The Collaborator

15

It was as if Eddie pressed on a coiled spring. His breathing was hard, uncontrolled. His leg muscles had tightened and his hands were clumsy, insensitive. Tension built in him.

He did it.

Eddie had the galvanised bucket under the lower hinge bar. The upper was already detached and had swung away from the steel-sheeted door. He let the spring go; his energy danced free. All of his strength now was directed on to the bucket and his fingers were gripping it. He pulled, tugged, forced back the bucket and the two screws screeched. He had been more careful, had worked slower, on the upper hinge and it had made less noise. Now the lower hinge made a cat-fight sound. No going back. A sound – proverbial – to wake the dead. Enough to wake any guy on sentry duty, drowsy in a chair. He did the last heave, and was hurled back across the space as the hinge bar came away and one of the screws exploded into his face, like gunfire. The bolt fittings loosed. The door sagged and fell away.

A strip of light came into the space. Eddie could see where he had been – walls that were graffiti-marked, and his own name a scrawl across other writing, the boarded window, the turned-over bucket and the plastic bag in which the food had been, the bottle on its side, the crevice of broken concrete from which the chain’s pin had been dislodged, and the hood. He could see all of that. Then he scooped up the length of chain, might have been five feet of it, the nail in his right hand, and he put his body into the gap, using his hips and shoulders to force the opening wider. He was snagged – he struggled, writhed… and broke out.

He didn’t know how much time he’d used since the screech of the screws – seemed an age, might have been a few seconds. Time, then, was most precious to him.

Eddie crouched. He had two weapons and readied them. He had the nail held like a knife for stabbing downwards, and the chain with the pin on it which he could swing as a flail. The room was small, empty. No chairs, no table, no cupboards or chests, but there were sacks against one wall, three, opened, and in them were stacked packages in sealed oiled paper – like it was their warehouse. There was wallpaper, peeled and damp-stained, with mould by the skirting and a loud flower pattern, and there was a window, daylight.

Going fast, crab-like, Eddie reached it. Light poured through it and stung his eyes. He blinked and they watered. He didn’t know how long he had been in darkness or with the hood over his face. He realised, peering through the grime on the glass, that he was high in a block. He could see below an empty road, then a path on which dogs fought, snarling and posturing, and a woman pushed a buggy. Beyond, kids kicked a football and the shadows were small, the sun high. He saw also that a man urinated in the bushes, his back to the block, and further down the road a couple, young, looked behind them furtively, then went into the cover. He knew he could have waved at that window, screamed, jumped up and down and yelled some more but no one would hear, see or care about him – not even the bloody dogs. But he pulled at the window latches. They were rotten and broke, and he had the window wide. Eddie had to close his eyes to protect them from the glare. He stood vulnerable – thought it pathetic – rooted and blind. He had to open his eyes, take the pain. He did.

He put his head out of the window. He saw a cruising police car, but only the tail, then it was gone – and a scooter coming up the street. The driver and his pillion wore black helmets with darkened visors.

What was he looking for? Perhaps he hoped to find, under that window, a drainpipe or a balcony, a hand reaching up from a window below, or a builder’s ladder, the convenience of a fireescape. He craned forward, lost sight of the dogs and the kids, the woman with the buggy and the man who had now zipped up and was walking. The scooter had gone and the road was empty again. There was nothing. Maybe a film stuntman could have done something, or a Special Forces soldier, a guy from a comic – not Eddie Deacon. There was no hand or foot grip, and the pavement was fifty, sixty feet below, the drop sheer.

He heard, behind him, the door open, then an oath.

Turning, he faced the man. Young, muscled, not focused but confused, T-shirt and jeans, hair slicked with gel and a chain on his neck with a crucifix hanging. Eddie saw every feature of him. The sun spot on his temple and the mole on his chin, his T-shirt inside the belt on the jean waist. Not more than two seconds, and Eddie had absorbed that the man had no weapon.

He charged him. Hit him hard, clenched fist holding the nail, hit him in the chest where the ribcage gives way to soft stomach skin. Didn’t know who he was, why he was there. Eddie felt he’d punctured him. Hadn’t seen him before. Hit him, wounded and hurt him, because he was in the doorway. The man grunted and doubled. Eddie didn’t know whether it was a flesh wound or a fatal injury to an organ. He pushed him aside. As the man went down, Eddie went through the doorway.

He was in another room. The men’s hands loosened, the cards fell haphazardly to the table and dropped on to the banknotes they played for. Chairs were pushed back and the table rocked as knees caught its underside. Three more men, all matching the other’s confusion, disbelief. But the door out of the room was beyond them. A hand clutched his shoulder from behind.

He was brought to the Sail by Fangio. His nose was a dull pain that throbbed. Blood was in his nostrils, and he had sucked some into his mouth and swallowed a little.

The anger burned in him. Salvatore had had to return to the Sail to report to the clan men who had sent him out, given him the photograph of an opponent to be killed and the map for the location of a killing. It had been demanded that he report back in person. Already a witness would have called a cut-out number, which would have phoned into the Sail. He was not bringing news of a killing – like when he was ten, before he was full time on the streets, and standing before a goddam teacher, his goddam writing commented on – ‘Poor, needs more practice. Improvement required’, but it was a part of the price Carmine Borelli had paid. They would know already that a bottle had hit his face, and that the execution had not shown calm, casual power.

When he lifted off his helmet, the visor spattered, the blood had been dammed by the padding and made a ring below his lower lip and on his cheeks. He was Salvatore, the idol of kids who had his photograph on their mobiles. He was Il Pistole. He was the enforcer of the Borelli clan. He could have screwed Gabriella Borelli, should have screwed Immacolata Borelli. He was a man of consequence in Forcella and Sanita, but in the Sail he was a servant and had been sent with a P38 on an errand. The blood on his face was as humiliating as if, a kid, he had soiled his pants.

He went up the stairs fast and hoped to find a washroom before he saw the principals. As he took the steps – two in each stride – the pain caught him.

The car was a high-performance Alfa 166, a three-litre engine. Orecchia drove and the seat beside him was empty, except for a machine pistol, gas canisters and a protective vest.

She had Rossi with her in the back. It might have been Orecchia’s sense of humour that he had insisted on driving and put her with Rossi, who had seen her naked as she had seen him. They sat at the far extremities of the black-leather bench seat, and there was another machine pistol between them, more gas and vests. She thought the car was low on its wheels and presumed it was armoured. Rossi, now, ignored her. It was as if, she thought – her signature on the ‘contract’, the agreement that she would collaborate and give evidence guaranteed – they were about to pass her on and therefore had no need to humour, flatter, cajole or dominate her. She was to them used goods.

Their eyes did not meet. Their hands stayed far apart, and their knees. She was behind Orecchia and stared out of the left side window. Rossi’s attention was locked on the right.

They went fast on the autostrada, kept a place in the overtaking lane. Traffic in front veered out of their path and blue lights flashed behind the radiator grille. They had been escorted out of the Roman suburbs by a marked car and would be met again when they approached the southern city. They were now south of Frosinone, north of Cassino, and cruised at an average of 145 kilometres an hour. Orecchia had music on, light opera, and there was no conversation. The radio filled the void.

She wore the best of her few clothes, had done her makeup and brushed her hair before leaving. She had seen residents on the balconies of the block on the hill and had walked straight-backed to the car. It would have been obvious from their body language that the men with her were a protection detail. She thought there would have been sneers from those balconies and it would have been obvious that she was a collaborator – she had protection but not the clothing of a person of status. By now she would be gossiped over. Like dogs with old bones, they would be exchanging anecdotes of sightings of her. Not one, she was certain, of the residents on the hill would have admired what she had done.

They had gone out to the autostrada by the north-east route. She had had only one glimpse of the river. The old bridge, built originally by a Roman-era architect, and carrying now a padlock sold that morning for thirty-five euros, was far behind her.

Immacolata Borelli was going home.

One man had a lacerated face, a ribbon of blood, from the chain swung against it.

Another had run and was gone down a corridor, a door slammed after him and a bolt pushed back.

Another was dazed from the collision of his head with Eddie’s and doubled from the impact of Eddie’s knee in his groin.

The man who had been stabbed with the nail and had grabbed Eddie’s shoulder, now moaned on the floor and held his throat. There were welts on it where the chain had wrapped round it, and he had almost choked with the constriction of his windpipe.

There were two doors, closed, ahead of Eddie.

The moment would not last, could not. They were in shock, and shock would clear.

Eddie opened the left-hand door. He saw a lavatory seat and a basin. He came out, twisted and dragged on the second door. He was in a hall. An artist’s conception of Christ hung on the wall, a candle under it, not lit. Eddie understood that adrenalin coursed through him. When it was used up, he would weaken. His pace would slacken, while their shock and confusion ebbed. There were more sacks in the hall and another door, with a steel-barred gate, and beyond it a steel sheet on wood. But the lock on the gate was unfastened and he could wrench it back. In the local paper, the one that did Dalston and Hackney, there had been a piece about crack houses that had been busted into by the police, with photographs and the crack houses had had those barred gates for security. Heavy keys were in the door. He didn’t know what was beyond it. He pulled it open.

An alarm wailed. He couldn’t have known the door was alarmed – had seen no key pad. Eddie reeled out on to a walkway. He could have gone right but he went left. In either direction there was only a long corridor of concrete with chest-high walls and wires running across it, looped to overhead bars, with washing slung on them – he had to duck his head below shirts, sheets and skirts, cotton trousers, lightweight towels and underwear. He ran, and heard the pursuit.

Because of the washing his head was down, and it was awkward running with the shackle on his ankle – bloody excuses, Eddie. He looked up. He saw, ahead of him, a gate. It was as if the air was vacuumed from his lungs. It was like when hope died. There was no way off the walkway and it was lined with doors – closed, blocked to him. There was a staircase, perhaps fifty paces ahead – might have been a mile or five. He slowed. There was a knot of men at the head of the staircase and between them and him the gate. He saw it so clearly. He could see five vertical and three horizontal bars, and it was topped with a loose coil of barbed wire. The pandemonium behind him came nearer. He had almost stopped. He saw the man, with caked blood on his face, approach the gate and talk to the guards there, and attention was distracted.

Eddie was level with a window. Some on the walkway had been broken and repaired with cardboard, others had old sheets or towels draped across them for privacy, or were too filthy to see through. He caught the eyes of an old guy slumped in a chair but who had turned, twisted, then was on his feet.

The door beside the window opened. It must have been in Eddie’s face: two big words – per favore. He heard a key turn. The door wasn’t opened. For him to do it.

Eddie understood the survival instinct. Refuge given, but for him to open the door, and for him to determine whether it brought the dogs of hell into the old guy’s room. Nowhere else to go. He went inside.

Old blood on Salvatore’s face. New blood on the men confronting him. He had been slowed at the gate, they had been slowed by the washing slung across. Some items had been torn down when the cloth was across their faces. Women screamed and were in the walkway, collecting up what had been torn down. For dirtying washing, foot-soldiers of the clan could be abused, not for murder, not for selling narcotics or for intimidation, but for washing that had been dragged off the pegs and would have to be washed again.

Salvatore was allowed through the barred gate. He could have been let through immediately, but that was not the way power was exercised in Scampia. He was kept waiting on the pretence that an answer to a mobile was needed – bullshit. And amusing, too, the blood on his face. He saw men coming towards him. He recognised three of the four, knew where they had been and what their work was.

Incoherent ramblings greeted him. Then clarity.

Salvatore screamed.

His man was lost. Where? Above the scream, close to where he stood, a television was turned up loud and blasted out of a closed window. He had to scream to be heard above it: ‘Knock down every fucking door. Find him.’

The handler of Delta465/Foxtrot had enjoyed his cake and coffee, had put the tapes given him into his briefcase and had wandered back to the office used by the service, a block in the Mussolini tradition that was behind the Posta e Telegrafi building and backed on to the piazza Carita.

He had wound fast through the picture images, had seen a clan leader whose image was perpetually on the database. He had seen a close-up of Carmine Borelli and his hood, Salvatore, both thrown up by computer recognition, and the three still frames that showed a hooded prisoner being frogmarched along the walkway – a front frame, a side frame, a back frame.

He had typed his report.

He had gone down a corridor and had knocked with due respect on the door of his line manager. He had been admitted. He had explained what matters the agent – Delta465/Foxtrot – had felt sufficiently important to warrant an extraordinary meeting. He had shown the images.

The concerns of the agent were logged.

His line manager said, ‘We operate, Beppe, in a world of priorities. We’re not policemen, not detectives of the Guardia di Finanze, or investigators of the carabinieri. We are defenders of the state in matters of national security. This is mere criminality. We do not, for any short-term position, endanger the safety of a long-term asset. If the police or other units were to act on this information it would hazard his safety – our agent. It should be filed. Thank you. Please, excuse me, I have a meeting. The usual file and without specific flagging.’

The search had started. In the warren of concrete that was the Sail, on its third floor, where the walkway had the numbers of the three hundreds, odd and even, doors were hammered on for entry. Like a pack of hunting dogs, hurt and demanding blood, men went about the task of tracking down a fugitive.

It had been the washing suspended from the wires criss-crossing above the walkway that had permitted the escaper to lose his pursuers. The washing was gone now, and the women had retreated.

It was a methodical search, down two sides, and every apartment was scoured. All those who hunted or watched waited for the triumphant shout that would tell them of success. There was no love for strangers here.

News travelled fast in Naples and its environs. It might as well have been carried on the hourly bulletins of the independent radio stations or on the RAI network. It burrowed through prison walls, over the barbed-wire defences, into the great heat-stifled blocks, where the cells were, and into the wire-roofed exercise yards.

At Posilippo, north of the city, Gabriella Borelli heard a whisper through her door that her daughter was back in the custody of the Servizio Centrale Protezione and would testify. She sat on her bunk and the sweat streamed off her. She thought of the boy, the one lever left, and wished him dead, his corpse dumped at her daughter’s feet. She was near to tears.

At Poggioreale, south of the city, Giovanni Borelli strutted in a yard and Silvio Borelli slouched around the circuit, and it was murmured to them that their sister had returned to the protection of the state and had guaranteed her willingness to give evidence. The older swore, cursed and blasphemed, his cheeks reddened, and his brother heard him say, ‘The whore, the fucking whore – she should have her boy, have him dead.’ The younger shook his head, didn’t understand the scale of his sister’s hatred or why it was directed against himself. He would have seen the boy butchered if it would open the Poggioreale gate for him.

Umberto, the lawyer, heard – brought to him by the grapevine his nephew, Massimo, listened to. He thought: then the boy is condemned. And his building had cameras aimed at it, his phones were listened to. If he walked to a bar for coffee and a pastry he was followed on foot, and if he drove to the launderette to deliver or collect his cottons a car came after him. ‘The boy is condemned and has little time. Sad but inevitable… little time.’

Eddie Deacon had no bloodlust, would have said he did not practise cruelty to the defenceless. He had memories. He could hear – through doors, walls, above the volume of the television – the search coming closer… doors breaking, shouting, always closer.

A memory of fishing for pike in the Avon as a child, with other children. A small roach or a juvenile perch, maybe three inches long, was impaled alive on treble hooks, then thrown into still water in the ebb of a weir and near a reed bed, and a float would bob around as the fish swam for safety from the predator. It would try to reach the cover of the reeds and find shelter there from the pike’s jaws, and the children would yank the line and pull it away from the reeds so that it would swim where the big beast could see it. Always the live bait went for the most tangled reeds to hide.

The apartment was a trap, and its teeth had closed round him.

A memory of the kids who lived on farms – and the child, Eddie, went to their homes at weekends and headed off with them across the fields – and had set snares. They were put in place on a Friday afternoon, inspected on Saturday and Sunday morning. Sometimes the rabbit was already dead, sometimes there was just blood and fur and a fox would have taken it but occasionally the rabbit had crouched, so still, and seemed to know its fate and merely waited for the killing blow. Always, with its final strength, it had tried to get into what deep cover the snare’s restraint allowed.

There was a front room in which an old man sat and watched the television. It was a dirty, smelly, hot room, and the man had gone back to his chair after turning the key and hadn’t looked at Eddie. He had watched a film, technicolour, cowboys – it could have been Robert Mitchum, half a century old, and had not caught Eddie’s eye. What alternative? A pack running behind him. A closed gate in front. No steps off to the sides, up or down. The door had been unlocked for him to open and close. A front room with a window that was exceptional for its cleanliness. He had gone inside. A corridor ran from the living room, and there was no air-conditioner, no electric fan, and the heat caught inside was a blanket in his face. There was a kitchen space off the corridor with a small cooker and a fridge, both from a museum, and small cupboard units. It wasn’t a place where a man – five foot ten, twelve stone six – could hide. No chance. There was a bedroom and a double bed, and under the mattress there were fixed drawers, a wardrobe that looked ready to fall apart and a chest with more drawers. Again there was no hiding place.

A memory of the ferrets that most of the farmers’ kids had. Little sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, sharp-toothed killing machines. Nets put across the burrows, the ferrets slipped in, then the listening, the pounding of a rabbit running and a net bulging. This child had not enjoyed the spectacle but had gone so as not to lose face – bloody important at nine or ten. He had often thought of a rabbit going deeper and further into the far extremity of the burrow and all the time hearing the scurrying brush of the little bastard’s clawed pads, and having nowhere further to run.

The bathroom was the only room remaining off the corridor. The hunters were in the next apartment. The walls were thin, little more than partitions. He thought of it as a bathroom, but it had no bath. There was a basin, a lavatory without a seat, a shower unit with a curtain drawn half across and sagging for lack of support. There was a small cupboard, and a window.

The memories were of the defenceless ones who had tried to reach thick reeds, bramble cover and the last extremity of the burrow.

Not much went through Eddie’s mind as he looked at the window, heard the banging and shouting through the wall. She wasn’t in his mind. He didn’t think of love, of getting his leg over, of growing old in her company and owning a bloody cottage with roses growing. Eddie thought of survival. There was a man who had blood on his chest from a rusted nail’s wound, and another with slash marks on his face from a chain, and a third who had doubled when a knee had crunched his testicles. He thought they were all coming, they and plenty more, and where he was would be next for the search.

He had the window open.

The breeze through it, slight, riffled the plastic curtains. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go that offered the possibility of survival.

Then the door down the corridor and beyond the living room was hit. He saw the men, in his mind, pouring inside, the blood on their clothing and skin.

Eddie went out through the window. He stood on the rim of the lavatory bowl and swung a leg out, then the other, and his weight was taken on his shin, which was across the sharp metal of the window frame. He looked down. Once was enough. There was the road, and long, sun-scorched grass. There were bushes and rubbish trolleys, long filled to overflowing, and there was concrete. What had he thought when he was looking out of the window in the holding place, his cell? That the drop was fifty or sixty feet. Seemed fucking further now. A pipe jutted out of the concrete a little to his left – an overflow pipe for the lavatory, maybe – diameter of about half an inch, protruding maybe six. He thought, from what he heard, that they were now in the bedroom or the kitchen. The nail went into his pocket. Again, Eddie took a deep breath. It was about survival. If he was taken now he stood no chance. He didn’t think of her, or his father and mother – didn’t see the childhood home or the house in Dalston. Saw a bastard drop, a pipe from which water dripped, the edge of the window frame and the flutter of the curtain.

Eddie went over, and the chain cascaded down. He let his chest and stomach scrape down the iron window fitting, then against the old concrete of the building. His feet kicked. His fists, clenched to give his fingers the strength needed and gripping the bottom of the window frame, took his weight. Then a trainer found the pipe and a fraction of the weight was shed. But, he did not know how long the pipe would carry its share of the weight, and the chain swayed beneath him. He hung.

He played the idiot, a deaf idiot, well. They swarmed through Davide’s living room, shrieking questions at him, and he grinned but barely turned his head from the big screen in front of him where a gunfight blazed. He didn’t answer and left them to think he was afflicted by deafness as well as idiocy. The agent was not deaf and was not an idiot. His years of living the lie in the Sail had required of him the acutest sense of self-preservation. It was irrelevant at that moment whether his hearing was good or impaired: his sanity was on the line. He could not have articulated why he had risen from his chair, gone fast across the worn carpet through the polystyrene takeaway trays and unlocked his door. Their eyes had met. He had looked back through the window, had seen the face and the desperation, the stains on the clothing, the nail in the fist with the dark stain at the tip, and the chain, and he had known that a fugitive ran. Had seen that shirt below a hood, had seen that dark shade of jeans when a prisoner was brought along the walkway. He saw so much of human misery, the arrogance of the clan capo s and the swagger of the foot-soldiers, and he performed his duty and reported to his handlers. He had never before intervened. Not much of an intervention, the unlocking of a door, but a first time. Now he was ignored. Four men at least flowed through his apartment and doors banged but he did not hear the whoop. There was no place of refuge if a search, barely a thorough one, was made but they came out of the corridor. He muttered a short prayer. He dedicated it to Matteo, the patron saint of bank workers and book-keepers – as he had been. He said the prayer again, silently but never allowed his eyes to leave the screen where revolver shots were exchanged in front of a timbered saloon. He could not imagine where the boy had hidden. They were all gone, but one stood in the open door and lit a cigarette.

*

It seemed that his arms were slowly being wrenched from their sockets. He didn’t know for how much longer he could keep it up. Cramp had set into his fingers, which gripped the base of the iron window frame. What sustained him was the diminishing voices. They had been right above him. The voices and the clatter of movement had come so close, within spitting range, but his hands – what little of them would have been visible above the window frame – had been behind the flutter of the curtain. It would have been just a glance, a moment’s check, and they would have seen no place where an adult could hide. Maybe they had then been in twenty apartments, maybe they had ten more to go through, maybe they had gotten careless… and the voices had drifted. Maybe another half-minute and then, God willing, he would begin the attempt to regain the window.

The first stone missed him, was well wide.

The second, thrown harder, more expertly, a better missile, hit the concrete level with his head, around a yard from him.

He swung momentarily, as if he had tried to swat the grit its impact spat at him, on one hand, then clawed the other back into position, and the extra weight had shifted the overflow pipe on which there was room for one foot. Little voices were far below, shrill.

He looked down. Had to tuck his head almost into his right armpit and his view went past flush window sills, to the paving, the rubbish bags, the bushes and the kids… Fucking kids. The chain swung languidly below his foot. Not the kids. Nothing halfhearted about the little bastards. Four of them down there. The smallest had a catapult. Three slung stones up at him, which made a random shower, but the smallest kid had the range, had damn near hit Eddie’s head, and had another stone loaded. Eddie looked back up at the window. Couldn’t look down any more. He heard their shouts – voices that were choirboys’ – and imagined they were all pointing up. Wrong. All except the sod with the catapult. He was hit in the shoulder-blade. Imagined one man looking down from a window and seeing them pointing. The next stone from the catapult hit the back of Eddie’s leg, where it was soft, just above the left knee.

He tried to lift himself. It would have taken the ultimate of his concentration – real focus – to find that strength, channel it and get himself up high enough so that his elbows could go over the window frame. A stone hit the concrete a foot from his eye and level with it. He couldn’t turn his head away – wouldn’t dare destabilise himself. Eddie knew his strength was going, and with it the heart.

The drop was below him, and the kids bayed, and more had come, and it was a chorus below his feet and the chain with the pin attached. Too much pain in his fingers.

Where it all ended. Some God-fuck-forsaken awful housing estate somewhere out of Naples.

Get it over with. Get it done. He had only to loosen his grip and it was over, done. The pain would be gone from his hands and he would have peace and… would hit the paving, a potato sack. Eddie felt tears welling.

His wrist was grasped.

He couldn’t look up. First one hand had taken his left wrist, then a second. He thought of the old man in the chair and sobbed, in silence, thanks to him. He didn’t doubt that the grip on his arm was strong and wouldn’t fail him. He’d hug him, kiss him. His foot was off the pipe and his hands had lost their hold on the window frame. He was reliant. When did he know?

A truth came to Eddie Deacon when a third hand and a fourth, then a fifth had a grip on him. Two hands on his left wrist, two more on his right and a fifth had a fistful of his shirt. He was lifted. He saw the faces. There was blood on one, and blood on another man’s T-shirt. And there was the man who had put him in the van on via Forcella, whose eyes seemed to dance with laughter.

He was pulled up, lifted through the window, then thrown down on to the floor. The tears came.

*

As the investigator in charge of the case, Marco Castrolami had the prime place at the end of the table. It was rare for this committee to be called together, but he thought it worth the effort. There were few other places he could go. The meeting had lasted twenty-four minutes, on the wall clock behind his chair, and its usefulness was exhausted.

Around the table were the head of the carabinieri criminal-intelligence section for the province of Campania, the officer who headed intelligence-gathering for the Naples police, the senior intelligence co-ordinator of the Guardia di Finanza, and a dapper, slight man who seemed to offer no name and was set apart from the rest.

Castrolami said, ‘I repeat, for the final time, that only a few hours are now available to save the life of this British boy, Eddie Deacon. I repeat that all surveillance of principals has failed to find – as best I know – a pattern of movements or intercepts that can locate him. I hope you will all examine your memories with due diligence. Whatever else you have in on-running investigations, I request your help. So, I repeat, has anyone even the smallest information on where the Borelli clan is holding this boy? Please.’

His eyes travelled round the table: to his colleague, to the police officer he had known for a dozen years of late-night drinking, bitching, complaining and laughing, to the fiscal policeman who was new in the city. They had all shaken their heads or used their hands to gesture ignorance. Last, his glance rested on the official from the secret service, who was doodling on a sheet of paper. He looked up and Castrolami lip-read his quiet answer: ‘Nothing.’ But it was not said aloud.

He stood. He had no more to offer.

They came off the autostrada, through the toll booth, and on to the slip-road. Below, far to the west, were the city and the sea, its beauty and its magnificence.

In the glove box, Orecchia had found a lightweight raincoat, flimsy, but sufficient for what he needed. If it hadn’t been there he would have used a newspaper. He covered the machine pistol with it, then switched off the flashing light behind the radiator grille.

Now Rossi caught her eye, accepted the contact. There was a query in his expression and she nodded decisively. She was prepared for the last stage of the journey, into Naples.

And memories swept her. Immacolata knew the features and signs of the road. She knew the filling station, owned by the Mauriello clan, and the garden centre that seemed to have hectares of rattan furniture on display and was owned by the Nuvoletta clan. There was the restaurant beside the dual-carriageway where her father had taken her and she had met the Lo Russo family – she had been seventeen and had taken an instant dislike to the boy whose company she was supposed to enjoy. It would have been a good alliance, and her father had laughed all the way back into the city at the scale of the failure. There was the truckyard where the long-distance lorries were kept, maintained and repaired; it was owned by the Licciardi clan, and the fleet could be hired by her father or her brother for the empty run north, under the terms of a sub-contract, and the return laden with chemical waste for the Moccia or the Alfieri clan. It was excellent commercial co-operation. They came past the great angled towers of the Scampia district, and on through Secondigliano and into the territory of the Contini clan. She saw cafes where men had been killed, and bars where men had been killed, and pavements where men had been killed, and she had come home.

Immacolata was adult. She was intelligent. She knew what happened in her home city, and the history of its streets. She knew where the envelopes of five-hundred-euro notes, tight in elastic bands, had been slipped into the smart, expensive leather briefcases of politicians, national and local; she knew where civil servants who prepared recommendations on contract choice of cement manufacturers were entertained by Romanian or Belarussian girls; she knew where the men who led the clans housed their mistresses – and where there had been a concrete-lined hole in a yard that had been the home for eight months of a clan leader’s eldest son, his heir. The police had needed reinforcements before they could remove the twenty-six-year-old and had fired gas at a screaming crowd. They had lost two patrol cars, torched, before order was restored for long enough to make the retreat. She knew where. It was her city.

She could see the Sail building, and knew that her father – in an earlier prison term – had been in an adjacent cell and had shared exercise with the clan leader’s cousin. Now it had drifted away from her view, with the other towers, and she saw the signs to Capodicino airport.

The car went fast. She saw now that Orecchia spoke – outside her hearing – into a button microphone that hung loose from an attachment. She had not noticed him put an earpiece in place.

They were near to the bottom of the last long hill, on the via Carbonara, going past the high walls of the Castel Capuano. Rossi had stiffened in his seat and had undone his seatbelt, as if he felt the need for greater freedom. His hand was on the stock of the machine pistol, and a car – unmarked – was in front of them, with another behind. It was not the direct route. She sensed they were playing with her, testing her, or steeling her.

Immacolata saw, very clearly, the lower end of the via Forcella. There was the bar where her grandfather went for coffee and brandy, to play cards or dominoes with old friends. There was the vegetable stall where her grandmother bought broccoli and spinach, tomatoes and spring onions. There was the narrow entrance to the shallow arcade where Silvio played the machines, and the hairdresser Giovanni used was beyond it. Momentarily, she had a view of the facade of the block where her grandfather and grandmother lived, then the three cars – in unison – had swung left.

She could see, fleetingly, the shops, businesses, outlets from which, as a teenager, she had collected the pizzo, and those to which, older, with the benefit of her newly learned book-keeping, she had gone to revalue their contributions. She could recall her ice-cool responses when she was told that such sums were not possible. They always were. They crossed the big square in front of the railway station, and it was from there – only a few times – that she had taken the train, anonymous and unidentified, to the town of Nola to visit her friend. On down a crowded, logjammed street. Then the siren started. They had gone the wrong way in the traffic chaos and the sun had been blocked by the height of the Poggioreale walls, where Giovanni and Silvio were held. She saw the church, modern and magnificent, and the triple towers of the Palace of Justice.

They went down a subway entrance and a barrier was raised.

She had never been there before, descending into the greyness of the tunnel under the palace. She had been through the main public entrance, off the pedestrian area, through which the families of the accused were admitted, but not this route. In Naples there were the Castel Capuano, the Castel Nuovo, the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel San Elmo, all great historic monuments, but the palace was another castle, as formidable, the home of what had been for every one of her aware years the ‘enemy’, the nemico. One thing to meet the enemy in a park in north-east London, and to travel with the enemy from London to Rome, then to be in a safe-house on a hill with exquisite views of the capital. It was another to be taken, under the protection of guns, into the enemy’s castle.

She was in an underground car park, dimly lit, and there was the stench of petrol fumes.

Immacolata did not look into Rossi’s face as he stood beside the opened door of the Alfa. She climbed out, making light of the awkwardness in slipping her legs from the low seat, and stretched. She followed Orecchia towards a lift shaft where more men waited. She was ringed with guns. Theatre? Or real and present danger? The men had hard faces and she didn’t think they play-acted.

In the lift, she was hemmed in, and Rossi’s machine-pistol magazine dug into her arm.

She could not have said when on the journey she had last thought of Eddie Deacon. She wasn’t certain if she’d thought of him since she’d fastened the padlock and thrown the key into the river, where it meandered among sandbanks.

*

Salvatore came out through the door. The man with the face wound, now caked and dried, had taken his place. The door was closed, a poor fit since the power drill had replaced the hinges and gouged new screw holes. He went to the sink and started to wash the blood off his fists and the sweat from his body.

A man came up behind him. ‘The door is always locked by any person who lives on any floor of any walkway in the Sail.’

He didn’t understand. It was more important to him that his fists hurt and the knuckles were scraped. Much more important: the boy had not yelled.

The man said, ‘Every door is locked. How did he get in? Was the door left open? Was there a plan? I think not. Was the door opened for him? I think it was.’

If the boy had screamed, begged, it would have given Salvatore more satisfaction. He could hear now the thudding blows he had inflicted. There would be more blood from the eyes, the lips, inside the mouth and the nose. There would be much more when the man with the nail wound in his chest took his turn, and the man who still walked badly because of the knee and the bruising.

‘What are you saying?’

‘They found many new shirts in the cupboard, still wrapped, never worn. He’s Davide. He goes to the city each week and buys a new shirt. Why? Why does he need new shirts that he never wears? He’s an idiot. Is that the behaviour of an idiot? Why did he unlock the door for a fugitive? No one would.’

Salvatore’s upper teeth closed on his lower lip and bit hard. He was a stranger here, isolated. He had loyalties: to Gabriella Borelli, whom he had not protected, to Carmine and Anna Borelli, whom he revered, to himself, paramount. He wondered where Fangio was, what he was doing, how he was treated down there among the shit, not allowed to come up to the third level. He sensed alarm. Two men waited, each with different wounds, to beat more hell out of the boy. He said they should not take the boy’s life. He dried his face. He said the idiot, Davide, could wait. He went to find Fangio. He walked along the walkway and past the apartment and noted, for the first time, the cleanliness of the window and the old man watching television inside.

‘He wants to know when.’

There was surveillance throughout the city. Each of the forces, the carabinieri, the Squadra Mobile and the Guardia di Finanza, would have loved to be able to claim plaudits. For recognised faces – Umberto, Carmine Borelli, Salvatore, Il Pistole, named foot-soldiers of the clan – there was foot surveillance, camera surveillance, audio surveillance and telephone surveillance. Almost – not quite literally – the men and women of the three law-and-order agencies jostled each other.

‘When is he to kill him?’

Fangio walked in a cemetery with Massimo, the lawyer’s nephew, beside him. Neither had any idea of the identity of the corpse in the coffin, the sex or the age. They took a position near the tail of the cortege as it wound towards a high wall and the line of small capelle in front of it. Within the last four months, over a meal in the evening heat at a ristorante on the west slopes of Vesuvio, Gabriella Borelli and Salvatore had chosen this as a method of avoiding watchers and cameras. Salvatore had activated it now, a plan decided on after the whore’s departure to London.

‘And where, for best effect, is he to leave the body?’

Massimo cultivated a north-European pallor, but he fancied his face had gone bloodless. He was, could not avoid the implication, now at the heart of a conspiracy of murder; might before have avoided that conclusion by playing at semantics – no longer could deflect his own guilt.

They had reached the capella in which that day’s body would be placed. By happy coincidence another funeral had ended. A column of mourners – men loosening their ties, women dabbing their necks with cologne and using the order-of-service cards as fans – came past them and headed for the gate that would lead into the Sanita district. They switched.

‘When? Where?’

They didn’t leave together. Fangio was far down the via Foria and accelerating through slow traffic by the time Massimo had telephoned Anna Borelli, had apologised profusely for disturbing her siesta and begged permission to collect clean underwear for her grandsons and take the items with him on his visit the following day to Poggioreale gaol.

It did not surprise him that Anna, the crow in her perpetual uniform of black, would make such a decision: when a young man would die and where his carcass would be dumped. But he was hooked and could not step back.

He sat on great smoothed stones. They were at the foundations of the narrow metalled track leading to the main entrance of the castle that jutted into the bay. A wedding party hung back, but the girl bride and her fresh-faced new husband had come off the road and over the low wall, had stepped on to the stones, a photographer with them, and posed close to where Lukas sat.

He should not have been there. He should have been in the annexe off the operations room. If he had been there he would have been able to soak in the collator’s surly acceptance of his presence, and the psychologist’s sneered hostility. The ROS men, who would have made up any assault team that might be mounted, would have sat around him, yawned, broken wind and belched, as such men did, as he had when he was a member of a hostage rescue team. And, if he had been there, he would have been close to Castrolami who seemed to him now a man of split priorities: the life of the boy, the testimony of the girl. And the scales, as Castrolami demonstrated them, slipped fast towards the girl as his priority. He watched the bride pose in front of the towering castle walls and hold out her train so that the afternoon breeze caught it and made a sail of it. He saw the adoration in the groom’s face. It had not happened in Lukas’s life.

It was good for him to see real people and share what they offered, not to be incarcerated in an annexe with a gallows-humour crowd.

There should, of course, have been intelligence coming in from the assets, but the way Castrolami had told it there were the usual, inevitable, divisions and rivalries. If it was a carabinieri -instigated investigation, would the police crime squad or the fiscal police help? Small chance. And there had been, at their meeting, the domestic security service. They wouldn’t. No chance. In the States, it might have been the Agency, the Bureau and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, might have been Counter-Terrorist, Intelligence and the Junglas, Colombia’s supposed elite, the Agency, the Bureau, Task Force 145 and the local warlords in Iraq – might have been in any goddam place where a life hung by a thread and the big boys disputed territory. The wedding party lined the road to the castle entrance, shouted approval, and the groom had come to hold her. Lukas liked the image.

He thought that unless luck was served up in buckets he had lost the boy: no assets quoted, no intelligence offered, just silence in close-set walls around him. He could lose a hostage, climb on to a flight, get himself back to Paris and not feel that the world had fallen in. He didn’t understand why this boy had gotten to him.

He let out a long, slow sigh, which was pretty damn self-indulgent. Nothing to do with his own boy – with whom contact was severed – not a piece of ‘replacement’ psychology that the shrinks would have enjoyed talking up. He didn’t know why this boy had burrowed, like a worm, under his skin. He had gone through the routines of hostage negotiation so many times and not felt that anything was personal. Maybe it was the goddam photograph he’d been shown, or the sight of the girl running in the park. Maybe their romance had fuelled that worm, and little of romance had crossed his tracks. Perhaps he was just damn jealous. He hailed a taxi and gave it piazza Dante as a destination. All his instincts told him that a body would soon be in a ditch, or in a car, or in an alley, and he felt shredded of power.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator