It’s to save his life.’

‘I, too, have a family.’

‘Tell me, and I’m gone. I’ll never come back.’

The trays were filled, the fish sorted, the water spray turned on, the scales were set up and the cash tin was opened. The man, Tomasso, looked Lukas straight in the eye. ‘The price for the swordfish is a hundred and fifty euros. The boy stayed upstairs in the Borelli apartment, with the old bitch who is Anna. Carmine came down and sent a message and then he went back. I saw him at the window several times. I regret, sir, that I cannot do a better price for the fish. It is rare. The van arrived and the driver waited, and Salvatore came here, to where you stand. Salvatore is called Il Pistole and he is the assassin of the clan Borelli. Do you follow me?’

‘I do.’

‘You pay me a hundred and fifty euros for the fish, and the old bitch takes fifty euros. They screw me in the market and on the stall. I apologise for the price. I tried to warn the boy with my eyes. He did not react quickly. You say he came to Naples to find Immacolata?’

‘Yes.’

‘He must have believed he was going to her. He looked very happy. Perhaps that is why, when I warned him with my eyes, he was slow. Salvatore put him in the vehicle. Salvatore is the killer, has killed more than he has years. Salvatore took him.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Salvatore would kill me, and would kill the person at the pensione, would kill anyone. It cooks well, the fish. He looked a nice boy.’

Lukas paid him for the fish, and it was wrapped in newspaper and plastic. Blood oozed from where it had been gutted and from the gills. The tail stuck out behind Lukas, the sword in front of him. His promise to Tomasso, a fish-seller and frightened, with reason to fear, was meaningless, so the guarantees had been sculpted with care. Those pledges of anonymity, handed out with the carelessness of jelly babies and chewing-gum, had no value.

He carried the fish out of the street, hoisted on his shoulder, and never looked back. Lukas thought the day had started well.

Rossi’s alarm woke him. He blundered towards the bathroom, showered, shaved and dressed fast. He came into the living room. It was a few minutes past seven and the sunlight stormed through the blinds. He opened them, illuminating Orecchia, and started to whistle a tune popular in the far south, then went to Orecchia and slapped his face gently.

Orecchia jerked up, and groped for the holster under his arm, then saw the grinning Rossi.

Rossi went to the kitchen, switched on the electric kettle and took a carton of juice from the refrigerator. What they had in common, the two men from the Servizio Centrale Protezione, was a love of tea, exported in tins from England; they started each day with a mug, but Rossi also had juice. He called from the kitchen, with the mock-respect of a courtier, and asked if she, the important one, had yet made an appearance. How could Orecchia have known? He’d been asleep. He hadn’t heard her, or been woken by the water system. It was agreed that she was not yet up.

Rossi said, as the kettle boiled, ‘She’s usually washed and dressed by now.’

Perhaps because he was irritated at having been discovered asleep on his watch, Orecchia snapped, ‘Today she isn’t. Today she sleeps.’

‘I only said it was unusual.’

Rossi went down to the ground-floor hall, collected the newspaper from the front gate and came back up. He heard Orecchia in the bathroom, poured the tea, took him a mug, put the rolls into the oven and switched on the television for the breakfast news: more killings in Iraq, a bigger bomb in Afghanistan, instability in the currency markets, defections from the ruling coalition… Time passed.

Orecchia was dressed and smelled good, had used the Hugo Boss stuff. Rossi made a show of recognising it and teased his colleague. They had worked together many times. They had been on a detail that had done a Cosa Nostra killer, and twice had done the escort and security on an ’Ndrangheta bagman. They had been with the collaborator from the Misso clan in Naples, and with a Triad from the Chinese community in Genoa. They knew each other, were regarded by their superiors as of exceptional competence and… Together they had the thought. Rossi, extraordinary for a man who had been with the Guardia di Finanza before transferring to the SCP, could call upon almost poetic imagery. He thought of a wave on its way from the horizon, not yet seen, then closer and noticed for its ripple. Closer still, it seemed to cry that catastrophe approached, broke upon them and swallowed them. They were choking. He was in the spume and under the green darkness of the water, Orecchia too.

There were no sounds from behind the door. No grumbles from the plumbing. It was long past the time she would normally have risen. The sense of disaster caught them. Not a word was exchanged.

They didn’t knock. They didn’t pause respectfully after calling her name. Orecchia went in first, Rossi at his heels. Perhaps from the door the shape in the bed might have confused them, but it was obvious that a pillow substituted for a body. Rossi heard the sharp intake of Orecchia’s breath.

