The Collaborator

by Gerald Seymour

  An hour later… Marco Castrolami wore the suit that was kept on a hanger in a cupboard of his work area, a clean shirt and tie, and he escorted Salvatore, Il Pistole, from the front entrance of piazza Dante. Men of the ROS section held the arms of the prisoner – the Tractor and the Bomber – but their identities were obscured by balaclava masks with eye slits. The camera flashes exploded in the hitman’s face. He winced and turned away, which gave an impression of fear that would be frozen irrevocably in the digital memories. Castrolami saw a reporter he recognised, an eager young woman, but couldn’t remember her name or whether she was employed by Cronaca or Mattino, or an agency, and he murmured as he passed her: ‘He always threatened to kill himself rather than face arrest. In fact, confronted with firearms, he didn’t choose suicide-by-cop but surrendered without a fight – hardly a hero’s end.’ He would not normally have spoken to what he usually termed the ‘vermin pack’, but the day was not usual.

  He had dropped his charge at the airport, in time for the first London flight out of Capodicino, had shaken the hand formally and muttered gruffly something about ‘good fortune for the future’ and ‘better to cut Naples out of any future travel plans’, had cuffed his shoulder in an awkward gesture, had not mentioned Lukas’s death, and had seen the boy met by his consul, who would do the ticket, then take him in search of the shirt, and had left him.

  He had not, in years, allowed himself to be photographed for the Naples dailies, but it was not a normal day. With the hitman on his way to a life sentence, he would go back to piazza Dante, clear his desk and cupboard, then write the letter to his superior. His personal effects would be in a plastic bag and he would drop off his ID at the front desk and slip away. No fanfare, no party… He would not be in Luciano’s trattoria that night where the ROS men were due to eat, finally, swordfish steaks. He would be out of Naples by the end of the day.

  Salvatore was driven away in a convoy of sirens and lights, en route for Poggioreale. What had Castrolami’s years in the city of magnificence and squalor, beauty and rank ugliness, glory and shame achieved? He would go up north, maybe drive a taxi or work in a cheese shop. Perhaps he had achieved something, perhaps he had not – more could not have been asked of him.

  A day later… Men from the Misso clan spread out in the Sanità district, through the little businesses where the carved-wood madonnas watched trading from behind screens of lit candles, and called at the shops and bars that had been under the protection and control of the Borelli family. And men from the Mazzarella clan came to the via Forcella and the via Duomo and the via Carbonara, and walked in freedom and safety on the narrow alleys. Guns were carried and remained hidden. Premises were not earmarked for petrol bombing after dark. It was a seamless transfer of authority in all the areas that had been the fiefdom of the Borellis – grandfather, son and grandsons. Most of their foot-soldiers embraced humility and offered themselves to the new masters, and the few who had picked fights in the past with Misso people and Mazzarella people, or traded insults, or had slept with their women, were gone in the night and by midday might have reached southern Germany or western Austria or the Mediterranean coast of France… At Poggioreale, Giovanni was pushed from a lunch queue and Silvio dared not leave his cell, and Carmine sat, trembled and waited for a doctor to see him – and at Posilippo, Anna and Gabriella were in the same exercise yard but did not deign to let their eyes meet. They had known power and it was stripped from them, and they could focus only on their hatred of the young woman who had brought them low, Immacolata, who shared their blood.

  A week later… He was lucky that his job was still available, the principal had told him. Eddie had been dutifully grateful. He had thanked him.

  Outside the staff room, he shared a cigarette with Lottie and she – inevitably – asked him about the love of his life, the Juliet story, and he’d said something about ‘just didn’t work out’, and nothing about a concept of justice being bigger than the value of his life. And near the end of that shared smoke she’d looked into his face, where the bruising was yellow with mauve traces and the swelling on his lips was still prominent and the scrapes had scabs and the stitches needed to come out. She’d asked. He’d said that the memory was a bit dulled: might have been a door he’d walked into and then again it might have been a set of stairs he’d fallen down, anyway that’s what he’d told the principal, and he’d managed to laugh.

  She quizzed him. In Naples, while he wasn’t walking into doors or falling downstairs, had he taken a coffee in the Galeria Umberto I, built to revitalise the city after the 1884 cholera epidemic? No, he had not. Had he wandered in the state rooms of the Palazzo Reale, completed in 1651 after a half-century of work? No, he had missed out on that experience. In the Capella Sansevero, had he circled the Veiled Christ, the work of the eighteenth-century sculptor, Giuseppe Sammartino, regarded by many as the élite art work housed in the city? No, he had not been able to. Had he been to San Lorenzo Maggiore or the Pio Monte della Misericordia or the Gesù Nuovo or had he been to the ruins of Pompeii, or had he climbed to the rim of Vesuvio? No… no… no. ‘Not my business, Eddie, but what did you do there? For God’s sake, Naples is one of the wonders of the world – did it just pass you by?’

  He’d shrugged. She would have thought him an imbecile and a Philistine, and the roll of her eyebrows seemed to suggest he’d have been better off in Milton Keynes or Welwyn Garden City. When the cigarette was finished and he’d stamped on it and she’d ground her heel on it, she asked, ‘That address we worked out, what was there?’ He’d said there was a couple of old people, the girl’s grandparents, and he’d smiled and just seemed to tell her that the subject area was closed. No talk about the Sail, and about a pistol in the neck and the gouge it had made and shots fired and a man who was the ‘best’ killed. No war stories.

  A bell rang in the corridor.

  Neither did he tell her about a cemetery, with the sun rising, and about a girl who looked drained and wan and near broken, and was dressed drably, and who had spoken of a padlock and… He said to Lottie that it was good to be back in the comfort zone of Agatha Christie, and Poirot and Jane Marple, and The Body in the Library. Well, for a bit – grateful for the work but no one should bet their shirt on him not moving on. He thought that Lottie had believed nothing he had told her, but was too polite to quiz him further.

  He went into his class. Of course, same walls and same posters of tourist Britain, same desks and same students as there always were for that day of the week at ten in the morning, and the same table for him to spread out his notes. Nothing changed – except there was a private emptiness and he did not know how, whether, it could be filled.

  A month later… They were gathered on a viewing platform in the Crowders Mountain State Park. It was out west from Charlotte, beyond Gastonia and along Route 85, and was a favoured place for those seeking good rock-climbing conditions. The family were there, and a man from the New York office of Ground Force Security, and another represented the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those men held back and allowed the mother, the wife and the son of Foster Lukas to do their bit with the small veneer wood casket. It could have been a short experience of dignity and respect, but Ground Force had realised early that the blood relatives gave not a damn once a will had been produced that left all worldly chattels to a clinic that helped military veterans acclimatise with their new artificial limbs, and the Bureau had come up with the idea of scattering the ashes at a place of natural grandeur. Trouble was, the wind was wrong. The FBI man was retired as an agent, but was kept as a freelancer on the payroll for the funerals of those who had long left the Bureau but required recognition. ‘What I heard, there was burnout: too much work, till it had gotten to obsessional levels and no hobbies – Lukas didn’t give himself time for women, for golf, not even for wall-eye fishing. Wasn’t that old but the work levels and the places they took him sort of left him crisped.’ The wife had the top off the small casket, supplied by a crematorium in London, and the moth
er tilted it, but the goddam wind was wrong. The Ground Force man said, ‘Our evaluation, from the debriefs of those who were closest to him, he’d gotten careless. Happens with burnout cases.’ A good handful of the ash blew back over the viewing platform rail and became embedded on the son’s trousers and provoked a barely suppressed oath. The Bureau man responded, ‘There were two factors that killed him. The one was that carelessness which comes from having done something so many times that it’s clockwork, but the other was involvement, emotional involvement. We say that any form of involvement is a road to failure and worse than “careless”, but emotional involvement is the pits. That’s the combination that killed him. But I reckon “careless” was bigger.’ Mother threw some more and a little went into the wife’s eye, and a sprinkling of it on to her coat.

  The two men walked away, left them bickering about the wind and about a dirty coat and a pair of trousers that would need cleaning and a mote in the eye, and both thought their work done… It was indeed a hell of a place with a hell of a vista, and the Ground Force man said, as he fished car keys from his pocket, ‘He felt for the boy he was trying to bust out of a bad time – wasn’t just a dreary routine. Lukas was the sort of man you need in that kind of scrape – difficult, taciturn, lacking in social skills, and as good a type as we throw up. The boy was lucky to have him on the case.’ The family had finished and had turned away from the platform. They both waved at them, and called out their good wishes – which were not acknowledged. The Bureau man said, ‘The boy was indeed lucky, and will probably never know how lucky.’ They parted, would drive in their own hire cars to the airport at Charlotte and the flights would take them back to DC and to New York City, and neither could have pictured the Sail building and a walkway where the washing hung, and a little runt of a guy naked except for his boxers.

  A year later… The senior judge thanked her.

  She bobbed her head. She stood. She turned for the aisle and the double doors. The prosecutor had told her that the sentences would range between ergastolo, life, for the younger men, except her juvenile brother, thirty years for her mother, twenty years for the advocate, ten years for her grandfather who would die in Poggioreale, and eighteen months at Posilippo for her grandmother.

  In the cage, no one looked at her. Her mother and her three brothers, her grandfather and grandmother, the lawyer who had known her since she was a babe in arms, and the hitman, all looked away as if that co-ordinated gesture demonstrated their contempt of her. It was a wasted effort. She never glanced at them. On earlier hearings the abuse from the cage – particularly from Giovanni and Anna Borelli – had blistered across the court room, and on her fourth day in court Vincenzo had come to the front of the cage and spat venomously at her, and her mother had declaimed that Immacolata would rot in a living hell, and on many days Silvio had wept. Her evidence was completed after a month of daily testimony. She had forsworn cosmetics and dressed in lifeless colours for her appearances. That day, her last in court, she was different. She had brought, almost, a possessive smirk to the face of Orecchia and a bounce to the step of Rossi when they had collected her from the safe-house and driven her early to the Palace of Justice. They, alone, were privy to the transformation.

  Rossi and Orecchia had taken her the previous evening to the boutique salon in the back-street on the seaward side of the piazza dei Martiri. Her mother’s account? Of course it would be on her mother’s account. Who would have refused her? The owner faced an investigation from the Guardia di Finanza, so easily arranged, if Immacolata Borelli and her escorts were turned away… and the account was still open because her mother needed fresh underwear and required the changes of plain clothing that might, to a court, indicate a misunderstood and guiltless woman. That day, her daughter had been driven to court in the bulletproof and armour-plated Lancia in clothing that was chic, elegant, styled. Her jacket and skirt were Asian silk, sea blue and severe, her shoes were white, with low heels, her blouse was cream and hung loose. She wore no jewellery. Also, the night before, the wife of a court security guard, had come to the safe-house, cut and styled her hair. She had turned heads in court, all except those of her family and her family’s closest confidants. It was as if a trapped bird had escaped a cage.

  She went down the stairs from the court, through guarded double doors into a concrete underground cavern, and was led to the Lancia.

  It was time there, beside the car, for a brief moment when the professionalism of the Servizio Centrale Protezione was abandoned, thrown to the winds. Orecchia took her hand and kissed it lightly. Rossi kissed her on each cheek, cool lips. She knew them, knew of their families and their problems, their excitements and their moments of despair. They were, perhaps, her only family.

  She sat in the back, encased by the dark privacy windows, and accepted now and did not query the vest that was laid on the seat beside her. Orecchia drove, for this final journey, in the middle of an October afternoon when light rain fell on the city and the mountain’s summit was hidden in gloomy cloud. Beyond the tunnel, the road ahead was blocked by police motorcycles, and they were given a free run on to an open road. She would never see the city again, knew it.

  At the airport gate, Rossi laid his machine pistol on his lap, rummaged in his briefcase, produced her airline ticket and passed it to her. He said, quietly, that the aircraft was due to leave five minutes ago but was held for her. Then he gave her the new passport that carried the new name. They were at the terminal’s Departures door. Orecchia turned and faced her, then tapped the top of his head. She took her cue and lowered the dark glasses from her hair, covered her eyes with them and her upper face.

  Rossi said, ‘At the gate they’re expecting us. We’ll be taken straight to the aircraft. I’m with you until the hatch closes after you… You’ll be met?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Orecchia frowned. ‘You said you were coming?’

  ‘I did it by text. The number he used to have. What flight, where we should have dinner. I don’t know whether he has a different mobile… I didn’t call, maybe for fear of what I might be told.’

  ‘Are you sure of this?’ Rossi demanded of her.

  ‘Very sure – I’ve not had a text back but I’m sure… I hope I’ll find him.’ She paused, then said softly, ‘After what I did to him, what else – now – can I do? I must look for him – at the airport, in a restaurant we used, in the bar he liked. I owe it to him to look.’

  Orecchia scribbled on a sheet of his notepad, then ripped it off. ‘Call me and tell me if you’ve found what you’re looking for.’

  She smiled at them, and treasured them for their loyalty. ‘You’ll get one word, fatturato. In English that’s “turnover”. Then you’ll know I found him.’

  Orecchia changed – was the professional, the guard. ‘You don’t stop, you follow Alessandro, you keep close to him. Goodbye, Signorina Immacolata, who is finished. Goodbye, whoever you have become, and today you are beautiful. I hope you’re met.’

  The car door was opened for her.

  She walked well. The gate closed behind her. She didn’t know if he would be there. She had a brisk stride and remembered a park, a bench and a young man, and a question put in innocence – and a great wrong done to him, and to others, in a faraway place.

  Gerald Seymour spent fifteen years as an international television news reporter with ITN, covering Vietnam, the Middle East, and terrorism across the world. Seymour was on the streets of Londonderry on Bloody Sunday, and was a witness to the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

  Seymour's first novel was the acclaimed thriller Harry's Game, set in Belfast. He has since written twenty-four more bestselling novels, of which six have been filmed for television in the UK and US.

 

 

 
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