The Collaborator

20

It was still dark when they left the hospital, a great cavern of a building on the edge of the Scampia district. The pronto soccorso section was as grim a place as Eddie had known and he had been left with two black overalls on a plastic seat in a corridor, and the world had gone by him – beaten-up tarts, overdosed druggies, knife-wound victims, complicated pregnancies. He had known it was a formality but had sat still, and a nurse had come with a bowl and a towel and had cleaned his face wounds and had stitched, expertly, his lips, and he had had sutures under his right eye. He had not mentioned the pain in his ribcage, had thought it disrespectful of Lukas’s injuries. A little after the American consul had arrived, with a phalanx of security around him, Castrolami had emerged from behind the swing doors. It had been obvious when they had gone in that the injuries were terminal, that Lukas was dead, but Eddie supposed it necessary for them to go through the procedures of resuscitation and fail. Castrolami – the suit had given his name in the minibus in a curt growl and had not offered a hand for the greeting – had walked up to him in that wide corridor outside the emergency section, and had flicked his fingers as a gesture for Eddie to follow him and had kept walking. He might have been the damn dog.

They did not use the minibus. There were hugs and cheek-brush kisses between Castrolami and one called the Tractor, another called the Engineer and a third called the Bomber, and the one who had a sniper rifle – uncased – made a joke of complaining that he had not been given the opportunity to shoot. Eddie realised then that the prisoner was gone, would have been transferred to a different wagon and taken away. Beside the minibus was a marked carabinieri saloon, with a uniformed driver and an escort, and the engine idled. He was put into the back and Castrolami slumped beside him.

They left the hospital where a body would now be wheeled towards the mortuary building.

Not much to talk about. He was the best… What are you? Are you worth the life of the best? There was no warmth on offer, nothing that soothed the jumbled confusion in his mind. He supposed that, by now, a telephone call would have been made to England, to a corner of Wiltshire, to a bungalow in a lane, and that lights had flashed on in answer to the persistence of a bell, and that his parents now sat on their bed, in their night clothes, in shock and relief – his mother might have gone to make two mugs of cocoa. He couldn’t face making a call himself – would have to, but later. They sat silent and they looked out of their different windows.

The light grew, came slowly.

He did not ask where they went, why. What are you? Wasn’t prepared to try to answer, and the blood of the ‘best’ was caking his T-shirt and jeans. They didn’t go towards the city, but drove away from it and the first light, soft gold, was above distant hills.

There was no beauty, no majesty alongside the road.

They went by homes and small farms, scorched orchards, compact factory units and ribbon developments of advertising hoardings. He thought of the orderly, managed greenery of the village where he had spent his childhood; here there was anarchy. The sun peeped a fraction higher, and the first glimpse of a segment, still gold, was over the hills’ horizon.

Castrolami had taken from his pocket an old leatherbound notepad, with scuffed corners, and had started to write busily. It would have been his memory jottings for his report on the death of the ‘best’.

Eddie was, and he realised it, an intruder, not wanted.

He felt no anger at this but accepted it and sat deep on the seat, and the car was driven fast on empty roads. He had, of course, no watch, but if he craned forward he could see the dash in front of the driver, and thought they had been travelling for a little more than half an hour.

There was a sign beside the road, and the driver slowed and the escort studied his map, then written instructions. The place was called Nola.

They went into the heart of it, past a cathedral-sized church. The low sun was nestled on the tower, the road was rough, the pavements worse, and a very few hurried to be at work. Eddie thought the place desolate, as if hope had gone.

He did not ask why they had come here, for what purpose.

Nobody had fed him, nobody had offered him coffee or water, or a beer. He saw more churches, and the road took them along the perimeter of a hospital’s grounds. Then they veered off a main route and headed on narrower, meaner streets.

The driver stopped a few metres short of a cemetery’s main gates. They were of heavy ironwork and closed; Eddie assumed they were locked. There was a pedestrian’s door at the side… He could have played hard. He could have sat in the car and demanded explanations. A man was dead, the ‘best’ man. The man with the caved chest and the chair-leg-thin arms and the knees that had nothing pretty to them was in the mortuary. He followed Castrolami out of the car. He was led.

First light bloomed inside the small gate. A man was lit as he swept dried leaves, and when he saw them, he eased himself on to his witch’s broom and Castrolami must have asked the question with his eyes because the sweeper gestured to his right and watched them.

There was a girl’s statue on a plinth, life-size, and a single rose slotted by her hand. She had the sadness of youth snatched and her name, carved in the stonework, was Angelabella. He went through avenues of small chapels, all with artificial flowers flourishing, and some had candles burning and displayed photographs of the long-deceased when they had lived and enjoyed health. A great piazza for the dead opened in front of him and Castrolami. He was considered responsible for the loss of the ‘best’. He queried nothing, was obedient.

Between concrete paths there were gravestones, more flowers, more candles and more sepia photographs. At the far end of the square of the dead there was a wall with five layers of sealed shelves each large enough to take an adult’s corpse, and more flowers decorated it. Two men stood against it and the sun caught their faces.

One waved to Castrolami, who acknowledged and switched course.

He saw her.

She would have noticed the two men’s reaction and she stood, her hand across her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, low and growing in intensity.

She did not run towards him. He followed Castrolami, kept Castrolami’s pace.

In his ear: ‘She wanted this. Myself, I would have thrown you on the plane, the first. She wanted to be here when news came of whether you had survived or not. Her friend is here, her most valued friend. Her friend is here because of the toxic pollution of what we call the Triangle of Death. The pollution is by the Borelli family, in part, over many years. It is why she has collaborated. It is in memory of her friend, a tribute.’

‘I was second to her friend?’

‘You were second, Eddie, to her friend. You could not compete… It is ludicrous to be here, but we are. You do not have long.’

Her arms were not outstretched, welcoming. They were behind her back. The light on her face did not flatter and there were bags under her eyes, lines at her mouth and a frown of worry. He thought her drably dressed – a plain grey skirt, a blouse that seemed darker – her hair was uncombed and she wore no lipstick.

Castrolami moved aside. The two men behind her edged clear.

He was in front of her. He was as far from her, and from the bulge of the blouse, as he had been from Lukas when he had thought the ‘best’ man was impatient, might have been bored and looked tired enough to drop. It was the face of the girl he had slept with and laughed with and… He was not certain he knew her, and he let his hands hang and hers were behind her back.

‘You survived?’

Not the moment for the trite or the sarcastic. ‘Yes, I survived.’

‘You are hurt? You have wounds.’

A shrug, a grin that dragged on the sutures. ‘I’m fine – like if I walked into a door.’

‘I couldn’t help you.’

‘You could have helped me. You chose not to help me.’

‘It was not easy.’

‘You made a choice.’ Eddie gazed into her eyes, held them.

‘Do you understand the choice?’

‘I understand that my life was of secondary importance.’

‘Eddie, that is so pompous. Can you not…?’ She looked away, broke the intensity of the contact.

He said, ‘Sort of puts me in my place – second place.’

‘Should we talk of what’s been, the past?’

He smiled, almost managed to laugh, and the pain was in his ribs at the thought of letting his chest heave. ‘In the past, here – in this damn country, in Naples – there were people of quite outstanding courage. Top of the list, he was called Lukas and he tried to save me – he’s my past. There’s a fish-seller down via Forcella and he gave me the warning before the bastard bounced me, which was big – he’s in my past. A man in that block, when I’d broken free and was running and the dogs of hell were after me, he opened a door for me. I don’t know what happened to him, or the fish-seller, but Lukas died and I lived and… What bit of the past do you want to talk about?’

‘I put a padlock on a bridge in Rome, and I threw the key in the river,’ Immacolata said. The sun was in her eyes, worse than before. It made her squint, and took more of the prettiness off her.

‘Don’t know what you’re talking about. Am I supposed to be impressed? What’s special about a padlock on a bloody bridge?’

She shrugged.

Eddie grimaced. ‘Do I get to see the padlock – whose significance escapes me – that doesn’t have a key?’

‘Maybe.’

‘When is “maybe”? Some day, some time?’

‘Perhaps… Go home.’

He swung on his heel and his trainer ground at the gravel chips on the avenue between the headstones. He walked briskly and Castrolami had to stretch his stride to catch him. The sun had now risen, up and flush on him.

Castrolami said that if they used the light and the siren they would be at Capodicino in time for the first flight of the day and to buy a new shirt.

An hour later… Marco Castrolami wore the suit that was kept on a hanger in a cupboard of his work area, a clean shirt and tie, and he escorted Salvatore, Il Pistole, from the front entrance of piazza Dante. Men of the ROS section held the arms of the prisoner – the Tractor and the Bomber – but their identities were obscured by balaclava masks with eye slits. The camera flashes exploded in the hitman’s face. He winced and turned away, which gave an impression of fear that would be frozen irrevocably in the digital memories. Castrolami saw a reporter he recognised, an eager young woman, but couldn’t remember her name or whether she was employed by Cronaca or Mattino, or an agency, and he murmured as he passed her: ‘He always threatened to kill himself rather than face arrest. In fact, confronted with firearms, he didn’t choose suicide-by-cop but surrendered without a fight – hardly a hero’s end.’ He would not normally have spoken to what he usually termed the ‘vermin pack’, but the day was not usual.

He had dropped his charge at the airport, in time for the first London flight out of Capodicino, had shaken the hand formally and muttered gruffly something about ‘good fortune for the future’ and ‘better to cut Naples out of any future travel plans’, had cuffed his shoulder in an awkward gesture, had not mentioned Lukas’s death, and had seen the boy met by his consul, who would do the ticket, then take him in search of the shirt, and had left him.

He had not, in years, allowed himself to be photographed for the Naples dailies, but it was not a normal day. With the hitman on his way to a life sentence, he would go back to piazza Dante, clear his desk and cupboard, then write the letter to his superior. His personal effects would be in a plastic bag and he would drop off his ID at the front desk and slip away. No fanfare, no party… He would not be in Luciano’s trattoria that night where the ROS men were due to eat, finally, swordfish steaks. He would be out of Naples by the end of the day.

Salvatore was driven away in a convoy of sirens and lights, en route for Poggioreale. What had Castrolami’s years in the city of magnificence and squalor, beauty and rank ugliness, glory and shame achieved? He would go up north, maybe drive a taxi or work in a cheese shop. Perhaps he had achieved something, perhaps he had not – more could not have been asked of him.

A day later… Men from the Misso clan spread out in the Sanita district, through the little businesses where the carved-wood madonnas watched trading from behind screens of lit candles, and called at the shops and bars that had been under the protection and control of the Borelli family. And men from the Mazzarella clan came to the via Forcella and the via Duomo and the via Carbonara, and walked in freedom and safety on the narrow alleys. Guns were carried and remained hidden. Premises were not earmarked for petrol bombing after dark. It was a seamless transfer of authority in all the areas that had been the fiefdom of the Borellis – grandfather, son and grandsons. Most of their foot-soldiers embraced humility and offered themselves to the new masters, and the few who had picked fights in the past with Misso people and Mazzarella people, or traded insults, or had slept with their women, were gone in the night and by midday might have reached southern Germany or western Austria or the Mediterranean coast of France… At Poggioreale, Giovanni was pushed from a lunch queue and Silvio dared not leave his cell, and Carmine sat, trembled and waited for a doctor to see him – and at Posilippo, Anna and Gabriella were in the same exercise yard but did not deign to let their eyes meet. They had known power and it was stripped from them, and they could focus only on their hatred of the young woman who had brought them low, Immacolata, who shared their blood.

A week later… He was lucky that his job was still available, the principal had told him. Eddie had been dutifully grateful. He had thanked him.

Outside the staff room, he shared a cigarette with Lottie and she – inevitably – asked him about the love of his life, the Juliet story, and he’d said something about ‘just didn’t work out’, and nothing about a concept of justice being bigger than the value of his life. And near the end of that shared smoke she’d looked into his face, where the bruising was yellow with mauve traces and the swelling on his lips was still prominent and the scrapes had scabs and the stitches needed to come out. She’d asked. He’d said that the memory was a bit dulled: might have been a door he’d walked into and then again it might have been a set of stairs he’d fallen down, anyway that’s what he’d told the principal, and he’d managed to laugh.

She quizzed him. In Naples, while he wasn’t walking into doors or falling downstairs, had he taken a coffee in the Galeria Umberto I, built to revitalise the city after the 1884 cholera epidemic? No, he had not. Had he wandered in the state rooms of the Palazzo Reale, completed in 1651 after a half-century of work? No, he had missed out on that experience. In the Capella Sansevero, had he circled the Veiled Christ, the work of the eighteenth-century sculptor, Giuseppe Sammartino, regarded by many as the elite art work housed in the city? No, he had not been able to. Had he been to San Lorenzo Maggiore or the Pio Monte della Misericordia or the Gesu Nuovo or had he been to the ruins of Pompeii, or had he climbed to the rim of Vesuvio? No… no… no. ‘Not my business, Eddie, but what did you do there? For God’s sake, Naples is one of the wonders of the world – did it just pass you by?’

