Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

‘I hope everybody’s had a very good day.’

‘Thank you, Mr Deacon.’

He’d had a hideous day of hurt, wounds and anguish. No Mac and didn’t know where to find her. He was important to her, wasn’t he? Definitely he was, had to be. He knew it because she’d told him so… had told him when they were in bed. ‘Right, settle down. We’re going to continue this evening with our Agatha Christie story, and we’re going to pick up on page forty-nine. Let’s get there.’ When they were in bed, naked, ecstasy shared, she’d told him how important he was to her. She wouldn’t lie, would she?

It had been enough to bring Mario Castrolami in his car through red stop lights, then to get him as close to running along poorly lit corridors as he knew how.

Castrolami steadied himself, his hands clamped on the back of a chair. The fog of smoke made his eyes water and irritated his throat. Four men and two women in the prosecutor’s office had cigarettes alive. The desk and the mahogany table in the window were scattered with open files. The prosecutor headed the section in the Palace of Justice that attempted to combat the power, influence and control of the city’s Camorra clans. With him were his deputy, who had responsibility for the inner-city clans of Naples, his carabinieri liaison officer, who worked from the palace, his secretary and the archivist he most trusted. Castrolami knew them all, knew also that each man and woman in the room could be trusted implicitly. The liaison officer, Castrolami had heard, personally swept that office each morning for electronic devices. And a radio played – tuned to a rock programme on a commercial channel. The screen on the prosecutor’s desk showed the soft-focus close-up image of a young woman whose features he knew, whose history he had studied, whose importance he recognised and whom he had never met.

The secretary handed him coffee, a thimble cup. Castrolami hitched off his jacket, the pistol in his waist holster bouncing on his hip, and loosened his tie. He would have described the prosecutor as neat, like a manicured garden; his shirt was freshly laundered and his shave that morning had been close enough to hold the stubble at bay. A man who cared for himself. The deputy, tall and angular, was also tidy for a man now into the thirteenth hour of his day. The liaison officer was not in uniform but wore a well-cut jacket of expensive Scottish material. The women, too, did not show the day’s pressures, had probably changed in mid-afternoon… There was no fragrance about Castrolami.

A tiny cassette was loaded into a Dictaphone and a button depressed. He realised the machine had been activated late, after the call had been taken. ‘… him, I’m Immacolata Borelli… Do not interrupt me, Dottore… I am calling you from London, but I wish to return to Italy. It is my intention to collaborate… By saying that to you on the telephone, I put at risk my life… More important, I put at risk the possibilities of a successful prosecution of my family… I require immunity, and an officer who is trusted by yourself should meet me in the Hackney Downs park, in east London, and I will come to a bench at nine in the morning, London time, and will wait for one hour. He should bring with him a warrant for the arrest and extradition of my brother Vincenzo. Castrolami is an officer of the ROS whom my father respected. You should send him. You hold my life, Dottore. You hold also the prospect of the conviction of my family, the Borelli clan… Good night, Dottore.’

There was a click, then silence.

He looked at the photograph on the screen. Castrolami saw the haughtiness that verged on arrogance, that in the surveillance still she wore ‘ordinary’ clothes, and small, ‘ordinary’ trinkets, no lipstick or other makeup and her hair was tousled. He did not know when this photograph had been obtained, whether she had been on her way to terrify a shopkeeper who was late in filling the little envelope with twenty or twenty-five per cent of his takings, or to a meeting with the general manager of a cement-production company to tell him that her price should be accepted or none of his mixer fleet would reach the road again… The voice on the phone had made a play of being decisive and in control. He thought Immacolata Borelli had failed, was in bits, near to physical and mental collapse.

‘What is she worth?’ the deputy prosecutor asked.

Castrolami assumed he knew the response he would get, but needed confirmation of the obvious, and gave it him. His breathing had steadied and he lit his own cigarette from a heavyweight Marlboro lighter an American had given him. With the flame extinguished, he said, ‘Only a blood member of a family has a near to complete knowledge of its affairs.’

‘With her help, what might we achieve?’ the prosecutor queried.

He thought the prosecutor the best and most dedicated under whom he had worked in Naples. The man possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s clan structure and the principal players. He imagined that the call had come during a meeting, when the day was winding down and perhaps a whisky bottle had been produced, and that it had exploded among them, a shellburst, fazing them. He thought he understood. ‘We could close down the clan. The whole mass of them would go into the net.’

The liaison officer ground out his cigarette, scratched the bald crown of his head, murmured, ‘She telephoned from London. What happened there for her to attack her family with such venom? I find none of it credible.’

Castrolami told them of the young man who had come to his office late the previous evening, the barbarity of a street fight in a cemetery. His words painted a picture of a family’s controlled grief melded with aggression, and their courage. He said, ‘She could have reacted in two ways. She might have condemned that family to death for the insult, or crumpled under a burden of self-disgust. It’s happened before but not often. They feel overwhelming shame… Can you get the warrant in the time?’

He was told that the paperwork would be ready in an hour, that it had been on file, then given a flight number and a departure time. He preached the need for secrecy, which was accepted. He was told who would meet his flight in London, but the individual would be outside the loop of confidences. In that hour he could have gone back to his office in the barracks on the piazza Dante and packed a travel bag – spare shirt, singlet, socks and toilet bag – but he did not. He slumped into a chair, which squealed under the impact of his hundred-plus kilos. He wondered how she would be and whether she would greet him as an ally or an enemy. Then he swept an armful of files from the table and started to gut them, learning the latest intelligence, sparse and hearsay, on a clan now stalked by treachery, and he was smiling. He tried to bring life, animation, to the typescripts, flesh and blood to the photographs. He thought he walked with them.

Pasquale Borelli went to the recreation hall. He was fifty-five, slight and bald, with a prominent nose and a scarred head. He was allowed one hour in the hall per day under the terms of the pena dura . He was a strict-regime prisoner, under the terms of the Article 41 bis legislation, had no access to a mobile telephone, few and heavily supervised visits, little time in the company of fellow inmates. He was held in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Novara in the north; the city was near Turin and Milan, astride the route from Genoa into Switzerland. It was a long way from his home in Naples, hundreds of kilometres, and the authorities had intended that his incarceration there would sever his links with the clan he had dominated for two decades. Their intention was unfulfilled – a prison officer carried out messages written on cigarette papers. He still controlled an empire that was worth, perhaps, a half-billion euros. He awaited trial, and the chance of him enjoying freedom again was small, but he was optimistic that the evidence and testimony lodged against him could be challenged. He had to believe that no further denunciations would cloud his horizon. For an hour he would play pool in the hall; the table, of course, would be occupied when the officer unlocked the last barred gate, but a prisoner would immediately give up his place for Pasquale Borelli. In his cell he had a photograph of his daughter – not his wife. He loved her deeply, his principessa.