The Collaborator

5

The kid hissed, ‘No lights, only the torch. And no torch till the curtains are done.’

Eddie Deacon could honestly have said that never in his life had he done anything that warranted the intervention of the police. Maybe he was a bit drunk sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night, rolling along the street and using a lamp-post as a crutch, but he hadn’t done anything that required an officer to get stuck into him. It didn’t make him special, just ordinary. If a policeman’s torch had lit him now, it would have been handcuffs, the back of a wagon and a cell door slamming.

The kid had asked for fifty; they had haggled. He had settled for thirty. Eddie thought the kid might be as young as nine. Newspapers he glanced at in the staff room carried interminable features on the spread of hooligans on the capital’s streets. Thirty pounds had been passed, and to make it up Eddie had had to empty a pocket and dig up pound and fifty-pence coins. It was big money to him, but he didn’t think it was high-value work to the kid… He rather liked him.

They had gone to the parallel street at the back. The kid had led and Eddie had followed. There was a locked iron gate at the side of a four-house terrace, and the kid had unfastened the lock as if it was easier than opening a toothpaste tube. They had edged along a garden, while inside a baby cried and a television played, and Eddie had been helped over the end wall. They had dropped down into a yard filled with sodden cardboard cartons that would have come from the shop alongside the steps to the door used by Immacolata and her brother. Next, up a drainpipe using a dumped stool to get clear of the ground, then a window ledge. The kid used a penknife on the window while Eddie tottered beside him. The kid was sure-footed and showed no fear. The window was levered up and a small thin arm, width of a broomstick, came down, a hand took Eddie’s and wrenched it through the gap. Funny thing. When the small hand took his weight, Eddie never doubted that he was safe.

What he liked about the kid was his sheer anarchy. Didn’t do arithmetic, as nine- or ten-year-olds should, but did burglary. Didn’t do joined-up writing and reading aloud but did house-breaking. And smiled: wasn’t sour-faced, but had an openness and a sense of untamed rebellion about him that were captivating. They stood statue still in the darkened room, listened and heard nothing. Then the window was closed and the kid said – still a treble voice – his friend Vinny had boasted that a new alarm system had been installed, had cost a grand, that the system couldn’t be interfered with by an intruder. The kid said, shrill whisper, that the system was shit and he’d gone into the apartment by this route, disabled it and brought out a leather-covered Filofax by way of proof and carried it to the trattoria where Vinny ate his pizza. Eddie hadn’t understood how the circuits could be blocked but Vinny had. He had given the kid fifty pounds.

The kid worshipped Vinny. Only when he was talking about him did the anarchy light go out of his eyes. He had looked away just once, not done eyeball-to-eyeball, when Eddie had asked what work was Vinny in. The kid had said, ‘Business,’ and looked away. Eddie remembered how he had been at that age – guarded, protected, supervised, bred on a wish-list of ambition and success, and damn near frightened of his own shadow.

The curtain was drawn. A palm-sized hand torch was passed to him. ‘Is it in her room?’ the kid asked.

He nodded. The kid took his arm and took him across what he now realised was a spare room, storeroom, into a central corridor and then the living area. The torch beam raked it. It was chaotic. Every drawer was out and upturned, the contents on the carpet. Every cushion was off the chairs and dumped. Pictures hung at wild angles, and Eddie thought they’d been shifted to see if they concealed anything. The magazines had been opened and dropped. He asked, confused, why it had been done. The kid told him, matter-of-fact, that there must have been a problem with the VAT. Then he repeated that he had heard police talk of the girl – Immacolata – who had gone back to Italy, her bag to follow. The kitchen was more chaos, plates scattered, saucepans on the floor or in the sink, refrigerator left open, sachets of pasta sauce slit as if they might have concealed something. The kid now amplified explanations and Eddie made out an exaggerated wink when he was told that people in ‘business’ sometimes forgot what VAT they owed.

Eddie didn’t use his brain to analyse, then challenge. The kid seemed to glide over what was on the floor; but Eddie didn’t. He kicked a china cup and heard it disintegrate, glass crunched under his feet. Then the small hand was tugging him and he was facing a closed door.

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she, Vinny’s sister?’

‘Leave it.’

‘Did you really do it with her – shag her? I used to watch her – I was out the back, and her room light would be on. Maybe she didn’t think anyone was there. I used to, you know – when she was taking them off. I did.’

He didn’t think of the kid as a dirty-raincoat man, or a voyeur: they all did it. At his house, with a few beers taken, he and his friends had lined up to see across the garden to an upstairs window. He wasn’t proud of himself, but didn’t reckon it a hanging offence. Eddie thought that here, at least, the precocious adulthood of the kid came up short. Wouldn’t have had sex, not at nine or ten. He was let into the room. The door had been locked and no key in it, but the kid opened it with a fast movement and Eddie didn’t see whether he used a hairpin or a plastic card. He could smell her.

‘Not your concern…’

Her perfume scent and slight body odour mingled. To smell her hurt him – like a kick, sharp, on his shin. The first thing that Eddie Deacon realised was that the room was only untidy. It had not been searched. The wardrobe doors were open but the dresses, blouses and skirts were on the hangers, and the drawers were not dragged open, tipped out. He hurried to the window, drew the curtains and switched on the torch.

