The Collaborator

17

He was asked by a voice, now detached, the face in shadow, did he want food? It hurt Eddie to speak. It meant he had to suck air into his lungs, which expanded his ribcage and the bones that might be cracked. His throat was dry, his lips grotesquely misshapen. His voice was a croak. ‘I don’t… Thank you. No.’

There was no reaction: no indication of softening and a degree of kindness, or offence that the offer was refused. Eddie couldn’t read the face high above him. He was unable to judge whether the chance of food meant that his hope of survival was greater or less. Did they bloody bond? Was it a last meal being ordered? He couldn’t control the rambling of his thoughts, which bounced, pinballs in a machine: home, Immacolata, work, the guys in the house, her again, pains in his chest and head, curry in the Afghan, the knife or the pistol, Immacolata. Some of the thoughts, jumbled and without process, were comforting; others wounded.

He didn’t understand why the man, Salvatore, stood over him, watched him.

Should he have accepted the food?

Did refusing it diminish his lifespan by a day, an hour, five minutes, or did it make no difference?

He had said he didn’t want food because he wasn’t hungry – seemed a good enough reason to turn it down. His throat itched, seemed rubbed raw.

Eddie wheezed, ‘Please, I’d like water.’

‘You would like water?’

‘Please… yes… please.’ Did it play well if he grovelled? Should he not stand upright for himself? Eddie didn’t know whether he should be cowed or whether he should goddam show some fight – there was no one to tell him. He thought he needed to earn respect and wouldn’t if he bowed, scraped, slithered. ‘I want some water.’

‘You want water?’

‘Bring me water.’

Would he be kicked? Was there any more shit left in him to be kicked out? He saw the shadow turn and it was gone from the doorway. The darkness was falling. A light came on down a corridor and he heard running water. Well, Eddie had a target, a new aim. Might not live, might not hang on and cling to the pulsebeat, but he was looking to achieve respect. What a man wanted. The tap was turned off. A light was switched off. The feet came back down the corridor and across the room, then the shadow shape filled the doorway.

Eddie looked up at the shadow. ‘Thank you…’ He coughed. ‘… for bringing me water. Thank you.’

The shadow moved. A bucket swung. The water came in a wall, slapped hard into Eddie’s face and drenched him. It was in his eyes, his ears, up his nostrils and down his throat. His lips smarted and he feel sharp stubs of pain from the grazes on his face. The water puddled on the floor round him. He expected, then, to be kicked and tried to curl himself up so that the soft parts of his body were better protected – but no kick came. He thought he would hear the maniacal laughter of a man demented. There was none.

More movement in the doorway.

Eddie dared to look.

The man, Salvatore, bent his knees, slid his back down the door jamb, then pushed his legs out. His trainers buffeted Eddie’s knees, but it wasn’t a kicking.

Salvatore sat with him.

A second cigarette was offered, held up in front of his eyes, and Eddie nodded. It was put between his lips. There was a brief flash from the lighter and Eddie sucked. He could hear distant, occasional traffic and a cacophony of barking dogs. The smoke climbed. His thoughts were sharp now, as if they’d been tempered on stone, and the moments when he had bounced them, juggled them, were gone. He had learned a truth: a man had total physical control over him, could snuff out his life as easily as he would let go of the little lever that kept the cigarette lighter alive, yet the man was vulnerable. Eddie reckoned that the water thrown over him, and the cigarette between his swelled lips were signs of earned respect.

‘If you want to talk,’ Eddie said, ‘I’ll listen.’

There was only silence and he could hear the rhythm of Salvatore’s breathing.

And Eddie heard, also, the dogs bark again, raucous, as if a pack hunted.

They had frightened away the rats, which scurried to holes. The dogs circled the body.

The rats and dogs fed well round the rubbish bins at the base of the Sail. The rats had made a meal of the blood, and the dogs, soon, would use the body as a toy.

A mastiff-cross was the pack leader. Had that dog been a pedigree, a pure Neapolitan mastiff – the symbol of the most fanatical tifosi following the city’s Serie A football team in the glory days when Diego Maradona had lit it – it would have been pampered, not running free among the rubbish bags of Naples’s most deprived rione. It would not have gone close to the corpse, sniffed it, then worried at its clothing and taken a leg in its jaws. This animal, though born to a mongrel bitch, retained many of the mastiff characteristics. It weighed in excess of seventy kilos, and lifted the man with ease. The beasts in its pack attempted to join in, tugging at the other leg, the arms, the head and strips of clothing.

The struggle for possession moved away from the refuse bins and the body was carried through scrub towards the viale della Resistenza, the dogs howling, barking, whining, yapping and dragging what their teeth held.

The mastiff-cross couldn’t lose his pack. The game progressed. It didn’t wish to chew the man’s flesh, but it was sport to have smaller dogs compete for possession. Bones were broken, joints dislocated but the sinew, gristle and muscle held the body together.

They were in the middle of the road.

