The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  In her room, she lay on her bed. She did not weep. She stared at the ceiling, the lightbulb and the cobweb draped off the shade and didn’t think of the boy who had made her laugh. There was music playing in the living room and traffic outside in the street, voices raised in the apartment above and a baby screaming below. They meant nothing to her and she shut them out, but she couldn’t escape from the raised bundle, the spoken savagery and cruelty of death.

  The young man found his maresciallo in a bar to the right side of the piazza in front of the town’s cathedral. He was from the Udine region in the far north-east, where there were rolling hills and valleys, civilisation and cleanliness. He would have hated Nola, his first posting after training for induction into the carabinieri, had it not been for the gruff kindness of his commanding officer. He still wore the suit that had been suitable for the funeral service and the burial, but his dark glasses were high now on his hair.

  He waited until he was waved to a chair, then sat and handed the maresciallo the plastic folder he had prepared. A waiter approached. He ordered Coca-Cola. The folder, with the name on it of Marianna Rossetti and that day’s date, was opened. His report covered five closely typed pages. He knew that, two days before, the maresciallo had met with the girl’s father and was aware of the circumstances and cause of the girl’s death. He himself had been ordered to the basilica and the cemetery to watch, listen – it had been explained to him that the family’s emotions ran high. Also, he knew that a researcher at the hospital had published material in the foreign-language edition of the Lancet Oncology under a title that referred to il triangolo della morte, and that in the secure archive section of the barracks there was a small mountain of files dealing with the area’s contamination. The maresciallo had read the first two pages, and he sat in silence. The waiter brought his Coca-Cola, with an espresso and a large measure of Stock brandy. He had known the maresciallo always spent time here in the evening and that he could be certain of finding him. He tried to read the other man’s face, but saw nothing. He had hoped for praise.

  The question was as blunt as it was unexpected: ‘Have you drunk alcohol tonight?’

  And he had believed that praise was due. The father and mother of the deceased had made no attempt to lower their voices so he had heard them crystal clear. Within minutes what they had said was written in his notebook as virtual verbatim. He had the accusation, the condemnation and the name. An older man, jaundiced and cynical, from long service with the Arma – what the carabinieri called themselves – might have hung back, lounged against a distant headstone, smoked a quiet cheroot and reflected on what a shit place Nola was. The young man had made certain he was close enough to hear every word and to see the violence shown towards the woman. He accepted that he would not be praised.

  ‘No. I haven’t had a drink for three—’

  He was interrupted. The report was in the folder, which was pushed back across the table. The maresciallo had a mobile and was scrolling, then making a connection. The young man was shown his superior’s back as a call was made. He couldn’t hear what was said. The chair scraped as the maresciallo turned to him.

  ‘If you haven’t had a drink, you can drive to Naples. There’s a barracks at piazza Dante. You’re expected.’

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My report – is it useful?’

  The maresciallo swirled the coffee, drank it, then some brandy, and coughed. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps, if you want praise, you should ask the officer I’m sending you to. My old mother does jigsaw puzzles to pass her time, and tells me that discovering where one piece fits will solve the rest. There may be a thousand pieces on the tray in front of her, but slotting one piece into its home makes the rest easy. I can’t say whether or not what you have told me is that one piece. Twenty-five years ago I was at the training college in Campobasso with Mario Castrolami, who’s waiting for you at the piazza Dante. He will decide whether or not you’ve helped to solve the puzzle or made it more difficult.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He had the folder under his arm as he walked to the door. In the glass he saw the maresciallo wave to the waiter, who poured another measure of Stock. He went out into the late evening and felt the warmth on his face. He didn’t know whether or not he had learned something useful that day. He started his car and drove towards Naples. He wouldn’t be there, he estimated, before eleven, and wondered what sort of investigator was still at his desk at that time, and what a physical and verbal attack on a young woman at a funeral might mean.

  ‘Fucking brilliant.’

  He turned the third page, and started on the fourth. He saw, from the corner of his eye, the carabinieri recruit, the kid just off the training course, flush with pleasure.

  ‘Not you. You want a lecture? I’ll give you one. If you stand against the power of the Camorra clans, you’ll have behind you tens of thousands of uniformed men. But still, I think, you’ll hesitate. Luigi Rossetti – who stands behind him? Only his wife. But he had the courage, alone, to stand up against the weasel girl from a clan family. All you’ve done is listen. Don’t think you have the courage of the Rossetti parents. Did the weasel swear at them when they attacked her?’

  ‘She said nothing.’

  ‘Did she challenge them? Do I need to offer protection to the parents? Can he go back to teaching, she to her work? Their courage was amazing, but should they spend the rest of their days in hiding? Are they dead already? What did you read on her face?’

  ‘Humiliation.’

  Castrolami finished reading and shuffled the pages, straightening them. He chuckled, but without mirth. ‘Understand. This weasel is the daughter of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli, the sister of Vincenzo and—’

  The recruit interrupted him, which very few did. ‘It was humiliation. Also, she’s a member of the clan, yes, but also a friend of Marianna Rossetti. She came to Marianna Rossetti’s funeral and brought flowers. The Rossetti family have no connection – my maresciallo is definite on this – with the Camorra inside Nola or beyond it. This friendship crossed a divide.’

  The pencil had a blunt tip and was chewed at the other end. Castrolami rapped it on his desk, found a small place, a few centimetres square, clear of papers and beat a tattoo. His forehead was cut with a frown. Mario Castrolami could accept preconceptions and believe them, but when he was confronted with a superior argument he could ditch them. The Borelli girl had been at the funeral.

  ‘It’s rare, but not unknown, for a member of a clan to have a friendship with someone outside it.’

  ‘She didn’t fight back. She was shamed.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Is it useful?’

  On the desk, files and folders made foothills and mountains. Coffee had sustained him through the evening. Around his desk, against the walls, there were filing cabinets, some locked and others open, showing squashed-in paper. There were more files at his feet, and on the bookshelves that flanked the door. He could have pointed to them or to the chart Sellotaped to the wall on the right of the door, which listed the clans and the districts they fed off, with lines running between them, blue to show alliances and red to show feuds, or to the montage of mug-shots on a board that hung to the left of the door, a hundred faces, men and women, categorised as major organised-crime players. He could have waved his arms theatrically to demonstrate the scale of the war in which he was a foot-soldier, the numbers of the enemy, and spoken of a campaign without end. Had he done so, he thought he would have cheapened himself.

  ‘In a year or two, what you’ve brought me may prove important – or in a week. I don’t know… The problem is that you didn’t see Immacolata Borelli arrive, and you don’t know how she left. Where did she come from? What was her destination? You’ve given me a little, which is tantalising… Thank you.’

  Alone again, he felt excited, which was unusual for him, after twenty-five years with the Arma, and seventeen in the ROS. But it was there, unmistakable. He
sank down from his chair, was on hands and knees, and his stomach sagged as he burrowed for the file that held her photograph. When he found it and extracted the photograph – taken in Forcella by a long-lens surveillance camera – he stared at it. Could a woman from that family show remorse and be humiliated by the death of a friend? He gazed at the photograph and searched for an answer.

  Time ebbed. Eddie was slumped on the bed.

  Before getting back to his room, he had sat for three hours in the restaurant on the left side, going up, of Kingsland high street. Opposite him there had been an empty chair and a laid place that went unused.

  The heels of his trainers left smears on the coverlet. Her face would have puckered, a frown wrinkling her forehead, if she had been there to see them. She was not. Her picture, straight ahead of him, had pride of place on the wall facing the bed. The landlord’s offering, a Victorian artist’s effort at cattle grazing beside the Thames, was out of sight behind the wardrobe, Mac’s picture in its place. She was in the Mall, in front of the Palace, smiling, her hair thrown back, T-shirt strained, and the sun was on her. It was the best photograph he had of her, so he’d taken the memory stick to the camera shop the Punjabis ran, in Dalston Lane, where they’d blown it up to thirty inches by twenty. The picture was stuck to the wall – if it was taken down the paper would come with it. He thought it was there in perpetuity and had come to believe that he and Mac were in it for the long term.

  The Afghan place, which did a wonderful lamb dish, was their favourite, and they could make the food last for ever, as they gazed into each other’s eyes and held hands across the table. It was as if they belonged in the place, and the people who ran it – from Jalalabad – welcomed them with an enthusiasm that lifted the soul. All the time he had sat there he had waited for her to push the door wide and come in, panting, then hang on his neck to whisper apologies and murmur some excuse. She’d have kissed his lips and he’d have kissed hers and… He had studied the menu as a break from watching the door – not that he needed to because he knew it by heart. He hadn’t ordered food for one, hadn’t even ordered a drink. He hadn’t believed she wouldn’t come.

  To the left of the photograph was the door to his room, a flimsy dressing-gown – Mac’s – hanging on it. She would have complained loudly, in a jumble of Italian and English, if she had seen the smears on the coverlet, because it was his and her bed when she slipped into his little home. Only one room, only one window overlooking an overgrown back garden, then another row of houses, chimneys and greyness. The rain had fallen more heavily as the evening had gone by and now it was spattering the window panes. They had made love on that bed, sometimes fast, sometimes noisy, sometimes slow and quiet. They had first been on it after their second meeting… not long then, maybe twenty minutes, until she’d said she had ‘to get back’, and had wandered over his threadbare carpet, retrieving the scattered, sodden clothes, and had refused to let him walk her to her front door. It had been the happiest two months in the life of Eddie Deacon… He lay on his bed and hated the world.

  He’d left the restaurant after three hours because his was the only table with a spare place and two couples were waiting. The owners had seemed to sympathise, but had made clear that his love life was his concern and their priority was to seat one of the waiting couples. He had shambled out, and for a while he hadn’t noticed that the rain was persistent, driving. The misery had eaten into him. Nobody who knew him, who saw him with Mac, could believe that Eddie Deacon had landed a girl like her. Dear old Eddie, ‘steady Eddie’, one of thousands who drifted along and didn’t stand out, who was better than bloody ordinary but who didn’t bother to be exceptional, had a girl on his arm who was dramatic, impressive, head-turning… and a bloody good shag. He had shuffled home and the rain had dribbled down his face, and he’d been within a hair’s breadth of being knocked over crossing a road because hadn’t seen the van coming. He hadn’t known such love or such unhappiness.

  On that bed, her still astride him and him still inside her, his sweat running with hers, her hair in his face, his lips brushing the cherrystone nipples, two evenings ago, they had fixed the rendezvous time and place. Always, in the two months since the park-bench meeting beside the Serpentine, she had been on time for their meetings. There were magazines on the floor, dropped haphazardly or chucked, Espresso and Oggi, fashion magazines and home-refurbishment magazines, a pile of her textbooks, dictionaries and notepads. He liked it best when she wore the dressing-gown, nothing else, and sat cross-legged on the bed, close to him, and they worked on her English – he liked every damn thing about her. It was the first and only time she had failed to turn up.

  He didn’t have an address for her, only a sight of a street corner, no mobile number. It hadn’t mattered before because she was always where she said she would be… He thought a disaster must have struck her, couldn’t think of anything else. It hurt Eddie so much that Mac wasn’t there… and he realised how little he knew of her, how much had been kept from him. Questions deflected. Subjects changed. He could have bloody well wept. She was smiling at him from the photograph, the dressing-gown hanging loose on the hook… Damned if he’d lose her.

  He stood by the hut. The sun teetered at the top of the treeline, and was in his eyes. It was hard for him to see. Behind the open door of the hut, at his back, he heard crackling radio connections. He had a little Spanish, picked up on three visits here, so if he had strained and concentrated he would have had definitive answers to the two outstanding questions: how many were kicking and how many were not? He stared out over the trees and thought he heard the first sounds of a Huey’s engine and the gentle chop of the rotors. When the bird landed and they spilled out he would know for sure how many were kicking and how many were not. He would know, also, whether the advice he had given to the captain was sound or horseshit. He lit another cigarette – he’d worked through the best part of a carton since the team had been lifted on to the plateau and set down in the clearing close to the hut.

  His name was called. ‘They are coming, Lukas. Two minutes, and they will be down.’

  He raised a hand in acknowledgement and ash fell from his cigarette on to his boot.

  In the middle of the plateau, a soldier in combat gear took something from his webbing belt, arced an arm back, then tossed whatever it was. When it landed bright orange smoke burst from it, climbed and was shifted by the light wind, masking the sun. The noise of the helicopter was louder. He heard, behind him, the exodus from the hut and the communications. The captain reached him, took the cigarette from between his fingers, dragged hard on it twice, then replaced it. The captain was Pablo – probably a good man, probably an honest one. He couldn’t have said how many of the others, those who had gone into the jungle or manned the communications nets, were good and honest. Too often a call was made, satphone, mobile or landline, or a message sent, and the storm squad found only a ‘dry house’, which had been used to hold some wretch but from which he had been shifted out. Pablo had gone past him and was yelling orders. Soldiers came off their asses and carried folded stretchers towards the orange smoke. He told himself it meant nothing. It was standard operating procedure.

  The Huey came in low, doing a contour run over the canopy.

  Pablo stopped, turned, shouted: ‘Are you coming forward, Lukas, or staying back?’

  He indicated, two hands up, that he was standing his ground. He dropped the cigarette, ground it out under his boot and lit another. He was not in an army so didn’t wear a uniform. He had on a heavy wool blue shirt that was buttoned at the cuffs and kept him warm enough against the chill at this time of year and at this height above sea level. His trousers were heavy-duty corduroy, dun-coloured. His boots were not military but of the brown leather used by hikers, and hitched to one shoulder was a rucksack that held his spare socks, underclothes, washbag and the notepad laptop.

  The Huey made the approach. Usual for it to do a circle of a touch-down point, give the flier a chance to check the ground,
but it came straight in.

  If the bird came straight in, and was dropping the last few feet over the dispersed orange smoke, it didn’t mean his advice had been wrong. He gave the advice as best he could and sometimes the corks popped and sometimes the bottles stayed in their boxes. His advice, offered to the captain, given what he knew, given the location where the poor bastards were held and the near impossibility of maintaining secrecy, had been to make the strike. The Huey landed heavily on the skids, bounced and settled.

  The light hit the bird’s camouflage-painted bodywork and he had a good view inside the door, which was slid back. The hatch machine-gunner jumped down and went up to his thighs in the long grass, which made more room for the soldiers with the stretchers to pass them inside. Three were handed up. If, at that moment, it was a disappointment to him that three were needed, he didn’t show it. His feelings of disappointment or elation, his thoughts, were not for sharing. They wouldn’t be FARC guys, wounded enemy, on the stretchers: they’d have been tipped out. Two of the stretchers were lifted down, the orderlies holding drips high above them, the bearers hurrying as best they could. A doctor in a pristine uniform was between the stretchers and examining the occupants on the move. The wounded would be stabilised, then casevaced: it was the way things were done.

  He saw the third stretcher lifted down, no drip. The body-bag rolled on the canvas as it was lowered.

  The doctor came past him. ‘They were spotted when they were almost on target, but it gave away the critical last thirty seconds. It’s what it depends on – success, failure. I think, Lukas, it’s neither… I hope to save them.’