Gerald Seymour - The Collaborator

She didn’t sleep. She was in her room with the light off so there wouldn’t be a strip showing under the door when the gang came back and she wouldn’t be called to get up and make coffee or pour beer.

Immacolata knew most of the stories of betrayal in the folklore of her city, although her mother, father and brothers would not: she had gone to a school that had taught her more than how to write a police statement in an interview room. She had been educated. She also knew what happened to the men, yesterday, today or tomorrow, who betrayed their own… She didn’t know what they did to the women. Her mind raced, flicked through a score of images, and glimpsed the nightmare sight of what might happen to a woman before it was superseded. She was in the crowd, at the back, and the polizia were unwinding the roll of crime-scene tape. She was on tiptoe and had just seen the blood and the white underwear, the tanned thighs, maybe black hair, and the blanket was cast to cover… Her mind had gone on.

She told herself that only one person would have understood what she had done in the public phone box on the Kingsland Road. That person was dead. Marianna Rossetti would have understood. But her friend was immured behind the concrete hatch with the marble facing, which might now have been sealed with grouting. She lay still and breathed quietly. She had heard her father speak of Castrolami, the investigator from the Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale, and she imagined a man of dignity, stature and bearing. She thought of how he would welcome her, show gratitude for the sacrifice she intended to make and talk to her of the nobility of what she did… He seemed handsome and… But she didn’t sleep.

She was in that street again – in the via Foria, or the via Cesare Rosaroli, or the via Carbonara – and the pain bit into her toes as she struggled for greater height to see better the woman on the pavement, who had been accused of betrayal, and know what had been done to her. Always, shoulders and heads impeded her view.

The hours went slowly. They came in. They drank, talked, played cards, watched TV, then Vincenzo was alone. She thought he paused outside her door and listened. If she had moved in her bed he would have come in and talked to her – maybe he had some problem with money, foreign-exchange regulations, the opening of a new account or a transfer – so she lay still. After half a minute she heard him clear his throat and go to his room.

Her mind was made up, the seed sown in the cemetery at Nola.

He had stomach cramps. He walked down the long pier inside Arrivals at Charles de Gaulle airport. The pain snatched at nerves in Lukas’s gut, made his mouth twitch and brought a frown to his forehead. The cramps had not been brought on by the landing of the aircraft that had brought him from Madrid to Paris, a catastrophic bump, leap and skid in a fierce cross-wind that carried driving rain. Nor were they the product of the food served on the long Atlantic crossing, or the result of the confined leg room – he’d gone steerage because business class was fully booked. He had not smoked since he had gone through the departure gate at El Dorado. He walked slowly and soaked up the ache in his guts. Within a few strides he had killed the pain, the twitch and the frown. Nothing about him was noticeable to a stranger. He would go through Immigration and Customs briskly. He didn’t need a visa for France, living now on a UK passport, and had only the rucksack slung loose from his shoulder. He had been authorised, some months back, at permanent-secretary level, to carry two passports; in Washington this had been endorsed by an under-secretary. The passport with the Colombian entry and exit stamps was at the bottom, under his laptop. The one he would show at Immigration bore only East European and north African stamps – nothing from the Middle East, or Latin and Central America – so his movements would not go down in the computers that tracked international travellers. It was important in the work he did that he left no paper trail.

He would take a bus into the city centre.

He’d have a chance at a bus stop, in the driving rain and wind, to light a cigarette. That seemed important to Lukas, about as important as gaining a return of three unhurt, two wounded, one fatality. He didn’t triumph, nor expect hero-grams, only a long debrief with his employer when he would sift in his mind what was relevant and what could be discarded. Not something to boast about, playing God, making decisions that might cost the lives of men and women. He thought more about the cigarette he would light in the bus queue than about a return of five survivors from six… It had been about the one guy, the Agency man, but Lukas declined to recognise a stark fact. When the bus came, he would ride into the city, then get himself down into the late train on the Metro and walk from the subway at Solferino to his apartment.

If he had permitted it, a limousine would have been waiting for him at the kerb outside Arrivals. The Americans would have sent one as a mark of gratitude. The company would have ordered one. He had, perhaps, a Low Church love of frugality. None of the good men, the ones to whom Lukas gave respect, sought greasepaint, flashbulbs and welcoming bands. It was just possible that he was the most competent of the ‘good men’. If he was the elite figure among them it was not because of his crusading spirit but the attention he gave to detail, the depth of his experience and his rejection of conceit when he won through. It was said that many who knew Lukas waited to spy out his emotions and motivation, and still waited. No car, no congratulations. Might have been because he knew how fine the lines were between success and failure…

He had one regret that evening. It was a few minutes short of midnight and he was returning to Paris too late to meet up with his friends. By the time he had negotiated the bus ride, the Metro and done the walk, his friends would have gone home.

Lukas was back where he lived – would be there until the next time the phone shrilled in his ear. It was his life. As someone had once said to him: ‘Lukas, you dance on other people’s misery. If it wasn’t such a crap world you wouldn’t have work.’ He hadn’t disagreed.

He blinked to see better. He was under a tree. During the night the wind had taken off enough of the foliage for the rain to drip on to his shoulders and head. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to clear out the water and the bleariness of a bad night. Mario Castrolami was looking for her.

The Ministero degli Interni, the vast, creaking bureaucracy on the Viminale in Rome, had an officer seconded to the Italian embassy. He was a policeman, not a member of the carabinieri, so Castrolami regarded him as a lesser creature – good enough to meet him last night at Heathrow and drive him to a Holiday Inn, not good enough to be given advance warning on the identity of a potential collaborator with justice and the implications that might splinter from it. An ROS investigator from Naples, a front-line salient in the war against organised crime, would have little trust in the combination of policeman and Viminale. So, after his failure to sleep, Castrolami had left the heavy sealed envelope containing the arrest-warrant papers for Vincenzo Borelli at the hotel’s reception desk, with the officer’s name on it… Laborious, complicated, but necessary, and if the woman did the business the officer would be told to collect the envelope and act on it. Trust, the lack of it, always governed Castrolami’s actions.

He searched for her. He had never seen her in the flesh, but had the surveillance photograph to remember. Rain spattered his head and jacket. He saw some old people, mostly men, many meandering with a toy-sized dog on a lead, and some youngsters of both sexes who wore tracksuits and earphones, and ran in a trance. The most exercise Castrolami took was to walk, via a bar for an espresso and a pastry, to the station for the Funicolare, and after his descent to the Stazione Cumana, he would cross via Toledo and reach the barracks at piazza Dante. He thought it sufficient exercise for any man in the morning, but if it rained he brought his car. Twice, while he had waited under the tree, a dog had come to the trunk, cocked its leg and pissed. On neither occasion had the owner apologised.