The big dog still had the leg and ten others had a grip on the arms and the clothing. The body seemed suspended a metre or so from the tarmacadam. They tugged, growled, snarled and… A cruising police patrol car swerved to a halt.

The observer said, ‘I can’t fucking believe what I’m seeing.’

The driver said, ‘If you want to throw up, do it out of the car.’

They watched for a full minute. The noise grew as the mastiff-cross was unable to assert its authority over the pack, and the game was played out noisily. Traffic was backing up behind the police vehicle. The ambulance, called on their radio, would be there within minutes – not that a paramedic was going to be of any help to the poor bastard being pulled apart. Back-up was coming too.

The observer said, ‘The big one, that’s a mastiff.’

‘On the leg.’

‘It was used as a fighting hound in Roman times, against lions. It’s a guard dog now, possessive, obstinate – it’s fucking big.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘Are you going to put the man and the dog in the ambulance? Or are you planning to tell the dog to let go of the man?’

‘Shoot it.’

‘Shoot a mastiff? That’s like shooting Maradona himself? Shoot it with a handgun?’

‘Shoot the fucking thing.’

The observer used his Beretta 93R to fire four 9mm rounds into the dog’s head before its grip on the body’s left leg loosened. The others had slunk away.

An ambulance came, and the body was removed.

From the pillion seat, over the shoulder, Massimo watched the ambulance pull away and the headlights caught an animal’s carcass spread out on the road. Beyond it, in deeper shadows, a group of dogs had gathered and Massimo could have sworn they were whining. The road was still blocked.

The scooter jolted as it mounted the kerbstones and ploughed through the oleander that grew wild there, then again when it came down on to the road at the far side of the dog’s body.

The township of Scampia had been built immediately after the earthquake of 23 November 1980 that had killed more than 2900 people, injured some ten thousand and destroyed the homes of three hundred thousand. Money wasn’t a consideration. The finest architects available were employed on creating a heaven for the dispossessed. Scampia rose from wasteground. Massimo had been born the year that the first blocks were laid. He had been twelve before he was driven past the great complex and shown the ludicrous size of the Sail. He had been back twice since then, once with a school party on a field trip to examine modern demography, once because a pretty shop girl lived there. His last journey to the jungle of concrete and heroin had been seven years ago. He was – and couldn’t have hidden it – terrified to be on the viale della Resistenza.

The scooter braked. The engine was cut. Shadows moved. He thought himself encircled and the streetlights close to him were dark – he presumed they had been broken so that trading was easier. A finger jabbed at his chest, then his helmet. He lifted it off and it was taken from him. The finger pointed, and he made out an ebony black opening in a grey wall. He was told how many floors up he was going, and given the number, that he should use the name of Salvatore to get through the inner gates. The beat of Massimo, working for his uncle, was between Umberto’s office and the Palace of Justice, and there were excursions to visit clients in the gaols of Poggioreale and Posilippo. Twice there had been visits to the head of the Borelli clan, which had taken him and Umberto to Novara; they had stayed two nights in a decent pensione. He had not, till that day, had to make the big decisions in life: to go right or go left, destra o sinistra. He had been able to hide behind the enablement of justice – every man and woman’s right to professional representation. Now, facing the black pit of the opening, he was at the road’s fork.

It was, of course, about fear.

What was he afraid of? Going into the crowded stinking hell that was the Poggioreale gaol.

Who was he afraid of? The old woman, dressed only in black, with the wizened face and throat, the bony hands, the sun’s cancer scars on the skin.

What was he most frightened of?

Her.

He couldn’t quantify it. It existed. The glance and brilliance of the eyes denying age, the withering contempt in her voice, the touch of her fingers and their rap upon his skin when she gestured. He wouldn’t have told another human being about it, not Umberto or his grandmother. The fear lived. He could remember each word she had said, at what time it should be done and how the body should be disposed of. During every trial when a member of the Borelli clan was before a court, Massimo walked from his apartment across the pedestrian piazza with a capuccino in his hand and a sweet pastry, a sfogliatella, and he would cross the patterned paving where the witch had said the body should be left. He carried the sentence of death that would put the body there, and guilt made him shiver. He headed for the darkness.

He left behind the scooter and its rider.

A man loomed out and blocked his path. Massimo stammered the name. He wore his suit. Every day that he went to work he wore a suit, sometimes silk, sometimes cotton, sometimes mohair, and a shirt with a tie and good lace-up shoes. He didn’t think he possessed any clothing that would have made him feel unnoticed here.

He was let through, and a mobile call was made. He thought he stepped on a syringe and held a handkerchief over his face against the smell… but he had more fear of her, and went on up the steps and remembered – word perfect – the message she had given.

*

‘It’s a very grave situation, Dottore.’

‘Any situation involving criminality and a threat to an innocent’s life is grave.’

Umberto, the lawyer, pursed his lips, seemed to feel genuine pain. ‘Again these wretches are using me as a conduit. I follow the paths of the law, and do my best to save a life. I seek no personal advantage. I’m above suspicion, with no guilt in this matter. Dottore, the wretches who are using me predict that the English boy will be killed tomorrow. Is Immacolata Borelli’s testimony so important?’

The prosecutor didn’t answer. An answer was not yet required. He revolved a pencil in his hand and waited for the speech to continue. A sip of water was taken. The pause was allowed to continue for a beat or two.

‘As the messenger, I want only to help. Is the testimony of the Borelli girl so valuable? I hear many things in confidence as a legal practitioner. I’m told she’s disturbed, has psychological difficulties. She has an incomprehensible hostility towards her mother and siblings. I see an unreliable witness, a troubled woman with a misplaced sense of grievance against her relatives. I also see an innocent in desperate circumstances whose life may have only hours to run. If, Dottore, you could see a way to issuing some public statement to the media, stating without equivocation that Immacolata Borelli will not give evidence against her family, and that those members of the family recently arrested are to be released without charge, I believe I can save this young man’s life – as a messenger, you understand.’

The prosecutor had taken no notes. He was aware, of course, of the need to prevaricate, delay and not to deny, but the lawyer would be as well versed as he was in the tactics of obfuscation and diversion. He thought a dance was played out, elaborate and choreographed, but a doomed dance for all that. His thoughts drifted. He remembered the dance his wife had seen, the Dying Swan, set to a cello solo by Camille Saint-Saens, inspired by the poem of that name by the English milord, Tennyson, and designed first for Anna Pavlova to perform a century before. It was a good image – the Dying Swan.

‘Dottore, we are professional opponents, but we are also defenders of justice. You, as much as I, must have serious misgivings about the process of collaboration. Too often the evidence is unreliable and self-serving. Immacolata Borelli no doubt believes she can escape scrutiny of her own actions by concocting lies about her family. Perhaps, also, greed drives her – the more lurid her accusations, the greater the rewards that the state will drop into her bag. Collaboration makes for bad law. I have one thing further to say, Dottore, and it involves the image of the city we love and cherish. If Gabriella Borelli and her sons do not go to court it will not be noticed beyond the circulation area of Mattino and Cronaca. If the English boy dies, reports of his death will go round the world and our city will be denounced as a dangerous hell-hole. Is there something, Dottore, that I can take back to those who use me as a conduit of information?’

The prosecutor laid his pencil neatly beside the blank sheet of paper. His hands went across his mouth, as if for prayer. He reflected. Had his career not taken a path towards making judgements on which freedoms depended, what might he have done with his life? He could have gone for well-paid management of the electricity-supply company, safe and honourable employers. He could have practised corporate law in Milan or Venice, civilised places. He could have forsworn responsibility and owned, with his wife, a hotel in the mountains. He could have been valueless. He thought he had respect for himself, and prized that achievement. To him it was of paramount importance. He said quietly, and with equally false sincerity, ‘We are all grateful, my friend, for the efforts you’re making on behalf of the innocent. I want you to know that I shall reflect on the substantive points you’ve laid before me, and I hope you’ll have an opportunity to urge those in contact with you to avoid precipitate action. I do not rule out an accommodation – it’s difficult but not impossible. I appreciate what you’re doing. If necessary, I’ll go to Rome next week to raise questions of priority with the minister. Thank you, my friend.’

When the bastard had been shown out and escorted from the building, the prosecutor stayed by his phone. Dusk turned to evening, and it didn’t ring.

Salvatore stood over the boy. There was no light and he could see only the outline of the body, but he could hear the breathing and smell the boy.

He broke the silence that had been long, lonely. There were other men outside the main door on the walkway but none inside. Those who had been hurt and who had taken revenge were gone… He needed to talk.

‘What do they call you? At your home, in your family, how do they call you?’

Salvatore didn’t know anything about the season of spring, had not noticed its start six months ago, or the blooming of small flowers. Without a sense of romance or fantasy, he would not have seen that question – ‘What do they call you… how do they call you?’ – as a mood change, as if he had come from the darkness of winter. Why should he wish to know such a thing about a boy he was shortly to slaughter? In Forcella he wouldn’t have asked or in Sanita. He wouldn’t have asked if Fangio had been with him, or if he had come from Gabriella Borelli. And flowers played no part in the life of Salvatore, Il Pistole, and he had never in his life picked or bought any to give to a girl. If he had given a bouquet to Gabriella Borelli she would have laughed in his face and maybe slapped it. He didn’t know whether his own parents were still alive, or had been buried and had needed flowers. Maybe there would be flowers at his own funeral, because he would not be taken alive to rot in a cell – and maybe kids would throw flowers at the hearse as it passed. He didn’t see that asking such questions weakened his resolve to kill and, if he had been told, he would not have believed it.

‘They call me Eddie.’

‘Just that?’

‘It’s what they call me. Eddie.’

‘Where is the home of Eddie?’

