The Collaborator

6

He had been lucky. He told himself that luck had dictated that a lorry should spill its load on the M11 just north of Harlow, the northbound carriageway, and that a tailback of four miles should delay a family on a budget break to Rome while the rail service had sailed past unaffected. Eddie Deacon would have slept on a bench at the airport, Stansted, but instead found himself aboard a ‘cheap and cheerful’ flight going to Ciampino.

A rush to get himself on board, a chase down corridors and piers, and he had been the last on to the aircraft. He was not even in a seat before the doors were closed and it was taxiing. He told himself then that he was blessed.

He had not bought a book, and they didn’t do freebie newspapers with that airline. The child on his left ate chocolate messily and concentrated on a GameBoy, and the woman on his right was rigid with nerves – he reckoned he might have her hand in his lap, for comfort, when it came to landing. Eddie didn’t buy anything from the trolley and sat still, upright, stared ahead and made no contact, eye or physical, with the woman or the child. He thought he might just as well have pulled a pin and rolled a pineapple grenade into his parents’ living room: his father had been monosyllabic and breathing hard, but had coughed up the offer to look after his plastic bill, which was decent, but afterwards they would – together – have been in shock. He had switched off his mobile before catching the train to Stansted. He reckoned they would have tried half a dozen times to phone him, to try to dissuade him, to tell him he should go to the language school and request his job back. His parents, and all their friends, would never march out of regular paid employment without having another position to move to on the following Monday morning. So, the concept of what he had done left him vaguely light-headed. His mind danced.

What was bizarre about the choreography was that he had not stopped – he hadn’t since he had sat alone in the Afghan restaurant and waited – to consider that Immacolata might have decided that he was a boring no-hoper, a saddo and a loser, and that a summer fling was over as autumn came on. Never thought of it. He had a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages, only a 2:2 – they called it a Desmond at that university in the Thames Valley – and at the end of four years’ study was supposed to possess some capability at analysis. He had left with a good knowledge of German, fair French and some Spanish, with a smattering of Italian, which might take him over the front page of a newspaper.

He knew Berlin, having walked the pavements and worked in all-night cafes during summer vacations, and could get himself around Paris without glancing every five minutes at a map, and he wouldn’t have been lost in Barcelona. He didn’t know Rome or Naples, but he had once spent two days in Milan, having climbed on the wrong train in Geneva when he should have been going to Montpellier in France, coming from Munich. It mattered not. It was not in the temperament of Eddie Deacon to worry at a problem, as if he needed to untie a tight knot in a length of string. He either ran from problems or tilted at them. If she had indeed walked out on him she could say so to his face: clear, one-syllable words. Not possible, not his Mac. Second point, chewed on briefly in the aircraft cabin: police at the flat, a brother taken away, the flat searched, everything about her hidden from him like her address. Was she ‘dodgy’, or ‘bent’? Weighed it. Didn’t care. She was his Mac.

There was no doubt. He had to go to Naples. He had to find her. He’d pull a face, she’d grimace and shrug a bit, ask him what the hell he was doing there – in a street, whatever it looked like, whatever via Forcella looked like. He’d say he wanted a fresh roll for his breakfast, maybe some croissants. She would look surprised, astonished, then grin. He’d laugh. Both laughing, hugging and holding tight. It was what he thought. Nothing about a broken door, police on the step, a wild kid who was expert on breaking and entering, maybe no more than ten years old. Nothing about sitting for several hours in a restaurant, hurting, and hurting worse in his bedroom where her dressing-gown hung and her magazines lay about. Nothing about talking to, pleading with a blow-up photograph on a wall. They would do it, meeting again, just casual, as if nothing had happened and no wounds had been cut into him. He never saw her solemn, sullen, serious, because Mac was always the photograph on the wall.

Who knew what love was? They didn’t talk about love in the little house they shared in Dalston. Love was not an agenda area with the guy from HM Revenue and Customs, the club waiter, the rail-ticket seller or the perpetual student. Love was in movies, books, magazines. Screwing and shagging were real – rare but attainable with a good alcohol flow – but love was off-limits. The definition of love, as known to Eddie Deacon, was an ache in his guts, a yearning and the bloody awful misery of not seeing that face coming round the corner and the little wave, then feeling her touch… And the bloody child had put chocolate on the sleeve of his jacket, and the bloody woman’s hand was on his knee and her fingers were tightening. They were long over the Alps.

The light was failing, and the sun had dipped below the wing. The child was gobbling chocolate to get the box finished and the woman was going into white-knuckle time because the engine pitch had changed, and Eddie sensed that the descent had started. At that time, he should have been educating a roomful of immigrants – all his chums from the Baltics, the Balkans and North Africa – on the intricacies of Murder in Mesopotamia or Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express, didn’t really matter which. Like pressing a button on the staff-room computer keyboard, he deleted them, erased them.

It was early in the evening and a city’s lights were on. The aircraft yawed and the undercarriage rumbled as it was lowered. Of course he had come. He was Eddie Deacon, and he wanted nothing more than to see her, hear her, feel her – and there was no logic in it and no more analysis of what he knew.

