The Collaborator

8

Eddie came out of the main door on the ground floor. He had been told he would be met and taken to Immacolata. He saw a great deal in the moment he was on the outer step but he assimilated the importance of nothing.

The door swung shut behind him. He caught a glimpse of it and the grandfather’s old hand, pocked with cancer scars, that had heaved it: too fast, no chance to thank. A van was parked on the street as if about to unload, but nothing was taken from the tail doors and nothing was carried to them. A pavement opposite had bustled and was now still. The kids were not crowded in the street but further up the slope of via Forcella and further down, as if they formed a cordon and made a perimeter. A man came forward and did not play-act friendship, a frown puckering his forehead. A hand from the interior slid open a side door of the van. The guy on the fish stall caught Eddie’s eye, the swordfish in ice beside him, and held his gaze.

Eddie had his hand in his pocket, was reaching for a handkerchief – must have been dust, up his nose and in his throat. He was about to sneeze. A man closed on him, came from the van, and behind was a dark interior, and sacking, a rope trailing out of the opening. The man on the fish stall held Eddie’s eyes. So much, then, for Eddie Deacon to assimilate. Time slowing. The man coming slower. People in the cafe opposite pirouetting their chairs to face away from the street, but the pace of the movement slackening. Trying to understand… The fish-seller had that look, unmistakable, no argument with it. Like a warning shout, but nothing passed his lips. The quiet, like fog, settled on him but the sights were clearer.

He could not comprehend why the fish-seller should give the warning. He could only react to it.

The hands of the man reached towards him. Not open, not in greeting, clenched. The veins stood out in his muscled arms, like highways through the hairs. Eddie ripped his hand from his pocket and moved into that defensive stance, as a boxer does, trying to go forward on to the balls of his feet. He had never, since he was a child in a tantrum, hit anyone. He had never punched, kicked, gouged or bitten another adult. He had only once intervened in a fight and played a hero and- So fast. His hand was only halfway up to protect his chin and throat when the fist of the man came at him. He felt himself buffeted. Pain riddled his nostrils and there were tears in his eyes. A grip tightened on his shirt and he was dragged forward. He was pulled past the fish-seller and saw nothing but a face without expression. Should he have tried to run? No chance: blocked by the van and the fish stall on its heavy trestle legs. Could see only the backs of the heads in the cafe opposite.

He was dragged forward and when he was close enough the man’s knee exploded into Eddie’s groin.

About the end of it, his experience as a street-fighter. Real pain now. He tried to double up, which merely offered his jaw, the chin, to a short-arm hook punch. He went into the side hatch of the van.

Eddie was face down, his head buried in a heap of loose sacking, foul-smelling and tasting – hard for him to breathe, and he struggled, but one fist was clamped in his hair and the other whipped his face, used it as if it was a boxer’s training gear. He stopped the struggle. The door was slammed. Then all light went and a hood was over his head. His arms were snatched down into the small of his back, handcuffs snapped on. He heard the tearing of heavy-duty tape and his hood was lifted, the tape fastened over his mouth, and the van was moving.

The hands were at his legs and rope was wound round his ankles. He heard the oath when the van must have hit a hole, perhaps where a cobblestone was missing. Then the rope was lashed tight and tied.

He was helpless.

He wondered if he would hear sirens, immediate pursuit. There had been people in the cafe, people further up the street and down it. He imagined a phone call on a mobile, alerting police to what had happened. The hope died pretty bloody soon.

Eddie realised that the van was not speeding. There was no chase. The driver went at the normal speed for morning traffic, didn’t hoot, didn’t weave, didn’t chase back-doubles and rat-runs.

He thought the worst. He was gone, lost, and it was hard to drag air into his lungs, and could hear the breathing of the man sitting on the van floor close to him. He didn’t dare move because that would get him another thrashing. Truths came.

Eddie Deacon, bloody idiot, had blundered on to territory where he should not have been. Way back, he should have walked home from the Afghan place, should have reached up and taken down the blow-up of Immacolata, his Mac, folded it and put it deep in a drawer, maybe under his socks. He should not have gone with a street kid and burgled, should not have jacked in work and taken a budget flight, should not have walked down a street where no smile met his and no help requested was given. He should not have trusted the old couple, grandparents and providers of coffee, cake and betrayal. Pretty damn obvious: keep the idiot in place and send for the heavy squad.

What to do? Important – not important: why it had happened. What to do mattered.

Bitch and fight and get another beating. Go passive, supine and give up the ghost. Lie still, let the world move and try to bloody think. He gave himself three alternatives. He was bound at the ankles, handcuffed at the wrists, his mouth was gagged and a hood covered his face. He had to make choices between alternatives, would have to.

He did not know how long he was in the van, lost track of time, and would lose also the pain in his wrists where the cuffs bit. He never heard a siren.

The fish-seller, Tomasso, came round his stall and bent low. He believed it would be thought he retied the knot in his lace. He hadn’t moved from his place beside the cash box and the scales until life had returned to the via Forcella. Chairs in the cafe had swivelled, the pavement was filled, and scooters swerved along the length of the street. Children poured out of the big gates of the school named after the girl who had been shot in cross-fire, Annalisa Durante; a murder gang had come to kill the son of a more minor clan leader in the district. Tomasso watched the children – six or seven, the only evidence of innocence in the street. He knew her parents, who lived a dozen doors up, and he knew what had been the fate of the priest then at the church on the corner with the via Duomo who had denounced the clans and called for their elimination from the community. He had seen the street return to normality, then moved round his stall and bent to tie his shoelace. He could reach, also, a few centimetres to the right of his shoe and slide his palm over the piece of paper that had fallen from the young man’s pocket. It had been at the moment that the hand came out fast, in response to Tomasso’s silent warning, that the piece of paper had been dropped. He slipped it into his breast pocket after glancing at it and realising what it was.

The priest who had stood against the clans and their culture, after the killing of the teenager Annalisa Durante, had had two shots fired at him when he paused on the steps of his church and now lived in Rome. He came back to Naples rarely, but always with an escort of police bodyguards. There would be protection for a priest but not for a fish-seller, so he was careful in his movements. He telephoned his uncle and asked him to come – quickly, subito, immediately – and mind the stall. The paper in his pocket gave the name of a hotel and the room number. While he waited, he considered which route was quickest, and hoped he might help – when no other would – a wretch in the gravest of danger. To ring the police direct was a step too far.

Immacolata was permitted to prepare the food.

She had heard the courier’s motorbike outside the main gate to the block, then the doorbell. She had seen the plastic sack of tapes Castrolami had taken across the living room into the hall, and the door had been opened. She had seen, from the kitchen’s balcony, the courier in black leathers load the sack into a pannier, then ride off at speed, spitting dust.

She washed vegetables, scraped potatoes and brought the penne down from the upper shelf where the pasta was stored. She had turned up the radio and did dance steps between the sink and the surfaces where the food was laid out. For a few minutes she felt freedom, perhaps for the first time. Orecchia and Rossi had left her to herself, and in those minutes she had expelled from her mind the scams, deals, fixes and hits of the clan, and had filled the void with… nothing. She delighted in the emptiness of the black hole.

Castrolami was at the door. She was sluicing the spinach leaves, had been measuring the penne in her mind, was deciding on the mix of tomato puree and cream for the sauce.

She turned once, saw his face, must have had a smile on hers and the music from the radio lifted her. Her mother was gone, her three brothers were gone, via Forcella was gone. Castrolami was at the door, leaning on the jamb and watching her, not sharing any form of pleasure. He had destroyed the mood. She saw no thanks, no gratitude. He looked at her as if she was a child, wayward and not to be humoured.

‘Yes?’

‘We go back to work. Now.’

‘I need only a few minutes and then I’m-’

‘We start now,’ Castrolami said. He reached across the work surface to the radio and killed the sound.

‘What is so important that it can’t wait five minutes?’ Her hands were on her hips, her feet apart, her chin jutted. She barked: ‘Well, what?’

He scratched his leg, then let his teeth run across his lower lip, looked at the ceiling, then said coldly, and without apology, ‘It’s time to talk about leukaemia and about the death of a longstanding friend.’

Everything gone, broken. ‘Yes, of course.’

She threw the kitchen gloves into the bowl where they sank among the spinach leaves and the potato peel. She yanked the tie loose on the apron, hitched the strap over her head and let it fall to the floor. She turned her back on the sink and the work surfaces and strode towards the door, but he made no effort to back away.

Almost, she had believed she would be among colleagues. Now she realised she was alone.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll eat first.’

The fish-seller, Tomasso, spoke with the day manager of the pensione, Giuseppe. They had not met before, but in the sparring for mutual contact – for guarantees – it was learned that a cousin of Tomasso had been at middle school with Giuseppe’s niece. Everyone who lived at street level in the city knew that there were times when a man took a grave risk, times when he relied on trust.

He showed the piece of paper. It was a big decision for him to say what he had seen, but old enmities, long-festering slights and past wrongs encouraged him. The fish-seller was rewarded. The day manager had an address on a card filled in by a young Englishman, a point of contact. He had done his bit, played his part, and was assured of virtual anonymity. Tomasso believed he had done right, which was important to him.

Giuseppe did not pay the pizzo. The night manager did. Sometimes it was Giovanni Borelli who came for the small envelope, and sometimes it was the younger son, the little bastard, and once it had been Gabriella Borelli, who had been rude, boorish. First it had been the daughter. Immacolata Borelli had arrived with a pocket calculator and demanded to see the books. She had sat with the owner for an hour in the office at the back. Two men – thugs – had been with her and had loafed in the reception lobby. They had known, the night manager, the day manager and the owner, of a shift in authority in that district and that the Borelli clan was now supreme. There had been photographs in the Cronaca of bodies lying in the streets. The books had been shown to the daughter, and the owner had not considered refusing to pay and informing the police. Immacolata, with her calculator, had decided how much should be paid each month. The day manager was from Genoa, and worked in Naples because his wife demanded to be near her widowed mother. Giuseppe hated the corruption of the city.

He found a number in England from the address given, rang it and steeled himself for what he had to say.

There was the sound of a trapdoor slamming above him, then a bolt’s scrape. The impact pushed air across his hands, but not through the hood covering his head. He was on concrete. Now that the trapdoor was shut, and the air from above was gone, Eddie sensed dampness around him. For a while he lay still. He tried to learn. There were sounds, at first clear, and he thought feet moved immediately beside the trapdoor, then heard low voices, but the footfall and the words were soon muffled, then gone. He was uncertain as to whether he had heard an engine start – the van’s or a smaller, noisier one, like a scooter’s. Silence fell.

The quiet frightened him. It was more intimidating, he thought, to have a curtain without noise draped around him than it had been at the moment of his capture – violence, speed, pain, scrambled, tumbling images and thoughts. The intimidation of the silence was intensified by the hood, the gag, the cuffs, but the rope at his ankles had been untied. He could, after a fashion, relate to his kidnap: nothing like it had happened to him before, obvious, but it did in movies and books. Books didn’t do the darkness and films didn’t do the silence. He could move on his backside, could wriggle forwards, backwards and sideways.

He started to explore.

The concrete floor was not wet but moist. He had been dragged out of the van and had slipped. His head had careered into the bottom of the side hatch and the impact had dazed him, but the hold on him had not slackened. He had heard a door unlocked ahead and had been propelled through it, then down some steps. On the steps he had stumbled again and fallen forwards unable to use his arms to protect his face. The hands gripping him had let him go, and Eddie’s shoulders had taken his weight against the wall, but his nose had bled. He had been held upright in a room, a basement or, more likely, a cellar, and the trapdoor had been lifted and his ankles freed. Hands had held him under the armpits and he had felt his feet dance in a void, like a hanged man’s. He had been lowered into the space and then, as his feet had made contact with concrete, he had been shoved violently sideways so that he collapsed and was prone. Then the trapdoor had been shut. Now he moved, with the grace of damaged reptile, across the floor.

To learn about his surroundings, Eddie had to manoeuvre himself backwards so that his fingers could touch and feel. He made calculations. He reckoned he was in a bunker dug into the earth below a cellar, and that its dimensions were six feet by eight. The sides were of breeze blocks and the mortar holding them was crudely applied. In a corner there were two sacks, heavy-duty plastic and well filled.

Something now was worse than the darkness and the silence. He imagined the hood over his head had once been a pillowcase on a child’s bed. Maybe since then it had been used as a rag to clean floors, windows or lavatory seats. The smells in it were deep in his nostrils. Bad enough not to be able to breathe through his mouth, worse when the passage into his nose was clogged with the hood’s stench. Eddie found he could tilt his back against a wall and wriggle his body downwards while his head and the hood had contact against the roughness of the mortar. The movements eased the hem of the hood upwards. He scratched his shoulders against the barbed edges of the mortar and might have drawn more blood, but the hem was lifted from the nape of his neck, then to the back of his skull and on to the crown. It was important to him that he did this. Since the street, and the slamming of the door behind him, the eye-contact with the fish-seller and the raising of his hands, Eddie had done nothing for himself, had been like a bloody vegetable. He shook his head violently. Rotated it, waggled it. The hood came off. A different air and a different smell were on his face and in his nose.

He thought it a victory. There was no light in the bunker. All he could see now, with the hood off, was a thin outline where the trapdoor sides met the ceiling it was set in, and one pinpoint where there must have been a flaw in one of the trapdoor’s planks. He stood. He couldn’t straighten to his full height – and reckoned the bunker was five feet high. It was a victory that he had shed the hood, and the guys in the house in Dalston would have rated it. A Revenue clerk, a clubland waiter, a ticket seller and a work-shy PhD student would have seen the value of success.

Shortlived, the sense of that victory.

Eddie wanted to pee. He had crawled backwards around the bunker’s walls and found the filled sacks, but no bucket. With his wrists held in the small of his back, he couldn’t drop his zip. He hadn’t wet his trousers since he was five, on a school outing. Also gone, with the sense of victory, was the belief that the guys in Dalston would have the faintest comprehension of being in darkness and feeling the urge to wet their trousers. He slumped.

He could hear nothing – no vehicles, no music, no voices and no sirens. It was as if he had gone off the face of the earth. Fight, be passive or think. Time for Eddie Deacon to face the alternatives and make a choice. Time to wonder why it had happened.

He sat against the sacks, with only the bloody darkness and the bloody silence for company. The bladder pressure grew, and he knew that the fear would return.

It was a gesture of his new-found defiance. Carmine Borelli left his stick propped in the corner inside the doorway. He had swallowed three Nurofen tablets – the strong ones – washing them down with cold water. He knew that Anna would watch him from a high window and he would be tongue-whipped if he failed.

Between the clans that were labelled ‘Camorra’, there was no overall authority, no consensus of leadership. On the island of Sicily, Cosa Nostra groups acknowledged the disciplines imposed by a cupola, a cabinet of principals; there was a predictability and a certainty about the future. Not so in Naples. A clan was dead when power was lost… Now the Borelli clan teetered on the brink of oblivion.

The drugs compensated for his leaving behind his stick. The pain from his rheumatism was controlled. In old age, Carmine watched much daytime television and flipped between the satellite channels – so many dealt with the big animals of the African plains, elephant and lion and buffalo. When their teeth failed and they could no longer forage, or when their muscles and strength failed, or when their eyesight was gone and their keen hearing, the great beasts were pushed aside by the young. Many afternoons he had sat in his chair and watched as an old elephant, lion or buffalo was killed or pushed aside and left to starve. As brutal as Naples. He had shaved closely, and wore a suit with a laundered shirt and a tie. His thick hair was slicked back with gel, and Anna had wiped the dust off his shoes.

He felt himself born again.

He walked down the street where a man had been taken from a bar and shot in the leg, then driven over. Salvatore was a half-pace behind him, while a dozen of the young men who wanted to be enforcers and had tried to find favour with his son, Pasquale, and daughter-in-law, Gabriella, fanned out around him. Carmine wore his suit jacket open, the jacket flapping from his walk, the butt of the pistol in his waistband there to be seen. Salvatore had a fist buried in a deep pocket that bulged, and some of the young men carried wooden staves or pickaxe handles. If he was not on the street and not exercising authority, his clan area would be lost. It would not be gone over a year or six months, but in a day. His right hip hurt in a throbbing ache. To compensate he put more weight on his left knee and experienced stabs of pain there. He kept walking, his smile broad.

Some of the older men gathered in doorways. They had been on the payroll in the early days of power when the city was devastated by bombing, the sewers were fractured, epidemics rife and money was to be made. Now they called the name he had once been given. Then, now, he was ‘Il Camionista’, the Lorry Driver, because he had had the first fleet of trucks on the road, the permit, the petrol and the goods they transported from the Americans. He had skewered his way into so much in those incredible, prosperous days. He had been told, and had believed it, that a third of all cargo landed by the Americans ended up on the stalls of the street traders in Naples, a good proportion of it in the via Forcella: food, clothing, oil. Best of all was the copper wire used for the Allies’ telephone communications – it fetched massive prices: his people cut down the wire before the first connection was made. He acquired good business from funerals. He could arrange, for a price, to summon that ‘successful cousin from Rome whose intellect and wealth enhanced a sad day’, and therefore lifted the prestige of the bereaved family. Nothing had been beyond Carmine Borelli, but it was sixty-five years ago that he had been known as Il Camionista. The younger men looked at him questioningly.

They would have thought: Pasquale Borelli already in gaol, Gabriella Borelli also in gaol, Vincenzo, Giovanni and Silvio in gaol, and the whore of a granddaughter singing to the Palace of Justice. Where was the power? Would the Misso clan take it, or the Contini clan, or would a new boy come out of the shadows? Was the old guard already dead, or moving only in the last spasms? At the cafe, from which a customer had been taken and killed, the owner brought out a small tray of bogus silver with coffee and a brandy aperitif. Carmine drank the coffee first, then the alcohol, and stifled successfully the choke that rose in his throat. Further down the street, a haberdasher who was three days late in payment of his pizzo thrust the envelope into Carmine’s hand, murmured apologies and said he had put in extra. He had been on the street for five or six minutes, and little time was left.

Had the man actually said that Carmine Borelli was an old drunk and useless, fit only to pleasure himself in a chair? Had he? Who had heard him? He had been kept for an hour, to wait and sweat, in a lock-up behind the butcher’s, would have squatted among the bones and offal waiting for disposal. Some had said they had heard him say Carmine Borelli was fit only to take his penis in his own hand. It was enough that a rumour of what the man had said was abroad. Carmine Borelli had not risen to the position of clan leader by clemency and charity. It would be done on the street.

In his time, leading the clan, he had killed, it was estimated, thirty-six men with his own hand, and had ordered the proxy killing of at least another sixty.

It was high risk.

It was about authority and respect. It would be done on the street, in public view, in daylight, so that none could say Carmine Borelli slunk in the shadows. The man was brought out. Carmine recognised him. The man knelt on the pavement. Two of the foot-soldiers produced plastic bags – for garden fertiliser – and held them close to the man’s head. He gibbered. Carmine had known the man’s father, his uncles and his mother’s family. Many said he was an idiot and certifiable. But he shot him. He had not killed for twenty years.

He shot him low in the forehead at a point equidistant between the eyes. Blood spouted but was trapped by the plastic bags. Had Carmine wanted to run, he could not have. The damaged joints in his knees and hips prevented it. Salvatore took the pistol from him and was gone.

He turned his back on the man, who should have been in an asylum and was crumpled on the pavement, and made his way back to the via Forcella. He hoped he had sent a message or he, too, would be on the pavement. He would not give up the clan, would not see it cannibalised. His hand shook from the impact of the pistol when it had fired. He was out of the street by the time he heard the sirens. They would take the corpse to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, then to the mortuary. The police and the carabinieri would come. If he, Carmine Borelli, was named by a witness as the killer, his authority was sand dribbling between his fingers. If the investigators and detectives met the familiar wall of silence, there remained a small chance he could resuscitate the clan… meaningless, if the whore didn’t break with her interrogators.

He stopped at several more shops, small craftsmen’s businesses and showed himself. He thought it the best of fortune that a fool had come from England and had talked the rubbish of love for the whore. By the time he reached his main door, beside the fish-seller’s stall, he would not be able to hide the limp. The whore was the key; the fool was critical. He would go first to the home of a dear and long-standing friend and there he would strip and shower. The fine suit and the shirt would be bagged, and the change of clothes brought for him there by Anna would be neatly laid out. His friend would burn the clothes that carried the residue of the pistol’s firing, his body would be clean of such traces, and then he would go home – after visiting a cafe where many would swear he had spent two hours… if his authority held up. As he walked, Carmine Borelli shook his head. It was so hard to believe that Immacolata was the whore.

She wanted to dance. Orecchia refused and Rossi declined more politely but as firmly. She did not ask Castrolami.

She had had the music up, high volume. Castrolami had pushed his chair back from the table, gone to the radio, turned the volume down and talked of unwelcome complaints from the floor below. They had said she cooked well, that it was a fine meal, and she had thought the praise insincere. She did not dance in Naples, had not danced in London. She was not trained to dance. If she could dance with Orecchia or Rossi, she thought she might dominate whichever man held her.

They had eaten what she had put in front of them, but not had second helpings. It was not disguised: she believed they would have preferred to hit the freezer and do defrosts in the microwave.

She stood up, went round the table, worked her hips and let her hands drop first on Orecchia’s shoulders, then on Rossi’s. Neither reacted. When she was opposite Castrolami, he looked at her. She stared at him and undid an upper button on her blouse. He looked away.

She fell back on temper.

She didn’t wait for them to clear the table of glasses and the cheese plate, she scooped up what she could carry, and made as great a noise as possible by dropping them into the bowl in the sink, on top of the pans she had used for the meat and the pasta, the knives, forks and spoons. She expected them to come running. Their voices were low in the dining room. Immacolata went back for the wine bottle and her glass, then stalked again to the kitchen. There was enough in the bottle to fill her glass: the men had only drunk water. She ran a tap noisily, put the soap in. Everything could, of course, have gone in the dishwasher, but then there would have been no noise, no possibility of reaction. She had noise, not the reaction. She sang, made more noise.

Immacolata washed and stacked.

Songs from Naples – where else could they be from? She only knew songs from that city. It was her life. She heard him wheeze and turned.

‘Tell me how it was for her in the last twenty-four hours of her life…’

‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life.’

He stood in the kitchen doorway. He was not, then, proud of himself. Seldom, if ever, was. It was a job. He couldn’t bring himself to show sympathy or humanity. Had he done so, the emotions would have been fraudulent. The course he took was necessary for the job. He gave nothing of himself to Immacolata Borelli.

She reacted. Was a little drunk. It had not been a strong wine, but she’d put down most of a bottle. She stared hard at him and her lips moved, but no words came.

Castrolami said, ‘I want to know about the last hours of Marianna Rossetti’s life. If you’ve forgotten what you were told I can remind you. Would that be a good idea? Should your memory have failed you, I have a note of what was said to you in the cemetery in Nola. I ask again. Tell me how Marianna Rossetti died, what the leukaemia had done to her, about the contamination. Does your memory need prompting?’

The reaction was not aggression but as if a deep wound had opened, the rawness exposed. There was, he thought, an inner struggle.

‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes,’ Castrolami said. He squeezed it out of her, as if from a tube that needed folding over and pressurising. He heard how the father had spat beside her feet, how her offer of the flowers had been rejected, and she was called a whore. He heard how the mother of her closest friend had used her fingers to rip her blouse and underwear, had kicked her, and she had fallen, crushing the flowers.

‘Don’t gild it. I’m not interested in you, how you felt, what they did to you. I’m interested, Signorina, in the last hours of your friend.’ He said it harshly, and had no regret.

‘Her last days were marked by exhaustion, very tired, very lethargic, no energy…’

He thought she spoke like a machine, and no emotion showed.

‘Then bruises appeared all over her body, but she had not hit herself or been hit. The bruises were there. She was very pale. It was high summer in Nola – hot sunshine – and she was so white, anaemic. She was taken to the doctor. He knew immediately. As soon as he had peered behind her eyes, used that little torch, he made the call to the hospital.’

‘You miss nothing, and you spare yourself nothing. Continue.’

He tested her, her toughness and resolve. He had to strain to hear her, but he didn’t lean forward: he stayed propped against the door jamb. ‘The doctor thought it too urgent for Marianna and her mother to wait for an ambulance. Her mother drove her, and they called her father from work.’

He was told of the fast collapse of the patient, the pain in the skull, the uncontrolled internal bleeding, the neurosurgeon arriving too late, the failed resuscitation.

‘How did she contract the disease that took her life, that left her in her last hours without dignity and peace? How?’

‘Being in the fields, bathing in streams, having gone close to where toxic waste was dumped.’

‘Who dumped the poison?’

He was told that the father of Marianna Rossetti had said that the clan at Nola had, for more than twenty years, paid for the toxic waste to be left in the fields, the orchards and the riverbeds around the town.

‘The question I asked was “Who dumped the poison?” You have not yet answered it.’

He was told that the transportation of the waste from the north was sub-contracted to the Borelli clan in Naples who had an empire of lorries and trucks. Her father had arranged the transportation. Her brother and her mother had banked the money paid for it.

‘The food on your plate, Signorina, was the blood money for the poisoning of your friend. That isn’t a question. It’s a statement.’

She nodded. All the time she had spoken, and he had listened, she had washed plates, knives, forks and glasses. He hadn’t noticed. It was as if they were tied together, bound by what he said and what she said, and all else was shut out.

‘The clothes on your back.’

Again, she nodded, then tipped out the water from the bowl, but did not face him.

‘The classes where you have learned book-keeping, the basics of accountancy, so that you can more successfully launder the cash from poisoning others.’

She peeled off the rubber gloves, threw them into the bowl, then nodded – accepted what he had said.

‘You should know, Signorina, that the Camorra has a profit of three billion euro each year from this trade. That is a vast amount of food, clothes and classes. Cancer rates are up in some categories – liver, colo-rectal, leukaemia, lymphoma – to levels three times that of the rest of Italy. It is the Triangle of Death, Signorina Immacolata. Do you accept responsibility?’

She was staring out of the window. From the little movements of her shoulders, Castrolami thought she might weep. ‘I do.’

‘I care little for the killings in Naples. Bad guy kills bad guy. Excellent. Fewer bad guys to pollute the streets. Marianna Rossetti was not a bad guy. I seldom do speeches, Signorina. This one is about those already dead, those already condemned and those yet to be contaminated, all innocent. A whole district, hundreds of square kilometres, is poisoned and no one knows how to clean that ground and filter that water. For generations to come there will be the misery of the visit to the doctor, the rush to the clinic, the failure to prolong life – and for your like there will be meals on the table, the best clothing on your back and a fat bank account. You confirm to me that you take responsibility?’

She had lifted the glass. Drained it. Held it up so that not a drop of the wine should be left in it. ‘Yes.’

‘And you will see this through?’

‘I will.’

‘Whatever?’

‘Correct.’

He heard the glass fracture. He realised she had crushed it in the palm of her hand. She opened the rubbish bin with the foot-pedal, let the shards fall into it and blood dripped. He thought he’d done well. Theatrical, but acceptable in context. Castrolami’s opinion: it had been necessary to cut away the bullshit in her and break her. Having broken her, he could rebuild her. He thought her stronger now, and focused. He believed she would, as she had said, see it through in the face of whatever was thrown at her.

The policeman stood on the step and the porch light played on his shaven scalp. His suit was crumpled, his shirt was second-day-on and the tie was loosened; he should also have smeared some polish on his shoes – shouldn’t have been there, should have been in Salisbury at County Headquarters, should have been changing into the best suit, clean shirt, best tie and better shoes, should have been focusing on the seminar kicking off that evening: ‘Terrorism – Tackling the Reality of Today’s Threat’. Was, instead, at a bungalow in a village outside Chippenham. The rain was tipping down.

‘We have to look, Mr Deacon, at the actual world – as it is, not as we’d like it to be. Do we have at the moment – I’m just repeating what I’ve already told you and your wife – the resources to look into this, as you would like us to? We do not. It’s a matter of priorities, Mr Deacon – difficult as that may be for you to appreciate – and what you’ve told us doesn’t top the priority ladder. Then there’s the cutbacks. If we could link your son’s disappearance to international terrorism, it’s a different ball game – could probably send an aircraft-carrier down there. Sorry, not appropriate, Mr Deacon… Look, I understand how upset you are, but see it, please, from our viewpoint.’

The father said, ‘I’m sorry if my son’s situation is inconvenient.’

‘I think you’re getting the hang of ours, sir. He’s gone off, your boy, to try to patch up a scene with a girl who walked out on him in London. You get a garbled call, all the language difficulties thrown in, saying your son’s been kidnapped. Who says? You can’t tell us. What’s the source? You don’t know.’

‘I’m probably keeping you,’ the father said evenly.

‘We’ve called the carabinieri – those people in pantomime uniforms – in Naples. They have no report of a kidnap. We’ve not been idle. We’ve called the consulate there and they’ve checked with the police. Nothing heard. I’m being frank with you, sir. It’s about resources and priorities – and also about our pretty desperate relations with Italian law and order.’

‘I’m sure you’ve something more important to be getting on with.’

He saw the brief smile of relief and watched the man scuttle to his car, which was parked in the lane. He checked his watch. It had been twenty-eight minutes of pass-the-buck messing.

From behind him, Betty asked, ‘Arthur, what’s Eddie worth?’

He looked out on to the lane, then the darkened outline of the hedges and fields, hearing the smack of the rain around him. ‘Pretty much everything we have. That’s what Eddie’s worth to us. Not the easiest boy, but the only one we have.’

‘A difficult enough little beggar.’

‘But he’s our son.’

‘Can be infuriating. What do we do?’

‘Can be an utter wretch. I was thinking, top of my head, of going down to Dean’s. Hear what he has to say.’

‘You should. Eddie met him, didn’t he, last time he was here? Had a good talk. A pretty sensible chap. Just troubled… I can’t think, right now, of anyone better – or what else to do.’

He came inside and – as if it was something he should do more often and had forgotten for too long – gave his wife a brush kiss on the cheek. He dialled a number, and spoke to Dean Weymouth’s partner at their home a quarter of a mile up the lane. He wouldn’t have gone near the man without first checking that it was a good time to call. All the village knew Dean Weymouth had bad turns when he came back from the three-month visits to Iraq, and his space was respected – but he had always said the company he worked for was the best: efficient and dedicated.

Arthur Deacon didn’t know where else to go. But it involved his son so he had to go somewhere.

‘Each time I go back, Mr Deacon, it’s worse. But I keep going… Doesn’t make sense, does it? I go back because there’s nothing else. Going back is my way of saying I’m not history, not scrap, not finished and chucked out. I’m a soldier, Special Forces, that family. I have no other skills. I’m diagnosed PTSD – my stress levels go up to the top of the gauge – but I keep going back, have to.’

They were outside, in the wilderness of the untended back garden. Dean Weymouth was happier there than in the house.

‘I’m not accusing anybody, certainly not you, Mr Deacon, but I hear the word is, round here, that I’m “peculiar” or “unpredictable” or “difficult”… maybe just round the twist. People don’t understand “traumatic stress” and don’t see it as a medical affliction, like a worn-out hip or a hernia. They cross the street, pretend to look anywhere else, find excuses not to talk. You’re almost crying on the Black Dog days for someone to talk to – but people haven’t the time or the inclination.’

He wore only a T-shirt on his upper body and it was short-sleeved. The rain ran down the decorative lines of his tattoos, and was in his cropped hair. Mr Deacon had on an anorak and a cap. Dean Weymouth spoke softly and without rancour, in a flat, almost lifeless monotone.

‘All right, wrong. Most people haven’t. Your boy, your Eddie, he did, he made time. We didn’t talk stress, trauma, disorder. He let me ramble on down by the river – only last Sunday – about that new weed that’s taking over on the banks, and we saw the kingfisher fly, and I told him about the fish in there and… It was nothing talk. Would have bored a saint half to death. He gave me time, not many do. It was precious.’

He lit a cigarette. It took three matches because of the shake in his hands – he remembered his hands hadn’t shaken when he’d been by the river and given time. The trembling was always bad when the end of a home leave was in sight.

‘I’m going back in a couple of weeks. What spooks us most there is the thought of getting lifted – being taken. It’s like your worst nightmare but ratcheted up. We do close protection, usually of civilian experts. We have to take them to work. Could be lifted in the office, hoods in bogus police uniforms, or blocked in on the road and not able to shoot a way out of it. We know about kidnapping. It scares the shit out of us. If that’s happened to your boy, Mr Deacon, in Naples, then I’m sincerely sorry.’

He threw the cigarette on to the uncut grass.

‘There’s a man who works for our company. I’ve not met him. He’s a sort of freelancer and gets hired out to corporations and governments, and to people with big bank balances. I don’t know if we can fix something. We say, out in Baghdad, that if ever we’re lifted, we’d pray this guy isn’t on another assignment, that he’s sent for. He has a gold-plated reputation – a nose for what to do and what angle to come in from… but I’ve not met him. Have to see what’s possible.’

The rain was across the face of the father and dripped off the cap’s peak. In the half-light from the kitchen window he couldn’t tell whether it was only the rain on his cheeks or tears too.

‘I’m going to make a call for you. It’s the best shout I can do. Your boy had time for me. I’ll let you know.’

His hand was gripped, held tight, as if Dean Weymouth was a lifeline.

‘I hear what you say, Dean. My dad, and your dad, my mother and your mother – just the same – and worried sick as yours and mine would be. To expect help from the boys in blue, well, that’s asking too much. Yes, I’ll ring. Are you resting up? Good to hear it. Look after yourself, and we’ll see you before you go south again.’

He was Roderick Johnstone. He opened a file on the screen of his computer. The abbreviation of his first name, and an exchange of one letter gave ‘Ruddy’. There was a duck with that name. He was known therefore, to his face and his back as ‘Duck’ and had been since school. Most casual observers of Duck rated him stereotypical: a mane of blond hair, a public-school education but few academic qualifications, a commission via the Royal Military Academy into a good cavalry regiment, a middling career, then into the outside civilian world, a pinstripe suit and a Mayfair office. Such observers would badly have misread the man. He had formed a private security company, had drawn around him a kernel of experienced men, mostly with the hallowed Special Forces background, had shown rare business acumen and had landed major contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did protection of property and personnel, and used UK nationals from the Regiment at Hereford, the Squadron at Poole and from the Parachute Regiment. He had built a reputation for the delivery of what he promised, value for cash and discretion. His payroll was small, but he was expensive, and clients queued for his services. Among illustrious clients, among those requiring total anonymity, was the Central Intelligence Agency, and Duck’s email in-box was filled with ‘sincerest thanks’ and ‘deepest gratitude’ and ‘top to bottom appreciation from those inside the loop here’, and on his payroll there was a hostage co-ordinator. He was searching that file.

Why did Duck bother with a matter so seemingly trivial?

Where were the rewards?

Would he involve himself in something so lacking in fact and intelligence?

There was about Duck a quirk of anarchy that had made him a second-rate soldier and an alpha-class business operator. He liked to say that ‘ordinary’ people used the same hand, same paper, same technique to clean their backsides as the self-appointed elite, and those that his teams protected were ‘ordinary’ – ordinary accountants, ordinary telecom engineers, ordinary electricity-supply managers, ordinary sewage-treatment technicians, ordinary advisers on hospital management – and his teams, too, were made up of ordinary people, as Dean Weymouth was, and had ordinary parents and…

Duck’s care for men such as Dean Weymouth, the men on whose backs – and guts – the company prospered, was utterly sincere. He valued them, listened to them and tried damned hard to stay loyal to them. His own company had not – thanking the good Lord – had an employee kidnapped. He’d met other CEOs, whose firms had. He understood the awfulness of it, and he had on the books a bloody good man. The file told him of a link that, sort of, confirmed the matter, something in his man’s past that would open Italian doors and guarantee co-operation of a sort. He knew what effect a kidnapping had on a family and an employer. There, but for God’s grace. Because Dean Weymouth had called him, he was – damn near – obliged to get involved.

He lifted the telephone again and dialled the number given him by the one-time Royal Marine.

‘Mrs Deacon? Hello. I’m Roddy Johnstone, but everyone calls me Duck. Dean Weymouth has just spoken to me, and explained your problem. Up front, Ground Force Security makes big money from governments, which sort of underwrites the costs when we deal with individuals. I want you to tell me what you know of your son’s situation – all the names and locations – because I might have someone who can help you. If your fears are founded, time is always against us so we should push on. But it’s your decision… Right, Mrs Deacon, begin at the beginning…’

Lukas ran. Just when the light had failed over the rooftops, he had come back to his apartment and unlocked the door. Dark in the hallway, and before he had switched on the ceiling light, he had seen the flashing red bulb on the telephone. He ran for the Solferino Metro station.

At the airport he would get downloads, but important now was speed and getting there. The bag, always packed with the few things he needed, was high on his shoulder. Pedestrians darted out of his path, as if realising that when a grown man ran at that speed he wouldn’t swerve to avoid collision. He hurried because he didn’t acknowledge complacency, and knew it travelled alongside failure. Lukas had been at Waco.

‘Where the shit/the fuck/the hell is this place – Waco?’ had been the chorus on the flight down from Andrews. They had half emptied the stores huts at the Bureau’s place in Quantico, among the forests, where the HRTs sat and waited for the call. The beepers had gone and the Hostage Rescue Team had scrambled, and filled more than one C-141 could carry. They believed there – except for the few who had been at Ruby Ridge – that they were the ‘invincibles’ and were given missions beyond the capabilities of other SWAT groups. Seven weeks at Waco, endless books read, stuck behind a Barrett. 5 calibre sniper rifle with 3000 feet per second muzzle velocity and a high hit probability at 1000 yards… and watching from a distance the fuck-up to end all fuck-ups, so many children killed in the fire, no medals, only inquests, and complacency stripped bare.

He went down the steps into the Metro station, and was still running.

Most had quit after Waco rather than face the interrogations, under subpoena, of the Office of Professional Responsibility. New snipers were brought into new teams. He would have quit if not for the creation of a Critical Incident Response Team, when the negotiators, profilers and Hostage Rescue heroes had to gather in the same room, even had to talk to each other. A new world and a new style of action, with a co-ordinator sitting at the end of a CIRT table. The job of the co-ordinator was to weigh the input of the negotiator, hear the profiler’s analysis, listen to the fears and demands of the ‘stormers’, then make a decision and live with it. He liked the job. Only decent thing that had come out of Waco, the fire and the deaths was the creation of the job, its culture and the responsibility that went with it.

He forced his way on to a train as the doors closed.

*

He had had to break off. He had cursed when his mobile had rung. Always – Castrolami’s belief – it rang at the least opportune moment. She was talking well. He would have kept her going all through the evening, changed tapes and not let her off the hook.

He took a call from Naples, from the palace, the personal assistant to the prosecutor.

Confused… a boy, English, aged twenty-seven, an adult-student English teacher, reported kidnapped, believed to be taken from via Forcella, named as Eddie Deacon. ‘What has that to do with me?’ Impatience shouldered out politeness.

An investigator from a private commercial security firm was flying tonight to Rome on behalf of the family, and would wish to see, at the start of the working day, Mario Castrolami.

‘Tell him and whoever volunteered me to get lost. No possibility of me involving myself.’

The parents of the boy, Castrolami was told, had reported that their son had gone to Naples to find his girlfriend.

‘I feel like my knees are weak, that I could throw up, because I know what you’ll tell me. Let me have it. What’s her name?’

He heard it.

‘Mother of Jesu…’ Castrolami told the assistant where he would be in the morning, at the start of the working day, and rang off. He murmured, to himself, ‘What have I done to deserve that?’

He went back into the living room. He could mask reactions. It might have been his wife who had called with news of a new dress purchased in faraway Milan, or the administration department at the piazza Dante barracks with confirmation of his annual leave dates near to the Christmas holiday. He smiled thinly, switched the tape-recorder back on and prompted Immacolata Borelli on her father’s involvement with City Hall. She started again, as if a tap had been turned on.

Why had he not believed she would lie to him? Why had she lied? He felt no sympathy for the boy, for her, and he let her talk without interruption about City Hall, then give the names of national politicians, the location of meetings, the dates. In the morning he would learn and then he would confront her. He took it badly that she had lied to him about a boy.

He was kicked in the face. That was first, then kicks to the chest and the small of his back. Eddie tried to curl himself into the foetal position for protection, and succeeded well enough for more kicks to find his upper arms and wrists where the handcuffs were, but not to reach the organs that would hurt more. His head was lifted, then punches were thrown at him. He realised the crime.

Feet had approached, the trapdoor had been lifted. Light had cascaded into the bunker but had not reached right into the corner recess next to the filled sacks. He had seen the man clearly, the same face as had been on the street, that of the man who had taken him. The man would have realised the hood was off and that he was stared at. Eddie hadn’t really absorbed the face on the street, but now he’d had a good clean sight of him. It was when he was punched that he wet himself – all those bloody hours of lying on his side or sitting, clamping his muscles overtime and calling for will-power, wasted effort. When the punch went in he could hold back no longer. Could have cried then. He felt the heat of the urine and its stream on his leg, then the clamminess of his trousers. It was degradation, learned hard.

More blood in his mouth, swallowing it, unable to cough properly because of the sagging tape, and choking.

He felt a new emotion. Eddie Deacon, ‘steady Eddie’, easygoing and friend to almost everybody, little riled him and not much exhilarated him: he hated. He had, now, a true sense of loathing. Novel. He took in all the features of the face. Didn’t think in terms of a police station line-up, or of having a crowbar in his hand, but reckoned he needed to get that face into his mind, acid-etch it there. He’d coughed and taken that blood down, and the heat was gone from the urine on his thighs. He could have just felt miserable and sorry for himself.

The hood was put on. He was back inside the small world, hemmed in by the material and the cuffs, the sodden trousers and his ankles were again roped and he was kicked some more. The kick went into the stomach. The force made him piss more. He didn’t cry out.

No moan, no cry, no scream.

He wondered if the memory of faces, and the hope of a judicial process had kept those people alive in the camps – they’d done that at school, German extermination camps, and in Berlin he’d seen the plaque that marked where the railway station was from which the Jews were shipped, and he’d been on Prinz Albrechtstrasse where they had excavated the holding cells used by the Gestapo. He wouldn’t forget that face.

Or the voice.

‘I speak it, a little, English. You fuck the whore, Immacolata. You come here to find Immacolata. Immacolata is with police. Immacolata is infame. Immacolata betrays her family. If she likes again to fuck with you, she will leave the police. To encourage her to leave the police, we send perhaps an ear, orecchio, perhaps a finger, dito, perhaps a hand, mano, perhaps we must send the pene – and she will recognise it as from you. Did you not know who was Immacolata, who was her family? Did you not know what she did? She will leave the police or we send the ear, the finger, the hand, the pene, then all of you but not breathing. I think I speak English very good. She will save you or she will kill you. It is her choice. Not another person will save you.’

He heard the man grunt as he levered his way up and out through the trapdoor, then it was closed. He heard the footsteps retreat. Bloody hell. What to think about? Sort of put pissing his pants in the background. He sensed all of them – his ear tingled, his finger scratched his palm and his penis was still wet, but shrunken.

He hated the man. He hoped the hate would give him strength.

Lukas walked out of the terminus where the airport bus had dumped him. The warm night air hit him after the cool of the vehicle, and he felt then the little lift in his step, the stretch of his stride, and reckoned the mission launched – always did feel good then. Afterwards was bad, when he had the name and face of a target, a threat level to assess. Then the hard times came. As yet, walking briskly, he was not burdened by the responsibility of a human life in his hand, but when he thought like that, Lukas either stubbed a toe on the kerb, spat, or kicked his ankle bone. He crossed a couple of dark streets, wove like a native through the traffic, was in the immigrant quarter – north African, west African, east African – predictable alongside a railway hub. He passed a telephone bar, where calls could be made to Mogadishu, Lagos or Algiers, and a cafe where guys sipped soft drinks and had at their feet the mountains of unsold handbags they’d try with again the next day. A trolley bus went up the street, rolled and rattled. There was a narrow door into the pensione. He was told by the guy behind the desk that a single room was booked for him, the bill open-dated and prepaid. He didn’t bother with the lift and climbed two flights of stairs.

The room was fine: a television he didn’t switch on, a mini-bar he didn’t open, an air-conditioner going like a tank’s engine and the noise of the street coming through a double-glazed window. It was the way Lukas liked it, the sort of place where he was comfortable. Why was he there? It confirmed he was still capable, not washed up, not yesterday’s creature, that he wouldn’t hesitate to accept an invitation to travel. It was why he was there, and it went unshared.

He hooked power into his laptop, wired into his mobile, and information cascaded through to him. He started out on the first steps of learning about Edmund ‘Eddie’ Deacon, and about a girl, and with each page passing on the screen, so the deadweight, the responsibility, settled heavier. Nothing ever changed. She looked a pretty girl, and he looked an ordinary boy – nothing was different from every other time – but the scorpion sting was at the end. Last page up was the sitrep profile on Immacolata Borelli – who she was, what she did, where she was. A Camorra-clan girl, a money-washer, now a traitor to her own, was what the kid had gone looking to find.

In his career, Lukas thought, there had been worse situations, but not many. He didn’t know when he’d next get any rest, so he killed the laptop, stripped, and pretty soon was asleep.

Gerald Seymour

The Collaborator