Many thousands of people lived inside the Sail, and many tens of thousands in the other towers around it, but quiet had fallen, which heightened his isolation. The need to talk was an itch that had to be scratched.

‘In the country.’

‘What is in the country?’

‘Fields – green fields – villages built of stone, with churches, and a river through the fields, and cows.’

‘We do not have fields, green, because it is too warm, and everything is built in concrete, and we do not have cows but we have buffalo – and we have to kill many.’

‘Why are the buffalo killed?’

‘They have poison.’

He heard surprise, a smear of confusion, from the shape on the floor. ‘How do they have poison?’

‘It happens. There is poison.’

‘Ridiculous – where is the poison? Why are the buffalo killed?’

‘The buffalo make the milk for the mozzarella cheese, and they have poison so the cheese cannot be eaten and they are killed. Enough.’

‘Where is the poison from?’

‘Too many questions.’

‘Why is there poison for the buffalo to eat?’

‘You ask too much. It is enough.’

He kicked out. He caught the boy on the hip, and the jolt went up through Salvatore’s ankle and his knee and right to the joint in his pelvis. The boy did not shout or whimper, but seemed to wriggle further from him. Salvatore thought he had shown weakness by kicking Eddie, but he was angry: he had wanted to talk, he had asked in innocence where the boy came from, and had said in innocence – without thought – that buffalo were killed because the cheese made from their milk was poisoned, and he had been questioned. Salvatore, Il Pistole, was not questioned by any man. He could not have said, ‘They are poisoned because we, the clans, have killed the ground with toxic material from which great disposal profits are made, and the ground is poisoned for generations to come, and the poison is now in the blood of the buffalo and the milk for the mozzarella is contaminated. We spread the poison so that we could make money.’ He could not say it. Instead he kicked. Again, he heard the quiet and felt the aloneness.

‘It is a good place, the village, Eddie?’

The handler, Beppe, was told by his line manager to bring to his office the recent package from the agent, Delta465/Foxtrot. He retrieved it from his safe and carried it along the high, echoing corridors of the building, knocked and was admitted.

The line manager said, ‘Whether he was taken to the window and thrown out, therefore murdered, whether he was in flight and crawled out in an escape attempt and fell, whether he has determined to take his own life to avoid capture and the rigour of interrogation, I don’t know. Whatever, he’s in the mortuary of the hospital in Secondigliano, and in due course we’ll find some women to claim him and show suitable grief. This evening, we have no more use for him. We don’t admit to ownership or knowledge of him. Because we don’t need to safeguard that intelligence source, his past film can be sent to the relevant officials. There is a carabinieri officer, Marco Castrolami, at piazza Dante. He should be given the films and told that the camera was sourced at apartment 374 on the third level of the Sail. He should be assured that this material reached us only this evening and has been transferred to him directly, without delay. We will answer no other questions about the film. Beppe, the death of an agent, whether by murder, accident or suicide, is sad. It leaves emptiness and creates humility, tomorrow is another day. Take it. Thank you.’

He put it into his leather bag, hitched it on his shoulder, and went off down the wide, high corridor, symbol of an age of power. He didn’t know that a life depended on the package in the bag that swung against his hip.

The priest had told her she was sitting in the seat Eddie Deacon had taken when he had come to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. She didn’t know the priest well, had seldom confessed to him before she had gone to London. She had known better the one who had fled under armed guard to Rome, who had despised her and her family. Two of Castrolami’s men were on the door, one inside and one out, and another was at the side entrance to the sacristy. Two women were at the altar, arranging the flowers, and they would have seen her come in, but hadn’t acknowledged her, their backs to her: know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Immacolata thought Castrolami, three rows behind her, was playing with her.

The priest said, ‘If you’ve come to me for the Church’s praise of what you’re doing you’ll leave with empty pockets. I, the Church, have little interest in your conversion to legality. Society in this city embraces criminality, which feeds half of our population, provides work and opportunity, is enjoyed. I hazard the opinion that the majority of Neapolitans take pleasure and pride from the reputation of their home as the centre of the western world’s most successful criminal conspiracy. The reason for your conversion, after so many years of benefiting from illegality, is not important to me. You denounce your family. You seek to imprison your mother and brothers, to earn their enmity for the rest of the days you will all breathe God’s air, and reconciliation will be denied you even on a death-bed. Your family is destroyed, but that doesn’t mean Forcella is freed from its criminal burden. Outsiders will use these streets as a battleground while they fight for supremacy over insiders who believe they are the natural successors to your family. Equilibrium is broken and I will be called upon for many funerals. It will be a time of great danger for the old and young who live here. Your actions will create no respite… and you will have on your shoulders, until the day God calls you, the weight of responsibility for the life of the boy who came, with his love, to find you. All you will have as solace is a principle. Those are the complications you face, the potholes in the road you have taken, but I admire your determination to walk along it. The example you set cannot be countered by sneers or contempt, and cannot be ignored. Immacolata, may God go with you.’

They prayed together, hunched down, for a bare half-minute. Then she stood up, straightened her skirt, tugged down her blouse, and pushed her hair back from her forehead. She did not look again into the priest’s face, and did not shake his hand. Facing the altar, she crossed herself, then turned.

At the door, Castrolami asked, ‘Do you want to do it?’

No answer, but a firm nod, her hair bouncing on her neck.

He said, ‘I can’t predict the reaction.’

She gave him a cold smile, showing him her authority. He wondered then – at that moment, and as the evening settled on the via Forcella – how Eddie Deacon had thought of love when he had stood with her.

‘Right. We’ll get this fucking circus on the road. If I grab you, don’t fight me. If I run, run with me.’

They came down the steps of the church, past the twin chips where the bullets had nicked the stone pillars. They turned to their right. Two of the men, those from the front entrance, walked ahead of her, each with his right hand hidden under his jacket; the one who had watched the sacristy door was behind. She didn’t know whether he would have his pistol exposed or secreted. Castrolami was half a pace behind her, at her right shoulder.

Immacolata allowed her bag to swing with the rhythm of her hips.

It was as she remembered it. Nothing had changed.

She saw the barber’s shop, the hardware shop and the shop where cheese and fresh milk were sold; she knew what pizzo each paid because she had determined the amount. She saw the shop where the wedding gowns were sold and the suits for grooms and principal guests, then the bakery. No one inside – shopkeepers and customers – caught her eye and no one called to her, abuse, support or a greeting. A scooter came towards her, bouncing on the basalt blocks. The rider’s visor was up and she recognised a young man who had been at school with her, whose father had been killed by hers. It swerved past her. Men played a last card game in the light thrown from a bar’s window but did not look up.

It would have been easier if insults had been shouted, eggs or tomatoes thrown. It would have been a triumph if there had been a shout of support.

What she was doing was not acknowledged. She did not exist as a living human. She passed many she had known since childhood. None cheered and none spat at her. She assumed that the mobile phones were in contact and a network of messages rippled the length of the street and off into the side alleys, that a foot-soldier had been called out, a handgun sent for, lifted from a cache, unwrapped and stripped of its protective cover, a magazine hurriedly loaded.

She saw a man hosing down the cobbles where his stall had stood, and through the open door of a van boxes of unsold fish lay among melting ice. She had often bought octopus, mullet and bass from him, but he didn’t see her. She saw lights at the front windows of her grandparents’ home. She assumed, by now, they knew of her walk down via Forcella, but they didn’t show themselves on the balcony.

The cars waited. Walking briskly – not running, as if afraid, but not dawdling with a fool’s conceit – they had covered some hundred and fifty metres in two minutes. Castrolami pushed her without dignity through a back door and had barely slammed it before the vehicle had pulled away. It wove down the street, headlights flashing to clear a way, and skirted the square in front of the Castel Capuano, then went fast on to the via Carbonara. In three minutes there might have been a gun and a marksman, in five there would have been. She thought she had sent a message of her resolve, and that she had killed Eddie Deacon.

The boy wouldn’t speak – and had been kicked again – so Salvatore did.

‘I am from the city, from the old city. I do not know about fields or a village or where there is a river that is not a sewer ditch. I do not know about cows, and I have never been into the country and towards the mountains where they keep buffalo. I do not know it here. I am here because it was decided to bring you to this place. I hate it. My home is the old city. It is where people follow me… Many people follow me and give me respect.

‘I lived on the street, Eddie. I worked the street, the via Duomo and the via Carbonara. It was best on the via Duomo because tourists came to the cathedral, and fewer were on the via Carbonara because the Castel Capuana does not have many tourists. I start at nine years. I finish the school at nine years. I am a spotter at nine years. I spot for tourists who have a bag loosely held, or a Nikon camera that is on a shoulder strap, or a Rolex watch. At nine years old I am not strong enough to get a watch or a bag or a camera, but I am the best at spotting. At ten years old, I am the leader. Boys with more years do what I say. I am commander, and I sell on what we take from the tourists.

‘At eleven years old, I am taken by Pasquale Borelli, the father of Immacolata. He chose me. He could have had a thousand kids, our word is scugnizzi, but he chose me. I owe everything to him. I can read and I can write and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am not a kid from the gutter and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am a person of standing in Forcella and in Sanita, and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I think that after his eldest son, who is Vincenzo, I am the most important. I have more respect from him than Giovanni and Silvio. I am the favourite of Gabriella Borelli and she is among the most admired women in the clans in the city. Everybody has respect for me.

‘If I had wanted to, I could have been married with Immacolata. You understand that? Both Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli have sufficient respect for me to give to me Immacolata if I had wished it. Did I want her? I think she is not good in bed and I think she has poor skin on her face. I did not want her. I am trusted by them, and I am trusted by Carmine and Anna Borelli, the old people. They do nothing if they have not talked first with me. Do you know that the kids in Forcella have my picture on the screen of their mobile phones? I am a person of importance. All the police hunt me, and all the carabinieri special teams, and the prosecutor. I am, in Naples, in the list of the ten most wanted – I have that status, and that respect. I have a place in the ten with a Russo and a Licciardi and a Contini. There are many days when I am in the newspaper. In the newspaper is my photograph. The journalists write about me.

‘I read everything that is written about me in the newspaper. They call me Il Pistole in the newspaper. Many times I have been on the front page of Cronaca and of Mattino, and they talk about me on the news from RAI. I am a celebrity in this city. I am more famous than a film star, or a singer, or a footballer. They say I am the assassino – you understand that? – who has no fear and who does not give mercy, we say senza misericordia. I have killed more than forty men. I do not know exactly how many men because it is not important to me. I am the killer, the expert at killing, and I do not have hesitation in killing.

‘When I have the instruction I will kill you, Eddie. It is not personal. It is not because you sleep with Immacolata Borelli who has fat ankles and bad skin. I will kill you when it is ordered by the clan. I will not kill you because I hate you, but because it is ordered. I will not hurt you. I am not your enemy, but if I was ordered to kill you and did not I would lose respect. I must have respect.’

He heard the voices at the door, then heard it opened. Salvatore turned away from the figure bound on the floor, lying in the darkness.

It had been a nightmare. Massimo thought himself in the corridors of hell, with no end to their length. They were a labyrinth. It had taken him an hour, might have been more, to travel the extent of a walkway set between reinforced doors, barred windows, dull-lit corners, refuse heaps, washing that was draped, and still stank, across his route. He did not think the nightmare complete, or half consumed. He had climbed the staircase and at the top had been searched. Fingers had prised into every pocket. Then he had been stripped almost bare and those fingers had gone inside the orifices of his body. Then he had been allowed to dress and had had to scrabble in the near darkness at his feet to collect what had been taken from his pockets, examined and dropped. He had gone through the first barred gate.

There had been three more searches, as if no message had been passed ahead on the mobile phones. Three more times he had been questioned, then strip-searched. Then the fingers had been in his mouth and in the anal passage, and lights had been shone into his ears and up his nose and the sac under his penis had been lifted. There had been more delays at more barred gates. He thought contempt was shown him.

He was left with little that preserved dignity.

Each time he was allowed to progress he had taken time over dressing, knotting his tie and shoe laces.

He feared for his life.

He saw the silhouette of Salvatore’s head. He had seen the man several times before, always a half-stride behind Gabriella Borelli. Massimo had thought the man who hovered at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder to be a psychopath, probably medically certifiable. He thought his own feet, in the expensive handmade shoes of soft leather, were on a treadmill, that the motor went ever faster and struggled to keep up the momentum. If he did not he would fall, and he didn’t know how to jump clear of the treadmill.

He saw the body on the ground, strained his eyes and detected cuts on the face.

‘What did they say?’ Salvatore murmured – the voice of a dreamer, a sleepwalker.

He remembered the equation of fear: the cells of Poggioreale, or the anger and retribution of the old witch.

Massimo did not lie, did not dare to. He stuttered through the message he had been given by Anna Borelli, now in her eighty-eighth year, and realised that what he had said was understood by Salvatore and by the figure bound on the floor near his feet. Salvatore nodded, as if the matter did not concern him, but the figure twitched and he heard the intake of breath. Massimo thought himself damned. He said where the body should be dumped.

Damned. He had a law degree, he owned an apartment in the most select district of the city, he drove a high-performance car, and already could count his assets in hundreds of thousands of euros, yet he was reduced to ferrying instructions, was the boy sent from a reception desk at the Excelsior Hotel on the via Partenope. Damned for ever.

He ran.

He wasn’t stopped.

He ran as fast as he could and the barred gates seemed to open ahead of him. He was not searched, questioned, delayed or hindered by men with mobile telephones. He careered down the staircase, syringes and glass shards crunching under his shoes, and broke out into the night.

The scooter took him only to the edge of Scampia. He was dropped where the via Baku made a junction with the via Roma Verso Scampia. He was left at a bus stop.

The evening air played on his face, and he waited for a bus, alone, and believed he had killed a man.

They clustered round the screen. Those who worked the annexe had prime positions, but others from the operations room peered over shoulders for a glimpse of what the video showed. He had thought it a tipping point when a contact had been made, but had been wrong. This was.

The collator gave the commentary, Lukas hunched beside him. ‘That is the Great Nose – to everyone except him and his face. That’s him. We have one photograph of him in ten years and that was with dark glasses. It’s excellent. He has that territory of the Sail. He has been a fugitive for more years than the photograph has existed… Incredible.’

The image on the screen was monochrome and the walkway poorly lit. The figure of the man identified as Il Grosso Naso came from under hanging washing slung across the walkway and was clear for a matter of seconds in profile, then was gone under more draped sheets.

