Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He put it into his leather bag, hitched it on his shoulder, and went off down the wide, high corridor, symbol of an age of power. He didn’t know that a life depended on the package in the bag that swung against his hip.

The priest had told her she was sitting in the seat Eddie Deacon had taken when he had come to the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. She didn’t know the priest well, had seldom confessed to him before she had gone to London. She had known better the one who had fled under armed guard to Rome, who had despised her and her family. Two of Castrolami’s men were on the door, one inside and one out, and another was at the side entrance to the sacristy. Two women were at the altar, arranging the flowers, and they would have seen her come in, but hadn’t acknowledged her, their backs to her: know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Immacolata thought Castrolami, three rows behind her, was playing with her.

The priest said, ‘If you’ve come to me for the Church’s praise of what you’re doing you’ll leave with empty pockets. I, the Church, have little interest in your conversion to legality. Society in this city embraces criminality, which feeds half of our population, provides work and opportunity, is enjoyed. I hazard the opinion that the majority of Neapolitans take pleasure and pride from the reputation of their home as the centre of the western world’s most successful criminal conspiracy. The reason for your conversion, after so many years of benefiting from illegality, is not important to me. You denounce your family. You seek to imprison your mother and brothers, to earn their enmity for the rest of the days you will all breathe God’s air, and reconciliation will be denied you even on a death-bed. Your family is destroyed, but that doesn’t mean Forcella is freed from its criminal burden. Outsiders will use these streets as a battleground while they fight for supremacy over insiders who believe they are the natural successors to your family. Equilibrium is broken and I will be called upon for many funerals. It will be a time of great danger for the old and young who live here. Your actions will create no respite… and you will have on your shoulders, until the day God calls you, the weight of responsibility for the life of the boy who came, with his love, to find you. All you will have as solace is a principle. Those are the complications you face, the potholes in the road you have taken, but I admire your determination to walk along it. The example you set cannot be countered by sneers or contempt, and cannot be ignored. Immacolata, may God go with you.’

They prayed together, hunched down, for a bare half-minute. Then she stood up, straightened her skirt, tugged down her blouse, and pushed her hair back from her forehead. She did not look again into the priest’s face, and did not shake his hand. Facing the altar, she crossed herself, then turned.

At the door, Castrolami asked, ‘Do you want to do it?’

No answer, but a firm nod, her hair bouncing on her neck.

He said, ‘I can’t predict the reaction.’

She gave him a cold smile, showing him her authority. He wondered then – at that moment, and as the evening settled on the via Forcella – how Eddie Deacon had thought of love when he had stood with her.

‘Right. We’ll get this fucking circus on the road. If I grab you, don’t fight me. If I run, run with me.’

They came down the steps of the church, past the twin chips where the bullets had nicked the stone pillars. They turned to their right. Two of the men, those from the front entrance, walked ahead of her, each with his right hand hidden under his jacket; the one who had watched the sacristy door was behind. She didn’t know whether he would have his pistol exposed or secreted. Castrolami was half a pace behind her, at her right shoulder.

Immacolata allowed her bag to swing with the rhythm of her hips.

It was as she remembered it. Nothing had changed.

She saw the barber’s shop, the hardware shop and the shop where cheese and fresh milk were sold; she knew what pizzo each paid because she had determined the amount. She saw the shop where the wedding gowns were sold and the suits for grooms and principal guests, then the bakery. No one inside – shopkeepers and customers – caught her eye and no one called to her, abuse, support or a greeting. A scooter came towards her, bouncing on the basalt blocks. The rider’s visor was up and she recognised a young man who had been at school with her, whose father had been killed by hers. It swerved past her. Men played a last card game in the light thrown from a bar’s window but did not look up.

It would have been easier if insults had been shouted, eggs or tomatoes thrown. It would have been a triumph if there had been a shout of support.

What she was doing was not acknowledged. She did not exist as a living human. She passed many she had known since childhood. None cheered and none spat at her. She assumed that the mobile phones were in contact and a network of messages rippled the length of the street and off into the side alleys, that a foot-soldier had been called out, a handgun sent for, lifted from a cache, unwrapped and stripped of its protective cover, a magazine hurriedly loaded.

She saw a man hosing down the cobbles where his stall had stood, and through the open door of a van boxes of unsold fish lay among melting ice. She had often bought octopus, mullet and bass from him, but he didn’t see her. She saw lights at the front windows of her grandparents’ home. She assumed, by now, they knew of her walk down via Forcella, but they didn’t show themselves on the balcony.

The cars waited. Walking briskly – not running, as if afraid, but not dawdling with a fool’s conceit – they had covered some hundred and fifty metres in two minutes. Castrolami pushed her without dignity through a back door and had barely slammed it before the vehicle had pulled away. It wove down the street, headlights flashing to clear a way, and skirted the square in front of the Castel Capuano, then went fast on to the via Carbonara. In three minutes there might have been a gun and a marksman, in five there would have been. She thought she had sent a message of her resolve, and that she had killed Eddie Deacon.

The boy wouldn’t speak – and had been kicked again – so Salvatore did.

‘I am from the city, from the old city. I do not know about fields or a village or where there is a river that is not a sewer ditch. I do not know about cows, and I have never been into the country and towards the mountains where they keep buffalo. I do not know it here. I am here because it was decided to bring you to this place. I hate it. My home is the old city. It is where people follow me… Many people follow me and give me respect.

‘I lived on the street, Eddie. I worked the street, the via Duomo and the via Carbonara. It was best on the via Duomo because tourists came to the cathedral, and fewer were on the via Carbonara because the Castel Capuana does not have many tourists. I start at nine years. I finish the school at nine years. I am a spotter at nine years. I spot for tourists who have a bag loosely held, or a Nikon camera that is on a shoulder strap, or a Rolex watch. At nine years old I am not strong enough to get a watch or a bag or a camera, but I am the best at spotting. At ten years old, I am the leader. Boys with more years do what I say. I am commander, and I sell on what we take from the tourists.

‘At eleven years old, I am taken by Pasquale Borelli, the father of Immacolata. He chose me. He could have had a thousand kids, our word is scugnizzi, but he chose me. I owe everything to him. I can read and I can write and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am not a kid from the gutter and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I am a person of standing in Forcella and in Sanita, and that is because of Pasquale Borelli. I think that after his eldest son, who is Vincenzo, I am the most important. I have more respect from him than Giovanni and Silvio. I am the favourite of Gabriella Borelli and she is among the most admired women in the clans in the city. Everybody has respect for me.