The Collaborator

14

He had crossed the space, the chain dragging behind him.

He was against the door, standing, and when he pressed an ear to the crack below the upper hinge he could make out, very faint, voices and music. He couldn’t understand what was said or by whom, or distinguish what music was played.

Once the pin had come clear of the wall and the chain was free, Eddie had not stopped to consider, step by step, his actions. He had gripped the nail tighter in his fist and had crawled across the space, groping in the darkness until he reached the door. He had moved his fingers up the smooth metal sheeting nailed to the wood, then listened. He would have worried if the sounds had been more distinct.

He didn’t think he would be heard.

A glass is half full: the nail would enable him to break out, flee for freedom. A glass is half empty: he would fail, be mutilated, butchered, buried in secrecy and some day, some time, someone would find this place and read his name. He scratched with the nail tip in the blackness and trusted that he had fashioned the capital characters: EDDIE. Didn’t do a message, or an epistle, didn’t do an approximation of a date, didn’t make a heart and arrow and gouge ‘Immacolata’, just did his name and thought that if, some time, it was read and files were turned up, it might just be that the bastard who had him there would face some sort of retribution. He didn’t believe that to have done his name with the nail was the same as admitting defeat, accepting ultimate failure. He didn’t know whether it could be deciphered.

Eddie began to work on the lower hinge, sank down to his knees. He knew what he had to do. His dad, back in Wiltshire, had given over the inside end of the garage to shelves and boxes. Neat as a hardware-shop display, he had about every tool a man could ever want and plenty more. His mum shrugged about it, and Eddie had sort of sneered, but his dad had the tools to get the hinge off in about two minutes flat. Now Eddie didn’t sneer. He used the nail, first off, to try to open a fraction of a gap between the hinge and the metal sheet – and didn’t like to think again about a glass being half empty.

And didn’t like to think about whether his name could be read or was just the scratching of an imbecile.

Minutiae dominated Eddie Deacon’s existence. Top of the list was the depth that the nail tip could go down behind the hinge bar, starting at two millimetres, estimate, and needing to open right out so that it could go down more than ten, and likely twenty. Then there were the screws to be loosened, and he had no screw-driver. Any time before he had been ‘lucky’ and had caught that flight, ‘lucky’ again and had caught the train from Rome Eddie Deacon would have said, ‘Fuck it,’ or ‘No can do,’ and walked away from the problem. Would have said, before, that Eddie Deacon did not take off hinges, the lower one first, without the necessary tools. He would have said that it was impossible to dislodge two old hinges, both held in with likely rusted screws, without a cordless or powered drill – and he had only a single nail that was slightly bent halfway up.

He did not acknowledge ‘impossible’.

Through the focus came small solutions. He had the pin extracted from the wall as a lightweight hammer. He had a handkerchief in his pocket, dirty and disgusting, and could fold the corner and use it as a wad across the nail head to dull the hammer sound. He had the bucket – and he had the thought of the knife: he could feel, on his head, on his hands and in his privates, what the knife would cut.

He had no way of judging time.

Eddie hit the nail three or four times, then stopped, listened, let the quiet cling round him, and the darkness, then repeated, listened again, and had the nail behind the hinge bar by – his estimate – five millimetres. Double that insertion, then utilise the bucket, and he reckoned he made progress, did well and Voices, louder music, as if an internal door were opened. He scurried, hands and knees again, back towards the far wall, used his fingers to find the hole where the pin had been, jammed it home, stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket, put the nail into his right trainer against his instep. He had his back against the wall, had found the hood and slipped it on, and his knees were drawn up, his head dropped and resting on them. He waited.

Seemed a damned eternity.

Couldn’t be certain, but Eddie thought that men had come close to the door and had started a bloody conversation. He resented that, was pissed off that he’d heard them, had backed away from his work and now sat idle, wasting time and- The bolt opened – which told him, because now he listened hard for everything, that it was lightweight, and a key turned. A heavy key. The door was opened.

Through the hood he realised a torch powered against his body.

The voice was the same as before, the bastard’s voice: ‘You did not eat. Why did you not eat?’

Didn’t eat because he’d been too busy – got that, bastard? ‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘If I bring you food you should eat it.’

‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘Did you drink?’

He’d needed the water – hot work, dragging out a pin, in the stifling space with flaked concrete making a dustcake in his throat, and heavy work, trying to ram a nail tip behind a hinge bar. ‘Thank you, yes.’

‘You have used the bucket?’

‘I have – the minimum. There is no paper and if I use the bucket and have no paper I will stink worse than I do already. Thank you.’

‘I bring you food, Eddie, and water, and I change your bucket. Am I kind, Eddie, or not?’

‘Kind. Thank you.’

‘I leave food for you, and water, and a new bucket.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I hope, Eddie, that we hear something today of Immacolata. We give them until tomorrow. For you, I hope we hear today.’

He heard the food, in a bag, dropped, a water bottle, plastic, roll, and the clatter of a new galvanised bucket.

‘Thank you for the food and water, and the bucket.’

Then wistful, softer: ‘I think she is very beautiful, Immacolata…’

Eddie anticipated. He was kicked.

He used his legs to protect his stomach and groin, and his arms were over his hooded head. Not a single kick but a flurry of them. Eddie understood it. He understood that the bastard regarded him as a rival – not just as a bargaining chip but as a rival for Immacolata Borelli’s affection. Could have laughed while the kicks came. Maybe she hadn’t done it with him, the bastard, maybe she’d turned him down. He heard the bucket, the one he’d used, knocked over. The kicking stopped.

He heard the rhythm of it. Door opened, voices, door closed, faint voices. Door locked and door bolted. Silence. Only his groans… She had been his, not the bastard’s. He saw her face, then crawled awkwardly through the mess from the upturned bucket, which wet his hands and knees. He saw her face clearly, and began again to work with the nail.

The river level was down. The Tiber’s flow was erratic and followed channels between sandbanks.

She was on the bridge.

She lifted the lock from the bag. It had plastic wrapping round it, and she used her teeth to break it open. There was another couple on the bridge, their arms locked, and the girl was kissing the man. Immacolata pulled the padlock clear of the packaging, and the keys fell to the paving. She bent to retrieve them. There was, immediately below her, a current moving in the water, a free flow between two banks. The river had been low long enough for scrub to have taken hold on the banks. Great dead boughs and trunks were scattered in it, old trees that had been swept downstream by the early spring’s flood rip.

All she knew of the bridge was what Castrolami had told her – not the crap about its history, but about the lamppost that had threatened to collapse and the replacement of low metal posts with a chain running between them that the city mayor had ordered to be erected. The padlock she had bought was heavy-duty, would have been a struggle to break through even with large bolt-cutters. It had two good keys that shone in the morning sunshine. The man in the hardware shop had wanted to sell her a padlock with combination numbers. She had refused and he had persisted until she had flared at him that it was not his business what sort of padlock she purchased. Then he had understood, and the smile had crossed his face, a patronising tolerance of the young, and he had offered her a cheap, shiny model, made in China; the implication was that a good padlock would be wasted when fastened to the column. Castrolami had said that young people in love came to the bridge with padlocks – like the couple who stood along the rail from her and kissed. She had told the shopkeeper she wanted the best, and that she was prepared to pay thirty-five euros for a lock with keys. Only when she had paid did he tell her slyly that it was possible to buy the padlocks from an Albanian trader on the bridge, but not of quality. She could see the one the couple had. Together they hooked it on to the chain, and she thought it would have cost ten euros at most. For them it was a joke, a diversion, and a chance to kiss again. There was a long line of padlocks on that section of chain, enough to make it sag. Names had been written in indelible ink on some.

Immacolata did not have a pen with indelible ink: if she had, she would not have used it.

She threw the packaging over the bridge’s stone rail, watched it flutter down, fall into the flow and float away, like a boat. The couple had broken in their embrace and now eyed her with hostility. She gave them the look of contempt of a daughter of the Borelli clan, and must have intimidated them because they hurried on with their business on the bridge. She might, perhaps, in that gesture of throwing away the plastic and cardboard, have unsettled them; they would have seen her face – her chin and eyes – and been nervous of intervening to chastise her. Their moment of declared love had, maybe, been lessened by their fear of her. She watched them go south, and towards the road sign for the Lungotevere. They didn’t turn, kept their backs to her, and held close to each other.

Immacolata thought that placing the padlock on the chain on the bridge was about as relevant as laying fresh bouquets beside a road where there had been a fatality in a traffic accident. Irrelevant, but she thought it worthwhile.

She wondered then if he saw her, pictured her. She had the image of him: grubby jeans, socks that usually had a hole at the heel or the toe, yesterday’s shirt, his hair unbrushed, the smile and the laughter that walked with him, the flatness of his stomach, the delicacy of his fingers, the thin thighs and… She seemed, inside herself, to arch and press and be closer so that he went deeper. She remembered Eddie. She knew what they would do to him. She was of the Borelli family, and she knew how pain and fear were used as regular weapons of choice. She did not have him there to kiss.

She kissed the padlock face: it was cold, remote. She let her lips linger on it.

The chain was rusted, lower than the rail, and festooned with the padlocks of lovers. She hesitated. She heard a little squeal of mirth, mocking, and the Albanian who sold the padlocks on the bridge was staring at her and would have been wondering why she had come alone, and why she paused. Could she not make up her fucking mind? He might have thought that. The water was dull, dirty and wound between the banks. There was nothing attractive about the view upstream, nothing of majesty.

She made her commitment. Immacolata took three steps, four, to the chain, then looked for a section that was not already crowded and found one. She didn’t kneel because that would have been an act of sentimentality. She crouched, used a key to open the padlock, then secured it to a link in the chain and snapped it shut. It hung there, and for a moment the sun was on it.

She stepped back, held the keys between her fingers and remembered what Castrolami had told her, and what she had seen the lovers do hurriedly after they had scowled at her for letting the packaging drop. They would have taken longer over it but she had destroyed their moment… Not important to her. The sun was over the next bridge, still low enough to dazzle her. It was indeed her commitment. There were three keys on the ring, little bright trinkets of her mood. Not diamonds, not jewels, not flowers, but three keys from a Chinese factory. She raised her arm, saw his face, threw them, watched them fall, irretrievable, saw the splash and the fast-forming ripples, then only the swirl of the current.

‘The old mendicante was right. I’m surprised,’ Rossi said.

‘The old beggar’s usually right,’ Orecchia said.

‘Is she going to jump in after them?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do we go for her now?’

Orecchia said, ‘As we would for a mourner beside a family grave. Half a minute for contemplation, then we go.’

They had been there a quarter of an hour. They had been sitting on a low railing in the shade of the trees, with the scent of the market’s fruit stalls behind them, and they had waited to see if Castrolami’s judgement was sure or whether it leaked. They had seen her come, with that haughty stride, as if she was of God’s chosen few, on to the bridge – as Castrolami had said she would – and each man had let out an involuntary sigh of relief.

‘Would we have been fired?’

‘Probably “returned to unit”, probably on a trash heap. I think he told very few. It’s contained.’

‘Would you do that? Buy a padlock, waste it, throw away the key?’

‘I know too little about romance.’ A faint grin broke on Orecchia’s face. ‘Come on.’

They stood.

‘How do we treat her?’

‘Like an old friend. How else?’

Orecchia led. They skipped through the traffic, crossed the far pavement and walked out on to the bridge.

Rossi asked, ‘Do we go gently or kick hell out of her?’

Orecchia answered, side of his mouth, ‘I lead, Alessandro, an uncomplicated life. I have a wife who tolerates me, a kid who accepts my usefulness to him as a milch-cow, I have a cat who ignores me but doesn’t scratch. I have an apartment I can afford, I have a cheque in the bank on the first day of each month and an attractive pension fund. I don’t live with a perpetual crisis at my shoulder. They do, the collaborators. She does. I would say, Alessandro, that betrayal brings a heavy burden. It would be attractive to kick her for what she has done to us today, but our anxieties are small in comparison with her agony.’

‘Sensitively put. It does you credit.’ Rossi grinned wryly. ‘But has she capitulated? Is that what this crap, the padlock and the key, is about?’

‘I think not,’ Orecchia said.

She looked proud, the older of the two thought, and seemed in no hurry to leave the bridge. She would have seen them coming from the edge of her vision but made no move. Orecchia had seen the flash of light on the keys but not where they went into the water. Almost magnificent – better than proud, he thought, as she stared up the river. Beside him, Rossi was alert, on the balls of his feet, ready for pursuit. Orecchia was beside her, close but not intruding on her mood.

He said, ‘I think, Signorina, that it is time for us to go back up the hill and continue with our work. Are you ready, or would you like a few moments longer?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re ready?’

She nodded.

He was at her shoulder as they came off the bridge, Rossi behind them. They walked briskly at his pace, and she matched it. She told him she’d paid thirty-five euros for the padlock, and seemed to expect a comment.

Orecchia quoted a frequent remark of his child, usually offered when the father attempted to limit expenditure: ‘I think in this world, Signorina, you get what you pay for. I imagine that for thirty-five euros you have a very fine padlock.’

He wondered if she would be weeping, eyes glistening, but she was not.

Fangio drove him. Salvatore was pillion. The clan that had offered help to Carmine Borelli had asked for a great deal in return – narcotics, an investment portfolio and Salvatore’s services. It might have been that there was a genuine requirement for a stranger’s face among the towers of Scampia, or a need to demonstrate power and humiliate the old man from Forcella. He had been given a photograph of a face and a map that showed a wide street and a cut-through leading off it. Then a bar was marked, built into the ground floor of a fifteen-storey block. Rare for Fangio – the most skilled scooter driver Salvatore knew – to demonstrate apprehension. On the pillion, knees clamped on the padding and one hand in the deep pocket of his leather jacket, Salvatore sensed the older man’s nerves. He, Salvatore, would never grow old. His friend, Fangio, had a less fatalistic mentality and did not look to die that morning. It was not their territory, and others back at the Sail building played with them.

Fangio had studied the map drawn for them, memorised it, did not need directions from Salvatore. In silence, of course, they rode on the high-performance scooter, couldn’t have spoken through the visored helmets. Salvatore leaned with the cant of the machine as they came off the via Arcangelo Ghisleri, and the alley was ahead. They were seen. Watchers tracked them. In unison, Salvatore and Fangio lifted their smoked visors. Without showing their faces they would not have reached the far end of the narrow cut-through. Little enough space but Fangio had to weave between heaps of rubbish bags, most broken open with refuse spilling out. Once he swerved hard and missed, by a tail’s length, a large scurrying grey rat. They went into an enclosed piazza and the bar was under the end of the block. It seemed squashed under the weight of stained concrete above, and weeds sprouted outside. When Salvatore swung his leg off the pillion he walked on a carpet of discarded cigarette tips.

The doors were open. They had little paint and the glass was cracked. It was dark inside except for the glimmer thrown by candles on the carved-wood Madonna. He saw three men sitting at a flimsy table, Formica top on steel tube legs. There were empty cups in front of them and they played cards. The one who faced Salvatore most directly wore a short-sleeved green shirt, was bald and had a goatee-style beard. It was the description he had been given at the Sail. He realised then the extent of the pain in his leg as he limped to the door. Why did his foot hurt? How had he injured it? A kick. Repeated kicks. The big toe of his right foot had been the strike-point when he had kicked the boy. The boy had loved Immacolata, maybe Immacolata had loved the boy. Twice he had thudded his foot against the pelvic bone, which was hard, reinforced. Immacolata had not loved Salvatore, had seemed not to notice him – as if he was merely a paid servant of the clan. So he limped into the bar, and felt a fucking idiot because he couldn’t walk casually, as if he was in control.

He took the pistol from his pocket. Around him chairs scraped and table legs screeched as they were pushed back; the television in the corner seemed louder and dinned into his ears. He fired. Always two shots, and for the head. Salvatore didn’t know the name of the man who pitched forward, whose head fell without the protection of his arms on to the table surface. Blood spilled, the cups jumped, the ashtray flew sideways and emptied, and the cards scattered. He didn’t know the man’s name, or why he had been killed. What hadn’t he done?

He turned. He saw Fangio astride the scooter, gunning the engine; he had lowered his helmet’s visor. A bottle was thrown at him – Sprite, Fanta or Coke. It came from behind the bar and he saw it in flight, then the figure ducked. He was hit full in the face and the bottle broke – his helmet or his nose – he couldn’t see and felt the moisture. A hand clawed at him, another. He fired once more – into the ceiling. He was freed. Couldn’t run so he limped out.

Fangio snatched at him, pulled him clumsily on to the pillion and was gone, and Salvatore realised then that what he had not done was lower his visor as he had gone into the bar. He wiped a sleeve across the bridge of his nose and there was blood on the leather. They went back up the alley and now he had the visor down. He had shown the world his face. Blood was in his nostrils, already caking, and when he snorted to clear it there was a spray on the visor’s screen.

Fangio drove him away.

It was the clumsiest killing Salvatore had done, without finesse, and the first in which he had not known a man’s name or what he was accused of. Because he had kicked the boy, because he had limped, it was the worst of his killings.

The bucket was crucial to Eddie. The nail eased the hinge bar a few more millimetres from the steel surface of the door, at last enough for the rim of the bucket. There was insufficient leverage from the nail for the heavy effort of shifting the screws. The bucket did the job.

The first hinge, the lower one, was loosened. One more heave, the big effort, all the muscles in use, and it would come apart. Eddie didn’t finish it off. He didn’t know when the bastard would come back. Couldn’t take off one hinge, then start to free the other: he had to do the break-out when both hinges were ready – a few moments of heaving – to come away. When he had used the galvanised-steel bucket, which stank, the noise of the screws moving, the scraping against the steel and the splintering of the wood had seemed to shriek in the black space… But no one had come.

He had heard nothing, not even the faint voices and the murmur of music.

One last time he had the bucket rim behind the hinge bar and dragged it back, the sound screaming at him. The sweat ran on his shirt, and his knees were still damp from crawling in the urine, but he felt a glow of triumph.

The kicking hadn’t hurt, couldn’t compete with the elation. He was Eddie Deacon, ‘steady Eddie’. Many said that nothing flapped or fazed him. He didn’t do football and hadn’t the tribal loyalties of those who howled and yelled when a goal went in or didn’t. A woman from Algeria, in a class taken by Eddie Deacon, had gone into labour, and he had cleared the room, except for a woman who could help, then called the ambulance and had taken his coffee in the staff room, as if it wasn’t a big event. There had been a- Didn’t matter what else there had been because everything in Eddie’s old life had been to the shredder. He clenched his fist, didn’t punch in the air, but allowed it to shake as if that was good enough.

Nobody would have recognised him now. All who had been in his life would have recoiled at the sight and smell of him, wouldn’t have understood the ecstasy of moving a hinge bar with the rim of a galvanised bucket.

He started again.

He was up on his toes to give himself the fraction of height that helped, and had the nail tip on the angle where the upper hinge’s bar was flush against the steel plate, had the filthy handkerchief folded as a cushion on the nail head. He beat down on it with the pin from the chain.

There was a little give and he thought the nail tip was down by a millimetre or two, but it might have been wishful thinking – or even bloody fantasy. Nothing before in his life that was measured in a couple of millimetres had been important to Eddie Deacon.

It was late morning in the annexe off the operations room. The ROS men were back on their chairs, legs splayed out in front of them, and a couple snored quietly. One used a multiple-blade knife to clean the dirt from beneath his fingernails, and another read a magazine called Fur, Feather and Fin, seeming interested in waterproof socks. A fifth chewed gum and had a list in front of him of what was included in a personal survival kit, available in a mail-order offer; he elbowed Pietro, distracting him from the socks, and told him that this PSK had two non-lubricated condoms for water-carrying. He was Luigi.

The collator often worked alongside the ROS men. They seemed good at taking rest where it was offered, on a hard-backed chair, a floor or in a car. In fact, they seemed to rest more than anything else and had the weird magazines, everything about the kit they wore and how to improve it. But the collator knew that, when the location surfaced, they would be running, awake and alert. Pietro did not speak to him. Neither did Luigi. He was not regarded as having a useful opinion on condom water-carriers or water-resistant socks. It was nothing personal – the psychiatrist was similarly ignored. Both men would have agreed that they found the personnel of the storm team extraordinary: could face amazing crises, could hibernate mentally in lists, and could be mawkishly sentimental, cold-blooded or uncaring, and juvenile in their humour. Both men had a deep, sincere respect for them.

Castrolami was not in the annexe, but was on the end of a mobile signal. The man, Lukas, was with him.

They talked. A question and an answer, a pause for maybe five minutes, then some more talk.

It took time to get round to the psychiatrist’s big question: ‘This American – whatever he is – is he good? Is he the best? Is he a man who talks well? Does he deliver?’

Then the collator’s big answer: ‘He has the pedigree of a prizewinning mastiff. Can he deliver? Tell me the circumstances.’

‘Some would say it’s an insult to our professionalism that he’s here.’

‘Some, also, would say his presence was not asked for.’

‘If he succeeds, and delivers the English boy, our reputations are denigrated.’

The collator grinned, flashed his teeth, showed mischief. ‘Have faith in our city. Naples doesn’t bow the knee to foreigners.’

The ROS man interrupted their murmurs, hit Pietro again with his elbow and told him that this personal survival kit, top-of-the-range in America, had a brass snare wire, a length of fishing-line, six hooks with four weights, and a leader trace with an integrated swivel. Both men – as if at a signal – laughed, were close to collapse and held each other. They wondered whether the PSK was designed for the third world of Secondigliano or the via Baku of Scampia, and whether two condoms would be enough. The collator and the psychologist returned to their screens.

A phone rang. The collator answered, listened, put down the receiver. ‘They have the Borelli girl.’

‘What’s she going to do? Stay or quit?’

‘Do we have her or not?’

Castrolami was told. He showed no enthusiasm, no excitement.

‘Do you believe her?’

Lukas hovered. He didn’t crowd Castrolami.

Castrolami took a big breath, as if that was necessary when a decision of importance was taken, and let the air whistle out again between his teeth. He said, ‘Bring her down to us. She’s not hidden now. If she runs on these streets she’s committing suicide. That will end the shit. Bring her.’

They walked.

‘Things you have to understand, Lukas.’

‘What things?’

A square stretched out in front of them, with big churches on two of the four sides; on a third there was a view of the sea’s horizon. They were near to a fountain with statues at the four corners; no water flowed and the basins where the water might have been were filled with cardboard, plastic and other junk. The statues were of crouched lions but each had been decapitated, and the centre of the square was populated with kids’ bikes, plastic tractors and tricycles, and plastic garden furniture. It should be a fine place, Lukas thought. In Paris it would have been a fine place. Castrolami told him it was the old mercato.

‘Do I get a lecture in history?’ Lukas asked quietly, and the smile flickered.

‘It was the last year of the eighteenth century. The English navy restored a Bourbon tyrant to the throne. The piazza dei Mercato was the execution site, it was where those who had sided, erroneously, with the Napoleonic revolutionaries, were brought for hanging. Many thousands died here over several months, kicking the air, to the drunken jeers of the lazzaroni, the street thugs. One hangman was a dwarf and it pleased the crowd when he climbed, like a monkey, on to the shoulders of the condemned, putting more weight on the strangulation. Women were hanged here and abused – it was a true terror. It satisfied the mob – it was their narcotic. It has not died in Naples. On the streets they like a good killing and a display of horror. Nothing has changed, Lukas. If we deny them the ears, fingers or penis of the boy coming through the post, or hand-delivered, they will be angry. Certainly, they will not help us. It is a lesson of Naples I learned many years ago, and learned well: the mob enjoys death.’

Lukas looked around him. It was a place of decay. He did not like to imagine but he felt the presence of the baying drunken crowd, a lynch mob, and saw a gallows of rough wood and used, well-stretched ropes. The sun blistered his forehead and he had to squint. There seemed no takers for the toys and the plastic furniture.

His gaze had gone beyond the church in front of him and past the broken statues. He saw the mountain, huge, grand and hazed. Cloud sat on it, a white cushion.

Castrolami said, ‘In the rest of Italy there is no love for this city. It does not concern the citizens because they have each other’s love. You know Narcissus? Of course you do. He could be the patron saint of Naples. The society is fashioned by the mountain. The mountain dominates. Tomorrow it may blow, or next week, or next year. The mountain creates fatalism. If it blows it will be fast and there will be no escape – perhaps half a million people will die, most sitting in their cars and hooting in a traffic jam as the ash comes down. There is resignation and acceptance of death. They used to be in this square to watch the death dance at the hangings. Today they gather, crowded close and pressing forward, to see the spasms of a man bleeding on the pavement after being shot. I hate this city, my home, and I hate its absence of morality, its acceptance of corruption, its compromising of honesty. They are total in the city. I have to tell you, Lukas, that Immacolata Borelli swears she will testify. She will not back down.’

‘Then find him – find him quick, before the bits are sent to you,’ Lukas said.

They turned their backs on the piazza and the mountain.

He had already bought the shirt, inexpensive and manufactured in China, wrapped in cellophane, when he met his handler. It was one of Davide’s routines that he bought a cheap shirt when he took the bus down the hill to the old town. Then he had something to bring back to the Sail and talk about if anyone wanted to know why he went so far.

That day he didn’t know the name of his handler. There were men and women, and some he thought were senior, and others little more than clerks. Neither did he know from what building in the city they worked. He had, that day, requested an extraordinary meeting and broken the schedule.

A man in a hood, handcuffed, had been hustled along a walkway. There was a view, fleeting, of the capo of the clan that had control of the Sail and half of the rest of Scampia, who, with his family, was a billionaire in euros and had been a fugitive for twelve years. There had now been four sightings of a man who was a stranger on that floor, not seen before, escorted. An old man, unable to disguise arthritis or rheumatism, had been brought past the agent’s apartment window. He told it all. He was not expected to interpret or analyse. He said that the activity was of greater intensity than he could remember and he thought the presence of the outsiders, and the hooded man, of sufficient interest to be reported.

He passed to the handler two small cassettes. He was given two replacement spools.

He received no encouragement, no praise. Neither was he criticised for requesting the extra rendezvous.

He left the handler at the table, also routine. He knew that when he had gone, the handler would leave. Using his pass, which showed him as disabled, he took a bus to the railway station, then another back up the long hill. It would drop him – with the rest of the flotsam and the addicts who came each day to buy – in Scampia near his block.

He had seen the shape of the hips, known it was a young man, – but his handler had shown no humanity, was unconcerned. Perhaps he had cared more for the cake on his plate.

Umberto, the lawyer, used his open hands to demonstrate helplessness. ‘I don’t seek to be an intermediary. What am I to do? A note is left at my office, and an answer demanded. I do my best, and attempt to save the life of an unfortunate.’

The prosecutor had the note in front of him. They were in the same room as they had met in before and, again, no dignity was offered to the clan’s advocate. He considered his answer. He had learned much that morning. Castrolami had come to him and brought news that Immacolata Borelli was back with her minders, that Operation Partenope proceeded and her support was guaranteed. Excellent news. Less excellent – in fact, dismal: a further communication via the lumaca, the lawyer he regarded as a slug crawling in slime, and an ultimatum that had hardened. Time was running fast, fine sand between fingers.

With Castrolami there had been a short, slight man, who looked unfed and carried no spare weight, whose clothes were clean but unironed, and who had pepper-speckled hair that was cut short – as if by using scissors harshly the need for brushing was removed. He wore a short-sleeved checked sports shirt – not the collar and tie that the prosecutor and Castrolami habitually put on. The man had on jeans, not suit trousers, trainers, not polished leather shoes. His accent was a little American, had something of French, intimations of English, the language he used. The expression on his face was of humility. The prosecutor would likely have dismissed him as an indulgence that wasted precious time but for two factors: Mario Castrolami had brought him and would not have done so lightly, and the man had eyes that pierced, in which a light burned and demanded attention. He used only one name: Lukas.

The prosecutor, formulating his answer, recalled what he had been told by the soft voice with many accents. The man, Lukas, had said they were now in the ‘stand-off’ time, that they needed to get to the next stage, the ‘negotiation phase’, and there followed only ‘termination’. Right now – with a tenuous line of communication open – they should be stalling, playing the game towards deadline extension. He should not be negative, should not refuse, but should delay while always reassuring that a solution of mutual benefit could be found… And when nothing is negotiable? The man, Lukas, had said with simplicity and candour: ‘You swallow the truth and lie.’ It stuck, like a mullet’s bone, in the prosecutor’s throat. He had been told how he should begin the dialogue and wanted, almost, to throw up.

He smiled sickly. ‘What you must remember all the time, Umberto, is that I want to help.’

Nothing was negotiable. Immacolata Borelli would testify. She would denounce her mother and brothers. Her evidence would send her blood relatives to harsh gaols for the greater part of their lives. There was no slack, no elasticity in the rope he now played out. He had, in his desk drawer, a photograph of the boy. A decent photograph, one that had been used for a passport. It was a photograph of an ordinary boy, and nothing was negotiable. The boy’s freedom could not be bought. It would be duplicity that saved the boy, not honesty – which did not sit easily with the prosecutor. He had talked of it that morning with his wife, who had remarked, predictably, ‘His parents, how awful for them…’ The parents, of course, were another burden for shouldering. Often, when faced with the gravest problems, he would talk to his wife and listen to her, then decide on the course to be followed. He would go to his office in the palace tower and listen to none of his closest aides. His wife had said, ‘But you cannot buy, dear one, the life of the boy.’ He valued what she told him, and could be strengthened by her opinion. What would change when he was gone, retired? What would be different on the streets of Naples when Castrolami was gone, and all the men and women who worked in that trusted loop round him? Would anything have altered? Was a great victory possible before the day that he, his wife and child turned their back on the place? He smiled again, looked across the table at the lawyer and felt the purity of hatred. ‘I need you to know, Umberto, that I want to help resolve this matter in any way I can. My help is on the table.’

She didn’t talk about her mother. The tape-recorder was not produced. She didn’t speak of Vincenzo in the British prison, Belmarsh, or of Giovanni and Silvio, in the Poggioreale gaol. She made no more accusations against her father, locked in a solitary cell of the maximum-security block in Novara.

Her plastic bag was filled.

She had cooked an omelette, with cheese and diced ham, had mixed a dressing and tossed a salad, and had about emptied the refrigerator of bread and fruit. She had drunk a glass of water from the tap, as they had, and she had cleared the table. They had offered to help and been curtly refused.

Immacolata washed up the plates and bowls and the frying pan, the knives and forks.

They were behind her, still at the table.

She could have asked if there was news of Eddie Deacon. She did not. They hadn’t spoken of anything significant, major or minor, of the purchase of the padlock and it being left to rust on a chain on the Ponte Milvio, a place of history. She used scalding water and no plastic gloves. The pain flushed her skin and she didn’t know whether they approved of what she was doing or thought her a cold, heartless, treacherous bitch. Knives and forks clattered on to the draining-board.

Immacolata had not asked for information on what was being done to save Eddie Deacon’s life. She knew she wouldn’t be answered. They would have shrugged, pleaded their junior rank, and she would have demeaned herself. The salad bowl and the frying pan dripped on the draining-board, and she attacked the plates.

Her problem – why she washed up and would then mop the floors and wipe the surfaces – chewed inside her. A junction reached, two turnings for choice. To take one betrayed the death agonies of Marianna Rossetti, to take the other condemned Eddie Deacon. There was no middle road. A plate broke. Maybe it had already been cracked, or she had put it down too forcefully on the draining-board. Without thinking, she collected the pieces, laid them out and looked to see if the damage could be repaired. Only for a moment. She picked the pieces up, marched across the floor to the bin, dumped them and let the lid slam.

She was finishing. Orecchia came from the table, gestured that he would help to dry up, but she waved him away. She wondered, briefly, who would be here next – a pentito from the Camorra, from the far south or Sicily? She had thought once that the hill, with its views, its fences, its guard dogs and its money, could be a home. She would never come back here. She saw a future of cars with privacy windows, false identities, and apartments that displayed nothing personal. No friends. She supposed, one day, they would give her a number to ring if she had difficulties. She would not, after a few more days or weeks, see Orecchia or Rossi again. There would be no friends. She would not love.

It hurt too much to think of Eddie Deacon.

She cleared the draining-board, made the correct piles on the shelves – and wondered if, for a department of the ministry that dealt with housing collaborators, she should write a confessional note reporting the broken plate. Then she went to the cupboard and brought out the mop. All the rooms would be cleaned. Orecchia and Rossi would understand that she needed to purge the place of her presence. She was a memory that would be erased, as if she had never been there. But she would have left something. She bit her lower lip hard, felt no pain but the warmth of blood. Without what she left, Immacolata would be a changed person.

She would not know how, again, to love.

The prosecutor’s car had brought him to the city hall. He did not see the mayor or any elected politician, but an official in the Interior section of the city’s bureaucracy. ‘We believe the successful prosecution of the entire Borelli family is a matter of great importance to the administration of Naples.’

In his own world, at the Palace of Justice, the prosecutor was a king, an emperor, and had – almost – the authority of a Bourbon.

‘We are concerned that the image of the city is fractured, that national leaders from the north regard us as a nest of anarchy and criminality, and that the city is ungovernable.’

He was not in his own world. Power, absolute, resided in this building, and when he was summoned, the prosecutor came.

‘Without a mark of success, we face the very grave dangers of attacks on the city’s budget as supplied by central government – it would be reflected in police and carabinieri budgets. There is the expression, “throwing good money after bad”, and it is used frequently in reference to our society. We have to succeed. The election, also, looms.’

A small mountain of paper was on his desk, with foothills of files on the carpet around it, but in acknowledgement of that power he must show dutiful attention.

‘There can be no question of a bargain being done. We deal, Dottore, with justice and we are not in a souk. Justice comes first, always. The case against the Borelli family will be prosecuted with full rigour. The mayor, or a principal in his administration, wishes – very soon – to give a media conference at which the iron-fisted determination of the city hall will be shown as resolute against organised criminality.’

The prosecutor nodded, seemed to show what was required of him: respect.

‘If the young man dies – and no negotiation will be deployed – it is believed that such a tragedy can be turned to advantage as a clear indication of the barbarity of the clans, their ruthlessness. If… We demand there is no weakening.’

He was dismissed. He had stood throughout and had not been given coffee. What angered the prosecutor most: he had been dragged across the city, brought here, lectured, and he agreed with each sentiment voiced. Nothing was negotiable. He left through the ornate double doors. He wondered how high a level of deceit was required to save the boy, and whether the man, Lukas, who had been in his office was capable of lying to that level.

A priest said, in brisk Italian, ‘Yes, he came here. He came to my church of San Giorgio Maggiore. I’m told he waited a long time for me. Before, he had been the length of via Forcella and back, and had asked where he could find Immacolata Borelli. Her last home was with her grandparents. He was a stranger and no one would tell him. If a stranger asks for the directions to the home of an old clan leader and his wife, no one will tell him… except me. I told him. I realise now that I should not have, but I did. And the boy has “disappeared”, a way of saying he has been kidnapped, and will be used to pressurise the granddaughter, Immacolata. I know Immacolata. If she had stayed, if she had taken a young man from her own class, from another family, I would have been asked to marry her in my church, and I doubt I would have refused. It would have been a grand wedding, followed by an obscenely lavish party, and horrible amounts would have been spent on the principals’ clothing. A heap of banknotes would have been given me for the repair of the church roof and most of those notes would have tested positive for recent cocaine exposure. A predecessor of mine refused, and he was not supported by the hierarchy, and his condemnation of the killing of a child in a gun battle was not backed. For a few days after the girl died there were demonstrations of hostility towards the clan. The anger was a wind that blew out very soon, and the priest was isolated, under threat. When the TV cameras had gone, and their lights, he was alone. He is now in Rome, and when he comes back to visit his mother and father he has an explosion-proof car to travel in and armed bodyguards to escort him. Our cloth and our collar do not protect us. There are bullet marks by the main door and you passed them. It is not easy to stand against such a force. You wish me to ask in my pulpit on Sunday for information to be given to the police concerning the boy. I would be wasting my breath. They are the state, not you, Dottore Castrolami. They have complete power, complete authority. Even inside this house of God I feel the fear. It is always with us. It shames me, but it’s there. Fear is in the fabric of this street, this church, this congregation, this priest. A priest stood out against the Casalesi clan and was shot dead. You say you have few hours left, and you have no idea where the boy is held. I’m grateful for the trust you place in me that you can give me information so sensitive, and I can suggest only that you pray for good fortune and that the sun will shine on your endeavour. It is Naples. We are all, believe me, friend, powerless in the face of this force of evil. We lack the strength to stand against it. But I tell you, friend, if it is one or the other – the force of justice exerted against the family of Forcella or the boy’s life – I choose justice. I feel inadequate, a failed man, not only today but every day I serve here. I will pray for the boy, but privately. The Church has little use for another hero, less for another martyr.’

Castrolami shook his hand, then Lukas. They left him in the quiet, cool, empty cavern of his church, and went back out into the sunshine. Lukas was not a man, ever, to criticise the actions, the self-preservation and the priorities of a victim skewered on dilemmas. They went for coffee.

Did he want it?

Eddie shivered.

The enormity of what he had achieved struck him, a hammer blow. He was shivering, his legs were trembling spasmodically and his hands shook.

He had two hinges loose.

He could now, using the galvanised bucket for leverage and the head of the nail as a screw-driver, free the hinges from the door.

At any moment, on his decision, with a five-minute window to shift the screws, he could open the door, forcing the bolt from its slot, and go through it. He would have the nail as a weapon, with the end of the chain and its pin.

He didn’t know what was beyond the door.

He could get through one, might find another that was locked, bolted and barricaded… might find that the handle turned and it opened. He might confront, beyond it, three men with knives, guns and coshes, or he might find it empty, or one man asleep. He might be too high up to go out through a window – or there might be a flat roof for him to drop down on.

He didn’t know.

If he opened the door that took him beyond the chance to turn back – he’d be going for broke. If they caught him they’d hurt him, then kill him.

Choices faced Eddie Deacon, almost crushed him.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator