The Collaborator

7

There were kids at the top of the street. They wore a uniform of faded T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms or denims and scuffed trainers, had close-cropped hair that made them look as though they were recovering from a louse infestation. They had darting eyes that crossed over the pedestrians who came off the via Duomo, turned and headed on down the street. When the T-shirt of one was lifted in a sudden arm movement, Eddie Deacon saw the handle of a knife and the upper part of its sheath. The kids did not kick footballs. Behind them, astride a scooter, smoking, was an older boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and he kept the engine idling. Against the wall two more boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, had mobile phones clamped to their faces.

Eddie Deacon was not an idiot – some said he was bone idle, that he lacked ‘drive’, that he was short on ambition – and nobody had ever called him ‘stupid’, but he had common sense, ‘nous’. He had realised that everyone who went down that street was visually checked over. There was a rhythm to it. A man or a car appeared and the kids seemed to rush in front of him, maybe to slow him. The scooter’s engine speed quickened and the mobile was spoken into. Once he had seen the scooter pull out and go down the street, and a signal must have been sent because, within seconds, another scooter had taken over sentry duty. He had walked past two other streets leading into the district and there had been kids, a scooter and mobile phones at the top of each. He could recognise it, could not deny it. Eddie had slept poorly because of the nerves. He was as intimidated by the street, hesitating and hovering at its mouth, as he had been in the darkness the night before. He felt his intelligence dulled. But it was what he had come for, to go down that street and find Immacolata Borelli.

Nobody had accused him of cowardice, or ever mocked him for fast-fix religion.

It might have been the nerves. On the via Duomo, before he reached the junction with via Forcella, he had found himself outside the cathedral. He had gone inside and lingered there. He had read that the huge high interior was built four hundred years ago after earthquake devastation had brought down the thirteenth-century building, and that under the most recent foundations were a Greek temple and a Roman-era rainwater canal. He’d read, too, of San Gennaro, who protected the city from disaster and whose blood, kept here in a vial, liquefied each first Sunday in May and each 19 September. The saint had died in 305 – he did a simple sum fast – 1704 years ago, beheaded after torture as punishment for his beliefs, and his blood was a dried cake for three hundred and sixty-three or -four days of the year, but went liquid on those two days. If Eddie Deacon had told the guys in the house off the Kingsland Road this story, and that he didn’t doubt it, he would have been laughed all the way to the pub, to do the first round and the second. Flowers were being arranged near the altar and he imagined there would be a wedding later. A scattering of chairs was taken by crouched figures. He was happy to have been there, yet he never went into the church on Hoxton Street or the one on the other side of Dalston at Middleton Road. Being there, hearing a choir of treble angel voices rehearse, settled him a little.

So, best bloody foot forward.

The light didn’t come down the street. The alleyways leading off to the sides, spars off a mast, were narrower and dim, and above them washing hung. There were shops: for hardware, groceries, bread, cheap clothing. The facade rendering had peeled away and the paintwork was chipped and flaking. Often, in the first few paces, he reached back and touched his hip pocket, where the slim wallet was. He wore faded jeans, trainers and a short-sleeved shirt; he had left his passport, his plastic and most of his cash in the little safe in the pensione room. It seemed necessary for him – under the gaze of the kids, the boy astride the scooter and the older boys with the mobiles – to feel for his wallet.

He said softly to himself, ‘For fuck’s sake, Eddie, get with it. Where are you? In western Europe, the cradle of civilisation. Why are you in western Europe? To find Mac. What are you? A bloody wimp. When are you going to grow up? Now… now.’

A woman carried two thin plastic bags that were heavy with vegetables. Eddie asked her – in stuttered Italian – if she knew where Immacolata Borelli lived. The woman looked through him, as if he didn’t exist, and he repeated the name, but she walked past him.

He didn’t know where the street ended, where the vicolo Vicaria began, but he did not think via Forcella was long, maybe two hundred yards. Everyone should know her… A man stopped in the centre of the street, a dog squatted and defecated, a cat crouched at his feet and chewed gristle from a bone, and a scooter swept by them. The man had paused to light his pipe. Eddie asked if he knew, please, where Immacolata Borelli lived. The man gaped at him. Eddie said the name again. The match burned until it touched the skin of the man’s fingers, then the man pushed past. He stepped in the dog’s mess, four square in it, and seemed not to care.

The kids were behind and level with him. If he faced them, they met his gaze. They made a cordon behind him when a car came down and it had to hoot for them to give space. Two men sat at a table on the street, and the car slowed to get past them. Eddie saw they had dominoes. He stood over the table, waited for a play to be made, expected that one would look up, but neither did so he interrupted the game. He asked once more: did they know where in the via Forcella the home of Immacolata Borelli was? He couldn’t read the faces, tanned, cracked, as if the skin was old leather, or the eyes, but one spat and the brightness lay on a cobblestone beside Eddie’s trainer, and the game went on.

He was confused. He didn’t understand why she lived there. It was poverty. So were parts of Dalston, corners of Hackney, Hoxton and Haggerston, but he did not see any of the pockets of wealth, anything of quality – the small areas that had been tarted up – as there were in his corner of London. He thought he sounded like his father. But it had been clear enough on the scrap of paper – Borelli, Via Forcella, Zip code, Napoli. He stood outside a shop that sold bread, rolls and cake. He was taken inside as the queue moved in and the kids were left on the pavement. Now the scooter was with them and the engine was gunned. He reached the counter. He asked for the home of the Borelli family, said that he was looking for Immacolata Borelli. The woman heard him. Eddie thought she considered what was requested of her. He spoke the name again: Immacolata Borelli. The woman looked away from him and her eyes went to the next in the line, her smile broad. What did that customer want? Eddie went out of the shop.

Bells clamoured in his mind. A broken front door in a north London street and a police guard, his Mac never giving him an address or a phone number, and she had disappeared. This was her home, and he was watched, and no one in the street responded to his request for information. The bells rang loudly. What to do?

Should he stop, turn, walk away and quit? He didn’t doubt that each person he had spoken to had known of Immacolata Borelli. He swore. Stop? No. Turn and walk away? No. Quit? He went on down the street and looked for the next man or woman to ask, the kids and the scooter trailing him.

She talked of her mother, had done since she had woken. She had taken a perfunctory shower, gobbled a roll, gulped coffee and sat at the table, drumming her fingers for the tape to be switched on.

‘An account she values is that with the Dresdner Bank – I can’t tell you the number. It’s at fourteen, Karl-Liebknechtstrasse in Leipzig. It’s the first place cleaned money goes, fixed-rate deposits for six months. She goes in October, doesn’t stay overnight since my father’s arrest. She has a travel agent that routes her from Reggio Calabria to eastern Germany on budget flights for German tourists. The turn-round time for the aircraft is sufficient for her meetings. There’s never less than eight million euros in the Leipzig account, and she’s a generous supporter of the bank’s nominated charities. You understand?’

Castrolami sat opposite her. He was swivelled sideways and did not look at her, or at the picture of Gabriella Borelli on the wall. He didn’t look at her because he was shaving. Had he faced her, the action of the battery-powered machine would have interfered with the recording. She couldn’t tell, with his cheeks and eyes away from her, whether he was impressed by what she said, or indifferent to it, but he didn’t prompt her. Perhaps, Immacolata thought, he had turned on a tap and preferred not to interrupt the flow. He shaved, working the machine with three heads across his face, his throat, below and above his lips, and she talked about the distribution of money. Where were the accounts placed? In what banks in what cities? She spoke of huge sums but he never raised his eyebrows in astonishment or disbelief.

The sun shone on her.

A maid sluiced the tiles of the kitchen floor.

Orecchia lounged on a settee behind her and read his newspaper – a socialist one that her father, Pasquale, said was fit only for wiping a backside. He never spoke or coughed or intruded in any way, but his holster harness was round his shirt.

Rossi was on the balcony and swept up dried leaves that had fallen from the plants in the ochre pots. He would have been aware that he could be seen by the residents in other blocks so his holster was hitched on a chair. She had fired a pistol, but never at a human target. Had her mother? Perhaps, but she didn’t know. She couldn’t have said whether her mother killed by proxy – Vincenzo, Giovanni, or the cold, creepy one they used – or had done it for herself. It didn’t matter. After she had talked about money, she would go on to killings. With killings she might raise Castrolami’s eyebrows. Rossi swept diligently, but sometimes she looked up and out through the opened glass doors to the terrace and she thought he watched her, and each time she set her shoulders back and allowed her blouse to be stretched. Then he swept some more.

There had been no views from the apartment her brother rented in London or from the buildings they had occupied in Sanita and Forcella: roofs, water tanks, satellite dishes, and glimpses of the great mountain where the cap was missing. Here, from Collina Fleming, the view was exceptional. Clear skies above, trees and an autostrada link below, and a distant horizon of grey hazed hills on which clouds perched. Maybe she would live here… Have a maid who came in and cleaned… Finish accountancy courses and have diplomas… Set up in a small business with money provided by Castrolami’s people, or the prosecutor’s people, until she was able to support herself… A new name… And maybe meet someone, have babies, maybe… The warmth filled the apartment but a small zephyr wind came with it. Immacolata had dreamed of her future and talked of her mother.

‘Every April she goes to the Societe Generale bank on the road called La Canebiere, number fifteen, in Marseille. She is driven to Bari, then flies to Milan and connects to Marseille. She starts early. She has lunch with her manager, and is back the same evening. They think she’s a resident of Milan. That account is for more than two million euros and-’

A plastic bucket on the balcony toppled. She realised then that Rossi had swept and now watered the pots. He had kicked over the bucket. She stopped. That brought a reaction from Castrolami, a little hissed curse because she had been interrupted and the flow broken.

‘How am I doing?’

‘You talk and we listen. That’s what’s expected.’

It was the place, in a dream, that she might live, away from the dark, drear streets of Naples, beyond the reach of Sanita and Forcella – and the gaols at Poggioreale and Novara – beyond the reach of the hands that would be scrabbling for her eyes.

‘Please, I want to go out.’

Now wariness clouded Castrolami’s face. ‘You know what’s dictated. No phone calls, no meetings, no contacts. Signorina Immacolata, they’ll kill you.’

‘I want to buy food – I want to cook.’

He sighed. She thought him confused. He had finished shaving. Now he opened the head of the machine and blew the mess out on to the floor. ‘What other banks outside Italy does your mother use?’

‘And we’ll shop and I’ll cook?’

‘Yes… The other banks?’

‘She doesn’t visit it but meets a representative in Turin each January, the Danske Bank in Stockholm, on Norrmalmstorg. In Spain, in Madrid, the family uses the Banco Santander for fixed-term deposits.’

Her mind had drifted. It was where she could be, could settle, could live, could make a new family.

His mobile rang. The noise, insistent, clamoured in his pocket: he had tried to emphasise that he shouldn’t be called when he was with the pentita, Immacolata Borelli, unless to be given information of seismic importance. They had gone beyond European banks, were now in the Cayman Islands – a Swiss bank – and had just talked through Greek Cyprus, a Larnaca branch. She stopped and he switched off the tape.

He listened. It was the message he had expected – he might have been surprised had it not surfaced the previous evening.

A Naples newspaper, Cronaca, had telephoned the Palace of Justice and asked for guidance on a rumour in the Forcella and Sanita districts that Immacolata Borelli, twenty-five-year-old daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, was collaborating. Was the rumour confirmed or denied? He was told that time had been bought, that the prosecutor was unavailable, in meetings, and that the press office could neither confirm nor deny – but only a few hours could be bought. He thanked the caller and pocketed the mobile.

They had had the gentle hours. He imagined the word racing through the district of her birth and childhood – as it had with an Alfieri, a Contini, a Misso and a Giuliani. But for it to be a girl, pretty, educated, intelligent, would captivate the city. He did not hide news. Good or bad it should be spelled out.

He said, ‘It’s rumoured in Naples that Immacolata Borelli is an infame. Word is out and on the streets. They would spit at your picture, if they had you in via Forcella, they would stamp on you until your breath had gone. If you ever believed there was a time for turning back it’s gone. Now I shall ask you a very serious question.’

‘What?’

‘Is there anything in your life that I should know about which you have not told me? Signorina Immacolata, is there anything that can be exploited, a weakness?’

‘No.’

‘Should I believe you?’

‘You insult me.’

She looked at her best when she was angry. But, and it troubled Castrolami, the sunlight was reflected on to the white marble floor and her eyes, making them black pockets. He liked to look deep into the eyes when he was deciding whether a suspect was truthful or lied. He could not see hers. He thought her strong, and that she would need to be strong.

He said, ‘In an hour, maybe, we will go to the piazza, where the stalls are, and you can shop. I think you’ll find that a chic corner of Rome is more expensive than Forcella or any part of Naples, and probably the produce is inferior. That we give permission is a gesture of trust.’

She didn’t thank him. He thought her an enigma: tough and vulnerable, resolute and frightened, hard and pliant. He didn’t yet know her, didn’t know whether he ever would – whether a gesture of trust was misplaced.

She had shuffled towards him. Salvatore watched the approach of Anna Borelli, grandmother to the family and icon in the clan. He had heard she had been the strength behind her man, that the clan would not have prospered without her and that she was the worst woman in Naples to make an enemy of. He knew her to have been born in 1922, the year Mussolini had launched, from Naples, the march on Rome that elevated him to power. He knew her to have been married in 1941 when her husband had come out of hiding from military conscription and posting to Montenegro. He knew her to have stepped back from the running of the clan in the middle 1980s when its strength was assured and Pasquale was given authority, knew that she had paramount importance in the clan’s territory. She came close to him.

She was frail, with bent shoulders, and walked with a stick to mitigate her rheumatism. She had cropped white hair, but her clothes were always ebony black. If she ever smiled he hadn’t seen it. If she ever laughed he hadn’t heard her. She paused outside a hardware shop and he saw her examining brooms, weighing the advantages of one against another: she was worth, by whatever calculation, millions of euros, but fingered brooms to decide whether one that cost three euros was as good value as one that cost five. He came close to her, and the owner of the shop, who had been solicitous and grovelling as if to royalty, stepped back to give him room and privacy.

He said, ‘Grandmother, it is a time of maximum danger to the clan. Nonna, the wolves circle because they believe us weak. Nonna, without Pasquale, Gabriella and Vincenzo, and with the bitch Immacolata whoring with the palace, we need leadership or we’ll disintegrate. Everything you and Carmine achieved will be lost. Unless you lead now, your lives will have been wasted. I beg you, take control. Fight. Umberto can find me, but in extreme emergency call this…’ He slipped a piece of paper into her clawed hand. He relied on her memory, in her eighty-eighth year, to absorb the number. He was satisfied she would have done so within an hour. With total sincerity Salvatore said: ‘We depend on you, Nonna, and on Carmine. If we’re led we’ll follow. If we don’t fight, we’re dead, and the whore has killed us.’

He walked away from her. At an entry fifty metres down the via Forcella from the hardware shop, he paused in the shadow. The priest passed her, the bastard priest from the church of San Giorgio Maggiore – should have been shot – and she didn’t acknowledge him. Salvatore thought she bartered with the shop owner for a discount on the broom, and – for certain – she would be given it. There were many who would delight in dancing on his corpse and many who would queue for the privilege of dropping him. He reached his man, Fangio, put on the helmet with the smoked-glass visor and was gone.

It was perplexing to him. Frustrated, annoyed, failing and unable to get sense from anyone, Eddie Deacon beaded on the priest. Perplexingly, the priest walked in the centre of the street and scooters swerved to pass him, going either way, and the street was lined with shoppers and gossipers, old and young, and no one spoke to him. He was young, no more than thirty, with a rounded, chubby face but there was no cheer in it: pallor and tiredness characterised him. He had come out of a courtyard through tall iron gates. The school had the name ‘Annalisa Durante’. Eddie sidled towards the priest.

A quick side-step, like a soccer player’s swerve, and the priest had passed. Eddie called after him. No response, but the priest’s step quickened. He fastened on the back of the man – had to: he had been the length of the street and must have asked a dozen people where the Borelli home was, and had not received one coherent answer. The kids followed him still, but not with intensity. He didn’t think they regarded him as threatening, more as a curiosity, but they were behind him and he’d noted that each time he asked, the boy on the scooter quizzed the person he’d spoken to.

The sun came higher. He sweated. Strips of light and warmth knifed on to the street from the alleys. More people were out. If he met eyes, they were averted. If he smiled, it was not returned.

He didn’t know what else to do, but followed the priest. The spark had gone out for him, as if hope was extinguished. So alone. The priest went up the steps of the church and into it. Eddie had that sense of being the stranger and unwanted. In the stone slabs beside the main door, at about the level of a man’s head, there were chip marks, two scars where the stone had been gouged. He followed the priest inside. Cool and quiet enveloped him.

They walked. Rossi led and he wore a lightweight poplin jacket so that his shoulder harness was covered. She followed, with Castrolami alongside her, Orecchia behind. They went down a side-road from the block, where the parked cars had been in place all summer, the bonnets and windscreens coated with the fine dust that came from the north African deserts, carried on the winds. The hill where they had brought her was empty of residents, still holidaying in the south or at the Sardinian resorts. That would have been why they had shipped her in here. There were so few people in the apartments and on the roads.

The dogs had not been taken to the southern beaches, but abandoned to the care of maids and porters. They threw themselves at the balcony railings. Immacolata had forgotten, almost, the ferocity of the sun – but there were many things to be forgotten. She walked with a good step and Rossi had to sense her pace and stretch his stride to keep ahead of her. They went past the entrance to a tennis club and she glimpsed the pool, azure blue, and the loungers; the Borelli family had not been able, in Naples, to belong to a club where tennis was played and there was a pool, so Immacolata didn’t play tennis and couldn’t swim. Different worlds, and this one closed to her by the dictate of the clan’s security, but there were clubs like this in Posilippo and Pozzuoli north up the coast. There was a clinic, and more apartments set back, with different dogs and different porters, then the road ducked down and ran beneath a roof of pine branches.

Castrolami said, conversationally, ‘We put you in a tower block on the north side or on the east side of Rome and on every floor women are looking to see who is new. It’s an intelligence-gathering system, unavoidable – you know that. It’s the same in a tower in Naples. We put you in a small town near Firenze, Pisa or on the Adriatic, you open your mouth and they hear you, Naples, and they hear us, outsiders, and they think that Mafia scum is being hidden among them, and there are demonstrations, perhaps violence, because they despise you and believe you contaminate their society. It’s good here because we’re among the people who don’t know the Mafia but hate the VAT officials and the Revenue investigators, and who seek to live in privacy. If, however, they believed that a collaborating criminal had been brought here, there would be outrage and the accusation that we’ve reduced the worth of their property. We don’t flaunt you.’

‘And when they come back from holiday?’

‘We’ll think again, look at the budget and-’

‘Move on?’

There was an old bridge over the river ahead. They had left the shade of the trees and gone under a six-lane road. She could see over the parapet wall that the Tiber’s level was down. It looked played out, not like a famous river. He didn’t answer her. She thought they would keep her in the fine apartment while they stripped the meat of what she knew, then ship her on when only the bones remained.

Castrolami said, ‘The bridge is the Ponte Milvio, one of the most important in the city. It was built by Gaius Claudius Nero more than two thousand years ago. Constantine won a great battle at the bridge in 312 AD. It’s been repaired many times, then a new phenomenon. Three years ago, young people in love were attracted to it, put padlocks on the lamppost and threw the keys into the river. So many padlocks – the bigger and heavier they were, the greater the love – were fastened there that the lamppost collapsed. For a few months there was a virtual lamppost, on the web, but now the mayor has put steel columns on the bridge and it’s possible to fix padlocks again. Do you find that interesting?’

She shook her head decisively.

Quietly, his response: ‘No, you wouldn’t because you assured me that you do not, at present, have a lover. You told me so. We should cross the road.’

Rossi had already done so.

It was a fast thought only, a brittle image – of him in a park, and in a small, grubby house, then laughter, the smoothness of skin and… She followed Rossi, and Castrolami was holding her arm. She didn’t think she was a prisoner but that he guided her between cars and vans. In her mind she had a list.

She had shopped twice every week for food to cook for Vincenzo and his friends, and once a fortnight she had gone to the street market to buy enough to make a meal for him and his friends. It was a market far superior to those in London, laid out in splendour, stalls stacked high, every variety and every choice, but of a lower standard to that of the piazza Mercato and what was – had been – her home. She turned, tapped her hip pocket to show it was empty, pulled out the lining of a side pocket, grimaced, laughed… Orecchia passed her a ten-euro note, and Castrolami was taking his time, pecking in his wallet, so she leaned forward and took a twenty from it. Rossi gave her a ten. Immacolata chose veal and was about to point out the size of the fillets she wanted when she felt the pressure of Castrolami’s fingers on her arm. She indicated, and he spoke. She had learned. She selected potatoes, spinach and green beans, and Castrolami took the notes from her and paid. She bought tomatoes and peppers, button mushrooms and onions, and at another stall there was cream and cheese. On the way out at the far end of the covered market there were wines and spirits, and Castrolami bought one bottle, from Friuli, and she queried it with a gesture, then pointed to him, Rossi, Orecchia and herself. One bottle? He tapped his own chest, and the other men’s, then shook his head. She could drink; they would not.

They didn’t take the bags from her. She carried three and Castrolami two. It was hotter, might have reached the eighties, and no breeze came off the river. In London, if she had shopped with him, he would have carried the bags. In Naples, a foot-soldier would have carried her shopping, just as he would have parked the car and waited a respectful pace behind her as she chose. Perhaps it was the glance she gave Castrolami that prompted him. He said, ‘If they carry your shopping it would impede their shooting. If they had to shoot it would be in your defence. A shopping bag doesn’t help in aiming and firing.’

She thought, again, he had insulted her. She walked faster, away from him, and slowed only when she was a pace behind Rossi. The padlocks on the bridge were in her mind: if she’d been there with him , which of them would have taken the key, made the statement of love, and thrown it out into the slack water?

Castrolami was with Orecchia. They were fifteen paces behind the young woman and kept that distance, and Castrolami listened to the older man, who lived and ate with the criminals who collaborated, and slept near them – and held a grip, maybe a loose one, on sanity.

‘You ask me how she’ll be. You want to know if she’ll fall early or late, or stay on her feet and be strong enough for the court.’

To Castrolami it was a pain to be endured. Some investigators and detectives were easy in the company of criminals, could go to weddings and birthday parties and survive allegations of corruption. Not Castrolami. He detested being with them.

‘I was with one from your city and you’ll have known him. He walked out of the door one morning and the next we heard he was in the Secondigliano area of Naples, or perhaps Scampia, whichever. He had taken a train from the north. A week afterwards we heard he’d arrived home and was on the street, dead. One bullet, middle of the forehead. We’d been with him for four months. Time and resources wasted.’

Castrolami remembered him. Police, not carabinieri, had handled his defection. He walked slowly, felt burdened.

‘There was another. We had him in Genoa for a whole year, with his wife, his mother, his aunt, her mother and three children. We brought him to Caltanisetta to give evidence against twenty prime Sicilian fuck-pigs. We dressed him in his good suit, a clean shirt and a tie and drove him to the courthouse. He smiled and said he now wished to renegotiate his terms – like his evidence was a piece of goddam property. More money, a better allowance, or no evidence. We had twenty men in the cage and were waiting on his testimony. We agreed the new terms, won the conviction. Then the agreement was torn up. I don’t know now whether he’s alive or dead.’

Castrolami knew there was a segment of opinion, influential, which believed too many had been allowed to become a collaboratore di giustizia, that too much was given them. It was an easy way to win convictions. With the crimes of the Camorra or the Mafia, there was little opportunity for gathering forensic evidence, less chance of finding eye witnesses prepared to face down intimidation and go public in court. The collaborator, the infame, was an attractive solution.

‘I’ve seen little of her, but we were given some notes before her arrival. I read of the leukaemia death, her supposed friend. Perhaps it was merely that the guilt needed a trigger or perhaps the emotion was real. Now you talk to her about her mother, her brothers, but you haven’t played a big card. It’s there.’

Castrolami faced him. They were now on the rough, narrow road that went up beneath the pines.

‘I’m not trying to teach you your job but I’d milk the disease. To be verbally abused, physically assaulted in a cemetery at a burial, is no small matter. Use it, twist it, work it. My advice, Dottore, there isn’t a living human being whom she loves. Make good with the dead.’

They trudged on. Orecchia was fitter than Castrolami and climbed the hill easily. He could see, in front, the haughty swing of her hips.

The priest came from a side door. A cleaner who polished the altar silver had said he would be there soon, but it had been an hour. The measure of Eddie’s stress, lethargy, lost nerve was that he had been prepared to sit out the hour on a shadowed pew, only moving to do something he had not attempted before: he had made a donation, taken a candle and lit it, then sat some more.

When the priest came through the side door, the cleaner went to him, pointed to Eddie and returned to his polishing.

The priest approached. His short hair, rimless glasses and creased cassock made no concession to style. He sat on the bench beside Eddie, who introduced himself, then asked for Immacolata Borelli. Oh, yes, the priest knew Immacolata Borelli. His eyes flashed and his back straightened. Eddie warmed. Where would he find her home? There was no immediate response. He thought the priest considered. Eddie, ignorant, didn’t understand. Why, if the priest knew, should he hesitate? Eddie, innocent, did not comprehend. Sadness fell on the face of the priest, as if he had made a decision that wounded him. He sighed, stood up, and the sadness was wiped away. The face was devoid now of expression. He took Eddie down the aisle, and Eddie paused to put a five-euro note into the box for the repair of the church. He was led out into the brightness. The kids waited on the far side of the street and watched, with the boy on the scooter. The priest pointed far down the via Forcella. Eddie could just make out the fruit and vegetables stall that protruded into half of the street’s width. Beyond it was the fish stand. The priest said that the door between the fruit and vegetables and the fish was the home of the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli. For a moment, his head was beside the two scars on the stone, then he backed away. Eddie had been past those stalls twice, had asked in the tabaccaio opposite and been ignored. When he turned to thank the priest the church door was already closed.

What should he have done? What should he have said to the foreign boy, a fool, who came to Forcella and asked for the home of Carmine and Anna Borelli? What was his responsibility? Too tired, he had deflected the problem – had done as he was asked and had not accepted responsibility. The foreign boy wanted to meet Immacolata, and he could picture her, the granddaughter of Carmine and Anna Borelli: it had been her brother, the middle of their three grandsons, who had fired the two pistol shots at a predecessor. It was too much for him to take on as personal responsibility.

Fear stalked him. Fear corroded principle, decency, courage. He had no stomach for the war on the streets. He had crumpled. Predecessors had fought the culture of criminality in Forcella and been broken, or had moved away in indecent haste, or were in Rome under police guard.

He could justify to himself that he could have done nothing to divert the foreigner from visiting the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli – and she was the only one of them with, perhaps, a thimbleful of charity and goodness. He felt cold in the church, shivered and crossed himself.

The Allies had reached Naples. The Fascists had fled. An opportunity had arrived. The troops, British and American, reached the city on 1 October 1943, and within a week the fortunes of the infant Borelli clan had prospered. Carmine, out of gaol, would never deny that the first moves of Anna, his young wife, were integral to them. She had opened the brothel.

It was the first to function within a short walk of the seafront where American officers were billeted in the sequestrated hotels. She brought in women from all classes of Neapolitan society. They shared common features – acute hunger, extreme poverty, the ambition only to survive. It was on a small courtyard where the walls of two buildings were held up by timber supports; a third side had taken a direct hit during a bombing raid. It was within a stone’s throw of the Palazzo Sessa – home of Sir William Hamilton, Emma, and Horatio Nelson – and the officers trooped there. The women Anna Borelli recruited began work with the puffiness in their faces that came from near-fatal starvation, but food supplies came with the patrons, and silk stockings, lipsticks, chocolate and cigarettes. They were the wives of stall-holders and lawyers, of labourers and advocates, of street-sweepers and civil servants. Soon they had colour in their cheeks, and they started to eat well, their families too. There were mornings when a queue of women, dressed in their best, had formed outside the heavy front door to plead for the opportunity to be fucked by GIs, and Anna took the most attractive, the most sexually experienced. She did not employ uninitiated teenage girls: the GIs wanted women who did not waste time, were easy to penetrate, who knew the trade. It was said – among the women who came to work at noon and went home at midnight – that in the first days Anna Borelli herself had lain under the gross belly of an American lieutenant colonel, that she could make him squeal like a spiked boar, and the security of the building was guaranteed.

The war of Carmine Borelli was fitful. Called up on his eighteenth birthday, the papers instructed him on which barracks in the town he should report to, and the day after he went into hiding, courting Anna while he was on the run and dodging raids by the Fascist police, coming out of hiding for the day, his marriage to Anna in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, being informed on, and arrested the following evening. A question never asked and therefore never answered: how was Anna Borelli so skilled in lovemaking, after one night with her nineteen-year-old husband, that she could so successfully entertain the American lieutenant colonel? After two years in Poggioreale gaol, he was freed by Allied forces after he had woven a tale of a young, persecuted liberal democrat imprisoned for his beliefs. He had found the first employees of his wife in cubicles wide enough for a bed, a chair and a narrow table for a washstand, and had shaken the hand of the lieutenant colonel in the hallway, ignoring the man’s apparent intimacy with his wife. They had, together, not looked back.

Within weeks, she had opened two more brothels. Within months, he had become a king in the black-market sale of goods brought by the Americans into the Naples docks, and he had started his mercato nero with those stockings, cans of food, packs of cigarettes, coffee, sugar and chocolate that the first customers had given his wife by way of a gratuity. First a handcart, then a small closed-sided van, then a flat-bed lorry, then many lorries, and always protection from the military government – and the question he never asked of his wife.

It was in the bloodstream of both: the search for power, authority and wealth bred microbes in their veins, which they had never lost.

He had walked down the street from the church, past the shops that were now familiar to him, past the men who sat and played cards or dominoes, and past the Madonna figures in niches in the stonework where candles burned and flowers drooped. He had paused beside the fish-seller’s stand and had watched water from a fine spray fall on the swordfish. He had never seen a swordfish, and this one was more than five feet long, its sword another four, and… he realised the outer door was open. He could have sworn on oath that it had been closed the previous times he’d gone by. He had known then that the kids or the scooter rider had forewarned them.

He said simply, ‘I came to find Immacolata.’

The old man had American-accented English. ‘You knew her in London? You knew her well?’

The old woman had a crow’s croak, and spoke English. ‘Do you sleep with her? Do you do fuck-fuck with her?’

He blushed. Eyes pierced him. The coarseness of the question neither unnerved him nor seemed peculiar – almost, in this place, natural. They were both, he estimated, in their eighties. He sensed that they moved with difficulty, were in pain, and near the door there had been a stand of walking-sticks. The room he was in was furnished, Eddie thought expensively, but with hideous taste – chrome, plastic, fluffy, pinkish. The PhD man in the house in Dalston would have called it kitsch, and his mother’s lip would have curled in disdain. He noticed there were no photographs. Not a picture of Immacolata, or of a man who would have been her brother, or of her parents. Everyone his mother knew, all her friends, had homes littered with photographs of grandchildren, shelves and surfaces groaning under them.

The question, its vulgarity, almost amused Eddie, but the eyes of the old woman pierced him with a brightness that suggested she harboured a degree of humour. He would not have dared to lie to her. ‘Yes.’

The old woman shrugged. ‘There are many girls. Why come to find Immacolata?’

‘I think… because I love her. You know… what I mean. Yes, I love her.’

She said something to the old man, Eddie didn’t know what. She reached up from her chair, caught the collar of his shirt, tugged his face down and spoke into his ear, then moved her head to let him speak into hers, but her eyes stayed on Eddie.

The old woman asked if Immacolata loved him. He thought she used the word ‘love’ as if it was strange to her, but he reckoned that was because she was struggling with the language. He wondered how she had learned English, what call this peasant woman had had to speak it. He repeated and amplified. ‘I hope she was in love with me – at least, very fond of me. We were very happy together.’

She tugged again at her husband’s shirt collar.

Her small spider fingers scratched at the material of his shirt, pulled and jerked his head down. She was, like him, in her eighty-eighth year, but her memory was as sharp as the day he had come back to her from the Poggioreale and she had told him – without a balance sheet to read from – the finances of the brothel. She murmured the numbers given her by Salvatore. He would have had to write them down. Her mouth to his ear, her ear to his mouth as he repeated the numbers. She told Carmine that it was equal to a gift from the Virgin – and ignored his shock at what he considered inappropriate, almost blasphemy – that leverage against the bitch had walked through the front door, presented itself, gift-wrapped. He understood. Anna would go to the kitchen, make coffee and take cake from the tin. He, Carmine, would go into the hallway and telephone. He repeated the number again.

What they knew of the English language, American, was from the days when the troops had been in Naples. Good days, the best, he a king and she a queen. The fingers loosed his collar. He smiled at the young man, hoped it a smile of friendship, and there was a girlish charm about his wife’s smile, which he thought as insincere – and sweet – as the smile she had used for her customers more than sixty years before. The same smile and no truth in it. She said she would make coffee and bring cake, and she said that Carmine would go and telephone, that there was a man who knew where Immacolata was and, please, would the young man wait a little. There was an image of long ago, never forgotten. A shared cell in the south-west block of the Poggioreale. A spider, huge, whose territory was the angles between the brickwork, the bars and the grimy glass of the window. It had a web that extended nearly a metre across and half a metre high and the prisoners bet each evening, in cigarettes, how many new flies would be trapped in the daylight hours and eaten at night. The spider was esteemed and admired, its body the size of a matchbook. It trapped the ignorant and the innocent. She went to prepare coffee and bring cake, and Carmine went into the hall, leaving the young man alone. There was excitement on the young man’s face.

Always, to fight against the testimony of an infame – the bitch whore who was his granddaughter – there must be leverage. Only that, applied with extreme violence, could destroy the most feared threat to the clans: the informer, turncoat and traitor.

His was the cleanest and best-polished window of any in the long line looking out on to the central walkway on the third floor of the Sail. He was Davide. He spent many hours each week with a bucket and a rag washing his windows, outside and in. He used warm water and soap, then a disintegrating cloth to dry them. He sprayed them with polish, then used a dry cloth to take off the last of the filth that had accumulated on the glass. Those who lived in the box apartments, crumbling from neglect, on either side of him regarded the occupant of 374 with tolerance and amusement. Many in the Sail – a gigantic architectural monstrosity – existed with mental aberration. It was a dumping ground for the socially challenged and the medical misfits. On the eastern extremity of Naples, the district of Scampia had achieved notoriety as a supermarket of drugs, a killing ground in clan warfare, and as a place where the city authorities could dump the detritus of the city’s population. Davide was among the rubbish placed there, and he seemed to eke a minuscule living from delivering messages and packages for one of the Comando Piazza, who flourished around the Sail, and small handyman tasks.

Davide’s home was on one of the lower floors of a building that had become a cult symbol of ugliness. The lower floors, where No. 374 is found, represent the hull and level decking of a yacht, with ten storeys of floors. Above the deck there is a towering sail-shaped construction, vertical at the mast on the far end from Davide’s location, but terraced down for another ten levels. It has always been known as the Sail. Of the seventy thousand listed in the most recent census as living in Scampia and its tower blocks, some eleven thousand are in this architect’s eccentricity. Some call the different levels and ends of the Sail by colours, and others know each block there as a lotta. Davide was a resident of Lotta H, which was Green, and which had the franchise to market heroin, already refined. Through his well-cleaned windows, Davide observed much of the trade and the sight of him in his handkerchief-sized living room, the television blaring and only a side light on, was familiar to the lookout, the seller and the Comando Piazza who ran them, and to the magazzinieri who held the stockpiles of the narcotic, and even to the level of aquirenti who purchased in bulk, and bought from the capo of the clan that had authority in the Sail. All, from the top of the tree to the bottom, knew of the demented old fool who spent hours on the windows, bringing them to a brilliant shine, and left his apartment not more than once a week. He was almost always there and when he was not outside and window-cleaning, he was hunched in a chair with the curtains open.

To others, he was Delta465/Foxtrot, and valued – too valuable to be burned by the routine of drugs trafficking.

*

Salvatore came. He had left the van, with dark bloodstains on the tyres from where a stomach had burst when it was driven over, and was at the door. He was met by Carmine Borelli. He was briefed. He thought the old man panted as if some rare delight hooked him, anticipation… Sometimes Salvatore found that his own breath spurted in the moment that he lifted a pistol and aimed it. He thought it would have been, perhaps, before he was born that the old man had last made operational decisions. He was revelling in the chance to live again. The talk was short, as it should have been. He broke away, chuckled to himself: the young man who had screwed Immacolata in London, who loved her, would find that the bitch’s sweat, the bitch’s caresses and the bitch’s groans came expensive. Carmine Borelli had said the young man, screwer of Immacolata, was an idiot and would not make any difficulty. The radio that morning had quoted an unnamed official in the Palace of Justice as stating, no equivocation, that the Borelli clan was history, a broken reed. He saw nothing in the street that gave cause for anxiety.

The fish-seller, Tomasso, had had the pitch in the via Forcella for twelve years, his father for the twenty-three before him. Short but broad-shouldered and thick at the waist, he had cropped hair, controlled stubble, good jeans, a good-quality shirt and good shoes. What he wore was good because he sold fine fish fresh from the market that morning. There were, however, matters relevant to the state of mind Tomasso enjoyed that were not generally known to those who dictated the economics of his fish stall. His father’s cousin had a boat that fished from the harbour at Mergellina, but two years before Tomasso had been told by the Borelli clan that he must only buy fish landed from the boats they owned. He had not complained and had acquiesced because his chance of obtaining another pitch was minimal. Now, also, he must pay to the clan a hiked pizzo for the right to put the stall in that place. Also, now, he must supply fish at cut-price to the trattoria two streets away, at less than cost, because the trattoria was owned by the clan. The pesce spade, huge, with the malevolent eye, frozen, would have been taken by Giovanni on a normal day, and not paid for: that had happened more often in the last months.

But the shit-face hadn’t come, was in the cells at Poggioreale, and the cow who headed the clan was also in the cells, and Vincenzo who had sent the message by courier telling him where he could and could not buy. They were, in his opinion, fucked, but he knew what had been done last evening to a man who had shouted it. Tomasso kept quiet, sold where it was possible, but impotent anger burned in him. Where he stood, close to his till and scales, he was, perhaps, two metres from the door of the house where the old goat lived with his woman. He had seen the young man go into the building, had seen also that kids had come with him, and a scooter boy, and he had thought the young man a stranger. The kids had still been in place, on the far side of the road, till two minutes ago. Everyone knew Salvatore. Everyone who worked in the via Forcella or in the Sanita district knew the face of Il Pistole, who had come and talked inside with the old goat, had waved the kids away and gone. He felt the tension ratchet, and he was aware that the street, quietly and without fuss, was emptying.

The grocery was down the rue de Bellechasse, and Lukas – as was usual for him – bought only the bread, milk and eggs that he would eat in twenty-four hours, nothing that would go sour or stale in the fridge if the apartment was indefinitely abandoned. The red light had not been blinking when he had returned.

He had checked his post before he started on the cleaning, as he did every day. Nothing that needed attention. There was little enough for him to collect from the box by the main door: a few utility bills, offers of health insurance and holiday brochures, never anything personal. When he was away, in a war zone or counter-insurgency theatre, he always noted how men and women, far from home, yearned for mail from their families, emails or phone calls. Didn’t matter whether he yearned or not, he wasn’t getting any. No envelopes came with spidery writing, copperplate, a big fist or one that was near indecipherable. It was as if, wanting or not, he had no home and no folk who cared a shite. So, he built a wall, surrounded himself and… Lukas cleaned.

He did the cleaning, too, about every day, because he had the feeling always that he would go out through the front door, lock it behind him and might survive or might not. Might go down in a Black Hawk over a Shiite city in Iraq, and might get blown off a road by an IED outside Kandahar, and might fall off some dirt track in the mountains of central Colombia. He was like many of the gypsies who serviced the dirty little wars: he didn’t want to think of anyone making an entrance to collect his effects and puckering a forehead as they wondered where to start, thinking that the man was an untidy jerk and had left a mess. He might only have ten minutes between the telephone ringing or coming back in and having the red light alert him, dragging the bag out from under the bed, locking the door and starting the sprint for Solferino Metro. He kept the place neat and just about in a state that no one could be sure that anyone had recently lived there. All his washing went most days to the launderette, even if it was just briefs, singlet, socks and a shirt.

When he had finished the cleaning – it took all of a quarter of an hour – he checked the laptop. There were copies of the fulsome praise from DC that had come into Ground Force Security, and gratitude for his report. The company didn’t give him saccharine accolades for what he had achieved in the last trip, knew that the sweet stuff was unwelcome. Lukas could have reeled off the story of disasters in the hostage-rescue trade. He didn’t do celebrity and didn’t want back-slapping. Truth was, the fear of failure gripped his gut more when he was in the field than the demands of success. Failure was a body-bag. There had been enough for them never to be forgotten.

He wound up the cord of the vacuum cleaner that did the living-room rugs and the bedrooms’ carpet. Ruby Ridge was in Lukas’s battle honours, and nobody was keen to shout that one up to the clouds. Lukas, if he had engaged in a discourse about his work – which he never did – would have said that Ruby Ridge, up in the forests of Idaho where it was wild enough for mountain lion, had been the first pinpoint lesson of where a screw-up had happened. An innocent woman shot dead by official marksmen, and a child, and in return fire a US marshal killed, then the circus of a full-blown FBI-controlled siege of ten days’ duration, with a cast of maybe five hundred agents, and millions paid by government in subsequent compensation. Lukas had not been senior, had been then a marksman with the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team, and had seen a cock-up played out close enough to smell the shit that emanated. A good lesson for a rookie. He had been far back from the front line overlooking the cabin, and his Remington Model 700 had never been out of its bag, let alone loaded, but he had seen, played out before him, how bad it could get. He knew he walked a fine line between Ruby Ridge and the broken careers, and the hero-gram stuff on his laptop.

He watched the telephone and thought it might be an opportunity to go visit his friend who did the artwork down by the river, shit work and without talent, but by a good friend. The artist would never have heard of Ruby Ridge – or seen the face of a hostage when it was frozen in death, attached to or severed from the neck, or incoherent and trembling in the moment after liberation. Lukas played the strings, did God, and he went round a last time with a duster.

When he closed the door he stood in the lobby for a moment and listened. The bell did not ring. He went off down the flights of stairs.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator