The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  She would, herself, have sliced off the ears, fingers and nose of the English boy, her daughter’s lover. What Gabriella Borelli loathed most was the removal of power, the loss of authority. She must play-act with cigarette papers across a table. Anger welled in her, but was confined inside the walls, three metres by two, of the cell. She could do none of it herself. She was off the bed. In fury, Gabriella Borelli beat her forehead against the wall, bruised and scratched herself against the graffiti. She didn’t care about clothes, an electric fan or shoes. She wanted her daughter dead.

  The old lady had been waiting for him. She was sitting in his office amid the mountains of paper and files that were Umberto’s trade. When he came back from Posilippo – and he had had coffee at the Café Gambrinus, where old friends, the advocates of other clans, had greeted him – she was in front of his desk. Extraordinary, but she didn’t speak. She handed him a small envelope, then stood, looked around as if she was searching for a dead cat carcass, and was gone. He tore open the envelope, retrieved the camera’s memory pad, then called for his clerk, Massimo. The young man was his nephew, had his trust. He told Massimo to take money from the petty-cash box and go to the camera shop on the corso Vittorio Emanuele – a long bus ride but there was little chance of his clerk being recognised there – buy a portable printer and bring it back. If the clan fell, Umberto fell. So hard for him to believe that the sweet pretty face of Immacolata – always his favourite – might cause him to fall, and fall far.

  She had talked through the morning to the deputy prosecutor, up from Naples. She had found, with each anecdote and each item of evidence, that old loyalties had frayed, disintegrated. A few days before she had hugged her brother, Silvio, for driving out to Capodicino, collecting her, ferrying her to Nola and back. That morning she listed all the occasions she knew, and would swear to it on oath, that Silvio had ridden on his scooter around the city distributing handguns and ammunition. She skewered him. She identified the weapons caches he had visited, the men from whom the weapons were collected and those to whom they were given. The tape spools had turned. She had seen, across the table, grim satisfaction on the face of the deputy prosecutor. She felt no more affection for her youngest brother than she did for the others, and none for her mother. She didn’t think of her father. She kept in her mind, central, the image of her friend. She saw, as she condemned her family, the features of Marianna Rossetti. There was no other face in her mind. No other friendship was ‘significant’. I’ll go to court, whatever. She sensed, that morning, a growing relaxation in the apartment, as if a barrier had been broken down. She was not treated with the same suspicion – near hostility.

  When they broke, the deputy prosecutor for coffee and she for juice, she had stood and stretched, sensing that her T-shirt rode up over her navel, then wandered towards Rossi. He was on the balcony, through the open doors, sitting in a rattan easy chair, browsing a newspaper. She could fight, as she did with Mario Castrolami, scratch. She could smile, too, flash her eyes and be docile. ‘Please…’

  ‘Yes?’ Rossi looked up at her. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Do you run – for exercise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Please… may I run? It’s claustrophobic here. I’d like to run – if it’s allowed but I don’t have the clothes – I’d be so grateful if I could.’

  ‘Can’t see why not. Let me float it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Why did she want to run? Not for fitness. She didn’t have a weight problem, she was young and healthy. She believed that if she could run along a pavement, as other women did, she would take another step towards changing her life. She drank the juice Orecchia brought her, sat again at the table and talked about Salvatore, Il Pistole, who had fancied her, had wanted to sleep with her and might have wanted to marry her. She stabbed him, too, with the stiletto, pushed it deep. Another tape was slotted into the recorder. She thought of nothing that was insignificant or meaningless.

  There wasn’t a dog in the household for Arthur Deacon to walk. Best he could do was borrow his immediate neighbour’s, a cheerful golden retriever. He’d needed to get out of the house, stretch his legs and have someone – or something – to commune with who brought no complications. Betty had taken the day off work, and had warned them it might be the week. He’d felt hemmed in, as he had in the last months at the water-board office, and the dog was a sort of therapy against worrying – agonising – about Eddie. They hadn’t slept, either of them, last night. Could have taken the dog round the loop of byways and bridlepaths all over again, but felt he should go home. He had dropped the dog off at the neighbour’s, well short of Dean Weymouth’s bungalow, and tramped the last hundred yards to his house. The back door, of course, because his dirty shoes lived in the utility room. He lived a pretty boring life, ordered, predictable and boring, so there was a place on a shelf for muddy shoes, and another place on another shelf for merely dirty shoes, and a cupboard spot for clean shoes – it was about as boring as it could get. He was about to sing out, ‘Hello, it’s me, I’m back,’ but didn’t. Who else might it be? The Queen? The Pope? Osama bin bloody Laden? He said nothing, but as he took off his shoes he heard his wife’s voice, the accent she used for work, with all the vowels and consonants in place.

  She said, ‘I’m grateful, Mr Johnstone, more grateful than I can say, and my husband… Yes, please do, please keep in touch with us, any time of day or night… Can I ask you one question, Mr Johnstone, only one?… Thank you… Why, Mr Johnstone, are you doing this for us?… Perhaps I do and perhaps I don’t, but thank you.’

  He heard the phone put down. He heard her choke, like a sob, and couldn’t remember when he had last heard or seen his Betty in tears – wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t heard the choke. He took off his shoes, put them on the correct shelf, went inside and put his arm round her shoulders. She was still standing by the hall table, facing the silent phone.

  She said, ‘That was Mr Johnstone. He says his name’s Duck, but I’m not indulging him. He’s building what he calls a “profile” of Eddie.’

  ‘Don’t know that I could.’

  ‘He says Eddie’s been kidnapped and the likelihood is that he’s in the hands of an organised-crime group. This one, called the Camorra, is in Naples. The likelihood is that the girl Eddie spoke of, Immacolata Borelli, is from a criminal family, a very successful one.’

  ‘God, poor Eddie – an innocent abroad.’

  ‘It gets blacker. The girl has turned herself in as a state witness against her family. Eddie, our Eddie, barged in there – supremely innocent but also supremely ignorant, I don’t know which is worse – and Mr Johnstone says they will try to use his captivity to persuade the girl to withdraw her evidence. He wanted to know how Eddie would withstand extreme pressure and stress – he didn’t say torture, but I think that’s what he meant – and the information will help in building the profile. I said he was just ordinary, a bit lazy and a bit stubborn.’

  ‘Usually aware, kind, not very ambitious.’

  ‘Without malice. I said that. It was almost like I was doing his obituary for the Western Daily Press. I said he was a nice boy, decent, and steady, but hadn’t too much imagination. His own mother, selling him short.’

  She did a brief sniffle, blinked, and the weakness of tears was gone. Arthur Deacon held her tight. Her eyes were still on the phone.

  ‘A man’s flown to Rome. I wasn’t told his name. He’s called a co-ordinator, and he works on a freelance basis for Mr Johnstone’s company. He has FBI experience and has been in Iraq for the American military. He’s an expert on hostage rescue, whether by negotiation or use of force. It’s all because of Dean. Dean spoke well of Eddie. I’m in areas I don’t understand but I think it’s a sort of family – Dean Weymouth, the people who work for this company at whatever level of importance, and the man who’s going to Naples. It’s like a brotherhood of mutual support because of the awful places they operate in. The expert – he’s as good at his wo
rk as anyone in the world, Mr Johnstone says.’

  ‘We have to be strong, and pray Eddie is.’

  ‘What Mr Johnstone also says, we must hope, we must believe, and we must understand the desperate nature of the situation Eddie’s in. And Mr Johnstone says we mustn’t feel angry with him. That’s the natural emotion, extreme anger, for having caused our misery. Eddie may not be the brightest star but he’s done nothing wrong, has nothing to be ashamed of. This expert, the co-ordinator, is used to going where governments get entangled in bureaucracy and pomposity and guarding territory, Mr Johnstone says, and side-stepping them all. But he doesn’t flannel.’

  ‘You live nearly a lifetime, then into your cosy world come people you didn’t know existed. I’m not trying to be profound, but now we share space with them.’

  ‘He says Eddie’s position is “difficult”. He’s going to ring us twice a day, and he promised that all the questions he’ll ask are relevant for the profile. I asked him why. He said that people climb mountains because they’re there, cross deserts because they’re there, get involved in problems because they’re there. He didn’t mention anything about money… I’m frightened for Eddie.’

  Arthur held her, couldn’t do it tighter.

  ‘Which is more important? That the girl gives her evidence or our Eddie’s life? I’m not asking you for an answer.’

  They had walked without speaking, had had a coffee and walked some more, not spoken, and drunk a second coffee. Lukas knew that the exhibition in the canteen had left a sour taste in Castrolami’s mouth, but it was easier done that way than having to explain himself.

  Near the end of the second coffee, at a bar that over looked the big square, piazza Venezia, where the coffee cost more than a meal, Castrolami put his gripe: ‘Mr Lukas, it was dishonest.’

  ‘If you want it to be.’

  ‘Implication – you win them all.’

  ‘I win a lot.’

  ‘Not all.’

  ‘I could have had you put on an Alitalia big bird and you’d be mid-Atlantic now, and I could take you to a trailer camp in Arkansas or Alabama, and I could wheel out the family of a marine or a ranger or a military truck driver not past his nineteenth birthday who was lifted and killed because I didn’t save him. I could do that, if it would help you.’

  ‘You don’t win them all.’

  ‘I lose people, yes. I try to win. I don’t ask for a shoehorn. I’m there if I can help, and I try to win.’

  ‘What keeps you in the game?’

  Lukas said, ‘It’s what I know – about all I know.’

  A hand reached out, slapped Lukas’s face – quite hard but not malevolent, and not playful. Lukas supposed he had said the right words, the right thing at the right time, but that, too, was a skill of his. One day, if time allowed, he would work at sincerity – what was real and what was not.

  Castrolami said, ‘We should go and see her. Then maybe you can judge better what happens to the boy.’

  *

  He had eaten, used the bucket and ditched the hood. The focus in his mind was the hatred, and the need for control, and Eddie held it. With the darkness around him there was the silence.

  Self-pity, which would not have been control, cursed that he had stepped on to a flight when he’d thought he was ‘lucky’, cursed that he had made it on to a train going south, cursed that he had found a priest in a great church who, distracted and seeming not to care, had told him where to find his Mac’s family – and cursed that he had lingered over cake while the man was sent for. Any cursing was self-pity. He would not have turned his back on Immacolata – would not and could not. Mixed it up in his mind – the face that was the source of hatred, and the face of Immacolata, and she was laughing, sharing her happiness with him. He mixed the two, but the hatred was of greater importance… He mustn’t lose control.

  He couldn’t stand in the bunker, couldn’t pace, couldn’t lose the smell of the bucket, couldn’t allow his head to drop.

  10

  A new decision faced Eddie. A week before, it would have been whether to do Shakespeare or Agatha Christie with his class, drink British bitter or Czech lager, eat pasta or Oriental, sleep the night with Immacolata or send her home, put the whites in the washing-machine or the woollens. Big decisions, but all in the past.

  How to get a pair of locked handcuffs off his wrists, in near total darkness, was the problem that needed a decision.

  He doubted there would be an anaesthetic – maybe, at best, alcohol or iodine to keep the cut clean. It might be a medical student, a man who cut up chicken for his family’s evening meal – a butcher – or any bastard off the street. He had been told that his ears, his fingers, his hand and his penis would be chips in the negotiation stakes, which seemed a good enough reason to work on the locked handcuffs. Do nothing? Not a bloody option.

  How to do it? He didn’t know.

  He had searched the floor space for wire, then gone over each wall, hoping to find a nail hammered in. He had crouched under the ceiling and smoothed the surface with his hands, but there had been no nails, hooks or wire. They had done the Holocaust at school. There were pictures, downloaded from the net, of day-in-the-life scenes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belsen and Treblinka. It had seemed a long way from a sixth-form college in northwest Wiltshire, until an old man had been brought in on a wet Tuesday afternoon in February 1998. He had been in the camps as a child and had survived, and was – a half-century later – a witness. He had the tattooed number to prove it and had rolled up his sleeve to show it. The class had seen the photographs of the crowds shuffling in lines, with suitcases and bundles, holding their children’s hands, towards the gas chambers. The Jew had talked about death, its certainty. A boy, Robinson – cocky little sod – had asked the Jew: ‘Why did they all just accept it? Why didn’t they fight it? They were dead anyway, so why didn’t they give it a thrash?’ The class teacher had told Robinson that the question was offensive, but the Jew had waved him down and said, ‘A few did, a very few, not enough. The state of Israel today still has a sense of shame at what is seen as the inability to fight, the lying-down, the docility. Israel will defend itself now with the utmost robustness, but then we had come from ghettos, we were exhausted, starved, degraded of dignity. We did not have the strength, physical and mental, to combat the inevitable. It was a good question.’ They’d talked about it afterwards, in the canteen, the school corridors, and had all said – Robinson at the helm – that they wouldn’t have gone like sheep. Easy to say at a school in north-west Wiltshire. Eddie Deacon had not come from a walled-in ghetto, was tired from lack of sleep but not exhausted, was hungry but not starved, and his dignity was fired by hate. How best to regain the freedom of his hands?

  He told himself that they would cut off his ears, fingers and penis. Maybe it had been his failure to react fast enough on the pavement, in the moment after the fish-seller had given the glance, but it was all an unwalked road for him.

  Fighting was about films, about stories. Heroes did fighting with scumbags. He didn’t know heroes or lowlife. He had to learn how to fight. First lesson: shed the handcuffs.

  Eddie found one place on the flooring where the concrete had a rough edge. Might have been where one load had gone down as liquid against the previous load that had almost set hard. The ridge was about half a centimetre high and sharp. The handcuffs were not the bar variety that the police were issued with when they came into Kingsland Road, but the old sort with a short chain linking the manacles. Eddie knelt. He planted his elbows, crouched, then had the chain against the ridge, made it taut and started to scratch, working the chain over the ridge. It hurt like fuck in his elbows but he kept on at it, and when he had rubbed smooth one short section of the ridge he edged further along to a new position. Dust came up and was in his nostrils.

  Better to be beaten – face the knife – and have given it a thrash.

  ‘It’s about windows – the best opportunity for escape by the potential hostage – right at the sta
rt. Chaos, confusion, maximum tension for the hostage-taker. You can count it on the seconds of one hand, the sight of a window. That’s when the hostage is most likely to get clear, but an attempt to escape is when the hostage is most likely to be killed. It’s a hell of a risk and—’

  Castrolami interrupted: ‘You go in there?’

  Lukas saw the façade, behind high, heavy railings, of the building, the flag drifting limp, and the barricades to keep the truck bombs away from the embassy walls. There had been a time when he would have been welcomed, open arms, at any US embassy. He wondered how it was for them, living in a fortress, bringing the Baghdad Green Zone to the via Vittorio Veneto. ‘I’d go in there if I’d lost my documents, assuming I was travelling on American papers. Get it straight, I don’t belong to governments.’

  They kept walking. It was hot, the sun high. Lukas thought the city not yet back from holiday and the temperature too great for the comfort of tourists. He was not told why they walked in the heat, or why Castrolami checked his watch, as if that would make the hands go faster. Castrolami said, ‘Sorry I interrupted. Don’t think I’m not interested.’

  Lukas asked, blunt, ‘Are you fooling with me?’

  ‘No.’

  They left the flag, no wind to make it proud, behind them. Lukas said, ‘After that first open window, there’s less likelihood of another. We used to advise, at those seminars the state put on and the private security companies host for big bucks, that once taken a hostage shouldn’t try to escape. Then along came Iraq. Remember the Brit? Doesn’t matter how, but he managed a runner, barefoot and in darkness. He was actually within three hundred paces of an American checkpoint when they caught him. Maybe he was already condemned but the escape confirmed it. His throat was cut. Would we now advise people to hang about and see what the sun brings up? We’re a bit humbler with advice. What we do say: to escape and fail is a death sentence. These people here, do they have qualms about killing? Is it a big deal for them?’