Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

Lukas saw, looking past Castrolami, a cola can lying abandoned on the walkway a few yards short of the steel-barred gate that had chains and a heavy-duty padlock securing it. The cola can was in the centre of the walkway. He was in Baghdad. There was a street, emptied, silent, where kids didn’t play, men didn’t stand on steps to smoke and talk. There was a street with a Sprite can tossed on to the path, and the patrol would use that path. There was a private, first class, of an airborne outfit and he was point on the patrol, and the Sprite can was in front of him and he was near to it. There was a first sergeant leading the patrol, walking with Lukas – doing acclimatisation – and the man’s yell had damn near shredded the clothes and the vest off Lukas’s back, and had stopped the private, first class, dead in his tracks. It had been explained – an empty street, no people, no traffic, was the tell-tale sign of an ambush. A trashed can was on a path and grunts always, did it always, kicked a can that was in front of them. A can could hold a quarter-kilo of plastic explosive and a detonator operating off a tilt switch could fire it when it was kicked, and it could take a leg off the point man and the balls off the one following him, and maybe some eyes… Lukas burst forward.

He shoved Castrolami aside. He sprinted as near as he could.

He went past the Engineer and the Bomber.

He caught the Tractor’s arm. He held it, stopped him.

He panted – couldn’t find a voice to speak. He pointed to the can.

They went on, and Lukas again had taken his place behind Castrolami, and each of them stepped with care round the can, until the last ROS guy squatted down, then went on to his knees and shone a torch into it. Lukas had turned and could see him under a kid’s towel. Then the guy stood up and kicked the can to hell. It rattled away.

The warning he had given, his caution for a can, was not ridiculed – he had respect.

The Engineer took big bolt-cutters from his bag, opened the blades and put the loop of the padlock between them, flexed and used his strength, and the padlock broke apart. The gate was pushed open by the Tractor. Beyond it, the washing hung thicker and made a fog; it could not be seen through.

Lukas knelt. He could see under the washing, and the walkway stretched to a darkened infinity and had no horizon. Nothing, nobody, moved.

They used the long tunnel from the Palace of Justice to bring Immacolata to the Poggioreale gaol. She could have gone by car and entered through the back gates, but when offered the choice she took the walking option and did it briskly, with a good stride, Rossi and Orecchia at either side of her. The deputy prosecutor was in front, the carabinieri liaison officer behind.

The air around her was close, dank from the dribble of a water leak, and was ill lit. Prisoners were brought by small bus from the court to the gaol and the fumes hung, trapped.

Immacolata did not show relief when they reached the steps, when a door was unlocked by a guard, when fresh air wafted over her.

She was told by the deputy prosecutor how long she had. She shrugged, and answered that she did not need that much time.

The gaol was not yet shut down for the night and the clamour inside it filled her ears. She had no doubts. She was led to an interview room. At the door she was told her brothers had not been informed that they were to meet her.

The door opened. They had their backs to it. There were four officers in the room and cigarette smoke rose towards a single barred light. She saw that Giovanni lounged, had tipped back his chair, and Silvio was hunched forward, his head resting on his joined hands. They were manacled. She was led round the table and recognition broke. Shock from Giovanni, confusion from Silvio. She smoothed her skirt and sat down. Two of the officers flanked the table and two were immediately behind her brothers.

Immacolata said, ‘I’m here to tell you – in person, because I’m not frightened of you – that I intend to continue collaborating with the state, and to give evidence in any criminal trial that follows the information I provide. I will not be deterred and-’

Big hands rested on Giovanni’s shoulders. He spat, ‘Bitch! You’re the walking dead – and the boy you fucked will be sliced.’

‘I won’t be deterred and my decision is irrevocable. I’ll be a witness in court, whatever is done to those who have been close to me.’

Silvio did not have to be held and his shoulders shook. He blurted, ‘I loved you, you were my sister, I did whatever you asked me. I never told our mother I drove you to Nola. Why have you done this to me? Please, why?’

‘To break the power of our family. I’ll put that power under the heel of my shoe and grind it to dust. Whatever happens, my mind will not be changed.’

She stood. She was the queen of the moment and the audience was completed. Silvio – sad, inadequate, a worshipper – wept into his hands. She started to move round the table and Giovanni lunged. The hands, held together by manacles, were in her face, the fingers outstretched and the nails exposed, as a cat’s claws would have been. One nail caught the tip of her nose, and as the blood welled he was thrust back into his chair. He spat, but it fell short of her. Then a hand was in his hair and locked his head still.

Silvio sobbed, ‘I thought you loved me. I thought you were my friend.’

Giovanni snarled, ‘They’ll slice him slowly. They’ll send you his dick. Keep looking over your shoulder, and know that you’ll be found.’

She left. Her escorts would have hustled her out, but she went at her own pace.

She heard, outside the room – as inside Giovanni fought an unequal battle and Silvio howled – Orecchia ask Rossi, ‘What did Caesar say?’

And heard Rossi’s answer, ‘At the Rubicon river, as he prepared to ford it and march south, he said, “ Iacta alea est! ” “The die is cast.” She can’t turn now.’

‘She understands the consequences.’

‘She understands – and has cut herself free of them.’

Orecchia said, ‘God be gracious and protect us from principles.’ She didn’t turn her head and tell him she’d heard what he’d said – and didn’t think of Eddie Deacon, but of Nola and a cemetery.

They went past the agent’s door. Easy to recognise: there was a light on inside and the room, seen through the broken door, and the clean window, was wrecked. It had been searched systematically and then, Lukas thought, trashed in vengeance. He knew now what had happened to the agent, about the fall and the dog that had been shot. Lukas was big on agents – assets – and he recognised their value more than most. In any city he worked, or any strip of jungle, or up any goddam mountain, he would ask about intelligence assets and probe for what they were able to bring to the table. It was not for him, an outsider, to criticise the unwillingness of an agency to share – well, not out loud and not for quoting. He could have said that the agent might be alive, might enjoy a glass of a local wine in a safe-house, if his material had been shared and he’d been lifted out. He could have surmised that many agents had been ‘lost’ – euphemism for slaughtered – because they’d been kept in place beyond the sale date. The agent had cheated those who had come to his apartment, had plunged from a window and so denied them the chance of the beating, the kicking, the burning with cigarettes, maybe the use of electrodes and waterboarding. For cheating them they had wrecked the place.

Lukas could see, also, the cables that hung from the ceiling and dropped down from the cavities in the plaster where they had been hidden, the hole through the wall and the place where an attachment for the hook that held a washing line in place had masked the exterior lens. He couldn’t have sworn to it, but he thought that Castrolami’s arms moved, saw the jerk of the elbows, and reckoned the investigator had crossed himself. If the boy survived – if Lukas’s best effort was sufficient – if an apartment further up the walkway was not dry, then that life would be owed to the asset who had died. Sobering – yes. They went on, quiet, fast and wary, but not stampeding. Each took fistfuls of the washing and dragged it down, thought little of dumping it in the dirt at the side of the walkway. Sometimes it was women’s underclothes they snatched, but there was no laughter. They hustled forward, momentum with them. Lukas thought he liked serious men, that they were good to be with when advancing towards what his jargon called the ‘termination phase’. Then not even outsize knickers or a frilly imitation lace brassiere made for humour.