The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  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 café, 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 café 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 purée 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 café, from which a customer had been taken and killed, the owner brought out a small tray of bogus silver with coffee and a brandy apéritif. 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.