The wheels hit, a good landing, feathered, and he didn’t know of anything he should fear.

He came out of the car fast, slammed the door, waved off the driver. For Mario Castrolami this was foreign territory. What he had seen of Collina Fleming was enough to curl his lip. He tasted the first trace of bile in his throat. He had heard it was a hill for millionaires, the big ones, and the apartments were broad built, their balconies had expensive plants on them and the plots were surrounded by barricades. Dogs barked behind electronically controlled gates and porters patrolled the front doors. He thought the hill was about privilege and wealth. Castrolami, investigator in the carabinieri ROS, detested privilege and lacked wealth. Could have done… Could have blocked enquiries, made files disappear, given advance warning by public phone, with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece, of a raid planned for the following dawn. All of that would have filled an offshore account. He lived in Vomero, the comfortable area of Naples, but on the north side of the Castel Sant’Elmo, and he needed to be a gymnast and to stand on tiptoe on a chair to peer through a skylight for a minuscule glimpse of the sea and the east promontory of Capri. He thought the hill oozed money.

A woman passed him as he went to the gate. It was late September and Castrolami’s tie was loose and there was sweat in his armpits. She wore a fur coat, and carried a dog under one arm. Where Castrolami lived, on the wrong side of Vomero, there were stray cats that would have killed that toy dog and eaten it. She looked up, saw him, dismissed him as irrelevant and went by – probably thought him a plumber or an insurance salesman. There was no porter on this block and he rang the bell, gave his name and the gate was unlocked. He carried a thin cardboard file and a small overnight bag. He loathed Rome, and hoped the bag would be needed for a night or two, no more.

He was admitted.

He asked how she was. Rossi, the young one, gestured – something of amusement and something of frustration.

The older one was Orecchia. ‘She stays in her room. It was about her mother. We find it often enough. There’s the excitement and drama, the centre-of-stage hour, then the moment of reality and the fear. She’s frightened of her mother. You understand, we’re not interrogators. At this stage we’re here to protect her and maintain the security of the safe-house. She wants to stay in her room, hide at the back of her cave so we don’t drag her out. She won’t eat, she won’t talk, she won’t…’

Castrolami smiled. He did a grim, dark smile well.

He went to the door. It was less than twenty-four hours since he had brought Immacolata Borelli to this address, and less than twelve since he had been told she had refused to speak to the prosecutor, and only half a dozen since the file had landed on his cluttered desk. They used him, at the Palace of Justice, as a bulldozer. That evening, he should have been with his friend, who painted views of the mountain, at an exhibition of modern art in a church on the riviera di Chiaia and afterwards… They took for granted, at the Palace of Justice, that the bulldozer did twenty-four/seven.

He didn’t knock.

The light was off, but the blinds were not drawn and the street-lamps far below threw up enough for him to see her. She lay on her back, her legs together, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t turn to face him but said quietly, ‘I don’t want anything to eat or drink.’ He put the light on, hit all the switches, and she jerked her head sideways. He went to the table and put the file on it. Then he walked towards her. He took her right arm at the wrist, heaved her off the bed and she nearly fell. He said nothing and dragged her to the table, her feet slithering on the floor. He kicked back a chair, made room for her, pressed her down on the seat.

He flicked open the file cover, and spilled out the photographs.

She saw her mother. Immacolata held the photograph under the table light. She looked at the wife of Pasquale Borelli, the leader of the clan and controller of most business activities in Forcella and Sanita, the woman who did deals that had relevance in the north of Italy, in the South of France, in Spain and Germany, who had ambitions for the opening of opportunities in Great Britain, who aspired to be a player on the east coast of the United States and had links with organisations operating in the west of the former Soviet Union. She looked at the photograph of her mother.

A little gasp.

Her gaze slipped to Castrolami. If he felt sympathy for the fate of her mother he disguised it. His expression was blank. He showed neither clemency nor triumph.

She matched his mood.

Her mother, whom she had feared, was on the ground – on concrete built up a few centimetres from the street – was helpless.

For a moment she wondered, and then she asked, ‘Is she dead?’

He shook his head.

In the black-and-white photograph, enlarged to twenty centimetres by twenty-five, her mother was prostrate. A man was poised above her head, his pistol drawn and aimed at her. A woman crawled on her back and had wrenched up one arm so that the hand almost touched the neck, and held a pistol against the neck so that the barrel dented it. Her mother wore the dead look on her face. She was supine, had no fight, did not cringe. It was as if she was comatose from shock. She had fallen awkwardly under the weight of the woman, then must have wriggled backwards to get further clear of the man with the aimed pistol. The effect of that movement had been to ruck up her skirt. It had ridden up her thighs. Immacolata gazed at the photograph. It was the indignity… Her mother’s thighs were white on the grey concrete, but not as white as the knickers she wore. Immacolata had a glimpse of them, frozen by the camera. She thought of the respect her mother demanded – from her children, the clan, foot-soldiers and associates, from businessmen to foreign gang principals. She thought of when a stick had been taken to her, aged twelve, when she had refused to leave her bedroom to sweep the floor in the living room and hall, and when her face had been slapped, a stinging blow, as her mother had announced to her brothers that she was to be la madrina and Immacolata had not suppressed a giggle – of nerves at her mother’s self-elevation to such a height. She thought of the verbal criticism, offered in a cafe, when she had failed to bring back all the protection-payment envelopes from the via Casanova. It was her mother, humiliated, who lay prone in the road, and at the periphery of the camera’s view a small crowd had gathered and formed a wary half-moon. She believed, from the greyness and distortion of the picture, that her mother’s arrest had been captured on a mobile phone. She realised she had been brought this particular photograph – not one of her mother being led through paparazzi and cameramen, flashes and arc lights, able to use the haughtiness of a Pupetta Maresca, a Rosetta Cutolo or a Patrizia Ferriero – to see her mother laid out in a posture of vulgarity.

‘Did I do that?’ Immacolata asked, almost in awe.

Castrolami: ‘Alone, nobody achieves anything. Together, much. You were part of “doing” that. A big enough part, when your involvement is known, to guarantee that the sentence of death is passed on you.’

‘What do you want of me now?’

‘I want you, Signorina – excuse me – to stop trying to play games with me. You should now consider your situation as set in stone. You see the photograph of your mother. I don’t think she’ll be pleased to know that her picture is now a source of amusement throughout Naples. When she knows, and she soon will – it’s inevitable – that her daughter has collaborated and is in part responsible for her being photographed with bare thighs and most of her arse on display, I believe she’ll feel resentful towards you. But there’s no turning back. And she’s behind bars, in a cell. She’s beginning the process of rotting.’

‘Do you know, Dottore, what it’s like to die of leukaemia?’

‘No. I would imagine, though, that it’s worse than being in a cell and rotting.’

‘I think so.’

‘I rarely offer advice, Signorina, but now I’ll break a habit. Don’t waste my time again, and don’t forget your friend’s suffering.’

‘Where do we start?’ she asked, pushing away the photograph.

‘We should talk again of Vincenzo.’

A corridor led from the staircase to the basement cell block and the interview rooms where prisoners met their lawyers. One of the detectives who had arrested Vincenzo Borelli accompanied the custody officers who escorted him from the cell along the corridor. Even for this short walk from a departure point to a destination deep inside a protected police station – and Paddington Green was a fortress, designed to hold resourceful terror captives – he was handcuffed to an officer. Since his arrest, he had seen no lawyer, no detective, only the uniformed men entrusted with guarding and caring for him. He knew nothing.

He was Neapolitan, a man – it was right that strangers should see he cared. He asked softly, with concern, ‘My sister, Immacolata, where is she? Is she held?’

The detective behind him sniggered. He would have thought, Vincenzo recognised, that he dealt with crap, with an Italian. ‘Not held, friend, not here and not likely to be. Actually, friend, she’s shafted you – she’s singing like a whole damn choir… Sorry, did I say that? I don’t think I did.’

Vincenzo thought it was arrogance. The detective needed to appear a mastermind, senior, and to have detailed knowledge of an extradition case. Vincenzo looked blankly ahead as he was led down the corridor, and mimed being simple, fitting a stereotype, not understanding.

In an interview room, he met a lawyer. The lawyer offered him cigarettes, said he came from Catania in Sicily, was based in the British capital and dealt exclusively with cases – criminal and civil – in which Italian citizens needed representation. He said, too, that he had been appointed to act on Vincenzo’s behalf by Umberto. He gave the name of a street and quoted a telephone number as verification that he knew where the clan’s lawyer lived and the number of his personal mobile. Vincenzo told him to call it and deliver a message urgently.

The message was in English: The diva performs with rare beauty and is hired for many performances. He told the lawyer that the message was to be spoken once, fast. That was all he wished to say. He wanted the man gone.

Vincenzo, in his cell, believed that within half an hour the message would be on Umberto’s desk. Umberto would have recorded it for safe transcription, memorised it, then destroyed the tape and the typescript. The door shut on him, a key turned in a lock. He leaned against a wall, much scribbled on and graffiti-strewn, then beat the painted brickwork with his fist till the bruising came.

His own sister…

He left the ticket window and ran. He was last on the train, and he thought that, too, was luck. Eddie Deacon had managed to rip open the heavy door while the uniforms shouted, waved their arms and blew hard on whistles, but he jumped aboard, closed the door after him, they did a sweet smile for the man who reached the window and glowered.

The train rolled out of Rome.

He had come into the city on an airport bus, and had suffered a sea-change. Realised it now. He didn’t have a seat, but stood and rocked with the motion of the carriage. The engine gathered acceleration. The sea-change was in him. Luck was sprinting with him, and he was thankful for it. Darkness flanked the train as it cleared the Roman suburbs, and then he made out the tight clusters of lights high up, and imagined the track had been routed between hills and their old villages. He felt exhilaration, as if he challenged himself. Not bad, was it, getting himself halfway across western Europe on the same day that he’d jacked a job, cleared a bank account? He had plastic his family would guarantee, and was hightailing through the hills south of the Eternal City. Excitement, adventure: they wouldn’t have contemplated it – ‘they’ being the HM Revenue and Customs clerk, the waiter, the ticket man and the student. One would be dragging himself back to the house after a day of staring at a screen with a head fit to bust, the next would be making polite noises to pompous farts in the club and bringing them drinks, the ticket man would be on late shift and counting the minutes till he finished, and the last would be buried in some damn book about manorial field divisions in the Tudor period. They would find his note, hasty, scrawled, and would each feel – Eddie reckoned – a spasm of jealousy – but not half of the jealousy they’d feel when he brought her back. It was excitement, adventure, and he felt himself lifted, almost euphoric.

It was a brilliant line, so fast, so modern, so smooth. It was as if he had entered true civilisation. Didn’t have a line like this, or a carriage, on the route to Chippenham. He knew of nothing now that could block him. He was on a pedestal, had placed himself there.

He would find her.

‘Incredible! It’s Mac! Wow! Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’

‘Did you now? Funny old world, yeah?’ And hearing her voice, the accent and the lilt, and knowing she damn near laughed – not at him, with him.

‘Like you say, Mac, “funny old world”. Shall we go and get a beer?’

‘Can’t think of anything better.’

Didn’t know where he’d find her, couldn’t picture it – or where she’d lead him to find a beer. Didn’t care. Excitement was the narcotic in Eddie Deacon. On this train, on the new track, it would take ninety minutes to travel from Rome to Naples. Everything went for him, and luck smiled. Why should it not?

He read the note that the child had brought him. He needed a magnifying-glass to decipher the tiny characters. It was Carmine Borelli who had first taken the young lawyer, Umberto, inside the clan’s affairs. He had spotted the overweight and indulgent rookie with no resources of his own, and no family to keep him in a fitting standard of living, and had backed his intuition. It had been forty years the previous June since he had made the approach, and the youthful Umberto had virtually kissed his hand in gratitude. It astonished him that Umberto’s ponderous, stubby fingers were capable of writing in such a delicate minuscule style. He would have thought the lawyer too clumsy to fashion it. The magnifying-glass made the message clear.

Clear, but almost unbelievable.

Your daughter-in-law arrested, your grandsons also arrested. Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.

He couldn’t complain that four words were used when one sufficed. So few words and so great this effect. He was breathing hard, with wheezes and bubbling gasps. He understood. It was a situation as critical for the clan he had founded as that which had confronted the brothers in Sicily during the Fascist regime and the rule of the brutal ‘prefect of iron’, Cesare Mori, when the Cosa Nostra had been closest to defeat, and no different in Naples during the time of Mussolini. But Mussolini had fallen, and the Allies had landed first in Sicily, then on the mainland at Salerno, and a new era of opportunity had arrived. Carmine Borelli had seized that opportunity, had begun to form the apparatus of the clan that bore his name. It had survived, with respect, on the streets and in the files of the Palace of Justice for sixty-six years. He had been married to Anna only two years when American troops had entered the bombed streets of Naples. Everything he had built – according to the note a street child had brought him from the lawyer – was now at risk.

A convulsion of coughing shook his body. He spat phlegm into his handkerchief and the irritation passed. He sat still in his chair with the scrap of paper in his palm and the magnifying glass. He did not call his wife, but she had admitted the child and would have known that the much-folded piece of paper was of importance so had allowed him to digest it first, then would come to share. He had known, of course – as she did – that the boys were held, not merely Silvio, that Gabriella had been taken in the street and her photograph circulated in the day’s newspapers. The bite of the vipera was your granddaughter collaborates. If he smoked more than a full carton in a day there were pains in his chest – but no worse than those now in his mind. He could think of so many clans in which a member of the inner family had taken the pentito programme of the Palace of Justice, and he had always – in the fifteen years since the programme had been launched – felt a sense of superiority over those who had not been able to hold the loyalty of sons and daughters, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters. It was his own nipote who sat now with the men who were his lifetime enemy.

Much for him to reflect on.

He remembered the contempt he had larded on those clans cut deep by the testimony of their own: the sneer, the retort, the shrug, and the secret feeling that it was but for God’s grace that… It could have been his brother, now long dead, or his brother’s son, shot and left to bleed to death on the via Carbonara, or his grandson, the least liked among his nipoti, Giovanni. It was none of them. Immacolata was accused.

He let his mind rove. His wife, Anna, had brought the newborn granddaughter to the visitors’ hall at the Poggioreale gaol. In that place of dirt, noise and despair, where he had been held for four months before the charges of extortion were dropped, the infant had slept, as if unaffected by where she was, had made a little island of calm in the clamour. Her christening had been delayed until his release. He had been present in the church at the top of the street in Forcella, and the priest had been his friend. The child’s father had been one of the many latitanti in the city, in flight from the prosecutor, and Carmine had replaced Pasquale in the place of honour at Immacolata’s first communion and had hosted the celebration lunch. The child became a teenager, then a young woman, and he would sit her beside him and give her the benefit of his experience, and she would listen. He would have said that her affection for him was great – greater than she harboured for her mother and father – and that her respect for him was total.

Anna came into the room. She had poor eyesight, poorer than his, and her chair was always by the window. She reached out a hand and he passed her the scrap of paper and the magnifying-glass. She glanced at the note, then shook her head sharply. It was for him to tell her what was written, and to repeat it would be another wound, cut ever deeper. He used the zapper to turn on the big TV and raise its volume. There had been police in the house so recently and not a chance of observing them: he would say nothing of importance without turning on the television and increasing the volume. She leaned close to him and he to her, his lips little more than ten centimetres from her ear. He could see each of the cancer marks on her skin, the wrinkles at her throat and the hairs on her upper lip. He told her everything, and always had.

He said, ‘The boy came from Umberto. Umberto writes, “Your granddaughter collaborates with the Palace of Justice and has been flown to Rome.” Umberto denounces Immacolata. She is, Umberto says, an infame. Immacolata seeks to destroy us.’

She gave no answer. Carmine could see only the chill slab of his wife’s face, devoid of expression. The child, Immacolata, had spent as many of her waking hours in this apartment as she had in her mother’s. It was personal, the hurt. Anna gave no answer, he believed, because she still pondered on what her response should be. She would not speak unless there were words of substance to say. He felt the damp on his face. A tear trickled down his skin to the thin stubble on his cheek.

His shin was kicked.

A sharp blow with a heavy lace-up shoe, which stabbed pain into the bone.

He thought she might as well have condemned their granddaughter. It had taken five or six seconds for him to relay the message, and twenty-six years of love, commitment and caring were obliterated.

He looked into his wife’s face. Many times in those sixty-six years of marriage she had worn an expression that frightened him, and so it was. He saw in that face a terrible, but controlled, hatred. Where Immacolata was involved, he could be soft – but his wife could not.

They had broken. Castrolami came into the kitchen to make tea and left Immacolata Borelli to sip a glass of juice.

It was different. He had fastened the photograph to the wall. From where he had sat her at the table, the microphone close to her, she faced it. He was to the side of her. It was natural for her to look up, to be certain that a point made was assimilated, and then she saw her mother – on the ground, in humiliation, the skirt pushed up, white skin, whiter underwear, dignity and control stripped. It was different because the Borelli girl now talked, and during the time he had been there he had used three spare tapes from the stack he had brought. They had moved beyond Vincenzo, enough on the first two tapes to ensure an extradition case to go with the evidence already laid before the British courts on charges of murder, and the third detailed the control of Gabriella Borelli over the clan, not mere supposition. Supposition would have been that Pasquale Borelli slipped out messages from the gaol of Novara through a route in the gaol’s catering; detail was that the route, whereby the husband let the wife have his advice, involved the man who brought the flour, yeast, salt, olive oil and cheap dried milk to the prison bakery, and was a facilitator for the communications of two maximum-security Sicilians. Supposition was that the contract for a new sewage works at a town inland from Naples had corrupt political involvement; detail named the men who had granted the contract in the local town hall, what they had been paid for their cooperation, how the payment was made and how that contract would be shared between different clans – who had trucking, who had labour, who had cement. Castrolami needed to break the meeting for tea.

Orecchia took milk from the refrigerator and poured it. ‘You’re pleased with her.’

‘More so than before.’

Orecchia’s smile was cold. ‘You were hard on her.’

Castrolami said, ‘Because I feel nothing for her. She is not a true pentita. There is no sense of penitence. The death of a friend, linked to her, and an attack on her at a cemetery, her being too late to attend the funeral Mass combine to create a sense of guilt. She seeks to redress the guilt, but that’s not penitence. Revenge, anger, dislike for her family, who may not have valued her as she thought she deserved… Many things. But it’s not a road-to-Damascus conversion.’

‘She’s not Paul,’ Orecchia murmured, ‘but few of them are.’

‘And no shining light, only little grievances topped by the friend’s death. No sense of outrage at the criminality of the Camorra, what has happened to the city, Naples distinguished by callousness. Shit, that’s boring.’

‘Excuse me, have you no sense of sincerity? You see her as shallow?’

‘You know better than I, friend, what she’ll face. When the pressure crushes her, we’ll see sincerity or not…’

Orecchia handed him the cup, no saucer, and a sweet biscuit. ‘Me, when I go home – not often – I stand in the shower for a full fifteen minutes and the family screams there’ll be no hot water for the rest of that day. They say I’m mad, that I sup with devils. I say I eat with a long spoon. You know what’s worse? The collaborators believe they do me, Rossi, you, society, a great favour by coming to us. I despise them.’

Castrolami smiled grimly. ‘Maybe you’d find spiritual fulfilment as a street sweeper. Thanks for the tea.’

Orecchia said, ‘I’m not joking. I trust this one, all of them, as far as I can kick them. They entangle people, squeeze and suck the goodness from them.’

‘I hear you.’ Castrolami couldn’t have argued with a word he’d said, but he wondered how a man survived in his work if he saw only bleakness. Did he laugh at home? Did he follow a football team with the fanaticism of the Mastiffs in Naples? Did he pay tarts? Castrolami wondered if Orecchia was ever saddened when a collaborator was cut loose from the protection programme and left to fend for himself – did he ever respect them? That evening he would talk to Signorina Immacolata about her mother’s hard-drugs-importation programmes and…

The voice droned again at him: ‘To be touched by them is to be contaminated.’

More luck. He was told that a single room was available, the last, and that it was the first day after the end of the high-season rate – big luck double time for Eddie Deacon, innocent and ignorant.

The accommodation desk at the city’s railway station had found him the room. A pretty girl had circled the hotel on a map and confirmed it would not be expensive. He had slung the bag over his shoulder and started to walk, making his way – only two wrong turnings – from the wide square, the piazza Garibaldi. He had tasted the heat, the noise, the smells and the chaos of traffic and scooters, and had known the first pangs of nerves. He had stood outside the hotel door and the neon above him blinked without pattern. Kids stood on the streets, smoked and didn’t talk but eyed him. More nerves. They spoke some English inside, and the man who gave him the key had a squint, a khaki mole on his cheek and a stutter. Eddie spoke kindly to him. He thought, then, that he needed a friend – any bloody friend from any bloody place. Maybe the excitement, the adventure, the exhilaration, like the neon, blinked.

He went up to the room. His step was heavier and the bounce had gone. They were saving on power for the stairs: the bulbs were low-wattage and made the shadows longer, the greyness of the walls and ceiling deeper, the lack of light accentuating the scratches in the paint. He was no longer within the civilisation boundaries of the train carriage that had brought him south. He heard a couple row in German about the cost of the meal that evening and the budget being blown. Another couple on the next floor up grunted, squealed and worked the bedsprings, and there was a tray outside the door on which was a barely nibbled pizza: the sex sounded good but the pizza had dried out. He had been told by the girl at the accommodation desk at Napoli Centrale that this pensione was the best he could afford. He went on up the staircase, the carpet thinner, more faded and worn with each flight.

The key was on a chain that hooked on to a small wooden ball. He slipped the little card that had come with it – his name, room number, the hotel address – into his trouser pocket, opened the door and groped for the switch.

The room was smaller than a prison cell, with a wardrobe, an upright chair, a table hardly deep enough for an A4 sheet of paper and a single bed. Beside the wardrobe there was a square section of transparent plastic for a shower, basin and toilet. Only a damn small cat, a kitten, could have been swung in it. Had he expected a Marriott room, or one from a Holiday Inn, maybe an InterContinental? Old story: in this world, Eddie, you get what you pay for. Eddie Deacon, in Germany or France, had never felt himself a stranger, had not been the lonely foreigner.

He pushed open a window and the sounds of the night buffeted against him – cars, screaming, music turned up high. He knew he was in a street behind the piazza Garibaldi because it showed up on the map he had been given. He had asked the girl if it was near to the via Forcella and she had shrugged as if to indicate that only an idiot needed that information, and then she had agreed it was. Another visitor to Naples, with a rucksack on his back, had elbowed Eddie away from the desk. He felt an increase in those nerve pangs.

So, he slapped his face with the palm of each hand, then unfolded the map. He didn’t feel good, he didn’t feel right, but he didn’t feel as if he was about to bloody lie down and cave.

He mapped out a route.

A man had said – in public – that the family was shit, finished, a spent power. Might have been right. Salvatore walked into the bar.

He wore no face mask. The room was brightly lit and his face, features, identity were clear. The clan of which he was the enforcer was worth – if all property investments, treasury bonds and shares in a half-dozen of the leading money markets were added up – in excess of half a billion euros. As an enforcer, he could have been directed to a penthouse apartment on the Cote d’Azur or a villa in a smart, protected suburb of Frankfurt, and his target would have been a banker or investment manager who had misappropriated tens of thousands of euros, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Also, his work was to maintain the respect and dignity the clan family needed. He handed down the justice of the Borellis to those who were high and mighty, to the potential informer who refused to pay a hundred euros a week – and to the braggart in the bar. He looked around him.

He was seen, noticed. He didn’t want anonymity. If many saw and knew him, the word went faster. His eyes fastened on the man.

It had always surprised Salvatore that when he confronted a victim, they seldom ran or fought. They were, almost all, helpless and trapped in terror. This one was no different. He would have said it, that the family were shit, would have repeated it, would have gone home and lain beside his whore-wife in their bed, and the bravado would have oozed away. He would have known that within hours, a few days but less than a week, the enforcer of the clan would come for him. He had nowhere to hide. A victim, a man of forty, would have been familiar with only the few streets that surrounded the districts of Sanita and Forcella, and the labyrinth inside the area of two or three square kilometres. He was, and would have realised it, a dead man walking from the time his mouth had opened and his tongue had flapped, who lived out the final stages of his life in a small flat with his wife and children, in a bar where others were cautious of his company, who was in la cella dei condannati a morte. Others now backed away from him. His jaw was slack, the spittle was white against dark lips and sweat gleamed on his high forehead. He would have felt his legs sag under the weight of his body.

He did not have to show the pistol, the Beretta, at his waist. Salvatore flicked his fingers. He gestured with his head to the door. At that moment some men – bankers or street scum – wet their trousers in the crotch or fouled their seat. Some closed their eyes and began to pray. Some wept, some pleaded. Some spoke of their children, their wives. Some went as if they sleepwalked.

This one did.

Salvatore also knew that the man he had called out would have friends in the bar with whom he had played in the street as a child, sat in schoolrooms, talked and watched football in that bar for an adult lifetime, and none would help him now. Perhaps in a week… not yet. Power not yet gone: a photograph in a newspaper of the thighs and the covered arse of Gabriella Borelli, more photographs of her children in custody, but no certainty, yet, that power was in new hands. None of those friends, once valued, would block the door, defend him.

It was the way of Naples. The authority of the clans, even one seriously wounded – weakened – ruled.

And none in that crowded bar would say they had seen Salvatore’s face. Within two minutes the bar would have emptied, well before the first sirens and lights arrived. Only the staff would be there. All would claim to have been facing the far wall, or busy at the coffee machines, or in the rear store for more milk. That, too, was the way of Naples, unchanged and unchanging.

Clear of the bar, he pushed the man across the broken pavement, a vicious shove. Where a slab should have been there was a pit and the man’s shoe caught in it and he fell forward. He was half in the street and half in the gutter. Salvatore kicked him in the buttock and the man crawled limply forward. He had chosen this place because he knew that no street cameras covered the stretch of road between the Porta Capuana and the via Cesare Rosaroll. He had the pistol out of his belt. He fired one shot and the bullet went into the back of the man’s knee and there was a little limp scream of shock, then another, shrill, from the pain’s spread. Salvatore waved up the street.

Extraordinary – true to Naples, Palermo and Reggio Calabria in the toecap of Italy’s boot: traffic had disappeared from the road. It had been there, a constant, hooting snarl, but was gone. The road was empty but for a white van, old, rusted, with no registration plates.

It could accelerate. The man would have seen it, heard it, but with his leg shot away at the knee he could not avoid it, and squirmed on the tarmacadam. He was in an oil slick now, his shirt smeared, and the van went over him, cleared him. No one saw. No witnesses in the bar, on the pavement or in cars on the road saw the van go over him. Perhaps it crushed his back or broke his neck. Perhaps it left him grievously injured but still living. It braked.

It reversed. It came back up the road and the rear tyres lifted as it mounted the body a second time. When the body was cleared and the van stopped again, there was no movement.

Salvatore climbed into the passenger seat. His driver, whom he called Fangio, went away down the road.

He thought that the clan, those still at liberty, clung to power by the thickness of the string used to bind a birthday present.

An hour later, a boy came to him. He and Fangio, for speed, shared the shower, scrubbed and washed. Their clothing was bagged for disposal. Few knew of that address. The lawyer was among the few. The child brought a scrap of paper and left, running. More than adults, Salvatore, Il Pistole, whose face was on their screensavers, trusted the kids. He had to wipe soap from his eyes before he could read the compacted handwriting. He shuddered.

He crumpled the paper, threw it at Fangio’s feet and saw it carried in the torrent of soapy water down the drain. To shoot a man in the back of the leg meant nothing to him. He was unaffected by the sight of a van speeding down a road well lit with high lamps, then bouncing over a sprawled body. He felt almost a tremble in his legs, under the damp towel.

He would have said he could believe anything of Naples – anything . He had been wrong. He could not have believed, if he hadn’t seen it written in the spider hand of the lawyer, that Immacolata Borelli had collaborated.

Not the thickness of string – the thickness of one strand woven to make string.

He didn’t know, then, what he could do, should do, without the power of the clan at his back. He, too, was dead – squashed, broken, bloody. He didn’t know where he should turn.

He couldn’t still the trembling – or the image of Immacolata Borelli – and he couldn’t believe.

He was at the end of the street under the sign that said it was via Forcella. He saw nothing familiar and nothing that offered a welcome. The light was poor, the shadows harsh. The spearing headlights of weaving scooters caught the shapes of men, women, kids, then lost them as the riders powered away. Eddie Deacon had told himself that it was important, before he went to sleep, to know where via Forcella was, how far away, how… He felt intimidated. There, at the head of the street, and he thought it hardly wide enough for two cars to pass, he realised that a group of kids watched him and he wished he hadn’t brought his wallet with him. He believed himself evaluated as worth a hit or not worth a hit. Nothing he saw reassured him. He was beside a church, but it was darkened and he sensed that the doors were bolted, locked, secure against the night and strangers.

He turned away.

It was as if he backed off.

The street corner seemed an interface. When he retreated he was on the via Duomo, and the map said that the city’s principal cathedral was there, and the shops had lights in their windows. There, he felt fine. Down that street, he had felt a cloying nervousness. It would be different in the morning, of course, and he would be back in broad, warm, sunshine-laden daytime. He trudged back to his bed, and was troubled that he had suffered what was bloody nearly a panic attack. He had thought, till then, that luck rode with him.

He would be back in the morning to find her.

Eddie was serenaded to faltering sleep by sirens – so many of them and for so long – and the vehicles came, raucous, to a street near where he was. Only when the sirens had died did the restlessness and tension drain away. Then he could think of her again, as she was in the photograph on his wall.

‘Fancy bumping into you here. Just happened to be passing.’

Because of the work he did, Lukas had long ago shed a body clock. He could work in the night, sleep in the day, just as he could type on his laptop in the back of a bucking Land Rover or Humvee in half-darkness.

He typed his report on Colombia, what they had achieved and whom they had lost.

He was as happy working late into the night as in the morning, was not fresher at the start of a day than at the end.

No drama would creep into his report, no descriptive factors and no colour. He would list briefly what he had known, and the advice he had offered on the basis of facts available. Nowhere in the text would there be disguised praise for his own part or criticism of others.

Only a professional could make sense of it. Only those who employed him now, the chief executive officer at Ground Force Security and the director of operations, or those who had employed him in years past – the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense – could have made drama from the few pages on offer. The descriptions were clinical, and he used the short-hand jargon of his trade. Men across the globe who dealt with the high-risk stakes of hostage rescue and negotiation would read the pages and know that Lukas had written them, and they would pray to God that the next time he was needed they found him available to travel and not marooned in some other shit-heap place.

Home for him, where he typed, was an apartment under the eaves on the top floor of a street off the rue de Bellechasse. The mother of the CEO of Ground Force Security had lived and died there, and when Lukas had come on the firm’s books, it had been offered to him. The French capital suited him. He had no wish to live in the UK when he was employed by a British-based company, and less to be resident in the United States after twenty-two years with the Bureau, the last two on secondment to the Department of Defense. He craved to be distanced from his work, and the Paris apartment satisfied him. Little more than a shoebox, it comprised a cramped living room and a kitchenette behind a chipboard partition, a bedroom under a sloping ceiling but that had room for a big bed where a man with nightmares could toss in the darkness, a bathroom with a power shower that could wash off Iraq’s sand and Colombia’s mud, and a hall with a table and the telephone. It might not ring for a week or a month, but a red light would flash if he had missed a call. Lukas did not like being far from the telephone.

He was finishing off the report. Ground Force Security would be heaped with praise by the Agency because their man had survived and cover had been maintained – ‘goddam brilliant, a mother-fucker of a triumph,’ his CEO would be told by Langley. His own view: pretty much OK – not desperate and not wonderful. Some whom Lukas dealt with at field level regarded him as a lunatic. A few told him he was a lunatic. He didn’t take it personally, or when a Spanish diplomat had tried to punch him after calling him a lunatic. He had written it up in the usual laconic way afterwards.

Negotiations with a tribal leader had been ongoing for excess of three days. Much reliance placed on the talks; my view, too much reliance. Asset intelligence reported the hostage held in a six-storey block of twenty-four apartments plus basement. Exact location of hostage and hostage-takers in the building was not known but we had electronics in the stairwell. A male – not seen before at the building – approached and carried a plastic bag containing one large potato. I advised readying the storm squad for immediate intervention. Spanish diplomatic personnel in the command centre took a contrary position. The electronics in the stairwell indicated the unknown male to have gone to the second floor, right side of staircase. I urged an instant assault…

No mention of the attempt to punch him, the screamed accusation that he cared nothing for the life of a Spanish-born expert in antiquities on attachment to the National Museum. No mention of a diplomat having to be restrained while frothing with rage. No mention in the report of an expert’s experience. A big potato, weighing more than two kilos, had been the trigger for him. The diplomats believed negotiation would free their national, that a premature assault endangered the captive’s life. To be told that a man carrying a potato into the building was reason enough to abandon the talks that had been so difficult to initiate had caused an explosion of fury.

The assault was successful. Four Iraqis were killed by troops from the Polish special forces team and the hostage was freed. He would have been dead within the hour. Signed, F. Lukas.

NB A large potato was used as a pistol’s silencer in the assassination of a British national, the barrel tip being indented into the potato and the killing bullet passing through its bulk.

A British co-ordinator – one whom Lukas admired – had told him about big potatoes. It didn’t offend him to be accused of lunacy because he understood too well the stresses they all felt. The Brit had given him a cassette and Lukas had gone off to watch, alone, the video of a killing. The potato as the end of an automatic-pistol barrel, a Makharov, had dulled the noise on the soundtrack of the firing. He had seen the body collapse – not fall forward but go down like one of those big old cooling towers that were dynamited. The co-ordinator, tough, hard, had seemed badly cut by that loss. They were all in the same club, limited membership, and all felt badly when they lost out. He had failed to save the life of a European tourist who was a damn fool stupid guy to think he could walk those mountains without having looked through websites and Foreign office advisories – but it still hurt. It just seemed cheap to Lukas to show the world what hurt.

From his living room, he often looked out into the hall, but no red light winked and no bell rang.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator