Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He did not, of course, but he would have liked to offer more of his advice to Castrolami. Would have stopped and turned and the advice would have been: ‘If a little guy who says he’s just there to help ever starts walking towards you – and you’re a hostage-taker – and has a decent, honest smile on his face, and looks concerned for you, just shoot him. Don’t hesitate. Shoot.’ He must have reached close to halfway from the start point to where the boy and the hood were. Would have been about twenty paces from them.

Lukas felt the crisis moment was on him.

The scream: ‘Stop.’

The pistol did not move off the neck and the heads did not separate.

A second scream: ‘Stop. Do not come close.’

At twenty paces, Lukas could be almost conversational. ‘You don’t want me nearer, I’m not coming nearer. Like I said, I’m just here to help. Let’s make a start. I’m Lukas, and I’m not a policeman. I’m a friend of Eddie’s mother and father. I want to help them, and help Eddie, and I want to help you. I want this to end with everybody winning. It’s where I’m headed – everybody wins. You don’t want me closer, I don’t come closer. You’re called Salvatore, yes? Good name. The Saviour, Il Salvatore – it’s a great name to have. Right, I’m going to start doing some helping. Salvatore, what do you need? Do you need some food? We can get pizza up here. You need water? We can do water that’s still or with gas. Cigarettes? Tell me the brand and I can get it.’

The pistol hadn’t shifted and the heads hadn’t separated. It was early. Lukas had time.

‘I will help you, and you can trust me…’

There were some of them, dumb and stupid, exhausted and hungry, who believed they could indeed trust the little guy who came close and offered help, food and drink and cigarettes, and they either stared up at a cell window or were dead, buried.

‘Tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you.’

He realised, now, many things. Clarity swamped the mind of Salvatore. The walkway was sealed at either end. The apartments fronting on to it were either evacuated or locked and barred. He had no freedom of movement, was as a rat in a corner – with teeth – without anywhere to run. He wondered at what stage Fangio had slipped away on his scooter. No mention made of Immacolata and whether she would retract evidence. No appeal, grovel or beg for the life – safety – of the boy he was close against. If he killed the boy, Eddie, who had slept with Immacolata and was her lover, then he himself was dead. Maybe half a second after he had pulled the trigger, he was dead.

Was it his destiny? Did he crave death?

Didn’t know. Had no one to tell him. Didn’t have Pasquale Borelli, who had taught him to read, write, shoot and kill. Didn’t have Gabriella Borelli to tell him whether he wanted to die, be shot down, and didn’t walk behind her and follow the sway of her hips. Had no one, was alone… He had seen so many. They didn’t lurch back when shot, as the movies showed it. They fell. They were like the cattle in the abattoir that the clan owned. They subsided. And they twitched. Chickens did, they flapped. Men’s muscles moved. While the blood flowed, the fingers fidgeted, tried to catch dirt or the concrete on a pavement, the vinyl tiles on a bar floor. He had seen it. Death was frozen on a face, that last expression. Laughing? Never. Happy? Never. Supreme? Never. Etched on to a dead face was, at the last, fear. Did he want it?

He saw a television cameraman who filmed and smoked, then heaved the camera off his shoulder, dragged a last time on the cigarette and threw down the filter. It would be on the walkway near his head. He saw two reporters and heard their laughter, as if they were the latterday crowd in the piazza Mercato when the aristocrats were hanged, and maybe the laughter was about the filth of his clothes and the smell of his body, and he saw children who stared blank-faced at the blood. He didn’t know how long his photo would stay on the screens of the kids’ mobiles.

‘One step more, and I blow his head away,’ Salvatore yelled. Didn’t have to, not to be heard twenty metres away. If he did, if he squeezed the trigger, he was dead a half-second later. Knew that, realised it.

The voice was so calm. ‘Because I’m here to help, I need to know the type of pizza we can order, and if the water should be still or with gas, and the brand of cigarettes. Look, we’re not in a hurry. You think about it, give me an answer when you’re ready – what’s on offer is food, something to drink and cigarettes. Take your time, Salvatore – we have all the time you need.’

And the face was so reasonable, and it smiled at him. He had no one to ask, to tell him whether he wanted to eat and drink and smoke, to die or to live, and the hands of his watch moved – couldn’t be stopped.

Three raids, supported by arrest warrants… In the via Forcella, a good-sized crowd watched as Carmine and Anna Borelli were led out through the main door of the block, escorted past the stall, empty, where the fish-seller traded. They didn’t look fearsome. Anna Borelli carried her teeth, had not inserted them in her mouth, and wore a pink night wrap over a white gown and had on fluffy pink slippers. Carmine Borelli looked confused and his hair was wild. He clutched his stick and wore striped pyjamas. A police officer followed them with two overflowing bags of day clothes. They had not been given time to dress because the police had feared a riot when they were taken away, but it didn’t happen. No riot, neither were they handcuffed. Two insults, both hard to stomach. To prompt no reaction in Naples was to be dead, irrelevant.

In an alleyway off the via Tribunali, the section running to the west of the via Duomo, the lawyer was arrested. He fared worse than the old clan leader and the old brothel keeper: he was handcuffed and the photographers of Cronaca and Mattino were there to poke lenses in his face. He was ashen. He wore the previous day’s socks, shirt and underwear, and had to hold up his trousers because he had dressed at such speed that he had forgotten his belt. The crowd jeered because it was a sport to see a big man taken down. He was headed now for the foul, faeces-smelling cells reserved at Poggioreale for prisoners arriving late at night. It was the ultimate insult to him that he was not ferried to the Questura or to piazza Dante, but to a common cell.

Near to the Palace of Justice, behind the Holiday Inn that rose in the business zone of the city, there was an apartment block that was a target only for the most successful to aspire to. It was – had been – the home of Massimo, the lawyer’s clerk and nephew. On a table in the kitchen area there was a fulsome letter of apology to his family, of explanation to the prosecutor, of pleading to his God. He apologised for the disgrace bred from greed. He explained the link between the kidnap of the English boy, the Borelli veterans and the hitman, Il Pistole. He pleaded that he should not be eternally damned for carrying a sentence of death. One of the police officers who found him suspended from a skylight in a smaller bedroom by a sheet had had experience of hangings. He said that the signs on the neck showed that the young man, having kicked away the chair, and choking, had tried to save himself, and failed; weals at the neck showed the efforts he had made following his change of heart.

The net closed around a clan, stifled its breath, strangled it.

Her mother spat at her.

Gabriella Borelli had been given an officer’s coat to drape over her shoulders but, with or without it, she gave no sign of cold.

No response from Immacolata.

They had thought, at the palace, that she would lecture her mother in her conversion from the clan’s culture. She did not. She said nothing. The tactic, employing silence, had been determined in the car that had brought her round the bay, along the coast road and through the gaol’s gates.