It was a single bed, unmade, the duvet pulled towards the pillow but not straightened and smoothed. He let the beam sweep the room. He knew what he was looking for, had not promised it to himself but had hoped… He was disappointed. He had wanted to find a photo frame on the little pine table beside the bed, on the chest, or the bookcase to the left of the window, with a picture of himself inside it.

He set to work.

Nothing in the room shouted that Immacolata Borelli was the lover of Eddie Deacon. His own room, on the other side of Dalston, had the blow-up image of her, and her dressing-gown, which she put on when she came off the bed and went to make tea or coffee or to bring him a beer. He had precious little money each week after he’d paid the rent, and presents for her were his definition of mild extravagance, but the last thing had been a scarf – silk, a sale in Regent Street, price slashed – and she’d said it was wonderful. He found it in the top right drawer of the chest.

He had been three, four minutes in the room when the kid came to the door. He made a sucked sharp whistle, as if he wanted to be gone. As yet Eddie had found nothing. There were three more drawers in the chest, on the left side. He went through them faster as the kid watched.

Nothing. Nothing in the pockets of clothes in the wardrobe. Nothing in the drawer of the bedside table. The kid came further into the room, snatched away the torch as if that were his right and shone the light into a wastepaper bin, picked it up and tipped it out. Eddie saw a ripped packet for tights, the wrapper from a tube of strong mints, two or three squashed paper handkerchiefs, a torn blouse, shredded brown paper that might have been used on a small parcel – and a plastic tray for sweet biscuits with Italian markings. The kid bent and sifted through what was on the carpet. He gave a scrap to Eddie. ‘About all there is.’

Eddie Deacon held a piece of jagged paper, the tear running through a handwritten address – not the destination. Where the tear was, to the right, there were four scrawled lines. On the top line was ‘elli’. Below it was ‘cella’. Under that line was ‘157’. At the bottom was ‘poli’. He was trying to decipher it when the torch beam was cut.

He was led, as if he were the child, out of the room and the lock was refastened. They went on tiptoe across the debris on the living-room floor to a window facing out on to the street. He was gestured to look down. There were two police officers on the front step, rubbing their hands and talking quietly. He realised then the quality of the kid’s anarchy.

They went as silently as they had come. Down the drainpipe, across the yard and over the wall, through a garden and a side gate, supposedly fastened, then out on to a lit street. All tarted up, this one. Signs in the window proclaimed neighbourhood security co-operation, and alarm boxes winked lights.

The kid turned to him. ‘Don’t give me any shit about what they call love. It’s all because she’s a great shag, yes?’

He wondered if, one day, the kid might learn what was shit and what was something else, but was not confident of it – and he thought the boy didn’t want to hear about the pain of separation, the hurt of his Mac going out of his life, about fighting heart and soul to win back the one person, in his world, he could not be without. He had the scrap of paper in his pocket and knew where he would take it. The kid, at nine or ten, was riddled with cynicism, and love hadn’t reached him. Why disabuse…?

‘A great shag,’ Eddie Deacon said.

They did high fives, whacked their hands together, and he watched the kid walk off. Just a kid, but with a bounce and a roll in his stride. There was the flash of a match, and a wisp of smoke curled away from his face.

Couldn’t help himself. Eddie Deacon called, ‘She’s fantastic, the light for me. Thank you for helping me. She’s more important to me than anything.’

If the kid heard he gave no sign of it but kept going towards the corner. Daft to have confided that to an urchin, a thief, but it was heartfelt.

She stood by the window, full length, with a sliding door that led to the balcony. The nightdress, bought in London, was shorter than she had thought, thinner, and hung tight on her. She had no slippers, sandals or flip-flops so Immacolata was barefoot on the marble flooring. She assumed that any of the penthouse apartments in such a block, in such a location, would have a veneer of marble in the living room. The sun was up, just above the distant mountain range.

She didn’t know Rome, had been there once with her mother, years before, to stand on an Easter Sunday in the piazza San Pietro and see the tiny far-away figure of the Holy Father. So she had not recognised the route taken by the two cars as they had sped towards the centre, then veered away, crossed the river again and climbed a hill. The headlights had speared up and caught pine branches. No sirens and no blue lights. Nothing to indicate that the passenger in the lead car was a collaboratore di justizia, was protected, a pentita who would give evidence against her family in return for clemency, an infame, who would be despised in the streets where she had been reared. She came unheralded and unannounced. She had been hustled out of the car, and the guns were there, but under draped coats. She had been bundled into the lift, then almost pushed the few steps from the lift door into the penthouse.

She had been ignored at first by Castrolami, who was on his mobile – she’d heard him swear – and eyed by the two men who were to mind her.

Cold cuts of meat, a salad, fruit and cheese, laid out on plates, were taken from the refrigerator.

She was told nothing, shown to a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and had heard the door locked. It was done quietly and she reckoned it was not intended that she should hear it. A poor night’s sleep, almost nightmares when she did drift off, able now to comprehend what she had done. At half past six, according to her watch, she had heard the key turn in the lock. She’d gone into the living room. The two men were up, smartly dressed, shirtsleeves and ties, shoulder-holster harnesses across their chests with weapons.

In case she had forgotten overnight, she was told – after the hope was expressed that she had enjoyed a satisfactory rest – that their names were Giacomo Orecchia and Alessandro Rossi. She’d nodded, then gone to the window.

She had intended to provoke them.

Immacolata wore only the flimsy cotton nightdress, white but with flowers at the collar, and stood in front of the window as the sun came up over the rooftops, towers and spires. She eased her feet apart, let her heels be half a metre separated. She could feel, through the pane, that the sun already had the power to warm and would have lit the outline of her body. It was not normal for Immacolata Borelli to glory in her body, to use it as a tool or as a weapon. She imagined the way the light silhouetted it. Then she turned.

It would have been their skill that they moved in silence; neither watched her. The younger was out through the door, in the kitchen area, and sat at a table, looking at a newspaper – he was Rossi. The older one, Orecchia, was in a bedroom, again with the door open, smoothing a duvet and straightening a coverlet. It had been for nothing, her gesture. She had flaunted her body, to tease or confuse, and it hadn’t been noticed.

From the kitchen, Rossi: ‘Would you like coffee, Signorina? And we have panini or bread, fruit, and cheese. Some of it or all?’

Whatever. Did she care? Hardly. ‘I don’t know…’

Orecchia said, ‘Do you want some coffee before you dress or while you’re still almost naked?’

She met his eyes. She realised then that he had taken a gamble with her: that he could ridicule her, showing he recognised the game she was playing and would not tolerate it so had laughed at her. She flushed and twisted away from them so that neither would see, through the flimsy material, the curve of her bosom, the cherrystone nipples or the hair above her thighs. Orecchia reached behind the bedroom door and his hand appeared with a heavy towelling robe. He threw it at her. It landed on the marble beside her so she had to bend to lift it up, with an arm across her chest as she did so. She slipped into the robe, belittled and angry.

Rossi called, ‘I make good coffee, Signorina, and I bought the bread this morning while you slept. My suggestion: breakfast now, dress afterwards. Then we have visitors and work.’

She believed they were treating her as they would a spoiled child, and seemed to have set guidelines. They had not leered at her or been shocked by her. They had, with laid-back politeness, almost taken her legs off at the knees. She stumbled across the marble, bare feet slipping, losing her poise, to her bedroom door. She showered – found a small bar of soap there and a sachet of shampoo, and she had her own washbag. She barely allowed the water to run hot, then was out and drying herself viciously. She dressed – new underwear, the same outer clothing she had travelled in, and left her hair damp. She could smell the coffee and the warmed panini.

Beyond the window there were similar blocks to the one she was in, surrounded by high steel fences with sharp spikes; the walls had broken glass embedded in concrete on the brickwork. She saw a maid beating a carpet on a balcony, and a man, who wore only shorts on another, was smoking and scratching his chest. A woman watered her plants with a hose. She did not belong in their world. Perhaps she belonged to no world. Her nakedness had been her attempt to take control of the void into which she had thrown herself.

She was as much a prisoner in that apartment as she would have been in a cell in the Poggioreale gaol. They might have read her.

‘Signorina, the coffee is ready.’

‘Bread and fruit are on the table, Signorina.’

She went into the kitchen and sat with them. Rossi was the heavier and she imagined he worked out in a gym. His arm muscles bulged in the short sleeves of his shirt, he was clean-shaven and a little gel had gone on his hair. She recognised the pistol in the holster as a Beretta. He poured her coffee.

Orecchia pushed the fruit bowl towards her. He would have been fifteen years the elder, wiry thin, and his shirt seemed a size too large and fell loose from his shoulders, except where the holster harness trapped the fabric. His tie was the more vivid. He had a worn face – had been there, had done whatever, had seen it. She gulped coffee, snatched up a roll and tore it into pieces.

Rossi said, ‘Signorina, we are from the Servizio Centrale Protezione, under the authority of the Interior Ministry. You will be given later a form in triplicate that you will read and sign. By agreeing to the conditions laid down by us, you commit yourself to obeying instructions and following the advice we will offer. You are not a free agent. You have made an agreement with the state, and we expect you to honour it. We’re a specialised team, trained to handle and protect collaborators. We’re not nannies, chauffeurs, psychiatrists or servants – and, most certainly, we’re not friends. It was your decision to be where you are today. You were not under duress to take this course. From us you can expect dedication and professionalism.’

Orecchia said, ‘It was not thought, Signorina, that you needed a female officer attached to you. There are very few. Those we have are allocated to women we consider inexperienced in the role of a pentita , and the pressures that will inevitably be exerted. I have read the file. You are from a family high in the ranks of the organised-crime clans in Naples.’

Rossi: ‘We don’t think you’re fragile, Signorina.’

Orecchia: ‘As tough as the boot on an artisan’s foot.’

Rossi paused, eyed her, without charity or respect, but his tone was as correct as if it had been taught on a course: ‘Nothing about you, Signorina, is unique. You’re one of many we have overseen. We understand the psychological stresses you will endure. You will believe you can escape from us, go home, walk on your own streets, explain and be forgiven, then forgotten. They’ll kill you, Signorina. You’ll lie in the dirt of a street among dog’s mess and rubbish, and you’ll bleed. A crowd will gather to stare at you and not one person will shed a tear of sympathy. And you can put the scum where they belong – in maximum security, and under Article 41 bis, and you can be born again. You will not run from us.’

Orecchia scratched a mole on his nose. He wore a wedding ring, narrow, and she wondered if he went home often and if, when he was at home, he told his wife the secrets of his work. He spoke quietly and she had to lean across the mess of crumbs and orange peel to hear him. ‘In a few hours, Signorina, it will be realised that you have collaborated, become an infame, and they will search for you. Alessandro has talked about a shot in the head fired from the pillion of a scooter as you walk a street in Naples – or Rome, or Milan, or Genoa – but he’s told you the minimum. To me, from what I know, it’s predictable that they’d wish – before killing you – to hurt you, but you’re of the Borelli clan and you know what happens when a message is to be sent. In the most recent killing – the funeral is today – the victim’s testicles were cut off and placed in his mouth, then his head was cut off and placed in his groin. That is reality.’

‘We’re not bullet-catchers or human shields.’

‘We know our trade. We’ll do all in our power to protect you.’

She poured more coffee for herself, slurped it. The doorbell rang. Orecchia glanced at his watch, was satisfied. Rossi took his hand off the pistol in the holster and went to the hall, but Orecchia stayed in front of her, blocking a view of her from the archway linking the kitchen to the hall. His hand did not leave the pistol in his holster.

Immacolata was introduced to the prosecutor. She had seen him many times before – on most days his picture was in Cronaca or Il Mattino, or his image was broadcast on the local RAI channel, and he had been in court when she had seen her father brought in chains to the cage. He was slighter than she had imagined, his hair was thinner and his checks had the pallor of exhaustion. She thought of the magnetism in her father’s eyes, the way they mesmerised and captured attention. Ash stained the front of the prosecutor’s jacket and he dumped a heavy briefcase on the kitchen table.

He pulled out a file with her name and photograph on it. She thought of the cemetery at Nola. The table was cleared. She was told that the woman with the prosecutor was his personal assistant. A tape-recorder was laid on the table and wires were connected to a small microphone. She noticed now that the plates and cups had been stacked in the sink, and the guns had gone.

The tape-recorder was switched on, there were the briefest preliminaries. Immacolata kept the cemetery in her mind, the statue of Angelabella, the screams directed at her, the anger, and the pain inflicted on her. She started to talk.

Gabriella Borelli needed to work. There had been La Piccolina a decade earlier, and before the Little Girl, as Maria Licciardi was known, there had been Rosetta Cutolo, known as ‘Ice Eyes’ in the city. There had been Carmela Marzano and Pupetta Maresca. All had been figures of consequence on the streets of Naples, as was Gabriella Borelli. She had to work if she was to cling to the most important strand in the life of a woman who craved and valued the title ‘ la madrina ’, which was power. The gaining of it far outstripped the acquisition of money. Power came, primarily, from the ability to do successful deals.

She could not hide in an underground den, as Pasquale had been able to. She needed meetings, and to be at them without the clay of the countryside on her shoes or the dust of cement-floored bunkers on her skirt. She was in the back room of a pizzeria on the northern side of the via Foria, one of the busiest streets in the city for traffic and pedestrians, where noise and movement were constant, overpowering and engulfing. She had slept fitfully at the home of the mother of a man who drove cement-mixing trucks for the clan; had arrived on the doorstep, had been admitted in time to see the midnight news on the local RAI channel, had seen tape of Giovanni and Silvio paraded past the ranks of the paparazzi, an old monochrome picture of Vincenzo, had heard the mayor in front of the grand building on piazza Municipio speak of a ‘great blow against the heart of the evil of the criminal culture’ of the city. She had been brought fruit and cheese and had been offered the woman’s big bed, had declined and slept on a settee, with her handbag on the floor beside her head, the small pistol in it within easy reach. It was the first time she had used that address as a refuge for a single night: it would not have been known as a place of importance to her – as were the safe-houses that had been raided. She understood that she had been betrayed from inside the clan, but did not yet know by whom. She had been gone early in the morning, as the city’s life returned, and had walked to the pizzeria.

Salvatore was outside the inner door.

She met with Albanians. They talked of the movement of girls – none, she demanded, to be more than fourteen – who would be taken from Moldova overland to Tirana, then brought to the Adriatic coast to be ferried by speedboat to a fishing village north of the Italian port of Bari, then driven to Naples. She was firm on the price, would not haggle. She demanded also that the girls be made available for medical examination to prove virginity, then stared at a dull ceiling light while they bickered among themselves. She presumed they would have learned that she was a police and carabinieri front-line target, that her organisation was in danger of being successfully dismantled, and that they might believe she was vulnerable.

The matter of the girls was dealt with. Brusquely, she continued with the agenda: refined heroin – the poppies from Afghanistan, the chemical from the laboratories of Turkey, then shipped from the Balkans and Montenegro to the port of Naples. The price of the heroin. Again, no debate permitted. She said what she would pay. Monies were agreed, delivery dates accepted.

Her meeting broke. She shook their hands formally to bind the agreements.

She went out of the pizzeria’s front door on to the street.

She did not, of course, carry a diary. Everything was in her head. Meeting locations and times, rendezvous points, market prices. The next meeting – in another back room, in a bar on the via Arenaccia – was to determine the volume of hardcore stone for the foundations of a new apartment block on Cristoforo Colombo, then the amount of concrete required for the six-storey construction, the prices for the materials and the fee for the men in the municipio who would give permission to build. It was a normal routine for Gabriella Borelli.

The sun was warm on her face. She felt as if a winter frost thawed. By the conclusion of the meeting the Albanians had shown her the necessary respect. She wondered if those who had guided them to the rendezvous had shown them a half-page of yesterday’s Cronaca and translated a report on the death of a man in a street, the meal made of his testicles. She walked briskly, Salvatore, Il Pistole, behind her, and felt she had regained control.

They broke. The recorder was switched off and a new tape inserted. The prosecutor’s assistant went to the toilet.

She looked up into the prosecutor’s face and hoped for a smile and praise. Immacolata Borelli had been prompted to talk about her brother, Vincenzo, who was to appear before magistrates that morning and would then be transferred to a maximum-security facility. She was confused. ‘You haven’t mentioned my mother.’

‘That is correct,’ the prosecutor answered gravely.

‘You took her?’ she pressed.

‘We did not.’ A small frown cut into his forehead.

‘Because you couldn’t find her.’

‘She wasn’t where we looked for her.’ The prosecutor’s tongue licked his lower lip.

‘I told you where to go.’

‘You did.’

‘She was the principal target.’

‘She was one target. We regret she isn’t yet in custody. She will be, very soon.’ He smiled wanly. The assistant came back to her chair and the recorder was switched on again. ‘It shouldn’t concern you whether or not your mother’s in custody.’

The gesture was fast, instinctive. Immacolata hit the table with the heel of her hand. The impact bounced the tape-recorder and spilled the prosecutor’s coffee. There was a flicker of movement in a doorway off the hall as if a watcher had been alerted. She said, ‘I won’t talk to you until my mother has been taken. I trusted in your competence. You have failed.’

‘Do you imagine I travel lightly from Naples to Rome to hear the tantrum of a woman who overestimates her own importance? I can cut you loose and-’

‘You won’t take my mother.’

She stood and the chair fell behind her, clattered. She didn’t look at them, didn’t see the slow turn of the spools in the tape-recorder. She went to her room and slammed the door. It was her mother’s face, lit by camera flashes, that she wanted to see, her mother’s face, in shadow as a cell door closed on a corridor’s lights, and her mother’s face, when early sunlight caught the cell windows and the bars made stripes on her skin. Her strongest emotion that morning was not love but hate. It went so deep. It covered a mother’s apparent indifference to a girl-child, the failure of the parent to rate the achievements of a daughter. Immacolata had been denied attention, denied praise, ignored. She lay on the bed. There had been hate for her mother, but now there was fear at the reach of her arm.

‘Is that what he said?’

‘It’s what I was told he said.’ Salvatore was at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder. His voice had been a murmur and his lips had barely moved. While he had guarded the inner door of the pizzeria, the scugnizzi had brought messages to him. Lower in the chain than the foot-soldiers were the kids who watched entrances to the quarters of the city and reported, listened to conversations in bars and reported, sat in the gutter opposite police stations and carabinieri barracks and reported.

‘Say it to me again.’ She spoke from the side of her mouth, a whisper, as the traffic roared by, horns blasted, men and women walked along the pavement, and her words were lost to all but Salvatore.

‘He was in the bar at the top end of Casanova, Luigi Pirelli’s bar. He was in a group and the TV was on. The arrests… Alfredo’s youngest heard him. He said, ‘The Borelli clan is history. They’re finished, old, shit and soft. They have no authority now. Count the days, they’ll be gone.’

‘That man, he is not to say that again.’

She walked on. Salvatore dropped back. He was soon fifteen or twenty paces behind her. He had much to think about. He was the enforcer of the clan and answered only to Gabriella Borelli. He had taken on, also, responsibility for her security and the offshoots of the group. Three years ago, before he had been arrested, Pasquale Borelli would have had the last say on security. Eight months ago, before his flight to London, Vincenzo had been given that responsibility in his father’s absence. He did not know where such leakage of information had come from: the faces of men bounced in his mind, called forward, then discarded. He kept her back in his sight, and the pistol, the Beretta P38, was in his belt. He wore a loose-fitting jacket to conceal it.

She was tough, and her walk showed it. The weakness of the last evening had been short-lived. Salvatore thought Gabriella Borelli magnificent as he tracked her, watching her back.

He asked, respectfully, if Lottie would join him in the staffroom alcove. Eddie Deacon hardly knew her, had offered her no friendship, but now he needed her. She was – and the young guys who taught at the language school tittered over it – shyly lesbian. Obvious, but never confessed. Lottie had not outed herself. She was reluctant to come with him, suspicious, but then he did what he reckoned was his best imitation of ‘Labrador eyes’ and she would have seen it mattered to him. There was no snigger on his lips.

Eddie said, ‘Sorry and all that, but I need help. I’ve lost a girl. It’s really hacked me off. Don’t know where she is, other than gone home, and she’s Italian, from Naples. Says on Google that a million people live there, that the city is a hundred and twenty square kilometres. I have to find her, but I don’t know where to start.’

Lottie looked at him in the marginal privacy of the alcove, perhaps remembered slights that were not imagined, remarks behind hands and little darts of cruelty. ‘What if little Miss Perfect doesn’t want to be found – at least, not by you?… All right, all right. What have you got that might help?’

Eddie had the torn scrap of paper in a see-through plastic bag, as if it was priceless. He seemed reluctant to give it up, share it, but did so.

‘You didn’t answer me. What if she rates you a pain, and wants shot of you?’

