The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  The secretary handed him coffee, a thimble cup. Castrolami hitched off his jacket, the pistol in his waist holster bouncing on his hip, and loosened his tie. He would have described the prosecutor as neat, like a manicured garden; his shirt was freshly laundered and his shave that morning had been close enough to hold the stubble at bay. A man who cared for himself. The deputy, tall and angular, was also tidy for a man now into the thirteenth hour of his day. The liaison officer was not in uniform but wore a well-cut jacket of expensive Scottish material. The women, too, did not show the day’s pressures, had probably changed in mid-afternoon… There was no fragrance about Castrolami.

  A tiny cassette was loaded into a Dictaphone and a button depressed. He realised the machine had been activated late, after the call had been taken. ‘… him, I’m Immacolata Borelli… Do not interrupt me, Dottore… I am calling you from London, but I wish to return to Italy. It is my intention to collaborate… By saying that to you on the telephone, I put at risk my life… More important, I put at risk the possibilities of a successful prosecution of my family… I require immunity, and an officer who is trusted by yourself should meet me in the Hackney Downs park, in east London, and I will come to a bench at nine in the morning, London time, and will wait for one hour. He should bring with him a warrant for the arrest and extradition of my brother Vincenzo. Castrolami is an officer of the ROS whom my father respected. You should send him. You hold my life, Dottore. You hold also the prospect of the conviction of my family, the Borelli clan… Good night, Dottore.’

  There was a click, then silence.

  He looked at the photograph on the screen. Castrolami saw the haughtiness that verged on arrogance, that in the surveillance still she wore ‘ordinary’ clothes, and small, ‘ordinary’ trinkets, no lipstick or other makeup and her hair was tousled. He did not know when this photograph had been obtained, whether she had been on her way to terrify a shopkeeper who was late in filling the little envelope with twenty or twenty-five per cent of his takings, or to a meeting with the general manager of a cement-production company to tell him that her price should be accepted or none of his mixer fleet would reach the road again… The voice on the phone had made a play of being decisive and in control. He thought Immacolata Borelli had failed, was in bits, near to physical and mental collapse.

  ‘What is she worth?’ the deputy prosecutor asked.

  Castrolami assumed he knew the response he would get, but needed confirmation of the obvious, and gave it him. His breathing had steadied and he lit his own cigarette from a heavyweight Marlboro lighter an American had given him. With the flame extinguished, he said, ‘Only a blood member of a family has a near to complete knowledge of its affairs.’

  ‘With her help, what might we achieve?’ the prosecutor queried.

  He thought the prosecutor the best and most dedicated under whom he had worked in Naples. The man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s clan structure and the principal players. He imagined that the call had come during a meeting, when the day was winding down and perhaps a whisky bottle had been produced, and that it had exploded among them, a shellburst, fazing them. He thought he understood. ‘We could close down the clan. The whole mass of them would go into the net.’

  The liaison officer ground out his cigarette, scratched the bald crown of his head, murmured, ‘She telephoned from London. What happened there for her to attack her family with such venom? I find none of it credible.’

  Castrolami told them of the young man who had come to his office late the previous evening, the barbarity of a street fight in a cemetery. His words painted a picture of a family’s controlled grief melded with aggression, and their courage. He said, ‘She could have reacted in two ways. She might have condemned that family to death for the insult, or crumpled under a burden of self-disgust. It’s happened before but not often. They feel overwhelming shame… Can you get the warrant in the time?’

  He was told that the paperwork would be ready in an hour, that it had been on file, then given a flight number and a departure time. He preached the need for secrecy, which was accepted. He was told who would meet his flight in London, but the individual would be outside the loop of confidences. In that hour he could have gone back to his office in the barracks on the piazza Dante and packed a travel bag – spare shirt, singlet, socks and toilet bag – but he did not. He slumped into a chair, which squealed under the impact of his hundred-plus kilos. He wondered how she would be and whether she would greet him as an ally or an enemy. Then he swept an armful of files from the table and started to gut them, learning the latest intelligence, sparse and hearsay, on a clan now stalked by treachery, and he was smiling. He tried to bring life, animation, to the typescripts, flesh and blood to the photographs. He thought he walked with them.

  Pasquale Borelli went to the recreation hall. He was fifty-five, slight and bald, with a prominent nose and a scarred head. He was allowed one hour in the hall per day under the terms of the pena dura. He was a strict-regime prisoner, under the terms of the Article 41 bis legislation, had no access to a mobile telephone, few and heavily supervised visits, little time in the company of fellow inmates. He was held in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Novara in the north; the city was near Turin and Milan, astride the route from Genoa into Switzerland. It was a long way from his home in Naples, hundreds of kilometres, and the authorities had intended that his incarceration there would sever his links with the clan he had dominated for two decades. Their intention was unfulfilled – a prison officer carried out messages written on cigarette papers. He still controlled an empire that was worth, perhaps, a half-billion euros. He awaited trial, and the chance of him enjoying freedom again was small, but he was optimistic that the evidence and testimony lodged against him could be challenged. He had to believe that no further denunciations would cloud his horizon. For an hour he would play pool in the hall; the table, of course, would be occupied when the officer unlocked the last barred gate, but a prisoner would immediately give up his place for Pasquale Borelli. In his cell he had a photograph of his daughter – not his wife. He loved her deeply, his principessa.

  Gabriella Borelli was six years younger than her husband. Since his arrest, when he had been dragged out of the underground bunker by the ROS bastards, she had been undisputed in her leadership of the clan. They had been married for thirty-two years, since she, at seventeen, was little more than a child, but decisions inside the core of the clan had always been taken after her advice had been heard. Now she was a latitanta, and her continued liberty depended on her moving from safe-house to safe-house, a network of covert addresses. As a fugitive from justice, she was unable to utilise publicly the vast wealth the family had accumulated. Since her husband had been taken and the flight of her eldest son, she had won respect from other clan leaders. It had come from her clear-headed ability to strike deals, open up new markets and act with cold ruthlessness when such was required. She was feared. She was a small woman, petite, dark-haired, and well kept for her forty-nine years, but she wasn’t out to look for a new dress, as she would have liked, but to attend a meeting. She was an anonymous figure in the narrow streets, walking briskly and carrying an old shopping bag. She missed having the strengths and certainties of her eldest son close to her, but rarely thought of her daughter.

  Vincenzo was in his thirty-second year, the eldest, and he was eating a pizza in a trattoria off Hackney’s Mare Street. He always had the Margherita, with mozzarella, tomato and basil – the colours, white, red and green, were those of his country’s flag. He was with friends, young men from the fringe of the clan, and together they dreamed of a day when they could return to the city and eat the best pizza from the via Duomo, the via Forcella or the via Ettore Bellini. He would go back. He would take authority from his mother. He would not be able to drive a Ferrari, wear Armani suits or have a penthouse apartment overlooking the Golfo di Napoli, but he would have power, and he would be careful not to leave a trail from himself to a killing hand-gun
. Vincenzo faced four charges of murder if he was located and arrested, so it was important for him to maintain his unseen existence in London, but he was concerned that if he stayed away too long the fear in which he was held in Forcella, and the respect, would diminish. He barely noticed his sister, accepted the need for a member of the family to have a good knowledge of financial procedures and structures, but he expected her to clean the apartment they shared and to look after his laundry. She wasn’t important to him.

  Nobody loved Giovanni, he knew that. He was twenty-three. That evening he was on a girl’s family bed. Her father and mother were in the next room and had the television on loud. He fucked the girl – a virgin until he had penetrated her the previous week – on her parents’ bed because it was bigger and more comfortable than hers. They would not complain, and they would not attempt to throw him out of their home. He was Giovanni Borelli, the son of Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli. In the Forcella district, and in part of Sanità, his name gave him unquestioned power. He would not pay the girl under him, who was giving him as good a ride as he was used to. Neither would he pay for the meal he would have afterwards. He paid for nothing. The only man who had ever raised a fist to Giovanni was his elder brother, who had beaten him, split his lip and cut his eyebrow – the sister of a friend had accused Giovanni of putting his hand up her skirt. His father had not protected him from Vincenzo; neither had his mother. Now he grunted and cried out as the orgasm came, louder than was natural for him, but he knew the sound would carry into the living room and would not be drowned by the television. Good that they should know their daughter was a good ride. He was responsible for the collection of dues in the area north of corso Umberto, south of the via Foria, and between the via Duomo and the corso Giuseppe Garibaldi. The only excitement came when a smart-arse shite would plead poor business, inability to pay, and be beaten – as his brother had beaten him. He thought his sister, Immacolata, an arrogant bitch, and she had no time for him.

  In his bedroom, Silvio Borelli read a comic and listened to music on his iPod. He was seventeen, the youngest of the tribe. He had been told by his grandmother, never one to mince words, the circumstances of his conception. Eighteen years ago, in 1991, his mother had been sneeringly informed that his father flaunted an amante, had been seen with her in an hotel on the sea front, the via Francesco Caracciolo. When Pasquale Borelli had next come home she had punched his head, scratched his cheeks, kicked him in the stomach and kneed him in the groin. He had suffered a tempest of abuse. He had crawled to Gabriella Borelli and pleaded for her forgiveness, promising abjectly that such behaviour would never be repeated. They had made up, her on top of him, calling the shots, at her speed and for her gratification. The result had been Silvio. He was a sickly child from birth, and was doted on by his mother, but he loved his sister. He told her everything. Giovanni sniped that he wouldn’t wipe his arse without asking Immacolata’s permission. He lived with his grandparents, above the via Forcella, and sensed their contempt for him because he was not blessed with the family’s hardness. He wanted little more from life than to speed in narrow alleyways on his scooter, and to mess with old schoolmates – and almost resented that his name denied him friendships. He knew that some spoke of him as a cretin, but a reputation for stupidity brought its rewards, and the clan used him to ride round the district and drop off narcotics, cash, messages and firearms. He was unsettled. Driving back from Nola the previous afternoon, he had been bewildered by the transformation in his sister’s mood – and her shoe was broken, her clothing ripped and her knee scraped raw. She had been near to tears. And she was the best person he knew, the most important in his life.

  The parents of Pasquale, the grandparents of Vincenzo, Immacolata, Giuseppe and Silvio, were Carmine and Anna Borelli. They were both eighty-seven, though she had been born four months after him. They had founded the clan, given it teeth and muscle, then passed its control to their son. They lived now in via Forcella, and as she sewed a collar back on to a shirt, he snored quietly in his chair and…

  The television screen in the prosecutor’s office was blank, the photograph killed. The files on the clan family were back in the secure area of the archive. The office was darkened. He had gone home, as had his deputy, the liaison officer and the women who ran his life; they were as dedicated as he was to the extermination of the Camorra culture.

  A car’s tyres had screamed as it had headed for Capodichino. The liaison officer drove Castrolami. No sirens and no blue lights, but speed on the back-streets. They had swept into the airport and the Alfa had rocked at the sudden braking outside Departures. Then he was out and on the forecourt. He slid the pancake holster off his belt, the loaded pistol in it, and left them on the seat. No backward glance, no wave, and he heard the liaison officer power away. He scurried through the doors to Check-in. An officer of Mario Castrolami’s seniority could have demanded, and received, preferential treatment at the airport – a ticket already processed, a boarding card presented to him, a lounge to wait in until the rest of the passengers had been herded to their seats, a drink, a canapé and an automatic upgrade – but such treatment would have been noticed. He went past the site of the death – unmourned – from heart failure of Salvo Lucania, known to law enforcement in the States as ‘Lucky Luciano’. He thought that the pain of the coronary was a fitting end for that man. He always noted the place where that boss had collapsed.

  He went to the communal lounge and had barely flopped into a seat before the flight was called. He walked to the aircraft, the last flight of the day to London Gatwick, in a swell of tourists. Voices played across his face and behind his head. He spoke quite reasonable English, and was able to distinguish appraisals of the ruins at Pompeii and Ercolano, judgements on the Capella Sansevero compared with the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the merits of the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel Nuovo. He was happy to be among tourists. He accepted that an army of watchers, foot-soldiers, maintained a sophisticated web of surveillance over the city and its suburbs. Every district would have entrances watched by men and boys, and myriad mobile phones would report which policeman moved and the direction of his journey. The camera systems of the police and the carabinieri were sophisticated but could not compete with those of the clans. It would be a disaster if it were known that Mario Castrolami had caught the last flight of the night to Britain: warnings would have been issued, coded messages sent, and it would have been known in London before the Boeing’s undercarriage had dropped that a Camorra hunter was travelling.

  He eased into a seat. The watchers were everywhere – the policeman on the forecourt, the porters on the concourse, the check-in staff, the baggage-handlers, the cabin crew. He put his face into the in-flight magazine, but tapped his jacket to reassure himself – for the fourth or fifth time – that the envelope with the warrant folded inside it was still there. He sensed the admiration of the tourists for his city, and their ignorance: they knew nothing. The watches were still on their wrists, the wallets and purses in their coats and handbags, and Naples was wonderful. He thought that an ignorant man or woman was blessed. He could count on the fingers of his two hands all the men and women in the city whom he believed had no price.

  Sicily was bad for corruption inside the forces of law and order, money changing hands in return for intelligence and warnings. In Calabria, little was planned that did not reach the ears and eyes of the criminal tribes. From his own city, Castrolami could not have put twenty men – police, Palace of Justice and carabinieri – in a line and sworn on oath that he harboured no suspicion against them. The fear of corruption and the suspicion it engendered against colleagues should be ranked as one of the greatest successes of the Camorra. He had not phoned his wife to tell her that he would be away, had had no need to: she had long ago left for Milan, taken the children, gone back to her mother. She had sworn that Naples was a cloaca and that she and they would never return to that sewer. There was, of course, another woman, for mutual convenience, and he hadn’t phoned her
either… As the aircraft thrust up the runway and lifted, he replayed in his mind what that voice had said.

  I put at risk my life.

  He would not dispute that. She might, the bitch, have changed her mind by morning – they did, often enough. But he could recall each word of that young officer from Nola and believed she would be there. He could sleep wherever he found himself so he threw back the seat, ignoring the protest from behind, loosened his trouser belt, and saw, in a dreamer’s kaleidoscope, the features of Immacolata Borelli. He heard himself say, in a sort of wonderment, ‘I don’t intend to talk you out of this, but have you any idea at all of where this will lead you, what is at stake?’ Not just wonderment: astonishment. It wasn’t the face of a camorrista, it was a good face, with smooth skin, not a cheap whore’s and pocked. Or did he delude himself?

  They were bored but polite. It was as plain as a pikestaff to Eddie Deacon that Agatha Christie needed high-profile selling in Mogadishu or Lagos, Vilnius or Bratislava – anywhere they came from. Agatha Christie was not holding them.

  But he ground a nail into his palm and kept going. He was talking about the author’s sentence construction. All the language schools did Agatha Christie; she was supposed to be the route towards decent spoken English.