‘Typical of those bastards, the spies. They won’t share. They have a camera on him. Another visitor, far from his home ground. It is Il Camionista, the old man of Forcella, and his rheumatism is bad again. So, the Grosso Naso and the Camionista do business. Carmine Borelli is off territory. He will be nervous, he will not be there with a position of strength and he will have come to ask a great favour, for which he will pay.’

Lukas reckoned that in other company the old man would have used a stick but not there: a stick was weakness and frailty. A younger man walked two, three paces behind him, but he was led, a cloth tight round his upper face, blindfolding him.

‘No trust. They’re strangers in the Sail. I cannot see all his face but I know from the walk, from the mouth, from the shoulders and the hips, that Carmine is escorted by his son’s killer – it is the hitman, it is Il Pistole, Salvatore. There is a file, fat, on him. When he goes to prison – if he is not shot dead by us, by another clan – he is locked up for the rest of his life. He is to be condanna all’ergastolo. He will never again feel grass under his feet, hear birds sing or swim in the sea. They were all here but the spies wouldn’t tell us until their man was dead and we couldn’t blunder into their precious world. The file, the fat one, says there are many murders proven to Salvatore, usually with the Beretta P38, usually with a man on a scooter to take him to the target and away, and there are many more homicides with him as first suspect. He has no parents, no family, no woman. He has only the pistol and his dependence on the family of Borelli. He would want to be killed, and that is the only reason not to kill him.’

Lukas craned forward. Far beyond that point, the tipping done. He understood that he saw an opponent. He did not use, verbally or in his mind, a word such as ‘enemy’. In his world emotion and rancour were put aside. He saw an opponent brought under the draped washing, shuffling past the lens, then taken under more washing. They went on through the films and did fast view for the departure of Big Nose, the Lorry Driver and the Pistol. The collator muttered more names, but without enthusiasm, as if they had no part to play. Many images went at jerky old-movie speed across the screen, cigarettes were lit, more coffee was downed.

Their attention, again, was jolted, and silence fell. Lukas could smell the sweat of many bodies, and his own, of socks and underclothing not changed, and his own. Men came down the walkway and gestured dismissively, women went indoors abruptly and kids fled. It was as if a route was cleared of obstruction and witnesses. Lukas saw Salvatore again, and the boy. He was within touching distance. Lukas could have reached out and let his finger brush the screen. The boy went slowly, as if exhausted and hurt. His feet did not have good traction on the walkway and he was mostly dragged; his shoulders were down. Lukas knew him because he had spoken with the man at the hotel, and with the man who sold fish. The fish, yes, the fish presented to the annexe at piazza Dante, the swordfish, was in a freezer tray in the kitchen area of a local restaurant. It would be thawed and cooked if there was a successful outcome, and would go on a rubbish heap if there was not – fuck the fish. He had spoken to both men and knew what clothes the boy had worn when he left the pensione in the morning and when he had met the eye of the fish-seller. Lukas had demanded of them what shirt, trousers and trainers the boy had worn. He saw them in the black-and-white image on the screen, and the hood. Lukas had only once been hooded – in his time as an instructor at Quantico, after he’d come off the Hostage Rescue Team and before he’d got himself lodged with the new Critical Incident Response Group. He had been one of the FBI instructors doing close-quarters battle training: in simulating the storming of a building, they had needed a ‘tame’ prisoner and it hadn’t seemed fair to allocate a rookie. He had done it. He could remember, still, the smell and taste of the sacking, his panic at his inability to breathe deeply, and the fear of what would happen next. He had had on ear protectors when the storm came, blank rounds and thunder-flash grenades. He had been hustled out, the hood had been lifted off, and no one seemed to have much time for him: interest was in the ‘bad’ guys, who were wasted, and the ‘good’ guys, who were heroes.

‘I assume that’s Eddie Deacon.’

Lukas made his first contribution. ‘It is.’

‘He has been beaten.’

‘He has.’

‘If he still lives, he is on the third level of the Sail building in Scampia. It is not my expertise but I would suggest there is no more difficult place inside the state from which to extract a prisoner.’

Lukas said, ‘I don’t intrude, gentlemen, I don’t push or impose my opinions. I’m here to give help if I’m asked for it.’

Castrolami said they would go in five minutes, not a suggestion but a demand.

Lukas knew them now by their familiar titles. The bustle broke around him. He had little to take, nothing of consequence other than his laptop. Some that he knew of made occasional trips into Baghdad or Bogota, for the FBI, DoD or a contractor and travelled with their bespoke flak vest, blood and sterile dressings. Lukas had never bothered. Neither did he have manuals to refer to because everything he needed, and half a ton more, was in his head, but he regretted that he had no fresh socks or underwear in the rucksack.

They had discarded their given names, were identified by those their colleagues used for them. The Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber were loading big kitbags. There was no more talk of military survival kit, water-resistant socks, small strengthened hacksaw blades and fishing hooks. Lukas had learned how they would operate at the first wave of an ROS assault. The Ingegnere would take off a door or blow out a window for entry. The Bombardiere would put in a handful of XM84 stun grenades, the ‘flash and bang’ gear – the flash was up to seven million candela and the bang 180 decibels. The Trattore would lead the storm guys inside. Lukas had seen it done in practice and for real, sometimes the practice was fouled up but the actual thing went a treat. At others the practice was perfect and the actual a disaster. What the Tractor, the Engineer and the Bomber did was a definition of the old ‘inexact science’, but so was Lukas’s work.

Lukas hung back in the annexe. He heard Castrolami talking in the operations room. The small team, which would fit into one large minibus, would travel to Scampia ahead of a larger squad. Only when the initial group was in place would the numbers for securing a perimeter be deployed. Lukas understood. It was about security, about maintaining secrecy. He thought it a harsh world in which police officers and paramilitary men couldn’t be trusted – might have a place on a gang leader’s payroll.

A last brief act was played out in the annexe. The psychologist announced defiantly that he could monitor, observe, contribute from the operations room. The collator gave as his opinion that he was better employed close to his big computer and his archive. Lukas felt that the reputation of the Sail lay on them. He was not invited. Neither was it suggested that he should find a quiet corner and get involved in basket-weaving. He wasn’t accused of imposing himself. Lukas was on board.

He thought, and it suited him well, that he was barely noticed as they hiked out of the annexe and skirted the side wall of the operations room, the far side from the banks of screens and the illuminated map. Castrolami was given a brief bear-hug by a superior, while others slapped the arms and shoulders of the ROS guys in encouragement. Lukas was offered no warmth, no good will, and flitted out. Apprehension burgeoned. He had seen the face, in monochrome, of his opponent. Had been there so often, looking into a face and wondering which well-trodden path to take to consign the face to the rubbish heap. Had been there so often – was concerned, again, that the magic moment was dulled. God, let it not be said that, almost, he was bored with all the faces.

There was a driver and the driver’s escort, big men, armed with filled holsters and belts that sagged with kit. There was a communications kid, looked no more than nineteen, who carried a steel box and Lukas saw that it was chained by the handle to his wrist. There were six ROS, and Castrolami. A pecking order existed as they loaded into the minibus. The driver and his escort were together. The communications kid and Castrolami were side by side, the link and the decision-taker, there were the men who would make an entry, if it came down to the desperate uncertainty of a storm, and there was Lukas, who was without status and quantifiable expertise and had been there so many times before.

They left piazza Dante.

Lukas sat across the aisle from Castrolami and the communications kid. A map of the Sail was spread out across the investigator’s knees and he used a pencil torch. Lukas gained an impression of the enormity, complexity and threat posed by the building. He did not wish to talk.

He turned away from the map and stared out of the window at the passing streets. It was, he reflected, a city with some of the finest architecturally designed churches in Christendom, which contained some of the greatest works of art, sculpture and painting ever created. There was the beauty of the bay behind them and the crude majesty of the mountain. Sophistication, intellect, culture and glory encircled the minibus. All he had seen of them was the view over the rim of the crater when he had received the warning of hidden and violent danger. There were no such contrasts in Baghdad, or in the mountains and jungles of Colombia, or on the great plains of Afghanistan. The cafes seemed full, and the bars, and outside two restaurants he saw people standing on the pavement in what apologised for a queue, waiting to be given a table. It was so goddam normal.

Castrolami pushed the map of the Sail towards the communications kid, left him to fold it. He asked Lukas, ‘When we get there, what do you want?’

‘To be as close as possible.’

‘What do you do first?’

‘I try to make some calm,’ Lukas said. ‘It’s not always easy but it’s a good place to start.’

Castrolami looked into Lukas’s face, and a slow smile spread. ‘Do you have that buzz in you, the adrenalin pump? Is it going? Riding towards the location, not knowing what you’ll find, and…’

Lukas shrugged, then said, droll, ‘Worst you can find is a dry house. A dry house is where they were, it’s the one they’ve quit. Sheets and blankets, a hell-hole for a cell, food and mountains of cigarette butts, but gone. That’s a dry house. I don’t often get sex, don’t often fire a handgun, and I’m a small-town boy from a trailer park with a mongrel’s pedigree, so I guess riding towards the location is sort of ecstasy, orgasm and cartridge discharge. Yes, the pump’s going a bit.’

‘Do we have a good environment or a bad one?’

He looked out of the window again. The road was clogged with traffic and a horn blasting wouldn’t have helped, or a siren, or the lights. The driver wove, looked for weaknesses in the jam, and the ROS guys didn’t talk but worked on their kit.

Lukas said, ‘If it isn’t a dry house, and if the boy’s still alive, the location’s about as shit as it gets – but, then, none of them comes easy. A big deal? You have the girl nailed down. None of them comes easy.’

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator