Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

He went to the communal lounge and had barely flopped into a seat before the flight was called. He walked to the aircraft, the last flight of the day to London Gatwick, in a swell of tourists. Voices played across his face and behind his head. He spoke quite reasonable English, and was able to distinguish appraisals of the ruins at Pompeii and Ercolano, judgements on the Capella Sansevero compared with the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the merits of the Castel dell’Ovo and the Castel Nuovo. He was happy to be among tourists. He accepted that an army of watchers, foot-soldiers, maintained a sophisticated web of surveillance over the city and its suburbs. Every district would have entrances watched by men and boys, and myriad mobile phones would report which policeman moved and the direction of his journey. The camera systems of the police and the carabinieri were sophisticated but could not compete with those of the clans. It would be a disaster if it were known that Mario Castrolami had caught the last flight of the night to Britain: warnings would have been issued, coded messages sent, and it would have been known in London before the Boeing’s undercarriage had dropped that a Camorra hunter was travelling.

He eased into a seat. The watchers were everywhere – the policeman on the forecourt, the porters on the concourse, the check-in staff, the baggage-handlers, the cabin crew. He put his face into the in-flight magazine, but tapped his jacket to reassure himself – for the fourth or fifth time – that the envelope with the warrant folded inside it was still there. He sensed the admiration of the tourists for his city, and their ignorance: they knew nothing. The watches were still on their wrists, the wallets and purses in their coats and handbags, and Naples was wonderful. He thought that an ignorant man or woman was blessed. He could count on the fingers of his two hands all the men and women in the city whom he believed had no price.

Sicily was bad for corruption inside the forces of law and order, money changing hands in return for intelligence and warnings. In Calabria, little was planned that did not reach the ears and eyes of the criminal tribes. From his own city, Castrolami could not have put twenty men – police, Palace of Justice and carabinieri – in a line and sworn on oath that he harboured no suspicion against them. The fear of corruption and the suspicion it engendered against colleagues should be ranked as one of the greatest successes of the Camorra. He had not phoned his wife to tell her that he would be away, had had no need to: she had long ago left for Milan, taken the children, gone back to her mother. She had sworn that Naples was a cloaca and that she and they would never return to that sewer. There was, of course, another woman, for mutual convenience, and he hadn’t phoned her either… As the aircraft thrust up the runway and lifted, he replayed in his mind what that voice had said.

I put at risk my life.

He would not dispute that. She might, the bitch, have changed her mind by morning – they did, often enough. But he could recall each word of that young officer from Nola and believed she would be there. He could sleep wherever he found himself so he threw back the seat, ignoring the protest from behind, loosened his trouser belt, and saw, in a dreamer’s kaleidoscope, the features of Immacolata Borelli. He heard himself say, in a sort of wonderment, ‘I don’t intend to talk you out of this, but have you any idea at all of where this will lead you, what is at stake?’ Not just wonderment: astonishment. It wasn’t the face of a camorrista, it was a good face, with smooth skin, not a cheap whore’s and pocked. Or did he delude himself?

They were bored but polite. It was as plain as a pikestaff to Eddie Deacon that Agatha Christie needed high-profile selling in Mogadishu or Lagos, Vilnius or Bratislava – anywhere they came from. Agatha Christie was not holding them.

But he ground a nail into his palm and kept going. He was talking about the author’s sentence construction. All the language schools did Agatha Christie; she was supposed to be the route towards decent spoken English.

Maybe, he wondered, Agatha Christie was taking the blame for his own inadequacy. He was droning. He had as much interest in who was the murderer as they did. His students wanted to be able to do the business with a gang-master, a bureaucrat at the Job Centre, the warden of a hostel, while the brightest needed to be able to communicate in a good-quality three-star hotel. What they also needed, and somebody was paying for, was a teacher with enthusiasm who could concentrate on a text. It was as though he was on auto-pilot. He could hear his voice, monotonous and flat.

The straw he clung to was that his Mac would be back at his place. She had an outer door key and a Yale to his room. It was only a straw, a pretty thin one, but it was possible that she’d be there. They all liked her at the house – couldn’t believe she was real. A guy who pushed paper for H M Revenue and Customs, another who waited at tables in a club on Pall Mall, the one who sold train tickets for Great Western, and the PhD student from Goldsmiths couldn’t believe she was real because once a week she made pasta with a sauce to die for.

They would all have known when he and Mac were on the bed in his room, must have heard, through those walls and down those narrow stairs, enough noise… Then she’d cook. She always brought plastic bags of food, and would never accept money – it was the only time she splashed out and showed she was flush. When they were out, as they should have been in the Afghan place, they shared. It had been laid down between them at the start…

He ached for her…

He didn’t care about Miss Marple, or Poirot, didn’t give a damn who’d done it. He wouldn’t wait for a bus: he’d run all the way back to the little house and pound up the stairs and burst through the door and hope, hope, she was there… his straw. He hadn’t made the bed that morning, hadn’t straightened the coverlet. Seemed to see it still in chaos. He said, ‘I apologise to you all. I’m not myself today. I hope it’s not the flu. Thank you for your attention, and I’ll see you all next week.’

As he gathered together his dog-eared lecture notes, they chimed, ‘Thank you, Mr Deacon. A very good evening to you.’

He fled. Hit the pavement, at full stride, and tears blistered his cheeks.

She liked Salvo – always used the diminutive, not Salvatore, and never called him by his street name, ‘Il Pistole’ – more than any of her own children, and had since the day he had been introduced into the heart of the clan three years earlier.

When she reached the bar, she went inside and past the counter, the tables, and into the inner room. He was already there, and immediately stood up. Giovanni was at the table but did not get to his feet. She could accept her eldest, Vincenzo, because he possessed the dynamism of his father, and could feel affection for the youngest, Silvio, because he was helpless, devoid of authority and ambition. She had never considered her daughter of equal importance to the boys. She disliked Giovanni for his painful and prolonged birth, and for his conceit and exploitation of the family name. If he had not been of her blood and had behaved with such arrogance in her presence he would now, like as not, be dead. Dead at the hand of Salvo, Il Pistole. It gave Gabriella Borelli some slight pleasure to know that her middle son, Giovanni, not only loathed Salvo but also feared him.

And Giovanni had cause to fear Salvo.

When she had come into the outer area of the bar, the staff would have begun to prepare coffee for her, a variety that was gentler on her throat than the small, bitter measures the men swore by.

She thought Salvo was similar to a ferocious dog that ran wild and free at night inside the fence of a scrap-metal yard and showed obedience to none but his acknowledged master. Her husband had recruited Salvo and advanced him, had been that master, but on his arrest the young man’s loyalty had turned to her. She believed his devotion to be as honest as that of any slobbering Rottweiler or German Shepherd.