He’d shrugged. She would have thought him an imbecile and a Philistine, and the roll of her eyebrows seemed to suggest he’d have been better off in Milton Keynes or Welwyn Garden City. When the cigarette was finished and he’d stamped on it and she’d ground her heel on it, she asked, ‘That address we worked out, what was there?’ He’d said there was a couple of old people, the girl’s grandparents, and he’d smiled and just seemed to tell her that the subject area was closed. No talk about the Sail, and about a pistol in the neck and the gouge it had made and shots fired and a man who was the ‘best’ killed. No war stories.

A bell rang in the corridor.

Neither did he tell her about a cemetery, with the sun rising, and about a girl who looked drained and wan and near broken, and was dressed drably, and who had spoken of a padlock and… He said to Lottie that it was good to be back in the comfort zone of Agatha Christie, and Poirot and Jane Marple, and The Body in the Library. Well, for a bit – grateful for the work but no one should bet their shirt on him not moving on. He thought that Lottie had believed nothing he had told her, but was too polite to quiz him further.

He went into his class. Of course, same walls and same posters of tourist Britain, same desks and same students as there always were for that day of the week at ten in the morning, and the same table for him to spread out his notes. Nothing changed – except there was a private emptiness and he did not know how, whether, it could be filled.

A month later… They were gathered on a viewing platform in the Crowders Mountain State Park. It was out west from Charlotte, beyond Gastonia and along Route 85, and was a favoured place for those seeking good rock-climbing conditions. The family were there, and a man from the New York office of Ground Force Security, and another represented the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those men held back and allowed the mother, the wife and the son of Foster Lukas to do their bit with the small veneer wood casket. It could have been a short experience of dignity and respect, but Ground Force had realised early that the blood relatives gave not a damn once a will had been produced that left all worldly chattels to a clinic that helped military veterans acclimatise with their new artificial limbs, and the Bureau had come up with the idea of scattering the ashes at a place of natural grandeur. Trouble was, the wind was wrong. The FBI man was retired as an agent, but was kept as a freelancer on the payroll for the funerals of those who had long left the Bureau but required recognition. ‘What I heard, there was burnout: too much work, till it had gotten to obsessional levels and no hobbies – Lukas didn’t give himself time for women, for golf, not even for wall-eye fishing. Wasn’t that old but the work levels and the places they took him sort of left him crisped.’ The wife had the top off the small casket, supplied by a crematorium in London, and the mother tilted it, but the goddam wind was wrong. The Ground Force man said, ‘Our evaluation, from the debriefs of those who were closest to him, he’d gotten careless. Happens with burnout cases.’ A good handful of the ash blew back over the viewing platform rail and became embedded on the son’s trousers and provoked a barely suppressed oath. The Bureau man responded, ‘There were two factors that killed him. The one was that carelessness which comes from having done something so many times that it’s clockwork, but the other was involvement, emotional involvement. We say that any form of involvement is a road to failure and worse than “careless”, but emotional involvement is the pits. That’s the combination that killed him. But I reckon “careless” was bigger.’ Mother threw some more and a little went into the wife’s eye, and a sprinkling of it on to her coat.

The two men walked away, left them bickering about the wind and about a dirty coat and a pair of trousers that would need cleaning and a mote in the eye, and both thought their work done… It was indeed a hell of a place with a hell of a vista, and the Ground Force man said, as he fished car keys from his pocket, ‘He felt for the boy he was trying to bust out of a bad time – wasn’t just a dreary routine. Lukas was the sort of man you need in that kind of scrape – difficult, taciturn, lacking in social skills, and as good a type as we throw up. The boy was lucky to have him on the case.’ The family had finished and had turned away from the platform. They both waved at them, and called out their good wishes – which were not acknowledged. The Bureau man said, ‘The boy was indeed lucky, and will probably never know how lucky.’ They parted, would drive in their own hire cars to the airport at Charlotte and the flights would take them back to DC and to New York City, and neither could have pictured the Sail building and a walkway where the washing hung, and a little runt of a guy naked except for his boxers.

A year later… The senior judge thanked her.

She bobbed her head. She stood. She turned for the aisle and the double doors. The prosecutor had told her that the sentences would range between ergastolo, life, for the younger men, except her juvenile brother, thirty years for her mother, twenty years for the advocate, ten years for her grandfather who would die in Poggioreale, and eighteen months at Posilippo for her grandmother.

In the cage, no one looked at her. Her mother and her three brothers, her grandfather and grandmother, the lawyer who had known her since she was a babe in arms, and the hitman, all looked away as if that co-ordinated gesture demonstrated their contempt of her. It was a wasted effort. She never glanced at them. On earlier hearings the abuse from the cage – particularly from Giovanni and Anna Borelli – had blistered across the court room, and on her fourth day in court Vincenzo had come to the front of the cage and spat venomously at her, and her mother had declaimed that Immacolata would rot in a living hell, and on many days Silvio had wept. Her evidence was completed after a month of daily testimony. She had forsworn cosmetics and dressed in lifeless colours for her appearances. That day, her last in court, she was different. She had brought, almost, a possessive smirk to the face of Orecchia and a bounce to the step of Rossi when they had collected her from the safe-house and driven her early to the Palace of Justice. They, alone, were privy to the transformation.

Rossi and Orecchia had taken her the previous evening to the boutique salon in the back-street on the seaward side of the piazza dei Martiri. Her mother’s account? Of course it would be on her mother’s account. Who would have refused her? The owner faced an investigation from the Guardia di Finanza, so easily arranged, if Immacolata Borelli and her escorts were turned away… and the account was still open because her mother needed fresh underwear and required the changes of plain clothing that might, to a court, indicate a misunderstood and guiltless woman. That day, her daughter had been driven to court in the bulletproof and armour-plated Lancia in clothing that was chic, elegant, styled. Her jacket and skirt were Asian silk, sea blue and severe, her shoes were white, with low heels, her blouse was cream and hung loose. She wore no jewellery. Also, the night before, the wife of a court security guard, had come to the safe-house, cut and styled her hair. She had turned heads in court, all except those of her family and her family’s closest confidants. It was as if a trapped bird had escaped a cage.

She went down the stairs from the court, through guarded double doors into a concrete underground cavern, and was led to the Lancia.

It was time there, beside the car, for a brief moment when the professionalism of the Servizio Centrale Protezione was abandoned, thrown to the winds. Orecchia took her hand and kissed it lightly. Rossi kissed her on each cheek, cool lips. She knew them, knew of their families and their problems, their excitements and their moments of despair. They were, perhaps, her only family.

She sat in the back, encased by the dark privacy windows, and accepted now and did not query the vest that was laid on the seat beside her. Orecchia drove, for this final journey, in the middle of an October afternoon when light rain fell on the city and the mountain’s summit was hidden in gloomy cloud. Beyond the tunnel, the road ahead was blocked by police motorcycles, and they were given a free run on to an open road. She would never see the city again, knew it.

At the airport gate, Rossi laid his machine pistol on his lap, rummaged in his briefcase, produced her airline ticket and passed it to her. He said, quietly, that the aircraft was due to leave five minutes ago but was held for her. Then he gave her the new passport that carried the new name. They were at the terminal’s Departures door. Orecchia turned and faced her, then tapped the top of his head. She took her cue and lowered the dark glasses from her hair, covered her eyes with them and her upper face.

Rossi said, ‘At the gate they’re expecting us. We’ll be taken straight to the aircraft. I’m with you until the hatch closes after you… You’ll be met?’

‘I don’t know.’

Orecchia frowned. ‘You said you were coming?’

‘I did it by text. The number he used to have. What flight, where we should have dinner. I don’t know whether he has a different mobile… I didn’t call, maybe for fear of what I might be told.’

‘Are you sure of this?’ Rossi demanded of her.

‘Very sure – I’ve not had a text back but I’m sure… I hope I’ll find him.’ She paused, then said softly, ‘After what I did to him, what else – now – can I do? I must look for him – at the airport, in a restaurant we used, in the bar he liked. I owe it to him to look.’

Orecchia scribbled on a sheet of his notepad, then ripped it off. ‘Call me and tell me if you’ve found what you’re looking for.’

She smiled at them, and treasured them for their loyalty. ‘You’ll get one word, fatturato. In English that’s “turnover”. Then you’ll know I found him.’

Orecchia changed – was the professional, the guard. ‘You don’t stop, you follow Alessandro, you keep close to him. Goodbye, Signorina Immacolata, who is finished. Goodbye, whoever you have become, and today you are beautiful. I hope you’re met.’

The car door was opened for her.

She walked well. The gate closed behind her. She didn’t know if he would be there. She had a brisk stride and remembered a park, a bench and a young man, and a question put in innocence – and a great wrong done to him, and to others, in a faraway place.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator

Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter with ITN, covering Vietnam, the Middle East, and terrorism across the world. Seymour was on the streets of Londonderry on Bloody Sunday, and was a witness to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Seymour's first novel was the acclaimed thriller Harry's Game, set in Belfast. He has since written twenty-four more bestselling novels, of which six have been filmed for television in the UK and US.