The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  His handlers had placed him in the Sail four years before.

  He was a crusader. He was there because he wished to make a difference. A son buried, and the heroin microbe gone in his veins to the grave. A wife had walked out on him, unable to weather the strain of an addict youth. At the time of the death and the walk-out, he had worked in a bank in a resort town on the Adriatic. He had volunteered himself, had not been accepted, had come to live in a neighbouring tower on the far side of the viale della Resistenza, had made the second approach, had been accepted, given a code name and a cover history that checked, had been found the apartment, number 374. Once every week he took the bus into town, reported and delivered tapes. Once, also, every week he went to the mini-mart and bought the basics of sustenance. The rest of his waking hours he spent watching the walkway, or sat behind a lace curtain in his bedroom, observing the street below.

  He knew every pulsebeat of the Sail.

  Knew the times that the buses came from the railway station down the hill on piazza Garibaldi. Scampia, with the Sail at its heart, was the narcotics supermarket of Italy, even of Europe. Both users and dealers took trains to come here from all over Italy, from Frankfurt and Berlin, Paris and Marseille, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Madrid and Barcelona. The regular bus service waited for them at the station, and if the police stopped the buses there were taxis. A watcher on a street corner, a teenage youth, was paid two hundred euros a day, and there were twenty piazze, each administered by a capopiazza. They were the locations where cocaine, heroin and ecstasy were sold in Scampia. All needed watchers, and watchers were employed in three shifts. An army had been recruited to watch the bus passengers coming in, and those driving their own cars, and to warn of the approach of the police. The boy who went from the customer to the dealer could make eight thousand euros a month – and eight hundred if he was, extraordinarily, to get a job in a factory. Each piazza, his handlers had told Davide, generated an income of fifty thousand euros a week, so the trade for this abandoned urban slumland brought in a guaranteed minimum of fifty million euros a year. Just what was sold on the streets of one suburb of the city. The figure, they emphasised, was a minimum. A young buck, if ruthless, if charismatic enough to find blind followers, can head a clan by the age of thirty – can be worth a billion euros. It was a fighting ground. In the late evenings, when his television was turned off, Davide would sit in his darkened bedroom and rely on the few streetlights still working for necessary illumination to watch trading and killing, linked. Clans clashed: assassins went after a man, couldn’t find him, took his woman, tortured her for information on his whereabouts. She wouldn’t tell so she was trussed and put into a car, which was torched: in Scampia. A man was beheaded with a butcher’s axe: in Scampia. The assassins came to take a man from his mother’s home – he had already fled; his mother, in her nightdress, was shot on her step and bled to death: in Scampia.

  He watched, every day and every night, and knew the vagaries of the pulsebeat of the Sail… and a short bus ride from the stop on via Baku was the old city, patronised by the tourists, the lovers of fine arts and the gourmets, who did not know about Scampia.

  His eyes flitted between the mirror against his thigh and the game-show. He knew that, in the depths of this monstrous building, a drama played around a hooded man.

  ‘Don’t ask me any questions. If you ask it will be wasted breath, yours, wasted time, mine. All I can say, what you tell me is of critical importance to the well-being of your friend, of Eddie.’

  He had marched them down to the pub. Roddy ‘Duck’ Johnstone had taken a corner table, then gone to the bar, had been given a tray by the barmaid and had come back with two pints for each of the three lads – one missing, still at work – and a single Scotch for himself, six packets of crisps and six of peanuts.

  His question: ‘Tough or weak, determined or vacuous, hard or soft, serious or kid-like? Which is Eddie?’

  He didn’t need names, hadn’t a tape-recorder and no need of a notepad.

  From the club waiter, who would be late at work: ‘He’d like you to think he’s just a lazy tosser, that nothing matters to him, that he’s a push-over. Maybe he was, but not any more. He’s changed. Actually, he’s quite tough. I think he’s pretty determined.’

  The PhD student’s contribution: ‘The role he acts is that he’s weak and soft – just a prat, really. Maybe he was. Everything’s altered, though, hasn’t it? A new man, our Eddie. Quite funny to watch it.’

  Hunched forward, the Revenue and Customs clerk said, ‘He wanted to seem a kid still, never going to grow up – like the thing he’d run a mile from fast was responsibility. That’s in the past. Gone to the recycle bin. Different guy – and maybe carrying us with him. Tough? Probably, and getting tougher. Determined? Wouldn’t have jacked the job and done what he has if he wasn’t. Hard and serious, I suppose so – but it’s like I said, and us too.’

  He listened. He let them tell their anecdotes, put more pints in front of them and didn’t speak until he felt he’d drained them.

  Late, Duck asked, ‘What was different? How had he changed? What was new?’

  Like a chorus, spoken together: ‘It was Mac. She turned up. That is one fantastic person. Immacolata was what was different. She changed him, maybe us. Immacolata was the new thing. Sorry and all that if we don’t express it well. Immacolata was brilliant. Any guy would be crazy not to go after her. Are you going to tell us what this is all about? What’s of critical importance?’

  He bought a last round, more crisps, and left them.

  He drove back to his office, went inside. He started to type and tried to express what three pretty inarticulate guys, decent enough, second-rate enough, had said about their friend and about the girl – and didn’t know whether he did a good job or a poor one, and whether he had painted a fair enough portrait of her.

  Could she go into the Borghese and run?

  Rossi said she couldn’t.

  Why not?

  ‘Because Castrolami has to give permission, and he’s in Naples.’

  Why was he in Naples?

  ‘I think you know, Signorina. Try to remember, please, the lie you told.’

  The tape-recorder had been put away. Of course it was foolish to imagine they would allow her to run in the darkness. She worked towards the challenge.

  Could they go that evening to a restaurant?

  Orecchia said they could not.

  Why was it not possible to eat in a restaurant?

  ‘It requires the permission of the investigating agent, Castrolami, or of the prosecutor. Both are in Naples, and I won’t call them for this. There is food in the kitchen.’

  Why were they in Naples?

  Orecchia did not look up from his magazine. ‘I think you know very well, Signorina, what business they have in Naples. If you hadn’t lied it would have been different, but you did. You aren’t going to run or to a restaurant.’

  She stood then, legs a little apart, pelvis forward, head back, chin jutted, and built on the challenge. ‘Am I difficult? Are many collaborators “difficult”? Will you write a report on me as difficult?’

  Rossi said, ‘A few aren’t particularly helpful.’

  Orecchia said, ‘Some, not many, go on believing, Signorina, that they’re still on the pedestal they enjoyed while their family was Cosa Nostra or ’Ndrangheta or Camorra. Some, until they have disabused themselves, are “difficult”. We believe they’re frightened of the reality of their situation – which they created of their own free will. You can flounce, pout, stamp, throw plates and slam doors, shout or wave your boobs and fanny at Alessandro, but nothing will change.’

  She sucked in her breath, prepared to bare her spirit.

  ‘I should tell you that Alessandro’s wife is exceptionally attractive. Very much more attractive, mentally and physically, than you.’

  She spat the question: ‘What’s happened to him?’

  They looked at her dumbly. Perhaps they’d practised their e
xpressions of incomprehension. Orecchia had returned to his magazine, as if he didn’t understand who ‘him’ was. Rossi had not reacted to the description of his wife. Orecchia’s tone had been harsh and unforgiving, as if he had spoken to a child in a school room – not that such a volley of insults had ever been directed at Immacolata Borelli at school. Her mother had brought her on the first day to the Forcella infants’ classroom. The head teacher and the year teacher had been lined up as if she was heiress to the Bourbon dynasty. A seat had been found for her at the front of the room, and the staff had bowed and scraped because she was the daughter of the Borelli clan. Her father had taken her on the first day to the middle school, had materialised from his life as a fugitive, and slipped an envelope stuffed with banknotes into the hand of the head teacher, murmuring about new electronic equipment. It had been pocketed, with discretion. Her eldest brother, Vincenzo, had escorted her to the senior school, and had oozed power as he walked alongside her into the building. At every level of school she had attended, her marks in examinations had been exceptional, her reports remarkable. She was the daughter of the Borelli family, and no teacher would have been stupid enough to mark her down or criticise her. Only at the accountancy and book-keeping college had she been treated, almost, as another kid – and there she had met her friend, Marianna Rossetti, and… Orecchia and Rossi spoke to her as if she was any other child, one who was not given the seat of privilege at the front.

  She repeated it, more shrilly: ‘What has happened to him? What has happened to Eddie?’

  Their eyes met. Unspoken acceptance that something must be said, something minimal.

  Orecchia said, ‘The boy you indicated was unimportant to you? Yes? We don’t know what has “happened” to him.’

  Rossi said, ‘Signorina, we are very junior links in a very long chain. We would not be told the latest intelligence. We don’t know.’

  ‘Castrolami would tell you if he knew anything, or the prosecutor.’

  ‘We are merely functionaries. They don’t share that sort of information with people at our level.’

  Doubt clouded her. ‘You know nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing of substance.’

  She went to her room, didn’t bang the door but closed it carefully. She stood at the window and gazed out over the roofs, and myriad lights stretched away from her. None was in the home of a friend, or lit the street of a friend, or was driven on a road by a friend. She had no friend in this city. She stripped, let her clothes fall, and stared out of the window at the expanse of lights. The air chilled her skin. It hurt that she didn’t know what had happened to him – hurt that she had made a play in her mind of ignorance.

  She knew what happened to members of the family of a collaborator, to their friends and lovers. Ignorance was not a screen behind which she could hide.

  She thought it was Orecchia’s voice she could hear, and imagined he had telephoned Naples to tell Castrolami of her hysteria – but had not rated it a problem.

  Off the operations room at the piazza Dante barracks there was a square annexe space, four metres by three, no more. Into it had been crowded a work surface, six computer screens and keyboards, the same number of chairs and scattered telephones and, at the edge, more chairs. There was no window, and cigarette smoke fogged the air.

  He knew the names of the two men who shared the work surface with him, but Lukas did not make conversation, had no wish to or need to; neither did he think it would be welcomed. One was the carabinieri unit’s psicologia, the other was the unit’s intelligence collator. He bided his time because experience had taught him that the psychologist and the collator had to be won over, would not respond to being battered into submission. Lounging against the annexe walls there were sometimes three, sometimes four, of the fast-reaction team – Lukas knew about the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale – their kit scattered at their feet: flak-vests, caps, windcheaters, boots and radios. Down a corridor there were more of them. He was an intruder, tolerated only because word would have come from Rome that he had saved the life of a colleague: it allowed him to be accepted but not welcomed. That would come later, if he could insinuate himself without breeding hostility. They talked Italian round him and he gave no sign of understanding a word they said. He had good Italian but, as with other European languages, he favoured often disguising the fact.

  A concession: he had been brought coffee, with a ham- and salad-filled roll.

  He learned that every informant in the city, used by the Squadra Mobile of the police and by the carabinieri’s serious crime squad, had been alerted to the kidnap of the English boy. Learned also that teams scoured CCTV tapes for evidence of the abduction and the movement of a hostage. Learned as well that the grandparents of Immacolata Borelli were now under twenty-four-hour surveillance, as was their lawyer, as were all known associates, and that the watchers and tailers had been stripped from high-profile targets. Learned that one of the clans’ most effective and feared assassins, the Borelli family’s man, was loose on the streets, location unknown. Learned that an ear, a finger or a penis was expected in the post, soon.

  And Lukas learned that the informants had produced nothing. Learned that the CCTV tapes had given up nothing, or the surveillance operation. He would have said that the faces around him were not cut by disappointment: he sensed fatalism, the inevitability of failure. Too early in the relationship with the annexe for him to chivvy, far too early to press a point. Did time exist for the niceties and the protocols? It had to. An alternative did not.

  Lukas would know when he was accepted by the psychologist and the collator, the guys from the ROS, the storm squad, when they took his cigarettes and offered him their own… Not yet. They smoked theirs and he smoked his, but the coffee and the roll were a start.

  As a kid from the trailer park, he had found virtue in waiting and patience. Any kid from a trailer home – a father who was part-Brit, part-Polish, and gone in search of better-carat gold-paved streets, a mother who was part-American, part-Italian, who cleaned offices, no money sloshing in pockets – knew that waiting and patience paid dividends. He would wait with patience until his opinion was asked and advice requested. Already he sensed a poor outcome was anticipated.

  Could have been worse. There was an icon story about hostage negotiation, had to be true, too precious not to be. Some said the icon was a British guy, having a real black day, climbing a crane ladder to a jerk sitting on a spar above him, squealing that he was about to go fly and that he’d not be talked out of it, mind-made-up crap. The icon had shouted back: ‘Way I’m feeling this morning, friend, way my missus is carrying on, do you mind if I come up there and join you? We can bloody jump, fly, together.’ The story was that the Brit guy meant it – would have. The story also was that the jerk didn’t want to share and came straight down. There was always somewhere that it was worse for someone.

  It was getting late, and there was room in the ashtray, on the table between Lukas, the psychologist and the collator, for maybe six more butts. He’d stay that long… It was always about intelligence. The psychologist could feed in opinions, but intelligence gave facts – and nothing came.

  Late that evening, he walked with the prosecutor. It was difficult for either man to say that he was subjected to a greater or lesser emotion – or no emotion – than usual when they knew a wretch was beyond reach. Both the prosecutor and Castrolami relished the cool of the air, almost a chill on the face, drying the day’s sweat. They were outside the palace and traversed the wide piazza, with the towers of the financial district, the Holiday Inn and sought-after apartments ahead. On what they earned as servants of the state, Castrolami and the prosecutor had no chance of purchasing or renting a place in one of those blocks. Neither did they need the services of the financial institutions lodged there, but to their right was a church, a better place. Lights beamed from it, and Castrolami could see the figures inside. He thought it a rehearsal for a wedding.

  There were b
odyguards behind them, the prosecutor’s, a pair of men. The church drew them as they talked.

  The desk at piazza Dante reported nothing.

  Rome reported a crisis point.

  What to do?

  The church was modern, finished in 1990, and the concrete of its slim pyramid shape, and the narrowing twin towers that supported the bell, was not yet weather-stained. It was named after a saint, Carlo Borromeo – died 1584, aged forty-six, in Milan of a fever from the plague sweeping the city; he had helped the sick at great personal risk and paid for it with his life. It was a dramatic building, a feature of the centro direzionale, and the prosecutor was a familiar figure there. He led Castrolami inside.

  The bride was not beautiful and the groom was not handsome; she wore a skirt about three centimetres too short and the other faded jeans. They pledged their future, and had good voices.

  Castrolami said, ‘I had felt her to be strong. Now I sense weakness.’

  The prosecutor’s voice was soft, would have been inaudible to the couple, their supporters, the priest, and the woman who worked the portable CD player for their music. ‘I always look for a priority.’

  ‘Her evidence statement, taken with full legal cover, her appearance in person in court as a witness.’

  ‘I look for a priority, then for accommodation of it.’

  ‘There is no accommodation – excuse me. There cannot be.’

  ‘We cling, then, to the priority.’

  ‘The statement, then the appearance. There can be no manoeuvre.’ Castrolami shrugged. Perhaps then he thought of his own marriage. His wife, severe-faced, wrapped in sheets of white material, and himself in a full-dress uniform, a serious dispute within a week over the date of her mother’s first overnight stay at their one-bedroom apartment: his mother-in-law and his wife would share the marriage bed, and he would sleep in the living room on a pump-up – no accommodation, no compromise, no manoeuvre. Extraordinarily, he had stayed long enough with his wife to produce three children. He visited each year, stayed a few days, drank too much, then piled, with relief, on to the fast train from Milan to the south. He was – his own words – pathetic, sad and a committed, dedicated, single-minded, focused investigator. He supposed that – in an inexplicable fashion – he represented the hopes of the girl with the short skirt and the boy in old jeans. ‘The priority alone is worthy of consideration. She goes to court, she gives evidence. There is no question of stepping aside from the priority.’