They were not recruits. They had valued experience. They did not scream, curse, shriek or blaspheme. Rossi felt a chill settle on the hackles at his neck and shivered. Orecchia was breathing fast, gasping. Orecchia did the bathroom, went inside as if there was no chance of finding her on the toilet. They scoured the apartment, each room, each cupboard, each wardrobe.

Rossi knew – was thankful for it – that Orecchia was senior and would have to make the telephone call. They went down to the ground floor and checked there, then to the subterranean garage, which they didn’t use, and looked there. They were supposed to have a roster whereby one slept and the other was alert, but both had been asleep. In older times, in history, to be asleep on duty was to invite a meeting with a firing squad. Today it would be a return to the uniform of the Guardia di Finanza, and they would be checking VAT statements in Bari or Brindisi. Maybe for Orecchia it would be dismissal.

Rossi asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘That she is not here, yes.’

‘What has she taken?’

‘Her handbag – she has some money.’

‘Has she taken any clothes?’

‘She has hardly any to take, and no case to put them in.’

‘Could she have gone to the piazza to buy bread or a magazine?’

‘Could pigs fly to the moon? I think not.’

Rossi saw that Orecchia’s mobile was in his hand. He was scrolling through the directory. He felt aggression towards the girl, their ‘Signorina Immacolata’, and might have exploded, let the fury rip, but he turned away and took the deep breaths counselled by the anger-management people. He could see the rooftops, then the hills and part of the city, the haze and gold light on the mountains. Where could she be? How long had she been gone? How far?

Orecchia gave him a wintry smile and pressed the call button.

She sat on a bench by a bus stop, a weed- and litter-filled flowerbed behind her. The bushes were oleander. She knew them from Naples. Their flowers were soft pink and pretty, well formed. As a child she had walked with her mother in the garden between the sea and the riviera di Chiaia, and had picked a sprig of those flowers and put it in the top buttonhole of her blouse. Her mother had seen it, snatched it, thrown it away and smacked her, open hand and hard, on her bare thigh above the knee. She had said that the flower of the oleander was the most dangerous in the city, could cause grave illness, even death; the sap was a compound of strychnine, a poison of the same strength. It had been so pretty, so delicate. Nothing was as it seemed, and she had learned the lesson. The shop she wanted was across the street, and she was waiting for the man to come and the shutter to be raised.

Nothing was as it seemed, and nobody – except Eddie Deacon – those days, those nights and that time.

Mario Castrolami was not a man of crude temper. He took the call, he listened in silence, he cut the call.

In his mentality there was a practised survival routine in the event of what many would describe as ‘disaster’. He began it. He lifted down his jacket from the hook, shrugged into it. He slipped out of the annexe and into a toilet where he dribbled out some urine. Then he went to the canteen, bought coffee and chocolate and took them out past the desk at the front. He circled the piazza as he drank the coffee and ate the chocolate. The wrapper went into a bin and the plastic cup followed it after the next circuit. He did the disaster routine when news came through from the palace at the centro direzionale that the judiciary had thrown out a case that might have taken three years to prepare, had involved dedication and massive man-hours, because of a supposed ‘technicality’, or because a politician had interfered in the process, or a file had walked from a supposedly secure archive. Others went to bars and drank, or dug with manic intensity into new files. Some went home and took their women to bed, or walked by the sea and gazed at the water. He plodded round the piazza, with coffee and chocolate, and pretended that a new day was starting when he eased into his chair. Judges were not known for patience when a collaborator’s testimony was withdrawn.

His friend, the artist, would have said, if asked, that he needed a holiday, but she would not be asked.

His wife in Milan would have said, if asked, that there was work in the private sector – in that city’s banking industry – for a man of his experience and that he should take the plane north, but she would not be asked.

There was, of course, a check-list of actions that followed the disappearance of a collaborator. A watch on the railway station in Rome, on the principal coach station and the airports of Fiumicino and Ciampino – and she might have been gone for two hours, or four. Orecchia, a good man, had spoken woodenly on the phone and Castrolami had put the question: how long had she been gone? Had put another question: how long had he slept? And the final question: how long between the time she was found to be missing and the time of reporting it? She might have been, he reflected, through and out of the airport, at the other end of the country, holed up in Rome – might be dead with a bullet in her head.

He came back into the annexe. Both the men at the table, the psychologist and the collator, looked away, and the hard men of the ROS group shuffled in their seats and made room for him to get past. As if a black cloud hung over them, the cloud of failure. He could give instructions. They waited on his leadership. He didn’t often feel, or sense, the burden of aloneness, but it was his shout, his right to activate whatever procedures he thought appropriate. There were none. She was gone, was clear, lost. Castrolami let his head fall into his hands and his elbows on the table took the weight. He had hoped for a small victory and had thought it within his grasp – and the fate of a young man, held somewhere, was erased as of no importance. He stared at the surface of the table. There was silence around him, except for the breaking open of the cellophane round a cigarette packet, then the click of a lighter, and he felt a rare, isolated misery, then heard rippling laughter. First nervous and quiet, then growing, gaining confidence, then playing on the walls and bouncing on the table, driving into Castrolami’s ears. He looked up.

The fish could not be fitted through the door. Either the tail stuck or the sword did. The body, with the tail, would have been more than a metre long and the sword the same. The beast was two metres in total and death had left it rigid. It could not be bent or folded. It wedged. Lukas held it. Castrolami recognised it as pesce spade, and knew it as the most expensive fish on any market stall. It was the size that would be bought for the celebration of an extended family. No one helped Lukas.

He didn’t seem to want help. He had another go, but the sword caught the table and jarred it and the laughter was louder. He turned round and led with the tail, squeezed and heaved. The flank of the beast caught in the lock of the open door – and then it was through. Laughter chorused the success. Lukas dumped it on the table, and the annexe was filled with its smell. Only Castrolami did not laugh.

Lukas said, droll, ‘If there’s a restaurant the guys use, maybe they’d do us the favour of cooking it. My news is useful. I look at you, friend, and say to myself that yours is between disaster and catastrophe. Get it over with.’

‘We have lost the girl.’

He saw the grin wiped off Lukas’s face. ‘What did she take?’

‘Her bag, money, her ID. She went early and-’

‘What clothes?’ He used Italian now, as if the pretended ignorance of the language was no longer important.

Castrolami said he didn’t know of any.

‘Did she take knickers and a spare bra?’

Castrolami said he didn’t know.

‘Just an opinion, and humbly put. I know very little of women, enough to fill the back of a postage stamp, but I doubt they travel far without next-to-the-skin necessities. Think about it. Each item you’ve spoken of, however small, it’ll be there – usually is. I make, of course, only a suggestion. It might be worth thinking about the little things.’

Castrolami looked sharply at him, wondered if he was mocked – realised he wasn’t. He thought he saw honesty in Lukas’s face. He couldn’t criticise a man who had confessed to failure with women. After all, he had no medals in relationships. He turned behind him, poked a finger at the chest of a man from the ROS, perhaps his favourite in the unit. The guy had unevenly cut hair that fell to his shoulders, and his cheeks, jaw and upper lip were painted with stubble. He told the man to take the fish, and its spike, to Donato at the restaurant on the piazza Gesu Nuovo, book a table for a dozen that evening, or whenever cause for rejoicing was justified, and ask for the beast to be prepared for cooking. The big man heaved it off the table and carried it out, but the stink stayed.

‘What was your news, Lukas?’

He was told, and instructed the collator on action, if any. He didn’t rate what he’d learned against the importance of the girl having gone, but he took the suggestion given him, and went back outside to pace, think and scratch at his memory. It had started as a bad day and Castrolami thought it had the potential to get worse.

Twin celebrations grew in pitch. A senior police officer took a call in his car and was heard by his driver to say, ‘They’ve lost her? Tell me again… Incredible… If they’ve lost her, can they hold the mother, the brothers? Will the case against the Borelli clan collapse?… Incredible…’

The driver, an elderly policeman with little in his life to create excitement, and little to augment his status, told a colleague that Immacolata Borelli was loose on the streets. The colleague told a cousin who ran a quality furniture chain. The cousin, meeting a young man who sought to bring in a comprehensive contract for the refurnishing of an apartment in the bank section of the city, repeated the story – and the young man was Massimo, nephew of the flamboyant Umberto. Word rushed along certain selected channels that Immacolata Borelli had fled protective custody. From the lawyer’s office, news of it was inside the gates of Poggioreale within an hour, and within an hour and a half it would be behind the walls of the Posilippo gaol at the far end of the Gulf. At both prisons the foot-soldiers offered congratulations, which were received by Gabriella Borelli, and by Giovanni and Silvio Borelli. Within two hours, the message had infiltrated the top-security prison on the eastern outskirts of London, HMP Belmarsh. Men and women crowded around the mother and her sons. It was felt that power had been restored, an old order retained.

Davide, the agent who was Delta465/Foxtrot, saw more movement on the walkway that early morning, and recognised the clothing as that worn by a blindfolded man. He noted the presence, and his memory would be backed by the tapes. He did not himself sift and evaluate what he saw. It was for his handlers to make definitions of priority.

*

Salvatore held the torch. He alone went into the chamber. Two men, neither known to him, held back and guarded the door. More were on the walkway. He couldn’t complain of the number of men allocated, but had thought, still thought, the price to be exacted from Carmine Borelli was cruel. The door was left ajar behind him. He was good, the boy, disciplined. He had the hood over his upper face and eyes, and seemed grateful when told food had been brought. It was fruit, some cold pasta, coffee in a plastic cup, more cheese and water. He bent and took the boy’s ankle in his hands. The leg kicked clear, but he stayed at the task and checked that the chain did not cut deep. He thought it a gesture of kindness: he was not familiar with compassion, could not have explained why he showed it, here, now. The boy had his head ducked down and did not respond. He let his hand brush the boy’s arm, only a slight touch, and the boy shrank from him, his fist clenched.

Since he had been eleven or twelve, people had recoiled from close contact with him – other children, women, old men and men in their prime had backed away. His reputation now was that of a killer – no conscience, no mercy, no love. Salvatore needed that reputation to survive in Naples – but he did not think it important that a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger, should have that fear of him – but he would still, of course, cut off the boy’s ear, finger or penis. There were confusions in the mind of Il Pistole. He did not love and did not attract it. The nearest he knew of ecstasy was not in laughter with a friend, or in the penetration of a girl. It was when he looked deep into the eyes of a man he would kill and saw the spreading terror. It was the greatest thrill in Salvatore’s life. He didn’t know how he would go to his own death, but swore to anybody who needed to be told that he would not be taken alive, locked away and left to rot in Novara, Ascoli or Rebibbia: he would not be captured, arrested, and if there was a hallucinating nightmare in his life, it was the moment of failure, capture, and the parade past the camera flashes, and of being merely a number on a landing of a cell block. He did not hate the boy. What was more difficult for Salvatore: he wasn’t indifferent to him either. Confusing.

‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Eddie.’

‘What is that, Eddie?’

‘It’s not Eduardo. It’s Edmondo, but I’m called Eddie. That’s my name.’

The hood masked most of the face, but the mouth was good, hair grew clumsily around it and the skin was clear. Salvatore despised men who had acne and pimples. The replies were hesitant, soft-spoken. He saw that the bucket had not been used, and that only part of the food was eaten.

‘You have not finished the food.’

‘No.’

‘I brought food for you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But you do not eat it.’

‘I apologise that I did not eat the food you very kindly brought me.’

‘All right – I have brought more food and more water.’

‘Thank you.’

Was the gratitude sincere? Always, Salvatore craved to know what people thought of his character, his actions. So difficult to know with certainty… Was he generous? Was he intelligent? Was he handsome? Was he the best company, the best in bed, the best enforcer in all Naples? He didn’t know who could tell him. He had been thanked for the food and had received an apology, but he couldn’t judge sincerity from a dropped, hooded head. He had killed men, had shot or strangled them, because they had not offered him respect.

‘You are from London.’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you do in London?’

‘I am a teacher, a language teacher.’

‘I speak English very good.’

‘Very good.’

Was that respect? He had gone into a bar in Sanita and a man had spat on the floor, just in front of his feet, a metre from Salvatore’s shoes. That was not respect. A man, who had known his face and identity, had parked a saloon car on a street in the piazza Mercato so that Fangio’s scooter was blocked in, then had told Fangio to ‘go fuck your mother’ but his eyes had been on Salvatore. That was not respect.

‘In London you met Immacolata?’

‘I did.’

‘It was bad for you that you did.’

‘I love Immacolata. So I came to find her.’

‘She is dead.’ The boy, Eddie, cringed away from him, huddled against the wall. His shoulders trembled and his arms shook. ‘Not yet – she will be. She is condemned. She is living but dead. Better that you had not met her and loved her.’

‘When… when do you…?’

‘I understand you well. Tomorrow. They have until tomorrow. If we do not have heard by tomorrow, we send… our word is dono – you say “gift”, yes? Or do you say “present”? You ask… It is tomorrow. I think my English is good, Eddie.’

‘Who are you?’

‘It does not matter to you.’

He thought the boy, Eddie, might have cursed and tried to kick him, or to plead with him. Some swore or screamed when he came at them with the knife or the handgun, and there were others who wet themselves or soiled their trousers, who knelt and clutched his legs, begging for their lives and moaning their children’s names. The boy had not sworn or begged – and he loved Immacolata Borelli, and she had ignored him as scum.

He kicked the boy. Did it hard, in the shin, saw the pain that spiralled up the leg, the jerk of the hood and heard the gasp. He went out, shut the door and bolted it. He was escorted away. He felt unsettled, and the confusion nagged in him.

He left by the same walkway, and saw an old man low in a chair watching the television, could see the back of the head clearly because the window was well cleaned.

*

When the pain in his leg died and aching took over, Eddie put the nail to work. His fingertips told him that the chain’s links were slid into a loop at the end of an iron pin concreted into the outer wall. He used the point of the nail to drive down, two or three millimetres at first, into the minute gap between the concrete and the pin’s flank. He couldn’t hit the nail with the bucket because the noise would have reverberated, but he could use the heel of his trainer for want of a heavy-duty claw hammer. Eddie reckoned he’d done well, that the day had already given him something positive. He tapped with the shoe, felt the nail driving down, but every few millimetres he would extract it, then reinsert it, wiggle it, and feel the gap, the hole, widening. He thought he had, in probability, twelve hours before the man came with the knife. Time to be used. He had also learned a little of the routine. Two men at the door, only one entering the cell. Knew it was two because one had coughed and the other had lit a cigarette, and he had been able to separate the sounds.

He would not go quietly.

Denied the use of his eyes, left with the power of his ears, Eddie reckoned the man had lost certainty. Reckoned, also, that the loss had taken him on to unfamiliar ground. Downside: he didn’t know what was beyond the inner door, didn’t know what weapons the two men carried, didn’t know whether at the key critical moment he would be able to use the nail to stab, didn’t know whether he was capable of it. He’d have to learn the answer to that. It would have been so easy to roll over on his side, lie limp and wallow, give free rein to the self-pity and the unfairness – maybe they’d use alcohol on his skin before they made the cut, maybe they’d gag him or stick a wad in his mouth for him to bite on – but that wasn’t an option.

The concrete round the pin was of poor quality: it cracked easily, and little pieces crumbled. Then, using the nail as a lever, he could work the gap wider.

He thought it had been an hour, but it might have been two, before he could use his full strength, tug on the pin and feel it rock – but it wasn’t yet loose. Would be soon.

Carmine was under surveillance. Anna was not.

‘I promise you that the contract will be honoured, payments will be to the accounts you have nominated, nothing is different.’

Carmine, with his escort – he had life-long experience in recognising when he was tracked – went to a cafe in the square opposite the old entrance to the Castel Capuana, where he had done his first sentence of penal servitude a half-century before. He took coffee and, with old friends, played a game, twenty-ones, with cards and looked for the watchers. He had pleasure in identifying six, and two cars. Anna, with no tail, talked business.

‘For how long will I be making decisions that affect our contract? As long as is necessary. Depend on it. I have the authority to speak for my family, for my daughter-in-law, for my son, and you have my hand.’

Anna Borelli, who was less than 1.60 metres in height and less than forty-five kilos in weight, peered across a table at a Venezuelan, an Ecuadorian and an Irishman who together made up the cartel that would oversee the shipment from the Colombian port of Cartagena, via west Africa and transhipment at Dakar, into the port of Naples, of a tonne of cocaine. And she could haggle.

‘You have my guarantee, and I tell you that predictions of the collapse of my family are exaggerated, lies spread by envious rivals. You are wise to trust me.’

In front of her was an old calculator she had not used for more than twenty years. Her first stop that morning had been at a corner shop for batteries. What concerned her was the drop in the street price of cocaine, and she showed keen determination not to commit herself to an excessive front price when the market rate had deteriorated through saturation. A bony forefinger alternately rapped rhythms on the table and pointed at the men for emphasis. When her small hand was wrapped successively in the fists of the two South Americans and the Irishman, they would each feel the strength of her claw grip.

‘It’s a pleasure to do business with gentlemen,’ she said. Behind her, the clan’s treasurer beamed.

She was asked then – natural and inevitable – for news of her daughter-in-law, Gabriella.

‘I expect her home very soon, and my grandsons. We had a sweet granddaughter, wonderful as a child, but now suffering a mental collapse, a fugitive from those who tricked and deceived her. It’s cruel what they will do to turn the head of a naive and simple young person… It’s a good deal. Please don’t forget that my hand is my bond.’

She stood, tiny. They towered over her. She revelled in the deference offered her. She would have stood in line to slit the throat of Immacolata, ‘naive’ and ‘simple’, who had been ‘tricked and deceived’, and would happily have used a blunt knife.

She walked out of the shop, the sun beat down on her and the early-morning traffic built. Its fumes were in her nose, horn blasts in her ears, as she carried the bag they had given her.

She knew the stories of betrayal in her home city. She had learned them at school. Betrayal was in the culture of Naples, bedded in its stonework.

One story she had always enjoyed was that of Belisarius. The sixth century after the birth of Christ had been, Immacolata’s teacher had declared, a time of catastrophe. The city had fallen to Odoacre, king of the Ostrogoths, Roman rule had disintegrated, the network of lucrative trading routes had collapsed, malaria was rampant. A dark age had begun.

It was a story that still lived with her, carried forward from the classroom.

But in the year of our Lord 537 deliverance advanced. The Byzantine emperor, Justinian, sent his finest general, Belisarius, to win back the city. He came to Naples, saw the height and strength of the city walls, and despaired of capturing and sacking it. Then he found a traitor.

Immacolata could remember the hush of the children, the sucked-in breath of those around her, and the teacher spoke of an infame, a collaborator, a pentito.

And the traitor guided the general to a broken, disused aqueduct that had carried water to the city in the great days of the Empire. Led by the traitor, the soldiers of Belisarius entered the city through the forgotten tunnel, moved in silence in the quiet of the night – and sacked the city, butchering the Ostrogoths.

No child in Immacolata’s class had raised a squeal of indignation against the act of treachery. It was the Neapolitan way.

She walked towards the river.

Around the table in the annexe, there had been no criticism of Castrolami’s long absence from his chair. Reports were brought to the collator who beavered at them, opened computer cross-files, pushed paper at the others. The psychologist drew a word profile of Salvatore, enforcer to the Borelli clan, and painted a psychopath’s portrait. Lukas put bricks in place, built contact: he murmured, never allowing his voice to intrude, to both men the hopes he harboured for the hostage’s behaviour, how Eddie Deacon should be.

Should be… combating the sense of disbelief that ‘this is actually happening, and to me’, confronting fear and holding on, however grimly, to a sense of control. He should establish a routine for himself, and learn the routine of his captors. Regrets and sentimentality should be ruled out, unacceptable. Talk with his guards should be kept to a minimum and attempts to ingratiate himself with them would usually be doomed; they ‘don’t like a crawler or a whiner’, Lukas had said, or a guy who hit back and antagonised; ‘he’s best staying quiet’ and should never complain. He should not be uncooperative or short-tempered, and should not compromise his integrity. Always he should be remote from the cause of the hostage-taker. When a phone rang, or more paper was brought, Lukas would back off.

‘And escape?’ the psychologist had asked. ‘Does he work towards an escape attempt?’

‘Should he, shouldn’t he?’ the collator demanded, and the men behind – the storm squad – murmured support for an answer, an opinion.

Lukas said, ‘Eddie Deacon’s a nice guy, a second-rate guy, a teacher. He’s in a bunker, a cell, probably in darkness, likely hooded. Assuming he breaks clear of restraints, chains, gets through a door, a trap, he will have no knowledge of what’s beyond. Again, assuming he gets out of the building, he doesn’t know where he is, on hostile ground. Who will help him? Escape is the measure of desperation at a last resort. Almost inevitably it will fail.’

‘You paint a black picture,’ the psychologist said.

‘His situation is black.’

‘He depends on us,’ the collator said.

‘A failed attempt arouses a reaction of extreme brutality.’

He heard footsteps stamping along a corridor, then across the operations room.

‘Usually, then, they kill.’ Lukas saw Castrolami’s entry. He questioned with his eyes, spoke the name of the girl, and the collator – as if it was his personal cross to bear – shook his head.

Castrolami lifted a phone, dialled. Lukas heard him tell a minder in Rome that he had walked twenty-four times round the piazza Dante, and had thought. Then he told the minder where to find Immacolata Borelli, bit his lip and rang off. The breath sang through his teeth, like dice rolled but not yet settled.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator