Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

‘If I had wanted to, I could have been married with Immacolata. You understand that? Both Pasquale and Gabriella Borelli have sufficient respect for me to give to me Immacolata if I had wished it. Did I want her? I think she is not good in bed and I think she has poor skin on her face. I did not want her. I am trusted by them, and I am trusted by Carmine and Anna Borelli, the old people. They do nothing if they have not talked first with me. Do you know that the kids in Forcella have my picture on the screen of their mobile phones? I am a person of importance. All the police hunt me, and all the carabinieri special teams, and the prosecutor. I am, in Naples, in the list of the ten most wanted – I have that status, and that respect. I have a place in the ten with a Russo and a Licciardi and a Contini. There are many days when I am in the newspaper. In the newspaper is my photograph. The journalists write about me.

‘I read everything that is written about me in the newspaper. They call me Il Pistole in the newspaper. Many times I have been on the front page of Cronaca and of Mattino, and they talk about me on the news from RAI. I am a celebrity in this city. I am more famous than a film star, or a singer, or a footballer. They say I am the assassino – you understand that? – who has no fear and who does not give mercy, we say senza misericordia. I have killed more than forty men. I do not know exactly how many men because it is not important to me. I am the killer, the expert at killing, and I do not have hesitation in killing.

‘When I have the instruction I will kill you, Eddie. It is not personal. It is not because you sleep with Immacolata Borelli who has fat ankles and bad skin. I will kill you when it is ordered by the clan. I will not kill you because I hate you, but because it is ordered. I will not hurt you. I am not your enemy, but if I was ordered to kill you and did not I would lose respect. I must have respect.’

He heard the voices at the door, then heard it opened. Salvatore turned away from the figure bound on the floor, lying in the darkness.

It had been a nightmare. Massimo thought himself in the corridors of hell, with no end to their length. They were a labyrinth. It had taken him an hour, might have been more, to travel the extent of a walkway set between reinforced doors, barred windows, dull-lit corners, refuse heaps, washing that was draped, and still stank, across his route. He did not think the nightmare complete, or half consumed. He had climbed the staircase and at the top had been searched. Fingers had prised into every pocket. Then he had been stripped almost bare and those fingers had gone inside the orifices of his body. Then he had been allowed to dress and had had to scrabble in the near darkness at his feet to collect what had been taken from his pockets, examined and dropped. He had gone through the first barred gate.

There had been three more searches, as if no message had been passed ahead on the mobile phones. Three more times he had been questioned, then strip-searched. Then the fingers had been in his mouth and in the anal passage, and lights had been shone into his ears and up his nose and the sac under his penis had been lifted. There had been more delays at more barred gates. He thought contempt was shown him.

He was left with little that preserved dignity.

Each time he was allowed to progress he had taken time over dressing, knotting his tie and shoe laces.

He feared for his life.

He saw the silhouette of Salvatore’s head. He had seen the man several times before, always a half-stride behind Gabriella Borelli. Massimo had thought the man who hovered at Gabriella Borelli’s shoulder to be a psychopath, probably medically certifiable. He thought his own feet, in the expensive handmade shoes of soft leather, were on a treadmill, that the motor went ever faster and struggled to keep up the momentum. If he did not he would fall, and he didn’t know how to jump clear of the treadmill.

He saw the body on the ground, strained his eyes and detected cuts on the face.

‘What did they say?’ Salvatore murmured – the voice of a dreamer, a sleepwalker.

He remembered the equation of fear: the cells of Poggioreale, or the anger and retribution of the old witch.

Massimo did not lie, did not dare to. He stuttered through the message he had been given by Anna Borelli, now in her eighty-eighth year, and realised that what he had said was understood by Salvatore and by the figure bound on the floor near his feet. Salvatore nodded, as if the matter did not concern him, but the figure twitched and he heard the intake of breath. Massimo thought himself damned. He said where the body should be dumped.

Damned. He had a law degree, he owned an apartment in the most select district of the city, he drove a high-performance car, and already could count his assets in hundreds of thousands of euros, yet he was reduced to ferrying instructions, was the boy sent from a reception desk at the Excelsior Hotel on the via Partenope. Damned for ever.

He ran.

He wasn’t stopped.

He ran as fast as he could and the barred gates seemed to open ahead of him. He was not searched, questioned, delayed or hindered by men with mobile telephones. He careered down the staircase, syringes and glass shards crunching under his shoes, and broke out into the night.

The scooter took him only to the edge of Scampia. He was dropped where the via Baku made a junction with the via Roma Verso Scampia. He was left at a bus stop.

The evening air played on his face, and he waited for a bus, alone, and believed he had killed a man.

They clustered round the screen. Those who worked the annexe had prime positions, but others from the operations room peered over shoulders for a glimpse of what the video showed. He had thought it a tipping point when a contact had been made, but had been wrong. This was.

The collator gave the commentary, Lukas hunched beside him. ‘That is the Great Nose – to everyone except him and his face. That’s him. We have one photograph of him in ten years and that was with dark glasses. It’s excellent. He has that territory of the Sail. He has been a fugitive for more years than the photograph has existed… Incredible.’

The image on the screen was monochrome and the walkway poorly lit. The figure of the man identified as Il Grosso Naso came from under hanging washing slung across the walkway and was clear for a matter of seconds in profile, then was gone under more draped sheets.

‘Typical of those bastards, the spies. They won’t share. They have a camera on him. Another visitor, far from his home ground. It is Il Camionista, the old man of Forcella, and his rheumatism is bad again. So, the Grosso Naso and the Camionista do business. Carmine Borelli is off territory. He will be nervous, he will not be there with a position of strength and he will have come to ask a great favour, for which he will pay.’

Lukas reckoned that in other company the old man would have used a stick but not there: a stick was weakness and frailty. A younger man walked two, three paces behind him, but he was led, a cloth tight round his upper face, blindfolding him.

‘No trust. They’re strangers in the Sail. I cannot see all his face but I know from the walk, from the mouth, from the shoulders and the hips, that Carmine is escorted by his son’s killer – it is the hitman, it is Il Pistole, Salvatore. There is a file, fat, on him. When he goes to prison – if he is not shot dead by us, by another clan – he is locked up for the rest of his life. He is to be condanna all’ergastolo. He will never again feel grass under his feet, hear birds sing or swim in the sea. They were all here but the spies wouldn’t tell us until their man was dead and we couldn’t blunder into their precious world. The file, the fat one, says there are many murders proven to Salvatore, usually with the Beretta P38, usually with a man on a scooter to take him to the target and away, and there are many more homicides with him as first suspect. He has no parents, no family, no woman. He has only the pistol and his dependence on the family of Borelli. He would want to be killed, and that is the only reason not to kill him.’