The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  The matter of the girls was dealt with. Brusquely, she continued with the agenda: refined heroin – the poppies from Afghanistan, the chemical from the laboratories of Turkey, then shipped from the Balkans and Montenegro to the port of Naples. The price of the heroin. Again, no debate permitted. She said what she would pay. Monies were agreed, delivery dates accepted.

  Her meeting broke. She shook their hands formally to bind the agreements.

  She went out of the pizzeria’s front door on to the street.

  She did not, of course, carry a diary. Everything was in her head. Meeting locations and times, rendezvous points, market prices. The next meeting – in another back room, in a bar on the via Arenaccia – was to determine the volume of hardcore stone for the foundations of a new apartment block on Cristoforo Colombo, then the amount of concrete required for the six-storey construction, the prices for the materials and the fee for the men in the municipio who would give permission to build. It was a normal routine for Gabriella Borelli.

  The sun was warm on her face. She felt as if a winter frost thawed. By the conclusion of the meeting the Albanians had shown her the necessary respect. She wondered if those who had guided them to the rendezvous had shown them a half-page of yesterday’s Cronaca and translated a report on the death of a man in a street, the meal made of his testicles. She walked briskly, Salvatore, Il Pistole, behind her, and felt she had regained control.

  They broke. The recorder was switched off and a new tape inserted. The prosecutor’s assistant went to the toilet.

  She looked up into the prosecutor’s face and hoped for a smile and praise. Immacolata Borelli had been prompted to talk about her brother, Vincenzo, who was to appear before magistrates that morning and would then be transferred to a maximum-security facility. She was confused. ‘You haven’t mentioned my mother.’

  ‘That is correct,’ the prosecutor answered gravely.

  ‘You took her?’ she pressed.

  ‘We did not.’ A small frown cut into his forehead.

  ‘Because you couldn’t find her.’

  ‘She wasn’t where we looked for her.’ The prosecutor’s tongue licked his lower lip.

  ‘I told you where to go.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘She was the principal target.’

  ‘She was one target. We regret she isn’t yet in custody. She will be, very soon.’ He smiled wanly. The assistant came back to her chair and the recorder was switched on again. ‘It shouldn’t concern you whether or not your mother’s in custody.’

  The gesture was fast, instinctive. Immacolata hit the table with the heel of her hand. The impact bounced the tape-recorder and spilled the prosecutor’s coffee. There was a flicker of movement in a doorway off the hall as if a watcher had been alerted. She said, ‘I won’t talk to you until my mother has been taken. I trusted in your competence. You have failed.’

  ‘Do you imagine I travel lightly from Naples to Rome to hear the tantrum of a woman who overestimates her own importance? I can cut you loose and—’

  ‘You won’t take my mother.’

  She stood and the chair fell behind her, clattered. She didn’t look at them, didn’t see the slow turn of the spools in the tape-recorder. She went to her room and slammed the door. It was her mother’s face, lit by camera flashes, that she wanted to see, her mother’s face, in shadow as a cell door closed on a corridor’s lights, and her mother’s face, when early sunlight caught the cell windows and the bars made stripes on her skin. Her strongest emotion that morning was not love but hate. It went so deep. It covered a mother’s apparent indifference to a girl-child, the failure of the parent to rate the achievements of a daughter. Immacolata had been denied attention, denied praise, ignored. She lay on the bed. There had been hate for her mother, but now there was fear at the reach of her arm.

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘It’s what I was told he said.’ Salvatore was at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder. His voice had been a murmur and his lips had barely moved. While he had guarded the inner door of the pizzeria, the scugnizzi had brought messages to him. Lower in the chain than the foot-soldiers were the kids who watched entrances to the quarters of the city and reported, listened to conversations in bars and reported, sat in the gutter opposite police stations and carabinieri barracks and reported.

  ‘Say it to me again.’ She spoke from the side of her mouth, a whisper, as the traffic roared by, horns blasted, men and women walked along the pavement, and her words were lost to all but Salvatore.

  ‘He was in the bar at the top end of Casanova, Luigi Pirelli’s bar. He was in a group and the TV was on. The arrests… Alfredo’s youngest heard him. He said, ‘The Borelli clan is history. They’re finished, old, shit and soft. They have no authority now. Count the days, they’ll be gone.’

  ‘That man, he is not to say that again.’

  She walked on. Salvatore dropped back. He was soon fifteen or twenty paces behind her. He had much to think about. He was the enforcer of the clan and answered only to Gabriella Borelli. He had taken on, also, responsibility for her security and the offshoots of the group. Three years ago, before he had been arrested, Pasquale Borelli would have had the last say on security. Eight months ago, before his flight to London, Vincenzo had been given that responsibility in his father’s absence. He did not know where such leakage of information had come from: the faces of men bounced in his mind, called forward, then discarded. He kept her back in his sight, and the pistol, the Beretta P38, was in his belt. He wore a loose-fitting jacket to conceal it.

  She was tough, and her walk showed it. The weakness of the last evening had been short-lived. Salvatore thought Gabriella Borelli magnificent as he tracked her, watching her back.

  He asked, respectfully, if Lottie would join him in the staffroom alcove. Eddie Deacon hardly knew her, had offered her no friendship, but now he needed her. She was – and the young guys who taught at the language school tittered over it – shyly lesbian. Obvious, but never confessed. Lottie had not outed herself. She was reluctant to come with him, suspicious, but then he did what he reckoned was his best imitation of ‘Labrador eyes’ and she would have seen it mattered to him. There was no snigger on his lips.

  Eddie said, ‘Sorry and all that, but I need help. I’ve lost a girl. It’s really hacked me off. Don’t know where she is, other than gone home, and she’s Italian, from Naples. Says on Google that a million people live there, that the city is a hundred and twenty square kilometres. I have to find her, but I don’t know where to start.’

  Lottie looked at him in the marginal privacy of the alcove, perhaps remembered slights that were not imagined, remarks behind hands and little darts of cruelty. ‘What if little Miss Perfect doesn’t want to be found – at least, not by you?… All right, all right. What have you got that might help?’

  Eddie had the torn scrap of paper in a see-through plastic bag, as if it was priceless. He seemed reluctant to give it up, share it, but did so.

  ‘You didn’t answer me. What if she rates you a pain, and wants shot of you?’

  ‘I’ll have her say it to my face,’ Eddie said. He shrugged, then did the smile he was famed for – it implied that no woman could possibly want shot of him. Lottie grinned, then looked at the handwriting. He had gone to her because she had spent time in Naples, at the university, and spoke the language fluently. He tried to joke: ‘I really don’t understand why any female of the species could want shot of me, let alone rate me a pain. Just not on the agenda.’

  She studied the paper as if it were a crossword puzzle, then gazed at him. ‘I’m wondering, Eddie, if you’re behaving like an adult or reverting to teenage male, all acne and infatuation – or is that not my business?’

  ‘Just a little old cry for help… please. If it wasn’t for her, it’s you I’d be chucking red roses at.’

  She rolled her eyes, almost blushed. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Immacolata Borelli.’

  She breathed out hard. ‘Ri
ght, line one, try Borelli. Line two, go with a number and via Forcella. Line three will be the zip code, four more preceding digits, then 157, for that part of the Forcella district that runs between via del Duomo and the Castel Capuano. The last line is Napoli. It’s hardly Enigma code-breaking but, then, you’re only a man.’

  ‘A specimen to be pitied.’

  After she’d repeated it, and he’d written it in ballpoint on the back of his hand, he surprised himself, and her, by taking hold of her shoulders and kissing her hard on both cheeks. He was turning away as she said, ‘Are you really going there?’

  ‘Too right – what else?’

  Eddie Deacon set off down the corridor for the principal’s office.

  Twenty metres had become forty. They were on via Carbonara, close to the old castle that had doubled as a courthouse. He understood the route she had taken. In Salvatore’s mind many issues competed for prominence: the man who had said the Borelli clan was ‘finished, old, shit and soft’, a leak in security, his job as protector to Gabriella Borelli. Any could have claimed priority, but he didn’t make that choice. Then he looked at his watch, saw the time, recognised he was late for the rendezvous with his scooter driver, Fangio, and smiled. Gabriella Borelli was at the lights, waiting for the pedestrian green and would cross via Carbonara above the castle. He smiled when he remembered ‘Fangio’, who had done a ‘Wall of Death’ stunt in a circus, had crashed spectacularly in front of five hundred punters, or more, and would not have had the money to buy a new bike. He had always enjoyed the memory of Fangio’s face when he was offered the post of scooter rider to Salvatore, Il Pistole. Fangio had been in Poggioreale and Secondigliano, was no altar-boy. There were few Salvatore trusted, but Fangio was one. Many people were waiting to cross at those lights, then the traffic slowed and the charge started. Not for Neapolitans to wait. Sinewy lines of pedestrians wove among the vehicles. He could barely see her.

  She had heard doors close, and a minute later a car had revved outside the block. Then music had started in the apartment, and the only voices were those of the minders.

  She lay on the bed, her head on the pillow, straining to hear what was said. The music was opera and distorted the voices. She realised the prosecutor had gone, would now be on his journey to Naples. There had been no soft knock on her door, and no discreet voice – maybe that of the woman, his assistant – had urged her to come out of her room, to co-operate. She had been abandoned.

  She had convinced herself that walking out on them was justified by their display of incompetence. They had failed to arrest her mother.

  The doorbell rang.

  They were at the bottom of the seniority heap. He was twenty-four and she was his senior by three months. They had started at the training school on the same Monday morning, had been posted to Naples on the same Monday, accepted and begun duty with the Squadra Mobile on another, very recent, Monday. To survive, they stayed close, had volunteered to work together. Around them there were men and women who were prematurely aged, jaundiced and pessimistic, who preached that ambition was heresy in the team. They had been up all the previous night and now headed for their homes out to the south on the sea front and sleep.

  He had driven one of the Alfas carrying a senior man to a block where, on the third floor, they had hoped to find la madrina. She had driven a car filled with officers to another of the addresses given by an informant – not identified at the briefing. Now she drove and stifled a yawn, changed down and braked. Pedestrians flooded the roadway around them. The photographs, blown up, of Gabriella Borelli, the target, were in the car. He cursed. Both were hungry, exhausted; both, for the operation the night before, had studied the photograph long and hard.

  The curse became a gasp. He jack-knifed and snatched up a picture that had been on the rubber matting, smoothed it, gawped. He elbowed her hard in the ribcage below her right breast, jarring his bone on her holster. For a moment the photograph was in her face. She nodded. They had the certainty of youth, and neither would have considered their judgement flawed, their recognition wrong.

  Weapons drawn, they ran from the car, left the doors wide. The crown of her head bobbed in front of them and the gap closed.

  *

  Not hate, but fear. After the doorbell had rung, Immacolata heard a bucket, water splashing, a woman’s voice, and laughter from the minders. She thought a maid had come to clean, and she was ignored.

  She realised the weight of her fear.

  No warning. No shout to alert her that police with guns drawn were immediately behind her. No opportunity to raise her hands as the pistols were aimed at the point in her back where straps and shoulder muscle met.

  Salvatore saw a small tableau in front of him that seemed mimed.

  He was used to making calculations, those that involved a reasonable chance of survival within a time frame of a second or two. He could cruise on the pillion his chest and stomach against Fangio’s back, have the P38 in his fist inside the right pocket of his leather jacket, and he would see the target – darkened by his helmet visor – walking, sitting or eating, on the pavement, in a car or at a pizzeria table, and he would know whether or not that was the moment to strike. If he went in for the kill, he would rap his left hand on Fangio’s shoulder, the scooter would swing and take him close, then stop for the few moments he needed to aim and achieve a clean hit. If he hit Fangio’s shoulder twice, Fangio would take the scooter past the target and the hit was aborted: might be an escort in place, a folded windcheater on a table when the temperature was high that would conceal a firearm, might be that a carabinieri or police vehicle was following or approaching. He wouldn’t intervene if he couldn’t succeed.

  She was pitched over. The young man stood, legs apart in a movie pose, his weapon aimed – two-handed – at her. The young woman had launched herself and landed on Gabriella Borelli’s back – a she-cat on prey – had wrestled her down and, with one hand, had wrenched an arm of la madrina behind her back. The other held a heavy pistol, big in a slight fist, so that the barrel pressed against the neck. Salvatore had the Beretta half out of his waist belt, and the moment was gone. The man no longer covered Gabriella Borelli but the people – men, women and children – who scattered away from where they had their prisoner, as cars and vans veered to the side. It was as if a cordon was around them, an exclusion area. He thought she would have said, and perhaps stroked his arm as she did so, that she trusted him alone. Because of the open area between him and them, he would be seen and identified if he ran forward, and would have to enter the space to be close enough to fire killing shots.

  It could not be done.

  He thought that she looked old with her face crushed down on the sand and shit and weeds of the little island where once there had been a traffic bollard. There was dirt on her face, her hair had lost its shape and there was shock in her eyes. He had broken the trust, had failed her.

  She was dragged to the car. Her feet did not get a hold and a shoe came off, but she was pulled there and the door thrown open. The young man thrust her in and threw himself on top of her. Fumes spewed from the exhaust and the car sped off. Salvatore saw, before he lost it, a hand clamp a light on the roof and the blue flashes that spilled from it. He heard the siren wail.

  He walked away, more alone than he could remember at any time since Pasquale Borelli had chosen him, had taught him to kill, and taught him well.

  Flashes in her mind of the moments of fear. A girl left to mind a slow-cooking meat – baby lamb – in the oven, told when to take it out, forgetting, and coming back into the kitchen to see the smoke then cringing from her mother’s beating, a hard one. Her mother made fear, and the hate was secondary. There was no love in her life, not from her family. Love was sealed away from her in the cemetery at Nola. She knew only hatred and fear. More laughter came through her door, but Immacolata did not share it.

  He put the phone down, ended one of the calls that seemed to consist of almost endless silences. The display panel told him t
he connection had been for four minutes and nine seconds, but it had seemed to Arthur Deacon a fair imitation of eternity. He walked slowly from the hall table towards the kitchen. He couldn’t go in as Betty was washing the floor but he came to the doorway and coughed, as if that was the best way to gain his wife’s attention.

  She squeezed out the mop, quizzed him with a glance. ‘Well?’

  ‘It was Edmund.’

  ‘I know – what did he want?’

  She used a mop on the kitchen floor three mornings a week, then went to work at a family firm of builders, and would tut if he stepped on the clean tiles and messed up. He was watching her, thinking how to relay what he had been told.

  ‘Have you lost your tongue? What did he want? Money? At his age he ought to be able to—’

  ‘Listen. Just for once. Listen. Thank you.’ He saw astonishment on her face. His boldness, almost, surprised him. She liked to say that her mother had told her on the eve of their wedding, ‘Always remember, Elizabeth, a husband is for life but not for lunch.’ She was at work over lunch time and he made himself sandwiches. She liked also to remind him that she was now the principal breadwinner and he was a pensioner who had taken the early bullet. ‘Yes, best if you simply listen. Edmund has resigned from his job.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He packed it in as of today. He’s going tomorrow, or this evening if he can arrange it, to Naples.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’