‘I’ll have her say it to my face,’ Eddie said. He shrugged, then did the smile he was famed for – it implied that no woman could possibly want shot of him. Lottie grinned, then looked at the handwriting. He had gone to her because she had spent time in Naples, at the university, and spoke the language fluently. He tried to joke: ‘I really don’t understand why any female of the species could want shot of me, let alone rate me a pain. Just not on the agenda.’

She studied the paper as if it were a crossword puzzle, then gazed at him. ‘I’m wondering, Eddie, if you’re behaving like an adult or reverting to teenage male, all acne and infatuation – or is that not my business?’

‘Just a little old cry for help… please. If it wasn’t for her, it’s you I’d be chucking red roses at.’

She rolled her eyes, almost blushed. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Immacolata Borelli.’

She breathed out hard. ‘Right, line one, try Borelli. Line two, go with a number and via Forcella. Line three will be the zip code, four more preceding digits, then 157, for that part of the Forcella district that runs between via del Duomo and the Castel Capuano. The last line is Napoli. It’s hardly Enigma code-breaking but, then, you’re only a man.’

‘A specimen to be pitied.’

After she’d repeated it, and he’d written it in ballpoint on the back of his hand, he surprised himself, and her, by taking hold of her shoulders and kissing her hard on both cheeks. He was turning away as she said, ‘Are you really going there?’

‘Too right – what else?’

Eddie Deacon set off down the corridor for the principal’s office.

Twenty metres had become forty. They were on via Carbonara, close to the old castle that had doubled as a courthouse. He understood the route she had taken. In Salvatore’s mind many issues competed for prominence: the man who had said the Borelli clan was ‘finished, old, shit and soft’, a leak in security, his job as protector to Gabriella Borelli. Any could have claimed priority, but he didn’t make that choice. Then he looked at his watch, saw the time, recognised he was late for the rendezvous with his scooter driver, Fangio, and smiled. Gabriella Borelli was at the lights, waiting for the pedestrian green and would cross via Carbonara above the castle. He smiled when he remembered ‘Fangio’, who had done a ‘Wall of Death’ stunt in a circus, had crashed spectacularly in front of five hundred punters, or more, and would not have had the money to buy a new bike. He had always enjoyed the memory of Fangio’s face when he was offered the post of scooter rider to Salvatore, Il Pistole. Fangio had been in Poggioreale and Secondigliano, was no altar-boy. There were few Salvatore trusted, but Fangio was one. Many people were waiting to cross at those lights, then the traffic slowed and the charge started. Not for Neapolitans to wait. Sinewy lines of pedestrians wove among the vehicles. He could barely see her.

She had heard doors close, and a minute later a car had revved outside the block. Then music had started in the apartment, and the only voices were those of the minders.

She lay on the bed, her head on the pillow, straining to hear what was said. The music was opera and distorted the voices. She realised the prosecutor had gone, would now be on his journey to Naples. There had been no soft knock on her door, and no discreet voice – maybe that of the woman, his assistant – had urged her to come out of her room, to co-operate. She had been abandoned.

She had convinced herself that walking out on them was justified by their display of incompetence. They had failed to arrest her mother.

The doorbell rang.

They were at the bottom of the seniority heap. He was twenty-four and she was his senior by three months. They had started at the training school on the same Monday morning, had been posted to Naples on the same Monday, accepted and begun duty with the Squadra Mobile on another, very recent, Monday. To survive, they stayed close, had volunteered to work together. Around them there were men and women who were prematurely aged, jaundiced and pessimistic, who preached that ambition was heresy in the team. They had been up all the previous night and now headed for their homes out to the south on the sea front and sleep.

He had driven one of the Alfas carrying a senior man to a block where, on the third floor, they had hoped to find la madrina. She had driven a car filled with officers to another of the addresses given by an informant – not identified at the briefing. Now she drove and stifled a yawn, changed down and braked. Pedestrians flooded the roadway around them. The photographs, blown up, of Gabriella Borelli, the target, were in the car. He cursed. Both were hungry, exhausted; both, for the operation the night before, had studied the photograph long and hard.

The curse became a gasp. He jack-knifed and snatched up a picture that had been on the rubber matting, smoothed it, gawped. He elbowed her hard in the ribcage below her right breast, jarring his bone on her holster. For a moment the photograph was in her face. She nodded. They had the certainty of youth, and neither would have considered their judgement flawed, their recognition wrong.

Weapons drawn, they ran from the car, left the doors wide. The crown of her head bobbed in front of them and the gap closed.

*

Not hate, but fear. After the doorbell had rung, Immacolata heard a bucket, water splashing, a woman’s voice, and laughter from the minders. She thought a maid had come to clean, and she was ignored.

She realised the weight of her fear.

No warning. No shout to alert her that police with guns drawn were immediately behind her. No opportunity to raise her hands as the pistols were aimed at the point in her back where straps and shoulder muscle met.

Salvatore saw a small tableau in front of him that seemed mimed.

He was used to making calculations, those that involved a reasonable chance of survival within a time frame of a second or two. He could cruise on the pillion his chest and stomach against Fangio’s back, have the P38 in his fist inside the right pocket of his leather jacket, and he would see the target – darkened by his helmet visor – walking, sitting or eating, on the pavement, in a car or at a pizzeria table, and he would know whether or not that was the moment to strike. If he went in for the kill, he would rap his left hand on Fangio’s shoulder, the scooter would swing and take him close, then stop for the few moments he needed to aim and achieve a clean hit. If he hit Fangio’s shoulder twice, Fangio would take the scooter past the target and the hit was aborted: might be an escort in place, a folded windcheater on a table when the temperature was high that would conceal a firearm, might be that a carabinieri or police vehicle was following or approaching. He wouldn’t intervene if he couldn’t succeed.

She was pitched over. The young man stood, legs apart in a movie pose, his weapon aimed – two-handed – at her. The young woman had launched herself and landed on Gabriella Borelli’s back – a she-cat on prey – had wrestled her down and, with one hand, had wrenched an arm of la madrina behind her back. The other held a heavy pistol, big in a slight fist, so that the barrel pressed against the neck. Salvatore had the Beretta half out of his waist belt, and the moment was gone. The man no longer covered Gabriella Borelli but the people – men, women and children – who scattered away from where they had their prisoner, as cars and vans veered to the side. It was as if a cordon was around them, an exclusion area. He thought she would have said, and perhaps stroked his arm as she did so, that she trusted him alone. Because of the open area between him and them, he would be seen and identified if he ran forward, and would have to enter the space to be close enough to fire killing shots.

It could not be done.

He thought that she looked old with her face crushed down on the sand and shit and weeds of the little island where once there had been a traffic bollard. There was dirt on her face, her hair had lost its shape and there was shock in her eyes. He had broken the trust, had failed her.

She was dragged to the car. Her feet did not get a hold and a shoe came off, but she was pulled there and the door thrown open. The young man thrust her in and threw himself on top of her. Fumes spewed from the exhaust and the car sped off. Salvatore saw, before he lost it, a hand clamp a light on the roof and the blue flashes that spilled from it. He heard the siren wail.

He walked away, more alone than he could remember at any time since Pasquale Borelli had chosen him, had taught him to kill, and taught him well.

Flashes in her mind of the moments of fear. A girl left to mind a slow-cooking meat – baby lamb – in the oven, told when to take it out, forgetting, and coming back into the kitchen to see the smoke then cringing from her mother’s beating, a hard one. Her mother made fear, and the hate was secondary. There was no love in her life, not from her family. Love was sealed away from her in the cemetery at Nola. She knew only hatred and fear. More laughter came through her door, but Immacolata did not share it.

He put the phone down, ended one of the calls that seemed to consist of almost endless silences. The display panel told him the connection had been for four minutes and nine seconds, but it had seemed to Arthur Deacon a fair imitation of eternity. He walked slowly from the hall table towards the kitchen. He couldn’t go in as Betty was washing the floor but he came to the doorway and coughed, as if that was the best way to gain his wife’s attention.

She squeezed out the mop, quizzed him with a glance. ‘Well?’

‘It was Edmund.’

‘I know – what did he want?’

She used a mop on the kitchen floor three mornings a week, then went to work at a family firm of builders, and would tut if he stepped on the clean tiles and messed up. He was watching her, thinking how to relay what he had been told.

‘Have you lost your tongue? What did he want? Money? At his age he ought to be able to-’

‘Listen. Just for once. Listen. Thank you.’ He saw astonishment on her face. His boldness, almost, surprised him. She liked to say that her mother had told her on the eve of their wedding, ‘Always remember, Elizabeth, a husband is for life but not for lunch.’ She was at work over lunch time and he made himself sandwiches. She liked also to remind him that she was now the principal breadwinner and he was a pensioner who had taken the early bullet. ‘Yes, best if you simply listen. Edmund has resigned from his job.’

‘What for?’

‘He packed it in as of today. He’s going tomorrow, or this evening if he can arrange it, to Naples.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Listen, and you might – after a fashion. That girl he spoke of, the one he promised to bring to meet us, she’s gone. Gone home. No warning, no explanation, but gone. Sadly, he intends to follow her.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said there were other fish in the sea. Apparently not. I said he’d run the risk of hurting himself. He said he was hurting enough as it was and wouldn’t notice any more pain. He’d never said anything like that to me before, bared himself in that way.’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘I don’t want to be rude, Betty, but I’m wondering whether either of us would have gone chasing halfway across Europe if the other had done a bunk. I doubt that’s unfair. I said I’d look after his Visa bills – and couldn’t think of anything else. Oh, yes, I wished him luck. It didn’t seem sensible to be parental, old and cautionary. That’s it.’

His wife said, ‘No, I wouldn’t have followed you. She must be very special, that girl.’

At that time in the morning, the tourists had not yet come to the museums. Lukas had. The bars, coffees and beers were for later in the day, while squatting close to his friend who drew the river, the Louvre and Notre Dame was for the middle. Early, he came with a plastic bottle of fizzy water to sit on a bench and watch the first arrivals. Most would not know a Millet from a Manet or a Monet, but Lukas had no sense of superiority, and could not have made the distinction himself. He came to see people and search their faces, the better to understand them.

The science he practised affected humble people, average people, ordinary people. It was they who looked at the great statues, the bronzes, outside the former railway station that was now a museum and gazed at the massive charcoal grey bulk of the rampant elephant with flared ears and the rhinoceros that looked ready to charge, both larger than life. It was those people – businessmen, teachers, backpackers, engineers, charity workers, and those of whom it was said ‘Wrong place at the wrong time’ – whom he worked to liberate, to keep alive.

When the buses came he would settle back and stare into the faces, but not be noticed himself, and he would play mind games. How would they respond, hooded, bound, beaten, videotaped with guns at their heads and knives at their throats as they parrot-spoke denunciations of state policy? His interpretation of how they would react, in circumstances of the greatest stress would govern the guidance he gave and the decisions he took.

He had no favourites. He was no more on the side of the pretty slim blonde girl with the denim mini-skirt who came off the bus with the Hamburg plates than he was on the side of the guy who walked behind her with a stick. All were equal. So, he was not summoned to the great offices of authority in the power centres of the world. He did not walk echoing corridors, was not brought into carpeted offices and offered sherry or Scotch, because their occupants did not know his name. He worked in dark corners, that were – except once – beyond the reach of long-lens cameras.

It was rumoured, though five years later it remained unconfirmed, that a photographer from a German news agency had snapped him on a street in Baghdad when he was with a Special Forces crowd. The photographer had been embedded with a marine unit or would otherwise have been hotel-bound. Rumour ran that the sunlight had nicked the glass of the Leica camera so he had seen its owner and strode up to him. He had half strangled the snapper when he pulled off the strap and broke the camera open by stamping on it, destroying maybe fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. He had taken out the memory stick and had chucked it into the middle of a wide sewer, then had gotten on with his work. The photographer had been told by a gofer alongside Lukas, from the Green Zone, that if he talked about the incident his safety could not be guaranteed. It was a rumour. In the work he did, his anonymity was precious, perhaps even more so than that of an elite bomb-disposal operative. If his face had been known to the enemy, with his reputation, he would have been a prime target, and his usefulness in the field minimised. And, which he had not admitted to another soul he had a rooted aversion to the limelight, almost shyness, disguised under brusque indifference.

He had no medals, but the people – ordinary, average, humble – coming off the bus of a Hamburg tour company, pretty and ugly, young and old, did not have medals. Most of those freed from the hell-holes, the bunkers where they squatted in excreta and urine, listening for footsteps and wondering if a weapon was loaded or a knife sharpened, would never know of Lukas’s existence. It was better that way. No handshakes at the end, if it had gone well, no hugging and kissing, no names and promises of cards on the anniversary. The only way.

So, his imagined friends queued in front of him to enter the museum, and one of his real friends sketched in crayon by the river, and several more cleaned cafe tables and swept floors – and all would be wondering if he would stroll by, spend some time, or whether he was gone, wherever and for whatever.

That morning he left his bench, went to the kiosk and bought a pistaccio ice-cream. It was his favourite. He thought about it when he was in places that didn’t do that flavour or any other. Some said he was a screwball and unhinged, others that folk should be goddam grateful the lunatic stayed on call and was never far from his phone.

When he had finished the ice-cream and wiped his mouth, he would head into the museum for the Legion of Honour, and the impeccable garden in the central courtyard with the fine red roses. It was where he went when he had tired of the mind games, and it was where heroes were. He did not see himself as heroic, and if a medal had been offered he would have refused it.

Many, meeting him for the first time, defined him as ‘that screwball’. A major in the Rangers had. It was Baqubah and they’d helicoptered in from Camp Liberty at the Balad air base between Baghdad and Samarra. There was a single-storey house, breeze blocks and tin roof, on the extreme edge of the place near fields, and the asset handled by Task Force 145 said it was where the hostage was – a Greek-born engineer and expert in electricity supply, and how many guys held him. Difficult to get close, and the usual thing would have been to do three or four days’ reconnaissance, learn the movements and do it from a distance. Lukas was at the command point, four or five klicks back, and was barely tolerated by the major who rated him – FBI background and all – as an unwelcome shoe-in. A forward covert observer would have been on a telescope, reported a jerk coming to the building cautiously and that he carried a canister of milk and a metre-wide roll of clear plastic sheeting. Only Lukas – in the command centre – had reacted. He had demanded – not asked or suggested but demanded – that the storm squad assault the building immediately. It had been agreed. Would have been Lukas’s damn near manic certainty that had won the day: an attack without sufficient preparation, without a model of the interior, and in the bright heat light of the middle of the day.

Twelve minutes after Lukas had made his demand the first men in the Ranger platoon hit the doors front and back, then the windows, and chucked in stun grenades and gas canisters, like it was Christmas and they were giving them away. They dragged out the Greek, and brought him back from the dead. The Greek said he would have been dead in five minutes, was shouting it because of what the grenades had done to his hearing and choking because of the gas. Then the major asked the man designated a ‘screwball’ how he’d known the attack had to go in without the necessary preparation. Lukas had said: ‘Because they took the plastic sheeting in.’ Would he explain? Lukas had said: ‘They always spread plastic sheeting out on the floor before they saw a guy’s head off with a serrated blade to keep the blood off it.’ There had been a camera, with a charged battery, mounted on a tripod. The major had been awarded another ribbon and his storm squad had commendations, and none of them had ever seen Lukas again. Maybe by now the major had made brigadier or even general, and maybe the Greek had a good position in power supply at the ministry in Athens… and Lukas wandered into the courtyard of the museum for heroes.

It was how he liked it, staying unknown but being on call.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator